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Because they contain a lot of information, the downloaded maps can be rather hefty files. Keep in mind the preloaded versions will not have real time information like traffic conditions. If you prefer to get real time updates with your Google Maps directions, consider getting an international travel plan from Verizon Wireless before you go, which is typically cheaper than roaming on the data networks of overseas carriers. (If you are renting a car in Europe, getting one with a GPS unit is another alternative.) Like most major carriers, the Verizon Wireless site has an international trip planner where you can enter the names of the countries you plan to visit, your smartphone model and an estimate of how much data you think you may need to use. Once you enter the information, the site confirms that your device will work in that country and suggests an add on plan for international coverage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If dance seasons were like fashion weeks, then some trends from the Spring 2015 collections would be legacy projects and tributes to Merce Cunningham. Paul Taylor just ended the inaugural catwalk of his American Modern Dance initiative to preserve vintage dances and champion younger contemporary voices alongside his own. And last month brought nods to Cunningham, who died in 2009, by Compagnie CNDC Angers from France and Juilliard Dances Repertory. This week, the Stephen Petronio Company wraps up its 30th anniversary by starting "Bloodlines," a five year project to restage important postmodern dances. First up: Cunningham's "RainForest" from 1968, a work that feels both fanciful and menacing, with layers of drama, innocence and rebellion. Mr. Petronio also contributes a world premiere of his own, "Non Locomotor," a companion to last year's "Locomotor" (also part of this program), which confirms that three decades on, he's still addicted to the art of speed. (Tuesday through next Sunday, Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, Chelsea; 212 242 0800, joyce.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
What amount to garbage piles some are 4,000 years old are spread over an area the size of Britain in a remote Brazilian forest. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Stephen J. Martin noticed large mounds, some 10 feet tall, 30 feet wide, along the side of the road as he drove through a remote part of northeast Brazil. "After 20 minutes, we were still driving through these, and I started saying, 'Well, what are they?'" said Dr. Martin, an entomologist at the University of Salford in England who was in Brazil for research on the worldwide decline of honeybees . He thought they might be piles of dirt displaced from the construction of the road. Instead, his companions told him, "Oh, they're just termite mounds." Dr. Martin recalled his incredulous reply: "And I went, 'You're really sure about that?' And they're like, 'Well, I don't know. I think so.'" On a subsequent trip, Dr. Martin met by chance Roy R. Funch, an ecologist at Brazil's State University of Feira de Santana who was already arranging to conduct radioactive dating to determine the age of the mounds. "I said, 'Look at those, there must be thousands of these mounds. And he went, 'Nah, there's millions.'" In research published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, Dr. Martin, Dr. Funch and their colleagues report the findings from several years of investigations. How many mounds? Some 200 million, the scientists estimate. "They're all over the place," Dr. Funch said. The cone shape mounds are the work of Syntermes dirus, among the largest termite species at about half an inch long. The mounds, spaced on average about 60 feet apart, are spread across an area as large as Britain. "As humans, we have never built a city that big, anywhere," Dr. Martin said. The scientists were also surprised when they received results of the radioactive dating of 11 mounds. The youngest was about 690 years old. The oldest was at least 3,820 years old, or close in age to the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt. "That just kind of blew me out of the water," Dr. Funch said. Dr. Martin said they used the minimum age suggested by the data, but the oldest mound could conceivably be more than twice as old. The scientists also estimated that to build 200 million mounds, the termites excavated 2.4 cubic miles of dirt a volume equal to about 4,000 great pyramids of Giza. "This the greatest known example of ecosystem engineering by a single insect species," the scientists wrote. Another surprise was that the mounds turned out to just be mounds. Other termites build mounds with complicated networks of tunnels that provide ventilation for underground nests. But cutting through some of the mounds, Dr. Funch and Dr. Martin found only a single central tube leading to the top, and they never came across any nests. These mounds were not ventilation structures, but simply piles of dirt. As the termites excavated networks of tunnels below the landscape, they needed somewhere to discard the excavated dirt. So they carried the dirt up the central tube to the top of a mound and tossed it out. That might also explain the regular spacing between the mounds. At first, Dr. Funch and Dr. Martin thought that to be the result of competing colonies. But when they put a termite from one mound next to one from a neighboring mound, there was no conflict, indicating they were from the same family. They concluded the pattern was simply an efficient spacing of garbage piles. Young, active mounds grow to four to five feet tall in a couple of years, Dr. Funch said. Most of the older mounds appear inactive. The scientists do not know if that means the termites have left or if they simply have no need for additional digging in the area after constructing the needed tunnels. While people living in the region knew of the termite mounds, few outsiders did. The expanse of the termites' construction were hidden by scrubby forest known as caatinga. "That's why they were undiscovered for so long," Dr. Funch said. "You cannot see them in the native vegetation. And not many scientists pass this way." For most of the year, with temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter, the trees are scorched white. The landscape turns green after a short rainy season, and then the leaves fall, and the landscape grows desolate again. "These termites live on dead leaves, and they get to feed once a year," Dr. Martin said. As parts of the forest were cleared, the mounds became visible, and about a decade ago, Google Earth's satellite images became sharp enough that Dr. Funch could spot individual mounds. He drove to some of the sites to verify that the mounds were there. Dr. Martin said he wanted to better understand the intertwining between the insects and the vegetation. When part of the forest is cut down, the mounds remain, but the termites move away as there are no longer any leaves for them to eat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Hawks were missing their best player, the dynamic guard Trae Young. In the grand scheme, this matchup was a mere pebble in the ocean of meaningful wins. But in a vacuum, it was meaningful because Irving temporarily allayed concerns about his injury and reminded everyone why he was one of Brooklyn's marquee free agent acquisitions last summer. Irving missed 26 games because of an ailing right shoulder, which he had described as an impingement, in addition to bursitis, a condition that causes joint pain. But his performance Sunday was a stark contrast from just last week, when he told reporters that he could not lift his shoulder while taking jump shots. He didn't sound like someone close to returning to anything resembling professional basketball, raising fears that his injury was worse than previously believed. Irving floated the idea of surgery if his shoulder did not respond to the cortisone shot he said he had recently taken. "It really is disheartening," a downbeat Irving said then. But on Thursday, Irving surprised observers by practicing with the team and taking part in five on five workouts. He suggested he might be able to come back within a week. Then came the even more unexpected announcement that Irving would make his return over the weekend. Clearly, the shot and the weeks of rehab had lessened Irving's pain. Maybe he could lift the shoulder a bit more now. But shoulders are finicky, and who knows how Irving would respond to the rigors of a 48 minute N.B.A. game. Who knows if the decision to return on Sunday would just mean surgery down the line, causing him to miss time when Kevin Durant returns next season, when the Nets are expected to be a championship contender. But let's give credit where credit is due. Irving had every reason to shut it down this season, especially given the risks of aggravating the shoulder. The Nets, 18 20 and seventh in the Eastern Conference, are not going to win a championship in what is essentially a bridge year for the team. Not without Durant. They are likely to be the underdog in the first round of the playoffs, assuming they get there. And there are some legitimate questions about how Irving will fit next to the emergent Spencer Dinwiddie. On Sunday, Atkinson paired the two in the starting lineup and brought Caris LeVert, who missed several weeks because of surgery to repair ligament damage in his right thumb, off the bench. Dinwiddie, who like Irving is a ball dominant guard, shot only seven times against the Hawks. In the long run, starting Dinwiddie and Irving in the same backcourt is likely to cause defensive issues. And at this point, LeVert's production has warranted a starting role. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Dr. Vernon B. Mountcastle, whose studies of how brain cells conspire to process perceptions and movement laid the foundations of modern neuroscience, died last Sunday at his home in Baltimore. He was 96. His daughter, Anne Clayton Bainbridge, said the cause was complications of the flu. Dr. Mountcastle, known by some as the Jacques Cousteau of the cortex, began his work in the 1940s, when the brain was still very much a black box, as dark as the ocean floor. Scientists knew from studying brain injuries that certain neural regions had specialized functions for example, to process language. But they had little idea of how brain cells, or neurons, did the work they did. The mystery seemed especially deep when it came to so called higher functions like thinking and perception, which are centered in the neocortex, the thin outer layer of the brain. Dr. Mountcastle stumbled on an answer, and recognized its importance immediately. In a series of painstaking experiments, he used an electrode to record the activity of neurons in the brains of cats, as the animals responded to being touched on the fur, for instance, or on the skin. An odd pattern emerged: Neurons that fired together in response to a specific kind of touch were stacked in columns, one on top of another. Those on the periphery did not fire in the same way. "These facts support a hypothesis," he concluded in a 1957 report that became a classic in the field, "that the elementary pattern of organization in the cerebral cortex is a vertically oriented column or cylinder of cells" working together on a single job. Despite deep skepticism among his colleagues about the hypothesis, brain scientists soon found the same pattern in areas of the neocortex that process vision and other functions: cells working together stacked in columns. The finding confirmed a fundamental property of the brain, namely that it has specialized modules that divvy up the jobs of parsing sensations, making decisions and acting. "He essentially produced the first functional map of the neocortex," said Dr. Solomon Snyder, a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where Dr. Mountcastle spent his career. "Without that, no one was going to get anywhere." Dr. Mountcastle longed to know how brain cells could integrate these different jobs. In another seminal series of experiments, he trained monkeys to make a variety of movements and decisions, with a treat as their reward. Again, he used an electrode wire to take direct recordings of cells in the animals' brains only this time the animals were active, moving and making decisions, rather than passively being touched. He found, in an area of the brain called the parietal lobe, strong evidence that the discrete columns of cells that did specific jobs talked to other modules, in effect, to coordinate perception, decisions and movement. His findings, reported in the 1970s, filled out a picture of the brain as a neural documentary crew, with specialists in sound, in lighting, in judging distance, judging expressions all working together to produce a coherent picture of the world and how to act in it. "He was the first one to really articulate this whole notion of distributed functions, that in order to act in the world, there are a number of modules that work together," said John Morrison, dean of basic sciences in the graduate school of biomedical sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Researchers later drew on Dr. Mountcastle's findings to construct detailed three dimensional maps of the brain, to take direct recordings of brain cells in "conversation" with their neighbors, and to develop sophisticated technology to allow paralyzed people to manipulate mechanical arms with their thoughts. Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle Jr. was born on July 15, 1918, in Shelbyville, Ky., the third of five children of Vernon Mountcastle and Anna Frances Marguerite Waugh. His father was in the concrete business, and his mother worked at home. The family moved to Roanoke, Va., when the boy was 3, and soon he was excelling in school, skipping two grades. He graduated from high school at 16 and earned a degree in chemistry from Roanoke College, in three years, graduating in 1938. He attended Johns Hopkins for medical school, completing his degree in 1942 before receiving orders to join the Navy's medical corps. He served in North Africa and in Europe during World War II, participating in the Normandy invasion. He returned to Johns Hopkins in 1946, hoping to join its neurosurgery residency program. But the program was full, so he took a temporary position doing lab work in physiology, "and he found he loved it," Dr. Snyder said. That same year he married Nancy Clayton Pierpont, who survives him. In addition to his wife and his daughter, he is survived by a son, Vernon III; a sister, Marguerite Cook; six grandchildren; and two great granddaughters. Dr. Mountcastle received many awards, including the prestigious Lasker in 1983 and the National Medal of Science in 1986. He wrote or co wrote more than 100 scientific papers and a book, "The Mindful Brain: Cortical Organization and the Group Selective Theory of Higher Brain Function," with Dr. Gerald Edelman. It became a standard text in the field. At Johns Hopkins, he directed the department of physiology from 1964 to 1980 before finishing his career as a professor of neuroscience. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Isabel Sarli captivated Argentina, and then international audiences, with her sexy screen presence. She appeared in her country's first cinematic nude scene. BUENOS AIRES Isabel Sarli, an immensely popular star of sexploitation films in Argentina during the 1960s and '70s and a bane of censors, died on June 25 in San Isidro, a suburb of Buenos Aires. She was 89, and in her later years had found new generations of fans. The cause was cardiac arrest, said Gustavo Cardonatti, an official at San Isidro Central Hospital, where she had been hospitalized with a urinary tract infection. Ms. Sarli became an instant sex symbol in her first feature film, "El Trueno Entre las Hojas" ("Thunder Among the Leaves"), in 1958, when she became the first woman to appear fully nude in a mainstream Argentine movie. She did so in a scene in which she frolicked in a swimming hole, and it became the talk of Argentina. People lined up at theaters to see the film. But by her account she had not intended to cause such a sensation. She had been tricked, she said, by the director, Armando Bo, who told her that she would be filmed from a distance. "I did not know they could zoom in," Ms. Sarli said in a 2002 television interview. She was so angry at Mr. Bo, she often said, that she threw an ashtray at him, breaking the glass top of his desk. Nevertheless, the two proceeded to make 27 more movies together, some of which were released internationally, including in the United States. The movies often pushed the limits of what could be allowed onscreen, and several were removed from theaters after a prosecutor brought charges against Ms. Sarli and Mr. Bo. In 1977, when Argentina was under military dictatorship, censors banned the release of another Sarli Bo movie, "Insaciable" ("The Insatiable Widow"). It would not have its premiere until 1984, a year after the return of democracy. "Every movie meant a persecution," said Miguel Doneddu, who had been friends with Ms. Sarli since 1960. The relationship of director and actress grew offscreen as well: They became lovers, though Mr. Bo, who often co starred in their movies, was married. As her popularity grew, Ms. Sarli became known by the nickname her mother had given her as a child: La Coca. She acquired another nickname, La Higienica ("the Clean One"), from a frequent trope in her films. "I was always bathing," she said, laughing, in the 2002 interview. Claiming to be shy, Ms. Sarli said she needed a little whiskey to gain courage to film some scenes. But shyness was hardly evident on the screen when she played a nymphomaniac in "Fuego" ("Fire"), or a woman who becomes sexually aroused watching horses copulate in "Fiebre" ("Fever"). "Isabel Sarli squeezes more sexual frisson into the space between breathing in and breathing out than most of us could spread over a lifetime of ordinary lovemaking," Roger Greenspun wrote in The New York Times in his review of "Fuego" in 1969. "The movies had amazing export power and were distributed around the world through Columbia Pictures, something that did not happen with anyone else," said Marcelo Stiletano, a journalist who writes about film for the Argentine newspaper La Nacion. While continuing to fight censorship in his country, he said, Mr. Bo filmed racier versions of some scenes for foreign markets. One of those paying attention to Ms. Sarli's career was the director John Waters. "You were a huge influence on me," he told her in a videotaped conversation during a Buenos Aires film festival in 2018. He said he had gone to watch her films in New York with Divine, who starred in several of his movies, which are notable for their own efforts to push the boundaries of good taste. Although Hollywood came knocking, Ms. Sarli never answered. "I never wished to go without Armando," she told Mr. Waters. But she continued to churn out movies with Mr. Bo, until his death in 1981. Afterward, said Miguel Doneddu, a longtime friend, "she fell into a deep depression." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SpeakingInDance: a new weekly visual exploration of dance. Follow us on Instagram: nytimes. Dancers fall. Sometimes, it's intentional. One of the most breathtaking dance falls dates to 1933 and involves 36 women who, in a nail biting descent, collapse onto the floor like dominoes. This classic of precision choreography by Russell Markert, "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers," is part of the "Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes." But instead of bare legs and gleaming smiles, the dancers wear Vincente Minnelli's pristine soldier uniforms and stiffly curve around the stage like machinery. "The first time I tried on my soldier costume, I actually cried," the Rockette Alina Duncan said. "It's history." The fall is the grand finale, a physical act that demands abs of steel, steadfast teamwork and infinite patience. "We're thinking of staying completely flat all the way down," she said. "If you're even just a centimeter off, then the fall can go wonky." Speed is critical. From her center of the line position, Tiffany Griffith must slow the fall down even though, as she put it, "there are seven or eight women whose weight is on top of me." Ms. Duncan, in the front, must maintain a completely straight plank position. "When it's one of those four show days," she said, "you're like, 'Are we going to fall now?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Visiting Los Angeles after her mother's sudden death, Lyn (Melissa Barrera) strikes up a conversation with a stylish young businessman from out of town. She tells him that she's staying on the Eastside. "Eastside, like Silver Lake?" he asks. No, not Eastside like Silver Lake. But I can see why he might guess that, if he watches enough TV. Silver Lake and its upscale Eastside environs have become the hipster face of L.A. in recent indie ish series like "Transparent," "Casual" and "Love." Lyn, on the other hand, is staying in Boyle Heights, a Hispanic Eastside neighborhood that's being pushed to become like Silver Lake more expensive, more Anglo by gentrifiers and investors. It's the sort of place where locals eat at a longstanding birria (stewed goat) restaurant while a white woman shoots a video on the sidewalk about "discovering" it. But "Vida," beginning Sunday on Starz, gets to that big story through a smaller one, which is where it excels. Lyn, a free spirited serial entrepreneur (currently creating a line of "Aztec inspired lotions"), and her white collar sister, Emma (Mishel Prada), hurry home to settle the affairs of their late mother, for whom the series is named. Job No. 1 is dealing with the neighborhood bar their mother owned, which leads to some surprises. First, it's deeply in debt. Second, they learn, Vida was running it with the bartender, Eddy (Ser Anzoategui), who was also her wife. The setup recalls the premise of series from "Six Feet Under" to "One Mississippi" to "Queen Sugar": adult children settling family business after the death of a parent, in the process reopening the family's emotional books, too, reassessing old debts. "Vida," created by Tanya Saracho, keeps its focus tight, on a few relationships: between the guarded Emma and the reckless Lyn; between both of these prodigal daughters and Eddy, plain spoken and fiercely loyal to the bar and Vida's legacy; and between each of them and the idea of home. For Marisol, the sisters represent "gente fication," a Spanish English portmanteau for people gentrifying their own home. (See also "chipster," for Chicano hipster, and "gentrifence," for the horizontal fences erected around renovated houses. There's a whole glossary of disruption in "Vida.") The local politics plot of "Vida" suffers from on the nose Gentrification 101 exposition and speechifying. But the pull of home and memory is more complicated for the two sisters. Lyn realizes how much the neighborhood has changed, for instance, when she sees the bed in her old room is next to the window now. "They're not worried about drive bys anymore," she says. Emma has a steely brusqueness that reads to her old neighbors as superior and maybe it is, a little but it's as much about self defense as anything. She still feels connected to Boyle Heights in a way that she can't shake, despite her painful memories. A subplot for Lyn, involving a fling with an old flame who's now engaged, is less successful. Mx. Anzoategui (who is gender nonbinary and prefers gender neutral terms) is especially good as the grieving Eddy, who's separated from Lyn and Emma by both personal history and class. She knew a different Vida than they did, and she struggles to understand how the daughters can view her business as a matter of dollars and cents. "Vida" is shot through with affection for its setting and characters. But it's the unsentimental, difficult kind of love that an adult child has for a parent with whom she's had a rough history. It sees the imperfections rather than looking past them. One last word must be said for "Vida." It's short: six episodes, a half hour each. (So is "Sweetbitter," its Sunday night companion series on Starz.) In an era of TV gigantism, when ambitious shows distend their episodes like a Yes double album, this small thing is no small thing. The brevity works well for a series that's all about intimate, minute observations, emphasized by the roving hand held camera, which creates the sensation of pulling up elbow to elbow with the characters. At typical drama length, this series might have been bogged down with plot digressions and expansions. As it is, it sometimes slips into melodrama, but the lapses pass quickly. Life may be too short, but "Vida" is just right. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
On the face of it, parasites use a variety of similar strategies. Some make cat urine suicidally attractive to mice, which are promptly eaten so that the parasites can go through the next phase of their life cycle in the cat. Others prompt ants to expose themselves on high tree branches, the better to be eaten by birds. And still others cause snails to hang out in open spaces, with swollen eyestalks pulsing like neon signs, for apparently the same reason. At the level of biochemistry, it can be difficult to determine which changes in a host result from its immune system trying to fight off the parasite, and which are the parasite bringing the host under its sway. Mr. Herbison and his colleagues suggested that if researchers could identify similar kinds of molecular changes in different hosts with different parasites, they could possibly see the strings the parasite is pulling. Using 12 earwigs and 12 sandhoppers, the team investigated how infected insects differed from the uninfected. They took an inventory of the proteins being manufactured by the earwigs and sandhoppers, noting which were being made in greater numbers and which had declined. They found that while very few proteins were changed in the same way in infected individuals of both species, the jobs the proteins had were often similar. For instance, 23 percent of the proteins that changed in sandhoppers were involved in energy regulation and metabolism, and 39 percent in earwigs. This fits with the higher levels of activity observed in infected insects. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
When hackers associated with North Korea tried to break into Polish banks late last year they left a trail of information about their apparent intentions to steal money from more than 100 organizations around the world, according to security researchers. A list of internet protocol addresses, which was supplied by the security researchers and analyzed by The New York Times, showed that the hacking targets included institutions like the World Bank, the European Central Bank and big American companies including Bank of America. While some of the Polish banks took the hackers' bait, the scheme was detected fairly quickly, and there is no evidence that any money was stolen from the intended targets. Yet security researchers said the hit list, found embedded in the code of the attack on more than 20 Polish banks, underlines how sophisticated the capabilities of North Korean hackers have become. Their goals have now turned financial, along with efforts to spread propaganda and heist data and to disrupt government and news websites in countries considered enemies. The list of targets, which has not been previously reported, is part of a growing body of evidence showing how North Korea, a country that is cut off from much of the global economy, is increasingly trying to use its cyberattack abilities to bring in cash and making progressively bolder attempts to do so. North Korea's hacking network is immense, encompassing a group of 1,700 hackers aided by more than 5,000 trainers, supervisors and others in supporting roles, South Korean officials estimate. Because of the country's poor infrastructure, the hackers typically work abroad, in places like China, Southeast Asia and Europe. Like other North Koreans allowed to work abroad, the hackers are constantly monitored by minders for possible breaches in allegiance to the government. The security firm Symantec said it believed that the hackers behind the Poland attack were also behind two other major breaches: the theft of 81 million from the central bank of Bangladesh and a 2014 attack on Sony Pictures, which rocked the film industry. "We found multiple links, which gave us reasonable confidence that it's the same group behind Bangladesh as the Polish attacks," said Eric Chien, a researcher at Symantec, which studied both attacks. The firm has not traced the attacks to a specific country's government, but American officials have blamed North Korea for the Sony attack, partly based on intelligence that came from American breaches of North Korea's computer systems. United States prosecutors are investigating North Korea's possible role in the Bangladesh heist, according to a person briefed on the inquiry, who asked to remain anonymous because the details are confidential. And on Tuesday, Richard Ledgett, a deputy director of the National Security Agency, said that research linked the Sony Pictures attack to the Bangladesh heist. He also affirmed that he believed nation states were now robbing banks. All of this represents a troubling new front in cyberwarfare, Mr. Ledgett said at an event sponsored by the Aspen Institute. "That is a big deal," he said. North Korea has denied involvement in the attacks on Sony and others, instead accusing South Korea of disrupting its websites. North Korea's population is cut off from the internet except for a handful of state run sites filled with propaganda. The Polish episode provides a case study of how North Korean cyberattack goals have escalated. The attack began around October when the hackers planted a virus on the website of the Polish financial regulator then waited for banks to inadvertently download it when they visited the site. The perpetrators used what is called a watering hole attack named after the way predators ambush prey by lazing around a high traffic spot to go after the banks; in this case, the "watering hole" was the financial regulator's website. When the visitors on the list landed on the page, they would be redirected to software that would attempt to download malware. The list of targets extended beyond Poland, investigators said, because the group intended to carry out similar attacks elsewhere. "This was a global list, but they hadn't gotten around to making a watering hole for all these country banks," Mr. Chien said, adding that the hackers appeared to have created watering hole sites in Mexico and Uruguay, too. Symantec said it had blocked 14 attacks against computers in Mexico and 11 in Uruguay. The fact that the hackers were able to attack a specific site showed that their capabilities had improved, Mr. Chien said. The group also used its own modifications of code and exploits more broadly shared by cybercriminals, whereas before it had mostly built its own tools another indication of evolution. While Polish banks were the most numerous targets, the second largest number was in the United States, including the American arm of Deutsche Bank. CoBank, which lends to agriculture and rural projects, was targeted, too. The central banks of Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, Chile and the Czech Republic were on the list. The only target associated with China: branches of the Bank of China in Hong Kong and America. North Korea has been carefully cultivating its cyberattack capabilities since the early 1990s, according to South Korean officials. Generally, the country selects young computer prodigies and trains them as hackers, according to people who have attended the South Korean government's discussions of the North's hacking operations. South Korean cybersecurity officials began detecting attacks attributed to North Korean hackers around 2009. Working overseas is a huge incentive for young hackers, since many North Koreans have little chance to leave their impoverished, isolated country. As long as the hackers meet their government set targets, they are allowed to live abroad and often get the added perk of running illegal gambling sites online, generating profits they can share with supervisors. While North Korea lags developed countries in hacking capabilities, it has occasionally startled observers in South Korea. In 2011, investigators found that a South Korean bank had been hit by malware when an infected computer used by a maintenance company employee was briefly hooked into the bank's server network. South Korean hackers who forensically analyzed the attack were impressed not so much by the malware, but by the fact that North Korean hackers had been so constantly on alert, apparently for hours or days on end, waiting for the short window during which the infected computer was connected to the bank's servers so that they could activate the virus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Back at the beginning of 2016, Kanye West was already sounding alarms. On Dec. 31, 2015, he released "Facts," an out of nowhere harangue that insulted Nike, praised his wife's business acumen and seemed to express sympathy for Bill Cosby. About a week later came "Real Friends," as potent and dispiriting a catalog of loneliness he has ever recorded, a song about how fame warps and traps, and no matter how high it brings you, will always yank you down. These songs set the stage for one of the most productive, disjointed and confusing years in the life of Kanye. It was one that began with him seeking grace, in the form of music, and also ended that way, but for very different reasons, following his hospitalization and his meeting with the president elect, Donald J. Trump. And yet the Kanye of 12 months ago and the Kanye of today aren't so far apart: instability, loneliness, a sense that he was being treated unfairly, a continuing quest to be heard. Mr. West may be facing severe public scrutiny, skepticism and concern, but even during this most challenging stretch, there are clear bridges to his old self. Though there were bumps along the way the uncertain rollout of "Pablo," the collapsing models (and shoe heels) at Roosevelt Island the first nine months of the year were Mr. West firing on all pistons, and meeting with success. But the final three months of 2016 spiraled well beyond his control. First came the robbery of his wife, Kim Kardashian, in Paris, a violent affair that included the theft of the 20 karat diamond engagement ring he gave her, worth a reported 4 million. That was followed by the disruption of his tour, and its eventual cancellation, following a couple of speeches in which he spoke admiringly of Mr. Trump; his involuntary admission to U.C.L.A. Medical Center hospital, followed by what will certainly be remembered as the most public crack of all: his meeting with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower on Dec. 13. Rupture has long been the axis around which Mr. West's career has turned where most artists seek to create smooth narratives about themselves and get everyone else to play along, he instead prefers disruptive leaps, quick reframing and firebrand positioning. Stasis is his kryptonite. The ruptures are typically intentional provocations, but not always: The period of deep trauma following the 2007 death of his mother remains one of Mr. West's most vital, influential and least understood times. The last three months of 2016 figure to be another such stretch. Mr. West dyed his hair blond, then multiple colors. In paparazzi photos, and even in the holiday party family picture he posted on Twitter, his eyes are somewhere far off. Since his hospitalization, he has barely spoken publicly. When he and Mr. Trump descended to the Trump Tower lobby after their meeting, they were peppered with questions from the media, to which Mr. West replied only, "I just want to take a picture right now." By contrast, "The Life of Pablo" takes a turn to the ornate, the melodic and also the emotionally intimate. "Ultralight Beam," the album opener, is a prayer. On songs like "Real Friends" and "No More Parties in LA," Mr. West sounds exhausted and exasperated, while "I Love Kanye" is a withering self assessment passed off as a taunt ("I miss the old Kanye"). And on "FML," there was the specter of psychological instability, a possible foreshadowing of troubles to come: "You ain't never seen nothing crazier," he rapped, than him when he's "off his Lexapro." The Saint Pablo tour, which began in August, took the worship elements of the album and rendered them literal. Each night, for a couple of hours, Mr. West performed while tethered to a platform that dangled over the crowd and moved from one end of the room to the other like a warship. The optics were bracing: Mr. West was both a god hovering over his subjects and a slave bound for their entertainment. Below him, chaos and thrill. Above him, klieg lighting that baked and beatified him. The approach was also a stark contrast to his last tour, following "Yeezus," which became well known for lengthy speeches that veered between motivation and tirade. But in November, that impulse began to return. In San Jose, he said, "If I would've voted, I would've voted on Trump." In Sacramento a few nights later, he spoke for about 15 minutes before leaving the stage having performed only three songs. The remainder of the tour was swiftly canceled, and a few days later, Mr. West was hospitalized, after the police were called to perform a welfare check after an episode at his personal trainer's home. Mr. West's collapse was very public, but then again, even his private space is public: "My psychiatrist got kids that I inspired/First song they played for me was 'bout their friend that just died," he rapped on "No More Parties in LA." He still appears on his wife's reality show, "Keeping Up With the Kardashians." Plus, some of his most fascinating work last year the video for the song "Famous," and the ensuing art installation was about the erosion of the public private boundary. In the clip for the song which restoked the tension between him and Taylor Swift doubles of him, his wife, Ms. Swift, Mr. Trump, Rihanna, Mr. Cosby and more celebrities all lay in an oversized bed, nude. It was an outrageous gesture of invasion, but it was also disarmingly tender here were the famous, the powerful, the protected, shown in innocent, vulnerable slumber. It felt like a wish more than an attack. How Mr. West interacts with other celebrities fearlessly, stubbornly continues to be one of his most powerful tools. During his Sacramento speech, he accused Beyonce of negotiating her way to a video of the year award at the MTV Video Music Awards last year, and in October, lashed out at Jay Z, his longtime mentor, about the tensions between Apple Music and Tidal, and how the two men's children "have never even played together." In this way, Mr. West makes art of his peers, too. That's even more true of the younger generation. His most important mentor mentee relationship is with Chance the Rapper, whose thumbprint is all over "The Life of Pablo." (He also appeared on Chance's "Coloring Book.") Lil Yachty, the smiling hip hop provocateur then still at the beginning of his ascent, was a model in the Yeezy Season 3 show at the Garden, as was a lackadaisical Young Thug. But to some from an older generation Mr. West's elders, peers or his first wave of acolytes now grown up Mr. West was floundering. Following Mr. West's embrace of Mr. Trump, Talib Kweli posted a series of emotional appeals on Twitter: "we love u. u r everything u say u are. A genius, an icon. U added greatness to my life. But lifting Trump up kills us. Come home." And in early December, J. Cole released "False Prophets," a song that, while not using Mr. West's name, appeared to be discussing Mr. West's Icarus like career path: "When he tell us he a genius but it's clearer lately/It's been hard for him to look into the mirror lately." Sometimes the critiques came directly to Mr. West's doorstep. During the Sacramento speech, Mr. West singled out Q Tip: "I love you, bro. Don't tell me how to be me, though." Embracing Mr. Trump is perhaps the most consequential political act of an artist who, at a much earlier and less sure footed stage of his career, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina risked his mainstream acceptance to make a bold accusation on a national telethon: "George Bush doesn't care about black people." But he and Mr. Trump have parallels both are vocal about those who they see as obstacles; both are steadfast in their self belief. Perhaps Mr. West sees in Mr. Trump someone who freely speaks his mind and has been rewarded for it. During his speech at the Sacramento show, Mr. West referenced him as a sort of spirit guide: "Yeah, I'm taking his lead. I'ma just say how I say, be 'Ye, and win." Read another way, Mr. West's embrace of Mr. Trump symbolic or otherwise suggests an incipient nihilism at work. Rather than align himself with broader social causes "I love being a voice of freedom when so many people are scared to speak up," he wrote on Twitter in February or the mainstream of black political thought, or even the politics of his wife, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, Mr. West's unlikely shift suggests the maneuvers of someone who no longer believes in the systems that have previously nourished, sustained and inspired him someone whose sense of safety has been revoked. It should also be said, though, that Mr. West's sympathy for the publicly maligned is as central to his personality as his self regard. His outspokenness in favor of Mr. Trump wasn't the first time he sided with a controversial figure "Bill Cosby innocent!" he tweeted in February. Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, Kanye West: highly visible stars with highly motivated antagonists. Mr. West may well perceive himself as still aligning with the persecuted, but the view from the top can be disorienting. It's one thing to side with those who suffer on the wrong end of power, but another thing altogether to side with the ones who wield it, consequences be damned. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
When "Catastrophe" began in 2015, its title seemed to refer to a discrete event. Rob (Rob Delaney), an American businessman visiting London, had a whirlwind fling of marathon sex with Sharon (Sharon Horgan), who got pregnant. He stayed, they married, they bumpily transitioned from unplanned pregnancy to an unplanned life. By the raunchy, glorious end of its fourth and final season, arriving on Amazon Friday, Rob and Sharon have been through health scares, family losses, infidelity, alcoholism and the sundry exhaustions of life with two small children. "Catastrophe," it is clear, refers not to a single occurrence but to a state of being the chaos of life, which this comedy depicts with deadly honest charm. One thing that sets the series apart from other rom coms is its maturity, which is to say, age. Rob and Sharon, both in their forties, already know themselves. They're conscious enough of each other's flaws to adapt, experienced enough not to expect the other to change. Sharp witted and outspoken, Sharon can be a bulldozer; she's the more cynical of the two, but therefore often the more perceptive of the two. Rob's more laid back, but his swallowed down stress can turn into passive aggression. It's also expressed itself in a drinking problem, which he had under control until the end of Season 3. The final season picks up after Rob's car crash under the influence has cost him his driver's license, put him in a neck brace and left Sharon wary of trusting him. She's known about his alcoholism since she met him, but it's different, she says, now that his drinking is more than "folklore." It's not a spoiler to say that they get through this; getting through is in a way the subject of "Catastrophe." Rob and Sharon's relationship is a love story, a war story and an alliance. They spar terrifically, with an absurd edge "Do you know how hard I'd laugh if you killed me?" Rob says during one quarrel they get it out of their systems, they move on to the next calamity. Their marriage isn't storybook, but it works; emphasis on work. It's a grown up romance, and the final season leans into the themes of middle age and maturity (or lack thereof). Rob and Sharon's friends are dealing with midlife variously, be it splitting up their marriages or getting really into disaster prep. The season also introduces Rob's sister, Sydney (Michaela Watkins), who's become a Quaker, a peaceable practice that baffles her brother and sister in law, who can't believe you can just train yourself never to be angry. (Spoiler alert: You can't.) As for Rob and Sharon, parenthood itself concentrates one's focus like the prospect of an execution. "Having kids," Rob tells a starry eyed new dad friend, "is like strapping yourself to a Formula One racecar, you know? Boom! Your life is over. But not in a bad way!" "Yeah," Sharon says. "You just have to take everything you ever wanted and put it in a box because you never ... but yeah! It's great!" The idea that falling in love and having kids isn't the start of a limitless adventure but a narrowing of life paths isn't a typical rom com conclusion. But where is the lie? "Catastrophe" is smart and aware about the costs of commitment, especially for women. It's also the rare feminist TV comedy whose perspective is split evenly between male and female protagonists. The perspective pays off especially well in the fifth episode. which I would call MeToo inspired, except that it hits themes the show's had since it began. Sharon has an uncomfortable encounter with a superior at her job and Rob may be the beneficiary of a sexist boss (Chris Noth) at his, two parallel stories that swing between the need to speak up and the difficulty of sacrificing one's self on principle. Like the previous seasons, the final installment of "Catastrophe" is six short, neatly contained episodes. It's the rare series in this era of streaming binge marathons whose seasons actually feel too short. With less than three hours to play out, the emotional turns can feel abrupt and the resolutions sudden. But it also finds the greatest emotional depths of the series in a story line that acknowledges the real life death of Carrie Fisher, who played Rob's mother, Mia, and the co writers Delaney and Horgan maintain a tone of mordant optimism. Falling in love, this series suggests, is a sort of self imposed extremity, like marooning yourselves on an island. It's never easy, but you survive by pulling together. "When is it all going to stop being such a slog?" Sharon asks Rob at one point. There's no answer, except the one that this show has acerbically given for four seasons. It doesn't stop until everything does. The slog, the catastrophe, is life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Forward, the 121 year old Jewish publication that started as a Yiddish language daily newspaper for those who had fled persecution in Europe, announced on Thursday that it planned to stop publishing print editions this spring. "Whereas our readers once went to the newsstand with a nickel to read the news of the day, today, the vast majority of our community connects through the digital world," the publication said in a note to its readers. "That is where The Forward is and will be." In addition to the move away from print, The Forward cut nearly 30 percent of its staff, including the editor in chief, Jane Eisner, and the executive editor, Dan Friedman. "The staff here is great, and it was a very difficult decision," Rachel Fishman Feddersen, the publisher and chief executive of The Forward, said in an interview. "But my job is to make sure The Forward is here for the next 120 years, and that means having an organization that is focused on digital readership." Once known as The Jewish Daily Forward, the publication first put out supplements in English in the 1980s and started a weekly edition in English in 1990. Since 2017, The Forward has been a monthly magazine. It will continue to publish in both languages online after it stops appearing on newsstands. The Forward reaches more than two million readers a month online, the publisher said. The English print edition has 16,000 subscribers; the Yiddish version has fewer than 1,000. Overseen by the Forward Association, a nonprofit, The Forward has been losing money since 1945, Ms. Feddersen said. Over the last several years, she said, the losses have been "in the millions." 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. Ms. Eisner had been the editor since 2008. Before that she spent 25 years at The Philadelphia Inquirer, working as a reporter and editorial page editor. Under her leadership, The Forward broke several high profile stories, including a 2017 investigation saying that Sebastian Gorka, a former national security spokesman for the Trump administration, was a member of Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian nationalist group with a history of Nazi collaboration. Ms. Eisner also interviewed President Barack Obama in the Oval Office in 2015. "During more than 10 years as editor in chief, I have embraced visionary, fearless and impactful journalism that served our community with distinction," Ms. Eisner said in a statement. "I was ready to continue to lead The Forward in its next, online phase but the board and publisher chose instead to make substantial personnel changes, including that I will no longer be editor in chief." "I have cherished my time at The Forward, which has assembled the very best staff in Jewish journalism," she added. "It's been an honor to work with them." The Forward was co founded by the Belarus born writer Abraham Cahan, who served as its editor for 43 years. For many decades, the Nobel Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer published his short stories and serialized his novels in its pages. The publication "came to stand for the idea that the redemption of the Jews could be found in America and the ideas of social democracy. It fell in love with the way its utopian ideas could be pursued in America," Seth Lipsky, a former editor in chief of The Forward, said in an email. At its height in the 1920s, the publication had a circulation of more than 250,000, with editions printed around the country. "It was huge," said Mr. Lipsky, who wrote "The Rise of Abraham Cahan" and founded The New York Sun, a New York City daily broadsheet that lasted from 2002 to 2008. Mr. Lipsky said he was not worried about The Forward leaving print for something less palpable. "All of us in one way or another are approaching this rendezvous," he said. These days, he added, the manner of publication is not the main thing: "I think the future of the paper will be secured by scoops, rather than the method of delivery." At a time when print advertising has decreased and newsstands sell more candy bars and lottery tickets than newspapers, The Forward is not alone in making the shift to a digital only format. Conde Nast recently put an end to the regular print editions of Glamour, Teen Vogue and Self, and Hearst Magazines made the venerable Seventeen magazine into an online only publication. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
ATHENS Racing to secure financial aid and avoid a debt default, the Greek government has agreed to austerity measures totaling 24 billion euros (about 32 billion) that will include cutting some workers' pay and some public sector jobs as well as opening up parts of the economy, Greek officials said Friday. A letter of intent with the International Monetary Fund was mostly complete, according to one government official, who declined to be identified because of the confidential nature of the discussions. A deal could be announced by Sunday, this official said. As unions denounced the cost cutting measures and pledged to take to the streets over the weekend and go on strike on Wednesday, Prime Minister George Papandreou said Greece must quickly adopt the international aid plan. "Today, the top priority is the survival of the nation," he told Parliament on Friday. "This is the red line." The euro gained against the dollar for a third day, rising to 1.3312, as fears that Greece's turmoil could spread in Europe were surpassed by relief that a bailout was imminent. The details of the plan have been settled in negotiations here with officials of the European Union, the I.M.F. and the European Central Bank. Greek officials close to the discussions said the deal would include as much as 130 billion euros in aid over the next three years at reasonable interest rates. In return, the I.M.F. asked Greece to cut public sector spending by 8 billion euros in the 14 months after the plan was adopted. Economists called that provision crucial because past reform programs by the government have relied too much on overly optimistic assumptions about the collection of unpaid taxes. Union and government officials said Greece had also pledged to raise its value added tax to 25 percent, to freeze civil servants' wages and to eliminate public sector bonuses amounting to two months' pay. They said the government intended to increase taxes on fuel, tobacco and alcohol. Among the most significant features of the plan, a Greek government official said, would be a measure making it easier for the government to lay off some of the many thousands of public sector workers, whose low levels of productivity and high wages are a big contributor to Greece's debt problem. Until now, the government has not been able to lay off civil servants, whose employment rights are in effect constitutionally guaranteed. Another reform high on the list is removing the state from the marketplace in crucial sectors like health care, transportation and energy and allowing private investment. Economists say that the liberalization of trucking routes where a trucking license can cost up to 90,000 and the health care industry would help bring down prices in these areas, which are among the highest in Europe. Some analysts fear the austerity measures could push Greece into a deeper and prolonged recession and spur widespread social unrest. But Yiannis Stournaras, a leading economist and former economic adviser to the ruling socialist party, said a majority of Greeks had lost the will to rebel. After years of profligate spending, he argued, Greece is being forced to make changes that would improve its competitiveness in the longer term. Teachers' union members at a rally this week in Athens. Their banner reads "for the education, for Greece." Unions have denounced cost cutting measures and pledged rallies and a strike. "In any other situation the reaction would be fierce, but while the Greek people are angry, there will not be a widespread revolt because they realize that the alternative is for the country to go bankrupt. We have no other choice." As Greek television stations reported on the aid plan, European leaders sought to reassure jittery markets, dismissing calls by some economists for Greece to restructure its debt. Amadeu Altafaj, a spokesman for Olli Rehn, the European Union's monetary affairs commissioner, said European officials were engaged in what he described as "fire brigading" to ensure stability "on the Greek front." There would be "no restructuring of the debt," he said. That's "not even part of the debate in Athens." He insisted that no discussions were taking place about whether other euro zone countries could have access to similar financial aid if needed. In recent days debt markets have come under pressure in Portugal and Spain. Meanwhile on Friday in Germany, where the government has equivocated for months, the finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, reiterated a pledge to take swift action to help Greece. Chancellor Angela Merkel faces a regional election in the country's most populous state, North Rhine Westphalia, on May 9. But Mr. Schauble, apparently alluding to what was at stake for the euro zone, indicated it was important to maintain the stability of the euro. "Germany will take a major part in coming to the assistance of Greece," he said. "Opposition groups will not block this. Given the mood in the public in Germany, everyone in politics knows that not being helpful is not a good argument to win regional elections." In Athens, where the prospect of a rescue has been greeted with a mix of relief and wounded pride, central bank data showed that business and household deposits at Greek banks fell for a third month in March, bringing total losses in the first quarter to 10.6 billion euros. Moody's Investors Service downgraded its credit ratings on nine Greek banks on Friday. Platon Monokroussos, an economist at EFG Eurobank, the nation's second largest bank after the National Bank of Greece, said speculation that austerity measures would include new taxes on savings had caused some wealthy Greeks to move their funds to foreign banks and Cypriot units of Greek banks. But he said he expected the rescue package to calm fears and prevent a flight of funds. Earlier in the week, the finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, told Mega TV that the Greek government had pledged to guarantee deposits at banks. But some businesspeople said the credit squeeze was growing worse. Konstantinos Michalos, president of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and the owner of a company exporting latex products, said businesses were being deprived of much needed liquidity. He said his group's members were complaining that some foreign banks were refusing to accept credit guarantees from Greek banks, citing the economic instability. As more Greeks in rural areas took their deposits out of banks and put their savings under their mattresses, he said, home burglaries were on the rise. Despite all the financial concerns, many Greeks insisted that fears of economic collapse were exaggerated. Yiannis Batsos, 37, a lawyer, said he would not shift his money elsewhere in Europe. "If people take their money out of banks, this will only make things worse," he said on a bustling street in central Athens, where dozens of Greeks sipped cappuccinos, seemingly unperturbed by the economic crisis. "We Greeks are not the only ones in Europe who are in this mess." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at David Geffen Hall (May 17, 7:30 p.m., through May 22). Semyon Bychkov takes the podium at the Philharmonic this week, and his recent outings there have had a certain solidity, an assured quality, to them. After the Los Angeles Philharmonic's performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 only a couple of weeks ago in the same hall, the piece finds itself on this program too; it is preceded by Brahms's "Tragic Overture" and Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1. Bertrand Chamayou is the soloist. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org YUJA WANG at Carnegie Hall (May 17, 8 p.m.). Ms. Wang has been experimenting with stalwarts of the Austro Germanic tradition in a few of her more recent Carnegie recitals Beethoven, Schubert but there's none of that here. Instead, pyrotechnics and composers whose music is suited to her talents, not least an infectious sense of rhythm and a heady way with lusher sounds. On offer: preludes and etudes tableaus by Rachmaninoff; etudes by Ligeti; a Prokofiev sonata, the Eighth; and Scriabin. Expect encores by the half dozen. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org SHAI WOSNER at the 92nd Street Y (May 11, 9 p.m.). The last of three concerts from a subtle, sensitive pianist, all of which have looked afresh at Schubert's late piano sonatas, with the latest of the late pieces, the disturbed, valedictory Sonata in B Flat (D. 960); and the Sonata in G (D. 894), a work too often overlooked. If that doesn't convince you, a free glass of wine might. 212 415 5500, 92y.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Super Bowl is a popular destination for commercials showcasing premium water, candy and beer but politics can make it a difficult forum. 84 Lumber, a private supplier of building materials in Pennsylvania that is advertising during the game for the first time this year, said it was forced to alter its plans for a commercial after Fox deemed its depiction of a Spanish speaking mother and daughter confronting a border wall between the United States and Mexico, which President Trump has pledged to build, as "too controversial." The ad, slated to run before halftime during the network's broadcast of the game on Sunday, will now showcase the pair on a journey, but omit the wall. Instead, the address of a website will appear on the screen, giving viewers a chance to see how their story ends. "I still can't even understand why it was censored," Maggie Hardy Magerko, 84 Lumber's president and owner, said in an interview this week. "In fact, I'm flabbergasted by that in today's day and age. It's not pornographic, it's not immoral, it's not racist." Advertisers pay millions of dollars for commercial space during the game, but the network and the National Football League maintain the right to approve any ad. "We review spots to ensure they do not violate our advertising policies," a league spokesman, Brian McCarthy, said in an email. "The ad that will air does not violate our policies." He did not say if the N.F.L. had asked for 84 Lumber's original commercial to be altered. Fox declined to comment, but the network's advertising guidelines online say that, in general, it will not sell commercial time "for viewpoint or advocacy of controversial issues." It adds that advertisers cannot use the space to address such topics. But with political tension in the country running high since the election of Mr. Trump, keeping politics completely away from the broadcast is a difficult task. Budweiser, for instance, has gained notice it wasn't anticipating for its Super Bowl ad. The commercial, which was released online this week and has passed two million views on YouTube, recounts how the brewery's co founder immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1800s and notes the discrimination he overcame. Budweiser has emphasized that it is not responding to Mr. Trump's immigration crackdown last weekend. In 2012, a Chrysler Super Bowl ad featuring Clint Eastwood was seen by some conservatives as pandering to President Barack Obama after his administration's bailout of automakers. In the case of 84 Lumber, Ms. Magerko said that Fox vetoed the initial idea based on a storyboard of the proposed commercial from Brunner, the company's ad agency. That document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, said the commercial would show a mother and daughter on "an arduous journey north," as American workers built a large structure. Their journey appeared doomed once they reached the wall until a patriotic symbol inspired them to find a massive doorway which is what the workers were creating all along. The final line: "The will to succeed will always be welcome here." Ms. Magerko, who said she voted for Mr. Trump, said the ad was meant to recruit employees in their 20s "who really believe in American dreams." She expressed concern about the labor shortage her company is facing. She said she had a welcoming attitude toward certain immigrants, while providing the caveat that she had faith in elected officials to "make the decisions to make us safe." "I am all about those people who are willing to fight and go that extra yard to make a difference and then if they have to, you know, climb higher, go under, do whatever it takes to become a citizen. I am all for that 110 percent," she said. "But do I want cartels? Hell, no." It has become a marketing strategy of sorts over the years to intentionally create a Super Bowl ad that will never make it to air, then capitalize on online traffic. But Ms. Magerko said that was not 84 Lumber's plan, noting that the company is still showing the edited 90 second spot that Fox has approved. Ms. Magerko said that some people might think she was "as crazy as a loon to go out there and buy this enormous ad that makes no sense financially." "I'm sure I'm going to have economists and all these people say she's an idiot, and maybe I am," she said. "But I'm an idiot that has some money now that my people made for me, and I owe it to them to say that they're great and I need more people like them." A company representative confirmed that it spent more than 5 million on the ad, which was the average rate this year for 30 seconds. The company, which draws about 2.9 billion in revenue a year and has been rebuilding since the recession, is keen on igniting a conversation around housing and labor, she said. As for immigration and the wall, "We didn't know this was going to be the hot topic six weeks ago," Ms. Magerko said. "We knew it was a topic. We didn't know it was the topic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A decade ago, when Harris Melmed's company moved him to Manhattan from the Philadelphia area, he rented a one bedroom in a Hell's Kitchen tower. When the rent rose, he moved to another one bedroom in a newer building nearby. Mr. Melmed, now 40, works for a pharmaceutical company. Four years ago, he met Eric Hannah, 45, a personal trainer, at an "Out at Night" event at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. Two years ago, Mr. Hannah moved from Philadelphia to be with Mr. Melmed. The couple lived in a two bedroom rental in the West 50s, with the second bedroom for Mr. Hannah's daughter, who visits often. Their apartment overlooked Eighth Avenue, which, although convenient, turned out to be loud. They could set their watches by the arrival of sanitation trucks at the hotel across the street in the middle of the night. Cars sat at the corner with music blaring. Last year, a friend who had purchased a place in the West Village convinced Mr. Melmed that he, too, should buy an apartment. The friend referred him to Janine Young, a saleswoman at Bond New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Scientists warned osteoporosis patients on Thursday to avoid two common procedures used to shore up painful fractures in crumbling spines. The treatments, which involve injecting bone cement into broken vertebrae, relieve pain no better than a placebo does, according to an expert task force convened by the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research. The task force noted that the pain goes away or diminishes within six weeks without the procedure. Patients should take painkillers instead, the experts said, and maybe try back braces and physical therapy. Patients also should take osteoporosis drugs to slow bone loss, said Dr. Peter Ebeling, head of the department of medicine at Monash University in Australia and lead author of the new report, which was published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. A patient who has had a spine fracture and does not take the drugs has a one in five chance of developing another fracture in the next year. With the medications, the odds are one in 20. The new advice may not sit well with many doctors and patients. For chronic pain caused by fractured vertebrae, there are few good treatments. And many patients believe the procedures eased their pain and increased their mobility. "That's why people don't want to let go of this," said Dr. Alan S. Hilibrand, a professor of neurological surgery at Jefferson University and a spokesman for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Surgeons use two methods to deliver the bone cement. In one operation, vertebroplasty, the cement is injected directly into the injured vertebra. In a newer procedure, kyphoplasty, doctors inflate a balloon to elevate the broken bone into position, and then inject the cement. The treatments are widely advertised and promoted by companies that make surgical devices and bone cement, as well as groups such as the National Osteoporosis Foundation. Insurers generally cover the treatments. Medicare pays about 2,400 to 3,000 for vertebroplasty, and 6,500 to 10,000 for kyphoplasty, depending on where the procedure is performed. To assess the effectiveness of the two methods, the task force reviewed previously published data. Vertebroplasty was tested in five rigorous trials with placebo controls, the task force found. Subjects who received sham procedures reported just as much pain relief. Moreover, for those who had the treatment, pain relief did not last, said Dr. Bart Clarke, president of the A.S.B.M.R., who wrote a perspective accompanying the task force report. After a month, pain among these patients was no less than it was among patients who did not have cement injections. Kyphoplasty has not been subjected to such rigorous evaluations, but it has been compared with vertebroplasty in a few small trials. In terms of pain relief, the two procedures were roughly equivalent. "If one of these procedures is going to be offered, the patient should be informed that there is a minimal chance it will help," said Dr. Ebeling, who conducted one of the first randomized trials of vertebroplasty. "The natural history is that pain will get better over the next four to six weeks," he added. "That's what I tell my patients." Australia's health care system stopped paying for the procedures in 2010, after two placebo controlled trials failed to find a significant effect, and their use dropped by about 70 percent, Dr. Ebeling said. The problem for doctors and patients is that even if the pain diminishes with time, patients may be desperate for relief in the short term. The cement injections can seem to offer that. Suppose a patient is incapacitated by pain from a broken vertebra, said Dr. Joshua A. Hirsch, a back pain specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Is it so bad to offer bone cement? "You have a choice," said Dr. Hirsch. "Opiates and lying in bed with diminished activity, or a procedure that can mobilize patients and improve them." Then there are the difficult patients, perhaps 10 percent of the total, whose severe pain lingers for months. Dr. Hilibrand said he agrees with the task force's findings, but if patients "still have recalcitrant pain one to three months after the fracture, this is an option. Do you withhold treatment and have them continue to suffer?" Dr. David Kallmes, a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic and one of the first doctors to cast doubt on vertebroplasty, said he understands the appeal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
On its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the music streaming service finished with a valuation of 26.5 billion. The share price closed at 149.01, giving Spotify a market value similar to that of companies like M T Bank and General Mills. For the music business, Spotify's listing on the Big Board symbolized the ascent of streaming as the new dominant format. It also represented some rare good news for an industry deeply affected by technological change. Buoyed by subscriptions from services like Spotify and Apple Music, record labels have begun to have significant revenue growth for the first time in nearly two decades, drawing attention from investors. "There's a healthy appetite among public market investors for streaming media assets," said Rob Sanderson, an analyst at MKM Partners. The stock opened trading at 165.90, meaning that Spotify was valued at 29.5 billion to start the day, before declining gradually through the afternoon. Among Wall Street traders, Spotify's debut as a public company drew attention for the way it decided to list its shares. It went with a so called direct listing approach, a rare process that eschewed the usual circus and safeguards of a standard initial public offering. Typically, a company lists its shares publicly as part of a broader plan to raise fresh cash for acquisitions or other investments. Spotify chose not to raise any new funds by issuing shares, which would have diluted the value of existing stakes owned by shareholders. Instead, the company is taking existing shares and allowing them to be traded on the exchange. That allows longtime shareholders like investors and employees to sell their shares on the exchange immediately, though for years an active secondary market has existed for Spotify stock. The Stockholm based company, which was founded in 2006 and went online in 2008, said it did not need to raise any new cash from investors, citing the roughly 1.84 billion it had on hand at the end of 2017. Daniel Ek, the company's chief executive and co founder, characterized Spotify's manner of going public as perfectly in keeping with the company's self image as a disrupter. "Normally, companies ring bells. Normally, companies spend their day doing interviews on the trading floor touting why their stock is a good investment," Mr. Ek said in a statement Monday. "Normally, companies don't pursue a direct listing." 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. "While I appreciate that this path makes sense for most, Spotify has never been a normal kind of company." Indeed, Mr. Ek gave no interviews on the trading floor (although he did appear on "CBS This Morning"). Spotify's direct listing approach was still seen as risky. Without underwriting banks acting as "stabilizing agents," and without millions of newly issued shares to guarantee liquidity, the process for setting an opening price proved slow and complex. The stock did not begin trading until 12:43 p.m., the latest start for any company ever listed on the New York Stock Exchange, according to Kristen Kaus, a spokeswoman for the exchange. Before the slow start, in a botched attempt at hospitality, the New York Stock Exchange welcomed the Swedish company to the trading floor by flying the red and white flag of Switzerland outside its headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The error was quickly corrected, with a blue and yellow Swedish flag taking the place of the Swiss banner but not before Scandinavian Twitter had captured the mix up. Afterward, the day went without a glitch, with Spotify achieving a trading volume of 30 million. "It was a safe landing," said Santosh Rao, the head of research at Manhattan Venture Partners. "People thought this was going to be chaotic, but it was smooth." Spotify's arrival on the market followed the Wall Street debut of Dropbox last month, when the cloud storage company's shares jumped 36 percent on its first day of trading. Dropbox closed Tuesday at 31.59, far above its I.P.O. price of 21 a share. Taken together, the new offerings amount to a bright spot for a technology sector that has been badly beaten up by investors this year. Amid growing concern over trade tensions with China and possible regulatory scrutiny of Facebook, technology shares shed roughly 450 billion in market capitalization between March 12, the peak of the Standard Poor's 500 tech sector, and Monday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Students at Newton Bateman Elementary School in Chicago use Google powered laptops and Google education apps for classwork. More than half the nation's primary and secondary school students more than 30 million children use Google education apps, the company says.Credit...Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times Students at Newton Bateman Elementary School in Chicago use Google powered laptops and Google education apps for classwork. More than half the nation's primary and secondary school students more than 30 million children use Google education apps, the company says. The director of Google's education apps group, Jonathan Rochelle, touched on that idea in a speech at an industry conference last year. Referring to his own children, he said: "I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don't know why they are learning it." He added, "And I don't know why they can't ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there." Schools may be giving Google more than they are getting: generations of future customers. Google makes 30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable. Every year, several million American students graduate from high school. And not only does Google make it easy for those who have school Google accounts to upload their trove of school Gmail, Docs and other files to regular Google consumer accounts but schools encourage them to do so. This month, for instance, Chatfield Senior High School in Littleton, Colo., sent out a notice urging seniors to "make sure" they convert their school account "to a personal Gmail account." That doesn't sit well with some parents. They warn that Google could profit by using personal details from their children's school email to build more powerful marketing profiles of them as young adults. "My concern is that they are working on developing a profile of this child that, when they hit maturity, they are able to create a better profile," said David Barsotti, an information technology project manager in the Chicago area whose daughter uses Google tools in elementary school. "That is a problem, in my opinion." Mr. Rochelle of Google said that when students transfer their school emails and files to a personal Google account, that account is governed by Google's privacy policy. "Personal Gmail accounts may serve ads," he said, but files in Google Drive are "never scanned for the purpose of showing ads." But that also caused problems in Chicago and another district when Google went looking for teachers to try a new app effectively bypassing district administrators. In both cases, Google found itself reined in. Unlike Apple or Microsoft, which make money primarily by selling devices or software services, Google derives most of its revenue from online advertising much of it targeted through sophisticated use of people's data. Questions about how Google might use data gleaned from students' online activities have dogged the company for years. "Unless we know what is collected, why it is collected, how it is used and a review of it is possible, we can never understand with certainty how this information could be used to help or hurt a kid," said Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media, a children's advocacy group, who vets the security and privacy of classroom apps. Google declined to provide a breakdown of the exact details the company collects from student use of its services. Bram Bout, director of Google's education unit, pointed to a Google privacy notice listing the categories of information that the company's education services collect, like location data and "details of how a user used our service." Mr. Bout said that student data in Google's core education services (including Gmail, Calendar and Docs) "is only used to provide the services themselves, so students can do things like communicate using email." These services do not show ads, he said, and "do not use personal data resulting from use of these services to target ads." Some parents, school administrators and privacy advocates believe that's not enough. They say Google should be more forthcoming about the details it collects about students, why it collects them and how it uses them. "If my daughter came home and logged on to Google Docs on my computer at home, they'll know it was now coming from this address," said Mr. Barsotti, the Chicago area project manager. "If this is truly for educational purposes, what is their business model and why do they need to collect that?" "You can't just hand out product and hope it will work in the classroom," Ms. Hahn said. "You have to work with the districts to make sure that you are keeping the kids and the teachers safe." Jim Siegl, technology architect for Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, the nation's 10th largest school district, reported a similar experience. He said that Google had directly contacted certain Fairfax teachers who had volunteered to beta test Classroom, giving them early access to the app. In so doing, he said, the company ignored the Google settings he had selected that were supposed to give his district control over which new Google services to switch on in its schools. Mr. Siegl added that Google did not tell him which, or even how many, Fairfax teachers the company had enlisted to try out the Classroom app. And by the time he was able to shut off the app, Mr. Siegl said, teachers had already set up virtual classrooms on the service and started using it with their students. He said he complained to Google. "Because of who they are and how sprawling the ecosystem is," Mr. Siegl said, "they are held up and need to meet a higher standard than any other vendor schools deal with." In an emailed statement, Mr. Bout said of the company's core education services, "In all cases, the use of these services is tied to the approval of an administrator who is responsible for overseeing a school's domain." Classroom was the brainchild of Mr. Rochelle, who started Google's education apps group, and Zach Yeskel, a Google product manager and former high school math teacher. They said they envisioned the app as a kind of "mission control" dashboard where teachers could more efficiently manage tasks like assigning and correcting homework, freeing teachers to spend more time with students. To create the app, they collaborated closely with teachers. In May 2014, Google posted an announcement online, asking for volunteers to beta test Classroom. More than 100,000 teachers worldwide responded, the company said, illustrating Google's power to rapidly stoke demand among educators. That August, Google made Classroom available to schools. "They developed a real momentum with teachers," said Mr. Fisher of Futuresource Consulting. "Google Classroom was key to that." That was too fast for Chicago Public Schools. Administrators there wanted to test Classroom first to make sure it complied with district policies and fit their teachers' needs. So they set up a pilot program, involving about 275 teachers and several thousand students, to run for the entire school year. Every month, Ms. Hahn said, she collected teachers' feedback and sent it to Google. "We wanted to help them do it right," Ms. Hahn said. One immediate problem administrators identified: School board policy required employees to keep records of cyberbullying and other problematic comments. But Classroom initially did not do that. If a student wrote something offensive and a teacher deleted it, there was no archive. "It took us a long time to get them to do it," Ms. Hahn said. She added, "Unfortunately, there were things that a district of our size needed that Google did not understand." Google eventually added an archiving feature. The next fall, the Chicago district switched on Classroom. Teachers there later vetted other Google products, effectively becoming a test lab for the company. "We have said to Google many times, 'If it works in Chicago, it will work anywhere,'" Ms. Hahn said. Mr. Bout of Google agreed, saying that Chicago Public Schools often made more stringent demands on Google than other school districts did. The relationship has benefited Chicago Public Schools, too. In 2015, the district was reeling from a scandal: The Justice Department charged the Chicago Public Schools former chief executive Barbara Byrd Bennett with steering more than 23 million in no bid contracts to two school vendors in exchange for kickbacks. Ms. Byrd Bennett later pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced in April to four and a half years in prison. The fact that Chicago schools were vetting Google products, like the Classroom app, gave administrators a welcome counternarrative of the district's altruistically helping Google debug its products for schools across the country. And it remains a good story even as the district now faces a financial crisis. Today, about 15 million primary and secondary school students in the United States use Classroom, Google said. Google's ability to test its products on such a monumental scale has stoked concerns about whether the tech giant is exploiting public school teachers and students for free labor. "It's a private company very creatively using public resources in this instance, teachers' time and expertise to build new markets at low cost," said Patricia Burch, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California. Mr. Rochelle, the Google executive, said that it was important for the company to have large, diverse sets of educational users giving feedback otherwise it might develop products that worked for only a few of them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If you, like me, have an emotional default set to low level dread, terror lurks everywhere. Consider the climate emergency, the coronavirus, rising far right extremism, the disappearance of frogs, crimes over avocados. Last week, I stumbled on a study of hair dye toxicity that sent me into an hourslong Google spiral, and I now know uncomfortable things about p Phenylenediamine. Which is to say that modern life is scary. So it's baffling that two new adaptations of horror classics "Frankenstein" and "Dracula," running in repertory at Classic Stage Company are not. In fact, they summon all the terror of a cooling mug of chamomile tea. Individually, the plays have their pleasures, with "Dracula" the more (sorry!) toothsome. Collectively, running these versions in repertory is a thing that goes flop in the night. Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," published in 1818, and Bram Stoker's "Dracula," released in 1897, are stranger, squirmier novels than their pop culture legacies suggest. Works that both defy and create genre, they adopt peculiar forms. "Frankenstein" opens and closes with a letter from a polar explorer to his sister. "Dracula" assembles itself from telegrams, diary entries, doctor's notes and ship's logs. Both books operate on at least two levels as thrilling tales and elusive allegories. "Dracula" has been read as a metaphor for capitalism, colonialism, sexual desire, anxieties around the New Woman. "Frankenstein," invented by a teenager on a wet vacation, has inspired interpretations centered on scientific responsibility, climate change, a horror of childbirth. Theatrical adaptations can't and shouldn't encompass all that, but they need to integrate both story and symbolism in some graceful, playable way, which neither of these scripts manages. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"Friendsgiving," the new comedy written and directed by Nicol Paone, takes a surprisingly charming and hilarious approach to a traditional holiday. Abby (Kat Dennings), who recently came out and has spent the whole year mourning her first lesbian relationship, can't wait to spend Thanksgiving with her recently divorced best friend Molly (Malin Akerman). But things do not go as planned: Instead of turkey, pies and tears, the two friends end up hosting a friendsgiving dinner made up of family, buddies, new loves, old flames and some psychedelic drug induced fairies. The ensemble cast which includes Jane Seymour as Molly's cougar leaning mother, Chelsea Peretti as a questionably certified shaman and Wanda Sykes as one of Abby's self described "fairy gay mothers" carries the film at every turn. These delightful performances prevent the film's antics from being dizzying and overwrought. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Conservatives are zeroing in on a new enemy in the political culture wars: Big Tech. Arguing that Silicon Valley is stifling their speech and suppressing right wing content, publishers and provocateurs on the right are eyeing a public relations battle against online giants like Google and Facebook, the same platforms they once relied on to build a national movement. In a sign of escalation, Peter Schweizer, a right wing journalist known for his investigations into Hillary Clinton, plans to release a new film focusing on technology companies and their role in filtering the news. Tentatively titled "The Creepy Line," Mr. Schweizer's documentary is expected to have its first screening in May in Cannes, France during the Cannes Film Festival, but not as part of the official competition. He used the same rollout two years ago for his previous film, an adaptation of his book "Clinton Cash" that he produced with Stephen K. Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News. "The Creepy Line" alludes to an infamous 2010 speech by Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google at the time, who dismissed concerns about privacy by declaring that his company's policy was "to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it." The documentary, which has not been previously reported, dovetails with concerns raised in recent weeks by right wing groups about censorship on digital media a new front in a rapidly evolving culture war. If the mainstream media is a perennial enemy of the right, Big Tech is a fresh and novel foe, arguably more relevant to 2018. Facebook, Google and their ilk are facing tough questions about their inability to police the content they distribute, including Russian propaganda during the 2016 presidential campaign. The companies have also been accused by lawmakers, critics and activists of monopolistic tendencies and manipulative product design. The critique from conservatives, in contrast, casts the big tech companies as censorious and oppressive, all too eager to stifle right wing content in an effort to mollify liberal critics. "This could end up being the free speech issue of our time," said Alex Marlow, editor in chief of Breitbart News, which has published articles accusing Google and Facebook of, among other sins, political bias. "The Silicon Valley elites are saying: 'We don't care what you want to see we know what you should see. We know better.'" Big Tech is easily associated with West Coast liberalism and Democratic politics, making it a fertile target for the right. And operational opacity at Facebook, Google and Twitter, which are reluctant to reveal details about their algorithms and internal policies, can leave them vulnerable, too. "It's the perfect foil," said Eli Pariser, a former executive director of the liberal activist group MoveOn.org and the author of "The Filter Bubble," a book about how consumers find information online. "There's not even a real basis to establish objective research about what's happening on Facebook, because it's closed." Google, Facebook and Twitter loomed large at last month's Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., where dozens of guests squeezed into a standing room only ballroom for a discussion called "Suppression of Conservative Views on Social Media: A First Amendment Issue." Among the panelists were James O'Keefe, the guerrilla filmmaker who has tried to undermine news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, and James Damore, an engineer fired by Google after he circulated a memo arguing that biological differences accounted for the low number of women in engineering. Mr. Damore a new celebrity in the right wing world, who, in an interview, said of his first foray to CPAC, "There's definitely a lot of people that want to take selfies" described a culture of dogmatic liberalism at Google. "There are political activists in all of these companies that want to actively push a liberal agenda," he said. "Why does it matter? Because these companies are so ubiquitous and powerful that they are controlling all the means of mass communication." Before Mr. Damore spoke, organizers distributed baseball caps to guests emblazoned with an illustration of Twitter's bird logo, upside down and with its eyes crossed out. That charge of editorial bias was echoed last weekend by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind Infowars, who accused YouTube of planning to delete his organization's account, a claim that was widely shared among conservatives. YouTube did delete some videos that accused teenage survivors of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting of being "crisis actors," and it issued "strikes," or warnings, to the accounts of Infowars and Jerome Corsi, a conservative author and Infowars contributor. (YouTube denied that it had plans to delete the Infowars account.) Facebook has also caught flak for adjusting the algorithm for its News Feed to emphasize posts from "friends, family and groups" over content from public pages. The change was part of an effort by the company to answer criticism, but also to reinvigorate its oldest and most profitable product, which recently recorded a decline in American daily users for the first time in its history. The Facebook adjustment has affected virtually every media organization that is partly dependent on the platform for audiences, but it appears to have hit some harder than others. They include right wing sites like Gateway Pundit and the millennial focused Independent Journal Review, which was forced to lay off staff members last month. The social news giant BuzzFeed recently bought ads on Facebook with the message, "Facebook is taking the news out of your News Feed, but we've got you covered," directing users to download its app. Away from the political scrum, the viral lifestyle site LittleThings, once a top publisher on the platform, announced last week that it would cease operations, blaming "a full on catastrophic update" to Facebook's revised algorithms. Right wing media has pounced. In late February, citing statistics from the social analytics firm NewsWhip, Breitbart published an article on the effects on the president's Facebook page with the headline "EXCLUSIVE: Trump's Facebook Engagement Declined By 45 Percent Following Algorithm Change." The drop, the article insinuated, occurred "following a year of pressure from left wing employees and the mainstream media for 'allowing' the president to win the 2016 general election." Still, the brewing backlash did not stop Google and Facebook from courting the very crowd that now seems ready to declare them enemies. Both companies were sponsors at this year's CPAC, leading to a few awkward moments. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
WASHINGTON At the age of 6, a child is full of imagination and may not distinguish reality from fantasy. She is beginning to read and can't grasp nuances in written communication. She also doesn't understand privacy. Citing those reasons and more, dozens of pediatric and mental health experts are calling on Facebook to kill a messaging service the company introduced last month for children as young as 6. In a letter to the company, they said the service, Messenger Kids, which pushes the company's user base well below its previous minimum age of 13, preys on a vulnerable group developmentally unprepared to be on the social network. The letter was organized by the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, an advocacy group that has successfully pushed companies to abandon marketing like a Pokemon Go app that sent children to fast food and other stores, and McDonald's advertising on the envelopes of report cards in Florida. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The following video contains a Facebook newsfeed. While information contained in it is based on real posts and real events, the feed and characters depicted within it have been created for illustrative purposes. Section 1: INTRO On the surface Facebook seems pretty straight forward. You use it to spy on exes and make people jealous about that vacation you took that was actually a disaster. But in becoming such a central part of day to day communications Facebook has transformed into its own geopolitical force. One in five minutes spent online are spent on Facebook. It's a cyber kingdom with a population of over 2 billion. That power has made the leaders of many countries feel threatened. So governments have started to push back, attempting to regain some control over how their citizens communicate. Our story begins here where the fight between companies and countries has begun fragmenting the internet itself. TITLE: How Facebook is Changing Your Internet To understand Facebook's role in how the internet is breaking apart, you first have to leave the U.S. Zuck: "Its great to be here in Barcelona with you" Zuck: "Its great to be here in Berlin" Zuck: "Its great to be here in India" Zuck: "I Wanted to come to Legos first" Want to win an election in Ecuador? Are you trying to build a business in Brazil? Network in the Netherlands? Or are you trying to have your single go no. 1 in Senegal? It doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing Facebook has become a necessity for real world success. Section 2: Expansion Model In part, that's because the company has gone through extreme efforts to reach far flung corners of the globe. They're putting satellites into space and developing internet beaming solar powered drones. Here's one taking off now. 1. Zuck: "Connectivity can't be a privilege for just the rich and powerful. (It needs to be something that everyone shares, an opportunity for everyone.") The company is subsidizing connectivity in the developing world with the mission to make Facebook accessible to all. Here on the outskirts of Nairobi, Facebook made a deal with a telecom provider and now customers of that company can use Facebook free of charge. For those users, Facebook might be their entire experience of the internet. "If you grew up and never had a computer and you've never used the internet and someone asked you if you wanted a data plan, you response would probably also be "what's a data plan and why would I want one?" They call it "Free Basics" a kind of mini version of the internet that gives users free access to Facebook and a few other sites. They're rolling it out in developing countries all around the world. So why does it matter if they gives away free Facebook access? KENYA EX: 1 of Unintended Consequence Let's say you live in Nairobi and your name is Phyl. You find some cheap handbags made of the finest chinese pleather and decide to sell them online. With Facebook offering free internet and just about everyone you know using the site, you decide there's no need to pay for a shop, so you snap a photo of a blue bag, post it on your facebook page and soon customers from across East Africa are liking your photo. Some people even place orders, even a few who don't have a data plan because they're using Facebook's free version of the internet. They're happy because they found a bag and didn't pay any sales tax or data fees. Your happy because you avoided renting a shop and got cash. So life is good. But then you realize, your entire economic existence is resting in the hands of a coder in a hoody who loves avocado toast sitting in Silicon Valley. The more you think about it, the more uncertainty there is. What would happen if Facebook decided to start taking a cut of your business? Or what would happen if the Kenyan government added fees to Facebook, would they pass it on to you? And what if you decided to cut them out and go straight to the customer yourself? How could you possibly have a chance against Facebook? Questions like these, have led some critics to compare Facebook's dominance in places like Kenya to a form of digital colonialism. For Kenyans, these issues are still theoretical, but for others the issues are much more real. JAKARTA Ex: of Unintended Consequence 2 Let's say you live in Indonesia and you're a devout Muslim man. You're not convinced about this whole internet thing and you don't want to spend a good chunk of your monthly income to get a connection. But your daughter keeps telling you, the internet thing really is a thing. So she sets you up with Facebook's free version of the internet. Online you discover cat videos are surprisingly fun to watch. Then you see a video of your mayor. In it, he appears to say the Quran is lying. You can't believe it. The video has millions of hits. NAT POP MAYOR AHOK: "Thus ladies and gentlemen, if you feel that you can't vote for me because you're afraid you will go to hell, you are being lied to, but that's alright because this is your personal calling." In response, you and hundreds of thousands of other people come out to protest calling for the mayor to be removed from office. Six months later he's voted out of office. But the problem is the video that got you so angry was edited to make the statement seem more provocative than it actually was. But you don't know that. And you don't even have the ability to seek out other information because Facebook's free version of the internet only gives you access to a few sites. So you're left only with A Facebook reality. Section 3: Cause And Facebook's reality is one that's based on an algorithm. And that algorithm rewards engagement, which often means prioritizing inflammatory posts. Combine that with Facebook's ambitious mission to bring internet to the developing world and you've got a problem. On one hand, Facebook's efforts bring information to more of the world than ever before. On the other hand, you have the world as it looks today, where guys like your Uncle Joe bicker on behalf of candidates using rumors and propaganda. Trump Supporter: "Fuck political correctness, Build the wall!" This is a space where protests flare up around lies and measured voices are shouted down by radical ones. Duterte Nat Pop: "President Obama is a son of a whore" Trump nat pop: "We will have so much winning if I get elected" Wilders: There is lots of Moroccan scum in Holland Mr. Zuckerberg has said the company is working on squashing fake news, but the problem goes further into what gets promoted and why. But for Facebook, there isn't a lot of incentive to cut down on the half truths and misconceptions. Its main goal is to hold its audience captive and grow its community ever larger. Written Quote on Screen: "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." At stake is the future of the internet itself. Facebook and only a handful of other major internet companies control our online lives, and each is aggressively trying to expand. Does the Kenyan government care if Facebook has allowed Phyl to circumnavigate their tax system? Does the Indonesian government care that 200,000 people are in their streets protesting? The answer is yes. Section 4: Effect The end result pits countries against companies. And not all governments are willing to cede power to Facebook. So they create new laws to govern their country's digital space that cater to their interests. This goes against the way the internet was original supposed to work, as a way for people to share information without borders or rules. Now, Instead of one internet there are many. Some are controlled by countries, others by companies. And everyone wants more control. Section 5: China Comparison There's no better place to see the fragmentation of the internet than in China. Nat Pop Zuck: Xin Nian Kuai Le China's internet is cut off from the rest of the world by filters that keep websites like Facebook from working. Tank Man Clip It's sort of an anti internet. Instead of facilitating free communication, it often works as a means to control that communication. Instead of connecting China to the world, it cuts it off. According to China's internet, this event never even happened. But if you compare China's internet to Facebook, some uncomfortable parallels emerge. While facebook lets you post plenty of articles and links from the greater internet, it also operates by its own rules. Just like China's internet, a central authority tracks what you do and decides what you see. Most of the time your feed is hiding a baby photo from that girl Jane who may have been in your 4th grade class, but you can't quite remember. But sometimes it's hiding more. For example, these images were all banned from Facebook because they didn't meet its community standards and now they're in this video. We think it's important to show them, but because we did, Facebook could now block our video. Cut to black OUTRO The question is: Whose values are we following? Should we cater to the values of Facebook's algorithm and policies in order to be heard? Even understanding Facebook's values can be difficult. In many places they promote free speech, yet in others, they are willing to consider censoring. They push for encryption in some places, but turn around and in other places to fight privacy laws that would damage their ad business. That inconsistency is driving fragmentation. And while Facebook claims to be connecting people, they're doing it their way, with their rules. And you don't really have a say in it. That's because Facebook isn't a democracy, it's a business. And their business interests are changing the future of your internet. ENDIT | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
1. Wash your hands. Hand washing works. Even if people come into contact with the virus, they can avoid becoming infected by washing their hands before touching their face. But do it right. "Hands should be scrubbed for at least 20 seconds, the time it takes to sing the 'Happy Birthday' song twice, to ensure germs won't be transferred to objects or spread from person to person," Liz Mineo of The Harvard Gazette writes. Hand sanitizers help too, but soap is usually more reliable. 2. Try to touch your face less. It's virtually impossible not to touch your face, I realize. I've been trying. But you can touch it less often. Be aware of when you've just touched surfaces that might infect you (like doorknobs in busy places) and don't touch your face until you've washed your hands. There are strategies like keeping tissues handy and keeping your hands busy, as Jenny Gross of The Times writes for touching your face less. 3. Keep your distance. It's not easy, but try to stay at least six feet away from other people when you're at work or in public. And don't shake hands. Your hands are brutally efficient disease vectors. When family members came over to my house this weekend, they greeted us with a little bow. It was a nice touch a small welcoming ritual that reduced the awkwardness of saying hello without a hug or handshake. 4. Be more aggressive about staying home if you feel sick. You probably don't have coronavirus (though, of course, you can't be sure), but you could spread your cold and make it more severe. The Washington Post's Marisa Iati explains: "If everyone with a cold floods their local emergency rooms, it will be harder for health care workers to treat patients who are critically ill. Plus, you could pick up the virus in the hospital if you don't already have it." 5. Don't stockpile masks. They're needed for hospital workers and other caregivers. "Masks are only useful if you have a respiratory infection already and want to minimize the risk of spread to others, or if you're caring for someone who is sick or working in a hospital in direct contact with people who have respiratory illnesses," writes Julia Belluz of Vox. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
In nearly three decades of visiting Paris, a highlight of my sojourns is shopping for the sort of Franco distinct fashions impossible to find at home. Over the years, the proliferation of chain stores in Paris (and easy access to French luxury brands at home) has made finding unique pieces a challenge. So, on a recent trip, when I noticed a secondhand shop filled with high end designer jackets, bags, boots and jewelry many from defunct Parisian ready to wear brands, I was thrilled. While paying for my haul (a cashmere blazer by Angelo Tarlazzi and vintage fur stole), I learned that there were dozens of others, a network of resale shops catering to Frenchwomen's exacting taste and passion for a deal. As a longtime designer resale and thrift store aficionado, I find few things more satisfying than tracking down accouterments that whisper "Fabrique a Paris" without paying retail. Thus began my deep dive into the City of Light's lively depot vente scene: upscale thrift shops that traffic specifically in luxury goods. This is no dive for treasures in the trash thrift shop scenario. Les depots ventes (which translates to "deposit and sale") are airy and efficiently organized: rows of leather jackets, tuxedos, blazers, silk blouses, cashmere sweaters, fur and cocktail dresses beckoning from hangers; vitrines piled with jewelry, wallets, sunglasses and, of course, scarves. As for prices, the resale value of top drawer luxury products is a fraction of the original sticker price. Think Balenciaga for the cost of Zara. Many pieces are consigned after being worn just once; some still have original price tags inciting heart palpitations in thrift obsessed clientele. Unlike a traditional retail environment, prices are not set in stone. Don't be afraid to negotiate, especially if buying a few things. The 16th arrondissement, with its wide, leafy avenues and ornate Art Nouveau apartment buildings, is fertile ground for fashion deals, specifically the smaller streets behind fashionable Place du Trocadero. Start at Reciproque, Paris' largest depot vente, with 5,300 square feet. Here, you'll shop alongside smartly turned out locals for classic veering, ready to wear evening gowns and a mind blowing array of scarves. Make sure to hit the basement where more casual pieces (denim, blouses, bathing suits) are stocked. Pay attention to the shoe nook. With vision (new soles and a good cleaning), you can score show stopping footwear on the cheap. Around the corner is Le Date, a boudoir evoking jewel box brimming with cocktail frocks, furs, heels and bags displayed on vintage hat boxes. You'll find the usual suspects: Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Hermes. But the more interesting pieces and better deals are lesser known French labels like Kyros and Stephan, as well as quality basics from Lil Pour L'Autre, Joseph and Hotel Particulier. Diagonally across the street, Depot Vente Luxe Paris focuses on of the moment fashion, not vintage. The concept? Slashed prices (men's and women's) on items that could (give or take a few seasons) be found in the pages of current fashion magazines. Last November, I spotted a Fendi Peekaboo bag, a Saint Laurent Sac de Jour bag, a Balmain biker leather jacket and Men's Louis Vuitton Icare briefcase Off the main artery, Rue de Passy, on a cobblestone pedestrian market street, you'll find Coeur de Luxe, a small shop tricked out like the ultimate French walk in closet: tuxedo jackets, Celine blouses, Breton striped knits and Chanel tweeds alongside Jean Claude Jitrois leather, sheared furs by Sylvie Schimmel and no shortage of gold buckled belts, bags and shoes. Over in the 8th arrondissement, steps from Elysee Palace and behind fashionable Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore, is Valois Vintage where you'll find a glamorous mash up of au courant and vintage pieces. It's pricey. But swanky ready to wear couture and hard to find designer collaborations make it a favorite for magazine editors and women who like to stand out in a crowd. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The subscription cancellations were coming every 10 minutes. Angry readers have been calling in droves. One caller issued a death threat. "We're feeling the weight of our history," Phil Boas, the editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. Until it endorsed Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, the newspaper, founded in 1890, had never endorsed a Democrat over a Republican for president. In endorsing Mrs. Clinton, The Republic's editorial was, by any interpretation, scathing toward her opponent, Donald J. Trump. "Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads," the editorial says at one point. "That's beneath our national dignity." "Trump's long history of objectifying women and his demeaning comments about women during the campaign are not just good old boy gaffes," the editorial added. "They are evidence of deep character flaws. They are part of a pattern." Mr. Boas of The Arizona Republic said he expected "a lot of cancellations," pointing to cancellations at The Cincinnati Enquirer, which like The Republic, is owned by Gannett. But he said financial considerations were "never a factor" for the newspaper's nine person editorial board. "It was more of a curiosity," he said. "We know we're doing the right thing. We feel very good about this decision." The endorsement of Mrs. Clinton would probably not have come as a surprise to the paper's faithful readers, he said. The paper had already written several cautionary editorials about Mr. Trump, including one last November, when a black protester was beaten at one of Mr. Trump's rallies in Birmingham, Ala. It also ran an editorial after Mr. Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability. "Trump through the primary and into the general did a half dozen things that we believe would have been disqualifiers in years past," Mr. Boas said. "We think that we are being traditionalists here. We're saying we're not willing to compromise our values." The decision to endorse a Democrat, however, was not taken lightly. The newspaper did not have a record of its endorsements, and it hired a researcher to determine when it had last supported a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican. A historian was brought on to review the researcher's work. When they found out the paper had never endorsed a Democrat, Mr. Boas said, "It was a real surprise." But in the end, he said, the editorial board's decision was not contentious. "We're never in unison on anything, but it wasn't a difficult thing," Mr. Boas said. "It was the kind of thing that just evolved over time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Horses sacrificed by fierce nomads living in Central Asia more than 2,000 years ago have provided new insights into how people tamed the wild animals and bred them to their needs. The Scythians roamed over a vast swath of this region, from Siberia to the Black Sea, for about 800 years beginning about the ninth century B.C. They were known for their equestrian battle skills, including the ability to shoot arrows while riding, and for the brutal treatment of those they defeated. Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, wrote that the Scythians blinded their slaves, and the warriors drank the blood of the first enemy they killed in battle. In a study published Thursday by the journal Science, an international team of researchers deployed the latest genetic tools with 13 stallions that were buried in a mound in what is now Kazakhstan, well preserved in the permafrost. (The Scythians appear to have only sacrificed male horses.) The decoded DNA not only provides insights into the ancient horses, but also suggests the Scythians were more than warriors. "Here we see them as breeders," said Ludovic Orlando, a professor of molecular archaeology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who led the research. "We reveal part of their management strategy and part of their knowledge 2,300 years ago." The findings also fit an emerging theory of how domestication in general changes animals as they become intertwined with humans. "It's great stuff," commented Greger Larson, director of the paleogenomics and bioarchaeology research network at the University of Oxford in England, who was not involved in the research. "It demonstrates the power of ancient whole genomes to understand the pattern and the process of domestication." Among the farm animals whose lives have become entwined with people, horses were a late addition. Dogs were the first animal friends of humans wolves that scavenged for food among garbage piles and turned docile about 15,000 years ago, or possibly much earlier. Cattle, chickens and pigs were domesticated by people in different parts of the world between 8,000 and 11,000 years ago. It was only about 5,500 years ago that people in Central Asia started catching and keeping wild horses for meat and milk. Riding horses came later. In the new research, the scientists used a bit of bone from the horse skeletons less than half a gram in most cases to extract DNA. They were able to decipher the genomes for 11 of the 13 horses from the Scythian mound. They also analyzed the DNA of two stallions from a royal Scythian tomb 400 years earlier, and one mare, dating to 4,100 years ago, that belonged to a nearby, earlier people, the Sintashta, who had already figured out how to use horses to pull two wheeled chariots. From the DNA, the scientists found that the Scythians bred for certain characteristics: stockier forelimbs that were thicker. The horses also had genes for retaining water, perhaps indicating that the mares were milked for human consumption. Many, although not all, of the horses possessed genes associated with racing speed that are found in today's thoroughbreds. The genes also showed a variety of colorings cream, black, spotted, bay and chestnut. Many of the genetic changes were related to the "neural crest" a line of cells along what becomes the spinal cord during embryonic development, but which migrate to various parts of the body. That fits in with an idea proposed in 2014 of how domestication and the initial goal of breeding tamer animals able to live and work with people also led to a series of other traits commonly observed among domesticated animals: smaller brains, floppy ears, curly tails, varied colorings. "Most of them have a neural crest derivation," said Adam S. Wilkins, a visiting scientist at Humboldt University in Berlin and one of the authors of the hypothesis. The genetic changes may slightly reduce the number of neural crest cells, and that may lead to smaller adrenal glands, which produce "fight or flight" hormones. The result may be animals that are less likely to startle, and are more amenable to being handled by people. "This begins to support a sort of grand unified theory of domestication," said Daniel Bradley, a professor of genetics at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. What the researchers did not find is the gene that enables certain horse breeds today to "amble" a gait that is faster than a walk but slower than a gallop. Unlike modern horses, the Scythian horses' DNA showed no signs of inbreeding. "This is extremely surprising in horses," Dr. Orlando said. The Y chromosome tells the genetic story of males of a species. The mitochondria energy factories within cells contains DNA passed down only from mothers. In modern horses, the Y chromosomes in stallions are almost identical, reflecting the breeding technique of using a single stallion with desired characteristics to father many offspring. That indicates that the Scythians maintained the natural herd structure of horses, Dr. Orlando said. He said additional studies had revealed when and where the genetic diversity of stallions crashed later, but he would not say publicly until he finished the scientific paper that laid out the answer. For Melinda Zeder, a Smithsonian Institution scientist who studies domestication, that fits in with other research that indicates the narrow genetic variation among many domestic animals which sometimes leads to prevalent diseases is a recent development, not an inevitable consequence of domestication. "I think that's a very important lesson for the future," she said. "A red flag warning we would do well to pay attention to." The findings also point to the profound impact that humans have had on the environment and the evolution of other species for millenniums. "It is something humans have been doing for a long time," Dr. Zeder said. "It's not always detrimental." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It wasn't until a friend invited him to design a collection of rugs that the textile designer Zak Profera found his true calling. Before that, Mr. Profera was working in music marketing. "I thought, 'This is what I need to do to be happy,' " said Mr. Profera, 32, who started his New York textiles company soon after creating those rugs for Decorative Carpets in Los Angeles. "I knew I couldn't afford to do rugs," he explained, "and thought fabric would be similar." His company, Zak Fox, makes graphic textiles for designers like Robert Stilin and Workstead. But Mr. Profera still can't resist a good rug, so he also collects and sells vintage Turkish and Persian carpets, and Overland, the fabric collection he introduced this month, was inspired by those designs. It's easy to be seduced by pattern, he admitted, but when you're choosing a new rug there are other, equally important, things to consider: Will the rug be in a high traffic area like an entrance hall? If so, think durability. "Ask yourself," Mr. Profera said, "will this rug get trashed in a year, or will it stand the test of time?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
When the choreographer Reggie Wilson curated "Dancing Platform, Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance," a series of performances, talks and walking tours at Danspace Project last year, he wove together three rich threads into a tapestry full of history and heart. The aftereffect of that platform still echoes at Danspace, which also, of course, happens to be a church St. Mark's. This week, the work he choreographed in honor of the platform, "... they stood shaking while others began to shout," returned to Danspace Project as part of American Realness 2019. (The Gibney dance organization is a co presenter.) Inspired partly by black Shakers, mainly the religious activist Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, Mr. Wilson explores the intersection of worship and dance with poetic imagination. Within the frame of postmodern dance and with a heady mix of spirituals, contemporary music and field recordings he produces a remarkable work that flows seamlessly from start to finish. Each program starts with a performance lecture. There are three possibilities for any given night; the one on Monday, opening night, lasted slightly longer than the dance and covered ring shout, African dance and postmodern dance. Mr. Wilson discussed the rhythmic ritual that moves in a counterclockwise circle with shuffling feet and also screened video excerpts from different styles of African dance and contemporary pieces to show, among other things, how cultural appropriation works. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
How does one find love over the holidays? It's easier, perhaps, to lock down a trusty holidate: someone who shines as a party plus one and evaporates after the revelry. Such is the premise of "Holidate," a noxious new entry into Netflix's seasonal catalog. Set in an interminably festive Chicago, the story follows Sloane (Emma Roberts), a romance cynic who's sick of her family harping on her singledom. In line to return a Christmas gift, she meets Jackson (Luke Bracey), a golf pro reeling from his recent fling with a stage five clinger. Both are seeking a companion on New Year's Eve; neither wants to deal with baggage or commitment. Voila, a holidate bargain is born. Soon, the pair extends their pact to all holidays: Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo. In this alternate universe, even Mother's Day occasions a no strings attached escort. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Within the 2.5 million acres of the Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve in central Alaska, wolves and other majestic animals are protected. But animals like wolves do not respect lines drawn on a map. And a recent study suggests that efforts to limit populations of these predators outside those borders is having negative effects on wolves living within the preserve. The study, published in June in Wildlife Monographs, suggests that when the Alaskan authorities were limiting wolf populations outside the Yukon Charley preserve, survival rates of wolves within the preserve were lower than usual. The findings highlight the notion that managing wildlife within human imposed boundaries requires communication and cooperation with the authorities beyond a preserve's boundaries, and could have implications for wildlife management programs elsewhere. Since the 1990s, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has spent millions of dollars, first sterilizing wolves, then shifting to shooting and killing hundreds of the animals from helicopters (independently, it announced the planned suspension of the program next year). The wolves were targeted as part of an intensive predator management program in the Upper Yukon Tanana region aimed to increase the population of the Fortymile caribou herd in lands surrounding the preserve. Once estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, the caribou herd fell to just 6,000 in the 1970s and now generally peaks at about 50,000 to 60,000. And evidence has built up suggesting that these efforts may be ineffective at increasing caribou in this area. After 22 years monitoring wolves in the preserve using radio collars, the researchers, led by John Burch, a wildlife biologist for the National Park Service, were not surprised to find that wolf survival rates decreased during lethal management outside the preserve in the Upper Yukon Tanana Predation Control Area. "Every single wolf pack went outside the bounds of the preserve," Dr. Burch said. The state never shot wolves inside it, but many wolves that left the boundaries of Yukon Charley were shot and killed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The big social networks have, of course, been trying to confront the spread of divisive news and misinformation on their platforms. Facebook's quarterly financial results, which it announced on Tuesday, showed a slowdown in revenue that appears to have been caused, at least in part, by the company's efforts to rein in bad actors. But a flurry of reports this week underscored how ineffective these measures have been. A Vice reporter, William Turton, found that despite Facebook's new efforts at advertising transparency, he was able to get approval for ads that he posted in the name of fake political groups and sitting senators. When Twitter unveiled a page dedicated to capturing news on the midterm elections, BuzzFeed quickly noticed that the page was spotlighting disinformation. Even when one social network manages to drive away bad actors, those bad actors are generally able to find other online outlets for their activities. Sheera Frenkel, Mike Isaac and Kate Conger shined a spotlight on how Instagram has become the latest hot spot for anti Semitic material. A few days after the synagogue shooting, a social network that began as a place to post happy vacation photos was found to be hosting over 11,000 posts with a hashtag that blamed Jews for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Kara Swisher, who has been covering the tech world for decades, wrote a column for The Times this week where she described how the internet, which promised to promote global harmony, has instead become a tool of hate. All in all, it was enough to make at least this reporter long for a time when a new iPad was the thing everything was talking about. Some other tech stories of note this week: Nellie Bowles wrote a powerful trio of stories about our troubled relationship with the screens that dominate our lives. Her first story looked at how many people in Silicon Valley do everything in their power to keep their children away from screens. Some parents have gone so far as to bar the people taking care of their children from ever using a phone or other electronic device in front of the kids. Not long ago, people were worried about poor children missing out on the digital revolution. Now, Nellie reported, there is more concern that poor children are getting too much of the revolution, in the form of screen time, while wealthier parents keep their children away from addictive digital devices. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Lien and Tam Nguyen left Vietnam for the United States in 1975, just before the fall of Saigon. They settled near Richmond, Va., where Lien Nguyen worked as a hairdresser and Tam Nguyen in a chemical plant, often on the night shift. "Growing up, I didn't realize it wasn't normal to have your dad leaving for work at 11 p.m.," recalled the younger of their two sons, Peter Nguyen, 33. "There was always a calendar on the kitchen wall that was his shift work schedule, and that's how we knew whether we would be having dinner together." But those days are long gone: Tam Nguyen, 72, is now retired, and Lien Nguyen, 62, recently quit working as well. Their plan was to move to Connecticut, to be near their older son, Martin Nguyen, 37, his wife, Kiran Tahir, and the couple's 2 year old daughter, Maryam. Living in the suburbs, however, would have meant driving, and there wasn't much to do. So New York City, where their son Peter lived, seemed like a better option. And Mr. Nguyen, a Yale graduate who works in commercial real estate, decided he should be the one to buy his parents a new home. "I wanted my parents to be able to enjoy retirement," he said. "Through their entire lives, my parents had made huge sacrifices and worked really hard to make sure my brother and I would have every opportunity available to us. So making the decision to do this was a no brainer." As his parents set about selling their three bedroom house in Virginia, Mr. Nguyen began hunting for a one bedroom apartment big enough to hold a table for eight, where the family could gather. It also had to have an open view: Mr. Nguyen once lived in a walk up with an air shaft out the window, he said, and "my mom would complain about it when she came to visit." But with a budget of 400,000, he knew that whatever he found was likely to be some distance from the prime areas of Manhattan, as well as from his own home, a condominium near Columbus Circle where he lives with his partner, Robert Mazzola. Mr. Mazzola suggested Queens; a friend who once lived in Jackson Heights spoke highly of it. So Mr. Nguyen began looking at areas along the route of the 7 train. Woodside Court Condominium, a 1927 building in Woodside, had recently been converted to condominiums, but at that point it was nowhere near completion. "I couldn't imagine my parents living through a construction zone for months," Mr. Nguyen said. Carlton House in Jackson Heights, a 1946 brick co op building on a pretty tree lined street, seemed ideal. Still, it was some distance from the subway, and Mr. Nguyen didn't want his parents to have to trudge through the winter slush. At Berkshire Green, in nearby Elmhurst, however, there were several one bedrooms available. And as a recent co op conversion of a 1926 building, it had amenities that Mr. Nguyen hadn't even considered: a garden, a gym, a roof deck. After visiting several times, he sent his parents pictures and videos. They deferred to his judgment. As his father said, "Peter has been here over 10 years he knows what's going on in New York." Because "their old furniture was sized to fit into a three bedroom home," Mr. Nguyen said, his parents, who arrived in the late spring, furnished the apartment with new multifunctional items like a convertible sofa and an expandable table. "We were a little nervous everything small but now we love it," Lien Nguyen said. For his parents, Mr. Nguyen said, the changes have been monumental. But "they knew I would get them a place where they would feel comfortable," he said. "I give them a lot of credit for that; I wouldn't necessarily let someone else make that decision for me." They are bracing themselves for their first winter and "still learning the challenges of weekend subway service changes," Mr. Nguyen said. "They still go to Costco in Rego Park, but they've learned not to buy in such big quantities." Walking is becoming a habit for them. "We don't need to drive every time we need to buy something," Mr. Nguyen's father said. On weekends, they can take Metro North to see their granddaughter, who is no longer an eight hour drive away. "We love to spoil her," Mr. Nguyen's mother said. And when Mr. Nguyen and his partner visit for home cooked meals, they leave loaded with leftovers. In the past, family gatherings were mostly on holidays and vacations, Mr. Nguyen said. "But now, to be able to see us basically whenever they want has made all the difference in the world." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
We take the weekend to highlight some of the recent books coverage in The Times: On our cover this week, two new books about African American lives in the city two cities, in particular: Chicago and Cleveland. Alex Kotlowitz's "An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago" and Kyle Swenson's "Good Kids, Bad City: A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America" are also both, broadly speaking, about decaying infrastructure, political corruption, segregation, racism, gun violence and incompetence in the criminal justice system. Kotlowitz is also on the podcast this week, discussing "An American Summer," and John Lanchester visits to talk about his new dystopian novel, "The Wall." Have our politics become impossible to satirize in the age of Trump? Ben Greenman explores. "Daisy Jones The Six," a novel about a fictional 1970s rock band, is presented almost entirely as an oral history, and it reads like the transcript of a particularly juicy episode of VH1's "Behind the Music." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Karl Lagerfeld stole his famously pampered cat, Choupette, and was not ashamed to say so. "Choupette belonged to a friend of mine who asked if my maid could take care of her for two weeks when he was away," Mr. Lagerfeld, the designer who died in Paris on Tuesday, told The Cut in 2015. "When he came back, he was told that Choupette would not return to him," Mr. Lagerfeld said. "He got another cat who became fat, and Choupette became the most famous cat in the world, and the richest." Fans of Choupette, and there are many, need not worry: Mr. Lagerfeld claimed to have taken measures to provide for her after his death. In an interview last year, the late designer said that Choupette, a Birman cat, would inherit some of his fortune. In life, Mr. Lagerfeld took great care of Choupette. The cat would join him at the table for lunch and dinner. (She didn't like eating on the floor, he said.) At meals, she would choose among three dishes made by the luxury brand Goyard: one for water, another with a croquette and a third bearing pate, he told Harper's Bazaar in 2012. Choupette was the center of Mr. Lagerfeld's world, but he was not alone in caring for her. Two maids tended to her, lavishing Choupette with attention, grooming her and documenting all of their interactions in a diary for Mr. Lagerfeld. An Instagram account dedicated to her has more than 215,000 followers. "When I am not there, the maids take down, in little books, everything she did, from what she ate, to how she behaved, if she was tired, and if she wasn't sleeping," he told Women's Wear Daily in an interview published in June 2012. "In the nine months, we already have almost 600 pages." Pampered though she was, Choupette reportedly earned her keep. Her likeness inspired some of Mr. Lagerfeld's products and, in 2014, she earned 3 million euros from work on two projects. ("One was for cars in Germany and the other was for a Japanese beauty product," the designer told The Cut.) Despite her luxurious lifestyle, Choupette retained a taste for the simpler feline pleasures. "She likes strange toys, toys that aren't supposed to be toys," Mr. Lagerfeld told Harper's Bazaar. "She plays with pieces of wood, pieces of paper, shopping bags. She loves shopping bags." If it turns out that Mr. Lagerfeld left Choupette a substantial inheritance, she will be far from alone: There have been plenty of lucky pets left with eye popping sums after the deaths of their owners. When the billionaire real estate and hotel tycoon Leona Helmsley died in 2007, she left 12 million for her Maltese, Trouble. (After Ms. Helmsley's death, Trouble was slowly weaned of her diet of hand fed crab cakes, cream cheese and steamed vegetables with chicken to caviar from a can.) In 1991, Carlotta Liebenstein, a German countess, left her 80 million estate to her dog Gunther. And, on her death nearly a century ago, Ella Wendel, a real estate heiress, reportedly left her 100 million estate to Tobey, her French poodle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Credit...Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times As they neared the turn of the millennium, and steeled themselves for the Y2K bug, Americans faced a critical question: Whom would they crown the teen queen of pop? In 1999 there were four candidates. Britney Spears was an early front runner, riding the breakout success of "... Baby One More Time." Christina Aguilera, her fellow former Mouseketeer, was cast as Ms. Spears's direct opponent. Jessica Simpson entered the field as a quieter, more chaste presence. And then there was Mandy Moore. "Oh, I knew I was in a distant fourth if there were rankings," she said earlier this month over tea at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. Two decades later, Ms. Moore is more of a household name than ever. "This Is Us," the TV show she stars in, is one of the most popular dramas on NBC. Ms. Moore's character helps tie together the show's decade crossing plot points, often in old age makeup. "This Is Us" has earned her Golden Globe and Emmy nominations, as well as two Screen Actors Guild awards and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. "It kind of changed everything," Ms. Moore, 35, said. It also arrived at the tail end of a relationship that had stifled her creativity and warped her sense of self. But she's past that now, and ready to share new music. "Silver Landings," her first album in more than a decade, comes out March 6. "I'm a firm believer in things happening for a reason, and it took the last 10 years of my life to get to this point." she said. "I really feel like it was worth it." Ms. Moore's first album, "So Real," was a modest success when it was released in 1999: It spent 23 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart, peaking at No. 31 and selling 950,000 copies. In the years that followed, she leaned into a crossover career, appearing alongside Anne Hathaway in the "The Princess Diaries" and starring with Shane West in the film adaptation of "A Walk to Remember." As she racked up acting credits, some of which included vocal solos, she continued to record music. None of the albums surpassed her first in sales. Then, after her sixth, she went silent. That last album, the folk and country inspired "Amanda Leigh," came out in 2009 also the year she married the musician Ryan Adams. Throughout their relationship, Ms. Moore wrote songs, some with Mr. Adams, for a seventh studio album. Every so often she would share updates with her fans on social media. But nothing was ever released. "I was so ready. I was so hungry," Ms. Moore said. At the time, she had no formal representation; she had parted ways with her music manager. Mr. Adams, a prolific solo artist, writer and producer, discouraged her from working with anyone but him on the new album, she said. She and Mr. Adams divorced in 2016, but it would be years until she went public about his treatment of her. And she certainly wouldn't write about him. "I'm so done with that person having taken so much of my life and my time," she said. Last February, Ms. Moore opened up about her relationship with Mr. Adams in a New York Times investigation of sexual misconduct and emotional abuse allegations against the musician. (Through his lawyer, Mr. Adams denied many of the allegations. After the article's publication he posted a series of apologies on Twitter "to anyone I have ever hurt, however unintentionally.") "I was blown out of the water by the information, some of which was in the article and some of which after the fact I found out wasn't a part of it," Ms. Moore said, wiping tears from her eyes. For months after the article's publication, people reached out to Ms. Moore some with their own stories about Mr. Adams and others who had experienced similar treatment in their personal lives. "Women were, are, so hungry to have this conversation, I think, when it involves emotional and psychological abuse," she said. She is proud to have spoken up about her experience. Still, Ms. Moore is reluctant to frame Mr. Adams as the center of or even a turning point in her story. "I just don't want this thing to be about him," she said, referring to the interview and the article that would come of it. "He's taken so much for so long from so many people. I can promise you he gets satisfaction being talked about in any capacity. I just know that about him. I haven't spoken to him in, I don't know, two years or something, but just knowing him as well as I know him, he really gets off on being talked about." Over the course of Ms. Moore's first decade in music, her sound evolved considerably. After two straightforward pop albums, her self titled third veered clubby and dance pop, with some Middle Eastern and hip hop influences. "Coverage," in 2003, included covers of Elton John and John Hiatt. "Wild Hope" and "Amanda Leigh," released in 2007 and 2009, were a definitive shift to folk pop. In November 2018, she married Taylor Goldsmith, the frontman of Dawes, a California rock band. "Taylor is the most profoundly good person I've ever met in my life," Ms. Moore said. Being with him helped encourage her return to songwriting. "There wasn't a question that if I ever made music again it would be with him," she said. "Silver Landings," the album they wrote and recorded together, is largely forward looking, showcasing Ms. Moore's growth as a folk musician and an honest, empowering portrait of an artist accepting her past. The album also touches on her insecurities with returning to music. On "When I Wasn't Watching," she addresses this head on: "My favorite version of me disappeared through longer days and shorter years." She also confronts herself on "Forgiveness," singing, "I wanted to be good enough for you until I wasn't good enough for me." For the album, Ms. Moore leaned on the influence of artists who have always inspired her: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon. She has spoken publicly about being embarrassed by the music she made at the beginning of her career because of what little creative control she had. Now she doesn't "begrudge it in the same way" she once did, she said. She even pays tribute to her teen pop days for the first time on "Silver Landings" with the nostalgic single "Fifteen." "I think I've really turned a corner on the idea of having a lot of affection for that part of me and how that 15 year old was able to navigate what could have been a very tricky world," Ms. Moore said. "That I'm still here is proof that I did something right, I guess." Over the years, Ms. Moore's fan base has come to encompass five generations: the millennials and Gen Xers who remember her '90s pop stardom, and the wide ranging audience (from the silent generation to Gen Z) of the family friendly "This Is Us." "Social media obviously changed the ability to connect one on one with folks and shape our own narrative," Ms. Moore said. "I think young women who were fans as teenagers have grown up with me, maybe, and now their moms, aunts or grandmas even are familiar with my work through 'This Is Us.'" Mr. Buttigieg, who is second behind Senator Bernie Sanders in the delegate race, has attracted many celebrity donors, including Sharon Stone, Anna Wintour, David Geffen, Tom Ford, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ellen DeGeneres. "I think he's the most qualified, and he's the most electable," Ms. Moore said, though she added that she would support whomever wins the Democratic nomination. Ms. Moore has campaigned for Mr. Buttigieg in Florida, Iowa and Louisiana, and has posted about him on her social media accounts. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, she has donated more than 3,800 to his campaign, about 1,000 of which has been earmarked for the general election to comply with contribution limits. Chris Meagher, the national press secretary for the Buttigieg campaign, described Ms. Moore as a "kind, hopeful person who saw Pete's message of unity and bringing people together and I think that she wanted to share that with folks." While she had been personally politically active, she had never endorsed a candidate during the primary before. "If I can do anything and use my platform to, you know, help garner support for something and someone that I really believe in then I'm all for it," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
I don't know how to break it to Idris Elba. So I just say it. "Is Kate Winslet really the woman you want to be stuck with when disaster strikes in freezing weather? You do know that she didn't move over to make room on that door and Leo slipped into the icy Atlantic?" The British actor laughs. He is sitting atop the New York skyline in a dining room at the Mandarin Oriental. "Kate Winslet is surprisingly resilient to almost anything," he says. "I mean, she is a bruiser. Tough. As. Nails. And if we were ever to fall off a real mountain, her and I, we would survive because she's not like a slouch in any shape or form." And, to be fair, Ms. Winslet did hoist Richard Branson's mother down some stairs after a lightning bolt in a hurricane sparked a fire that engulfed the Branson holiday home on Necker Island, where she and her children were staying in 2011. That was when she met her husband, Mr. Branson's nephew, a.k.a. Ned Rocknroll, when he rushed into the burning house with a headlamp. "She was just like, 'That guy's for me,"' Mr. Elba says. The actor is starring with Ms. Winslet in the "The Mountain Between Us," based on a novel about strangers who struggle, snuggle and eat roasted mountain lion in the frigid Utah wilderness after their small plane crashes. Mr. Elba often plays opposite very strong women, and he says that's fine with him. His Ghana born "Mum" is so into tough love, he says, that at his 45th birthday party recently, she turned her cheek away when he went to kiss her. Mr. Elba also portrays the New York lawyer who defends Molly Bloom, the audacious poker madam to the stars played by a fiery Jessica Chastain in the Aaron Sorkin movie, "Molly's Game," out Nov. 22. And the actor created one of the most memorable romances in TV history in the popular BBC series "Luther," when his London homicide detective in the big tweed overcoat, known by his deputies as "his satanic majesty," gets in an erotic and psychopathic entanglement with a latter day Lizzie Borden, played with film noir panache by the flame haired Ruth Wilson. "I think powerful women are sexy," he says. "But powerful, dangerous women? It's like, woooo." Mr. Elba confesses that he got jittery during his sex scene with Ms. Winslet because he hasn't done that many. "I was a bit nervous because it was Kate Winslet, number one," he says, slyly, and her breasts were exposed. "Do I look, do I not look? Am I supposed to kiss?" In a world where most movies disappoint and true stars are rare, Mr. Elba is magnetic. He is tall and muscular, and before he hit the big time as the drug lord Stringer Bell in "The Wire," he was a bouncer (and pot dealer) at the comedy club Carolines on Broadway, sometimes living in his Chevy Astro van. He is leaner than he looks on screen, with a small hoop earring, a gray flecked beard and elaborately tattooed arms. A tree climbs his upper arm. "I have a spiritual connection to trees," he says. "I kind of use trees as a place to pray." His daughter's name, Isan, is also tattooed on his arm. (She is with him in New York, upstairs in his hotel suite.) And he has a line of a song inked: "This train carries no wrongdoers," to indicate that he does not want the people in his life to let him down. He is wearing a snug gray polo shirt and black jeans from his own clothing collection, with a small "IE" emblazoned. When Amy Pascal was head of Sony, she suggested that Mr. Elba might take over the James Bond role if Daniel Craig ever "hung up his tuxedo." As a producer of "Molly's Game," Ms. Pascal said that they cast Mr. Elba as the lawyer because "if you had to put yourself in someone's hands, whose hands would you want? He is like the best version of masculinity. All his complicated contradictions make every character he plays fascinating. Maybe it's the way he walks, like his legs are more powerful than anyone else, like he is gravity. He always seems like he is in the midst of a moral struggle, but he is the calmest one in the room. It's rare, undeniable movie star stuff." I remark to him that race seems beside the point in his romantic liaisons on screen. "Yeah, my leading ladies have been both black and white and I haven't thought about it consciously," he says. "You know, a good friend of mine, a black producer, said to me, 'Are you sure about the "Mountain" movie, man? Do you think the black audience is going to go for that?"' (In the book, his character, a surgeon, was white.) He said it had not come up except during a Facebook Live video, when a woman asked if the movie was advocating greater trust between the races during a divisive time in this country. Growing up poor as the son of African immigrants in a part of East London called Canning Town, he says, "it was common to be called a black bastard as you walked down the street. Did it make me a racist against white folks? Not really. The nationalist front had a strong hold in Canning Town, and it was a party that was very vocal about a sort of separatism. I hate to say it, but it was a little bit of a storm in a teacup. Here I am, a product of Canning Town and I'm not that guy that's like, 'Hey, let's all be separate because I was called a black bastard once."' I wonder what he thinks about the intense debate over the plans by the creators of "Game of Thrones" two white men to make "Confederate," a series envisioning a post Civil War America in which the South won. (Husband and wife Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman, who are black, will write and produce.) Ta Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic, presented the case for HBO dropping the show: "the symbols point to something Confederate's creators don't seem to understand the war is over for them, not us." On the other hand, John Ridley, an African American writer and producer who made "12 Years a Slave," brought up, in The Hollywood Reporter, Norman Jewison's "powerful stories about race and identity" in movies like "In the Heat of the Night." Mr. Ridley worried that the "litmus test" could be flipped and prevent him from making a movie about Hispanics, for instance. "Actually," Mr. Elba says about the uproar, "I personally don't want to see any more slave films. I think it's a time that's been very well documented. '12 Years a Slave,' although a genius movie, I just found it really hard to watch and didn't want to go back down that road for the sake of entertainment. I think there are a lot more interesting stories that are less covered that we can spend our time on." I also ask for his response to the kerfuffle when Samuel L. Jackson complained about black British actors getting leads in American movies, such as David Oyelowo playing Martin Luther King Jr. in "Selma" and Daniel Kaluuya in the Jordan Peele horror film, "Get Out." "They think they're better trained, for some reason, than we are because they're classically trained," Mr. Jackson told Hot 97, the New York radio station, in March. "I don't know what the love affair is with all that." He said he thought that "Get Out," a movie about white liberal racism, should have featured "an American brother who really feels that." Mr. Elba says: "I spoke on this and I spoke quite openly that I was disappointed." He got a standing ovation when he made a speech to British Parliament last year urging greater diversity in film and television because he could only play so many "best friends," "gang leaders" or "athletic types." (It was around the same time he got snubbed by the Oscars, failing to receive a nomination for his powerful performance as a brutal African warlord with a child army in "Beasts of No Nation," and wasn't even invited to the ceremony.) He calls Mr. Jackson "a god" who gets respect "as an actor, black, white, whatever," but adds: "It felt like a very stupid thing to say, if I'm really honest and in a time where people are being marginalized, why marginalize us even further by going on about black Americans and English Americans? And to his credit, he read that and apologized. He called and said, 'Hey, man. I agree. You're right, black is black.' I respect him for actually acknowledging what I said and sort of rethinking it. "Americans come into England to the theater and play English characters all day long and no one pipes up and says, 'Hey, you can't do that,' and no one should. It's called acting for a reason." I wonder why it's harder for Americans to get a British accent right than vice versa. "Something to do with the way the tongue sits in the mouth, believe it or not," he says. "But when the English speak, we speak more frontal and it's harder for Americans to get that sound because the tongue is so much more relaxed. I've studied it." He did worry about the East Coast accents for "The Wire" and "Molly's Game," however. Just as he was nervous to make love on screen with Ms. Winslet, he says he was nervous to speak the high velocity words of "the oracle," as he calls Mr. Sorkin, especially since it was the writer's first directing gig. Mr. Cameron got throttled, but he is right that it's easier for the suits who run Hollywood to accept a gorgeous young woman in a sexy costume than to make movies with middle aged, non cartoony heroines struggling with life, the kind Bette Davis and Joan Crawford used to do. "Cameron has a point to some degree, but come on!" Mr. Elba says. "Let's be positive it's a character created for TV in the '70s and she kicks ass in the movie. Change is incremental, O.K.? First you can't have a black guy kissing a white woman. But then you can have a light skinned black kissing a white woman. And then it changes, you know. So first you can have a lead woman and she is the hero, but she has to be slightly sexualized. It's going to change." I ask how he handled the critical drubbing given to "The Dark Tower," based on the Stephen King magnum opus, in which he played the Gunslinger. The New York Times's Manohla Dargis called it "an unappealing hash of moviemaking cliches" but still praised Mr. Elba's "irrepressible magnetism and man of stone solidity." "I don't tend to read reviews but this was inescapable," he says. "Cause it made such a big fanfare 'Dark Tower' is coming out!' And the reviews really beat it up. I didn't take it personally but I was like, ooof, that hurts." But the Brit, who comes from a country with much tighter gun control laws, agonized over taking the part of the interplanetary vigilante, telling Esquire, "I had a clash of conscience with my character. In America, there's a real awareness of gun culture." Luther, the London lawman, is about reasoning, not shooting. His father once advised him to look people in the eyes. It was the same technique Alfred Hitchcock used when he directed the great actress Eva Marie Saint in her sultry performance opposite Cary Grant in "North by Northwest." In our A.D.D. planet, it works. Mr. Elba does not look away at his phone, at the waitress when he asks for a knife, at his publicists trying to hustle him along or at his steak salad and steak and eggs. His expressive brown eyes are always on you. His vibe is cool but his career is frenetic. When he's not starring in movies and "Luther," he's directing movies, designing clothes, D.J. ing in London and Ibiza, and producing his own music, as well as making documentaries about his adventures kickboxing in Thailand and car racing in Ireland. Maybe that's why his personal life is so turbulent; he has vowed never to marry again. He has had two children a 15 year old girl and a 3 year old son with two makeup artists, one of whom he married, and a brief second marriage to a lawyer. He publicly stepped out with his new girlfriend, Sabrina Dhowre, a former Miss Vancouver, at last month's debut of "Molly's Game" at the Toronto International Film Festival. He met her when he went to Vancouver and British Columbia (standing in for Utah) to make "The Mountain Between Us." "Falling in love while falling in love," he says, dreamily. He also experienced that "You are not the father" moment that can either be the worst or best moment of a man's life. In a therapeutic moment four years ago, he told a GQ reporter the "tragic, punch in the face" story of how he discovered that the son he thought he had had with a woman he was involved with in Florida was not his. "They just have so much of who I am wrong, they feel like I must be a playboy. I must be noncommittal. I must be the kind of guy that jumps in and out. And, you know, I suppose if you look at my history or you know anything about my history or you can read on Google who I was married to or what's happened, you know, it might appear that way. But it's completely misunderstood. People think they know about me and my past and my relationships and they don't. There's very few people that can say they really, really know me and I can say, 'Yes, you really, really know me.' Very few people. Very few." I ask him about a rap lyric he wrote that fame brings you to the "devil's door." "I live a duality, do you know what I mean?" he says. "I got an O.B.E. It's Officer of the British Empire, but I've always known it as a British sweetheart, treasured. "But I'm a naughty boy. Do you know what I'm saying? I sort of live a full life, and naughty. And I'm one knock away from the devil's door. Because, you know, I'm human, man. But at the same time, I'm honored by my country and I'm like, yeah," as long as he doesn't mess up or be a jerk, he says, using raunchier words. "There's responsibility to be a leader on the right moral side. Don't go out there and get coked off your face and get caught in orgies. Not that I would." I reassure him that Mick Jagger has been knighted, so other naughty boys are in the Queen's pack of aces. And I wonder if there's any other challenge on the horizon, noting that he would make a remarkable Othello. "Don't like the story," he says brusquely. "Jealousy's a real poison and I'm not into it," he says. Is that because you get jealous? "It's a poison," he repeats, laughing. As we get ready to leave, I pose the question I know Mr. Elba doesn't like: "I have to ask about James Bond because George Clooney has now said you would be a 'perfect James Bond and it would be a great step forward."' | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A farm to table restaurant, which is to show cult classic movies, is to open in May in this four story 1921 walk up. The space has exposed brick walls, high ceilings and access to a private garden. The restaurant plans to offer its own signature cocktails and craft beers. It signed a 10 year lease, and received four months' rent free for its build out. A 3,730 square foot retail TriBeCa condominium is available with a tenant in place, and a cap rate of about 5 percent, in this six story 1920 building. The tenant, Urban Archaeology, with a 10 year lease, sells salvaged historical architectural elements, as well as new home products. The space features a cast iron storefront and double door entry, 18 feet of frontage and a private yard. Its ground floor has 12 foot, 6 inch ceilings and hardwood floors, while the lower level has 10 foot ceilings and poured concrete floors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. AMERICAN BALLET THEATER (through Oct. 30) Ballet Theater's fall season continues with the premiere of "Her Notes," by the choreographer Jessica Lang, to the music of Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix's talented but stifled sister. The coming week offers more performances of Alexei Ratmansky's handsome portrait of male camaraderie, "Serenade After Plato's Symposium"; Frederick Ashton's intimate midcentury study in pure classicism, "Symphonic Variations," and his delicate "Monotones I and II"; Twyla Tharp's large scale "The Brahms Haydn Variations"; Benjamin Millepied's Greek inspired "Daphnis and Chloe"; and George Balanchine's "Prodigal Son." At various times. David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, abt.org. (Brian Schaefer) BALLETCOLLECTIVE (Thursday and next Friday) As a member of the New York City Ballet corps, Troy Schumacher often performs classics. But as a choreographer, both for City Ballet and BalletCollective, his own plucky troupe, he likes to experiment with collaborators. This week, he introduces two new works that take inspiration from music and architecture, pairing the architects Carlos Arnaiz and James Ramsey with the composers Judd Greenstein and Ellis Ludwig Leone. A handful of Mr. Schumacher's City Ballet colleagues do the dancing (1:15). At 7:30 p.m., Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 La Guardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, 866 811 4111, nyuskirball.org. (Schaefer) JEROME BEL (through Oct. 31) Known as the "philosopher of dance," Jerome Bel is more concerned with concepts than choreography, challenging ideas of what constitutes dance. The results can be brilliant or amusing or infuriating, or some combination. The Crossing the Line Festival offers a broad look with "The Show Must Go On" (1:30), featuring 20 performers with headphones reacting awkwardly to pop songs the audience can't hear (Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 212 242 0800, crossingthelinefestival.org); "Jerome Bel" (0:50), a starkly pared down duet between a man and a woman, both nude (Thursday through Oct. 29, at 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 255 5793); and "Artist's Choice: Jerome Bel/MoMA Dance Company" (0:30), featuring museum staff performing sporadically throughout the day in the museum's atrium (Thursday through Oct. 31 at various times, Museum of Modern Art, 212 708 9400). (Schaefer) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Mr. Suilebhan recently spoke about the shoot and the final artwork. Following are excerpts from the conversation. Tell me more about the woman in the photo. She had what I wanted, which was an every person look to her, an American look. She has an approachable face and a face you want to sympathize with. The miracle, which I did not know when I selected her, is that she had just delivered her first baby two weeks before the shoot. She's wearing a prosthetic pregnancy belly in the image. When I first saw the poster, I thought: Is she laughing or crying? I like that it's unclear. That's intentional. The playwright is very determined in her unwillingness to interpret the play for an audience. When you're so over the top excited about something, you feel like you're leaving your body. You're half sad, half joyful. It's so extreme it makes you cry. What role does motherhood have in the play? There's motherhood everywhere. There's a grandmother; her daughter, who is pregnant; and that daughter's earlier two girls, one of whom is also pregnant. Their house is collapsing around them. Trees crash on things. I won't spoil too much, but their world is falling apart. The candle was not lit. The light in it was Photoshopped. She was being pelted with intense wind, and regularly sprayed with water. The background is a hand painted backdrop to evoke the feeling of a storm. The suggestion is that the candle is offering some sort of revelation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The most rigorous study to date of how much it costs to care for Americans with dementia found that the financial burden is at least as high as that of heart disease or cancer, and is probably higher. And both the costs and the number of people with dementia will more than double within 30 years, skyrocketing at a rate that rarely occurs with a chronic disease. The research, led by an economist at the RAND Corporation, financed by the federal government, and published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, provides the most reliable basis yet for measuring the scale of the problem. Until now, the most cited estimates of the condition's cost and prevalence came from an advocacy group, the Alzheimer's Association. Although some figures from the new research are lower than the association's projections, they are nonetheless staggering and carry new gravity because they come from an academic research effort. Behind the numbers is a sense that the country, facing the aging of the baby boom generation, is unprepared for the coming surge in the cost and cases of dementia. "It's going to swamp the system," said Dr. Ronald C. Petersen, who is chairman of the advisory panel to the federal government's recently created National Alzheimer's Plan and was not involved in the RAND study. If anything, Dr. Petersen said of the study's numbers, "they're being somewhat conservative." Dr. Petersen, the director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the Mayo Clinic, is part of another team collecting data on dementia costs. The RAND results show that nearly 15 percent of people aged 71 or older, about 3.8 million people, have dementia. By 2040, the authors said, that number will balloon to 9.1 million people. "I don't know of any other disease predicting such a huge increase," said Dr. Richard J. Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, which financed the study. "And as we have the baby boomer group maturing, there are going to be more older people with fewer children to be informal caregivers for them, which is going to intensify the problem even more." The study found that direct health care expenses for dementia, including nursing home care, were 109 billion in 2010. For heart disease, those costs totaled 102 billion; for cancer, 77 billion. The study also quantified the value of the sizable amount of informal care for dementia, usually provided by family members at home. That number ranged from 50 billion to 106 billion, depending on whether economists valued it by the income a family member was giving up or by what a family would have paid for a professional caregiver. Michael D. Hurd, the lead author and a principal senior researcher at RAND, said the team could find no research quantifying such informal care for heart disease and cancer. But he and other experts agree that given the intensive nature and constant monitoring required to care for people with dementia, informal costs are probably much higher than those for most other diseases. Dr. Petersen said, "Clearly, dementia is going to outstrip those dramatically." Without a way to prevent, cure or effectively treat these conditions yet, the bulk of the costs 75 to 84 percent, the study found involves helping patients in nursing homes or at home manage the most basic activities of life as they become increasingly impaired cognitively and then physically. "The long term care costs associated with people with dementia are particularly high because of the nature of the disease," said Donald Moulds, acting assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. "People eventually become incapable of caring for themselves, and then in the vast majority of cases, their loved ones become incapable of caring for them." Each case of dementia costs 41,000 to 56,000 a year, the study said. Researchers project that the total costs of dementia care will more than double by 2040, to a range of 379 billion to 511 billion, from 159 billion to 215 billion in 2010. Because the population will also increase, Dr. Hurd said, the burden of cost per capita will not grow quite as fast, but will still be nearly 80 percent more in 2040. Dr. Hurd noted that in addition to the estimates of people with actual dementia, earlier analyses of the same data estimated that 22 percent of people aged 71 and older about 5.4 million people have mild cognitive impairment that does not reach the threshold for dementia. In the study, about 12 percent of those people developed dementia each year, meaning that they experienced problems with memory, concentration and daily functioning that were severe enough to meet the medical definition. The number of dementia cases calculated in the RAND study is smaller than that from the Alzheimer's Association, which used a different database and tended to count people in earlier stages of memory loss. The association estimates that five million people aged 65 and older have Alzheimer's, the most common dementia. The RAND cost estimates for current dementia care are similar to the Alzheimer's Association's, but the association's future cost projections are significantly higher: 1.2 trillion in 2050. Robert Egge, the association's vice president for public policy, said his group's cost projections are based on the assumption that "more and more people will be in severe stages of dementia" in the future because they will be older. He said his group welcomed the RAND study, especially its comparison of dementia to other serious illnesses. It shows that groups using different methodologies reached the same conclusion about the high costs of dementia care, he said. Dr. Petersen, whose team at the Mayo Clinic will be analyzing costs using a third distinct data set, said he suspected that "the reality is somewhere in the middle" of the RAND numbers and the Alzheimer's Association's projections. When it comes to dementia, Dr. Hurd said, his team's study could not capture the full toll of the disease. "One thing we haven't talked about, and it's not in the paper, is the tremendous emotional cost," he said. "Economists are coldhearted, but they're not that coldhearted." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Jimmy 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. Over the weekend, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes ("one of Team Trump's most devoted disciples," Jimmy Kimmel joked Monday), denied reports that he had played a role in asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. "I don't even think the word 'hypocrisy' covers it anymore. This is the 'hypocalypse' we're living in right now." JIMMY KIMMEL "We don't need the show 'Succession' on HBO. This thing is 'Succession,' 'The Sopranos,' 'Breaking Bad' and 'Borat' all rolled into one." JIMMY KIMMEL "Now, in a totally unrelated story, in 2018, Nunes claimed expenses for a four day trip to Europe between Nov. 30 and Dec. 3. Abraca dum dum. How stupid do you have to be to file expense reports on a crime? 'All right, give me all the money in the vault, and could you validate my parking?'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Wait, so you were overseeing the impeachment inquiry, and you were part of the thing he's being impeached for? This is like if the judge at the O.J. trial had been the glove." SETH MEYERS "It reminds me of the children's classic, 'Nancy Drew and the Case of the Man Murdered by Nancy Drew.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Meanwhile, today at the White House, Trump hosted the hero dog that was wounded during the al Baghdadi raid. His name is Conan, check it out. It was interesting when Trump said, 'Sit, stay and rollover,' every Republican in Congress started doing it." JIMMY FALLON "I'm surprised he did not give Conan his famous sports team welcome, because a dog is really the only one who'd truly appreciate a table of cold hamburgers." STEPHEN COLBERT "Although it's kind of funny: Trump didn't touch Conan during the visit; he just kept his arms at his sides. But the vice president, Mike Pence, is giving him a friendly pet, the whole thing. It was nice. It was nice to see Trump's dogs playing together, it really was." JIMMY KIMMEL "He was actually so well behaved during the Oval Office appearance that Mike Pence gave him a treat afterward. Not the dog Donald Trump." JAMES CORDEN " Imitating Trump I love this type of dog it's a special type, a certain type. My third favorite after hot and corn. Wait, does chili count?" STEPHEN COLBERT "The president gave Conan the dog a plaque, which I'm sure he will treasure, and presented Conan with a medal. You know what kind of medal the president gives a dog? The medal of fleadom." JIMMY KIMMEL "Conan knew exactly what was going on, which is why the dog has released the memoir: 'A paw lling: My Ruff Time in the Trump White House He's Not a Good Boy' by Conan T. Herodog." STEPHEN COLBERT The "Star Wars" actor Daisy Ridley rapped a recap of all eight films from the franchise on the "Tonight Show." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The N.F.L. plays football in rainstorms, blizzards and blazing heat. Now, the league wants to play in a pandemic. On Monday, rookies from the Kansas City Chiefs and the Houston Texans were the first of thousands of players to report to training camp after an off season of virtual workouts. They will be followed in the coming week by other rookies, quarterbacks, injured players and then all other players, just as is detailed in a memo sent to teams on Friday. The league's insistence on sticking to the pledge to start its season on time comes as infections from the coronavirus are rising in dozens of states, including California, Florida and Texas, which together are home to eight N.F.L. teams. The owners and the N.F.L. Players Association have worked for months to find ways to bring players back together as safely as possible. They have established protocols for how players should social distance when they travel and use locker rooms, and how long they must be quarantined if they test positive for the virus or were in contact with an infected person. The players' taking their case to millions of followers on social media is one way to try to keep management accountable and to win in the court of public approval. Before agreeing to a 60 game season, Major League Baseball players engaged in an acrimonious negotiation with its league last month over many of the same issues. Star players like league M.V.P. Mike Trout deployed their message on social media, repeating "tell us when and where" in their posts to emphasize that they were willing to play as long as they viewed conditions of their return as safe. In the past week, the N.F.L. Players Association has taken a similar approach, enlisting well known players like San Francisco 49ers defensive back Richard Sherman to argue for more stringent health protocols. But because the owners have the right to open camp when they want, and because fans are eager to watch football again, it is not clear whether the players will gain ground. "The only realistic leverage the players have is their star power, because on the legal side there's not much they can do," said Mark Conrad, who teaches sports law at the Gabelli School School of Business at Fordham University in Manhattan. "Football is also tantamount to religion for a lot of fans and they want to see football, so I don't know how effective these tweets will be." The N.F.L.'s chief medical officer, Allen Sills, said that there was little daylight between the league and the union when it came to safety protocols. The two sides agreed that players would be tested every day for the first two weeks, then every other day. If more than 5 percent of tests are positive in the first two weeks, teams will continue testing every day. But he warned that tests were not perfectly accurate and that additional measures protective equipment, social distancing and contact tracing were also needed. "We know that we can't eliminate risk, but we're trying to mitigate risk for everyone," Sills said. "We can't test our way to safety." Despite the precautions, at least one team has decided that it needs more time to prepare to practice. The Miami Dolphins, who play in South Florida, where infections are rising rapidly, told their rookies to report on Thursday, two days later than most teams. Some players have accused the team owners of prioritizing the league's finances over all else. One former team executive, Amy Trask, said that the league's decision to stick to its schedule spoke more to its confidence that it would ultimately find solutions than to a cavalier attitude about player safety. "Of course, economics play a big part of it," said Trask, the longtime president of the Raiders who left the club in 2013. "But from a business perspective, I don't think the outlook of team owners is 'We're tough,' but 'We're smart.'" While the two sides wrangle over safety measures, they are also negotiating over a second pressing matter: how to offset the loss of revenue from having a limited number or no fans in stadiums this season. The owners proposed keeping 35 percent of players' salaries in escrow as a way to recoup that money as quickly as possible. That was a nonstarter for the union, which prefers to absorb the losses by lowering the salary cap, which is the maximum teams can pay players, over as many as 10 years. "We know that players are taking all of the risk by returning to work," the union said in a statement last week. "We also know there will be a shortfall in revenues next year, but players cannot be asked to bear the full brunt of both the health and safety risk and the financial one." The financial formula, though, does not need to be agreed on by the start of training camp. The more pressing matter for the players is how to safely start the season. In addition to the coronavirus, they are concerned about a possible spike in injuries after a long layoff. They point to 2011, when players were locked out by the owners during the off season and sustained a rash of injuries during training camp. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
When Pam Mundus and a friend landed in Milan for a weeklong vacation on Feb. 23, uniformed airport workers in face masks, attempting to contain the spread of the new coronavirus, took their temperatures. But when Ms. Mundus returned home on a direct flight from Rome to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on March 1, no one questioned her about her time in Italy or whether she might have been exposed to the illness. At that stage, the State Department had already urged Americans to reconsider travel to Italy; there were at least 1,500 cases there and 34 deaths related to the coronavirus by then. "The only question we were asked was, 'Have you been to China?'" Ms. Mundus, 62, said in a phone interview from her home on eastern Long Island, where she has been in self quarantine since her return. President Trump has claimed credit for slowing the spread of Covid 19 in the United States by imposing a ban in late January on some travelers who had recently been to China. His administration has since barred entry to travelers who have been in Iran, nearly 30 European countries and the United Kingdom. But several experts say the experience of Ms. Mundus shows the limited effectiveness of the administration's travel restrictions, which followed outbreaks in affected countries by days or weeks. The administration never even imposed restrictions on passengers who had been to South Korea, which also faced a large outbreak. And the restrictions applied only to foreign citizens, despite the fact that the virus could be transmitted just as easily by the many Americans returning home in droves, who were getting confusing and inconsistent messages on how to protect themselves and their communities or in many cases, no advice at all. "The policy makes no sense," said Danielle Ompad, an epidemiologist at the N.Y.U. School of Public Health. "It was based on nationality, not risk of infectiousness, and the two are not synonymous." Josh Michaud, an associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, went further last week. When Mr. Trump barred Europeans from entering the United States, he tweeted that the move "makes about as much sense as a homeowner installing a fire alarm in the living room while the kitchen is going up in flames." Ari Minelli, a New York City architect who cut short a trip to Spain, landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday evening, but was not provided any guidance on self monitoring or self quarantine. Spain by then had more than 4,000 cases and had just declared a state of emergency. Mr. Minelli, who flew home from Barcelona through London, was asked before he boarded the flight in England only if he had been to China or to Iran. But the epicenter of the outbreak had already shifted to Europe. During the flight, Mr. Minelli filled out a customs form saying he had been to Spain. But he was not given any health forms to fill out nor any instructions on quarantine. "It seems they were operating under a previous set of regulations," said Mr. Minelli, who, like Ms. Mundus, decided of his own accord to self quarantine for 14 days. In recent days, some passengers said they were given forms to fill out on the plane that asked about their travel history and symptoms, and whether they had contact with anyone who was sick. The form also included a box for "measured temperature." Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. But Jolien Louis, 20, a George Washington University student from Queens, N.Y., who flew home from London on Monday, said that when she tried to hand the health forms to the person at Kennedy Airport inspecting her passport, he was not interested. She told him she had just been to Barcelona, but he told her to "keep the paperwork." What screening did occur may also have created conditions conducive to spreading an infection that should be avoided during a pandemic, experts said. As hordes of American travelers rushed home from Europe in a panic in recent days after Mr. Trump announced sweeping restrictions on travel from Europe last week, without making clear that United States citizens and residents would be allowed to come home travelers were packed together in close quarters in airports, sometimes for hours. "That probably caused more transmissions than it prevented," said Ira M. Longini, co director of the Center for Statistics and Quantitative Infectious Diseases at the University of Florida. Asked about procedures for screening returning passengers, a spokesman for the C.D.C. said passengers returning from Italy and South Korea were processed in a different way than passengers from China and Iran. Those who had been in Italy and South Korea were supposed to be screened for symptoms before departure. But the exact screening was left up to those countries, the spokesman said. Airline crews were supposed to distribute cards with written information to these passengers. Those on connecting or indirect flights were to get the information from Customs and Border Protection. Passengers who had recently been in China or Iran were to complete questionnaires about their travel history and any symptoms, and to have their temperatures taken. Those without symptoms were to be given instructions on what to do if they felt ill, and those with symptoms were to be evaluated by a C.D.C. health officer and transferred to a hospital for further assessment and isolation if necessary. But the C.D.C. spokesman said that anyone returning from affected areas China, Iran, South Korea, Europe's Schengen area and Britain should have received a card with information telling them to stay home for 14 days, not go back to work or school, avoid crowds and mass transit, and maintain distance from other people while monitoring their temperature. No one interviewed for this story received the card. Debbie Hasbrouck, 67, lives in McCormick, S.C., and spent three weeks in Verona, Italy, in February and March visiting a son who plays professional basketball there. But when she arrived in Atlanta on March 5, having changed planes in Paris, all the customs officer wanted to know was whether she had been to China. She has stayed home since her return, but recently developed symptoms consistent with the coronavirus and sought care at a local emergency room. Doctors did a comprehensive work up, but were unable to test her for the coronavirus because diagnostic kits are in short supply. Casey DeSimone, a junior at SUNY Albany who lives in New Paltz, N.Y., and planned to spend the spring semester studying in Milan, returned to Kennedy Airport on a direct flight from Milan on March 3. Her temperature was taken as part of security screening before she boarded the flight in Milan, she said. But she was given no information or guidance, either on the flight or afterward. The customs officer who checked her passport at Kennedy only asked if she had been to China or Iran in the past two weeks. She and her mother, who had picked her up from the airport, stayed home for 14 days. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The C.D.C. says any traveler who has come back from a region where there is widespread community transmission of the coronavirus should stay home for 14 days and quarantine themselves. They should take their temperature with a thermometer two times a day, and watch for fever, cough or trouble breathing. "Stay home and avoid contact with others," a C.D.C. spokesman said, when asked for instructions for returning travelers. "If you do get sick, call ahead to your doctor before you go to a doctor's office or emergency room." With community transmission now occurring in places throughout the United States, travel bans are not likely to have any effect on curbing the epidemic at this point, experts say. "It is possible to contain an epidemic at the source, but you have to act really quickly and have airtight containment and mitigation right from the beginning," said Dr. Longini. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
OTTAWA The province of Saskatchewan could be hit by substantial revenue losses from a takeover of the Potash Corporation, according to an independent study released by the government on Monday. Politicians in the province have repeatedly expressed concerns about lost tax and royalties payments if the company, a fertilizer producer, is acquired by BHP Billiton, which is based in Australia and has made a hostile takeover offer for it. Indeed, the study by the Conference Board of Canada, a research group based here, estimates that if BHP's 38.6 billion offer is successful, revenue to the province will fall by about 2 billion Canadian dollars, or 1.96 billion, over the next decade. That finding, related mostly to taxes, was the opening sentence of a news release on Monday by the Saskatchewan government, which commissioned the study. While the provincial government did not allow the Conference Board to make any recommendations, the authors of the report said in a conference call that there might be ways for the province to avoid that revenue shortfall by altering its royalty and tax system. The authors were also careful to add that a takeover by BHP was not all bad news for the province. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
WASHINGTON A federal judge on Tuesday doubled down on his hesitation to approve the merger settlement between CVS Health and Aetna, asking the combined companies to take steps to keep some operations distinct while he completes his review. Judge Richard J. Leon, of the United States District Court in the District of Columbia, stopped short of an attempt to block the 69 billion merger, but he reiterated his concerns over the Justice Department's approval of the combination. He went on to scold the government's lawyers for being "hostile to the role of the federal courts" in looking after the public's interest, telling them they "would do well to re evaluate the tone with which you address this court." Judge Leon proposed assigning a government monitor to ensure the two companies remain separate, and he urged them to take steps to "preserve the ability to unwind CVS' acquisition of Aetna in the event an unwinding is necessary." CVS Health, one of the nation's largest pharmacy benefit managers, has pitched its acquisition of Aetna, the giant health insurance company, as a way to offer patients better coordinated and more efficient care. But consumer groups and others have criticized the deal, saying it would create a powerful entity that would stifle competition and harm consumers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Emily Hurwitz, an advertising supervisor who lives in San Francisco, doesn't like buying cars from traditional dealerships. In fact, she recently bought a 2012 Volkswagen Tiguan through Shift, a start up that arranges online sales of used cars. She is happy with her car, which the company brought directly to her apartment to try out. Shift financed the 18,000 vehicle. Speaking of conventional car dealerships, Ms. Hurwitz, 28, said: "I always think they're going to swindle you. You're talking to a guy who's sizing you up. It's a very overwhelming situation, and you feel like you have to be on top of things and on guard." A handful of nascent online used car companies, including Shift, are capitalizing on sentiments like these. Although most online sites merely refer consumers to dealers, these companies are aiming to disrupt the industry by skirting dealer markups and promoting what they see as a better buying and selling experience. As with most of the start ups, Shift appraises cars and sets a price. For buyers, that means no negotiation. That's fine for consumers like Ms. Hurwitz, who had already done cost comparisons online. Partly because the prices are set, the process is much quicker, said George Arison, founder and chief executive of Shift, which is based in San Francisco. "It's four hours at the dealership. With us, it's 45 minutes start to finish." In the last three years, online used car start ups have grown rapidly, accruing more than 2 billion in funding, according to ABI Research. Still, some say these companies underestimate the complexity of automotive retail and that upending a century old business model may prove difficult. "History is littered with the corpses of companies that thought they could do better," said Cliff Banks, president and founder of the Banks Report, which analyzes the automotive retail industry. "None have succeeded yet." By 2015, the year after it was founded, Shift had raised nearly 75 million in capital from Goldman Sachs, DFJ and Highland Capital Partners. Beyond that, it would not discuss its financials. The used car marketplace Beepi started operating in April 2014 with the backing of tens of millions of dollars from the tech industry and other investors. But it ran out of cash and closed this year. Mr. Banks said Beepi, which eschewed conventional test drives for 10 day money back guarantees, failed to appraise cars accurately and was too capital intensive. (The Beepi co founder Alejandro Resnik did not respond to an interview request.) Mr. Banks said Internet based car companies face the costs associated with advertising, product depreciation, repair, detailing, transportation and delivery. "It's very difficult to balance supply and demand with a marketplace business model," he said. In addition to not offering traditional test drives, Beepi also tried to grow too quickly, Mr. Arison said. "They quickly pushed to go national," he said. "We believed then and still that the car market is a local market. There is no national market." Most of these fledgling e commerce companies must contend with local and state licensing and regulations, particularly during expansions. Shift, for example, recently had to discontinue sales in the Washington area until it received dealer licensing, Mr. Arison said. In a test for the used car industry, Carvana, which lost 93 million last year, recently filed to go public. Bolstered by fast growing sales, Carvana, a five year old Phoenix based company, which is not yet profitable, is expanding to 21 markets. The trend toward online sales isn't going away anytime soon, especially among the set that came of age with smartphones. More than 55 percent of Shift's customers are under 35. "The market is heavily skewed toward the younger generation shopper," Mr. Arison said. "Most young people do everything online." Rachel Lutz, who owns the Peacock Room clothing boutique in Detroit, said she would not have known how relatively roomy the new Mini Cooper Clubman was had she shopped exclusively online, since the model didn't show up in searches. She ended up buying one from a veteran salesman, she said. "Millennials want experiences; they don't want purchases," said Ms. Lutz, 37. "Sometimes they don't know what they're missing with the brick and mortar experience because it's been lacking for so long. When you give them service like that, it's new and exciting for them." Over all, traditional dealers have missed opportunities to attract and better serve customers, said Paul Hennessy, chief executive of the online car retailer Vroom. "There's already an appetite for doing research online; now, the next step is actually quite small," said Mr. Hennessy, the former chief executive of Priceline.com. The industry is big business; more than 38.5 million used cars were sold last year at an average retail price of 19,189, according to an Edmunds report. By contrast, 17.2 million new vehicles are forecast to be sold this year. Although similar predictions were made for last year, used car prices are still widely expected to soften. "This is something we've not seen in many years, and it's going to cause some disruption and hurt margins, especially if they have inventory on hand," said Dave Sullivan, manager of product analysis for AutoPacific Inc. "The next three years will weed out the weak ones." Jonathan Collegio, senior vice president for public affairs of the National Automobile Dealers Association, said that while consumers had benefited from the competitive used car market, new companies could encounter tough times. "New entrants are always moving in," he said, "but under the assumption that they can better figure out how to crack the nut than the thousands of other entrepreneurs who have been at it for decades." Still, Mr. Sullivan said it would be folly to discount what would probably be a swelling number of e commerce car businesses. "This should be a wake up call for dealerships that there's a business model that some consumers prefer," he said. "Consumers don't want to be told how they'll buy something. For some, the traditional model works. For others, they're ready to try something new." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A makeshift field hospital is being set up in the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York. Why not also convert the city's hotels into quarantine centers? Darren Mcgee/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, via Associated Press New York City today is like Wuhan, the city in central China with the first known Covid 19 outbreak, in late January. And now that the United States is facing its own epidemic, federal and state authorities are experimenting with many of the same tactics adopted by the Chinese authorities: vast lockdowns, sweeping travel restrictions, bans on public gatherings and mandatory social distancing measures. But they are omitting one crucial element of what helped make Wuhan's response effective in the end: a form of centralized quarantine. In late January, the authorities in Wuhan were essentially doing what New York authorities are doing today: For fear that hospitals would become overloaded with patients, they discouraged some sick people, especially the mildly sick, from even seeking hospital care. Only, there is a serious problem with that approach: Sending thousands of sick people home all but ensures that they will infect other people in their households. That's what happened in Wuhan. And that is almost certainly what is happening in New York possibly other American cities, too right now. The Chinese authorities, after recognizing the danger, quickly shifted tactics. Starting in early February, they built a series of quarantine centers, including roughly 20 facilities with about 1,000 beds each, just in Wuhan, a city of about 11 million people. The mildly sick were sent there for two weeks, while patients with serious complications were to be treated in hospitals. Not only did the measure help ease the burden on hospitals; it curbed transmission of the virus from the lightly ill to relatives, roommates, friends or anyone else sharing their living spaces. In Wuhan, the move was critical to breaking the back of the epidemic in less than two months: Those mass isolation centers have all closed down. New York, like other American cities, is now trying to rapidly build up capacity to handle large numbers of patients. A temporary field hospital is scheduled to open on Monday in the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, with a capacity of nearly 3,000 beds; it is being set up to treat non Covid 19 patients so as to allow mainstream facilities to focus on patients infected with the new coronavirus. Four other temporary medical facilities with a total of 4,000 beds are currently being planned for New York's other boroughs. Yet new confirmed cases in the city numbered roughly 3,500 on Sunday alone. Faced with such a rapid increase, the lightly ill in the city will almost certainly be asked to keep staying at home which only risks spreading the virus even more. There is another solution, though: Using the tens of thousands of hotel rooms in the city, many of which currently are empty, to house people who have tested positive for the coronavirus or given the dearth of available tests who display mild Covid 19 like symptoms. Let's turn hotels into temporary quarantine quarters. Patients would be put up for free for 14 days, the standard recommended period of self isolation. Food could be delivered. Nurses could be stationed at the hotels to check on the people who are quarantined, in particular to ensure that anyone who develops more severe symptoms can be rapidly taken to a hospital. Any member of one's household who subsequently tested positive could move in. Congress recently authorized hundreds of millions of dollars of stimulus spending to combat the epidemic. Some of those funds could help finance a crash campaign to help hotels not only in New York, but throughout the country convert themselves into quarantine centers. At least four New York City hotels have already volunteered to provide rooms to medical personnel or patients who aren't critically ill; Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York State, has praised their gesture. Now, state and city authorities must actively encourage more such efforts by directly compensating hotel owners who agree to turn their premises into quarantine facilities. Los Angeles County authorities experimented with just that last week, opening a quarantine center at a Sheraton hotel in Pomona, with plans for more emergency arrangements at other hotels. Chicago is also reported to be planning on reserving some 1,000 hotel rooms in the city to ease pressure on hospitals. New York City authorities should also organize to have public health officials train hotel employees about how to safely interact with self isolated individuals: how to deliver meals, disinfect rooms or handle people with pneumonia like symptoms. (Taiwan has prepared a detailed guide for such procedures. Why not New York?) Some people are sure to resist any move toward centralized quarantining: It does raise difficult questions about individual rights. For example, should the measure be mandatory, as it was in China? Would the police be made to enforce it, and how? But there is good reason to believe that people who are ill with Covid 19, or who fear that they might be, would voluntarily quarantine themselves outside their own homes, even if the authorities didn't require them to: Many are terrified of infecting family members, friends and others. So why not make it possible for them to undergo quarantine without endangering anyone else, all the while using resources already on hand? Let's convert New York's hotels including yours, Mr. President into temporary self isolation facilities. Carl Minzner is a professor of law at Fordham University, in New York, who specializes in Chinese law and politics. 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 |
The pigeons are strutting, the leaves in Central Park are budding and the sun is sticking around longer over Manhattan's canyons. What's missing from another spring in New York? Baseball, of course. So what are the Yankees up to? Starter Gerrit Cole, the big free agent signing of the off season, filmed himself not pitching, but catching. On the mound was his wife, Amy, who played softball at U.C.L.A., and she showed off some pretty serious fastballs. Cole was in Connecticut, where he planned to live during the season, and Manager Aaron Boone, whose permanent home is there, has also played catch with him recently. So if a pitcher playing out of position, a runner and a boxer are what the Yankees need, the team should be set. Now if only they were back playing major league baseball. 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. And Mets fans, we don't want to leave you out, but perhaps encourage your players to start posting some workout videos across social channels. We've got the time to watch. The Rakuten Monkeys, a Taiwanese major league team, are getting ready to play their first game of the season with a new set of fans in the stands: more than 500 "robot" mannequins. Opening day was originally scheduled for March 14, but was moved to Saturday because of the coronavirus outbreak. The Chinese Professional Baseball League will be one of the first professional leagues in the world to return. But only 200 people will be allowed in each stadium in compliance with government regulations. Since players, coaches, team employees, league officials and news media members make up most of that number, the team came up with an alternative to fill the stadium: robot mannequins dressed in team gear, with many holding up signs. "Since we are not allowed to have any fans in attendance, we might as well have some fun with it," the team's general manager, Justin Liu, said to the league's official website. Starting April 17, fans will also be able to buy custom cardboard cutouts with their pictures on them to appear in the stands. These will cost the equivalent of 200 for a group of four. The Monkeys have won the last three C.P.B.L. Series, and will start the season against the Chinatrust Brothers, a rematch of last year's final. DANIELLE ALLENTUCK The (Possible) Return of English Soccer If you're looking for hopeful sports signs, you'll be glad to know that in a few places, leagues are beginning to actually think about returning to play, and not just Taiwanese baseball. First, the caveat. No one knows what's going to happen with the coronavirus, and plans like these could easily go awry. Still, English soccer fans will be heartened to know that the second, third and fourth tiers of the game could finish their seasons this summer. In a letter, Rick Parry, chairman of the English Football League, said training could resume as soon as May 16, games could start in June and the season could finish in August, with little or no break in the season, The Telegraph and other British news organizations reported. The postseason promotion playoffs would also be held under the plan. The return of soccer would be welcome news to English clubs that have started to feel the financial pinch. The Times of London reported that the Premier League would release some of the 2019 20 season prize money early to help with the strain. Notably, the money would be allocated based on the teams' league positions at the time the season was stopped; that is perhaps a good omen for Liverpool, which sits comfortably in first place and would like to be declared champions should the season not finish. A key sign of the financial woes in English soccer came on Thursday when Southampton deferred wages, the first Premier League club to do so. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Anna Winger was one of the creators behind "Deutschland 83" and "Deutschland 86," the spy thriller series about East German espionage and the ordinary people who became caught up in the Cold War's machinations. So "Unorthodox," a four part series about a young woman escaping a Hasidic community in present day Brooklyn, might seem like a departure for her. It is not. It's not just that the show, which arrives Thursday on Netflix, shares the intensity, cultural specificity and psychological acuity of Winger's earlier series. It's that the story, which tracks its protagonist's personal journey and peril across continents, is itself a kind of espionage caper, a thrilling and probing story of one woman's personal defection. It's true that Esty (Shira Haas, "Shtisel"), a 19 year old bride in an unhappy arranged marriage, is not trapped behind an international border. We find her in her apartment, looking out at the streetscape of Brooklyn. But as she tells a friend, "Williamsburg is not America." The thin eruv wire that surrounds the Satmar Hasidic community where she lives might as well be an Iron Curtain. One day, with cash and a few papers stashed in her waistband, she breaks that barrier, catching a plane for Berlin alone, looking for the mother who herself fled the Satmars and her alcoholic husband when Esty was a child. Esty's disappearance creates a scandal in the community, which already saw Esty as suspect both because of her parents and because of her credentials as a wife. ("A year of marriage and not even a baby!" her mother in law says.) The elders send her confused, soft spoken husband, Yanky (Amit Rahav), to search for her, accompanied by Moishe (Jeff Wilbusch), a thuggish prodigal who sees the retrieval mission as a chance at winning reacceptance. What unfolds is a story of personal discovery with the intensity of a spy thriller. Esty's escape is only part of the story of "Unorthodox," based on the memoir of the same name by Deborah Feldman. The bigger and more captivating question is why she left and what she was fleeing. Winger, who created the series with Alexa Karolinski, lays it out patiently in a series of flashbacks to Yanky and Esty's arranged pairing and marriage. Told about the match, Esty asks her aunt Malka (Ronit Asheri), "What's the boy like?" To Malka, it's an absurd question: "He's like everyone else. Normal." "Normal," at first, is all that Esty craves. A dreamy young woman with a passion for music in a community in which women are not even allowed to sing publicly she has always seen herself as a misfit. Maybe, she hopes, becoming a wife and mother will give her a sense of purpose. In Berlin, she's free but terrified, with little money, no contacts but her estranged mother and few skills applicable in the modern world. (Encountering a computer search engine for the first time at a library, she asks it if God exists. She gets only a list of contradictory answers.) By chance, she falls in with a group of international music students from a conservatory; their free spokenness awes and daunts her. To them, Esty is like a fascinating alien, a time traveler from the 19th century. There's an otherworldliness to "Unorthodox," a credit to how well the director, Maria Schrader (also of the "Deutschland" series), visualizes both Williamsburg and Berlin. The dialogue hopscotches among Yiddish, English and German; the scenes among the Hasidim are essentially period pieces, meticulously designed and costumed. There's a sense, which Esty must feel, that the series takes places simultaneously in the past and the future. Haas is a phenomenon, expressive and captivating. As Esty makes her way, drawn forward by little more than hope and an attraction to music, Haas makes you hear the unsounded symphonies in her head. In the first hour, Esty goes to a beach with her new conservatory friends, carefully pulls off her pantyhose, wades mostly clothed into the water and sets her wig adrift. The sequence is religious in its ecstasy. (It also contrasts with a ritual bathing scene at a mikvah, where she is cleansed before her wedding.) At the same time, "Unorthodox" follows Yanky and Moishe's peregrinations across Brooklyn, then Berlin, like long coated G men. You root for Esty to escape them, but the series is also sensitive to their perspective. Yanky, especially, is at sea, raised to believe that as a husband he is "a king" but also discovering that the customs that defined his life are thinner and more fragile than the wire around his neighborhood. "Unorthodox" is, unambiguously, the story of a woman's escape from a society that she finds suffocating and unsustaining. But it extends its curiosity and understanding to those who find Hasidic isolationism to be a refuge from a world that has continually been hostile to Jews. At a Seder, an elder remarks that the Hasidim recall the story of escape from Egypt to remind them of the Jewish people's historical suffering. Its lesson, he says, is that whenever they assimilate into the larger community, they are punished for it: "When we forget who we are, we invite God's wrath." From his point of view, Esty's defection is both foolhardy and a betrayal. For Esty, as "Unorthodox" shows with power and deft musicality, it is instead its own flight from bondage. Ultimately, she's chasing the same insight that her former neighbors find in ritual. She wants to know who she is. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"At that point every American was like, 'Is that on him or on my TV.?" JIMMY FALLON "And, hey, shouldn't he be in quarantine? I heard something like 35 of his co workers have the virus. Although, Pence is probably safe because he's so boring his co workers scatter whenever he comes in the room: 'Run, guys, Pence is coming!'" SETH MEYERS "And, hey, after all the trouble you went through, nobody will remember a damn thing that was said thanks to a fly landing on Mike Pence. And it's a shame, because before that happened, Pence was making some very terrible points." SETH MEYERS "And look, flies land on people all the time. There's nothing crazy about that. What was crazy is how long it sat there for. Even Trump was watching at home like, 'Wow, two minutes with Mike Pence. I could never do that.'" TREVOR NOAH "OK, can I just say that I was not surprised at all to see that fly on Mike Pence. First of all, even a fly knows better than to land on a Black woman's hair." TREVOR NOAH "This is what happens when you go 18 years without blinking." JAMES CORDEN "Mike Pence doesn't even look live when he's live. Dude is an in person Zoom meeting. Whenever he started speaking, I started looking for the gallery view button." SETH MEYERS | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In the beginning, there is nothing. And in the end, there is nothing, once again. Such is the way of all flesh, no? And, since the subject here is the accumulation of money, let's say the way of all cash, too. But in this case, out of nothing there emerges such a heaving ferment of aspiration, energy, tenacity and audacity that you're left reeling by the scope and vitality of it all. That, in essence, is what the magnificent play "The Lehman Trilogy," at the Park Avenue Armory, both is about and, more important, simply is. This genuinely epic production out of London, directed with surging sweep and fine tooled precision by Sam Mendes, charts the history of the financial institution that would come to be known as Lehman Brothers, from its humble origins to its epical implosion, over a span of three centuries and many generations. The script by the Italian playwright Stefano Massini, exquisitely adapted into English by Ben Power, follows the blossoming of a small Alabama clothing store in the 1840s, founded by three immigrant Jewish brothers from Bavaria, into an international powerhouse of the stock exchange, before its world rattling collapse in 2008. What is wrought by those three original brothers and their descendants is impressive, for sure, as they redefine the nature of getting and spending in the United States, while accumulating unbounded personal wealth. But for my money (you should pardon the expression), what's really thrilling here is the parallel accomplishment of this show's creators, who have conjured not only the play's leading merchants and their kin but also entire cities, nations and the rush of history that keeps sweeping them onward and outward, toward oblivion. This is achieved, as a tale of such scope must be, with a cast of hundreds possibly, thousands. And they are all embodied by a mere three actors: Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley, singular looking men who turn out to contain multitudes. (Oh, in the shadows, you might spot a pianist Candida Caldicot whose music seems to originate in your own brain.) Under the inspired direction of Mr. Mendes, with a design team that understands the value of simplicity in doing justice to complex matters, "The Lehman Trilogy" unfolds a tale of extravagant wealth with an even more dazzling economy of means. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter. The three hour plus version first staged at London's National Theater, where I saw it last summer, is roughly half the length of those earlier productions in Paris and Milan. As for its set, designed by the remarkable Es Devlin, it doesn't appear to be much more than an outsize glass box, minimally furnished with the remnants of some sleek office furniture and packing crates. Yet five minutes into the production, you feel you have somehow already traveled vast distances. For in the middle of this glaring and barren modernity, there steps an anachronistic silhouette, a figure in a severe black suit who might have come from a faded daguerreotype. (Katrina Lindsay is the costume designer.) This is Henry Lehman, a young man from Bavaria, who has just set foot on American soil for the first time. As brought to life by Mr. Beale, one of the finest classical actors alive, Henry is radiant with astonishment, trepidation and a sense of infinite possibilities. His name has already been changed (from Heyum) by a New York customs official; the journey of endlessly becoming, reflecting that of millions of arrivals to the United States then and now, has begun. How "The Lehman Trilogy" built its big glass box: Very carefully. It's a moment that will feel achingly familiar to anyone who ever arrived in New York from somewhere else to be someone else. It registers as so deeply personal that it may take you a moment to realize that Mr. Beale, as Henry, is speaking in the third person, not the first. And how he and his fellow actors speak has the resonance of a work by Homer or Virgil, in which specific acts and thoughts are always juxtaposed against a sense of eternity of time past, present and to come. Here is how Henry concludes the beginning of that opening scene: "He took a deep breath, picked up his suitcase and walking quickly, despite not knowing where to go, like so many others he stepped into the magical music box called America." And by then, you have a sensory grasp of just what that world is. This is partly the result of the delicate use of light (Jon Clark), sound and music (by Nick Powell) and melting videos (by Luke Halls) that stretch teasingly across a cyclorama at the back of the stage. But above all, it is the words and the men speaking them that allow us to know uncannily and exactly where we are and who we're dealing with. Mr. Power's adaptation is filled with rhythmic repetitions, descriptions of recurrent dreams that seem realer than life and linked images that expand and mutate in the telling. Even the many enumerations in the script of prices and profits and their endless dangling zeros assume an incantatory lyricism. This is appropriate to a play in which a specific reality is always shaped by the changing mythology of those who inhabit it. As their story continues, and the Lehman business moves to New York after the Civil War, those rites, too, will evolve and eventually all but disappear. For like so many American stories that span generations, "The Lehman Trilogy" is a progress of deracination. At the same time, another kind of rootlessness is being traced. This one is economic. Against a New York that moves from the Gilded Age into the frenzied '20s, from the Great Depression into the postwar boom of acquisition and beyond, the goods in which the brothers and their descendants traffic become increasingly abstract. From traders in cotton and coffee and railroads and tobacco they become "merchants of money." And as the firm shifts from banking into the more nebulous ether of high finance, money turns into something intangible, with a mighty but tenuous existence all its own and ever increased potential to evaporate altogether. These heady considerations, from the financial and the ontological, are grounded in three of the most virtuosic performances you're ever likely to see. As they switch among genders, ages and nationalities of their countless characters each actor has his bravura moments. But, under the supervision of Mr. Mendes (whose command of stagecraft is also on view in the Broadway hit "The Ferryman"), each is also, always the original Lehman brother he first portrays. It is those voices the sound of history itself that enfold the particularly rendered scenes of courtship and acquisition, of growing older and dying. These multifarious beings aren't all talk, by any means. Those packing crates are enlisted to build walls of stores and institutions, and to be piled into the toppling, smothering towers that haunt the brothers' nightmares. The glass walls are scrawled upon in marker with names and numbers, and are then wiped clean, leaving barely discernible smudges as reminders of who and what came before. Not that audiences are likely to forget what they've seen. The real magic of "The Lehman Trilogy" has nothing to do with numbers. It's the miracle of three men, on a nearly naked stage, resurrecting vanished lives and worlds, leaving an oddly indelible afterglow in that final fade into darkness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
52 Places to Go in 2020 is here. Read the full list now. "Where would you go if you could go anywhere?" That was the question I posed to the members of The Times Travel desk back at the beginning of September, at our kickoff lunch for the 2020 edition of our annual 52 Places to Go list. Between that day and the list's publication, there have been almost four months of research, discussion, debate and as many synonyms for "argument" as you can imagine. In the end, we came down to these 52 destinations that we hope will inspire, delight and motivate you to explore the world. How did we choose them? After that initial poll, we asked our regular contributors, as well as The Times's foreign and domestic correspondents, to suggest places that seemed newly fresh and compelling. We pestered in the know travelers for their 2020 musts. We grilled travel pros about what had them excited. To make the cut, it is not enough for a place to be beautiful, amazing and culturally significant. It also has to answer the question, why now? Why this place, this year? Tokyo, a great city in any year, is hosting the Summer Olympics in 2020. It's on our list. The Bahamas, always a pleasure, needs support from tourists in the wake of 2019's Hurricane Dorian. On the list. Greenland, with its magnificent glaciers threatened by global warming and new airports on the horizon, made it, too. As we made our choices, themes emerged. This year the two most prominent were the importance of sustainability and the pull of history. Over the last year, the travel world woke up to the implications of climate change and its contributions to global warming, as well as questions about overtourism and who benefits from tourist dollars. A growing number of companies, destinations and individual travelers are committed to mitigating their impact on earth. Global brands like Hilton and Marriott pledged to get rid of single use plastics; KLM, the Dutch airline, ran ads suggesting that travelers might want to take the train. On Times Travel, we committed to buying carbon offsets for our staff plane travel. (And no, we will not be sending out a 52 Places Traveler this year, though we will report from many of our chosen destinations.) This list is, at least in part, a fantasy of escape (see Australia's Kimberley region or La Paz, Mexico), but we recognize that travel, like life, can be messy and contradictory. Getting on a plane or a cruise ship or behind the wheel of a car adds carbon to the atmosphere. But travel also brings people together, enlightens and amazes, and, properly managed, has economic benefits. A number of places on our list are leading the way in making travel more sustainable (Western Sweden, we're looking at you) or are limiting visitor numbers to avoid the plague of overtourism (Haida Gwaii, in Canada, is a leader here, as well as in making sure locals benefit from tourism). Uganda limits the number of gorilla trekking permits for its famed Bwindi forest, and makes sure the proceeds help protect the animals. Others, like Sabah, on the island of Borneo, could use help from tourists in establishing that preservation can be more profitable than the destruction of habitats. Our concerns meant that some very tempting places did not make the list. We had a long debate, in particular, about Antarctica. Travel to the southernmost continent is booming: The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, which includes most of the companies doing business there, predicts that 78,520 people will visit Antarctica in 2019 2020, up from 56,168 in 2018 2019. Norwegian Airlines, the low cost carrier, is now offering service to Ushuaia, the jumping off point for many Antarctic itineraries. All that gave us pause: Can Antarctica handle that increase? Can it face difficulties similar to those that have developed in the Galapagos or on Mount Everest? Against those worries, history offered a countervailing story of continuity. The German town of Oberammergau has been putting on its once a decade Passion Play since 1634; you can take in the 42nd staging this year. Egypt, a contender last year, is scheduled to complete its massive new Grand Egyptian Museum in 2020, making thousands of objects associated with the pharoahs newly visible. As every American learns, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England, 400 years ago. In marking that moment, the town will acknowledge and explore the conflicting perspectives on the consequences of that voyage. So history changes, too. Our 1 place, Washington, looks both forward and back. We thought it was important to mark the 100th anniversary of American women winning the right to vote. While Seneca Falls had its proponents, we decided there was no better place to do that than the capital of the United States, a majority minority city filled with immigrants and with a vibrant life beyond its monuments and halls of government. And what better year than 2020, in the middle of what promises to be an extraordinarily contentious election, to visit and remember the ideals on which the United States was founded, and the fact that Washington belongs to everyone. Amy Virshup is the travel editor of The New York Times. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Jennifer Mankins took over the boutique Bird in 2004 and has since expanded it to include three Brooklyn outposts. When she opened her Williamsburg shop in 2009, she included men's wear to complement her women's selection. "I felt like the male counterpart to my female customers didn't have any place to go," she said. Recently, Ms. Mankins remade Bird's website, and she plans to open a store in Los Angeles next year. "Being a retailer in New York, even an independent one, I always tell my staff that we're competing on the highest stage," she said. "Even though we're a little store in Brooklyn, we compete with Barneys, we compete with Bergdorf, because our customers can go there." Is there something that you could buy a million units of and you'd always sell out? Lately, it's the Isherwood, a style of shirt from Acne Studios. Season after season, I buy more and more variations of it, and we sell all of them, whether I buy it in chambray, a novelty print or a classic Oxford broadcloth. Guys can't get enough button up shirts in general. You can wear them with jeans, you can wear them with a suit. It's funny, I find with men that they may not want to dress the same as other people, but once they find their thing, they want to buy six. They want a uniform. Is there a difference you see being a Brooklyn retailer rather than a Manhattan one? I think so. Practical is a word that people in fashion hate. But one thing I've always incorporated into my idea of fashion is that it has to perform. It has to work. This is very general, but if you're in Union Square, you can walk outside your door and get a taxi. You don't need a big old parka. When people move to Brooklyn, they're willing to make that extra step, literally and figuratively, of wearing boots and a parka. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
I work at a Tyson Foods processing plant. I help process the chicken for packaging. I cut the necks off the chickens. I pull the fat from the chicken. Pulling the fat, you pull a leg up on a chicken and pull it out like this. I do it like karate style. LAUGHS It's very fast paced. It's very, very intense. Line speeds are designed to run 140 birds a minute. Everyone is standing not even arm's length apart. CLUCKING There's absolutely no way that we can social distance within these plants. Meat processing plants around the country have become Covid 19 hot spots. More than 10,000 workers in poultry and meat plants have contracted the virus. At least 30 have died. We now have masks and temperature checks. Tyson even put up plastic barriers between workers. But these measures can only do so much for when we're cramped together on these lines. The reason our plants continue to be super spreaders is because Tyson forces us to process so much chicken so very quickly. The rate that they have to get these orders processed, it is physically impossible to social distance. If you slow down the lines, less workers will be needed. And by doing so, we can be able to social distance from each other and be more safe. We may be feeding America, but we're sacrificing our own selves. I've been with Tyson for almost a year and a half. I am very proud to work for for the biggest company that's producing chicken for this country. I've always been a dedicated worker to Tyson Foods. I took great, great pride in my job. They said either you come into work, or you will be terminated. But right now, I don't feel like it's safe enough. Back in March, my mother was diagnosed with pulmonary sarcoidosis. I couldn't carry that weight on my shoulders if I were to bring that virus home not knowing I had it and gave it to her. From my hypertension, from having a blood disorder puts me in a little higher risk. But I still go in every day to sacrifice myself to make sure people in America are taken care of. Chicken is the most popular meat in this country. And Tyson is the largest poultry producer. Here's how this works. The government regulates how fast these factories can run. So companies like Tyson lobby for faster and faster line speeds. The Trump administration relaxed regulations. They are allowing companies to speed up the production lines for chicken. Even with these outbreaks at Tyson plants, John Tyson, the company chairman, took out a full page newspaper ad pushing for these plants to stay open. And President Trump listened. We're working with Tyson, which is one of the big companies in that world. The president will mandate that meat processing facilities remain open. My family supports the Trump administration. However, Tyson and the president are prioritizing keeping the supermarket stocked instead of keeping workers like me safe." Tyson, slow down your production line so we can social distance within these factories. How can we feed America if we're all getting sick? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Alanis Morissette and the director Diane Paulus at a rehearsal of "Jagged Little Pill."Credit...Matt Cosby for The New York Times CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Everyone seems to have a story about hearing Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill" for the first time. The writer Diablo Cody was listening to the radio when a D.J. said, "This is going to be huge." The composer Tom Kitt was in college, feeling like the whole world had stopped. I was a kid who got grounded for accidentally saying the F word while singing along to "You Oughta Know." The album's parade of fearlessly raw hits was as integral to '90s pop culture as AOL promo disks and Doc Martens. Its success vindicated Ms. Morissette, who was previously rejected by radio stations saying they didn't need another woman after Sinead O'Connor and Tori Amos. "For those in the patriarchy who thought women were not bankable," she recalled in a recent interview, "that went out the window." Now Ms. Morissette's trailblazing 1995 album is taking on new life: as theater. And don't expect a fun, nostalgic jukebox musical about the '90s. "Jagged Little Pill," which opens at the American Repertory Theater here on May 24, is very much of the present and may just be the most woke musical since "Hair." "Alanis's songs were written 23 years ago," said Mr. Kitt, the production's music supervisor and the composer of the Pulitzer Prize winning musical "Next to Normal." "But they feel like they were written yesterday. These are all human issues that we've been dealing with for years." To pull off what may risk coming off as heavy handed, American Repertory has assembled a team of A list collaborators in addition to Mr. Kitt and Ms. Morissette: the Tony Award winning Diane Paulus, the company's artistic director; the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; and Ms. Cody, the screenwriter of "Juno" fame," who wrote the book. (The unsung hero, they all said, is Lily, a French bulldog puppy that has become the production's de facto therapy dog.) "When you're dealing with an album that has such meaning for people, you have to respect that," Ms. Paulus said. "We know people are going to expect some sonic universe and emotion. But if we do our job right, people are going to think: I've never heard these songs like this." The songs, which also include Morissette tracks outside "Jagged Little Pill," are convincingly theatrical in the context of the musical, which may be a surprise considering the material comes from two outsiders; Ms. Cody didn't even take an academic stab at dramatic writing while growing up, she said. "I don't think I ever had the confidence in my younger years to say I could tell a story on the stage," she said. "I was never an assured creator. I didn't think I had anything to contribute." But Ms. Cody's book for "Jagged Little Pill" which strips away the picture perfect veneer of a Connecticut family over the course of a year is unapologetically on brand: by turns bitingly satirical, touching and frank. In fact, it may even be a more honest reflection of her writerly mind than we typically get onscreen. "I come from a world of parent companies and advertisers and suits and caution," she said. "If I want to express a belief of my own, I'm asked to temper it so that we don't alienate anyone. This is the opposite." If there is anything keeping Ms. Cody's book in check, it's the music itself. But part of her task has been to twist the poetic ambiguity of Ms. Morissette's lyrics in the service of an original story. That means framing "Mary Jane" as a husband's whisper over his wife's hospital bed, or "One Hand in My Pocket" as musical theater's prototypical "I want" song. But sometimes the production leaves Ms. Morissette's cherished music alone: The staging for "You Oughta Know," sung by the scene stealing Lauren Patten, is so spare it could just as easily be an intimate concert. (At the performance I attended last week, Ms. Patten's "You Oughta Know" stopped the show with a minutes long standing ovation. I was told that this has been happening every night since previews began on May 5.) "Ironic" is sung in the context of a high school writing workshop and the scene makes a joke from the elephant in the room: decades of pedants nit picking the song's misuse of the word "ironic." "I'm probably laughing the hardest in the audience," Ms. Morissette said, adding that when she worked on the song with the songwriter and producer Glen Ballard, "we didn't give a expletive about the malapropism." She also didn't think many people would even hear it. But once "Ironic" became a hit, there were entire website forums dedicated to shaming the song and in true internet fashion thinking of ways to murder Ms. Morissette. "I naively thought fame would be me kumbaya ing with Johnny Depp lying on my lap at a campfire and Sharon Stone offering me a drink," she said. "It was the complete opposite, totally isolating. I just stopped reading any comments." The vibe behind the scenes of the musical is, like its material, inclusive and socially aware. Early in the rehearsal process Ms. Paulus asked everyone in the cast to give a presentation on a topic from the show. Celia Gooding (the daughter of the current Tony nominee LaChanze) who plays the queer, protest sign toting daughter Frankie spoke about colorism, a form of discrimination based on skin color that transcends race. And Elizabeth Stanley ("On the Town"), who plays her mother, chose to research transracial adoption. "Everyone shared really vulnerable personal stories," Ms. Stanley said. "It forced us as a company to be gentle with each other." Members of the cast and crew have also been one another's shoulder to lean on amid what Ms. Paulus called "the last two years of major trauma in America," which shaped "Jagged Little Pill" throughout development. Some material has even gone straight from headlines to the stage, like a sobering moment in "All I Really Want" when the song suddenly stops leaving the audience with the tableau of Frankie holding up a NeverAgain against a backdrop of images from the Parkland student protests. Ms. Paulus's inspiration for moments like this is "Hair," which she directed for Shakespeare in the Park, and later Broadway, nearly a decade ago. "They were reflecting in real time what was happening in the world," she said of that show's original production, in 1967. "Guys were getting their draft cards delivered to the stage door; it was that real." With that in mind, the version of "Jagged Little Pill" I saw could change tomorrow. It could even be a different show if it were staged on Broadway, as many of her American Repertory productions are. "I feel like theater is all about the present," Ms. Paulus said. "When and if we get another shot at this in the future, I'm sure things will change." But, she was quick to emphasize, any revisions based on current events would have to take their lead from Ms. Morissette's music and lyrics which, she added, actually provide a hopeful outlook in the age of bleak push notifications. "The pain and anger of my songs are all on this spectrum," Ms. Morissette said. "The darker the song is, the more that hope is just this pilot light that was there the whole time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
That's some road trip that's been mapped out by the three drunken travelers now bending an elbow at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater. (I mean the ones onstage.) In "Anything That Gives Off Light," a wide ranging work of stand up musical theater from the Brooklyn based troupe the TEAM and the National Theater of Scotland, two Scots and an American meet in a London bar. The Scots are Brian (Reuben Joseph) and Iain (Martin Donaghy), and, in happier times, they were the best of friends. They call the American woman (Jessica Almasy) Red because she never says what her real name is (or if she does, I didn't catch it) but has ordered a "red daiquiri." Red, who comes from the mountains of West Virginia, is on what she describes as a second honeymoon, but without her husband. Iain has arrived from Scotland bearing the ashes of Brian's recently deceased granny, a firebrand who used to take the young'uns on protest marches. Brian, who appears to devote his life to getting and spending in London, seems to have little interest in either returning to his homeland or revisiting his past. Everybody is on edge. Still, as the song that opens the show reminds us, there's nothing like a "long handled whisky bottle" to blur any unpleasantness. And before the first flush of intoxication has faded into a grayer shade, Brian, Iain and Red are in a rental car bound for Scotland. That country, in this rendering, turns out to be an exceedingly mutable land, fixed in neither time nor place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
As Major League Baseball's commissioner, Rob Manfred, boarded a private jet in Phoenix in June, he was convinced he had finally put his sport's season on track. He had just met with the head of the players' union, Tony Clark, and had hashed out what he thought was a framework to play an abbreviated season, seemingly ending weeks of an ugly back and forth between team owners and the players. Finally, Manfred thought, he could focus on transforming a sport steeped in tradition into one played safely in the age of social distancing. But as Manfred's plane passed over Nebraska on its way to New York, he received a message from Clark. The sides did not, in fact, have a deal. Aboard the jet, Manfred realized he was staring down an existential threat not only to baseball, but to his career as well. Voices inside and outside the sport were looking to M.L.B. to give the country some semblance of normalcy, to ease the seemingly unending frustrations of infections, lockdowns and a sprawling pandemic. Manfred knew that the chances of holding a season would dwindle by the day. He has risen through the sport on his ability to create labor peace with the players, but he knew the blame would rest at his feet if he couldn't resolve the financial dispute between the athletes, many of whom make millions per year, and the owners, who are worth billions. "We cannot be the one sport that doesn't figure out how to play," Manfred would tell himself repeatedly in the days and weeks that followed, as he sat in his den at home, working the phones with the owners of the 30 teams and his deputies. Manfred, who has an unusual ability to vacillate between pugnacious and charming, cajoled owners, stressing the idea that the sport had to have a season. Ideally, the owners would negotiate a plan with the players' union to hold a season, but Manfred knew he ultimately needed only the owners' approval to issue a schedule. As he tried to steer the players and owners toward agreement in the weeks that followed, he leaned into his willingness to endure withering news media coverage, and took a pummeling from players and fans. "Well, we're going to make it to the starting line," Manfred said on Thursday from Nationals Park, the site of the season opener between Washington and the Yankees. "Everybody seems excited, like we have done something; all we have done is get out of the gate the hard part is playing 60 games." 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. As he sought to salvage the 2020 season, Manfred discussed his efforts in a series of interviews with The New York Times from May through July. What emerged from those interviews was a portrait of an executive confronting the stress of trying to settle a labor dispute and hold a season amid a confounding global health crisis nearly all of it from his den at home. Manfred's determination to return the sport to the field and his renewed engagement with his predecessor and former boss, Bud Selig demonstrated how the sport's 1994 strike still haunts the game. Even before the pandemic, Manfred was facing possibly the toughest period of his five year tenure as commissioner. Attendance had fallen for the fourth straight season in 2019, and he was under pressure to implement measures to speed up the pace of games. In January, he had released a report detailing an illegal sign stealing scheme that the Houston Astros had used during their championship season in 2017. Manfred punished the team's manager, general manager and front office, but he did not suspended any players, creating a backlash among rival teams and fans. Perhaps his biggest misstep came when he referred to the World Series trophy as "a piece of metal" when explaining why he declined to strip the Astros of their title. For some team owners, the remark illustrated the stark differences between Manfred and his predecessor, Selig. No owner could ever get through a conversation with Selig without him referring to baseball's history. To some owners, Manfred, a career labor lawyer who succeeded Selig in 2015, needed to do more to embrace the folksier and romantic aspects of his job. But when the pandemic forced swaths of the country to lock down and pro sports leagues suspended operations, it seemed like a problem that more suited Manfred's strengths. Before becoming commissioner, he had been the sport's top official to deal with the gnarly problem of steroids, and this conundrum felt similar, covering an unusual collision of legal, labor, financial and health issues. Right after the N.B.A. suspended its season on March 11, Manfred shut down the commissioner's office in Midtown Manhattan, and set up at his home office in Florida. But even before he could try finding a way to safely playing the game, he had to deal with the financial problems the pandemic had created. "There was an initial phase of survival, literally, of the business and that mostly involved liquidity," Manfred said. Baseball, a 10 billion industry, took on 2.5 billion worth of debt over a matter of days, Manfred said. M.L.B. quickly made a deal with the players' union to lay out a rough framework of pay for players and other considerations for the 2020 season whenever it might be played. He, his deputies, and allies in ownership, including Yankees President Randy Levine, then bore down to study the health and science around the virus and how it might affect their sport, but hard answers proved elusive. Doctors and scientists had different opinions about basic issues, like whether the virus could live on surfaces an essential question when talking about a sport played with a ball. But as he believed he was confronting a science problem, a labor one arose. The dispute centered on whether players would receive their same pay per game even if there were no fans in the stands, which was becoming an increasingly likely prospect. Owners felt players should take additional pay cuts if there was to be no ticket revenue, but the union insisted on the initial deal they had struck: getting paid their full prorated salaries for every game played, whether fans attended or not. Amid public jousting with the players and growing criticism of the owners, Manfred flew to Arizona to meet with Clark, the union head, in the hopes of hammering out a deal. Accounts of what happened in the meeting differ. Manfred says that Clark agreed to a framework for the season, in which players would get their full prorated salaries for a 60 game regular season and the playoffs would be expanded. The union said no such agreement was reached, and that the meeting contained little more than a new pitch from the commissioner. The union's unwillingness to make a deal vexed Manfred as he flew back to New York. He had made his name on making deals with the players. Before Manfred joined the commissioner's office in 1998 as the top negotiator, the sport had never signed a new collective bargaining agreement without first enduring a work stoppage. But in the two decades that followed, with Manfred taking the lead, the owners and the union had made four deals without missing a single game. Now, Manfred, in the most high profile moment of his life, appeared unable to make a deal. Manfred, 62, said he felt a level of stress this summer that he had never before felt. For one of the first times in his life, he took up running, chasing after his daughters, who were much faster than him, as he tried to clear his head. "There's been like a couple of times I'm thinking, Oh, this is what it feels like to be really stressed," he said. "Oh, I mean, I have had a couple of those days." Manfred said he tried to put distance between his sport's fate and his own. "The outcome of no games is a massive threat to the good of the game," he said. "The me part of it you know what, that's the great part of this job: This is the last job I'm going to have. I don't worry about that piece of it that much, I really don't." Manfred knew there was one person who understood the perils of canceling a season: Selig. Manfred had been Selig's top deputy until Selig retired as commissioner after the 2014 season. They had been very close, but had grown more distant as Manfred settled in as commissioner. Selig wanted to avoid looking as if he was still meddling; Manfred wanted to chart his own course. But in June the two began speaking regularly again. Manfred said he looked to his old boss for guidance. "I'm the only other guy on the face of the Earth who understands exactly what the pressure is and what the situation is," Selig said. During a phone call in June, Selig emphasized to Manfred that he had to narrow his focus to a singular idea: Finding a way to play. "If you just keep thinking about that one phrase, you're going to make really good decisions," Selig said he told him. Manfred acknowledged to Selig that there was one "sort of negative thought in my mind that I'm trying to avoid." "What do you mean by that?" Selig asked. Manfred responded: "Look, I remember what happened to you in September of 1994," referring to when Selig canceled that year's World Series, only the second time in M.L.B. history it had not been played. Selig recalled the anguish he had felt after making that announcement. When Selig returned home that day, he went upstairs to his den, closed his eyes and recreated every World Series he could remember starting with 1945 in his head, as he mourned the season. On June 22, the owners voted to implement a season, eschewing a negotiated deal with the union. The regular season would be 60 games with full prorated pay for players, who retained an expanded postseason as a bargaining chip for the future.The league ended up expanding the playoffs to 16 teams on Thursday. But even with the players back on the field, Manfred acknowledged that the hardest part may be yet to come as the coronavirus continues to ravage the country. That point was underscored on opening day, when the Nationals' star outfielder Juan Soto was held out of the lineup because he received a positive virus test result that morning. Manfred acknowledged in a phone interview on Thursday from Nationals Park that travel restrictions or an outbreak that threatened the integrity of the sport's competition could stop play. But for now, he believes the league can move forward, especially because the percentage of players who have tested positive is far lower than the general population of Americans. "That can change, we understand that, and we know we have to be careful and vigilant to deal with the possibility that it is changing but right now, we feel like our environment is pretty good, our protocols are good," Manfred said. Then he thanked the players. "I am really thankful that the players have been so good on this topic," Manfred said. "I mean they have really taken it seriously. They have followed the protocols, they have worn the mask, they've distanced, they've adjusted. And that's a huge part. You can test all you want, but all testing tells you is whether somebody's sick, the way you keep from being sick is you follow the other protocols." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Earlier this week, on Twitter, I called the Facebook chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg the Susan Collins of the internet. I thought it was the perfect comparison to make between the Silicon Valley boy king and the senator from Maine, who has become well known for saying she's disturbed and concerned by President Trump's latest example of awful behavior and for doing absolutely nothing about it. Mr. Zuckerberg, critics say, does nothing about Mr. Trump's rampages across Facebook while grandly stating that he personally disapproves of some of the toxic and often rule breaking content that the president posts. (I should be more precise: Mr. Zuckerberg says it's content he strongly disapproves of.) The problem, of course, is much more complex than the garden variety fecklessness of Ms. Collins, whose power is limited. Mr. Zuckerberg has become unwittingly or not the digital equivalent of a supercharged enabler because of his enormous power over digital communications that affect billions of people. He is a man I cannot stress this enough who cannot be fired. He's accountable to no one because of that power and also because of his immense wealth as one of the richest people in the history of the human race. It's striking then that Mr. Zuckerberg has also found time to be the world's most expensive customer service rep. Late last week as the anger over the killing of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers grew stronger, the situation was further inflamed by postings on Twitter and Facebook from Mr. Trump, who said, referencing a racist trope from the 1960s, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts." Not this one though, as Mr. Zuckerberg told his own employees at a virtual question and answer session, in the wake of a virtual walkout by some employees this week. He faced an angry staff, which is rare at Facebook, where workers have typically been much more docile than at other tech companies. After he told the staff he did "pretty thorough" research on the subject, Mr. Zuckerberg said he made the "tough decision" not to take down the president's post in order to protect free speech. I would love to hear exactly what research he was referring to, with give me a thesis on it detail. But all of this is just more intellectually bereft nonsense from Mr. Zuckerberg. Even without taking into account the history behind Mr. Trump's comment on looting and shooting, it should be obvious that referencing extrajudicial shootings is bad. While Mr. Trump denied that is what he did, this post was yet another obvious case of gaslighting by a president who has been around long enough that he should know better. Mr. Zuckerberg often naively wraps himself in the First Amendment, as he cloddishly mixes up complex concepts of free speech with that astonishingly amazing text that focuses on restricting the government (and not companies). The text speaks for itself: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Congress shall make no law. There's no mention of Facebook, or any other company. And there's no mention of Mark Zuckerberg, who certainly has the power to rein in speech that violates company rules. While downplaying this power, Mr. Zuckerberg also took time last week to try to kneecap Twitter's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, over that company's decision to slap warning labels on Mr. Trump's problematic tweets. He used the curious phrase that he did not want the company to be the "arbiter of the truth," probably because it is a perfectly loaded way to cast Mr. Dorsey as censorious. Mr. Dorsey is no such thing. He's simply trying after what has been a troubling delay to clean up Twitter and remove the blanket immunity the platform has been extending Mr. Trump for far too long. And on Wednesday, Snap announced it would not promote Mr. Trump's content on Snapchat's Discover platform, again, just highlighting Mr. Zuckerberg's increasing isolation in his detachment from reality. More to the point, labeling troubling posts is in line with the kind of action that Twitter and Facebook already take every day as they make myriad editorial decisions by using much beleaguered human content moderators or technology. Whether that makes social media companies media companies or not, and whether they should be subject to the same liabilities as others, has also become a hot button issue, centering on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which absolves tech companies of responsibility for what is posted on their platforms. While Mr. Trump has tried a specious executive order to overturn Section 230, and there has been legislation proposed to do so, this is a longer term debate that we all must have as a nation, involving all the constituencies that are affected. Until that happens, Facebook has chosen to cozy up to the current administration and presumably will do the same if another comes to power next year. Mr. Zuckerberg is playing what is always called the long game, largely because he has seen in his short corporate history that he can get away with almost anything. In my first column in this space two years ago, titled "The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley," I tried to describe what had happened with social media companies: "They have weaponized social media. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics." And here we are now without recourse. Because, even if employees, the media and politicians are unsatisfied with how Mr. Zuckerberg is handling Mr. Trump, it hardly matters since Facebook remains a juggernaut of a stock as it smashes other businesses and grabs market share. It can do this because the stock is at all time highs and because it is the only game in town. Eventually that will be a problem especially given the rage that has long lived online is leaping to the streets in cities across the nation. The public's focus is now, as it should be, centered on the issue of police brutality and racism, but that anger will eventually shift to those entities, including the tech companies, that did far too much to break us apart. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Cody Critcheloe, who makes music and art under the name Ssion, is releasing "O," his first album in seven years. The first time the musician and artist Cody Critcheloe came to New York, in 2001 when he was 19, his trip turned into a pilgrimage. "I walked around the city trying to find the place where the Mudd Club and Danceteria used to be," he said. "When I found them, I just stood there, staring ridiculously up at these buildings saying, 'cool' as if they were still there." A few weeks ago, Mr. Critcheloe made a fresh journey to the city's nocturnal past by visiting MoMA to see its Club 57 exhibition, which valorizes one of the most creative spaces for music, art and mischief of the late '70s and early '80s. Entering an immersive room dedicated to the throbbing Day Glo work of Kenny Scharf, it was hard to tell where Mr. Critcheloe's body ended and the art began. His outfit of the day, highlighted by Bazooka pink tracksuit pants and a carrot orange jacket, bled seamlessly into Mr. Sharf's tsunami of color saturated chairs, bottles and toys. "Everything is so bright and there's so much of it," Mr. Critcheloe marveled. The same could be said of his own creations. Operating under the stage name Ssion (pronounced Shun), Mr. Critcheloe, 37, has amassed a rich body of work that sprawls over several disciplines music, video direction and painting all infused with a whimsically dense array of pop culture references. Each is fired by the spirit of queercore, a 30 year old music and art movement that draws on the outsider perspective of the L.G.B.T. experience to both reclaim and redefine the early fury and independence of punk. Mr. Critcheloe's latest project pushes that principle to its limit. After concentrating for the last half decade on directing videos for other artists, including Santigold, Grizzly Bear and Ms. Minogue, he is releasing "O," his third full album and his first in seven years, in early May. It's by far his most ambitious work, making either sonic, or visual, allusion to everything from expected gay pop touchstones (George Michael, Prince, Liza Minnelli) to ones far afield (Pink Floyd, Sonic Youth, Jimi Hendrix). The sensibility and sound is at once dance pop and classic rock, art and trash, all spun around the breathy vocals of Mr. Critcheloe, which can paint him as the lost love child of Prince and the Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant. Mr. Critcheloe has billed "O" as an "audiovisual" album, a la Beyonce's last two releases. But operating on a tight D.I.Y. budget means every song may not get its own video. Even so, the two he has released so far feature a million dollars' worth of ideas. The first, "Comeback," which lasts more than seven minutes, amounts to what Mr. Critcheloe called "my modest attempt at 'Bohemian Rhapsody.'" It links three distinct musical segments, matched to scenes that draw on influences that range from the Bob Fosse film "All That Jazz" to the surreal cow cover of Pink Floyd's 1970 album "Atom Heart Mother." In the video, Mr. Critcheloe has the cow's rear painted on his face, "where it belongs," he said. His rock side came out more strongly this time, in part, because of the input of one producer on the album, Sam Mehran of the band Test Icicles. (The album's other producer, Mr. Weiss of the band Teengirl Fantasy, helped retain the electro funk style from earlier Ssion songs.) "Cody wanted a wider palate of sounds this time," said Mr. Mehran. "This album used a whole matrix of ideas, some of them drawn from the music Cody grew up listening to." "I wouldn't exist as a musician if it weren't for punk rock," Mr. Critcheloe said. It helps that his mother is what he calls "a real hard core rocker chick." She was a draftsman, drawing pipelines for Texas Gas, while his father worked as a maintenance man at a paper mill near the tiny town of Lewisport, Ky., where Mr. Critcheloe grew up. "It's all tobacco farmers, so you could smoke at 15 if your parents signed a release," he said. "Mine did." In middle school, he was bullied, but he excelled at painting, which gave him a voice one he often used to provoke. During "Spirit Week," his class was assigned to create banners to represent the '80s. "Mine said 'AIDS' in blood red," Mr. Critcheloe said. "Even the teachers didn't know how to tame me." After he got a driver's license, he traveled far enough to find a group of kindred spirit punk girls who introduced him to the films of Gregg Araki and Pedro Almodovar. At 17, he formed his first band with them, choosing a name pronounced Shun to embrace, and redefine, rejection and shame. He thought the spelling of Ssion "looked so chic," though he now regrets that no one can spell or pronounce it. He modeled Ssion's initial style on Lydia Lunch's no wave attack band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. "Our whole thing was trying to get kicked offstage," he said. "We got good at that." Mr. Critcheloe really blossomed when he entered the Kansas City Art Institute, located in a city he loves. He first came east after winning a one year scholarship to the New York Studio Residency Program, which let him do whatever kind of art he wanted. He spent more of his time at rock clubs, which were then experiencing a resurgence with emerging bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Strokes. After a show by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the small club formerly known as Brownies, he gave the group's singer, Karen O, copies of the stop motion animation pieces he'd been working on. Impressed, she not only invited him to design the cover of the band's first album, "Fever to Tell," but to create the art for all their early singles and posters. "Cody's artistic voice was there from the start and it doesn't whisper at you, it screams in your face," Karen O wrote in an email. "I love that his 'Fever to Tell' cover is kind of ugly. It really captured the feeling of the early days of the band, which were an exquisite mess." Around the same time he conceived the cover art, Mr. Critcheloe began to release his own music, first on cassette. After meeting the Liars on tour, the band hired him to direct its 2005 clip for "There's Always Room on the Broom." From there, he developed a signature style, often employing stop action animation and imagery from "The Wizard of Oz." When he turned 30, Mr. Critcheloe started concentrating on directing videos for other artists because "people were more interested in what I was doing visually," he said. "Also, it got harder to pull off a total D.I.Y. music thing." Still, he continued to write songs, gaining confidence along the way. The quality of his recent compositions encouraged him to create the new album, as did input from his producers and an array of like minded guest stars, like the singers MNDR and Sky Ferreira. The music takes a pastiche approach to pop: art as allusion. "The collage aspect comes from Beck," Mr. Critcheloe said. "It's also from the queercore films of Bruce LaBruce, whose whole thing was stealing things and then turning them upside down." He thinks of the new music as much in terms of color as sound, specifically "electric blue," inspired by a certain hue found on old VHS tapes. At the Club 57 exhibition, Mr. Critcheloe kept finding that shade in various artworks. "It's the most beautiful color," he said. "But it's also violent." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Any experienced designer will tell you that lighting is an essential ingredient when you're decorating a room not the afterthought that many of us consider it. If you're tempted to spend more of your time picking out furnishings or puzzling over layouts, remember that lighting can completely transform a space not just by brightening dark corners, but by affecting your emotions. "Light is a powerful thing," said Theo Richardson, the director of development at Rich Brilliant Willing, the Brooklyn based design studio known for its striking LED fixtures, which he founded with Charles Brill and Alexander Williams. "The right light lifts the mood, inspires productivity and motivates us. At home, light enlivens the little things our morning routines, or the moments we spend with friends." Most designers agree that you need more than one source of light in a room. Think layered illumination: Every room should have a mix of lighting, including overhead, accent and task lights. In the living room, for example, you might begin by hanging a decorative ceiling fixture near the center of the room, said Nathan Orsman, a lighting designer based in New York City and Southampton. "Then we look toward the outer walls for downlighting that can gently wash the walls, curtains and art with warm, functional brightness," he said. This can be achieved with soffit or valance lighting, or even plug in torchier floor lamps that bounce light off the ceiling. Depending on a room's layout, he said, accent lights could be used to highlight art, and table lamps could be placed beside seating to add another layer of light. And for extra ambience, he added, "a candle never hurt." The goal, he explained, is to create contrast between the light at the center of the room and around the perimeter, and the darker spaces in between: "Without the darker, quieter moments, everything is flat and boring. It's the subtle interplay between light and dark that creates appeal." Go Bright in the Kitchen One place where bright light is more important than ambience is the kitchen. Mr. Orsman suggested flooding the space by installing high hats or recessed lights along the edge of the ceiling. If you have a kitchen island, consider hanging pendants overhead, he said, which will light the space without taking up room you might need to eat or prepare food. Also, you'll be able "to see your guests without having to look around a hanging light." And don't forget under cabinet light: Running LED light strips on the bottom of your upper cabinets is the easiest way to create an evenly lighted counter space for food prep and cooking. If you have a north facing room without direct sunlight, it will generally require a little more thought. Donna Mondi, an interior designer in Chicago, installed recessed fixtures along the perimeter of a north facing living room to complement a central pendant that spread light horizontally throughout the space. But she didn't stop there: She also used table lamps to illuminate dark corners and a pair of sconces to draw attention to a special piece of art. For a dark bedroom, she used a similar strategy, combining a central chandelier with discrete up lights in the corners of the room, bedside lamps for reading and a pair of sconces over the fireplace opposite the bed. "The worst option is a recessed fixture over the sink, as it casts shadows that are not flattering," Ms. Mondi said. Instead, she suggested, opt for wall mounted sconces with 75 watt bulbs installed about 66 inches off the floor, which will help cast even illumination across your face. Another "great feature to add is motion lighting at the cabinet base," she said, which creates "a very subtle glow" like a night light if you wake up in the middle of the night. To create a sense of intimacy and spalike luxury, consider installing a sculptural pendant lamp. Janey Butler, who runs Janey Butler Interiors, the interior design wing of the Llama Group in Cheshire, England, transformed a windowless bathroom into a dramatic space by hanging Ochre's Celestial Pebble Chandelier over the tub. "The light itself is a beautiful object that meets the eye on arrival to the room and provides focus to the free standing bath," Ms. Butler said. She also used LED strip lighting, concealed behind floating shelves, to wash the chevron patterned floor with a subtle glow. "When you have an empty and awkward corner, one trick of the trade is to transform that space with an oversized floor lamp," said Caitlin Murray, the founder and chief executive of Black Lacquer Design, in Los Angeles. "Look for a lamp that is complementary in finish and material to the surrounding space, and an otherwise lost corner instantly becomes an intentional, polished part of the overall room design." To brighten up the space next to a desk in a bachelor's living room, Ms. Murray chose the Detrick Floor Lamp, from Arteriors, in an earthy finish with a gray green shade. "It did the double duties of providing added light to his work space while also being a statement accent piece," she said. "It was important to find something in tone and texture that both complemented the overall design and provided enough of a contrast to the surrounding neutrals to really make a visual impact." "Over the years, we've found that one of the biggest mistakes is made with overhead lighting," said Robert Highsmith, a principal at Workstead, the Brooklyn design firm he founded with his wife, Stefanie Brechbuehler, and fellow Rhode Island School of Design alum Ryan Mahoney almost a decade ago. "Often it can be excessive, generating spots and unwanted shadows." For that reason, Workstead advises residential clients not to use recessed overhead lighting. Instead, Mr. Highsmith recommends hanging a large pendant fixture or a chandelier in common areas. In the kitchen, he suggested using globe fixtures, "for even lighting" that leaves counter surfaces free. For living rooms, he said, try subtle lighting sources like wall sconces and floor lamps, and in dining rooms, "a sculptural centerpiece above a table provides depth, while accent lighting amplifies warmth." Put dimmers on all of your lights: "Workstead prefers a more analog approach that allows you to manually adjust lighting to respond to changes in natural light, seasons and so forth," Mr. Highsmith said, noting that the easiest way to adjust the light in a room is by putting a dimmer on each fixture, rather than replacing a wall switch with a dimmer that adjusts all the lights at once. In the bedroom, he suggested using a bedside light with both a dimmer and a movable shade. Workstead designed the Orbit sconce, for example, to be adjustable in both ways, with a dimmer and a swiveling reflector that allows the light to be directed or blocked. "We feel like the more flexibility, the better," he said. "Whenever you use a shade whether it's on a lamp, a sconce or a chandelier use frosted or soft white bulbs to eliminate the shadows and hot spots created by shade clips," said Paloma Contreras, an interior designer in Houston. And be sure those shades are on straight. "The harps are pliable, so you can manipulate them a bit to ensure that the shades sit on the lamp properly," Ms. Contreras said. You should also orient the lampshade so that seams are hidden. "I can't begin to tell you how many seams I have seen on lampshades in movies, on television shows and even in magazines," she added. "You wouldn't put your dress on backward, would you?" Make sure lamp shades are oriented so that the seams are concealed, said Paloma Contreras, an interior designer in Houston. Be Choosy About Your Bulbs "I'm all about the LEDs now," Ms. Contreras said. "Our home is illuminated by warm colored LED bulbs, and they look like traditional incandescents. Plus, they're made for all fixtures, including recessed cans, table lamps and sconces." For a warm, inviting light, she said, go with 2,700 to 3,000 kelvin, often advertised as "warm white." As you go higher in the color temperature range, she said, "more blue is introduced, and this ultimately gives that dreaded warehouse look." (Those bulbs often advertised as "daylight" do better in a garage or a more utilitarian space.) For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Eiji Toyoda, Promoter of the Toyota Way and Engineer of Its Growth, Dies at 100 TOKYO Eiji Toyoda, who as a member of Toyota Motor's founding family and an architect of its "lean manufacturing" method helped turn the automaker into a global powerhouse and changed the face of modern manufacturing, died on Tuesday in Toyota City, Japan, where the company has its headquarters. He was 100. His death, at the Toyota Memorial Hospital, was caused by heart failure, the company said in a statement. Mr. Toyoda, a nephew of the Toyota Group founder, Sakichi Toyoda, was president of Toyota from 1967 to 1982 and continued as chairman and then as adviser until his death. In almost six decades with the company, he helped transform a tiny spinoff of a textile loom maker into the world's biggest automaker. Early on he helped put Toyota at the forefront of a wave of automobile production in Japan, pushing it to bolster its lineup, first by adding compact vehicles and sports cars in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, he initiated the development of luxury models to compete with the likes of Mercedes Benz and BMW, culminating with the Lexus brand in 1989. Mr. Toyoda also pushed Toyota's expansion overseas, helping to establish the company's joint factory with General Motors in Fremont, Calif. The plant, known as Nummi, introduced Japanese lean production methods to the United States as part of a migration of Japanese auto manufacturing to American soil. The company's manufacturing efficiencies have helped maintain Toyota's status as one of the top auto manufacturers and employers in the world. Nummi closed in 2010. It is now the site of a factory that makes the electric car trailblazer Tesla. In the early 1990s, Mr. Toyoda, known as a man of few words, gave voice to a sense of crisis inside the company as Japan's economic growth sputtered. He argued that Toyota needed to change the way it made cars if it hoped to survive in the 21st century. His urgings prompted the development of the popular Prius gas electric hybrid, the manufacturing expert Satoshi Hino wrote in the 2005 book "Inside the Mind of Toyota." Mr. Toyoda was born on Sept. 12, 1913, near Nagoya in central Japan, the second son of Heikichi and Nao Toyoda. He spent much of his youth at his family's textile mill and took an early interest in machines, he said in his 1988 autobiography, "Toyota: Fifty Years in Motion." He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1936 with a mechanical engineering degree and joined his family's loom business. The next year, Kiichiro Toyoda, son of the founder, created Toyota Motor, taking the young Eiji Toyoda with him. "Problems are rolling all around in front of your eyes," Mr. Toyoda said of those days in "Inside the Mind of Toyota." "Whether you pick them up and treat them as problems is a matter of habit. If you have the habit, then you can do whatever you have a mind to." In 1950, he set out on what would turn out to be a pivotal three month tour to survey Ford's Rouge plant in Detroit, then the largest and most efficient factory in the world. Before World War II, the military government prevented Toyota from building passenger cars, compelling it to make trucks for Japan's war effort instead. By 1950, Toyota had produced just 2,685 automobiles, compared with the 7,000 vehicles the Rouge plant was rolling out in a single day, according to "The Machine That Changed the World," a 1990 study by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos. Mr. Toyoda was unfazed, writing back to headquarters that he "thought there were some possibilities to improve the production system." He brought back a thick booklet that outlined some of Ford's quality control methods; the company translated it into Japanese, changing "Ford" to "Toyota" in all references. Mr. Toyoda went on to oversee Toyota's Motomachi plant, a huge undertaking that gave the automaker the capacity to produce 5,000 passenger vehicles a month at a time when all of Japan produced about 7,000 vehicles a month. The plant, completed in 1959, was soon running at full capacity and gave Toyota a decisive lead over its domestic rival Nissan and the confidence to turn its eyes overseas. Even as he aggressively expanded production at Toyota, Mr. Toyoda applied a manufacturing culture based on concepts like "kaizen," a commitment to continuous improvements suggested by the workers themselves, and just in time production, a tireless effort to eliminate waste. Those ideas became a core part of what came to be called the Toyota Production System and a corporate ethos known as the Toyota Way. "One of the features of the Japanese workers is that they use their brains as well as their hands," he said in an interview with the author Masaaki Imai for the 1986 book "Kaizen." "Our workers provide 1.5 million suggestions a year, and 95 percent of them are put to practical use. There is an almost tangible concern for improvement in the air at Toyota." The methods Mr. Toyoda nurtured have had global influence. Though Toyota long guarded its manufacturing techniques, the company came to recognize a broader interest in its model and has offered consulting services to manufacturers outside the automotive industry and to nonprofit organizations. As part of its community service programs, Toyota now trains workers at the Food Bank for New York City in ways to optimize flow and quality through streamlining and enhancing performance. In 1994, the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Mich., inducted Mr. Toyoda for his contributions to car manufacturing. He was the second honoree from Japan, after the founder of Honda Motor, Soichiro Honda. "Ever since Toyota's establishment in 1937, I have been involved in this wonderful business, and as long as my engine keeps running, I intend to give back as much as I can for the industry's further development," Mr. Toyoda said in a statement at the time. Mr. Toyoda is survived by his three sons, Kanshiro, Tetsuro and Shuhei, and a daughter, Sonoko. His wife, Kazuko, died in 2002. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Philadelphia entered Wednesday's play as the East's No. 5 seed at 34 20, six games behind Milwaukee (39 13). The Sixers' twofold challenge now will be establishing a chemistry among its new five man core in the 28 games left before the playoffs and then re signing Harris and Butler this summer after making two of this season's biggest trades to get them. Harris emerged as an All Star contender for the Clippers this season by averaging 20.9 points and 7.9 rebounds per game. His move to Philadelphia gives the Sixers another much needed shooter (.496 from the field and .434 from 3 point range) alongside Redick. In making this trade, the Clippers ultimately decided that the draft picks Philadelphia offered were too valuable to pass up as they prepare for a big summer in which they are widely considered to be the league's strongest threat to lure Kawhi Leonard away from the Toronto Raptors in free agency. The Clippers, at 30 25, have been one of this season's surprise teams and sit at No. 8 in the Western Conference. But earlier this week, they also were named as one of four teams that Anthony Davis of the New Orleans Pelicans is willing to sign with long term. This deal adds two more potentially enticing trade chips for the Clippers to offer the Pelicans for Davis who has requested a trade or to use in pursuit of other elite players. With Thursday's 3 p.m. trade deadline approaching, teams across the league, especially Philadelphia's top rivals in the East, are running out of time to make their own moves to try to keep pace. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
IN THE LAND OF MEN By Adrienne Miller Reading Adrienne Miller's account of her decade plus working at men's magazines during the glory days of print journalism, I was reminded of how, in the 1990s, it was seen as daring and even outre for educated liberal men, reacting to the perceived scourge of political correctness, to say demeaning things to women. Hence, staffers at GQ, where Miller is hired as an editorial assistant, announce, "That's the best set of tits I've seen all year." When she wears a skirt to the office, a colleague asks her to twirl for him. And when, at 25, Miller becomes the improbably young fiction editor of Esquire, another tells her that "everyone wondered" whom she slept with to get the job. Never mind that the publications where Miller toils trumpet both men's achievements and good looks, but women's good looks only and only if the women are half naked and young. "Before I had this job, I had never known, like really known, that there were actually environments in which women's bodies were evaluated as if they were tires, or trucks," writes an understandably peeved Miller, who deftly brings to life the free spending and freewheeling glossy magazine culture of the time. But rather than return to her native Ohio or launch her own feminist press, Miller accepts the compromises and doubles down on her commitment to editing and delivering quality fiction to a mass audience most of it, of course, written by men, though the occasional female writer makes the cut. In 2004, near the end of her tenure at Esquire, Miller proudly wins a National Magazine Award; the following year, the magazine published no short stories at all. Meanwhile, of the men behaving badly in her midst, Miller attempts a nuanced view. "Even when the actions of the men were abhorrent," she writes, "I tried to approach the behavior with a spirit of irony, leniency and good humor." It's a familiar reaction to those of us now middle aged women for whom the desire to be "in on the joke" once seemed preferable to being incensed, even when we failed to find any of it funny or ironic. I suspect it also explains the ambivalence with which some Generation X women have greeted the MeToo movement. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of February. See the full list. But neither the short story's last hurrah nor the casual sexism of the literary world turns out to be Miller's main subject. That honor goes to the complicated personal and professional relationship she had with the meta novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace. "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time," Maya Angelou once told Oprah Winfrey. Unfortunately, two decades on, Miller still seems only half willing to believe, and even less willing than that to pass judgment on, a man who, his prodigious talents and premature death by suicide notwithstanding, did not apparently see or treat women as fully human. It is this reluctance that ultimately renders "In the Land of Men" a painful and frustrating read. During their second phone conversation, Wallace complains to Miller that, at his recent book party, it took him seven tries to get a woman that is, any woman to agree to come up to his hotel room. Her response? She wonders why he's "debasing" himself with her. Even more bafflingly, she blames herself for inviting Wallace's crude banter. "Maybe I was the problem here. Maybe I wasn't conveying any sense of gravitas. And maybe I was the one with boundary issues." 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. Miller is similarly forgiving when, on their first date, he calls her Andrea instead of Adrienne. By the time Wallace declares that he prefers sleeping with women who don't read, Miller, unable even to come up with a deflection, tells the reader, "I know, believe me, on every possible level, I know." And when he confesses that, during a "period of insanity," he bought a gun and hired a hit man to kill someone a version of a tale recounted on Twitter in 2018 by the writer Mary Karr, who also claimed that Wallace assaulted her and stalked her family members the revelation appears to leave Miller similarly nonplused. If "In the Land of Men" sometimes seems at odds with itself, it's because Miller who can be witty and knowledgeable about the cliches of fiction written by men apparently regards Wallace as too special and too fragile to have been held to the rules that she applies to others. "Troubled male genius" is an old trope, but Miller elevates it to new heights. Despite objecting to the hypersexualized female characters in Wallace's novel "Infinite Jest," Miller describes his literary output as a "miracle" and "godlike," while she calls Wallace a "towering colossus unto himself" and "one of the greatest and most uncompromising artists of all time." At another point, she writes, "David surely had to have been as great as Tolstoy, his closest peer ... in depicting how emotions are displayed on the body." (Wait, what?!) By the time she tells us that Wallace "changed the world" and compares him to Alexander the Great, I began to wonder if her praise, fulsome to the point of hagiographic, especially for a writer who elicits as many eye rolls as encomiums, was best understood as her effort to explain to herself why she never told the guy to get lost. Wallace eventually replaces Miller with a woman about whom he says, "You may know more words than she does, but she's better at cleaning my underwear." When Miller objects, Wallace counters with the defense that at least she's age appropriate this time! (Karr also confirmed Wallace's predilection for bedding his students.) Eros can lead to a kind of blindness. And it seems clear that Miller loved Wallace. What Miller loved about Wallace is harder to fathom. Or maybe the better question is why Miller didn't love herself more. After he lashes out at her in a particularly cruel fashion, she recalls thinking, "His life is actually worth more than mine." Even when lauding Wallace's positive attributes, she denigrates herself: "Of course, given David's experience resume relative to mine, he had every right not to care too much about anything I had to say, but the guy really was the best active listener you could possibly imagine." Yet even Miller is eventually forced to admit that Wallace's main area of interest is, well, Wallace. "Throughout the years of my relationship with him, David's psychological existence would be the principal topic of our conversation," she writes. It's also a principal topic of interest to Miller, who devotes considerable words to pondering how difficult it must have been for someone as sensitive as Wallace to manage his own fame. At their final lunch, Miller tells him she's begun work on a novel of her own: "'I wonder why you're telling me this,' he said acidly. Of course, David could never bring himself to offer me a token show of support or even display any phony interest in my writing. He was too competitive for that." Given Wallace's earlier admission that, by and large, he doesn't read female writers, it seems far more likely that he simply didn't care. Wallace and Miller's unequal relationship reads as an allegory for the quiet humiliation that Miller suffered professionally as a young woman. Yet Miller herself, maybe because she is still too close to the subject, or maybe because the tragic nature of Wallace's death inclines her to dissemble, seems unable or unwilling to fully embrace the connection. Even the conclusions she draws while dealing with Wallace seem misguided. "I didn't yet understand that the most important thing in the adult world is ... to keep your cool, keep your mouth shut, stay in your own lane and state an opinion only when you know which side is winning," she writes. I would argue that the maintaining of dignity, especially as a woman in a man's world, requires the exact opposite reaction. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Steven Spielberg's production company is cutting ties with the CBS prime time show "Bull," six months after it was reported that an actress on the show was paid millions to settle her sexual harassment claim against its lead actor. "We can confirm that we are no longer associated with the show," a spokeswoman for Mr. Spielberg's company, Amblin Television, said on Thursday. In December, The New York Times revealed that CBS paid the actress Eliza Dushku 9.5 million to settle her claim that she was sexually harassed by the show's star, Michael Weatherly. At the time, CBS said in a statement that Ms. Dushku's allegations were evidence that the network's attempts to create "a safe, inclusive and respectful workplace" were "far from done." Amblin severed its ties to the show on the day the network announced that it had renewed "Bull" for a fourth season. Mr. Spielberg's company had previously been one of the program's producers, along with CBS Studios. Ms. Dushku was Mr. Weatherly's co star in a run of episodes during the show's first season. She said Mr. Weatherly's inappropriate remarks included comments on her appearance, references to a threesome and a rape joke. Ms. Dushku also said that, shortly after she confronted Mr. Weatherly about his behavior, she was written off the show, despite plans to make her a series regular. Ms. Dushku's allegations were included in a draft report prepared by two law firms that examined CBS's workplace culture last year. The firms were hired after the CBS Corporation's chief executive, Leslie Moonves, was accused of sexual misconduct. Mr. Moonves was fired by CBS in September 2018, after a dozen accusers described their claims to The New Yorker. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In a statement to The Times last year, Mr. Weatherly said he made jokes to Ms. Dushku "mocking some lines in the script" and he was "mortified to have offended her." He denied that he had anything to do with her being written off the show. Ms. Dushku said she had told Leslee Feldman, an executive at Amblin, about her experience with Mr. Weatherly. "If Steven ever knew about this, he would be so horrified," Ms. Feldman said, according to what Ms. Dushku told the law firms. Ms. Dushku went into a mediation process with CBS and was paid 9.5 million in 2018. The network said the figure matched what she would have "received for the balance of her contract as a series regular." During the mediation process, a CBS lawyer produced video that he thought would discredit Ms. Dushku, because it showed her cursing on the set, according to a draft report prepared by the outside law firms. Instead of having its intended effect, the law firms wrote, the footage supported Ms. Dushku's claims, because it "actually captured some of the harassment on film." As part of her settlement agreement, Ms. Dushku was allowed to discuss the situation with Mr. Spielberg. In an interview with Deadline in March, Ms. Dushku said she met with Mr. Spielberg and people affiliated with the Time's Up organization to discuss "possible solutions for this systemic imbalance of power" in the entertainment industry. Deadline first reported the news of Mr. Spielberg's departure. CBS declined to comment on Amblin's decision. When asked if Amblin would refuse any future remuneration resulting from back end deals, in addition to removing its name from the show, a spokeswoman for Mr. Spielberg's company declined to comment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In 1998, nearly two years after I was sexually assaulted and during the height of my depression, I'd spend hours imagining what I would do if ever saw my assailant again. In some of my thoughts, I'd track him down and demand an apology. In others, I'd scream my story out loud, giving him no chance to dispute my account, while making sure those most important to him his boss, his fiancee, his friends knew the violence he was capable of doing. In my darkest moments, I'd replay scenarios in which I'd attacked him sometimes with a knife or a gun or, at my most extreme, a bomb in a desperate attempt to approximate his decision to destroy me. I never did see my assailant again, and more than 20 years after that brutal night, I can barely remember his name. But my retributive fantasies returned as I watched the season finale of "I May Destroy You," HBO's summer breakout hit, which aired on Monday. The show revolves around a rape victim named Arabella, played by the creator, writer and co director Michaela Coel, and it is partly based on Coel's own experience with sexual assault. In 2018, she revealed that one night while she was working on her first show, "Chewing Gum," Coel went out for a drink with a friend, only to wake up the next morning realizing that her drink had been drugged and she had been sexually assaulted. In "I May Destroy You," Coel created an entire series based around flashbacks and fragmented memories of a rape. The show opens with Arabella (called Bella by her friends) taking a break from working on her book to meet a group of friends at a bar, after which she ends up being dragged to a bathroom stall and assaulted. In subsequent episodes, she fills in the gaps in her timeline by talking to friends she was with that night, retracing her steps via Uber and A.T.M. receipts and discussing the crime with the police and a survivor's support group. And yet, as her memory becomes more clear, accountability for her perpetrator becomes more elusive. In Episode 8, nearly nine months after her assault, police officers sympathetically tell her the DNA sample they retrieved from her had cleared their only suspect, and that without further evidence, they must declare it a cold case. Officially, there is now no assailant to be found, no one to be arrested or convicted of her assault, and no legal recourse available to her. So Arabella's seeks justice through her art, and Coel's fragmented storytelling becomes even more so: She offers three different potential endings, and one real one. In addition to creating an astonishingly original narrative about sexual trauma, Coel also does something far more ambitious: She gives Arabella the power and authority to choose from one of a variety of endings, even if they contradict one other, without ever calling into question the fact of Arabella's rape. By offering multifaceted endings, Coel gives victims of sexual assault, particularly Black women who have survived rape, some of the most radical and cathartic moments of television I have ever witnessed. In another version, Terry and Bella concoct a plan to have a coked up Bella trick David into assaulting her again, in order to have the police catch him in the act and arrest him. Once David realizes that Bella is not sedated by his drugs, however, he tries to assert himself by belittling and attempting to choke her, only to quickly break down and apologize, while intimating that he too is a victim of assault. Moved by his vulnerability, Bella takes him back to her apartment, where he admits to having raped others many times before, even once going to prison for it. That scene closes with a teary Bella trying to help an inconsolable David as the police take him away. Next, in a near empty bar this time, Bella introduces herself to David, who is shy and deeply flattered by her attention. Like all the other scenarios, they end up in the restroom, but this time, they make out, with Bella and David returning to her apartment to have consensual sex. The next morning, Bella does not wake up with a bloody forehead or plagued by flashbacks, but with David tenderly watching her. "I'm not going to go unless you tell me to," he says. And when she asks him to leave, he, and the bloody version of himself stuffed under her bed, walk out of her bedroom together. After each of these encounters, Bella abruptly grabs an index card, scribbles down what happened, and pins it to her bedroom wall. At first, it is unclear whether she is trying to remember what has just happened or if she is trying to determine which ending is the right one. Not until the fourth and final scenario, in which we see Bella deciding to stay home rather than spending another night at the bar in the hope of confronting David, do we realize all these situations are potential endings for Bella's second book. More poignant, we also realize that we are seeing her journey of healing. As I watched Bella transform from avenger to empathizer to wooer, and David morph from rapist to victim to lover, I became increasingly nervous. I wondered if her attempts to humanize David would lead some viewers to think that she was not actually raped. I immediately thought of the phenomenon of sexual assault victims who come forward and are demonized and doubted because they maintained contact with their assailants after their attacks. But I also understood the payoff. Through a brilliant series of undoings and re doings, she covered the range of possibilities that many of us survivors privately explore in our journals, in therapy and in our imaginations, our striving to approximate some semblance of justice when the law and our communities fail to protect us. "I May Destroy You" can be considered as part of a larger cultural trend in which Black women's experiences with sexual assault are appearing with greater frequency and treated with more sensitivity, in documentaries like "Surviving R. Kelly" and "On the Record" and television shows like "Queen Sugar," "The Chi" and "Lovecraft Country." (Except for "On the Record," all of these were created by Black women). This season of Lena Waithe's "The Chi" on Showtime, which had its finale on Sunday, in particular stands out for its story line about the kidnapping of a teenage girl named Keisha (Birgundi Baker). The subplot explores the overlooked phenomenon of Black girls being abducted and sexually exploited, and Keisha's recovery depicts sexual assault as a kind of founding trauma that binds several generations of Black girls and women, including her mother, to each other. The intimate and layered storytelling of "I May Destroy You" stands out, however, because Coel does two incredibly hard things at once. She explores, with great nuance, the complicated and often fraught public conversation about sexual assault and consent. She also centers rape victims that have historically been treated as less worthy of support: Black women, those attacked while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and in the case of Bella's friend, Kwame, Black queer men. The finale ends with the launch of Arabella's book "January 22," which she self publishes after losing her original publishing contract, but which also symbolizes her wresting control of that fateful night back from her assailant. In some ways, this outcome echoes Coel's actual decision to walk away from a 1 million dollar Netflix deal in order to maintain ownership of this show. But, this result is also unfulfilling and deeply unfair, because Arabella, like so many sexual assault survivors, has been left to resolve the criminal act done against her on her own. And though I remain curious about the long term effects this trauma will have on Bella's well being, I'm likely to never know. There have been no indications from Coel or HBO that there will be another season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A Triplex Near the Center of Amsterdam This six bedroom, two bathroom townhouse triplex is in the leafy, upscale Weesperzijde residential neighborhood of Amsterdam, on the eastern bank of the Amstel river, near the heart of the city. The home includes the bottom three levels of a five level house: a basement level, garden level and first floor. The two floors above contain apartments with separate entrances and are not included in the sale. Built in 1901 and renovated in 2000, the home has a private yard in the back and another in the front that extends to the street, a rarity in Amsterdam, where homes are typically flush with the sidewalk or have minimal yards, said the owner, Samantha Destree. "A front garden is an anomaly very, very rare," she said. The front door opens to a long, tiled hall that stretches to the back of the house. On the left are the living and dining rooms; on the right are a half bathroom and a staircase leading down to the basement and up to the second floor. The kitchen is in the rear of the house, attached to a sunny breakfast room with built in shelving. Large glass doors open to a broad terrace with seating areas and, beyond, to the back garden. The kitchen has red cabinetry and a Belgian stone counter that is open to the breakfast area. On the second floor, the master bedroom has wide plank floors, a wall of windows and a balcony overlooking the back garden. An adjacent second bedroom has been used as an office, and a third is at the stair landing. The upstairs bedrooms share a hall toilet and a separate room with a shower, tub and twin sinks. The basement level has three bedrooms, two storage rooms and a shower room. One room could be converted into a full bathroom, Ms. Destree said. The Weesperzijde neighborhood, about a mile south of Amsterdam's center, is home to "a mix of young, hip professionals and families," she said, as well as shops, cafes and schools. The venerated De Hoop rowing club is down the street, on the riverfront. Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands and the country's largest city, with about 875,000 residents. It has seen increasing home prices in recent years, although the growth slowed a bit in 2019. Data collected by Statistics Netherlands, the government's national statistics agency, showed that the average home sale price in 2019 was 484,995 euros ( 535,000), a 5 percent increase over 2018, following increases of about 13 percent year over year in 2017 and 2018. Amsterdam is also the country's most expensive city, according to a 2019 report by Dutch Rabobank, which found that the average sale price there in the second quarter of the year was 25 percent higher than in Utrecht and 67 percent higher than in Rotterdam, the second largest city. Kees Kemp, an agent owner at the local Broersma Estate Agency, described Amsterdam as "booming" and "very international," in an email. "The demand is very high, as the number of citizens is rising fast," he wrote. With development struggling to keep pace, "the market in Amsterdam is under pressure," said Tjerk van der Linden, a managing director of Engel Volkers Amsterdam. Among other factors, Mr. van der Linden and other agents pointed to the arrival of foreign companies that have moved their headquarters to Amsterdam because of concerns related to the Brexit referendum in Britain. The influx of foreign businesses and buyers has some calling the Dutch capital the new London, although Pieter Joep van den Brink, the founder and broker of Vandenbrink, the Christie's affiliate in Amsterdam, said the comparison is not entirely apt. Amsterdam may be vying to become Europe's next financial center, he said, but the real estate market is behaving differently than London's because people are primarily buying to homes to live in, rather than as investments. "The result is that the old and less popular neighborhoods of Amsterdam are becoming more and more expensive," said Jim Reerink, the owner of Netherlands Sotheby's International Realty. "There is a clear increase in single person households and student accommodation. Also in the luxury segment there is a shift to even more luxury through concierge and other service facilities." Homes priced below 1 million euros ( 1.1 million) sell fast, Mr. Kemp said, often in a matter of weeks and at up to 60 or 70 percent above asking price. There is some new development in the city. High rise developments have gone up in the Amsterdam North and Amstelkwartier neighborhoods, Mr. Kemp said, and IJburg, a series of man made islands along the northeastern waterfront, promises thousands of new homes. The city center, with its canals and bridges, remains popular, but "we see an increasing number of buyers who find the center too busy and touristy," Mr. van der Linden said, pointing to limited parking and scarce affordable housing. Instead, buyers are moving farther afield into the Zuidas business district, for example, which has evolved into a neighborhood "with many international people," Mr. van der Linden said. Buyers are also discovering areas outside the city, including Haarlem, Heemstede, Amstelveen and The Hague. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
What books are on your nightstand? "The Silence of the Girls," by Pat Barker, which I've just finished. A very good, very raw rendition of the Trojan War from the point of view of the women. "Circe," by Madeline Miller, which I've just started and which in some ways seems like quite a good companion to the Barker. A new book, "Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service," by Gordon Corera. And an old book, "Evidence in Camera," by Constance Babington Smith, the story of photographic evidence during World War II. The latter two are for research for a novel. (I'm not writing about pigeons.) And they may not be books but there are a lot of back issues of The New Yorker as well. Few things make me happier than a New Yorker cartoon. What's the last great book you read? Well, that depends on your definition of "great." The last "great" book I read was probably a rereading of "Pride and Prejudice." The last really good book was "A Far Cry From Kensington," by Muriel Spark, also a reread. What classic novel did you recently read for the first time? Elizabeth Taylor's "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont." Is that a classic? It should be anyway. I've spent the last year or so catching up on books by British female authors who had slipped below my radar, one way or another, or who seem to have been unfairly neglected. Barbara Pym for another, but also some unread (by me) backlist of Penelope Fitzgerald and Anita Brookner. I've developed a real taste for this "quiet" kind of writing. I feel, sadly, incapable of it myself. Fitzgerald's "Human Voices," about the BBC in wartime, has become one of my all time favorite books and was a big influence on "Transcription." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. What do you read when you're working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing? I tend to avoid fiction if I'm writing it. I avoid good books and writers I admire in case they make me feel deflated about my own writing, and I avoid mediocre books (I get sent a lot) because they make me feel deflated as well. I tend to read nonfiction when I'm writing, usually research. I read less and less fiction these days. I hold Netflix responsible. What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams," by Matthew Walker, is immensely readable and has made me attend much more to my need for sleep, although it unfortunately made me paranoid about my lack of it. I now try very hard for eight hours a night, something I previously thought was only for the weak. What moves you most in a work of literature? The death of animals. I have never recovered from the death of Ginger in "Black Beauty." Not joking. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I don't avoid anything as such; I'm willing to give most things a go. But I don't read much romance or sci fi, and I tend to read very little crime these days. I don't like all those "women in jeopardy" novels either, and there seem to be an awful lot of them. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night? How do you organize your books? What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? A lot of books about nutrition. I've been obsessed for years. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? "The Adventures of Augustus" it's a book within a book, in my novel "God in Ruins." My British publishers made a special little edition as a gift so it looks like a real book. Which it is in my head, of course. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? Heroes: Ratty and Mole in "The Wind in the Willows," by Kenneth Grahame; Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"; and Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End." I thought long and hard about villains and realize I don't really have any. I don't think I rate characters by their morality. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? Voracious. All my childhood books stick with me and still continue to influence me today. "The Wind in the Willows"; Lewis Carroll; all of E. Nesbit's books; Susan Coolidge; Richmal Crompton's "Just William" all were profoundly important one way or another. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Oh, lord, I would never invite writers. They're so competitive. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? Many, many, many. All of which shall be nameless. Whom would you want to write your life story? Absolutely no one. If I was alive I would arrange to have them killed and if I were dead I would come back and haunt them. I can't think of anything more horrible. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. The saxophonist Kamasi Washington and his band had been virtually living on the road for about four years when they arrived in Harlem to play a packed house at the Apollo in 2019. You can tell from this video excerpted from a new full length concert film that the group has not lost the spark inside the material; on this version of Washington's "Street Fighter Mas," from the album "Heaven and Earth," the two drummer rhythm section pounds out a beat that's both funkier and more thrashing than on the record and Cameron Graves takes a lightning sharp keyboard solo that could make a metal guitarist quake. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO The sequel to "Talk," Khalid's magnificently tentative 2019 collaboration with the production team Disclosure, feels a little too inevitable. There's nothing really wrong with "Know Your Worth," Khalid's brotherly self help advice to someone who's being mistreated and underestimated (though the cutesy vocal sample of "What!" does get annoying). But after the opening line, "He keeps leaving you for dead," there's nothing a plot twist, a texture shift, a contrasty bridge to challenge anyone's expectations. JON PARELES Sharon Van Etten's new single is all deliberation and determination, hovering between dirge "Your big old heart gets beaten down" and homily: "Don't you get beaten." It's a subdued anthem that ticks slowly along on sustained synthesizer tones, tolling piano and Van Etten's high, carefully understated voice, refusing to grieve or exhort, only to claim and hold its place. Maybe it's an election year song, too. PARELES The bright jangle of "Promises," by the Chicago indie rock band Beach Bunny, belies much darker subject matter. The singer Lili Trifilio is overcome by a breakup "Sister said be patient, things aren't what they seem/But it's hard to think clearly, you never say what you mean" and grappling with the void it left behind. In the video, she's jumping on the bed, flailing. But look closer: She's having fun, she's free. JON CARAMANICA Leaked versions of this song have been popping up online since last summer, and have been making their way onto the viral song charts for the last few weeks. Now, it's finally getting a formal release. "Blueberry Faygo" is the best song to date by the generally unimaginative rapper Lil Mosey. He sounds cheerful, almost childlike, in his boasting. Underneath him, the production is dreamy, built on a tightly squelched sample of Johnny Gill's R B classic "My, My, My." CARAMANICA Christine and the Queens, 'People, I've Been Sad' Christine and the Queens the French songwriter Heloise Letissier couldn't be more straightforwardly melancholy than she is in this ballad. Behind her declaratory vocal lines, it's all bassy, sustained, 1980s flavored synthesizers (think "Take My Breath Away") and quivering strings. She's singing about depression and withdrawal, perhaps with a partner "If you disappear, then I'm disappearing too" and passages in French trace her wounds back to a lonely, misjudged adolescence. But the music insists she's not vanishing anytime soon. PARELES The esteemed bassist Christian McBride was born just after the close of the Civil Rights Movement, so he remembers learning about its heroes by flipping through the copies of his grandmother's copies of Ebony and Jet magazines from the 1950s and '60s. For many years he has worked on "The Movement Revisited," a musical suite celebrating four figures from those pages who inspired him as a child: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali. The suite, finally released as an album Friday, mixes hard nosed small group playing, soaring big band orchestration, spoken readings from figures like Sonia Sanchez and Wendell Pierce, and choral singing. On "Sister Rosa," the piece dedicated to Parks, a big band and a choir both savor the deep, mid tempo swing feel, leaning on McBride's bass for support as the voices unite in a long, weary drawl, quoting Parks: "I'm tired." RUSSONELLO "That thing you do is not love," the Colombian Canadian singer Lido Pimienta chides a disappointing partner, but "Eso Que Tu Haces" from an album due in April, "Miss Colombia" is no petty kiss off. It's a substantial cultural statement uniting Afro Colombian roots rhythms, instruments and, in a video shot in Colombia, group dances with just enough synthesizer heft to place Pimienta's music in the here and now. PARELES Pottery is a band from Montreal, but it lays a carpetbagging claim to to punk and psychedelia in the six minute "Texas Drums Pt 1 2." At first, it harks back to the Clash's "Rock the Casbah" and a hint of the Rolling Stones version of "Harlem Shuffle" a grunting, cowbell thumping, guitar scrubbing vamp with an electric piano in the mix and proceeds to get ever more crowded and noisy as singers shout, "All my best friends moved to Texas/All my best friends play those drums." Of course there's a phasing and feedback interlude, generous dollops of fuzztone, even a key change anything but the sounds of the present. PARELES | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
THE EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST A Memoir By Samantha Power Whenever The New York Times invites me to do a book review, I look for an excuse. I'd rather spend my extra time writing books than reviewing them. But when the Book Review editors asked me to review Samantha Power's "The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir," I said yes, without hesitation. It wasn't because I suddenly had time on my hands. And it certainly wasn't because Power is a friend. I've met her only once in her last week as Barack Obama's ambassador to the United Nations. No, it was because I knew only one thing about Power from afar. She was a table pounding idealist and human rights advocate, and believed in using American power to protect innocent civilians and advance democracy. And lately I have struggled with that position. Having been a foreign correspondent in London, in Beirut during its civil war, in Israel and then the foreign affairs columnist for this newspaper since 1995, I'd long wrestled with how much idealism one should allow oneself when advocating for or against the uses of American power abroad. I began reporting from the Middle East in 1979 with a lot of Minnesota optimism in my DNA. Alas, idealism is now a recessive gene in me after so many crushed hopes and covering one too many massacres. I am much more wary today not isolationist, but wary about what well intentioned outsiders can do to sustainably reshape another country or region. George W. Bush was right on one thing about the Iraq war many Iraqis wanted to be free to be more democratic once the tyranny of Saddam Hussein was lifted from their necks. But many other Iraqis wanted to be free to be more Shiite, more Sunni Jihadist, more corrupt or just more powerful than the tribe or sect next door. No, Toto, everywhere is not like Kansas. The only Arab Spring country that was able to make the transition (albeit still tentative) from dictatorship to democracy, and to power sharing between Islamists and secularists, was Tunisia the one Arab country America had nothing to do with. Think about that. And Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi showed how even a Nobel Peace Prize can't guarantee that today's human rights heroine won't become tomorrow's victimizer. Yet Obama's intervention in West Africa to stem the spread of Ebola maybe his most significant foreign policy achievement, for which he got little credit precisely because it worked demonstrated that without America as quarterback, important things that save lives and advance freedom at reasonable costs often don't happen. So I was curious. This Samantha Power she had started her career as a journalist covering the mass killing of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs, which led her to write a Pulitzer Prize winning book, "'A Problem From Hell': America in the Age of Genocide," about why American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to halt genocides. She had worked as a foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama, and then as a human rights adviser to President Obama before ultimately becoming his second United Nations ambassador. People told me she was a real idealist not a tortured one like me. But then she had to eat some heaping plates of realism in public, like defending Obama's nonintervention in the genocidal Syrian civil war. I wondered: How did she wrestle with all that as she went from reporter author to policymaker? So I told the Book Review editors: "Yes. I'd like to review her book." I wanted to see how she sorted it all out. I'm glad I did. This is a wonderful book. It's an unusual combination of autobiography, diplomatic history, moral argument and manual on how to breast feed a child with one hand while talking to Secretary of State John Kerry on a cellphone with the other. The interweaving of Power's personal story, family story, diplomatic history and moral arguments is executed seamlessly and with unblinking honesty. 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. The book isn't all about world affairs. One of the most compelling chapters is about when Power joined the Obama presidential campaign as a foreign policy adviser but ended up making news herself for a "large and public mistake." That was describing Obama's rival, Hillary Clinton, as a "monster" while on a book tour in Ireland no less and being forced to resign from the campaign. But when the man that her Irish cousins called "O'bama" wins the 2008 election, he brings her back into the fold. To ease her way back, her friend and the Obama adviser Richard Holbrooke as a wedding gift arranges for Power to have a private face to face meeting to apologize to Clinton and clear the air. When Power tells Obama about the "wedding gift," the president quips, "Don't most people get toasters?" With America being run today by a president for whom no dictator is too odious to call his friend, I found it something of a balm to journey with this Irish immigrant girl from the basement of a Dublin pub, where Power spent way too much time as a little girl reading books while her dad held court in the bar upstairs, to America, where she emigrates with her mom in the 1970s and falls in love in equal parts with the Pittsburgh Pirates and American idealism. Not the cheap flag waving variety, but the belief that America is more than just a country. It's a mission to promote justice and human rights where it can. When it comes to striking that right balance between idealism and realism, this book is basically a dialogue between the young, uncompromising, superidealistic Power who cold calls senior American officials at night at home to berate them for not doing more to stop the killing in Bosnia and the more sober policymaker Power, who struggles to balance her idealism with realism, and who frets that she's become one of those officials she despised. The older Power is not at all a cynic, but she is less ramrod straight. Her posture is what I like to call a tilt. Always tilted toward using American power to defend the defenseless, moderate the tyrannical, rescue the needy and inspire and strengthen the forces of decency but when she loses the argument to do so in one country, she doesn't resign. She looks for somewhere else to fix. Does that sound like an idealist selling out to hold onto the perks of power, or one who keeps looking to fight another day another way? You decide. And you can because Power is unstinting in giving you all the ammunition you need to denounce or defend her. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of September. See the full list. Drawing often from her journals, she shares what colleagues and friends saw, at times, as her annoying self righteousness. The young Power that we meet early on is in Sarajevo berating herself in her journal for not personally preventing the 1995 murder of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica: "I was the correspondent in Munich while the bodies burned in Dachau. ... I had power and I failed to use it." Writing now, she says, "In beating myself up, I was clearly exaggerating my actual power back in Sarajevo." (I'd say so!) She quotes the American diplomat Jonathan Moore, who advised her on the choice of continuing to report from Bosnia in hopes of changing policy or going to Harvard Law School: "Get the hell out of there. You need to break out of the compulsion for power, glory, ego, relevance, contribution." The elder Power takes you on the roller coaster ride of being the leading in house advocate for idealism on the Obama team. Power argued for intervention in Syria, at least for a no fly zone that might have tilted the balance of power there enough so the Syrian regime would negotiate with the pro democracy rebels. But Obama overrules her, fearing an endless quagmire. We don't know what would have happened had Power's advice been taken. All we know are two things: 1) America was spared getting deeply involved in another Middle East internal struggle without a clear exit strategy, and 2) our absence helped the Russians, the Iranians and the Syrian regime crush the rebels and produce a flood of refugees into the European Union that led to a populist nationalist backlash there that contributed to Brexit and weakened the E.U. In Libya, Obama took the advice of Clinton, Power and our NATO allies and helped to decapitate the regime of Muammar Qaddafi to prevent him from killing large numbers of antiregime Libyans. But when we and the Europeans failed to organize a follow up peacekeeping force on the ground, Libya descended into disorder, unleashing another destabilizing refugee flow into Europe. Obama's team and our allies had willed the ends without willing the means. Idealism untempered by an understanding of the complex interplay of forces inside a country ends up in this sort of mess. During these various debates about Libya and Syria, Power quotes Obama as snapping at her when he felt her comments came across as "dogmatic or sanctimonious." During a Situation Room debate on Syria, as Power was advocating for stronger action, Obama wearily says to her: "We've all read your book, Samantha." Obama, she recalls, repeatedly told her, "you get on my nerves." But at the same time, when she wouldn't speak up for idealism, Obama would ask her: "Are you sick, Power?" He wanted to hear it. It's complicated. Power regularly debated with herself about resigning in protest over Obama's refusal to intervene decisively in Syria. She asks herself whether she'd become what Obama's human rights critics said he'd become just another "realist," but one who "feels bad about it." In the end, she stays, quoting a friend who tells her "the world is filled with broken places. Pick your battles, and go win some," and quoting Obama "better is good." Perfect is rarely on the menu. And then, in the best chapter in the book, Power gives us the ammo to see how even just striving for better can lead to unforeseen complications. The chapter is entitled "Toussaint." In 2016, Power decides to visit Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria "to meet with people on the front lines of the fight" against the terrorist group Boko Haram, which had kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls, so that she could draw attention to their struggle the way a visit from a high ranking American official can do. It was a dangerous trip and required a caravan of some 14 armored vehicles. Locals lined the roads on their way to Mokolo, a town in rural Cameroon. There, Power hears about how a village's "vigilance committee" used stones and bows and arrows to kill a young woman who had entered a local market with a suicide belt under her hijab. She also recalls, though, how some of these same local guardian groups attacked people as "Boko Haram" in order to steal their livestock. Yes, not every good guy is a good guy. But as Power is leaving the village an aide whispers to her: "As we were driving here our car hit a young boy." The boy's name was Toussaint. He was killed. "Had we not come," she writes, "a 6 year old boy would still be alive." Nonetheless, the trip helped Power and others to lobby the United Nations for an additional 168 million in humanitarian assistance for people menaced by Boko Haram. Was it worth it? Again, she gives you all the ammo to decide. Yet Power remains steadfast in her tilt: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions, to be sure," she writes. "But turning a blind eye to the toughest problems in the world is a guaranteed shortcut to the same destination." I can imagine a course for incoming diplomats at the State Department that would use Power's book as a text, and the final exam question would be: "In 500 words or less, explain whether you identify with the younger Power or the older Power." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Lots of things look different when you step into a small Green House nursing home. The bright living and dining space, filled with holiday baubles at this season. The adjacent open kitchen, where the staff is making lunch. The private bedrooms and baths. The lack of long stark corridors, medication carts and other reminders of hospital wards. I was visiting the Green House Homes at Green Hill, a continuing care facility in West Orange, N.J. Dorothy Bagli, who's 91, showed me her room, looking out onto the garden and filled with artwork from home and photos of her grandchildren. (Her son, it turned out, is a reporter at The Times.) "I've gotten to know most of the people that live here," she said an easier task when there are only 10 residents. "It's very intimate," agreed Eleanor Leonardis, who declined to give her age and is recuperating from a nasty fall. "It feels a lot like home." But the thing that struck me most was a man sitting alone at the communal table, having his breakfast oatmeal at noon. The staff knows that he doesn't like getting up or eating early in the day. At conventional nursing homes, aides have to hustle residents out of bed, help them dress, escort them to the dining room by whatever time breakfast is served, and then perhaps whisk them off for physical therapy. These facilities struggle to provide even a smidgen of personal autonomy. Here, physical therapists come to the Green House Homes. If they find a resident still asleep, they come back later. The Green House Project, which in 2003 opened its first small nursing homes in Tupelo, Miss., counts just 242 licensed homes in 32 states to date, with 150 more in various stages of planning or construction. (Next up: Bartlett, Tenn.; Lima, Ohio; and Little Rock, Ark.) That's a droplet in the bucket of the nation's more than 15,000 nursing homes. They seem to embody change. "The numbers are still modest, but it truly is a different model of care," said Sheryl Zimmerman, a gerontologist and health services researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. What wasn't clear, until Dr. Zimmerman and a team of researchers around the country undertook the most comprehensive research to date on Green Houses, was how good a job these newcomers do. "Does this model work?" she asked. "Is it sustainable and replicable?" The group's study of nearly 100 Green Houses compared to standard nursing homes, funded by a 2 million grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in the journal Health Services Research, showed that Green Houses don't fulfill all their goals and promises. Though "control over the rhythms of the day" represents a pillar of Green House life, as one of its brochures declares, the researchers found that about a third of the homes didn't allow residents to decide when they awakened, and most restricted when residents could bathe or shower. Compared to conventional nursing homes, Green Houses also are far less likely to offer formal activities. But overall, the studies, incorporating nine years of data, add up to a positive report card. "Compared to traditional nursing homes, no doubt about it," said Dr. Zimmerman. "It's a preferable model of care." Green Houses practice what's called "consistent assignment," meaning that the same aides care for the same few residents. "People know you. They know your likes and dislikes," Dr. Zimmerman said. "There's more trust and familiarity. Relationships develop." An aide (in Green House lingo, a shahbaz) who knows residents well is also better able to spot health problems early on. "Because aides were in closer and more consistent contact, they were more aware of changes in residents' conditions," Dr. Zimmerman said. A Green House shahbaz spends many more hours on patient care: an average 4.2 hours per resident per day, compared with 2.2 hours in conventional nursing homes. (At Green Houses, that includes tasks like preparing meals and doing laundry.) Compared to residents in traditional nursing homes, Green House residents fared better on three of eight federal inspection criteria, and did equally well on the others. The researchers found that Green House residents were 16 percent less likely to be bedridden, 38 percent less likely to have pressure ulcers and 45 percent less likely to have catheters. Avoidable hospitalizations and readmissions were also lower, reassuring observers who wondered if the Green Houses' emphasis on quality of life meant sacrificing quality of care. Though Green Houses are expensive to build (including a 200,000 payment to the nonprofit Green House Project for training, design and support), with 8 percent higher operating costs than standard nursing homes, they save Medicare 30 percent per resident per year. (They charge residents or their insurers somewhat more than regular nursing homes, however.) Developers also seem able to adapt them for particular populations. They've built Green Houses for assisted living, for veterans, for a public housing agency, for people with dementia and multiple sclerosis. Green Houses incorporate hospice care, too. "We try very hard to say, 'This is home for life,'" said Susan Ryan, senior director of the Green House Project. She's troubled by how slowly the model has spread, partly because of complex state regulations and financial obstacles. Critics who deplore the state of American nursing homes have called for a "culture change" for at least 20 years. That means "deinstitutionalizing nursing homes, making them more like the way we've lived all our lives, with our own routines and familiar objects," said Robyn Grant, public policy director for The National Consumer Voice for Quality Long Term Care. We've made only modest progress toward that goal, Ms. Grant said. Perhaps one function of the Green House model, then, is to point the way. "There are many elements of it that could be done by other nursing homes," Ms. Grant said. "There are ways to break down the size and make nursing homes smaller," with workers consistently assigned to a group of residents. Facilities could be redesigned to offer private rooms; they could give residents more say over their routines. At Green Hill (disclosure: my late father lived there for a year and a half, though not in a Green House), Dorothy Bagli's family has discussed whether to move her into the facility's traditional nursing home, which costs slightly less. But Jeanne Jenusaitis, one of her 12 children, thinks the small scale of the Green House suits her mother, along with aides who know and understand her. Wouldn't her mother, who has dementia, get disoriented trying to find her way through the long nursing home corridors? Would there be a staff person always in sight to assuage her fears? Her Green House, Ms. Jenusaitis said, "is so much more nonclinical. She likes that feeling of home." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
WARSAW More than 72 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the first traveling exhibition about the Nazi death camp will begin a journey later this year to 14 cities across Europe and North America, taking heartbreaking artifacts to multitudes who have never seen such horror up close. The endeavor is one of the most high profile attempts to educate and immerse young people for whom the Holocaust is a fading and ill understood slice of history. The Anne Frank House, the Jewish Museum Berlin, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and others all find themselves grappling with ways to engage an attention challenged world with a dark part of its past. Yet anything that smacks of putting Auschwitz on tour instantly raises sensitivities. Organizers of the exhibition, which include the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum itself, took pains to explain that, yes, visitors would probably be charged to enter in at least some locations. But officials at that museum and the company behind the exhibition say that their intent is not to create a moneymaker out of the suffering of millions of Nazi victims. "If you're telling me, 'Gee, they're coming out and they're going to be millionaires over this,' I would object," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, who founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. "But if they're making what is normally considered to be a fair amount of profit since the final end is that hundreds of thousands of people maybe in different places all over the world will see the exhibit I think that's quite legitimate." The exhibition announced on Wednesday by the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum and the organizer, the Spanish company Musealia will include pieces from the museum such as a barracks; a freight car of the same type used to transport prisoners; letters and testimonials; and a gas mask, a tin that contained Zyklon B gas pellets and other grim remainders from the complex's gas chambers. Seven years in the making, the exhibition is a response to growing anti Semitism in Europe and elsewhere, those involved with it said. "We have never done anything like this before and it's the first project of this magnitude ever," said Piotr Cywinski, director of the state museum, which is on the site of the former camp, in southern Poland. "We had been thinking about this for a long time, but we lacked the know how." Even though the Holocaust remains a major focus of study by historians and is a staple of school curriculum in many countries, knowledge about the camps is fading for younger generations, he said. The exhibition will make its first stop in Madrid, aiming for an opening around December, and then tour for seven years. Precise dates and locations will be announced in about a month. It is no longer enough to "sit inside four walls, stare at the door and wait for visitors to come in," Mr. Cywinski said, so museum officials decided to reach out to a more global audience. The exhibition was broached in 2010 when Musealia, a family owned company whose shows include artifacts from the Titanic, approached the museum. Luis Ferreiro, the company's director, said the idea came while he was grieving the death of his 25 year old brother. He had found consolation in "Man's Search for Meaning," a book by a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, Viktor E. Frankl, about his experiences in four extermination camps after his pregnant wife, his parents and brother all perished. Inspired by the book's lessons for spiritual survival, Mr. Ferreiro said he decided to try to make the subject of the Holocaust closer to those who might never have a chance to visit the museum. The museum also insisted that the artifacts be presented in historical context, especially because many aspects of World War II are only vaguely understood by younger generations. For instance, in Spain, asking about the history and place of Jews in Europe "would probably get some strange answers." The exhibition will show that Spain which during the war was led by Francisco Franco, a dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler was not home to large Jewish communities and did not have extensive connections with the Holocaust; yet there were notable exceptions, like Angel Sanz Briz, a Spanish diplomat who saved more than 5,000 Jews in Hungary from deportation to Auschwitz. "In other words, we want to show that the Franco regime was certainly very sympathetic to the Nazis," said Robert Jan van Pelt, a history professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a Holocaust scholar who has been working on the exhibition. "But individual Spaniards could make, and made, a difference." As for the morality of charging money to see artifacts from a death camp, and potentially turning a profit, Mr. Ferreiro said that traveling exhibitions like this one usually generated huge expenses. Putting the display together has already cost more than 1.5 million, and there are no guarantees "the exhibit will even be sustainable," Mr. Ferreiro said. Musealia will offer museums that want to host the exhibition a flat fee for transportation, installation, design and all the content. "We need to earn an income to sustain ourselves and keep the enterprise going," Mr. Ferreiro said, "but our goal is to focus on larger social goals such as enlightenment and education." The Auschwitz museum will get a fixed amount that will be given to it yearly to cover any expenses arising from the project, though neither museum officials nor Musealia specified how much. If the exhibition is profitable, the amount the museum receives will be increased, Mr. Ferreiro said. The story of Auschwitz, as told through the artifacts, will cover the physical location of the camps and their status as symbols of structuralized hatred and barbarity. The exhibition will begin with the history of Oswiecim, the Polish site of the German camps, whose population was about 60 percent Jewish before the war. That history will be followed by the origins of Nazism after World War I. Of the 1,150 original pieces to be displayed, 835 will come from the state museum. The rest have been lent by other institutions, like Yad Vashem in Israel, or directly by survivors and their families, much of which has not been displayed before. Mr. Cywinski, of the Auschwitz museum, said he expected the exhibition to be provocative, with some patrons drawing connections between the rise of Nazism and events around the world today. He mentioned populism, propaganda, institutionalized hatred and an international community that he regarded as sometimes seemingly blind to these social forces. "Memory that is intelligent, reflexive, is not limited to the past, but allows you to define the reality and project the future," he said. "Otherwise, why would we even need memory?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The term "downtown dance" may be outmoded, recalling an era closer to the 1970s when living and dancing in SoHo lofts was the norm. Today's grass roots dance spaces more often spring up in Brooklyn or Harlem or Queens. But dance still happens downtown, and the past year has been a time of upheaval for organizations that support it. From July 2016 to February 2017, directors came and went at five major contemporary dance hubs below 23rd Street: New York Live Arts in Chelsea; Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side; Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University in Greenwich Village; Gibney Dance Center, in TriBeCa and near Union Square; and the temporarily nomadic Performance Space 122 (PS122), whose East Village home, under renovation since 2013, is poised to reopen soon. More changes are underway across the city, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center Festival and Joyce Theater, where longtime leaders have announced plans to leave, or, in the case of Lincoln Center, recently stepped down. Sustaining a dance career and a performing arts organization in New York has never been easy, and it's not getting easier. As rents keep rising, so does the need among artists for affordable space and opportunities not only to train and create new work but also to fail. Recent threats to federal arts funding though dodged for now have further destabilized an already financially precarious field. Craig Peterson, the artistic director of Abrons, also noted the need for "opportunities for cross pollination," as gentrification has dispersed once tight knit artist communities. "How do we create long term viable homes for artists where they can intersect with people from different disciplines?" he said. "Because those communities don't exist unto themselves anymore in the same way." And like other arts, dance is engaged in broader dialogues about cultural appropriation and representation: Who can tell whose story? Whose voices are being heard? "This is the big issue of our moment," Mr. Peterson said. If the contemporary dance field seems insular at times, the recent transitions, resembling a game of musical chairs, may have reinforced that reputation. When Jay Wegman left his post as the artistic director of Abrons to become N.Y.U. Skirball's senior director, his job went to Mr. Peterson, whose job at Gibney went to Ben Pryor, known for founding American Realness, a performance festival based at Abrons since 2010. Jenny Schlenzka, the first female director of PS122, is more of a newcomer, having built her career as a curator of performance at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1. And Janet Wong, the associate artistic director at Live Arts, is new in a different sense. After 21 years of helping to direct the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, which merged with Dance Theater Workshop to form Live Arts in 2011, she has taken on a programming role for the first time. Just before the rush of the fall season, the five spoke about settling into their jobs and the plans they've started to hatch. The most dramatic transformation, so far, has taken place at N.Y.U. Skirball, where Mr. Wegman has been rebranding since last August, in part to build an audience among N.Y.U. students. "We held focus groups and discovered students weren't coming because they thought the programming was for their parents or grandparents," he said. He has also been strengthening ties with academic departments like art and public policy, performance studies and dance. "Anything that comes here should be just as compelling or challenging as anything a student would learn in a classroom." His choices are notably bolder than his predecessor's. This season has included an evening organized by the dance network Aunts a festive invasion of lobbies and backstage areas and "7 Pleasures," a work of orgy as performance by the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen. Reading lists for every event are available online. The dance and visual art worlds have become increasingly entwined over the past decade. So Ms. Schlenzka's appointment as executive artistic director of PS122, a haven for dance experimentation since 1980, was not a shock. Her first season, tentatively scheduled to begin early next year, will focus on the history of the East Village and of PS122. She said that until she has keys to the renovated building, a former public school on First Avenue, she couldn't elaborate further. Her larger vision, she said, is for "a really lively building" where people come and go all day for performances, talks, rehearsals and exhibitions. As for moving on from museums? "The big difference is that now I'm the director I love being the one able to make decisions and not having to ask someone else," she said. "I'm thinking, Why didn't I do this earlier?" The sudden departure last year of the director of programs at New York Live Arts, Thomas O. Kriegsmann, ushered in the latest phase of a confusing merger between the adventurous Dance Theater Workshop founded in 1965 as a choreographic collective in a Chelsea loft and the more financially stable Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. The full implications of being led by "one consistent artistic and management team," as the organization said in a statement at the time, remain to be seen. But one thing is clear: Ms. Wong, who took on many of Mr. Kriegsmann's responsibilities, is busy. In addition to planning the Live Arts season in consultation with Mr. Jones she is still the associate artistic director of his company, a role that involves teaching class, touring and leading rehearsals. She said that Live Arts plans to continue its existing residency and commissioning programs, as well as its multidisciplinary Live Ideas festival. While she noted she has much to learn, she also spoke of drawing from her two decades with an internationally touring dance company. As she put it, "I can talk as an artist to the artists." And she's already an expert in collaborating with Mr. Jones. "I think I'm a good balance for him," she said. "I'm much calmer than he is, but I'm also very strong, and I think he respects that." Over at Abrons, Mr. Peterson hopes to preserve some of the old downtown. "I don't want to lose the gritty New York theater feel of this place," he said of the sprawling complex, which houses three idiosyncratic theaters. "I like theatrical failures." But when it comes to making programming decisions, he is looking for new, more democratic strategies. This summer he appointed Ali Rosa Salas, a master's candidate at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University, as director of performance programs. He was looking for "a thinking partner," he said, to help him "bring new voices to the table." "I think there was a resounding ho hum when I got appointed here, for good reason," he said. "It would be great if some new voices popped into some of these institutions, some non white male voices, frankly. It'll be interesting to see what the Joyce and BAM and other major institutions do." Mr. Pryor also spoke about trying to "step back." To that end, he plans to developa new platform for guest curators at Gibney. First up will be the dancer and independent producer Marya Wethers, who will organize a three week series in the spring. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The second season of "Big Little Lies" is getting bigger. Meryl Streep has been cast in the Emmy winning HBO series, the network said Wednesday, joining Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon as television continues to attract major stars. Ms. Streep, who received her 21st Oscar nomination this week for "The Post," has not done much TV work over the years, though she has won three Emmys, including one last year for outstanding narrator for the Netflix documentary "Five Came Back." In "Big Little Lies," Ms. Streep's character comes to the show's beachside California town "searching for answers" following the death of her son, Perry, played by Alexander Skarsgard. Her character is the mother in law of Ms. Kidman's character. Though HBO hasn't announced the rest of the cast, the network said it expected that most of the actors from the first season would return. TV Line reported this week that even Mr. Skarsgard was expected to return in some way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
LOS ANGELES "Are you afraid of snakes?" asked Brittney Parks , the songwriter and violinist who records as Sudan Archives. In an interview at her home, where her bedroom often doubles as her recording studio, she was introducing me to Goldie, her ball python, as he languorously wrapped his gold patterned body around her tattooed forearm. Goldie appears in the video for "Glorious" from Sudan Archives' superb debut album, "Athena," which was released Nov. 1. Her pet snake is also "kind of like the theme of the album," she said. "It's like me people are sometimes intimidated by me, just because of how I look. The album is about duality and also about being misinterpreted. People are afraid and they almost scream when they see him, but look how cute and shiny he is! He don't want to hurt nobody." With a dozen songs on two EPs that she released in 2017 and 2018, "Sudan Archives" and "Sink," Parks, 25, has already earned a place among boundary defying R B innovators like FKA twigs, Frank Ocean, Solange, SZA, Kelela, Sampha and H.E.R. They have been turning R B into an elastic, futuristic realm where fantasy and self revelation, otherworldly electronics and real world musicianship are constantly recombining. With "Athena" she pushes even further, sonically and emotionally, allowing her songs to be more revealing. "I washed away my fears and trusted my own ears," she sings in "Confessions," the album's first single. The EPs brought Parks an international audience for a playful, sometimes vertiginous style that she forged on her own, working largely alone. Singing about self invention, connections and independence, she emerged as a solo phenomenon online and onstage. She constructed her music from loops of her beats, her airy voice and her violin, plucked and bowed in phrases that often evoke the modes of African music. (Parks is African American, not African; she was born and raised in Cincinnati before moving to Los Angeles.) For "Athena," she kept the core of her music the call and response of her voice and violin but brought in producers and collaborators to enrich and vary her sound. On the cover of "Athena," she is a bronze nude statue on a pedestal, a goddess holding her violin high. "That's her trying to create a distraction from how naked she is in the music," said her co producer, songwriting collaborator and boyfriend, James McCall IV, a.k.a. the rapper Nocando, known recently as All City Jimmy . During an interview over chips and guacamole at her kitchen table, Parks was bright eyed and in nearly constant motion, with her hands dancing through the air as she spoke. She kept her laptop nearby, clicking links to credit her references and influences. Sudan Archives' music was forged from instinct, happenstance, discipline and research. Parks grew up in a family that attended a small Church of God three times a week, for ecstatic services with harmony singing and speaking in tongues. The church's clapping and stomping survivals of gospel's African heritage echo in the music she grew up to make. She was in elementary school when Barrage, a fiddle centered Canadian band mixing Celtic and international influences, came to perform there and she decided she wanted to learn the violin. After school programs got her started, but she learned the rest by ear. She improvised along with the singers in church, and she taught herself to hear musical architecture and to invent melodic lines. "This discipline that I had at a young age to keep playing an instrument that's what separates me from a lot of artists," she said. "The violin chose a path for me." Parks recently started working with a violin teacher to expand her technique. She is also planning her first non solo tour, joined by a pianist, that she intends to present as a surreal variation on a classical violin and piano recital. Her microphone stand will be shaped like a silvery snake. "I think she's going to be a hero," McCall said. "The fact that she's an instrumentalist and producer, and she happens to be sexy but she's not selling sex no matter what happens in her career, she's normalizing musicianship and making musicianship cool for little black girls. And taking it past the race thing, little American girls." Parks started writing and recording songs in her teens with her twin sister, Cat. Their stepfather, who had worked in the music business, thought they could be "the next big thing," she recalled. He had them work with producers in Cincinnati, hoping they would come up with a hit, under the name N2. But even as a teenager, Parks had her own ideas, and N2 didn't last. "She always wanted to do what felt good to her, even if it wasn't popular," Cat Parks said by phone from Los Angeles. "She was very bold in her opinions. When it came to her music, it was always, like, this is how I want it done." At 17, she decided she didn't like the name Brittney; Sudan was a suggestion from her mother. There was friction with her parents, in part over her staying out late to attend concerts on Cincinnati's underground experimental music circuit, which gave her ideas about effects, textures and looping. At 19, she moved to Los Angeles. There, curiosity led her to look into the music of Sudan, where she found a fiddle tradition raw, kinetic, modal that felt to her like the spirit she had heard in Irish jigs back in elementary school. Propped up on a turntable in her living room was the LP cover of one of her pivotal discoveries, Francis Bebey's "African Electronic Music 1975 1982." Bebey, who died in 2001, was an ethnomusicologist from Cameroon who wrote extensively about African traditions and channeled them into his own music. His book "African Music: A People's Art," led her to African string music, and she dug deeper: down YouTube rabbit holes, into albums and books. Thinking about personal and ancestral memory, she began calling herself Sudan Archives as she performed around Los Angeles. She was also "doing a lot of psychedelics," she said. "I would just mess with gear all day. I swear to God, when I started to experiment with stuff like that, that's when I became a little more creative." In 2015, her home recorded songs drew the attention of Stones Throw, a label that's fond of left field funk, which released and promoted her two EPs; she made her first music video in Ghana. As her songs gradually drew millions of plays online, Parks honed her one woman shows for larger and larger audiences. She has spent the past two summers touring festivals in the United States and abroad. Her musical ambitions were also expanding. "The EPs are just thoughts," she said. "The album is a fleshed out thought. I wanted it to sound like the EPs, but I also wanted it to sound like it got picked up and then taken to another world." Stones Throw encouraged her to try writing songs with producers including Rodaidh McDonald (who worked with the xx), Paul White (who has worked with Charli XCX) and Ernest Greene (who records as Washed Out). Working in her bedroom studio, she also built increasingly elaborate string arrangements, bringing a new orchestral richness to some songs and placing abstract instrumental transitions between album tracks. "I wanted all of my influences growing up as a little girl to be part of the album," she said. "So there's jazz represented there, there's R B represented in there, classical references, Irish jigging references, pop references, trip hop, even some industrial weird experimental references." She also opened up her lyrics. On her EPs, songs like "Nont for Sale" put a cheerful, empowered face on conflicted relationships. But on "Athena," Parks also explores darker, angrier, more confused moments: succumbing to desire, pulling away from codependency, recognizing inner angels and demons. Working with collaborators led her to be "wilder" in both music and lyrics, she said. "I had people around me, they knew what the song was about, so they were holding me accountable for my own feelings. I felt like I couldn't hide." She reached a turning point with "Confessions," which convinced her she didn't have to work alone. It poured out in a single session with the producer Will Archer (a.k.a. Wilma Archer). "We did that insanely fast. It came together, the whole thing, in an hour and a half," Archer said. Sudan Archives sings about her move to Los Angeles, breaking free while reckoning with what she's left behind: "There is a place that I call home/But it's not where I am welcome." Over a drum loop Archer provided, "She just responded with violin, and lyrically and melodically, instantly," he said. "She didn't even sing a guide vocal. She had the lyrics immediately she didn't hum a melody, she just went right in." Parks constructed "Athena" as an album to be heard end to end. It starts as biography, reaching back to remake "Did You Know" the first song she recorded as a teenager followed by "Confessions." Then it shifts to become a "mental journey," she said. "It's about duality and this battle within your inner thoughts, and you're trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong, and it leads to this sense of oneness where nothing's really right and nothing's really wrong. Your life is just crazy, girl! And it has this magical twist on it, and it's supposed to be this soundtrack of the making of a goddess." Is that makeover now complete? Parks briefly considered the idea: "I don't think she'll ever be finished." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Mets and the Miami Marlins chose not to play on Thursday, joining 12 other Major League Baseball teams in sitting out in response to the police shooting of a Black man in Kenosha, Wis. But before that decision was formalized, Mets General Manager Brodie Van Wagenen was captured on video delivering a searing critique of Commissioner Rob Manfred that he later retracted in a written apology. "At the leadership level, he doesn't get it," Van Wagenen said of Manfred, in a video feed the Mets use for Zoom news conferences that appeared to have been accidentally broadcast online. "He just doesn't get it." Van Wagenen was speaking with two unidentified people, both out of the video frame, about a proposal for the Mets and the Marlins to stage a walkout at the scheduled game time, then return and start play an hour later. In a statement, Van Wagenen said that he thought it was Manfred's plan, but that it had actually come from his boss, the chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon. He said Wilpon had called Manfred to tell him that the players had voted not to play, and the two had discussed the difficulty of rescheduling the game, since the teams are not scheduled to meet again this season. Wilpon proposed the delayed start, which irritated Van Wagenen. In a news conference later, Van Wagenen said he had not been part of the conversation between Manfred and Wilpon and had misunderstood the context. "In talking with both the commissioner and with Jeff in the aftermath of my video coming out, I recognized that there was brainstorming about suggestions, and it wasn't Rob and his leadership that was requiring or suggesting or mandating anything by any stretch of the imagination," Van Wagenen said. "I've apologized to him publicly, I've apologized to him over the phone, and I recognize that it was a disrespectful move to his office and to him. It was an emotional day, and I want to support the players." 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. Van Wagenen said he held himself "personally responsible" for the comments about Manfred, who released his own statement saying he had not tried to stop players from demonstrating or suggested different ways to protest. "Over the past two days, players on a number of Clubs have decided not to play games," he said in the statement. "I have said both publicly and privately that I respect those decisions and support the need to address social injustice. I have not attempted in any way to prevent players from expressing themselves by not playing, nor have I suggested any alternative form of protest to any Club personnel or any player. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong." The Mets' chief executive, Fred Wilpon, then issued a statement praising Manfred, while Jeff Wilpon, his son, gave one confirming Van Wagenen's account. Jeff Wilpon also harshly criticized Van Wagenen while misspelling his first name in the statement. "Brody's misunderstanding of a private conversation was and is inexcusable," it said. As it turned out, the Mets' starters took the field at game time as the other players on both teams stood silently in foul territory for 42 seconds; 42 was the number worn by Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball's color barrier in 1947. The players then retreated to their clubhouses, leaving behind a "Black Lives Matter" T shirt over home plate. The Mets had played on Wednesday, as other teams were debating whether to do so. Outfielder Dom Smith, who is Black, knelt during the national anthem before that game and later gave a gripping, emotional news conference. "The first thing that needs to happen is these tough conversations," Smith said, flanked by three teammates, after Thursday's game was called off. "The fact that these guys supported my decision, and our decision as a team, these are the tough conversations we have to have." Three major league games were called off on Wednesday, and seven more on Thursday including every night game that was not part of a doubleheader because of players refusing to take the field. The possibility that the Mets' game would be an exception, even with a delayed start, seemed off key to Van Wagenen, according to his comments in the video. "You know what would be super powerful three of us here, can't leave this room you know what would be really great, if you just have 'em all take the field, then they leave the field and then they come back and play at 8:10," Van Wagenen said, describing the idea he thought had come from Manfred. "And I was like, 'What?'" An unidentified person then asked Van Wagenen: "Who said that?" Van Wagenen replied that it was Manfred, "And with Jeff, scheduling's going to be a nightmare, and there's so much at stake. And I said: 'Jeff, that's not happening.'" The unidentified person said, "They're not dealing with reality," to which Van Wagenen responded: "They're not playing. But that's Rob's instinct exactly what I'm talking about at the leadership level he doesn't get it. He just doesn't get it." He added that the Mets were waiting to coordinate their plans with the Marlins, and that Wilpon was waiting to hear about the decision. The Mets do have scheduling issues. They had four consecutive postponements from Aug. 20 through Aug. 23 after a player and a staff member tested positive for the coronavirus, and had been scheduled to play nine games in a six day span, including a doubleheader with Miami on Tuesday and two against the Yankees this weekend. On Thursday, though, the players decided that the mundane problem of their schedule could wait. "I'm very proud of them, just fully support what they did out there, to use the baseball platform to voice their opinion for this topic," Mets Manager Luis Rojas said. "We all feel strong that we're very much against racism and injustice and we want this to stop right now." For his part, Van Wagenen said he regretted that his comments about Manfred had distracted from the day's more meaningful message. "This conversation is about recognizing the pain and the anguish that Black people are experiencing every day in this country," he said. "The fact that I put myself and this organization into the conversation in a way that takes away from the real point, I'm disappointed in myself." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies. AMERICAN INDIES, 1980 1989 at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 2). The way this retrospective tells it, the 1980s represented a transformational period in American independent cinema a time when indies served as a counterbalance to the mallification of Hollywood movies and before they started to become commodified by organizations such as the Sundance Film Festival (now underway). The decade gave rise to the first triumphs of the Coen brothers ("Blood Simple," on Friday and Feb. 1) and Jim Jarmusch ("Stranger Than Paradise," on Saturday and Jan. 31); it also yielded punk infused anarchic experiments like Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames" (on Saturday and Feb. 1) and nuanced portraits of African American life (Charles Burnett's "My Brother's Wedding," on Saturday and Wednesday; Billy Woodberry's "Bless Their Little Hearts," on Tuesday). 212 708 9400, moma.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"Hi, my name is David F. Sandberg, and I'm the director of "Shazam!" So this scene is when our protagonist Billy Batson has just turned into adult superhero Shazam played by Zachary Levi. And he doesn't know why he got this power or what to do with it, so he seeks out his new foster brother, Freddy, played by Jack Dylan Grazer. Freddy is a big superhero fan and a bit of a superhero expert, and he's hoping that he knows what to do with this." "Stupid adult hands." "Now Zach and Jack are just amazing together. It took a long time to find Zach, to find the right kid to play this because he is a big kid at heart, and Jack is like this super fast talking, super smart little kid, and the two of them together is just amazing because they have this a lot of their banter just comes naturally, which made my job as a director really easy because they found their characters right away." "That's crazy, right?" "What are your super powers?" "Super powers? Dude, I don't even know how to pee in this thing." "O.K. Can you fly?" "And oftentimes that meant letting the camera roll for a little longer and see what they would do when they ran out of script or do take after take just to see how they would change it up because no two takes would ever be the same." "Obviously you have to jump. Come on." "How is any of this obvious?" "O.K." "And coming up here is our stuntman Ryan jumping off a car into a very tiny pad onto the ground that was painted out, but I'm always so impressed by stunt people and the things they're able to do and the pain they're able to deal with because it's not like stunt people don't feel pain. They just do these things anyway." "Did you believe?" "And as you can see, the environment here, this takes place in Philadelphia." "Yeah." "You want to try invisibility?" "Now the thing was when we scouted Toronto where we shot it, there was so much cool graffiti. And I was like, this is going to be perfect. This is awesome." "Oh my God, it worked. Where'd you go?" "But then of course because of rights and everything, you can't use all of that graffiti, so you have to put up your own graffiti. So a lot of what you see here is the stuff that art department put up, except that Bike Pirates in the back there. That was something that was there." "I might have been testing invisibility and super intelligence at the same time." "Coming up here is the exploding transformer, which was something we did for real on the day. And my direction to the pyrotechnics guys was to Michael Bay it." "Oh my God, the lightning emblem. It was staring us right in the face the whole time." "Literally." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Mr. Toobin did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The New Yorker suspended Mr. Toobin after he exposed himself during a Zoom call with employees of the magazine and WNYC radio. The call was held to discuss a future episode of a podcast that The New Yorker and the public radio station produce. During breakout discussions, Mr. Toobin switched to a second call that was the video call equivalent of phone sex. "I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off camera," Mr. Toobin said last month. "I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co workers." Vice first reported the incident last month. Mr. Toobin, a former assistant U.S. attorney, joined The New Yorker in 1993, under the editor Tina Brown, and quickly made a splash in publishing circles with his coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Mr. Toobin had applied for a job at the magazine on the advice of a friend, David Remnick, who had joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1992 and would become its top editor in 1998. Mr. Toobin is also the chief legal analyst for CNN, having worked for the network since 2002. In a statement last month, CNN said he had asked for time off "while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted." CNN had no comment on Wednesday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The streaming champions of modern hip hop have not yet hit their ceiling. On April 20, the day of its release, the rapper J. Cole's new album, "KOD," logged more than 36.5 million Spotify streams in the United States, setting a new first day record for the service. That lasted all of a week, as Post Malone's "Beerbongs Bentleys" came along and claimed nearly 48 million first day Spotify streams on Friday. And then there is Drake, looming over them all, with a new album, "Scorpion," planned for June. For now, though, J. Cole can celebrate. "KOD," which the New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica said "has the feel of a casual placeholder between bigger ideas," hit No. 1 easily on this week's Billboard chart with a total of 397,000 album equivalent units the biggest week of the year so far including 174,000 in sales and 323 million streams, according to Nielsen. That digital windfall is the largest streaming week of the year (surpassing Migos's 225 million for "Culture II") and the third largest of all time behind Drake's "More Life" (385 million) and Kendrick Lamar's "DAMN." (341 million). "KOD," J. Cole's fifth album, also marks his fifth consecutive Billboard No. 1. Overall, Mr. Cole, the studiously low key North Carolina M.C., had five of the Top 10 streaming tracks for the week, according to Nielsen; the song "ATM" was streamed more than 42.5 million times alone, second for the week behind Drake's current No. 1 hit, "Nice for What." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The nomination is very meaningful to me because the show is so meaningful to me. Doing this "Veep" thing for the last eight years has been actually a massive part of my life. And it's been incredibly hard work, but it's been incredibly buoying. It was something that I really kept my sights on when I was going through my cancer romp. I love the sort of linking arms with these guys and going after this thing that we're trying to create episode after episode. So the fact that we get Emmy nominations on the heels of all this work is just a complete delight. It really is. How did you feel about how "Veep" ended? And how do you feel about where Selina ended up? I was very, very proud of how we finished the series. I feel just every character was well tended to, all these arcs were kind of deftly handled by the writing, and I feel that where Selina ended up was perfect. Because she got what she wanted, or so she thought. As the show was wrapping up, did you ever have second thoughts about calling it quits? It was definitely a wrenching time for not just me, but for the whole group, because it's a very close knit group of people. But the timing did feel right. I have to say particularly as we were sort of winding it down and we were working on that last episode, it was very hard to do. It was very heartbreaking to say goodbye to these characters. But the fact that it was heartbreaking sort of sent home the message to me even further that it was the right time to end it. Some of this season's plot points seemed more closely analogous to D.C. reality than in previous seasons. Was that intended to be kind of a parting jab at Washington? Well, the show has always been a political satire, so it's always been a jab at the culture of politics from its inception. It just so happens that we're in an exceptionally divisive time. The world of Washington doesn't resemble the world of Washington when we first started making the show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LONDON A gender swapping version of Stephen Sondheim's "Company" and the feel good 9/11 musical "Come From Away" dominate the nominations for this year's Olivier Awards the British equivalent of the Tony Awards which were announced on Tuesday. "Company," which got nine nominations including best musical revival, was expected to lead the way. The production has been one of the most acclaimed in London in the last year. The Times's theater critic Ben Brantley wrote that the "Company" revival, which replaces the musical's male lead with a woman, "has emotional coherence and clout that it never possessed in my previous experiences of the show." "Come From Away," which opened at the Phoenix Theater in January, is about the residents of a Canadian town who accommodated 6,700 travelers whose planes were diverted there after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It also received nine nominations, including one for best new musical, despite receiving less positive reviews in London than it did when it opened on Broadway in 2017. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In the span of 30 years, virtual reality has transformed from a science fiction curio to a growing asset for the real estate industry. And some of the biggest changes in the field are now becoming commercially viable, thanks to the spread of affordable consumer hardware, like 360 degree cameras, and the ubiquity of powerful smartphones and devices. There has never been a more likely moment for virtual and augmented reality to move beyond showroom demonstrations, not just in the increasingly digital buying and selling process, but also in design and construction, which remain stubbornly analog. Just ask the contractor lugging rolls of paper plans to construction sites. To be sure, the technology is still something to behold, but the following examples aspire to something beyond the gee whiz factor. Namely: How do you monetize this? On a recent tour of 9 DeKalb Avenue, the future site of a 1,066 foot residential tower, soon to be the tallest in Brooklyn, construction workers were still laying the foundation. "We can visualize problems that would not be able to be seen from a computer screen," said Adam Chernick, as he tapped on individual panels of another tower rendering to receive live updates on the materials used, construction status and dimensions. Mr. Chernick, the research and development lead for A.R. and V.R. with SHoP, has been working closely with the designers on the augmented reality app. The rendering is not merely a fancy 3D illustration, which could have been produced years ago, but a dynamic stand in for what has or hasn't been completed on site, Mr. Chernick said. It marries two and three dimensional design data so that a contractor can peer through the virtual facade and determine where plumbing should be installed, whether the electrician has left adequate space for ventilation ducts or if columns are correctly aligned. The technology is made possible by the use of the Unity engine, a software platform created in 2005 by the San Francisco based Unity Technologies, primarily for the video game industry. Today it is used in half of all mobile games, the company said, including the massively popular augmented reality game Pokemon Go. In 2018, the company began tailoring its tool set for architecture and design clients. In the next few years, "I think we'll see pervasive use of real time 3D in the building industry," said Tony Parisi, the company's global head of A.R. and V.R. "Think about what you can save on re dos alone" which could translate to more investment in design and materials. The software will also make it possible to build more difficult designs, said Gregg Pasquarelli, a partner with SHoP, pointing to the complicated hexagonal geometry of the tower. So far, the real world savings are hard to estimate. The on site crew is not yet using the software, relying instead on about 1,200 pages of 3 by 4 foot paper schematics mandated by the buildings department, said Foteinos Soulos, a senior associate with SHoP. But the construction workers will get their hands on the app soon and will build the tower using the software, he said; construction is expected to be completed in late 2021. "As the building goes up," Mr. Soulos said, "the app is going to get better." The use of 3D virtual tours in real estate is not new, but until recently it was too expensive for most of the market. Now Matterport, a tech company founded in the Bay Area in 2011, is preparing to make its spatial capture software available to a much larger audience. The company entered the nascent virtual reality field with a proprietary device now called the Pro2, a tripod affixed camera that takes 16 photographs per rotation, creating a 3D composite of a room. The images are stitched together to create a virtual replica of a space and can be viewed from a number of devices, including 3D headsets like the Oculus Rift. But that camera still costs about 3,400 (down from 5,000), limiting its mass appeal. In early 2019, thanks to years of improvements to its algorithm, the company announced that its software was compatible with off the shelf, 360 degree cameras that can be bought for around 300, a tenth of the price. Capturing a 1,500 square foot apartment takes about 15 minutes with an off the shelf camera, said R.J. Pittman, the company's chief executive. "The biggest growth has been in residential real estate," Mr. Pittman said, and in Airbnb short term rentals. Early next year, the company will support the use of smartphones to create the 3D tours, with monthly subscriptions starting at 9.95 to create and host the tours on its website. With the growth of so called iBuying the electronic sale of real estate that is often sight unseen and completed online more buyers and sellers may embrace the virtual house tour, said Mr. Pittman, whose tenure as chief product officer at eBay several years ago left an impression. If someone is willing to spend millions of dollars bidding on eBay, he said, "then a 1 million home surely can be a commonplace purchase on the internet." The technology has reached the point where the appeal of the virtual can surpass that of the real, presenting other quandaries. The 3D visualization company, roOomy, which was founded in Amsterdam in 2010 and entered the American real estate market about five years ago, can take photographs or 3D composites from a company like Matterport and fill the space with lifelike furniture and staging. 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. Looking to sell, but your living room is crammed with tchotchkes? "We can digitally remove the clutter," said Pieter Aarts, a founder and the chief executive at roOomy, and replace it with realistic renderings of high end furniture from brands like Perigold, one of the company's retail partners. (And lead prospective buyers to purchase those furnishings.) The company recently partnered with the luxury brokerage Sotheby's International Realty and the developer Toll Brothers to virtually furnish real and under construction apartments, wooing prospective buyers with virtually styled looks. "We want to give the consumer enough visual information to put in an offer without ever seeing the home," said John Passerini, the global vice president of interactive marketing for Sotheby's International Realty. Sotheby's has begun using the Magic Leap headset, a "mixed reality" device, to allow house hunters to walk through a virtually rendered space. The price to virtually stage a room now runs from 49 to 109, half of what it cost five years ago, Mr. Aarts said. The process remains labor intensive, involving several decisions about how to light the room and arrange the layout, and it can take up to three days to complete a commission, but thanks to the company's "render farm" in Chengdu, China, where it exports much of the process, the turnaround is usually closer to one day, he said. But has the pendulum swung too far in the virtual direction? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SAN FRANCISCO Employees at the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter voted on Tuesday to unionize, the first well known technology company to take the step toward being represented by organized labor. The decision, which was formalized by a vote count at the National Labor Relations Board, came down to a narrow margin, with 46 employees voting in favor of the move and 37 opposing it. The debate over a union and whether such representation was appropriate for highly paid tech workers had been a source of tension at the company for many months. "I'm overjoyed by this result," said Dannel Jurado, a Kickstarter senior software engineer who voted for a union. "There's a long road ahead of us, but it's a first step to the sustainable future in tech that I and so many others want to see." The pro union vote is significant for the technology industry, where workers have become increasingly activist in recent years over issues as varied as sexual harassment and climate change. Behemoth companies such as Google and Amazon have struggled to get a handle on their employees, who have staged walkouts and demanded that their companies not work with government entities and others. But large scale unionization efforts have faltered. Only a group of contractors at a Google office in Pittsburgh unionized last year, and a small group of Instacart workers managed to do so this month. In the past, most unionization drives have been associated with blue collar workers and lower paid white collar workers rather than white collar tech workers, who are often paid upward of 150,000 a year. Veena Dubal, an associate professor of employment law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, called the Kickstarter vote "a hugely important step" that "signals to workers across the tech industry that it is both desirable and possible to build collective structures to influence wages, working conditions and even business decisions." Kickstarter's chief executive, Aziz Hasan, said in an interview that what he was now "engaged in and thinking about is the ability for us to move forward." Kickstarter's employees will be affiliated with the Office and Professional Employees International Union and begin negotiating a contract with management over equal pay and inclusive hiring practices. The bargaining committee will include employees who opposed the union as well as those who supported it. "The tech sector represents a new frontier for union organizing," Richard Lanigan, the union's president, said in a statement. Kickstarter, which was founded in 2009 and has raised less than 15 million in venture capital, gives people a way to raise money for their creative projects such as a film or a new gadget from the public instead of through traditional investors, a model known as crowdfunding. The privately held company, which is based in Brooklyn and has 145 employees, has long positioned itself as altruistic. In 2015, it reincorporated as a public benefit corporation, meaning it also focused on providing a benefit to society rather than merely on generating profits for shareholders. Its employees' unionization drive began in earnest last year, after Kickstarter found itself embroiled in a debate over whether to cancel a fund raising effort on its site for a comic book that included images of people punching Nazis. Workers pushed the company to allow the project to continue, which it did. The episode sparked discussions among employees about formalizing their voice in the workplace. The incident "was one moment in a line of events that prompted Kickstarter employees to organize," Clarissa Redwine, a former organizer at the company, said in an email on Tuesday. "We wanted power in product decisions, certainty in the terms of our employment, and power to question management when needed." Last March, employees announced that they were trying to organize a union. Some colleagues dissented, arguing that organizers had not been transparent about their efforts and questioning whether white collar tech workers could benefit from a union. They said they were already highly paid and received more benefits than the average worker. One employee, who opposed the union effort and who asked not to be named because some dissenters had been harassed online, said that Kickstarter pays well and that some employees worried a contract might hamper them from engaging freely with leadership. It was also unclear whether a union would give employees sway over business decisions since traditional union contracts cover wages and hours, not corporate strategy. In September, Kickstarter fired two of the organizers behind the union attempt, including Ms. Redwine. The organizers said the company was retaliating and filed claims with the National Labor Relations Board. Their cases have not been resolved. Kickstarter said the two employees had been let go for performance issues unrelated to their organizing. The firings drew attention and support to the organizing effort, including from the author Neil Gaiman and the actor David Cross. "I'm very unlikely to post support or links on Twitter for Kickstarter projects in the future. Even if I very much want them to succeed," Mr. Gaiman tweeted in September. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Re "Klobuchar Drops Out of Biden's V.P. Search and Backs Picking a Woman of Color" (nytimes.com, June 19): I am a moderate Republican and have never supported Donald Trump. I'm confident that Joe Biden will do a better job as president and agree with most of his centrist ideologies. Because of his age, 77, I care deeply about whom he chooses for his running mate and feel that her positions should align with his. I believe that Amy Klobuchar is the most qualified vice presidential candidate, but her withdrawal from consideration leaves me searching for another moderate Democrat. Senator Tammy Duckworth and Mr. Biden share similar stances on health care, the environment and student debt relief. Representative Val Demings shows promise as a centrist on law enforcement and economic issues, but she lacks a real track record while in office. I'm disappointed that Ms. Klobuchar withdrew. I hope Mr. Biden chooses another candidate who appeals to fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters like me. Millions of moderate Republican votes will be lost in the general election if Mr. Biden chooses a progressive V.P. like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris or Stacey Abrams. Re "Biden's Search for a Running Mate Puts a Select Few Women in the Spotlight" (news article, June 14): When we make a case for whom Joe Biden should select for a running mate, the most important consideration should be "Is this person ready to be president?" if he is unable to fulfill his first term or doesn't run for a second one. Susan Rice is probably the most viable candidate for the vice presidency. She is a woman and an African American, which satisfy the diversity issues. Her credentials are impeccable: national security adviser, ambassador to the United Nations, etc. She has the experience, the temperament and the gravitas to be seriously considered for the vice president. There's one more African American woman who should be on Joe Biden's list of potential running mates. No further need for painstaking vetting in this case, given how much is already known about her and how fully she personifies the desired combination of insight and personality, leadership potential, and already proven ability to inspire and embrace diverse segments of the populace. This outside the box, yet sensible and workable choice would electrify the election in ways no one else (of any race) could right now: Michelle Obama. Re "Roadblock to a Biden Warren Ticket: Decades of Policy Disputes" (front page, May 23): As much as I admire Senator Elizabeth Warren, her selection as Joe Biden's running mate would be a major mistake that could cost him the election. An important reason that Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016 was that voter turnout among black women decreased from 70.7 percent in 2012, when Barack Obama headed the ticket, to 64.1 percent in 2016. Mr. Biden has promised to choose a woman as his running mate, which is admirable, but he needs to go farther and choose a black woman who will motivate black, female voters to come back to the polls. Senator Warren will not do that, and there are several excellent black female Democrats who will. An eminently qualified individual as the Democratic V.P. candidate was unfortunately left out of this otherwise comprehensive article. She is African American, more experienced in politics and diplomacy than any of the names mentioned and without question one who would help unite our nation. We speak of Condoleezza Rice. Sure, she's a Republican, but she's no ideologue. Yes, there are missteps in her past, yet she cares deeply for America. Plus, she's business friendly, a proven administrator and whip smart. If Joe Biden really wants "someone strong" and someone "who is ready to be president on Day 1," he should give Condi a call. A Democratic Republican ticket can win and unite America in the process. We definitely don't need a ticket complementing pick but instead require a ticket balancing pick. Also, Joe Biden doesn't need his V.P. pick's help in rebuilding the Democrats' Midwest "blue wall." As far as ticket balancing goes, Kamala Harris edges out Elizabeth Warren in terms of diversity, experience and appeal to independents and suburban voters. Then there is the sweet karma of role reversal. In 2008 a mixed race presidential candidate picked a ticket balancing white man as his V.P. In 2020 that same white man as presidential candidate picks a ticket balancing, mixed race person as his V.P. candidate who also happens to be the most qualified woman for the job. It just cannot get any better than Biden Harris. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
MADRID Spain is on track to meet the 2013 budget deficit target it agreed on with its European Union partners and should emerge from recession before the end of the year, the economy minister said on Monday. The minister, Luis de Guindos, also said the government would not require additional one time austerity measures as part of the 2014 budget that it will present this month. The budget will be based on an improved forecast for 2014, both in terms of overall growth and unemployment, which hit a record 27 percent earlier this year, Mr. de Guindos said. After the financial crisis burst Spain's construction bubble in 2008, "no doubt 2014 will be the first year when Spain will have some recovery," the minister said. Given the depth of Spain's recession, the European Commission agreed in May to give Madrid more time to reach its budgetary targets. Mr. de Guindos said he expected Spain's deficit to fall to the new target of 6.5 percent of gross domestic product rather than the initial target of 4.5 percent from 7 percent last year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
After the studied zaniness of a campaign with the tag line "None of this makes sense" a reference to how a five calorie antioxidant drink could still manage to taste good Bai Brands is looking to cast itself in a mature, inspirational image. But for a company whose popularity was cemented by a commercial featuring Christopher Walken channeling the boy band 'NSync, that may not be as easy as it sounds. "We're trying to really think about our personality," said Chad Portas, the company's chief creative officer. "We have a funny, irreverent, silly personality, but we also have a serious side." A niche player in the flavored water beverage category, Bai caught the attention of the singer Justin Timberlake and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group last year. The singer signed on as an investor and Snapple group purchased the start up for 1.7 billion. For the 2017 Super Bowl, Bai's in house creative team developed a commercial featuring Mr. Walken reciting lines from the hit NSync song "Bye, Bye, Bye" as Mr. Timberlake looked on quizzically. The play on words, combined with Mr. Walken's offbeat delivery, gave Bai a hit, but it also risked locking the brand into an identity. "It was really meant to be a bit of a one shot," Mr. Portas said of the Super Bowl commercial. "It wasn't meant to live beyond that." Bai executives saw the hashtag baibaibai spike on Twitter, and internal polls registered an increase in brand awareness, findings other market research confirmed. "They were one of the bigger winners in the Super Bowl," said Ted Marzilli, the chief executive of YouGov BrandIndex, which found that Bai's ranking in two out of three perception categories it measures rose significantly after the commercial aired. "I think they ran a quite quirky ad, and that seemed to resonate or stand out among the clutter." The challenge is that the company wants a more mature brand image today, but it doesn't want to walk away from that kind of exposure. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Bai recently expanded its two year old partnership with the Tribeca Film Festival, working with Tribeca Studios to develop a series of mini documentaries about people who performed odds defying achievements. The first featured Jessamyn Stanley, a yoga teacher dedicated to "body positivity" or, as her Facebook page puts it more bluntly, "yoga enthusiast and fat femme" who encourages people of all shapes and sizes to practice yoga. Another video profiled Burnell Colton, an entrepreneur who poured his life savings into opening a grocery store in the food desert of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina. The series is hosted on Bai's website as well as being pushed out via the brand's social channels and a YouTube channel, where it is accompanied by related content about the brand and its history, including what Mr. Portas called a "manifesto" by Mr. Timberlake. Bai will continue to air the Super Bowl commercial through the end of this month and supplement it with online and outdoor advertising speaking to the idea of ending a relationship with sugar. "To say 'bye bye' to sugar is very functional and very focused on our core Bai product," Mr. Portas said, a focus experts say could serve the brand well. "These days, the No. 1 thing consumers try to keep out of their diet is sugar," said Darren Seifer, a food and beverage industry analyst at the market research firm the NPD Group. Bai's low calorie antioxidant drinks, which are sweetened with stevia extract, hit a proverbial sweet spot, particularly with health and wellness minded millennials. As Americans eschew soda, they are looking for replacements that claim to deliver nutritional value, said Michael Bellas, chairman of Beverage Marketing Corporation. "Health and wellness is really more and more important," he said. "You're seeing that affect every beverage category." Bai is seeking to capitalize on those trends as it rolls out the inspirational arm of the campaign, which it envisions as a sort of umbrella brand identity as its grows its offerings to include classic soda flavors like root beer and cola, varieties of water, iced tea and coconut drinks. "It's really more about us as a company," Mr. Portas said, adding that each of Bai's beverage lines could wind up with individual campaigns. "For the past few years we've always focused on, 'This is what we make.' Then, we can tell them this is why we make it." Mr. Marzilli said YouGov BrandIndex data shows that Bai has experienced a recent uptick in awareness that is even greater than its post Super Bowl bump. "What's more impressive is that ad awareness is about 50 percent higher than it was after the Super Bowl," he said, suggesting that the combination of the two messages could be increasing their collective impact. "We are a mature enough brand to start talking about our philosophy as opposed to our product," Mr. Portas said. "This is really pulling back the curtain of our company." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
MEXICO CITY While the sex crimes trial of Harvey Weinstein takes center stage, another case is winding through a New York court with shattering implications. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are pursuing drug trafficking charges against Genaro Garcia Luna, a key architect of the drug war of former President Felipe Calderon. After Mr. Garcia Luna's latest hearing on Jan. 21, his lawyer reiterated that he pleas not guilty, saying he "adamantly denies that he accepted any bribes" (from traffickers) and will go to trial. The case is being heard by the same court that convicted Joaquin Guzman (El Chapo) last year. But in some ways this case is even more important. While the stories of drug lords fuel endless movies, TV series and novels, their convictions have failed to ease the blood bath in Mexico. There were a record 34,500 murders here last year, while the cocaine king Guzman was sentenced in New York to life in prison and sent to the Super Max. Some activists and academics have long called for going after the gangsters' political enablers, who often move to the United States with their millions of dollars. And to give credit to American prosecutors, they are now trying to do this. The charges against Mr. Garcia Luna, who has lived in a mansion in Miami since 2012, follow the conviction of the brother of the Honduran president on cocaine trafficking charges in October and various cases against Venezuelan officials. Such efforts are likely more effective in reducing the power of cartels than classifying them as terrorists, as President Trump considered doing. I first met Mr. Garcia Luna in 2005 when he headed Mexico's Federal Investigative Agency, and he cut the figure of the tough, square jawed crime fighter. When he became public security secretary in 2006, he oversaw a crackdown on traffickers that spread across the country, involving a hugely expanded federal police alongside soldiers and marines. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
WASHINGTON Last Thursday, Van Jones couldn't even buy a tuna wrap here without a woman in her late 20s walking up to him to ask for a selfie. Two minutes later, the Argentine woman behind the counter gave him a thumbs up. "It's like this everywhere," said Mr. Jones, 48. "I haven't paid for a cab since the election." That is when this CNN commentator, whose fiery political exchanges with supporters of President elect Donald J. Trump over the last nine months have often gone viral, declared that the Republican nominee's victory represented a "whitelash" against a black president and a changing electorate, as well as a deeply painful moment for minorities in America. "You tell your kids, 'Don't be a bigot,'" he said on camera. "You tell your kids, 'Do your homework and be prepared.' And then you have this outcome, and you have people putting children to bed tonight. And they're afraid of breakfast. They're afraid of, how do I explain this to my children?" Perhaps predictably, these comments garnered swift outrage from some on the right, such as Rush Limbaugh, who said the election had "nothing to do with white people wanting their country back on racial concerns." But in the liberal enclaves Mr. Jones inhabits, they were treated as something like gospel: a moment of naked honesty in a campaign season filled with distortions. "I've heard people say it was a star making moment," said Mr. Jones's friend Ava DuVernay, the Oscar nominated filmmaker. She quickly added that she had held him in that regard for quite some time, given his three decade career in civil rights activism, his best selling books on progressive issues and the considerable time he has spent on the lecture circuit. Growing up in Jackson, Tenn., Mr. Jones knew from an early age he would wind up doing a version of what he is doing now. His parents were educators who taught him about the importance of hard work and social justice. "In their view, excellence was a weapon against bigotry," said Mr. Jones, who worked on a student newspaper at the University of Tennessee at Martin before going to Yale Law School. Upon getting his law degree, Mr. Jones said, he moved to the Bay Area, was dumped after "like two weeks" by the woman he had relocated for and began working in criminal justice reform, starting the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an organization he named after the pioneering activist who mentored Stokely Carmichael and Representative John Lewis of Georgia. There, said Bryan Stevenson, who as the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative is one of the nation's most prominent voices on issues of mass incarceration and race, Mr. Jones emerged as an "early architect" of the movement, who got "people all over the country to care about" criminal justice reform. Right after Mr. Jones won a Reebok Human Rights Award in 1998, he spoke at the University of California, Berkeley, and met a law school student named Jana Carter, who ultimately became his wife. (They have two sons, 12 and 8, and live in Los Angeles. Mr. Jones asked that his children's names not be published.) But suing the police and staging protests took their toll. So did defending those who were released from prison but had no real opportunities for rehabilitation or employment. By 2002, Mr. Jones was seriously burned out. "I went to counseling, meditation groups, did every kind of self improvement course you could imagine," Mr. Jones said. "Tony Robbins, Landmark Forum, Hoffman Institute. I was like Frankenstein, experimenting on myself." With former Vice President Al Gore's green movement picking up steam, Mr. Jones soon had an epiphany: Why not try to bring together the fights against pollution and poverty, training nonviolent offenders to work in eco friendly construction, doing things like installing solar panels. He saw it as an ideal form of manual labor, since it couldn't be outsourced to other countries. This became the subject of a best selling book called "The Green Collar Economy" and led to a post in the Obama administration as an adviser to the president. Just six months after Mr. Jones arrived in Washington, the conservative talk show host Glenn Beck started an investigation into his past and found evidence showing Mr. Jones had flirted with communism in college and had made impolitic comments about Republicans in a videotaped address. Mr. Beck also charged that Mr. Jones had signed a 2004 petition from 911truth.org, a group that believes the United States government was involved with the attacks on the World Trade Center. As the Drudge Report began linking to the stories and right wing radio had a field day, it became clear that he had become a liability to the White House and he resigned. Another dark period followed ("an emotional black hole," as Mr. Jones described it), but he was able to rebuild his reputation. In July 2010, 911truth.org removed his name from a list of those who support its mission, after reviewing its records and failing to find evidence that Mr. Jones had signed the original petition. Then came a visiting professorship at Princeton University and a friendship with Prince, with whom he played table tennis, discussed black history (and was admonished by to stop swearing). And in 2012, CNN hired Mr. Jones to appear on a new iteration of "Crossfire" with Newt Gingrich, Stephanie Cutter and S. E. Cupp. "The show did not last, but we loved Van's voice," said Jeff Zucker, the network's president, who kept him on afterward as a commentator. In March 2015, Mr. Jones went on the air to talk about the 50th anniversary of the march on Selma, Ala., and received a message on Twitter from Ms. DuVernay, the director of the Academy Award winning film "Selma," about the civil rights struggle that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. They struck up a correspondence and went to breakfast in downtown Los Angeles, where Ms. DuVernay explained that she was working on a documentary about the criminal justice system for Netflix and wanted him to be a part of it. He said yes and referred Ms. DuVernay to Mr. Gingrich, who despite being on the opposite side of the aisle, is now his good friend, and talks in the film about the disparity in sentencing guidelines for white users of powder cocaine and black users of crack cocaine. Today, the movie, "13th," is a front runner for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and Mr. Jones has set up a production company to identify multimedia projects. Central to his progressive mission is finding common ground with right wingers, even as he disagrees with them on matters big and small. "He makes the conversation better every time he's a part of it," said Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor. "He's not an ideologue who's regurgitating talking points. He's incredibly thoughtful." "There's a ritual Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots quality to TV news, where everyone is supposed to come bludgeon the other person with their talking points," Mr. Jones said. "And over the course of the last 18 months, I've fallen out of love with that. I think the truth is messy." That segues neatly to Mr. Jones's new web series for CNN, called what else? "The Messy Truth." It debuted in late October, and the first episodes featured Mr. Jones going to Gettysburg, Pa., where he spoke with empathy and open mindedness to Trump supporters, who discuss their economic concerns and heartbreak over being branded as racists simply because they support Mr. Trump. Several thanked Mr. Jones at the end for really listening to them and asked him to pose for pictures. The symbolism of this black man surrounded by a phalanx of star struck white Trump supporters was hard to miss. (A televised special of "The Messy Truth" will air on CNN Dec. 6) Consequently, Mr. Jones didn't want people to infer from his election night comments that he thinks all of President elect Trump's supporters are bigots. At the same time, he thought it was essential not to brush aside the role of racism in Mr. Trump's ascent. "If you only focus on the toxic crap, you're not being fair to the Trump voters," Mr. Jones said. "But if you deny all the toxic crap, you're not being fair to the rest of Americans." There is little denying that Mr. Jones is popular among his colleagues at CNN, particularly after watching him last Thursday evening on a rooftop set overlooking the Capitol for a special taping of "Anderson Cooper 360." A cameraman approached during one of the breaks and implored him to run for office. "Please!" Mr. Jones said, "I'm running from office." Then, Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father who spoke out against Mr. Trump at the Democratic National Convention, approached to praise Mr. Jones. "We need more voices like his," Mr. Khan said. Mr. Jones had gotten into a testy interchange the night before with his Evangelical co panelist Kayleigh McEnany as she all but accused him of race baiting and he admonished her to stop interrupting him. Yet as they sat side by side near Mr. Cooper, shooting the breeze during commercials, it was clear no harm had been done. If there was anything disappointing about the evening, it was that Mr. Jones's other on camera nemesis Jeffrey Lord, a staunch Trump defender and former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp wasn't there for one of their ferocious but friendly altercations. "How can you not like Jeffrey?" Mr. Jones said. "He's adorable. He's like a Fraggle." Then he paused. "If a Fraggle had a tendency towards terrible revisionist history." "Which is exactly how I feel about him," said Mr. Lord, speaking later by phone. "I think Van's a terrific person and a great friend. We just disagree on everything, and God bless America." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Kendrick Lamar packed "Black Panther the Album" with nearly as many ideas, allusions and ambitions as one of his solo records. All the symbolic weight attached to "Black Panther" as a major Hollywood blockbuster with an African superhero, an African American director, a majority black cast and a vision of a highly advanced, self sufficient, colonialism free African kingdom extends to "Black Panther the Album," a collection of songs "from and inspired by" the film. That's a loose enough rubric to give the album's executive producers, Kendrick Lamar and the CEO of his label, Anthony Tiffith, known as Top Dawg, the leeway to build a coherent album that juggles multiple missions. After four studio albums and many other releases, Mr. Lamar is this moment's pre eminent rapper: furiously inventive, thoughtful, virtuosic, self conscious, musically adventurous and driven. "Black Panther the Album" is very nearly as densely packed with ideas, allusions and ambitions as one of Mr. Lamar's official solo albums. He's superbly abetted by his frequent collaborator Sounwave (Mark Spears), the producer or co producer on almost every track, who shifts the atmosphere constantly often within a single song deploying ratchety trap percussion, menacing electronics, blurry pitch shifted samples, and even a rock guitar. "Black Panther" does include the mandatory action film pop anthems. In "All the Stars," Mr. Lamar raps about conflict between hopeful choruses from SZA. But the song's release as a single has been marred by complaints that its video clip imitates, without credit, the imagery of a Liberian British artist, Lina Iris Viktor. Ending the album is the more grimly determined "Pray for Me," with the Weeknd mournfully vowing to "spill this blood for you" and Mr. Lamar rapping about how "I fight the world, I fight you, I fight myself" over a track that vaguely suggests African drumming and traditional ululations. Ballads, another soundtrack album requirement, are equally burdened. The English songwriter Jorja Smith sings "I Am" over an adamantly sluggish drumbeat and a lonely guitar line, affirming a sense of duty: "When you know what you got, sacrifice ain't that hard," she declares. The album's broader strategy is to hint at the movie's story while concentrating on tales of struggle and swagger much closer to home. From the songs, it would be easy to believe the movie was set in California, although there are bits of African input tucked in. Mr. Lamar dips into the roles of both T'Challa, the African king of the fictitious Wakanda who is also the Black Panther, and Erik Killmonger, his tenacious adversary. Yet in the track "Black Panther," which ends with the words, "I am T'Challa," Mr. Lamar is also quite insistently "King Kendrick": "King of the answer, king of the problem, king of the forsaken," he raps over a nagging, dissonant loop. Later in the track, with an almost conspiratorial voice, he asks, "What do you stand for? Are you an activist?" Mr. Lamar announces "All hail King Killmonger" in "King's Dead," after a litany of repudiation and denial "Not your baby, not your equal/Not the title y'all want me under" that may sum up Killmonger's negativity. But it also parallels Mr. Lamar's refusal on his albums to accept oversimplified roles like spokesman or generational conscience. The album's many guests don't try as hard to connect with the movie. Most of them appear as California figures, flaunting fancy cars and thinking about street level battles. "Paramedic!" is a showcase for the Sacramento group SOB X RBE, boasting about being "heavy in the streets" over plinking percussion. Ab Soul and Anderson .Paak share "Bloody Waters," matter of factly describing growing up around, and perpetuating, endless lethal gang rivalries: "It's warfare. Is war fair? No.," Ab Soul raps. The album welcomes some South African rappers and singers, and there are brief glimpses of South African rhythms; its most cheerfully upbeat song, "Redemption," features the South African singer Babes Wodumo riding the South African club beat called gqom. Mr. Lamar and Vince Staples share "Opps" with Yugen Blakrok, a South African rapper as quick and convoluted in her boasts as they are: "Crushing any system that belittles us/Antidote to every poison they administer/Switch it like time signatures," she raps. The track, produced by Sounwave with the composer of the film's orchestral score, Ludwig Goransson, uses a low, scowling synthesizer line, West African talking drums and a thumping beat suggesting South African house music. Another South African, Sjava, sings fervently in Zulu in "Seasons," a slow soul vamp that makes way for raps from two Californians, Mozzy and Reason, about being trapped in a cycle of institutional racism, poverty and violence. Those aren't problems that a song or a superhero can solve. But if "Black Panther" had wanted simple comic book escapism, it wouldn't have hired Mr. Lamar. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Invasive species are bad news, or so goes the conventional wisdom, encouraged by persistent warnings from biologists about the dangers of foreign animals and plants moving into new territories. Conservation organizations bill alien species as the foremost threat to native wildlife. Cities rip out exotic trees and shrubs in favor of indigenous varieties. And governments spend millions on efforts to head off or eradicate biological invaders. "I think the dominant paradigm in the field is still a 'when in doubt, kill them' sort of attitude," said Dov Sax, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University. "It's almost a religious kind of belief, that things were put where they are by God and that that's where they damn well ought to stay," said Ken Thompson, an ecologist and retired senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield in England, who wrote the 2014 book "Where Do Camels Belong: Why Invasive Species Aren't All Bad." "We're actually moving plants and animals around the world all the time," he said. "We have been for centuries." Dr. Thompson and other scientists have called for a more nuanced approach to evaluating whether the presence of a species is harmful or beneficial. Eradicating most invasive species is virtually impossible in an era of globalization, they note. And as climate change pushes more species out of their home ranges and into new areas, the number of so called invaders is likely to multiply exponentially. Yet the notion that a species should not be judged on its origins is highly controversial, as Mark Davis, a biology professor at Macalester College in Minnesota, discovered when he and 18 other researchers submitted an article in 2011 saying just that in the journal Nature. The response was immediate and signed by 141 scientists, many of them specialists in the field known as invasion biology. Their approach, they said, was already sufficiently "nuanced," thank you very much. "Most conservation biologists and ecologists do not oppose nonnative species per se," wrote Daniel Simberloff, a professor of environmental science at the University of Tennessee, who led the group that wrote the rebuttal. He added that Dr. Davis and his colleagues had vastly played down the severe harm that alien species caused. But in the five years since that contentious exchange, the idea that invasive species should be assumed guilty until proven innocent has begun to wane, the shift prompted in part, Dr. Davis speculated, by concerns over the use of chemical pesticides and the disruption of landscapes caused by many eradication efforts. Some alien species are undeniably harmful, a fact that neither Dr. Davis nor others who share his view dispute. The fungus that causes chestnut blight, for example, decimated thousands of trees and changed the American landscape in the early 1900s. The Zika virus is invading new regions, carried by infected mosquitoes that some say are being driven northward by warmer temperatures. The vampirelike lamprey, sneaking into the Great Lakes in the 19th century, gradually champed its way through the fish population. Islands and mountaintops are especially vulnerable to damage from invaders because their native species often evolved in isolation and lack natural defenses against predators or immunity to exotic diseases. The brown tree snake, accidentally transported to Guam, has virtually eliminated the bird population there. But, Dr. Davis noted, "all species have negative impacts on something," and the danger, he said, is often exaggerated. A study published Feb. 17 in the journal Biology Letters, for example, concluded that alien species "are the second most common threat associated with species that have gone completely extinct" since 1500 A.D. But the study, Dr. Davis and other experts said, relies on subjective judgments about extinction and does not distinguish between island species which are far more vulnerable and land or ocean species. In some instances, nonnatives offer clear benefits. In California, for example, monarch butterflies prefer to spend their winters in the branches of the eucalyptus, an exotic tree transplanted to the state more than 150 years ago and viewed by some as an invasive fire hazard. In Spain, non native crayfish serve as prey for migratory wetland birds, including some endangered species. And some notorious invaders can have positive effects. Western states have spent a fortune trying to eradicate the tamarisk tree, which many experts believe hogs more than its share of water and damages the habitat of native species. But Julian D. Olden, an associate professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, said tamarisks had been found to provide shelter for birds like the southwestern willow flycatcher. Some studies have also concluded that the tree's water use is not significantly different from that of other tree species. But the moniker did not achieve its full derogatory weight until the 1990s and early 2000s, when academic interest in the subject peaked and the number of papers on the subject generated by invasion biologists grew proportionately. To biologists like Dr. Simberloff, taking action to head off alien species early on makes sense, allowing governments to address threats before invaders take firm hold. Non native species are far more likely to do harm than native plants and animals, he argued, adding that the debate was "a phony controversy." Whether a species is viewed as native, however, often depends on when you arrived on the scene. Much of what Americans eat was originally imported: The horse, an icon of the American West, for example, was reintroduced by the Spanish thousands of years after the original North American horse became extinct. Several states list the honeybee as their state insect. But like many other state fish, insects and flowers, the bees are in fact immigrants. In at least one case, a species that was long extinct in its native range was treated as an interloper when it finally returned home. Beavers were common in Britain until they were hunted to extinction centuries ago. But when a group of the toothy dam builders took up residence along the River Tay in western Scotland several years ago, local farmers and fishermen greeted the animals with hostility, saying they posed a threat to farmland and salmon runs and were potential carriers of disease. Scottish Land and Estates, an organization representing landowners, insisted that the beavers' centuries of absence from Britain nullified their resident status, the Independent reported in 2010. "It's just silly," Dr. Thompson said, of the reaction to the Tay beavers. "I don't think we would have ended up in this ridiculous situation if we hadn't been so bombarded by propaganda about invasive species." Often, he and others say, "invasion" is just another word for "change." And the only thing that is certain is that more change is to come. Already, the flora and fauna of countries around the world are more homogeneous than they once were, as globalization has, accidentally or intentionally, moved exotic species from one place to another. In a paper published last month in the journal Conservation Biology, two scientists in California, Michael P. Marchetti and Tag Engstrom, describe the "paradox" of species that are under threat in their native range but are viewed as invasive in other places they have settled. They include the Monterey pine, endangered in California and Mexico but treated as a pest in Australia and New Zealand, and the Barbary sheep, endangered in Morocco and other countries but running rampant in the Canary Islands and elsewhere. "This is a challenge," Dr. Olden said. "If we identify a plant or animal that might not be able to respond to climate change, do we roll the dice and intentionally move that species northward, or up in elevation?" "We're playing a little bit of ecological roulette here," he added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
With Summer Nearly Over, It's Time to Think About Houseplants In a moment filled with all too much that is unfamiliar, there is consolation in small things that remain constant. My grandmother's Clivia sits beside me faithfully, asking little, as it has for more than 40 years. Although it's not that small anymore there are now three massive pots of it. Marc Hachadourian, the director of glasshouse horticulture and senior curator of the orchid collection at the New York Botanical Garden's 55,000 square foot Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, has a similar companion, a Sansevieria he adopted as a boy from his grandmother. It survived a house fire and has been thriving for decades. Recently, he replanted a Pilea cadierei, a botanical cousin of the social media star Pilea peperomioides (also known as a Chinese money plant), with its gleaming, coin like leaves. Mr. Hachadourian's Pilea was brought to the collection by Thomas H. Everett, one of the 20th century's leading horticulturists. Working with "horticultural history and the garden's history of scientific research and exploration," he said, "brings back the people who wrote the books I studied from and these are the plants they touched." That lineage of plants is not unique to the botanical garden, he noted: "People have that in their homes and families, too." But even if you're lucky enough to have inherited your grandmother's favorite plant, you may want to add to your collection. So as autumn beckons, we compiled a list of houseplants durable favorites, a few oddballs and the most cooperative orchids to tuck in with. Moses in the cradle (Tradescantia spathacea), with its purple, white and green foliage, is extra durable, too, "a classic houseplant." So is that Sansevieria, or snake plant and besides Grandma's plain, dark green version, there are variegates marbled or edged in white or gold, dwarf varieties and ones with cylindrical rather than blade like foliage. "Definitely keep them in bright, indirect light and pot bound," Mr. Hachadourian said. "They may even bloom, with honeysuckle fragrance flowers at night." Clivia miniata is another reliable choice; the only difficult part may be acquiring a good sized plant to start. Give it bright light, but not direct midday sun, and a well drained potting mix. Attempting to mimic the dormant period that triggers bloom in its natural environment, I bring mine indoors before the first freeze. I move it to the coolest place in my house, a mudroom with lots of windows, and start withholding water. Although I can't control it precisely it won't ever bloom on schedule and qualify for the annual Clivia Society shows in March I try to keep it under 55 degrees (but above 35) and dry from October to January. Next, after a couple of weeks of raising the temperature into the 60s, as the days get longer, I resume watering and flower stalks begin to emerge. "Quirky doesn't always mean difficult or challenging," said Mr. Hachadourian, who puts the once ubiquitous Christmas cactus (Schlumbergera) in this category, because among cactus family members, it is odd. "It's a very different kind of cactus," he said. "Most are spiny and angry, but not this one, with its leafless, jointed stems and then those wonderful flowers. I wish more people would grow them again." No desert plant, this bright filtered light guy: Its ancestors were epiphytic, living in trees in Brazilian rain forests. Schlumbergera blooms in response to shorter days, with continuous darkness (13 hours or more a night) accompanied by cooler nights (55 to 65 degrees), from around the autumnal equinox until about Thanksgiving. Both Bowiea and Schlumbergera like a fast draining potting mix. And don't overpot them: Tight quarters are preferred. Also, go easy on the water. (With Bowiea, begin withholding water when the vines start yellowing in fall, signaling dormancy.) And what's not to love about a plant that moves? Prayer plant, Maranta leuconeura, has vividly marked leaves that fold up at night. Mr. Hachadourian's aunt had one on her kitchen windowsill (it also makes for a nice hanging basket). Her reaction when she clued in to its nightly routine: "Miraculous magic!" Other rhizomatous types are easier, he said. One that the botanical garden's plant information line gets a lot of inquiries about is a 19th century hybrid, Begonia Erythrophylla, the beefsteak or pond lily begonia, that often shows up in old hand me down pots. Some durable rhizomatous varieties, with modified stems that look like caterpillars, have spent many years in my house. Marmaduke is a big plant with puckered, yellow green leaves splashed reddish brown, and pink spring flowers. Kit Kat is mounded and lower growing, with chartreuse spotted bronze leaves and white flowers. Most of the cane like or angel wing begonias, which have fibrous root systems, also do better in the home than most Rex types, Mr. Hachadourian said. Basic begonia care: Give them bright, filtered light and moderate humidity. Keep plants away from drafts and allow them to approach dryness between watering. (Kartuz Greenhouses, Logee's and Steve's Leaves offer a diversity of begonias and other indoor plants.) His multiplication how to: Take a leaf cutting, leaving as much petiole, or stalk, as possible. Cover a water glass with aluminum foil; poke a hole through with a pencil. Place the stem through the hole, where it will root in the water and eventually make a new plant. Or give someone an amaryllis bulb. (Mr. Hachadourian does, and then enjoys the excited email progress reports from recipients.) Pass along a jade plant, a Philodendron, a Peperomia. And why not share Cryptanthus, "an odd little bromeliad I got at the Two Guys discount store for 1.99 and used to propagate as a kid, and give away," he said. "I couldn't bear to throw the offsets out." Adaptable to varying light levels, Cryptanthus plants develop the best foliage color in bright light and, unlike other bromeliads, don't store water in their cup of leaves. New Isn't Always Better Don't stifle the urge to go with what is familiar and what has flourished before for you or for someone else whose plant sticks in your memory. The trendy, Swiss cheese like Monsteras of the moment the more holes and notches in the foliage, the more likes they seem to garner on Instagram may be thrown over when some pretty new leaf arrives on the scene. But our life partner plants will remain. "You think, 'I had a really nice X, and I want to get one again,' and that's good go with that," Mr. Hachadourian said. "Get more of the performers," he said. "People have a tendency to avoid the common, but there's a reason things are common: because they work." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
For This Choreographer, the Olympics Are the Zenith Brazilians know how to put on a good show on a shoestring this is the country of Carnival, after all. So despite Zika fears and reports about murky water in Guanabara Bay, the colorful and ecologically conscious Olympics opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro on Friday night went off without a hitch, and even more: It felt like a giant street party. The film directors Fernando Meirelles ("City of God"), Andrucha Waddington and Daniela Thomas were in charge of the show. The dancing, and there was a lot of it, was the responsibility of the veteran Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker. (Her official title is movement director.) Ms. Colker is a passionate mixer of forms. (In addition to dance, she has a background as a competitive volleyball player.) Her company, Companhia Danca Deborah Colker, combines death defying feats on giant hamster wheels, vogueing, hip hop, acrobatics and anything else that suits her eclectic sensibility. And she loves props: walls, vases, ropes, wheels. This was all evident in the show. And her experience working with Cirque du Soleil (in 2009) and with samba schools in Rio collectives that dance their way through the streets during Carnival surely came in handy. This is not someone easily intimidated by the complexities of a large spectacle with many moving parts. Even so, with 3,000 volunteers and 114 professional dancers under her direction, this was the biggest show of Ms. Colker's career. She spoke on the phone from Rio before and after the ceremony. Here are edited excerpts from those conversations. Were you happy with how the show turned out? It was the way I had expected, and everything worked. I'm relieved and happy and proud. I am used to working with a huge system, like when I worked with Cirque du Soleil. Early on I did five workshops and hired people in different styles and areas, which enriched the vocabulary a lot. I started planning a year and a half ago, and the first small workshops were about a year ago. Slowly, I built my team. I started working with the volunteers on May 27. Every weekend, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and during the week as well. How did the budget cuts for the ceremony affect you? Not so much. I had to cut one workshop and two weeks of rehearsal, but that was about it. Brazil and Rio are famous for their variety of musical and dance styles. What did you want to show? I wanted everything to bleed together. Like here in Brazil, where everyone is surviving and sharing together. Samba, funk a style specific to Rio, born in Rio and passinho, which combines breakdance and hip hop, and maracatu, from northern Brazil. I mixed all of this. How much of the dancing reflected your own compositional style? I brought things I know to represent Rio and Brazil, and some symbols that are part of my company, like the climbing wall and wheels. But I also found new ways to depict different cultures and people that have been building our country: indigenous, Asian, European, African. It looked like the dancers had a little bit of freedom when they were dancing on those platforms at one end of the stadium. In one section, you had parkour athletes running across an imaginary obstacle course of walls and platforms actually projections with a climbing wall at the other side. How did you come up with the idea? Parkour is the athletics of the street. They reveal the city through acrobatics. This is where I brought in my wall that I have used in previous shows a strong symbol, totally related to the idea of occupying the street and with the idea of sport. There was a section dedicated to indigenous Brazilian culture, in which you used hanging ropes, which dancers wove together. The indigenous peoples are usually shown with stereotypes of folklore. I didn't do this. I took an organic approach. I went twice to a place call Parintins in the Amazonian jungle, close to Manaus, to lead rehearsals. The idea of the weaving of the elastics was inspired by the oca thatch houses from Mato Grosso, a west central state in the rain forest . We wanted to show Brazil before colonization, something aesthetic, organic and huge. At the end of the show, there was this great samba moment ... We had all 12 of Rio's escola da samba samba schools not the entire ensembles, but a selection from each. Of course, we couldn't have everyone. We had to choose the best drummers and some special dancers. That was quite an entrance for the model Gisele Bundchen, walking the length of the stadium to "The Girl From Ipanema." Did you have a hand in that? Laughs I didn't do anything! That's Gisele. She has the most perfect walk and the most perfect legs in the world. What message were you and your collaborators trying to get across? The most important thing is the possibility to mix styles and ideas and aesthetics, dance and music and energy. We are a new country, with contemporary ideas, not just what foreign people think about Brazil: pretty women and football. Brazil is this and so many other things. It is an amazing place for contemporary dance and music and film and fashion and art. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Fredrick Brennan, who founded but later distanced himself from the 8chan message board that has given encouragement and visibility to violent extremists, is facing arrest in the Philippines in a "cyberlibel" case brought by the site's current owner. An arrest warrant was issued Thursday in Pasig City, his lawyer, Alex Acain, told Rappler, a news site in the Philippines. Mr. Brennan is currently in the United States, and it was unclear on Thursday if he planned to return to the Philippines, where he lives. The case stems from Twitter posts Mr. Brennan, who gave up control of 8chan in 2015, directed at Jim Watkins, who took over the site and also lives in the Philippines. Mr. Watkins, whose message board contains unapologetically racist material that has frequently cheered deadly violence, sued Mr. Brennan after tweets that referred to Mr. Watkins as "senile" and called the site's moderators "incompetent." In the Philippines, cyberlibel is a criminal offense that can be punished with prison time. In recent years, Mr. Brennan has repeatedly criticized the site and how it has been run. Several mass shooters, including those accused in shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, had posted hate filled screeds on the forum before their attacks, and been cheered on by the site's users. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It's hard to decide what lessons women should draw from Fox News's reluctant, slow motion ouster of Bill O'Reilly. Will they feel emboldened to report sexual harassment now that a powerful man has been held accountable after longtime accusations and hushed up settlements? Or is this an example of a company dragged into action after a financial calculus that the revenue he produced could not compensate for the reputational damage, the loss of advertisers and the potential thwarting of 21st Century Fox's global expansion? The answers aren't necessarily incompatible. Outright cheerleading is clearly premature, and many women remain skeptical that they will be heard or protected if they come forward with tales of what they've had to endure in the work force. But it may be that the power women wield outside their own places of employment helps even the game. Research shows that most women who experience sexual harassment don't report it, primarily because they fear retaliation, and with good reason. Sexual harassment is interwoven with power imbalances, and those who experience it are usually subordinate in rank, status and importance to a company's bottom line. The impunity of powerful men has long been a deterrent to women taking action. Women at Fox News and beyond have watched as the company has lurched toward pushing out for the same reasons two men integral to its success: Roger Ailes, its former chairman, and Mr. O'Reilly, whose viewership continued to soar in the face of public disclosure of the sexual harassment settlements. As Alisyn Camerota, a CNN anchor who for years co hosted a show at Fox News, said on Thursday: "It was Roger Ailes' fiefdom. He was the king. There was no higher authority that you could ever go to and there was harassment. And I tried, in my own way, to raise the flag and to talk to people about it. I went to my superiors to talk to them about it and there was certainly a feeling of 'this is Roger, what are you going to do? Who are you going to go to?' " Mr. Ailes and Mr. O'Reilly have denied the accusations against them. In both cases, the sons of Fox's founder, Rupert Murdoch, had to coax their father to act even after internal investigations turned up more evidence of a toxic culture for women at the company. Female employees reported being pressed to trade sexual favors for advancement and endure explicit sex talk, groping, and more. Two settlements with Mr. O'Reilly took place after the company had publicly pledged it would no longer tolerate such behavior. It's also notable that women are scarce at the senior levels of Fox News, on or off the air. Rupert Murdoch took over leadership of Fox News after Mr. Ailes was forced out. Megyn Kelly, its most visible female anchor, left the network partly because of Mr. O'Reilly's public condemnations of women who had complained about sexual harassment, and because she grew skeptical that Fox's culture would change. The replacement for Mr. O'Reilly's show is hosted by a man, Tucker Carlson, and most of the other shows in the prime time lineup feature men, with the exception of Kimberly Guilfoyle and Dana Perino, still outnumbered by men on "The Five." Judging from more than 950 comments posted on Facebook after The New York Times asked women for their assessment of Mr. O'Reilly's departure, many doubted that this heralded a new era for Fox or would encourage more women to report sexual harassment. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "I'm glad pressure was put on the network but no... this does not show men in power will be held accountable. It shows that Fox was losing money," Elizabeth Gibbons Woodhouse wrote. "This was a financial decision. Accountability would have been thoroughly investigating the multiple complaints, not just allowing O'Reilly to throw money at them to keep them quiet." And Mairead O'Grady commented: "The issue of sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace will not be resolved until we have a diverse work force at all levels of the corporate world. There is little hope that claims of mistreatment will be handled fairly with the astonishing imbalance of power between men and women at work. When you know that reporting an issue puts your career at risk, exposes you to possible retaliatory actions, and potentially could sideline you at that organization you think twice about whether it's worth it." Some women defended Mr. O'Reilly, sensing a liberal conspiracy and saying the accusations were unproven. Others said they remained discouraged that a man who boasted of forcing himself on women had been elected president. "This isn't really a win for women," said Lynn Thompson. "This was done to satisfy advertisers, not because it was the right thing to do. Men in powerful positions will continue to taken advantage of women and women will be seen as liars if they report it. We elected a man who admitted to assaulting women and much of the public doesn't care. Kind of speaks for itself." Many women recounted their own experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace. "I'm in the ad industry, and things haven't changed all that much," Michelle Barlow Dickens wrote. "It's still Mad Men, only a little more covert." Patty Ryan told of witnessing a judge press women against a wall and stick his tongue in their mouths. Fox was forced to act in the end because its treatment of women was exacting a cost it could not bear. The more than 50 advertisers who pulled ads did so, they said, because they could not afford to alienate women and their considerable purchasing power. It was bad for their brands to be associated with Mr. O'Reilly. 21st Century Fox's stock price fell 6 percent during the O'Reilly scandal. It's not that Fox's revenue suffered Mr. O'Reilly's viewers remained loyal and many advertisers redirected their ads to other Fox shows but investors feared longer term reputational damage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Even if you've never seen "Election," Alexander Payne's 1999 comedy about high school politics run amok, you probably know something about Tracy Flick. She is, after all, a pop culture archetype. In the 20 years since the movie, adapted from a novel by Tom Perrotta, was released to critical praise and disappointing ticket sales, Tracy's name has become a synonym for relentless drive and obnoxious self confidence. Her image sending her hand skyward in class when she knows the answer, which is always; passing out cupcakes frosted with her own name; haranguing her schoolmates at Carver High to "Pick Flick" for student body president has been immortalized in countless memes. Reese Witherspoon may have gone on to win an Oscar and run with the mean moms on "Big Little Lies," but Tracy remains (along with Elle Woods from "Legally Blonde") her defining role. Even if you have seen "Election," you may have trouble remembering the name of Tracy's antagonist, the social studies teacher played by Matthew Broderick. "Jim McAllister" rings no particular pop cultural bells. The guy is too bland, too ordinary in both his virtues and his shortcomings, to stand as an archetype of anything. He lingers in the collective memory as Tracy's foil, a flawed fellow whose modest aspirations and pathetic lapses are all but obliterated by the locomotive of her ambition. It's not that anyone thinks of Mr. M as his students call him as the hero of the story. Just as Reese Witherspoon's perkiness scores a few points in Tracy's favor, so does Broderick's affability make it hard to hate Jim. This was even truer in 1999, when we knew him primarily as Ferris Bueller, the voice of Simba in "The Lion King" and the kid who saved the world from nuclear destruction by playing tic tac toe with a computer. How can you not root for this guy, even if he makes some pretty outrageous mistakes? That's more or less how I remembered "Election" until I watched it again recently, and 20 years of accumulated criticism suggests that I'm not alone. Here I should issue a spoiler warning, both for readers who haven't seen "Election" who should stop reading and stream it right now and for those who think they know what it's all about: The movie has been persistently and egregiously misunderstood, and I count myself among the many admirers who got it wrong. Because somehow I didn't remember or didn't see what has been right there onscreen the whole time. Which is that Mr. M is a monster a distillation of human moral squalor with few equals in modern American cinema and that Tracy Flick is the heroine who bravely, if imperfectly, resists his efforts to destroy her. She's not Moby Dick to his Ahab so much as Jean Valjean to his Inspector Javert. But it's trickier than that, because the movie's moral structure is hidden. Maybe the apt literary analogy is to Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" a narrator whose vileness is camouflaged by self delusion and charm. "Lolita" invites misreading in a way that puts the reader's soul at risk, and "Election" poses a similar test for its audience. How despicably does a man have to behave before he forfeits our sympathy? How much does a woman a teenage girl have to suffer before she earns it? The results, as enshrined in Tracy's status as a near universal object of contempt (and Mr. M's as an afterthought) aren't especially edifying. Nor are they surprising. A recent article by Charles Bramesco in The Guardian affirms the conventional wisdom about how "smug and annoying" Tracy is, and cites the fact that she ultimately goes to work for a Republican congressman as further proof of her "unslakable thirst for power." Pieces published during the 2016 presidential campaign emphasized Tracy's similarity to Hillary Clinton, rarely in ways that complimented either one. But let's review the tape. One of the very first things we learn about Tracy Flick is a graphically sexual description of her anatomy, offered by Jim's colleague, Dave Novotny. Dave's words, delivered straight to the camera, come out of nowhere, one of a number of jarring plot transitions and tonal shifts that Payne throws in to keep us alert and off balance. Jim fills in the tawdry back story for the audience, detailing what most accounts of the movie characterize as an affair between a student and a teacher. Really, though, it's a textbook case of predatory grooming. Dave undermines Tracy's self esteem and separates her from her peers by telling her how lonely she seems to him, and offering himself as a special friend, someone who understands her in a way nobody else can. He swears her to secrecy, takes her to his house, puts "Three Times a Lady" on the stereo and drags her into the bedroom. Right before that happens, she's shown sitting on his sofa sipping root beer from a can, her posture and facial expressions decidedly childlike. The consequences of Dave's transgression he's fired from his teaching job, divorced by his wife and exiled from the modern day Eden of Omaha, Neb. leave Jim in an uncomfortable spot. His festering grudge against Tracy grows from his unstated, unmistakable conviction that she ruined Dave's life and made his own less fulfilling. The loss of his best friend is one of a series of grievances lurking behind Jim's cheerful Midwestern demeanor. His self pity is the engine that drives the plot. Disgusted by Tracy's apparently uncontested path to the presidency she wants the job, takes it seriously and is willing to work hard to get it Jim recruits Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run against her. Paul, a popular football player sidelined by a skiing injury, might be a worthier target for his teacher's scorn than Tracy, but that's not how the world works. Even though he's not all that bright or studious, Paul has the air of a born winner. He's a jock, the son of a wealthy businessman and, it's important to note, a genuinely nice person. Tracy, in contrast, is a striver, the only daughter of a single mother who works as a paralegal and has raised Tracy in a regimen of up by the bootstraps positive thinking. More often than not, a mediocrity like Jim will choose privilege over merit, even as he persuades himself he's doing the opposite leveling the playing field, giving everyone a fair shot and a free choice, upholding the principles of democracy. What he does, by the end, goes far beyond meddling, and also beyond the confines of the campaign. Jim, who is married, pursues an affair with Dave's ex wife, Linda, using some of the same passive aggressive pickup artist tactics with her that Dave did with Tracy. When Tracy wins the election there's an asterisk here that I'll return to shortly Jim destroys the ballot that would have given her a one vote victory over Paul, reversing the outcome. (And also, curiously enough, canceling his protege's vote, since Paul didn't feel right about checking the box next to his own name.) To be sure, that kind of gloating, even when nobody seems to be watching, isn't the best etiquette. And Tracy isn't perfect. She can play hardball in a way that seems a little intense for high school. We know that after accidentally damaging one of her campaign posters, she lost control and tore them all down, covering up her rampage and letting someone else take the fall for it. Still, when measured against Mr. M's sins, Tracy's peccadilloes look pretty trivial. Or so "Election" tells us, whether or not we absorb the lesson. A recurring theme first explored in Mr. M's class is the difference between ethics and morals. The distinction is fuzzy in most of the characters' minds, but Payne and his co writer, Jim Taylor, hone it to a very sharp point. Some of what Tracy does is surely unethical. But Jim McAllister is thoroughly immoral. Does anybody care? When "Election" was first released, it was recognized as a clever satire of American life. Twenty years later, the satire, and the political allegory, seem much darker and deeper. Maybe this is because the movie has been misunderstood for so long. Or maybe it springs from of a deeper set of misunderstandings and collective delusions. More than Perrotta's novel, which highlights Tracy's sexual agency in the whole Dave Novotny business, Payne's film exposes the casual misogyny baked into the structures of civic and scholastic life. But two years after what was then commonly called the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the public was perhaps disinclined to see it that way. Nor, a year before the Florida recount and Bush vs. Gore, was anyone prepared to listen to Payne and Taylor's prescient warnings about the fragility of democratic norm s or to acknowledge their diagnosis of the rot afflicting the whole system. When he first presses Paul to throw his hat into the ring against Tracy, Mr. M offers up a pretty weak defense of democracy, belaboring a shaky metaphor about apples and oranges and freedom of choice. Paul buys the idea even though he's unable to decide on a favorite fruit of his own. Since he's accustomed to getting what he wants sex, friends, attention before he even knows he wants it, he doesn't have much stake in a system designed to allocate imaginary goods. But he's happy to go along with it. For Tracy, though, the stakes are utterly real her identity and her future depend on succeeding in every competition she enters and her faith in the system is correspondingly fervent. She has made herself (with her mother's encouragement) into the living embodiment of everything we say we value, in ordinary citizens as well as in our leaders. She cares. She participates. She works hard. She refuses to see herself as a victim. She's everything America celebrates in theory and, as often as not, despises in practice. The truth here comes that asterisk is that neither Tracy nor Paul wins the election. The third candidate is Paul's rebellious younger sister, Tammy (Jessica Campbell), who enters the race out of spite after the girl she loves dumps her for Paul. Tammy's platform is purely nihilistic. Everybody knows that student government is a joke, and her appeal is that she has the nerve to say so. When she does, in her first campaign speech, she earns a standing ovation and a suspension from school. She accepts blame for Tracy's poster shredding tantrum as a way of getting thrown out of Carver altogether and sent to a Catholic girls' school. Who needs democracy? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Stefani Reynolds, Sarah Blesener for The New York Times, Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images, and Brittainy Newman/The New York Times. Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Stefani Reynolds, Sarah Blesener for The New York Times, Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images, and Brittainy Newman/The New York Times. Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Stefani Reynolds, Sarah Blesener for The New York Times, Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images, and Brittainy Newman/The New York Times. This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For months, New York City managed to keep the coronavirus under control until it didn't. As coronavirus cases surge to fearsome levels across the country, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday that the city's positivity rate, which had been rising steadily since October, had exceeded 3 percent, setting off a shutdown of the city's public school system, the nation's largest. It's a major setback for the city's recovery, as well as a source of fury for parents baffled by the priorities the move telegraphed: As schools closed on Thursday, limited indoor dining continued and gyms remained open. The situation is not unique to New York. "In many American cities," my colleague Binyamin Appelbaum wrote on Twitter, "children are allowed to eat in restaurants but not to learn in classrooms." Why? Here's what people are saying. There isn't a uniform answer. So far, the bulk of the evidence suggests that schools, especially for younger children, are not stoking community transmission of the coronavirus. But much of the evidence about the risk of school reopenings is flawed and the research inconclusive, especially when it comes to middle and high school students. In the absence of a firm consensus, experts told Ms. Mandavilli in September that they agreed on one point: Schools should reopen only if community transmission is low that is, if less than 5 percent of people tested receive a positive result. By that measure, most school districts in the nation would not be able to have in person classes without problems, though New York City theoretically could for now. But to the extent that it can be known, "the No. 1 factor is what your local transmission is like," Helen Jenkins, an expert in infectious diseases and statistics at Boston University, told Ms. Mandavilli. "If you're in a really hard hit part of the country, it's highly likely that somebody coming into the school will be infected at some point." 'Exactly the opposite of what we should be doing' Many public health experts say that closing schools first defies epidemiological explanation. Virtually all social activities during an outbreak of this magnitude carry risk, and determining which to cut back on requires weighing a restriction's benefits against its harms. Some have analogized this calculus to that of a budget: In the budgetary analogy, trying to reduce coronavirus risk by closing schools is like trying to save money by canceling your electricity service: modestly effective in some cases, maybe, but not exactly the first expense to cut. Restaurants, gyms and other crowded indoor sites accounted for some eight in 10 new infections in the early months of the U.S. coronavirus epidemic, according to a November analysis. "These are the activities responsible for a vast majority of transmissions, and these should be the focus of our initial interventions," Aaron E. Carroll writes in The Times. "Because schools are not the major cause of the problem, shutting them down won't do enough on its own to slow the spread of the disease." But shutting schools down will do and has already done a great deal of harm, the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argues. "America's education system already transmits advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next: Rich kids attend rich schools that propel them forward, and low income children attend struggling schools that hold them back," he writes. "School closures magnify these inequities, as many private schools remain open and affluent parents are better able to help kids adjust to remote learning. Meanwhile, low income children fall even further behind." What's more, the American Academy of Pediatrics has said that school is an important bulwark against hunger, social isolation, physical and sexual abuse, drug use, depression and thoughts of suicide. Removing it "places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality." The damage done is not only to children. In opposite sex couples, the burden of unexpected family needs tends to fall on women, a pattern the pandemic has thrown into stark relief: About 1.6 million fewer mothers are in the labor force this fall than would be expected without school closures. In many cases, the gendered division of parental labor has not just pushed women out of jobs they held, but also prevented them from seeking new ones, causing potentially permanent economic scarring. "Other countries have social safety nets," Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University, told the journalist Anne Helen Petersen. "The U.S. has women." The alternatives on the table There are many ways we could keep schools safe if we chose to: Making class sizes smaller, staggering lesson times and requiring universal masking would all help, as would moving some classes to auditoriums, libraries and vacant buildings, Dr. Carroll argues. Measures could also be taken elsewhere that would significantly reduce risk but still fall far short of a lockdown. "What the public interest requires for now is a suspension of indoor dining in areas where the virus is spreading, combined with federal aid to keep restaurants in business," The Times editorial board writes. "While that alone wouldn't totally control the virus or reopen schools, it would help." It's an approach that would require billions of dollars from the federal government, but it would be well worth the investment, Dr. Carroll argues: "When not if businesses are forced to shutter temporarily in the near future, we can tide them over with money, and we absolutely should. When schools are closed, however, handing students a check will not replace what they've lost." That leads one back to the central and intractable problem, however, which is that neither businesses nor children are getting a check anytime soon, as The Washington Post's Jeff Stein has reported. The Senate returned from recess last week to confirm more of President Trump's judicial nominees but adjourned on Wednesday until after Thanksgiving, with a prospective relief bill nowhere in sight. "It's not like we get the luxury of just staying home," Isis Usborne, a worker at a burger joint in Denver, told Colorado Newsline. "I feel like there's not any kind of support from our government. I feel like they're just hoping that more of us die, so that they don't have to worry about us. And then they're going to be real upset when they realize that means we can't make their burgers." Complicating the calculus further, many federal and state officials have said that the current surge in infections is being driven in no small part by private social gatherings. "What we're seeing as the increasing threat right now is actually acquisition of infection through small household gatherings," Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said last month. "Particularly with Thanksgiving coming up, we think it's really important to stress the vigilance of these continued mitigation steps in the household setting." Closing businesses, then, might do less good than some hope, and might even be counterproductive in the case of restaurants, Christian Britschgi argues at Reason. "If people aren't allowed to socialize in a sanitized, socially distanced, well ventilated restaurant, they might be more likely to gather in private homes that might not have any of those measures in place," he writes. If there are any loose ends to be found in this Gordian knot, it lies with those in possession of the means to stay home, who have both more power and more duty to save lives this winter than they might think. "'Personal responsibility' is bad public policy," the journalist E. Alex Jung tweeted. No doubt, but the public policy we have is even worse. Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
What books are on your nightstand? "The Hidden Life of Trees," by Peter Wohlleben, and "A Thousand Mornings," by Mary Oliver. What's the last great book that you read? When I started writing a memoir, I went and read a bunch of memoirs to get different people's take on the whole thing. I was really struck by Assata Shakur's "Assata" and Dr. Willie Parker's "Life's Work" (not technically classified as a memoir but I think of it that way). Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father" and Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" were also real standouts, both particularly epic. "Miles: The Autobiography," a book put together by Quincy Troupe, sure left an impression, too. I was captured for a time by each of these books, but I think it was Parker's voice that ended up providing the most guidance to mine as I was writing my own story. Who are your favorite musician writers? Your favorite memoir by a musician? I thought the Springsteen memoir was an amazing piece of work. I especially loved how he wrote about his fellow musicians in the E Street Band and what it's like to be part of a musical family. I was impressed with how vulnerable he allowed himself to be too, toward the end, when he shared with us the challenges of facing advancing age. I thought he was brave not to end the tale before the man "born to run" has to actually stop running and deal with himself. I also found books by lesser known artists, such as Suze Rotolo's "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties" and Dave Van Ronk's "The Mayor of MacDougal Street," which I thought were great. Revealing of a whole cultural movement and era and scene. And speaking of a scene, there's nothing quite like seeing all the greats of jazz through the eyes of Miles Davis! Now that was a gripping autobiography. Goddess bless Quincy Troupe for weaving together what must have been endless hours of taped interviews, with Miles and everyone, tons of research and reading, listening and corroborating and cat herding and coming up with such a seamless and authentic feeling narrative. Quincy wrote a story that feels like it's coming hissing right out of Miles's mouth into your ear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
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