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CLEVELAND The first ever Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art here, conceived by the collector Fred Bidwell and directed by the artist and curator Michelle Grabner, is organized like a scavenger hunt. In addition to more or less self contained shows at places like MoCA Cleveland and the Akron Art Museum, the festival includes a number of unusual stand alone installations that seem designed to guide visitors all over the city and its surrounding suburbs. Katrin Sigurdardottir mined clay in Iceland, formed it into tiles that she arranged in architectural stacks, and contributed several handsome and evocative photographs of those stacks to the Akron Art Museum's well balanced show, organized by Ms. Grabner and Ellen Rudolph, the museum's chief curator. The tiles themselves Ms. Sigurdardottir buried around town, and one group, marked with a discreet sign in a grassy lot on an Akron back street, brings you right to the surprising doorstep of an ornate Lao temple. Back in Cleveland, Yinka Shonibare MBE created a majestically proportioned installation, "The American Library." It's composed of a huge free standing bookshelf, filled with volumes wrapped in African wax cloth and stamped in gold with the names of notable immigrants to the United States. The work highlights the glory of Brett Memorial Hall, at the Cleveland Public Library, with its Romanesque Revival ceiling and William Summer murals. And the Cleveland Curry Kojiwurst special sausage, designed for the festival by the artist John Riepenhoff and available from a number of food vendors, is a good excuse to have lunch at West Side Market. One downside of this diffuse approach is that it can make what purports to be an art festival feel a little too much like a Chamber of Commerce advertising campaign, which isn't pleasant even if, as I did, you find the pitch convincing. The upside, though, is that each discrete group of art works has plenty of space to make its own discrete impact. And the most powerful may be in the Ohio City neighborhood, where you can find the 40 year old alternative gallery Spaces; St. John's Episcopal Church; and Mr. Bidwell's Transformer Station gallery. "A Color Removed," conceived by the artist Michael Rakowitz and installed at Spaces art gallery, is a response to the fatal police shooting of the 12 year old Tamir Rice in 2014. The color in question is orange, because police blamed the shooting on a missing orange safety cap on the boy's toy gun; people in Cleveland and around the world have donated orange objects of all kinds tarps, food wrappers, a set of plastic vampire teeth that are now displayed around the gallery. It's an idea that could have been exploitative, manipulative or literal minded. But because Mr. Rakowitz along with the Spaces staff, and Tamir's family, who are involved in the project lets these objects accumulate with minimal intervention, it's a pure precipitation of frustration and grief. Dawoud Bey's "Night Coming Tenderly, Black" is installed just three blocks away in the beautifully peeling St. John's Episcopal Church, once the last stop before freedom in Canada for many fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. Large photographs of rural Ohio printed so dark that it's hard to make them out are hung at eye level above the church's pews like so many portals to the still living past. In combination with "A Color Removed," it's devastating. Notable at the Cleveland Museum of Art are a series of huge woodcuts by Kerry James Marshall, Allen Ruppersberg's crisp lightbox photographs of Cleveland, and Marlon de Azambuja's paradoxically whimsical "Brutalismo Cleveland," an airy little city of found bricks and cinder blocks held up with a menagerie of interesting clamps. At MoCA Cleveland, a pairing of Eugene von Bruenchenhein's uniquely odd paintings of undersea glass towers with the Georgia born painter Walter Price's densely colored scatterings of fractured imagery walks the line between dream and nightmare. But the most fully realized show is that one in Akron, where Ms. Grabner and Ms. Rudolph have mixed high concept work by young artists well known in New York, like Walead Beshty's impaled office equipment, with less familiar jewels, like aluminum grids of blinking lights by the Croatian artist and computer scientist Vladimir Bonacic, who died in 1999. The highlight is a group of comic, delightful, implicitly heartbreaking drawings and wall mounted models by the young artist Nicholas Buffon, who lives and works in New York. Working from memory and found images, Mr. Buffon has offered the museum 20 or so vignettes of gay life and history in Akron and New York. A drawing set on the High Line in Manhattan, which features a poster of Zoe Leonard's furiously direct 1992 protest poem "I want a president," focuses less on the poem's political context than on four passers by in autumn jackets who've stopped to read it. A meticulous wall mounted model of the Stonewall Inn, site of the police raid and riot that kicked off the gay liberation movement, is notable for its details: 12 tiny pride flags and, in the window, a "B" from New York's Department of Health. The drawing "Pizza Liberation," 2017, in which the artist holds a drooping slice of pizza next to George Segal's statues of the Gay Liberation Monument in the West Village, is irreverent, honest, and self deprecating. It's also a distinctly individual take on a well known landmark, rendered in a style that seems to take inexhaustible joy in the process of drawing which makes it the perfect way to wind up a scavenger hunt. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
STANFORD, Calif. An unorthodox device for treating pelvic pain was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and its inventors say it could help legions of men in misery from what are misdiagnosed as prostate problems. The therapeutic wand resembling a longshoreman's cargo hook, but made of plastic, is used to gently press on "trigger points" in pelvic muscles that are in spasm. What makes it unorthodox is that men must insert it rectally; a small number of women use it vaginally. The treatment, known as the Stanford pelvic pain protocol or the Wise Anderson protocol, includes extensive relaxation therapy and sessions of mapping the internal points to be stretched. "People who see us have failed all other treatments," said David Wise, a psychologist, who devised the protocol with Dr. Rodney U. Anderson, an emeritus professor of urology at Stanford's medical school, and Tim Sawyer, a physical therapist. "They've been on antibiotics, anti inflammatories, Flomax," Dr. Wise continued. "Some have had wicked surgeries. Some have lived with pain for 20 years. Quite a few are mad at their doctors." Since 1995, the three men have taught the protocol to 2,500 patients; after clinical trials, the wand won F.D.A. approval late last year. As a treatment for pelvic pain, the technique has been accepted by the American Urological Association, said Dr. J. Stuart Wolf Jr., chairman of the association's guidelines committee. The wand costs 800, but is available only as part of a set of training sessions. Its inventors hold six day workshops for 4,300, but doctors and therapists in other cities and overseas set their own fees. Health insurers usually pay for the physical therapy but not the relaxation techniques or the wand itself, Dr. Wise said. Urologists frequently misdiagnose pelvic pain as a prostate problem, Dr. Anderson said. Cancer must be ruled out, of course, but the pain typically starts in a person's 20s or 30s, when prostate cancer is uncommon. Wendy W. Isett, an association spokeswoman for the urology association, declined to comment on Dr. Anderson's assertion, saying, "We do not have any reliable data on the diagnostic patterns." Like tension headaches or nocturnal tooth grinding, the pain appears to be a response to stress. "In some men, stress makes them clench exactly the way a frightened dog does when it pulls its tail between its legs," Dr. Wise said. "They get a charley horse in the pelvis, but one that can't be stretched out." Mr. Sawyer, the physical therapist, said that patients tended to be driven men, many of them athletic and in good health. The pain often begins after a personal failure like a divorce or a job loss. The first twinge is sometimes described as a golf ball in the rectum or stab in the groin. It starts in the web of muscles that move the pelvis, push food through the intestines and control the bladder, sphincter and ejaculation, but can radiate to the back, the testicles or the penis. Sex, urination or bowel movements can set it off, and sitting, driving or even wearing underwear can become excruciating. Telephone interviews with nine male patients, who spoke on the condition that they be identified only by first name, echoed those descriptions. Most were professionals physicians, lawyers or business executives. All had endured years of intermittent agony and had seen several doctors before hearing of the protocol, usually through a web search that turned up the book "A Headache in the Pelvis," by Dr. Wise and Dr. Anderson, published in 2003. All had been prescribed multiple drugs, including antibiotics, prostate shrinking medicines, anti inflammatories, antidepressants, anti anxiety pills, vitamins, steroid injections, even methadone. "I consulted with several urologists," said Allen, an internist in Los Angeles. "Almost to a man, they called it chronic prostatitis." "In retrospect, it seems incredible," he continued. "There was nothing wrong with my prostate." Several said surgeons suggested operations, and two had surgery to sever ligaments around the pudendal nerve. "That not only didn't help, but I got additional scrotal pain," said Eric, a doctor in Washington. "That really scared me." Another patient had a hernia operation that found no hernia. Others have had a testicle removed, and one patient had his coccyx, or tailbone, removed, Dr. Wise said. Another had a colostomy because defecation was too painful. Several described explosions of agony the first time Mr. Sawyer touched their internal muscles. "My pain went through the roof," said Al, who works in financial services in Los Angeles. "But that was a real light bulb going on that's where the pain was." Trigger point therapy pressing on knotted muscles to relax them has been used by physical therapists for decades. (Acupressure, in Chinese medicine, uses similar points.) Dr. Janet Travell, the first woman to serve as White House physician, used trigger point therapy to treat President John F. Kennedy's back pain; Mr. Sawyer studied under Dr. David G. Simons, a protege of Dr. Travell. The germ of the protocol emerged in 1994, Dr. Wise said, as he visited yet another urologist during a flare up of what by then was 22 years of pain. While trying to massage his prostate for fluid to test for bacteria or cancer, he said, the doctor pressed instead on the nearby levator ani muscles. "It was probably an accident," Dr. Wise said, "But when I left, I was pain free for a few days." He began pressing the spot with one of his fingers, which was awkward, and consulted a therapist who treated women. He also used relaxation techniques he was trained in.. A year later he visited Dr. Anderson. In an interview in his house on the Stanford campus, Dr. Anderson said he saw patients "who were at their wits' end, while their own urologists considered them a nuisance because they couldn't help them." In a telephone interview, Mr. Sawyer said: "You think: Rectal exams? Jeez, that's not what I got into this business for. But there was a need, and seeing the first 400 patients with internal trigger points convinced me it wasn't crazy." In the beginning, men had to reach their own trigger points, see therapists frequently or ask someone for help. "We taught the spouses," Dr. Wise said, "but it's not the greatest thing for a marriage." "We were the only guys with ties and no tattoos," he said. "But nothing was quite right. There were S shaped glass things for stimulating the prostate, but they weren't safe. People sometimes had to go to the E.R. to get them taken out." So they commissioned the wand, a two foot bend of medical grade plastic with a fingertip like rubber end and a pressure gauge to keep patients from pressing too hard. Up to 30 attend each California workshop, and several said they previously thought themselves alone in their suffering. "It's not coffee table talk, and no one's wearing pink ribbons for it," said John, a Memphis lawyer. "But tons of people have it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Russ Solomon, who died on Sunday at 92, created what for many music fans was the ultimate music emporium: Tower Records, whose yellow and red color scheme, "No Music, No Life" slogan, and wide aisles stocked with LPs and CDs defined the retail music business in the pre digital era. At its peak, the chain had nearly 200 stores in 15 countries and more than 1 billion in annual sales, before debt and shifting consumer habits forced it to close in 2006. Starting at his father's drugstore in Sacramento, where he sold used jukebox records as a teenager, Mr. Solomon built a retail empire that became known as much for its selection vast by brick and mortar standards as for the culture that surrounded it. Employees were opinionated aficionados, and Tower stores, open till midnight, were gathering places for fans. The locations on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and on Broadway in Greenwich Village became tourist meccas. The shops even made devotees of the stars. Bruce Springsteen and Bette Midler were regular visitors, but Tower's most famous patron was Elton John, for whom the Hollywood store would open early. "All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records," a 2015 documentary, includes footage from the 1970s of Mr. John briskly walking the aisles and tossing brand new vinyl records into a cardboard box. Mr. Solomon relied on debt to fuel Tower's expansion, creating a burden that weighed heavily on the company's finances by the early 2000s. By that point, the stores had also been hit by an industrywide plunge in record sales precipitated by online piracy. The company lost 10 million in 2000 and 90 million in 2001. Tower's parent company declared bankruptcy in the United States in 2004. Two years later, after liquidation sales had emptied its miles of CD racks, Tower shut down its 89 American stores. Workers left a message outside the first store, in Sacramento: "All things must pass." A Tower store near Lincoln Center in New York in October 2006, as shoppers hunted for a few last bargains Michael Nagle for The New York Times Sales of physical albums in the United States, which peaked at 785 million in 2000, fell to 103 million last year, according to Nielsen, as music consumption shifted to digital formats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
But we have been at this end before. We have always been here. The institution of slavery meant that the Constitution, for all its worthy prescriptions that Representative Adam Schiff defended so eloquently during the House trial, was going to be a document undermined from the beginning by the founders' tacit embrace of that institution. Black history rooted in slavery means that the country was always going to have to make ugly compromises with its own ideals, a process that became normalized. The longevity of slavery meant that business and the pursuit of profit, not justice, would be the dominant force in American life and the real energy driving even the most optimistic notions of American exceptionalism. Put in this context, the cult of Trump is not new, just another compromise with our ideals, albeit a far reaching one that looks particularly bad in the supposedly enlightened post civil rights era of the 21st century. The good news may be that America is finally feeling the embarrassment about the flaws in its national character that it should have felt 400 years ago. Embarrassment is not moral outrage, but it's a start. The civil rights revolt of the '60s was greatly aided by the images on television of police dogs and white officers attacking black protesters who were only seeking the right to sit at lunch counters and shop at department stores. It was bad public relations for America, and in the end, bad for business. That was then. Embarrassment forget moral outrage is totally lacking now among Republicans, who willingly take their cues from a man incapable of feeling remorse or regret for any reason. Far from being embarrassed, the cult now seems to be saying that racism and corporate supremacy are, if not actually good for business, conditions we all can and perhaps should live with. Again, not new we all lived with the economics of Jim Crow for a hundred years. But in 2020 the consequences of clinging to the status quo are incredibly far reaching. What we must come to grips with is that the arrogance and myopia that made our race based social caste system possible, that allowed us to dishonor our Constitution and delude ourselves on a regular basis, are the same arrogance and myopia that are now threatening the well being of the entire planet. Denying climate change is part and parcel of denying the corrosive effects of segregation. The point is that America is very good at making its own reality, which is another way of saying it has always tolerated even welcomed fake news and alternative facts for the sake of power and political convenience. All this month, I've wondered: Would Harriet Tubman, et al., have been surprised at this state of affairs? I think not. Disappointed for sure, but not surprised; I doubt any black freedom fighter expected a country so wedded to inequality to significantly change in his or her lifetime or ours. Yet if we as a country don't significantly change our view of our own history, which is framed in black history, there will be precious little in the future to celebrate. 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 actress Laverne Cox is best known for her role as Sophia Burset on the Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black," which is back for its sixth season on Friday . She is also the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy, and an L.G.B.T.Q. advocate. With a glam red carpet persona, Ms. Cox, 46, knows her beauty stuff, including highlighting, baking, contouring and more, but she prefers "to keep it simple" on off days. The first thing I do when I wake up is go over the five things I'm grateful for and the five things I'm manifesting for the day. After that, I keep it simple. I'm not as chichi as I appear. I wash my face with baby shampoo. It's really weird, but if it's gentle enough for a baby, then it's good enough for me. Jeannie Mai gifted me a facial at Tulura in New York. They have this great skin oil for summer and Vitamin Peptide Serum. They have one set for summer and another for winter. I freaking love it. My eyes have always been puffy. I love Kiehl's Facial Fuel Eye De Puffer to wake it all up. I started doing that when I was shooting "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." At night I use their Eye Alert cream. One of the beautiful things about being black is that aging is amazing. Black is beautiful. But we have to be careful, too. I just don't go in the sun. It's aging. But if I know I'm going to be out there, then I use Neutrogena with SPF. When I started wearing makeup in high school, it was about being more myself. It was me communicating to the world and being as integrated as possible who I am on the inside being reflected outwardly. That's what most people are trying to do whether you're trans or not. But makeup for me, for many years, was also my armor. The world was not safe for me without it. As I've developed into my womanhood, this beauty thing is now tied to my work. It's important to distinguish between my work life and home life, so I don't always wear a lot of it now. If it's just me doing makeup for everyday, I keep it super basic. I wear mascara. I've been living for L'Oreal Lash Paradise it's so good and a lip balm. I don't like lipstick during the day. I'd rather kiss my boyfriend and not get it all over the place. I might do a powder too. I've been using L'Oreal True Match in 7 for years. I have my natural hair, and then I have my wig. My own hair grazes my shoulders, and that's as long as it ever gets. I don't relax or process my hair. Kendra Garvey at Kim Kimble Studio will usually wash and braid me. She will also do a deep condition. But I love drugstore stuff. I get hydrating coconut oil from Marc Anthony. It's really important to oil your scalp for hair growth, and I use that. I also have products from Kinky Curly and co wash from HAIRiette, which is a hair line by Tanya Wright, who is on "Orange Is the New Black." I recommend a wig for anybody just in case for a bad hair day. I rarely style the wigs myself. I have a professional do it, and then you're good. You have to be careful with your edges. I use Hicks for my edges and use that to blend into the wig. Just make sure that you're not using glue or clips to secure the wig because they can rip out your edges. I use spirit gum and then remove them with 99 percent alcohol. Lately I've gotten into Chanel No. 5 L'eau, and I'm obsessed with Proenza Schouler Arizona. It's really kind of amazing and sexy without being overly so. I've been to Eileen Henry in L.A. for holistic medicine. I've had back issues, neck issues and knee issues. I've been going to her for acupuncture for a year and a half. We've done micro currents as well. She also diagnosed my gluten intolerance. People ask me all the time about my skin, but it's really about what you put in it. Meat, sugar and dairy are all really bad for my skin. I avoid gluten. I was vegan for four months last year, but then I did a food sensitivity blood work panel and found out I'm sensitive to soy. If you're vegan and can't eat soy, it gets real tricky. So I started eating fish again. I'm basically a gluten free pescatarian, and then I go in and out of sugar and carbs. I just moved into a condo, and we have a pool. It's one of my main reasons for moving here, so I can swim. I try to dance when I can but not as consistently as I'd like. I just started lifting weights. For years I was terrified of lifting because I was afraid of getting bulky. I'm pretty weak right now. I'm doing lots of repetitions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A large federal study that found an antiviral drug, remdesivir, can hasten the recovery in hospitalized Covid 19 patients, has begun a new phase of investigation. Now it will examine whether adding another drug, beta interferon which mainly kills viruses but can also tame inflammation would improve remdesivir's effects and speed recovery even more. So far, remdesivir, an experimental drug, has received emergency use approval from the Food and Drug Administration to treat hospitalized Covid patients. In a large clinical trial, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, remdesivir was shown to modestly shorten recovery time, by four days, on average, but it did not reduce deaths. The additional drug, beta interferon, has already been approved for treatment of multiple sclerosis, which takes advantage of its anti inflammatory effect. The U.S. trial, known as ACCT, is designed to move quickly. Known as an adaptive trial, it is a race between treatments. It tests one treatment against another and when results are in, the drug that won that phase becomes the control drug for the next phase, in which it is tested against a different drug. The new phase is the study's third. A total of 1,000 patients will receive either remdesivir and a placebo or remdesivir and beta interferon. Interferon is given as an injection. Remdesivir, made by Gilead Sciences, is given as an intravenous infusion. A team of researchers held multiple group conference calls trying to select the new test drug for Phase 3, Dr. Peter Chin Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California in San Francisco, said. Their first suggestion was to try adding an experimental drug made by Merck known as EIDD 2801, which, like remdesivir, is an antiviral but is a pill. But they wanted something that had already been approved and available for other diseases. They hoped that by showing that the new drug was effective, and had already been approved for other illnesses, that doctors could immediately give it to Covid patients. The group also considered dexamethasone, a common steroid that seems to be effective in reducing the death rate in severely ill patients. The drug, which suppresses inflammation, might be even better when added to remdesivir, the researchers reasoned. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. But they worried. Dexamethasone is inexpensive and easily available. With widespread publicity over its apparent effectiveness, many patients would balk at joining a study in which they might get a placebo. Then the group weighed using beta interferon, which had several things going for it. It is on the market as a treatment for multiple sclerosis, because of its weak anti inflammatory properties. It kills the new coronavirus in laboratory studies and it kills SARS and MERS, which also are coronaviruses. And, most impressive, Dr. Chin Hong said, the drug was tested twice in Covid patients, with promising results. One test was in England, where beta interferon or a placebo was provided to 101 hospitalized patients. They inhaled it in a nebulizer, a device like the ones used to deliver asthma medications. The study, although small, found that those who had received the drug recovered better than those who had received a placebo. The other study, in Hong Kong, involved 127 patients who received beta interferon along with two antiviral drugs. The patients were hospitalized but many were not severely ill. The drug cocktail was superior to placebo in speeding recovery. But the U.S. trial will be the only large rigorous trial to test beta interferon in Covid patients. The first phase involving remdesivir began on Feb. 21, testing the experimental drug against a placebo. That phase closed on April 19 after 1,000 patients had been enrolled. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is sponsoring the study, announced preliminary results on April 27. The next phase began on May 8, testing remdesivir and a placebo against remdesivir and baricitinib, an arthritis drug that quells inflammation. Researchers hoped that the addition of the arthritis drug would improve patients' outcomes by stemming an overreaction of the immune system to the virus, a so called cytokine storm, which can occur in severely ill patients and can be lethal. After 1,000 patients were enrolled and followed, that part of the study was closed. Results of Phase 2 are still being evaluated. Dr. Chin Hong said that he and others were fairly certain that if adding the arthritis drug, baricitinib, were found to have helped at all, the effect would not have been huge. If the drug had demonstrated an impressive effect, the study's data safety and monitoring board, which oversees the trial, would have halted it and given every patient remdesivir and baricitinib. That combination would then have been the control drugs for Phase 3 of the study. Rather than wait while the data with baricitinib could be fully evaluated, the study has moved on to its next phase, testing remdesivir and placebo against remdesivir and beta interferon. At the University of California in San Francisco and San Francisco General, nine patients have joined so far. "We are approaching another today," Dr. Chin Hong said on Monday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
FRANKFURT When Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister and war horse of European politics, celebrated his 70th birthday at a theater in Berlin last September, two of the most powerful women in the world offered warm words in his honor. The other, delivering the keynote speech, was Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Ms. Lagarde's presence reflected her close, longtime friendship with Mr. Schauble. But it also was a confirmation of the enormous stature that Ms. Lagarde and the I.M.F. have acquired in Europe as a result of the euro crisis. The I.M.F. has more say over crisis management than many euro zone members, and Ms. Lagarde has become a quasi head of state, whose views carry more weight than those of many elected leaders. Indeed, without the I.M.F.'s money and advice, the euro zone might have fallen apart by now. Because she has Mr. Schauble's ear and respect, Ms. Lagarde has also played an important role overcoming German reluctance to accept proposals intended to strengthen the euro zone, like a centralized bank supervisor. Recently, there have been signs that Ms. Lagarde is seeking to nudge Mr. Schauble and the German leadership to moderate their views on an issue that is central to the crisis: the degree of austerity that should be imposed on countries like Greece and Portugal. For most of the last three years, the I.M.F. and Germany have insisted that aid recipients must cut government spending and raise taxes. But lately Ms. Lagarde has been arguing that too much austerity could be counterproductive. A shift by the I.M.F. would transform the debate in Europe. But the fact that the organization is so tangled in European affairs is controversial both inside and outside the Continent, and could be a source of discord as the I.M.F. and World Bank hold their spring meetings in Washington. The policy making bodies of both organizations meet on Saturday, while related conferences and other events began on Monday and continue through Sunday. Poorer nations that contribute to the I.M.F.'s financing have grumbled about having to prop up rich Europe. More than half of the I.M.F.'s lending goes to the euro zone, from virtually nothing a few years ago. The I.M.F. has contributed about a third of the money used to rescue countries like Portugal, Ireland and Greece, with the rest coming from other euro zone countries. "Historically, Europe took no I.M.F. lending," said Guntram B. Wolff, the deputy director of Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels. "Now lending has increased since the beginning of the crisis dramatically. Is it appropriate? That is a very big question." Leaders and citizens of countries like Greece, Portugal and Ireland have complained bitterly about the terms that the I.M.F., as part of the so called troika of technocrats along with the European Central Bank and the European Commission, has imposed in return for loans. In addition to budget cuts and tax increases, governments have been pressured to roll back rules that protect some workers from dismissal and impose other unpopular changes. Even if the I.M.F. is rethinking its stance on austerity, it will continue to demand strict conditions because that is the only leverage the organization has to get its money back. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Ms. Lagarde, the former finance minister of France, is perceived as less doctrinaire than the Germans, but she was at the table last month when leaders negotiated an ill fated plan to make ordinary bank depositors help pay for a bailout in Cyprus. Although the I.M.F. had reservations about imposing a levy on insured depositors in Cyprus, Ms. Lagarde went along with the accord. After an outcry, the plan was revised to put the burden on large depositors. But even those who have doubts about the I.M.F.'s role in Europe see no alternative. The organization will inevitably be a force in Europe for years to come, because of the money that it has lent and because of its traditional role as watchdog over the economic and budget policies of its members. "If the I.M.F. wasn't participating at all, the crisis would have been worse," said Morris Goldstein, a former deputy director of research at the I.M.F. who is now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research organization in Washington. The I.M.F. also helps lend legitimacy to decisions by political leaders. It is unlikely that the German Parliament would have approved the country's contributions to euro zone bailouts if the rescue plans had not had the I.M.F.'s stamp of approval. "If Europe was organized as a federal state we wouldn't need an I.M.F.," Mr. Wolff of Bruegel said. "There isn't enough trust in Europe. They prefer to have an outside player." Despite Ms. Lagarde's relationship with Mr. Schauble, which seems to be genuinely warm, she has often demonstrated her independence. She has warned numerous times that European banks have not confronted their problem loans aggressively enough. She has prodded leaders to move more quickly to establish a central bank supervisor with more powers, and to establish a system to wind down failed banks without burdening taxpayers. Such advice is not necessarily welcome in Germany, whose banks have their own share of troubles. German leaders have moved more slowly on centralized bank regulation than some other leaders would like. Still, the I.M.F. and the Germans agree more often than they disagree. "Germany has the largest economy and the one in the best condition," Mr. Goldstein of the Peterson Institute said. "If this is going to work, you need to get along with the Germans." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Last week Showtime stirred up interest on social media when it posted a teaser on YouTube advertising the coming release of "perhaps the most dangerous show in the history of television." On Monday the network had details: Sacha Baron Cohen is returning to television with a seven episode series, "Who Is America?" that will debut on Sunday. The series will bring Mr. Cohen, the gonzo creator of the characters Ali G, Borat Sagdiyev and Bruno Gehard, back to a starring television role for the first time since 2004, when HBO broadcast the final season of "Da Ali G Show." "Who Is America?" has been in the works for more than a year. The method of the series seems to be in keeping with that of Mr. Cohen's previous efforts, which blurred the line between satire and reporting, with the disguised star filleting unwitting subjects. On Sunday, Mr. Cohen's Twitter account linked to a trailer that led with the words, "Imagine if Sacha Baron Cohen had been undercover secretly filming a new show for a year." That was followed by a snippet of former Vice President Dick Cheney signing what Mr. Cohen's newest character described as his "waterboard kit." The video has been viewed more than one million times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Transmission through aerosols matters and probably a lot more than we've been able to prove yet. Yes, the Coronavirus Is in the Air Finally. The World Health Organization has now formally recognized that SARS CoV 2, the virus that causes Covid 19, is airborne and that it can be carried by tiny aerosols. As we cough and sneeze, talk or just breathe, we naturally release droplets (small particles of fluid) and aerosols (smaller particles of fluid) into the air. Yet until earlier this month, the W.H.O. like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Public Health England had warned mostly about the transmission of the new coronavirus through direct contact and droplets released at close range. The organization had cautioned against aerosols only in rare circumstances, such as after intubation and other medical procedures involving infected patients in hospitals. I am a civil and environmental engineer who studies how viruses and bacteria spread through the air as well as one of the 239 scientists who signed an open letter in late June pressing the W.H.O. to consider the risk of airborne transmission more seriously. A month later, I believe that the transmission of SARS CoV 2 via aerosols matters much more than has been officially acknowledged to date. In a peer reviewed study published in Scientific Reports on Wednesday, researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center found that aerosols collected in the hospital rooms of Covid 19 patients contained the coronavirus. This confirms the results of a study from late May (not peer reviewed) in which Covid 19 patients were found to release SARS CoV 2 simply by exhaling without coughing or even talking. The authors of that study said the finding implied that airborne transmission "plays a major role" in spreading the virus. Accepting these conclusions wouldn't much change what is currently being recommended as best behavior. The strongest protection against SARS CoV 2, whether the virus is mostly contained in droplets or in aerosols, essentially remains the same: Keep your distance and wear masks. Rather, the recent findings are an important reminder to also be vigilant about opening windows and improving airflow indoors. And they are further evidence that the quality of masks and their fit matter, too. The W.H.O. defines as a "droplet" a particle larger than 5 microns and has said that droplets don't travel farther than one meter. In fact, there is no neat and no meaningful cutoff point at 5 microns or any other size between droplets and aerosols: All are tiny specks of liquid, their size ranging along a spectrum that goes from very small to really microscopic. Yes, droplets tend to fly through the air like mini cannonballs and they fall to the ground rather quickly, while aerosols can float around for many hours. But basic physics also says that a 5 micron droplet takes about a half hour to drop to the floor from the mouth of an adult of average height and during that time, the droplet can travel many meters on an air current. Droplets expelled in coughs or sneezes also travel much farther than one meter. Here is another common misconception: To the (limited) extent that the role of aerosols had been recognized so far, they were usually mentioned as lingering in the air, suspended, and wafting away a long distance threat. But before aerosols can get far, they must travel through the air that's near: meaning that they are a hazard at close range, too. And all the more so because, just like the smoke from a cigarette, aerosols are most concentrated near the infected person (or smoker) and become diluted in the air as they drift away. A peer reviewed study by scientists at the University of Hong Kong and Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, China, published in the journal Building and Environment in June concluded, "The smaller the exhaled droplets, the more important the short range airborne route." So what does this all mean exactly, practically? Can you walk into an empty room and contract the virus if an infected person, now gone, was there before you? Perhaps, but probably only if the room is small and stuffy. Can the virus waft up and down buildings via air ducts or pipes? Maybe, though that hasn't been established. More likely, the research suggests, aerosols matter in extremely mundane scenarios. Consider the case of a restaurant in Guangzhou, southern China, at the beginning of the year, in which one diner infected with SARS CoV 2 at one table spread the virus to a total of nine people seated at their table and two other tables. Yuguo Li, a professor of engineering at the University of Hong Kong, and colleagues analyzed video footage from the restaurant and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) published in April found no evidence of close contact between the diners. Droplets can't account for transmission in this case, at least not among the people at the tables other than the infected person's: The droplets would have fallen to the floor before reaching those tables. But the three tables were in a poorly ventilated section of the restaurant, and an air conditioning unit pushed air across them. Notably, too, no staff member and none of the other diners in the restaurant including at two tables just beyond the air conditioner's airstream became infected. Similarly, just one person is thought to have infected 52 of the other 60 people at a choir rehearsal in Skagit County, Wash., in March. Several colleagues at various universities and I analyzed that event and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) published last month concluded that aerosols likely were the dominant means of transmission. Attendees had used hand sanitizer and avoided hugs and handshakes, limiting the potential for infection through direct contact or droplets. On the other hand, the room was poorly ventilated, the rehearsal lasted a long time (2.5 hours) and singing is known to produce aerosols and facilitate the spread of diseases like tuberculosis. What about the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off Japan early this year? Some 712 of the 3,711 people on board became infected. Professor Li and others also investigated that case and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) in April concluded that transmission had not occurred between rooms after people were quarantined: The ship's air conditioning system did not spread the virus over long distances. The more likely cause of transmission, according to that study, appeared to be close contact with infected people or contaminated objects before the passengers and crew members were isolated. (The researchers did not parse precisely what they meant by contact, or if that included droplets or short range aerosols.) But another, recent, preprint (not peer reviewed) about the Diamond Princess concluded that "aerosol inhalation was likely the dominant contributor to Covid 19 transmission" among the ship's passengers. It might seem logical, or make intuitive sense, that larger droplets would contain more virus than do smaller aerosols but they don't. A paper published this week by The Lancet Respiratory Medicine that analyzed the aerosols produced by the coughs and exhaled breaths of patients with various respiratory infections found "a predominance of pathogens in small particles" (under 5 microns). "There is no evidence," the study also concluded, "that some pathogens are carried only in large droplets." A recent preprint (not peer reviewed) by researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center found that viral samples retrieved from aerosols emitted by Covid 19 patients were infectious. Some scientists have argued that just because aerosols can contain SARS CoV 2 does not in itself prove that they can cause an infection and that if SARS CoV 2 were primarily spread by aerosols, there would be more evidence of long range transmission. I agree that long range transmission by aerosols probably is not significant, but I believe that, taken together, much of the evidence gathered to date suggests that close range transmission by aerosols is significant possibly very significant, and certainly more significant than direct droplet spray. None Social distancing really is important. It keeps us out of the most concentrated parts of other people's respiratory plumes. So stay away from one another by one or two meters at least though farther is safer. None Wear a mask. Masks help block aerosols released by the wearer. Scientific evidence is also building that masks protect the wearer from breathing in aerosols around them. When it comes to masks, size does matter. The gold standard is a N95 or a KN95 respirator, which, if properly fitted, filters out and prevents the wearer from breathing in at least 95 percent of small aerosols. The efficacy of surgical masks against aerosols varies widely. One study from 2013 found that surgical masks reduced exposure to flu viruses by between 10 percent and 98 percent (depending on the mask's design). A recent paper found that surgical masks can completely block seasonal coronaviruses from getting into the air. To my knowledge, no similar study has been conducted for SARS CoV 2 yet, but these findings might apply to this virus as well since it is similar to seasonal coronaviruses in size and structure. My lab has been testing cloth masks on a mannequin, sucking in air through its mouth at a realistic rate. We found that even a bandanna loosely tied over its mouth and nose blocked half or more of aerosols larger than 2 microns from entering the mannequin. We also found that especially with very small aerosols smaller than 1 micron it is more effective to use a softer fabric (which is easier to fit tightly over the face) than a stiffer fabric (which, even if it is a better filter, tends to sit more awkwardly, creating gaps). None Avoid crowds. The more people around you, the more likely someone among them will be infected. Especially avoid crowds indoors, where aerosols can accumulate. None Ventilation counts. Open windows and doors. Adjust dampers in air conditioning and heating systems. Upgrade the filters in those systems. Add portable air cleaners, or install germicidal ultraviolet technologies to remove or kill virus particles in the air. It's not clear just how much this coronavirus is transmitted by aerosols as opposed to droplets or via contact with contaminated surfaces. Then again, we still don't know the answer to that question even for the flu, which has been studied for decades. But by now we do know this much: Aerosols matter in the transmission of Covid 19 and probably even more so than we have yet been able to prove. Linsey C. Marr ( linseymarr) is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. 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 snow sparkled on broad Kath Run at Boyne Highlands in northern Michigan as Tony Sendlhofer and I hit the powdery margins with each slope hogging S turn, leaving a joyous loopy trail on the freshly groomed corduroy of a sunny Sunday in March. "They say about Midwest skiers that we love to make turns," said Mr. Sendlhofer, a native of Austria and the director of the resort's snow sports. "That's what we have, to make it last." By our turns, we Michiganders say, you shall know us, from Aspen to Zermatt. Our mountains, with their 500 foot drops, some call hills . But the resorts of northern Michigan have a tradition of teaching by European experts that goes back to the earliest days of skiing in the United States and a reputation for raising ski enthusiasts eager to make tracks at the larger mountain destinations of the world. As a Detroit native and a lifelong visitor to the region known as "Up North," I learned to turn on these hills, acquiring ski skills that have served me well from Switzerland to New Zealand. Affordability is a major draw lift tickets often cost less than half of what the big Western resorts command as is natural beauty, albeit of the subtle Midwestern sort. Three of the region's top ski areas reside in the upper left quadrant of the Michigan mitten, which is rough geography for the map of the state's Lower Peninsula that locals commonly make with their palms held high. None is more than 90 miles apart, making it easy to hill hop from the fruit growing region around Traverse City following the Lake Michigan shoreline north to the highlands bracketing Little Traverse Bay. It's a part of the state that has drawn celebrity emigres (the chef Mario Batali owns a house north of Traverse City), hardy winemakers and a fair number of protectionist locals. As my friend Mike Fisher, who grew up near Petoskey, often says, "This is the best place on earth. Don't tell anyone." In summer, the Great Lakes and the lesser ones attract tourists and second home owners from near and far, swelling towns like Charlevoix and Harbor Springs. In winter, most of their T shirt and fudge shops close, reminding me just how lean a four season existence in northern Michigan really is. I've always thought of winter as the magical season of warm fires, trackless drift filled forests and sunsets that paint the snow covered lakes pink. For skiers who like to explore, it's also the best time to meet the locals in resort towns like Traverse City and Petoskey with the sort of history and authenticity that most newer western ski resorts try to construct. Over a long weekend last winter, I took a northern Michigan road trip to test my theory that elevation isn't everything and compensations can come well off piste. The snow guns at Crystal Mountain in Thompsonville, 30 miles south of Traverse City, were blasting when I arrived on a bright afternoon, blotting out the blue sky in artificial clouds during a remarkably warm winter season. The thrum of the machines continued all night, frosting the tidy base village and piling more promising accumulations on the hills as the conditions, dipping to 11 degrees, improved. Eight lifts provide easy access to 102 acres of skiing, which is helpful as, with a 375 foot rise, I found myself riding the chairs a lot. The main high speed quad delivers skiers to beginner, intermediate and expert runs, as well as what turned out to be my favorites in the Backyard: five mostly blue runs on the far side of the hill that I had to myself for hours without having to slow much to catch the lift. Crystal was my first reminder that Michigan resorts do not compete on mountain stats. It takes creativity to vie for winter business in an industry dependent on increasingly unpredictable weather and the challenge of bigger mountains within a three hour plane ride. Recreational diversity abounds and Crystal's unique attraction, Michigan Legacy Art Park, strews over 40 pieces of sculpture throughout a wooded, 30 acre plot threaded by rolling snowshoe trails where the spiraling wood boards of "Sawpath No. 2" by David Barr seemed a fitting descendant of the hardwoods above it. Ask a simple question of a Michigander my go to was "What's fun around here?" and you're bound to get a laundry list of recommendations. I quickly found my Michigan ski trip was less about the resort than the region when I was directed off property for a drink at Crystal's new neighbor, Iron Fish Distillery. The farm to flask operation grows 30 percent its own grain and gets the rest locally, then mills, mashes, ferments and distills it on site. The end products, including a tasty gin made with regional botanicals, are named for the steelhead in the neighboring Betsie River. "Its personality is similar to whiskey," said Richard Anderson, one of the owners, showing me around the stills installed in a barnlike production room. "Fishermen describe them as coy, territorial, strong and determined. It's a fish with attitude." A Mexican food truck was pulling in for the apres ski hour as I set out for Traverse City. The largest city in the north, Traverse, as it is called, has taken its cue from the orchards and vineyards nearby to nurture a culinary flare evident at a range of restaurants and bars from thoughtful microbreweries to ambitious locavore restaurants such as Alliance. Even in town, the country was never far away. I checked into the new Hotel Indigo Traverse City opposite Grand Traverse Bay, where a photo mural of river rocks decorated the room. The city's many breweries, shops and restaurants lay within walking distance. At the Workshop Brewing Company, with the cheeky slogan "Pour to the People," runners registering for a chilly 5K race the next day stopped for pints of Sickle saison over board games of Guess Who? and rounds at the foosball table. I continued my pedestrian pub crawl a few blocks away in a former canning company loading dock at Rare Bird Brew Pub named for the owners' passion for bird watching and filled with tables salvaged from a local cottonwood tree that was over 120 years old when it died. Overnight snow this skier's prayer fulfilled slicked the two lane roads that lead 58 miles north from Traverse City to Boyne Mountain in Boyne Falls. The Tyrolean accented resort became Michigan's leading ski area when Everett Kircher, a Studebaker dealer and avid skier from Detroit, found 40 acres with a 1,150 foot rise in the northern woods and paid the skeptical owner 1 to build a winter resort in 1947. Its base village presses against the mountain's rise, producing an energizing degree of congestion. Snow flocked Adirondack chairs clustered around open fires near a food truck serving beef shank tacos. Some 10 lifts scaled its broad face, offering plenty of choices. I joined Wolfgang Russold, another native of Austria and the director of Boyne's ski school, on the central Mountain Express chair where he explained Boyne's long tradition of Austrian recruitment, "for flavor and for labor," he said. "Ski instructor certification is more rigorous in Austria than here," and Everett Kircher wanted the best. In 1954, he recruited the Norwegian Olympic gold medalist Stein Eriksen to run the Boyne ski school and dazzle crowds with his signature aerial flip. Othmar Schneider, an Olympic champion from Austria, took over in 1961 for the next 14 winters. Skiers came from around the Midwest to learn the then new reverse shoulder technique at Boyne. As skiing caught on in the 1960s, Kircher, "a wiry little man who operates at Bravura tempo and dances to his own tune," according to Skiing magazine, continued to tinker with his formula. He developed the first three person chairlift, installed the first four person lift and advanced snow making technology. There are luxury condominiums here now and a hotel with a grand lobby, testaments to the resort's year round appeal that includes two golf courses. An indoor water park, added in 2005, ensures families have plenty of diversion whatever happens with the weather. But its vintage features including the Snowflake Lounge where apres skiers dance on snowflake pattern carpet, echo Boyne's early days as a getaway for singles. Old photos displayed in vitrines devoted to memorabilia in Stein Ericksen's restaurant capture outdoor parties and couples in a steaming swimming pool beside the slopes, where one exists today. "Winter is our season of recovery," he said. On the clearest, coldest and most breathtaking day of the trip, the snow glinted in the sunshine at Boyne Highlands, where eight lifts range across two mountains. The view from the central ridge takes in iced over Little Traverse Bay in one direction and the peaked red roofs of the alpine base village in the other. "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan played on outdoor speakers, setting a mellow tone. When he arrived from Austria in 1976, Tony Sendlhofer, then a new recruit to the ski school staff, looked at the 552 foot vertical drop and wondered where the mountain was. "But it wasn't about that," he said. "I always wanted to come to the U.S." He took up the mantle of the Austrian tradition here and has since taught generations of families how to ski, how to enjoy the outdoors in winter and, most infectiously, how to make the most of where you are. "Come on," he said, waving an insulated mitten toward the empty Kath Run below us. "Let's make some turns." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Another full floor residence at One57, the 90 story Midtown tower from the Extell Development Company that promises unparalleled vistas of Central Park, the Hudson and East Rivers, and nearly every New York City landmark on the horizon, traded at 55,498,125 and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. The monthly carrying costs for the 6,240 square foot apartment, No. 81, are a relatively non astronomical 12,132, owing to a tax abatement negotiated by the sponsor. Only 11 residences, all on upper stories, occupy an entire floor at 157 West 57th Street; all are spoken for, with the majority of them to be used as decidedly non cozy, but definitely impressive and entertainment ready, pieds a terre, which is apparently the plan in place for No. 81. Like its 10 peers near the pinnacle of One57, the brash blue skyscraper designed by Atelier Christian de Portzamparc, the French firm with a Pritzker award among its laurels, No. 81 has four bedrooms, five and a half baths and a galvanizing 75 foot long entrance gallery with a sitting room at its southern tip and head on views of the park to the north. The ceilings throughout are nearly 12 feet high, enhancing the overall sense of spaciousness. The so called grand salon, with its three exposures and floors of rift sawn white oak, includes 57 feet of floor to ceiling windows directly overlooking the park and beyond. Distant views of the Catskills and the Atlantic Ocean are possible on a clear day. The unit has a white Smallbone of Devizes kitchen buyers could select white or Macassar ebony finishes that adjoins a 27 by 17 foot breakfast room for informal dining. Each en suite bathroom in the bedroom wing is a different type of stone, including onyx, travertine or marble. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
PASADENA, Calif. From "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" to "Big Little Lies" and "Game of Thrones," one thing has been true at HBO: Original scripted programming airs on Sunday nights. There was even once a marketing slogan, "Sunday is ... HBO." With HBO's programming slate growing and the battle between networks and streaming services getting only more intense, the network will soon start shifting some original scripted series to Monday nights. The prime time expansion will begin with the limited series "Chernobyl," scheduled to premiere in May. Other shows appearing on Monday nights during the rest of the year include the final season of the drama "The Deuce," a limited series about Catherine the Great starring Helen Mirren and a new series adapted from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books. There will be two hours of prime time scripted series on HBO most Monday nights. The reason, said Casey Bloys, the network's president of programming, is simple. "There's obviously only so many Sundays in a year," he said in an interview. Consider this statistic: This year, HBO will have 150 hours of original scripted content, a 50 percent increase from last year. Mr. Bloys said he anticipated that number would rise again in 2020. It's a volume play for a network whose biggest hit ever, "Game of Thrones," is three months away from going off the air. Later this year, HBO will debut a much anticipated drama based on the comic book series "Watchmen" and adapted by the "Leftovers" co creator Damon Lindelof. The network also has science fiction series in the pipeline one from J. J. Abrams and another from the "Avengers" director Joss Whedon in addition to a "Game of Thrones" prequel. All of this is set against a backdrop in which its digital rivals like Netflix are spending with abandon and picking off big name Hollywood talent like Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes. Apple is spending well over 1 billion on its own original content, which will roll out at some point this year. Though the expansion to Mondays is a big change for HBO, the move is largely symbolic. Most of HBO's viewership comes well after an episode's original air date. Five years ago, 35 percent of the total viewership of an episode of "True Blood" was logged on Sunday night, Mr. Bloys said. In 2017, only 10 percent of the viewership of "Big Little Lies" watched on Sunday night. This year, 18 percent of the viewership for "True Detective" has come from Sundays, a percentage that will decrease as more people watch the show on demand or on HBO Go or HBO Now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"My aunt and uncle and their two kids in New Jersey opened their hearts and home to me about 20 years ago when I first moved to New York to try to be an actor. They took me in and treated me like I was their son. I would have about five sets of keys in my bag at all times because when I missed the bus from doing shows in the city I had friends, rare and remarkable ones, that kept their doors open to me at any hour of the night. I finally was able to save up a couple of dollars and move into the city, a tiny, tiny studio apartment where if you walked in too fast you'd fly out the window. My mom and dad didn't know that I was living off of pasta and cheese and rice pudding to be a frugal actor, because it would break their hearts and they'd try to turn the world upside down to help me be O.K. Because when I hurt they hurt more, and when I smile and soar they're able to breathe. Thanks to Bart and J.T., this is the biggest honor of my life but mainly because my mom and dad are here with me tonight. Solomon and Anna Aronov, you've always had my back more than anybody else in the world and you love me and Greg more than you love yourselves. My victories mean nothing to me unless I'm sharing them with you. Thank you." "I want to dedicate this, oh my goodness, to the musical theater department at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance. My education there as a young person changed my life forever. My professors, my classmates: They instilled in me an appreciation for what it is to be an artist and what it is to be lucky to be part of this incredible community. If you're out there and you have money, and I know a lot of you in this room have a lot of it, start a scholarship. Change someone's life the way that Art and Marti Hearron changed mine." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
BLACK MONDAY 10 p.m. on Showtime. The cocaine flows and the cash is blown in Showtime's claustrophobic new half hour comedy series, which dresses Regina Hall and Don Cheadle up in 1980s garb and attempts to bottle the trembling energy of a B level Wall Street brokerage firm operating on the brink of a stock market crash. Cheadle plays Maurice Monroe, the head of the firm, who delights in riding in a Lamborghini limousine and whose response when presented with a bag of cocaine as a birthday gift in the first episode is to say, "You guys get me." Dawn Darcy, played by Hall, is an expert trader; Andrew Rannells plays an eggheaded Wall Street newcomer. CRASHING 10 p.m. on HBO. Following in the footsteps of shows like "Seinfeld" and "Mulaney," this big hearted comedy series features the stand up comic Pete Holmes playing a version of himself. When the series picked up, Holmes's character was spat out of a crumbling marriage and into the New York comedy scene. In the third season, debuting Sunday night, his character a spiritual comedian is returning to the city from a college comedy tour and plunging into a new romance. "While I love 'Louie,' and 'Seinfeld,' those are about successful comedians," Holmes told The New York Times in 2017. "We're telling a story of what it's like to hand out fliers in exchange for stage time at 1 in the morning at a club for five people. And that's such richer kind of tapestry to explore." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Alice is having an out of body experience. It is an interesting, if not particularly pleasant, one: After all, she is dead. When we first meet the young woman in Milly Thomas's solo play "Dust," her entrance is preceded by an ominous, tectonic rumble that suggests a terrifying underworld. Alice peers down at a morgue's stainless steel table. It is bare , but she sees something: herself, laying down. And so Alice mercilessly scrutinizes her own corpse. The scene is horrible, and horribly funny. Ms. Thomas, wearing a flesh colored bodysuit, has a wonderfully dry touch with morbid humor she peers into her dead self's vagina, graphically describing what she sees, and apologizes to her body for what she has put it through. This includes death itself, because Alice died by suicide . (Theatergoers need to be aware that "Dust" deals with delicate subject matter with brash, graphic forthrightness.) The first word of the show is an expletive. It is followed by "I think this is the end." But it isn't quite. Instead, Alice is in a kind of limbo, check ing out how her survivors are doing. She does not always like what she sees. Then again, she didn't when she was alive either death has not cleared her persistent discontent. Attending her own funeral, Alice is irritated by most everything she sees and hears. When her father starts reciting the words to her favorite song, the disgusted ghost sneers: "When I was 15 maybe, yeah. Jesus Christ." At least that's less discomfiting to Alice than watching her boyfriend receive oral sex or her best friend mid coitus. That last scene turns into a graphic three way that feels like what would happen in a Phoebe Waller Bridge remake of "Ghost" there are times when "Dust" feels a bit like "Fleabag" in the afterlife. Ms. Thomas has a voice of her own, though, and it has found an audience across the Atlantic. The show has had several runs in her native Britain, from Edinburgh's Fringe Festival to the West End, and Ms. Thomas is now adapting it for television with Sharon Horgan ("Catastrophe"). At the intimate Next Door at NYTW, where Sara Joyce 's spare, chilling production is making its American debut, there is no avoiding Alice's stare that is as direct as the character is slippery underneath her deceivingly frank exterior. Although "Dust" was inspired by its author's own experience with depression, the show deals with that topic in a roundabout way: Ms. Thomas alludes to Alice's history of self harm and anorexia but does not dive into the young woman's psychology. Indeed, the story eschews a standard arc leading toward a catharsis that would provide relief to its main character and, by extension, the audience. Alice, quick witted and harsh, is not conventionally "likable," and she does not exhibit much by way of soul searching. Then again, what would be the point? That the dead Alice would be kinder, more enlightened? There is not an ounce of sentimentality in this show. Ms. Thomas clearly has affection for Alice she takes her seriously but she does not let her off the hook either, and eventually circles back to what put her on that table. The scene is among the most brutal I have ever seen at the theater. That Ms. Thomas is still standing afterward is not the least of her achievements. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The fashion industry is in a state of emergency. This has been made clear not only by the mounting bankruptcies of big name retailers, but also by the closure of beloved small businesses. These are brands that won't bounce back. There have never been many places to buy a pair of black leather ankle boots in size 13 about four sizes larger than the widely accepted average size for women's shoes. Now, with the closure of Long Tall Sally, there are even fewer. That news, announced by the 44 year old British retailer, resulted in "a quite tangible outpouring of grief," said Vicky Shepherd, the company's spokeswoman. Long Tall Sally sells women's wear and accessories for tall people: pants with extended inseams, tops designed for longer torsos, shoes up to size 15. The clothes are uncomplicated and office friendly, appealing to broad swaths of shoppers more Gap than Fashion Nova, though at a higher price point. It is the only retailer of its kind, where tall shoppers can browse a diverse inventory without worrying about hemlines landing three inches above the point they're supposed to land. They're not confined to one department in a shop; everything is made for them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Doulas, Who Usher in New Life, Find Mission in Support for the Dying MARY HILBURN spent the last three years watching her partner of 17 years, Jo Allison Bennett, die of brain cancer. Their families weren't supportive, and many of their friends found the experience too emotionally wrenching to become very involved. So in the last few months of Ms. Bennett's life, Ms. Hilburn turned for help to Deanna Cochran, a death doula. The word doula, Greek for "woman who serves," is usually associated with those who assist in childbirth. But increasingly, doulas are helping people with leaving the world as well. "She was a wonderful gift," said Ms. Hilburn, 58, who lives just outside Austin. Ms. Cochran, a former hospice nurse, helped Ms. Hilburn with practical arrangements, like choosing and organizing caregivers, but more important, she was there "during that in between time, after hospice had gone, when you want to say, 'Can you come and just hold my hand or sit with me?' " Ms. Hilburn said. "That's where the doula fits in." The concept is not completely new; hospices have long had "vigil volunteers" who sit by the bedsides of the dying, but it has now expanded far beyond that. Since there are no federal or state accrediting agencies for death doulas also called end of life doulas, death midwives or simply companions there are no statistics on how many exist. And just as there isn't one name for such a job, there isn't one description. Some volunteer to visit a dying patient weekly. Others charge to do things like organizing paperwork, living with a patient or assisting with funeral arrangements. But everyone involved in the field agrees that interest both in hiring and training to be such a doula is growing as an aging population grapples with how to gain some control over this most uncontrollable stage of life. The problem, they say, is that people don't know how to prepare for it, face it in ourselves or our loved ones or cope with it after it happens. "We see lots of deaths on TV, in video games, but we're detached," said Laura Saba, founder of Momdoulary, which trains and certifies birth and death doulas. "A doula is more comfortable with death. We can provide the framework to address it. We can help make space for a conversation." Ms. Cochran, for example, helps people get together their papers, like wills and advance directives. She visits hospices, private homes and nursing homes and arranges family meetings and postdeath needs. For her services, Ms. Cochran charges 450 for a consultation and 900 and up for private hospice care services, depending on what is needed. But she emphasizes that she often works free of charge, as she did for Ms. Hilburn, if she can afford to do so. She also runs a death doula training program at AccompanyingtheDying.com with costs from 59 a month for independent study to a 4,000 six month program. In addition, she offers private and group classes. Ms. Saba, of Staten Island, works as a birth doula, but she said time spent in hospitals helped her see "the need for someone to provide support to a family who had a member pass." About two years ago, Ms. Saba began offering training to death doulas through her website mourningdoula.com. Her classes cost 1,400 for 20 weeks, and cover topics like aiding people in exploring end of life options and helping families choose caskets. The program also includes information about health issues like safely handling foods. Ms. Saba said for her services as a death doula, she charges nothing for consultations and 100 to 200 for meetings about end of life documents. A package that includes three meetings and staying with a patient in the final hours runs from 800 to 1,200. While the practicalities of death are important, the fact is, "most of us don't even know how to go into a room where someone is dying in a way that is helpful," said Frank Ostaseski, founder and director of the Metta Institute, which offers an End of Life Practitioner Program, a five day residential program for 1,000. "We walk right in and start blabbing away with our nervousness," Mr. Ostaseski added. Instead, he said, pause at the threshold before walking in. Talk less. Listen More. "It's not your opportunity to have some deep psychological experience. Maybe all they want is someone to do their laundry," he said. "It's their dying, not yours." Those who run the training programs say they have enrolled chaplains, funeral directors, social workers, nurses and doctors who want to serve their constituencies more "mindfully and with compassion," Mr. Ostaseski said, whose institute has a program solely for those professionals. Since death doulas are unregulated, it's important to ask questions before hiring someone. Ms. Saba offers suggested interview questions on her website, which include asking prospective doulas how they were trained; whether they have any political or spiritual aim; how well informed they are about end of life documents; and any limits placed on support in terms of time, activities and tasks. Not all who are interested in becoming an end of life doula want to make it a career. Mara Altman, a writer, signed up as a volunteer with the nonprofit Doula Program to Accompany and Comfort in Manhattan. Volunteers in the program visit the same person weekly for an hour until the person dies. "I had always been freaked out about death and thought if I got to know it, I might not feel that way," Ms. Altman said. "I wanted to help someone, but I also wanted to come to terms with the whole death thing." So after she did the eight week training course two to three hours weekly required by the program, she met several possibilities at a nursing home. "I had the best connection with Jethro," she said, a man in his mid 50s who had AIDS, diabetes and other ailments. His background was different from hers. He was a sanitation worker from the Bronx; he had no friends or family around. "It wasn't about helping him come to terms with death, which I thought it would be," she said of their time together. "IIt was focused on doing whatever he wanted." That meant playing blackjack or watching soap operas. He was failing but hung on, and when he died last year, Ms. Altman had spent almost four years visiting him. "It was a wonderful relationship," she said. Amy Levine, a social worker who runs the program Ms. Altman volunteered for, said she received about 100 applications and accepted up to 15 people for training annually, because not everyone is looking to volunteer for the right reasons. People who had a recent loss, for example, are probably not the best fit, she said. And someone expecting profound philosophical insights by visiting with the dying a sort of "Tuesdays with Morrie" situation will probably be disappointed, she said, referring to a best selling memoir and television movie about the death of a 78 year old man. Bill Keating, a retired corporate lawyer, has volunteered with Ms. Levine's program for about 15 years and is currently visiting a man in his 70s who has had a series of strokes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Decades ago, commercials for insurance companies followed certain formulas. There were the ads featuring happy families, with a voice over offering reassurance that all would remain well for those who chose the right coverage. There were ads with images of fires, floods, tornadoes and burglaries, stark reminders of how suddenly and seriously things could go awry. There were cautionary tales of parents who died unexpectedly and uninsured, leaving their children in the lurch. (A young John Travolta was the star of one such heart tugger.) Then there were the testimonials from satisfied customers, and monologues from insurance agents about their devotion to duty. A few ads may have used humor, but they were the outliers. Insurance, the vast majority of the ads seemed to say, was a solemn business. By most accounts, the game changer was the gecko. The redoubtable reptilian mascot, which made its debut in 1999, was conceived by the Martin Agency to both reinforce Geico's name and help the public figure out how to pronounce it. (The name stands for Government Employees Insurance Company.) Since then, Geico's ad campaigns have featured the cave men, Maxwell the pig and rhetorical questions like: "Could switching to Geico really save you 15 percent or more on car insurance? Does a 10 pound bag of flour make a really big biscuit?" "Insurance doesn't make you happy very often, so we thought that the advertising should have a smile to it," said Joe Alexander, the chief creative officer of the Martin Agency, which has had the Geico account for 23 years. Before Geico signed on with Martin, it had a 2 percent market share and was the eighth largest car insurance company in the United States, according to Dean Jarrett, the agency's chief communications officer. It is now No. 2, behind State Farm. Rivals in the category took note. "Geico came out and said that people don't care that much about insurance; insurance is a burden category, so let's lighten the burden," said Britt Nolan, the chief creative officer at Leo Burnett U.S.A. and a member of the team that created the Mayhem character for Allstate. "Let's make it simple and cheap, and let's make the brand feel likable and fun. "I think they showed everyone else that there was another instrument available to be played," Mr. Nolan added. "And now all these other brands are trying to find their own unique voice in comedy." Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Humor is also a way for insurance companies to connect with younger people. "'Good neighbors.' 'We're on your side.' That's how insurance companies used to communicate, but it was for an older consumer," said Mr. Alexander of the Martin Agency. "Today, we're trying to reach a much younger, more cynical audience." Whatever the target audience, the humor has to be handled with care, said David Fowler, the executive creative director at Ogilvy Mather, whose accounts include Nationwide. "It's a rich area with endless possibilities, and you have to be vigilant about going beyond the edge," he said. "The online world will quickly tell you where the edge is." In any case, the punch line shouldn't overwhelm the pitch. "We can't forget that we sell, or else," Mr. Fowler said, quoting David Ogilvy, the founder of his agency. "That's rule one. In Geico's case, most of the ad is crazy, but at the end there's the message: 15 minutes saves 15 percent." Context is everything. "I think you have to divide the ads into categories, into property insurance and life insurance," said Rachel Howald, the chief creative officer of the ad agency Invisible Man. "When you're talking about a stolen TV, that's not do or die, so there's more latitude to have fun with it. But when you're talking about the fate of individuals, there's a reticence on the part of clients and insurance companies to make light of it." Insurance companies also have to draw a line between their ads (funny) and their intentions (earnest). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
ON THE BEACH Casa Casuarina, the former home of Gianni Versace in South Beach, has a 100 million list price. FOR 100 million, the buyers of Casa Casuarina, the mansion that once belonged to the fashion icon Gianni Versace, will get a 23,000 square foot spread in Miami Beach with a 54 foot long pool lined with mosaic tiles and 24 karat gold. They will acquire millions of dollars' worth of Italian furniture one room's windows alone are framed by 250,000 in silk and velvet drapes, the current owner said. The mansion also comes with a boutique hotel with 10 suites, British trained butlers and a restaurant that serves cocktails in Versace martini glasses. That hotel will come in handy, because whoever buys Casa Casuarina may need at least half those rooms for lawyers. The mansion Mr. Versace was gunned down at its entrance gate in 1997 is embroiled in a particularly complicated legal battle, taking some of the shine off this trophy home for any prospective buyers. The mortgage on the property is in default, and the owners of the debt, an entity affiliated with the Nakash family of New York, are battling in Miami courts to foreclose on the mansion. The Nakashes, owners of Jordache Enterprises, the jeans company, are outraged at the high listing price for Casa Casuarina. The mansion's current owner, telecom mogul Peter T. Loftin, put the residence on the market for 125 million in June and lowered it to 100 million in November. The Nakashes want the court case to play out expeditiously so they can take the property over in foreclosure, said Jonathan Bennett, who manages the family's multibillion dollar real estate holdings, which include three hotels in Miami Beach, all on Ocean Drive. "The Versace mansion has been listed for an outrageously inflated price," the family said in a statement, "for the main purpose of trying to gain some tactical advantage in ongoing litigation." Mr. Loftin denied that he was trying to stall the legal case in order to sell the property on the open market for more. "Absolutely not," he said. "It is a good time for me to sell it. Properties are selling now for large amounts." For some New Yorkers, a 100 million price tag may not induce sticker shock . But in Miami, Casa Casuarina's list price is more than twice the highest recorded sale of a 10 bedroom home on Indian Creek that sold for 47 million last year. The only other property in Florida to draw such a lofty asking price was a Palm Beach home that Donald Trump sold for 100 million in 2008 to a trust linked to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire. VM South Beach, the entity affiliated with Jordache, filed a federal foreclosure lawsuit in December 2011 against Casa Casuarina and Mr. Loftin for failure to pay a 25 million mortgage bought by the Nakash family for 15 million from WestLB, a German bank. Mr. Loftin said he had stopped paying his mortgage after 2010 when he realized the loan documents at closing did not reflect his final agreement with WestLB. He has alleged a conspiracy involving the Nakashes and the German bank. "They bought a fraudulent note," he said of the Nakashes. "They knew it was fraudulent." Mr. Bennett, the Jordache representative, called the allegations "completely ridiculous," noting that Mr. Loftin "signed the documents." Taxes, too, were not paid for three years, and Mr. Loftin is in a dispute with his tenant, the hotelier Barton G. Weiss, over who is responsible for the payment. (Mr. Weiss, who was out of the country this week, did not respond to e mailed questions sent through an assistant.) Since the Nakashes filed their foreclosure action on the property in late 2011 there have been many court filings but little real action in the case. The two sides are currently battling over jurisdiction. To further complicate things, a bankruptcy trustee also has a claim on the property, because Scott Rothstein, a Miami lawyer now in prison for masterminding a 1.2 billion Ponzi scheme, held a minority interest in it. Mr. Loftin dismissed the idea that this messy court battle might affect his ability to sell. He said he had received "very serious inquiries and verbal offers most would accept" for the mansion, but was taking his time to try to sell to the "right buyer to reimburse all owners that are entitled to reimbursement." Assessments of the property's value vary widely. Nakash lawyers claimed to the court that the estimated market value was 15 million. While Mr. Versace's taste for Venetian style architecture and furnishings may not be for everybody, Casa Casuarina is a rare mansion on Ocean Drive with a special history. He bought it in 1992 for 2.95 million, and then sank an estimated 33 million into it. He lived there until the day he was killed by Andrew Cunanan upon returning from a morning walk along Ocean Drive. In 2000, Mr. Loftin bought the mansion from the grieving Versace family for 19 million in cash, believed then to be the highest sales price ever in Miami Dade County. He later got a mortgage, and he has said he put in 20 million in renovations, including 10 million in Italian furniture bought mostly in Venice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The redesigned 2015 Honda Fit received an Acceptable rating in the small overlap frontal crash test performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a significant improvement over the Poor rating that the 2013 model received when it was tested in January. But it took two tries for the new Fit to get its Acceptable rating. An early production 2015 Fit was originally tested in March, but received a Marginal rating in the challenging small overlap test. So Honda strengthened the bumper beam welds on the Fit, which earned an Acceptable rating in the second test. The small overlap test replicates what happens when the front corner of a vehicle collides with another vehicle or an object such as a tree or utility pole. In the test, 25 percent of a vehicle's front end on the driver's side strikes a rigid barrier at 40 miles per hour. In the new Fit's first test, the nonprofit group said the car's bumper beam, which is a steel bar behind the plastic bumper cover, broke free of the frame rail on the passenger's side early in the crash test, which caused more of the crash energy to be absorbed by the driver's side of the car. The result was "extensive intrusion into the occupant compartment and excessive upward movement of the steering column." After Honda engineers improved the beam, it stayed attached to the frame rail, intrusion was reduced and the steering column was much more stable, the group said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Kyle Curry, at right, with India Whiteside, is a private high school student aiming to go to a prestigious college in the Theater Wit production of "Admissions." Jeremy Wechsler was on his way to rehearsal one morning in March when his phone started, and then wouldn't stop, going off. The artistic director of Chicago's Theater Wit was at the helm of "Admissions," a wry glimpse at privilege and educational opportunity through the eyes of a white teenager deferred from his dream school and his parents, officials focused on diversifying their East Coast boarding school. The play was set to begin performances in just over a week. As Mr. Wechsler made his way to the theater, he got one text after another "Have you seen this?" with links to that morning's unfolding news: Federal prosecutors had charged 50 parents, coaches and test administrators in a wide reaching college admissions scheme, a scandal implicating wealthy families who, according to the Justice Department, had cheated, bribed and photoshopped their children's way into elite universities. "Admissions," which was written by Joshua Harmon and opened Off Broadway exactly a year before the scandal broke, doesn't have much to say on bribery (or cropping a student's face onto a water polo player's body, for that matter). But its overarching themes how far parents will go to secure opportunities for their children, and the systemic advantages some demographic groups wield over others reverberated through the emerging details of the scandal. "Of course everyone was like, 'You're so lucky; your show's going to do amazing,'" Mr. Wechsler said. And they weren't necessarily wrong: The Chicago production will close Sunday after three extensions, which added 14 weeks to the unusually successful run for the theater. The play is also picking up speed across the country, with 13 other productions being licensed through 20 20. Like Mr. Harmon's 2013 "Bad Jews," "Admissions" is on track to be one of the most produced plays at regional theaters in the next year. But if there is a correlation between the scandal buzz and the new show's buzz, it's a murky one. "Admissions" had already made its way to several regional theaters, including a Washington, D.C., production that saw four extensions, before anyone was charged in the investigation. Not to mention: The idea of theatergoers throwing down their newspapers and sprinting to the box office? Not entirely plausible. Paul Daigneault programmed the play as part of SpeakEasy Stage Company's 2019 20 season last summer, nearly a year before the news broke. SpeakEasy, which is based in Boston, targets shows that can generate cultural conversation, he said, and if anything, the scandal will make the conversation resonate even more. (SpeakEasy's production begins performances in October.) "The events of the play do not perfectly coincide or mirror the effects of the college admissions scandal," said Mr. Daigneault, the theater's artistic director. "White privilege and the idea of America hiding behind its liberalism until the mirror is turned around and facing you is what makes it even more relevant." Theater Wit's ticket sales didn't explode when the admissions scandal broke. Rather, it was when previews began, Mr. Wechsler said, that word of mouth referrals "went through the roof." "I would sit in the lobby, and I would listen to people as they were coming out and they would be on their phones, literally calling people and saying, 'You've got to come see this show,'" he said. Post show conversations that usually lasted 20 minutes were running twice as long. One white woman emailed Mr. Wechsler a letter recounting and renouncing her long held resentment of colleagues of color for what she saw as their unfair advancement. Mr. Harmon declined to comment about the way "Admissions" reverberates with recent events. And the play's tricky, satirical tone and its array of seemingly well meaning liberal characters already made it one to argue about. They include Charlie, a high school senior who embarks on a 17 minute diatribe on who really counts as a person of color, and his mother, Sherri, who ditches her diversity oriented priorities when her own child's success is at stake. The 26 year old actor Ben Edelman played Charlie at Lincoln Center as well as in a London run that concludes Saturday . In a recent interview, he compared the admissions scandal to a fun house mirror : a heightened version of the problems in education that typically manifest in less egregious ways. "One of the things that's kind of exciting about the play is how it doesn't reduce the conversation," Mr. Edelman said. "It complicates the conversation. It's not black and white. It's dealing with the shades of gray. " As previews in Chicago began, the nature of the scandal was one of Mr. Wechsler's biggest concerns. Would the conversation about the play be hijacked by a discussion of behavior that was easy to condemn? "A lot of parents who come to the play are like, you have to do whatever you can to help your kids," he said. "Then followed two beats later like, 'Not like those parents.'" But for some, the scandal added a realistic framework to "Admissions." Kate Phillippo, a professor of cultural and educational policy studies at Loyola University Chicago who spoke on a post show panel in May, said the admissions scheme shaped her understanding of how desperate parents can be to ensure their children get a distinguished education. "We're asking kids to think about equity and social justice or at least I hope we are and we're also asking them to compete," Dr. Phillippo said. "And those two things in a lot of ways are opposed to one another. You want equity, but you also want to get ahead of other people. And to some degree, everybody can't have both of those things." Lisa Levy, a parent and educator in Chicago who saw the play in March, said that the admissions scandal didn't affect her perception of the show, but that the play did lead her to reflect on how she handled her own children's college application process. "With or without the scandal," Ms. Levy said, "I thought it was a really relevant play to the times." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A high school senior mowed down by a car with other pedestrians in last month's Times Square attack was hemorrhaging internally and transfusions could not keep up with the blood loss. Doctors and nurses at NYC Health Hospitals/Bellevue raced to save the student, Jessica Williams of Dunellen, N.J., who suffered severe injuries to her legs, abdomen and pelvis. But her pulse skyrocketed to 150. Her blood pressure dropped to 40/30. "She was about to go into cardiac arrest," said Dr. Marko Bukur, a trauma surgeon. He grabbed a device that neither he nor anyone else at the hospital had ever used, except in training sessions on mannequins. It had arrived at Bellevue just days before. The device, called an ER Reboa catheter, was born on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, the brainchild of two military doctors who saw soldiers die from internal bleeding that medical teams in small field hospitals could not stop. Their invention, made by Prytime Medical and cleared by the Food and Drug Administration in 2015, is gradually being adopted in civilian trauma centers around the country and has recently been used by the military. But medical teams need rigorous training to use it: Mishandled, it can be dangerous. Dr. Bukur punctured Ms. Williams's thigh, threaded a slim tube into her femoral artery and eased it up about 12 inches into her aorta, the major artery that carries blood from the heart to most of the body. Then he injected salt water to inflate a balloon near the tip of the tube, blocking the aorta and cutting off circulation to Ms. Williams's pelvis and legs. Above the balloon, blood still flowed normally to her brain, heart, lungs and other vital organs. Almost instantly, her blood pressure rose and her racing heart slowed down. The balloon stopped the hemorrhaging inside her pelvis, almost like turning off a faucet. Reboa stands for resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta, but some doctors describe it simply as an "internal tourniquet." The clock was ticking. Circulation could be safely cut off for only so long ideally, no more than about 30 minutes. Beyond that, the lack of blood flow could severely damage Ms. Williams's legs and internal organs. The balloon had only bought the medical team a bit of time to find the source of the blood loss and fix it. If they failed, when they deflated the balloon they would be back where they started, with Ms. Williams on the verge of bleeding to death. In New York City, Dr. Sheldon H. Teperman, director of trauma and critical care services at NYC Health Hospitals/Jacobi, and Dr. Aksim G. Rivera, a vascular surgeon there, have been teaching the procedure to trauma surgeons at city hospitals and other medical centers in the area. Bellevue surgeons trained with them. A Jacobi team led by the trauma surgeon Dr. Edward Chao was the first in the city to use the ER Reboa, in February. Their patient, Nanetta Hall, 60, a manager in the city's Human Resources Administration, had been run over by a pickup truck. Like Ms. Williams, she nearly died from internal hemorrhaging caused by pelvic injuries. "It's a lifesaving instrument, but it needs to be handled with respect because turning off the blood supply to half the body is dangerous," Dr. Teperman said, adding, "I lie awake at night worrying that maybe someone will use it improperly." Several patients in Japan had to have legs amputated after being treated with a related device that was left inflated for too long. The idea for the ER Reboa catheter came to Dr. Todd E. Rasmussen and Dr. Jonathan L. Eliason in 2006, while they were deployed as surgeons in Iraq. Improved tourniquets and transfusion techniques did prevent soldiers from bleeding to death from wounds in their arms and legs. But there was no similar solution for bleeding in the abdomen or pelvis, or what doctors call "noncompressible hemorrhage." The two doctors, both vascular surgeons, started to develop a new device based on an older balloon catheter designed to prevent bleeding in people having surgery on the aorta. The older device can be used on trauma victims, but not easily. It is large and complex, and meant for use by vascular surgeons with X rays to guide it. It was "really designed to be used in nice surgery centers, with well staffed, fancy operating rooms," said Dr. Rasmussen, an Air Force colonel, who is associate dean for research and an attending surgeon at the military medical school and medical center at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md. Dr. Rasmussen and Dr. Eliason set out to create a smaller, stripped down version that could be placed quickly inside the aorta without X rays by trauma surgeons and, eventually, by general surgeons, emergency room doctors and maybe medics. Those doctors and medics are usually the first to reach people who are bleeding, in what trauma experts call the "golden hour" after an injury, Dr. Rasmussen said, adding, "That's where the margin to save lives is greatest." By 2009, he and Dr. Eliason made a prototype, nicknamed their "Home Depot version" of the device. "It was pretty clunky," Dr. Rasmussen said. But it was good enough to start testing in the lab. The results were promising, but large, traditional medical device companies showed no interest in developing it. After a talk Dr. Rasmussen gave in 2009 that mentioned the lack of commercial interest in military medical research, Mr. Spencer, a technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist from San Antonio, offered to start a company to make and market the device. A self described Army brat, Mr. Spencer said he liked the idea that something inspired by a military need could also save civilian lives. The catheters, used once and then thrown away, cost about 2,000, which is relatively cheap compared with other devices used in vascular surgery. The ER in the product name stands for the last names of the two inventors, Eliason and Rasmussen. The Defense Department and the University of Michigan hold the patent, Dr. Rasmussen said, and he makes no money from it. People with pelvic injuries, like Ms. Williams and Ms. Hall, are ideal candidates for Reboa, surgeons say. Those injuries are a notorious cause of life threatening hemorrhage. When the body is hit hard enough to break the pelvis, the impact almost always shears or severs hundreds of tiny veins and arteries that bleed profusely. Bleeding in the pelvis can be difficult or impossible to stop, because the area often cannot be compressed enough. Abdominal bleeding can also be stopped with the device, if it is pushed higher into the aorta. The balloon almost certainly saved Ms. Williams's life, Dr. Bukur said. With her circulation cut off, he was able to pack the damaged area with gauze to prevent more bleeding after the balloon was deflated. Another surgeon removed Ms. Williams's spleen, which had ruptured and was also bleeding copiously. "We're conservative on claiming it saved someone," he said. The device may prevent accident victims from bleeding to death, but they may have head injuries or organ damage that turn out to be fatal. "Reboa is not the second coming of Jesus Christ," Mr. Spencer said. "It is not going to miraculously save someone on a motorcycle who hit a car going 80 miles an hour. But it gives the surgeons a chance where maybe there wasn't a chance before." One case, at the University of California, Davis Medical Center, involved a pregnant woman at high risk of bleeding to death from a placental abnormality. A Jehovah's Witness, she could not accept blood transfusions. Using the balloon helped doctors perform a cesarean section that saved both her and the baby. At a Reboa training course last week for about 50 trauma surgeons from the New York region, Dr. Teperman introduced a surprise guest: Nanetta Hall. Injured in February, she was just about to be released from a rehabilitation hospital. With a walker, she made her way slowly to the front of the auditorium to address the doctors. Without the Reboa procedure, she said, she almost certainly would not have survived. Mr. Spencer, from Prytime, had just described a soldier's death that had driven the military surgeons to create ER Reboa. Gesturing to Ms. Hall, he said, "Because that man died, this lady is alive." Addressing the doctors, Ms. Hall said: "Please, please, take this seriously. And let the word be spread to everybody that this is a vital procedure that should be taught." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Dr. Jen Gunter, an obstetrician and gynecologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, didn't mean to pick on Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle and wellness e commerce company. In fact, she's a fan of Ms. Paltrow's acting. "'Shakespeare in Love' is one of my favorite movies," Dr. Gunter said. "She was so wonderful in that movie." But she doesn't think much of the stories posted by Goop on health and sex. One that sent the doctor to her blog earlier this year was the suggestion in a Goop story that women insert jade eggs into their vaginas to improve their sex lives. "I read the post on Goop, and all I can tell you is it is the biggest load of garbage I have read on your site since vaginal steaming," Dr. Gunter, 51, wrote on her personal blog, which carries the tagline "Wielding the Lasso of Truth." Another Goop story that said bra wearing may increase the chance of breast cancer also irked Dr. Gunter. "It's breast size that increases the risk of breast cancer," she wrote in retort. What about another practice recommended by a doctor interviewed on Goop: cleansing the body with goat's milk as a hedge against parasites? "I'd just write it off as crazy except some people are going to follow this advice and waste a lot of money," Dr. Gunter wrote, adding a certain modifier before "crazy." Goop, which held the In Goop Health conference last month in Culver City, Calif., for acolytes who paid between 500 and 1,500 a ticket, had 1.8 million unique American visitors to its website in June, a 62 percent increase from the previous June, according to comScore, an analytics company. Comparatively, Dr. Gunter's blog is small potatoes. It is hard to navigate and antiquated in design, and failing to meet comScore's threshold of about 50,000 unique visitors a month, its web traffic is too meager to be measured. However, after posting a few viral essays in recent years, Dr. Gunter has emerged as the most ardent critic of Ms. Paltrow's website, routinely responding with snark and medical data to its pronouncements on diet and female genital health. It may have been the lectins which are plant proteins that have been targeted on Goop by one of its contributors, Dr. Steven Gundry that finally got to Ms. Paltrow and the Goop team. After Dr. Gunter posted a sweeping rebuke of several of the alternative health trends promoted by Goop, including a diet low on lectins, Goop posted a retort, which Ms. Paltrow tweeted to her nearly three million followers, along with a line that alluded to a Michelle Obama speech: "When they go low, we go high." The post was intended to take a stand for open discussion about alternative approaches to health and wellness, said Elise Loehnen, the head of content for Goop. The doctors interviewed by Goop are "highly vetted" and offer advice based on "evidence from their own practices," Ms. Loehnen said, adding that Goop's wellness stories include a standard disclaimer. Titled "Uncensored: A Word From Our Doctors," Goop's "we go high" post seemed to single out Dr. Gunter (without naming her but referring to her "wielding the lasso of truth" line) as looking to "critique Goop to leverage that interest and bring attention" to herself. In a section attributed to "Team Goop," it went on to note Dr. Gunter's "strangely confident assertion that putting a crystal in your vagina for pelvic floor strengthening exercises would put you in danger of getting toxic shock syndrome." The rest of the post was written by two of Goop's featured doctors, including one who cited Dr. Gunter by name and castigated her for using swear words. "Now, it's fine to get into a reasonable discussion about the pros and cons of lectins without throwing F bombs," Dr. Gundry wrote. "Dr. Oz and I just had a friendly discussion on this topic you might learn something if you tune in." The flame war continued with another post from Dr. Gunter titled "Goop's Misogynistic, Mansplaining Hit Job." "I am not strangely confident about vaginal health; I am appropriately confident because I am the expert," Dr. Gunter wrote. She then cited her credentials, which include a medical degree from the University of Manitoba, a residency at the University of Western Ontario and a fellowship in infectious disease at the University of Kansas Medical Center. The post has generated 157,000 page views, Dr. Gunter said. Other medical professionals have written in support of her. Dr. Gunter, who works as a gynecologist and obstetrician for Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco, began to blog in 2010, around the time she published a book, "The Preemie Primer." She has long written about "snake oil," she said, focusing on trends and products marketed to women to better their sex lives or vaginal health. "Every single day I am talking to women about how you shouldn't use this product and why you shouldn't use that product," she said. She said she doesn't check the Goop website every day. She usually ends up there after she has grown frustrated with political tweets. "I try to shift my indignation to something I can do something about," Dr. Gunter said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
SEATTLE Microsoft doesn't have an iPhone. It isn't the Everything Store. It isn't a verb for "search." But it sure is good at making money. The company reported earnings Wednesday afternoon, and results showed that it continued to reel in huge profits. Sales for the latest quarter were 33.1 billion, up 14 percent from a year earlier, and profits rose 21 percent to 10.7 billion. The results easily beat analyst expectations. Shares in Microsoft, one of the world's most valuable public companies, were mostly flat in after hours trading. While Microsoft's past was built largely on the back of its Windows operating system, its future firmly rests in the cloud. It has steadily risen to be the No. 2 provider of cloud computing services, behind Amazon's AWS, which all but created the market. And Microsoft is closing in on Amazon's lead, analysts say. Despite market concerns that businesses may cut back on technology spending in the face of an economic downturn, Microsoft executives said they were bullish on the future as more corporate customers moved to the cloud. "I see long term, secular growth opportunities," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said in a call with Wall Street analysts. Here are three major reasons for that optimism. Microsoft's cloud products are getting better Microsoft's offerings used to lag far behind Amazon's. But as Mr. Nadella has thrown his company's weight behind a transition to cloud computing, Microsoft has been catching up on the product front. Microsoft is just a year behind Amazon now, and it has some advantages with large customers, said Keith Weiss, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. In a Morgan Stanley survey of 100 chief information officers, almost 40 percent said Amazon was best positioned among tech providers to gain share as companies moved to the cloud in 2019, with more than 30 percent saying Microsoft was best positioned. In three years, though, they expect the advantages to Amazon and Microsoft to be about equal, they said. They saw Microsoft catching up in key areas including security as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Amy Hood, Microsoft's finance chief, said the company had seen larger and longer customer commitments. "Having commercial bookings growth, at this level, across all of our major properties, I do think makes us feel as though we are having a growing part of I.T. budgets around the world," Ms. Hood said. Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. In the most recent quarter, Microsoft's core cloud computing product, Azure, grew 63 percent from a year earlier excluding currency fluctuations, a touch below analyst expectations. One area where Microsoft is gaining ground is with software developers, who typically favored AWS, which provided many self service tools. "What has always been a really easy task at AWS used to be really difficult within Microsoft," Mr. Weiss said. That perception has been changing over the past year, he said, as Microsoft bought GitHub, which lets developers collaborate on code, and as it has rolled out more developer focused tools. As Microsoft's cloud products approach parity with Amazon, more focus is expected to be placed on how businesses buy and use those products. Increasingly, the adoption of cloud services will be driven not by early adopters like start ups or tech companies that have helped propel Amazon into its lead, but by large traditional businesses. "If that is the next phase of growth, that is Microsoft country," said Karl Keirstead, an analyst at Deutsche Bank. Amazon and Google don't have as many existing relationships with large companies as Microsoft, Mr. Keirstead said. Amazon has been furiously hiring sales and marketing staff for AWS, investments that Amazon told investors were a drag on profit last quarter. "They are in the process of building relationships with the Fortune 500, and Microsoft is one of the largest suppliers of tech to the Fortune 500 already and has been for 20 years," Mr. Keirstead said. "That is powerful." In the Morgan Stanley survey, Microsoft was seen as the top vendor for an approach called "hybrid" cloud, which is popular with large organizations. Hybrid cloud computing lets companies use a single set of tools to manage their information across both remote data centers and their own servers, be it close to a store or in internet connected machinery. A measure of Microsoft's sales for traditional servers and cloud services was up 33 percent excluding currency fluctuations, indicating the approach continued to gain traction. Microsoft has continued to move customers from its traditional Office suite of products like Outlook and Excel to its cloud based Office 365 service. In the quarter, Office 365's commercial sales rose 28 percent excluding currency fluctuations. The company said it had more than 200 million monthly active business users on Office 365. Microsoft says that productivity tools are the hub of where office workers spend their time, and that moving them to the cloud can give companies more up to date tools and data to analyze, like improved security. The power of that suite is clear in the fast adoption of Teams, a chat and collaboration tool that competes with Slack and Google Hangouts. While Slack has more functionality, analysts say, Teams has become good enough for companies to adopt. Also, because Microsoft bundles it with other Office 365 products, it is available at a very low cost. "That is the new user interface," Mr. Weiss said. "That is why Slack is so threatening to Microsoft, and why they are competing so aggressively against it. Microsoft doesn't want you to take that nexus of where you spend your time away from them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Harriett D. Foy, center, as a slave living in a household of women that includes the imperious Beartrice Albans (played by Lynda Gravatt, right) and her daughters, played by Juliana Canfield and Nedra McClyde. When you hear a drum beat as you're watching Marcus Gardley's "The House That Will Not Stand," which opened on Monday night at New York Theater Workshop, sit up and pay attention. It's likely to be the prelude to a flash of wondrousness. Drums are what herald two extraordinary monologues in this densely packed, erratic comic drama, directed by Lileana Blain Cruz. Their percussive insistence shapes two separate instances when both a character and the play that has hitherto confined her soar into a stratosphere of freedom. Each is, to some degree, about living in and denying captivity in early 19th century New Orleans. The first monologue belongs to Marie Josephine (a rapturous Michelle Wilson), a middle aged woman who is a virtual prisoner of her domineering sister, as she recalls a cruelly terminated love affair with a drummer who, like her, had skin as black as "a midnight with no stars." The second soliloquy finds Makeda (Harriett D. Foy), a household servant of regal bearing, delivering a propulsive history lesson to Odette (Joniece Abbott Pratt), the youngest daughter of the house, who believes her dark complexion is a fatal stain. In a speech that recalls the time bending arias of August Wilson, Makeda hymns the sacredness of the drum: It be the sway in a Negro woman's hip The shuffle in a colored man's stride. The beat be the blackest thang alive Wake up! See how we survived Makeda, rumor has it, is skilled in the sinister arts of voodoo. But what she's channeling here is a spirit of pure divinity. And as Ms. Foy rides the bucking rhythms of Makeda's journey through the past, present and future of African Americans, she achieves an exaltation that lifts her and the audience into the empyrean. "The House That Will Not Stand" is Mr. Gardley's loquacious and freewheeling answer to "The House of Bernarda Alba," Federico Garcia Lorca's tightly coiled 1936 tragedy of sexual repression in rural Spain. Mr. Gardley's "House" lacks the compelling inevitably and grim logic of Lorca's. Yet consistency of plot and tone clearly are not Mr. Gardley's first objectives. What he's up to here is suggested by the difference between the titles of his and Lorca's plays. (Mr. Gardley has made a specialty of ingenious riffs on classic themes and American archetypes, in works that include "X: or, Betty Shabazz v. the Nation" and "A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes," which relocated Moliere's "Tartuffe" to Atlanta.) Sign up for Theater Update, a weekly email of news and features. Though he has provided an equivalent to Lorca's titular matriarch Beartrice Albans, embodied by the formidable Lynda Gravatt the house that gives his play its name is more openly metaphoric. This house that is destined to fall is the corrupt institution of slavery. Or rather slavery in many forms cultural, familial and religious, in a world where worth is measured by skin tones. This "House" has been built in a fascinating, very particular time and place in American history, when women of color were mistresses to white New Orleans grandees in a system called placage. These were women who, like Beartrice, ran their own households and enjoyed a degree of autonomy that would have been unthinkable for slaves on plantations. In the summer of 1813, a decade after Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States, such freedoms are about to be revoked by the establishment of new laws. In "House," this threat imposes a deadline not only for Beartrice whose longtime lover has just died (and is visibly lying in state) to secure legal ownership of her home. Her personal slave, Makeda, must acquire her freedom from her owner before it is no longer legally possible to do so. Beartrice, though, is a woman who likes to control those around her. That's especially true of her three daughters: Agnes (Nedra McClyde), who longs to attach herself to a rich white man; Maude Lynn (Juliana Canfield), a young woman of fanatical piety; and Odette, the least assured of the three. Rounding out the menage is their ranting aunt, Marie Josephine, who lives restlessly in the attic, like the mad Mrs. Rochester of "Jane Eyre." And lurking at the edges, like a vulture who has scented carrion, is La Veuve (Marie Thomas), an evil tongued frenemy of Beartrice. You may find it difficult to sort out all the rivalries and counterplots festering among these women. And despite Ms. Gravatt's monolithic presence, it isn't any easier to reconcile Beartrice's puritanical strictness with her consciousness of her sexuality as her greatest asset. (She refers to her genitalia as her "sweet potato pie," which becomes addictive to anyone who tastes it.) In the same vein, the insults that fly among the characters have the formulaic snap of contemporary sitcom banter. And Mr. Gardley's fondness for metaphor can sometimes strangle what should be simple exposition. Ms. Blain Cruz, the fast rising director whose earlier credits include the Signature Theater's stunning production of Suzan Lori Parks' "The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World," doesn't find a similar, persuasively sustained perspective here. But the production is a lavish eyeful, for sure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
If you are enjoying this newsletter every Friday, please pass it on to a friend (or four) and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory. Athletic Bilbao feels on the inside precisely as it appears from the outside. To Aritz Aduriz, the striker who retired from the club this week, it always had the air of a "neighborhood team taking on the world." It was a club in which the players shared a background and an outlook, in which the line between the squad and its public was blurred to the point of invisibility, a team that is of a place in a sport that knows no borders. The roots of that identity are well documented. Athletic is the rare team in elite soccer that refuses to take advantage of the globalization that has transformed the game mostly for better, occasionally for worse in the last two decades or so; it adheres to a strict policy of fielding only players born or raised in the Basque regions of Spain and France. It is, on the surface, a massive competitive disadvantage. Bilbao's rivals, after all, can recruit from around the globe. Athletic is reliant on its own youth academy, and on its ability to pluck players from a handful of other teams in the region: Real Sociedad in San Sebastian, Osasuna in Pamplona and, in recent years, Eibar. Occasionally, a player of Basque heritage will emerge elsewhere: Athletic signed Bixente Lizarazu, a French Basque, from Bordeaux in the 1990s, and added Ander Herrera, born in Bilbao, from Real Zaragoza in 2011. Cristian Ganea, a Romanian international, was able to join the club in 2018 because he had spent some of his teenage years in the region. Not all such players, though, meet the criteria. The club reportedly felt Marcos Asensio did not quite fit the bill and turned down the chance to bring him into their ranks as a teenager. He now plays for Real Madrid. That Athletic remains a force in Spanish soccer it has never been relegated, and it was slated to feature in the final of the Copa del Rey before the postponement of this season is something of a minor miracle, then. It helps that the Basque region has been, traditionally, a fertile breeding ground for players. It helps that the club has the financial strength to resist all but the most lucrative offers for its stars, enabling it to keep its squad together. And it helps, of course, that players like Aduriz revel in the feeling the club generates, that they buy in to what it means, that they relish the chance to play for a team that feels as if it stands for something. Most of all, though, Athletic Bilbao works because of the fans. Modern soccer conditions its fans to think in a very specific way. What matters, ultimately, are results. Success, for the elite, is weighed in the silver and gold of trophies and medals. For everyone else, it is measured in the league table, an annual review held every weekend. If your team's position is too low, if it is not meeting expectations, then it is your right to demand immediate change. Coaches must be fired, players sold and others bought and, if necessary, executives dismissed: whichever one applies, but there must be change, and change almost always looks like recruitment of one sort or another. What is most compelling about Athletic's model is that it deprives its fans of the chance to think like that. Of course, there are times when San Mames, the club's stadium, will roar its disapproval. There are seasons when the club will cycle through coaches, or when players will fall out of favor, or when the board will come under fire. But written into the unspoken contract between Athletic and its fans is the tacit acceptance that there will be fallow years. There will be seasons when success is a comfortable midtable finish. There will be times when trophies are a distant prospect, and the best that can be hoped for is a single euphoric night against one of La Liga's giants. To some extent, Athletic has chosen to prioritize its model still, more than a century on, not actually officially codified over its ambitions. Success, at Athletic, is in doing as well as a neighborhood team that has to take on the world can do. Some years, that might mean reaching a major final. Many years it will not, and yet still, the overwhelming majority of fans support the policy. There is no yearning for change, big or small. There is something in this that might, perhaps, be a useful example for clubs far from the Basque region as soccer comes to terms with its new, post pandemic reality. Many executives accept that soccer's 30 year bull market is over, for the time being at least. Clubs will have to spend less, in the short term, and spend better to succeed. Change will not be so easy to effect in an altered marketplace, and problems will have to be solved, at times, by things other than cash. For fans, too, it may be time to internalize a different idea of what success is, to accept that some years might be better than others, that building slowly and cautiously toward a pinnacle may not only be preferable, but necessary. The idea that any other team might willingly limit its choices, as Athletic Bilbao has, is fanciful. Its model is not one that might be easily franchised. But the consequences of that model can be international, if we permit them to be. Change does not always have to be seen as a virtue. A team's worth does not always have to be gauged exclusively by league position. Sometimes, success can just be having a team that is of a place, and has to take on the world. It is worth explaining the mistake, I think, because after we published this week's interview with Aduriz, at least a couple of people got in touch to point it out. The same thing happens when you write about Sporting Lisbon actually titled Sporting Clube de Portugal and, occasionally, Inter Milan properly called Internazionale too. In the last few years, it's got to the stage where we could probably add using Red Star Belgrade instead of Crvena Zvezda to that list. The allegations range from ignorance (understandable) to some form of soccer based cultural imperialism (a bit of a stretch, if I'm honest). There is no argument over which of those names is correct. So why make the mistake? Well, my feeling has always been that the point of language is communication. To an English speaking audience, Athletic Bilbao is much more instantly familiar than Athletic Club; Sporting Lisbon evokes a clearer image than just "Sporting." Some fans, I know, find that offensive, but it works the other way, too. Plenty of people talk about Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers (even in Britain). "Manchester" is used across the world as shorthand for United, which says a lot about City's global impact until recent years. You will, very occasionally, see references to Arsenal London, too. They're all wrong, of course. But what matters, deep down, is that people know what you're talking about. What Are We Watching For? And yet, looked at purely statistically, the outputs across Europe's four major leagues are startlingly similar. There are minor variations, of course, little points of inflection, but it would take a trained eye to identify each league correctly merely by its basic data. It has always seemed odd, then, that so many fans and players and coaches and pundits and journalists regard themselves as devotees of one league in particular. It is especially prevalent among those who favor the Premier League (and is, in many ways, actively indulged by the Premier League itself). Italian soccer is dismissed as boring, Spain as predictable, Germany as try hard and hipster. (France, as it happens, is dismissed entirely.) The approaches are different, of course, but the outcomes are broadly the same. So on some level, logically, if you enjoy watching soccer, you should at least take some pleasure from a game, regardless of where it is being held. The explanation is obvious: The league that seems most entertaining to a fan is the one that the fan is emotionally invested in. What elevates one competition over another is not its innate quality, but how much we care about it. This same thought struck me last weekend, watching Borussia Dortmund dismantle Schalke, the first live soccer in any major league since the shutdown. The span of reactions was surprising: some enjoying sport, live and fresh and new; some struggling with the eeriness of the empty stadium; some so bored that they could not bear to watch more than a few minutes. Was that, though, as it was assumed to be, because of the absence of fans? Or is it because most of those watching were doing so out of curiosity, and not out of any genuine emotional attachment? Would they have had the same reaction had the stadium been full? Would many of those people even have been watching at all? The game, after all, is the same. The spectacle is not the spectacle is, obviously, much worse but then we do not only watch for the spectacle. If we did, Argentine soccer's television deals would be through the roof. The crucial difference is not the quality on the field, or the noise off it, but how much any of it means to us. The return of the Bundesliga, you will have noticed, did not bring about any mass gatherings of fans. Many, in fact, stayed away even from bars that had been permitted to open as lockdown restrictions are gradually lifted. "I think the distrust of fans you speak of is the same generalized distrust of football players that has emerged during the current pandemic," Lorraine Berry wrote. "In both cases, I would argue that a certain strata in British society regards the working class backgrounds of many players and the increasing numbers of black and minority ethnic and immigrants among the player elites as a convenient shorthand for well worn class assumptions. "We know that the nadir of that feeling was in the way that the dead at Hillsborough were written off as working class yobs who got what they deserved. But despite the Premier League's ownership comprising despots and oligarchs, it's still the working class lads whose talent commands PS250,000 a week who make convenient targets." Charles Marro, meanwhile, points out "the irony that sports that are played for love have been canceled, while the sports trying to cobble together ways to resume playing seem to be populated by people more in love with the money than the sport itself." This is true, I think, but perhaps unavoidable. The sports themselves will survive. The threat is economic, rather than conceptual, and therefore it applies largely to the sports businesses. All communication on Twitter is welcome, and please keep sending ideas, comments and suggestions to askrory nytimes.com. Do you like getting emails? Then other people probably do, too. Send them here to help them fulfill their ambitions. And one programming note: Marcus Rashford features in this week's Set Piece Menu, too. That's all for this week. Keep safe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
It is strange how some of the world's most retrograde authoritarian states end up being such inadvertent conservators of both their country's architectural heritage and vast tracts of wild, unspoiled nature. Of course, it was not their leaders' intention to distinguish themselves as environmentalists or conservationists, but by so abjectly failing to develop viable economic engines, they nonetheless had this providential effect. The still pristine beaches and undisturbed colonial architecture in Cuba that the Castro dynasty froze in amber for so many decades and the smog free and tourist less cities and untouched coastlines and mountains in North Korea that the Kim dynasty so effectively kept unvisited by industry and tourism are two such examples. But laurels must also go to Myanmar, the Southeast Asian country that languished after a military junta took power in 1988 and overturned a democratic election. It was the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or Slorc, that put the dissident Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under long term house arrest and changed the country's name from Burma to Myanmar and the capital's name from Rangoon to Yangon. Traveling this fascinating and contradictory land today, one must acknowledge a certain debt of gratitude to those generals who helped keep it in a state of penurious, suspended animation while most of the rest of Asia was incinerating itself in orgies of high speed economic growth and environmental despoliation. By not providing much for them to consume, the generals also managed to protect their largely good hearted and devoutly Buddhist people from the predations of rampant consumer culture. It was, of course, a bittersweet triumph. Such ironies were swirling around my head as the Asian Wings prop plane that my friends and I were on set down last month at Putao's tiny airport in the northernmost part of Myanmar, where a protrusion of the Kachin State juts up toward Tibet between the Yunnan Province in China and Arunachal Pradesh, a state in India. Brigitte Lacombe for The New York Times The most distinguishing features of this far flung part of Myanmar are its remoteness and the fact that it boasts the country's share of the Greater Himalayas, that magnificent range of towering peaks that arcs up over the top of the Indian subcontinent, stretching from China to Afghanistan. That Kachin possesses Southeast Asia's tallest summit, Hkakabo Razi (19,296 feet), and one of Myanmar's largest national parks is a source of pride. But so remote is this area that even the Japanese Imperial Army never managed to wrest it from British control during World War II. And outside Putao, you can still see the remains of Fort Hertz, one of the most far off outposts of the British colonial army's Burma Frontier Force. Once in a raft and coursing down this sylvan river, I was overcome with a feeling of exhilaration at being in a place where there are so few other people, the water is still so pure, and the natural landscape is still so breathtakingly unperturbed. The only signs of human intrusion were the occasional lean to and small bamboo raft on the rocky shore that are used by local fishermen. Nowhere to be seen were the effluvia of discarded plastic bags, bottles, wrappers and other detritus that, along with polluted water, have become the hallmarks of most other Asian rivers and lakes. But, even as I marveled at the beauty of it all, a reaction kicked in that for many of us has become almost autonomic each time we encounter a scene of unalloyed natural beauty in our modern world: Suddenly an unwelcome sense of the scene's fragility jolts us with feelings of apprehension about its future. Now that Myanmar is finally "opening up," foreign investment is flooding in, and tourism is burgeoning, we are left to worry about how long it will be before our own rapacious, Promethean instinct to exploit, develop and enrich becomes the undoing of even these last out of the way and hard to reach backwaters of the world. (Commercial flights to Putao are still seasonal, and because its airport has no refueling capability, aircraft must stop on the way from Yangon at Mandalay or Myitkyina.) It is a seemingly inescapable and bitter reality that, for the remaining remote and wild places still left in the world, discovery and access are almost inevitably a prelude to exploitation, if not desecration. The Putao region was originally populated by only a few indigenous tribal people. However, in 1949, as Mao began taking over China, the American missionary J. Russell Morse was forced to leave Yunnan Province and seek refuge across the border in Burma, then still a British colony. Leading several thousands of his Church of Christ Lisu parishioners, he trekked to this Kachin valley and established a new church and mission compound on the banks of the Nam Lang River in Mulashidi. (Although Morse is long gone, one can still walk through the collapsing ruins of his lovely old mission and even attend one of the still active churches he spawned that continue to serve the many Christian members of the Putao community.) The Malikha Lodge and bungalows in Putao. Brigitte Lacombe for The New York Times As the Nam Lang River approaches the flat Putao plain, it broadens out, and there perched high on a rocky bluff are the thatch roof bungalows of the Malikha Lodge. Shrouded by bamboo groves, a teakwood veranda in front of the main building juts out like the foredeck of an old sailing ship that seems to be beating straight up the river toward the sweeping panorama of the snow capped peaks in the Khamti Mountains, on Myanmar's border with northeastern India. That such a beautifully appointed auberge designed by the Belgian born, Kuala Lumpur based resort designer Jean Michel Gathy, of Aman Resorts fame is here at all is a wonder, as is the fact that, after being dunked in the chilly river while rafting, guests will arrive back at their bungalows to find their private teak hot tubs filled with hot water and flower petals by the cheerful staff. That all this tastefulness and refinement has managed to materialize in one of the remotest parts of this long isolated country, even as it struggles with poverty, separatism, poor infrastructure and opium production, seems a miracle. Beautifully constructed out of local hardwood and roofed with traditional palm frond thatching, each of the lodge's 12 private "bungalows" is equipped with its own espresso maker, hot tub, wood burning stove and outdoor terrace. The lodge is open for business from October (when the seasonal monsoon ceases and the weather begins cooling to provide welcome natural relief from heat and mosquitoes in these malarial climes) through April (when the rains resume, temperatures rise, bugs proliferate and the surrounding jungles become a high humidity tropical pressure cooker). Because most of the region still lives in a pre electrical age, the lodge is powered by its own generator, and when the power goes off each night, the darkness feels primal. Indeed, without all of the light pollution to which our urban eyes have become accustomed, the stars overhead shine with such dazzling brilliance that they seem almost unnatural, even psychedelic. Here, local people tend to retire and rise with the sun. Each new day is announced not by cellphones, clock radios or the beeping of other digital devices, but by the first insomniac rooster's prelight reveille, a clarion call that quickly triggers a wrap around sonic cacophony, as every other backsliding rooster in the neighborhood joins in to herald the dawn. Then from across the river, where rice paddies step down to the shore, come the sounds of crying babies, laughing children and the chopping of wood. Only then does the sky begin to brighten and smoke begin to curl up from cooking fires. And when the sun finally does burst forth to limn the frieze of jagged, snow capped peaks behind the forested foothills, it is, indeed, like being present at creation. For guests at Malikha Lodge, most of whom are European, the next morning sound is the lock turning in their bungalow door as a staff member steals in to light the woodstove and take the chill off the room. But, truth be told, it is only after the generator comes back on and the electric blanket on top of everyone's thick quilt returns to life that most visitors begin to feel fortified enough to finally greet the dawn themselves, rise, pull on some frigid clothing and troop off to the main building for a delicious breakfast. Well, there is a fascinating early morning outdoor market in Putao to visit, elephants to ride, rapids to shoot, treks to remote villages to take and wild orchids to find. Myanmar is on the verge of civil war. Following a military coup on Feb. 1, unrest has been growing. Peaceful pro democracy demonstrations have given way to insurgent uprisings against the Tatmadaw, the country's military, which ousted the country's civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is a polarizing figure. The daughter of a hero of Myanmar's independence, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi remains very popular at home. Internationally, her reputation has been tarnished by her recent cooperation with the same military generals who ousted her. The coup ended a short span of quasi democracy. In 2011, the Tatmadaw implemented parliamentary elections and other reforms. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi came to power as state councillor in 2016, becoming the country's de facto head of government. The coup was preceded by a contested election. In the Nov. 8 election, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi's party won 83 percent of the body's available seats. The military, whose proxy party suffered a crushing defeat, refused to accept the results of the vote. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi could face time in prison. She was detained by the junta and secretly put on trial. If convicted of all 11 charges against her, which include "inciting public unrest," she could be sentenced to a maximum of 102 years in prison. Or one can just enjoy some remedial lounging, a lunch in the lodge's excellent communal restaurant, some quiet reading around the fire in the main lounge, a little restorative napping in one's elegantly canopied (with a mosquito net) bed or a massage (the first of which is gratis for every guest). Affiliated with the Aureum Palace Hotels Resorts and Myanmar Treasure Resorts, a confederation of five star properties controlled by the Htoo Group of Companies, whose chairman is the prominent businessman U Tay Za, the Malikha Lodge has the benefit of being connected to what is perhaps the best run network of high end hotels and resorts in Myanmar. However, U Tay Za also has the distinction of being on the United States Department of Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals list, a roster established by Washington during the military junta to sanction Myanmar's so called "cronies," businessmen accused of profiting by collaborating with the ruling generals. While many "cronies" did accept concessions from the generals and still profit from what critics characterize as a "looting of the country," there is nonetheless an international inconsistency inherent in Myanmar's being on the list: Most other countries with equally reprehensible records of abuse are unencumbered by such lists. What is more, one of those very generals, Thein Sein, who ran the old junta, is now not only Myanmar's president, but also the architect of the country's unexpected and quite ambitious reform agenda. As such, he was conveniently removed from the list so that, as the country made its volte face releasing political prisoners, abandoning press censorship and seeking to restore constitutional government he was eligible to meet with President Obama and Secretaries of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry. Yet because many other former military leaders and businessmen who worked together under the junta remain on the list, Myanmar confronts a unique problem: How can the new government successfully promote development and fully enter the global economy when so many of its biggest commercial players are sidelined? However, there is the challenge of reforming governance in this ethnically divided country; indeed, of refashioning the very essence of Myanmar itself. As this uncertain process continues to unfold, Myanmar finds itself in the anomalous position of having the further development of much of its best tourist infrastructure hotels, travel agencies and airlines complicated by the very United States sanctions that are supposed to be helping it. And the Htoo Group's chain of resorts and hotels, which happen to cover the breadth of Myanmar and comprise one of its best networks of accommodations, will be an important piece of the hospitality industry's future in this still very underdeveloped and infrastructure challenged land. Composed of some 12 properties in all, the chain includes some of Myanmar's best known hotels and resorts, from the elegant Kandawgyi Palace in Yangon and the Popa Mountain Resort near Bagan to the singular Malikha Lodge in Putao. Even as many large hotel chains like Hilton and Shangri la are now clamoring to open properties in Myanmar and are changing the chemistry of visiting this once languid backwater, for now one could hardly do better as a visitor than to simply travel from one of these properties to another like a Franciscan friar making his way up the California coast by stopping one after another at Spanish missions. Despite their indelibly authoritarian provenance, Myanmar's generals did unexpectedly, and very counterintuitively, begin reforming their own government in 2011. It was a stunning about face that caught almost everyone off guard. While they remain very much in transition with the outcome of their efforts still uncertain, what is everywhere evident to any of the growing number of visitors to the country is Myanmar's enduring physical beauty, rich and largely Buddhist culture and extremely open and warm hearted people (attacks by Buddhist extremists against Muslims in Rakhine State notwithstanding). What is more, unlike other popular Asian tourist destinations such as China, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, which have increasingly become theme park like experiences leeched of authenticity, in Myanmar it is still possible for visitors to become lost in a culturally varied and vibrant indigenous society that has yet to become a commercially mummified simulacrum of its former self. But for now, strolling through the beguiling small town of Mulashidi, just outside the gates of the Malikha Lodge, laid out well over a half century ago by J. Russell Morse and his mission, one still gets the feeling of being immersed in an earlier time, when people made their own houses out of local rattan and thatch, kept a yard full of chickens and a pig, cultivated their own fruits and vegetables, rose with their roosters in the morning and then smiled to neighbors as they walked to work or school. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Imagine being held up at gunpoint. Do you trust you could remember the perpetrator's face? The gun? Or would you have a better recollection of how loud the birds were chirping at that moment? "The memory does not operate like a videotape machine faithfully recording every single detail," said Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of "Remembering Trauma." "The thing that is happening is that you're focusing on the most dangerous thing," he said. "That is the function of fear: to alert you to imminent threats." Stress can play a role in eyewitness cases of mistaken identity, experts said, and it could be a reason there were such conflicting accounts of the suspects in the shooting death of Jazmine Barnes, the 7 year old Texas girl who was fired upon in a car with her mother and three sisters on Dec. 30. A gunman pulled up alongside them and opened fire. Jazmine's mother, LaPorsha Washington, 30, was injured. Ms. Washington and her daughters met with investigators to help them create a composite sketch of the gunman, who attacked them before sunrise. The man was described as white, thin and in his 30s or 40s and driving a red pickup truck. On Sunday, the authorities announced they had charged a 20 year old black man with capital murder in connection with the shooting. In a CNN interview, Ms. Washington said her teenage daughter told her that the man was white and that his hoodie was black. "That's all she could see at the time because the sun hadn't really even came out yet," Ms. Washington said in the interview. For days, the search for a white man dominated news headlines. The unexpected turn that the suspect charged was black and not white was not intentional, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County, Tex., said at a news conference on Sunday. The person driving the pickup, who the police now believe was likely a witness to the shooting, might have been the last thing Jazmine's family remembered "prior to the mayhem and chaos," the sheriff said. Lori Brown, a criminologist at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., said "eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence you can have" because people try to understand how a traumatic event could have happened by using what they know about the world. "Unfortunately," she said, "we fill in the gaps." There is a well defined biological response to stress, said Daniel Reisberg, a professor of psychology and perception at Reed College in Portland, Ore. The body prioritizes resources and sharpens your focus to help you cope with stress. The body activates a stress response mechanism, or the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal, or H.P.A., axis. This is a chemical sequence that starts with the hypothalamus in the forebrain, sending chemical signals to the pituitary, which then secretes the stress hormone ACTH, which then causes the adrenal glands to produce cortisol, experts said. This is where memory comes into play. The stress hormone cortisol causes a person to have tunnel vision in the extreme or a really narrow snapshot of what happened, Professor Reisberg said. "When you're under high stress, not only does it have an impact on how things are recorded in your brain but also how you can report on the memory," he said. The second a person walks away from an event, the memory of it starts to fade. This is when a memory can be contaminated by talking to the authorities, a lawyer, friends or bystanders, Professor Reisberg said. People fill in gaps in their memory with context and references from their own experiences, Jeff Evan Saerys Foy, an assistant professor of psychology at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., said. "People will sort of incorporate things," he said. "Even with these very vivid events, the inaccuracy keeps going on with time. There is a possibility for change." Memories formed during a traumatic event become an amalgamation of a person's understanding of the world, the people around them and the snippets they were able to encode into their brain. "Our working memory has a limited capacity," Professor McNally said. "You cannot encode everything at once, especially when it is happening very quickly. Our minds are just not that powerful." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Credit...Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo by Vincent Tullo for The New York Times If art isn't about life and death, and the emotions and ethics that surround them, what is it about? Style? Taste? Auction results? Some artists focus on those, but the most interesting head for the uncool existential bottom line, which is what Bruce Nauman does. He's approached this line by many paths: history, humor, shock, politics and formal variety. And he's merged those paths into a bumpy superhighway of a career, which we're invited to travel in "Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts," a half century retrospective that fills the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art and nearly the entire premises of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. It's a transfixing trip. Now 76, and still on the job (there's work from this year in the survey), Mr. Nauman has done much to change the way we define what art is, and what is art. Without being overtly topical, he has consistently viewed the world through a critical eye, with the result that art he made decades ago is pertinent to our present morally wrenching American moment. And even his loudest, most outsized art feels personal, sourced from extreme emotions we all feel panic, despair, disgust, hilarity one by one. The retrospective is Mr. Nauman's second at MoMA the first, which originated elsewhere, arrived in 1995 though it's far from being a repeat. The earlier survey was, among other things, a punishing aural assault. The noise level made you want to hustle through it. The new one feels, if only by contrast, subdued. You still get high decibel discomfort. The gallery guards at MoMA should be awarded combat pay. But at PS1, the soundscape is actually mellow. You hear someone pick out a spare piano tune. A guitar plays a mournful country song. And in a 1966 video, in the entrance lobby, a youthful Mr. Nauman scrapes away, not unmelodically, on a violin. The two installations look intriguingly unalike. MoMA's is, as usual, wide open, white, light blasted and sealed off from any hint of an outside world. At PS1, the work occupies a three floor warren of hallways and tight, low lit enclosures. Many were once classrooms of a public school a damp air of adolescent angst still clings to them and are probably about the size of Mr. Nauman's starter studios. But the big reason to take in both sites is that Mr. Nauman deserves to be seen in full. When you talk about life and death you're talking about the body, present or absent. And the body his, ours has been the primary focus of Mr. Nauman's work from the start. I don't know how this focus developed but by time he enrolled in the M.F.A. studio program at the University of California at Davis in 1964, it was there. He spent his first year doing abstract painting, then dropped that for good. He moved on to sculpture, and that seemed to turn on a switch, point the way. Minimalism was the hot style then, but he found its industrial blankness pretentious and turned to making smallish, rough, gnarly things, that referred to the body, or parts of it. Often, that body was, at least nominally his own, as is the case in nearly half of the 21 sculptures and drawings, all from the 1960s, in the first gallery at MoMA. The gallery looks a little like the aftermath of an autopsy, with the discarded scraps waiting for cleanup. A wax cast, gangrenous green, of an arm and shoulder, severed just above the chin, hangs on the wall. (Its title, "From Hand to Mouth," introduces Mr. Nauman's penchant for visual verbal puns.) What look like large strips of raw fat lie on the floor. Another wall sculpture, "Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals," is an unprepossessing network of weakly glowing light tubes and sagging writing. In a video, the young Mr. Nauman appears in person alone in his studio repeatedly positioning and repositioning, and wrestling with, a large metal T bar. He seems to be trying to turn the T bar into a Minimalist style sculpture, but it won't cooperate. In fact, it is positioning and repositioning him. Video new to art, cheap to produce, easy to show became a primary medium for Mr. Nauman and with it he continued, for a while, to be his own most malleable subject. In a piece called "Art Make Up: No. 1 White, No. 2 Pink, No. 3 Green, No. 4 Black," he smears his face and bare chest with layers of colored pigment. He's turning himself into a living painting, but he also seems to be playing with the fictions and stigmas of race at a time 1967 68 when America was burning with racial violence. In another video, "Walk With Contrapposto," gender gets a workout. For this piece he constructed a tall, narrow, free standing corridor from wallboard, then filmed himself walking its length with a funny, hip swinging gait. He was ostensibly imitating the pumped poses associated with the ideal male form in Classical sculpture. But his bump and grind sashay brought conventions of female striptease to mind. The crossover male/female, old/new had liberating potential, but not when crushed between viselike walls. Soon after this, around 1970, images of his own body dropped from view. And in certain works, he invited viewers us to physically take his place. He presented the corridor of the walking piece as a stand alone installation, with surveillance cameras added. The piece now became an audience participation exercise in claustrophobia and paranoia. Nor did he absent himself entirely. He remained very present in the form of words, spoken and written. And the work got angrier. In a small, darkened gallery at PS1, a male voice Mr. Nauman's alternately hisses and shouts the command: "Get out of this room, get out of my mind." With neon tubing, he cooked up hellish versions of standard commercial signage. In 1984, he composed a wall from 100 flashing, rainbow colored variations on the phrase "Live and Die." A year later came a neon animation, called "Sex and Death by Murder and Suicide," in which two silhouetted nude figures, male and female, stab and shoot themselves and each other. And when he returned to video, the aggression continued. In the 1987 video installation "Clown Torture," the clown of the title (played by an actor) cowers and ceaselessly screams a horrified "no, no, no, no, no" at an unseen tormentor, who is apparently us, the viewer. The image of Mr. Nauman as a cowboy was in wide circulation by the time of the 1995 retrospective. And for some people it colored the way his art was perceived. It was seen as dude art, and, as such, evidence that he was just another alpha male artist taking an institutional victory lap around the arena. The assaultive ambience of the show itself didn't help. These reactions, while not baseless, clouded the nature of his art. The new retrospective, less theatrical and more meditative a substantial selection of works on paper is a big help lets us see with more clarity where Mr. Nauman's art, ethically speaking, stands, and how it connects up with politics in the present. It lets us see Mr. Nauman's image of hanged and flayed animals (he adapted them from taxidermy models) as prescient of an era when protections of natural resources, including wildlife, are being gutted. A 1981 neon sculpture that spells out "American Violence" in the shape of a swastika suggests that white nationalism is a chronic condition. It says something about Mr. Nauman's view of art as a moral instrument that when, in 1969, he was invited to be in a major Land Art show, he proposed hiring a plane to sky write the words "Leave The Land Alone." In the seven channel video installation ''Mapping the Studio II (Fat Chance John Cage)," from 2001, the body, in all its manifestations, is gone. For this monumental work Mr. Nauman set video cameras running in his studio overnight for several nights to record what happens when he wasn't there. A lot does: distant dogs bark, coyote cubs howl, mice scamper, cats prowl, hunting. The result is a ground level study in first and last things. And an art and life lesson in how to be absent, and not. The show is at two museums. Oct. 21 through Feb. 18, Museum of Modern Art; 212 708 9400, moma.org; MoMA PS1, Oct. 21 through Feb. 25, 718 784 2084, momaps1.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is not under control and could continue for another year, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview on Friday. "Let's not underestimate this outbreak," he said. His outlook was less optimistic than that of the director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said at a news conference on Thursday that his goal was to end the outbreak in six months. Dr. Redfield has just returned from a trip to the region that included a visit on March 9 to a treatment center in Butembo that, just hours before, had come under gunfire by attackers who killed a police officer. It was the second attack on that center. Another was attacked on Thursday. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Also on Thursday, Dr. Redfield related his observations from the region, telling a Senate subcommittee that sometime between May and mid September, Congo could run out of an Ebola vaccine that is widely believed to have kept the epidemic from becoming even worse. More than 87,000 people have received the vaccine, which is being donated by its manufacturer, Merck. The vaccine is not yet licensed and cannot be sold. So far, Merck has donated 133,000 doses. In response to Dr. Redfield's warning that vaccine supplies could become dangerously low, Pamela L. Eisele, a spokeswoman for Merck, said in an email that the company could not comment on the C.D.C.'s projections. She also said that Merck keeps a stockpile of 300,000 doses, which it replenishes by making more vaccine whenever doses are deployed for outbreaks. "Our commitment is to keep at least 300,000 doses," she said. This outbreak began in August. There had been 932 cases and 587 deaths as of Wednesday, according to the World Health Organization. The epidemic is the second largest ever, after the one in West Africa from 2014 to 2016, which killed more than 11,000 people. The disease has struck two of Congo's northeastern provinces, North Kivu and Ituri, a conflict zone where people have for decades lived in fear of armed militias, the police and soldiers. The most heavily affected areas are urban, with a surrounding population of about one million. The region is close to Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda, and tens of thousands of people cross those borders every day. Some 20 million have gone back and forth from the outbreak zone since August, Dr. Redfield estimated, and added, "Truly, it's nearly miraculous that we haven't seen cross border spread yet." The C.D.C. has worked with the neighboring countries to set up screening stations to stop the disease from reaching them. Some travelers with suspicious symptoms have been tested, but so far none have been infected. Dr. Redfield said that experts from his agency could do more to help stop the disease, but that so far, because of violence in the area, the United States government had not permitted them to work where they are needed most, in the epicenters of the outbreak. Some were deployed in August to Beni, but were quickly relocated because of unrest in the area. C.D.C. employees are working in other parts of Congo, however, to train health workers and help coordinate the response. The State Department decides whether it is safe for government employees to work in other countries. "We're ready to deploy as soon as they tell us it's time," Dr. Redfield said. He noted that health workers from the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, Alima and other aid groups, had been working nonstop in the region for more than seven months. Fatigue was setting in, he said, and workers needed reinforcements, especially leaders with deep experience in this kind of outbreak. Several red flags indicate that the outbreak is not under control, Dr. Redfield said. One is that too many people about 40 percent are dying at home and never going to treatment centers. There is a high risk that they have infected family members, health workers and other patients at local clinics they might have gone to for help. The disease is spread by bodily fluids and becomes highly contagious when symptoms start. Corpses are very infectious and pose a big risk to relatives who may wash, dress and prepare them for burial. To control an outbreak, at least 70 percent of patients need to be isolated and treated safely in isolation units so that they do not infect anyone else, and that percentage needs to be maintained for several months. In the epicenters in Congo now, that figure is only about 58 percent, Dr. Redfield said. Another bad sign is that too many new cases are turning up who were not known contacts of patients and were not being monitored, meaning they could have infected yet more unknown people. Also problematic is that a high percentage of patients, about 25 percent, became infected at local health centers, and about 75 health workers from those centers have also been infected. Rates that high indicate that information about the disease and how to avoid spreading it have not reached those clinics. Many patients in the current outbreak, about 30 percent, have been children, and doctors say they think some caught Ebola when they were taken to local clinics for other illnesses. In addition, the contact tracing has not always been effective . In some cases, if contacts missed a scheduled appointment to be checked for symptoms, their names were simply dropped from the list, Dr. Redfield said. He said one incentive to encourage contacts to cooperate was to offer food if they showed up. But then a decision was made locally to hand out the food at a central location, which defeated the purpose of using it as an incentive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In pursuit of the perfect legging print, Zara Tisch has baked and photographed chocolate chip cookies, used a tweezer to set crystals in a skull shape, and spent a year arranging and rearranging cassette tapes to figure out the most leg lengthening configuration. Ms. Tisch's company, Terez, is known for its playful photo real patterns, including crushed powdered eye shadow and dogs (her own appear), and one that features emoji, which is the company's best seller. (The leggings have been worn and Instagrammed by Lena Dunham.) Other prints include jelly beans, milkshakes and doughnuts perhaps the only desirable way to carry these foods on the hips. "Pretty much we love any reason to have sweets in the office while still being able to call it work," said Ms. Tisch, 31, who has also taken bites out of holiday themed sugar cookies destined for a pattern (all in the name of "diversifying the layout," of course). On a recent day, she showed a visitor around the company's 4,000 square foot offices in Manhattan's garment district, dressed in the cassette tape leggings (her favorite, also Instagrammed by the actress Olivia Wilde). She was joined by her childhood best friend, Amanda Schabes, 30, Terez's creative director. With its jumble of sneakers, fun size candy bars, oversize taco shaped pillows and matching sweatshirts slung over every chair, Terez's office feels like a cross between a basement rec room and a girls' summer camp bunk before the hair braiding is about to commence. A specially commissioned pink neon sign over the sofa reads: "You can sit with us," Ms. Tisch's inclusive inversion of the infamous "Mean Girls" quote. She is the type of person who hugs strangers upon meeting them. At Terez Ms. Tisch's middle name, an amalgam of her grandmothers' names the cotton candy atmosphere, and the often whimsical product crafted there, belie a serious mission: Ms. Tisch's determination to fill her life with as much color and fun as possible (and help others do the same) after her high school boyfriend drowned in 2003, two weeks before she was due to start her freshman year at the University of Michigan. She teared up explaining what she usually refers to more obliquely as "a traumatic event," apologized, and then quickly regained her composure. Acting, her childhood dream, no longer seemed appealing. "I just didn't have the heart to do it anymore," she said. Eventually, she found inspiration in what wasn't available in shops. "I wanted something that would make me feel good about myself," she said. "But there wasn't something that I could just go to a store, pick out, wear and smile and feel fun about." She decided to start with handbags, both because they freed her of the tyranny of clothing sizes and because she was frustrated with the quality of the ones she could afford. She was 22, living in Atlantic Beach, on Long Island, with her parents (both of whom worked in the fashion industry), and using her paycheck from a marketing job to create samples. The shapes and colors were classic a black clutch with a messenger chain, for example but they were lined in fun prints she scavenged from ends of rolls at spandex stores in the garment district: comic book strips, skulls and bones, neon leopards. Sales didn't take off, but QVC executives came calling, requesting she design a cheaper line for them. Ms. Tisch who spent her childhood in front of a video camera, performing plays and singing songs for a homemade TV channel she and Ms. Schabes invented loved appearing on QVC in Italy, England and Germany, the home shopping channel's three smallest markets. Ms. Tisch was required to sell at least 500 handbags in her hour of airtime or lose her slot, and so she began experimenting with the linings, making scarves and pencil cases out of the material as part of the network's "if you buy now, get this free" style of sales pitch. She was sufficiently successful that the network wanted to graduate her to Japan, which is second only to the United States market, but Ms. Tisch and Ms. Schabes (who joined the company the year after Ms. Tisch started it) decided their hearts weren't in selling to the home shopping audience. One day in 2012, the pair spotted a print with candy colored constellations and planets, and decided to make some leggings, which they loved to wear long before athleisure was a thing. They wore the galaxy print to a children's merchandising show (they were showing the pencil cases there), and Lester's department stores picked them up. The pants nearly sold out in a weekend. Guests at Ms. Tisch's bridal shower that year she married the Techstars co founder David Tisch, whom she met at an atypical for her trip to a nightclub in Times Square received bags with the print. A few months later, Ms. Tisch and Ms. Schabes decided to design their own prints, and started with jelly beans. Buyers were wary, this being before the days when prints outnumbered plain black in exercise classes. Ms. Tisch and Ms. Schabes were unfazed. They posted the prints on Instagram, encouraging girls to request them from stores. Emoji, which their young customers loved to use when commenting on Terez's posts, were Terez's second print. Business took off. Sarah Jessica Parker ordered some online for her daughters (even today, Ms. Tisch remains thrilled by anybody's orders, and so still receives push notifications on her phone about them), and Angelina Jolie bought several pairs for her daughter Zahara. Where the children went, the moms and other women followed. Ms. Tisch, a SoulCycle fan, talked her way into a meeting at the spin chain, and one of the founders stopped in, saying she was excited to meet Ms. Tisch because her daughters were such big fans. Terez now produces designs monthly for the company (for children and adults). The brand has also collaborated with the Bagel Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (of rainbow bagel fame), and, perhaps inevitably, Candy Crush. In the latest in bat mitzvah one upmanship, Terez has also done special prints named after the honoree and featuring her favorite things. The company has produced more than 1,000 prints, surpassed seven figures in revenue for the first time in 2013, and it has doubled every year since, according to company figures. The majority of the company's revenue is now from sales of women's clothes, whereas before 2014 it was less than 5 percent. Liz Jones, the vice president for women's contemporary collections at Bloomingdale's, first spotted Terez's leggings (about 75 a pair for women's) on a shopping trip to check out the competition. She was intrigued but cautious: The emoji print was "cute, but I didn't think it was going to be as incredible as it was," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Yet tap born from slavery and inherently a mode of resistance, even when it may appear otherwise offers a way forward. On a different night, "And Still You Must Swing" might have been pure revelry, bringing nothing but delight in the dialogue between the music of the feet and the live band. On Thursday, the stage became a space for mourning, but not at the expense of joy. Tap, as embodied by this ensemble, can hold it all. The hourlong show is a study in swing, what the scholar Constance Valis Hill, in her essay in the program, calls "the sense of a propulsive rhythmic 'feel' or 'groove'" that dancers and musicians can collectively experience. As the hoofers trade turns in the spotlight, each yields songs from the ground, scraping and stroking and piercing the floor in ways that confound the eye and ear with their intricacy. Ms. Brown, in sneakers, doesn't tap, but rhythm still courses through her body as she churns and wrestles with the space around her. We see tap's ancestors in her spirited rendition of the buzzard lope, a heel toeing dance with West African roots. Words were sometimes needed. "I love you, Lulu," Mr. Grant said, as he raised one fist in the air. "I love you, too, Daddy!" his daughter shouted back from the audience. After her moments of silence, Ms. Sumbry Edwards found her way through a quietly seething solo, her gaze pointed downward or inward. But she wasn't alone. When Mr. Grant and Mr. Samuels Smith returned to the stage, so did her smile. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Indigo and cotton made a fine pair long before bluejeans ever existed. A new study, published this week in Science Advances, reports the earliest known use of indigo dye to date, found in 6,000 year old cotton textiles from Peru. Before these findings, archaeologists attributed the earliest use of indigo to ancient Egypt, where indigo dyed linens have been found wrapped around mummies from about 4,400 years ago. In the new study, researchers found traces of blue pigment woven into fabrics from an ancient temple on the north coast of Peru. The dry weather there and the hard, concrete like material of the temple, located in a prehistoric settlement called Huaca Prieta, preserved the fabrics exceptionally well, said Jeffrey Splitstoser, an assistant research professor of anthropology at George Washington University and an author of the paper. He studied hundreds of textile samples that were found alongside gourds, baskets and mats in the temple. Microscopically examining the fabrics, he found that most had been altered in some way. Often it seemed they had been cut or torn and then had liquid poured over them. Dr. Splitstoser says he thinks the people of Huaca Prieta possibly used the textiles to wrap up offerings to the gods. In addition, Dr. Splitstoser suspects that the fabrics may have been part of an early communication system, which used features like colors and weaving patterns in textiles to encode information. Along with indigo blue, the textiles from Huaca Prieta also featured red, gold, white and tan stripes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
ANNANDALE ON HUDSON, N.Y. Imagine that you are about to exit through a narrow doorway just as someone else is about to enter. What's the polite thing to do? With a semicircular flourish of an arm and perhaps a tip of your head, you indicate an open path for the other person, as if to say, "After you." Those two words are the title of Mark Morris's new work for American Ballet Theater. On Friday, when the company gave the piece its world premiere here at the Bard College Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, it wasn't long before Stella Abrera (recently promoted to principal rank) made the titular gesture toward one of the wings, ushering in a line of dancers. A little while later, Gillian Murphy, alone onstage, made the gesture again, but no one took the cue. So she shrugged her shoulders and left. "After You" is a dance of civil behavior, of good manners that include good humor. Its courtesy is the courtesy of ballet, of orderly entrances and exits and the sharing of stage space, but also of classical music. The music is the piano septet in C by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a student of Mozart and contemporary of Beethoven. Apart from its inclusion of a trumpet in a chamber setting (the source of the septet's "military" label), the score is conventional, distinguished mainly by the balance among its instruments, politely passing around thematic material like dishes at a dinner party. Even the trumpet is modest. It is this balance that Mr. Morris mirrors. The beauty of the dance, and also much of its gentle wit, arises from the way material introduced by a soloist is taken up and amplified by other members of the 12 person cast. It's a form of agreement and fellowship, binding everyone into something larger. When the "after you" gesture is adopted by three dancers, the shared door becomes a revolving one, and the dancers weave the courteous flourish into a garland. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Credit...Keir Gravil, via Reuters BRIGHTON, England Tens of thousands of people protested in British cities in solidarity with those rising up against police brutality against black Americans in the past week. They highlighted similar injustices in Britain. Protesters in the city of Bristol drew connections between a white police officer's killing of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, and the histories of colonialism and the slave trade. On Sunday, they toppled the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th century slave trader, trampled over it and rolled it into Bristol Harbor. Between 1672 and 1689, Colston's Royal African Company shipped about 100,000 enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean, branding them on their chests with his corporation's acronym, RAC. Disease and dehydration killed more than 20,000 people taken onto those ships by Colston's company, and their bodies were thrown into the ocean. Yet Colston's bronze statue, which was erected in 1895 in Bristol, was engraved with the inscription " ... one of the most virtuous and wise sons" of the city. Toppling statues is one way of unsettling accounts of the past that fail to acknowledge the broader truths of the British Empire. Attempts had been made through petitions and letters and engagements with local authorities to change the inscription and to reconsider the names of civic and public institutions that continued to honor him. But to no avail. This week, people of all backgrounds joined together to highlight the multiple injustices embodied in the statue and took matters into their own hands. The glorification of the British Empire despite its histories of colonization, plunder and enslavement is evident in the plethora of statues to its architects. The toppling of Colston's statue begins a conversation about how we are shaped by our past and that we are accountable for how it configures the present. Dispossession, appropriation, elimination and enslavement were central to the British Empire and to the making of modern Britain. Its initial expansion westward into the territories of the Americas was followed by commercial and colonial initiatives in the East. This was compounded by Britain's involvement in the Europe wide trade in human beings from Africa and circuits of indentured labor from Asia. These histories rarely make it into the standard narratives of how Britain came to be. Instead, there is either a glorification of the empire or amnesiac histories that either ignore it or consider it benign. The end of the empire is similarly elided. The limited public understanding of the empire, through education, popular histories and television shows, is largely an exercise in forgetting or celebration. There is no requirement to teach British students about it. Few Britons have an adequate understanding of the histories that produced Britain or why the unquestioning glorification of some aspects of that history is wholly inappropriate. Across the 20th century, decolonization movements from Ireland to India and across the African continent began systematically to dismantle the imperial state. Britain's decline from an imperial global power to a "small island" coincided with its entry into the European Economic Community. This masked the loss of global power and status that came with the loss of empire and enabled Britain to continue to exert disproportionate influence upon the world stage. It is significant that it was when Britain sought to leave the European Union that questions both of the "breakup" of Britain (previously united by the imperial project) and unresolved issues of its imperial past emerged center stage. The discourses around the Brexit referendum sought to reclaim national sovereignty with little recognition that Britain had never been a nation, but an empire. This inadequate historical understanding disfigured contemporary arguments about who belongs and has rights, as was evident in the illegitimate deportations of Commonwealth citizens known as the Windrush scandal. The parochiality of Brexit has been disrupted by two more immediate contexts. The resurgence of the global Black Lives Matter movement in light of the death of George Floyd and the disproportionate deaths of black, Asian and other minority ethnic citizens in Britain mostly people with origins in the former colonies from Covid 19. The inherited consequences of colonialism are evident across all British ethnic minority populations. And their roles as front line workers, keeping the country going during this crisis, has shifted the public sense of who constitutes the social and political community. This conjunction provokes all of us to reconsider the nature of the inequalities that structure our communities and the complicity of particular forms of public representation in this. The inequalities and injustices created by colonialism, enslavement and empire are manifest in the public display of statues of men such as Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes, Henry Dundas and Robert Clive. They are manifest in statues of King Leopold II in Belgium or any number of Confederate statues in the United States. They represent and glorify those histories and call us to agree to be defined by them, to be represented by them. It is only if you are unaffected by Colston's trade in human beings that it is possible to value his philanthropy separated from it. If it is understood that his philanthropy is intimately connected to the slave trade and the imperial project and that we continue to live the hierarchies and inequalities established through such historical processes, then a reckoning is necessary. This is particularly so when we acknowledge the subjects of empire, and those who were subjected by it, as also being who we, collectively, are today. A mature political community addresses historical wrongs by recognizing and acting upon the just claims of others. In the process, it tackles the contemporary inequalities that flow from those histories and comes to a more expansive self understanding. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Every morning, after cleansing her skin, before applying her serum and while making her coffee, Alyssa Bonanno spritzes her face with a rosewater and aloe mist she discovered on TikTok. "I let it soak in," said Ms. Bonanno, 27, an owner of a marketing studio in Los Angeles. "It helps my skin look a little more awake." The mist, which is made by Glossier, has become a favorite part of Ms. Bonanno's beauty routine. "I have no idea if it legitimately does anything," Ms. Bonanno said. "It seems to help my makeup go on smoother, and it just feels good." Part beauty product, part self care rite, skin mists have blasted on to the skin care scene in recent years. For a generation that has eschewed the use of toners that erstwhile cotton ball enabled step between cleansing and moisturizing face sprays offer a hipper way to prep skin while also delivering a moment of Zen and maybe more. And, in the pandemic era, with hygiene concerns and mask related breakouts running high, mists are a hands free and non pore clogging way to refresh the skin throughout the day. "There is the convenience factor it's easy to pull it out of your bag, mist your face and you are good to go," said Brandon Ford, the chief accelerator director at Lubrizol Life Science, a company in Ohio, that develops and manufactures products for the beauty industry and other businesses. Mr. Ford noted that the mist trend started about two years ago with sprays that claimed to help with skin hydration but not much else. "What we are seeing now is an evolution of those mists, moving from simple jobs to more complex jobs, whether that's antipollution or anti aging," Mr. Ford said. Jillian Wright, an aesthetician and co founder of the Indie Beauty Media Group, a company in New York that works with skin care and cosmetic brands, said she has clocked mists that are said to protect the skin from blue light and other environmental stressors and mists that come infused with crystal energy. To be sure, there seems to be a mist for everything. There are mists with probiotics (Tula Refreshing Brightening Face Mist, 34) and CBD oil (WLDKAT Coconut Water Noni Fruit Electrolyte Spray, 27), and there's even a mist, aptly named Forest Bathing in a Bottle ( 28), that claims to mimic the benefits of "shinrin yoku," or the Japanese art of forest bathing, with the help of an esoteric mix of tree oil phytoncides, vitamin D3, fulvic acid and micro algae. The luxe beauty brand La Mer offers the Mist ( 85), which uses marine botanical extracts to hydrate skin; Pause Well Aging Hot Flash Cooling Mist ( 39) relies on plant extracts and a form of menthol to cool skin. The French beauty brand Payot formulates its MY Payot Baume Eclat with hyaluronic acid and an antipollution compound to boost plumpness and protect skin. "People are looking into light texture and easy things," said Marie Laure Simonin Braun, the chief executive of Payot. But can a spray really deliver results? Dr. Marina Peredo, a dermatologist in New York, said they can, depending on the formulation. Dr. Peredo is a fan of mists containing hyaluronic acid, a molecule that helps the skin retain moisture; vitamin E, an antioxidant that enhances the skin's barrier function; or glutathione, a tripeptide that may combat inflammation and is the star ingredient in PrimaSkin, a mist Dr. Peredo uses on patients in her Upper East Side office. "Initially I used it because it was very cooling for after lasers, but then I noticed over time it brightened the skin," said Dr. Peredo, who is on the advisory board of PrimaSkin. Ms. Wright uses mists in her treatment room, especially after extractions, but doesn't consider them a necessity. "Just like a sheet mask, it's a nice to have, not a have to have," said Ms. Wright, who is nonetheless working on formulating a mist that can help protect against blue light. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
MIAMI For decades, the wealthy tourists and transplants who flock to South Florida bought their Chanels, Cartiers, Diors and the like at one place: Bal Harbour Shops, an open air mall housing many of the highest end retailers in the world around a courtyard of palm trees and koi ponds at the northern end of Miami Beach. This was where Gucci opened its first shopping center boutique in the 1970s. It is where, last week, a 22 carat yellow diamond ring priced at more than 1 million glittered in the window of the jeweler Graff. Last year, the International Council of Shopping Centers pronounced it the single most productive shopping center in the world as measured by sales per square foot of retailing space. But recently a string of big name tenants Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Cartier and others has been abandoning Bal Harbour's rarefied confines for a scruffy city neighborhood 10 miles away. More than a dozen other Bal Harbour tenants, including Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Fendi and Harry Winston, have signed leases in the area and are expected to follow. With middle income families still struggling after the recession, spending by affluent consumers has been a critical ingredient in the economic recovery in the United States. While New York and Los Angeles have long been magnets for high end shoppers, Miami's popularity as an attraction for moneyed foreigners, particularly from Latin America and Russia, has created an increasingly vibrant luxury market. More than 70 percent of Bal Harbour's sales these days are to foreign customers. Brazilians, in particular, have become so important that many of the stores in Bal Harbour employ Portuguese speakers. In no city is the battle for the high end consumer more intense than here. "I realized there was this crazy situation going on in Miami," Mr. Robins said in an interview in his office, an airy loftlike space that displays his personal collection of contemporary art. "This is the third largest luxury market in the United States and there was this remote, inaccessible, beautiful mall that controlled 100 percent of the market share." The issue is a clause in the Bal Harbour lease a common feature in shopping center contracts that bars tenants from opening another retail location within a certain distance. (At Bal Harbour it used to be a straight radius of 20 miles but it has been modified slightly in recent years.) Bal Harbour's intimate size it is less than 500,000 square feet, compared with more than two million square feet for some other malls in the region meant many tenants yearned for more space. But the success and cachet of the location kept them from seriously considering decamping until Mr. Robins came along. "Miami is completely under retailed in terms of luxury and in terms of potential of the city," said Emmanuel Perrin, the president and chief executive of Cartier North America. He said the jeweler had increased its retail footprint in the area twelvefold by leaving Bal Harbour and opening stores in the Design District and another mall in the area called Aventura. "It's unfortunate we couldn't find an agreement with Bal Harbour to have a multistore presence." For several years, he quietly bought up property in the neighborhood at attractive prices holdings now are valued at more than 1 billion after debt. Mr. Robins said the partnership was spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to create a new street with pedestrian plazas at each end, buildings by renowned architects, luxury condos, restaurants (and of course, four vast parking garages so the people will come). Referring to the family that built Bal Harbour in 1965 and still owns it, Mr. Robins said, "I don't consider this a war between me and the Whitmans. I believe Miami is a two location market and I want to be one of them." Mr. Robins said he asked the Whitmans a few years ago to waive their radius restriction so tenants could open a second store in the Design District, and he still hopes the two parties can have a collaborative relationship. But in the meantime, he has set about luring brands away. One of the big prizes in his sights was Hermes. "When I met Craig Robins and he presented his vision of what the Design District could become, I was really convinced from the first minute that he started talking," said Robert B. Chavez, the president and chief executive of Hermes of Paris. "We just thought, wow, this is really important and is really needed in Miami and something we wanted to become a part of." Hermes closed its 4,300 square foot Bal Harbour boutique after its lease expired last December and has opened a temporary shop in the Design District. It has begun work on a flagship store to open in the neighborhood in 2015 with a three story, 13,000 square foot space and a roof garden. "You can imagine the breadth and depth of what we can offer," Mr. Chavez said. "That's something that's not possible in a shopping mall." The Whitmans are fighting back with expansion plans of their own. Earlier this month they submitted plans to the village of Bal Harbour to expand the shopping center by about 250,000 square feet. "We are responding to the needs of the marketplace, and what our tenants tell us they need, which, in two words, is more space," said Matthew Whitman Lazenby, the 36 year old grandson of Bal Harbour's founder and president and chief executive of Whitman Family Development, the parent company of Bal Harbour Shops. The Whitmans have also entered into a partnership with a Hong Kong real estate company for a new project in downtown Miami's financial district called the Brickell CityCentre, nine million square feet of offices, hotels, condos and retail space. They will develop some 600,000 square feet of that for retail use, and tenants at Bal Harbour will be permitted under the lease to open a second location there. To study the changing market, Mr. Lazenby went back to school last year for an intensive one year master's program in real estate development at the University of Miami. His conclusion: Go where the tourists are which, he said, isn't necessarily the Design District. "All signs in our mind absolutely pointed to Brickell," he said. "It has for a long time been the Wall Street of the South. It is where Latin America does its banking. It has a healthy reputation for being a solid business tourist destination." With five star hotels like the Mandarin Oriental and the Four Seasons in the area and more luxury hotels on the way, he added, "That said to us in flashing red letters, that is the next luxury tourism area of town." Mr. Robins, who has experience in revitalizing neighborhoods he was instrumental in the renaissance of South Beach more than two decades ago says his vision extends far beyond shopping. He wants to turn the Design District into a cultural, as well as a commercial, destination. He has already brought galleries and the world renowned annual Art Basel fair to the neighborhood. "We don't intend to be a luxury ghetto," he said. To some prospective tenants, Bal Harbour is still the most desirable. The Webster, a boutique that sells a collection of high end labels in South Beach, recently announced plans to open a new shop at Bal Harbour. "I think it's one of the most luxurious and beautiful malls in the world," said Laure Heriard Dubreuil, the Webster's chief executive and founding partner, noting that she began shopping there when she first started visiting Miami around 2006. "It's a place that I personally love." Yet, while she did not choose the Design District, Ms. Heriard Dubreuil said she thought Miami was ready for more luxury choices. "I think it's a really amazing project and I'm very happy about the development of the Design District," she said. "I think the more the merrier." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Usually the destruction of a rocket means a failed mission. But on Sunday, SpaceX was demonstrating a crucial safety system of its Crew Dragon spacecraft, a capsule that is to carry astronauts for NASA to the International Space Station. There was no one on board during Sunday's flight. The passengers this time were two test dummies with sensors to measure the forces that real astronauts would experience if the capsule's escape system were ever needed. The system proved itself, even during a phase of the flight when atmospheric forces on the spacecraft are most severe. About nine minutes after the test, the intact capsule landed in the Atlantic Ocean. "Overall, as far we can tell thus far, it was a picture perfect mission," said Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, during a news conference after the test. Now SpaceX and Boeing, the companies hired by NASA, are nearly ready for their first crewed flights, and probably not just of NASA astronauts. "We're on the cusp of commercializing low Earth orbit," said Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator. "I want to see large amounts of capital flowing into activities that include humans in space. And those activities could be industrialized biomedicine. It could be advanced materials, and it could be people that want to go to space for tourism purposes." Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The abort test was postponed one day because of rough seas and gusty winds on Saturday at the planned splashdown site. On Sunday, the waves were beginning to calm, but a storm was moving toward the launchpad. At 10:30 a.m., conditions on both land and sea were good enough to allow the Falcon 9 rocket to blast off into the sky. At 84 seconds after liftoff, powerful thrusters on the Crew Dragon pushed the spacecraft away from the rocket quickly, reaching a speed of more than twice that of sound. The rocket then exploded. The next Crew Dragon mission is to take two NASA astronauts, Douglas G. Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, to the space station. Mr. Musk said that flight would likely occur in the second quarter of the year, between April and June. The Falcon 9 rocket and a new Crew Dragon capsule for that flight will be ready in Florida by the end of February, he said, but safety reviews will take some time. The crew on the space station is to drop to three in April when three astronauts currently there return to Earth on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. "So far on space station, our responsibility is to take care of ourselves while we're there, not make a mess," Mr. Behnken said. Mr. Bridenstine said that a decision on whether Mr. Hurley and Mr. Behnken would stay longer would be made in a few weeks. He also said that NASA was still negotiating to buy an additional seat on a Soyuz. "I think it's important we have options," Mr. Bridenstine said. The last time NASA astronauts launched from the United States was July 8, 2011, when the space shuttle Atlantis blasted off on its last flight from Florida. Thirteen days later, it glided to a landing back at the Kennedy Space Center, where it is now a museum piece. Since then, astronauts from NASA and other nations flying to the space station have been hitching rides on Russian Soyuz rockets, at a current price of more than 80 million each. From Alan Shepard's first flight in 1961 through the Apollo moon landings to the space shuttles, NASA was in charge of designing, building and operating its rockets and spacecraft. After the retirement of the shuttles, NASA planned to continue that approach with the Constellation program started under President George W. Bush. NASA aimed to develop the Ares 1 rocket to take astronauts to the space station. But costs for Ares 1 and the accompanying Orion capsule kept rising and the schedule slipped repeatedly. The Obama administration canceled the program. To replace Ares 1, NASA turned to commercial companies, the approach it uses for launches of satellites, cargo to the space station and robotic planetary probes. But relinquishing the transportation of astronauts was a bigger shift for the space agency. When NASA awarded the commercial crew contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014, the hope was that the flights carrying astronauts would begin by the end of 2017. The contracts set fixed prices, unlike earlier big NASA contracts where contractors were reimbursed for costs with an additional fee. Watchdogs in government have questioned the management and costs of the program, and both Boeing and SpaceX have suffered technological setbacks along the way. SpaceX successfully sent an uncrewed Crew Dragon to the space station a year ago, and the company was gearing up to conduct the in flight abort test. But in April, during a ground test, the capsule that was to be used for the abort test the same one that had gone to orbit exploded. No one was injured, but that pushed back SpaceX's schedule as it figured out what happened and how to fix it. In December, Boeing launched one of its Starliner capsules without crew, but the mission ended early, without going to the space station, because of a problem with the spacecraft's clock. Many space enthusiasts hope that the commercial crew program will spur new business in space. Last June, NASA announced that it would allow space tourists to make trips to the space station, and one company, Axiom Space, says it has one passenger signed up already for a 10 day trip that will cost 55 million. An Axiom mission could launch as soon as summer 2021. The spacecraft built by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic basically just go up and down like a big roller coaster and never accelerate to the speeds needed to reach orbit. Virgin's officials are optimistically saying that commercial flights will begin this year. Blue Origin has not yet carried any passengers. Neither company's trip to space will be in financial reach of the average person. Virgin Galactic charges 250,000 for a seat. Blue Origin has not yet said what it will charge. But the companies could greatly increase the number of people who travel to space. In the nearly 59 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, fewer than 600 people have followed him there. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The writer and director Lynn Shelton specializes in low key comedic parables featuring middle class white Americans approaching middle age. Her characters aren't quite hipsters or ex hipsters, but they do pride themselves on being plugged in culturally (as in 2009's "Hump Day," whose straight male subjects seek to affirm their progressive bona fides by making gay porn together). They're the kind of people whom you can envision listening to "WTF," the podcast hosted by the wryly dyspeptic comedian and actor Marc Maron. That's only one of the ways that Maron's presence in the lead role of Shelton's latest film, "Sword of Trust," makes sense. Shelton has been a "WTF" guest, and has directed Maron on television. And the opening scene shows Maron as Mel, a pawnshop owner, gently puncturing the expectations of a young man selling an "antique" guitar. If you're familiar with Maron at all, you'll get the impression that the role was constructed for him. Mel is like Maron with smoother edges: erudite, common sensical, compassionate and cleareyed, but with a running undercurrent of sarcasm that could turn into a torrent. Which isn't to say that Mel is not prone to end of the rainbow delusions. When Cynthia and Mary (Jillian Bell and Michaela Watkins) come into his shop, seeking big bucks for a Civil War sword whose "documentation" supposedly demonstrates that the Confederacy actually won the war, Mel scoffs hard. But his internet addled employee Nathaniel (Jon Bass) digs up some fringe characters online who say they'll cough up tens of thousands of dollars for items that prove that the South prevailed. And so the four establish an alliance that drops them down a rabbit hole, starting with a long ride in the carpet lined rear of an old mail truck. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Cliff Robinson, the 6 foot 10 inch forward and center who led the University of Connecticut to the 1988 National Invitation Tournament championship when the Huskies had yet to become a national collegiate power, and who played for 18 seasons in the N.B.A., died on Saturday at his home in Portland, Ore. He was 53. The cause was lymphoma, his family told The Athletic, a sports website. Playing for Jim Calhoun, the future Hall of Fame coach who developed UConn teams that became a formidable presence on the national collegiate scene, Robinson was a two time Big East All Conference selection. He averaged 15.6 points a game his four seasons at UConn, the last three under Calhoun. Robinson, who was selected by the Portland Trail Blazers in the second round of the 1989 N.B.A. draft, was a forerunner of the "stretch forward" who can drive for a layup and also hit 3 point shots, and he was an outstanding defensive player. He was durable as well, playing in 761 consecutive regular season games for Portland still a team record. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
This Star Looked Like It Would Explode. Maybe It Just Sneezed That is what happened to Betelgeuse, the red supergiant star that marks the armpit of Orion the Hunter, according to Andrea Dupree, associate director of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She and an international team of astronomers described that conclusion in a paper published this week in Astrophysical Journal. Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and most prominent stars in the winter sky, began dramatically and mysteriously dimming in the fall of 2019, dwindling to less than half its normal brightness. By February 2020, it was the faintest that it had been since measurements began more than 150 years ago, according to Dr. Dupree. "The dimming was obvious to everyone when looking at the constellation Orion," she said. "It was very weird. Betelgeuse was almost missing," Some astronomers and excitable members of the public wondered if the star was about to explode as a supernova. Such aging stars are notoriously cranky and moody, sputtering out bursts of gas and dust as their cores evolve and change. Something like that was happening to Betelgeuse last year, Dr. Dupree's team now reports. Observations in ultraviolet light with the Hubble Space Telescope revealed gobs of dense hot gas shooting out through the upper parts of atmosphere of Betelgeuse at speeds of 200,000 miles an hour, "almost like a sneeze," Dr. Dupree said. At the same time a robot telescope called Stella the STELLA Robotic Observatory, in Tenerife, Spain recorded the surface of the star pulsating outward, helping to propel the hot gas. The surface of Betelgeuse, like that of the sun, is covered with big blobs of rising and falling gas, called convection cells, that transmit energy from the interior. "We suspect that there was a confluence of a big convective cell on the surface and also the outward radial velocity that acted together to eject this material," Dr. Dupree said in an email. Radial velocity measurements showed that the surface, or photosphere, was moving out during 2019. From May to August, Betelgeuse was near the sun and out of view, she said: "And in September we saw this bright hot dense material moving out from the southern part of the star." In an email, Edward Guinan of Villanova University, who has been tracking Betelgeuse, called the new Hubble data "fantastic," and said Dr. Dupree's theory was "a good working hypothesis." He added: "But I don't entirely agree that the 'Mystery' is now solved." He noted that alternative explanations could explain the dimming: giant sunspots, perhaps, or gigantic rising convection cells tens of millions of miles across, radiating away their heat and energy and then cooling, turning over and sinking again. Adding to the mystery is that Betelgeuse, after regaining its normal luminosity this May, has started to dim again. Betelgeuse has long been known to vary in brightness although not so extremely as this year in accordance with a 420 day cycle of pulsation in its size, so this new fading is occurring early, for reasons unclear. That the star will eventually blow up is certain. Betelgeuse, sometimes pronounced "beetle juice," and also known as Alpha Orionis, is at least 10 times and maybe 20 times as massive as the sun. If it were placed in our solar system, its fiery gases would engulf everything out to Jupiter's orbit. The star is a so called red supergiant in the last violent stages of its evolution. It has already spent millions of years burning primordial hydrogen and transforming it into the next lightest element, helium. That helium is burning into more massive elements. Once the core of the star becomes solid iron, sometime within the next 100,000 years, the star will collapse and then rebound in a supernova explosion, probably leaving behind a dense nugget called a neutron star. Whatever Betelgeuse is going to do, it might have already done; we are just waiting for the news. The star is some 725 light years away, so the light visible from Earth today, whether rising or falling, left the star around the year 1300. "No one knows how a star behaves in the weeks before it explodes," Dr. Dupree said. "And there were some ominous predictions that Betelgeuse was ready to become a supernova. Chances are, however, that it will not explode during our lifetime. But who knows?" Dr. Guinan said: "I am really looking forward to seeing what the star will do this season. It will be fun to see." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
When you arrive home with your hands full, having a dedicated place to drop your keys, mail and phone can be a big help. But if they're just dumped on top of a console or a bench, they can look messy. That's where a catchall a small tray, bowl or basket comes in handy. "It not only adds an extra layer to a room as a decorative accessory, but also helps keep the space organized," said Paloma Contreras, an interior designer in Houston. And not only in the entry hall, Ms. Contreras noted. A catchall is also useful in the bedroom, where "they're great on night stands," she said, for holding jewelry or reading glasses. Or in a home office, where they can hold paper clips, pens and other small supplies. When you're shopping for a catchall, Ms. Contreras said, look for appealing shapes, materials and patterns. And don't forget to expand your search beyond items marketed as catchalls. Distinctive bowls, for example, work just as well. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
ASK retirees to design the perfect investment and it would surely be a guaranteed paycheck for life, providing protection in the market's darkest hours, yet allowing them to profit during upswings. A product that claims to achieve all of this, and often more, already exists: It is called a variable annuity with a guaranteed income rider and the name itself, a mouthful, reflects its complexity. Variable annuities also are among the products most frequently sold to investors over age 65, according to a recent report by regulators, which also found evidence of potentially inappropriate sales to older investors at more than a third of the 44 brokerage firms examined. The sales pitch can be hard to resist: Investors are guaranteed an income stream for life, with the possibility the amount will increase. If a retiree's portfolio free falls, no problem. He or she will still collect the same paycheck forevermore. That is because an insurance policy is attached to the investment portfolio, which guarantees the lifetime income. But all of these promises come at a steep cost 3.5 percent annually, on average, and often higher which will gnaw at even the best performing portfolios over time. So before signing any contracts, investors should first ask themselves if they fully understand what they are being offered. And then, they should weigh whether they could do better with a simpler investment. Often, financial advisers say, the answer is yes. With many variable annuities, investors effectively pay more than 3 percent annually for the privilege of spending their own money. But older investors who want a guarantee that they will not outlive their portfolio may still find them attractive, even though the products available today are far less generous than those sold before the financial collapse of 2008. "The thing with annuities is you are paying for insurance," said Mark Cortazzo, a financial planner who offers an annuity review service. "And as with most insurance products, it's the worst deal for some people, and for others it's the best thing they could have done with that money." Perhaps, but it is a notoriously complex product typically sold by people working on commission who are not usually required to put your interests ahead of their own. And it is nearly impossible for average investors to figure out if they are getting a reasonable deal without professional help. Changing your mind can be costly, because many contracts carry hefty surrender charges, sometimes 7 percent of your portfolio or more. Even Moshe Milevsky, an associate professor of finance at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto who has studied the products extensively, said he had to consult with colleagues to figure out if he should add money to a variable annuity with a guaranteed withdrawal benefit. "We needed two Ph.D.'s in math and some of their grad students to use their software normally used to analyze collapsing stars to figure it out," he said, only half jokingly. "I purchased it because I did the math and it looked like it was a good deal relative to other products." The money held in variable annuities with guaranteed income riders has doubled in the last five years to 843 billion in 2014, from 411 billion in 2009, according to the Limra Secure Retirement Institute, an industry research group. Sales were 67 billion last year, down from a peak of 96 billion in 2011, partly because some insurers have reduced their business. So exactly how do they work and how and when, if ever, should they be used? Every contract has unique twists, but here is how a hypothetical variable annuity with a guaranteed income rider could operate. An investor makes an initial payment, say 200,000, which is then invested. The investor might choose to take withdrawals right away, or let the tax deferred portfolio grow. From here, it gets a little tricky. The size of the guaranteed paycheck is based on what you might think of as a "shadow account," because its starting value mirrors the initial investment. But the shadow account, technically known as the benefit base, does not hold real money. It exists solely to calculate the amount of the investor's paycheck. The benefit base is usually guaranteed to grow by a set percentage, say 5 or 6 percent each year, until the investor starts collecting income. But if the investor's actual portfolio is worth more than the base on a specific date each year, the benefit base will increase to that amount. If the market plunges, the real portfolio will suffer but the shadow number and future paychecks will remain intact. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' The guaranteed paycheck is a fixed percentage of the benefit base perhaps 5 percent annually at age 65, or 4.5 percent for a couple depending on the investor's age when the income begins. The paychecks and hefty fees are deducted from the actual portfolio. If the portfolio is eventually depleted, the paychecks will continue based on the shadow account's value, just as they always have. "I think of it as draw down insurance," said Timothy Holmes, principal and head of Vanguard's annuity and insurance services, which offers variable annuities and guaranteed income riders with total annual costs, about 1.75 percent, that are well below the industry average. "If the sequence of returns in the market are such that you deplete your assets, the insurance would pick up the payments going forward." There are far simpler annuities that may initially provide more generous income streams, including immediate or deferred income annuities. Investors in those annuities hand a pile of money to an insurer, in exchange for a guaranteed paycheck for life, either right away or at some date in the future. But many investors balk at parting with so much money forever. Some variable annuities with income riders, however, are far more flexible because investors can change their minds. If the stock market is strong and a retiree decides she no longer needs the income guarantee some riders or contracts can be canceled. However, many contracts charge harsh surrender penalties, which can last for the first seven years or longer so it is important for investors to know which kind they are buying. Investors who stick with the product are likely to find their portfolio may shrink more rapidly than a low cost mix of investments, particularly when withdrawing 5 percent a year, while paying an added 3.54 percent in total fees, on average, according to Morningstar. That is why investors are told to invest aggressively, particularly when the annuity is part of a portfolio. Yes, this is the one instance where putting 100 percent in stocks is often recommended. The reason: No matter how far the market plunges, investors can still collect the guaranteed paycheck, which can never decline. If the portfolio rises with the markets, the paycheck will as well, which is why insurers increasingly cap the amount that investors may put in stocks. "These types of products are a lot less attractive if you're going to invest in a conservative portfolio," said David Blanchett, head of retirement research at Morningstar Investment Management. But that also means investors need to be comfortable watching their portfolio plummet in market downturns, while maintaining an unwavering faith in their insurer. One 77 year old retiree from the New York area, who did not want to be named, could not handle the volatility during the market downturn in 2008 and 2009, even though his guaranteed income stream of 6.5 percent, or 39,000 annually, would continue until he was 85. At that point, his contract required that he collect less, or 5.5 percent, a provision that he said had not been explained to him. He was not confident the lower amount, with diminished purchasing power from inflation, would be enough. After holding the annuity for two and a half years, he terminated his contract in 2012, paying a surrender fee of 42,000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
About a year ago, the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras introduced her portrait of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Cannes film festival. She was fresh off an Oscar win for her work on "Citizenfour," which focuses on Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistle blower. Mr. Assange, who sought asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, let Ms. Poitras into his inner sanctum. Some critics have praised her film, "Risk," for its up close perspective on Mr. Assange, while others have faulted the film's approach as "an embedded report that sacrifices impartiality for access," as Catherine Shoard of The Guardian put it. All the while, Mr. Assange was not lying low, to say the least. His story changed significantly from where Ms. Poitras's film had left off. And on Sunday, after the season finale of the espionage thriller "Homeland" on Showtime, a teaser for Ms. Poitras's "Risk" showed that her film has changed, too, in ways that portray Mr. Assange in a far different light. "This is not the film I thought I was making," Ms. Poitras says in the trailer. "I thought I could ignore the contradictions, I thought they were not part of the story. I was wrong. They are becoming the story." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
If you have to be dragged back into familial distress, why not let a mythical plesiosaur do the tugging? In "Fossils," an inventive entry in the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, a sighting of the Loch Ness monster forces a young scientist to confront her unhappy past. Narratively slight and at least a little nutty, this piece, created by the company Bucket Club, is deft in form and nifty in presentation. Vanessa (Helen Vinten) is a hard working, hard thinking evolutionary biologist who probably sleeps under her desk. Her idea of a hot and heavy Saturday night? Arguing with creationists in chat rooms. Most of her research is deeply unsexy and involves experiments with the skin cells of a coelacanth, "a living fossil" of a fish, once thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago. But an unusually clear image of Nessie upends her studious life. Journalists invade Vanessa's lab with questions about the work of her father, a researcher obsessed with the monster, who went missing years ago. Eventually, she and her cheery Ph.D. student Dominic (Adam Farrell) light out for that lake of legend, where Vanessa will try out some advanced imaging technology and maybe come to grips with Dad's disappearance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Now, under the direction of Mikko Nissinen, it comes to Lincoln Center with two programs that reflect its diversity. Program 1 offers William Forsythe's athletic "The Second Detail" and two New York premieres: Alexander Ekman's comic "Cacti," with wit as prickly as its real onstage cactuses, and Jose Martinez's "Resonance," a showpiece to brilliant piano music by Liszt. Program 2 includes two familiar works: Vaslav Nijinsky's "Afternoon of a Faun" from 1912 and George Balanchine's "Symphony in Three Movements" (1972), as well as Jorma Elo's sharp edged "Plan to B" and Jiri Kylian's "Bella Figura," which finds beauty in steps not conventionally considered beautiful. (Program 1: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 1 p.m. next Sunday; Program 2: 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; 212 496 0600, davidhkochtheater.com) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Let me summarize the Trump administration/right wing media view on the coronavirus: It's a hoax, or anyway no big deal. Besides, trying to do anything about it would destroy the economy. And it's China's fault, which is why we should call it the "Chinese virus." Oh, and epidemiologists who have been modeling the virus's future spread have come under sustained attack, accused of being part of a "deep state" plot against Donald Trump, or maybe free markets. Does all this give you a sense of deja vu? It should. After all, it's very similar to the Trump/right wing line on climate change. Here's what Trump tweeted back in 2012: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive." It's all there: it's a hoax, doing anything about it will destroy the economy, and let's blame China. And epidemiologists startled to find their best scientific efforts denounced as politically motivated fraud should have known what was coming. After all, exactly the same thing happened to climate scientists, who have faced constant harassment for decades. So the right wing response to Covid 19 has been almost identical to the right wing response to climate change, albeit on a vastly accelerated time scale. But what lies behind this kind of denialism? Well, I recently published a book about the prevalence in our politics of "zombie ideas" ideas that have been proved wrong by overwhelming evidence and should be dead, but somehow keep shambling along, eating people's brains. The most prevalent zombie in U.S. politics is the insistence that tax cuts for the rich produce economic miracles, indeed pay for themselves, but the most consequential zombie, the one that poses an existential threat, is climate change denial. And Covid 19 has brought out all the usual zombies. But why, exactly, is the right treating a pandemic the same way it treats tax cuts and climate change? The force that usually keeps zombie ideas shambling along is naked financial self interest. Paeans to the virtues of tax cuts are more or less directly paid for by billionaires who benefit from these cuts. Climate denial is an industry supported almost entirely by fossil fuel interests. As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." However, it's less obvious who gains from minimizing the dangers of a pandemic. Among other things, the time scale is vastly compressed compared with climate change: the consequences of global warming will take many decades to play out, giving fossil fuel interests plenty of time to take the money and run, but we're already seeing catastrophic consequences of virus denial after just a few weeks. True, there may be some billionaires who imagine that denying the crisis will work to their financial advantage. Just before Trump made his terrifying call for reopening the nation by Easter, he had a conference call with a group of money managers, who may have told him that ending social distancing would be good for the market. That's insane, but you should never underestimate the cupidity of these people. Remember, Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman, one of the men on the call, once compared proposals to close a tax loophole to Hitler's invasion of Poland. The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them? What should our leaders be doing? Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency. What are the worst climate risks in your country? Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. Where are Americans suffering most? Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S. What does climate devastation look like? In Sept. 2020, Michael Benson studied detailed satellite imagery. Here's the earth that he saw and the one he wants to see. Also, billionaires have done very well by Trump's tax cuts, and may fear that the economic damage from the coronavirus will bring about Trump's defeat, and hence tax increases for people like them. But I suspect that the disastrous response to Covid 19 has been shaped less by direct self interest than by two indirect ways in which pandemic policy gets linked to the general prevalence of zombie ideas in right wing thought. First, when you have a political movement almost entirely built around assertions that any expert can tell you are false, you have to cultivate an attitude of disdain toward expertise, one that spills over into everything. Once you dismiss people who look at evidence on the effects of tax cuts and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, you're already primed to dismiss people who look at evidence on disease transmission. This also helps explain the centrality of science hating religious conservatives to modern conservatism, which has played an important role in Trump's failure to respond. Second, conservatives do hold one true belief: namely, that there is a kind of halo effect around successful government policies. If public intervention can be effective in one area, they fear probably rightly that voters might look more favorably on government intervention in other areas. In principle, public health measures to limit the spread of coronavirus needn't have much implication for the future of social programs like Medicaid. In practice, the first tends to increase support for the second. As a result, the right often opposes government interventions even when they clearly serve the public good and have nothing to do with redistributing income, simply because they don't want voters to see government doing anything well. The bottom line is that as with so many things Trump, the awfulness of the man in the White House isn't the whole story behind terrible policy. Yes, he's ignorant, incompetent, vindictive and utterly lacking in empathy. But his failures on pandemic policy owe as much to the nature of the movement he serves as they do to his personal inadequacies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Lucy Prebble the British playwright and writer for TV series including "Succession" won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize on Monday for "A Very Expensive Poison," an acclaimed play about a Russian assassination on British soil. The Blackburn Prize, worth 25,000, is one of the most prominent awards for female playwrights. Previous winners have included Lynn Nottage's "Sweat" and, last year, Jackie Sibblies Drury's "Fairview." Prebble's play, which premiered at the Old Vic in London last year, is about the 2006 killing in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy, who drank green tea laced with polonium. The play follows Litvinenko as he investigates his own death, and his wife Marina's quest for justice. Critics praised the play for its inventiveness, as much as its political drive. It included songs, puppets, and even an offstage President Vladimir V. Putin trying to direct the action and divert the audience's attention from the killing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LOS ANGELES Who needs a "Plus" or a "Max" when you can use the plumage of a colorful bird? Such is the thinking at NBCUniversal, which announced on Tuesday that its new streaming service would be named Peacock. "For us, it's the perfect nod to the legacy without being too on the nose," said Bonnie Hammer, chairwoman of the upcoming streaming service. "From my point of view, it screams that we are proud and we are bold." NBC has released the name and logo for its new streaming service. When Peacock makes its debut in April, it will join the growing list of new streaming services, including Apple TV Plus (Nov. 1), Disney Plus (Nov. 12) and HBO Max, which is also to start in April. These platforms will enter an increasingly competitive arena that already includes the established services Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. To compete, Peacock intends to have 15,000 hours of content from its vast library available on both its ad supported and subscription based services. Highlights will include complete seasons of "Parks and Recreation," "Brooklyn Nine Nine," "Cheers," "Downton Abbey," "Everybody Loves Raymond," "Friday Night Lights" and "Frasier." In June, NBCUniversal paid a 500 million to regain the rights to "The Office," according to a person familiar with the deal who spoke on condition of anonymity because the terms were not public. The show will become available on Peacock in 2020. Competition for older network shows has become fierce in the streaming era. On Monday, Netflix won the rights to "Seinfeld," beginning in 2021, paying more than 500 million, according to two people familiar with the deal. In July, WarnerMedia secured the streaming rights to "Friends" for its service, HBO Max. And shortly before the introduction of Peacock on Tuesday, WarnerMedia said that HBO Max now has the rights to "Big Bang Theory," the first time the long running hit comedy will be available for streaming in the United States. On the film side of Peacock, movies from Universal Pictures, Focus Features and DreamWorks Animation including "Bridesmaids," "American Pie," "Do the Right Thing" and "E.T." will be featured. There will also be 3,000 hours of content from the Spanish language network Telemundo, including an original dramedy titled "Armas de Mujer," and popular library titles such as "100 Dias Para Volver" and "Betty in NY." Pricing details for Peacock subscriptions have not been made public. The company intends to use the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which will be broadcast on NBC and its affiliated networks, to publicize Peacock heavily. Soon after the closing ceremony, roughly a dozen new shows that incorporate elements of older properties will make their debuts on the platform. There will be a reboot of "Battlestar Galactica" from Sam Esmail, the creator of "Mr. Robot," and a new comedy series called "Rutherford Falls" from Mike Schur, the prolific producer behind "The Good Place," "Parks and Recreation" and "The Office." Ed Helms, an alumnus of "The Office," will star. Reboots of "Saved by the Bell" and "Punky Brewster" are also in the works. A documentary series from Lorne Michaels, "Who Wrote That," will feature some of the most memorable moments from "Saturday Night Live" and discuss the writers responsible. All 44 seasons of "Saturday Night Live" will be available on Peacock, with Season 45 coming on once it completes its run on NBC. "We are going to be very strategic in what we choose and develop based on the legacy of content we have," said Ms. Hammer, who previously served as chairman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment, where she oversaw NBC's cable channels. "We will have the entire library of 'The Office' and 'Parks and Rec.' What better than a new show by the same creator that will run beside it?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In January, the 25 year old landed five of her songs in Billboard's top 10 in the R B and hip hop category, beating the record set by Beyonce. (If you doubt the catchiness of her lyrics, listen to "Bartier Cardi" and try getting "wanna party with Cardi" out of your head afterward.) Now Cardi B has become New York Fashion Week's darling, with appearances at key shows: There she was in a lush green jumpsuit at Christian Siriano, a white fur throw over her shoulder and jewels encrusting her daggerlike nails; at Prabal Gurung in a coatdress and mesh heels; at Jeremy Scott in an oversize black and white fur coat with newspaper cutouts printed all over it and white knee high boots; and at Alexander Wang, in a black and tan trench coat, a black turban wrapped around her hair, chatting with Anna Wintour, a pairing that briefly set the internet on fire. This New York Fashion Week is certainly not Cardi B's first, but her style credentials have grown significantly since September's New York shows. In an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine in December, Kollin Carter, who has been Cardi B's stylist since the spring, said that for a period of time, some labels refused to dress his client. All that is shifting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
PARIS The Theatre de l'Odeon here had planned a decorous tribute to May 1968. Half a century ago, the 18th century building in the heart of the city's Latin Quarter was occupied by students and protesters for a month; under the slogan "Power to the imagination," it became a people's forum, open to all. And briefly, on May 7, it looked as if all hell might break loose again. The current Odeon director, Stephane Braunschweig, had gone the safe, rather than imaginative, road for his one off celebration, "The Spirit of May." For an hour or so, the evening plodded along, with lectures about history and speeches from guest artists and academics until a young man walked up to the stage, interrupting the proceedings. "While you're doing your commemoration," he admonished the crowd angrily, "students are being tear gassed in front of the Odeon." (A spokeswoman for the theater later confirmed that she had seen tear gas being used.) About 70 students were staging a symbolic protest outside and had been denied entry; as in 1968, there has been severe unrest this spring at universities across France in reaction to President Emmanuel Macron's change agenda, which includes more selective university admission rules. According to the spokeswoman, a handful of masked protesters attempted to force their way to the stage door, prompting the police to intervene. Inside, a heated debate ensued, and some scheduled speakers walked out. The evening laid bare the uneasiness that has so far surrounded the 50th anniversary of the events of 1968 in France. That revolutionary spring, which saw striking workers and students unite, is etched in the country's collective psyche, yet its legacy remains disputed. After briefly floating the idea of a national celebration, Mr. Macron retreated: Extolling 1968's spirit of freedom and anticapitalism was a juggling act too far for a liberal president facing strikes of his own. Have theater makers lost touch with their revolutionary roots? Fifty years ago, theater played an active role in putting culture front and center amid the clamor. Some companies, including Ariane Mnouchkine's egalitarian Theatre du Soleil, took their work to factories or to the streets; in addition to the Odeon, a number of venues were occupied or repurposed. The Theatre des Amandiers in Nanterre did not open until 1969. Still, this theater in a staunchly communist outer suburb of Paris stayed true to itself this spring with "Mondes Possibles" ("Possible Worlds"), a festival focused on the utopian legacy of May '68. Philippe Quesne, the Amandiers' director, chose to revisit the production most identified in France with the spirit of that year: "Paradise Now," created by the avant garde American company the Living Theater. The troupe faced a ban at the 1968 Avignon Festival in France after the initial performances of the work there prompted street demonstrations. In "Re Paradise," the director Gwenael Morin has recreated the original "Paradise Now" with minimal changes. Period reconstructions have never been popular in France, but there is real value in what Mr. Morin unearthed in the process. In Nanterre, it provided an illuminating glimpse of the artistic mood in 1968 and a reminder that some taboos haven't changed much in half a century. Indeed, some scenes remain more subversive than much of the work currently being made by self styled radicals. "Re Paradise" was staged in the Amandiers' workshops, with audience members seated on portable chairs or on the floor. Throughout, Mr. Morin's 36 performers remained almost too close for comfort discussing social taboos, from talking about money to drug use, while looking us in the eye, or inviting willing onlookers to get up and form revolutionary cells. "I'm not allowed to undress," they whispered conspiratorially, before proceeding to do just that. "Re Paradise" speaks of a time without trigger warnings. At one point, the nearly naked performers invited audience members to join them in a huddle on the floor; one cast member caressed the legs and backs of the audience members around him, while others made out. If a director pitched this surreal scene to producers today, concerns about lawsuits would probably factor in. Yet the result captured some of the happy go lucky energy associated with 1968. Many of the text's witty takedowns of capitalism and consumerism still resonate. At the end, the performers simply picked up the stage's makeshift backdrop and gestured for the audience to leave by passing underneath. Chanting "Free theater" and "Change the world," they followed us into the parking lot, where there were bemused faces and a noticeable spring in people's step. The Amandiers also presented a creation looking at 1968 around the world, Sanja Mitrovic's "My Revolution Is Better Than Yours." It is a wistful, episodic work featuring performers from France, the former Yugoslavia, Russia and Spain; each episode examines revolutions and the backlashes to them. The performance was framed by the presence onstage of Mohamed Nour Wana, a poet born in Darfur, in western Sudan, who fled war in Libya. With other refugees, he joined students in occupying a university and protesting Mr. Macron's labor, immigration and higher education measures this spring. "These aren't just images for me," he said at the work's conclusion. "It's my reality, and the hope of a revolution I believe in." In the event, however, the most trenchant reaction to the legacy of 1968 came and went before the actual anniversary. In March, Wajdi Mouawad, the director of the Theatre de la Colline in Paris, unveiled "Notre Innocence" ("Our Innocence"), a creation spun out of a workshop with students from the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art. The play's plot which centered on the death of a student had its weaknesses, but one scene packed more of a gut punch than anything seen recently on the Paris stage. In it, the 18 cast members, all in their 20s, formed a chorus and slowly recited a text that read like the manifesto of a despondent generation. At one point, they spoke directly to the "soixante huitards," the crusaders who took part in the events of 1968, "which you keep crushing us with": "You had the revolution, you knew how to share, you had camaraderie, you weren't glued to your phones like us," they intoned derisively. "We don't know anything, haven't done anything, haven't lived anything." It was an intensely confrontational moment, and several older audience members walked out. Yet it also captured one central difference between 1968 and 2018: the sense of hopelessness that pervades many of today's protests against Mr. Macron's proposed measures. The film director Romain Goupil, a leader of the student movement in 1968, expressed as much onstage at the Odeon evening: "We lived through a Promethean illusion. Everything could change. Now, people are looking to protect themselves." Perhaps reckoning with the sweeping utopian visions of 1968 is an impossible task for today's artists. Another period slogan, "Be realistic: Ask for the impossible," now sounds like a piece of vintage, youthful idealism. Yet the sense of disquiet doesn't abate in France. The few audience members who lasted until the end of the Odeon's derailed tribute, well past midnight, were greeted by police officers standing guard outside the theater. Celebrating a cultural revolution under police protection: Here is a paradox for our times. If theater makers don't address it, who will? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In 2015, April Matthis won an Obie Award for sustained excellence as an actor, having played almost every kind of role Off Broadway could offer. Or so I thought until I saw her as half of the strangest and in some ways the loveliest love story ever. I'm talking about her terrific performance as Toni Stone in the play of the same name by Lydia R. Diamond, in which the other half of the love story is a 9 inch sphere of horsehide, rubber and yarn. Stone, who in 1953 became the first woman of any race to play in a professional baseball game, was obsessed since childhood with the sport and thus with its main piece of equipment. "It is round, and small, and it fits right there in your hand," she says, expressing the same kind of longing she's heard other girls express about boys. Ms. Diamond's play, which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, tracks Stone, whom history has almost forgotten, from her tomboy youth on the sandlots of St. Paul to her years of barnstorming with men's exhibition teams, to her historic first at bat for the Indianapolis Clowns of the professional Negro Leagues. It considers her character and those of the men she played with in the context of social change reshaping the field and the country. Baseball biography is not usually a promising dramatic genre. ("Bronx Bombers," largely about Yogi Berra, lasted barely an inning on Broadway in 2014.) Sports plays in general not to mention those supported by industry cartels, as this Roundabout Theater Company production is supported by Major League Baseball invite bathos and boosterism. But Ms. Diamond, the author of "Stick Fly" and "Smart People," has avoided that trap. "Toni Stone" is at its considerable best whenever, like its main character, it's at its most unconventional. The spiky rhythm of Pam MacKinnon's direction; the unvarnished quirkiness of the eight man ensemble supporting Ms. Matthis; the astonishing, dancelike movement (by Camille A. Brown) that expresses the game without mimicking it all contribute to the feeling that we're learning something new, but also in new ways. Not that Stone's career unfolds for us in any orderly fashion; the flip side of Ms. Diamond's success in delivering the story's unconventionality is that she whiffs some of its conventional elements. Putting the play in a memory frame, narrated by Stone, allows her to jump around in time and place, but as a result you often aren't sure what state, team or decade you're in. Riccardo Hernandez's unit set just bleachers, bats and frames of floodlights is deliberately nonspecific, as if to suggest the larger, cosmic arena in which the story plays out. Even the exact nature of the historic achievement is smudged; I didn't understand, until I read about it later in her 1996 obituary, that Stone played professionally for only two seasons. Nor with such a blurry timeline can Ms. Diamond lead the story to a clear sense of climax and closure; the second act drags a bit. No matter: Ms. Matthis's characterization holds everything together, which is all the more astonishing because most of it must be her invention, built on the armature of Ms. Diamond's pungent dialogue. (Though some audio from interviews of Stone exists, and a biography by Martha Ackmann was published in 2010, the record is thin and questionable.) As a result, Stone's personality remains something of a puzzle. That she may have preferred it that way is something I like about the role and the play; you never feel that you have a full grasp on her. But Ms. Matthis does, absolutely. Without sanctimony or condescension, she gives us a woman who was prodigiously gifted, weirdly literal and totally in charge of her strange self. Even her peccadilloes become emblems of strength, as for instance when a teammate tells Stone he wouldn't throw her out of his bed for eating crackers, and the sense of it entirely eludes her. "Why would I eat crackers in your bed? Why would anyone eat crackers in a bed? They are very messy." Idioms let alone sexual innuendo are not something Stone understands. She prefers words that approach the irreducible facticity of her beloved baseball statistics. When a businessman named Alberga (Harvy Blanks) insists on buying her drinks at the dive she favors, she's nonplused enough to ask her friend Millie what it means. Millie (Kenn E. Head) certainly knows; she's a prostitute at the brothel where some of the team puts up when in town. Mr. Blanks, marvelous here in a romance even more unusual than Stone's with baseball, plays one of the Clowns when he's not the suave Alberga. Likewise, the touching Mr. Head toggles between prostitute and player, just by slipping a floral shift on or off. (The costumes are by Dede Ayite.) This simplicity of gender and racial transformation to become white characters, the men pass a hand over their faces allows Ms. MacKinnon to comment subtly on what has and has not changed over the years in our ideas about identity. There's great dignity in that, and in the way the play approaches race and gender in general. White oppression is of course a part of these black characters' lives: Opposing players rough them up when sliding into base, opposing fans shout vile slurs. Worse, the team must perform, as part of each game, a kind of minstrelsy called "cooning" to allay white fears of their prowess. As staged by Ms. Brown, it's funny until it's awful. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In the four or so years since Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter V" was first intended for release, hip hop which was for a time gleefully remaking itself in Lil Wayne's image found new tributaries, new role models. For some, Drake is the paterfamilias, with his pan regional pastiche pop rap. For others, it's Future and Young Thug themselves children of Lil Wayne and their distended wails. And for others still, it's J. Cole, a modern moralist reinvigorating the modes of two decades ago. Lil Wayne, now 36 years old, has come to feel like an elder, his innovations so baked into the genre as to be nigh invisible. A star since he was a teenager, he has been releasing music for two decades. When he began speaking about "Tha Carter V" several years ago, he described it as his final solo album. But then contractual battles with his label turned it into something more a rallying cry for artist independence, verging on the apocryphal. All the while, the genre was changing. When Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III" debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart a decade ago, it was a victory for his unorthodox path through the mixtape circuit, and still something of an outlier in terms of hip hop's success in the mainstream. But now those things are utterly normal, a circumstance embodied by no rapper more so than Logic, who has become one of hip hop's most commercially successful artists by charting a path similar to Lil Wayne's while making music that's loyal to different traditions. As characters, Lil Wayne and Logic couldn't be more divergent. Lil Wayne is a savage storyteller, always ready with a taunt, threat or boast. Logic is an unrepentant optimist, an up by his bootstraps teacher's pet who espouses the gospel of positivity. For him, hip hop is a tool of salvation, personal and public. As rappers, though, they share a great deal. They are technicians in an era of melodists and punks, both more appealing on a line for line basis than song for song. They are unflashy, eschewing hip hop's turn to high fashion. And they are gushingly prolific, releasing music in a torrent (at least, in the case of Lil Wayne, when he could). And on their new albums, they are both as mindful of how they are perceived by others as how they wish to present themselves. For Lil Wayne, who at his peak was as internal a monologuist as hip hop has ever seen, this is something of an evolution. For Logic, who is experiencing the thrills of fame along with its downsides, it is a step toward more complicated art. "Tha Carter V" allows Lil Wayne to bid farewell to the last few years of career limbo by reasserting his strengths. He still slurs his syllables, and he still leans heavily on assonance. Peak Lil Wayne can approach tone poetry, offering a clinic on how to revel in variations on one particular sound for minutes on end. Taken in pieces, his imagistic moments still thrill: "Blunt big, big as Mama June off the diet plan"; "Yellow diamonds up close, catch a sunstroke"; "Billion dollar smile, I sell myself short if I grin." His ease of delivery makes even offhand menace sound comical: "Body take a week to find/the cops gon' be like, 'Never mind.'" At his best, he is an electric storyteller, with verses that vibrate fiercely on the word level while assembling into something epic. That's the case on "Mona Lisa," a duet with Kendrick Lamar, on which both men write long verses about masculinity and weakness. Lil Wayne plays the role of someone who uses women to set up other men for robbery: "He tell her all his secrets, he tell her all his fears/And then she tell me, and I be all ears." But given that this album was assembled over the course of five years, it is unsurprisingly musically scattershot. There is a strong, old sounding DJ Mustard production, "Open Safe," and also "Don't Cry," which features a morbid sung hook by the controversial rapper XXXTentacion, who was killed earlier this year. There is "Dark Side of the Moon," a useless love duet with Nicki Minaj, and "What About Me," which indulges Lil Wayne's least appealing pop instincts. Perhaps because it was so delayed, "Tha Carter V" is long extremely long, almost an hour and a half. Excess was always a part of his proposition, but this album drags and seeps, with long stretches of shrug in between moments of invention. The most effective throughline on this album isn't actually Lil Wayne it's his mother, Jacida Carter, who appears in several spoken interludes. To her, Lil Wayne isn't a superhero or superstar. He's fragile and small, someone she never fully could take care of, but who found a way to take care of himself. Her words are hesitant and deeply felt, and they feel almost like a eulogy. When Lil Wayne was at his commercial and creative peak a decade ago, he liked to refer to himself as an alien, but the most vivid takeaway from this album is of Lil Wayne the human being. By contrast, Logic has built his whole career on his humanity, his ordinariness, his relatability. He is a stylistic inheritor of the 1990s, with stops at J. Cole, Mac Miller, Macklemore and others. But as a hip hop quasi pastor, he's sui generis. The line between mixtapes and proper albums was dissolved years ago, but no rapper has made mixtapes part of a commercial strategy as effectively as Logic. This is his second release this year; "Bobby Tarantino II," named for another alter ego, debuted atop the Billboard album chart in March. "YSIV" the conclusion of his Young Sinatra series of mixtapes is his most confident and accomplished release to date, shaking off some of the awkwardness that has long peppered his music. Like Lil Wayne, he is given to complex rhyme, but there has generally been an air of studiousness around him, like a mathematician showing his work. He is still working hard here, as is clear from the sheer range of styles he deploys. "100 Miles and Running," with Wale, has flickers of Washington, D.C.'s go go music. "Wu Tang Forever" is a literal reunion of the Wu Tang Clan. The title track is a tribute to Nas and AZ, with flows borrowed from Jay Z. "Who you know worth 50 million, still rappin' on breakbeats?" he asks. This isn't new for Logic he has consistently attempted to insert himself into the traditions he lionizes. But "YSIV" marks the first time the fit isn't unduly awkward. Lil Wayne's most exceptional time was his mid 2000s mixtape era, when he stole songs from others and made them permanently his own. (On "Tha Carter V," he does a version of this on "Uproar," a revision of G. Dep's "Special Delivery"). Both Lil Wayne and Logic are historians of a sort. They understand themselves in relationship to those who came before them. In places, Logic still mistakes cleverness for wit, especially when he's diving into his personal narrative: "Everybody talk about my race on socials/Make the boy wanna go postal/Since I went triple plat, I only identify as bicoastal." But on the whole, he's maturing into a thoughtful artist with a novel approach to hip hop that's likely to resonate for years to come. Where the testaments on "Tha Carter V" come from Lil Wayne's mother (and from David Letterman, Katie Couric, Barack Obama, all mentioning Lil Wayne's name), here the embrace comes from fans, on "Thank You," which features recorded messages from listeners around the world. They position Logic as a hip hop star, but also a source of comfort and inspiration, and a dream enabler. It would be less convincing if Logic weren't still using his music as a way to speak his wishes into existence. Even on this successful album, he's vulnerable and putting his greatest desires in a song: asking Jay Z to rap with him, soliciting Nike for a sneaker deal. He's motivated by fealty to the genre, and to its formal rules, but mostly he's motivated by the never ending task of asking others to see him as he sees himself. One person at a time, it's working. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
East 125th Street and Park Avenue may be East Harlem's best known crossroads, and one of its most forlorn. A busy stop for commuter trains, the intersection is marred with rundown buildings and lifeless lots that serve as discouraging reminders of development plans gone awry or never realized. Now, though, another proposal has surfaced for one corner there that, if realized, would bring an ambitious mixed use complex. At the same time, plans for major new office and apartment buildings appear to be going forward on two other corners, a sign that the struggling area might be getting the attention lavished in recent years on West Harlem. "It was always, 'The west was the best, and the east was the beast,' " said Holley Drakeford, an associate broker with Giscombe Realty Group, whose offices are situated at that prominent corner, in one of the few buildings not targeted for redevelopment. "But now everything around here is going berserk," said Mr. Drakeford, who is not involved with the nearby projects. Waterbridge Capital, a development firm, is the latest to float a proposal for part of this hub, one involving five contiguous properties on the southeastern corner of the intersection, for 37 million, according to brokers involved with the deal, which is expected to close this winter. The firm's plan is to demolish the low slung stores and hotel on the sites, which wrap around to 124th Street, and replace them with a 210,000 square foot high rise with retail space and apartments, brokers say. Waterbridge is seeking a single big box style retailer for the retail space, which would total 67,000 square feet and span several floors, though the design has not been completed, according to Lenny Sporn, a Douglas Elliman broker who represented both the buyer and sellers of the parcels. A spokeswoman for Waterbridge said the firm had no comment. In general, asking rents on this stretch of 125th Street start at 150 a square foot, according to Mr. Drakeford, who noted that the block the Waterbridge project would be on is bookended by the Metro North station and a stop for the 4, 5 and 6 subway lines. Waterbridge is considering a couple of options for the residential portion. One would create 160 luxury condos in the building, which under current zoning could rise to about 16 stories. Some local officials at the neighborhood Community Board 11, though, are seeking even greater heights along that part of Park Avenue, which has a viaduct for Metro North trains running down its middle. Under the second option, the building would feature rental apartments, in the form of so called microunits, each less than 400 square feet, Mr. Sporn said. Although there are many low income residents in the neighborhood, Waterbridge has not yet indicated exactly how many of its apartments might be affordable housing, though Mr. Sporn said they would "most likely" be included. And developments in the neighborhood, like so many others, can become quite controversial if longtime residents are pushed aside through gentrification. It is also unclear how Waterbridge would work around an empty city owned lot on Park Avenue that is in the middle of these parcels but not included in them. A spokeswoman for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which controls the property, did not comment. But the project's supporters do not seem to be worried about the success of the project, whether measured by shoppers or residents. "This area has become safer and cleaner," Mr. Sporn said, "and I think people are feeling a lot more comfortable there." While one project may not be enough to reverse the area's fortunes, it is arriving hand in hand with others that together could create a strikingly new look and feel for a neglected area. On the other side of the railroad tracks, in a project that is somewhat of a mirror image of the Waterbridge proposal, the developer Continuum Company plans to break ground in the middle of 2014 on its own mixed use complex, with retailing on the sidewalk level and a tower of apartments atop it, said a spokesman, David Wachsman. Located on a blocklong site at the southwestern corner, and currently vacant and fenced in, the 32 story project is meant to create 613,000 square feet of housing, some of which will be affordable, as well as 63,000 square feet of stores, Mr. Wachsman said. The site has seen grand dreams before. Before the depths of the recession, Vornado Realty Trust had planned an office tower there for Major League Baseball's cable network, as well as other tenants, but sold the property to Continuum last spring for 66 million, records show. And it wasn't the first large scale proposal to fizzle. Previously, in the early 2000s, a mixed use development called Harlem Park, anchored by a Marriott hotel, actually got as far as the groundbreaking stage. Hopes have also been occasionally dashed across the street as well, at the historic brick structure known as the Corn Exchange, which last decade was supposed to install a culinary school. The city has owned the crumbling 19th century Romanesque former bank on and off since the 1970s, when it was seized for nonpayment of taxes. Now, however, Artimus, a developer active in Harlem, is building a six story, 31,000 square foot mixed use building there, tucked in the ruins of the former bank, that will likely have a restaurant and a bank at its base and offices along the tracks, according to a source close to the project. The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2014, the source said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
David Ostow, a cartoonist and illustrator, draws on an F train in Brooklyn, his studio on the way to and from work. Most New Yorkers would rather not relive the mind numbing disappointment that can come from navigating the city's real estate market. They would rather forget that awful landlord, or that apartment they can't afford, or that condo that replaced all the shops on their block. But where most people see only stress and angst in the face of rapid gentrification, some artists find inspiration. A real estate broker desperately trying to sell an apartment in a Trump high rise makes for a surreal short film. Over the top amenities at a new condo seem doubly absurd when they're drawn as cartoons with quirky captions. And, somehow, the story of a landlord trying to force a grizzled New Yorker out of his rundown Hell's Kitchen walk up is something to laugh about when it's a television show. For these artists, such events are not a source of despair. They are fodder for creativity. Artists often hold up a mirror so the rest of us can better see the world around us. At the moment, the image reflected back is of a city undergoing a rapid, and sometimes disorienting, transformation. And it is no wonder artists have taken an interest in gentrification they are often its bellwether. When artists arrive, developers often take it as a signal that a neighborhood is ripe for investment. Longtime residents, meanwhile, get the message that displacement is not too far behind. But artists are not immune to the effects of gentrification, either, so why shouldn't it find its way into their art? Not that gentrification is new terrain for artists. But the tenor has changed as the scale of development has become ever larger and more frenzied. "Some artists now are more militant, for lack of a better word, in the way that they look at the issue" of gentrification, said Micaela Martegani, the executive director of More Art, a Chelsea nonprofit that connects artists with local communities. "There is more of an activist perspective." Among the new entries is "The Holdouts," a comedy series created by Stephen Girasuolo and Dan Menke. The show, which is in production, centers on a classic New York situation: a lease buyout. In the pilot episode, "Change Is Bad," a disheveled New Yorker named Kevin refuses to relinquish his grimy one bedroom, even after his landlord offers him 500,000 to leave. He'd rather wait for the return of a bygone era. "I look forward to the day when I can raise pigeons on my roof again, when I can grill in a vacant lot," he tells his roommate, Jayce, a schoolteacher who is trying to put on a tie so he will look respectable when he meets the wealthy parents of his students. At one point, Jayce takes Kevin to see a 7,000 a month two bedroom in a new development in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with "wool brushed" stainless steel appliances and a separate "poor door" to the building's subsidized units. "I'm having an allergic reaction," Kevin says. In early November, I sat in Andrews Coffee Shop in Midtown with Mr. Girasuolo, who is looking for a television network to pick up the series. Over eggs and home fries, Mr. Girasuolo, 46, asked, "How long do you want to deal with unhealthy living conditions at a cheaper price?" It's a reasonable question, and one that Mr. Girasuolo asked himself in 2010 as conditions deteriorated in the Hell's Kitchen walk up where he had lived for nearly two decades. Vagrants slept in the hallway, the building frequently had no heat, and a fire started on the roof. He did not receive a buyout offer, but other than that, Mr. Girasuolo said, the show "is completely drawn on my personal experiences." Unlike Kevin, though, Mr. Girasuolo did not hold out. He gave up his crummy apartment in 2011, even though it was rent stabilized, equivalent in New York to a winning lottery ticket. But, as luck would have it, he eventually found another rent stabilized apartment, a one bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which he shares with his wife, Nina Phuong Ha. He walked past his old apartment building a few weeks ago. It still had evacuation notices on the door. Kevin's apartment on the show, with a bathtub in the living room and a hanging sheet for a bedroom door, actually belongs to someone, the avant garde composer Elliott Sharp. The show's producer, Christopher Pike, found the place by sitting on stoops of old apartment buildings in the East Village and accosting tenants in the hope that someone would agree to let the crew use his or her apartment as a set. When Mr. Sharp emerged from his apartment, on East Seventh Street between Avenues B and C, Mr. Pike followed him for three blocks, pleading his case. By the third block, Mr. Sharp agreed to let him see the place. "Elliott's was perfect because he had all these old CDs, albums, analog equipment," Mr. Girasuolo said. While "The Holdouts" spotlights the grittiness of New York tenements, "Broker," a short film by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, rubs some of the veneer off a spotless three bedroom on the 77th floor of Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza. Gillian Chadsey, an actress, spreads out glossy Trump Organization promotional brochures and recites marketing strategies with statements like: "Emphasize unique qualities to increase the perception of scarcity." In a monologue stuck on an increasingly frenetic loop, she hawks glazed herringbone parquet floors and white Caesarstone countertops over and over again. By the end, it is not only the luxe bed that has become undone. The film was screened recently at Postmasters Gallery in Lower Manhattan. The McCoys, who are married and in their late 40s, filmed the movie over the summer in an apartment that is currently listed for 6.99 million. They selected the location because they could rent it through Airbnb, not because the building took its name from Donald J. Trump, then running for president. "The staff was nice as pie," Ms. McCoy said. "Once we got our equipment in there, it was a hermetically sealed netherworld." The McCoys never thought Mr. Trump would win the election, an outcome that inadvertently gave the film a more political tone. Ms. McCoy began thinking seriously about luxury apartments when she and her husband spent a year living in one in Abu Dhabi in 2010. "We found it almost impossible to be creative in that space," she said of an apartment that seemed sterile. When the couple returned to New York in 2011, Ms. McCoy began visiting open houses to see how brokers sell homes. She would dress up as a wealthy apartment hunter, wearing jewelry and heels, "like someone who didn't have to walk too far," she said. She would make up stories about why she was there she needed more space, or she wanted to live closer to the children's school. Secretly, she recorded the sales pitches on an iPhone hidden in her purse. On one tour, the broker told her that the faucets were modeled after an antique coffee maker. "I didn't really understand what that meant," she said. "But you're not meant to. It's just intended to carry you through the dream of your life." The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment. David Ostow, 37, an illustrator and cartoonist, is quite familiar with high end finishes. In his day job as an architectural designer, he works with design teams on luxury residential developments, designing palatial amenity floors and selecting quartz countertops, lacquered cabinets and fancy faucets for the kitchens. Riding the train through Brooklyn from his home in South Slope to work in Bushwick, Mr. Ostow was often struck by the industrial Brooklyn skyline, grim and yet unexpectedly beautiful. That contradiction defines the Brooklyn brand you know, distressed furniture and hanging Edison bulbs in the lounge area, but, paradoxically, a pet spa and a golf simulator on the amenity floor. Mr. Ostow had long doodled skylines and cityscapes, but in the summer of 2015, he sketched imaginary condos with absurd signs that said things like "Don't Panic: We Paid for the Graffiti in the Hallway!" He soon began imagining other condos as a sort of catharsis. "I'm part of that ecosystem, so I'm laughing at myself as much as anyone else," Mr. Ostow said. "These comics are my way of coming to terms with feeling a bit ridiculous about myself." The caption for "The Salvage," a condo made from a hodgepodge of buildings, reads: "Yesterday's debris is today's decor. Just sign the bed bug waiver and get ready to smell the luxury." Artists often play an uncomfortable role in real estate and gentrification. Someone has to paint those graffiti walls in the condo lobbies, but few artists can afford to actually live in such places. Instead, artists often live on the fringes of hot neighborhoods until developers discover those areas, too. "We are used by marketing people and developers as a sign that a neighborhood is going to be palatable for wealthier people," said the artist Jennifer Dalton, 48, who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "We are part of the process, but also pawns." Last May, Ms. Dalton and the artist William Powhida, 40, of Bushwick, organized Month2Month, a monthlong series of events held in private homes that focused on "whether housing is a right or a privilege." An exhibit about Month2Month is on display through February in "Home(ward)," a show organized by More Art at the Nathan Cummings Foundation in Manhattan. One event, "a night of experimental improvisational comedy" was called "The Rent Is Too Damn High So We Took Away Its Weed." Another, called "Gentrifiers Anonymous" encouraged participants to confess their gentrifying sins. "Who Stole the House" was a murder mystery involving a Brooklyn home in the clutches of a limited liability corporation. The McCoys pose for a portrait inside their installation of a scaled down apartment kitchen. Benjamin Norman for The New York Times "A lot of people came away feeling like it's more urgent than ever for artists to organize," Ms. Dalton said of the series. "We need to be activist citizens." Ed Hamilton, 55, a writer who has lived in the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street for more than two decades, is certainly aware of the urgency. "Artists used to be able to resist gentrification," he told me. "At some point, the tide turned." The hotel has been undergoing renovations for years. Mr. Hamilton and his wife have managed to hold onto their tiny room on the eighth floor, continuing to live there despite the construction, and its attendant plastic sheeting, all around them. Mr. Hamilton sees gentrification as not just a literal event, but also as a metaphor for growing old. You become invisible as the world changes around you. Last year, Mr. Hamilton wrote "The Chintz Age" (Cervena Barva Press, 2015), a collection of short stories and a novella about artists trying to survive in a changing city. The novella is called "The Retro Seventies Manhattan Dream Apartment." In the story "Highline/Highlife," the narrator, a writer unhappily married to an heiress, is living in his wife's luxury apartment overlooking the High Line. Trapped in a glass home, he is both a voyeur and an exhibitionist. Eventually, he goes crazy in his fishbowl. "Gentrification really doesn't benefit anybody," Mr. Hamilton said, sitting in an armchair in his tiny room, surrounded by stacks of CDs, books and art. "It seems originally like it's going to benefit the rich. But it gets out of hand." But Mr. Hamilton, a Kentucky native who speaks with a soft Southern drawl, is more optimistic than his characters. "I don't want to be somebody who's always down on something now," he said. Instead, "the way to resist is to carve out a niche for yourself in a crazy, gentrified world." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
You could almost say these novels predicted their own fates. A telling bit of dialogue appears midway through "Operation Burning Candle," Blyden Jackson's 1973 thriller about a Black disciple of Jungian psychoanalysis who fakes his death in Vietnam and returns to America with a group of other veterans to take down the white establishment. "You may get to write one book, maybe two," a student activist warns the Jungian revolutionary, Aaron Rogers. "But they'll get you because they have to. Your ideas are just too damn dangerous for them." In this exchange, Jackson foretold not only his character's future but his own as an author, as well as that of the literary subgenre to which he belonged: the revolutionary Black thriller of the civil rights era. Composed of equal parts pulp fiction and radical politics, a series of novels by Black writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s fantasized about dismantling American police departments, the media and even the government itself a marriage of form and content that landed them in the small oval of the Venn diagram where Fred Hampton and Frederick Forsyth overlap. Some of the novels found popular and critical acclaim; one author was hailed in The New York Times as "among the best of contemporary novelists." But their books soon vanished. Either the audience dried up or publishers got skittish about the radical content and moved on. The authors moved on too to new topics or, more often, new careers. These days, the books are tough to find. They're available as mildewed paperbacks on Bookfinder.com, in small run reprints from university presses or as hard to read bootleg PDFs. Yet their themes and plotlines featuring corrupt police officers who take their cut from drug dealers' profits, and institutionalized racism that pays only lip service to equal opportunity remain distressingly relevant. Together, the trajectories of the books, their heroes and their authors offer a cautionary tale about the struggle to achieve lasting progress on civil rights in America, as well as about the danger of creating speculative fiction that's a little too truthful for comfort. 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. Blyden Jackson was a Marine drill instructor who worked in the '60s as an organizer for a New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, where he embraced the tactics of civil disobedience to draw attention to inequities in education. In 1964, he helped stage a sit down protest, tying up traffic on the Triborough Bridge. For a time, he was romantically involved with Eleanor Holmes Norton, who would become a nonvoting delegate to Congress, representing Washington, D.C. One wonders if she inspired "Elaine," the young activist in "Operation Burning Candle" who tells Aaron his ideas are too dangerous to get away with more than a book or two. Elaine's prophecy proved accurate. Notwithstanding a rave review from Mel Watkins the first Black editor on the staff of The New York Times Book Review Jackson published only one more novel: "Totem" (1975), an African quest story that's even harder to find than his debut. Jackson went on to a comparatively anonymous existence as a husband, father, emergency medical technician and president of an ambulance squad in Middlebury, Vt. When he died in 2012, he left behind an unpublished novel: "For One Day of Freedom." Uncanny parallels exist between his first book, "Operation Burning Candle," and the Black radical thriller "The Spook Who Sat by the Door" (1969), by Sam Greenlee. I was reading Greenlee's book on a bench in the 103rd Street subway station when I noticed a stocky man looming over me. He had a big beard, long dreads and a United States Army jacket buttoned up all the way. "That's a good book, man," he said, then made a solemn Black Power fist and strode off. This is the sort of book you want to discuss with strangers. In it, Dan Freeman, a seemingly mild mannered, jazz loving Chicago intellectual, becomes the C.I.A.'s first Black employee and uses the techniques he learns at the agency to train gang members in his hometown to start a revolution he won't survive to witness. Greenlee based the novel partly on his experiences as an information officer working overseas for the United States Foreign Service. Even more than 50 years after it was published, the book feels thrillingly incendiary, as if it, like its hero, were only pretending to play by the rules while actually providing a blueprint for revolution. "No one could imagine that Freeman, tame, smug and self satisfied, would ever rock the boat; much less suspect that he planned to sink it," Greenlee writes. Though "The Spook Who Sat by the Door" was adapted into a film in 1973, Greenlee, like Jackson, published only one other novel: "Baghdad Blues," in 1976. It follows a disillusioned Black Foreign Service worker during a coup in Iraq, where Greenlee was posted in the 1950s. With its suspicion of Western imperialism and its skeptical hero, who finds more in common with the Iraqis than with his fellow Americans, the novel is a spiritual cousin to Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." Its attitude is neatly summed up in an observation that appears while the coup is taking place outside the United States Embassy: "I walked through the gloomy halls, watched the frightened white faces and inside I laughed like hell." By contrast, Barry Beckham's 1972 novel "Runner Mack" is much more phantasmagorical and impressionistic. There are echoes of Malamud and portents of "Da Five Bloods" as it tracks the misfortunes of a baseball phenom drafted into the Army. There he meets the charismatic Runnington (Runner) Mack, who hatches a quixotic plan to bomb the White House. But Mack's fate dead by suicide and that of Beckham's career as a literary writer fit the pattern of the genre's other radical Black authors and novels. Feted with raves for "Runner Mack," Beckham had a varied career, editing college guides for Black students, writing nonfiction, teaching creative writing at Brown and Hampton universities and starting his own publishing company. But his next novel, "Will You Be Mine?," didn't appear until 2006, and then via his own Beckham Publications Group. Julian Moreau's 1967 "The Black Commandos," in which a group of highly skilled fighters battle bigots, fly a saucer to Washington, D.C., and take over America, is a utopian revenge fantasy that can be seen as a precursor to modern novels, graphic and otherwise, featuring Black superheroes. John Edgar Wideman's 1973 "The Lynchers," about a group of Black men who plan to lynch a white police officer, is doleful and ambitiously literary, anticipating Wideman's distinguished writing career. Both novels share with the others an intensity, an immediacy and a timeliness, despite being consigned to obscurity decades ago. Near the end of "Operation Burning Candle," Aaron Rogers flags down a cab. He's been shot in the gut by a cop after having launched an attack on the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden. The driver wants to take him to the hospital. "Can't go to the damn hospital," Aaron says. "Take me to Harlem!" The driver drops him off at 116th and Lenox, and he staggers into a playground. Racked with pain, he deliriously imagines that he is being dragged onto a slave ship. But in his dying moments, he looks up: Lights flicker in apartments across the way. People have lit candles, expressing solidarity with the revolution he has started. "Everywhere there were burning candles!" Jackson writes. "Aaron lay back down. He was glad." Today, if you walk to the intersection where Aaron exited his cab, it's hard to say which playground Jackson had in mind. Two are equidistant from the corner of 116th and Lenox Avenue. One is named for Sojourner Truth, the other for Martin Luther King Jr. On a recent Saturday morning, you couldn't see any candles in the windows, but on three of the four street corners, vendors sold Black Lives Matter T shirts and face masks; some had "I CAN'T BREATHE" printed on them. Juneteenth parade marchers chanted slogans and carried black, red and green American flags and pictures of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. And, if you looked up, you could see signs in some windows. One said "BLM." Another was a sheet of paper cut into a heart. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A serious car accident in May taught the rapper Offset some larger lessons: "Slow down. Take your time," he said. "Think through your moves." His first solo album is due in December.Credit...Peyton Fulford for The New York Times A serious car accident in May taught the rapper Offset some larger lessons: "Slow down. Take your time," he said. "Think through your moves." His first solo album is due in December. ATLANTA When the rapper Offset, bleeding from the mouth and hands, staggered through the bedroom door of his suburban home around 5 one morning in May, his wife, Cardi B, went ballistic. She was about seven months pregnant with the couple's first child, and woke up early to have her makeup done before another busy day. Not much of a sleeper, Offset had run to the store in his lime green Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. But upon his return, he could hardly stand or speak, and he gripped in his hand a thick Cuban link chain that had fallen from his neck. Everyone was certain he'd been shot. Even in the ambulance later, as Offset insisted that he had only been in a car accident he swerved to avoid a man walking in the road and slammed into a tree, he said the paramedics told him that he might be delusional, and they cut off his designer clothes in search of a bullet wound. "I had so much blood on me, I didn't even notice," Offset recalled recently, detailing the crash for the first time and showing off the scars on the back of his hands that marred his tattoos of Jesus and his record label Quality Control's logo. He'd managed to throw his hands up before the airbags deployed, he explained, but the force sent his fists into his mouth, busting up his bottom teeth. His eye socket was broken, and his chest felt like it might cave in, but he was lucky to be alive, the police told him later. Recounting the details, he grew short of breath. He hadn't been wearing a seatbelt. "Slow down," Offset said when asked how the accident affected him. "That's the biggest lesson: Slow down. Take your time. Think through your moves." Yet for a member of the Atlanta trio Migos, the biggest rap group in the world one whose M.O. has always been more everything, all the time such mantras are hard to put into practice. The day after the crash, bandaged like a bejeweled mummy, Offset was back in the studio. For most people, in most years, a near death experience would be the marquee event. Not for Offset: In the less than 24 months since "Bad and Boujee" hit No. 1 and Migos pushed its way, millions of streams at a time, into the upper echelons of not just rap but pop, the group's members have released two albums (plus two solo albums and a 30 track label compilation), plenty of guest features and hours of videos. There have been Grammy nominations, a sold out, 54 date arena tour with Drake and appearances in N.B.A. promos, Netflix commercials and "Carpool Karaoke." But even among a collective that has made oversaturation a default mode and then continued to pile on more appearances, more cars, more jewelry, more music Offset has pushed excess and impulsiveness to the extreme, and emerged recently as the trio's most compelling individual character. Last September, after a brief and turbulent courtship, he merged his life and brand with Cardi's, marrying the platinum selling rapper in a low key secret ceremony (before proposing publicly at a concert the next month). Their daughter, Kulture, is his fourth child by a fourth woman. With a new family nucleus and superstardom on the horizon, however, slowing down has still proved challenging. Ten days after Kulture was born in July, Offset was arrested in Georgia and hit with felony charges, including possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, after police discovered three handguns, some marijuana and about 100,000 in cash in his car during a traffic stop. He performed the entire Drake tour while out on bond. At the same time, the rapper real name Kiari Kendrell Cephus earned three Top 15 hits without his groupmates this year, including standout verses on ubiquitous club records like Tyga's "Taste" and Kodak Black's "Zeze." On Dec. 14, Offset's 27th birthday, he will complete the Migos solo trilogy by releasing his debut album, executive produced by Metro Boomin. And while the preceding releases from the others, Quavo and Takeoff, have demonstrated the ephemerality of the modern music deluge, largely fading from the public consciousness after streaming and charting well in their opening weeks, Offset is betting on a breakout moment because he has added an element seen only in flashes throughout the expansive Migos oeuvre: introspection. "A lot of people don't really know Offset," he said, because of the group structure and the flashy blog headlines about his various legal and romantic troubles. He allowed that his face, which has a panther like intensity, is frequently in a scowl and covered in tattoos, making him "a little intimidating." But he stressed his sense of humor, his obsession with music industry data watching and his dedication to his mother, stepfather, friends, siblings and children, many of whom surround him at all times. "When people talk to me, they're like, 'Damn, bro' and they don't even notice that I notice them saying, 'You ain't no ignorant expletive ,'" he said. "I like that. I'm going to start opening up more." In Offset and Cardi's sparsely decorated mansion in the leafiest part of northern Atlanta, the tags were still on the furniture, the platinum plaques had yet to be hung and the only thing on the kitchen counter was Michelle Obama's memoir. Just two of the rapper's nearly a dozen dogs Bentley and Fat Mama were in the backyard, dining on Waffle House. But down in the basement on a recent Saturday, the home studio was coming together as Migos ended its three month concert run with three hometown shows. After his personal audio engineer, J Rich, dug through a fanny pack of hard drives and a maze of computer folders titled OFFSET SESSIONS, the rapper's forthcoming solo tracks blared from the speakers. While some were trademark Migos jabbing taunts, boasts and catchphrases Offset did, in fact, sound like a different man on songs like "Hibernation, "Red Room" and "Father of 4," his voice softened by vulnerability and his verses edging away from rapid fire trap imagery toward something more like storytelling. "Daddy on dope/we don't speak," he raps on one track, adding on another: "How I grew up, my mama was my dad." The preoccupation with fatherhood makes up the core of the album's emotional content as Offset details his own rebellion; his subsequent experiences with the criminal justice system; and its effects on his mother and children, all of whom he addresses directly with apologies for everything from missing birthdays to his dependence on lean and Percocet. "Jordan, my first son I was getting locked up trying to feed this" kid, Offset recalled. As a 17 year old father, "I was hitting licks, breaking into people's houses to bring it back." Being a criminal was preferable to being a deadbeat like his own father, whom he last saw when he was around 5, he said. (Offset's first felony conviction, in 2012, was for possessing stolen property.) But he also maintained that his home life was not to blame for his wayward years. "That was me being a knucklehead, trying to find the ropes," he said. He was raised in the Gwinnett County suburbs north of Atlanta, and his mother, Latabia, remains a fixture in his life. ("Mama!" is not just a Migos ad lib; it's what everyone calls her.) It's this complex, detail rich and mostly obscured biography that Offset is beginning to reveal, in fits and starts, on his solo album. Carlos Desrosiers, an A R executive at Motown Records who has been working with Migos on their individual projects, said, "People need to know the story. Nothing's better than your fans knowing who you are." In conceiving Offset's album, Desrosiers said, "I was just telling him, literally, word for word: 'I don't want to hear any Patek, Patek,'" a reference to the rapper's go to crutch of rattling off luxury brands. "It's easy for him to do swag but everyone's giving the swag: the watches, the jewels, the cars," he added. "And of course we're going to have a little bit of that on there can't not have that." Still, the overall message Desrosiers imparted was: "Give 'em substance, give 'em you." For Offset, leaning into his gradual metamorphosis has been a matter of finding confidence in his presence and songwriting, which he said lagged behind the other members' because of his time in jail. When Migos first broke with "Versace" in 2013, he was incarcerated on a probation violation. Two years later, as the group prepared to release its debut album, he was again behind bars, denied bail because of his criminal record after the group was arrested in connection with drugs and guns at a rural college concert. Those charges against Offset were eventually dropped, but he pleaded guilty to a rioting charge after fighting with an inmate who, according to court filings, had a history of racism and was tormenting him. He again received probation, which was terminated early, about a year before his most recent arrest on weapons charges. Business is the couple's romance language. After he scrolled past an Instagram post reporting on the sales for Cardi's recent fashion partnership, Offset beamed and announced to the room, "Man, my girl sold 10.8 million dollars in three hours," before FaceTiming her and inquiring about her royalty rate. "You might as well start adding that money up," he said. Minutes later, she called back. "That's the wife," Offset said diligently as he fished a second cellphone from his sweatpants pocket and sought some privacy. "She brings excitement and pressure to me, but I like that," he said later. "She's No. 1, so every time I'm hitting the charts, I've got to be Top 10." Because of the pair's insane schedules, quality time can be hard to come by, but Cardi's mastery of intimacy on social media where, for example, she catalogs Offset's obsession with limited edition sugary cereals has rounded out his image and made him more relatable by proxy. As Offset completed his press obligations, she posted a picture on Instagram of the pair on vacation with the caption "I miss you." Earlier, she did the only real promotion his solo album needed, tweeting that it brought her to tears. Settling down was "the best thing that's happened to me personally, which helps me make the music, which helps my career," Offset said, estimating that he had another decade left in music. "I have no distractions. And me and her? We haven't even dropped an album yet. That's a whole other realm." "I have a wife and a child that changed my whole everything," he added. "I was a young hothead, but now I understand the value of life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Many of us have a special spot at home that helps us hit the reset button. It might be a favorite chair, a quiet nook, or simply under the covers, in bed. But for children on the autism spectrum or who have sensory processing issues, finding this kind of sanctuary can be challenging, because ordinary items in the home, like a bright lamp or a textured rug, can trigger a negative reaction. Some public or commercial spaces, like schools, airports and sport stadiums, now offer sensory rooms that carry a wide variety of therapy equipment. Setting one up at home, though, need not be as elaborate or expensive. "It's all about providing a safe and enjoyable space that a child can navigate independently," said Paige Siper, the chief psychologist at the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She recommends having an occupational therapist do an assessment to determine the child's sensory preferences and needs before designing a space. With one in 59 children now identified with autism spectrum disorder, there are more parents who have experimented with simple home design hacks to help their children cope with their sensory processing issues where every day auditory, visual and other stimuli are experienced in a heightened way. Although not everyone with sensory processing issues have autism, many do. Conversely, studies conducted by the STAR Institute, a research facility based in Greenwood Village, Colo., suggest that about 75 percent of children on the autism spectrum have significant symptoms of sensory processing disorder. Simple design changes could include soundproofing rooms, installing heavier doors and quieter laundry machines and dishwashers. For children who find too much stimulus in everyday items around the home, finding clutter free storage ideas is another easy fix. Lindsey Biel, an occupational therapist with a practice in Manhattan, said equipment and toys from a therapy catalog can also be helpful, but she noted that they can be pricey and even counterproductive if the wrong item is bought. For example, the Dizzy Disk, a spin toy, may help some children release energy and strengthen balance and coordination skills. For others, though, the vestibular movement may provide overstimulation. "You have to fine tune the space and equipment to the individual's needs," said Ms. Biel, who is also an author of "Raising A Sensory Smart Child" (Penguin Books, 2009). Ms. Biel recommends simple tweaks in the home, like installing light dimmers and replacing harsh florescent lights with warmer LED light bulbs. Walls should be a soft, neutral color and patterned wall paper avoided. And for children who need movement, a rocking chair, hammock or a pod swing can help. "The tepee is his refuge, but it can also be fun," said Ms. Flyer, who purchased it for less than 100. Ms. Flyer also installed automated blinds for about 900. Sometimes the natural sunlight is too harsh and it is all Julian can focus on, leading him to pace and repeat certain words or phrases, known as echolalia. Julian operates the automated blinds himself to help regulate his own environment. Michael Volchok saw the need to create a safe exercise space for his son, Max, who is on the autism spectrum and has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Max, 6, became an expert at climbing bookcases when he was about 4. So when Mr. Volchok learned that a children's play space in his SoHo neighborhood was closing two years ago, he offered to buy all the sensory exercise equipment. This included a climbing wall, numerous mats, foam barrels and stairs. The owner let him take everything, he said, including a wooden play kitchen set, for about 1,500. "I saved thousands," said Mr. Volchok, adding that he had previously used closeout sales to buy items for his own computer business. Melissa Morgenlander said she had spent many hours thinking about her son's sensory needs and determined less was more, especially in the bedroom, where he needs help falling and staying asleep. Diagnosed with autism, ADHD and obsessive compulsive disorder, Quentin, 12, had shared a room with his twin sister, Fiona, until age 8, when the family decided to create two small bedrooms so that each sibling could decorate their room to suit their needs. For Quentin, this meant keeping his room a soothing, light green color with no wall hangings. The windows are dressed with blackout curtains and there's a small bookshelf, dresser and a bed. In contrast, Fiona has lots of photos, posters and lights hanging on her wall. 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. Quentin's room certainly looks rather bland, according to Ms. Morgenlander, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. But the tweaks were necessary because her son found many ordinary household items in his room too stimulating. "It's almost like a sensory deprivation room," she joked. The costs connected to raising a child with special needs include fees for special schools, doctors, medication and therapies. A study published in 2014 in the journal Pediatrics said the parents of a child with autism paid about 17,000 more per year for health and non health related costs than parents with a neurologically typical child. Some retailers now offer more affordable options. Target introduced a line of sensory friendly furniture for children last April, with each piece costing under 110. Moiz Rauf's family business, SensoryMoon, based in Paramus, N.J., began offering bubble lamps online for under 150 in 2015. He originally thought the lamp, an acrylic water tube with color changing LED lights and floating fake tropical fish, would sell as a decorative, novelty item. But when most of the orders and client reviews came from special needs families, he realized he had stumbled into a niche market. "It blew us away to learn about how our lamp could help kids with sensory issues," Mr. Moiz said, who has since added other sensory related products, like weighted blankets, for sale on the website. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
OWNING a car in a congested city like New York or San Francisco can mean more hassle than happiness, what with traffic snarls, limited street parking and expensive garages. But Curtis Rogers has figured out a way to turn those psychic costs into a source of profit. The less he drives, the more he potentially makes. Registering his vehicle on the peer to peer car rental company Getaround, Mr. Rogers, who lives in San Francisco, rents out his Toyota Prius by the hour or the day, whenever he does not need it. In the last six months, he has earned an average of 750 a month for essentially doing nothing but acting as his own rent a car company. "My friends and family back in Texas think I'm crazy," he said. "But I've been really surprised by how much money I've made.'' Mr. Rogers, whose day job also involves disruptive transportation technology, is an account operations manager for Lyft, the ride hailing competitor to Uber. Getaround joins companies like Lyft and Uber and for that matter, Airbnb that enable owners and customers to make use of valuable assets that might otherwise sit idle much of the time. And it is but one example of how smartphone based technology continues to upend the traditional car rental business, which was long dominated by Avis, Enterprise, Hertz and their various subsidiaries. The conventional car rental companies, which a decade ago had to respond to the rise of digital fleet rental alternatives like Zipcar which Avis ended up buying have had little choice but to continue evolving to adapt to smartphone upstarts like Getaround. "For us, technology is key," said Sam Zaid, Getaround's chief executive. "Our technology makes car rental as easy as owning a car." Operating in 10 cities in the United States, Getaround has signed up about 3,000 car owners. Each owner agrees to let Getaround install a small box under the car's dashboard, which tracks vehicle diagnostics, pinpoints the car's location at any moment and keeps track of how the vehicle is being driven. Getaround charges owners 20 a month, and a 40 percent commission on rental fees. To rent a car, which costs 5 to 25 an hour depending on the model, a customer uses the Getaround app to find a nearby vehicle. A grid shows its location and whether and when the car is available. The customer can unlock the vehicle by smartphone, then find a car key that has been hidden within the vehicle. All rental forms are filled out electronically, with no need for the owner and customer to ever meet. The rental rate includes 1 million of insurance coverage, as well as roadside assistance. The Getaround model is meant for cities with concentrated populations, which is why its initial markets also include Portland, Ore., Chicago and Washington. For less densely settled, sprawling metropolises like Los Angeles, there are companies like Skurt, a one year old start up, which will deliver rental cars to customers. After the drop off, Skurt drivers head back to the office by public transportation, a folding bike or even a skateboard. Like Getaround, Skurt does not own the cars. The company contracts with the major rental companies to make use of their excess capacity. Using the Skurt app, customers choose the models they want, set the drop off and pickup times and locations, and scan their driver's licenses. Prices start at about 40 a day. "Our customers don't consider us as an alternative to car rental companies; they use us as a replacement for car ownership," said Josh Mangel, 23, one of Skurt's founders. Skurt's cars are available in the more heavily populated parts of Los Angeles and neighboring Orange County, with expansion planned soon to San Diego and Austin, Tex. Besides the considerable costs involved in big fleets of vehicles and large chains of airport and storefront retail offices, the conventional rental car companies are also encumbered by longstanding business procedures, which for customers can mean standing in a slow moving line at a rental agency waiting for a paper rental contract to be issued. That is one reason that earlier this year, Hertz invested in customer convenience by taking a stake in Luxe, a San Francisco start up that operates as a valet on demand, parking a car when the customer cannot find a space and then handing it back over again when the customer is ready. Although Luxe will park anyone's car, Hertz plans to make it a service option with some of its rental fleet. To make its valet service feasible, Luxe operates only in parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, San Francisco and several other cities. The company returns a car within 30 minutes of the customer's requesting it. Hertz plans to enhance Luxe's convenience by having employees pick up and deliver cars for customers who rent away from an airport, wherever they are. "We're on the precipice of very significant changes within the company," said Jeffrey Foland, a Hertz senior executive vice president. Over the next two years, the company will refresh its core technology, including its customer interface and reservations systems. "We want to make the rental process no more complicated than a couple of clicks on a mobile device." Enterprise, which also owns the Alamo and National brands, is betting that the best way to reduce the stress of a rental is keeping the customer away from the rental counter. It already operates Enterprise CarShare, a service similar to Zipcar. And now, using Enterprise's new LaunchPad software, available in 17 North American cities, a customer who has booked a reservation is greeted at the rental agency door by an employee holding a tablet. With LaunchPad, the Enterprise employee has real time access to the locations of cars in the fleet. The employee uses a prefilled reservation and takes the customer directly to the car. During the car's inspection, any dings are photographed on the tablet through LaunchPad. When the vehicle is returned, the process is reversed, with a receipt emailed to the renter. "We're moving the process from a transaction to an interaction," said Scott Stephens, an Enterprise assistant vice president. Avis is taking a different approach. With its new Avis Now app, the company's preferred customers receive automatic notification of the location of their rental vehicle and a picture of it upon reaching the rental lot. Customers can use Avis Now to change cars while still in the lot, confirm fuel level and mileage and return the car without assistance. With Avis vehicles that have connected technology, the app also allows the renter to open the doors and flash the lights to make the car easier to find. Yet none of these advancements address the one basic fact about renting a car: Like borrowed evening wear, it may fit, but it is still not as comfortable as your own. Imagine one day jumping into your rental vehicle and finding your favorite radio stations, seat position and temperature all preconfigured, based on your digital profile. That is a goal that the rental companies say they are pursuing. "There's an aligned interest between the car manufacturers, Google, Apple and us," Mr. Foland of Hertz said. "We're working with these parties to have customized vehicles in the near future." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
With the midterm elections fast coming into focus, politics in Washington will remain consumed by health care for months to come. Democrats worry that the flagging support for expanding health care insurance may not recover soon enough from its botched introduction. Republicans are leaving no stone unturned in search of Obamacare horror stories to stoke further discontent. This political theater, however, has little relevance to the actual delivery of medical services. For that, the debate that matters has been taking place far from the klieg lights, in a remote courthouse in Idaho, where less than two weeks ago a district judge sided with the Federal Trade Commission and ordered the unwinding of the merger between one of the state's biggest hospital systems and its biggest independent network of doctors. The ruling against St. Luke's Health System's 2012 purchase of the Saltzer Medical Group underlined a potentially important conflict between the nation's antimonopoly laws and the Affordable Care Act. The new law has encouraged the creation of big, broad accountable care organizations, which are paid to keep patients healthy rather than for individual services. "We want to be providing a more coordinated product that delivers health care at a lower overall cost to the community we serve," Christine Neuhoff, general counsel at St. Luke's, told me. She suggested the hospital would most likely appeal the decision. "This was part of our implementation of that vision," she added. Paradoxically, Judge B. Lynn Winmill seemed to agree. In his decision, he noted that the merger, had he let it stand, would probably have improved patient outcomes: "St. Luke's is to be applauded," he wrote, "for its efforts to improve the delivery of health care in the Treasure Valley," which stretches west from Boise. Still, he slapped it down because the merged group, he reasoned, would be able to demand higher reimbursement rates from health insurers and raise rates for services like X rays, pushing up health care costs for consumers. "There are other ways" to obtain the desired efficiencies that "do not run such a risk of increased costs," he concluded. St. Luke's is not alone in pursuing this strategy. In the last few years, hospitals have been merging and snapping up physician networks to improve their bargaining power with health insurers and to capture a larger share of the patient pool. The new health care law provided extra motivation and a potential justification to boot. "Consolidation has gone up a lot in the wake of the A.C.A.," said David Cutler, an economist at Harvard who specializes in the study of health care. "A good deal of that is because the idea is to foster coordination within the health system, and coordination is often easier within a firm than between firms." Ten years ago, hospitals owned a quarter of the physician practices in the country. By 2011, they owned half. A substantial majority of hospitals are now part of health systems, a trend that continues apace: 247 hospitals merged in 2012, according to the American Hospital Association, three times as many as in 2008. The urge to merge is bending many doctors out of shape. Marc Silver, an orthopedic surgeon in Stamford, Conn., said his practice declined to be absorbed by Stamford Hospital partly because it would mean a loss of freedom. Now he worries over lost referrals as the hospital moves everything in house. "Their rationale is all to feed the home base," he said. Herbert Coussons, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Green Bay, Wis., had similar concerns after the Bellin Health Systems took over a rival practice. "They think the only way to control the cost of health care is to employ everybody and manage it," he said. "We don't know whether the hospital wants to work with independent groups any more." A family practice doctor under contract with a hospital in central Pennsylvania was too afraid to talk freely to me for attribution. "I need to be very careful with issues that might be interpreted as a breach of my contract that could result in my termination with associated punitive consequences," he said. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. The relevant question, though, is whether this process will prove benign. Will it push the health care industry from the expensive fee for service model to one that does a better job at rewarding good outcomes while keeping a lid on costs? Or will it spawn oligopolies that can squash smaller rivals and charge whatever they want for care? "Most markets in the country are already highly concentrated and they are becoming more so," said Martin Gaynor, who oversees the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission. "We are paying attention." While the F.T.C.'s track record has been mixed, in the last few years it has won a string of rulings against hospital mergers. The decision in Idaho was significant for being the first about the acquisition of a doctor group. The health care industry has long defied traditional market expectations. Indeed, despite the consolidation, spending has, in fact, been growing at its slowest pace in years. And health care reform may be a reason. "It's certainly true that the consolidation of physician groups and hospitals can lead to greater market power and higher charges to insurance companies," said Jonathan Skinner, a health care economist at Dartmouth. "But the insurance companies are creating narrower networks of providers. So providers who try to charge more risk getting dropped entirely from the now narrower network." Nonetheless, there are reasons to worry. "Hospital consolidation generally results in higher prices," concluded a recent survey of existing studies by Mr. Gaynor and Robert Town of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "When hospitals merge in already concentrated markets, the price increase can be dramatic, often exceeding 20 percent." They contended that the consolidation of hospitals and doctors' practices, mostly aimed at increasing hospitals' bargaining clout, "has not led to either improved quality or reduced costs." In 2011, the F.T.C. and the Justice Department's antitrust division set guidelines for hospitals looking to transform into affordable care organizations. Mergers that captured up to 30 percent of the service market would be allowed to go ahead as long as providers were not deemed exclusive to the affordable care organization. That might not be enough. In a recent report, Professor Cutler and Fiona Scott Morton of Yale suggested new regulations to complement antitrust law. They proposed forbidding dominant hospitals from demanding that health plans impose the same cost sharing at all hospitals in their network, to allow plans to charge more at costlier institutions and empower consumers to choose cheaper options. They urged new policies to foster the quick replacement of fee for service models with bundled payments that encourage cost saving. And "if there is no other way to obtain good care except through monopoly organizations," they wrote, policy makers could directly "regulate prices or total spending." Even some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the new health care law have called for caution. "There is a tension between the benefits of coordinated care and the possible consequences of market power," said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped shape the new law. "The ideal might be to set things up so they are easily unwindable." Just in case they don't work. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Tonne Goodman has a mantra for when things start to get a little messy: "This is happening for a reason." She is known for saying it on fashion sets when a model calls in sick or a runway look is stuck in customs. And also when far more serious situations arise, like when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 44 . She finds it reassuring because, as she explained, whatever then happens is some kind of fate, and in that lies mystery and curiosity. Often, it leads you on a better path. Certainly, Ms. Goodman whispered the mantra aloud last summer when it was decided, by the powers that be, that she would surrender her role as fashion director of Vogue, where she had worked for nearly 20 years, and become a contributing editor a growing trend, these days, in the struggling magazine industry. Without a doubt, she has found herself on a curious new path. "My overriding feeling is this is exciting," she said, seated on a white slipcovered couch in her Greenwich Village apartment , where she has lived for two decades. But her "inner feeling," she said, is something like fear. Dressed in her crisp, unwavering wardrobe of white Levi's, Italian driving loafers and a silk Charvet scarf wrapped precisely around her neck, Ms. Goodman cuts a rather cool figure. From afar, she is the reserved, aloof foil to the colorful Grace Coddington, another Vogue editor. In practice, though, she is "the nicest" of the magazine's editors, as many of those who have worked with her attest . While at Vogue she is known for styling her subjects in a classic, clean cut manner "the practical woman," as she put it Ms. Goodman said that she loves "to do crazy things." Gabriella Karefa Johnson, who assisted Ms. Goodman for four years at Vogue before becoming the style director of Garage magazine, said: "She's quiet and not bombastic and wears a uniform every day, but Tonne changed this industry and the way Americans look at fashion. Tonne is rad. She is the definition of radical." And in this new phase of her life, Ms. Goodman, 66, seems eager to reveal as much. Cue her forthcoming book, "Point of View," which features, on an opening page, a full frontal of Ms. Goodman, from her modeling days. Sam Shahid, the book's art director and a longtime friend, sneaked the nude in, and for a while tried to hide it from her, but Ms. Goodman loved the idea. "One assumes this is just another fashion editor's book, and it's not," she said. Granted, it is filled with one gorgeous and iconic image after another, stretching from her early days as a fashion reporter for The New York Times through her seminal stints as vice president for advertising at Calvin Klein and fashion director of Harper's Bazaar, to her tenure at Vogue, during which she styled more than 150 covers. It is also quite personal, revealing pictures and anecdotes from her days growing up on the Upper East Side, the daughter of an artist and a surgeon, both of whom not surprisingly were attractive and stylish. Her mother wore a floor length circle skirt for dinner every night, paired with cashmere and pearls. Her father would change into a green velvet smoking jacket. According to family lore, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt proclaimed them the handsomest couple in New York. There are also striking photos of Maarten, a Dutch sailor with whom Ms. Goodman ran off to sea for four months at the age of 17; and Rob, a troubled waiter she fell madly for and followed to the desert. She does not include images of Bailey Gimbel, the man she married and with whom she had two children, though she does mention their split. In fact, she touches, sparingly, on several searing aspects of her life, among them her bout with cancer, which coincided with the end of her marriage; and the time she feared she was having a miscarriage while in Paris for the collections. The photographer Mario Testino, whom she didn't know well at the time, drove her in his Fiat Cinquecento to the hospital, where they learned that her son, Cole, now 25, was alive and well. Mr. Testino became his godfather. "It's all part of my fabric," she said of including such intimate details. "The reason any photo shows up is because of what I experienced." She recalled one particularly emotional picture, shot by Peter Lindbergh during her Harper's Bazaar days. It features Amber Valletta running through the city wearing a set of wings. "I was pregnant with Cole at the time," said Ms. Goodman, who also has a daughter named Evie. "This was my angel." When it came to the book's cover, Evie, an artist, balked at the idea of using the very classic and minimalist David Sims image of Daria Werbowy in a Calvin Klein gown. "She thought it was too obvious," Ms. Goodman said. "That it didn't reflect all of me." Alas, Evie's racier pick, a Steven Klein photo of Ms. Valletta looking like a 1960s housewife who is up to no good, was nixed . "It's actually one of my favorite pictures ," Ms Goodman said. "But it didn't look like me." If Ms. Goodman's creative output is, in part, a reflection of her life, it appears that she is having a ball these days. With Ms. Karefa Johnson, she styled a rollicking evening wear story called "Black Cotillion" for Garage magazine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Richard Prince's New, Late Style Is One of His Best None Richard Prince is losing his cool or at least some of it. And that's a good thing. His new paintings in a show titled "Richard Prince: High Times," at Gagosian in Chelsea radiate an unusual heat. Mr. Prince, after all, is the artist who started photographing existing photographs in the late 1970s, which set the stage for appropriation art and the suave, aloof style of the 1980s Pictures Generation. This show is uncharacteristically generous and self revealing, with numerous moving parts. All told, it forms a rabbit hole of cross references, a hall of mirrors that irregularly reflect some of the life, times and inner thoughts of an artist given to mixing fact and fiction, one who is a devotee of American rock, an erudite collector of postwar literature and a writer of some distinction. In addition to over 30 paintings, "High Times" includes a large group of Mr. Prince's 1997 2000 "Hippie Drawings"; a hilariously fictive, fetishized private library ; and 16 copies of the catalog for a recent Willem de Kooning retrospective, each Oedipally vandalized and appended onto a Richard Prince artwork. The catalog is virtually an artist's book, laden with pertinent essays and treats, including three seemingly autobiographical posts from Mr. Prince's blog, Bird Talk. The initial reaction (mine included) to the paintings has often been "Basquiat meets Dubuffet." Indeed, they are so distant from the Pictures Generation's photo based ethic that they all but join forces with its '80s adversary, Neo Expressionist painting. An installation view of the exhibition. Their flat, dark surfaces are covered with cartoonish, robustly painted figures. Some of these creatures loom; others are tiny, and many flaunt bright colors and bristling masks. Still others are so simply outlined that they might be wearing onesies. Big, mitt like hands are the norm. These figures conjure jubilant trick or treaters, comically armored avatars or rock fans leaving a concert. Mr. Prince has never made anything quite so much fun to look at as the new Princes . They communicate an inclusive camaraderie, and a world that comprises markedly different beings. It's hard to know exactly if they are with us or against us, which creates some existential frisson. (Some of his earlier efforts could be sexist or classist, as when he focused on biker chicks and demolition derby pickup trucks that seemed to place artist and audience in a position of superiority.) As never before, the paintings reveal Mr. Prince's chops as a painter and colorist, but the "fun" they provide actually challenges more than entertains. With a little scrutiny, it becomes clear that the artist has not abandoned appropriation or the camera as much as taken them into much messier territory. And now he's appropriating from himself: Most of the figures in the paintings can be traced to the nearby "Hippie Drawings." This is a smart move, given the frequency with which he has been sued for using other people's photographs. Above and right, two works from Mr. Prince's "Hippie Drawings" series, both from 1997. An untitled work from 2017. With these collages, Roberta Smith writes, "You'll never get to the bottom of the alluring confusion of photography, rephotography and hands on painting and drawing." The paintings are collages. Every character appears on a separate piece of canvas that has been cut out and glued to the large one. Also, most figures begin as printed (inkjet) "Hippie images" on canvas and are then sometimes but not always supplemented with real brush strokes and drawn lines. You may move toward what looks like some lush bit of brushwork, and suddenly see pixels pop into focus. But no worries: Look to other paintings, and you may find the same figure as an original painted on print , or other copies of it, but in a different size. Sometimes you'll see large and small versions of the same figure in one painting. You'll never get to the bottom of the alluring confusion of photography, rephotography and hands on painting and drawing here. But you may come away appreciating Mr. Prince's provocative fusion of the twain of the Pictures Generation and Neo Expressionism. And he affirms two of the Pictures Generation's founding principles: Photographs lie, and a copy is as good as an original. At 69, Mr. Prince is beginning what must be called his late work. A gallery handout that he may or may not have written traces the development of the "High Times" paintings, stating that as a young artist, Mr. Prince put aside some drawings of heads when he came to New York because "they were the real thing, and he didn't want the real thing." Now, apparently, a greater realness appeals, and he's even glued his old drawings of heads into the de Kooning catalogs. Through Dec. 15 at the Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, Manhattan; 212 741 1717, gagosian.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Ebony Grace's imagination location is often rendered as comic book pages scattered throughout the text, giving the reader a peek into her whirring mind, full of intergalactic adventures and dialogue inspired by "Star Trek" movies and Parliament funk songs. (Some of Zoboi's late 20th century cultural references may be lost on younger readers, but Generation X parents will enjoy them.) It soon becomes clear that Ebony Grace's biggest challenge is leaving her imagination location for reality based interaction with those around her, and it drives her story. When she's reunited with her Harlem friend Bianca Perez after three years, it's evident that Bianca has outgrown the starship games they once played in a local junkyard. Ebony Grace has not. The twin towers are still standing downtown, but uptown in Harlem and the Bronx, hip hop, rap battles and break dancing are creating a vibrant culture. Drawn to the hip hop scene, Bianca and the neighborhood girls are far more interested in performing in a local contest under ice cream inspired nicknames like Butter Pecan Bianca of the Nine Flavas Crew than in dealing with the new girl's awkward interstellar whims. With her nerdy ways and lack of dance talent, Ebony Grace is called "Ice Cream Sandwich," a freezer section variation of the old "chocolate on the outside, vanilla on the inside" insult. Her presence is also noted with "There goes that weird girl." Depending on one's own childhood, reading Ebony Grace's story may feel incredibly strange or deeply familiar. Science obsessed but missing (or ignoring) social cues, she's not the easiest of characters to follow at times, but her flawed grandfather is her lodestar and her dedication is absolute. Leaving interpretation to the reader, Zoboi doesn't reveal if her protagonist is clinically neurodivergent or has developmental challenges. But it doesn't matter. Ebony Grace is a fresh voice and a highly memorable character trying to navigate life in her own way. While her fantasy fueled outbursts lead to a number of uncomfortable situations, her stubborn refusal to conform is admirable for anyone who's rebelled against the social pressure to blend in with the crowd especially in the tumultuous middle school years. Ebony Grace's boundless faith in her dreams also brings to mind another high flying science enthusiast who once advised, "Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations." That speaker was Mae C. Jemison, an engineer, medical doctor, astronaut and the first African American woman to go into space. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world's largest technology companies, intensifying scrutiny of the social media giant's business practices as it seeks to rebound from a year of scandal and setbacks. A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters. Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users. The companies were among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Sony, that had cut sharing deals with the world's dominant social media platform. The agreements, previously reported in The New York Times, let the companies see users' friends, contact information and other data, sometimes without consent. Facebook has phased out most of the partnerships over the past two years. "We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "We've provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so." Read Brian Chen's story on what he found when he downloaded his Facebook data. It is not clear when the grand jury inquiry, overseen by prosecutors with the United States attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York, began or exactly what it is focusing on. Facebook was already facing scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the Justice Department's securities fraud unit began investigating it after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the Facebook data of 87 million people and used it to build tools that helped President Trump's election campaign. The Justice Department and the Eastern District declined to comment for this article. The Cambridge investigation, still active, is being run by prosecutors from the Northern District of California. One former Cambridge employee said investigators questioned him as recently as late February. He and three other witnesses in the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity so they would not anger prosecutors, said a significant line of inquiry involved Facebook's claims that it was misled by Cambridge. Read more on the 5 ways Facebook shared your data. In public statements, Facebook executives had said that Cambridge told the company it was gathering data only for academic purposes. But the fine print accompanying a quiz app that collected the information said it could also be used commercially. Selling user data would have violated Facebook's rules at the time, yet the social network does not appear to have regularly checked that apps were complying. Facebook deleted the quiz app in December 2015. The disclosures about Cambridge last year thrust Facebook into the worst crisis of its history. Then came news reports last June and December that Facebook had given business partners including makers of smartphones, tablets and other devices deep access to users' personal information, letting some companies effectively override users' privacy settings. The sharing deals empowered Microsoft's Bing search engine to map out the friends of virtually all Facebook users without their explicit consent, and allowed Amazon to obtain users' names and contact information through their friends. Apple was able to hide from Facebook users all indicators that its devices were even asking for data. Privacy advocates said the partnerships seemed to violate a 2011 consent agreement between Facebook and the F.T.C., stemming from allegations that the company had shared data in ways that deceived consumers. The deals also appeared to contradict statements by Mark Zuckerberg and other executives that Facebook had clamped down several years ago on sharing the data of users' friends with outside developers. F.T.C. officials, who spent the past year investigating whether Facebook violated the 2011 agreement, are now weighing the sharing deals as they negotiate a possible multibillion dollar fine. That would be the largest such penalty ever imposed by the trade regulator. Facebook has aggressively defended the partnerships, saying they were permitted under a provision in the F.T.C. agreement that covered service providers companies that acted as extensions of the social network. The company has taken steps in the past year to tackle data misuse and misinformation. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg unveiled a plan that would begin to pivot Facebook away from being a platform for public sharing and put more emphasis on private communications. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The global marketing colossus WPP named Mark Read, a longtime company executive, as its new leader on Monday as the advertising agency tries to rebound from the abrupt departure of its founder in April amid a personal misconduct investigation. WPP, the world's largest advertising group, said that Mr. Read, who had recently served as the chief operating officer, would become the company's chief executive, effective immediately. Mr. Read, 51, replaces Martin Sorrell, the influential advertising executive who founded WPP in the 1980s and molded it in his image, but who quit this year while under investigation. "Our industry is going through a period of structural change, not structural decline, and if we embrace that change we can look ahead to an exciting and successful future," Mr. Read said in a statement released by WPP on Monday. "Our mission now is to release the full potential that exists within the company for the benefit of our clients, to accelerate our transformation and simplify our offering, and to position WPP for stronger growth." WPP, which is based in London, has more than 130,000 employees in its 100 marketing and communications firms, including Ogilvy and Y R. But the company faces new competition in a changing media landscape, including from Mr. Sorrell, whose new ad company, S4 Capital, outbid WPP for a Dutch marketing firm in July. Mr. Sorrell led WPP with an iron grip and a frenetic personality, cultivating the image of a superstar executive. He is a fixture on the London and European social scene, and is a regular at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000. He started out at Saatchi Saatchi in 1975, before setting out on his own. He bought Wire and Plastic Products, then a British shopping basket manufacturer, in 1985, and, through a series of high profile takeovers of a variety of advertising related companies, transformed it into what is now WPP. Over time, though, he came under sharp scrutiny for his lavish pay packages, which symbolized boardroom excess in Britain. Mr. Sorrell had earned at least 210 million pounds, or 272 million, in total from WPP since 2012, making him the highest paid chief executive of any publicly listed British company. That eventually prompted an investor backlash and criticism over WPP's governance and the leader centric corporate culture. Mr. Read, by contrast, is seen within the company as soft spoken and collaborative, seeking advice and input from those around him almost the complete opposite of Mr. Sorrell. Mr. Read will receive a compensation package that includes an annual salary of 1.25 million, as well as potential bonuses and incentive awards, the company said. Before becoming the chief operating officer in April, he was the global chief executive at Wunderman, a WPP firm, and held top positions at WPP Digital. WPP did not publicly disclose details into the investigation of Mr. Sorrell, saying only that the "allegation did not involve amounts that are material" and that the investigation ended when he departed. Over the summer, Mr. Sorrell denied a report in The Wall Street Journal that the investigation involved whether he had visited a brothel and paid company money to a prostitute. He also denied allegations of bullying behavior that were detailed in The Financial Times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
While it's been a terrible year in a lot of ways, 2020 has had some impressive astronomical occurrences. Remember Comet NEOWISE? Or when Betelgeuse dimmed in night skies? Those were just a couple of the celestial highlights as we stumbled our way around the sun during these 366 days (it was a leap year, too). So now, with only 10 short days to go before the year comes to a conclusion that many people will relish, we will be treated to no fewer than three astronomical occurrences on the same day: a great alignment of our solar system's largest planets, the winter solstice and a meteor shower at its peak. The two planets will be about one tenth of an angular degree apart, or about the thickness of a dime held at arm's length, according to NASA. All you need to enjoy it are your eyes and cloud free night skies; no fancy telescopes or binoculars required although they'll help if you'd like to pick out Saturn's rings or some of Jupiter's heftier moons. Read more about how to enjoy this "great conjunction" here: Earth leans away from the sun in the winter solstice. The good news: The days get longer from here on in. The bad: If the sun setting too early is getting to you, this will be a long short Monday. It already feels like winter in much of the Northern Hemisphere, especially after last week's nor'easter. But the winter solstice is something like the official start of the season, as this side of the planet tilts as far from the sun as it gets during its annual journey around the star. The solstice means more time to enjoy the night sky. It's also a fine moment to reflect on our planet's gradual lurching one way or another as it spins. Other worlds in our solar system have much more extreme solstices than what we experience, and it may be that life as we know it would be impossible without our planet's particular tilt. Earth passes through numerous meteor showers as it travels around the sun. Some can be real stunners. But many are too dim to be seen without specialized equipment. Still, with the Ursids, which peak Monday night into Tuesday's dawn, you could have a decent opportunity. They are leftovers of a comet, 8P/Tuttle, and are not known for putting on the most spectacular show in night skies, compared with other showers like the recent Geminids. But if you're out enjoying Jupiter and Saturn's courtship in the night sky, perhaps stay up a bit later and try to observe a fireball or two. Robert Lunsford of the International Meteor Organization, which forecasts annual meteor shower activity, wrote in a post last week that the Ursids could potentially be more active in 2020 than in previous years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
After a long run of negative headlines, ESPN drew cheers from Wall Street on Monday with a tentative contract agreement between ESPN's corporate owner, the Walt Disney Company, and Altice USA, which provides cable service to roughly three million homes in the New York City suburbs. Once the multiyear contract is made final, Altice will pay more to carry ESPN and other Disney owned networks, including ABC, despite declines in their ratings. ESPN is already the most expensive basic cable channel, costing distributors about 7.54 a month per subscriber home, according to SNL Kagan, a consulting firm. "A very bullish sign for Disney" was how the longtime media analyst Michael Nathanson described the payment increases in a research note on Monday. He saw the deal as a step toward changing "the highly negative narrative that has enveloped" ESPN for much of the last two years, as the sports television giant has endured subscriber losses known as cord cutting. The previous contract covered seven years. Benjamin Swinburne, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said the renewal "shows that, despite the rapid and even accelerating pace of change in the TV business, there continues to be pricing power for certain network groups." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
These days it is not unusual for a New York gallery to have two spaces and even three. Less typical are moments when their exhibitions complement one another, as do the current solo shows at the Paul Kasmin Gallery. On view in the gallery's three spaces clustered conveniently around the intersection of 10th Avenue and West 27th Street they form a valuable commentary on three artists' career arcs and the bandwidths of their visions. One show presents Jane Freilicher (1924 2014) at the beginning of a long career; another, Elliott Puckette (born in 1967) at a promising a midcareer turning point. A third surveys the work of the British sculptor Barry Flanagan (1941 2009), an artist whose stylistic about face around 1980, was always mystifying from this side of the pond. Freilicher's assured, little known oil paintings of nudes from the 1960s and '70s were a hit at last winter's ADAA Art Show. Now Kasmin's main space has a touching exhibition of 1950s canvases mostly still lifes. They reveal Freilicher getting her sea legs as a New York painter, working determinedly in a small, seemingly dark apartment. Richly colored, her efforts resemble clouded over Bonnards. Each is a quiet little battle in which the artist fends off the pressures of Abstract Expressionism, the prevailing style, armed with her love of representation, of looking and painting, in some form, what she sees. From picture to picture, different flowers, vases, textiles and pieces of furniture change partners and positions in the quiet interior. Freilicher works looser or tighter but is always searching, trying different things. In a large oil on paper patchy, pale colors almost dissolve the walls into abstraction and turn the ceiling into a ghostly Monet "Water Lilies." In "The Electric Fan" a kilim atop a table resembles a veritable waterfall of brush strokes. Perhaps aptly, the most precise work "The Painting Table" depicts the tools of Freilicher's trade. Across 27th Street, Kasmin's smallest space features the latest efforts of Elliott Puckette, a painter who became known in the early 1990s for incising (with razor blade) swirls of graceful calligraphic lines into panels of wood stained a single color of ink. Closer to penmanship than painting, this narrow concept of the medium seemed to have petered out a while ago. Over the last several years, however, Ms. Puckette has revived and expanded her narrow painting project, reviving her work partly, it seems, by making wire sculptures to use as models for her lines. Now tangled, even crazed, they are further agitated by more active uses of the ink. As the lines loop and coil, they deepen the space in the paintings. And in some cases, especially the ghostly landscape of the big triptych, "Love Letter," a nervous wobble betrays the hand. Ms. Puckette could use more of this irregular elegance. The third Kasmin space features a crowded but welcome overview of Barry Flanagan's career, with some 60 works ranging from 1967 to 2003 in several mediums. Emerging in the early late 1960s, Flanagan was a stalwart of Post Minimalism's multimedia experiments, best known for filling tubelike bags of dyed burlap with sand or plaster, letting, in a sense, the sculpture "make" itself. After a small "Projects" show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974, part of a continuing series for new and experimental art, his work wasn't very visible in New York. Then in 1983, he returned, showing of all things, large bronze rabbits mid leap, balanced on pedestals that were soon accessorizing collectors' lawns. Flanagan's apostasy is somewhat explained by the Kasmin show, titled "The Hare Is Metaphor," which gives an expanded view of both Flanagan's pre and post rabbit years. We see several instances of his Post Minimalist experiments: in sand (with and without burlap), video and photographs. These give way in 1973 to a wonderful block of marble, that seems to kiss Post Minimalism goodbye. The first rabbit appears in 1981, standing on a carved stone base. The strange pulled or lumpy forms of these creatures attest to a continuing love of process. The highlight among the bronzes is "Large Monument" (1996), whose massive base is a sculpture unto itself. On top, three rabbits cavort like Matisse's Dancers; below a solitary rabbit poses like Rodin's Thinker. This is an eye opening show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The office of the attorney general of New York announced on Tuesday that it has reached settlements worth 2.76 million with six ticket brokers as part of its continuing investigation into the online ticket scalping market. The investigation by the attorney general's office was announced in January with a 41 page report that detailed the many ways both legal and illegal that ordinary fans of concerts, Broadway shows and sporting events are prevented from finding tickets online. Among them are brokers' use of "bots," or automated software, to quickly seize the best seats, which are then frequently resold to consumers at inflated prices. "New Yorkers deserve a fairer ticket marketplace," the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, said in a statement. "Our office will continue to enforce New York's ticket laws by investigating ticket brokers who are breaking our laws, and making them pay for their illegal acts." Six ticket brokers in five states were found to be selling tickets in New York since 2011 without a proper license, as required by state law: TicketToad.com of New Jersey; Flying Falco Entertainment of California, which operates under the name Avery Tickets; Charm City Entertainment of Florida; All Events Utah; and Just in Time Tickets and A2Z Tix, both of New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Many people turn to a professional for financial advice when they have a big problem to solve: How much do I need to save for my children's college? Can I afford the bigger house? Will I run out of money in retirement? The answers to these questions could vary widely depending on the type of financial adviser you work with. If you find yourself sitting across from an annuity sales agent, for example, chances are that person will find some way to justify an annuity. And that may not be the right solution. For our best personal finance advice delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe to the Your Money Newsletter. A new consumer protection rule that recently went into effect requires advisers to act in your best interest. But that doesn't provide any guarantees, either; it covers only your retirement accounts, and the rule is being challenged by the current administration. All of this means that the onus remains on savers to ensure the professional they choose is the right one. Here are several questions to ask yourself when considering paying for financial advice. What kind of adviser should I work with? If you're thinking about hiring a financial planner, read this primer first. You'll want to hire the type of financial adviser who promises to act as a fiduciary all of the time, with all of your money, which is a fancy way of saying that person must be loyal to you first. In fact, you should ask your financial planner to sign a fiduciary pledge, a promise not to profit at your expense. We've written a version of the pledge that you can use the next time you're shopping for an adviser. Find it here. After your financial planner has signed the pledge, make sure to ask these 21 questions. Investment advisers, who generally must register with the S.E.C. or a state securities regulator, must work in their clients' best interest, regardless of what accounts they are working with. But being a "registered investment adviser" alone doesn't qualify a professional to answer your most challenging money questions. You also need to check that person's educational background and training. Certified financial planners, for example, must satisfy some of the more rigorous curriculum and experience requirements. Chartered financial consultants undergo something similar. Brokers, who may call themselves advisers, don't necessarily carry any of these credentials. Instead, they may simply pass licensing exams that permit them to sell certain investments. Outside of your retirement money, they are required only to recommend products that are "suitable," which isn't necessarily the best or most cost effective. And why should you settle for less? How much advice do I need? If you want to get started saving or make sure you're on track to meet certain goals you may want to pay a financial adviser for a financial plan (which could cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 in New York). Otherwise, you may want to pay a planner by the hour or some other flat fee arrangement for time and advice. People who want to hand over the reins of their portfolio to be managed by a professional may pay a percentage of their assets, typically around 1 percent. The key is to find an adviser who does not get compensated only if that person sells you something. What if I don't want a full time human adviser? Check out the robo advisers or hybrid services that use human planners who rely heavily on technology. They typically charge just a fraction of what a full time human money manager costs. What if I need advice about insurance or annuities? This is a tricky area where a lot of people get talked into buying products they don't really need. If you want to buy life insurance, you might pay a financial planner, for example, for a couple of hours to analyze what's appropriate for your situation. Then, you can seek out a sales agent with access to policies from several providers or buy a policy through online brokerages like PolicyGenius or AccuQuote. This is especially important as employers are increasingly pushing the onus of disability insurance onto their employees. Read our guide to purchasing disability insurance here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Created by the actress and writer Laura Chinn ("The Mick"), the show features a quartet of high school dropouts who all live together in a mobile home and mostly work together at a nearby dive, two behind the bar and one in the big fish tank in the middle of the room. (She puts on her mermaid costume at home and hops to the job.) The fourth, Jayla (Laci Mosley), is so determined to avoid work that she's the devoted sugar baby of an Applebee's franchise owner. Like its crime drama cousin, TNT's "Claws," "Florida Girls" is out to reclaim and redeem the tropes of "Florida man" Gulf Coast gothic. Chinn grew up in Clearwater, where the show is set, and the pawn shops, grow houses, "ghetto stores" and machine gun shooting parties ring true (or true enough for comedy). So does the absence of a single entirely redeemable male character. Also refreshing, if not as believable , is the relative lack of references to Instagram. Chinn plays Shelby, the aspiring adult of the group, whose continually frustrated attempts to study for the G.E.D. exam are one of the engines of the season's plot. Another is the determination of the group's enforcer, Kaitlin (Melanie Field), to continue a tradition of blowout bacchanals on a local island now that the previous party giver has passed away. ("Florida man eaten by alligator while hiding from police" is the headline in the newspaper displayed at his funeral.) Life and a profound lack of funds keep getting in the way, though. Episodes are built around the suddenly felt, extremely important need to do something go to a water park, borrow a rich acquaintance's boat and the near impossibility of accomplishing it. Money must be raised, usually through petty theft and pawning; bickering must be weathered; and focus must be achieved despite a rolling tide of bar shots, joints and acid. Standard sitcom mechanics, as previously noted. In the show's most frequent gag, the friends' progress is constantly interrupted while Shelby looks for someone sober to blow into the breathalyzer attached to her car's ignition. Chinn and her fellow writers (she's credited with four of the first eight episodes) are observant and punchy, and they give the comedy flavor without, for the most part, resorting to sitcom gags. "She ain't dead, she at the dollar store," the friends are told of a woman who owes them money. When Jayla is told, approvingly, "You look like a really expensive prostitute," Kaitlin yells, "No! No! Don't compliment her!" Absent and abusive parents are a major theme when Shelby hears of the foreign concept "family dinner," she asks plaintively, "What is that, like Thanksgiving but every night?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LOW interest rates have helped to fuel the stock market rally, and a climb in rates is eventually expected to snuff it out. At least that's the theory. Here's the reality: In May, rates actually rose quite sharply, as 10 year Treasury yields jumped to 2.16 percent from 1.63 percent. Yet the Dow Jones industrial average still soared more than 400 points, to end the month at 15,115.57. The stock market's road did become choppy as rates rose. The Dow lost more than 200 points on Friday, for example, but the overall trend remained upward. It just goes to show that while there is a connection between interest rates and the stock market, it isn't a simple one. When rates rise, said Jeffrey N. Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial, "it is not the size of the move itself, but the absolute level of yields reached that matters to the stock market." Even with the recent uptick, the 10 year yields are only about half of what they were five years ago, during the global recession. And a climb in rates from such a low level may be a tail wind not a headwind for stocks, Mr. Kleintop said. For starters, he said, "it reflects an improving outlook for economic growth and less risk of deflation." Both are welcome developments to equity investors. Moreover, "it results in losses for bonds," he said, which may prompt investors to sell those bonds and move money into stocks. Indeed, over the past month, the average bond fund that invests in long term government debt has lost more than 6.5 percent of its value, according to Morningstar, the investment research firm. The typical blue chip stock fund, meanwhile, has gained about 4 percent. But this is not to say that rising interest rates wouldn't hurt the stock market at all. For instance, if rates were to climb enough to threaten the rebound in housing, stocks might start to sing a different tune, market strategists say. But the average 30 year fixed rate mortgage is still at a historically low 3.81 percent, even though that rate is up since the end of April. Similarly, climbing rates would threaten stocks if they signaled rising inflation, so that the Federal Reserve might have to curtail its efforts to stimulate the economy. But the most recent reading of the Consumer Price Index showed that prices were up only around 1.1 percent over the past 12 months. That's down from the 1.6 percent pace of inflation at the start of the year. Doug Ramsey, chief investment officer at the Leuthold Group, has looked at stock valuations and bond yields going back to 1878. He has found that while there is a relationship between the two, big trouble for the stock market appears to kick in only when 10 year Treasuries are yielding 6 percent or higher. Theories abound as to why 6 percent seems the magic number. James W. Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management, argues that 6 percent is important because it reflects the overall economy's nominal long term growth rate. "I can see why you'd get a negative reaction if the cost of capital for the market was above the inherent, sustainable growth rate of the economy," he said. Mr. Ramsey offers a slightly different explanation. He said that for rising bond yields to hurt the stock market, they would have to be viewed by investors as real competition to stocks. Perhaps at 6 percent, he said, bond yields are high enough that "they are truly thought of as potential replacements or substitutes for long term stock returns." TO be sure, some market watchers say what really matters isn't the current move in long term market rates, but what happens with the short term rate that the Fed controls. Recently, Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, hinted that the central bank might soon begin to taper its purchases of Treasury bonds as part of its efforts to stimulate the economy. He did not offer any clues, however, as to when the federal funds rate, now 0.25 percent, might be lifted. John Stoltzfus, chief market strategist at Oppenheimer Company, noted that whenever the Fed does raise short term rates, "it could create a jostle in the stock market." But Mr. Stoltzfus warned investors not to assume that Fed increases would immediately pull the plug on the bull market. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Robert Kelley, the founder and artistic director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley who has served in his role since 1970, will retire in 2020 when the theater marks its 50th anniversary, the company announced late on Wednesday. "I'm healthy, I still love making theater," Mr. Kelley said in a statement, adding that the "half century mark" was a "timely and appropriate moment for TheatreWorks to embrace new leadership" in order to continue to grow. Mr. Kelley has developed the theater from a center for young, local talent in Palo Alto, Calif., into an incubator for new work that has helped foster some major American playwrights. Prominent writers including Wendy Wasserstein, Marsha Norman and Beth Henley have had residencies there, and the musical "Memphis" was developed by TheatreWorks before its transfer to Broadway, where it won four Tony Awards. The company also frequently presents the regional premieres of new work. The world premiere of a musical version of the DreamWorks movie "The Prince of Egypt," by the "Wicked" composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, will open at TheatreWorks this fall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Our weekday morning digest that includes consumer news, deals, tips and anything else that travelers may want to know. NEW FLIGHTS FROM LOS ANGELES TO ETHIOPIA Ethiopian Airlines has started a new route between Los Angeles and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with a stop in Dublin. The thrice weekly service on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner departs Los Angeles at 11:15 p.m. on Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Flying time to Dublin is nine hours and 45 minutes, and after a 75 minute stop, the trip to Ethiopia is an additional eight hours. The airline says that this is the only direct flight from Los Angeles to East Africa and also the fastest link between Dublin and Southern California. Tickets purchased before June 30 and used before Aug. 31 start at 999 to Dublin and 1,299 to Addis Ababa and will begin thereafter at 1,350 and 1,540, respectively. In Chinese culture, jade is considered to be cooling, and just in time for summer, the spas at three Mandarin Oriental hotels are featuring treatments with the stone. New York City has an 80 minute anti aging Jade Stone Facial created by Dr. Ping Zhang, an acupuncturist with a Ph.D. in Oriental medicine.? The highlight is a massage with jade that has been cut to fit the contours of the face and is supposed to help regenerate the skin. The Hong Kong property has a two hour Imperial Jade Ritual, a combination of a Chinese style body massage and a face massage using jade rollers. In Macau, there's the three hour Oriental Suite Experience for couples, which includes body exfoliation and a facial where therapists massage jade meditation balls on the face, neck and shoulders to help promote a sense of well being and ease tension. Prices from 315. From July 23 to 26, the chef Mark Dommen of San Francisco's farm to table restaurant One Market will host a culinary weekend at Rancho Santana, a 17 room hotel on Nicaragua's southwest coast that opened in March. The four events are meant to showcase local ingredients and cuisine, and the kickoff is a fiesta on the beach with a variety of tacos like pork belly from pigs raised on the on site farm. Also part of the festivities are a cocktail hour with drinks made with herbs from the property's organic garden, a tasting dinner with local lamb and a brunch with several kinds of mimosas, including watermelon and passion fruit. Room rates from 200 a night. An all access pass to the culinary events is 130 and includes alcohol. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A beautiful, ancient riverside city deep in northern Thailand, Chiang Mai is a laid back destination known for its temples, wildlife and, today, buzzing food, cocktail and local art scene. It's well worth a visit, but before you go, pack these essentials for your trip. We walk you through what to do if you visit Chiang Mai in our local guide, but we also talked to Ria Misra, an editor at Wirecutter, about some of the things you might want specifically for the trip, based on our itinerary. She checked with Candy Krajangsri, spokeswoman at the Tourism Authority of Thailand, to make sure her picks were on point. Here are their suggestions: Above all, and perhaps most obviously, you should prepare for tropical weather, Ms. Krajangsri said. Wear loose and breathable clothes that will be comfortable in the heat and dry quickly when wet from either sweat or rain. Average temperatures in the area can soar above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, or well over about 33 degrees Celsius, and that's even in the soaking rainfall of the rainy season. But Ms. Krajangsri also cautions that in December and January, Chiang Mai can get chilly enough that you'll be grateful to have a warmer layer tucked in your bag for the evenings. Ms. Misra recommends the trusty Arc'teryx Squamish jacket, which packs down small, and will provide some protection from wet weather. If you're visiting between July and October, when rains are heavier and temperatures are higher, Ms. Misra suggests you opt for an actual rain jacket, like the Patagonia Torrentshell, a Wirecutter favorite, especially if you plan to go out hiking or explore Chiang Mai's natural beauty. Everything You Need to Go Birding Only a couple of hours' drive from Chiang Mai, the mountainous, waterfall filled Doi Inthanon National Park is home to more than 360 bird species, making it one of the country's best spots for bird watching, particularly during the spring and summer months. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Santa Anita racetrack reopened Friday with new restrictions on whip use and medications in response to the deaths of 22 horses on the grounds since the winter meet began Dec. 26. ARCADIA, Calif. The mood was tense on Friday at Santa Anita Park, one of the grandest venues in horse racing, as the usually mellow track in Los Angeles County reopened after a nearly monthlong shutdown. Twenty two horses had died on the grounds over 11 weeks. "It's a little different vibe," Joe Locke said while sitting alongside his wife, Sandy. They are horse owners from Houston. There was relief after it was over: All the horses survived. On the morning of March 14, a garden variety filly named Princess Lili B crossed the finish line of a half mile workout at the track and collapsed with two broken forelegs. She had previously competed twice, placing fifth and ninth, in the lowest rungs of racing at majestic Santa Anita and earned 1,345, barely enough to cover expenses. The track had already been closed to racing for two weeks when Princess Lili B became the 22nd thoroughbred fatality since the winter meet began on Dec. 26, helping push racing toward a painful self examination and contentious reform. During the hiatus, racing executives imposed reduced limits on the common medication Lasix, blamed by some critics for exposing horses to trauma, and vowed to better diagnose pre existing conditions that could lead to injuries. They pledged to regularly evaluate the track, which has fallen under scrutiny as excessive rains may have made it more treacherous (studies are inconclusive). And officials abolished routine use of the jockeys' whips, even though the practice has not been linked to heightened risks for horses. The Hall of Fame jockey Kent Desormeaux could sense a difference when the riders met Friday for their daily session with their chaplain. "All we wanted to pray for today," he said, "was for the safety of all the jockeys." Desormeaux was a part of a chorus of jockeys, trainers, owners and patrons who want to allay fears that the main racetrack and the training course endanger the horses. "There is nothing wrong with either track," Desormeaux said. "Both are in superior condition." Friday's crowd included the Santa Anita first timer Joe Rench of Louisville, Ky., who had fretted that the track might remain dark during his visit to the area. Some observers emitted sighs of relief as the first race for undistinguished nonwinner fillies, which would have fit Princess Lili B ended without incident. "It's great to be back. Been a long time," said Aaron Gryder, a 32 year veteran jockey, after piloting Discrete Stevie B to victory. The winner's exultant trainer, Marcelo Polanco, said, "Nothing like winning, especially after all that has happened." The only audible deviation from normal race days was the track announcer Frank Mirahmadi's repeated alert that the prohibition on whipping had not yet begun. Jockeys and trainers, as a whole, are not happy about the ban, with some saying management capitulated to PETA and other critics. But the horsemen's chief concern is the condition of the track, which received a general thumbs up. Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president for PETA, the animal rights group, said: "Our goal is zero horse deaths and an end to all racing abuses. The industry has a long way to go, but the Stronach Group's new rules are the first real improvements in a generation." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. Before the Azores, he was eating well in the Spanish city and province of Cadiz. "Get ready to have your mind blown," I tell Maggie, my partner, who joined me on the 30th stop of my trip in the Azores , nine volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that are part of Portugal. I had been in this spot two years ago and I pull the vision out of my memory bank: a clear panorama of the twin lakes one blue, the other green that sit at the bottom of the Sete Cidades volcanic crater on the island of Sao Miguel. We turn the final corner of the winding road that leads up to the Vista do Rei viewpoint and, just as we pass the binoculars icon signaling a " miradouro, " we enter a dense, white cloud. We can barely see past our noses. So much for that. But then, walking back to the car, we see something else: the kind of out of nowhere, punch you in the face beauty that we've grown accustomed to over the course of a week. A full rainbow cuts through the mist, one end settling just behind a bush of soccer ball size hydrangeas, the other stretching into the patchwork of glistening green fields that blankets the slopes of the volcano. As we drive down into the lowlands of Sao Miguel, there are more of them: little rainbows that stretch over the asphalt and vanish as we drive through them; double ones, hanging over cow pastures. Where the backup plan is just as good One thing that has helped the Azores stave off major crowds is that, despite being an archipelago, it is not a beach destination. Travelers looking to post up on the sand and drink sugary cocktails all day under sunny skies should look elsewhere. In the Azores, the beaches are mostly black sand and blacker rock, and the ocean, open as it is, can be rough. Weather is unpredictable, even during the summer. We saw more rain than not, but where there's rain, there are rainbows, and to see a sky go from blue to apocalyptic in minutes, as it hangs over a landscape so green it doesn't look real, is an experience that is in itself worth traveling for. On a drive across Sao Miguel we hit a roadblock caused by an accident, and were forced into the back roads that led into villages where row upon row of pink and blue hydrangeas lined the streets and the day moved slower. When the rain came down in Furnas, the town by the volcano of the same name on the eastern end of the island, we walked to the hot springs at the Terra Nostra Gardens. Submerged up to my neck in water made murky by minerals, I looked up to the sky, the cold pattering of raindrops lighting up every nerve ending on my face. In fact, the entire itinerary put together, as is the pattern for the 52 Places trip, at the last minute was a bit of a Plan B. I had wanted to spend at least some of my time on the smaller islands. I heard tales of Sao Jorge, with its 9,500 inhabitants, famous cheese and wide tracts of land still left wild, and Pico, with its massive volcano and the vineyards that cover its slopes. But limited by my travel dates, none of those islands were feasible. Instead, we split our time between Sao Miguel and Terceira, the second most populous island in the Azores. While Sao Miguel's main city, Ponta Delgada, has a charming old center, where black and white cobblestone designs lead you down narrow streets and past grand churches, Terceira's hub, Angra do Heroismo, feels like an alternate universe. The palette, all bright colors framing whitewashed buildings, looks like it was chosen by a preschooler. Terceira is hoping to draw some of the tourists from Sao Miguel to its own volcanoes, rocky coastlines and dollhouse towns. In Terceira's case, it's also about economics: In 2015, the United States Air Force began closing down its base on the island, which had long served as the foundation of the local economy. Islanders hope that tourism can replace those lost dollars. "People from Sao Miguel come here to feel nostalgic for what life used to be like there," Sandra Rocha, a photographer who, along with some friends, recently opened Caparica, an eco lodge in Biscoitos, told me. None If you're going to island hop and you should be flexible with dates and give yourself some wiggle room so you don't find yourself stranded in Pico on the day of your flight off Sao Miguel. The little Azores Airlines puddle jumpers that make the trips can be hindered by bad weather, which can show up suddenly and unexpectedly. None On Sao Miguel, don't be afraid to venture out of the main hub of Ponta Delgada come mealtime. Some of the best restaurants on the island are in outlying towns. For seafood, head to Ponta do Garajau in Ribeira Quente for an array of delicious mollusks and whole fish bought straight from local fishermen. If land dwelling animals are more your speed, go to the restaurant in Ribeira Grande run by the local agricultural association and get ready for a protein overdose of steak topped with a fried egg. None Terceira has its fair share of great food options, too. If you want to feel like you're in someone's countryside living room instead of a restaurant, try Taberna Roberto where Roberto himself will take you into the kitchen to show you what's on offer and recommend one of the local wines, given a mineral rich kick by the volcanic soil where the grapes are grown. One afternoon on Sao Miguel, Maggie and I got into a boat and traveled far from the shoreline. We bounded across the waves until we spotted them: common dolphins, rocketing through the water, one of 27 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises that call these waters home. We lined up along the edge of the boat and then, just as the pod of dolphins swam past, dropped into the ocean, snorkeling masks on. There's something disorienting about dropping into deep blue, where, at first, it can be hard to tell up from down. I panicked momentarily, but then was calmed by the graceful movements of the dolphins through the water, unconcerned by our presence in their world. That lack of concern stems, at least in part, from the strict regulations around interacting with the animals. Outfitters like Picos de Aventura may only follow the dolphins for a certain amount of time; no more than three people are allowed in the water with the dolphins at once; and every guest can only enter the water up to three times on a trip. It's the photogenic attractions that bring people to the Azores. Along with dolphins and whales, there are steep cliffs and waterfalls that make ideal territory for canyoning, a sport that involves rappelling down the side of rock faces. Mountain bike trails wrap around craters, and the ocean stays between about 63 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit all year, thanks to warm currents. Beyond the outdoor pursuits, there is the food: a surf and turf array of grass fed beef and ocean delicacies like limpets, marine snails that are cooked in copious amounts of garlic, and barnacles that taste like lobster. There are the only major tea plantations in Europe and pineapple farms, where the fruit tastes like it's been dipped in sugar. In Terceira, we followed a tip that brought us to the village of Sao Mateus da Calheta, where a traditional bull run a tourada a corda, or "bullfight by rope" was taking place. Over the course of two hours, while spectators watched from high ground and behind barricades, one angry bull after another was released into the streets. Men and it was almost always men took turns goading the animal; getting as close as possible before it lashed out and they had to maneuver to avoid the filed down horns. More than once the bull chased revelers into the ocean. Will I come back to the Azores again, for a third time? No doubt. But on my next trip, I will do things differently. I'll go in the off season, as I did on my first trip (the difference in weather is minute), and I'll go to the less visited islands. I'll do it, in part, for the sake of the islands' future, because the more people who don't follow the seasons like geese, the longer places like the Azores will retain their magic and the more people can make sustainable livelihoods in the tourism industry. It's a decision more tourists will need to make if all that delicate beauty is going to live on. And if it sounds like a sacrifice, I promise you it is not. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Next Privacy Battle in Europe Is Over This New Law The new European data privacy legislation is so stringent that it could kill off data driven online services and chill innovations like driverless cars, tech industry groups warn. The American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union called the legislation "overly strict." The Developers Alliance, a trade group representing Facebook, Google, Intel and dozens of app makers, said it could cost businesses in Europe more than 550 billion euros, or about 640 billion, in annual lost revenue. And DigitalEurope, another tech trade group, said the legislation's prohibitive approach "seriously undermines the development of Europe's digital economy." These industry alarms are not over the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., a tough privacy law that went into effect in the European Union on Friday. Instead, the cause is an even stricter privacy law that's pending the tech industry's next regulatory battleground in Europe. It is called the ePrivacy Regulation, and it specifically protects the confidentiality of electronic communications. The law was approved by the European Parliament last fall and is under review by the Council of the European Union, a group of government officials representing the 28 member countries. Bloc officials had originally intended for the law to go into effect this month, but Council negotiations have been slowed by internal disagreements. If the current draft prevails, the law will require Skype, WhatsApp, iMessage, video games with player messaging and other electronic services that allow private interactions to obtain people's explicit permission before placing tracking codes on users' devices or collecting data about their communications. Now, some of the same companies and trade associations that a few years ago tried to defang G.D.P.R. have set their sights on derailing the ePrivacy legislation. Apart from heavily lobbying government officials in Europe, trade groups are funding doomsday financial forecasts and creating worst case scenario video campaigns warning people of the rule's potential drawbacks. "Most of the lobbying is unreasonable and very low regarding facts," said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the European Parliament from Germany who steered the G.D.P.R. legislation through Parliament. He pointed to industry "campaigns saying, 'With ePrivacy, the internet is going dark, and independent media, as well as digital growth, will be lost.'" Industry and consumer advocates are essentially fighting over a contentious issue central to the post Cambridge Analytica online economy: whether data driven digital services represent more of a boon to consumers or the kind of surveillance that can threaten democracy. The ePrivacy Regulation will replace and broaden an older European Union directive which covered traditional telecommunications like voice calls by also covering digital communications like text messaging and video chat apps. The legislation currently provides only one condition under which a company may use data or metadata about users' electronic communications: obtaining consumers' explicit and informed permission to use their information for a specific, agreed upon purpose. The bill also requires companies to offer people the same communications services whether or not they agree to have their data collected. "Do you really want that app to use your metadata? Do you really want them to read your content on a dating app?" Ms. Sippel asked. "Consumers need to get back control over what is happening with their lives and their data." Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. But tech industry groups and their supporters argue that ePrivacy's consent requirement and other provisions are so onerous that they would hinder innovations like smart cars, which automatically transmit safety information back to the manufacturer. And requiring companies to provide equal communications services to people who opt out of data mining, they say, could cause sites or apps that rely on data driven advertising to start charging fees or close down. "Every stakeholder I have talked to from industry, from all sizes from the very biggest to the very smallest businesses, are unanimously opposed to this," he said. Tech companies and trade groups have waged a furious, multipronged lobbying campaign to shut down, or at least weaken, the legislation. Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, the American Chamber of Commerce, DigitalEurope and the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe, a digital advertising industry group, have all lobbied officials at the European Commission about ePrivacy, according to a lobbying database created by Transparency International EU, a nonprofit research group in Brussels. How much they are spending on the effort is unclear. While companies and trade groups that lobby European Commission officials must provide financial details on annual lobbying expenditures, they do not have to break out the spending by issue. Trade groups have also created doomsday videos on ePrivacy. In one, an ominous voice warns that free online services won't be able to survive financially if they can't use people's personal data to target them with ads. The inevitable result, the narrator says, is "an app less future consumers never saw coming." Industry associations have also lobbied the Council of the European Union, whose leadership rotates every six months. For the ePrivacy law to be enacted, the Council must first come to its own consensus on the bill before negotiating the law's final language in a three way discussion with the European Parliament and the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm. The Council's decisions are so critical for ePrivacy that the Computer and Communications Industry Association which represents Amazon, Google, Netflix and others traveled to Bulgaria in October to meet government ministers there as that country was preparing to take over the Council presidency. The bill's supporters said the Council had not made much headway on ePrivacy since then. Elitsa Zlateva, a spokeswoman for the permanent representation of Bulgaria to the European Union, said her country's officials were committed to the bill's progress. She declined to provide names of other trade groups that the country's representatives had met with on ePrivacy. The "Bulgarian presidency acts as an honest broker," she wrote in an email, and works to balance the interests of European member states, citizens and business. With support from Google, the computer industry group also financed a research study last year saying that ePrivacy's data restrictions could cut revenue for the online news and online advertising industries, diminishing venture capital funding for cloud computing. Christian Borggreen, vice president for the computer industry group in Europe, said he hoped that the ePrivacy Regulation would not conflict with the G.D.P.R. and that it would "add meaningful privacy protection without unduly hurting digital innovation." And this month, the Developers Alliance published its own sponsored economic research that forecast the ePrivacy Regulation would slash profits dependent on electronic communication by 30 percent across all sectors in the European Union. The group called on government officials to "take these findings into account when discussing this critical file." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The recent tribulations of Facebook, which has lurched from crisis to crisis over the last year, most recently over the handling of users' personal data, has pushed a few of the industry's most prominent names to speak out against the company. Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, has compared the deleterious effects of social media to those of tobacco and alcohol, and has called for more regulation of those tech companies. Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, has also suggested new regulation protecting personal data might be in order for businesses like Facebook. "I think that this certain situation is so dire and has become so large that probably some well crafted regulation is necessary," Mr. Cook said recently at an event in China, referring to Facebook's recent problems. But don't expect a long lineup of other industry leaders to speak out any time soon. Although technology companies have their differences, a spirit of comity prevails among its leaders in moments of crisis. For example, technology chiefs have mostly kept quiet about Uber's travails from its efforts to sidestep law enforcement to a pedestrian death caused by one of its self driving cars even if they might express their opinions privately. Representatives from companies as varied as Amazon, Microsoft and Slack declined to comment for this story. Part of the silence, people in the industry say, comes from a desire to avoid the business equivalent of bad karma knowing that they, too, may one day face the buzz saw of public censure. Others say companies have little moral standing to criticize Facebook's practices, when they have themselves relied on the social network to acquire customers, using the same ad targeting tools that rely on personal data that have stirred up so much controversy in the context of politics. "I think we just have to acknowledge the entire industry's complicity with what's happening with Facebook," said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an internet real estate firm. "It's almost like we're Inspector Renault in 'Casablanca' where we say we're shocked, shocked with what's happening and then a moment later someone hands us our winnings." "We've all been advertising avidly on Facebook," Mr. Kelman added. Many companies are also linked to Facebook through partnerships, professional organizations and a worldview about the power of data that is not all that different from that of Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. "It has been really hard for executives to turn their back on the gold mine of big data even in the face of compelling arguments to do so," said Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook and a mentor of Mr. Zuckerberg's before becoming one of the company's most vocal detractors. "The C.E.O.s who are stepping forward here are taking the long view." But there are few active corporate leaders in Silicon Valley who have taken a stand. Most of the handful of chiefs who have spoken out against Facebook have long been forthright on the topic of privacy. It is no coincidence that their businesses do not rely on the collection of personal data to the same degree that most internet companies do. Mr. Cook of Apple, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from the sale of devices, has for years declared that "when an online service is free, you're not the customer you're the product." When asked about the Facebook's difficulties at an event in China recently, Ginni Rometty, chief executive of IBM, said companies needed to give their users better control over their personal information. "Ginni has long believed that individuals or customers own their data not platforms," said Edward Barbini, a spokesman for IBM. Noah Theran, s spokesman for the Internet Association, a trade group that counts Facebook and Salesforce among its members, though not Apple and IBM, said maintaining privacy and security was a top priority for internet companies. "Internet companies comply with a wide variety of data privacy and security laws and regulations that are actively enforced by the F.T.C. and state attorneys general," Mr. Theran said. "Trust and comfort with our products and services is essential to a thriving internet, and the internet industry is committed to providing people with information and tools to make informed choices about how their personal information is used, seen and shared online." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
At midnight last Friday, the European Union's long awaited new data protection rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, officially kicked in. Forty eight minutes later, Facebook and Google got their first taste of how troublesome the new European privacy regime could be. At 12:48 a.m. Brussels time, an Austrian privacy advocacy group filed the first of its four complaints against the Silicon Valley tech giants. The nonprofit organization NOYB short for "none of your business" claimed that Google and Facebook, along with two of Facebook's subsidiaries, WhatsApp and Instagram, failed to give European users specific control over the use of their data, in violation of the new rules. The complaints, which were filed in France, Belgium, Germany and Austria, ask regulators to impose fines of as much as 4.3 billion on Google's parent company, Alphabet, and 1.5 billion each on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp roughly 4 percent of each company's 2017 revenue, the maximum penalty allowed under the G.D.P.R. Even for cash flush tech giants, those would be painful checks to write. The architect of NOYB's campaign is Max Schrems, 30, an Austrian lawyer who has made a career of hounding American tech giants over their data collection practices. Several years ago, when he was still in law school, Mr. Schrems took on Facebook with a series of legal complaints, claiming the social network was violating European data protection laws. Later, Mr. Schrems successfully challenged the "Safe Harbor" policies that let tech companies store data about Europeans in the United States. That case sent shock waves through the tech industry, and made him a hero among digital privacy hawks. Edward Snowden, the whistle blower and activist, declared that Mr. Schrems had "changed the world for the better." I spoke with Mr. Schrems on Monday, several days after the start of his new privacy crusade. He said that while the timing of his latest volley was mainly symbolic the organization had been preparing complaints against Facebook and Google for months its substance was very real. "All of these cases should be absolutely won," he added. Tech companies never thought that Europe's data collection rules would be painless. But they may not have anticipated the chaos that unfurled last week, as lawyers rushed to tease apart the law's complications and companies barraged people with messages about their new, G.D.P.R. compliant privacy policies. As other countries also look to establish their own European style privacy regulations, the potential impact of the G.D.P.R. across the globe has turned a feeding frenzy of ambitious lawyers, lobbyists and activists into a kind of crowdsourced rule making process that will ultimately determine how the new rules are enforced. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. There has already been fallout from the G.D.P.R. in the digital media and advertising industries, where the new rules caused several American publications to shut themselves off to European users and the market for certain invasive types of digital advertising dried up. Faced with the prospect of stiff penalties, a few smaller American tech companies threw up their hands and stopped serving Europe altogether. As global companies, Facebook and Google don't have the option of cutting off the Continent. In statements, both companies defended their data collection practices, saying they fully complied with the new European regulations. "We have prepared for the past 18 months to ensure we meet the requirements of the G.D.P.R.," Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, said in a statement. "We have made our policies clearer, our privacy settings easier to find, and introduced better tools for people to access, download and delete their information." A Google spokesman, Al Verney, said, "We build privacy and security into our products from the very earliest stages and are committed to complying with the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation." Like many companies, Facebook and Google, which developed the Android mobile operating system, prompted users last week to accept new terms of service that explained their data collection particulars. Facebook members who declined to accept the new terms were unable to log into their accounts. Android users who didn't agree to the new terms were, in effect, locked out of their phones. Mr. Schrems said these all or nothing privacy policies violated the G.D.P.R.'s requirement that consent be particularized and "freely given." To comply with the law, he said, large tech platforms need to give privacy conscious users the option of sharing certain types of data but not others. Realistically, Mr. Schrems said, "you're not going to walk away from all your friends on Facebook." Opponents of the G.D.P.R. have said the law could end up backfiring by making it harder for smaller companies, which don't tend to have huge teams of European legal experts at their disposal, to compete with the American tech giants. It could mean that European users are required to pay more for certain internet services, to offset reduced advertising revenue. (The Washington Post is already offering an ad and tracking free "premium E.U. subscription" that costs 50 percent more than a regular subscription.) In a worst case scenario, it could turn Europe into a kind of technological dead zone, a place where influential American tech companies simply refuse to tread. Mr. Schrems shrugged off these concerns. The European market is too lucrative for companies like Google and Facebook to abandon, he said. And he doesn't believe that social networks and search engines would suffer unduly if they were forced to be more judicious about how they collected fine grain data about people for the purposes of selling more ads. "You can still make a lot of money without microtargeting," he said. Mr. Schrems's quest is far from finished. Regulators could decide not to pursue investigations, expensive litigation could drag on for years, and Silicon Valley companies are furiously adding lobbyists to try to influence the nascent rule making process. But if these types of complaints succeed and it's not entirely crazy to think that they could, given the current antipathy toward American tech giants and the satisfaction that European officials might take in kneecapping a few of them it could be a watershed moment for large tech companies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It's too bad that the words spoken by Donald Trump at his own inauguration, when he said he was "grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition," must have been written by a speechwriter. Nothing better illustrates the Trump presidency than his dangerous and vindictive actions that leave President elect Joe Biden a maze of turbulence affecting not only the United States, but the world order as well. As Michelle Obama said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention, "Being president doesn't change who you are; it reveals who you are." The commentary about Republican leaders' failure to urge President Trump to concede his loss seems to give one Republican leader a pass: Mike Pence. He could do the nation, and his party, a service by publicly conceding that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris defeated them. Re "Kerry Is Selected for Cabinet Level Position as Biden's 'Climate Envoy'" (news article, Nov. 24): I am pleased to see that John Kerry will be Joe Biden's international climate envoy. As a Vietnam veteran, I came to agree with Mr. Kerry's objections to the war, and I have admired his Senate career and service as secretary of state. Mr. Biden is choosing competent professionals to address his agenda, as opposed to Mr. Trump's group of incompetent and corrupt loyalists. As awful as the misbegotten nontransition has been, it would not surprise me if the real transition proves to be worse, revealing that over all the cupboard is bare. That is, I expect that not only will there be little of the detailed briefing books or proposed joint meetings like those prepared for the incoming Trump administration (and which were roundly ignored) in 2016, but also that there will be scant evidence that actual useful work has been done. That is all the more reason to appoint seasoned and knowledgeable people to key roles in cabinet positions and across all agencies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Alison Mosshart at Joseph Gross Gallery, where her show will be on view through July 11. There was something grotesque if not downright alarming about the portraits on the wall. Strangers encountered during concert tours, they glared glassy eyed from the canvas, grinning with stained teeth as crumbly and neglected as a tumbledown fence. So it was jarring when Alison Mosshart, the artist, strolled into the Joseph Gross Gallery in Chelsea last month, a study in cleareyed serenity, her glossy hair cascading to her shoulders, her creamy skin spotless except for the discreet tattoo on her wrist commemorating her first concert with her long term musical partner, the British rocker Jamie Hince. Ms. Mosshart, the 36 year old front woman for the Kills, is a raucous performer, fashion idol and, when she is on the road between concerts, a painter, crazily streaking chalks and acrylics onto canvases compact enough to fit into her suitcase. On the eve of her first solo exhibition, which runs through July 11, she said: "Over the years my art box has gotten bigger and bigger. I do have to sacrifice clothing space." Not much of a sacrifice, it turns out, since she tends to stick to a rocker uniform, swapping her biker coat on balmy days for the denim vest she wore the other night. "I'm a practical person," she said. "This is my summertime version of a leather jacket." That vest, covered in trinkets and amulets (an evil eye, a silver monogram pin), teemed with pockets jammed to bursting with necessities, among them a pack of American Spirits, a drivers' license, and the old fashioned BlackBerry she carries like a talisman. She is far less attached to her artworks, she said, turning her back on them the moment the last daub of paint has dried. "Painting is almost like a sport," she said. "It's like this action thing. When I do it, I'm really not thinking. The paintings are like a diary that I might not want to read again." She was happy enough, though, to review her work with a visitor, ushering her guest toward a wall on which hung a compact portrait of a towheaded boy, inscribed with the legend "Stingray." According to Ms. Mosshart, they were in Escondido, Calif. "We got there last New Years and there was a young kid I think I made him blond and he was telling us about the dangers on the beach," she said. "One of them was a stingray." "Electrified Reach," another disquieting piece, which is dated June 11, 2014, showed a swarm of helicopters, blades whirring, hovering wasplike over western Los Angeles. "To me, that's the soundtrack of L.A.," she said. For sure her paintings can be terrifying. As soothing, or as strident, as her music, they are meant to get under your skin, she said. During a recent tour, Ms. Mosshart befriended the 2 year old daughter of one of the engineers. "Fierce girl," she said. "She would critique all my paintings as scary or not scary, and go for the ones that were frightening. She was my best critic." She talks about her creative process with a disarming self awareness. In interviews, she has somewhat bizarrely confided that she trusts her eyes more than her ears. "I write music visually," she said the other night. "Jamie is always saying 'You use so many adjectives.' But I can't help it." When she writes, as when she paints, "I'm trying to use every color every jagged edge, every surface," she said. "There's a scene that's being created in my head and you are meant to walk into it." As if on cue, at that instant Ms. Mosshart's family her mop topped brother Matthew; her father, Mark, a car salesman; and her mother, Vivian, a high school art teacher whom Ms. Mosshart credits as her greatest influence materialized. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This is the story of how the most famous and talented sitcom star of her era and maybe of all time failed on Broadway. The star was Lucille Ball. The year was 1960. And she was in a tough spot in a "depressed state of mind," as she later recalled. "I Love Lucy" had just ended. Her marriage had too. The last kiss with Desi fell on the last moment of their last episode. His face in her hair; her blubbering through tears: "You're supposed to say 'Cut.'" The final clinch. The next day she filed for divorce. This envy pushed her off the sofa: a footlights career, as Ball put it in her autobiography, was the "ambition of my life." This was an ambition Lucille watchers could track. At 17 she'd left her upstate New York high school for Broadway, only to be told: "You just don't have it. Why don't you go home?" Later attempts had failed too; "I never made it," she told a reporter in 1960, "and I want to prove myself." Lucille Ball was not only a superstar by 1960. (One measure of her popularity: The nation's reservoirs dipped whenever "I Love Lucy" broke for a commercial. A whole country, flushing as one.) She was also a trailblazer, a female mogul. Desilu Productions, the business empire she split with Desi Arnaz, her ex, owned the most TV studio space and was "the single biggest filler of television time" in the industry, as Life Magazine put it. Now she just had to find a play to star in. I LEARNED ABOUT BALL'S largely forgotten theater bid when putting together my book, "The Queen of Tuesday." It's a novel memoir hybrid about Ball and also about my grandfather, and the thorny romance between them. The affair is all speculation but most of the rest is verifiable. (It was family legend that my grandfather and she met at a kind of doom swept party at which Donald Trump's father had celebrities throw bricks at a beautiful Coney Island landmark, which is the book's opening scene.) Writing the book led me really to admire this powerful, brilliant woman. But in telling this next bit, even the most besotted Lucyian treads warily. Ball wanted to shoulder a Broadway musical, starring in nearly every scene, dancing and belting a slew of difficult numbers. There were only two issues with that: she was not a good dancer and she was not a good singer. "Not even in the bathtub," she recalled in that autobiography, "Love, Lucy." And yet the show she chose, "Wildcat," required that she both croon and "just about climb walls." Or it would require that. Eventually. A play can suffer all kinds of mutations when the most popular star in America joins (not to say hijacks) the production. The writer of "Wildcat," N. Richard Nash, had conceived of it as a drama the story of "a woman in dungarees" who swings into a Southwestern oil town with dreams of striking it rich. Unlike the heroines of other plays Ball had read and rejected, Wildcat "Wildy" Jackson, "the cat with more bounce to the ounce," as she put it in her autobiography, was the kind of "rough talking, and unbelievably energetic" character she wanted to play. A phone call from Arnaz I love this thing! and, 400,000 later: "It was all packaged and literally taken out of my hands," Nash told a writer. "The final product had nothing to do with my original intentions." In 1960 attendance on Broadway was starting to wobble. And Lucille Ball was the star of all stars. Celestial bodies of such magnitude pull things into their orbit, so why not the theater world? The posters went for the obvious: "Broadway Loves Lucy!" You can hear, even now, the whir of the old calculator, the swish of receipts. And so Nash's drama had become (as Ball described it in her autobiography) "a musical with some really great songs by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh" at that time, a new writing team. Another renovation: the protagonist, a 20 something who cared for her teenage sister, had presto changeo morphed into a woman on the run from 50. Problems trailed the production from the first. In rehearsals Ball suffered from exhaustion, checked into a hospital, had trouble remembering the script. And her vocal coach suggested she confine her singing to only "one note, while the orchestra played the melody," Coleman said in Kathleen Brady's biography, "Lucille." Not that she wasn't committed: she leased an apartment on East 69th Street, and, though it was only a rental, she knocked down walls onto a view of both the Hudson and East rivers; the plan was to give Broadway five years. But as the queen of the sitcom, she had grown used to majestic yuks; when it became clear the show wasn't going to produce royal size laughs, she decided to make her own. An onstage dog had an accident one matinee not long after opening night, and Ball grabbed a stage prop broom and addressed the audience. "It's in the small print in my contract," she said, Lucy Ricardo style. "I have to clean up the dog expletive !" Another night, her character asked a supporting player, "Say, do you know a fellow named Fred Mertz?" The joke got a laugh (Mertz being the name of her "I Love Lucy" neighbor), but made no sense: Who in the play's 1912 Texas border town would know Mertz, and why would she ask? Ball was also given to holding up her hand to the audience when she lost her place in the dialogue or lyrics, and would start over. Needless to say these antics broke cardinal rules of the theater. But it wasn't the amateurish touches, nor even the bad reviews that doomed "Wildcat" (Variety: "Failure," New York Herald Tribune: "The rueful silences are many"). The show was a commercial hit. People wanted Lucy. This was the closest they'd get. But the production sank anyway, thanks to its original sin: relying on a miscast non theater actress to carry a musical. The gig was too grueling. "The most physically strenuous of my career," Ball would later say. She caught colds, had crying spells, broke two fingers; she sprained her ankle three times, pulled a tendon, and sweated off 19 pounds; she came down with a virus and went on hiatus while she recovered at the beach. Then she fainted onstage. Then she fainted onstage another time and the production set up an oxygen tank for her in the wings. Then she fainted again. It happened during a number called "Tippy Tippy Toes"; a castmate tried to catch her and broke a wrist. By that point in the performance, Lucille's understudy had gone home ... | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Guilford, Conn.: Proud of Its Place in New England Both woodsy and watery, Guilford, Conn., can seem to squeeze a lot of New England into 47 square miles. Granite boulders washed by waves recall the coast of Maine. Valleys that cradle farms could be in Vermont. And with nearly 700 buildings constructed before 1940, including about a dozen houses on Broad and Boston Streets that predate the Revolutionary War, the town has enough history to remind one, at least a bit, of Massachusetts. But residents say that Guilford is unlike a lot of the rest of Connecticut. For one thing, the New Haven County town doesn't have the same commercial sprawl and dense development of some of the suburbs in Fairfield County, its western neighbor. "We just always came back to Guilford," said Jessica Kunstman, 36, a management consultant, referring the time earlier this decade when she and her husband, John Kunstman, 36, a doctor, would set out on no destination in mind day trips from their home in New Haven. At the time, Dr. Kunstman was training to be a surgeon at the Yale School of Medicine, which was followed by a two year fellowship in Manhattan. But they weren't away for long. In 2018, Yale's medical school offered him a job as an assistant professor of surgery, and the couple considered buying a house Guilford. "There's just a nice agricultural feeling to it," said Ms. Kunstman, who favors the pick your own raspberry patch a few steps from the house they ended up buying for 431,000. The Cape Cod style house has three bedrooms, two baths and a furnished basement. The Kunstmans renovated the fireplace and bookshelves in the living room. Adjusting to life in a town of only 22,000 residents is not without its wrinkles. Unlike in New York, pharmacies aren't within walking distance, said Ms. Kunstman, who has an infant daughter. And restaurants close early. "Your social hour tends to end at 10 o'clock," she said. But the Kunstmans seem to be in familiar company. Yale employees are numerous in Guilford, which is 15 miles east of campus, residents and brokers say. Indeed, the census indicates that "educational services" is the most common type of job there. Until the 1950s, when Interstate 95 was laid east west right through town, making Guilford less isolated and more hospitable to commuters, the town was also a major summer getaway. Though more of a bedroom community for New Haven today, it still welcomes weekenders, with the lines sometimes blurring between what is a primary and secondary home. Jamie Salkind, 49, whose main residence is a one bedroom rental in Hell's Kitchen that he shares with his family, tests those lines. After buying a three bedroom, two bath, midcentury modern last year for 385,000, Mr. Salkind, a self employed documentary film supervisor, spent several months in Guilford. He and his wife, Starlet Jacobs, 38, a set designer, had just had a son, and Guilford offered comfy surroundings for the baby and his parents. And echoing other residents, Mr. Salkind said the full commute from Guilford to Grand Central Terminal by train, which can take about two and a half hours, wasn't something he wanted to do every day. But there was no missing New York's crowds, even though the family had plenty of company. A deer and an owl frequently appeared in their leafy yard. And osprey, egrets and cormorants fluttered at nearby Chaffinch Island Park, near where Mr. Salkind keeps his 34 foot sailboat. "In a very short distance, you get to be in the woods and on the coast," he said. "It's amazing." Many of Guilford's priciest houses are in Sachem's Head, which fans out into the Long Island Sound between Uncas and Vineyard Points, and which is overseen by a 120 member association that offers tennis courts, kayak storage and beach use for a fee. Although lots may be tiny in the area, the views are expansive, including of meandering salt marshes and the mansion topped Thimble Islands, in the adjacent town of Branford. Streets in Sachem's Head, like in other Guilford enclaves, are occasionally marked "private," so don't expect to cruise all of its shoreline by car. 308 NORTH RIVER STREET An 18 year old house with four bedrooms, three and a half baths and a patio, on about a quarter acre, listed for 759,000. 203 453 2533 Jane Beiles for The New York Times More modest is Mulberry Point, a nearby peninsula where some shingle sided cottages, usually not insulated, are for seasonal use. Houses may also be less expensive in the Shell Beach section of Leetes Island, where owners of ranch style houses have raised their homes on stilts to avoid flooding. Enormous rocks rib Westwoods, a woodland squiggled with trails whose 1,200 acres account for a big chunk of Guilford's 6,400 acres of protected open space 22 percent of the town. Clustered around the town's nearly eight acre green about the size of six football fields is a wealth of well kept older homes standing proudly behind picket fences. Federal, Italianate and Second Empire architecture are showcased there. North of Route 1, a busy shopping center lined strip, houses stretch out on larger parcels, while subdivisions dogleg off winding older routes like Long Hill Road, mixing some colonial style houses with others from the Colonial era. Structures are scarcer in the rural area north of Route 80, though houses with private docks hug Lake Quonnipaug as crew teams scull past. 55 CHIMNEY CORNER CIRCLE A waterfront four bedroom, three and a half bath house with a dock in Sachem's Head, built in 1882, listed for 1.2 million. 203 314 6269 Jane Beiles for The New York Times While Guilford is mostly known for single family houses, it also has condos, like 66 High Street, a four building, 57 unit complex now under development . An untraditional looking option is the Whitfield Shore Condominium, a mid 1980s creation whose copper cladding and semicircular prow earned it the local nickname "the spaceship." As of mid September, there were 162 single family houses for sale at an average price of 695,000, according to SmartMLS data prepared by H. Pearce Real Estate. The least expensive was a two bedroom Cape in need of gutting, for 149,900. The priciest was a Sound facing five bedroom for 6.2 million. There were also 31 condos listed at an average of 796,000, according to Pearce. Buyers often start their search in the adjacent town of Madison, to the east, but find that Guilford is more affordable. Indeed, the 171 single family houses for sale last week in Madison had an average price of 827,000, according to the data. 147 BOSTON STREET A four bedroom Colonial that dates to 1755, with two full and two half baths, five fireplaces and a pool, on nearly an acre, listed for 899,000. 203 671 6976 Jane Beiles for The New York Times In step with regional trends, sales activity seems to have slowed, though not by much. From January to August of 2018, Guilford saw sales of 226 single family homes at an average of 460,000. In the same period in 2019, there were 212 sales, at an average of 511,000. Houses are also taking longer to sell, from an average of 70 days in 2018 to 91 days in 2019, Pearce said. A pass for Guilford's beaches, like Jacobs Beach, the most popular, costs 35. But those who get their feet wet often have other goals such as digging for clams and oysters, or crabbing, like a group on a recent morning dangling lines at a low point on Leetes Island Road. Mom and pop vendors line the shopping district by the town green, including a hardware store, a tea store and a toy store, as well as Chapter One Food and Drink, a restaurant whose tucked away patio provides views of a sculpture garden. Shore Line East, a commuter line, has five trains on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. The trip to New Haven's State Street station, a busy stop, takes about 22 minutes. Monthly passes are 89.25. But Shore Line trains go as far as Stamford. Typically, commuters heading to Grand Central transfer at Union Station in New Haven. Four Metro North trains depart on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. (and five trains return between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.), and the trip takes about two hours. Monthly passes are 500. Founded in 1639, Guilford has seen industries come and go, like salt hay harvesting, lobster boat building, fish oil production and vegetable canning. But granite quarrying may be the town's claim to fame. Six tons of pinkish rock extracted from near New Quarry Road became the outer walls of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Similar stone from nearby quarries, including in Branford, wound up on the campus of Columbia University, in Grand Central and on the Brooklyn Bridge. 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 |
Quentin Bajac, the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, will return to his native Paris to become director of the Jeu de Paume, France's national photography museum. Mr. Bajac has served as MoMA's photography chief since January 2013, only the fifth person to hold the post since its creation in 1940. In New York, he organized a large retrospective of the American photographer Stephen Shore, as well as a century spanning history of studio photography and an edition of MoMA's "New Photography" series. He also was co curator of an acclaimed revisionist presentation of MoMA's permanent collection at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2017. Before coming to MoMA, Mr. Bajac served as a photography curator at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, then as chief curator of photography at the Centre Georges Pompidou. "It's a different adventure," Mr. Bajac said in an interview on Wednesday. "I spent six wonderful years at MoMA, and I've spent 25 years working in big institutions. I probably needed something else at this point in life something lighter, maybe a little more nimble." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'NOVENAS FOR A LOST HOSPITAL' at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (previews start on Sept. 5; opens on Sept. 19). St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village shut down in 2010. Condos and townhouses now occupy the block where it stood. Nearby, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the playwright Cusi Cram and the director Daniella Topol honor that shuttered institution in a site specific production that traces its rich history. Kathleen Chalfant portrays Elizabeth Ann Seton. 866 811 4111, rattlestick.org 'RUNBOYRUN' AND 'IN OLD AGE' at New York Theater Workshop (performances start on Sept. 4). Having previously presented "Sojourners" and "Her Portmanteau," New York Theater Workshop presents two further plays in Mfoniso Udofia's nine part "The Ufot Cycle," which follows a Nigerian couple across generations and time. Loretta Greco directs "Runboyrun"; Awoye Timpo directs "In Old Age." Chike Johnson and Patrice Johnson Chevannes star. 212 460 5475, nytw.org 'SUNDAY' at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (previews start on Sept. 4; opens on Sept. 23). Having conquered the wizarding world in "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" and having grappled with a giant ape in "King Kong," the playwright Jack Thorne joins a book group. In this new play, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, a group of friends meets to discuss fact and fiction. 866 811 4111, atlantictheater.org 'BAT OUT OF HELL' at New York City Center (closes on Sept. 8). Jim Steinman's audacious, incomprehensible musical, which draws on decades of his songs, runs out of gas. A garbled version of the Peter Pan story, it is set in a futuristic Manhattan and staged, by Jay Scheib, with carnality, exuberance and mess. Lena Hall and Danielle Steers, a London import, stand out in a hardworking ensemble. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
BERLIN For three years, Sibylle Ehringhaus, a veteran provenance researcher, worked with the Georg Schafer Museum in northern Bavaria to examine the ownership history of its 1,000 oil paintings and several thousand drawings, prints and watercolors. Mr. Schafer, the industrialist whose collection is displayed there, had bought much of the art in the 1950s in Munich, then a hub for dealers who had had relationships with the Nazis. Among those from whom he purchased works was Adolf Hitler's personal photographer. Ms. Ehringhaus's job was, in part, to determine just how much of the collection had a tainted provenance. But last year, she said, she began to ask herself why the city of Schweinfurt, which manages the museum, had bothered to hire her. After she had identified several plundered works, she said, no one seemed to have any plans to return them to the heirs of the original Jewish owners. Increasingly, she said, she began to feel her work was unwelcome. She was denied access to historical documents vital for her research, she said, and forbidden to contact colleagues at another museum with a research inquiry. So in December she rejected an offer to extend her contract for another year. "I got the impression they didn't want me there they really made things difficult for me," Ms. Ehringhaus, 60, said at a meeting in a Berlin cafe. "They needed me for appearances. I felt as though I was being used as a fig leaf." The owners of the museum collection, a private foundation run by the Schafer family, said they are aware of restitution claims for some of the works, but believe that it is the German government, not collectors, who are responsible for addressing it. The museum itself has denied trying to hinder Ms. Ehringhaus's work. But this case is a bit different. Though the museum occupies a building owned by the state of Bavaria and is run by the city, the art itself is on loan from the private foundation set up by Mr. Schafer, who made his fortune in roller bearings and died in 1975. The Georg Schafer Foundation says the art was bought legally and in good faith and that compensating victims of the Nazis is a state function, to be undertaken by the German government. The foundation argues that the internationally endorsed 1998 Washington Principles on the restitution of art looted by the Nazis do not apply to private entities like the foundation. But that view is opposed by experts who say the principles, which encourage action but are unbinding, cover both private and public collections. The foundation said that returning art would also violate laws that ban foundations from divesting assets. In a statement, the foundation said "the German federal government as the legal successor of the Third Reich is responsible for compensating for the crimes of the Third Reich." The statement called for a German restitution law that would include government compensation for private entities that return Nazi looted art. The German culture minister, Monika Grutters, has disputed the view that the government alone is responsible for compensating the heirs of victims of Nazi looting. "The historical and moral responsibility to redress Nazi art plunder does not lie solely with the state," she said in a speech at a conference on the Washington Principles in 2018. "We can and should expect much more engagement by private art collectors and the art trade." But there is little she can do about the foundation's refusal to hand back looted art, according to Walter Schmidt, a spokesman for the minister. "The federal government has no power to act in this concrete case," he wrote in an email, because the issue is outside its sphere of direct influence. The heirs of Jewish collectors have laid claim to about 20 works in the museum. Ms. Ehringhaus said she found many of them to be justified but said that under the terms of her contract she could not address specific cases. One request is for the return of a portrait of Martha Liebermann, painted by her husband, Max Liebermann. The painter, a Jewish Berliner, was chased out of his position as honorary chairman of the Academy of Arts in Berlin after the Nazis seized power in 1933. He created it before his death in 1935. "The family couldn't get her out of Germany, and my mother carried this with her for her whole life," said Katharine Wild, Max and Martha Liebermann's great granddaughter. "This kind of family tragedy gets passed along to the children, and I am no exception." The portrait of Martha Liebermann is on a Gestapo list of objects seized from her apartment after her death, according to Jutta von Falkenhausen, a lawyer who represents the Liebermann heirs. Georg Schafer purchased it in 1955 from a Munich dealer. The Liebermann family first tried to recover it more than 10 years ago. "I am trying to carry on what my mother and sister were doing and continue that work," Ms. Wild says. "What I would like the people in Schweinfurt to know is: We have an opportunity. We could settle this matter." Two other works in the museum are being sought by the heirs of Therese Clara Kirstein, a German Jew who committed suicide in 1939 after her escape to the United States was blocked. The heirs believe the works, a drawing by Adolph Menzel and a Liebermann study, were sold under duress shortly before her death or, more likely, confiscated and sold shortly after. "We want to have the provenance reports for those two works," said David Rowland, a New York lawyer representing one of the Kirstein heirs, "and we would like the foundation to apply the Washington Principles. We've been asking for that for a long time." Lawsuits to recover Nazi looted art generally fail in Germany because of statutes of limitations and other rules that favor good faith buyers of stolen items. Claimants trying to recover stolen property are reliant on the good will of the private collectors who possess it. Some private collectors do choose to abide by the Washington Principles. One notable example is the family owned company Dr. Oetker, a maker of baking product and food products, which has so far given back seven works to the heirs of collectors who had been persecuted by the Nazis. Like the federal government, the state of Bavaria said it could not simply direct that works be returned. The Bavarian culture minister, Bernd Sibler, said in an email that while the goal of the provenance research is "to give back artworks lost due to persecution or to find fair solutions for compensation," the state "has no legal means to exert influence over the Georg Schafer Foundation in terms of implementing the Washington Principles." Similarly, the city of Schweinfurt "is only the manager of the museum," the mayor, Sebastian Remele, said in a telephone interview. "We are aware that this is a politically sensitive matter but we have no power to act." Mr. Remele said the museum has withdrawn the disputed objects from the exhibition galleries, except for one, which is displayed with detailed information about its provenance. Wolf Eiermann, the director of the museum, rejected Ms. Ehringhaus's complaint that the museum had prevented her from exchanging information with colleagues, saying he had in just one instance requested her to refrain from contacting a researcher at another museum. "She took part in several symposiums and there was never any kind of ban on her exchanging information with colleagues," he said. The city put out a statement in January, after Ms. Ehringhaus left, saying that the provenance research would continue, but only after a digital inventory of the museum's drawings and prints was completed. Ms. Ehringhaus's departure was covered by the German press and the mayor seemed to show some fatigue earlier this month when asked to address her view that not enough effort was being made to ensure the works were returned. The issue of restitution "is not what should be occupying" Ms. Ehringhaus, Mr. Remele said. "Political moralizing is not her job. Her job was to research the history of the artworks." Ms. Ehringhaus, who has done research for the British Museum and the German Historical Museum, among others, said she wishes the foundation, city and state of Bavaria had agreed on a restitution process before she was hired. "There's no point in having a provenance researcher if this is not resolved," she said. "No one wanted any hassle," she said. "Everyone had an interest in keeping the status quo. No one showed any empathy for the human stories behind these artworks. I kept wondering 'do you really want to keep hold of these works belonging to people who were persecuted so horribly and suffered so much?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Driving along a winding highway in the Alps in Southeast France last August, I thought back to the Romans. When they came charging down the mountains into the Rhone River Valley in the first century B.C., how did they ever maneuver their chariots around some of the hairpin curves I was navigating? Did they ever stall, as I once did, at a pivotal juncture at the foot of the Vercors Massif, drawing the ire of Gallic motorists or the ancient equivalent honking behind? (As a recent convert from automatic to stick shift, it was my "baptism of the road," as my French wife, Claudie, put it.) One thing I knew: They braked long enough to establish the colony of Delphinatus Viennensis, which would eventually blossom into Le Dauphine the one time French province where personal and ancient history are intertwined for me in a place that Claudie once lyrically called "the geography of my heart." I came, I saw, I was conquered. For 31 years and counting, I have had privileged access to this charmed enclave of roughly 7,695 square miles in the southeast corner of France, ringed by the lavender fields and olive groves of Provence, the vineyards of the Rhone River Valley, and the plateaus and peaks of the Alps. On past visits we invariably dashed from Claudie's native town, Valence, near some of the country's finest vineyards, to arrive in time for dinner at her father's ancestral village, Les Savoyons, in the Alps. But my beloved in laws have died. There was no one awaiting us at table this time, so we took it slow. The French Revolution divided the royal province into three departments the Drome, Isere and Hautes Alpes and though the geography varies from fertile plains to rolling hills, to highlands and vertiginous summits, the regional identity remains distinctly Dauphinois. The mood is laid back, down to earth, modulated by a midday siesta and a chilled sip of pastis. But behind that mellow mood lie centuries of upheaval. The area was the Roman military and commercial corridor of choice between the Alps and the Rhone; the Punic general Hannibal passed through with his elephants up from North Africa to challenge Rome, allegedly leaving behind the pintade (guinea hen), a succulent cousin of the turkey, traditionally raised in the Drome. (It also became our favorite holiday fare, best roasted with chestnuts from Ardeche, across the Rhone.) In the Middle Ages, the Dauphine was a quasi independent principality. Its rulers were called Dauphins, until the impecunious Dauphin Humbert II sold his holdings to the King of France in 1349, when the title fell to the king's eldest son. The rugged terrain made it an optimal refuge for French Huguenots fleeing persecution during the Wars of Religion in the 16th century. In the 20th century, Jews fleeing the Nazi army and the Vichy Regime hid out here. It is hard for a visitor to square the scenic splendor of gorges like Grands Goulets and Combe Laval with the turmoil that took place on the Vercors where the French resistance made a valiant stand. Valence, the capital of the Drome, has a restored historic center, including a jewel of Renaissance architecture, the 16th century Maison des Tetes, a palace in the late Gothic flamboyant style featuring the sculpted heads of allegorical figures and Roman emperors. The future French emperor Napoleon was posted in Valence as a young lieutenant. But the city's present claim to fame is Pic, a Michelin three star rated restaurant run by Anne Sophie Pic, France's most celebrated female chef, where we once had my mother in law's birthday, over seared fresh foie gras. (Our budget forbade a return visit on this trip.) Next door to Valence is the Rhone River town of Tain l'Hermitage, one of France's wine meccas. The big names here are Paul Jaboulet Aine and Michel Chapoutier, the latter a seventh generation vintner. We took an electric powered bicycle tour of Mr. Chapoutier's vineyards, bursting with red syrah and white marsanne grapes, tended according to biodynamic principles. I'm ashamed to admit that the steep slope and hot sun got the better of us and we were forced to park our bikes below and hike up on foot. But our reward remained: a chilled glass of crisp white Chante Alouette sipped in an old hunting lodge at the summit. We had lunch at the home of friends, but should have skipped dessert: Our next stop was La Cite du Chocolat Valrhona, an interactive chocolate museum created by one of France's leading commercial chocolate confectioners. For a sensual experience a la "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," you can touch, smell and taste your way through the process of chocolate production "from bean to bar." On our friends' advice, we rounded out the day at the Domaine Bernard Ange in Clerieux, whose signature red Crozes Hermitage is aged in the cave of an abandoned quarry. The genial Monsieur Ange hosts tastings in an open air wine bar decorated with vintage insignia and advertisements. That same quarry yielded the molasse rock that makes up the core of the Palais Ideal du Facteur Cheval, a marvel of outsider art about 18 miles northeast of Tain in Hauterives. I will never forget my first impression 20 years ago. The Palais Ideal looked to me like a termite hill disgorged mid gurgle by a colossal oyster. The effect has not diminished over time. Part Khmer jungle temple, part Egyptian tomb, part Gothic cathedral, crawling with all manner of sculpted wildlife, it is the work of Ferdinand Cheval, a country postman inspired by the pictures of exotic places in the magazines he delivered. Posthumously recognized by the Surrealist Andre Breton and admired by Picasso, Cheval's creation was preserved thanks to Andre Malraux, then the French Minister of Culture. The Drome is rich in artifact complementing scenic splendor. Fortified hilltop villages, like Le Poet Laval, La Garde Adhemar and La Motte Chalancon, where local lords took refuge from passing marauders and where artists hide out today, are scattered among the lavender fields and forests of a pristine preserve in the Drome Provencale, a southern subdivision of the department, much of it thankfully off limits to industry. Commerce made its mark elsewhere. We stopped at Saillans, in the Drome River Valley, to visit a working magnanerie, a facility dedicated to silk farming and extraction. Silk thread was the economic mainstay of the region in the mid 19th century. A small grove of mulberry trees, the leaves of which make up the silk worm's rarefied diet, is all that's left of the thousands of mulberry trees that once thrived in the region. We toured the winding back streets of old Saillans with a garrulous Franco Irish guide, David Gourdant, a blue eyed giant who laughingly described the history of his hometown, a buffer between the embattled Catholic town, Crest, and Protestant Die, as "an ass between two chairs." Die and the neighboring town of Luc en Diois were once important Roman outposts. But the Romans located their colonial capital in Vienne, in the department of Isere. The Musee Gallo Romain, in Saint Romain en Gal, situated beside excavated ruins on the opposite bank of the Rhone, features remarkable Gallo Roman mosaics, including a haunting second century depiction of Orpheus stroking his lyre. Modern minstrels still strum their strings every summer at Jazz a Vienne, the annual festival held in a perfectly intact first century Roman theater. We were too late this time for the festival (this year's runs from June 28 to July 15), but I retain a vivid memory of the virtuoso guitarists George Benson and Gilberto Gil making the old stones vibrate some years back. There is little left of the Roman presence in Grenoble, capital of Isere, though the Musee Archeologique, ingeniously conceived in the shell of a 12th century church built atop a Gallo Roman necropolis, reveals a layered history. But the locals still celebrate another conqueror. In 2015, they marked the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's escape from Elba via a route that passed through town, still referred to as the Route Napoleon, in his fleeting 100 day long return to power. A Grenoblois friend, Jean Francois, recalled feeling a chill at the sight of an actor impersonating the emperor. "I stared in disbelief," he said. "History winked back." Grenoble's greatest draw is its geographic site. You can hop a cable car to the Bastille for a sweeping view, weather permitting; in winter drive a mere 15 minutes to the ski slopes of Le Sappey en Chartreuse; or seek serenity, as we did, about 25 miles due north at the 11th century Carthusian monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, one of France's architectural marvels. You don't have to be a monk to commune with the surrounding mountains. From Grenoble we took the scenic Route Napoleon (N85) through the pretty old mountain town of Corps, at the border between Isere and Hautes Alpes, proceeding to a lone 11th century chapel, Mere Eglise, that pokes out of the cliff like a petrified tree above the hamlet of Saint Disdier. It was a pilgrimage of sorts. We'd last stopped by years ago to sample the trout at La Neyrette, a country inn. Someone suggested a digestive hike up to the chapel. "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it," Pere Theo, the parish priest, had quoted Matthew 7:14 with a chuckle on our first visit way back when, leading us in through a narrow door. Pere Theo died in 1999, but a plaque on his tombstone perfectly bespeaks the spirit of the place: "If you be Christian or not, from these parts or just traveling through, joyous or distressed," it reads, "this is your house too." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LONDON David Storey, a British writer who drew on his experiences as a miner's son, a farmworker, an art student, a professional rugby player and a teacher to create novels and plays that won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, died here on Sunday. He was 83. A niece, Samantha Storey, said the cause was Parkinson's disease and related dementia. Though Mr. Storey struggled for recognition at first, he went on to win Britain's premier fiction award, the Man Booker Prize, in 1976 for his novel "Saville," in which a miner's son breaks away from his background. Two of his novels were shortlisted for the award. Three of his works were named best play by the New York Drama Critics' Circle, all within four years in the 1970s. He also earned two Tony nominations. It was as a playwright that Mr. Storey was probably best known; his plays have been performed in some 60 countries. Yet it was as a novelist that he first gained notice, with "This Sporting Life," published in 1960, which won the Somerset Maugham Fiction Award. A vividly told tale of a maverick miner turned rugby player, the novel was adapted for film in 1963, with a screenplay by Mr. Storey, and won Oscar nominations for its lead actors, Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts. "This Sporting Life" was soon followed by two more novels notable for their bold characterization and narrative energy: "The Flight Into Camden," narrated by a miner's daughter who falls for a married teacher, and "Radcliffe," about two unlikely childhood friends one moody and intelligent, the other physically powerful whose relationship takes a homosexual turn when they meet again as young men. "Radcliffe" was shortlisted for the Booker prize, as was Mr. Storey's novel "Pasmore," published in 1973, centered on a university lecturer whose comfortable life unravels. By 1966 Mr. Storey was established enough for the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh to stage his play "The Restoration of Arnold Middleton," which he had written in a single weekend six years earlier, at a time when he was despairing of his novel writing career. The tale of a troubled schoolteacher, it transferred to London, where Mr. Storey, who had seldom gone to the theater, found himself acclaimed as a dramatist. "The sheer exhilaration of seeing it come alive onstage prompted me to write another five plays in no time at all," he said. Two he threw out, but the others were staged in 1969 and 1970 at the Royal Court Theater in London. The three plays all directed by Lindsay Anderson, with whom Mr. Storey developed what he called "an almost mystical relationship" were "In Celebration," about the turbulent reunion of a miner's family scarred by the death of a son; "The Contractor," in which wrangling workmen were seen first raising and then lowering a tent for a wedding reception; and "Home," in which John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson portrayed elderly men precariously surviving in a mental institution. Mr. Storey said he had written "Home" in three days. The play's deft characterizations and understated dialogue led some critics to compare it to Chekhov, and after it transferred to Broadway, in 1970, it drew Tony nominations for Mr. Storey, Mr. Gielgud, Mr. Richardson, Mr. Anderson and the actress Mona Washbourne. "Home" was different from most of Mr. Storey's best known work in that it was not derived from his own experience, as "The Contractor" and "The Farm" were, both from 1973 and both drawing on his days as a laborer in his youth. Similarly, "The Changing Room" (also 1973) was based on his rugby days, and "Life Class" (1974) drew on his time at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. "The Changing Room" won a Tony nomination and that play, "Home," and "The Contractor" were all named best play by the New York Drama Critics' Circle. They and others continue to be revived. Reviewing an Off Broadway revival of "Home" in 2006, Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times described it as "achingly beautiful." In Mr. Storey's stage world, characters were misfits, at odds with their roots, their environment, their work, their relationships, their inner selves. "All my plays ask for a more whole, grander view of life," he once said. "But there's always sadness at their endings." David Malcolm Storey was born on July 13, 1933, in public housing in the Yorkshire town of Wakefield and grew up there with two brothers, a third having died as a toddler. Thanks to his father's determination that David not follow him into the coal mines, he was educated at a prestigious local grammar school and, it seemed, was destined to become a teacher. But he appalled his parents by deciding that a safe, secure profession was not for him. He attended the local art school rather than a university, and then won a place at Slade. A career as a painter seemed likely. But to pay for art school, Mr. Storey, an athletic 18 year old, signed a contract with the Leeds Rugby League club, which meant commuting between Yorkshire, where fellow players disdained him as "this artist swanning in for matches," he said, and London, where fellow students thought him "a bit of an oaf." He was, he added, at home only on the train, and he used the journeys to write novels, if unsuccessfully at first. He had to wait until he was 26, married and working in assorted London schools as a teacher before "This Sporting Life," his seventh novel, found a publisher. Though Mr. Storey's plays often reflected Britain's class tensions, they resonated with audiences around the world and with people of all classes. Mr. Storey remembered Princess Margaret's coming backstage after a performance of "In Celebration," a tale of emotional ferment in mining country, telling him that she had left behind a friend sitting alone and weeping. As the princess told it, an usher had asked the friend if the play had upset her. "It's just like the royal family," she sobbed. As attested to by the three plays of his that were all produced in 1973, Mr. Storey would work simultaneously on several manuscripts of plays or novels, walking between them like a painter moving from easel to easel in a second floor room in his house in the Camden district of London. His hope, he said was that they would "develop their own organic life." Many remained unfinished, he said, after he decided that they were "dreadful, turgid illustrations of some wonderful theme." And in recent years many of his finished novels failed to find a publisher or were unenthusiastically received. The same was true of his plays. "Stages," in which an aging artist looks back on his career, was presented at the National Theater in 2002. But Mr. Storey's last substantial theatrical success came in 1980 with "Early Days," in which Ralph Richardson played an elderly politician recalling achievements that he considered "dust." Though he had his angry moments he famously hit the critic Michael Billington in 1976 over a bad review Mr. Storey was a mild, modest man who lived quietly in London with his wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1956. She died in 2015. He is survived by two daughters, Helen Storey, a professor of fashion science at the University of Arts/London College of Fashion, and Kate Storey, a biologist; two sons, Jake, a finance director, and Sean, who works in aerospace defense strategy; a brother, Anthony; and six grandchildren. Though he was prone to depression, and said that writing was a way of relieving his bleaker feelings, Mr. Storey had a wry sense of humor and enjoyed turning experience into anecdote. One involved the time he organized the Slade School's annual dinner. The painter Lucian Freud, instead of bringing his wife, came accompanied by a huge, slobbering dog, which took her place at the table and ate her chicken. Then students began to set fires and throw plates, one of which hit a girl and knocked her unconscious. After the pandemonium ended, the painter Stanley Spencer was found sitting alone, staring morosely at his hands. "I can't come to another Slade dinner," he told Mr. Storey. "I can't take the risk." Mr. Storey, who once described much of his writing as disguised autobiography, never did turn that memory into a play. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LONDON When I got off my flight from Beijing to London nearly two weeks ago, I knew what I had to do: go straight into self quarantine. I live in China, where a dramatic lockdown since late January has made it clear that all residents, even those well beyond the epicenter's outbreak in Wuhan, were in the middle of a global health crisis. The boarding process in Beijing was the final reminder: two mandatory temperature checks and an electronic health statement for which I had to provide an email address and two contact phone numbers. But as the plane approached London, a sense of unreality set in. The airline distributed a cheaply printed sheet that only advised us to call the usual National Health Service hotline if we felt ill. On arrival, there was no temperature check and no health statement meaning that British officials would have had no easy way to track us if one of us came down with Covid 19. Instead, we just walked off the plane, took off our face masks and disappeared into the city. In the days since then, Europe and the United States have been convulsed by the coronavirus's rapid spread in those regions. Italy is now under lockdown, and cases are rapidly multiplying across the United States. The stock markets have tanked. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization formally announced what everyone already knew: This is a pandemic. Perhaps by the time you read this, airport health checks and declarations finally will be mandatory in places like London. But that won't change the fact that for weeks now, the attitude toward the coronavirus outbreak in the United States and much of Europe has been bizarrely reactive, if not outright passive or that the governments in those regions have let pass their best chance to contain the virus's spread. Having seen a kind of initial denial play out already in China, I feel a sense of deja vu. But while China had to contend with a nasty, sudden surprise, governments in the West have been on notice for weeks. It's as if China's experience hadn't given Western countries a warning of the perils of inaction. Instead, many governments seem to have imitated some of the worst measures China put in place, while often turning a blind eye to the best of them, or its successes. Outsiders seem to want to view China's experiences as uniquely its own. I imagine there are many reasons for this, including the comforting idea that China is far away and an epidemic over there surely couldn't really spread so far and so fast over here. More than anything, though, I think that outsiders, especially in the West, fixate on China's authoritarian political system, and that makes them discount the possible value and relevance of its decisions to them. Until recently, one dominant story line was that the epidemic in China spiraled out of control because the authorities cracked down on early whistle blowers in late December, allowing the virus to spread. When China put in place a draconian lockdown and quarantine measures in January, some mainstream foreign reports didn't just criticize the program as excessive; they described the entire exercise as flat out backward or essentially pointless. China did get props for building two hospitals in just over a week, but even the awe over that feat was tinged with a sense that something nefarious was at work in a Hitler built the autobahn kind of way. And when quarantine shelters were set up to host infected people so that they wouldn't spread the disease to family members at home, the effort was portrayed as dystopian or, at best, chaotic. Arguing against these interpretations makes me a bit queasy. I realize that Chinese officials covered up the problem in late December and early January a disastrous series of decisions. And I know that now China's leaders want to sell their heavy handed methods as exemplary. President Xi Jinping made his first visit to Wuhan on Tuesday, an implicit marker of success. Even as the virus was killing dozens of people a day there, government propaganda was touting the China model while ridiculing efforts by the United States to combat natural disasters. Now that other parts of the world are suffering, China is making well publicized efforts to offer help, sending teams to Iran and Italy to deliver supplies and offer advice. And it has imposed travel bans from some destinations hit by infections a measure the government decried as excessive when China suffered it. Yet it would be foolish to believe that China's decisions have been mainly based on crude authoritarianism. One needn't defend every one of its measures on medical grounds; those are matters that health care professionals might debate for years to come. But it's worth acknowledging that not all of China's failings are unique to its political system, and that some of its policies were motivated by serious concern for the public good and executed by a highly competent civil service. For example, before condemning the decision of Chinese officials in early January to dismiss the threat of a looming epidemic, remember that at that time the coronavirus was not reported to have caused any deaths. Contrast this with, say, the United States today: Despite having had a free flow of information for weeks and witnessed thousands of deaths in China as evidence, parts of America's political establishment including at the White House have pushed a disinformation campaign to downplay the risk. And if you think it's too easy to criticize President Trump, remember my airport experience in London. Or consider Germany's decision earlier this week to hold a mass sporting event in the middle of its outbreak zone. Or Japan's decision to let people walk off an infected cruise ship without proper testing. Some of these countries are now backpedaling, trying to explain away their blase attitudes, but that's weeks late. China's leaders did fumble at the very start, yet in short order they acted far more decisively than many democratically elected leaders have to date. Authoritarian or not, they also want the public's approval. Chinese leaders may not face voters, but they, too, care about legitimacy, and that hinges on performance for them as well. Aspects of China's quarantine especially when they prevented the elderly and disabled from receiving medical care were unnecessarily crude. But overall, I don't think the measures were unpopular. The government worked hard to get people to buy into the necessity of tough measures. It bombarded the public with social media posts, stories, billboards, radio shows and articles about the risks posed by the virus. In one park in Beijing, a recording on a loop admonished people to: "Wash your hands thoroughly. Avoid meeting up friends. Keep a safe distance." In my experience living in China for weeks during the peak period of the lockdown and talking to various groups beyond the disgruntled elites, people were frustrated, even exasperated, by the containment measures but they largely supported them, too. And while some in the West fixated on how China's system failed to stem the outbreak at first, they were ignoring the aspects of it that worked. There's nothing authoritarian about checking temperatures at airports, enforcing social distancing or offering free medical care to anyone with Covid 19. Not all open societies have fumbled. Singapore, Taiwan and perhaps soon enough South Korea, have moved forcefully but sensibly to contain the virus, showing the sort of savvy that seems to be missing in large swaths of the West. Maybe it's because these countries are close enough to the center of the outbreak that their governments could recognize its seriousness, while also being wary of China's sledgehammer measures. But too many countries further afield have stood by, watching for weeks what was unfolding in China, and then elsewhere in Asia, as though it was none of their concern. Some governments have dithered for lack of political will. Some seem to fall prey, still, to a perception of China as the eternal "other," whose experience couldn't possibly be relevant to us, much less provide any lessons other than in what not to do. Ian Johnson ( iandenisjohnson) is the author most recently of "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
LAMBERT'S COVE, Mass. James Taylor was 22 when he bought 175 acres of woods here with the proceeds from his first record deal. On a stormy June afternoon nearly half a century later, Carly Simon , his ex wife; their children, Sally Taylor and Ben Taylor; Ben's partner, Sophie Hiller, and their friends, the musicians John Forte and David Saw, were gathered in the rambling house that has grown up like a wagon wheel around the original structure, with hallways that hopscotch over rooms and staircases in odd places. Ms. Simon, or Mama C., as this group calls her, lives in the place, as do Ben and Ms. Hiller, in a house next door. They were strewn over a pair of plump green velvet sofas in front of a crackling fire it was that cold to practice for a performance they would give in the Berkshires earlier this month, though the men kept wandering outside, despite the pouring rain, for recreational breaks. "How nice not to be the focus for a change," Ms. Simon said. Their show, a medley of songs that includes some of her old hits, would open a yearlong multimedia installation at Mass MoCA's Kidspace by Consenses, the arts organization that Ms. Taylor founded half a dozen years ago. Paintings by fifth grade students have been reinterpreted by artists from around the world in different forms from music to perfume to poetry. This artistic game of telephone, as Ms. Taylor puts it, is also the basis of an educational program she has developed that focuses on empathy and perception. It has been a career shift for someone who, like nearly every person in her very large extended family, has mostly worked as a musician though she resisted what she refers to as "the Gig" until she was in her 20s. Now 44, Ms. Taylor was dressed on this day in a taut beige halter top, a Sri Lankan skirt, strings of beads and dangling bell earrings borrowed from her mother. She wore her abundant curly blond hair tied in a knot. At Brown University, Ms. Taylor studied medical anthropology, a major she created after taking time off to research the health benefits of coca leaves with Andrew Weil, the alternative medicine guru, in Peru. "No, that's not a joke," she said cheerfully. It was a typical day in musical Camelot, a shabby chic Bohemia bedazzled with rock star mementos. In a downstairs bathroom, at about knee level, there's a photograph of Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger backstage at Madison Square Garden taken by Eddie Kramer, who produced Ms. Simon's first album; they look like teenagers. If you're sitting down in there, one of Ms. Simon's many gold records, the single of "Nobody Does It Better," has been strategically placed. Ms. Simon said, "She's telling a pathetic story and making it nice." Ms. Simon shares the house with her boyfriend of 12 years, Richard Koehler, a surgeon who took this reporter's coat, offered her tea and then repaired to a barn to work on a sailboat he is restoring. "He reminds me of Myles Standish," Ms. Simon said. Mr. Saw, a 43 year old Englishman, has been playing music with Mr. Taylor for over a decade. Ms. Hiller , 28 and also British, met Mr. Taylor backstage after one of his shows in London when she was 14; they fell in love a decade later, after she'd been touring as a backup singer for Tom Jones, the Welsh crooner, among others Mr. Forte, 43, and Mr. Taylor, 41, have been friends since high school. Soft spoken but with a rock star's sheen, Mr. Forte, a producer of the Fugees, the 1990s era band, grew up in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn and went to Phillips Exeter Academy on a scholarship. In 2000, he was arrested on charges of drug possession with the intent to distribute, and spent seven years in prison before his sentence was commuted by George W. Bush, largely through the efforts of Ms. Simon and an unlikely ally Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah. "Do you know how incredibly lucky I am to have them as close as I do?" Ms. Simon said scooping up the group with a wave. "Is everyone O.K.? I'm sorry there's no background music but it's a Sonos system and no one knows how to work it. I'm going upstairs to put some CBD oil on my knee." Ben Taylor, who wore a chest length beard and enormous laced boots, asked if he could go join Mr. Saw and Mr. Forte, who were out on the porch and seemed to be generating their own version of a cannabis product, judging from the faint tang that had begun to mingle with the perfume of the peonies that crowded the room. When Ms. Taylor was 20 and on her Peruvian walkabout, she toured the Nasca lines, ancient geoglyphs that you can see best from the air, and the small plane she was in crashed on the Pan American Highway. As it was going down, Ms. Taylor had two thoughts, she said: "If I survive, I want to make music, and I want to have kids." Mindful of the shadow cast by her famous parents, she had resisted entering their field, unlike her brother, who hasn't been as bedeviled by the challenges of the family business, and long ago made his peace with its hardships. "I went to a therapist and said, 'This is crazy, right?' And she said, 'Yeah, it's crazy,'" Ms. Taylor recalled. "'But if I need to do this, what steps could I take to not get hammered?' We came up with this plan to not wake up the ego. One of them is never read an article about yourself. Another is don't believe the applause." Ms. Taylor formed a band, bought a van and christened it "Moby" (for the whale, not the musician), and toured for five years. She organized every aspect of the band's work: the performances, the press and the distribution of the music, packing up each CD with a thank you note. All went swimmingly until she had a fight with her boyfriend on the telephone. "I hung up and felt so awful about myself," Ms. Taylor said, "I got onstage and used that audience like a drug. Once you do that, you are powerless against it. Having watched my parents go through the emotional roller coaster of a career in music, from an early age I saw it as a substance that was abusable and could take you down. I saw both of them struggle with it successfully and not so successfully. " Mr. Taylor also famously struggled with addiction to heroin. It was he who taught his daughter not to read her press. "The complete opposite was my mom's way: 'I have no secrets and I have no armor so there is nothing to hide.'" Ms. Taylor said. "I feel like I have used both of those strategies." "Lightning doesn't always strike twice in one family," said Alexandra Styron, a novelist and a daughter of William Styron, who knows a thing or two about the obstacles facing the children of famous parents. "Growing up as we did gives you a very skewed take on what it means to be successful. It can feel like anything less than superstardom will be failure. Sometimes it can take a while to find your particular niche. It's really cool that Sally has found her own corner where she can celebrate art and be in control of it." Running Consenses is indeed a much happier career for her, Ms. Taylor said, though it has its own challenges. With some 150 contributors, each installation takes about two years to put together. But once the work begins to come in, Ms. Taylor said, "It's like Christmas. It's so different, so full of light and laughter." How would Ms. Simon describe her daughter? "How about if she were a fruit?" Ms. Simon said. "That's a very Consenses question. If she were a fruit, she would be a ripe apricot. Because of her coloring, her smile, her ebullience." It was time for dinner: vegan shepherd's pie. Ms. Simon led a tour through the meandering house while Morgan Rietzas, who owns a taxi company here, waited patiently in the driveway for this reporter. Mr. Rietzas, it turned out, is the saxophonist for the Boogies, a decades old disco tribute band that Ms. Taylor used to headline when she was in her 20s. "Each piece of our lives here gets sewn together," Ms. Taylor said later, noting the hothouse that is Martha's Vineyard. "It threads together like a string of beads that becomes one grand version of who you are." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
It Was 50 Years Ago Today, the Marathon Came to New York to Stay None Many sports fans assume the New York City Marathon has always occurred in October or early November, and always run through the five boroughs. That's not the case. Indeed, the first New York City Marathon took place entirely within Central Park, and it happened 50 years ago, on Sunday, Sept. 13, 1970. You couldn't say it was an instant hit. There were 127 starters and just 55 finishers. It preceded the so called running boom by a half dozen years. Even I, a New Yorker and a committed marathon runner then, didn't enter. As a busy magazine publisher, I focused all my attention each year on the Boston Marathon, held in April. On that Sunday morning in 1970, I decided to run the Central Park loop in the opposite direction from the runners. It was a fun way to log a long training run while cheering for my many friends in the race, including the marathon's co directors, Fred Lebow and Vince Chiappetta. I was among the few bona fide spectators that day. Most of the cyclists and pedestrians weaving in and out among the runners were just enjoying a car free Sunday in Central Park. They didn't seem to realize that a race was taking place. The winner, Gary Muhrcke, almost passed up the marathon. The previous night had been unusually busy for Muhrcke, a 30 year old firefighter, who was summoned to action several times near his station house in Far Rockaway. So at 8:30 Sunday morning, on almost no sleep, he called his wife, Jane, to suggest they spend the day relaxing at home in Freeport, Long Island. "I'm too tired to drive into the city and run a marathon," he said. Jane Muhrcke had a different sort of fatigue. With three young children to tend to all week, she was eager for an outing. She gently suggested they stick with their plans, and her husband acquiesced. Gary Muhrcke breaking the tape at the finish line in 1970. Muhrcke wore the No. 2 race bib, befitting his status as the best local runner at the time. Bib No. 1 went to Ted Corbitt, a renowned figure in the nascent distance running community. He made the United States Olympic marathon team in 1952, won numerous marathons and ultramarathons and later led the movement to measure road race courses precisely. At age 50, Corbitt was still a top competitor in 1970. The marathon started at 11 a.m. It was hot and humid. Muhrcke and Corbitt started conservatively over the hilly course that included four full loops of Central Park. Moses Mayfield, a Philadelphia distance running standout, jumped to an early lead, and still looked strong at 20 miles. Then, struck by a dizzy spell, he faded to eighth place . Muhrcke worked his way up through the field, and caught Mayfield at 24 miles. "Moses looked like he was pushing a piano up a steep hill," Muhrcke later recalled. He cruised to victory, breaking the tape in 2 hours, 31 minutes, 39 seconds. A 19 year old New Jersey college student, Tom Fleming, finished second (2:35:44), and Corbitt ran 2:44 for fifth place. There was only one woman in the field, Nina Kuscsik. She had run 3:12 five months earlier at Boston, but she came down with the flu just before the New York City race and had to drop out at 14 miles. The next day's New York Times published a short article, with no photographs, on page 54. Jane and Gary Muhrcke with their children after the race. The next five New York City Marathons were also held in Central Park, with the field growing to slightly over 500 starters. Fleming won two times, as did Kuscsik. In 1972, Jane Muhrcke began crafting the laurel wreaths that have crowned the winner ever since. Sadly, this year's marathon had to be canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic and become a virtual event instead. Gary Muhrcke, now 80, briefly considered running the virtual marathon this fall. When I asked him about this recently, he told me he was still running most days, then added: "I do love a challenge, George, but honestly I'm not sure I feel like running a marathon." I reminded him that he had said almost the same thing on a warm September morning in 1970. George A. Hirsch is the chairman of the New York Road Runners and the founding publisher of New York magazine. He was also the worldwide publisher of Runner's World and a founder of the five borough New York City Marathon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LOS ANGELES The gallery M B sold out its show of surreal, cloud dappled landscapes by Leo Mock over the summer. The work was enigmatic, with images of long, birdlike legs stepping through the paintings. The official "artist bio" was also mysterious, saying only that Mr. Mock had graduated from ArtCenter College of Design and "lives and works in Los Angeles." But those in the know soon discovered that Leo Mock was actually the alias of one Steve Hanson, a local art dealer pursuing his sideline career. Leo was his uncle's name; Mock, his mother's maiden name but it works as a jab at the art market, too: "People don't like artists having two careers," said Mr. Hanson, a founder of the pioneering Chinatown gallery China Art Objects. "I'm an old punk rocker and all of those musicians take pseudonyms," he explained by phone. How to exhibit your own work is just one of the challenges facing artists who open up shop as dealers, a deep rooted tradition that is thriving these days across this art obsessed city. Another is juggling the demands of making art while running a gallery, two careers not known for reliable revenue streams. But a surprising number of artists in Los Angeles have been opening commercial spaces anyway, giving the city's gallery scene a scrappy energy all its own and providing a strong counternarrative to the idea that visual culture here is defined by the recent influx of New York and international galleries. "L.A. has a long history of artist run galleries it's where so much experimentation and innovation take place," said Bettina Korek, the director of Frieze Los Angeles. She called the model an alternative to the usual white cube and "a great reminder that art can happen anywhere." Amy Bessone is a Los Angeles painter and sculptor with a high profile New York gallery (Salon 94) but she still supports artist run galleries at home: She had a solo show at the Pit last year and has work in a group show at La Loma Projects now. She credits these spaces with generating a "sense of solidarity and community," as well as "bringing a lot of artists out to see their shows." Their openings are also inclusive, she said, complete with "children, dogs, friends of friends, and sometimes tacos," minus the fancy after opening dinners. Chadwick Gibson, founder of Smart Objects, contends that "making art makes you more attuned to what's going on" in the culture. "A lot of galleries will say they show new or emerging artists," he added, "but if you go back you'll find that they showed at three artist run spaces first." He started his gallery in Echo Park at the end of 2012 specifically to hold an exhibition of his own work screen shots of gallery and museum interiors he printed from Google Art Project, where the operator's camera is caught in the image, a way of turning the Google eye on itself. He has just leased more space next to the gallery with plans to turn it into a ballroom of analog games. Devon Oder and Adam Miller, the wife and husband founders of the Pit, "In our branding, we like to say we're an artist run space," said Mr. Miller, calling their business "collaborative" in the spirit of musician run record labels like Dischord Records or Lookout Records. They produce zines for many of their shows (doing designs, printing and binding in house) and are known for their flexibility in scheduling. He remembers a big fair two years ago when four out of five artists could not make their deadline for delivering artworks to be photographed. He supplied older artwork instead and rescheduled the shoot. "When those things happen, instead of hammering artists about deadlines, we are more likely to pivot and accommodate the creative process," he said. As a figurative painter, Emma Gray of Five Car Garage said she realizes "how long it can take for an artist's vision to come in I hold the torch for them." Her old fashioned training in portraiture at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London ("no electric lighting was allowed") also helps her "talk to painters about painting." She founded the gallery in 2013 after moving to a home in Santa Monica that had a large custom built garage for a car collector. Now, the garage is the gallery, with a meditation studio on the property that she uses for community sound baths, breath work, and performances involving her artists, such as Alison Blickle (a practicing witch) and Lazaro (or "L," an alchemist). In her own studio next door, Ms. Gray is currently working on a series of "fire" paintings based on her experience fire walking in Santa Fe. Eve Fowler, a co founder of seminomadic Artist Curated Projects, says that giving artists agency was the goal of her program, started in 2008 out of her own apartment with a colleague, Lucas Michael. "We had so many friends who were good artists and didn't have shows. We also felt like artists don't have any power," she added so early on, they invited artists to share the decision making and organize the shows. Her last show featured optically "tricky" paintings by a graduate student in fine arts, Kate Mosher Hall. But now that Ms. Fowler's own queer forward, text based art is gaining traction a recent film is heading to the New Museum in New York for a screening she is not sure she will continue the gallery. On the flip side, some artists who found their calling as gallerists have decided to postpone their own art careers, perhaps permanently. Davida Nemeroff of the downtown destination Night Gallery, says she stopped making work in 2016 when her gallery partner left and she had to take over all operations. "I realized from my own artists how much time and energy you need to put into your practice, and I just didn't have that," she said. Young Chung, a founder of Commonwealth Council in Koreatown, said he "went back in the closet as an artist" and stopped making work in 2012, two years after opening the space in his apartment. At that time, he said, "a Getty curator came to see one of our artist's works but then the conversation gravitated to my own work in that moment, I realized I had a conflict of interest." Every artist dealer contacted for this story acknowledged the potential conflicts when juggling the two roles: whose work are you really promoting? Most have included their own work in an occasional group show but said they would not give themselves a solo show, with Ms. Gray saying she feels like it's "largely unethical to cross the line." Ms. Fowler said: "I just didn't think it would look good. I thought other opportunities would come up, which they did." But Mr. Gibson, who opened his space to have a venue for his Google project, conceded, "I understand why people might think it's tacky, " adding, "it's O.K. if the artists you show are good with it." Some gallerists sidestep the conflicts by refusing to promote their own art. Robert Gunderman rarely showed his own work while running the influential gallery ACME with Randy Sommer for 22 years. But after the gallery closed in 2017, Mr. Gunderman reinvented himself as an artist, with two strong shows of his lushly textured abstract paintings organized by the curator Lauri Firstenberg. It turned out that Mr. Gunderman had been painting fairly consistently, and discreetly, all along. "Only a few people knew I had a studio," he said. "And I would tell them I had six cats there " to keep them away. (Visitors to Frieze can see his work in a pop up space called The Street The Shop on the backlot of Paramount Studios.) As for Leo Mock, better known as Steve Hanson, he is now busy painting in Merida, Mexico, where he recently moved with his wife, Tuesday Yates. But he has not given up his idea of running a gallery. To that end, the couple is currently rehabbing part of an old bus depot in Merida. Still confounding the art world, they plan to call it China Art Objects. Five Car Garage, open Saturdays and by appointment, info emmagrayhq.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The journalist Alexandra Pascalidou has spent months watching a sexual abuse and corruption scandal unfurl at the Swedish Academy, the august body that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. At first, she was upset. Then, as a Swede, embarrassed. But when the academy took the extraordinary step of canceling this year's prize, she became a little angry, too. "I just thought, 'Why do the authors have to pay the price for this mess?' " she said in a telephone interview on Friday. That led her to another question: "How hard can running a prize be?" Now, Ms. Pascalidou with the help of over 100 prominent Swedish cultural figures, including actors, novelists and a rapper has started her own prize. The winner of the New Academy Prize in Literature will be announced on Oct. 14, and will receive one million kronor, or around 112,000. There will also be a banquet in the winner's honor, just as there would be for a Nobel laureate. But there is one big difference between the prizes: You can be involved in this one. Voting opened on the prize's website this week with a 46 strong list of nominees, selected by Swedish librarians. Rather than the highbrow and sometimes obscure names usually touted for the Nobel, this list includes J.K. Rowling, alongside the singer Patti Smith, the British fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and the Nigerian born novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Graham abandoned the tidy compression of her early work if you're a fan, you might think of poems like "An Artichoke for Montesquieu" or "San Sepolcro" a long time ago. Her latter day poems arrive instead like effusions, Whitmanic gusts of words, as if she's channeling a sort of emergency scripture. "Runaway" feels as though it has been written for right now, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on. You imagine someone in the future flipping through it, finding a record of a great unraveling, and spending hours trying to decipher it. In the poem "I'm Reading Your Mind," Graham appears to anticipate engaging with such a reader: Deciphering it won't be a cakewalk for that future pupil. The suggestion that Graham can be willfully cryptic is not a new one. (One voice from that aforementioned cacophony, David Orr, referred in The Times to "the fogginess that has been a chronic problem in her work" back in 2005.) Another way of saying it might be that she chooses to err on the side of Team Beauty instead of Team Coherence. But if you really are new to Jorie Graham's body of work, you could read her poems, as you might read Nathaniel Mackey's or John Ashbery's, less for a quick click of understanding than for the pleasures of the flow. Snippets of her lyrics can stop you in your tracks. Look anywhere: "Stillness in time. Rich concentrate." "Honeysuckle, / bramble, vine, / vibration / and / web tremble." "Take this October. The deep white turn the air is taking. / How many more / Octobers. Is there another October with us in it. / Blood flows in my hand writing this." "The phone call comes. You pick up the / receiver and hear the / final sounds of the islands. They are murmuring we want to / weep and lie down." And "on the screen / in the screen / you die. Are / dying. It's taking / time." Over the years, in poems such as "The Surface," Graham has written skillfully about rivers. Her body of work, too, can be experienced like a river, a current that passes through patches of stillness and turbulence and winds up being all the more mesmerizing because of its constant movement. "Runaway" reminds us that Graham is aware of where that current is heading for her and for all of us. If the book begins with a wet roar, it ends with a dry whisper, when Graham's narrator "accidentally / listening" picks up a signal from the home that humanity seems determined to leave in ruins. This last poem in the book is simply called "Poem," and here the churn of Graham's language settles into a benediction that couldn't be clearer: | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Other than timing, Jon Stewart's triumphant retirement and Brian Williams's public and humbling disenfranchisement would seem to have little in common. But begin with the fact that both men went to high school in New Jersey and both began their adult lives without much going for them, other than a sense that the island with all of the tall buildings in the distance suggested there was more to life than volunteering as a firefighter (Mr. Williams) or tending bar (Mr. Stewart). Both men made up for lost time once they got into their careers. Mr. Williams churned through assignments and assumed an anchor chair on MSNBC and at NBC on the weekends while he was in his 30s, and slid into the big chair in 2004 by the time he was 45. Mr. Stewart ground it out in stand up, working almost nightly at the Comedy Cellar, then landed some TV gigs here and there. After blowing up large on the "Late Night With David Letterman" in 1993, he was thought to be a favorite to replace him, but that job went to Conan O'Brien. It was only when he got his hands on the wheel of "The Daily Show" that he found his sweet spot and opened up a singular vein in American comedy. Both men spent more than a decade on top of their businesses for good reasons. Mr. Stewart had a remarkable eye for hypocrisy, found amazing writers and executed their work and his own with savage grace, no small feat. Mr. Williams managed to convey gravitas and self awareness at the same time while sitting atop one of the best television news operations in the business. They were kings of their respective crafts. But now they are both done, at least for the time being. Mr. Stewart, who said Tuesday he would leave "The Daily Show'' sometime this year, leaves on top, on his own terms. For all the cynicism assigned to his approach, Mr. Stewart is at heart a patriot and an idealist. Again and again, his indictment of politicians and media figures was less about what they were and more about what they failed to be. It is telling that when he did take time off from hosting his show, he did so to make a feature film called "Rosewater," about Maziar Bahari, an Iranian journalist who was imprisoned shortly after appearing on "The Daily Show." His subject was, in essence, being punished for an act of speech and Mr. Stewart, in spite of his nightly beatdowns of the press, admires the profession. You got the feeling after a while that he had grown tired of pointing out the foibles of the press and the politicians he covered. His version of the news may have started as fake, but it was seeming more and more real all the time. Oddly, Mr. Stewart will leave his desk as arguably the most trusted man in news. And Mr. Williams will find his way back to his desk only if he figures out a way to regain the trust he has squandered. Mr. Williams is now all but locked in his own home he might as well have an ankle monitor on. There is no playbook on how to come back from such a fall. Stephen B. Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, said everyone deserved a second chance. I very much agree. I just can't figure out how that second chance comes at NBC. What is the path to that? At what point will the tabloids and blogs take their boot off his neck and allow him to go to the gym, take a walk, have dinner with friends, let alone begin to resume a kind of active rehabilitation whatever that looks like in the public eye? When news of his untruths first broke, I think it was commonly believed that Mr. Williams was too big to fail. He seemed to think he would find a way to thread the needle and keep his job. But after a week of management miscues, aided by Mr. Williams's ham handed apology and misguided self exile, NBC executives took firm control of what they came to see as an existential threat to the credibility of their news operation and suspended him. It is difficult to surmise what Mr. Stewart will do next he has been plain about the fact that he isn't sure himself in part because his next step is not a natural one. His talents do not fit easily into that of a generic talk show host. His interview skills are intermittent and his interest in that kind of thing would seem to be low. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. While Mr. Stewart is adept at live television, you get the feeling that his need for its blandishments have diminished over time. He may be that odd celebrity who says he is taking time off to spend with his family and actually means it. "I'm going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people," he said in his announcement, which was a surprise in terms of timing, but not in terms of intention. We all knew he was getting close to done. Mr. Williams is another matter. I visited him at his apartment in 2011 when he was doing promotion for "Rock Center," a newsmagazine that did not pan out. He made the source of his happiness plain. "When you see me on television, I am there,'' he said. "That is where I am." Gesturing toward the big flat panel on the wall of his apartment, he added, "I am a creature of live television." Still, it was not enough for him to be the No. 1 anchor of the No. 1 news program in America. Perhaps he sensed that he was king of an entropic kingdom imprisoned by incontinence and cholesterol ads. As the ever more manic news cycle whirred around his evening newscast, it would be hard not to feel a little beside the point. And so came the serial talk show appearances on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" and "Late Show With David Letterman." He appeared several times on "30 Rock," often as a version of himself, and hosted "Saturday Night Live." He was good at all these things, good enough so that when NBC was thinking about a successor for Jay Leno, Mr. Williams raised his hands, a gesture that went over like a box of rocks with his overseers. And, of course, there were appearances on "The Daily Show," including a very funny few minutes in August 2012. Mr. Stewart was mocking something that had been on the NBC newscast, and Mr. Williams mentioned that sometimes when he is writing the show, he actually thinks of what Mr. Stewart will do with the same material. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Five years ago, Aline and Jack Tabibian moved from Tenafly, N.J., to Edgewater, a borough in Bergen County that is proportioned like a rasher of bacon. Three and a half miles long, and a few blocks wide at its broadest, Edgewater skims the west side of the Hudson River, from North Bergen to Fort Lee. "Being on the water is No. 1 for us," Ms. Tabibian, 47, said about the move. The couple's two bedroom duplex townhouse on Mariners Cove, which they rent for about 4,000 a month, has a backyard terrace overlooking the river with views of Upper Manhattan. But Ms. Tabibian is equally likely to enjoy the view of the water filling a lobster pot. In 2015, she and her husband opened Jack's Lobster Shack, an Edgewater restaurant modeled on the casual seafood places the couple visited on frequent trips to Maine. Mr. Tabibian handles much of the business side, while Ms. Tabibian oversees the kitchen. Their home is two minutes away (on foot) and also near major retailers like Whole Foods and Staples. When traffic chokes River Road, Edgewater's main artery, they take advantage of the nearby ferry service for weekday transportation to Manhattan. But this borough of 12,000 has plenty of quirks. Just down the road from Jack's Lobster Shack, perched on utility poles, are giant birds' nests, built by members of a colony of Quaker parrots that arrived in Edgewater more than 40 years ago. The parrots are believed to have escaped from their shipping crate at Kennedy Airport in the late 1960s, eventually making their way to New Jersey. Even the malls here score points for exoticism. Mitsuwa Marketplace, a Japanese food hall and superstore, is part of a shopping complex on River Road that caters to the area's large East Asian population. Slightly north, one finds not only a Trader Joe's but also a docked ferryboat or what is left of it the Binghamton, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. After transporting passengers across the Hudson from 1905 to 1967, the Binghamton became a floating restaurant and was eventually swamped by Hurricane Sandy. In July, demolition is expected to begin to make way for a replacement boat and restaurant, scheduled to open next year. Once an industrial center where Ford cars were assembled and Dove soap was invented, Edgewater still bears some blight. The Quanta Resources site, a 16 acre lot on River Road at the intersection of Gorge Road that was used to process coal tar in the 19th century and recycle waste oil that turned out to be laden with polychlorinated biphenylsin the 20th, was declared a Superfund site in 2002. Remediation efforts led by Honeywell International, which owned the plant where the coal tar was processed, began last month. Another long awaited project is the revitalization of Veterans Field, near the river, which had been closed since 2011 because its soil was contaminated by tainted concrete used in a previous reconstruction effort. The new park has been reconstructed with sports fields, tennis courts, a playground and a bandshell. The opening ceremony is planned for June 30. According to the website Neighborhood Scout, 78 percent of housing in Edgewater was built after 1969, and more than two thirds of the borough residents are renters. Of the 160 Edgewater residential properties advertised for sale on the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service website as of Tuesday, only six were single family houses. Kathy Dorfman, owner of Greenkat Realty in Edgewater, said developers maximized their profits by building bigger, multifamily structures on the decreasing number of available lots. On the east side of River Road, along the water, Ms. Dorfman said, the buildings are typically condominiums, including her own home, Admiral's Walk, a 300 unit gated development on almost nine acres. Across the road, rental complexes are more common, like the Alexander, a 280 unit ornate building built in 2012 with marble columns, lion sculptures and indoor and outdoor pools. (Lavish amenities are frequently found in the area's condo and rental buildings, Ms. Dorfman said.) To the west, where Edgewater climbs the slope of the Palisades before abruptly coming to an end, homes are predominantly townhouses, which can rise as high as four floors plus a rooftop structure and do not have backyards. "And everything, bottom line, is about the view," Ms. Dorfman said. An attraction of new condo buildings, like the Glass House in the Edgewater Harbor development, is their dedicated transparency. According to Trulia, the median sales price of homes in Edgewater as of Tuesday was 600,300, an increase of 7 percent over the previous 12 months. The price of single family homes advertised on the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service as of Tuesday ranged from 529,000 for a three bedroom brick and shingled house at 7 Edgewater Place to 2.85 million for a two bedroom house directly on the water, with dock, at 11 Shore Road. The 154 co ops and condominiums advertised included a studio at 1375 River Road for 125,000 and a three bedroom unit at 9 Somerset Lane for 2,999,000. Bergen County is the last county in the United States to prohibit the sale of many consumer goods on Sundays, which makes Edgewater, with its five shopping centers, especially lively on Saturdays. Go early to get a jump on the crowds waiting for ramen at Santouka, a restaurant in Mitsuwa Marketplace's food court, or for pancake wrapped omelets at Brownstone Pancake Factory at 860 River Road. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In a sudden shake up at one of Hollywood's biggest companies, three top executives have left WarnerMedia, the AT T division that houses HBO and the streaming service HBO Max, the company announced on Friday. The surprise moves came three months into the tenure of the WarnerMedia chief executive, Jason Kilar, who has wasted little time putting his stamp on the company. Robert Greenblatt, the chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, is out after little more than a year on the job. Kevin Reilly, WarnerMedia's chief content officer, is also departing, as is Keith Cocozza, the executive vice president of marketing and communications, who worked at the company for 19 years. Asked about the departures, Mr. Kilar said in a phone interview on Friday: "Disciplined companies have to make tough decisions." In a note to WarnerMedia employees that announced the moves, Mr. Kilar said the company would emphasize HBO Max. The company unveiled the streaming platform on May 27 in a crowded field that includes Netflix, with its 193 million subscribers, as well as Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and the relative newcomers Disney , AppleTV and NBCUniversal's Peacock. "We are elevating HBO Max in the organization and expanding its scope globally," Mr. Kilar wrote. With Mr. Greenblatt and Mr. Reilly gone, Mr. Kilar has given more responsibility to two WarnerMedia executives, Ann Sarnoff, who joined the company in June as the chief executive of the Warner Bros., and Andy Forssell, the general manager of HBO Max. In addition to overseeing the Warner Bros. movie and television studio, Ms. Sarnoff will lead a new unit, the studios and networks group, which brings together the company's original productions, including programming for HBO, HBO Max and the cable channels TNT, TBS and TruTV. Ms. Sarnoff, who has had leadership roles at Nickelodeon, the Women's National Basketball Association, Dow Jones and BBC America, will also be in charge of TV series made for WarnerMedia. Her business partner will bet Mr. Forssell, Mr. Kilar's former colleague at Hulu, who will report directly to the chief executive. A longtime HBO executive, Casey Bloys, was also promoted. In addition to heading original content at HBO, he will be in charge of original programming for HBO Max, TNT, TBS and TruTV. He will report to Ms. Sarnoff. Jeff Zucker, the longtime CNN head, was unaffected. Under Mr. Kilar, he remains the chairman of WarnerMedia's news and sports units. Christy Haubegger, the chief enterprise inclusion officer, will take over Mr. Cocozza's role of overseeing the global marketing and communications team. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Kilar, 48, who came to WarnerMedia after a stint at Amazon, was appointed to his job by John Stankey, a veteran AT T executive who ran WarnerMedia from June 2018 until May 1. Mr. Stankey became the chief executive of AT T on July 1, replacing Randall L. Stephenson. In the entertainment world, Mr. Kilar was considered a thoughtful executive who happened to be the chief executive (and chief architect) of Hulu when streaming was still a novelty. With his bold restructuring on Friday, he has gained a reputation as a forceful Hollywood player. The changes at WarnerMedia broke apart the team Mr. Stankey had assembled last year, when he ran the division after a three decade career spent mostly in telecommunications. In a resignation that got the attention of media insiders, Richard Plepler, the longtime head of HBO who led the network to 160 Emmys, left the company in February 2019. Mr. Stankey effectively replaced him with Mr. Greenblatt, who named Mr. Reilly, the onetime leader of the cable channels TNT and TBS, as WarnerMedia's head of content. Despite his evangelism for HBO Max and all things digital, Mr. Kilar said he was a believer in the traditional moviegoing experience. "Tenet," the much anticipated Warner Bros. sci fi film directed by Christopher Nolan, is still on the schedule for a Labor Day release. But Mr. Kilar noted that, even before the pandemic shut down theaters nationwide, the movie business was moving away from long theatrical runs. "For anyone to suggest that the theatrical construct isn't going to change over the next few years I think is not paying close attention," he said. "There will be shortened windows. But in no way is Warner Media stepping away from the deep embrace of theatrical exhibition." Mr. Kilar declined to comment on whether Warner Bros. would consider something like the deal AMC Entertainment signed last month with Universal Pictures. Under the arrangement, Universal agreed to shorten the theatrical window to 17 days, down from the industry norm of 90 days, and give AMC a share of video on demand revenue. The rise of digital media has profoundly altered the entertainment business, Mr. Kilar said, putting the studios in a position to distribute their films and TV shows to audiences without having to rely on other companies. "If you take a look at the history of WarnerMedia, or any media company, they largely had a history of wholesaling," he said in the interview. "They produce amazing stories, amazing content, and then work with partners who then interact with consumers. The gift that is the internet changes all of that. Suddenly, there is an opportunity to go direct to consumers, which I think is one of the biggest opportunities in the history of media." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"I'm pregnant," my patient's wife told me, her face a tapestry of conflicting emotions. My patient was watching her, too, trying to figure out if he should echo her happiness, or her grief. "I'd like to offer congratulations, but I can't tell if that's what you want," I said, trying to feel her out. She had been holding her breath for what seemed like minutes, and finally exhaled before answering. "I don't know if I want to go through with the pregnancy." My patient flinched a bit, but didn't say anything. Both he and his wife were in their 30s, and he had been given a diagnosis of chronic myeloid leukemia a year earlier. C.M.L. is one of our great success stories in cancer therapies. In 2001 the drug imatinib was approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat the disease, and was so effective that almost immediately the number of C.M.L. patients who required bone marrow transplantation plummeted. Over 90 percent of patients achieve some sort of remission, which lasts for years in the majority. Since then, four other pills have been approved by the F.D.A. for C.M.L., each at least as effective, if not more so, than the original. My patient wasn't so lucky. His blood counts dropped to dangerously low levels with each medication we tried, none of which brought him close to a remission, and it appeared likely that he would need a bone marrow transplant in the next few months, a procedure that carried with it risks of serious health problems, and even death. "What's going through your mind?" I asked her. This time her husband responded. "I was taking the chemotherapy when she got pregnant. We're worried about birth defects." This was terrain I had traversed before. Data about pregnant women exposed to chemotherapy for treatment of cancer, summarized in a National Toxicology Program report, show an apparent rate of major congenital malformations of 14 percent following first trimester exposure, and 3 percent thereafter. The qualifier apparent is used because these are only estimates, as information about birth defects is not rigorously reported. For men on chemotherapy at the time of conception, the data are even sparser. As a result, we adjust recommendations about whether or not to continue with a pregnancy based on the timing of chemotherapy relative to the pregnancy, whether it is the man or woman who is exposed, and on the known likelihood that the chemotherapy will cause birth defects or fetal mortality. For patients who are pregnant in their first trimester with a new diagnosis of acute leukemia a cancer requiring high dose chemotherapy that is almost certain to induce death of the fetus I have recommended termination, as a blighted pregnancy would endanger the life of the immunocompromised mother. In this case, though, I thought the risk of birth defects were low, and explained this to my patient and his wife. He smiled and looked over to his wife, as if expecting her to join in his relief. But she still looked torn, staring straight ahead, somewhere into the space between him and me. "But he's going to have a transplant. What happens if I have this baby and he's not here to be its father?" she asked, now looking directly at me. Tears had started to wind down her cheeks. I reached for a box of tissues to hand to her, half expecting her husband to say something encouraging about his prospects, to alleviate her fears. But he sat quietly, rubbing her back, staring into that same space she had occupied a few moments earlier. Perhaps he was struck silent by her honesty; or perhaps, by the reality of his condition. "Hopefully the transplant will go smoothly, he'll be cured of his leukemia, and we'll all look back at this conversation and wonder why we even had it," I told her. His focus shifted back to us. "But you both know," I continued, "there are no guarantees. On the one hand, it will be hard to care for a baby and for him as he goes through the transplant. It may be even harder if he doesn't survive." They nodded in agreement. "On the other hand, if the worst happens, and he dies, you'll still have a part of him that will live on." They sat in silence, my patient and his wife, each thinking about their possible futures: one with him present as a father, and one without. This wasn't my decision to make, or one in which I could provide any more informed advice. I sensed they wanted time to be alone, and said goodbye as I got up to leave. My clinic rooms, clean and nondescript as they are, sometimes provide a safe house for laying bare the difficult thoughts, the wrenching decisions, that tug on my patients. I couldn't guide this couple on what to do about the pregnancy, but they weren't really asking me to. They just wanted to be heard. By me, but more important, by each other. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Nobody wants a 50 game Major League Baseball season. The players want more games. The team owners want more games. The fans want more games. But with each passing day, that scenario becomes more and more likely. Monday was another discouraging day for the players and the owners, those bickering bedfellows who control the resumption of a sport still stubbornly on pause. When the coronavirus pandemic shuttered spring training on March 12, the sides forged a new economic agreement in about two weeks. They also pledged to hold good faith talks about the feasibility of proceeding without fans in the stands. All these weeks later, there is no indication that the two sides can negotiate a settlement. Without one, Commissioner Rob Manfred can impose a regular season schedule as he sees fit, which would mean a roughly 50 game season, at full, prorated pay, to be completed by the end of September, with the playoffs and the World Series in October. (The players' union must agree to any potential postseason expansion beyond the current format.) The players agreed in March to take prorated salaries based on how many games they played in 2020, and they have not budged from that stance. Their refusal to do so has exasperated Manfred, whose latest proposal, on Monday, is sure to be rejected by the union. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
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