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Sizing Up the Better Business Bureau, and Its Rivals on the Internet OVER the years, when writing about subjects as varied as driving schools and air duct cleaners, I've given the seemingly benign advice to check out companies with the Better Business Bureau. Like most people, I saw the century old institution as a helpful tool for consumers. But then I wrote an article about a slightly dodgy company that many people reported problems with. When I looked it up on the Better Business Bureau website, it had an A plus rating. And I started wondering. There are other options out there like Angie's List and Yelp, to name a few of the better known. Just those three rating services alone give millions of people information about millions of companies every year. Consumers and companies find them very useful on one extreme or worse than useless on the other. But few know how they actually work. So here are some tips on how the raters rate to help you decide how much credence to give the information they provide, starting with the Better Business Bureau, the oldest and arguably best known. First of all, it's important to lay out what the Better Business Bureau is and isn't. It isn't a government agency and has no enforcement power. And despite often being labeled such, it is not a consumer watchdog organization. It was started back in 1912 by businesses primarily to correct advertising abuses. It now operates as a nonprofit with almost five million businesses in the bureau's database; only about 400,000 of those are accredited. Accredited is a term that may confuse consumers. A business can only be called accredited if it pays a fee, which varies by location, but starts at about 300 annually and goes up, and meets standards set by the bureau, which include a scoutlike list of requirements such as advertising honestly, telling the truth and being transparent. A business is also listed in the bureau's database if it asks to be or if a consumer files a complaint. Local Better Business Bureaus are funded primarily by accreditation fees. The national office receives a portion of those fees and is also funded by corporations through its self regulatory programs. Now about those ratings: Companies are given an A plus through F rating based on a number of factors, including the size of the business, how long it has operated, how it responds to each complaint and whether that complaint has been resolved or the Better Business Bureau deems it resolved. Even if the customer is dissatisfied in the end but the business seems to have made "a good faith effort," as decided by the bureau, then the complaint is decided in the company's favor, said a bureau spokeswoman, Katherine Hutt. In the last several years, the Better Business Bureau has been battered by bad ratings of its own. News reports, including a scathing one on 20/20, detailed how the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau inflated the grade of a business if the company bought a membership. In 2011, David Segal, who writes The Haggler column for The New York Times, did a series looking at customers' complaints about the bureau. Since then, the bureau has made some changes. It used to give an A plus only to accredited businesses, Ms. Hutt said. That is no longer true. In July, the bureau made permanent a pilot program that gives details about the complaints filed; before they were simply put in categories such as "advertising issue" or "problem with a service or product." Earlier this year, after a lengthy and what Ms. Hutt called an "exhaustive internal process," the Los Angeles bureau, one of 113 local chapters in the United States and Canada, was kicked out. A new one is expected to open soon. The Los Angeles chapter was one of a kind, Ms. Hutt said, and is not part of any systemic problem. That doesn't mean everyone is happy with the bureau. On its own blog, frustrated consumers vent: "The BBB is a waste of time. You have done nothing for me and the companies just laugh about the 'threat' of the BBB," writes George Patrin. Similar comments are all over the web. On the other hand, Ashley writes that: "I personally have had a great experience with the BBB. After filing a complaint with them I was able to get just under 2,000 back from a company that did not provide their promised services." Angie's List is in some ways the flip side of the bureau. The consumer buys a membership, whose cost varies by location but 29 a year is fairly typical, said Angie Hicks, the founder of the 18 year old company. The list now has some two million members, double from two years ago. A member can peruse the companies and leave a review (a nonmember can also leave a review). Companies are graded on an A to F scale, and the grades are averaged if more than one person reviews them. The perk for companies that are rated B or higher is that they can buy advertising. This comes in the form of coupons offered to members for discounts on services, Ms. Hicks said. And those that advertise are put at the top of default searches, which Consumer Reports said in a September report of ratings services, skews the results. Most users are probably not aware that "70 percent of the company's revenues comes from advertising purchased by service providers," said Jeff Blyskal, a senior writer for Consumer Reports, who did the ratings report. Ms. Hicks disagreed. She said that members liked the idea that companies offered discount coupons and that those companies come up first on search results. As with the Better Business Bureau, there are plenty of satisfied and dissatisfied customers who have used Angie's List. And as an accredited company, it does have an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, with 233 complaints over the last three years, all of them closed. Another option is Yelp, which compared to the Better Business Bureau and Angie's List, is either sheer anarchy or refreshingly open. Anyone can look up a company on Yelp or leave a review. (It also has an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, is not accredited and had 1,181 closed complaints over the last three years.) The Consumers Report review also noted that allowing a company to get in touch with a disgruntled customer and make amends and the customer can then take down a negative review "undercuts the integrity and accuracy of the ratings." It's not easy to sort all this out. So some advice from the experts: Don't rely on any one source, especially if you're making an expensive investment. Check out specialized websites for example, PCWorld if you're looking for a computer. If you have a real problem with a business, go to the local or state agency that licenses the service you're using. And don't drive yourself crazy. Remember that one or two people can really skew the process. Consumers Report looked at one plumbing company in the San Francisco area for its review. Angie's List gave it a grade of F based on a review by one irate customer. It was an accredited company with the Better Business Bureau, which awarded it an A plus, with two complaints deemed resolved. And based on 20 reviews, it received a 2.5 out of maximum of 5 on Yelp. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
LOS ANGELES The lawsuit over Sumner M. Redstone's competency took a startling turn on Friday when the judge interrupted afternoon testimony to say that he was strongly entertaining a motion by Mr. Redstone's lawyers to dismiss the whole case. The development came after the ailing media mogul, in halting but fiery videotaped testimony, appeared to forcefully reject the proposal that his former lover, Manuela Herzer, who brought the lawsuit, make his health care decisions. Judge David J. Cowan delivered what amounted to a judicial bombshell as Dr. Stephen L. Read, an expert witness for Ms. Herzer, finished his testimony relating to Mr. Redstone's competence. Gabrielle Vidal, a lawyer for Mr. Redstone, asked that the judge reconsider their request for a dismissal. Judge Cowan said that he was leaning toward dismissal, but that he would review the matter over the weekend, and asked both sides to submit briefs. A decision to dismiss would put an end to a bitter, monthslong legal battle that has included thousands of pages of documents and exposed lurid details that industry observers say have tarnished both sides. It would also leave in place, for now, the controlling structure of his two big media companies, Viacom and CBS. Mr. Redstone is a director, chairman emeritus and controlling shareholder of both, and remains in control until he is either declared incompetent or dies. In bringing the suit, Ms. Herzer had claimed that the 92 year old billionaire wasn't competent when he removed her from a directive that would have put her in charge of his care. But in reopening the question of dismissal, Judge Cowan said he was relying heavily on Mr. Redstone's own statements in a profanity laced video that was played behind closed courtroom doors. "I think he said what he wanted to say," Judge Cowan said of the 18 minute video, in which Mr. Redstone repeatedly used obscene epithets in referring to Ms. Herzer, and said he did not want her involved with his health care. "How can I sit here and say, after seeing that video, 'No, you've got to have Manuela?'" Judge Cowan asked. In addition to Mr. Redstone's testimony, the judge said he was also strongly influenced by Dr. Read's acknowledgment under cross examination that Ms. Herzer at this point would not be a viable choice for management of Mr. Redstone's current or future care. In his testimony, videotaped on Thursday, Mr. Redstone said that he hated Ms. Herzer. In response to a question about whether he wanted Ms. Herzer to make health care decisions for him, Mr. Redstone replied, "No." "I want Manuela out of my life," Mr. Redstone said at the end of the session when his lawyer asked what he wanted at the end of the trial. The videotaped testimony was shown after reporters and spectators were cleared from the courtroom and a transcript was provided to news organizations afterward. In response to a question from his lawyer about who he wants to make his health care decisions if he is unable to do so himself, he responded with the name of his daughter: "Shar Shari." He also confirmed that he had been seeing his family lately and was happy with the nursing care that he was receiving. While Ms. Herzer claims that she is concerned about Mr. Redstone's well being, his lawyers say that she is after his money. On the same day Ms. Herzer was removed from the health care directive, she was also removed from Mr. Redstone's estate plan, in which he had planned to give her 50 million and his 20 million Los Angeles mansion. In his testimony, Mr. Redstone was able to answer some questions especially those with yes or no answers but did not respond to others. When asked what his birth name had been, for instance, he remained silent. (It is Sumner Murray Rothstein.) The transcript shows that the flow of the testimony was sporadic, and at one point his interpreter asked that Mr. Redstone's dentures be adjusted in order to better understand him. In the first question, he was asked who Ms. Herzer was. His response denigrated her with two obscene words. He repeated that description of her several times over the course of his testimony. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. During the testimony, Mr. Redstone said "yes" in response to a question about whether Ms. Herzer stole money from him, but was not able to say how much money she stole. He also confirmed that he once said that she was the love of his life, but that he did not still love her. When he later was asked by his lawyer why Ms. Herzer was ejected, he said, "She lied to me." When asked what Ms. Herzer had done to assist in his health care, he struggled to find words, repeated his obscenities about her, and failed to help an interpreter spell out an answer. "What's the first letter?" the interpreter finally asked. "L. The next letter? H. H. Next letter? I. E. H. E.," the interpreter continued. "She helped? Helped?" In opening statements, Ms. Herzer's lawyers sought to show that Mr. Redstone was mentally incompetent and under the undue influence of others when he removed Ms. Herzer last October from an advance directive that would have given her authority over his health care. Mr. O'Donnell cast Ms. Redstone as the central villain in a supposed conspiracy to deceive and manipulate him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In the wake of a New York Times report on sexual harassment allegations against the prominent architect Richard Meier, Sotheby's has closed an exhibition of collages and silk screens by Mr. Meier at its S2 Gallery in New York. In describing one example of Mr. Meier's misconduct, former female employees said they had been shown or asked to help with the architect's collages, which included images of female genitalia. Mr. Meier has issued an apology and taken a six month leave from his firm. "Under the circumstances, and in consultation with the Meier family, the decision has been made to close our exhibition early," the auction house said in a statement. The decision to end the show, which opened Feb. 28 and was supposed to run through March 29, was first reported by ARTnews. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Experts did little better than dog lovers and nobody did very well when asked to describe the heritage of various mutts. Oh, Lilly. I'd like to scratch your mutt ears and pet your mixed breed head, because although you're a mongrel, it's easy to guess the biggest portion of your heritage. Golden retriever? Of course. But well, you're a dog with a spotty inheritance. What exactly? I certainly can't guess. Maybe someone else can. Good luck. Both dogs were part of the MuttMix Project Survey, a scientific quiz conducted by Darwin's Dogs, a program run out of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. The researchers set up an online survey with pictures and video of 31 mutts, and participants were asked to guess the top three purebred strains comprising each one. The scientists waited two months to release the results. Recently every participant got an email telling them how poorly they did. Pretty much everyone did poorly. I was a participant, and I went into the project brimming with excitement. I finished burdened with a bit more humility than seemed entirely necessary. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. I knew I wasn't going to have a stellar record, and I was right. My score was well below average. I wasn't completely off the mark. Even I could tell that Lilly has a lot of golden retriever in her. So could a whopping 96 percent of the respondents on more than 10,000 completed surveys. But she also had some chow chow, which I did not guess. I'd like to emphasize that this was a really hard survey, like a test in high school French for which you have to know the subjunctive. I happen to know that you can wander around France and make yourself understood and catch at least a quarter of what people are saying with absolutely no use of the subjunctive. And that was pretty much the average accuracy of people participating in the survey: 25 percent. Self identified dog professionals did a bit better, barely. Their accuracy was 28 percent. The survey is part of the Broad Institute's studies of the genetics of dogs and the attitudes of people toward them. Researchers hope the results will help them better understand how "people evaluate and perceive mixed breed dogs." So far, the results show that we certainly don't perceive their heritage very well. Their makeup offers a reminder that the breeds prevalent in today's mutts may reflect the former popularity of certain purebreds. Chow chow, for instance, was the most common dominant breed . Calvin Coolidge had a chow chow. And it may be that there are chow chow genes in other breeds. But you don't see chow chows in the same number that you see Labrador retrievers. Other breeds common in mutts were German shepherds, labs and golden retrievers, as well as American Staffordshire terriers, which are essentially pit bulls. Among the best guessers in the survey was an amateur who got all three breeds right for four dogs. Nobody had more triples. But it was a professional who achieved the greatest accuracy: 41.9 percent. Not guessing a third breed, which I and other survey responders often did, was an indication that we could not bear just throwing in Labrador retriever again and again out of desperation. My accuracy was 18.3 percent. I got at least one breed right for 13 dogs, and two breeds for two dogs. My greatest success was Sophie. I guessed two of her three breeds. Poodle and Havanese. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
European leaders headed home from a weekend of meetings in Washington vowing bolder steps to address widening anxiety about the Continent's debt burden. But it will most likely be weeks or even months before any new action comes to pass. It's not clear whether the global markets will give them that much time. Investors will be watching a series of crucial votes by European parliaments due this week on an earlier package aimed at preventing a default by Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Sensing urgency from the markets and keenly aware of the potential consequences of a rejection of that plan by the German Parliament when it votes on Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel drew parallels on Sunday between the risk of a Greek default now and the broader chaos in the financial system that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. "We are doing it for ourselves," she said in a radio interview on Sunday night aimed at persuading a skeptical German audience that setting aside hundreds of billions of euros to prop up shaky neighbors made sense. "Otherwise, the stability of the euro would be in danger." "We can only take steps that we can really control," she said. If a Greek default started a fresh financial crisis, "then we politicians will be held responsible." All 17 member countries of the euro bloc must approve the strengthening of the rescue package, known as the European Financial Stability Facility, with votes set on Tuesday in Slovenia, Finland on Wednesday and Germany on Thursday. So far, only six countries have signed off, but European leaders say the process should be completed by mid October. Only after that do they seem likely to come up with a broader rescue package aimed at relieving the anxiety that has driven markets lower in recent weeks. The markets may not wait that long. Indeed, for political leaders like Mrs. Merkel, the problem now is that investors have already concluded that the 440 billion euro bailout fund, the expansion of which is being voted on this week, might not be enough to stop the contagion from spreading. On Friday, the yield on two year Greek notes rose to 69.7 percent, suggesting that investors considered a default all but inevitable. When the initial expansion of the bailout fund was agreed to in July, worries centered on three smaller countries on the periphery of Europe Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Since then, however, fears have multiplied about the ability of Spain and Italy, the third largest economy in the euro zone, to keep borrowing heavily, creating doubts about pools of debt from countries that right now are considered "too big to bail." The worry is that a default by Athens would threaten these and other sovereign borrowers, as well as banks in France and Germany that hold tens of billions of euros in Greek debt. That, in turn, has helped push shares of American banks, which are intertwined with their European counterparts, sharply lower, dragging down the broader market. "The next three weeks are absolutely critical, and they can still stabilize the markets, but I wouldn't tell my clients to put money to work until we see it," said Rebecca Patterson, chief market strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. "As we stand right now, European policy makers have gotten well behind the curve. It's not about the periphery anymore; it's about the core, too." A fresh indicator of market confidence in European borrowers will come as Italy sells billions of euros in bonds this week, culminating on Thursday. Weak demand at an auction on Sept. 13 brought global worries about the safety of Italian debt, which stands at a whopping 2.3 trillion, making Italy one of the world's largest borrowers. What is more, Italy's debt load equals 120 percent of the country's gross domestic product. In Europe, only Greece is in worse shape, with debt totaling roughly 150 percent of G.D.P. In addition, the Greek Parliament must vote this week on a recently proposed property tax increase that is seen as a test of whether the country will stick to past promises to tighten its belt. Greece is also trying to show its austerity program is enough to qualify for an aid payment due in October. Last week, anxiety about Europe led to the worst week for the Dow Jones industrial average since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, and as was the case then, it seems events are moving faster than political leaders, further narrowing their options. Besides the 6 percent drop on Wall Street last week, investors are concerned about the continuing rout in European stocks, especially bank shares, which stand at two year lows. In another troubling echo of the events of 2008, traders abandoned former havens like gold, oil and other commodities, preferring the safety of United States Treasury securities or, better yet, cash. In Asia on Monday, investors remained nervous. The Nikkei 225 index in Japan was down about 2 percent in the early afternoon, and the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong was down about 1.5 percent. Robert B. Zoellick, the World Bank president, speaking on Friday in Washington. Meanwhile, deep divisions persist, not just among political leaders in different countries but among policy makers and the heads of Europe's biggest banks. Under a deal worked out in July, European banks agreed to take a 21 percent loss on their holdings of Greek debt as part of a restructuring that would give Greece more time to pay back what it owes, but now it appears political leaders in Germany and elsewhere want the banks to take a bigger hit. Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's finance minister, suggested as much in a tough speech delivered to international bankers at the Institute for International Finance over the weekend. He argued that because of their bad lending decisions, bankers shared the blame for Greece's predicament and should also share in the cost. "Without a substantial contribution from financial institutions," he said, "the legitimacy of our westernized capitalized systems will suffer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The hacker or hackers claimed to have stolen an estimated 1.5 terabytes of data, according to Entertainment Weekly, which first reported the breach on Monday. The hacker said more material would be "coming soon." The attack is not expected to have any impact on Time Warner's deal with AT T, according to two people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss private company matters. Only a large material change in Time Warner's business would prevent the deal from going through, one of the people said. Unlike Yahoo, which disclosed last year that hackers had stolen the credentials of hundreds of millions of users in two breaches that went undetected for years, HBO does not appear to have sensitive personal information on a similar scale. Because the network typically sells its service through cable or satellite operators, it has not traditionally collected credit card information and other details about its customers. That has changed recently, however, as HBO introduced a stand alone streaming service in 2015. Much remains unclear about how much information was obtained in the cyberattack, which can be difficult to determine, said one of the people familiar with the breach. The person said the stolen content included a few show episodes, scripts and internal documents, like human resources records. There is no evidence yet that any episodes of "Game of Thrones" have been stolen, which would be a significant blow to the network. "Game of Thrones," currently in its penultimate season, is the most popular show in HBO's history and has long been a target of digital piracy. There are four highly anticipated episodes left in the season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
I LOVE going back over the year and looking at readers' responses to my column. It provides a perspective I lack when I'm focusing on one column at a time and receiving comments piecemeal. The passion, the insights, the desire to share a story, a helpful hint and yes, to correct a real or perceived wrong, are all there. And inevitably, I find that one column stands out above the rest in terms of reader response. It's usually not the column I consider most weighty or philosophical, but rather one that addresses an annoying problem people regularly face. This year, it was robocalls. In fact, I devoted a second column to the issue after the first one, on May 19, got so many comments. Those two yielded by far the biggest response. Some readers pointed out quite acerbically at times that the most obvious and simple tools to deal with such annoyances are Caller ID and an answering machine. Don't answer a call you don't recognize and let the answering machine pick up. Yes, most people I know do that, but with call spoofing, when telemarketers use fake phone numbers, it's sometimes hard to tell even with Caller ID if it's someone you need to talk to. And when we let the answering machine pick up, perhaps in a distant room, listening to see if it's someone you need to talk with can be difficult. In any case, it's annoying and disruptive, especially for those who work at home, to have the phone ring five, six, seven times a day with sales calls. As Julia Belt of Madison, Wis., wrote: "Instead of being a means to communicate, my phone has become an instrument of harassment in my home. Wait the phone is ringing, my answering machine message begins, the incoming call hangs up. Some days, this happens three or four times." Many offered suggestions to get back at telemarketers. The most popular was to answer the phone and then walk away. Philip Gribosky of Norwalk, Conn., said his brother puts the phone down, but does not hang up. "He then goes back to whatever he was doing before, leaving the telemarketer on the line for an extended period of time. Since he might leave the telemarketer hanging on for 15 20 minutes, time they'd rather spend calling your readers, he now gets virtually no telemarketing calls." Many, many readers also told me that although they filed complaints with various government agencies, as I had suggested, it seemed to do no good. I decided to go back to the Federal Trade Commission and pass on my readers' frustrations. William Maxson, the commission's program manager for Do Not Call Enforcement, said all the complaints are put in a database, which the F.T.C.'s lawyers and investigators use to find problematic conduct. The agency recently filed a case against a company that talk about nerve faked the commission's own 1 800 number when calling people. It was a scheme involving a promised rebate from the F.T.C. if a victim provided his bank account number. Mr. Maxson told me that since the Do Not Call registry was put into place in 2003, 289 companies have been sued and more than 69 million collected. "Billions of robocalls have been stopped," he said. But he certainly knows the difficulty in tracking down and blocking telemarketers who constantly use new technology to stay one step ahead of enforcers. To do more, he said, the commission is asking for your help. Until Jan. 17, you, can submit solutions to block illegal robocalls by going to FTC.gov/robocalls. People eagerly agreed with the author Katrina Kenison, who told me she wanted "to heal the disconnect between what I observed around me the pressure to excel, to be special, to succeed and what I felt were the real values I wanted to pass on to my children: kindness, service, compassion, gratitude for life as it is." I did expect at least a few comments admonishing me for embracing the idea of average and ordinary, but I received not a one. Kim Meth of West Caldwell, N.J., summed up many readers' feelings: "As we prepare for my high school senior to take the SATs for yet a third time, I read your piece. It was as if the skies opened up and an overwhelming sense of clarity suddenly engulfed me. My 17 year old son makes a mind blowing Bolognese, is one of the funniest people I know and a great camp counselor. "With an older brother who excelled in everything academic, he has grown up under a cloud of pressure that I could not eradicate. Somehow, your article made me feel empowered and energized. I'm not sure what direction I will take with him, but starting now, I will find a way to celebrate his qualities and 'heal the disconnect.' " The following reader comment I particularly liked, because it demonstrated that while all too often we think of some of these dilemmas as purely American, they can be felt just as strongly on the other side of the world: "Thank you so much for your wonderfully reflective article on the context of success and achievement," Damien Spain wrote, adding that words like "mundane" and "average" should not be pejorative but celebrated. "It's a funny life, but one to be delighted with, when an article in the NYT becomes a wonderful discussion point for a Sunday lunch in a small town in rural Victoria, Australia." The same theme was discussed in a different way in a March 24 column exploring research about why most of us remember criticism much more than praise and are more likely to be downcast by negative comments than uplifted by positive ones. Readers wrote about the difficulty of grappling with feelings of failure or disapproval, sometimes long after the incident. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Isaac Mahone and Marcus Arnett, who lived in San Antonio, visited New York often. After you visit the city, Mr. Mahone said, "that's where you want to live." The men, both 34, met as students at the University of Texas at San Antonio. This past summer Mr. Mahone landed a job in Hoboken, N.J., as a transaction coordinator for a real estate company, and they jumped at the chance to relocate. Mr. Arnett, who is employed in the member relations department of a financial services company, arranged to work from home. They put the San Antonio house, which had belonged to Mr. Arnett's grandmother, on the market. It was small, but it had a yard. The house, in the Highland Park neighborhood, sold for around 107,000. For their three dogs, all husky mixes, the couple needed an ultra pet friendly building, preferably with outdoor space. They preferred a Midtown or downtown Manhattan location so Mr. Mahone could easily reach his Hoboken office via subway and PATH train. The couple, who were married earlier this year, were in close touch with a Citi Habitats salesman who became ill just as they were flying up for an apartment hunting trip. So the agent referred them to a colleague, Lex Wang, also a salesman there. "We were very clear that we had three dogs and we knew it was going to be difficult," Mr. Mahone said. The dogs Glinda, Elphaba and Fiyero have names from "Wicked," one of the couple's favorite musicals. They began the hunt at a Hell's Kitchen walk up, climbing several flights of stairs to find a small one bedroom that did not appear to have been renovated, ever. "It was becoming a quick reality check," Mr. Mahone said. "This is what we were getting." Mr. Arnett didn't mind a place that was "rough around the edges," he said. So what if the floor was badly gouged. "We could make it look good. You can cover stuff up." They moved on, to see a one bedroom on East 32nd Street. But they could not get in. Another unit in the same building was dark and unprepossessing. The area was not inviting. "It was in the middle of a bunch of tall buildings," Mr. Wang said. "It was not really a neighborhood." They headed to a 1961 brick building in Midtown East, near the entrance ramp to the Queensboro Bridge. There they saw an alcove studio on the ground floor with a private fenced patio. "The building is really dog friendly," Mr. Wang said. "We saw, like, four dogs walking out while we were there." The couple were surprised how suitable the place was. The rent was 2,700 a month. "It was more than our original budget but within the comfort zone," Mr. Arnett said. They had one more place to check out, the new City Tower in Downtown Brooklyn, near an assortment of subway lines. A Brooklyn to Hoboken route was doable, but it wasn't clear whether all three dogs would be allowed. With apartments renting quickly, they didn't want to wait to find out and in the meantime lose the studio with the patio. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Although Erich von Stroheim's mauled 1924 masterpiece "Greed" is nearly 100 years old, it is sufficiently monumental that adopting its title can still seem like an attempted flex. In the case of Michael Winterbottom's new movie, a satire starring a frequent collaborator, Steve Coogan, it's less an allusion than a direct, blatant and bitter statement of theme. Coogan plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a coarse but not wholly dumb rag trade millionaire micromanaging his own 60th birthday celebration. In this framework Winterbottom, who wrote the script with Sean Gray providing "additional material," constructs a time traveling, format shifting biopic with a from humble beginnings hook. Some of the eat the rich barbs here are about a decade stale. If you think you've heard McCreadie's "I don't need drugs, I am drugs" boast, you have from Salvador Dali. But Coogan brings his usual comic reliability to his characterization, as does Isla Fisher as the rich man's predictably estranged wife, and they wring laughs from the material. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Anyone strolling the High Line between Tuesday, Sept. 5, and Thursday may encounter traffic in the Rail Yards, the park's northernmost section. At 30th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues, performers will create a moving barrier for pedestrians to pass through. The event, from 4 to 7 p.m., is Alexandra Pirici's "Threshold," a work that the artist describes not as a performance but as an "ongoing action." Inspired by images of thresholds in history and art, from a barricade erected during the Paris Commune to those depicted in the Spanish painter Francisco Goya's "Disasters of War" series, "Threshold" acts as a portal between the eastern and western Rail Yards, inviting reflection on borders and walls. It's not the first time that Ms. Pirici, who lives and works in Bucharest and Berlin, has brought performers and spectators into close contact. Her recent "Aggregate," at the gallery Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, cleverly confused the roles of watching and being watched; "Threshold" may do the same. (thehighline.org) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
This summer, Jade Osei Osafo moved into a studio apartment that is so sleek and modern compared to where she has lived before that she is still getting used to it. "This is definitely not my vibe of apartment I love the style of homes in brownstone Brooklyn," Ms. Osei Osafo, 28, said of her home in a brand new building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. "I'm afraid to put anything on the walls, it's so pristine," she continued, pointing out the numerous pictures propped up along the floor. "I'm kind of leaning everything up against them instead." But while the space may not be entirely to her taste, after a bad experience of living in a prewar walk up in East Williamsburg, Ms. Osei Osafo was willing to sacrifice character, a separate bedroom and a bigger share of her paycheck to live in a well maintained building. A Londoner who was transferred to New York in 2017 by the large asset manager she works for as a portfolio manager, Ms. Osei Osafo shared a two bedroom in the East Village her first year in the city, and she had been eager to move into her own apartment in Brooklyn. "Everyone said, 'You have to live in the East Village!' But I really did not like the East Village. Or Manhattan," she said. She found that East Williamsburg and Greenpoint were more her speed: less hectic but still very urban, with a variety of bars and restaurants catering to a slightly older crowd. They were also close to C3 NYC, the nondenominational church she attends in Williamsburg. Occupation: Asset portfolio manager The building's marketing: initially put her off. "They were really pushing the community vibe," she said. "I was like, 'I have a community.' But it's actually been really nice. A lot of people in the building are from different countries. It's like the U.N. when we're on the rooftop." The building's gym: is right next to her apartment. "It's noisy even before I get up at 5:30 or 6 to exercise," she said. "I don't mind the noise of the treadmill, but the weight dropping ..." The G train: is great. "Other people don't think so, but it's so easy to take the G to the E to get to work." Her first Brooklyn apartment seemed to be a great deal: a cute one bedroom in East Williamsburg that rented for 1,750 a month less than she paid for her room in the East Village. But she soon discovered that the apartment was cheap for a reason. The building was older and poorly maintained, with stairs that shook so much when she walked up them that she thought they might collapse. There were water bugs, which unnerved her. And when she asked about the fire safety situation alarms, extinguishers and exits the landlord seemed taken aback. "She was like, 'Are you planning to light candles or something?'" said Ms. Osei Osafo, who wasn't satisfied after a fire extinguisher was hauled up from the basement and hung in the stairwell, especially as her conversation with the landlord had ended with a warning never to go out on the fire escape. Not even in the event of a fire. Some renters might be willing to put up with such things for low rent, but Ms. Osei Osafo decided she wasn't one of them. "I feel like my work is very stressful, even though I love it. I don't want to have to come home and worry that my heater isn't working or there's a water bug in my apartment," she said. "I want a peaceful environment where everything is secure and safe." Shortly before her lease ended, she reached out to a friend from church, Stephanie Larsen, who is a real estate agent for Citi Habitats. "I told her I really needed a doorman building nearby," said Ms. Osei Osafo, who was willing to downsize from a one bedroom to a studio to live in a new building. She took the first apartment she saw with Ms. Larsen. It was bright and decently sized for a studio, and there would be no broker's fee. She also liked that it had a gym with two Peloton bikes, which meant she could cancel her Equinox membership. But it was the rooftop pool that really sold her. "I learned to swim this year," Ms. Osei Osafo said. "I had lessons growing up, but there was never anywhere to practice, so I would learn a little, but by the next time I went swimming I'd forget and feel like I was drowning." After attending a swimming school for adults in the basement of St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue, she finally felt confident in the water. But once the class ended, finding places to practice was difficult. Pools tend to be open for either laps she wasn't quite there yet or recreational swimming, largely for families and children. "I was like, 'There's a pool I can swim in without paying to use it? It's open 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. everyday, and there's a lifeguard?" she said. She even managed to negotiate having the pool fee waived because she had moved in after the season started. She was less successful at negotiating a rent discount and pays 2,995 a month, although the building was offering two months free, so it works out to about 2,500 a month. It has been a relief to live in a bug free, structurally sound, fully staffed building, Ms. Osei Osafo said, where she can call down to the lobby if any issues arise. And the pool, which was supposed to close for the season after Labor Day, stayed open until November because of the warm weather. "It's mostly empty," she said. "I do slow laps and breath work, practice different strokes. I'm not trying to get strong at distances; I'm just trying to get strong." She hasn't regretted downsizing to a studio. "It's a good apartment for one person," she said. "I just didn't want to go back to living with roommates. Living alone is the best. If there's a mess, it's your mess." And while she is still trying to square the austere aesthetic with her love of color and texture, she has come to appreciate one design element of new construction: "It looks clean without trying," she said. "Everything looks stark against the walls, in a good way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Despite Everything, People Still Have Weddings at 'Plantation' Sites The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement this spring spelled the end for many Confederate symbols. Monuments have been removed, by vote and by force. But those symbols include the romanticized imagery of weddings on Southern "plantations," a practice that carries on. These properties were forced work camps, where enslaved Africans and their descendants were tortured and killed. Perhaps nowhere has benefited more from the idea of the romance of Southern weddings than Charleston, S.C., where the Civil War began, and which is now one of the top destination wedding locales in the United States, hosting nearly 6000 weddings in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic interrupted the industry. Winslow Hastie's family has owned Magnolia Plantation Gardens since the late 1670s. Mr. Hastie, who is white, is also the president and chief executive officer of Historic Charleston Foundation, which works to preserve structures, many built by enslaved people. Magnolia "opened to the public in 1872," Mr. Hastie said. "I think it was actually one of the first tourist attractions in the state of South Carolina. And that was out of economic necessity." Today, Mr. Hastie said, "the wedding side is part of the business for us." "It might seem like a lame response," he said, "but the reality is the funds that are generated by the events do help to underwrite a lot of the other programing." Magnolia retains the quarters where enslaved people lived, he said, to provide a "powerful opportunity for us to talk about that aspect of our history." Wedding groups, he added, can visit the cabins. Mr. McGill also founded the Slave Dwelling Project, which has a mission to address the contributions of African Americans, the legacy of slavery and to preserve the slave dwellings. "Weddings on plantations is often discussed in the campfire conversations that we conduct," Mr. McGill said. "There is no surprise that the demographic makeup of the participants often determine how most feel about the matter, most Blacks against, most whites for." "The most unfortunate thing that happens, I think, happens typically with white wedding parties," said Bernard Powers, who is Black and the director of both the College of Charleston Center for the Study of Slavery and of the International African American Museum, which is scheduled to open in Charleston in March 2022. "They simply go out for the peaceful, kind of pristine, natural environment, the beauty, the romantic vistas of the Southern landscape," he said, adding that this disconnection to how the sites were created in the first place is part of the South's "schizophrenic approach" to history. Dr. Powers said some African Americans have wedding ceremonies in these places to bring a greater solemnity and commitment to the marriage rite. "Simply because," he said, "if the people incorporate the knowledge of what happened at these places, then their marriage ceremony, and indeed their marriage, becomes an example of psychic and cultural repair." Mrs. Ascue Kershaw is an owner of her family's auto body business. Her roots are within South Carolina's African American Gullah Geechee traditions. She said beyond the beauty of Boone Hall, a part of her wedding dream since high school, "we went there to honor those who built the plantation." Pearl Vanderhorst Ascue, Mrs. Ascue Kershaw's mother, said friends and relatives definitely had questions: "'Why are you going back to a plantation where our ancestors were held hostage, and working for free labor? They were enslaved. Why would you go back there for a huge wedding out there?'" "I just told them we are back to the plantation but it is for a different reason. Our ancestors, their spirit is still there for sure," Mrs. Vanderhorst Ascue said. "I felt it, she felt it. The people even at the wedding felt it it was just totally spiritual in a way that we honor our ancestors for what they did and the work they did at that plantation." Her daughter's ceremony incorporated African American traditions. Favors were of woven sea grass, a Gullah traditional craft. Mrs. Ascue Kershaw's aunt, Charlotte Jenkins, a famed Gullah chef, chronicled the wedding in her 2010 cookbook, "Gullah Cuisine: By Land and by Sea." Boone Hall, her wedding venue, still hosts weddings, but it is rethinking how it can add more context to its history. "The discussion of slavery is often difficult, but it is a part of history that should be discussed openly and honestly whenever plantation life is addressed," Boone Hall management said in a statement. "We believe there is a responsibility and a commitment to present history in an accurate and educational manner each day." Weddings are not a part of that mission. "There is a moral and a right thing," she said. She said the common justification that weddings and other social events support educational programming is "fiction." "You have to dedicate whole teams to sales and coordinating the events and either you buy all of the equipment or you're renting equipment. It's a huge cost," she said. "You really have to pour a lot of resources into just running your events and wedding business." At Whitney, she said coordinating wedding events on site would redirect "all of my energy or a significant portion of my energy into doing a thing that is counter to my mission." "We have to grind against this really entrenched idea of white supremacy, of the glory of the Old South," she said. "Having a wedding in 2019 or 2020 in front of these gorgeous colonnades on a plantation, all it does is reinforce the idea that what a plantation is: a beautiful home when it's not. It's a labor camp." "You never know," said Tracey Todd, the president and chief executive of Middleton Place Foundation, who is white, "when a transformational moment may occur in someone." Krisy Parker Thomas, a planner in Nashville who owns Southern Sparkle Weddings, has planned very few weddings at these sites. However, she had a visceral reaction at one popular site in her region after touring it as a possible venue for her clients, who she said in general are Black and white, Northern and Southern people. "They obviously had the beautiful mansion, but they also had the slave cabins on site, because it was also a historical museum," said Mrs. Thomas, who is Black. "So, seeing this beautiful house, and it is clearly still standing, and the fact that slaves built it, and then seeing what they go to live in, kind of got me super emotional." Tanis Jackson, a former wedding planner who now has a service in Charleston that does lighting for weddings and other events, and who is a white Canadian married to a Black man, said the sites are "definitely a big part of why people want to have their destination weddings here." "In my experience, most of the people when they say, 'Oh, we love the history,' I'm like all of it? Because, you know, you are looking at the 'Gone With the Wind' version." She has found that race is usually a factor in who chooses plantations. "When I moved here, nobody talked about it in the wedding industry," she said. "I'd had a few brides who are African Americans who brought it up." They were "really quiet and shy about it, because they're like, 'I don't want to go to a plantation,'" she said. It mattered in her own wedding as well. "My mother in law survived the '60s as a Black woman," she said. "I'm not going to ask her to go to a plantation." But she said she understood an economic reality of the region. "If you're in Charleston and you want to keep your business alive, it's not really an option," she said, of excluding those sites for wedding planning. "Half of the venues are plantations." Explore Charleston, a convention and visitors bureau, released a statement in June defending these sites as places for weddings that noted the same. "Virtually every historic site in the South has some tie to enslavement," it read. Aneesa Glines, a North Carolina wedding planner who is Black and Puerto Rican, owns Harmony Weddings and Events. She and Elana Walker of Southern Noir Weddings started a conversation about diversity for venues and planners called Bridging the Gap. About 500 were on their June webinar, which they said was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. Mrs. Glines said that even as a plantation wedding causes "a lot of emotion and disgust and discomfort with many people, Black and white, in the South," it's difficult to find a public venue with enough space for a wedding and "tons of beautiful land that does not have any history that ties back to slavery." Some local wedding sites have recently dropped the word "plantation" from their names, she noted. "I think that is a good step," she said, "but there is more to be done than simply changing the name." From 'Gone With the Wind' to Dylann Roof For Dr. Powers, of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston, bringing people of various backgrounds to such sites for education, including through weddings, offers "a valuable perspective." "If we cut ourselves off from these things," he said, "particularly if African Americans themselves cut themselves off, then I think you are really saying that there's no chance of repair and social repair because they are beyond redemption, and the people who are associated with them, and probably their descendants, are beyond repair, and I don't buy that argument." A "repair" may come with a cost. Mrs. Thomas, the planner in Nashville, recalled going to her car after touring a site for clients. "I just started bawling," she said. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Thank goodness there is another sporting event full of style moments to distract us. For a while I was wondering how we would top Serena Williams's cat suit at the French Open and the Thom Browne shorts suits the Cleveland Cavaliers wore to the NBA finals. But then the Nigeria kit arrived. I had a lot of fun debating the good, the bad and the nerdy with our soccer columnist, and am very curious as to what you think write in and tell me! but this has been a pretty crazy week in the world of dress, and there are other fashion y fish to fry. Like the fact that, on Wednesday, Kering somewhat abruptly announced the departure of its former star designer, Tomas Maier. And then, on Thursday, Dries Van Noten revealed that he had sold a majority stake in his business to the Spanish group Puig. And then, on Friday, Kering announced they had a new designer for Bottega, a young British guy called Daniel Lee. And then Missoni announced it had accepted a substantial minority investment from a private equity group. Sheesh. Let me catch my breath for a moment. And we thought things were supposed to go quiet in June. The Dries news will put new focus on whether a designer known for his singular aesthetic and highly humanistic approach to business will be able to maintain his signatures under the aegis of a corporate parent. Or whether, like so many designers before him, including Ann Demeulemeester, Helmut Lang and Jil Sander, he will eventually chafe against the strictures of a boss (even if he is still chief creative officer and chairman of the board) and depart the brand that bears his name. The Bottega news will bring some attention back to a brand that has become kind of predictable. It also raises the question of whether Kering can do it again after rocking the fashion world with its wholesale Gucci reinvention. And we'll see if Missoni can make the financial investor equation work. The path of fashion and private equity rarely has been smooth. Anyway, you know what all this means: Action! And that the next fashion month, in the fall, is going to be major. For distraction, I recommend spending some time this weekend considering the rise of fugly men's wear and the end of the dandy, mulling over a new thought provoking combination of denim and MeToo, and contemplating the truth behind Frida Kahlo's image. When you are not watching soccer, that is. Finally, cheers to all the dads out there, and best wishes for a wonderful Father's Day. Thank you for giving so much to style. Q: I am 26 and work in a noncorporate office job. A recent injury has forced me into sneakers think proper running shoes for the time being and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to dress for winter. I feel daggy wearing jeans and joggers. Any advice? Victoria, Sydney, Australia A: Winter? Ah, the Southern Hemisphere, right. This question is a good reminder that if you are a global fashion brand, with customers all over the world, you have to design collections that cater to pretty much every season. But it is also relevant no matter what the temperature outside. One of the greatest unexplored areas in fashion is the disability space, whether we are talking about a long term condition or a broken wrist. According to a 2015 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five adults in the United States has a disability. One in five! And any injury or lasting condition affects our ability to get dressed, and some awareness on the part of fashion brands that a sideline in elegant "healthwear" is simply good business would be welcome. Recently Oscar de la Renta teamed up with one such company, Care Wear, on a "chest access" hoodie for those with a central catheter, but more such thinking is needed. Anyway, I have personal experience with all this, since I once tore my Achilles' tendon and was in a cast, and then a boot, for months. That recovery period led to the discovery that I had only one pair of shoes with a heel height that matched my boot. They weren't sneakers they were black and white gladiator sandals but I had to wear them every day for about half a year. Sometimes with socks, which is really not my thing. It became a challenge. The good news for you is that since sneakers (or joggers) are pretty much the only shoes anyone seems to care about at the moment, the fact you are wearing yours to work is nothing less than a highly fashionable act. As for replacing your jeans, high waisted, wide leg or flare pants paired with a crisp shirt or cropped sweater would do a lot to both cover the shoes and extend the eye upward and away from your feet. (Topshop has a good selection.) Or try a boiler suit or jumpsuit in a bright color from Madewell or ASOS. Another option is a maxi skirt with a denim jacket and ribbed top. The idea is to offset the casual nature of the shoes with a more jazzed up top to create a high/low contrast that looks self selected and cool, as opposed to a choice made from necessity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. The first time I picked up the Italian writer Elsa Morante's 1957 novel "Arturo's Island," in this new translation by Ann Goldstein, the gifted translator of Elena Ferrante's novels into English, I put it down after 75 pages. Morante's vision is so baroque, and her prose so operatic, that after reading her I needed some alone time, with cucumber slices over my eyelids. "Arturo's Island" is about a semi orphaned boy's coming of age on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples in the years just before World War II. The book's themes incest, misogyny, narcissism, homosexuality slide across the pages like lava. Morante delivers epic emotions. Her people don't talk so much as they exclaim "with a contemptuous sneer" or "a loud, haughty cry of derision." They tremble with violent disgusts and savage attitudes. They strike poses of fear, loathing and, in the words of one character, "aggressive, insolent vehemence." They rattle the cutlery and they rattle each other. "Arturo's Island" kept calling out to me, however. It had set its brutal hooks. Before I picked it up again, I found Lily Tuck's slim and sophisticated biography of Morante, "Woman of Rome" (2008). Reading it is an experience I recommend. Morante led a striding, unconventional life; a life that helps put the soaring cadenzas of feeling in her novels in context. The unlikely details arrive right from the start. Morante's stepfather was a probation officer at a boys' reform school. He was found to be impotent on his wedding night, and his wife often made him stay, as punishment, in the basement of the family's house in a working class section of Rome. Morante's mother was often hysterical, and attempted suicide. Family photos had faces scratched out. Morante didn't attend college. She lived in poverty, sometimes resorting to prostitution, while struggling to become a journalist then a novelist. In 1938, she prepared a pot of boiling oil, intending to pour it on the heads of Hitler and Mussolini, who were passing in a convertible limousine under her apartment windows. Her future husband, the novelist Alberto Moravia (1907 1990), talked her out of this suicide mission. Moravia found that he was on the wanted list of the fascist police. He and Morante were each half Jewish. The pair went on the run in 1943, hiding for nearly a year in a small town, in a one room hut built against a large stone. 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. Back in Rome after the war, they became something akin to the Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir of the Italian intelligentsia. Their friends included the writer Italo Calvino and the directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti, with whom Morante had an affair. (She had to share him with the actress Anna Magnani.) Her table talk was famous. The filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci told his father, who begged him to go to college, "My university is having dinner every night with Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini." Morante wore trousers, a rarity for Italian women at the time. She did not suffer fools. Woe to those who referred to her using her husband's surname and not her own. Her novels, enormously influential in her home country, include "House of Liars" (1948) and "History" (1974), which was a landslide best seller in Italy. About its impact, Paul Hofmann wrote in The Times, "For the first time since anyone can remember, people in railroad compartments and espresso bars discuss a book the Morante novel rather than the soccer championship or latest scandal." The translations of her novels made little impact in the United States. Ferrante was among those who devoured Morante's novels. She chose her pen name because of its echoes with Morante's own. In interviews, Morante often claimed she wished she'd been born a boy, so that she could have heroic adventures. About the young male hero of "Arturo's Island," she commented: "Arturo, c'est moi!" The island of Procida, in this novel, feels stolen from myth. An enormous prison looms over the island, as if it were Alcatraz. Arturo's own house is a crumbling, spider webbed 20 room palazzo. The boy roams the island with his dog, and the sea in his small boat. Arturo's mother, who was 17 and illiterate, died in childbirth. His father, whom he idolizes, is mostly cold and aloof, spending much of his time away from the island on trips that he refuses to talk about. Arturo grows up in a woman scorning world. The house's previous occupant, a wealthy and apparently gay man, threw elaborate parties and refused entrance to women. His father, who inherited the house from the man, also inherited most of his opinions. "According to my judgment, real women possessed no splendor and no magnificence," Arturo says. He adds: "They were ashamed of themselves, maybe because they were so ugly; and they went around like sad animals." One day, Arturo's father brings home a new wife, a teenage peasant named Nunziata. Father and son treat her abysmally. ("Shut up, you ugly, slovenly devil," the father says to her, in a typical snippet of dialogue.) When she has a child, however, Arturo is jealous of the attention the baby gets. He realizes that he has never been kissed. He slowly falls in love with his stepmother and asks her to run away with him. Arturo's growing up plays out against the reader's awareness of the onrushing war. There's a tragic sense that the heroic dreams of his youth are about to be tested in ways he did not anticipate. Arturo's sense of himself, and of his father, are shaken when he realizes that his father is in love with a male prisoner on the island. The men in this novel are knives, and the woman meat. There are few happy or fulfilled women in Morante's oeuvre. Yet Nunziata keeps the fires lit in the kitchen; she makes fresh pasta every day; she cares for her child and tries to stay above the fray. She is luminous, a kind of saint. Morante's themes are not subtle. "Arturo's Island," even in Goldstein's adroit translation, is a sledgehammer performance. But her writing, once you acclimate to its gargoyle extravagance, has the power of malediction. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
An image from Samba Zine, a new Brazilian publication that is focused on L.G.B.T.Q. individuals, communities and causes. "Samba is a visual manifesto," said Pedro Pedreira, the photographer. One Monday afternoon in mid August, the megalopolis of Sao Paulo, Brazil, fell into darkness. The cause could have been forest fires burning more than a thousand miles away in the state of Rondonia, but the miasma could have stood as a metaphor for the way the country's president, Jair Bolsonaro, has cast a shadow in his nine months since taking office: increasing deforestation, using polarizing rhetoric and seeming to promote homophobia and transphobia. That same day, Juliano Corbetta, an editor, said he was sitting in his Sao Paulo apartment, looking at a photograph of a male model wearing only a diamante studded thong (with a rhinestone heart applied to the model's right buttock, for flair). Mr. Corbetta was evaluating the image for inclusion in his new publication, Samba Zine, which features only L.G.B.T.Q . Brazilian individuals, communities and causes. Samba Zine is also produced by L.G.B.T.Q. Brazilian photographers, stylists, makeup artists and more. The magazine will be released in late September, will then publish twice a year, and will initially come with a footwear and T shirt collaboration with the Brazilian brand Fiever, with proceeds from the items going to a Sao Paulo L.G.B.T.Q. support group called Casa 1. "Samba is a visual manifesto," Pedro Pedreira, a photographer who contributed to the debut, wrote in an email. "It documents Brazilian queer culture, right now, and in this moment of political calamity, I think it gives us some hope. The fashion, and a hint of sexiness, gives us the fantasy we need in these dark days." "For me, it was a moment with my girls," Liniker said in an audio message. "Celebrating our life and showing that we are alive." There is skin, but it is far from suggestive. Mr. Corbetta, 40, founded Made in Brazil, a popular blog turned magazine that celebrates the Brazilian male physique. "The idea for this started almost two years ago," he said in a phone interview, referring to Samba Zine. "I wanted to create a fashion vehicle with a queer voice in Brazil, because it did not exist." "As time passed," he continued, "the project has become more of a response to the political climate in the country. Essentially, Samba Zine has evolved to become a book about a rising queer, and especially a black and queer, movement in Brazil. The subjects range from established artists and musicians to people we cast on Instagram." This energized counter establishment movement is on full display at a party called Batekoo, which was started in 2014 in the state of Bahia by Mauricio Sacramento and Artur Santoro, who are D.J.s and producers. They described the party as "a safe space for minorities in general to express themselves through culture, black music, dance and aesthetics." Mr. Sacramento and Mr. Santoro are featured in Samba Zine, in a story that was photographed in late August at New York City's Afropunk festival. They now hold their events in Salvador, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife and Belo Horizonte, and have also expanded internationally because, they said in an email, "aesthetics are not detached from politics. Occupying one's own body is the first step in occupying new social spaces. By this, we mean building the self esteem of communities that have been subjectively molded out of self hatred." Though there is a palpable momentum behind queer Brazilians' expanding presence and visibility, there were roadblocks to Mr. Corbetta's vision of celebrating them in glossy pages in a country with a history of racism, homophobia and transphobia. More than a few subjects dropped out at the 11th hour, perhaps nervous about blowback for appearing in a queer centric project. Mr. Corbetta said this was part of it, but that the trepidation is overarching. "Unless there are more people that are publicly out there, there will always be fear," he said. "On one side, you have people that are not necessarily in a position of mainstream power, and these are the people that are fighting for change and for rights," he said. "On the other, you have those that are more mainstream, but these people, generally speaking, do not take stands. They don't make their gayness visible. It's O.K. to be out, but it's rare for someone to be out and outspoken about it." Samba Zine, whose first issue is 200 pages, has no advertising, in the traditional sense. Instead, brand partners, including Luxottica and the Brazilian underwear label Mash, provided funding and their products are featured "organically" in photo spreads. Mr. Corbetta said that he was not given any restrictions from the brands (though he did note that in meetings where he is seeking sponsorship, he will often be asked "'How gay is this going to be?' That question needs to go extinct," he said). Mr. Alves, the actor, said in an email that "there are ad campaigns in the country with gay couples, trans individuals, drag queens. This would have been unthinkable years ago. Companies know the importance of 'pink' money." There is a slowly growing nationwide acceptance, but, statistically, Brazil remains a dangerous place for L.G.B.T.Q. people. Brazil's Supremo Tribunal Federal ruled in June to include homophobia and transphobia as part of the country's policies that outlaw racism. This came after the gay rights association Grupo Gay da Bahia, the oldest of its kind in the country, reported 420 community deaths by homicide or suicide in 2018. Well over 100 queer Brazilians have been murdered in 2019. Marielle Franco, a lesbian councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, was the victim of a high profile 2018 assassination that still has the city roiling. Samba Zine, and its message, may be a hard sell beyond its immediate audience. Ultimately, Mr. Corbetta's goal is to help educate through his medium. "I am a gay man, I am 40 years old, and I recognize that I am in a position of privilege," he said. "I want for the kids in this country to see that there's a community. I want them to feel inspired and embraced. To know we're here, when they're hearing hate speech from the government." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, held every March at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, is the world's premier gathering of buyers, sellers and lovers of rare books. It's a kind of Woodstock for the ultra bookish, where museum like displays of stunningly bound 16th century volumes and illuminated manuscripts are surrounded by booths specializing in rare maps, historical documents, vintage crime novels, counterculture ephemera and just about anything else, as long as it's (mostly) on paper. One veteran dealer interviewed in the early scenes of "The Booksellers," a documentary opening Friday, just time for this year's fair, calls it "a roller coaster ride between tedium and great bits of commerce and discoveries." For the less jaded first time visitor, it can also be an overwhelming explosion of stimulation. "Going in, you might imagine it's a bunch of old brown spines, but it's completely the opposite," D.W. Young, the film's director, said last week while sitting in a the suitably book crammed offices of Sanctuary Books, a rare book outfit a few blocks from the armory. "It's just an amazingly visually rich experience." Another thing you might not expect: The world of rare books is a surprisingly tactile place. "I was amazed by how much you can touch," Judith Mizrachy, one of the film's producers, said, recalling the first time she visited the shop. "But you realize that these things last. They're meant to be held, and they've made it this far." Survival of books, and of the rare book business itself is a major theme of the documentary, which plunges viewers into this world via the passionate, eclectic, undersung people who make it all hum: the booksellers. It was one of them, Daniel Wechsler, the proprietor of Sanctuary Books, who first brought up the idea of a documentary seven years ago with Young and Mizrachy (with whom he'd collaborated on an earlier documentary, about a New York City street photographer). By the time they began working on it a few years later, the project had taken on greater urgency, as more figures from their imagined dream cast of characters like Martin Stone, the British rock guitarist turned book scout died. (Stone, the story goes, was once considered to replace Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones but chose a life of digging through crates of books instead.) "This was the generation that really made their mark before the internet," Wechsler said. "If we didn't record their contributions, they might not be around much longer." The film's approach is immersive, treating its subjects mainly booksellers, but also collectors, auctioneers, curators and others up and down the trade's food chain less as talking heads than as "jazz soloists," as Young put it, offering variations on recurring themes. If there's an underlying bass note, it's the way the profession is driven by equal parts commerce, scholarship and sheer love. "Booksellers are providing something beyond the mercantile," Young said. "They perform a core function of preservation." Wechsler, 52, got into the business about 30 years ago, after a post college stint at Second Story Books outside Washington. A few years ago, he had a brush with fame, or at least the antiquarian bookseller's version of it, when he and a colleague announced the discovery of an elaborately annotated 1580 dictionary they hypothesized might have belonged to Shakespeare (a claim that has been met with respectful skepticism). Sanctuary, housed in an unassuming midcentury office overlooking a tony stretch of Madison Avenue (and open by appointment only), is suitably atmospheric, particularly as the late afternoon light filters in. Still, it's nothing compared with some of the jaw dropping spaces the documentary peeks into, like the collector Jay Walker's M.C. Escher inspired Library of the History of Human Imagination (complete with floating platforms and glass paneled bridges); or the vast warehouse of the dealer James Cummins, crammed with 300,000 plus books New Jersey's answer to Jorge Luis Borges's infinite Library of Babel. And then there are the film's more alarming settings. In one sequence, the camera follows a dealer on a scouting trip to a stunningly decrepit apartment off Central Park West belonging to a recently deceased academic. "It was toxic the mold, the broken windows," Young recalled. "It was just full of books. And they all had to go somewhere." The film explores the ways the internet has radically transformed (some of the gloomier voices might say "destroyed") the rare book business, taking away "the dark and murky and fun aspects" of the hunt, as one dealer puts it, while disastrously flooding the market for some kinds of books, like modern first editions. But the filmmakers also show a hopeful infusion of new blood and an opening up to new collecting areas (hip hop ephemera, zines, comics), new ways of selling and a (somewhat) more diverse demographic. "The film captures what I love about bookselling, which is that there are lots of different ways to do it," Heather O'Donnell, the founder of the Brooklyn based Honey Wax Booksellers, said in an interview this week. "It's not some secret elite club." Last week, O'Donnell, who appears in the documentary, started posting images to a new Instagram account, europaredux, in an effort to crowdsource information about one of her offerings at this year's fair: a collection of 7,000 illustrations from prewar Europe, made by an unidentified Swiss artist who captioned them in an imaginary language. "Social media has the potential to open things up to so many different kinds of people and different kinds of material," she said. "You can start as a bookseller with just 10 books on Etsy." Through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, New York; 212 777 5218, nyantiquarianbookfair.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times. It covers the latest in pop music criticism, trends and news. In pop music, there are oodles of heroes, and also more than a few misunderstood giants. From time to time on Popcast, we attempt to correct the historical record and give maligned artists their proper due. Which is to say: As long promised, the Popcast presents the Ashlee Simpson edition, part one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
My son Zane celebrated his bar mitzvah this past Saturday. And to think I had been worried about a late season snowstorm. A week and a half earlier, when it was clear that the coronavirus crisis would force us to make some big decisions, I spent the day holding back tears, desperate for a paper bag to breathe into. The pressure I felt to both adhere to the new normal, ever changing as it was, and still preserve tradition was immense. How could I look out for the needs of society, and also my son? A bar or bat mitzvah is a rite of passage for a Jewish 13 year old, and like many kids preparing for the ritual, Zane has been preparing for this moment since he had a mouthful of baby teeth. He has spent the last year learning how to chant a chapter of the Torah. His was the one meant to be read during the Sabbath that fell on March 21, 2020. It's the same chapter (parshah) chanted by Jews all over the world on that day, as Judaism is centered around a shared lunar calendar. You can cancel a party at the last minute. But it's much harder to postpone a bar mitzvah. Driving to the synagogue in that time of indecision, I asked Zane what part of that day he thought would be most meaningful. "Leading the service and singing the prayers," he said, still not fully grasping the larger picture. At that point, our world had not yet ground to a halt. He was just excited about the possibility of school being closed. While Zane practiced reading from the Torah with his tutor, I met with Ariann Weitzman, associate rabbi at Bnai Keshet Reconstructionist Synagogue in Montclair, N.J., to discuss how we could do this responsibly. "He will have his bar mitzvah," Rabbi Ariann assured me. "We are spending all day tomorrow setting up cameras and figuring out how to live stream services." (She then asked if I was still hugging people as she opened her arms to me.) It is important to understand the significance of this. As Jews, we are commanded to celebrate the Sabbath by avoiding work. Jews have various ways of observing this commandment or not but you will be hard pressed to find anyone using a cellphone in a synagogue during a Shabbat service. Yet we are also commanded to put the preservation of human life above every other religious commandment. This is called pikuach nefesh. So even though technology is usually not permitted on the Sabbath, the rabbis at my synagogue decided that we had to use it because it is imperative to continue with tradition and to bring people together in community. And so, all of a sudden, Zane had a theme for his bar mitzvah: "going viral." As the days wore on, the weight of worrying about family members who shouldn't travel and the danger of assembling a crowd disappeared. Because the difficult decision I was facing was not my own anymore in the wake of new government restrictions. I was just hoping our family would be able to assemble at our synagogue before the state imposed a shelter in place. One week before the big day, as I was making calls to cancel the caterer and D.J., the initial grief began to dissipate. In fact, I felt giddy. Because what also disappeared was the minutiae that had been keeping me up at night buying cases of soda and snacks, dropping off goody bags for out of town guests, assembling centerpieces (simple as they may have been) none of which is truly essential to a religious ritual. My only concern aside from hand washing, telecommuting and home schooling was ensuring that Zane still felt special. He's the youngest of three boys, so for 13 years, this has been a familiar challenge. Without a printed program of his service, complete with baby photo and the lyrics from Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game," would he have that tangible reminder of just how much I love him? Months ago, he had already started practicing social distancing, barely allowing me to kiss the top of his head before going off to school. Expressions of love had already taken on a new form. My husband, David, and I sent an email to all of our guests, inviting them to celebrate virtually. "Planning this bar mitzvah has always been about being surrounded by family and friends," we wrote. "And we really hope that Zane will feel the love looking into a cellphone." We told Zane that we would have a D.J. party for his friends at some later time. He did express some disappointment that he wouldn't have his party. But he understands that there's nothing any of us can do, and he's keeping perspective. Going virtual allowed us to go big, including far more people than we had ever thought possible kids from Zane's camp and hockey team, distant cousins, co workers past and present, schoolmates we haven't seen since reunions. People from Germany and Israel tuned in, along with family, friends, and even strangers from all over the United States. At the same time, this allowed us to pare down the moment to what really matters: Recognizing that while we all come from a multitude of faiths, fundamentally we share the same things a need for connection to something bigger than ourselves, a desire to make this world a better place, and a sense of wonder as our children go about the hard work of growing up. We asked people to share photos of themselves at home watching the service along with a note so we could put together an album. At the end of the bar mitzvah, I had 248 texts: Adolescent boys sitting in their basements in suits and ties; cats and dogs wearing kippot, ritual skull caps; neighbors throwing candy at their screens, mirroring our celebration as Zane's brothers showered him with Jolly Ranchers and the four of us lifted him in a chair. Zane's peers were glued to their devices, not as a distraction from what was happening on the bimah (altar), but in deep connection to it. One family set up their living room to look like a makeshift shul; my friend from dance class wore a fascinator atop her head and remarked that she also sings the "Sanctuary Song" in her church. Observing state guidelines, which grew even more strict that night, only a handful of people essential to the service came to the synagogue, scattered in chairs spaced widely apart. We maintained a six foot distance while making a minyan (the 10 Jewish adults required by Jewish law in order to read from the Torah). At the end of the service, David and I gave a blessing to our son. "Being Jewish and doing Jewish has never been easy," we told him. "Throughout our history, Jews have met secretly in caves and cellars, persisted with ritual in ghettos and barracks. Our shul may be empty, but it is not a crime scene. We carry on right now, not in spite of hate, but out of love and care for each other who occupy this planet." This wasn't the bar mitzvah we planned. But it was better than anything we could have imagined. And while I don't want to ascribe anything positive to a pandemic, it was in many ways the bar mitzvah, in our hearts, that we wanted except for not having family in the same room. After all, what better lesson for our son to learn than the importance of holding onto tradition, learning how to be resilient, and looking out for others. Deb Levy is vice president of marketing and communications at Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance and the author of "Bury the Hot." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
THE Chevrolet Volt was born with a long to do list. Resuscitate General Motors and defy critics of the company's federal bailout. Demonstrate that G.M. can match Toyota's green might. Prove that plug in cars are more than a feel good exercise. All told, the Volt was weighed down with so much political and social baggage that I was surprised it could pull away from the curb. So for me, it felt great to finally jump into the Chevy, ditch the debates and just drive. And you know what? G.M. has nailed it, creating a hatchback that feels peppy and mainstream yet can sip less fuel than any gas or diesel powered car sold in America. The Volt leaves you grinning with its driving the future vibe. Yet the car operates so seamlessly that owners need not think about the planetary gear sets, the liquid cooled electrons and all that digital magic taking place below. Just don't forget to unplug it when you back out of the garage. And plugging it in is what you'll want to do, as the Volt was designed with an operating strategy entirely different from other hybrids. It is meant to be driven primarily on the energy stored in its battery; the gasoline engine's contribution to moving the car is largely indirect, by turning a generator that powers the electric motors once the battery has been depleted. The Volt, which shares its basic structure with the Chevy Cruze, can readily achieve the top end of G.M.'s estimate for all electric range: driving gently, I managed 50 miles on a full charge. The next morning, unplugging after a four hour refill from a 240 volt charging dock, I drove like a normal commuter, covering 41 miles to the Detroit Hamtramck plant where the Volt is built. Once its central display screen registered the last mile of battery power, the Chevy switched into "extended range" mode, divvying motive chores among the remarkably quiet 1.4 liter gas engine upfront, its dual electric motors and the 435 pound, 16 kilowatt hour lithium ion battery nestled below the floor. Having delivered the energy use equivalent of about 112 miles per gallon in battery mode, the Volt continued to have admirable economy with the gas driven generator supplying the electricity: 44 m.p.g. over all, whipping the E.P.A.'s estimate of 35 city and 40 highway. With its 9.3 gallon gas capacity premium fuel required you can exceed 300 miles per tank, in addition to the initial E.V. miles. That's the crux of how the Volt maintains everyday practicality while affording owners all electric motoring on short local trips. Unfortunately, if owners want that accurate accounting of combined mileage, including electricity, they'll have to do it online through the free five year OnStar account that comes with the car. That's because the Volt's trip computer simply measures the gas you use over the total trip mileage, including the initial E.V. miles. Essentially, the computer pretends that the electricity is free and its miles are on the house. So while the Volt accurately displayed my gasoline economy in extended range mode (a healthy 44 m.p.g.) it also showed a too optimistic 84 m.p.g. total after 120 miles because I had burned only 1.4 gallons of gasoline. But count those kilowatts in the battery, and the real average was 64 m.p.g. (The E.P.A. estimates the Volt's combined gas electric economy at 60 m.p.g., and its all electric operation at the energy equivalent of 93 m.p.g.) The Volt's vehicle line director, Tony Posawatz, said that G.M. tried to provide useful interactive mileage data, but not so much that readouts would confuse drivers. Software updates may let owners choose more data rich displays, including cost per mile or the so called m.p.g.e., which converts electrical consumption into its gasoline equivalent. Still, give the Volt's engineers their due: 64 m.p.g. is pretty spectacular. That's a real world result, and it's nearly 30 percent better mileage than a Toyota Prius, previously the nation's highest mileage hybrid. Remember, I managed 64 m.p.g. on a 50 50 split of gas and electric driving. Most owners, I think, will do better, determined to drive most of their miles on battery power. Early adopters with the means and mind set to buy a Volt 41,000 on the window sticker, but 33,500 after subtracting the 7,500 federal tax credit, or 350 a month on G.M.'s sweetheart lease will plug in faithfully, rarely sullying their Volts with a fuel nozzle. To me, G.M. should shout from the rooftops that the Volt is really a plug in hybrid; its ability to drive like an electric car when you want it, but coast to coast on gasoline should you need, is its huge advantage over short range, cord bound E.V.'s like the Nissan Leaf. As Chevy reminds us incessantly, a Volt owner can travel 40 miles each day and never burn a drop, joule or calorie of gasoline (more, obviously, if you can plug in while at the office or shopping mall). That owner will cover those first 40 miles for about 1.50 worth of electricity on average, a figure that includes electrical losses as the Volt draws some 12.5 kilowatt hours of juice to refill the battery. The Volt only uses about 65 percent of its battery capacity, one of several strategies aimed at ensuring long battery life. While the batteries are warranted for eight years or 100,000 miles, G.M. says it engineered them to last 150,000 miles. Covering those same 40 miles would cost 4.80 in gasoline for a typical 25 m.p.g. car, or 2.40 for the Prius driver who managed 50 m.p.g. Those figures are based on a national average of 12 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Department, but electric rates vary wildly by location. Charge your Volt in Connecticut, with its nearly 19 cent average rate, and the Volt's running costs fall close to those of a Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid, raising skepticism over the Volt's considerably higher price. But please, enough with stories that cherry pick statistics, comparing worst case Volts against Priuses running downhill on the nation's cheapest gas. So try this: In California, which endures some of the nation's highest electric bills, Pacific Gas Electric plans to charge as little as 5 cents a kilowatt hour for nighttime E.V. charging. At that rate, you'd spend 60 cents to cover 40 miles in the Chevy. For a Prius to commute on such pocket change, gasoline would have to cost 75 cents a gallon. If only the styling gave owners more bragging rights. There are two ways to look at the Volt: first, that its middle America normalness is exactly the point. Or, that Chevy missed an opportunity to brand the Volt with a truly eye catching design. At least it avoids the green goblin frumpiness of the Leaf. Call the Volt quietly handsome, with a pleasingly sporty stance and uncluttered visage aside from the unfortunate black plastic that underlines the side windows. There's a tad more gee whiz inside. It begins with an iPod like center stack and dual 7 inch information screens. A navigation system is standard, and there are clever smartphone and OnStar applications to remotely manage charging and check the charge level; owners can also cool or heat the car remotely, using grid electricity rather than draining the battery. The flush mounted touch panel controls look all Logan's Run, though they sometimes balk at an initial fingertap before responding. Even so, the Volt's vivid displays including a little green ball that hovers inside an animated circle offer welcome feedback on how efficiently you're driving. Because the 5.5 foot long T shaped battery runs between the seats, there's no room for a fifth passenger. Legroom is tight in back. The hatch is also a bit smaller than a typical compact's, though folding the rear seats vastly expands the space. While the Volt's cabin is comfortable and whimsically futuristic, materials and fit and finish are more akin to its sibling, the Cruze certainly not the luxury you'd demand in any other car at this price. But that's a necessary trade off, considering that each lithium ion pack costs G.M. an estimated 10,000. You can practically feel that battery sucking money from the interior. The Volt's payback is its sophisticated operation. It is not sporty per se, nor is it a limp noodle. The Chevy drives like an especially quiet and trusty family car. The regenerative brakes feel grabby and nonlinear at first, but you soon get used to braking early and lightly to recapture as much electricity as possible. Drivers can switch the console shift lever into a Low mode that bolsters the energy scavenging of the brakes. Though special Goodyear tires trade some grip for low rolling resistance and fuel economy, drivers may be surprised at how confidently the Volt will corner. The oddest part of driving the Volt? At times, the engine revs don't rise in sync with a push on the gas pedal, as they would in a conventional car, because the Volt may be drawing power from its battery instead. Then, a few seconds later, the engine speeds up to replenish the battery's buffer. Certainly, you could buy a conventional Chevy Cruze for 20,000, get respectable mileage and save thousands. But the Volt isn't for people looking for the lowest possible price or operating costs it is designed for those willing to spend extra for new technology that can wean them off gas and cut pollution. In other words, the Volt is a car that will make fans feel good about driving and about themselves. If that's not your cup of green tea, don't buy it. But if the Volt appeals to you, my hunch is that you're going to love it more than any car you've driven in years. The achievement can't be overstated. Poised to sell in the tens of thousands, the Volt (and Leaf) are the first cars in a century to make Big Oil sweat, if only a little. More will follow. And in a first for G.M., it's an economical car that Americans will buy for its cachet, not a cut rate payment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
On the Potomac, Change Comes to Alexandria's Old Town ALEXANDRIA, Va. Near the Potomac River, blocks of Federal style townhouses and commercial buildings still stand in this 267 year old city. Alexandria's Old Town district looks much as it did in the 19th century, though some modern touches have come gradually. Fitzgerald's Warehouse, which recalls the city's seaport history and survived a 1827 fire that ravaged buildings nearby, has housed a Starbucks since 2003. The Torpedo Factory, built along the river and where armaments were made after World War I, is a city owned artists' center and popular tourist attraction. Now, to the south, a boutique hotel, the Indigo, is under construction; groundbreaking is expected soon for a townhouse and condo complex next door. The changes, coming fast after years of wrangling, are part of a city plan to revitalize about 16 city blocks on and around the waterfront, around eight miles south of Washington. Some residents remain wary. The plans were first approved four years ago by the City Council and then approved again despite residents' complaints that the projects were too modern and too dense for such a historic area. The townhouse and condo project still faces a lawsuit, and plans for another mixed use project are being reassessed. "We love Old Town and see it as a place to be for the long term," said Austin Flajser, president of Carr Hospitality, the company behind the Indigo Hotel. "I think the history of Old Town is critical. That is what makes it a rich environment." Next to the hotel, at Robinson Landing, the developer EYA plans to replace one of two former Washington Post newsprint warehouse sites with housing and retail space. It plans to build 26 upscale townhouses of 2,000 to 2,800 square feet each, most with elevators; 70 apartment style condominiums with 1,300 to 3,500 square feet and water views; and 10,000 square feet of ground floor retail space. Plans for the hotel were scuttled late last month; projects for that site are being reassessed after a lack of interest from hoteliers. "We got caught in a hotel downdraft," said James Jay Lee, president of Rooney Properties in Arlington, Va. "We will retune the mix." Mr. Lee said the area's parks and access to the river made it appealing to developers, and noted that the north terminal is just a few blocks' walk to King Street, the center of Old Town, and close to a Harris Teeter supermarket and a Trader Joe's. Despite the years of controversy and lawsuits surrounding the projects, Karl W. Moritz, the city's planning director, is optimistic that the new developments will enhance the city and help pay for needed infrastructure improvements. The expanded open space, he added, will benefit more than the immediate neighborhood. "By replacing industrial buildings and parking lots with new parks, Alexandria can celebrate our history, reconnect our city to the river, significantly reduce flooding and provide residents and visitors new opportunities to enjoy themselves," he said. The city expects to build a 33 million flood control system topped by a 1,700 foot two level walkway that will hug the shoreline and, officials hope, end frequent flooding from the Potomac. A 120 million landscape plan by Olin Studios will help unify the waterfront, though the city still must allocate about half the funds in its capital budget. Fitzgerald's Warehouse, at South Union and King Streets in Alexandria, survived an 1827 fire. It now houses a Starbucks. Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times The public works projects are expected to take about 10 years to complete; the commercial and residential development is expected to be completed in the next few years. Plans for the waterfront also include a public pier and park on the site of the private Old Dominion Boat Club, which has occupied prime waterfront property since the early 20th century. The city has agreed to pay the club about 5 million to move a few blocks south. There, it will build a new clubhouse, a private pier and private parking, a valued commodity in Old Town's narrow and congested streets. A water taxi service, already in operation at a pier to the north, hopes to capitalize on business from National Harbor, a new development across the river in Maryland where a 1.3 billion MGM casino is expected to open by year's end. Robert Youngentob, president and a founder of EYA, based in Bethesda, Md., has been building in Alexandria for two decades. He said the city fits the company's "life within walking distance" philosophy. The waterfront neighborhood is about a mile and a half from the closest Metro subway stop, but a free shuttle bus, which looks like an early 20th century trolley, runs along King Street, one of two main commercial streets that traverse the city. Mr. Youngentob said the new residences would be priced similarly to homes in the surrounding area, where houses and condos can sell for more than 2 million. Commercial space in the area is about 25 to 50 a square foot; office space is around 35 a square foot, according to Tom Hulfish at McEnearney Associates. William D. Euille, who pushed throughout his four terms as Alexandria's mayor for extensive redevelopment of the 15.5 square mile city, said the waterfront plan was one of the final pieces of the puzzle. "Historically, the Alexandria waterfront had a great deal of industrial use," said Mr. Euille, who grew up in public housing here. "Like many waterfronts, in recent decades, the city has been looking at ways to shift from industrial use toward access to the water and more park space." Mr. Euille's support of redevelopment may have been his undoing. He was defeated for re election last year by the vice mayor, Allison Silberberg, who moved to Alexandria in 1989. She opposed the waterfront redevelopment plan, expressing concerns about traffic and density. "I believe in being careful and having development that fits in, and is to scale, and is respectful of the historic and special character of Old Town Alexandria," Ms. Silberberg said. A majority on the City Council, however, back the development plans. Longtime residents of Old Town are uncomfortable about the scale of the new buildings. "These are massive buildings that sit on the edge of exquisite small gems. And it cuts off the historic assemblage from the river," said Kathryn Papp, who lives a few blocks from the river. Hal Hardaway, an Old Town resident, has sued the city, saying it is allowing the EYA development to exceed the 50 foot height limit on Old Town buildings by two to five feet, changing the character of the area. The Virginia Supreme Court is expected to decide by the fall whether to take the case after lower court rulings found that Mr. Hardaway lacked standing to sue. Mr. Youngentob acknowledged that the EYA buildings have "more contemporary elevations than some in the community may like," but said the company aimed to be respectful of the city's history. Frank Poland, owner of Old Town Coffee, Tea and Spice, has been a mainstay in Old Town for 20 years. But a rent increase last winter forced him to consider going out of business. At the 11th hour, neighbors helped him find new space nearby, and he has signed a two year lease. "I am glad to see some of the empty old warehouses cleaned up," he said. But he is worried about the potential displacement of small, local businesses. The most recent to leave was the quirky Why Not shop a toy, book and craft emporium which was an anchor on King Street for more than 40 years. "We used to have a very strong identity," Mr. Poland added. "This is a very historic town. But now, some people say that that is being abandoned to be trendy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
WASHINGTON The nomination of Judy Shelton, one of President Trump's picks for the Federal Reserve, received a lift on Wednesday after a key Republican senator who had expressed skepticism about her qualifications said he would support her candidacy. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in a statement that he would back Ms. Shelton. That leaves two Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee who have expressed doubts about Ms. Shelton Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, and Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana. Mr. Shelby remains undecided, his office said. Mr. Kennedy is also undecided, according to a person with knowledge of his thinking. Ms. Shelton's path to the Fed board remains difficult. She would need a simple majority vote by the Banking Committee to move onto confirmation by the full Senate, meaning opposition by only one Republican on the panel could potentially dash her chances of moving forward. The committee has 13 Republicans and 12 Democrats, and it is unclear that any of the Democrats would support her bid. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
George Balanchine's full length "Jewels," new in 1967, remains a perfect education in the art of ballet in particular the diversity of ballet as he refashioned it in the mid 20th century. I go on learning from it myself. Part of its fascination is that its three parts "Emeralds" (to pieces by Faure), "Rubies" (to Stravinsky's Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra) and "Diamonds" (to the last four movements of Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony) are so unalike. "Emeralds" is Romantic medievalist, French, seeming to occur in a large garden, deep glade or forest. "Rubies" is 20th century American, indeed New York: merry, hard, dense, high rise. "Diamonds" is imperial Russian, courtly. On Wednesday Balanchine's 110th birthday "Jewels" returned to the David H. Koch Theater with New York City Ballet, the company for which he created it. Just over 47 years after its premiere, its lead roles remain among ballet's most illustrious. This cast was led by nine senior principals: Ashley Bouder with Jared Angle and Sara Mearns with Jonathan Stafford in "Emeralds"; Megan Fairchild, Joaquin De Luz and Teresa Reichlen in "Rubies"; Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle in "Diamonds." We can and should argue about aspects of their performances other troupes performing this ballet have sometimes matched or surpassed the current standards of this company (which offers other casts next week) but everything was intelligently focused, lucid, bold. Even some of City Ballet's hitherto more guarded performers just now seem to be communicating their love of dancing. It's infectious. They know this ballet intimately and made it newly engrossing. For some, all three are urban ballets: Paris, New York, St. Petersburg. And though the sets and Karinska's costumes strongly characterize each part, it's the choreography that most creates the three different worlds. In "Rubies," dancers sometimes flex their feet, tread hard on their heels and thrust their hips in ways that would be unthinkable in the other two works. In the first "Emeralds" solo, a ballerina extends and withdraws her arms with a quality both crisp and perfumed that's exclusive to that piece. And the central sections of the grand "Diamonds" have a particular remoteness; its ballerina scarcely addresses the audience until the finale. Yet "Jewels" is one ballet rather than three. Certain images, steps and motifs bind its parts together. All three feature variations on the same grand port de bras, in which the female dancer moves from a concave shape to a convex one while she changes positions from one leaning forward with hands meeting, to a position outstretched with a bent back and arms open wide; all three show the ballerina revolving powerfully en attitude (her raised leg bent behind her), an orb whose facets catch the light differently as she turns. "Emeralds" and "Diamonds" feature a slow, weighted walk; in "Rubies" there is an irrepressible jog or trot. In all three parts, dancers stretch one leg and both arms up in various upward directions (forward, sideways or behind); to me these indicate aspects of the radiance of jewels. And each has a central male female pas de deux: ceremonious, harmonious, but also dramatic. At one point in each, the ballerina, while the man holds her, bends her head, spine and arms in a straight horizontal line; it's suddenly as if he's holding not a woman but a tense, magical creature, and there's a sense of an impasse in their relationship, as if, amid all their brilliant cooperation, she still resists him. The central role in "Emeralds" extends the shrewd, brilliant Ms. Bouder marvelously. She's a formidable virtuoso in many roles, but here you see her keen sense of atmosphere and nuance. Often the most knowing and least innocent principal dancer in New York, here she's deeply absorbed by a stage milieu larger than herself. Jared Angle, always a superlative partner, helped her sail beautifully through many lifts. Ms. Mearns, often so exuberant and vivid a dancer, is at her most beautifully aloof as the work's other ballerina; as with Ms. Bouder, her absorption deepens the "Emeralds" spell. Mr. Stafford, who retires this season and has had many injuries, danced stylishly and was her admirable partner. Ms. Fairchild, always a strong technician, danced the lead of "Rubies" with a twinkling confidence and percussive musicality that seemed to be personal breakthroughs. She still lacks eloquent line, upper body plasticity and stage filling amplitude, yet the way she took risks in covering space set high standards for Balanchinean impetus, and her lower body sparkle was terrific. As her consort, Mr. De Luz exemplified the same virtues, with more than a touch of braggadocio. Meanwhile, the most definitive "Jewels" performance anywhere today is that of Ms. Reichlen as the female soloist. Sly and outrageous by turns, she hurled her beautiful legs up into the air with a power this company has seldom seen since Suzanne Farrell. You can watch all these women (Ashley Laracey was especially fine in the "Emeralds" pas de trois) and still gasp at the first sight of the spectacular Ms. Kowroski in her "Diamonds" tutu. She's the ultimate tall, slender, long limbed ballerina, with feet and neck to match. And her persona is enthralling: she's both shy and imperious, combining elusive grandeur with tender surprise. What she often lacks is stamina, a full throttle bravura technique and a fluent line that makes her legs and arms move in a single impulse. She has forged a bond with Tyler Angle like his brother Jared, a refined and redoubtable partner that is deepening her command of each ballet's poetry. Hers is a daunting role; on Wednesday you could feel and love her courage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I have been wondering what to say about the horror of Covid 19 behind bars. Much has already been written about the scale of the crisis, the moral argument for freeing people from prisons and jails, and the utter inadequacy of the response in many states, including New York. Activists, community leaders, medical experts and family members of people who are incarcerated have been raising their voices to little avail. In recent weeks, I sensed something was missing from the public debate but struggled to name it. Then I read a letter from a man in Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio. Suddenly the answer was obvious. In Ohio, my home state, more than 80 percent of the people caged at Marion have been infected with the coronavirus because of the state's lackluster response. Thirteen have died. Last month, the Ohio Prisoners Justice League and Ohio Organizing Collaborative demanded that Gov. Mike DeWine release 20,000 prisoners, about 40 percent of those in state custody, by the end of May. That number would encompass those whose sentences are nearly complete, those imprisoned for "nonviolent" offenses, elderly people and those with health problems that render them especially vulnerable to infection. In response to coronavirus concerns, Governor DeWine commuted seven sentences and created an opaque process through which the prison population may have been trimmed by roughly 1,300. The bulk of the reduction has been accomplished through diversions to alternative programs that lowered new prison admissions rather than through releases. About 200 people have been recommended for early release. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people crammed in the state's prisons fear for their lives. This crisis could have been averted if the governor had been willing to free people en masse when the risk to the caged population became clear. While the coalition's demand to release 20,000 people might strike some as unreasonable, Gary Daniels, the chief lobbyist at the A.C.L.U. of Ohio insists that figure should actually be viewed as a floor considering the scale of the crisis. "The system is already 10,000 above capacity," he told me. "Roughly 22 percent of people are there for technical violations of their post release conditions. And the No. 1 reason people end up in prison is for drug offenses. Releasing 20,000 is the baseline." Mr. Daniels is right. Our nation's prison population has quintupled over the last few decades; we lock up and lock out more people than any other country on earth overwhelmingly poor people and people of color. Viewed in this light, cutting the prison population by less than half in order to prevent unnecessary suffering and death is hardly an unreasonable demand. As I see it, people who have been convicted of violent crimes not just nonviolent ones should be considered for possible release. Why should we exclude from consideration someone convicted of armed robbery at 18, who's still locked up at age 45, simply because he has two more years left on his sentence? Our governments have been willing to shut down our entire economy, sparing only those sectors deemed "essential." Shouldn't we also consider whether it is truly "essential" for millions of people to be caged? Saying that it has been difficult to persuade policymakers to listen to the voices of those most affected would be a gross understatement. Given the restrictions on public gatherings, activists have had to become remarkably creative. In April, people from all over Ohio held a protest in Columbus to draw attention to the coronavirus crisis behind bars. More than 100 cars, filled with friends, loved ones and allies of those locked in cages circled the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and waved signs reading "Prisoners' Lives Matter." The car caravan then proceeded to the Statehouse, where about 50 people staged a "socially distant die out." People lay in rows, six feet apart, as though they were about to be buried. Supporters chanted the slogan "20K by May," and one family in attendance had children carrying signs pleading for their father's life. In the days after the protest, I wondered what could be said that might make a difference. Facts, data, medical evidence and pleas from family members have not been enough to stir a meaningful response. I asked myself and others: What has not yet been said? What do people need to hear? And then I read the letter. It was shared with me, with the writer's permission, by one of my colleagues. To protect this man from possible retaliation from administrators and guards, I cannot tell you his name or the name of the addressee. I cannot tell you whether he was convicted of a minor crime or a serious one. Those details do not matter in any event. What you need to know is that he, like many other people imprisoned today, is demonstrating a higher level of moral clarity and compassion in this crisis than many of us, especially elected officials who would rather let people die in cages than let them go months or years ahead of schedule. I recognize that prison officials may dispute some of claims in this letter. Last month, a spokesperson for the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said "There is no shortage of cleaning supplies, and inmates have access to soap and other hygiene products, hand sanitizer and masks." However, the conditions described here have been echoed by others, and the author makes a larger point that deserves to be heard. This is what he wrote, abbreviated and lightly edited for clarity: I walked to the back of the dorm today to check on my friend. He is confined to his bed by Covid 19. Weakness, fatigue, intense vertigo and difficulty breathing allow him to leave his bed area only to defecate (he has to urinate in a drinking jug) or an occasional shower. It has been two weeks now. I have somehow become his nurse. I cook and help with laundry, homework and whatever else he needs. He was asleep. I was relieved. I finally had a moment of rest. These last two corona months have been crazy. I have been sick, helping the sick, or both. Along my way to the day room, I met a nurse who'd just finished passing out daily medications. I asked her if we'd be retested for the virus. After testing positive with over 2,000 other men, and with the symptoms seeming to linger and even reoccur, I am eager to be retested. It has been over 14 days since the tests. We should be negative by now. I am concerned that we are reinfecting each other. The middle aged nurse, with the sweetest demeanor, gave me her undivided attention and began to speak comfortingly to me. This is a rarity in prison; nurses are usually curt and distracted. So I tuned in. She assured me that we would be retested at some point. I should be patient. The nursing staff really cares about us, she said, even those who act a "little snobby." I shouldn't listen to what was being said in the hallways; they're taking good care of us. Everyone who needs serious medical attention is being sent out. The proof of their commitment to us is the fact that they are here. They could have quit like other nurses. I should look at the bright side. Even with all the cases, only a few have had to be sent to outside hospitals. As she spoke, I thought of my friend I was trying to nurse back to health. She knew nothing of this man because, while his case is documented, no one has come to examine him. A cursory glance will show anyone how serious his condition is. Neither he nor I have notified the staff because we know from other friends' experiences that he will be thrown into a cell and left to his own devices. We believe that we unqualified inmates can do better. I also thought of another friend who, only now after two weeks, is beginning to walk on his own again. The virus hit him hard. At one point he had such difficulty breathing that we thought for certain he would die. We frantically scrambled around trying all sorts of remedies, while insisting that the guards alert the medical staff. The nurses refused to come. For hours, we fought for his life. The only thing that helped was boiling water and Vicks 44 in a crock pot and allowing him to inhale the steam. In the meantime, we contacted his family and told them to contact the administration incessantly. After about 3 1/2 hours, the nurse arrived. She took him to the medical area. Less than an hour later, we watched him be carried back into the building by two officers. He still wasn't walking on his own. His friends his fellow prisoners have taken it upon themselves to nurse him back to health ever since. As I pictured these things, she continued to explain why we should be grateful that we are receiving any care at all. She encouraged me to tell the men around me to be grateful in spite of the two month delay in the issuing of commissary items. I wondered how grateful she would be without toothpaste and soap, or how her mood would change if the state shortened food rations and wouldn't allow her to buy a few snacks. She said the officers were doing their best and that they didn't have to be here. They were working only because they care. She said they were volunteering to do things. She recounted how sad it was that one officer almost "threw in the towel" because of all of the ungratefulness. I struggled to understand what she meant by "volunteer." The officers are not only paid but paid extra for their efforts. I suspect that if the pay were to stop, they would stop. She waxed passionate when she talked about how some officers had to handle garbage (a job normally reserved for inmates). That sight affected her deeply. She was impressed by people who would willingly handle garbage for a short period of time for 22 an hour but considered it normal for prisoners to do it every day for 22 a month. The conversation saddened me because the nurse meant well. She was sincere. She was one of the good ones. She reminded me of one of the "moderates" Dr. King talked about in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." If the good people feel this way, then we are really in trouble. Despite all her passion, her main agenda was not to hear my needs or concerns or to help address them; it was to provoke passivity, assuage anger, and prevent revolt. She was alright if my problems didn't go away as long as I didn't make too much of a fuss about it. She is convinced that prisoners should be grateful for deficient medical care and two month lapses between access to vital necessities, hygiene products and sanitation services. Those are things that we don't deserve and shouldn't expect or feel entitled to. I'm certain she doesn't feel this way about everyone. She wouldn't see her daughter locked in a room with Covid 19 and no medical care and say, "Well, you know, you lucked out, honey." She just feels this way about prisoners. The social category of prisoner qualifies one as undeserving of a decent civilized life. Herein lies the cause of the profound spread of the virus throughout the institution: the collective sense of the undeservingness of prisoners. A vaccination would be nice. Proper P.P.E. would help. But the real cure for our woes is an affirmation of the inalienable entitlement to life for people in prisons and jails. After reading this letter, I took a deep breath. I had to admit to myself that there was a time when I was that nurse. I was a well intentioned, sincere person who viewed myself as working for social justice yet unconsciously believed that the lives of some people matter a bit less. Perhaps you are that nurse today. If you're completely honest with yourself, do you believe that "we," the so called innocent, are more valuable than "them," the "criminals"? Do you believe the lives of those locked up or locked out matter a bit less and they should be grateful for any care or concern at all? We now face a choice regarding what kind of country we want to be in the months and years to come. Rather than imagining that the lives of those locked in cages are less valuable than our own, perhaps we ought to get down on our knees and say, "There but for the grace of God go I." I do not even consider myself a Christian and yet those are the only words that spring to mind when I think of all those at Marion Correctional, including our letter writer, as well as all those in prisons and jails nationwide, whose lives have been discarded in the era of mass incarceration. It may be tempting to believe, if you've never been locked up, that you could never find yourself in prison. Yet most of us, at some point in our lives, have committed crimes that could result in prison time, such as illegal drug possession or theft. Some of us, due to poverty, trauma, oppression or mental health challenges, have gone through periods in which we made grave mistakes or caused serious harm to others. Equally important is the fact that who's behind bars today has more to do with our collective choices than individual ones. Our nation has spent trillions on endless war and systems of mass incarceration and mass deportation; yet basic human rights such as a living wage, health care, housing and quality education are routinely denied on the grounds that we the richest country in the world cannot afford to provide to all of our people what citizens of many other nations are granted as a matter of right. If we had invested heavily in the communities that need it most, rather than pouring our resources into policing, surveillance, prisons and jails, most of the people who are behind bars today would not need to be freed by a group of protesters staging a "die out" on the Statehouse grounds. It is precisely because of our collective choices that so many of us have friends and family who are incarcerated during this crisis. One in 4 women have a loved one behind bars; the figure is nearly 1 in 2 for black women. As the coronavirus sweeps through prisons and jails, millions of people are living in terror that their loved ones will not escape their cages alive. More than 95 percent of people in prison will come home one day, if they live that long. The issue is not whether they should come home but when. According to a recent study by the A.C.L.U., failure to aggressively decarcerate could add 100,000 fatalities to the overall U.S. death count among people both in and outside of jail. Fortunately, California has released nearly 10,000 people from prisons and jails and hopefully will release many more. But most states are responding like Ohio, even though national polling indicates that 66 percent of likely voters support measures to reduce prison overcrowding in response to the coronavirus, including a clear majority who support various forms of decarceration. If we, as communities and as a nation, fail to free people in this pandemic because we'd rather risk their lives than allow them to come home earlier than our criminal injustice system originally planned, we should consider ourselves guilty of utter disregard for human life. Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." 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 |
While Morrison fails to rescue the image of England's ruler as the portly, self indulgent lecher waggishly created by the poets and cartoonists of Regency times, he does well to remind readers how much George and his pet architect, John Nash, contributed to transforming London into an elegant and supremely modern metropolis. West of Nash's obsequiously named Regent Street, London society made and obeyed the rules of a mini Versailles. Even the Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, took his dismissal from an evening at a smart social club like a man. (The soldier duke's crime: wearing black trousers to one fashionable venue's etiquette conscious evening instead of the mandatory knee breeches.) While Morrison's tales of high society lack the spice of novelty few periods of English social history have been more thoroughly trawled he does a splendid job of exposing the grubby underbelly of Georgian life. East of Regent Street were the crowded rookeries of St Giles. Criminals swapped tips at the infamous Rats' Castle pub, jawing together in the new "flash" language to which today's street slang owes "pig" for a police officer and "pigeon" for a victim. Punishment was harsh. London's jails (28 of them in 1816, by one journalist's count) were augmented by the ships called "hulks," from which Dickens's convict Magwitch fled in "Great Expectations." Writing about Fagin's light fingered proteges in "Oliver Twist," Dickens must have scoured old news articles about the 6,000 pick pocketing children whose work for gangland bosses carried a death penalty as late as 1808. Sex in Regency times offers Morrison a field day in salacious details. The reader is not stinted. The Eleusinian Institution offered a visiting lady the chance to enjoy "one or a dozen men as she pleases." A raid on a brothel for working class men unveiled a "celebration room" where clients could frolic with Miss Selina, Sally Fox and even "the Duchess of Devonshire." With a conscious echo of contemporary scandals, Morrison describes how one highborn bishop fled to France (since sodomy was still a hanging offense) after being discovered in the back parlor of a pub during "the actual commission of that horrid and unnatural crime." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Time Inc. has decided to go it alone, choosing a path filled with challenges that no legacy publisher has completely mastered. On Friday, the magazine company, home to Sports Illustrated, People and Time, said its board had determined it would remain independent and not sell itself, ending a monthslong bidding process that had involved several suitors. Instead, the company said it would pursue the strategic plan its new management team had laid out, which includes increasing its digital audience and pursuing new opportunities for revenue growth. "This is a great company," Rich Battista, the chief executive of Time Inc., said in an interview Friday morning. "We think there's tremendous untapped potential, and we're just scratching the surface." With the decision, Time Inc., the most storied magazine company in the country, ended months of ambiguity and anxiety over its future. But it began another uncertain chapter for the company at an increasingly tremulous time for the industry. Print advertising and circulation revenues continue to fall, starving magazine companies of the lifeblood that long sustained them. Most publishers have shifted their focus to increasing nonprint revenue, but new revenue sources have yet to make up the shortfall. To compensate, publishers continue to slash costs, transforming themselves into leaner companies with fewer employees and diminished resources. "They have substantial challenges ahead as a public company," Reed Phillips, a media investment banker at DeSilva Phillips, said about Time Inc. in an email. "There will be pressure from shareholders wanting to see growth at a time when the magazine industry is receding." Potential buyers circled Time Inc. for months, and the company's board while pointing out that it had not initiated a sale process had been considering a number of options, including selling itself or bringing on an outside investor. As recently as March, five parties, including the Meredith Corporation, the Des Moines, Iowa based publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, expressed interest in buying Time Inc. in its entirety, according to people familiar with the bidding process. But one party, an investor group led by the Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman Jr., suddenly dropped out. Time Inc. previously rejected an offer of at least 18 a share from Mr. Bronfman's group late last year. But despite rumblings of interest, the bidding process for Time Inc. dragged on without an agreement. About two weeks ago, the company's board, worried about morale and the cloud of uncertainty, began considering whether to end the discussions, according to a person briefed on the process. On Thursday, the directors officially decided to call off the sale talks, the person said. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Meredith, which came to be considered the most likely acquirer, had been unwilling to pay what Time Inc. sought. The most significant issues for Meredith were concerns about pension liability connected to Time Inc.'s business in Britain, and Meredith's inability to secure sufficient financing from banks because of Time Inc.'s financial situation, according to a person briefed on Meredith's thinking. But the person briefed on the process said the pension was nearly fully funded and that the company had affirmed its financial outlook for the year. Time Inc.'s share price, which has been propped up for months on deal expectations, was down about 17 percent at the close of the market Friday. This was not the first time Time Inc. flirted with a sale. Meredith considered buying it in 2013, but a deal fell through in part because Meredith reportedly did not want to buy several of Time Inc.'s best known magazines, including Time and Sports Illustrated. Founded in 1922 by Henry R. Luce, Time Inc. long embodied the free spending of the magazine industry, with offices overlooking Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. As a publisher of magazines that highlighted stellar photography and weekly updates on news, sports and celebrities, Time Inc. was an empire that left an indelible mark on American culture. But like many magazine publishers, Time Inc. has struggled to adapt to a digital age. The brutal economics of the publishing industry have made that challenge more daunting. In the last decade, Time Inc.'s revenue and operating profit have fallen sharply. Its work force has dropped from 11,000 to just over 7,000. Although Time Inc.'s challenges are endemic to all publishing companies, other forces have contributed to the company's troubles. Executive churn has roiled the company for years, and cost cuts have bled off its resources. After Time Warner spun off Time Inc. in June 2014, the publisher struggled to find its footing. It has reported revenue declines each year since the spinoff. But there have been some positive signs for the business. Mr. Battista, who took the helm of Time Inc. in September, and the new chief operating officer, Jen Wong, recently embarked on an aggressive strategy to increase Time Inc.'s digital revenue, including enhancing advertising technology abilities and offering customers paid services, such as a food and wine club. Last year, advertising revenue increased 3 percent, driven by substantial growth in digital advertising. Executives project that digital advertising revenue will increase to more than 600 million this year and 1 billion in the coming years. But Time Inc.'s overall financial results have yet to improve, in large part because the company is still tied to its declining print business. About two thirds of its annual revenue is still derived from magazines. The company will report its first quarter earnings on May 10. Time Inc. is aiming to make 100 million in cost cuts this year, and Mr. Battista said the company would continue to be aggressive about cost management, particularly in its print business. He did not rule out selling individual magazine titles. Mr. Battista added that he was eager to continue transforming Time Inc. from a print publisher to a multimedia company. He planned to hold two town hall style meetings with employees Monday morning. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Ms. Lieberman directs this art world roundelay with vigor, and pricey artworks flit by in zippy video projections. Her command of auction lingo is satisfactory, and there are some good gags about the lengths to which Sotheby's and Christie's sometimes go to win the choicest lots. (After losing out on one major consignment, an auction house board member wails, "We paid for the shiva, for God's sake!") But both Weisenberg, the collector, and Zeigler, the artist, are underdrawn, and much of the second act is devoted to an Art History 101 costume party, featuring a paint spattered Jackson Pollock and an Andy Warhol snapping away with his Polaroid. The dialogue is riddled with commonplaces some of Mr. Gagosian's lines are lifted verbatim from a recent profile in The Wall Street Journal and groaners. Provenance: It ain't a town in Rhode Island. As an art critic in the theater reviewer's seat, I found myself wondering why the art market continues to hold dramatic appeal, and why so few people get it right. A few recent works wrestle with the current art world's construction of value, like Michel Houellebecq's novel "The Map and the Territory," which skewers the Paris art set, or the indie film "Untitled," set amid the galleries of Chelsea. Of course biographical plays have always appealed, whether done straight, like the play "Red," about Rothko, or more dreamily, like the Seurat refracting "Sunday in the Park With George." Yet the big money domains of the auction houses and the largest galleries remain stubbornly beyond most writers' faculties. If they are not treating collectors, critics and dealers as a bunch of pseuds and dupes Ms. Reza's "Art," which debates the merits of an all white painting, is a classic of the genre then they usually revolve around the doubters' two favorite themes: forgeries and thefts. Part of this may be because of the art world's murky workings. Auctions these days, at least at the top of the market, are increasingly pre choreographed via guaranteed prices, rather than dramatic affairs in which the richest aesthete goes home with prize. The maneuvering, the betrayals and the frequently alleged money laundering takes place behind the scenes; the sale room is just the last stop. Part of this, too, may come down to the number of zeros that trails every Richter or Warhol. For now, your best bet for understanding the inner workings of the art market remains reported nonfiction. What I continue to wait for is a work for stage or screen that does for the art world what a film like "The Big Short" did for finance: rooting real drama and real character study within the shenanigans of art sales rather than getting distracted by the dollar signs. Spend enough time with art, and you'll learn the money really isn't the point. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The ExoMars 2016 mission a collaboration between the European and Russian space agencies is scheduled to blast off from Kazakhstan on Monday. The spacecraft, which consists of an orbiter that will measure methane and other gases in the Martian atmosphere and a lander to study dust storms, will hitch a ride on top of a Russian Proton rocket that is expected to lift off at 3:31 p.m. local time. The European Space Agency will broadcast coverage of the launch on the Internet beginning about an hour before liftoff. After a journey of seven months, the ExoMars spacecraft will arrive at Mars in October. Three days before arriving, the lander, named Schiaparelli after the 19th century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, will separate from the orbiter. It is to enter the atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour and quickly decelerate on its way to settling down on the surface. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show this week that the coronavirus was being exploited "to bring down Donald Trump." The stock market is swooning. Consumers are stockpiling masks and antibacterial gels. President Trump's response to a global epidemic has done little to quell fears. In the right wing media universe, however, the commotion over the coronavirus is hardly a crisis for the White House. Instead, it's just another biased attack on a president from the usual haters. "It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, said on his syndicated program this week, dismissing the disease as a Democratic talking point. "The coronavirus is the common cold, folks," Mr. Limbaugh added, incorrectly. (The coronavirus is more deadly and more contagious than the common cold, and it can cause severe flulike symptoms.) Viewers of the Fox News talk show "Fox Friends" on Friday heard the co host Ainsley Earhardt introduce a segment by announcing: "Let's talk about the Democrats and the media with this coronavirus, and they're making it political." Her guest was Pete Hegseth, a "Fox Friends Weekend" co host and an on air Trump cheerleader who doubles as an informal confidant of the president. "I don't want to say this, I don't relish the reality," Mr. Hegseth began. "But you start to feel, you really do watch the Democrats, watch the media that they're rooting for coronavirus to spread. They're rooting for it to grow. They're rooting for the problem to get worse." Ms. Earhardt and her co hosts, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, nodded along. Their show is the highest rated morning program on cable news. "My inbox is flooded with people trying to get me to interview people who are being passed out as experts, who really are not experts," she said. In addition, the coverage, presented with the signature flash of cable news, has at times amplified misleading or downright false narratives about the spread of the virus. Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, for instance, floated the possibility in a Fox News interview that the coronavirus had originated at a Chinese laboratory, a theory that scientists say lacks any evidence. Jon Cohen, who is among the team of reporters covering the coronavirus for the magazine Science, said anyone exaggerating the likelihood that the virus had been created in a laboratory could leave viewers misinformed. "It reinforces biases people have against China, against government, against scientific research," Mr. Cohen said. Mr. Limbaugh, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Mr. Trump this month, used his radio program this week to link the virus with the Democratic presidential front runner, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Just keep in mind where the coronavirus came from," Mr. Limbaugh told listeners. "It came from a country that Bernie Sanders wants to turn the United States into a mirror image of: Communist China." (At a CNN town hall on Monday, Mr. Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, described China as an "authoritarian country, becoming more and more authoritarian," adding that it had "taken more people out of extreme poverty" than any other nation.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
PARIS If only Blaine Trump had been here to see it. The pouf skirt, relic of the go go 1980s, favorite party dress of the Wives of Wall Street, is back. Only, now it is in the shape of a sleeve (singular). Also a waistband. That's a tell. It made its return Wednesday afternoon in the raw concrete innards behind the stage of the Opera Bastille. And it made its return because Dries Van Noten , a designer whose arrival on the Paris fashion scene back in the '80s as part of the Antwerp Six effectively provided an antidote to everything pouf like, made a call to a man who was then king of exactly that kind of fantastical aspirational dressing: Christian Lacroix . A man who scaled the heights of luxury only to later become its cautionary tale: the first brand that LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton started from scratch, and the first it sold, starting a downward trend that ultimately resulted in Mr. Lacroix losing the rights to his name , saying goodbye to the runway in 2009, and starting a new career as a theatrical designer. Until Mr. Van Noten asked him to come back, for one time only. Because sometimes, seeing the familiar from someone else's perspective makes all the difference. Sometimes, engaging in negotiation with a different point of view gives you the best possible result. It's a truism that applies to a lot more than fashion. But for now, Mr. Lacroix's excess, his adoration of the baroque and rococo, his ability to say "pourquoi pas?" ("why not?"), and Mr. Van Noten's love of the ever so elevated everyday (the painter's pants with an embroidered flower; the jacket with a sparkling applique) met in a 68 look give and take of priorities casual versus decorative, elaborate versus easy that was in all ways more than the sum of its parts. Over the base of simple white jeans or shorts and a white singlet were layered ruched and ruffled taffeta tops (only they weren't taffeta, they were polyester made from recycled plastic that looked like taffeta); big, explosive skirts, in Old Dutch florals or graphic swirls, tiered and frilled and hiked up on the side to show the cool beneath or left to billow grandly behind (all 130 feet or so of fuchsia). Often there was a sweatshirt slouched on top. A single black bejeweled feather was worn like a cross body sword across a ribbed cotton tank top. Jackets were brocade and long or matador short and encrusted with gold bullion . Coats were shrugged off shoulders and worn like wraps, trailing like royal robes. Leopard played a role; so did zebra, So did neon. Giant polka dots. Opera gloves. Ribbons. Small, squishy brocade bags. Color was everywhere, and then there would be a cleansing breath of black. The '80s references were muted; a benediction on a moment that had become less "look at me" and more "once upon a time." At the end, Mr. Van Noten and Mr. Lacroix appeared in matching black crew necks and dark pants, their bride her white denim and white tank covered in a cascade of sheer tulle ruffles between them. As if any more proof were needed that this had been a happy marriage. It is rare in fashion to be given a glimpse into a designer's mind, but Mr. Van Noten has always been generous that way (he had a retrospective that involved giving credit to all the other work that inspired him). This was like being allowed to listen in on a fascinating conversation between equals, and watching the ideas at play. Collaborations can seem like a hackneyed exercise by now, there are so many: high fashion designers working with mass market brands, musical artists signing on to do sneakers, celeb faces working with designers and demanding their own capsule line; all of it seeming, increasingly, like the most naked form of mutual back scratching, based on little more than money and marketing. But this was something else: a reminder that at its purest, creative collaboration is a meeting of the eyes and the minds. Not to mention a solution to the modern ill of appropriation, be it styles or culture. Mr. Van Noten said, in an interview the morning after the show, that when he realized he had tacked up numerous photos of Mr. Lacroix's work on his mood board, he thought that instead of creating an homage , he would go straight to the source. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
On Feb. 28, when Glenda Bailey stands in the Musee des Arts Decoratifs of the Louvre, presiding over the opening of a new photography retrospective, "Harper's Bazaar: First in Fashion," it will mark her final act as editor of the storied magazine. Hearst, the publication's owner, announced on Wednesday her move to become a "global consultant" after 19 years. It will be a telling swan song. Not just because it will provide a showcase for the boundary pushing photography that originally made the magazine famous Avedon's "Dovima With Elephants," from 1955; Lillian Bassman's "Blowing Kiss," from 1958; Melvin Sokolsky's "Fashion Bubbles" series from 1963, to name a few. But because, in the contrast between what will be on the wall and what is often on the page, it will underscore just how much Bazaar changed during Ms. Bailey's tenure as she shepherded the magazine into the era of Instagram and reflected its ethos. Which is to say, the era of eroding authority of glossies, the rise of the armchair influencer and the commodification of creativity. Following the announcement, story after story mentioned her "whimsical" and surreal covers Demi Moore atop a spiral staircase feeding a giraffe, photographed by Mark Seliger; Rihanna in the ocean, happily reclining in the mouth of a shark (Norman Jean Roy). But Ms. Bailey's real skill the reason she lasted so long was being able to balance such high minded homages to the magazine's history with content that seemed, more and more, like an astutely art directed catalog. Doing so made the magazine accessible to larger numbers of readers. Dennis Freedman, the former creative director of W, noted in an interview that the pages were consistently shoppable. That arguably saved Bazaar from being crushed into nothing by the internet. But it also ceded what once had been very high ground, and dispensed with the most romantic notions about what fashion magazines can be. In some ways, that has been the story of most mainstream glossies, Vogue and Elle included. It is of a piece with broader shifts in fashion and the chase for the widest possible consumer base, which by definition requires a sanding of aesthetic edges. But the change of direction feels particularly pointed in the case of Bazaar, both because risk taking editors and photographers defined its history and because Ms. Bailey chose to slide it forward down a different path. From the 1930s through the '60s, Carmel Snow, Alexey Brodovitch and Diana Vreeland worked with era defining giants like Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus and Man Ray on features that took the building blocks of fashion shape, silhouette and transformed them into ideas and emotions, caught in a moment so powerfully that many of those images now reside in an assortment of museums. Then, after two decades in the wilderness (or, really, supermarket checkout counters, which is where the focus went under Anthony Mazzola in the '70s), the magazine returned to its glory in the '90s under Liz Tilberis, who won ASME awards (the magazine world's Oscars) for design and photography in 1993. They were the last such prizes the magazine would win. "David Sims, Inez and Vinoodh, Craig McDean, Mario Testino, Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Steven Klein, all these photographers were at Bazaar first," Fabien Baron, the magazine's creative director under Ms. Tilberis, said in an interview on Thursday. (Many of the highlights from that era can be found in Fabien Baron: Works 1983 2019, a brick size coffee table book released this fall.) Ms. Tilberis died of cancer in 1999 and was replaced for a tumultuous two years by Kate Betts; in 2001, Ms. Bailey took over, moving from inside Hearst, where she had served as the editor of Marie Claire, the company's upper middle class alternative to Cosmopolitan. Ms. Bailey restored the famous logo that had been jettisoned by Ms. Betts. She also brought back Hiro, whose phosphorescent beauty shoots for the magazine under both Ms. Tilberis and Ms. Vreeland had been among the magazine's high water marks. But Ms. Bailey's desire to make the pages more and more consumable, more service driven, gradually altered the expectations and understanding of what photography in a high end magazine needed (or didn't need) to be. It could even be an ad: Ms. Bailey ran Madonna on the cover of her September 2003 issue, with pictures that came from a new Gap campaign. Even by the ordinary standards of glossy magazines (where the relationship between editorial and commercial is increasingly porous), that was pretty brazen. But most of the pictures that really became collectibles migrated, first to W (which won seven ASME awards for its photography during Ms. Bailey's time at Bazaar); and then to the obscure fashion magazines being started by stylists and art directors for their own friends: Self Service, Mastermind, Ten, Muse. They were laboratories for visual experimentation, the kind of every few monthlies stocked not on newsstands but in museums and art book stores, and priced like luxury goods. In 2011, Ms. Bailey celebrated the images of her first 10 years at Bazaar by staging an exhibition of them at the International Center of Photography. She worked on it alongside Vince Aletti, whose writing about photography for The New Yorker and Aperture has made him a leading authority on fashion imagery. What appeared on the walls, he said in an interview, was something "I was not embarrassed by." Yet there was little question, he said, that "the magazine never had the ambition of the old Bazaar." Possibly it never could: The price of artistic aspiration the drive to move the eye and mind and closet forward is more often than not accompanied by a sacrifice in audience size. What is produced often seems too challenging, too weird. And audience is the pot of gold of the day. This is true for both fashion magazines and the industry they cover. It is part of the reason we see so much designer churn and lemming like clothes. Everyone absolutely needs an ugly sneaker until they don't. But another lesson from the contemporary fashion era is that when a talented designer dares upend the old order and received wisdom, dares hike the eye forward to where identity wants to go, it alters the landscape for everyone: See Phoebe Philo's first collection at Celine or Alessandro Michele's Gucci. And magazines do seem to have gone as far as they can go in imitating etail. Maybe it's time for the editors to give readers what they can't get online: photographs (and words for that matter) that offer ideas big enough to last. Maybe, rather than lowering the bar to where readers are assumed to be, maybe they should raise it and trust readers to meet them there. Maybe a new decade, and Ms. Bailey's successor, can give them that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In the 1980s, when John Truchard was a teenager, the most happening watering hole in downtown Napa was the McDonald's on Jefferson Street. "It was a ghost town," said Mr. Truchard, the owner of a wine room, JaM Cellars. "There were no good restaurants, nothing good to do." Napa, with a population of about 80,000, is Napa Valley's largest city and the county seat. Until recently, even as Napa Valley became an international wine destination, tourists tended to bypass the city in favor of venturing "up valley" for wine tasting, luxury lodging and upscale restaurants. Places like St. Helena, Yountville and Calistoga attracted tourists while Napa, an hour north of San Francisco, tended to be a pit stop for gas. It didn't help that there was also flooding in the downtown streets after torrential rains. Downtown Napa now has 65 restaurants and 24 wine tasting cellars, said Craig Smith, the executive director of the Downtown Napa Association. Two decades ago, downtown had one tasting room and approximately 30 restaurants mainly serving breakfast and lunch, because there was no reason to open for dinner, he said. Aiding the growth has been a river bypass flood project, completed in 2015, that diverted waters away from downtown. One of them, First Street Napa, is a 275,000 square foot development that will cost 200 million. It will cover three square blocks and include more than 40 spaces for retail outlets, offices and restaurants. Anchoring the project will be the 183 room Archer Hotel, which at five stories, with an additional sixth floor rooftop with pool and restaurant, is the tallest building in Napa Valley. The hotel will be a contrast to the city's mostly one and two story buildings. It will not be adding more parking, but will use existing structures and lots. Opening nearby will be the Culinary Institute of America's new outpost, called the CIA at Copia. The two story, 12.5 million project will include five day cooking boot camps, a culinary arts museum and wine tastings. Its retail shop, classes and restaurant are already open. Finally, the Feast It Forward network, an internet TV channel, is finishing a two story, farmhouse style building that will include shopping, wine and food, live cooking demonstrations and music. Katie Shaffer, the president of the Feast It Forward, said the development meant that "people will finally take downtown Napa seriously. "The sleeping giant is about to wake," she added. Ken Tesler, the managing director for Blue Note Napa, a new jazz club downtown, said, "Thank God, the streets no longer roll up at 9 p.m." He added: "This is definitely not the old Napa. Ten years ago, St. Helena was the place to be. Five years ago it was Yountville. Now downtown Napa is the hot ticket, and it is on a serious rise." Mr. Truchard said he was seeing millennials in downtown Napa for the first time. Bars and clubs are staying open until midnight daily. "There's lots of energy here now," he said. "We even open until 2 a.m. on weekends." Not everyone is enthusiastic about the change. Some believe that the town is tipping too much toward tourism and that residents will suffer for it. The Archer Hotel is far too large compared to its surroundings, said Patricia Damery, a ranch owner in Napa County. She is concerned about the long term effects of development on the community. "Why are we building more and more hotels?" she said. "We don't have enough workers to serve the ones now." Ms. Damery is a member of the Napa Vision 2050 coalition, which says it advocates responsible and sustainable Napa County planning. Ms. Damery said that low wage workers cannot afford to live in Napa, so they move to the neighboring towns and commute into the city. "I'm not anti development," she said. "I am for balanced development. Downtown is wonderful and so much better than before, but we have to invest in quality of life things like mass transit and housing." Jill Techel, Napa's mayor since 2005, said most residents were happy about the city's economic growth. The city's planning commission has approved downtown businesses including five additional hotels and bed and breakfasts and two tasting rooms. At least four more restaurants will break ground in 2017. "We would not be here if the locals were not supportive," said Todd Zapolski of Zapolski Real Estate, the developer of First Street Napa. "They said they needed new energy downtown, and they wanted to take advantage of the momentum that was already happening." Jim Brandt, the owner of the Napa General Store, said the block where the Archer Hotel was going up had long been dormant. "Guess what? We're are going to have them filled now. I am absolutely looking forward to the new hotel. More hotels are a great idea and help the tax base." A view to the future is essential, said Mr. Brandt. "When we opened 16 years ago, it was a ghost town," he said. "And we had to suffer through the building of the flood wall and road closures. Now we have more visitors than ever before." He added: "Locals are coming here in droves. I try to stay out of politics, but I talk to all sorts of people who think the changes are overwhelmingly positive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Henry F. Graff, right, with former President Gerald R. Ford at Columbia University in 1989. Mr. Ford spent more than an hour with students in Professor Graff's undergraduate class. This obituary is part of a series about people who died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. Henry Graff, a Columbia University professor who studied the past and present as a scholar of the presidency and, as an Army translator during World War II, foreshadowed the future from decrypted Japanese diplomatic messages, died on April 7 in a hospital in Greenwich, Conn. He was 98. The cause was complications of the new coronavirus, said Molly Morse, his granddaughter. He lived in Scarsdale, N.Y. An author of 12 books and countless articles and a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, Professor Graff was best known as a keen observer of the men who occupied the White House 17 of whom presided during his lifetime. Playing Boswell to Johnson's advisers on Vietnam, Professor Graff wrote the book, "The Tuesday Cabinet: Deliberation and Decision on Peace and War Under Lyndon B. Johnson" (1970), which he later described as "an effort at explaining the administration's Vietnam policy as the president and his chief aides said they understood it." While he rhapsodized about teaching at Columbia, which he did from 1946 until he retired in 1991, he exulted in his exploits as an Army translator shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was assigned to the Signal Intelligence Service in Washington, a precursor of the National Security Agency, because he understood Japanese. He had studied the language more or less by chance as a prerequisite to minoring in Asian history during a semester at Columbia when Chinese language courses were not being offered. In November 1943, he translated part of a message deciphered from Japan's complex Purple code that had been sent by Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, to the foreign office in Tokyo detailing German plans to repel the expected Allied invasion of northern France on D Day. Professor Graff quoted General George C. Marshall as saying "that message was worth 25,000 men's lives." "I, a kid, would come in and look to see if we had any messages from Oshima to the Japanese Foreign Office," he recalled. "And I was reading messages that reported his conversation with Hitler the day before. I cannot tell you other than I felt that I was at the center of the universe." Nine months later, he translated another intercepted message, this one from Japan to the Soviet Union. "I was the first American, the first member of the Allied side, to know Japan was going to get out of the War," he said, "because I was working at two in the morning in 1945 shortly after Hiroshima, and I got this message asking Bern, Switzerland, to help get them out of the war." If Japan had not surrendered, Professor Graff was expected to be deployed with the Allied invasion forces. Henry Franklin Graff was born on Aug. 11, 1921, in Manhattan to Samuel F. Graff, a salesman in the Garment District, and Florence (Morris) Graff, both descendants of Jewish immigrants from Germany. His maternal grandmother's family had a clothing store in East Harlem. Raised in the Inwood section of Manhattan, he graduated from George Washington High School at 16 and earned his bachelor of social science degree from City College in 1941. He was working toward his master's at Columbia ("I was the first Jew in the Columbia History Department," he said) when he enlisted. After the war, he taught history at City College before joining the Columbia faculty in 1946 and earning his doctorate in 1949. He married Edith Krantz in 1946; she died in 2019. He is survived by their two daughters, Iris Morse and Ellen Graff; five grandchildren; and five great grandchildren. His twin sister, Myra Balber, died. Professor Graff wrote "The Modern Researcher" (1957) with the historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun, a colleague at Columbia; and "The Presidents: A Reference History" (1984). He was honored with Columbia's Great Teacher Award and with its Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching. Kenneth T. Jackson, one of his successors as chairman of the history department, said that Professor Graff was that rare Columbia professor who also received an honorary doctorate from the university. Professor Graff was chairman of the juries for the Pulitzer Prize in American history and the Bancroft Prize in history by Columbia University Libraries. He was appointed by President Johnson to the National Historical Publications Commission, and by President Clinton to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. Professor Graff once said that American scholars of the United States are twice blessed, because the nation is young enough so that its historical record is largely intact, and because historians have the academic freedom to analyze that record critically. He regarded the presidency as "the litmus paper for testing the nation's aims and character." "When wearing their historical laurels and burdens," he wrote, "they symbolize even better than the Caesars the fascinating disparity between vast opportunity for personal glory and the uncommonness of the gift to use it wisely." But, he added, "in offering themselves for posterity's judgment, they confront a standard no one has defined." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Much of the empire built by Alex Jones, the Infowars founder and social media shock jock, vanished this summer when Facebook suspended Mr. Jones for 30 days and took down four of his pages for repeatedly violating its rules against bullying and hate speech. YouTube, Apple and other companies also took action against Mr. Jones. But a private Infowars Facebook group with more than 110,000 members, which had survived the crackdown, remained a hive of activity. In Mr. Jones's absence, the group continued to fill with news stories, Infowars videos and rants about social media censorship. Users also posted the sort of content hateful attacks against Muslims, transgender people and other vulnerable groups that got Mr. Jones suspended. And last week, when Mr. Jones's suspension expired, he returned to the group triumphantly. Mr. Jones built his Facebook audience on pages the big public megaphones he used to blast links, memes and videos to millions of his followers. In recent months, though, he and other large scale purveyors of inflammatory speech have found refuge in private groups, where they can speak more openly with less fear of being punished for incendiary posts. Several private Facebook groups devoted to QAnon, a sprawling pro Trump conspiracy theory, have thousands of members. Regional chapters of the Proud Boys, a right wing nationalist group that Twitter suspended last month for its "violent extremist" nature, maintain private Facebook groups, which they use to vet new members. And anti vaccination groups have thrived on Facebook, in part because they are sometimes recommended to users by the site's search results and "suggested groups" feature. Facebook's fight against disinformation and hate speech will be a topic of discussion on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, when Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, will join Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When it comes to public facing pages, Ms. Sandberg will have plenty of company actions to cite. Facebook has taken many steps to clean up its platform, including hiring thousands of additional moderators, developing new artificial intelligence tools and breaking up coordinated influence operations ahead of the midterm elections. But when it comes to more private forms of communication through the company's services like Facebook groups, or the messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger the social network's progress is less clear. Some experts worry that Facebook's public cleanup may be pushing more toxic content into these private channels, where it is harder to monitor and moderate. Misinformation is not against Facebook's policies unless it leads to violence. But many of the private groups reviewed by The New York Times contained content and behavior that appeared to violate other Facebook rules, such as rules against targeted harassment and hate speech. In one large QAnon group, members planned a coordinated harassment campaign, known as Operation Mayflower, against public figures such as the actor Michael Ian Black, the late night host Stephen Colbert and the CNN journalist Jim Acosta. In the Infowars group, posts about Muslims and immigrants have drawn threatening comments, including calls to deport, castrate and kill people. "They've essentially empowered very large groups that can operate secretly without much governance and oversight," said Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor at Syracuse University's S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. "There may be harms and abuses that are taking place, and they can't see." After The Times sent screenshots to Facebook of activity taking place inside these groups, Facebook removed several comments, saying they violated the company's policies on hate speech. The groups themselves, however, remain active. A Facebook spokeswoman said the company used automated tools, including machine learning algorithms, to detect potentially harmful content inside private groups and flag it for human reviewers, who make the final decisions about whether or not to take it down. The company is developing additional ways, she said, to determine if an entire group violates the company's policies and should be taken down, rather than just its individual posts or members. Harmful activity does not appear to be more prevalent in secret groups, the Facebook spokeswoman said. Private groups have been a core feature of Facebook for years. But they received new focus last year when executives changed the company's mission to emphasize close knit connections, rather than filling users' feeds with news stories and viral videos. In a long memo called "Building Global Community," Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, set out a goal of connecting a billion Facebook users. Soon after, the company's algorithms began giving posts from groups higher visibility in users' news feeds. The largest Facebook groups such as Pantsuit Nation, a progressive political group formed to rally Hillary Clinton supporters in the 2016 election gained millions of members. Facebook's promotion of private groups encouraged like minded people to cluster together. But it also meant that some users were seeing more posts from people whose opinions and interests they already shared, and it may have created echo chambers where polarizing behavior could flourish. "It's one of the really thorny challenges Facebook faces," said Eli Pariser, a co founder of the website Upworthy and author of "The Filter Bubble." "An easy way to bond is over a common enemy. How do you bond people together without actually fanning the flames of division?" Facebook groups are self regulated by members who act as administrators and moderators, with the authority to remove posts and oust unruly members. And the company has rolled out new features for group leaders to give them more control, and help them resolve conflicts within their groups. A conspiracy theorist. Mr. Jones, who founded the website Infowars in 1999, has spread conspiracy theories and misinformation for years, including false claims that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax. A far right broadcaster and pitchman. Mr. Jones built a substantial following by appealing to conspiracy minded, largely white, male listeners via his website and radio show, where he amassed a fortune by hawking diet supplements and survivalist gear. A spreader of misinformation. Facebook and YouTube, among other tech companies, have removed most of Mr. Jones's content in an effort to curb the spread of misinformation. The bans have drastically reduced his reach. A Trump ally. Mr. Jones was an early supporter of Donald Trump, who has adopted many of Mr. Jones's conspiracy theories. Mr. Jones also has echoed the former president's false claims about the pandemic and the 2020 election. Held liable for defamation. In four lawsuits brought by the families of 10 Sandy Hook shooting victims, judges found that because Mr. Jones refused to turn over documents ordered by the courts, including financial records, he lost the cases by default. One type of private Facebook group, known as a "closed" group, can be found through searches. Another type, known as a "secret" group, is invisible to all but those who receive an invitation from a current member to join. In both cases, only members can see posts made inside the group. The private Infowars group is closed, was formed before Facebook took action against Mr. Jones and is billed as an "unofficial" fan group. New users must be approved by moderators and answer several screening questions, including "What is the answer to 1984?" (The correct answer, according to the title of one of Mr. Jones's books, is "1776.") Since the public Infowars page was taken down, the private group has functioned as a makeshift home for fans of the site. Two remaining Infowars pages, along with profiles apparently belonging to Mr. Jones and others affiliated with Infowars, are listed as administrators, giving them a higher level of control of the group than moderators. Mr. Jones and several other administrators of the Infowars group did not respond to a request for comment. It's impossible, of course, for Facebook to prevent all bad behavior on its platforms. But its choices can make it easier or harder for violent and extreme movements to gather critical mass. This year, after viral hoaxes on the app were implicated in a spate of mob violence in India, the Facebook owned messaging app WhatsApp limited a feature that allowed users to forward messages easily to large numbers of groups. Because groups provide more privacy than public pages, they can also be magnets for trolls, abusers and spammers. Last year, right wing activists gathered in a private Facebook group, Republic of Kekistan, to organize targeted harassment campaigns, including threatening a transgender cartoonist and trolling a fund raising page for Heather Heyer, the woman killed in the violent "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va. And a private Facebook group for Marines became embroiled in scandal last year when members of the group were discovered to have shared nude photos of female service members, along with lewd comments. Foreign organizations have also found private groups useful. Last month, when Facebook took down hundreds of public pages that it said were connected to a coordinated influence operation with hints of Russian and Iranian involvement, it also removed three private groups. The company did not name the groups or say how they were used, but it revealed that 2,300 users joined at least one of them. "The vast majority of groups on Facebook are probably the run of the mill groups," said Renee DiResta, a researcher with Data for Democracy who studies online extremism. "The challenge is, how does the groups feature interact with the other features on Facebook that we know are causing radicalization, hate speech and genocide in certain places? Who is taking responsibility for looking at the negative externalities of this push to create communities?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
On Sunday afternoon, at about 20 minutes to 2, the crowd milling on the sidewalk outside 59E59 Theaters burst into applause. The star had arrived. Not Edward Gero, who plays Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in "The Originalist," the Off Broadway comedy they were about to see, but Scalia's treasured colleague and ideological opposite, Ruth Bader Ginsburg the one justice on today's court who has become a true pop culture force. Her silver hair pulled elegantly back, she was dressed all in black, with fishnet gloves, and when bystanders in the lobby spotted her making her way toward the auditorium, their eyes popped. She had been advertised as a participant in a post show discussion with the play's director, Molly Smith, so her presence was not a surprise. But still: There is only one Notorious R.B.G. "The Originalist," by John Strand, had its premiere at Arena Stage in Washington, in 2015, the year before Scalia died. It's a debate play, full of legal wonkery; audience members were handed a pocket copy of the Constitution as they came in a gesture, not a study aide. As the show's title reminds us, Scalia was an originalist, arguing that the Constitution must be interpreted as it would have been by the men who wrote it. In the play, he hires a young liberal, a fellow Harvard Law graduate named Cat (Tracy Ifeachor), to sharpen his arguments through her opposition. "Law clerk and sparring partner," the pugnacious Scalia says when he gives her the job. And this is what the play is mainly about: two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum who choose to be in the same room, trying to persuade and understand each other. If that was unusual in 2012, the year the play begins, it seems almost bizarre in the fervid, divided culture we inhabit now. "It's true that every once in a while, Scalia did pick, deliberately, a liberal clerk," Justice Ginsburg said, settled into a chair onstage after the performance. "He enjoyed the sparring," she added. That was part of her relationship with Scalia, too, which she traced back to the days when they were both teaching law she at Columbia, he at the University of Chicago and she attended a lecture he gave. "I disagreed with most of what he said," she recalled, drawing a laugh, "but he said it in such a charming, amusing way. And if truth be told, if I had my choice of dissenters when I was writing for the court, it would be Justice Scalia, because he was so smart, and he would home in on all the soft spots, and then I could fix up my majority opinion." Another big laugh. "Sometimes it was like a Ping Pong game between us." For all his bellicosity, the Scalia in "The Originalist" is also a charmer, balancing his ursine ferocity with a thoughtful quietude. Justice Ginsburg, who is 85 and figures in the play only as an offstage presence ("I love Ruth Ginsburg," Scalia says), painted the real Scalia as a considerate and mischievous colleague who, from the time they were appellate judges together in the 1980s, was not above whispering in her ear or passing her a note to crack her up. "Scalia was a very good writer, and he did labor over his opinions," she said. "Both of us did. And sometimes he would come to my chambers, to tell me I had made a grammatical error." The crowd roared. "I would sometimes tell him his opinion was so strident he would be more persuasive if he toned it down." A pause, because she knows how to deliver a line. Then: "He never took that advice." Their friendship was grounded in love of law, opera and, Justice Ginsburg said on Sunday, family. During his lifetime their rapport was the object of much fascination, and also the subject of a comic opera, "Scalia/Ginsburg." Justice Ginsburg who officiated when Ms. Smith married her partner, Suzanne Blue Star Boy, in 2014 has been gaining in cultural currency. There are the books about her, like "Notorious RBG" and "I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark," whose title was emblazoned on the book bag at her feet. Felicity Jones is playing her in a biopic, "On the Basis of Sex," due out in December. And there is the well received documentary "RBG," released this spring. In "The Originalist," Cat describes herself as a flaming liberal a fact Justice Ginsburg noted before saying, calmly and with a small flourish of her left hand, "Well, I consider myself a flaming feminist." One of the most vociferous liberals on a divided court, she didn't discuss the drama surrounding Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement. But when the subject of her own eventual retirement came up, she cited the example of Justice John Paul Stevens. "He stepped down when he was 90," she said, "so I think I have about, at least five more years." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
When William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, announced that he planned to step down, progressives and pro labor groups saw a rare opportunity to influence an important economic policy appointment over which President Trump has no say. Almost immediately, they drew up a list of demands. They wanted someone who would focus more on promoting employment than on fighting inflation. They wanted a candidate who reflected diversity and who understood the New York region. They wanted a tough regulator who was independent of Wall Street. And they wanted an open search process that would give the public a voice. Instead, the New York Fed's board appears to be close to appointing John C. Williams, a Fed insider with little regulatory experience and no close connection to New York. He is also, like everyone to hold the job in the bank's century of history, a white man. "It's like Exhibit A of how incredibly out of touch the Fed is with what is important and what's happening in this country," said Dennis M. Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a Washington based group that has pushed for stricter financial regulation. Mr. Williams, the 55 year old president of the San Francisco Fed, is a respected economist and an influential policymaker whose research has drawn praise even from some people critical of his possible selection. He has helped push the Fed to rethink its approach to monetary policy after the financial crisis, and has argued for policies that could lead the central bank to act more aggressively in the next crisis. Janet L. Yellen, the former Fed chairwoman whom Mr. Williams succeeded as president of the San Francisco Fed, called Mr. Williams a leader on the central bank's policymaking Federal Open Market Committee, known as the F.O.M.C. "He's a tremendous contributor to the Federal Reserve and the F.O.M.C., and has done influential research on monetary policy," Ms. Yellen said. But Mr. Williams's possible appointment which isn't yet final and could still change drew swift criticism from a variety of Democratic lawmakers, progressive groups and left leaning economists. They raised concerns about his record as a banking regulator and as a policymaker, and also criticized the search process for a lack of transparency. "The New York Fed should go back and restart their search now," said Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth College economist who spent 20 years at the Fed. A New York Fed spokesman declined to comment. But in a statement this month, the leaders of the bank's search committee said they had solicited comment from a variety of groups and had interviewed a range of candidates. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In recent years, progressive groups have put increasing pressure on the Fed to diversify its leadership and to become more responsive to public concerns about inequality, slow wage growth and other issues that are outside its traditional mandate of ensuring maximum employment and stable prices. The effort has scored some notable victories, including the appointment last year of Raphael W. Bostic in Atlanta as the first African American president of a regional Fed bank. Mr. Dudley's announcement last fall that he would step down represented the movement's greatest opportunity yet. The president of the New York Fed, unique among the heads of the 12 regional banks, has a permanent vote on the F.O.M.C. and serves as the committee's vice chairman. The New York bank also plays a crucial role in carrying out the Fed's policies, and in overseeing many of the country's largest financial institutions. Those pushing for change had reason to hope their voices would be heard. In the past, the selection of Fed presidents has been heavily influenced by the financial institutions that are formally the stockholders of the Fed's regional banks. But the regulatory overhaul after the financial crisis removed the banks' representatives from the selection process. One of the two leaders of the search for Mr. Dudley's successor is Sara Horowitz, who runs the Freelancers Union, a labor organization. The other, Glenn Hutchins, is a private equity investor. In early March, several dozen protesters marched to the New York Fed's headquarters in Lower Manhattan to demand an appointee representing workers' interests. Standing outside the Fed's imposing stone building on Maiden Lane, Shawn Sebastian, director of the Fed Up campaign, which seeks to make the central bank more responsive to labor concerns, said the board could "make history" by appointing someone without Wall Street ties. Mr. Williams would meet such demands in certain respects. He has spent nearly his entire career inside the Federal Reserve system and, unlike Mr. Dudley, the former chief economist for Goldman Sachs, he has never worked in the finance industry. But Mr. Williams does not have extensive regulatory expertise, and the experience he does have may not help him. He was president of the San Francisco Fed while Wells Fargo, which is based in San Francisco and is partly under the local Fed's supervision, engaged in aggressive sales practices that resulted in the opening of millions of accounts without customers' knowledge. In a statement Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Mr. Williams's record in San Francisco "raises several questions, including about his fitness to supervise Wall Street banks." She said the Fed's Board of Governors, which must approve appointments, shouldn't do so for Mr. Williams unless he testifies before the Senate Banking Committee, which has no formal role in the selection process. Fed insiders said Mr. Williams played at most a limited role in the supervision of Wells Fargo, which is primarily overseen by regulators in Washington. Bank supervision would be a much bigger part of his job if he moved to New York. But Donald Kohn, who served as vice chairman of the Fed's Board of Governors during the financial crisis, said Mr. Williams would hardly be the first president without substantial regulatory experience. Mr. Dudley's predecessor, Timothy F. Geithner, for example, served in a variety of government roles before joining the Fed, but had never supervised banks. "He's been sitting in all these Open Market Committee meetings where increasingly financial stability issues are being talked about," Mr. Kohn said of Mr. Williams. But critics said selecting Mr. Williams would be a missed opportunity to bring in a new perspective. In a commentary for Bloomberg View on Monday that never mentioned Mr. Williams, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, noted that the New York Fed has never had a woman or a person of color as its leader. "If we're serious about creating an inclusive and sustainable economy, no one should be left on the sidelines," Mr. Booker wrote. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Hunters Point South in Long Island City will eventually have 5,000 new units of housing, 60 percent of which will be available through the city's affordable housing lottery system. Emerging from a former industrial wasteland, a series of towering structures promise the most affordable housing units built in one New York development since the 1970s. In a plan reminiscent of Brooklyn's Starrett City, Hunters Point South will eventually have 5,000 apartments across multiple towers, creating a new neighborhood for New Yorkers of all income levels. In the current phase of construction, developer TF Cornerstone is adding 1,194 rental units in two new buildings, 719 of which will be affordable. The pair joins the first two towers built on site in 2015 by Related Companies, which include a combined 925 units. Located along the western Queens waterfront, the mega project sits alongside the second phase of Long Island City's newest gem: Hunters Point South Park. Completed in 2018, the 11 acre landscape is now a central part of life in the neighborhood, with hundreds of locals and tourists pouring into the park everyday. It also serves as an ecologically resilient buffer against future storm surges, and will eventually help protect the 11 new buildings that, when finished, will fill out the southernmost point of Long Island City. Stretching from 50th Avenue to 57th Avenue where the East River meets Newtown Creek and over to Second Street, the development stems from a Bloomberg era initiative to create over 5,000 rental units with 60 percent affordable housing for low to moderate and middle income residents. For decades, the 30 acre area was overgrown with plants, weeds and hundreds of trees that made up a dense waterfront woodland. It was an urban adventurer's paradise, created from the rubble of demolished industrial buildings, including a Daily News printing plant and the National Sugar Refinery. After Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg left office, the New York Economic Development Corporation managed the build out of the second and final phase of Hunters Point South Park; its first section was finished in 2013. The popular park helped lure developers to bid on nine available plots of land as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Housing New York Plan. TF Cornerstone won a bid for one of those plots in 2013 and is now building a pair of towers at 5241 and 5203 Center Boulevard. Zoe Elghanayan, the principal and vice president of company, said she believed the development was handled "exactly the right way," in a process that required cooperation from the public and private sectors. "Because the city was able to pay for the land and public infrastructure," she said, "developers were then able to focus on maximizing the affordability of these projects." The first of the two buildings to top out, 5241 Center Boulevard, will open to residents in February. It began preleasing nearly 200 units in late September through the city's new affordable housing lottery system, NYC Housing Connect. The lottery will be open until Nov. 23. Designed by ODA Architecture and SLCE Architects, the two tower development has been in the works now for seven years and the road has been bumpy. During the initial stages of construction, the project suffered a setback when the New York Power Authority and Amtrak, which owns a rail line underneath the site, wouldn't allow the building to rest atop the underground infrastructure. Initially, the architects had envisioned one structure that featured two towers joined together by a low rise building. What stands today is the result of multiple redesigns and years of negotiations with the New York Power Authority to keep weight off the tunnel. "This element really risked the feasibility of this project to a point where everybody almost gave up," said Eran Chen, principal architect and founder of ODA Architecture. "It seemed like it was impossible to overcome." Finally in October 2017, plans were filed for two separate buildings to rise on the single lot. A new 22,000 square foot public park designed by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects would be spread out over a half acre between the towers. The first building also includes 209 market rate units that will begin leasing later this year. Its sister tower, 5203 Center Boulevard, includes 534 affordable units that will be available in the affordable lottery next spring. Monthly rent for the affordable units in both buildings will vary based on income and will range from 698 to 2,028 for a studio, 883 to 2,544 for a one bedroom and 1,071 to 2,704 for a two bedroom. The 266 market rate units at 5203 Center Boulevard will likely begin leasing next summer and residents are expected to move in next August. Prices for the market rate apartments in both structures have not yet been disclosed. Half of the affordable units in the two towers are reserved for local members of Community Board 2 in Queens, which includes Sunnyside, Woodside and Long Island City. There will also be 100 affordable apartments set aside for low income seniors, as well as a 572 seat school, a 7,700 square foot community facility, and 8,900 square feet of street level retail. "It's really important for local people to apply," said Lisa Deller, chairwoman of the community board. "It's a positive addition to the affordable housing inventory of the city, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the need." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Susan Lindquist, a molecular biologist whose conceptually daring work with yeast proteins opened new avenues to understanding gene functioning and degenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, died on Thursday in Boston. She was 67. The cause was cancer, her husband, Edward Buckbee, said. Dr. Lindquist devoted most of her career, first at the University of Chicago and later at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., to studying how proteins changed shape during cell division to carry out genetic functions. This process, known as protein folding, can go awry, causing such neurological disorders as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's chorea, as well as cystic fibrosis and some cancers. Certain malformed proteins, known as prions, enlist recruits and attack the brain in the class of diseases called spongiform encephalopathies, which include Creutzfeldt Jakob in humans and scrapie and mad cow disease in animals. Her research demonstrated that protein folding errors occurred in all species and that biological changes could be passed from one generation to the next through proteins alone, without the participation of RNA or DNA a process previously thought to be impossible. "Her work has provided paradigm shifting insights into the most basic aspects of cell biology, genetics and evolution," the Genetics Society of America stated in awarding her its annual medal in 2008. Her work with yeast proteins generated a multitude of insights into neurodegenerative disease, drug resistance, cancer, evolution and prion biology. In a series of experiments described in a 2006 paper in the journal Science, she and her team introduced a Parkinson's gene into a yeast cell and, after testing 5,000 genes, isolated one gene with a protein that saved the yeast cell. Later experiments with other labs were successful in saving the neurons of fruit flies and rats. Together the studies opened a promising line of research for an eventual cure for Parkinson's. "I do a lot of what you would call high risk, high payoff research," Dr. Lindquist told an audience at Angelo State University in Texas in 2002. "Some of my projects don't work, but when they do work, they are pretty fabulous." Susan Lee Lindquist was born on June 5, 1949, in Chicago. Her father, Iver, was a tax preparer, and her mother, the former Eleanor Maggio, was a homemaker. As a child, she conducted experiments by gathering berries and mixing them in a bowl to see what happened when they fermented. After graduating from Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Ill., she earned a bachelor's degree in microbiology from the University of Illinois in 1971 and a doctorate in biology from Harvard in 1976. At Harvard, she became interested in the process by which genes provided the information to create a protein. "We knew we had all these genes, and there was pretty good evidence that they got turned on and off, but we didn't know why," she told The Boston Globe in 2004. "Each cell was using a different set of them: How does that happen? It was pretty much a black box at the time." She focused initially on fruit fly tissue, acting on a tip by Sarah Elgin, a junior faculty member. "She told me about this cool phenomenon in fruit flies where you can see puffs on salivary gland chromosomes in response to heat," Dr. Lindquist told the magazine The Scientist in January. "If you labeled the salivary glands, you could see new proteins being made. I wondered if tissue culture cells would make similar proteins. If so, it would make molecular analysis possible." After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, she joined the university's department of molecular biology and began working with yeast, despite warnings by a colleague that she could ruin her chances for tenure by switching organisms. Because she had never thought tenure was a possibility in the first place, she later said, the threat seemed moot. "So this was an aspect of gender inequality that was extremely positive," Dr. Lindquist told The Scientist. "It allowed me to be fearless." She added, "My highest aspiration then, if I did really well, was to have a corner of a lab and write grants under the auspice of a male professor." She ended up running her own molecular genetics lab with a staff of 20. In 1997, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Interviewers often expressed puzzlement that a medium as unpromising as brewer's yeast could be a scientific gold mine. Dr. Lindquist sympathized. "Even people in my laboratory thought we were crazy to try to study neurodegenerative diseases with a yeast cell," she told The New York Times in 2007. "It's not a neuron. But I thought we might be looking at a very general problem in the way proteins were being managed in a cell. And yeasts are easy to study because they are such simple cells." In 2001, Dr. Lindquist accepted the joint appointment of professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Whitehead Institute, best known for its work on sequencing the human genome. She served as director until 2004. In 2010, President Obama presented her with the National Medal of Science. Dr. Lindquist lived in Cambridge. Her first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughters, Alana Buckbee and Eleanora Buckbee, known as Nora; and her brothers, Alan and John. "I have to tell you that the sheer intellectual joy of finding out how life works is really cool," Dr. Lindquist told The Times. "This is the greatest intellectual revolution, and it is happening right now, and I'm lucky enough to be in the middle of it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LONDON On a drizzly September morning, David Hockney sat in his skylit London living room, puffing on a cigarette. The walls were covered with his art: framed self portraits, tender etchings of his dogs, and a large, brightly colored composite photograph. Leaning against one wall was a poster sized image of his latest creation: a stained glass window for Westminster Abbey to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Measuring 28 feet by 12 feet, the "Queen's Window" which was inaugurated on Tuesday represents a hawthorn, a thorny floral shrub, blooming in a joyous profusion of reds, blues, greens and yellows. "The hawthorn is celebratory: It's as though champagne had been poured over bushes," said Mr. Hockney, 81. He said he had reworked the design for the window from an earlier painting using an iPad. Mr. Hockney has used new technology extensively throughout his career and has exhibited works created with iPhones and Polaroid cameras alongside his paintings in some of the world's most important museums. Standing beneath Mr. Hockney's window in Westminster Abbey days later, the Very Rev. John R. Hall, the dean of the church, said he had approached Mr. Hockney because he was "the most celebrated living artist" and one whose fame coincided with the queen's reign. He said the resulting work was "absolutely vibrant: It's very legible, so in that sense it's very accessible, and I think people will be very excited by it." He contrasted it with the 19th century window next to it, representing the miracles of Christ, "so dark it's almost illegible." Helen Whittaker, the stained glass artist who headed the 10 person team that produced the window from Mr. Hockney's design, said the only element of it he had painted on himself was his signature. (That glass fragment was flown to and from Los Angeles, where Mr. Hockney lives.) "It was a joy to work with him, because he's very respectful of what we do," she said. "We're very grateful that he's putting our profession on the map, because stained glass is always seen as the poor sister to the art world," Ms. Whittaker added. Stained glass might seem an old fashioned medium for a sought after contemporary artist. Yet "it leads on very well from all the work he's been doing on iPads and iPhones," said the art critic Martin Gayford, who has written books on Mr. Hockney. "When he started working on his first iPhone, which was in about 2009, he compared it to stained glass, the point being that an image on the screen is illuminated, so formally it links quite well." Mr. Hockney is one in a long line of modern and contemporary artists working in the medium. After the wartime destruction of churches across Europe 2,000 were built or rebuilt between 1950 and 1965 in France alone many painters were commissioned to make windows. Well known examples of the genre are Matisse's dazzling blue and yellow designs for the Rosary Chapel in Vence, France; Chagall's windows for churches in England, France and Germany; and Gerhard Richter's abstract squares in Cologne Cathedral. Stained glass is "essentially an architectural medium, and its relationship to the building is critical," said Brian Clarke, a British artist who has created windows for architects such as Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, and I.M. Pei. While it's now being used in civic buildings, he said, there is "a tremendous danger of it becoming extinct, because it has become so universally associated with the church." "The greatest service that an artist can pay to the medium of stained glass is to use it for creating great art," he added. Mr. Hockney is not much of a churchgoer. Though his mother was a "keen Christian" and he grew up attending a Methodist chapel, he said, he stopped at age 16 because "I realized all the people who went to church weren't really that good: they were hypocrites. That put me off." Today, he has his own form of faith, he said. "I used to think I was heading for oblivion, and I still really think that," he said. Nonetheless, he had "a personal God," because "O.K., you've got the big bang, but what's before the big bang? I mean, you're always going to ask, aren't you?" As a church, Westminster Abbey could not be more intimately linked to the monarchy. Thirty eight sovereigns were crowned there, and 17 are buried on site. Mr. Hockney would not seem an automatic choice for it. The onetime bad boy of British art has spent the better part of the last five decades in Los Angeles, and in 1990, he turned down a knighthood, though he is no adversary of the monarchy, he said. "I was living in California. I didn't really want to be Sir Somebody," he explained. In 2012, Mr. Hockney accepted an invitation from the queen to join the Order of Merit, a distinction that is shared by only 24 high achievers in the arts, sciences and public service at any one time, after a vacancy was created by the death of the painter Lucian Freud. But when he was later asked to paint her, he turned that down, too. In the interview, he recalled Mr. Freud's depiction of the monarch. "He got 10 hours from her, which is not very much for him, but a lot for her to sit," said Mr. Hockney. "I knew the portrait. It was O.K. But I'm not sure how to paint her, you see, because she's not an ordinary human being. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Foster Van Lear, a 16 year old TikTok personality from Atlanta, has posted videos of himself kissing guy friends on the cheek. "Everyone is fluid and so men have become less hesitant about physical stuff," he said. Connor Robinson, a 17 year old British TikTok star with rosy cheeks and a budding six pack, has built a large following by keeping his fans thirsty. Between the daily drip of shirtless dance routines and skits about his floppy hair, Mr. Robinson posts sexually suggestive curve balls that, he said, "break some barriers." In an eight second video set to a lewd hip hop track by the Weeknd, he and a fellow teenage boy, Elijah Finney, who calls himself Elijah Elliot, filmed themselves in a London hotel room, grinding against each other as if they're about to engage in a passionate make out session. The video ends with Mr. Robinson pushed against the tiled wall. But as racy as the video is, fans are under no pretense that the two are in the throes of gay puppy love. Mr. Robinson and Mr. Finney identify as heterosexual, but as some TikTok influencers have discovered, man on man action is a surefire way to generate traffic. Uploaded in February, the video has gotten more than 2.2 million views and 31,000 comments (lots of fire and heart emojis). Josh Richards, 18, one of the group's breakout stars, has posted videos of himself dropping his towel in front of his "boyfriends" Jaden Hossler and Bryce Hall; pretending to lock lips with another buddy, Anthony Reeves; and giving his roommate, Griffin Johnson, a peck on the forehead for the amusement of his 22 million followers. It certainly hasn't hurt his brand. In May, Mr. Richards announced he was leaving the Sway Boys and joining one of TikTok's rival apps, Triller, as its chief strategy officer. He also hosts two new popular podcasts "The Rundown" with Noah Beck and "BFFs" with Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports and is the first recording artist signed to TalentX Records, a label formed by Warner Records and TalentX Entertainment, a social media agency. "These boys feel like a sign of the times," said Mel Ottenberg, the creative director of Interview magazine, which featured some of the Sway Boys in their underwear for its September issue. "There doesn't seem to be any fear about, 'If I'm too close to my friend in this picture, are people going to think I am gay?' They're too hot and young to be bothered with any of that." As recently as a decade ago, an intimate touch between two young men might have spelled social suicide. But for Gen Z, who grew up in a time when same sex marriage was never illegal, being called "gay" is not the insult it once was. Young men on TikTok feel free to push the envelope of homosocial behavior "because they've emerged in an era of declining cultural homophobia, even if they don't recognize it as such," said Eric Anderson, a professor of masculinity studies at the University of Winchester in England. By embracing a "softer" side of manliness, they are rebelling against what Mr. Anderson called "the anti gay, anti feminine model attributed to the youth cultures of previous generations." Mark McCormack, a sociologist at the University of Roehampton in London who studies the sexual behavior of young men, thinks that declining homophobia is only one aspect. He believes that many of these TikTok influencers are not having fun at the expense of queer identity. Rather, they are parodying the notion that "someone would even be uncomfortable with them toying with the idea of being gay at all." In other words, pretending to be gay is a form of adolescent rebellion and nonconformity, a way for these young straight men to broadcast how their generation is different from their parents', or even millennials before them. Parents are not the only ones perplexed; these videos confound some older gay men, too. Ms. Van Lear said that one of her gay male friends came across a TikTok video in which her son joked about a man crush and told her: "You know, if Foster ever wants to talk to me if he's gay ..." She had a good laugh. "People of my generation don't get these boys are straight," she said. "It's a whole new world out there." But there's no confusion among the mostly teenage fans who can't seem to get enough of these gay for views videos. Whenever Mr. Robinson posts videos of himself getting physical with another male friend, he is deluged with feverish comments like "Am I the only one who thought that was hot"; "I dropped my phone"; "OMG, like I can't stop watching." Meanwhile, straight male fans feel like they are in on the joke. And while they may not find these videos titillating, they want to emulate the kind of carefree male bonding that these TikTok videos portray. "Showing emotions with another guy, especially when expressed as a joke, brings a smile to someone's face or makes them laugh," said Mr. Van Lear, who took his cue from hugely popular TikTok creators, like the guys at the Sway House. Plus, he added, it "increases the chances of higher audience engagement." There is even a term to describe straight men who go beyond bromance and display nonsexual signs of physical affection: "homiesexual." A search of " homiesexual" pulls up more than 40 million results on TikTok. There are also memes, YouTube compilations, and sweatshirts with sayings like: "It's not gay. It's homiesexual." For the past year, Nick Toteda, a 20 year old gay YouTube personality from Canada, has been posting videos on his channel, It's Just Nick, reacting to what he called "bromance TikToks," usually with a mix of sarcastic humor and bewilderment. In one clip, two teenage boys are seated next to each other in class, when one drops a small stuffed animal on the floor. As they both reach down to pick it up, they lock eyes and move in for a kiss. Mr. Toteda likes what he sees. "When I was in high school four years ago, maybe it was uncool to be gay, but maybe now being cool is gay," Mr. Toteda says in the video. "Even straight boys are pretending to be gay to act cool. Just like when I was pretending to be straight to act cool, they're doing the opposite now." "You know what," he adds with a laugh, "it helps that they are attractive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
WASHINGTON The affair felt dissonant from the start: a festive gathering in the East Wing of the White House, thrown by President Trump for the journalists whose work and profession he lambastes on a near daily basis. The 2 p.m. start time did not sit well among some veterans in the White House press corps, either. As far back as they could remember, the reception had been held in the evening, complete with a presidential photo line, so that spouses and children could go home with a souvenir. But like other Washington traditions that have been disrupted since the arrival of Mr. Trump, the White House holiday party still went ahead on Friday, if in slightly altered form. CNN, Mr. Trump's bete noire among media outlets, boycotted. Breitbart News, the right wing website run by the former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, received its first ever invitation. Fox News personalities flooded the room, including the hosts of "Fox Friends" and Sean Hannity, who attended the party for the first time in years. Journalists who had fretted about whether to pose for a photograph with Mr. Trump a ritual that can be awkward for reporters during any presidency need not have worried: Mr. Trump skipped the usual photos. And after addressing the throng for about two minutes, Mr. Trump declined to answer questions about his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the F.B.I. about his ties to Russia. The president did find time to greet Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business host, complimenting her on her ratings, according to three guests who witnessed the exchange. April D. Ryan, the White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks and one of the few black reporters in the White House briefing room, did not attend. She said this week that she had not received an invitation, despite attending annually under previous administrations. "It is what it is," she said in an interview. "Everybody's more upset than I am. I am O.K." A White House official said the slight had been inadvertent. Social events that bring together journalists and the powerful people they cover can lead to touchy questions about coziness and Mr. Trump's recent anti press comments made the buildup to the reception particularly tense. In the past week, Mr. Trump derided NBC as "fake news practitioners," proposed a contest to determine which television network was "the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted" (with the winner to receive a "FAKE NEWS TROPHY") and denounced CNN International, prompting Libyan and Egyptian officials to dispute the channel's reporting. "The photos of journalists blushing and chumming with the Obamas was cringe worthy," Tim Miller, who served as chief spokesman for Jeb Bush's presidential campaign, said before the affair. "Partying with a Trump administration that lies without shame and calls reporters the enemy of the people would just be pathetic." CNN declared that its employees would not attend Mr. Trump's reception "in light of the president's continued attacks on freedom of the press." But in the end, journalists from nearly every major television network and publication attended on Friday, including reporters for The New York Times. Some offered a form of muted protest: David Nakamura, a reporter for The Washington Post, wore a "First Amendment" lapel pin. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. "With every administration, not just this administration, we are looking for opportunities to interact with folks in the White House," said Christopher Isham, the Washington bureau chief for CBS News. "If you can do it in an environment that is a bit more social, a bit less formal, that's probably not a bad thing." Friday's reception (business attire requested) required guests and their plus ones to pass through several security checkpoints. The White House was decorated with Christmas trees decked in fake snow and giant red bows, and a distinct aroma of pine greeted attendees who passed through a colonnade lined with white branches, a decor overseen by the first lady, Melania Trump. Eggnog boozy and virgin varieties was served. In a nod to Hanukkah, there were also miniature potato latkes. The official White House holiday card, however, declared "Merry Christmas," in contrast to the nondenominational versions sent by the Obamas. "I'm bringing my wife, because she puts up with 24/7 news cycles, so I look forward to treating her to an afternoon out," said Charlie Spiering, Breitbart's senior White House correspondent. He added that Breitbart writers had not been invited to the reception during the Obama administration. (Other right wing news outlets like Newsmax also received invitations.) Among the guests spotted entering the White House: Bill Shine, a former co president of Fox News, who was briefly considered for a position in the administration; the "CBS This Morning" host Norah O'Donnell; and the anchor Greta Van Susteren. In a break from past years, the White House press office also invited network camera crews and technicians who work in the West Wing. Like the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, the president's holiday reception has faced occasional criticism over the years. But the Trump presidency has placed long accepted Washington folkways under a national microscope, and critics on the right and the left seize on any twitch or tweet by White House reporters that could suggest anti Trump bias or pro Trump sycophancy. "I have to say I'm conflicted about it," Sally Quinn, an arbiter of Washington's social mores, said in an interview. "My feeling is, if you're a journalist and you cover the White House, it is probably a good idea to go." She added: "There are these moments of civility, and I think that any moment of civility should be encouraged." Brian Karem, a correspondent for the Sentinel newspapers in Maryland, who frequently clashes with White House officials at briefings, did not receive an invitation. "I wear it as a badge of honor," he said of the snub. Even so, he allowed that the event did carry a certain allure. "If you haven't gone before, you want to go at least once," Mr. Karem said. "It is the White House." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Q. I am satisfied with Windows 7 and don't wish to upgrade to Windows 10. Would a problem arise if I continue to use Windows 7, even after Microsoft stops sending updates for Windows 7? A. Microsoft stopped all official sales of the last available version of Windows 7 on Oct. 30 and began counting down to the end of its support for the operating system, originally released in 2009. The company has published the dates for milestones in the Windows 7 life cycle, and has moved from "mainstream support," in which new features are developed and added as updates, to "extended support," which mainly provides security patches. Extended support for Windows 7 is scheduled to end on Jan. 14, 2020. Certain third party security software companies may provide their own updates for Windows 7 after Microsoft stops, so you might be able to keep using the system for a few more years with protection against malicious software. (Despite protection, though, security flaws in the older operating system may also be hard to fix.) As long as you are happy with Windows 7 and the programs you run on it continue to work, you can probably keep using the system as you do now. However, as software companies release newer versions of their applications and as web technologies continue to evolve, you may find that your Windows 7 computer runs slower and acts more erratically than it once did. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A lawsuit asserted that New York State was taking months to pay traditional unemployment benefits to Uber and Lyft drivers, compared with two to three weeks for other workers. Drivers for Uber and Lyft won a key victory on Tuesday in their continuing effort to be treated like other workers when a federal judge in New York ruled that the state must promptly begin paying them unemployment benefits. Many drivers have waged a long legal and political battle with the companies over their employment status. Uber and Lyft have maintained that drivers are independent contractors who are not entitled to standard employment protections, such as a minimum wage, overtime pay and unemployment insurance. The companies have gone to elaborate lengths to prosecute this argument, including spending tens of millions of dollars on a ballot measure that would exempt their drivers from a California law that effectively classifies them as employees. In her ruling, Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall appeared to come down firmly on the side of drivers in this broader debate, citing "an avoidable and inexcusable delay in the payment of unemployment insurance." The ruling resulted from a lawsuit filed in late May by drivers and an advocacy group called the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, who argued that the state was taking months to pay unemployed drivers while typically processing benefits for other workers in two to three weeks. Although the lawsuit was filed against the state rather than Uber and Lyft, the judge called out the companies for extensive delay tactics that had made it difficult for drivers to receive the benefits they are owed. Under the ruling, the state Department of Labor has seven days to convene and train a "work group" of several dozen staff members who will identify backlogged claims by drivers who have sought "reconsideration" after being told that they were ineligible, and take the necessary steps to pay them promptly. The state has 45 days to resolve this backlog. Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the taxi workers' group, said thousands of drivers were in this position. The judge gave the state 14 days to report back on the number. Going forward, the Department of Labor must perform weekly queries to identify eligible claims by drivers who are currently denied prompt payment of their benefits so they can receive them quickly. The ruling was a preliminary injunction, meaning the court was sufficiently persuaded by the drivers' arguments and the urgency of the situation to require the state to accelerate the payments while the case is being litigated. The state can appeal the preliminary injunction to a higher court, and the court's decision at the end of the trial could also reverse the preliminary decision, though that is unlikely. "We are closely reviewing the decision and considering all of our options," said Deanna Cohen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Labor. The issue has become especially urgent during the pandemic, as the incomes of thousands of drivers have collapsed. "Today's decision is a huge victory for app based drivers across New York," said Nicole Salk, a senior staff attorney at Legal Services NYC, who represents the plaintiffs. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In late March, Congress approved the so called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program to replace income for workers like contractors, who don't qualify for traditional unemployment benefits. New York State and the ride hailing companies have encouraged drivers to apply for this assistance. But the new pandemic assistance program is typically far less generous than traditional insurance for full time drivers, of which there are tens of thousands in New York. Previous rulings in the state had entitled drivers to traditional insurance. Central to the case before Judge DeArcy Hall is data on driver earnings that would make it possible for the state to process unemployment benefits quickly. The lawsuit contends that the state has failed to require Uber and Lyft to submit this information, despite the earlier rulings. In court proceedings this month, a lawyer for the state said that Uber had cooperated with a data request from the Department of Labor, though it was unclear if what was requested would allow the state to process benefits quickly. The lawyer said in court that the state had yet to review the data. Lyft said in May that it was working with the state to provide data, but the state lawyer said at the court hearing that the company had yet to submit data similar to what Uber provided. Without the earnings data that employers typically provide the state's Department of Labor, drivers receive a statement saying that they have no earnings on file regarding their work for Uber and Lyft, forcing them into a bureaucratic process to demonstrate their eligibility for traditional benefits that can last months. During court proceedings, the lawyer for the state accused Uber and Lyft of playing "games" to prevent the Department of Labor from being able to obtain the relevant earnings information through an audit. He said the companies did this by initially fighting determinations of unemployment eligibility, then withdrawing their appeals, which prevented a final determination that could be broadly applied to other drivers and could also be used to prompt an audit. The ruling sheds light on the scale at which the companies employed this tactic, noting that there were about 294 cases in which the state had found Uber to be an employer and that the company had appealed 227 of them, only to abandon more than 200 of the appeals. There were about 78 instances in which the state deemed Lyft to be an employer, and the company abandoned nine of its 11 appeals, according to the ruling. Judge DeArcy Hall said in a hearing that if the data "is categorically made unavailable by the gamesmanship of the company, that it is incumbent upon the Department of Labor to use all the tools in its tool kit to ensure that unemployment insurance benefits are nonetheless paid." She said later that the department "has allowed itself to be led by the leash" of companies like Uber and Lyft, but added that "my determination on this issue is in no way a condemnation of the Department of Labor" whose culpability remains to be litigated. Alix Anfang, a spokeswoman for Uber, said the company had provided all the data requested by state officials. A spokeswoman for Lyft declined to comment. Neither company responded to a request for comment about the appeals tactics cited by the judge. The lawsuit said the state's failure to pay drivers' unemployment benefits promptly violates the federal Social Security Act, which requires states to pay unemployment benefits "with the greatest promptness that is administratively feasible." Judge DeArcy Hall endorsed this argument, saying in court that "there seems to be a systemic failure with respect to the payment, the prompt payment and determination of unemployment insurance benefits with respect to those workers who were seeking unemployment benefits as a result of work performed" for the ride hailing companies. Uber and Lyft are facing litigation related to the issue of employment status in other states, including California and Massachusetts, which have filed lawsuits claiming that the companies are misclassifying drivers as independent contractors. On Friday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed a ruling that an Uber driver was not self employed for the purposes of benefit eligibility, as the company had argued, bolstering drivers' claims to traditional unemployment insurance in that state as well. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
SAN FRANCISCO Minutes after a baby girl was born on a recent morning at UCSF Medical Center here, her placenta a pulpy blob of an organ that is usually thrown away was packed up and carried off like treasure through a maze of corridors to the laboratory of Susan Fisher, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences. There, scientists set upon the tissue with scalpels, forceps and an array of chemicals to extract its weirdly powerful cells, which storm the uterus like an invading army and commandeer a woman's body for nine months to keep her fetus alive. The placenta is the life support system for the fetus. A disk of tissue attached to the uterine lining on one side and to the umbilical cord on the other, it grows from the embryo's cells, not the mother's. It is sometimes called the afterbirth: It comes out after the baby is born, usually weighing about a pound, or a sixth of the baby's weight. It provides oxygen, nourishment and waste disposal, doing the job of the lungs, liver, kidneys and other organs until the fetal ones kick in. If something goes wrong with the placenta, devastating problems can result, including miscarriage, stillbirth, prematurity, low birth weight and pre eclampsia, a condition that drives up the mother's blood pressure and can kill her and the fetus. A placenta much smaller or larger than average is often a sign of trouble. Increasingly, researchers think placental disorders can permanently alter the health of mother and child. Given its vital role, shockingly little is known about the placenta. Only recently, for instance, did scientists start to suspect that the placenta may not be sterile, as once thought, but may have a microbiome of its own a population of micro organisms that may help shape the immune system of the fetus and affect its health much later in life. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development calls the placenta "the least understood human organ and arguably one of the more important, not only for the health of a woman and her fetus during pregnancy but also for the lifelong health of both." In May, the institute gathered about 70 scientists at its first conference devoted to the placenta, in hopes of starting a Human Placenta Project, with the ultimate goal of finding ways to detect abnormalities in the organ earlier, and treat or prevent them. Seen shortly after a birth, the placenta is bloody and formidable looking. Fathers in the delivery room sometimes faint at the sight of it, doctors say. It is bluish or dark red, eight or nine inches across and about an inch thick in the middle. The side that faced the fetus is covered by a network of branching blood vessels, the umbilical cord emerging like a fat stalk. The side that faced the mother, glommed onto the uterine wall, looks raw and meaty. In some cultures, the organ has spiritual meaning and must be buried or dealt with according to rituals. In recent years in the United States, some women have become captivated by the idea of eating it cooking it, blending it into smoothies, or having it dried and packed into capsules. Not much is known about whether this is a good idea. When scientists describe the human placenta, one unsettling word comes up repeatedly: "invasive." The organ begins forming in the lining of the uterus as soon as a fertilized egg lands there, embedding itself deeply in the mother's tissue and tapping into her arteries so aggressively that researchers liken it to cancer. In most other mammals, the placental attachment is much more superficial. "A parasite upon the mother" is how the placenta is described in the book "Life's Vital Link," by Y. W. Loke, a reproductive immunologist. He goes on: "It has literally burrowed into the substance of her womb and is siphoning off nutrients from her blood to provide for the embryo." The placenta establishes a blood supply at 10 to 12 weeks of pregnancy. Ultimately, it invades 80 to 100 uterine vessels called spiral arteries and grows 32 miles of capillaries. The placental cells form minute fingerlike projections called villi, which contain fetal capillaries and come in contact with maternal blood, to pick up oxygen and nutrients and get rid of wastes. Spread out, the tissue formed to exchange oxygen and nutrients would cover 120 to 150 square feet. Every minute, about 20 percent of the mother's blood supply flows through the placenta. The front line of the invasion is a cell called a trophoblast, from the outer layer of the embryo. Early in pregnancy, these cells multiply explosively and stream out like a column of soldiers. "The trophoblast cells are so invasive from the get go," Dr. Fisher said. "They just blast through the uterine lining to get themselves buried in there." Trophoblasts are so invasive that they will form a placenta almost anywhere, even if they land on tissue other than the uterus. Occasionally, pregnancies begin outside the uterus, in fallopian tubes or elsewhere in the abdomen, and the rapid, penetrating growth of the placenta can rupture organs. Placentas that form over a scar on the uterus, where the lining is thin or absent say, from a previous cesarean section can invade so deeply that they cannot be safely removed at birth, and the only way to prevent the mother from bleeding to death is to take out the uterus. Trophoblasts are a major focus of the research by Dr. Fisher's team, and her laboratory also acts as a bank, providing cell and tissue samples to other researchers around the country. One staff member is a recruiter, charged with the delicate task of asking women in labor to donate their placentas for research. Dr. Fisher's lab discovered that as trophoblasts invade, they alter certain proteins on their surfaces, called adhesion molecules, to become more motile. Researchers later found that cancer cells do the same thing as they spread from a tumor to invade other parts of the body. Trophoblasts change in other ways, mimicking cells of the blood vessels they invade. The spiral arteries, which feed the lining of the uterus, become paved with trophoblasts instead of the woman's own cells. This "remodeling" process dilates the arteries considerably to pour blood into the placenta and nourish the villi. Examining a micrograph of a remodeled artery, she said: "Look at the diameter of this vessel. It looks like some monster thing from the deep chasms of the sea." Invasion and remodeling are essential: If they do not occur, the placenta cannot acquire enough of a blood supply to develop normally, and the results can be disastrous. One consequence can be pre eclampsia, which affects 2 percent to 5 percent of pregnant women in the United States. Rates are higher in poor countries, particularly those in Africa. The condition brings high blood pressure and other abnormalities in the mother, and can be fatal. Pre eclampsia is considered a placental disease: Most women with the illness have abnormally small placentas, and when pathologists examine them after the delivery, they often find blood clots, discolorations and a poorly developed blood supply. How and why the problem occurs is not entirely understood. For unknown reasons, the placenta does not form properly and cannot keep up with the demands of the growing fetus. The trophoblasts cannot fully change into artery cells and begin churning out an abnormal array of molecules that jack up the mother's blood pressure and may damage her blood vessels. The rising blood pressure may be an attempt to compensate by forcing more circulation to the placenta. But it backfires. The only treatment is to deliver the baby, which probably works because it also removes the placenta. At some hospitals, pathologists who specialize in the placenta examine the ones from troubled pregnancies or sickly newborns, looking for clues to what went wrong. Massachusetts General Hospital also keeps seemingly normal placentas in a refrigerator for about two weeks, until it is clear that the mother and the baby are healthy. Dr. Drucilla J. Roberts, a placental pathologist there, said that relatively few hospitals had placental pathologists or the ability to train them. Nationwide, there are fewer than 100, she estimates. More are needed, she said. She and a colleague, Dr. Rosemary H. Tambouret, often examine specimens sent from other hospitals not equipped to do the work themselves. "The placenta gives the answer in many term stillbirths," Dr. Roberts said. Half of those deaths are never explained, but many of them involve abnormalities in the placenta, including infections or unusual conditions in which the mother's immune system appears to have rejected the placenta. "I can't tell you how important it is to the family just to have an answer," she said. Knowing can help ease the guilt that many parents feel when a child is stillborn. The information can also tell doctors what to watch for in future pregnancies. In one case, Dr. Roberts said, examining the placenta helped diagnose an immune incompatibility between the parents that had caused multiple stillbirths and miscarriages. The mother was treated and went on to have a healthy child. Another placental pathologist, Dr. Rebecca Baergen, the chief of perinatal and obstetric pathology at NewYork Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said that in some cases, particularly those involving fetal death or stillbirth, more could be learned from the placenta than from the fetus. She described a case in which a newborn was extremely small, had stunted limbs and did not survive. Doctors suspected a growth disorder, but bone samples revealed nothing. The placenta was sent to Dr. Baergen. She found many problems with its blood supply and recommended a battery of tests for the mother. The tests found a hereditary blood disorder. The mother was treated and later gave birth to a healthy baby. "The placenta has essentially been called the chronicle of intrauterine life," she said. "It really tells the story of what's been going on. It plays the role of many organs liver, kidney, respiratory, endocrine. It can give you a lot of information about the baby's and the mom's health." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The choreographer Sonya Tayeh had been working in Los Angeles for six months, when she presented her agent with a career wish list. It said: "I want to do a musical like 'Spring Awakening.' I want a career like Bill T. Jones" that show's Tony Award winning choreographer and a pillar of the modern dance scene. And the list ended: "I want to be on 'So You Think You Can Dance.' " Her agent, she recalled recently, was "looking at me like I was crazy." Choreographers pursuing a career in Hollywood might also have Broadway aspirations, but few dream of making a mark in concert dance, too, with its different aesthetics and audiences, not to mention its smaller paychecks. That was back in 2008, and as fans of the Fox reality television dance competition "So You Think You Can Dance" know, Ms. Tayeh has checked one item off that list. For the past seven years, she has been a regular guest choreographer on that show, teaching contestants 90 second routines in the contemporary category. Because of the show's reach, Ms. Tayeh's combative style, along with other choreographers' more lyrical work, has come to represent what contemporary dance looks like for many "So You Think" viewers. Ms. Tayeh, 38, is back for the show's 12th season, but she appears with less frequency now. A year and a half ago, she moved to New York to try her luck in the smaller scale, more insular and far less lucrative worlds of New York theater and concert dance. Ms. Tayeh is off to a good start in the theater. On a recent weekend, she was holed up in a studio with two assistants and the director Leigh Silverman, devising slinky strides and sassy gestures for the Encores! Off Center production of Andrew Lippa's musical "The Wild Party," a tale of debauchery and violent romantic entanglements in the Roaring Twenties. (It runs Wednesday through Saturday at New York City Center.) City Center is far from the clubs Ms. Tayeh frequented as a teenager in Detroit, where she grew up with a Lebanese mother, who more deeply immersed herself in the Muslim faith when Ms. Tayeh was 19. Her Palestinian father, who was not part of her upbringing, died when she was young. Two older sisters exposed her to Detroit's underground rave and house music scene, which served as her introduction to dance. "I didn't have formal training at the time, but I always thought I'd be involved in dance because what the music did to my body was insane," Ms. Tayeh said in an interview in Brooklyn, where she lives with her girlfriend, Joanna Lampert, a singer. The sense of wild abandon Ms. Tayeh experienced in the clubs has become a hallmark of her choreographic style, which features flailing limbs and sharp jabs that pulse as if powered by a bass speaker. "There's always an underlying aggression to it, no matter what I'm doing," she said. Seeking to give her free flowing movements a more formal foundation, she earned an undergraduate degree in dance at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she focused on choreography and was inspired by artists like Martha Graham and Twyla Tharp (and Frida Kahlo and Bjork) women who, as she put it, "invented an idea and maintain it," and who also "evolve and change." After college, Ms. Tayeh was making what she called "sensible" work; it wasn't until she re embraced her rave roots that she felt she found her voice. Thanks to the show, Ms. Tayeh, an Emmy nominee, has worked with artists like Madonna, Miley Cyrus and Florence Welch. But, Ms. Tayeh said: "I wasn't challenged. I wasn't scared." Two years ago, an audition tape featuring Ms. Tayeh's choreography was sent to Ms. Silverman, who was directing "Kung Fu," a bio play about Bruce Lee. "Whoever choreographed this dance is exactly who we want to do the show," Ms. Silverman recalled thinking after seeing the strength and precision of Ms. Tayeh's choreography. Ms. Tayeh joined the production, which played Off Broadway last year and earned her a Lucille Lortel award. Ms. Silverman said she was impressed with the discipline Ms. Tayeh brought to "Kung Fu" and thought her style was a good match for the decadent world of "The Wild Party." "There's a sensuality to it and a steadiness to it and a messiness to it, which I really love," she said. Having expressed herself in short bursts or through a director's vision for much of her career, Ms. Tayeh is ready to tell her own story through dance. But breaking into New York's contemporary and modern dance scene may prove her most difficult challenge. "The downtown New York City dance scene is a very tight scene," said Thomas O. Kriegsmann, the director of programs at New York Live Arts, a contemporary dance presenter, where Ms. Tayeh begins a residency this fall. The question, he said, about someone like Ms. Tayeh who has achieved commercial success is, "Where does she fit?" "There's a tendency to pigeonhole people," said Janet Eilber, director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, who invited Ms. Tayeh to do a piece for the company's Lamentation Variations project, which had its premiere in February. The commission, Ms. Eilber said, was an attempt to draw new audiences to Graham, while also "giving the concert community new eyes to see Sonya." (Ms. Tayeh's piece received mixed reviews.) After seeing it, Mr. Kriegsmann offered her the New York Live Arts residency, which includes a public showing in December and a premiere in the 2016 17 season. "It was a question of making sure this voice is given the steps to experiment and find her place in a more experimental sphere," Mr. Kriegsmann said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Sajith Abeyawickrama, who came in 2010 from Sri Lanka, teaches exam prep on genetics at Kaplan Medical in Newark, N.J. Thousands of foreign trained immigrant physicians are living in the United States with lifesaving skills that are going unused because they stumbled over one of the many hurdles in the path toward becoming a licensed doctor here. The involved testing process and often duplicative training these doctors must go through are intended to make sure they meet this country's high quality standards, which American medical industry groups say are unmatched elsewhere in the world. Some development experts are also loath to make it too easy for foreign doctors to practice here because of the risk of a "brain drain" abroad. But many foreign physicians and their advocates argue that the process is unnecessarily restrictive and time consuming, particularly since America's need for doctors will expand sharply in a few short months under President Obama's health care law. They point out that medical services cost far more in the United States than elsewhere in the world, in part because of such restrictions. The United States already faces a shortage of physicians in many parts of the country, especially in specialties where foreign trained physicians are most likely to practice, like primary care. And that shortage is going to get exponentially worse, studies predict, when the health care law insures millions more Americans starting in 2014. The new health care law only modestly increases the supply of homegrown primary care doctors, not nearly enough to account for the shortfall, and even that tiny bump is still a few years away because it takes so long to train new doctors. Immigrant advocates and some economists point out that the medical labor force could grow much faster if the country tapped the underused skills of the foreign trained physicians who are already here but are not allowed to practice. Canada, by contrast, has made efforts to recognize more high quality training programs done abroad. "It doesn't cost the taxpayers a penny because these doctors come fully trained," said Nyapati Raghu Rao, the Indian born chairman of psychiatry at Nassau University Medical Center and a past chairman of the American Medical Association's international medical graduates governing council. "It is doubtful that the U.S. can respond to the massive shortages without the participation of international medical graduates. But we're basically ignoring them in this discussion and I don't know why that is." Consider Sajith Abeyawickrama, 37, who was a celebrated anesthesiologist in his native Sri Lanka. But here in the United States, where he came in 2010 to marry, he cannot practice medicine. Instead of working as a doctor himself, he has held a series of jobs in the medical industry, including an unpaid position where he entered patient data into a hospital's electronic medical records system, and, more recently, a paid position teaching a test prep course for students trying to become licensed doctors themselves. For years the United States has been training too few doctors to meet its own needs, in part because of industry set limits on the number of medical school slots available. Today about one in four physicians practicing in the United States were trained abroad, a figure that includes a substantial number of American citizens who could not get into medical school at home and studied in places like the Caribbean. But immigrant doctors, no matter how experienced and well trained, must run a long, costly and confusing gantlet before they can actually practice here. The process usually starts with an application to a private nonprofit organization that verifies medical school transcripts and diplomas. Among other requirements, foreign doctors must prove they speak English; pass three separate steps of the United States Medical Licensing Examination; get American recommendation letters, usually obtained after volunteering or working in a hospital, clinic or research organization; and be permanent residents or receive a work visa (which often requires them to return to their home country after their training). The biggest challenge is that an immigrant physician must win one of the coveted slots in America's medical residency system, the step that seems to be the tightest bottleneck. That residency, which typically involves grueling 80 hour workweeks, is required even if a doctor previously did a residency in a country with an advanced medical system, like Britain or Japan. The only exception is for doctors who did their residencies in Canada. The whole process can consume upward of a decade for those lucky few who make it through. "It took me double the time I thought, since I was still having to work while I was studying to pay for the visa, which was very expensive," said Alisson Sombredero, 33, an H.I.V. specialist who came to the United States from Colombia in 2005. Dr. Sombredero spent three years studying for her American license exams, gathering recommendation letters and volunteering at a hospital in an unpaid position. She supported herself during that time by working as a nanny. That was followed by three years in a residency at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif., and one year in an H.I.V. fellowship at San Francisco General Hospital. She finally finished her training this summer, eight years after she arrived in the United States and 16 years after she first enrolled in medical school. Only 118 of those doctors, he said, have successfully made it to residency. "If I had to even think about going through residency now, I'd shoot myself," said Dr. Fernandez Pena, who came to the United States from Mexico in 1985 and chose not even to try treating patients once he learned what the licensing process requires. Today, in addition to running the Welcome Back Initiative, he is an associate professor of health education at San Francisco State. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The counterargument for making it easier for foreign physicians to practice in the United States aside from concerns about quality controls is that doing so will draw more physicians from poor countries. These places often have paid for their doctors' medical training with public funds, on the assumption that those doctors will stay. "We need to wean ourselves from our extraordinary dependence on importing doctors from the developing world," said Fitzhugh Mullan, a professor of medicine and health policy at George Washington University in Washington. "We can't tell other countries to nail their doctors' feet to the ground at home. People will want to move and they should be able to. But we have created a huge, wide, open market by undertraining here, and the developing world responds." About one in 10 doctors trained in India have left that country, he found in a 2005 study, and the figure is close to one in three for Ghana. (Many of those moved to Europe or other developed nations other than the United States.) No one knows exactly how many immigrant doctors are in the United States and not practicing, but some other data points provide a clue. Each year the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, a private nonprofit, clears about 8,000 immigrant doctors (not including the American citizens who go to medical school abroad) to apply for the national residency match system. Normally about 3,000 of them successfully match to a residency slot, mostly filling less desired residencies in community hospitals, unpopular locations and in less lucrative specialties like primary care. Over the last five years, an average of 42.1 percent of foreign trained immigrant physicians who applied for residencies through the national match system succeeded. That compares with an average match rate of 93.9 percent for seniors at America's mainstream medical schools. Mr. Abeyawickrama, the Sri Lankan anesthesiologist, has failed to match for three years in a row; he blames low test scores. Most foreign doctors spend several years studying and taking their licensing exams, which American trained doctors also take. He said he didn't know this, and misguidedly thought it would be more expeditious to take all three within seven months of his arrival. "That was the most foolish thing I ever did in my life," he says. "I had the knowledge, but I did not know the art of the exams here." Even with inadequate preparation, he passed, though earning scores too low to be considered by most residency programs. But as a testament to his talents, he was recently offered a two year research fellowship at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, starting in the fall. He is hoping this job will give residency programs reason to overlook his test scores next time he applies. "Once I finish my fellowship in Cleveland, at one of the best hospitals in America, I hope there will be some doors opening for me," he said. "Maybe then they will look at my scores and realize they do not depict my true knowledge." The residency match rate for immigrants is likely to fall even lower in coming years. That is because the number of accredited American medical schools, and therefore United States trained medical students, has increased substantially in the last decade, while the number of residency slots (most of which are subsizided by Medicare) has barely budged since Congress effectively froze residency funding in 1997. Experts say several things could be done to make it easier for foreign trained doctors to practice here, including reciprocal licensing arrangements, more and perhaps accelerated American residencies, or recognition of postgraduate training from other advanced countries. Canada provides the most telling comparison. Some Canadian provinces allow immigrant doctors to practice family medicine without doing a Canadian residency, typically if the doctor did similar postgraduate work in the United States, Australia, Britain or Ireland. There are also residency waivers for some specialists coming from select training programs abroad considered similar to Canadian ones. As a result, many (some estimates suggest nearly half) foreign trained physicians currently coming into Canada do not have to redo a residency, said Dr. Rocco Gerace, the president of the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada. In the United States, some foreign doctors work as waiters or taxi drivers while they try to work through the licensing process. Others decide to apply their skills to becoming another kind of medical professional, like a nurse practitioner or physician assistant, adopting careers that require fewer years of training. But those paths present barriers as well. The same is true for other highly skilled medical professionals. Hemamani Karuppiaharjunan, 40, was a dentist in her native India, which she left in 2000 to join her husband in the United States. She decided that going back to dentistry school in the United States while having two young children would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Instead, she enrolled in a two year dental hygiene program at Bergen Community College in Paramus, N.J., which cost her 30,000 instead of the 150,000 she would have needed to attend dental school. She graduated in 2012 at the top of her class and earns 42 an hour now, about half what she might make as a dentist in her area. The loss of status has been harder. "I rarely talk about it with patients," she said. When she does mention her background, they usually express sympathy. "I'm glad my education is still respected in that sense, that people do recognize what I've done even though I can't practice dentistry." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
They are at their exquisite peak, this boy and girl stepping through the shadows. They are far enough from childhood to be fully formed but not yet coarsened by adulthood, as delicate of limb and feature as mantelpiece figurines. Only the slight differences in the shades of their perfect skins suggest they are not a matched set. If you're thinking that anyone this fine and fragile is destined to be shattered, you are right. You need only listen to what they're saying, in hypnotic Southern accents to realize that whatever exists between them, it doesn't have a chance of survival in the early 1940s. Such is the world that is conjured so unsettlingly in Adrienne Kennedy's "He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box," her first new work in nearly a decade, which opened on Tuesday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Because it has been created by Ms. Kennedy, this landscape is as ugly as it is beautiful, its filigree shaped from barbed wire. Since she first baffled and electrified New York audiences in the early 1960s with "Funnyhouse of a Negro," a guided tour of one writer's enduring nightmare, Ms. Kennedy has been cultivating her own fertile plot in the crowded field of memory plays. Only Tennessee Williams, an early influence, summons a cultural past with such a plangent mix of rhapsody and disgust. Like Williams's characters, those who inhabit Ms. Kennedy's plays are both products of, and misfits in, a circumscribed society. Unlike the typical Williams protagonist, Ms. Kennedy's leading ladies (as they tend to be) are African American. Not that any label, ethnic or otherwise, comes close to pinning down identities that are always, dangerously, in flux. Works like her "Funnyhouse," "A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White" and "June and Jean in Concert" seem to take place inside their creator's mind, at the point where conscious anxiety bleeds into troubling dreams. "He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box," which has been directed with haunting lyricism by Evan Yionoulis for Theater for a New Audience, offers a historical, wider lens view of the same terrain. Occupying a mere 45 minutes of stage time (Ms. Kennedy's favorite dramatic form is the short fugue), it nonetheless seems to stretch and bend through generations of conflict. This is not to suggest that Ms. Kennedy, at 86, has made new concessions to narrative conventions or expository clarity. True, a bare description of her latest subject a romance between a girl of mixed race and the white scion of the family that rules the town in Georgia where they live brings to mind a century's worth of purplish novels about forbidden love. Ms. Kennedy is susceptible to the pulpy appeal of such fare, and equally contemptuous of it. And as the play's two characters, Kay (Juliana Canfield) and Chris (Tom Pecinka), tell their respective, overlapping stories, they seem steeped in a sentimental twilight. Yet often what they say is unyieldingly hard, or else feverish and fragmentary in the way of half remembered nightmares. In detailed descriptions delivered with perfect, paradoxically languid urgency by Ms. Canfield and Mr. Pecinka, they map the town where they grew up. We learn about its best houses, its streets, its schools and the racially divided town plan, devised by Chris's father. We also hear accounts, firsthand and distortingly recycled, of their family histories. And while Chris's is cushioned in an affluence that Kay has never known, they both carry a legacy of racially mixed sexual relationships. Kay's father was white, and her mother, who is black, died not long after giving birth to her at 15 possibly a suicide, possibly a murder victim. Chris's father, Harrison Aherne, is both an architect of segregation and a man with black mistresses, by whom he has had several children. He has lovingly overseen the creation of the graveyard in which these women and their families can be buried. Kay and Chris grew up watching each other from a fascinated distance. T he play follows their tentative courtship, from the eve of Chris's departure to New York City (he hopes to become an actor) to the moment of America's entry into World War II. Human and historic events turn out to be intertwined in unexpected ways. It is important to note that while "Box" is a two character play (three, if you count Chris's father, who is represented onstage by a cadaverous dummy), it is not really a dialogue. As Chris and Kay relate the facts and myths of their genealogies, it seems as if they are not connecting through shared history but pushing themselves into ever greater isolation. As in most of Ms. Kennedy's work, the narrative is delivered in a kaleidoscope of shards. These take the form of letters, recollections of conflicting tales told by family members, itemized descriptions of a train station, a savage moment from the Brothers Grimm (which gives the play its title), wistful period songs and lines from two very different shows Noel Coward's operetta "Bitter Sweet" and Christopher Marlowe's lurid revenge tragedy "The Massacre at Paris." Only Ms. Kennedy, perhaps, could gracefully balance such disparate works as mood defining reference points of equal weight. And while the implicit connections between Chris's father and Nazi Germany might feel overly contrived in a more traditional play, here they become natural echoes in a nightmare that enwraps the whole world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Consumer Reports is not impressed with the Fiat based Jeep Cherokee utility vehicle. The consumer advocacy publication called the Cherokee "half baked" and its ride and handling poor, and said it "scores too low to be recommended." (Reuters) As the profits of major Japanese automakers soar, Japanese labor unions seek an increase in pay and bonuses. Yasunobu Aihara, president of the Confederation of Japan Automobile Workers' Unions, said that for the first time in 15 years, auto workers were requesting bonuses that equated to more than five months' salary. (Bloomberg) Facing a backlog of unsold vehicles on dealership lots as brutal winter weather continues to pummel parts of the United States, Detroit automakers are looking for a way to make the best of a bad situation. Although eager to avoid touching off a price war that would undermine profits, automakers have expressed a desire to deepen discounts in order to move stagnant inventory. (The Wall Street Journal, subscription required) Hussain Lootah, director general of the Dubai Municipality in the United Arab Emirates, told The National, an English language publication, that the way to ease traffic in the city was to make car ownership more expensive. By increasing insurance and fuel costs, and establishing a salary threshold below which it would be impossible to acquire the permits necessary to own a vehicle, Mr. Lootah said use of mass transit would increase and the remaining motorists would enjoy less congested roads. (Motor Authority) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Sibeth Ndiaye, the first black spokeswoman for the Elysee Palace at one of her favorite shops, Make My Lemonade, near the Canal Saint Martin in Paris.Credit...Julien Mignot for The New York Times Sibeth Ndiaye, the first black spokeswoman for the Elysee Palace at one of her favorite shops, Make My Lemonade, near the Canal Saint Martin in Paris. PARIS There's no hiding when you're the spokeswoma n for the Elysee Palace. Especially if you are the first black spokeswoman for the Elysee Palace. Especially if you are Sibeth Ndiaye , the Senegalese born public face and voice of President Emmanuel Macron of France, and you have no qualms about making a statement. It doesn't always have to be in words. In a country where clothes are deeply embedded in the national identity, economy and history, where Brigitte Macron , its first lady, is applauded for wearing slim Louis Vuitton above the knee sheaths with matching stilettos, Ms. Ndiaye's playful, relaxed style of dressing has become a lightning rod for discussions around race, ethnicity and body shape. "I dress in little known French brands that match the body of women rather than constraining them to dress in a certain way," she said during a recent interview at one of her favorite Paris boutiques, Make My Lemonade , on the Canal Saint Martin. "I want to stop women from feeling ashamed about their bodies. The way I dress is almost a political statement." She avoids the tailored, black white beige uniform of classic Parisiennes in favor of bright colors, even with her eyeglasses and her multihued strappy patent leather shoes. She carries a silver metallic Nat Nin handbag and wears her hair either braided or in a full Afro. "Dressed like a Teletubbies, " Jordan Bardella , vice president of the far right Rassemblement National , said of Ms. Ndiaye during an interview in July on France 2 television's " Les 4 " program. The criticism didn't faze her. "I couldn't care less," Ms. Ndiaye said. "The way I dress is a reflection of what I think. I love explosions of color. I hate neutral. I don't want to look like a crow." Indeed, her clothes make Ms. Ndiaye stand out in a sea of white male bureaucrats dressed in sober dark suits . Unlike many of them, she did not attend elite French universities; she uses undiplomatic slang in conversations with reporters. Her clothes have come to symbolize those differences. The reaction of Mr. Macron's La Republique en Marche party was swift. Marlene Schiappa , the gender equality minister, who has praised Ms. Ndiaye as a stellar role model for young women, called it "hallucinatory that we discuss dress or hairstyle, rather than politics." Gilles LeGendre , the party's parliamentary leader, called Ms. Morano's remarks "openly racist," and called on her to withdraw them and apologize or be prosecuted . Ms. Ndiaye agreed. "It was racist," she said. "The implication was that black women wear very colorful African wax prints. And her allusion to my French naturalization meant that I wasn't a 'true, good' French person, as if to be a 'true, good' French person you have to renounce your origins. My cultural identity and relationship to the French nation has never been in doubt." Ms. Ndiaye is not the first woman in French political life to come under attack for what she wears. In 1972 , a guard prevented Michele Alliot Marie , who later became defense and foreign minister, from entering the National Assembly chamber because she was wearing pants. (Women were not allowed to wear pants to work in white collar government jobs until the late 1960s and not in the Assembly until some years later, although the restrictions were vague and applied erratically.) Forty years later , in 2012 , male Assembly members wolf whistled and oohed when Cecile Duflot , the housing minister, arrived at the lecturn wearing a blue and white floral V neck wrap dress. In 2015, Najat Vallaud Belkacem , the education minister, was accused by a right wing columnist of using her sexual charms to avoid answering questions in the Assembly. (She had worn a black dress with a neckline that showed a bit of her lacy bra.) And sometimes women in France's government have been told what to wear. In his 2009 autobiography "Autobiographie non autorisee," Jacques Seguela , the advertising executive, disclosed details of the official 2007 visit to Washington by his close friend, Nicolas Sarkozy . He said Mr. Sarkozy told Rama Yade , a junior foreign affairs minister , that she was "too beautiful for one of those 'frou frou' dresses;" instructed Rachida Dati , the justice minister , to "abandon her habit of Dior ized elegance;" and advised Christine Lagarde , the finance minister , to "leave her jewels in the safe." Ms. Ndiaye came late to her position as a change agent of political fashion. She was born in an affluent neighborhood in Dakar to a Catholic German Togolese mother who was a senior judge and then president of the constitutional council in Senegal, and a Muslim Senegalese father who was second in command of the Senegalese Democratic Party of Abdoulaye Wade, later the country's president. As a child, she learned from her mother how to sew, knit and crochet. At 15 , she moved to Paris on her own to finish high school, became a student activist and joined the Socialist Party, and eventually earned a master's degree in health economics at the University of Paris . She married, had three children and became a naturalized French citizen in June 2016. She first met Mr. Macron when he was deputy secretary general at the Elysee and she was working in the finance ministry as an adviser to Arnaud Montebourg , an outspoken left leaning economic minister in the government of President Francois Hollande. Much to the surprise of her leftist friends and colleagues, when Mr. Macron decided in 2014 to run for president, she joined his campaign team. These days, she favors high waisted dresses with full skirts ("flattering for my stomach and more comfortable") which she sometimes tops with a black leather biker's jacket. She wears Repetto ballet slippers or even brightly colored athletic shoes if she has a long day of walking. Unlike Mr. Macron, who likes to play tennis, jog and box; and her husband, Patrice Roques , who is a triathlete, Ms. Ndiaye eschews exercise. "Every Monday I decide to start working out, and every Tuesday I give up on it," she said. Ms. Ndiaye discovered Make My Lemonade, a do it yourself store and gallery space created in 2018 by the French blogger Lisa Gachet , when it was still only an online business. It sells brightly colored women's clothing, shoes and accessories, fabrics and women's patterns in a range of sizes, and recently opened a pop up at the luxury Left Bank department store Le Bon Marche. All its goods are designed in France and made either in France or elsewhere in the European Union. "It pays tribute," Ms. Ndiaye said, "to the Made in France movement, to inventiveness, to creativity a la francaise." For her, she said, "Clothes are fundamentally a partage" or, for sharing. "In France, clothes are a way to share French culture with the world. And we give something of ourselves with the way we dress." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The groundcherry might look at first like a purely ornamental plant. A member of the genus Physalis, it bears papery, heart shaped husks that resemble Chinese lanterns. (The plant popularly known as the Chinese lantern is a close cousin.) Within each groundcherry casing is a small, tart, edible fruit, similar in appearance to a cherry tomato, that is sometimes sold at farmer's markets. The fruit might be more common in supermarkets were it not so difficult to grow in large quantities. Groundcherry bushes sprawl untidily and can drop their fruits early, and the plants possess other undesirable traits. Diminishing these traits through selective breeding would take years. On Monday, however, a team of researchers reported that, by removing certain portions of the plant's DNA using common gene editing techniques, they've produced a groundcherry with a larger fruit and a more ordered bush, greatly speeding the process of domestication. Their work, which appeared in the journal Nature Plants, is part of a scientific initiative called the Physalis Improvement Project. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Groundcherries are related to tomatoes, which have a well studied genome. Joyce Van Eck, a plant geneticist at Cornell University and the Boyce Thompson Institute and an author of the paper, and her colleagues had already discovered that, using Crispr, a gene editing technique that can snip out portions of the genome, they could alter a specific tomato gene and produce plants that produced flowers more quickly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Valeant, Distancing Itself From Its Past, Will Change Its Name to Bausch Health Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, the company whose enormous price increases on old drugs helped fuel public outrage over high drug costs, is changing its name, the company announced Tuesday. The new name will be Bausch Health Companies, to reflect the company's better known and more respected subsidiary, the eye care company Bausch Lomb, which it acquired in 2013. The company announced the change, which will take effect in July, as part of its first quarter earnings. Joseph C. Papa, the chief executive of Valeant who took over in 2016 as part of an effort to turn around the ailing company, said the Bausch name invokes the rich history of Bausch Lomb, which dates to when J.J. Bausch opened his first optical goods shop in Rochester, N.Y., more than 165 years ago. The name change also comes as a former Valeant executive is on trial in federal court in Manhattan on charges that he defrauded the company through hidden ties to a mail order company that Valeant used to get around insurers' efforts to substitute cheap generics for the company's expensive drugs. Valeant was once a Wall Street favorite whose stock skyrocketed after selling investors on its brash business model of buying up companies, slashing costs and raising drug prices, sometimes by a thousand percent or more. But the company's run of success ended in the fall of 2015 amid congressional and regulatory inquiries into its drug pricing practices and its struggles dealing with 30 billion of debt. The company's decision to change its name recalled other companies' efforts to revamp their reputations in the wake of scandal, such as the tobacco maker Philip Morris Co. changing its name to Altria, or ValuJet Airlines's switch to AirTran. Since taking over as chief executive, Mr. Papa has sought to rebuild the company's reputation, replacing much of its top management and vowing to limit annual price increases to less than 10 percent a year. It still had about 25 billion in debt as of the end of 2017. In addition to the name change, the Canadian company will trade under a new symbol, BHC, and will debut a new logo and website. Valeant said Tuesday that revenue from the first quarter of 2018 was down 5 percent, to 1.995 billion, a decrease of 114 million compared to 2.109 billion in the first quarter of 2017. But it also raised its revenue guidance for the year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Several companies in the race for a coronavirus vaccine have stumbled upon a new and unexpected hurdle: activists protesting the use of a substance that comes from sharks in their products. The oily compound, called squalene, is churned out by shark livers and has immunity boosting powers, which has led several companies to use it as an ingredient in vaccines. A group called Shark Allies has mounted a campaign calling on the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory bodies to halt the sourcing of the compound from sharks, warning that mass distribution of a coronavirus vaccine could require harvesting tissue from more than 500,000 sharks. The call to action made headlines around the globe. But the story on shark squalene isn't as clear cut as it might at first seem. Why are some people so upset about sharks and vaccines? Companies commonly use squalene as a moisturizing additive in cosmetics and sunscreens. But the substance has also been occasionally used in vaccines as an adjuvant a chemical that kick starts the immune system into action, driving stronger, longer lasting protection against disease. Although adjuvants aren't necessary for all vaccines, they can make or break certain recipes. By boosting products' immunity priming powers, they can also increase the immunization's efficiency, giving the vaccine's ingredients more bang for their buck and freeing up supplies for more doses. Shark livers are considered among the best sources of the compound. Between 63 million and 273 million sharks die at the hands of humans each year, and liver oil is harvested from at least a couple million of them, according to Catherine Macdonald, a shark biologist in Florida. Two of the companies under the scrutiny of Shark Allies are GlaxoSmithKline and Seqirus, which each manufacture adjuvants that contain about 10 milligrams of squalene per dose. Those ingredients are found in a number of coronavirus vaccines currently being tested in humans, including products from Sanofi, Medicago and Clover Biopharmaceuticals, which have all partnered with GSK. According to one estimate, between 2,500 and 3,000 sharks are needed per metric ton of squalene. Shark Allies extrapolated from these statistics to arrive at their widely quoted numbers tabulating the potential ecological toll on sharks. Such estimates are difficult to make. Dr. Macdonald pointed out that sharks of which there are more than 500 species worldwide vary in size, weight and liver squalene content. The number of sharks required to yield enough squalene adjuvanted vaccine doses to treat everyone on Earth is thus likely to be a "huge range," she said. Her own calculations for this statistic stretch between tens of thousands and more than a million, depending on how many doses are needed per person. It's also the case that of the dozens of vaccine candidates in clinical trials in people, most don't include squalene. To only rely on vaccines that use shark based squalene, "a ton of other promising candidates would have to fail they would have to be the last vaccines standing," said Saad Omer, a vaccine expert at Yale University. A more plausible scenario would probably involve the distribution of several products made by multiple companies. Joanne Cleary, a Seqirus spokeswoman, said her company was in a similar situation. "More will need to be done to research plant based or synthetic alternatives before they can be used in vaccines," she said. Swapping adjuvants, or even adjuvant sources, isn't trivial, Dr. Omer said. Each product has to be refined and tested to ensure it's safe and effective, and work its way often ploddingly through the necessary regulatory steps. Are vaccine makers to blame for harvesting shark squalene? Neither GSK nor Seqirus named their suppliers. But GSK said the sharks their squalene came from were "typically caught for other purposes." Dr. Macdonald said it's impossible to answer questions about the exact number of sharks that would be killed explicitly for their squalene. Fishers capture sharks for their meat or fins, or simply as bycatch; in many cases, the oil pulled from their bodies might otherwise have been discarded. So should you really worry that coronavirus vaccines will result in a mass culling of sharks? Even the Shark Allies team does not think the vaccine industry is "going out and hunting down sharks we are not saying that at all," Ms. Brendl said. Nor do they wish for companies to terminate or delay coronavirus vaccine production. "But there are alternatives to shark adjuvants," she said. "Start testing them." Dr. Macdonald and others noted that vaccine manufacturers by no means bear the brunt of the responsibility for hoarding shark liver oil. Most fish sourced squalene is still routed to cosmetics "much less important things" than vaccines, said Jasmin Graham, a shark biologist at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. Crafting more sustainable fishing practices, she said, could help tackle multiple issues at once. "I don't think we should demonize the people trying to save our lives," Ms. Graham said. "There are much larger, more important hills to die on." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Kerry James Marshall's "Black and part Black Birds in America: (Crow, Goldfinch)," 2020. It is one of two new works by the artist that David Zwirner Gallery will put on view this week. About 10 years ago, the artist Kerry James Marshall caught a crow with his bare hands. The bird was cornered awkwardly near Mr. Marshall's home on the South Side of Chicago, and curiosity got the better of him. "I've always been impressed by that kind of bird," he recalled the other day. Mr. Marshall, widely acknowledged as one of the best painters working today, wanted to photograph and take video of the crow, since he often used such documentation as the basis for his work (he prefers props now). So he grabbed it and took it home. "At first he screamed like he was being murdered," Mr. Marshall said. "The minute I put him by my side, he got quiet." On his second floor deck, Mr. Marshall tied a cord to the crow's leg, and provided a meal of mulberries "so he wouldn't starve." He showed the crow to his wife and documented the bird as planned. The next day, he let the bird go. Some days later, he saw the crow being menaced by a cat. Mr. Marshall recalled: "So I picked up a rock and threw it at the cat. And I swear to God, that same bird, he stood there just looking at me. And I said, 'You better keep your butt off the ground because I'm not going to be around to save you the next time.'" The crow meeting, which started out as research, somehow edged into a metaphysical encounter with deeper meanings, and it now informs Mr. Marshall's newest series of paintings. His first two canvases officially debut Thursday in an online show, "Studio: Kerry James Marshall," at David Zwirner Gallery through Aug. 30. As he has for decades, Mr. Marshall, 64, has harnessed history, especially the history of painting, in these new canvases: They are his reimagining of John James Audubon's landmark series, "Birds of America," the painstakingly rendered 435 watercolors made in the first half of the 19th century, significant achievements in the fields of both ornithology and art. In one image, "Black and part Black Birds in America: (Crow, Goldfinch)," a large crow dominates the canvas, clearly too large for the birdhouses depicted behind it. There are glorious leaves, flowers and a small goldfinch in the bottom left corner. In the other picture, finished just last week, "Black and part Black Birds in America: (Grackle, Cardinal Rose breasted Grosbeak)," a grackle is the protagonist with a dainty birdhouse and brightly colored flowers. The cardinal and grosbeak are both flying in different directions, giving them a sense of being at cross purposes with the grackle. The series itself has been brewing in Mr. Marshall's mind for eight or nine years, he said, and he began painting the works just before transmissions of the coronavirus accelerated in the United States in March. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. A casual bird enthusiast who has been fascinated by Audubon's draughtsmanship since he was a child, Mr. Marshall has long put Black protagonists at the center of his complex, richly layered compositions. "Many Mansions" (1994), one of his large scale depictions of housing projects, features three Black men gardening and, not incidentally, there are two bluebirds holding up a banner, too. The pointed inclusion of Black figures is part of what he has called a "counter archive" to the familiar, white centered story of Western art. For the new series, the images hinge on Audubon's own racial heritage: Many people believe he was, as Mr. Marshall's title suggests, "part Black" born in what is now Haiti, as Jean Rabin, to a white, plantation owning father and a Creole chambermaid who may have been of racially mixed descent. But, the theory goes, he was able to pass as white. Not everyone agrees on this narrative. The biographer Richard Rhodes, author of "John James Audubon: The Making of an American," said that Audubon's biological mother was a white French chambermaid who died months after childbirth. "I know Audubon has been an inspiration to many people of color," Mr. Rhodes said, adding that he felt "terrible" about not being able to support the theory. But for Mr. Marshall, what he called the "mystery" of Audubon's parentage has fueled his imagination since 1976, when he saw the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition "Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750 1950." Organized by the curator and scholar David C. Driskell, the show included Audubon's work, a surprise to many at the time. He referenced the notorious "one drop rule" that someone with one drop of Black blood made the person Black. "That's the key to the whole thing," Mr. Marshall said of his new series, noting that in "Black and part Black" he included a goldfinch, a bird that also has black markings but is named for its yellow color. "And it dovetails with this mystery about whether or not Audubon himself was Black." Helen Molesworth, who was a co organizer of a 2016 17 retrospective of Mr. Marshall's work, "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry," when she was chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, said that his foregrounding of birds was significant. "He's known as a figurative painter, but in these he has left the human figure out," said Ms. Molesworth, who has seen photographs of the new paintings. "His paintings have been filled with birds all along," she added. "If you wanted to go birding in a Kerry James Marshall show, you could. People were paying so much attention to the human figure in his work, the birds may have gone unexamined." Examples include "They Know That I Know" (1992), "Bang" (1994) and "7 am Sunday Morning" (2003), all depicting birds as supporting players. Ms. Molesworth, a birder herself, said the new works were evidence that Mr. Marshall is a "polymath, deeply interested in a lot of things. He thinks the world is filled with knowledge, and all of it is available to him." His deep dives started early. Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955, Mr. Marshall moved to the South Central area of Los Angeles when he was a child, and the public library on Central Avenue was a primary destination as of age 8 or 9. "I'd pick out books by the stack," he said. "You had a limit of 10, so I would get 10 every time I went." Books depicting reptiles, birds and insects were first, and soon after came Audubon's images. "They appealed to me for two reasons," he said. "One, the way he set up the images and tableaus to create some drama, they were beautifully done and they were hand drawn." Mr. Marshall was well underway with his series when, in May, Christian Cooper, a director of New York City Audubon, who is Black, was birding in Central Park, and he asked a white woman to leash her dog. She threatened to call the police and tell them "an African American man is threatening my life." The collision exposed a deep vein of racial bias and was a blatant example of the routine humiliations in the daily life of African Americans. Mr. Marshall's reaction to news of the incident did not dwell on the conflict. Rather, he said he felt some kind of kinship to Mr. Cooper who was in the park pursuing a field he knows well and had memorized "The Birds of North America" when he was 11 and related to expertise that transcends race. "There are assumptions about the kinds of things that Black people do and are interested in," he said, adding that he wanted to push back on the idea that "all Black people's lives are consumed by trauma. I'm not thinking about trauma all day." What consumes this artist is paint itself. Mr. Marshall can talk about color theory for hours. The crow and the grackle in the "Black and part Black" pictures are particularly nuanced. "I have to be able to show that it's not just a silhouette; it has volume, it breathes," he said. "And so I had to figure out how to make that happen but not diminish the fundamental blackness of the thing." To do that, Mr. Marshall painstakingly adjusts both the chroma (the warmth or coolness) and the value (the amount of light or dark) by mixing colors like raw sienna, chrome green, cobalt blue, and violet with black pigments. It's among the things that Mr. Tuymans noticed first in the 1990s, when he got to know Mr. Marshall and his work. He called Mr. Marshall's attention to blackness, at a time when it was a more radical move, "decisive and unapologetic." True, but in painting, bravery only makes a difference if the artist has the tools, and the focus, to get the message across. "The picture plane is the site of every action," Mr. Marshall said. He seemed to be speaking not only about the painting process but also how he conducts his whole life after all, this is a man who captured a live crow to get to know it better. "How things occupy that space," he added, "matters more than anything." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Kate Filmer Wilson shops in the client atelier at Galvan's first store in the Notting Hill area of London. On a quiet strip of Rue de Marignan, just down the block from the Paris power lunch spot L'Avenue, Alex Bolen, the chief executive of Oscar de la Renta, was standing outside No. 4, where the brand is to open a store next May. "We think long and hard before we enter into a lease," Mr. Bolen said. "With all that's going on in retail, we need to think even harder. For a luxury brand, what's the point of a store, at least a bricks and mortar store?" It's a question many in the industry are asking, and trying to answer anew. In a difficult climate for retail, the stakes are very real, as 4, rue de Marignan makes clear. Above the doorway, a sign hung reading "Reed Krakoff." Mr. Krakoff, now the chief artistic officer of Tiffany Company, shuttered his namesake brand in 2015 and never opened a shop in the space. Recent years have seen store closings from small brands and seismic contractions from major retailers, including Hudson's Bay Company's sale of the landmark Lord Taylor building on Fifth Avenue last month to WeWork, the office sharing start up. (Lord Taylor will rent about a quarter of its former space to continue operating.) But the solution, say several retail innovators, is not the end of bricks and mortar, as some in the industry once anticipated. "There was a time six or seven years ago when there was only talk of pure play e commerce," said Stephanie Phair, the chief strategy officer of Farfetch, the marketplace and retail platform that helps brands do business online. "What we've seen from a millennial consumer behavior point of view is customers really want that joined up online and offline experience." What that means is a renovation of the old bricks and mortar ideal. Instead of the arms race for the biggest location on the most desirable street, a new model focused on multifunctional, integrated stores is gaining currency: less storehouses of product than event spaces, classrooms, community centers, showrooms or studios. In the case of Oscar de la Renta, the two story Marignan space will serve as not only the brand's retail home in Paris, but also the showroom for its four annual wholesale presentations. Jeang Kim, an interior designer and sister of Laura Kim, the brand's co creative director, is designing it as a modular space: Displays can be cleared for customer entertaining events and dinners, like the brand has begun to hold in New York following its runway shows, and a tailoring studio will allow customers to have fittings and alterations done on site. But while the physical stores continue to drive business, Oscar de la Renta has been finding new customers outside of its usual channels. Since joining Farfetch earlier this year to expand its e commerce, often by way of the site's personal shoppers, the company has seen sales in the range of 200,000 a month, mostly from new customers. "Two hundred thousand dollars, seemingly out of thin air," Mr. Bolen said. The model for success, as Mr. Bolen sees it, is a combination of on and off line. "We think bricks and mortar is going to be a critical part of it, but a very different part than it's been in the past," Mr. Bolen said. "Bricks and mortar stores those aren't necessarily advantages any more." Especially in second tier markets, he added, "stores might be a real millstone." Where brands affiliated with major luxury groups, like LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Kering, once had a clear competitive advantage in negotiating for real estate, given their ability to leverage entire portfolios of brands, smaller companies like Oscar de la Renta and the upstart London based evening wear label Galvan are finding the playing field leveled by the rise of the smaller shop. "I was with these very big brands that sell tens of thousands of units a week and have flagship stores," said Paul O'Regan, the chief executive of Galvan, who previously was an executive at the Gucci Group (now Kering) and Burberry. "Everyone's closing stores around us and the fashion model's changing." Galvan just opened its first store, combining its work space and showroom with shopping for walk in customers and by appointment. And its location in the Notting Hill area of London ensures lower overhead than on a luxury retail strip like Mount Street, a few miles east. Not only will the store have the current season's options but customers also may order from the next season's collection and browse past collections to have pieces revived in custom colors, working with personal shoppers or, in some cases, the founders themselves. Appointments also may be made at a client's home or office. "We wanted to throw away all of those preconceptions and say: 'What would be the dream scenario for a woman buying a dress?' " Mr. O'Regan said. Robert Burke, whose New York based company has consulted on retail strategies for industry players including Ralph Lauren, Chloe and Bulgari, has seen such thinking emerge in recent years. Even the larger retailers, he said, "are looking at just how many flagships or large stores they really need. That format worked for decades and decades. With the growth of online, it doesn't seem to be working. Bigger isn't better, necessarily. More focused is better, I think. And more intimate and more personal." The distinction, he added, was between the old idea of department stores and the emerging model of the "apartment store." Technically speaking, the store as home or hub is nothing new. Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges in London, once decreed that "a store should be a social center," and put an ice rink and a shooting range in his. But after several years of chilly, gallery like shop design, a homey feeling is again becoming dominant. MatchesFashion.com, the London based retailer, began as a single bricks and mortar store in Wimbledon Village (called simply Matches). But while business from its (now three) stores has been dwarfed by its global e commerce, as its rechristening as MatchesFashion.com suggests, the company is continuing to invest in new stores. After a year of testing smaller, homier stores as part of a pop up program called "In Residence," it is scheduled to open a new permanent space (the company prefers not to call it a "store") at No. 5 Carlos Place in Mayfair in the spring. "That's the beauty of what we're doing," said Ulric Jerome, the company's chief executive. "You don't have to create an enormous department store to have a reach that is 10 or 100 times bigger than that department store. The reach is way bigger than the physical space. But the physical space enables you to produce amazing content." The Carlos Place store will have fewer choices than the full MatchesFashion.com range; it will be "the curation of the curation, and we'll change the product quite often," Mr. Jerome said. But iPads will allow browsing in store, and all products will be available within 90 minutes for delivery within metropolitan London. But at the company's existing stores, 40 percent of the sales already are done via iPad. It reflects the reality that, for Matches, the online dwarfs the physical in every way: 95 percent of Matches' business is online, Mr. Jerome said, and 85 percent is done outside of Britain. Mr. Jerome has confidence in the hybrid online/offline model, with smaller physical and larger digital space. "We tested it," Mr. Jerome said. "Now we are investing in it. We think it's part of the future of the way we see retail." And he added that Apax Partners, which in September announced an agreement to take a majority stake in the company one that values it at about 1 billion is fully supportive. Even those brands born online are stepping into the physical world. The RealReal, the online luxury consignment giant it receives 8,000 to 10,000 consignment items per day, according to Julie Wainwright, its founder and chief executive has spent a year testing pop ups. And this month it is setting up a permanent retail space on Wooster Street in New York City. Ms. Wainwright is envisioning the space as community center as much as shop: RealReal's staff of experts, from watch gurus to fashion historians, will offer clinics and classes and offer appraisals, and the store will include a coffee bar and flower shop. It will also, lest one forget, have a curated selection of the website's clothes, shoes, accessories, jewelry and more: a fraction of the online offering, but a selection tailored to New York consumers. The RealReal's pop up experiment last December in New York revealed a particular synergy between on and off line shopping, and a customer base ready and willing to combine the two, Ms. Wainwright said. And, she added, the average purchase at the pop up was larger than the average one online. "If you walk into the store, everything you see will also be online, and anything you see online you can see in store," she said. "What we saw when we ran the pop up, some people went in, saw the item, thought about it, ordered it online that night and picked it up in the store that next morning." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
BRUSSELS The offices of Politico Europe, the Brussels outpost of the American political news organization, are less than a five minute walk from the Maelbeek subway station where a suicide bomber killed more than a dozen people in the terrorist attacks here last month. The niche publication normally focuses on the inner workings and power dynamics of the European Union's sprawling institutions, so acts of Islamic terrorism are not exactly its standard offering. But to Matthew Kaminski, Politico Europe's executive editor, it was an event that lent itself naturally to Politico's brand of swift, flood the zone news coverage. "We have the biggest newsroom in this town," Mr. Kaminski said of the more than 40 journalists now under his command, "and this was a hit on our community." Before the bombings, sharp coverage in Politico had already branded Belgium a failed state, after it was revealed that last November's terrorist attacks on Paris had also been organized in a neglected neighborhood of central Brussels. The sustained scrutiny in Politico, addressed to an international, English speaking audience, rankled many in Belgium's famously parochial establishment as the more deferential members of the country's French and Dutch language media looked on. Just three days before the Brussels attacks, a spokesman for the prime minister dismissed Politico's analysis on Twitter as "biased as always." "We were on site, pushing that button every day," said Ryan Heath, a senior correspondent who writes Politico's widely read Brussels Playbook newsletter. "It had a multiplier effect," Mr. Heath said, "and that did not go down well." The Brussels attacks punctuated what had already been an unusually newsy first year for Politico's European venture, which was started last April in partnership with the German publishing group Axel Springer. In addition to terrorism and security, subjects like the migration crisis, the ongoing war in Ukraine, grinding debt talks with Greece and the prospect of a British exit from the 28 member European Union not only kept the Continent in the headlines but also served to remind Europeans and the rest of the world of the importance of the often arcane policy debates taking place in Brussels. Much like the original Politico, which was founded in 2007, its European incarnation covers its beat like a village paper, harnessing the immediacy of the Internet to deliver breaking news at a brisk tempo to a core readership of political and civic insiders. Its granular coverage of everything from ministerial summit meetings to regulatory committee hearings is leavened with tidbits from errant emails and restaurant recommendations, as well as revealing anecdotes about the biggest power brokers in Brussels. "We don't want to just write about politics, but about why these different actors are doing the things they do," said Carrie Budoff Brown, a former White House reporter for Politico who is now the managing editor in Brussels. As a digital first news outlet, Politico Europe uses its website as a shop window. Politico.eu offers a mix of free news and analysis as well as a menu of premium Politico Pro subscription channels focused on topics such as energy, health care and technology policy. It is a hybrid of free and for pay offerings that has been copied from Politico's successful American operation, said Sheherazade Semsar de Boisseson, the managing director in Brussels. So far, she said, it has exceeded its shareholders' expectations both for audience and revenue. "We didn't really know how many readers inside the 'Brussels bubble' there would be," said Ms. Semsar de Boisseson, the former publisher of European Voice, a narrowly focused, policy driven weekly that she sold in 2014 to Axel Springer and that was supplanted by Politico Europe. Politico Europe claims an audience of one million to 1.5 million unique monthly visitors to its free website, 30,000 readers of its weekly print newspaper and about 200 institutional subscribers to its Pro products, whose potential user base numbers in the "tens of thousands," Ms. Semsar de Boisseson said. Compared with other English language publications with a reputation for in depth, if not exclusive, coverage of the European Union and that cater to a global audience Politico has a modest reach, especially relative to the size of its newsroom. The Financial Times, with a staff of five in Brussels, claims to reach 2.1 million readers every day in print and online, of whom close to 800,000 are paying subscribers. Politico Europe says it is the quality, not the size, of the readership that matters most. About 20 percent of its readers live and work in Belgium, its largest European market, followed by about 11 percent in Britain and 9 percent in Germany. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "We produce a kind of news for insiders that gives them the juice that they can use," said Mr. Kaminski, who came to Politico from The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for more than a decade in Paris and Brussels. Readers of Politico's specialized Pro services include officials and staff from all the major branches of the European Union, as well as senior members of governments, corporations and consultancies. Pro subscriptions, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars a year, generate 30 percent of Politico Europe's revenues; the rest comes from ads and branded conferences. Brussels Playbook is the European equivalent to the free morning email started by Politico's departing star Washington reporter Mike Allen, and like its American forerunner, it serves as the site's reportorial marquee. Compiled before dawn by Mr. Heath and sent out to 50,000 inboxes before the morning commute, Playbook is a briefing delivered in a jocular "Daily Show" style. "Everyone reads it," conceded Peter Spiegel, Brussels bureau chief of The Financial Times. "It has really become the thing that starts the daily conversation here." It has also transformed Mr. Heath, an Australian who is a former spokesman and speechwriter for the European Commission, into Politico's de facto public face and a minor celebrity in Brussels. "It means you're spinning a lot of plates," Mr. Heath said one recent morning as he raced from the newsroom to deliver a live update for CNN on the bombing investigation. But beyond the general and widespread praise for Playbook, Politico's European reception has been mixed. Its zest for short shelf life scoops and its frequent focus on personalities have led some to dismiss its coverage as incremental and shallow, with little relevance to readers outside Brussels. "Some of the coverage is a bit superficial and doesn't always get to the heart of the matter," said Jon Worth, a communications consultant in Berlin and longtime blogger about European affairs. Jean Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, for example, was upset by a Politico article last year about his battle with kidney stones, which he later derided as "peep show journalism." Jean Quatremer, who covers European politics for the French daily Liberation, said in an email, "Politico is firing on all cylinders to get people talking about them, and they are succeeding." But, he added, "it's too sensationalistic, too into hyping up small stories." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Rita Wilson walked into Bleecker Street Records and headed for the counter. "I'm going to ask you a question," she said impishly to the store's general manager, Peter Kaye. "Now this may stump you, and it could be very embarrassing to me, so just lie and say you're sold out. But do you have Rita Wilson's record 'AM/FM' on vinyl?" "No," Mr. Kaye said, managing to keep a straight face. "We just can't keep that thing in stock." Ms. Wilson who plays Marnie's mother on "Girls," has been Alicia's nemesis on "The Good Wife" and is Mrs. Tom Hanks in real life has a big, husky laugh. It filled the venerable Greenwich Village shop, where, on a recent Monday night, she had the place mostly to herself. She had known about Bleecker Street Records for years. With her newfound career as a singer and songwriter (this month, she followed up "AM/FM," a collection of soft rock covers from 2012, with "Rita Wilson," a group of songs she co wrote), it seemed the perfect time to visit. She was also in town for a two week engagement at the Cafe Carlyle. As a music obsessed teenager growing up in Hollywood, she would haunt the record bins at Tower Records on the Sunset Strip. (Kids, ask your parents.) "That was the hangout," said Ms. Wilson, 59, who was wearing a black scoop neck dress by Tom Ford, with a skinny black Chloe scarf tied around her neck. "If we were going out to the Rainbow Bar or the Roxy, Tower Records was always a stop on the way. So it's good to be in this place and to be hanging." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
As Steven Levingston recounts in "Barack and Joe," the partnership between Obama and Biden was an unlikely and, initially, an uneasy one. Obama, Levingston writes, was "a young, cerebral African American who sweated over the precision of his words"; Biden was "an older chummy white guy given to impulsively speaking his mind." Obama considered Biden a Washington blowhard; listening to one of Biden's long winded speeches during a Senate hearing, he wrote a note to an aide: "Shoot. Me. Now." Biden, for his part, believed Obama to be an impudent tyro. But when Obama needed to choose a running mate, Biden with his decades of Senate experience and his popularity among white, working class voters in Rust Belt states checked the right boxes. During the campaign and then in the White House, their relationship developed and deepened, to the point that, in 2014, when Biden considered taking out a second mortgage to help pay for his son Beau's brain cancer treatments, Obama told him not to and that, if necessary, he would give Biden the money himself. "Barack and Joe filled in the spaces that were missing in the other man and created something bigger than their separate parts," Levingston writes. They were "a perfectly matched odd couple." Levingston spends much of "Barack and Joe" dwelling on the public facing aspect of and public response to their "bromance." He quotes from both men's Twitter and Instagram accounts; late night hosts, cable news gasbags and internet meme makers are all frequently cited. And he attempts to tease out why those who were "observing the president and vice president from a distance" were so invested in Obama and Biden's relationship. Part of it, Levingston theorizes, was that "America had a weakness for buddy teams. Felix and Oscar. Bert and Ernie. Buzz and Woody." More interestingly, he argues that Obama and Biden's partnership, "just by its existence and daily workings ... served as a badge of racial harmony." What "Barack and Joe" fails to do is shed much new light on the private nature of the two men's relationship. The nonfiction book editor of The Washington Post, Levingston has combed through the memoirs of Obama administration officials, as well as a number of other journalists' books, for anecdotes and insights about events that transpired behind the scenes, but he appears to have done little original reporting of his own, interviewing only a handful of people who observed the relationship up close. (Noting that Obama and Biden both declined to be interviewed for his book, Levingston writes, "It has seemed curious to me that, despite their busy schedules, Barack and Joe could not find time to discuss their complicated but largely felicitous relationship.") As a result, "Barack and Joe" frequently reads like a rehash of episodes and events that are already well known, with seemingly minor matters being afforded undue significance if only because they've previously been well documented. Does the world in 2019, for instance, really need 20 pages on the "Beer Summit" the 2009 pseudo event in which Biden and Obama hoisted beers in the Rose Garden with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the white Cambridge police officer who mistakenly arrested him? Even worse, "Barack and Joe" is written in a cloying style "Barack and Joe, no longer opponents, were now able to move into a new phase with each other," or "Through straight talk over lunch, Barack and Joe resolved their spat" that seems better suited to a children's book than a sophisticated political account. That's a shame, because with Biden now casting his third presidential run as an attempt to create a third Obama term, it's never been more important to understand the true and substantive nature of the two men's political partnership. For all the affectionate lunch outings and bro hugs that lit up the internet, Obama nonetheless dissuaded Biden from running for president in 2016, instead putting his chips on Hillary Clinton. And in the 2020 race, Obama hasn't endorsed Biden or anyone else in the Democratic primaries. The two men's friendship may have "moved the nation" as no White House pairing ever had, as Levingston writes. But was it and should it be enough to move one of them back into the White House? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
NEW JERSEY'S recently enacted Fertilizer Law, designed to protect waterways from becoming overly nourished, sets new limits on the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that can be used on lawns and restricts the times when fertilizer can be applied. It is considered the toughest in the nation. But because of an early growing season and a timing hiccup affecting the certification process, it has at least temporarily been tough on landscapers, some of whom have found themselves unable to pursue business as usual until they receive the accreditation mandated by the law. For home gardeners, adherence to the new formulation standards is in principle as simple as following the instructions on a bag of fertilizer. "The manufacturers have already changed the formula to meet the new standards, and all the homeowner has to do is follow the directions," said John Buechner, the director of technical services for Lawn Doctor, a company based in Holmdel with 30 franchises statewide, each of which has been certified. The law was signed by the governor in January 2011, but its provisions were put into effect in stages. The first, which took effect immediately, instituted a ban during heavy rains and a blackout period from mid November to March in which no fertilizer could be applied. The second phase, this January, set limits on the quantities of chemicals used and required professionals to be certified. Phase 3 will take effect next January, when stores will be prohibited from selling anything that does not meet the standards. The hiccup came because the training for certification administered by the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station also required the taking of an online test at the end, and that test was unavailable until late February, shortly before the end of the blackout period. With temperatures more like early summer than early spring, the precocious gardening season precipitated a general last minute scramble among landscapers seeking accreditation. "It was a little disorganized," said Richard Goldstein, the president of Green Meadows landscaping in Oakland. "I took the course and then it was 72 hours before Rutgers had released my name to take the test." By mid April, some 1,200 landscapers had passed the test, according to James Murphy, a specialist in turf grass management, who heads the Rutgers accreditation program. The amount of nitrogen that consumers can use is limited to 0.9 pounds on 1,000 square feet of ground per application, and 3.2 pounds per 1,000 square feet for the year. That is a 10 percent reduction, said Mr. Buechner, explaining that the previous limit was a pound. (Professionals can apply up to a pound of nitrogen per 1,000 feet in each application, and are not to exceed 4.25 pounds for the year.) As Stephanie Murphy, the director of the Rutgers station's soil testing lab, put it: "It's most common that people are applying fertilizer once or twice a year, and that's well within what's recommended in the law. Only in some cases, in affluent neighborhoods where people pay a lot to have nice lawns and are applying too much fertilizer, they may have to cut back." As for phosphorus, it can be used only when establishing or reseeding a lawn, or when a soil test turns up inadequate levels. The Rutgers station also handles soil testing, a first step that Ms. Murphy recommends for all lawns. The test, which costs 20, provides an analysis of the soil's pH levels and nutrients, and recommendations for maintaining one's lawn. In the first three months of this year, she said, 62 percent more soil sampling requests had been received than for the same period last year. Cracking down on the use of fertilizers became the focus of New Jersey legislators about three years ago when environmental activists warned that Barnegat Bay, the state's largest enclosed estuary, was dying, in part because of the pollution caused by runoff lawn fertilizer as it washed into the sewer system. Such overstimulation has caused an increase in algae and jellyfish in the bay, and a decrease in sea grass, fish and shellfish. Saltwater bodies like Barnegat Bay are adversely affected by excess nitrogen, freshwater areas by too much phosphorus. William deCamp Jr., the president of Save Barnegat Bay, said there had been no scientific measure of the rate of the bay's decline, and therefore no prediction on the pace of recovery. "This in and of itself won't save the day for Barnegat Bay," he said, "but it's a good solid step." Other pollutants to the bay and other waterways, according to Ms. Murphy, include: soil erosion; leaking septic systems; any biological waste that makes its way into the storm sewer (she mentioned petals falling off trees); and the Oyster Creek nuclear plant, which uses the bay's water as a cooling system. In addition to creating the course and test, Rutgers Extension maintains records of those who have been certified. But Mr. Murphy noted that the extension has no enforcement authority. "Being an educational institution," he said, "we were willing to take the task on as long as we kept the focus on education, and not on being policemen." That job is being given to local and county health officials, who can issue fines and citations. Fines for noncompliance are 500 for a first offense, 1,000 for subsequent citations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Months ago, Will Toledo made up his mind to wear a costume, including a mask, while promoting Car Seat Headrest's first album of new material since 2016.Credit...Grant Hindsley for The New York Times Will Toledo is leaning into his ambitions and leading his band into new territory on "Making a Door Less Open," an album that comes with a new look and a mask. Months ago, Will Toledo made up his mind to wear a costume, including a mask, while promoting Car Seat Headrest's first album of new material since 2016. Will Toledo, the founder and principal songwriter of Car Seat Headrest, sat in his Seattle apartment, looking into his iPhone camera through the eyes of a modified gas mask. His face wasn't visible, but somehow he still seemed a little sheepish. Months ago, Toledo made up his mind to wear a costume, including the mask, while promoting his indie rock band's first album of new material since 2016, an atypically concise and beat driven collection of songs called "Making a Door Less Open." He'd been thinking about David Bowie, whose shifting alter egos demarcated new phases of his creative life. About ways of ameliorating some of the self consciousness he still feels onstage. About taking his live shows in a more deliberate and theatrical direction, and encouraging his audience to have fun. He had not thought of the possibility that a global pandemic would turn protective masks into both a commonplace sight and a potent symbol of all pervasive, amorphous dread. The mask's Darth Vaderish quality is relieved by a pair of bright and somewhat googly LED eyes custom installed by a prop fabrication studio in Los Angeles, and two floppy ears sewn by a friend of Toledo's. By request, Toledo wore it for the first half of the interview, which was conducted via FaceTime. But he acknowledged that sticking with this particular conceptual stunt felt a little awkward, given the state of things. "It was supposed to be sort of an exotic alternative to reality like a challenge, I guess, to normal life," Toledo said. "And now it just feels a lot more pointed in a way that I wasn't planning on and don't really take any pleasure in." He'd thought of "Making a Door Less Open" as a "daily life album" whose songs the mask would recontextualize; instead it's the daily life aspect of the lyrics that now seems strange. The half rapped "Hollywood," a dyspeptic interior monologue about riding the bus and staring at posters for bad movies, plays like a snapshot from a now bygone age of social proximity. The fever metaphors in the single "Can't Cool Me Down" might have played better, Toledo observed, "outside the context of constantly thinking about sickness." Granted, even on the early Car Seat Headrest recordings the ones Toledo made under his parents' roof in suburban Virginia and in his dorm room at William Mary, usually armed with nothing more than a guitar, a USB cable and a laptop you could hear him honing a Brian Wilson ish command of lo fi indie rock's scruffy sonic palette. But for Toledo, bedroom recording was a means, not a motive. As soon as he landed a deal with Matador Records, he began growing his sound in ways that indicated just how high his sights were set. The 2015 album "Teens of Style" featured new and improved home recordings of 10 songs from his Bandcamp era. The most recent Car Seat Headrest studio album, "Twin Fantasy (Face to Face)," was a maximalist full band rerecording of his ragged and intimate 2011 LP "Twin Fantasy," the audio equivalent of a 16 millimeter student film remade in IMAX 3 D. On tour in support of that record, Car Seat Headrest drafted members of the Seattle power trio Naked Giants, becoming a swaggering seven piece band with a sound that could fill venues like Madison Square Garden (where Toledo and crew played a triumphant set opening for Interpol in February 2019). The singer and songwriter Lucy Dacus recalled a conversation with Toledo one night when the two were on tour. "He was like, 'Lucy, what makes a good rock album, today?' That was a question he wanted to answer. I was like, 'Dude, I don't actually care about the history of rock.' Will, I think, cares a lot about it, and the place he can fill in history," she said. She noted that Toledo is shy but also can come across as fearless a dichotomy well captured by the mask. "The same can be said about the content of his songs," she said. "He's talking about having fears and insecurities and making mistakes, but also he's willing to admit them, so that's fearless too." Listeners who were introduced to Toledo via the music from his bedroom period are still the core of his large, passionate and extremely online fan base. In fan communities like Reddit's r/CSHFans, the mood appears to be a mix of new album excitement and concern about where the band is headed. Fan art of Toledo in his costume is already abundant, but one waggish poster has critiqued "Hollywood" by laying its audio track over the video of a car commercial for the 2018 Kia Stinger. Matador's founder Chris Lombardi, who signed Toledo less than a week after encountering his Bandcamp page, described him as one of the most self assured artists he's worked with. The story of how "Making a Door Less Open" actually came together is convoluted, but like most important Car Seat Headrest stories, it begins at Toledo's parents' house. Except in this case the first act involves a guy who is not Will Toledo recording a somewhat deliberately idiotic dubstep comedy rap song called "Stoney Bologne" in what was once Toledo's sister's childhood bedroom. The improviser in question was Andrew Katz, a drummer who'd placed a musicians wanted ad on Craigslist the year after Toledo moved to Seattle, in 2014. Katz became Car Seat Headrest's drummer, not long before Toledo's Bandcamp recordings landed the group (which also features Ethan Ives on guitar and Seth Dalby on bass) the Matador deal. While playing with his previous band, a Seattle indie EDM outfit called Lost Triibe, Katz who had been a "total rock guy" for most of his career learned to produce music using the digital audio editing program Ableton Live. When he began touring with Car Seat Headrest, he'd make silly improvised music to kill time, occasionally enlisting Toledo and the other members of the band as collaborators. While waiting for an overseas flight, Toledo and Katz found themselves with 36 hours to kill at Toledo's parents' house in Virginia, and created "Stoney Bologne," which features Katz shouting out Barack Obama and rapping about being pushed into a pool by bullies. Katz wanted to post it online immediately, but Toledo suggested it might make more sense in the context of an entire comedy album, and in 2018 they self released "1 Trait High," an LP credited to 1 Trait Danger, a band name Toledo plucked from a French highway sign warning against tailgating. (Trait is his alter ego.) But when Toledo suggested to Katz that the next Car Seat Headrest album should be a collaboration with 1 Trait Danger, Katz was apprehensive: "I'm thinking to myself, 'The label's going to freak out. Andrew Katz is about to ruin Car Seat Headrest.'" Katz said. "But Will, as always, has his vision and he understands what he wants," he added. When he started writing "Making a Door Less Open," Toledo had been reading "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!," a sprawling history of modern pop music by the English musician and critic Bob Stanley. Some of the territory was familiar; Toledo had grown up listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys and other music from pop's '60s golden age. "What I learned a lot about was the stuff that preceded that, what it was feeding off of," Toledo said. "That definitely affected how I was writing looking at that early rock material, and wanting to do something that had that simplicity, and stripping stuff back to the point where it could have that energy." Lombardi said he and his colleagues at Matador found it hard to imagine what a Car Seat Headrest album produced in collaboration with Car Seat Headrest's "joke EDM project" would sound like: "I kind of jokingly said, 'Come in and give us a PowerPoint presentation and tell us what's going on.'" Toledo responded, Lombardi said, by doing something no Matador artist has ever done. "He came to New York and he literally gave us a PowerPoint," Lombardi said. "He went through the story, what the album cover was, what the title was. He played us some songs, and we learned a little bit about the fact that he might be in character for this entire project." Lombardi admitted that the idea of the mask was initially a cause for concern at the label, but added: "The artists' ideas are always the best ones. Sometimes, as wild as they are, you have to have faith that they're seeing something you can't." For what it's worth, after excusing himself from his FaceTime interview to take a bathroom break, Toledo returned without the mask on and finished the conversation as an average looking guy with a narrow face, shaggy dark hair and a toothy smile. Toledo turns 28 in August. "I think I'm almost at the point where journalists can't call me young anymore," he said. "I hated it while it was happening. Maybe now I'll miss it." He was only 23 when he signed to Matador, and now he's at an age where artists tend to flame out or begin seeking ways to renegotiate their relationship with public life, their bargain with the world. Over the years, Toledo has struggled publicly with music journalists' tendency to read his work through an autobiographical lens; in 2018, he called out a Rolling Stone writer on Twitter for an interpretation of "Twin Fantasy" that Toledo called "a weird, gross, inaccurate representation of my personal life." Asked if wearing the mask in media appearances was about creating a harder line between himself and the version of Toledo who appears in Car Seat Headrest's songs, he replied: "That might be a part of it. But I think it's an attempt to get people to look at me in a different way, especially onstage." "I'm not trying to take anything away from people," he continued. "It's a connection with the music I don't want to slam their fingers in the door, regardless of how they have that connection. But I do want to offer something new, and I think the mask is a way to do that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, two icons of Hong Kong's pro democracy movement, are going to prison. On Wednesday, Joshua was sentenced to 13.5 months, Agnes to 10 months and a third defendant, Ivan Lam, to seven months, for inciting, organizing or participating in an unlawful assembly at Hong Kong Police Headquarters in June 2019. (They had pleaded guilty.) But they might not get out for quite a bit longer than that: The Chinese government, acting through the Hong Kong authorities, has already pressed more charges. And its point, after all, is to stamp out dissent in Hong Kong. These charges were brought under the Public Order Ordinance, but since June 30 there is also the much more severe national security law. Twelve people who were caught at sea trying to flee Hong Kong in August have been in detention on the mainland since, reportedly with no access to lawyers. Activists like us the authors, who are in exile and wanted for arrest or in the diaspora, and our comrades in Hong Kong who face imprisonment or persecution will continue to campaign relentlessly against China's authoritarian expansion and try to safeguard what is left of Hong Kong's liberal institutions, for as long as we can. But we need the support of governments, businesses, universities, labor rights organizations and NGOs everywhere. If the world does not act resolutely to build a stronger alliance against the Chinese Communist Party's increasing aggression, more activists will be sacrificed, and more essential democratic values, too. Hong Kong is at the front lines of the resistance against Beijing's authoritarianism; what happens there should matter to anyone anywhere who cares about the future of freedom, especially since Beijing is trying to export its high tech, repressive ways to the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Standing near an ice sculpture of a phallus encased in a condom, Charlie Sheen took the stage at an event on Monday evening in Manhattan to help introduce a prophylactic called HEX from a Swedish luxury sex toy brand. He emerged through a glass door in the corner of the room, shortly after a video of him, speaking frankly about his diagnosis of H.I.V., played on a television in the center of the room. As the real thing suddenly popped into the room, dressed in a charcoal suit and seeming smaller and far more upbeat than the man who last made public rounds in November, when he announced to the world that he was H.I.V. positive, the crowd gasped. It was a surprise appearance at the Midtown party for HEX, a latex condom with a resilient honeycomblike structure developed by the brand LELO. Before Mr. Sheen's appearance, the event had consisted of photo booths and party games like pricking a pin through condoms stretched across LELO vibrators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LONDON A team led by David Adjaye, the Ghanaian British architect behind the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, has won a competition to design a new Holocaust memorial in London. The winning proposal envisages an elevated memorial site in Victoria Tower Gardens, a park near the Houses of Parliament, and an underground learning center dedicated to the six million Jewish people killed in the Holocaust. "The complexity of the Holocaust story, including the British context, is a series of layers that have become hidden by time," Mr. Adjaye said in a statement on Tuesday. "Our approach to the project has been to reveal these layers and not let them remain buried under history." The design for the memorial features 23 bronze "fins" that jut out of the earth, with the spaces in between them representing the 22 countries in which Jewish communities were devastated during the Holocaust. A path through the structure leads visitors down narrow stairs into the exhibition space below ground. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit... GANGOTRI, India High in the Himalayas, it's easy to see why the Ganges River is considered sacred. According to Hindu legend, the Milky Way became this earthly body of water to wash away humanity's sins. As it drains out of a glacier here, rock silt dyes the ice cold torrent an opaque gray, but biologically, the river is pristine free of bacteria. Then, long before it flows past any big cities, hospitals, factories or farms, its purity degrades. It becomes filled with a virulent type of bacteria, resistant to common antibiotics. The Ganges is living proof that antibiotic resistant bacteria are almost everywhere. The river offers powerful insight into the prevalence and spread of drug resistant infections, one of the world's most pressing public health problems. Its waters provide clues to how these pathogens find their way into our ecosystem. Winding over 1,500 miles to the Bay of Bengal, Ma Ganga "Mother Ganges" eventually becomes one of the planet's most polluted rivers, a melange of urban sewage, animal waste, pesticides, fertilizers, industrial metals and rivulets of ashes from cremated bodies. But annual tests by scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology show that antibiotic resistant bacteria appear while the river is still flowing through the narrow gorges of the Himalayan foothills, hundreds of miles before it encounters any of the usual suspects that would pollute its waters with resistant germs. The bacterial levels are "astronomically high," said Shaikh Ziauddin Ahammad, a professor of biochemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology. The only possible source is humans, specifically the throngs of ritual bathers who come to wash away their sins and immerse themselves in the waters. Tests showed that about 70 percent of four bacteria species commonly found in hospital patients were resistant to typical first line antibiotics. Between 12 percent and 71 percent depending on the species tested were also resistant to carbapenems, a class of antibiotics once considered the last line of defense. Other studies confirm the danger. An article in Lancet Infectious Diseases found that about 57 percent of infections in India with Klebsiella pneumoniae, a common bacterium, were carbapenem resistant. But where exactly do these armies of drug resistant germs come from? Are they already everywhere in the soil beneath our feet, for example? Do they emerge in hospitals, where antibiotics are heavily used? Are they bred in the intestines of livestock on factory farms? Do they arise in the fish, plants or plankton living in lakes downstream from pharmaceutical factories? Or are the germs just sitting inside the patients themselves, waiting for their hosts to weaken enough for them to take over? Research now being done in India and elsewhere suggests an answer to these questions: Yes, all of the above. But how drug resistant bacteria jump from one human to another outside of a hospital setting is the least understood part of the process, and that is why the findings from the Ganges are so valuable. Antibiotic resistance genes are not new. They are nearly as old as life itself. On a planet that is about 4.5 billion years old, bacteria appeared about 3.8 billion years ago. As they fed on one other and later on molds, fungi, plants and animals their victims evolved genes to make bacteria killing proteins or toxins, nature's antibiotics. (Penicillin, for example, was discovered growing in mold.) The bacteria, in turn, evolved defenses to negate those antibiotics. What modern medicine has done, scientists say, is put constant Darwinian pressure on bacteria. Outside the body, they face sunlight, soap, heat, bleach, alcohol and iodine. Inside, they face multiple rounds of antibiotics. Only the ones that can evolve drug resistance genes or grab them from a nearby species, which some bacteria can do will survive. The result is a global bout of sudden death elimination at a microscopic level. Bacteria once susceptible to all families of antibiotics have become resistant to penicillins, then tetracyclines, then cephalosporins, then fluoroquinolones and so on, until nearly nothing works against them. "When bacteria are stressed, they turn on their S.O.S. system," said David W. Graham, a professor of ecosystems engineering at Newcastle University in Britain and a pioneer in antibiotic resistance testing. "It accelerates the rate at which they rearrange their genes and pick up new ones." Eight years ago, Dr. Ahammad, a former student of Dr. Graham, suggested testing Indian waters. "Until then," Dr. Graham said, "I had avoided India because I thought it was one huge polluted mess." With antibiotic resistant bacteria so ubiquitous, it would be hard to design a good experiment one with a "control," someplace relatively bacteria free. "We needed to find some place with clear differences between polluted and unpolluted areas," Dr. Graham said. That turned out to be the Ganges. Although it is officially sacred, the Ganges is also a vital, working river. Its numerous watersheds in the mountains, across the Deccan Plateau and its vast delta serve 400 million people a third of India's population as a source of drinking water for humans and animals, essential for crop irrigation, travel and fishing. Twice a year, two of Dr. Ahammad's doctoral students, Deepak K. Prasad and Rishabh Shukla, take samples along the whole river, from Gangotri to the sea, and test them for organisms with drug resistance genes. The high levels discovered in the river's lower stretches were no surprise. But the researchers found bacteria with resistance genes even in the river's first 100 miles, after it leaves Gangotri and flows past the next cities downstream: Uttarkashi, Rishikesh and Haridwar. More important, the researchers found that the levels were consistently low in winter and then surged during the pilgrimage season, May and June. Because the district is sacred, no alcohol or meat may be sold there. Devout Hindus are often vegetarian and abstemious. The riverside cities have wide flights of steps, called ghats, leading into the water, often with netting or guardrails. They help pilgrims safely immerse themselves and drink a ritual that is supposed to wash away sins and hasten entry into paradise. Souvenir stands sell plastic jugs so pilgrims can take Ganges water home to share. The most famous of the Upper Ganges pilgrimage cities is Rishikesh. Its streets are lined with hotels with names like Holy River and Aloha on the Ganges. Besides pilgrims, Westerners pour in for the town's annual yoga festival or to study in its many ashrams and ayurvedic medicine institutes. In 1968, the Beatles studied Transcendental Meditation there with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In his pre Apple days, Steve Jobs pursued enlightenment there. Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles have visited. In the meantime, pilgrims will continue to be at risk, trusting in the gods to protect them. "Ganga is our mother drinking her water is our fate," said Jairam Bhai, a large, jovial 65 year old food vendor who held two small jugs as he waited to descend into the water in Gangotri. "If you have faith, you are safe." "We don't follow bacteria, we don't think about it," added Jagdish Vaishnav, a 30 year old English teacher who said he swam and drank the water in Rishikesh, Haridwar and even in Varanasi, where torrents of raw sewage can be seen flowing into the river. Devout Hindus go there to die so that they can be cremated on the ghats or on floating rafts and have their ashes strewn on the water to free them from the cycle of death and rebirth. Up high in Gangotri, the priests on the banks say they are well aware of the dangers downstream. "Below Haridwar, I believe there are chances of disease," said Basudev Semwal, 50. "That's why we publicize that people should come here because it's cleaner." His companion, Suraj Semwal, 44, said the government should do more. If all Hindu religious figures could get together, they might be able to demand a cleanup, he said. But the many Hindu religious orders are not hierarchical like those of Roman Catholicism, which has a pope. "Everyone has their own voice, so they can't speak together," he said. In Canada, he said he had heard, "There is a river where you can get fined if you even touch it and it's just a river, not holy at all. Here we have a holy river, and it's very dirty and nothing is being done." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The artist JPW3 (J. Patrick Walsh) has described his materials wax, tuning forks, car engines, doorways, popcorn as "an excess of fuel," which he directs toward his various experiments in painting, installation, performance and holography. Now, in a show called "Figure Ascending a Return," which opened Aug. 17 at Martos Gallery's new Elizabeth Street location, he has created another version of his Serena Williams hologram, "Serena Hologram xl, 2017." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The American artist Ken Tisa is a painter, a sculptor and a hunter gatherer shopper. He likes objects and images, the more culturally varied the better, and what he makes from them are collages nested inside assemblages that are large enough to qualify as installations. His exhilarating show at Gordon Robichaux, "Objects/Time/Offerings," has several installations, though precise borders between them tend to blur. The best way to describe this show is with a selective inventory. Among hundreds of items, you'll find a Japanese Noh mask; a Hopi kachina; an African power figure; a plastic Virgin Mary from Lourdes; a Mexican glass Christmas ornament in the form of Mickey Mouse; a Chinese hand puppet depicting an American Indian; paired marionettes of two men embracing from India; a carved wood penis; a snake vertebrae necklace; and a photograph of a tattoo of a nude, dancing, madcap angel that Mr. Tisa designed for the drag performer and playwright Ethyl Eichelberger. One short gallery wall is papered in magazine and newspaper clips, and a long one is covered with hundreds of small paintings that Mr. Tisa turned out, one a day, in the 1980s and early '90s to maintain psychological balance during the early AIDS crisis. (Many of the paintings have inlaid snapshots of television screens showing advertisements, sitcoms and pornography.) Future historians tackling Mr. Tisa's career will have their work cut out for them in researching his art, which is both a material flood and a lovingly pieced together mosaic. They will also have the immense pleasure of interpreting it, and for that they will be indebted to the show's genius catalog, in which the writer and oral historian Svetlana Kitto channels Mr. Tisa's archiving memory and expansive, expressive voice. Structural and documentary films were historically at different ends of the filmmaking spectrum, with one focusing on formal and conceptual concerns, and the other on social realities and conditions. The two practices are fused, however, in Dara Friedman's "Mother Drum" at Gavin Brown's gallery in Harlem. The formal, structural characteristics of the work are evident in the film's projection onto three screens, with solid blocks of (mostly) primary color alternating with filmed images. The documentary aspect is in the capturing of Native American drum circles and dancers, elements inspired by the amateur archaeologist Ishmael Bermudez, who says he found Native American ruins on his property in Miami. What Ms. Friedman attempts in joining these two practices is more than creating a nifty hybrid object. Despite good, often altruistic intentions, documentarians have been accused of speaking for, or in the place of, various peoples. When the drummers and dancers perform specifically for her camera, the people presented here become more like participants than traditional subjects. The erasure of artist versus subject is not complete. But that is also a function of the art world in which we operate (and of much deeper historical forces, like colonialism). This is addressed in a portion of the show's news release written by Shuel let quaQ:olosoet (a.k.a. Cynthia Jim), who is also seen on film. She describes how the Mother Drum "resonates a vibration of unseen strands that link our past, present and future" and carries "vibrations of life waiting to heal those who need it." It is this energy that Ms. Friedman is trying to capture. Albert Oehlen titled a 2006 retrospective "I Will Always Champion Good Painting," though in case you thought this German artist was some easygoing aesthete, there was a sequel: "I Will Always Champion Bad Painting." His latest New York exhibition, at Gagosian, continues his decades long effort to paint sincerely without ignoring the medium's supposed butchers photography, the ready made, conceptual art, and a market that loves to turn artists like Mr. Oehlen into brands. Each of his latest "Trees," part of a running series of paintings, starts with a central black form, sometimes blocky, sometimes biomorphic, to which he then affixes thin black lines that spiral out like tentacles. The black forms are rendered with both a brush and a spray gun; observe the hazy and drippy edges on the curvier branches, petering out from the hand painted segments. The "Trees" are painted on Dibond, a smooth aluminum composite familiar from road signs, and gradated rectangles of magenta which, like black, is one of the four inks used in commercial printing invest these hand painted compositions with a technological edge. Searching for trees in these spindly, barely arborescent paintings feels valid and foolish at once. That double impression is just how Mr. Oehlen likes it. The other half of this show features a new series of "Elevator Paintings," allover abstractions in which cloudy washes overlay discordant backgrounds. The colors are as proudly wrong as ever dull putty, hot yellow, pale lavender, the sort of pink best left for a highlighter yet the compositions feel uncommonly decorous and aboveboard; one work here, a mishmash of green, red and orange stains, nearly makes you think the painter has gone for Ab Ex romanticism. Mr. Oehlen is the undisputed master of bad meaning good painting, and yet, as weird as this is to write, I wonder if these "Elevator Paintings" are bad enough. Matt Hoyt makes pocket size sculptures. Small pinches and loops of off white clay and sanded putty, they resemble seashells, bird bones or primitive tools. More than anything, when displayed in loose grids on low slate colored tables, they also look like reconstructed fossils. But because they wax and wane over years in Mr. Hoyt's studio, gaining patches and appendages in a half dozen shades of gray, it's usually impossible to guess which section of any given piece would have been original. As evocative as a collection of such highly worked objects can be, there's something forbidding about them, too, a hermetic focus on the artist's labor and process that's not particularly open to outside viewers. So it's exciting that Mr. Hoyt's current show includes, for the first time, a half dozen pieces big enough to fill a breadbox. Their forms are similar to their smaller forebears': one particularly beautiful untitled piece is like an S shaped snail with curving fins; another like the complicated pelvis of some eight legged mythical bird. The change in scale is minor, but it has an extraordinary effect, transforming what had been a series of quiet whispers into bold, unforgettable statements. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The ambitious Berlin airport project conceived two decades ago as a glittering symbol of German unification and the city's importance as a global hub has hit yet another delay and may not open before late next year, officials said Tuesday. An opening originally set for last year, then this past June and then postponed until next March, may now be pushed back again until at least October 2013. Officials cite various technical and budgetary problems that have turned the Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport now estimated at more than EUR4 billion, or 5 billion, an estimated EUR1.2 billion over budget from an emblem of German know how into a source of local embarrassment. And it does not help that cabin crews for the country's flag carrier airline, Lufthansa, are on strike, stranding travelers at airports that include Berlin's aging, overburdened Tegel airport. The endless series of delays, coming atop several recent breakdowns of the city's main commuter railway and its main soccer team's dropping out of the country's premiere league has made Berlin, despite its flair for making the down and out seem attractive, the butt of jokes across the country. "Berlin we can do everything, but nothing right," is the motto that German media organizations have lately proposed. But the setbacks at the airport could have more serious consequences, particularly for two local politicians Matthias Platzeck and Klaus Wowereit who are on the airport's board and have staked their reputations to the project. Both are members of the Social Democrats, the opposition party to the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Members of her administration and other lawmakers have called for the two to step down from the board. Mr. Platzeck, premier of Brandenburg, the largely rural state that surrounds Berlin, confirmed Tuesday that the airport's board had been advised to abandon the March deadline as unfeasible. The board, which had planned to meet next week to complete a new timetable and proposals for additional financing, will now meet on Friday. Spokesmen for the airport and the main project partners the city of Berlin, the state of Brandenburg and Germany's federal government declined to comment on the new opening date ahead of that Friday meeting. But one government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, confirmed that the airport's new chief operating officer, Horst Amann, had proposed at a meeting with stakeholders late Monday that the opening be postponed until at least Oct. 20, 2013. ''We think this sounds like a more realistic date," Oliver Wagner, a senior vice president at Lufthansa who is in charge of the airline's Berlin operations, said in response to the reported new date. Mr. Wagner has been keeping close tabs on the airport in progress, where Lufthansa has invested EUR60 million in new lounges and jet maintenance facilities. "For us, the issue has always been that quality comes first," Mr. Wagner said. "It has never been a matter of sacrificing reliability for speed." But, he added, "the whole industry has certainly been suffering from this situation." And he acknowledged the problems caused by the strike at his own company. "It is a bit sad for the image of the industry," he said. "This is what really what worries me most." Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. The delayed airport was envisioned at the time of Germany's reunification as a central aviation hub for the Berlin in place of three Tegel, Schonefeld in the former East Germany and the now shuttered Tempelhof in the former West that would serve both as a gleaming symbol of a united capital and attract new travelers and commerce to and from northeastern Europe. Berlin Brandenburg, with expected capacity of up to 45 million passengers per year, was also expected to relieve mounting congestion at the capital's much loved but well worn Tegel. Air traffic in Berlin has more than doubled since 2000 to around 24 million passengers per year, and Tegel, designed for a maximum capacity of around 7 million, now struggles to accommodate around 17 million. Schonefeld, whose terminal is 18 kilometers, or 11 miles, southeast of the capital and adjacent to the new airport site, has until now been the main portal for low cost carriers, including easyJet, Lufthansa's Germanwings subsidiary, and Ryanair. The Berlin Brandenburg dream quickly transformed into a nightmare of politicized wrangling among leaders of debt plagued local government. There have also been the challenges from residents of well heeled suburbs in Brandenburg and the southwest of the capital, who fought bitterly to have the proposed flight patterns changed to avoid noise pollution. Others living near the existing airport were against the added congestion the new one could bring. Preservationists, meantime, fought the project on architectural grounds. Years of protests and legal challenges ensued. Then, in mid 2010, the main engineering firm overseeing the airport's construction filed for bankruptcy protection, throwing off an initial opening planned for October 2011 by seven months, to June of this year. But by late last year, aviation industry executives said, it was clear that construction was far behind schedule, threatening the June deadline. Among the hang ups: blueprints detailing the complex routes of critical cables for the airport's security systems contained major errors; delays in the baggage sorting equipment, and the snags in the installation and testing of fire safety equipment. By this spring, "the number of open issues on the list kept growing instead of shrinking," said one senior airline executive, who insisted on anonymity to avoid alienating government officials. It was not until May 9, less than a month before the scheduled opening, that project officials and the board conceded the timeline could not be met and a new start date of March 17, 2013 set. The 11th hour decision forced airlines, which had already published their summer travel schedules and sold thousands of tickets for flights into and out of the new airport, into a scramble to regroup. Mr. Wagner of Lufthansa, which had expected to operate more than 1,000 flights per week from Berlin Brandenburg this summer, said the carrier was managing, so far, in maintaining its schedule with a minimum number of delays. Like most other carriers, he said, Lufthansa planned to seek significant compensation from the airport for the delays. But Air Berlin, which carries more than 220,000 passengers in an out of the German capital each week well ahead of Lufthansa, at 143,000 has been the hardest hit. With the help of a sizeable investment last year from Etihad Airways of Abu Dhabi, the company, which has not recorded an annual profit in four years, is seeking to transform itself from a primarily low cost carrier to a full service network airline. Key to that strategy was the new airport, which it planned to use as a hub for connecting domestic passengers to a broader menu of inter continental routes. In an e mail Tuesday, Mathias Radowski, an Air Berlin spokesman, said the airport was deferring comment until after Friday's airport board meeting. But he stressed that its current base at Tegel was "not dimensioned for the high number of flights operated there at the moment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
For three years Donald Trump led a charmed life. He faced only one major crisis that he didn't generate himself Hurricane Maria and although his botched response contributed to a tragedy that killed thousands of U.S. citizens, the deaths took place off camera, allowing him to deny that anything bad had happened. Now, however, we face a much bigger crisis with the coronavirus. And Trump's response has been worse than even his harshest critics could have imagined. He has treated a dire threat as a public relations problem, combining denial with frantic blame shifting. His administration has failed to deliver the most basic prerequisite of pandemic response, widespread testing to track the disease's spread. He has failed to implement recommendations of public health experts, instead imposing pointless travel bans on foreigners when all indications are that the disease is already well established in the United States. And his response to the economic fallout has veered between complacency and hysteria, with a strong admixture of cronyism. According to Reuters, the Trump administration has ordered health agencies to treat all coronavirus deliberations as classified. This makes no sense and is indeed destructive in terms of public policy, but it makes perfect sense if the administration doesn't want the public to know how its actions are endangering American lives. In any case, it's clear what we should be doing now that there must already be thousands of cases all across the United States. We need to slow the disease's spread by creating "social distance" banning large gatherings, encouraging those who can to work from home and quarantining hot spots. This may or may not be enough to prevent tens of millions from getting sick, but even spreading out the pandemic over time would help prevent it from overloading the health care system, greatly reducing the number of deaths. But there was almost none of this in Trump's speech; he's still acting as if this is a threat foreigners are bringing to America. And when it comes to the economy, Trump seems to fluctuate day to day even hour to hour between assertions that everything is fine and demands for enormous, ill conceived stimulus. His big idea for the economy is a complete payroll tax holiday. According to Bloomberg News, he told Republican senators that he wanted the holiday to extend "through the November election so that taxes don't go back up before voters decide whether to return him to office." That is, he apparently said the quiet part out loud. This would be an enormous move. Payroll taxes are 5.9 percent of G.D.P.; by comparison, the Obama stimulus of 2009 2010 peaked at about 2.5 percent of G.D.P. Yet it would be very poorly targeted: big breaks for well paid workers, nothing for the unemployed or those without paid sick leave. Why do it this way? After all, if the goal is to put money in people's hands, why not just send out checks? Apparently Republicans can't conceive of an economic policy that doesn't take the form of tax cuts. Trump also reportedly wants to provide aid to specific industries, including oil and shale a continuation of his administration's efforts to subsidize fossil fuels. Democrats, by contrast, have proposed a package that would actually address the needs of the moment: free coronavirus testing, paid sick leave, expanded unemployment benefits and an increase in federal matching funds for Medicaid programs, which would both help states meet the demands of the crisis and sustain overall spending by relieving the pressure on state budgets. Notice, by the way, that these measures would help the economy in an election year, and therefore arguably help Trump politically. But Democrats are willing to do the right thing anyway a stark contrast to the behavior of Republicans after the 2008 financial crisis, when they offered scorched earth opposition to anything that might mitigate the damage. The White House, however, is having none of it, with an official accusing Democrats of pushing a "radical left agenda." I guess sick leave equals socialism, even in a pandemic. So what's going on? What we're seeing here is a meltdown not just a meltdown of the markets, but a meltdown of Trump's mind. When bad things happen, there are only three things he knows how to do: insist that things are great and his policies are perfect, cut taxes, and throw money at his cronies. Now he's faced with a crisis where none of these standbys will work, where he actually needs to cooperate with Nancy Pelosi to avoid catastrophe. What we saw in Wednesday's speech was that he's completely incapable of rising to the occasion. We needed to see a leader; what we saw was an incompetent, delusional blowhard. 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 Rev. George V. Coyne, a Jesuit astrophysicist who as the longtime director of the Vatican Observatory defended Galileo and Darwin against doctrinaire Roman Catholics, and also challenged atheists by insisting that science and religion could coexist, died on Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y. He was 87. His death, at a hospital, from complications of bladder cancer, was announced by the Jesuit run Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where he had been a professor of religious philosophy after retiring from the observatory in 2006. Recognized among astronomers for his research into the birth of stars and his studies of the lunar surface (an asteroid is named after him), Father Coyne was also well known for seeking to reconcile science and religion. He applauded Pope Francis for addressing the role that humans play in climate change, and he challenged alternative theories to evolution like creationism and intelligent design. "One thing the Bible is not," he told The New York Times Magazine in 1994, "is a scientific textbook. Scripture is made up of myth, of poetry, of history. But it is simply not teaching science." Brother Guy Consolmagno, the current director of the Vatican Observatory, said in an email that Father Coyne "was notable for publicly engaging with a number of prominent and aggressive opponents of the church who wished to use science as a tool against religion." Among those he engaged on the debate stage and in print were Richard Dawkins, the English evolutionary biologist and atheist, and Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, who, in an Op Ed article in The New York Times in 2005, defended the concept that evolution could not have occurred without divine intervention. During Father Coyne's tenure, the Vatican publicly acknowledged that Galileo and Darwin might have been correct. Brother Consolmagno said it would be fair to say that Father Coyne had played a role in shifting the Vatican's position. While the church formally acknowledged in 1992 that it had "erred in condemning Galileo" in 1633 for promoting the theory that Earth revolved around the sun, Father Coyne was among the critics who complained that the admission was not only too late but also too little. In 1996, Pope John Paul II, without defining evolution, said that it was "more than just a hypothesis." His statement that Darwin's views had "progressively taken root in the minds of researchers, following a series of discoveries made in diverse spheres of knowledge," suggested that at least in public schools, religious faith and the teaching of evolution could coexist. In an article in the English Catholic weekly The Tablet in 2005, Father Coyne sought to reconcile religion with evolution. "God in his infinite freedom," he wrote, "continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves." He went further by finding fault with intelligent design. "If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research," he wrote, "religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly." He added, "Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent or as one who speaks encouraging and sustaining words." He joined the Society of Jesus when he was 18 and attended a Jesuit novitiate in Wernersville, Pa., northwest of Philadelphia, where his Greek and Latin literature professor imparted a passion for math and astronomy. Father Coyne earned a bachelor's degree in math and a licentiate in philosophy from Fordham University in 1958 and then a doctorate in astronomy from Georgetown University. He completed a licentiate in sacred theology at Woodstock College in Maryland and was ordained a priest in 1965. He joined the Vatican Observatory as an astronomer in 1969, taught at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and directed its Catalina Observatory. He was appointed director of the Vatican Observatory by Pope John Paul I in 1978 and was its longest serving director, holding the post for nearly three decades. Father Coyne presided in 1993 when the observatory mounted a new Advanced Technology Telescope on Mount Graham in southern Arizona. (Light pollution at the observatory's historic headquarters in Castel Gandolfo outside Rome had prevented the telescope from being installed there.) He established a research group at the University of Arizona and organized a summer program for graduate students. In the 1990s, Father Coyne arranged conferences at the Vatican Observatory in collaboration with the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, a program of the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, Calif. "Father Coyne oversaw the modernization of the observatory's role in the world of science," Brother Consolmagno said. "He essentially re founded the Specola Vaticana," using the Italian name for the observatory, which dates to at least the 18th century. After retiring in 2006, Father Coyne was president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation until 2011, when he was appointed to the McDevitt chair of religious philosophy at Le Moyne. He held that position at his death. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WASHINGTON Hundreds of independent pharmacists swarmed the House and Senate office buildings one recent afternoon, climbing the marble staircases as they rushed from one appointment to the next, pitching lawmakers on their plan to rein in the soaring drug prices that have enraged American consumers. As they crowded into lawmakers' offices, describing themselves as the industry's "white hats," they pointed a finger at pharmacy benefit managers like Express Scripts and CVS Health, which handle the drug coverage of millions of Americans. "Want to reduce prescription drug costs?" the pharmacists argued during their visits. "Pay attention to the middlemen." A civil war has broken out among the most powerful players in the pharmaceutical industry including brand name and generic drug makers, and even your local pharmacists with each blaming others for the rising price of medicine. It is an industry that was already spending nearly double what other business sectors in the United States economy allocate on lobbying, and those sums continue to rise. President Trump has only heightened anxiety by accusing the drug industry of "getting away with murder," even though he has not weighed in with his own proposal. For now, lawmakers are facing an almost daily assault. "Everyone is very eager to maximize their profits and get a piece of the pie, and sorting it all out is complicated," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. The question is whether a rare confluence of public outrage, political will and presidential leadership can bring about a meaningful change that will slow the drain on consumers' pocketbooks. "You remember that old photograph of the Three Stooges, their faces cracked sideways and they are pointing at each other?" asked Chester Davis Jr., the president of the Association for Accessible Medicines, sitting in the basement cafeteria of the Russell Senate Office Building at the start of a day in which he would make his own pitches on behalf of generic drugmakers. "Everyone is doing the finger pointing, when in fact there is a lot of blame to go around." "It's still a very uphill fight," said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, who like Ms. Collins has been pushing Congress to increase competition and lower prices, "given the millions they have spent on lobbying, advertising and campaign contributions." With billions in profit on the line, the pharmaceutical and health products industry has already spent 78 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year, a 14 percent jump over last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The industry pays some 1,100 lobbyists more than two for each member of Congress. In the 2016 election cycle, the industry poured more than 58 million into the election campaigns of members of Congress and presidential candidates, as well as other political causes, the Center for Responsive Politics data shows. That was the biggest investment in the industry's history and a 20 percent jump from the last presidential election cycle in 2012. No single proposal has emerged as a clear winner in the bid to lower prices. Mr. Trump has sent conflicting signals: On one hand, he has accused the industry of "price fixing" and has said the government should be allowed to negotiate the price of drugs covered by Medicare. At other times, he has talked about rolling back regulations and named an industry friendly former congressman, Tom Price, to head the Department of Health and Human Services, and a former pharmaceutical consultant, Scott Gottlieb, to lead the Food and Drug Administration. Members of Congress have put forward a grab bag of options, each of which would help or hurt different industry players. Some address minor aspects, such as a bipartisan bill that would force brand name drugmakers to hand over samples of their drugs to generic competitors. One would allow for the importing of cheaper drugs. Another would force pharmacy benefit managers to disclose more information about how they did business. Its trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, was so concerned about its vulnerability this year that it increased its annual dues by 50 percent generating an extra 100 million to flood social media, television stations, as well as newspapers and magazines with advertising that reminds consumers of the industry's role in helping to save lives. A second set of PhRMA ads point blame for price increases elsewhere, like benefit managers and health insurers. In doing so, PhRMA is seeking to rehabilitate a reputation that was damaged by the actions of companies like Turing Pharmaceuticals, which sharply hiked the price of a decades old medicine. Its unapologetic former chief executive, Martin Shkreli, came to be seen as the ultimate illustration of the industry's bad deeds. Though Turing was never a member of the group, PhRMA recently purged nearly two dozen companies from its membership after it voted to exclude investor driven drug companies like Turing. Nearly every week that Congress is in session, the industry holds fund raisers at private clubs and restaurants to help bankroll the re election campaigns of its allies. One former lobbyist for PhRMA recently boasted that he had once organized six fund raising events in a two day period. (He asked that he not be named because the fund raising efforts are supposed to be confidential.) In late April, for example, a PhRMA Industry Breakfast was hosted for Representative John Shimkus, Republican of Illinois, at the National Republican Club of Capitol Hill, a members only hot spot across the street from the Capitol. But other participants said industry influence as drug companies attempted to preserve their bottom line had played a decisive role. "When we first proposed this, people were warning me, 'Be careful, everybody on K Street is going to be gunning for you now,' and I did not really know what they meant," said Andy Slavitt, a top Obama administration official who pushed the prescription drug price experiment. "Now I know. When you take on pharma, you take on this whole town." Stephen J. Ubl, the chief executive of PhRMA, acknowledged that his group had been "very engaged" in defending his member companies' interests, and blamed a few bad actors not his own members for the public's disapproval. The generics industry has also come under attack. Though its drugs are generally cheap, some have also risen sharply in price, and prosecutors have been investigating claims of price fixing by some of the largest players, including Mylan. Heather Bresch, the chief executive of Mylan and a former chairwoman of the generics trade group, has been pilloried on social media for her role in hiking the price of EpiPens, even though EpiPens sold as branded drugs, not generics. As the controversy over EpiPens unfolded, Ms. Bresch shifted criticism toward what she called the "broken system" of brokers, distributors and pharmacists who take a cut of the price, too. In January, the generics trade group shed its old name for one that reflects the changed political climate: the Association for Accessible Medicines. Mr. Doggett, the Texas Democrat, said the industry war was in some ways a positive sign. "We have moved from 'There is no problem' to 'It's not my fault,' " he said. "It begins to focus attention on what so many of my constituents already know the problem is, which is price gouging." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Once upon a time you could drop a dime in a movie jukebox to hear and watch musical greats like Duke Ellington and Gene Krupa. Hair slicked and smile set to dazzle, Duke Ellington is standing at an upright piano when "Hot Chocolate" opens, conducting a band that's already swinging. A decorative musical staff provides the only ornamentation on the otherwise bare bones, cramped set. That scarcely matters because Ellington is playing. He calls out Ben Webster's name and there's a cut to the saxophonist. A few more cuts take us to two women who smile and nod, then Whitey's Lindy Hoppers begin jumping, rocketing the film into the stratosphere. "Hot Chocolate" was among the more than 1,800 short films called Soundies that Ellington and hundreds of other entertainers made in the 1940s. The films were commissioned by the Soundies Distributing Company of America, part of the Mills Novelty Company, which made the large cabinets Panorams that played them. Each had a 16 millimeter projector inside, a glass screen on the exterior and looked like a supersized early TV set. Viewers had to watch eight films on a loop, but today you can pick what you like among the hundreds that are free on YouTube. Many are in very rough shape, so watch them on a small screen where the visual degradation is less apparent. At around three minutes, they are perfect for short attention spans. As a showcase for black talent, Soundies also offer a bittersweet vision of an American movie mainstream that could have been. Produced during Jim Crow, the Soundies were as segregated as the rest of the country. The catalog listed black artists in a separate section, apparently for the convenience of the segregated joints that played them. Most of the Soundies I've watched feature either all white or all black casts; a few showcase Latinos, but there are next to no Asians. (Ricardo Montalban appeared in Soundies, including "He's a Latin from Staten Island," which, alas, I have yet to locate.) One of the few integrated Soundies I've seen is "Let Me Off Uptown," with the jazz greats Gene Krupa, Roy Eldridge and Anita O'Day cooking with gas. Soundies were largely produced and directed by white filmmakers, but one of their most important contributors was Fritz Pollard, the pioneering black football player turned booking agent, entrepreneur and future Hall of Famer. (He also worked on the Paul Robeson film "The Emperor Jones.") In 1942, Pollard signed with Mills, becoming the manager for the Soundies' New York office. According to the Pollard biographer John M. Carroll, musicians rehearsed their numbers at Pollard's Suntan Studios in Harlem and shot the acts in a Bronx studio. However contrived and impoverished their means, these films are a crucial part of African American cinema history. From 1941 to '46, Soundies could be played on Panorams or movie jukeboxes as they're often called across the country in bars, pool halls and restaurants. Movies have always tried to get out of the (cinema) house, and one of the fascinating things about Panorams is that they allowed users to control their viewing experience. Soldiers, barflies and folks waiting for the next train could slip a dime in a Panoram and summon up Louis Armstrong and Spike Jones, and future Hollywood stars like Doris Day and Dorothy Dandridge, who made my favorite Soundie, the delightful "A Zoot Suit." Most of the great entertainers in Soundies played jazz, but there are films with the blues, cowboy tunes, Hawaiian melodies, polka music, rumbas, the works. Soundies are often referred to as music video prototypes, which is true but doesn't fully capture their hybrid charm and how they fuse vaudeville, theater, cinema and the era's newest novelty, television. The films were made on the cheap, sometimes in just one day with the sound recorded first and performers miming the music during production. Often, the featured attraction performs in the middle of the frame while looking directly at the camera, as if on a stage. She most often he performs with other musicians, dancers or both, and sometimes for a tiny audience. The acts sometimes appear on a stage with a curtain, as if in a theater; at other times they look as if they're jamming in a basement storeroom. Like some other movies produced outside the studio system, Soundies wiggled around tight censorship rules. Some are amusingly racy when compared with the uptight Hollywood fare of the period, which explains all the bobbing breasts, crossing uncrossing female legs and even some teasing peekaboo from burlesque stars like the fan dancer Sally Rand. Female extras were often used to dress up the blah sets, to smile and nod and add sex appeal. If the Soundies were a guy, I'd call him a leg man, though sometimes the eye drifts elsewhere. In the otherwise insipid "Oh! Please Tell Me Darling," future noir goddess Gloria Grahame steals the show by fidgeting with her neckline while feigning interest in the singer Red Maddock. Soundies (and their assorted competitors) offered a challenge to the theatrical experience, so it's no surprise that exhibitors viewed them with alarm. In their invaluable guide "The Soundies Book," Scott MacGillivray and Ted Okuda explain that exhibitors were furious that the Mills Novelty Company had millions of dollars in orders before the first Soundie was shot. The company had grand ambitions: At one point it announced that it planned to manufacture 100,000 Panorams, but it ended up placing only about 5,000 machines across the country. Wartime restrictions on the materials used to manufacture Panorams put a dent in the business, as did a musicians strike, but it was television that really killed them off. Still, Soundies lived on, including in packaged reels sold for the home market. They are ripe for film preservation and for wider love from the public. That's especially true because they were such a fantastic showcase for black talent, including women of different sizes and complexions whom Hollywood ignored or degraded, and whose legacies are often memorialized only on jazz websites. It's because of Soundies that I discovered Una Mae Carlisle, a protegee of Fats Waller of black and of Native American heritage. In "'Taint Yours," she performs for a sharp looker leaning on her piano; in "I'm a Good Good Woman," she plays for five appreciative men doing the same. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Staring into my phone, I often find myself thinking of an essay by the dance critic Deborah Jowitt . Dance, unlike more permanent arts, "doesn't hang about on walls to be revisited or wait by your bed with a bookmark in it," she wrote in 1997. Nor does it "spill out of your glove compartment ready to be popped into a car's cassette deck." That "cassette deck" takes me back to another time: a time before I could pick up my phone, at any hour of the day, and scroll endlessly through images of dance and dancers. A time, that is, before Instagram. While there's no substitute for live performance for gathering to share physical space and time dance now also lives at our fingertips, if we want it to, a few taps away at any moment. If we see something we like onscreen, chances are we can return to it again and again. And when we don't like what we see, we can easily move on to the next thing. Like many pockets of social media, the world of dance on Instagram can be as uninviting and dull as it is revelatory and weird. The sheer abundance of dance content can be overwhelming, not to mention monotonous, tending toward the blandly sensational or self promoting. Much of what the app recommends to me a little girl hanging out in a straddle split, a pair of feet arched to what looks like a hazardous degree I have little desire to see. (In a much discussed Dance Magazine article last year, the writer Theresa Ruth Howard drew awareness to the popularity of such "Insta worthy tricks" and their negative ramifications for young dancers.) But there are reasons to stick around. I love to peer into classes and rehearsals; happen upon vintage performances or styles I rarely see in person; follow the latest pop dance challenge. Most of all, I appreciate artists who are making novel use of the platform, etching their own creative practices into an interface of right angles, whether they have 700 followers or 700,000. These are a few accounts that, for me, fit that bill, showing that self expression on the app can be an art in itself. Founded in 2018 by the freelance dance artist Joy Marie Thompson , Issa Dance Look ( issadancelook) chronicles what dancers wear in and out of the studio, a source of fashion inspiration whether you dance or not. A leotard over a biketard, gym shorts over jeans, all manner of Adidas pants: The looks not only work, they shine. Ms. Thompson, 22, who lives in Pittsburgh, started the account while attending the dance conservatory of Purchase College , where she was known for documenting her friends' outfits. "I just thought a lot of my classmates dressed so well," she said in a phone interview, noting how their clothes, often inventively layered, would "reflect the day's activities": dance class, then grocery shopping, then dance class again, for example. (The phrase "issa look," she added, comes from the ballroom world, an affirmation of good style.) Ms. Thompson, who runs the account with Dava Huesca , another Purchase graduate, encourages dancers from around the world to submit photos. What constitutes a look? "It's all about personality and confidence," she said. "Is it unique? Did you commit to the outfit?" Ms. Arrington, 37, has since learned her way around the app. Using only its tools, she assembles animated collages in which her dancing body communes with the stuff of myths and outer space: rotating planets, free falling skeletons, fish raining from the sky. While often captioned with astrological insights, these posts can also stand on their own as ornate, magical GIFs. The digital format lets her play with ideas that might not work in the theater. "I can be on Instagram and place a crow on my shoulder," she said. "It would be much harder for me to do that on the stage." And the app, she noted, has a choreographic structure built in: Videos can last no more than a minute, and when they're over, they repeat. "I'll end up making things with that in mind, knowing that it's going to be a loop," she said, "a loop that just runs for eternity." Plenty of dancers post clips of their rehearsal processes, but Joanna Warren ( joannasmovementblogg5678) always catches my eye with hers. Maybe it's her use of color (often fluorescent), or outdoor space (a rooftop, a sidewalk) or simple camera tricks, like speeding up movement or rotating the frame 90 degrees. Or maybe it's the sense of focus, mixed with play, that comes through as she practices handstands and partners with chairs and with friends. For Ms. Warren, 24, Instagram has infused more levity into the work of making dance. "Though it's a complicated platform in regard to external validation and being seen (and so much more)," she said in an email, "its casualness has helped undercut some of my own seriousness about dance and dancing." She also finds it useful as a young artist finding her place in New York. "As someone whose tangible opportunities to show work are few and far between," she said, "it feels good to have a platform to share what I'm working on and thinking about on a daily basis." By far the most Insta famous of this bunch, with about 800,000 followers, the 22 year old Canadian dancer Donte Colley ( donte.colley) delivers unequivocal joy through his widely shared motivational videos. Emoji hearts, stars, confetti and rainbows emanate from his emphatic moves, along with inspirational messages like "Keep on doing you!" A hip shake or shoulder roll might usher in a new message or smash it out of the frame, making way for more. Who couldn't use an occasional pirouetting reminder that "your hard work is not going unnoticed"? Through this outpouring of fun, Mr. Colley also raises awareness about serious mental health issues; his most recent dance post draws attention to Suicide Prevention Week. The hundreds of comments include one from the actress Jennifer Garner : "You are a love bomb." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
MONACO JEAN CHRISTOPHE MAILLOT was in full swing. "Precis! Precis! Hold! Stay! Feel where your body is!" he cried in a mix of French and English. Phalanxes of dancers ran and leapt and balanced as Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" music surged through the air. The desire to please was palpable. Mr. Maillot sighed. "I don't know why I feel tender towards you today," he said. "You haven't seen them for a week," his ballet master reminded him. Mr. Maillot, 53, the demanding and occasionally benevolent director of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, has been doing this job for 20 years. On Friday, his globe trotting company begins a brief run at City Center in Manhattan with "Lac," Mr. Maillot's take on "Swan Lake," one of the many classical ballets he has refashioned in his own particular way. That usually includes a complex reworking of the plot. (He is French, after all.) In "Lac," the Prince is first shown as a child, falling for a little girl who grows up to be the white swan. The wicked magician Rothbart is transformed into the Queen of the Night, who has possibly had a liaison with the Prince's father and is thus possibly the father of the black swan. (So much for George Balanchine's maxim about no mothers in law in ballet.) "It's not a rereading of 'Swan Lake,' it's another thing, which is why I've called it 'Lac,' " Mr. Maillot said in French in his office, filled with books and photographs, several of which feature the company's patron, his friend Princess Caroline of Monaco. "When you see 'Swan Lake,' you are fascinated by the beauty of Act II, but you are seeing the femininity of a dancer, not an animal. For me, there is something more aggressive and primal here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"We kind of looked at each other and thought, what would it look like if we started from the ground up?" said Cindy Spiegel, left, who with Julie Grau is reviving their publishing imprint Spiegel Grau. Last year, after Penguin Random House shut down the literary imprint Spiegel Grau, the veteran editors Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau pondered what to do next. Splitting up was never something they considered. Ms. Spiegel and Ms. Grau have worked together for the past 25 years, first as founding editors and publishers of Riverhead Books, where they helped launch the careers of writers like Khaled Hosseini, James McBride and Gary Shteyngart, and later, at their eponymous imprint, where they published pivotal works by Ta Nehisi Coates, Barbara Demick and Yuval Noah Harari. Other publishers were eager to recruit them. Instead, they decided to revive Spiegel Grau on their own. This week, Ms. Spiegel and Ms. Grau announced that they are back in business this time, as an independent publishing house with a much broader definition of what publishing entails. "We kind of looked at each other and thought, what would it look like if we started from the ground up?" Ms. Spiegel said. "What would it look like in a world where a book is no longer just a physical object?" In its revamped form, Spiegel Grau will produce 15 to 20 books a year, as well as original audiobooks and podcasts. It will also work on television and film adaptations and already has signed a first look deal with Amazon Studios to develop projects from its titles. It is also working with the podcasting company Lemonada Media on original audio content and has a forthcoming podcast, "Believe Her," a narrative account of a domestic violence case that was reported by the journalist Justine van der Leun. The company's first book, Catherine Raven's memoir about her friendship with a wild fox in Montana, is due out in July. Though books will be at the center of the enterprise, they plan to experiment with publishing across different mediums perhaps releasing a project as a podcast first, then a book, or developing a book, audio and screen adaptation simultaneously. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. "That was appealing to us, to have something that was boundary free, so that we could pursue that entrepreneurial instinct without being hemmed in," Ms. Grau said. The resurrection of Spiegel Grau comes at a moment of growing consolidation and homogenization in the publishing industry. After a wave of mergers in the last decade, the biggest houses are increasingly dependent on blockbuster titles and often plow more of their marketing and publicity budgets into books and authors with built in audiences. Some in the industry worry that there are dwindling opportunities for new writers and that debut and midlist authors may get passed over. In October, Molly Stern, who was formerly the publisher of Crown but left after Penguin Random House merged the Crown and Random House publishing divisions, started her own publishing house. The company, Zando, is experimenting with new ways to market books directly to consumers, by teaming up with high profile people, companies and brands. By forming their own businesses, Ms. Spiegel and Ms. Grau, as well as Ms. Stern, are all now chief executives in an industry that is still dominated at the top by men. Of the five largest publishing companies in the United States, just one has a woman as its chief executive, Madeline McIntosh at Penguin Random House. Launching a company in 2020 is daring, even for two veterans. But in some ways, it's an opportune time to introduce a new publishing model. While many creative industries have been devastated by the coronavirus epidemic and shutdown, book sales are up. Print sales have risen nearly 8 percent over last year, according to NPD BookScan. Revenues for digital books and downloaded audio are up by double digits. Some executives say that the mergers among major publishers have created a void where independent companies can thrive, by investing in books and authors their corporate counterparts see as too niche or unproven. Richard Pine, a literary agent at Inkwell Management, said Spiegel Grau could become an attractive home for books that might not grab the attention of the biggest houses. "They're the kinds of creative minds who are not looking for the same thing as every other publisher," he said. "They are refugees from the biggest publishing company in the world who have been afforded an opportunity to do things differently." Spiegel Grau was in a way a casualty of corporate streamlining. Founded in 2005 at Random House, the imprint became an incubator for offbeat hits, with breakout books like Sara Gruen's "At the Water's Edge," Jay Z's "Decoded," Trevor Noah's "Born a Crime," Ta Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me," and Piper Kerman's "Orange Is the New Black." But not long after the merger of Crown and Random House, the imprint was shut down. Even before that happened, Ms. Spiegel and Ms. Grau felt it had become harder to get support for books that didn't fit the best seller mold. "It became increasingly difficult to break out books that weren't of a recognizable genre," Ms. Spiegel said. When they decided to resurrect their imprint as a stand alone business, they contacted several independent publishers for advice, including Morgan Entrekin at Grove Atlantic, Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians at Melville House Books, and Michael Reynolds at Europa Editions. All were encouraging. "It's great to have diversity in the landscape; it's healthy for the discourse and it's good for writers," Mr. Entrekin said. Ms. Spiegel and Ms. Grau have lined up financial backers, including William R. Hearst III and the Emerson Collective, the organization founded by the billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs. They also drew on their industry connections and recruited partners who could help navigate aspects of the business they never had to worry about before, like printing and distribution. As part of their founding team, they brought on Amy Metsch, who was formerly associate publisher and editorial director at Penguin Random House Audio, to lead Spiegel Grau's audio division; Liza Wachter, who co founded the RWSG Literary Agency, to head Spiegel Grau's TV and film efforts; and Jacqueline Fischetti, who will be the company's chief operating officer, and recently worked as the executive director of international content development for Penguin Random House. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When a housing authority can't provide the residence you need, why not build one yourself? The option obviously isn't widely available. But a concatenation of circumstances, and the kindness of an old family friend, gives Sandra, a mom fleeing an abusive husband, the chance to do just that in "Herself." Clare Dunne, who co wrote the screenplay with Malcolm Campbell, plays Sandra, who leaves her monstrously violent spouse, Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson), taking her two young girls. Early on, the movie, set in Ireland, has a bit of a Ken Loach vibe, as the hard working Sandra negotiates various unhelpful bureaucracies trying to set up a new domestic situation. The idea of building her own home is born out of some sessions with the computer search engine. The land and some moral support come from an aged woman Sandra looks after. A trip to the hardware store proves that the internet doesn't give you all the instructions you need for such an ambitious undertaking as house building. And an interaction with a rude clerk introduces her to an initially reluctant ally, a construction man, Aido (Conleth Hill), who's acquainted with Gary. Not in a pleasant way. His sympathy for Sandra compels the overworked fellow to lend her a hand. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SHANGHAI Even before Google began threatening to shut down its search service in China, it was not fitting in. Google and other major American Internet companies like Yahoo and eBay failed to gain significant traction in the Chinese market. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government. Instead, the hottest companies in the world's biggest Internet market have names like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba fast growing local firms that are making huge profits. Those homegrown successes, however, could have trouble becoming global brands. "If the Chinese government continues to favor domestic companies, those companies that reach critical mass could become phenomenally profitable," said Gary Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures, an American venture capital firm with investments in China. "But it may be hard for those companies to become world class without outside competition." Still, the success of Chinese companies here can be measured by the numbers. Revenue at Tencent, a kind of Internet conglomerate, jumped over 70 percent last year, to about 1.8 billion. Baidu, a Google look alike, has largely clobbered Google in China, despite giving up some ground in recent years. And Taobao.com, China's huge e commerce site, handled nearly 30 billion in transactions last year. The story behind the success of these companies is a simple one, some analysts say. The young people who dominate Web use in China are not just searching for information; they're searching for a lifestyle. They are passionate about downloading music, playing online games and engaging in social networking. "Sixty percent of the Internet users here are under the age of 30," said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. "In the U.S., it's the other way around. And in the U.S. it's about information. But in China, the No. 1 priority is entertainment." Experts say American companies have largely failed here because they don't have local expertise, are too slow to adapt and don't know how to deal with the Chinese government. "Internet companies in China have to work so closely with the government," said Xiao Qiang, of the China Internet project at the University of California, Berkeley. "And that means the government's political agenda can become the company's business agenda." The need to censor Web sites, for example, can overwhelm smaller companies, Mr. Xiao said. "This becomes a growing business cost. So often, small companies don't develop." At this stage, analysts say the Web in China is less about innovation than about quickly delivering on the latest online trend. "People here are quick to see trends, and to clone and innovate," said William Bao Bean, a former Internet analyst who is now a partner at Softbank China India Holdings. "If one company is doing well, other companies will quickly clone it and roll it out." At an Internet cafe like this one in Beijing, Web users under age 30 are commonly found. Shiho Fukada for The New York Times No company is better at that than Tencent, which is based in the southern city of Shenzhen. The company's biggest weapon is a popular instant messaging service called QQ. Its 500 million active users give the company an advantage when it introduces new products and offerings, like online games. Tencent was founded in 1998 by a group of friends that included Ma Huateng, also known as Pony, who is now its 38 year old billionaire chief executive. With Tencent commanding a stock market value of 37.2 billion, the only global Internet companies that are worth more are Google ( 173.7 billion) and Amazon ( 57.2 billion). But there are other Chinese powerhouses. Baidu, which dominates the market for search advertising in China, is expected to benefit from Google's departure, even though its own search engine is heavily censored. (Microsoft's search engine, Bing, which remains censored, could also gain users.) Investors are clearly betting on Baidu's future. Since January, when Google first announced that it might exit China, shares of Baidu have leapt 50 percent, adding 7 billion to the company's market value. One advantage local companies have is government protectionism. Because the Communist Party wants to maintain tight control over communication and the media, foreign Internet companies come under suspicion. For instance, YouTube has been blocked inside the country for over a year, ever since a user uploaded a video that was said to show human rights violations in Tibet. YouTube, which is owned by Google, had a large following here. But now online video in China is being championed by companies like Youku.com and Tudou.com. They may have dominated anyway, analysts say, but it certainly helps to have few big competitors. And without competition here from Facebook, which has not yet tried to develop a site for the Chinese market, a social networking site called Kaixin001.com has managed to register over 70 million users. But some experts say Google's departure will leave Internet users here with fewer options, making the country's Internet market less competitive and less open. "The biggest loser is Netizens," says Fang Xingdong, chief executive of Chinalabs.com, a research firm. "Google is a multilinguistic search engine, but Baidu is a Chinese language one. Chinese information only occupies a small fraction of the Internet." Google was troubled by censors. And it's clear that censors make some of the material on Baidu's search engine look like the bulletin board of propaganda, with some links directed to People's Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece. But Chinese Internet companies go along, despite some misgivings, sensing that the real money is in online fun and games. These seem to flourish despite repeated government crackdowns and warnings about Internet addicted youth and illegal music downloads. One question, though, is whether Google's departure will prevent Chinese companies from developing alongside the world's technology powerhouses. "When the Chinese companies go outside of China, they will find that they fail to understand their competitors as well as they did when they were competing in China," said Mr. Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures. Of course, Chinese companies may just be happy staying home. With 400 million Internet users and growing, their own market is a substantial prize. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
'Where We Stand' Review: Gifts are Given, but at What Cost? None A Pied Piper story that doubles as a boldfaced allegory about class and community, "Where We Stand" is rich in its language but vague about what it truly wants to say. The playwright, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, is also the sole performer (alternating with David Ryan Smith on some dates). She rises from the audience at the start of the show, beginning in song then transitioning into poetry, making her way to an unadorned stage. She's our nameless narrator, a down on his luck fellow who describes an encounter with a magical figure and the complications that result. Genie or imp? Devil or fairy? The stranger arrives dressed in gold and bearing golden gifts a seed, scythe and spade that our narrator will use to transform the town to an Oz like paradise. They're not in Kansas anymore, however, and, predictably, they all soon forget the debt they owe their smooth talking benefactor, with unfortunate results. Produced by WP Theater in association with Baltimore Center Stage, and directed by Tamilla Woodard, the show is unusually understated, despite the fanciful tale at its heart. There's an intentionally rudimentary story time feel to it, and Woodard's direction emphasizes the intimate interactions between Grays and her audience. She is an affable, uninhibited performer, whether as narrator or as the mysterious stranger, peddling the fable to us via enchanting lyrics and flourishes of humor. Transitions between characters in direct conversation, however, are less tidy. Yet the language in "Where We Stand" bounces with rhyme, alliteration and wordplay. "There's a chance, perchance to change my drifter's circumstance," Grays jests at one point, before describing the "salted ground" and "sour air" of a crumbling utopia. Her titillating descriptions and canorous phrasing are a pleasure so much so that I wished her to go bolder, to set the scene and capture the characters in rich Technicolor. Grays begins the show in the crowd, and it ends with audience participation as well. The peril in "Where We Stand" seems to befall a black community (the script dictates that the narrator be played by an African American actor), but connections to the workings of contemporary society are unclear. Which makes the play's final immersive turn a trial, with the audience as jury a welcome, if abrupt surprise. Confronting the real world, which is so absent elsewhere, lends a dose of real life gravity to the fiction. After all the theatrical fun and games, you'll eventually have to pay the piper. Where We Stand Through March 1 at WP Theater, Manhattan; 866 811 4111, wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Mary Ann Madden, who for three decades challenged New York magazine readers to compose double dactyls, literary limericks, godawful puns and dexterous spoonerisms in a weekly competition that foreshadowed hashtag games on Twitter, died on July 26 at her home in Manhattan. She was 83. The cause was a stroke, said Steven Clar, her executor. Ms. Madden, a gifted wordsmith, was recruited by her friend Stephen Sondheim, the composer and lyricist, to create the New York Magazine Competition, which made its debut in 1969. At the time, he held a part time job there devising cryptic crossword puzzles for the back pages every week but had found it becoming too time consuming. When he shifted to once every three weeks for about a year (succeeded by Richard Maltby Jr.), Ms. Madden took over the page the rest of the time. At her retirement in 2000, she had edited 973 wordplay competitions. "If the week's collection of entries looked a little lame to her after she turned it in," Christopher Bonanos, a senior editor, wrote last week on the magazine's website, "she'd get off the phone, and 15 minutes later, a couple of extras would arrive in my inbox, all of them better than the ones we'd received." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Salvador Dali's "Gala Placidia. Galatea of the Spheres" from 1952, for which his wife, Gala Dali, was the model and muse. A new exhibition in Barcelona examines Gala as someone willing to play those roles, but also as a person eager to forge her own path as an artist. BARCELONA, Spain In 1969, Salvador Dali, the Surrealist painter, gave a derelict castle to his Russian born wife, Gala, as a present. She welcomed his generosity but also set rules for her new home in Pubol, a village in Catalonia. Gala stipulated that her husband could visit the castle only if he had received a written invitation. "Sentimental rigor and distance as demonstrated by the neurotic ceremony of courtly love increase passion," an acquiescent Dali later wrote. The castle in Pubol, Spain, where Gala Dali lived. Her husband was not allowed to visit without a written invitation. The peculiar visiting ritual ordered by Gala is a well known anecdote. But much else about Gala's life, ambitions and desires remains unclear or subject to conflicting accounts, which probably explains why it has taken until this month for a museum to devote a full exhibition to her, even though she shared and shaped the lives of several key artists of the Surrealist movement. The exhibition, "Gala Salvador Dali. A Room of One's Own in Pubol," runs through Oct. 14 at the National Art Museum of Catalonia, in Barcelona. Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova in Kazan, Russia, in 1894, had a stepfather who read her the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov and introduced her to other great Russian writers. The family moved to Moscow, where they lived comfortably and moved in intellectual circles, but, when Gala became unwell with suspected tuberculosis at age 17, she was sent to a sanitarium in Switzerland to recover. There she met and fell in love with a young Frenchman called Eugene Emile Paul Grindel, who was unsure about whether to become a writer. Gala encouraged him, and he went on to publish poetry as Paul Eluard. Today, Eluard is remembered as one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. Alongside Eluard, Gala embraced the Surrealist movement in more ways than one. She had a love affair with Max Ernst, who also painted her. She was a close friend of Rene Crevel and Rene Char two leading French Surrealist writers. She also served as a model for Man Ray, the American artist and photographer. Her relationship with some other prominent Surrealists was often tense, however, notably with the French writer Andre Breton and with the Spanish film director Luis Bunuel. In 1929, the Eluards traveled to Spain and visited a budding artist called Salvador Dali. A love struck Gala left Eluard and their daughter to join Dali in his fisherman's house outside the town of Cadaques. Dali and Gala married in 1934. Over five decades, Dali made hundreds of drawings and paintings of Gala, showing his multifaceted wife as the Madonna, as an erotic figure, or as a dark and mysterious woman. Dali also started signing some paintings "Gala Salvador Dali," showing the couple's strong bond. But there is no evidence that Gala ever used a paintbrush or told Dali how to compose his works. Gala liked to read Tarot cards, but she was also a savvy businesswoman who knew how to attract gallerists while keeping Dali away from people she distrusted. In a diary entry in 1939, the novelist Anais Nin recounted how Gala would assign specific tasks to her and to other people to help her husband during their stay together in the house of Caresse Crosby, an American patron of the arts. Gala's talents as a publicist did not go unnoticed: Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian painter, asked her to become his agent, too. But as much as admiration, Gala provoked a mix of fear and fascination. In a male dominated society, she also found few allies among women. The American art collector Peggy Guggenheim, in her memoirs, described Gala as "handsome" but "too artificial to be sympathetic." Others denigrated her as "a money grabber," said Estrella de Diego, a professor of art history at Complutense University in Madrid and the curator of the show in Barcelona. But if Gala was driven by money, Ms. de Diego asked, then why did she abandon the established Eluard and the glamour of Paris for Dali, a young painter living in a village? The Barcelona exhibition raises as many questions as it answers. Several of the 315 displayed items come from the Pubol castle, including some of the clothing that also made Gala a fashion icon, dressed by the likes of Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian designer who made a famous hat for Gala shaped as a high heeled shoe. As the Dalis grew old, their relationship became more tense, and they struggled to confront death, Ms. de Diego said. Gala died in 1982 and was buried in Pubol, in a crypt designed by her husband to resemble a chess board. (Dali built his tomb alongside hers, but he then left Pubol two years later after getting injured in a fire that swept through his bedroom in the castle. Instead, he was buried in 1989 in his own museum, in his hometown, Figueres.) The exhibition shows how Gala found her place within a Surrealist movement that otherwise made little room for women. Ms. de Diego noted that Breton, the group's leader, had even decreed that a Surrealist female artist could not also be a mother. Still, Gala attended several of the group's reunions, took part in their collaborative drawing sessions and other Surrealist experiments, and also made some Surrealist objects of her own, though only photographs of those survive. The show also features several photographs of her working with Dali on projects like "The Dream of Venus," an early example of an art installation he made for the New York World's Fair of 1939. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The markets looked very shaky when Britain voted on June 23 to leave the European Union. They have firmed up nicely since then. One day, perhaps three or four months from now, they are likely to look even better, until the next crisis comes. Those statements are not based on visions of the future. I subscribe to the view that while history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. And in this case, history provides some limited reassurance. Barring a severe global recession, which doesn't seem imminent, stock market drops of this magnitude generally reverse themselves within three or four months. That's because big, quick declines embody reflexive panic urgent desires to cut losses before the larger meaning of a market shock has been digested. Sometimes there are quick recoveries as we saw after the initial declines after the so called Brexit vote which are followed by further losses until the markets find equilibrium. Jeffrey Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab, last week enumerated three episodes since 2009 that started with big drops and ended swiftly with recoveries. The first started on March 11, 2011, when an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident all struck Japan. As I wrote at the time, the markets were initially unable to grasp the dimensions of the crisis; on the first trading day after the quake, the Nikkei stock index fell 6 percent. Accumulated losses over two trading days came to 16 percent. Yet the Nikkei returned to where it started within four months. In the United States, on Aug. 1, 2011, when Congress could not reach a deal to raise the debt ceiling, the Standard Poor's 500 stock index dropped 3 percent, partly rebounded, then fell 14 percent by Oct. 3. It recovered within three months. Finally, on March 27, 2012, the European debt crisis forced Spain into budget austerity, setting off labor strikes and driving the Stoxx Europe 600 index down 3 percent in one day, and a total of 11 percent. The recovery time? Again, a mere three months. "It is important for long term investors to note that in each of these instances, stocks rebounded to their pre shock level in three or four months," Mr. Kleintop said, "even when a recession took place." That said, neither Japan nor Europe nor the United States is in wonderful economic shape right now. Japan and Europe have endured severe market and economic downturns after these market shocks. The United States economy has grown very slowly and could be threatened by the shock waves emanating from Europe. It is also worth noting that the post 2009 period is too brief to conclude much about the long term performance of the markets. There has been a tenacious bull market in stocks in the United States since then, fueled in part by central bank policy that has engineered ultralow interest rates. The market has been running out of steam. That is why a deeper dive provides a useful perspective. First, from a market standpoint, the Brexit crisis so far hasn't caused much damage. In the history of the S. P. 500, for example, the decline on June 24, which came to 3.6 percent, was inconsequential when measured as a percentage of the index's total value. Using that measure, the decline ranked as only the 180th largest since 1928, according to data compiled by Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S. P. Dow Jones Indices. What distinguished the early phase of this crisis, statistically, is that the markets were so poorly positioned in advance of the British vote. It was almost as though they were moving full speed in one direction and had to turn around and sprint the other way. But that upward momentum before the Brexit vote set up a nasty market downturn. The combination of an overbought market immediately before an extremely oversold one was so unusual, he said, that "extraordinary may be an understatement. Using that overbought oversold measure, the two day price reversal was the biggest since 1928." Only two episodes came close. One was in October 1989, when the failure of a leveraged buyout of United Airlines devastated the junk bond market. The S. P. 500 fell 6.5 percent over two days. (That compares with a 5.3 percent decline in the two days after the Brexit vote.) There was a partial recovery and another downturn, but in less than three months the market returned to its old level. That example is comforting; the second is not: It occurred during World War II, when Germany invaded Belgium and the Netherlands and began to overrun France. On May 10, 1940, Neville Chamberlain resigned as prime minister of Britain, and Winston Churchill replaced him. Worldwide markets were grossly unprepared for what came next. Over two days, the S. P. 500 in the United States declined 8.3 percent. And over the next two years, the war deepened, millions died and as an incidental casualty, the stock market declined another 33 percent. It took more than three years for the S. P. 500 to return to its former level. In early 1940, historical stock data would not have helped much in forecasting market returns for the rest of the year. Much bigger factors than 50 day moving averages determined the course of events. If only by comparison, today's problems seem manageable and easily understood. Events in Europe are still unfolding. But the preponderance of data strongly suggests that the markets will settle down in days, weeks or months, not years. Other crises are sure to follow in this election year. We don't know what lurks beneath the surface of moving events and won't find out until the smoke clears. History provides only clues, not a road map to the future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
THE RENTERS Lorena Flores and Richard Pena with their dog, Emma, in their new one bedroom in Roselle, N.J. In New Jersey, Searching for a Dog Friendly Place to Call Their Own Richard Pena and Lorena Flores met as students at Elizabeth High School in New Jersey. Both went on to Rutgers University, where they began dating Mr. Pena was at the Newark campus and Ms. Flores at New Brunswick. But it was easy enough to see each other, since they both lived with their parents, about 10 minutes apart in Elizabeth. "We wanted to finish school and get good jobs so we could move out and have a good life after we got married," said Mr. Pena, now 27. "We wanted to establish our home before the wedding," Mr. Pena said. "It would make the wedding planning easier, instead of going back and forth." Even so, Ms. Flores, 25, tried to delay the move. "I knew it would save us money if we stayed at home," she said. Their priority was a dog friendly building for Emma, their Shih Tzu, that was not far from their families, with whom they are close. (Mr. Pena grew up in Elizabeth and Ms. Flores is originally from Ecuador.) Mr. Pena drives throughout New Jersey for his job at a labor union, but he wanted Ms. Flores to have a quick commute to her job as a scientist at a pharmaceutical company. They were also eager to have their own washer dryer in the unit. In the past, using a laundromat, "we would waste three or four hours because we would have to babysit our clothes," Ms. Flores said. "I never want to go back to having to go outside to do laundry." It was easy to check online if a building allowed dogs, and most big apartment buildings had a laundry room but not all had washer dryers in the units. And while they had expected to pay for utilities, they were not prepared for so many fees. Pet costs usually included a one time pet fee, monthly pet rent and an additional security deposit. They also found application, amenity, parking and administration fees, as well as fees for water and sewer use. "It was things you would think they would cover and they don't," Mr. Pena said. At the Point at Watchung (in Watchung, N.J.), one bedrooms started at around 1,800. They thought the interiors seemed outdated and the fees were abundant. Later, they saw Meridia Lafayette Village, which opened last year in Rahway, where one bedrooms started at around 1,700. A unit had a through the wall air conditioner, which was a welcome change for Mr. Pena, who had lugged window units up and down attic stairs for both families. But the air conditioner was positioned low and limited the ability to arrange furniture. And while there was laundry available, it was not in the unit. This building allowed for only one parking spot, and they had two cars. The Rahway Transportation Center Garage is nearby, but the garage is full and monthly cards are not available right now. "No place had what we wanted," Mr. Pena said. "We learned we would have to sacrifice something for something else. We were torn because we didn't know what to do." Emma gets a walk every night, often on the three mile trail that is lined with stations to allow for easy disposal of pet waste. The complex, which is scheduled to be completed in the next six years, will eventually include 932 units. The couple was disappointed that the pool wasn't ready this summer, but it should be open next year. To their surprise, they found a home that, Mr. Pena said, "had everything and more than we wanted." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
So far the Republican National Convention isn't so much presenting a record of America and an administration as it is inventing one. The speakers at the event haven't admitted to the pathological pursuit of a white nationalist, white power agenda that has become a signature of Donald Trump's presidency. So what we've heard bears little relation to the fullness of truth and is not the correct distillation of a record. Instead, we have been feted to a parade of Black and brown faces that have sought to soften or even erase Trump's overt history of racism to falsify an American story into one in which liberals are worse racial offenders than conservatives. In this inside out world, Trump has been an exemplar on racial inclusion and his defeat would usher in an era of racial division. This is the Rip Van Winkle approach to campaigning: Just pretend that people were asleep the entire time you called Mexicans rapists, said Islam hates us, called Haiti and African nations shithole countries, separated migrant children from their parents and locked them in cages, tried to deport the Dreamers and attacked Black Lives Matter. That is exactly what happened, particularly on the first day of the convention. "It hurt my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald. The worst one is racist. I take it out as a personal insult that people would think I've had a 37 year friendship with a racist." Walker's personal relationship with Trump is meaningless here. The personal doesn't negate the pattern. History is full of racist white people, white supremacists, even enslavers, who developed friendships with Black people. Racism, at its base, lacks logic, so racists constantly have to make exceptions and exemptions. One such exemption is the Exceptional Negro Clause that releases a particular individual, by their merit, from the universality of the racist's conceptions. Trump famously frolicked with young, successful Black pop culture figures like rappers and athletes in New York. None of that altered the fact that he was a racist being sued for housing discrimination or demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five. "People who think that don't know what they're talking about. Growing up in the Deep South, I've seen racism up close. I know what it is and it isn't Donald Trump." I too grew up in the Deep South, and I've also seen racism. I too know what it is and it is precisely Donald Trump. Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Black man and the Republican lead on now stalled police reform, referred to the "deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor," an innocuous descriptor, rather than calling them killings or making clear that they were carried out by law enforcement officers. Furthermore, he said: "We live in a world that only wants you to believe in the bad news racially, economically and culturally polarizing news. The truth is, our nation's arc always bends back toward fairness." Scott said that he believes "in the goodness of America, the promise that all men and all women are created equal," and that "over the past four years, we have made tremendous progress toward that promise." In what reality has tremendous progress been made on universal equality under the Trump administration? We have seen the largest racial protests in American history under the Trump administration. Trump has used massive force against these protesters. He has demonized them. Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, an Indian American woman, went even broader with her revisionism, saying, "In much of the Democratic Party, it's now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country." She says this was personal to her as a "brown girl in a Black and white world." "Not a racist country?" What precisely does that mean? Was its founding caught up with enslavement? Yes. Were many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence enslavers? Yes. Were some of our presidents enslavers? Yes. Were many of them white supremacists? Yes. Was lynching allowed, sometimes by law enforcement itself? Yes. Was Jim Crow legal in this country? Yes. Was mass incarceration a thing that the country engaged in? Yes. Are Black people still the recipients of worse treatment than white people on a broad range of metrics? Yes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
If you wanted style and edge in your footwear in the 1970s, Terry de Havilland was your go to designer. He offered gravity defying wedges with metallic accents. Also bondage boots. Even winkle pickers. They came in his favored psychedelic colors, inspired by his frequent trips on LSD. Mr. de Havilland, a noted party boy and cobbler to the stars, died on Nov. 27 in London at 81. His website did not give a cause in announcing his death. His output included python boots for Rudolf Nureyev, black leather thigh high boots with red satin lining for Jacqueline Onassis, spangled platforms for David Bowie and a naughty creation for Kate Moss, who asked him to make her a pair of bright red snakeskin platforms decorated with a vulgarity written in Swarovski crystals. "I designed most of my shoes on acid, and the opening party for my shop in the King's Road was famous for the three Cs champagne, cocaine and caviar," Mr. de Havilland wrote in The Guardian in 2006. "God knows who was there everybody." His shop, Cobblers to the World, with its mirrored walls and purple velvet banquettes, opened in 1972 and became party central. His designs ran from acid green to peach. His cowgirl boots featured glittering stilettos. His clientele included the Beatles and Elton John. He became known as "the rock 'n' roll cobbler." He often didn't know who was in his shop. "I was usually doing drugs out back," he once said. He was also pouring milk into shoe samples to feed stray cats. In those early days, his first wife, Sandy Conlin, left him for a woman. She later turned to hard drugs and died of an overdose. The shop flew high for years, but in the 1980s and '90s Mr. de Havilland fell into a business slump and slipped off the fashion pages. So completely had he vanished, according to The Telegraph, that Cher assumed he had shuffled off his mortal coil until she ran into him one day in 1995. She had gone to his factory looking for shoes for herself and her friend Bette Midler when she spotted him. "My God," she told him. "Me and Bette used to buy your shoes in Paris we assumed you were French, gay and dead." In Mr. de Havilland's version of that story, in The Guardian, Cher was wearing "a daggy old tracksuit," and after crying out, "I thought you were dead!" she told him that she and Ms. Midler "were down to sharing their last pair of de Havilland shoes." She bought 13 pairs on the spot "to tide her over," he said. Mr. de Havilland said he always loved women, and he fathered three sons with three different ones. His only criterion for them seemed to be that they had small feet what he called "sample size," preferably Size 5. "Couldn't have lived with them otherwise," he wrote. No doubt his sky high heels could be difficult to wear. But Mr. de Havilland took care that they did not impede his clientele, whether it was Beyonce, Amy Winehouse or Madonna, from dancing or otherwise performing. And no one complained. "The effect on the wearer's confidence, to his mind, far outweighed any discomfort," The Telegraph said in its obituary, "and when questioned about his heels he insisted: 'I think they empower women. They give you your own little stage to stand on.'" He was born Terrence Higgins in London's East End on March 21, 1938, and grew up there. During the war, his cobbler parents made black market shoes from scavenged scraps for showgirls. By the time he was 5, Terry was hammering in dowels for their three tier wedges. "He had been playing with leather scraps and wooden lasts since infancy and had unbridled ideas about exotic and erotic materials, shape and decoration," The Guardian said. He married Ms. Conlin when she became pregnant. In the late 1950s, they went to Rome to see if he could break into acting, but that didn't work out and he returned to London to immerse himself in his parents' shoe business. Once there, he found the surname Higgins insufficiently glamorous, so Sandy reached for a phone book and picked out the name de Havilland for him. Mr. de Havilland first came to public attention in 1964, when, during a photo shoot in London, someone spotted the shoes he had designed for his girlfriend, the model Perin Lewis. A feature in the fashion magazine Queen followed and made those shoes an instant must have. He was soon attracting celebrities. Both Ms. Midler and Bianca Jagger would showcase his distinctive snakeskin three tiered wedges. In 1970, his father was accidentally electrocuted by machinery in his shoe factory and died in his son's arms, The Telegraph said. Control of the business passed to Terry. It was successful for a time. He created Tim Curry's shoes for his role as Dr. Frank N Furter in the extravagant cult movie "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975). But shoe fashion was fickle, and in 1979 his shop was liquidated. While many of his creations were hits, the market kept shifting, and his business was uneven for the next several years. Finding it difficult to compete in the global marketplace, he was forced into liquidation again, in 1999, and in 2001 he suffered a minor heart attack. He married Liz Cotton in 2003. She survives him, as do his son Perry, from his first marriage; his son Jason, whose mother was Ms. Lewis; his son Caesar, whose mother was Angie Burdon; and five grandchildren. In time, the '70s styles that had made him popular made a comeback. He received a burst of welcome publicity after the BBC broadcast a documentary, "Trouble at the Top" (2004), about a spat he had with Prada's Miu Miu label over its copying one of his metallic platform creations. (Prada called it a "homage," and it appeared in an episode of "Sex and the City.") Prada eventually paid him a settlement. Mr. de Havilland went on to start new labels, and by 2013 his signature Margaux shoe, a five inch wedge, was once again all the rage 40 years after it was first introduced. At least one pair of his '70s snakeskin leather platforms, in iridescent metallic colors, went into the fashion collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2010 he received the Drapers Footwear Lifetime Achievement Award, bestowed by the British Footwear Association, for his half century in the industry. In an interview with Drapers.com, Mr. de Havilland said that Queen Elizabeth II and the pope (he did not specify which one) had both considered having him design custom shoes for them, but that they both pulled out at the last minute probably, he said, "because they Googled me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Alfred (Jack Bannon), newly returned to civilian life, hopes to use his military training to launch a security business with his fellow commandos Dave Boy (Ryan Fletcher) and Bazza (Hainsley Lloyd Bennett), but in the meantime he's working as a bouncer at a posh nightclub. It's there that he meets a visiting American businessman, Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge), not yet the father of a budding caped crusader named Bruce. Wayne is about to become embroiled with the Raven Society, and to drag Albert and his mates in with him. Bannon, who played the son of Inspector Thursday in the "Inspector Morse" prequel "Endeavour," is a charming, resourceful and alert performer, and his Alfred with an aggressively pompadoured widow's peak that embodies the nervous energy of a generation is a consistently engaging presence at the center of the series. Bannon is well matched by Emma Corrin as Esme, the dance hall girl and aspiring actress Alfred falls for, and their initial scenes together have a life and a tenderness that you don't usually get from television romance. As in "Gotham," though, Heller and Cannon are better at the setup than at the continuing execution. They want serious, kitchen sink style drama, with class conflict and political relevance and poisonous family strife. But they also want, or at least feel required to provide, comic book exaggeration, with world ending plot twists and caricatured villains and occasional hyper violence and gore. That combination may be the selling point in theory, but in practice it's kind of a drag rather than amplifying or enriching each other, the straight ahead drama and the comic contrivances cancel each other out. It's harder to take either one seriously in the presence of the other. It doesn't help that so far the villains of "Pennyworth" Jason Flemyng as an Oswald Mosley style aristocrat, Paloma Faith as his psycho flunky are a somewhat dull lot, without the baroque flourishes of Robin Lord Taylor's Penguin or Cory Michael Smith's Riddler in "Gotham." Bannon's doing good work, but he could use some help, and this time Batman is definitely not coming to the rescue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Katie Rogers, a White House reporter for The Times, discussed the tech she's using. How do President Trump and Melania Trump use tech? They're an Apple couple. Both use their iPhones to interact with the outside world sometimes to the chagrin of Mr. Trump's security advisers and critics. The president is not as technologically savvy as the first lady. His aides slip him paper copies of news articles, and when he travels on Air Force One, an aide is often spotted carrying around these mysterious looking cardboard boxes. They are full of paper documents. The president will often sift through the papers when he needs to refer to something which can be where that famous Sharpie of his comes into play. She keeps in touch with staff in person, but also through lots of email and texts. When planning events, she will do internet searches to find things she likes and then gives staff photos of what she wants, or draws things, with the Be Best logo being one example. She also uses email, text, phone calls and Signal to keep in touch with her contacts. How have you seen White House tech evolve under President Trump? I think moment to moment digital coverage of every single thing the president does is new with this White House. President Barack Obama had people tracking his movements through Twitter and beyond, but with this administration, journalists live tweet, photograph and send video from pool sprays (brief Oval Office events) and Marine One departures, in addition to news conferences. If I'm on the road, it's easy for me to tune into a pool spray or speech through someone else's Periscope live streaming account, for instance. And when the president is at one of his properties, including the Trump Hotel or Mar a Lago, I often lurk on Instagram to see who is hanging out with him. The Trump White House also had journalists switch over to an in house Wi Fi network, which made some reporters understandably uncomfortable for security reasons. The West Wing has also made more use out of devices that scan for gadgets including phones I can understand why Signal is so popular. I think the anxiety over surveillance is perhaps more heightened than it was under the Obama administration, which, by the way, did its part to pave the way for these types of procedures. What are your most important tech tools for keeping up with breaking news from the White House and talking to your sources? I've been on this beat since January. I thought I was pretty much tethered to the news before, but this job requires you to imbibe a daily tidal wave of news. So that's fun. A lot of my monitoring is Twitter based, so I use tools I've relied on for years. I use Nuzzel, a social news app that lets me know what the people I follow on social media are sharing, which is helpful for identifying the stories getting traction. And I use Twitter's list function to sort all of the noise into manageable buckets: I have lists of White House reporters, politicians, White House aides and Washington chatterboxes. Outside of a few news apps, I dislike having notifications on my phone in general my eyes tend to glaze over if I have too many but I receive them from a few news organizations and whenever the president or his press secretary tweets. Several of my colleagues have the Apple Watch, which gives them a friendly little jolt when those tweets happen. I haven't been able to bring myself to cross that particular Pavlovian bridge yet. Living and working in Washington have a way of narrowing your perception, so I try to make sure I understand what people outside my bubble are talking about and reading. On my computer, I use Tweetdeck which helps manage Twitter accounts to display a list of prominent conservatives, which runs alongside a list of journalists. It's interesting and instructive to see how the two worlds function in real time, especially when news hits. This beat is competitive, and building it from scratch has meant using a lot of research tools Nexis for phone numbers, Spokeo for social media accounts and making a lot of cold calls and sending emails. (If I really need something, I'll go to your doorstep.) I've also learned that calling from a blocked number leads people in the president's orbit to believe the call is coming from the White House, so they answer right away. I text or WhatsApp with my sources, and we often transition to Signal. With the caveat that nothing is perfectly secure, Signal encryption tends to provide peace of mind, especially since it comes with a function that allows messages to wipe out after a certain period. I have some sources who set their messages to dissolve after a few minutes, which has come in handy if they're sending documents. At home, I love having friends and loved ones over, so I use the NYT Cooking app to help find recipes to feed them. (I spent the fall perfecting an apple butter rugelach.) I love apps for travel, including Kayak, Hotel Tonight and Airbnb. And on my last vacation, which took me pretty far north, I downloaded Aurora Pro and Sky Guide to view the Perseid meteor shower. Given the gig, I can have a hard time focusing or winding down, so I have been experimenting with meditation apps. I recently downloaded one called Happy Not Perfect. I used it at work the other day when I needed to focus on writing, and even though Maureen Dowd's assistant was in the background yelling about a moose that got hit by a fast moving car, I turned back to my piece refreshed. What tech product is on your holiday wish list? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
George Stephanopoulos of ABC had it easy, steering an old school Washington veteran through policy plans against a patriotic backdrop, while Savannah Guthrie of NBC had to navigate the stormy waters of QAnon, white supremacy and whether the virus stricken president had pneumonia. (Despite repeated inquiries, he would not say.) Viewers of Thursday's dueling network town halls with President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. which aired simultaneously in prime time, much to civic minded critics' chagrin were treated to a pair of telecasts as starkly different as the candidates they featured. On a night when Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump had been scheduled to meet on a single debate stage, television instead cleaved in two. Mr. Biden's ABC town hall had all the fireworks of a vintage episode of "This Week With David Brinkley." Mr. Trump's NBC forum had all the subtlety of a professional wrestling match. The election may hinge on which type of programming Americans want to spend the next four years watching. Ms. Guthrie, an anchor on "Today," welcomed viewers with a friendly greeting "We want to say, right off the top, this is not how things were supposed to go tonight" that only hinted at the stakes for her and her network. There was no debate on Thursday because Mr. Trump withdrew, refusing to commit to a virtual matchup. Mr. Biden agreed to an ABC town hall, and NBC booked Mr. Trump for the same night and the same time, prompting a furious backlash. NBC stars like Mandy Moore denounced the network, and the MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow chastised her bosses on the air. But if Mr. Trump expected an easy night on NBC, former home to his show "The Apprentice," he did not anticipate Ms. Guthrie, whose background as a former litigator quickly came in handy. In an out of the gate barrage, Ms. Guthrie pressed Mr. Trump repeatedly on his medical condition, if he had taken a coronavirus test before the first presidential debate, if he would denounce white supremacy and if he opposed QAnon questions that Mr. Trump, who typically sits down with friendly interviewers, had avoided facing. The president is a skilled dodger who has outmaneuvered his interlocutors for four years. But Ms. Guthrie repeatedly interrupted his filibuster attempts, throwing Mr. Trump off kilter. "I just don't know about QAnon," the president protested at one point, declining to criticize the fringe conspiracy group. "You do know!" Ms. Guthrie shot back, respectful but relentless. 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. At another moment, when Mr. Trump brandished a sheaf of papers to rebut a point "I have things right here that will show you exactly the opposite!" Ms. Guthrie revealed her own set of documents. "Me, too!" she retorted. After 20 minutes of Ms. Guthrie's grilling, Mr. Trump's advisers appeared concerned. His communications director, Alyssa Farah, approached Ms. Guthrie during the first commercial break, and then joined three other aides gathered with the president onstage. Even as Ms. Guthrie solicited questions from voters, she kept up the pressure, cajoling Mr. Trump into a sidelong acknowledgment of a New York Times report about his 400 million debt load, which he previously had refused to confirm. And she confronted him with a concern that even some of his allies share: "You're the president," Ms. Guthrie said. "You're not someone's crazy uncle who can retweet whatever." On ABC, the mood was different. Mr. Biden and Mr. Stephanopoulos engaged in a sober policy conversation more suited to a Sunday morning public affairs broadcast. Seated on a drab blue set, legs crossed, the men discussed the pandemic, taxes, the environment and the Supreme Court. When Mr. Stephanopoulos followed up on the effect of the coronavirus on the Democrat's tax plans "Mr. Vice President, let me press you on that" Mr. Biden replied: "Absolutely. That's a great question." He went on to cite a study from the financial firm Moody's. Later, when Mr. Stephanopoulos nudged Mr. Biden to wrap up an answer, the candidate apologized. "Not at all," Mr. Stephanopoulos responded politely. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Rollie Fingers was 45 years old when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1992. He has returned every summer since, and he wanted to be there this July when Ted Simmons, his old catcher, was scheduled to be enshrined. But Fingers is 73 now, and on Monday he said he could not imagine that happening as the country grappled with the coronavirus pandemic. "You've got guys my age there 73, 74, 75, up to 80 or 85," Fingers said. "Do you want to take that chance on maybe catching it? You're writing your own ticket then." On Tuesday, the Hall of Fame's board made it official: There will be no induction ceremony this summer in Cooperstown, N.Y. Derek Jeter, Larry Walker, Simmons and Marvin Miller, the union leader who died in 2012, will have their day in July 2021, combined with the next class of electees. "Being inducted into the Hall of Fame will be an incredible honor," Jeter said in a statement, "but the health and safety of everyone involved are paramount." Walker added: "It is most important to do the right thing for everybody involved, and that means not putting any participants in jeopardy, whether Hall of Famers or visitors. I realize how serious this situation has become and how many lives have been lost." The Hall of Fame was expecting a crowd that would have exceeded the record 80,000 or so who showed up for the induction of Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn in 2007. Now, the ceremony has become the latest slice of baseball Americana to disappear from the summer calendar. Both the College World Series in Omaha and the Cape Cod League in Massachusetts had already been canceled, and Cooperstown Dreams Park where thousands of players flock for youth summer tournaments had closed for the 2020 season. The Hall, which has been shuttered since March 15, said in a news release that its board of directors had voted unanimously to move the induction festivities to July 23 26 of next year. The Hall of Famer Joe Morgan, the vice chairman of the board, cited "so many unknowns facing the world" as the main reason for the decision. The ceremony is essentially an all or nothing event. It is free to attend just pull up a lawn chair but laborious to plan, with one hotel, the stately Otesaga, serving the Hall of Famers and their families and many local residents renting their homes to out of towners. The workarounds of the day, like Zoom conference calls or social distancing, did not apply. Tim Mead, the Hall of Fame's president, said in a phone interview on Monday that his staff members had devised and eliminated several options. "We would not have a made for television or a virtual program," Mead said. "That induction ceremony is a special moment for the baseball community across the country and beyond." The stage might not be crowded in 2021, even with two classes inducted together. The best newcomers on the next writers' ballot, statistically, will be Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson and Torii Hunter, who seem highly unlikely to be elected on their first try, if at all. Only one holdover, Curt Schilling, came close last year. Schilling got 70 percent of the vote, with 75 percent needed for election. The candidacies of Roger Clemens (61 percent) and Barry Bonds (60.7 percent), both complicated by ties to performance enhancing drugs, have stalled. Mead said that the Hall of Fame felt a responsibility to the inductees, another factor Morgan cited in his statement. Making a speech on a Cooperstown stage with thousands of fans in front of you and dozens of legends behind you is the moment a player crosses an imaginary threshold into baseball immortality. "That's the biggest day of your life when it comes to baseball," said Fingers, who elevated the closer position and the handlebar mustache as an Oakland Athletic in the 1970s. "You want that big day, you want all your fans to be there, your whole family. It's not just getting into the Hall, it's a whole lot of other things. Everybody wants that." Fingers was scheduled to join Wade Boggs, Goose Gossage, Fergie Jenkins, Tim Raines, Ozzie Smith and recent retirees from each team for an annual exhibition game in Cooperstown on May 23. That event was canceled in March, and the Hall has been staging virtual events online, including a weekly podcast with Chipper Jones and the broadcaster Jon Sciambi on Instagram Live. Meanwhile, Hall of Fame officials are considering the health protocols of a return to business. Is it still sufficiently sanitary for visitors to touch the plaques, to sit beside one another in the Bullpen Theatre, to peruse the bookstore and gift shop? And without the usual summer visitors, what will become of the shops and restaurants on Main Street, with its one stoplight and millions of memories for sale? "The induction weekend is one thing, but the summer business that we're losing is the majority of it," said Adam Yastrzemski, who runs a popular memorabilia store on a corner near the Hall. "We'll just do the best we can." So will the hallowed museum down the block, which has not combined classes into one ceremony since 1949. But this is a year like no other, and cramming tens of thousands of people onto a field in upstate New York was simply implausible. "If there's 70,000 people there, you know someone is going to have it, even if they don't know they have it," Fingers said. "They may infect somebody, and then it's a domino effect. It's the same thing with baseball itself. If they're playing with fans in the stands, you don't know what can possibly happen." The league still hopes to have a season somehow, somewhere. But the staples of the summer are already slipping away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Lili Chopra, a creative force behind two major festivals at the French Institute Alliance Francaise, has been hired as an executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. In a new leadership structure that splits financial and artistic duties, Ms. Chopra will be the council's director of cultural programs, grants and services beginning April 9. Diego Segalini, who has been serving as interim executive director, will be the organization's leader for finance and administration. Ms. Chopra will oversee the council's annual River to River Festival, a sprawling series of innovative theater, dance and music performances, as well as art exhibitions, throughout Lower Manhattan and Governors Island where she will also be at the helm of efforts to finish the renovation and expansion of the organization's Arts Center. The festival and other cultural council programs, she said in a statement, "engage and inspire audiences across New York City with new ideas and ways of seeing the world." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Shao Chunyou exemplifies the Chinese dream. Over three decades, he rose from an assembly line worker to an electronics business owner, following China's rise from an economic backwater to the world's No. 2 economy. He now owns two factories and employs over 2,000 workers. Now, as China changes, Mr. Shao must reinvent himself again. Fast growth is fading. Competition has intensified. And in a country sometimes called the world's factory floor, it sometimes seems as if nobody wants to work in a factory anymore. "There were more workers and fewer factories then," Mr. Shao said, referring to the old days. "Now we have to beg workers." China's economy is slowing, yes, and government policies have made business tougher for many. But there are bigger, broader forces at work challenging the entrepreneurs like Mr. Shao who lifted China out of poverty. China has moved up the value chain, and its people have moved up along with it. They want higher wages and a better life. China is no longer the world's cheap factory. The country must now embrace high value manufacturing, automation and innovation if it hopes to keep growing at a steady clip. Success depends on the ability of people like Mr. Shao to pivot away from their traditional business methods. Mr. Shao's pivot won't be easy or cheap. He is replacing people with robots. He is making more sophisticated gadgets that could flummox copycats but could also be disastrously expensive if they fail. And in a shift for a businessman who prides himself on doing it alone, he is for the first time accepting direct government help. "Doing business is like releasing the arrow from a bow," said Yu Youfu, Mr. Shao's wife. "Once it's in motion, there's no way to turn it back." The family is defined by its factories. For years, the couple slept in their office next to the factory, and Ms. Yu still crashes there from time to time even though their spacious apartment is a 15 minute drive away. "I sleep better with the noise of the machines," she said. "If they're noisy, it means they're functioning." Mr. Shao was born in Jiujiang, a medium size city in China's interior. At 16, he became an apprentice carpenter, making roughly 60 cents a day, barely enough to feed himself. In 1989, the same year the authorities gunned down protesters in Tiananmen Square, Mr. Shao, then 20, went south. Deng Xiaoping, then China's paramount leader, had opened special economic zones essentially areas where entrepreneurs could start businesses and court foreign investors in southern cities like Shenzhen and Zhuhai. The newly built factories there were hiring. Mr. Shao left home with about 5 in his pocket. Highways and high speed trains didn't crisscross China as they do now. He had to take a one hour bus ride to the provincial capital, then a 15 hour train ride. "The trains were always packed, like the ones shipping pigs," he said. It wasn't easy to find a job, without which Mr. Shao couldn't get permission to live in Shenzhen. Whenever the authorities raided dormitories looking for trespassers, he and others would hide overnight in a nearby cemetery. In 2004, Mr. Shao started a small metal molding company while working at his day job. Ms. Yu dealt with clients and managed the books. They called the company Quankang, which can mean "all healthy" or "all good." They sent their son back home to be raised by his grandparents, as many migrant workers in China had done. Two years later, they moved from Shenzhen to neighboring Dongguan, a city of cheap factory buildings. Government and state owned banks typically didn't help small business owners like Mr. Shao and Ms. Yu, and they struggled at first. They once turned away a big customer because they didn't have the cash to buy the materials. To win over another customer, they rented a huge metalworking machine and moved it into their factory overnight to show the client who visited in the morning that they could do the work. They got the order. They started by making metal parts for MP3 players, then cellphone casings. They spent 13,000 of their savings on a polishing machine, a fortune for most Chinese at the time. "My heart was filled with trepidation," Mr. Shao said. "If we failed, we would lose everything." They didn't fail. Helped by China's surging growth, they became part of a vast web of suppliers that has helped China dominate the business of manufacturing electronics. But as China began to mature, business got tougher. Competitors emerged. Pricing became brutal. Mr. Shao and Ms. Yu found they had to evolve or die. In 2015, the couple started working with Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and Huawei to make key metal parts for their headsets as smartphone sales took off. They took out millions of dollars in bank loans and invested in 120 tooling machines. The bet paid off until the competition became too fierce that they began considering harder to replicate products, such as appliances. "In China, once you have a product that sells well, many companies will rush in to make the same thing," Mr. Shao said. The biggest problem the couple and many other Chinese manufacturers face is the growing cost of labor and increasingly scarce workers. Mr. Shao and Ms. Yu paid their workers about 1,000 renminbi a month in 2004, or about 150 at current exchange rates. Now pay is at least five times that, and can go as high as eight times that. Like most factories Quankang also provides housing and meals. It used to pay four types of social benefits. Now it pays six. Quankang is working with Xiaomi to design and make smart home appliances such as space heaters and electric fans. Mr. Shao and Ms. Yu plan to build three fully automated assembly lines. The first is expected to be running by March. And for the first time, Quankang is accepting direct government support. Mr. Shao's modernization campaign will happen on more than 30 acres far away from Dongguan, in neighboring Hunan Province. The local government there is giving Quankang the land almost free of charge. The local government of Yanling County is more interested in tax revenue and job creation than revenue from land sales, Mr. Shao said. So far, he has spent nearly 12 million on the Hunan plant. China's boom started when the Communist Party unleashed the country's entrepreneurs and largely left them alone. This next stage of growth may not be so easy. To help it along, the central government is spending vast amounts to upgrade manufacturing. Local officials in less developed provinces are trying to lure companies to replicate southern China's economic miracle. It proves appealing to entrepreneurs like Mr. Shao and Ms. Yu, who are desperate to find a new niche to survive and thrive. "The business of our factories isn't as good as before," Ms. Yu said. "But since we've been doing this, we'll keep charging ahead because behind us it's a precipice. We'll fall if we step back." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
TORONTO Travelers actually like flying on Porter Airlines. It could be the Canadian airline's formula of offering free premium beer and sandwiches, served by flight attendants in trim 1960s era uniforms and, of course, the discounted tickets. But what travelers may love most about Porter is that it flies out of an airport on the edge of Toronto's downtown. It's a mere 10 minute cab ride or a vigorous walk from the city's financial district. The company now wants to expand that airport so it can add more flights and use bigger planes with jet engines, besides the turboprops it now flies. That's where its problems begin. Porter proposes to amend a longstanding and contentious agreement that bans jets from the downtown airport, and the plan has set off a political battle in Toronto. As part of its jet plan, which would allow the airline to finally serve all of North America, Porter plans to fill in hundreds of feet of Lake Ontario for a runway extension to accommodate the new planes. The airport in dispute is formally known as the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. (Its airport code seems a jumble of leftover letters, YTZ.) It is better known as Toronto Island Airport, because it sits, somewhat uncomfortably, at the western edge of a series of islands that form one of Toronto's major parks. "The enlargement, in New York terms, would be like proposing to land jets in Central Park," said Adam Vaughan, a city councilor. "The Toronto Islands are an emerald, one of the most beautiful and revered parks in the city. The issue is, Are we going to pave half a kilometer of Lake Ontario for one man's private interest?" That one man is Robert J. Deluce, Porter's chief executive. Mr. Deluce, whose family has owned and sold a series of small Canadian airlines, founded the discount airline seven years ago. But he had his eye on the airport even earlier. Before starting Porter, he struck a deal with the Toronto Port Authority that eventually allowed him to evict a unit of Air Canada, which was running a limited service to Ottawa from the island, in 2006. That gave his new carrier exclusive access for its first five years. "If you've enjoyed some success at something, then you keep doing it," Mr. Deluce, 60, said during an interview in his cluttered office in the island airport. Most people predicted that Porter's high service, low cost formula would fail. Instead, it boomed. In 2005, before Porter arrived, Air Canada served only 25,000 passengers from the island airport. Last year, the airport handled about two million passengers, an overwhelming majority of them flying Porter. Porter's fares are generally cheaper than those of Air Canada, its chief rival, on flights to Montreal or New York. Porter has also singled out smaller cities like Sudbury and Thunder Bay, Ontario, where Air Canada previously had a lock and priced accordingly. Porter's airport lounges serve free espresso in china cups, the seats in its turboprops provide business class leg room and a publishing house owned by Tyler Brule, the founder of Wallpaper and Monocle magazines, produces Porter's unusually stylish in flight magazine. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "We deliberately try to take you back a little bit in time to when travel was a little more fun," Mr. Deluce said. "So we do the pillbox hats on the flight attendants, and there's a bit of an element of what it was like in the days prior when people got dressed up to fly." "It's very effective," said Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at York University who lives near the island airport and flies Porter because of the convenience. "It's a nice airline to fly." Porter currently flies 70 seat turboprops made by Bombardier of Montreal, which give the airline access to Newark and Chicago. Longer range jets would allow it to reach the Caribbean, Florida, Los Angeles and Vancouver, British Columbia. Without any advance consultation with the city, Mr. Deluce last month announced a conditional contract to buy 12 Bombardier CS100s, a new 107 seat jet that would do just that. But for that purchase to go forward, the Billy Bishop runway would need to be longer. That proposition would require the city, the Canadian government and port authority, an independent federal agency that runs the ferry to the airport and that controls the land under the Porter terminal, to alter rules governing the airport. The federal government and the port authority both said they need the city to make its decision before they take any public position. It's not just filling in the bay that's a problem. There is also noise. Jets were banned from the airport to limit noise in 1983 as part of a political compromise that prevented the closing of the airport. Mr. Deluce said the ban was outdated because new engine technology in the CS100 would make it no noisier than one of Porter's turboprops. His opponents find it hard to accept that, because the jet has not yet made a single test flight. A third touchy issue is the extremely congested road leading to the ferry docks and a pedestrian tunnel to the airport that is now under construction. The only area available for its expansion is a park. Recreational sailors, who abound in the harbor, are skeptical of Mr. Deluce's claim that longer runways and jets won't lead to an expansion of the zone where boats are banned. "We won't get everybody on board," Mr. Deluce said. "There are still some who would like to turn the airport into a park, and everyone knows that's never going to happen." Mr. Deluce won't say how he plans to finance the 870 million jet purchase. Industry analysts are especially curious because they have long questioned the privately held company's financial strength. It filed for an initial public offering in 2010, but withdrew the filing. Mr. Deluce said that the airline had been profitable for the last two years, but declined to provide any details. Analysts note that its load factor, the number of seats filled on each flight, is below that of its two rivals, Air Canada and WestJet. In March, Porter had a load factor of 58.1 percent. Air Canada, by contrast, reported a load factor of 83.5 percent and WestJet was at 86.1 percent. Mr. Deluce said that Porter's cost structure allowed it to be profitable with a much lower load factor. But Ben Cherniavsky, an aerospace analyst with Raymond James in Vancouver, said that his reading of the data released at the time of the aborted I.P.O. suggested that Porter actually had higher operating costs than WestJet, excluding fuel. Mr. Cherniavsky credits Mr. Deluce with creating "a neat little model," but he said that he found the expansion plan misguided. "You can't build a hub out of the Billy Bishop airport," said Mr. Cherniavsky. "He's making the same mistake that just about every new airline I've seen in the industry make: they grow too much." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
It's not just about conscious uncoupling and recipes for "superpowered avocado toast." Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle site, may be most famous for being the place where the Oscar winning actress popularized a way to describe divorce and a forum to share her commitment to health (with accompanying products for sale). But it's also where she shares her passion for travel and writes about finds from her trips. In fact, chances are high that most sightings of Ms. Paltrow, 43, these days are of when she is on the road. Though she lives in Los Angeles, she says she travels at least a few times a month, both for work and pleasure, and counts Austria, Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong and Deer Valley, Utah, among her recent trips. Ms. Paltrow was in New York City recently to promote her new six piece skin care collection, Goop by Juice Beauty, and spoke about wellness on the road, traveling with her children and where she most wants to go. Below are edited excerpts. Q. Do you keep up your exercise regimen when you're traveling? A. Recently, no. If I'm in Paris, I'd much rather take a walk and discover something amazing than be stuck on a treadmill at my hotel. If it's more than a few days, I will work out because my body is so used to it, but my last trips have been short ones, and I haven't. Do you have a regular routine you follow when you're on planes? I drink tons of water, and I have a vitamin sachet that I put in it. Also, I moisturize my skin and put on a mask. I try not to eat rubbish either. I'll pack salad and fruit. If I'm going on an overnight flight, I'll drink whiskey or a glass of wine and then go to sleep, but on day flights, I try not to drink. When I land, I try to find a sauna to sit in for 20 minutes to help me sweat out all the germs from the plane. Do you indulge in meals when you're on the road? Absolutely. When I'm traveling, I would rather eat what I want and come home and tighten it up. I don't want to be in Paris and not have a croissant or goose fat potatoes. I love pasta in Italy, bread and cheese in Spain and wine everywhere. You don't have to indulge all day, every day, but I think it's important to your psyche to have flexibility and genuinely enjoy the food wherever you are. Is there a meal that sticks out as the most memorable? There's a restaurant on Koh Kood Island in Thailand called Benz's. You get on a boat and go up a river to get there. It is the most exquisite, spicy Thai food I've ever had. The flavors were incredible. Traveling with children, especially on long flights, isn't easy. How do you make travel with your two children more manageable? Keeping them entertained is important. I pack games like UNO and Battleship. And the iPad is essential! On the plane, they can play all the games and watch as many shows as they want. Do you have a favorite vacation spot? I love going to Mexico. There's a resort there called Cuixmala that's incredible for kids. But the best vacation I've ever taken was with my kids to Indonesia. We stayed at a resort in Bali and then slept on a wooden boat for three or four nights and also hiked with the Komodo dragons. It was a magical trip. You've stayed in more than your fair share of hotels. What do you think makes for a great property? Service and food are important. Also, good sheets and a comfortable bed. It doesn't necessarily have to be fancy. Some of the best hotels I've stayed in were basic in terms of the physical room but had great food and service. What destinations haven't you been to that are on your wish list? I'd love to go to Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia and Vietnam. I would also love to do something more adventurous like Iceland in the winter. Both the Zika virus and terrorist attacks have made people more apprehensive to travel. What's your attitude about traveling given these recent concerns? You have to educate yourself about what's safe and not, but you have to keep living your life. Right after the Paris attacks, I was meant to go to a Real Madrid soccer match and was feeling a bit shaken so didn't, which is rare for me. But, we're going to Buenos Aires for spring break. I think it's a case by case situation. Carry on. The only time I check in is when I am going to a cold destination and have to bring lots of warm clothes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The country singer Luke Combs reached the top of the Billboard chart this week with his latest album, and set a surprising record for country music. Combs's "What You See Is What You Get" opened with the equivalent of 172,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen, which includes 109,000 copies sold as a full album, thanks in part to ticket and merchandise bundles. It is only the second country album to hit No. 1 this year, after Thomas Rhett's "Center Point Road" in June, and it had the biggest opening for any country title since Carrie Underwood's "Cry" 14 months ago. But the most eye opening statistic for "What You See Is What You Get" is about streaming. Songs from the album were streamed 74 million times, by far the biggest number for any country album so far. And it broke a record not held by any contemporary star but rather one dead for more than 20 years Gene Autry, whose album " Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Other Christmas Classics " racked up almost 44 million streams late last year thanks to holiday chestnuts like "Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)" and "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer." Country fans have been slow to adapt to streaming. According to Alpha Data, a music tracking service that is a rival to Nielsen, just 8.7 percent of the consumption of country songs came from audio streaming last year well behind hip hop (26.9 percent), pop (19.4 percent) and even rock (13.7 percent). But Combs's success suggests this may be changing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"Snap out of it, Colbert. Don't believe the polls. You promised yourself after the last election that you would not 'Pokemon Go' down that road again. " STEPHEN COLBERT "Experts say that we need hope for the future to help ward off this anxiety. However, some Americans say they're too afraid to hope. This is likely a protective mechanism in response to the 2016 election. It feels like we're all Charlie Brown going to kick the football, but we know at the last second Lucy's gonna give us coronavirus." STEPHEN COLBERT "Two national polls this week showed Biden up by 12 and 11 points each, which, somehow, gives me even more anxiety than if the race was closer. It's like when your wife says she wants you to go on that guys' trip to Vegas for the weekend and you're like, 'OK, so what are you gonna do?' Imitating wife 'Oh, nothing.' 'You won't be, like, lonely?' 'Oh, no. I'll be fine.' 'Well then I'm not going!'" SETH MEYERS | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In a time of great uncertainty, the N.F.L.'s 2020 regular season schedule, which was revealed Thursday night, abounds with optimism. A full 17 week slate was released, with no obvious contingency plan in case the coronavirus pandemic prevents the season from starting on time. The league had already canceled the international games in London and Mexico City, moving them back to the United States. But it did not, for instance, front load the schedule with nonconference matchups that, with little to no bearing on postseason tiebreakers, could be lopped off if necessary. Instead, the league generally proceeded as normal, studding the opening week with appealing games, such as Tom Brady's debut with Tampa Bay, in New Orleans. As is customary for the Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs will play the season's first game, Sept. 10 at home against the Houston Texans, in the first of their five prime time appearances. The Buccaneers and the Patriots Brady's new and former teams are among those that will also land in prime time five times, the maximum in a scheduled season. So will the Baltimore Ravens, who perk up a three game Thanksgiving slate loaded with entertaining quarterbacks but lacking in interesting matchups. After Deshaun Watson and the Houston Texans play Matthew Stafford's Lions in Detroit, and after Dwayne Haskins and the Washington Redskins visit Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys, Lamar Jackson and Baltimore will face the Steelers, helmed by Ben Roethlisberger, in Pittsburgh. Jackson and Roethlisberger also factor into some of the season's other compelling games: Chiefs at Ravens, Monday, Sept. 28: Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes and Jackson have played against each other twice as professionals, and considering both the quality of their teams and their own general awesomeness, reprises of their matchups may define the N.F.L.'s next decade, a la Tom Brady and Peyton Manning during the 2000s. Between them, Jackson and Mahomes have won the league's last two Most Valuable Player Awards, and Mahomes is the reigning Super Bowl M.V.P. They are the most exciting players on the best teams in the A.F.C., and if they were playing at 3 a.m. in Kyrgyzstan we would watch. Buccaneers at Saints, Sept. 13: Two words: Tom Brady. Two more words: Drew Brees. For the two quarterbacks who have thrown the most touchdown passes, and for the most yardage, in N.F.L. history, this enticing opener is laden with meaning the grand unveiling of Brady, after 20 years in New England, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the start of what could be Brees's final season. They will be a combined 84 years old when Tompa Bay and Drew Orleans er, Tampa Bay and New Orleans meet at the Superdome for the first of two times this season. For the quarterbacks, this will be their initial matchup as N.F.C. South rivals, and only the sixth over all during their storied careers. Packers at 49ers, Thursday, Nov. 5: Last we saw Green Bay's defense, San Francisco was running through, around and over it, for 285 yards and four touchdowns in an N.F.C. championship game rout. The Packers have made only cosmetic changes this off season seeming to prefer moves that would minimize Aaron Rodgers's importance while the 49ers have restocked on both sides of the ball. Which team's approach proves smarter won't be determined until season's end, but each will get an opportunity at Levi's Stadium. Bengals at Dolphins, Dec. 6: Barring anything unforeseen, Joe Burrow, the No. 1 overall pick in this year's draft, will start at quarterback for Cincinnati this season and, the team hopes, the next 15. But how about Miami's Tua Tagovailoa, who, had he stayed healthy, might have been drafted first instead of Burrow? With Ryan Fitzpatrick aboard, the Dolphins can ease Tagovailoa in, but at some point they will unbridle him, and by early December that should happen. Patriots at Rams, Thursday, Dec. 10: An excellent litmus test for the contestants of Super Bowl LIII. Not even two years later, the Rams have faded from the league's elite, just as they're about to move into glimmering SoFi Stadium, while New England, after an exodus claimed Tom Brady and several defensive starters, will be adapting to a new starting quarterback, Jarrett Stidham ... while being coached, as ever, by Bill Belichick. Eagles at Cowboys, Dec. 27: The Eagles' mission, should they choose to accept it, will be to contain quarterback Dak Prescott, running back Ezekiel Elliott and Dallas's daunting fleet of receivers Amari Cooper, Michael Gallup and the rookie CeeDee Lamb, who, somehow, fell in the draft to the Cowboys at No. 17. How Philadelphia, which revamped its secondary by trading for Darius Slay and signing Nickell Robey Coleman and Will Parks, fares could determine the N.F.C. East championship. 49ers at Seahawks, Nov. 1: As we were reminded last season, the N.F.L. is far more interesting when Seattle and San Francisco are both good. They rekindled one of the league's best rivalries in an N.F.C. West race, decided by inches on the penultimate play of the final game. As long as Russell Wilson is leading the Seahawks and the 49ers' Nick Bosa, Arik Armstead and Dee Ford are chasing him every matchup has the potential for chaos. Browns at Steelers, Oct. 18: For the first time since ripping Mason Rudolph's helmet off last November and bashing him on the head with it, Cleveland defensive end Myles Garrett will visit Pittsburgh, where just a hunch the locals probably haven't forgotten what happened. A certain urgency is confronting each team this season Cleveland's latest coaching change, to Kevin Stefanski, surely has to be the one that boosts the Browns; Roethlisberger, coming off elbow surgery at 38, can't quarterback the Steelers forever and Garrett's return will add more sizzle to a meeting that is rarely tame. Bills at Patriots, Monday, Dec. 28: New England has won the last 11 A.F.C. East titles, and if it is to extend that streak, it will probably have to fend off the Buffalo Bills, who could arrive at Gillette Stadium still in contention for their first division championship since 1995. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Dr. Robert T. Gunby Jr. delivering a baby born to a woman who had received a transplanted uterus. This was the first birth after a uterus transplant in the United States, at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. Woman With Transplanted Uterus Gives Birth, the First in the U.S. For the first time in the United States, a woman who had a uterus transplant has given birth. The mother, who was born without a uterus, received the transplant from a living donor last year at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, and had a baby boy there last month, the hospital said on Friday. At the family's request, their name, hometown and the date of the birth are being withheld to protect their privacy, according to Julie Smith, a spokeswoman for the hospital, which is part of Baylor Scott White Health. Since 2014, eight other babies have been born to women who had uterus transplants, all in Sweden, at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg. A new frontier, uterus transplants are seen as a source of hope for women who cannot give birth because they were born without a uterus or had to have it removed because of cancer, other illness or complications from childbirth. Researchers estimate that in the United States, 50,000 women might be candidates. The transplants are meant to be temporary, left in place just long enough for a woman to have one or two children, and then removed so she can stop taking the immune suppressing drugs needed to prevent organ rejection. Dr. Liza Johannesson, a uterus transplant surgeon who left the Swedish team to join Baylor's group, said the birth in Dallas was particularly important because it showed that success was not limited to the hospital in Gothenburg. "To make the field grow and expand and have the procedure come out to more women, it has to be reproduced," she said, adding that within hours of Baylor's announcement, advocacy groups for women with uterine infertility from all over the world had contacted her to express their excitement at the news. "It was a very exciting birth," Dr. Johannesson said. "I've seen so many births and delivered so many babies, but this was a very special one." At Baylor, eight women have had transplants, including the new mother, in a clinical trial designed to include 10 patients. One recipient is pregnant, and two others one of whom received her transplant from a deceased donor are trying to conceive. Four other transplants failed after the surgery, and the organs had to be removed, said Dr. Giuliano Testa, principal investigator of the research project and surgical chief of abdominal transplantation. "We had a very rough start, and then hit the right path," Dr. Testa said in a telephone interview. "Who paid for it in a certain way were the first three women. I feel very thankful for their contribution, more so than I can express." Both Dr. Johannesson and Dr. Testa said that a large part of their motivation came from meeting patients and coming to understand how devastated they were to find out that they would not be able to have children. Dr. Testa said: "I think many men will never understand this fully, to understand the desire of these women to be mothers. What moved all of us is to see the mother holding her baby, when she was told, 'You will never have it.'" The transplants are now experimental, with much of the cost covered by research funds. But they are expensive, and if they become part of medical practice, will probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is not clear that insurers will pay, and Dr. Testa acknowledged that many women who want the surgery will not be able to afford it. Another hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, performed the first uterus transplant in the United States in February 2016, but it failed after two weeks because of an infection that caused life threatening hemorrhage and required emergency surgery to remove the organ. The clinic halted its program for an extended period, but has restarted it and has patients awaiting transplants, a spokeswoman, Victoria Vinci, said. The woman who gave birth at Baylor was the fourth to receive a transplant there, in September 2016. The process is complicated and has considerable risks for both recipients and donors. Donors undergo a five hour operation that is more complex and takes out more tissue than a standard hysterectomy to remove the uterus. The transplant surgery is also difficult, in some ways comparable to a liver transplant, Dr. Testa said. Recipients face the risks of surgery and anti rejection drugs for a transplant that they, unlike someone with heart or liver failure, do not need to save their lives. Their pregnancies are considered high risk, and the babies have to be delivered by cesarean section to avoid putting too much strain on the transplanted uterus. So far all the births have occurred a bit earlier than the normal 40 weeks of gestation at 32 to 36 weeks. Women who have transplants cannot conceive the natural way, because their ovaries are not connected to the uterus, so there is no way for an egg to get in there. Instead, they need in vitro fertilization. Before the transplant, women are given hormone treatments to make their ovaries release multiple eggs, which are then harvested, fertilized and frozen. Once the woman has fully recovered from surgery and begun menstruating, the eggs can be implanted in the uterus, one at a time, until she becomes pregnant. In Sweden, doctors waited a year after the transplant before trying to start a pregnancy, to allow the women time to heal. At Baylor, the team moved much faster, and began trying to impregnate the women within a few months of the surgery, soon after they began menstruating. Dr. Testa said it was his idea to start the pregnancies earlier, because the women were young and healthy, and did not need a year to bounce back from surgery. He argued that the waiting time just kept them on anti rejection drugs which have significant side effects for longer than necessary. "We went shorter," he said. "I think we were right." He and Dr. Johannesson said the Swedish team, and other centers planning transplants, had also begun to consider shortening the wait. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS at Damrosch Park (Aug. 2, 7 p.m.; Aug. 7, 7:30 p.m.). This free festival of eclectic performances under the sky boasts two dance offerings this week. On Friday, catch Caleb Teicher Company performing clever and charming pieces that draw from American forms like tap, swing and jazz. The troupe follows a screening of the famed 1972 concert "Liza With a 'Z'" and precedes the talented students of LaGuardia High School, doing a Bob Fosse number. On Wednesday, the dashing flamenco dancer Jesus Carmona presents his work "Amator," an ode to Spanish dance. He's paired with the Pakistani musician Arooj Aftab, who blends Sufi poetry with indie rock. 212 721 6500, lcoutofdoors.org WABAFU GARIFUNA DANCE THEATER at Crotona Park (Aug. 2, 6 p.m.). As part of the city's free SummerStage programming, this Bronx based dance company joins with the musicians of the Garifuna Collective to share the cultural heritage of the Garifuna at this park in its home borough. Descendants of Afro indigenous people in the Caribbean, Garifuna were later exiled to Central America, and a sizable population now lives in the Crotona neighborhood. Their buoyant dance style, with roots in the African dance of their ancestors, involves athletic jumps, lightning quick feet that match a driving, rhythmic drum score, and fast spins that send colorful skirts flying in waves. cityparksfoundation.org/summerstage YANG LIPING CONTEMPORARY DANCE at the David H. Koch Theater (Aug. 8 10, 7:30 p.m.). Beginning in 206 B.C., two would be dynasties fought for control of China in what is known as the Chu Han Contention. (The Han won.) That epic war is the subject of "Under Siege," an elaborate dance theater work by the Chinese choreographer Yang Liping, part of Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. She presents ancient history through a modern lens, combining folk and contemporary dance, hip hop and martial arts to evoke the rush of battle. The piece is set inside a stunning visual world by Tim Yip, who won an Oscar for his design of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org/mostly mozart festival | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Over the years, the Michigan born rocker James Osterberg Jr. better known by his stage persona, Iggy Pop has earned a reputation as "the Godfather of Punk." This is thanks mostly to his tenure as the frontman of the proto punk band the Stooges, but also because his reckless, sui generis stage presence embodied a gleeful but slightly scary abandon that became synonymous with the genre. His presence looms over "Punk," a four part documentary series about the fashion, politics and musical influences that defined punk rock, which debuted this week on Epix. Osterberg (credited as Iggy Pop) is an executive producer of the series, along with the fashion designer John Varvatos which might raise eyebrows given that Varvatos put what some would say was the final nail in punk's coffin in 2007 by buying CBGB, the hallowed punk club at 315 Bowery, and replacing it with one of his boutiques. In a phone interview, Osterberg defended Varvatos and also discussed the Sex Pistols, drugs and his favorite music critics. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. Punk, in its original form, was nothing if not iconoclastic. How do you feel when critics, fans or other musicians call you the "Godfather of Punk"? Once it gets into reverence, does that bother me? I was, initially, but now I don't mind being called "Godfather of Punk;" I suppose I've grown into the suit! There are occasional personal feelings that come from one on one interactions, when someone lets me know something genuine about the role that my work played in their life. When any type of music is still enjoying its vitality that's a social influence. And then, as people carry on that style and figure out how to further produce it, the style becomes academic, by really imperceptible steps. Even in country music: There is a hell of a big stretch going from Hank Williams to Garth Brooks, buddy! That process of change happens in all genres. Rock 'n' roll sort of took a beating and is now basically irrelevant, because it got mined to death. But whatever anybody wants to call me is O.K. I've been called worse things than the "Godfather of Punk"! You've said that the Sex Pistols were honest with their fans because they always told their fans that they shouldn't be trusted. I said "They always thought they were honest." I don't remember applauding anybody for saying "Don't trust me." I was much more impressed with their onstage ability than whether they were swindled out of thousands of dollars by their manager Malcolm McLaren . I just don't care. But that doesn't mean McLaren was not an effective Barnum type showman. He was, you know? And that's fine. The group, as a whole, had a lot of flair. Johnny Lydon is very good at the things you're supposed to be good at when you front a group. And the guitarist Steve Jones was a really good foil for Johnny, especially when it came to doing publicity. Everybody contributed something musically, or in terms of image, to the group. In "Punk," the deaths of the Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen are presented as examples of how drugs essentially killed the punk movement. There was a lot of that stuff around the music business as I experienced it, as a punky type. And it was the hard stuff, so there was always a price to be paid. LSD and marijuana were the stuff being pushed in 1966 and 1967. And taking those drugs has a way of breaking down some barriers that people need to hold themselves together. But while those barriers are being broken down, you also get insights about life and the world around you, especially if you've grown up as a milk fed American lamb to the slaughter, as we all were when we were told, "Go to Vietnam, but don't ask why." All that. Cocaine came in next. And it seemed like a good drug because, after a while, the weed and the LSD weren't doing it anymore. Some people were getting into speed, but cocaine was a more upscale stimulant that, in effect, kept the party going. Eventually, people's nerves were shot, their patience had worn thin, and many turned to opioid drugs, as well as Valium and other soporifics. Those are very subtle, dangerous drugs. Lester Bangs and Nick Kent are two people I can think of, off the top of my head. Both of them, in sort of a flailing, wild, highly subjective way. But why not! At least the two of them were treating what they write about like it's actually important. I read the stuff Lester Bangs wrote about me and thought: "Oh no, I'm a buffoon! But wait: I am a salient blowtorch of nihilism. Cool! Wait, am I cool or not? I'm not sure!" I have one of his books in hardback. I've had it for a long, long time. It's sitting on the shelf along with "The Andy Warhol Diaries," the collected works of Allen Ginsberg and a few other books. I look at their spines and think: "O.K., this is what's important!" In "Punk," you talk about your work without retrospectively judging yourself. What kind of questions were you asked and how did they make you feel? I knew and had worked for John Varvatos before I accepted both the interview and the fairly basic responsibilities that come with being listed as an executive producer. He loves and is genuinely interested in music. I once saw, in one of his stores, a book about the 100 greatest rock albums or something; at the time, I was modeling for him, so I was picking up some free swag. The book was thoughtful; it was a work of "soulful commerce," I would say. So I knew that was where this show's interview questions were going to be coming from. Like, there would inevitably be questions like: "So, you became a junkie ... " and that sort of thing. Whereas, a critic who's concerned with arcana and "pure art" is going to have different questions. In those cases, you listen to the question and try to answer it inasmuch as it can be respected. And then you try to insert something of your own that has nothing to do with the question, so that you get in your own licks. You try to twist the thing over a little bit to your own point of view. What would you say to people who remain outraged that CBGB was turned into a Varvatos boutique? What would I say to people who think, "It all happened at CBGB, man"? There was something about that room that was conducive to a range of musical approaches that centered on a kind of detail oriented, reference oriented, intellectually tinted art rock. Like Talking Heads and many aspects of the Ramones, which was stylized in many ways. And Blondie, though that's not as obvious in Blondie: The lead singer Debbie Harry seemed to learn how to sing out of nowhere. I don't know how she could have done that without a club she could go to over and over while she was learning. And then Patti Smith's group, obviously, even though I think "The Piss Factory" was recorded in the Nightingale. That was a little dive bar, smaller than CBGB, where they kept sawdust on the floor because people were going to puke, pee and spit, right? But she was also playing at CBGB, too. You could develop in that room. It was small in a particular way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A decade ago, living on a crosstown thoroughfare like 14th or 23rd street was considered undesirable. Now numerous residential towers are sprouting up along these four lane streets. A mere decade ago, frantic crosstown thoroughfares like 14th Street, 23rd Street and even 57th Street were not yet the apple of any residential developer's eye. If not out of sight, they were out of mind because of their traffic, noise and commerce. Luxury development stuck to the avenues, park view sites or classy corners; privacy and quaintness were the selling points of narrow side streets with one way traffic. Home sweet home did not apply to the two way corridors. There has been a sea change in attitude, in part because of the scarcity of available sites and the insatiable demand for upscale apartments, both among opportunity driven developers and discriminating buyers and tenants. Now new construction on major thoroughfares at all points of the Manhattan compass is viewed as both feasible and profitable. Build it right, brand it appealingly, and it will sell. "When I originally purchased the 350 West 23rd Street site for the development of Modern 23, brokers told me it would be a problem because of its location on a major thoroughfare," said Erez Itzhaki, who built the 15 unit condominium there about five years ago. The projected problems related to a marketing strategy for the units did not materialize. "We initially had concerns, but it became a very profitable project for us," he said. "As a developer, it's a winning situation because you have the ability to build retail on the ground floor, which is the equivalent of having two penthouses to sell." Mr. Itzhaki said he is hoping to acquire additional development sites on crosstown thoroughfares because living along them "is not a turnoff anymore to buyers or renters." According to Pamela Liebman, the president of the Corcoran Group, "Perceptions and priorities have changed; boundaries are being pushed. One57 ended the stigma of living on 57th Street. The hippest, hottest street in the meatpacking district is 14th Street. Smart developers are delivering the product people want, and nobody is ignoring crosstown streets anymore." Buyers are no longer turning up their noses at easy access to transportation, and the installation of large soundproof windows can lower the volume as well as capture the natural light of the main drags. And less importance is being placed on neighborhood cachet. "It used to be that people were very neighborhood specific," said Leslie Wilson, a senior vice president of sales for the Related Companies. "But the market has changed and it really is product driven, as opposed to location driven. Also, people really are cognizant of convenience: Living on a thoroughfare just plain gets you other places faster." "Connectivity appeals," said Ms. Wilson, also the director of sales at One Madison, the 60 story luxury tower at 23 East 22nd Street that has helicopter vistas anchored by an entrance on 23rd Street. "You would never have thought you'd see Rupert Murdoch buying a triplex penthouse on 23rd Street, but there you have it." Ms. Wilson noted that even though residents have a staffed entrance on 22nd Street, "they really do like the option of the 23rd Street entrance." Four lane thoroughfares once dismissed as unfashionably busy and intermittently seedy are being touted as undeniably convenient locations for residential towers, not to mention reliable providers of light, air and views that range from decent to spectacular precisely because the streets are often twice the 60 foot width of normal city streets. Also, developers can build bolder and higher on a thoroughfare site. "Zoning treats crosstown streets differently from side streets generally, and views them similar to avenues, which are wider and often permit retail," said Barbara van Beuren, a principal of Anbau, which developed the Citizen at 124 West 23rd Street in Chelsea, the luxury laden 155 East 79th Street uptown, and has another West 23rd Street condo project in the works. Most of Anbau's residential projects are situated on crosstown thoroughfares in Manhattan. "A lot of these crosstown streets had a reputation for being kind of trashy, but I think that perception is changing," she added. "Before, as a developer you'd go, 'Eeew, it's midblock.' Everybody was going after corners and avenues. But these cross streets offer so much more amenity than people ever gave them credit for before wide streets, well lit at night, maybe not A 1 park views but great cityscape views and now that we can build such sound insulated residences, technology is helping to mitigate people's concerns with living in a busy area. In some instances, you're not just enhancing a neighborhood, you're helping to bring it up." The stigma diminishing, crosstown streets are being rapidly reinvented as boulevards with European scale and flair. "The double wide thoroughfare is definitely undergoing a renaissance in terms of its attractiveness to developers and their clientele," said Steven Rutter, the director of Stribling Marketing Associates. "Look at 57th Street: The dynamic is so totally changed on that corridor that people are throwing the term 'Billionaire Boulevard' around. "But the common denominator with all of these thoroughfares," he said, "is the accessibility to transportation when you're outside your apartment, and access to natural light when you're inside. What's being built is of such high quality that you have buyers asking themselves, 'O.K., do I want to buy the co op in that prestigious old building and have to do a gut renovation or do I want to buy on 23rd or 57th or 79th and spend the same amount of money but get something totally brand new?' " Usheen Davar was living in a quiet residential neighborhood on the Upper East Side when she began shopping for an apartment in 2008. To her surprise, she found herself drawn to a stylish new one bedroom condo downtown at the 22 story Gramercy Starck at 340 East 23rd Street. "It was a hard decision for me because I'd never lived on a busy street before, so I was absolutely hesitant," said Ms. Davar, who works in digital advertising sales. "But there were certain things starting to happen in the neighborhood. Luxury buildings like this one were starting to go up, and you had to figure that these developers had done their homework and looked into the future if they were investing so much money in the area. But I didn't realize until I moved down here just how convenient it is. And it feels safe." Should she leave the building, which, in addition to having Philippe Starck interiors, is equipped with a fitness center and sauna, a lounge and billiards room, and a roof deck with private cabanas, Ms. Davar can stroll to Union Square in under 10 minutes. (Union Square began its turnaround in 1987 when Zeckendorf Towers, a mixed use development capped by pyramid shaped screens that were illuminated at night, arrived at 1 Irving Place/1 Union Square East. Related's 1 Union Square South followed in 1998.) Ms. Davar can hop on several subways, but for her work commute, she discovered she far prefers the Third Avenue bus: air conditioned, efficient, always an open seat. Other timesavers: a CVS drugstore downstairs that is open 24/7, and a pristine Starbucks at 23rd and First Avenue. "There are trees on the block now, and in the past two years, there's been a total transformation because of the infusion of luxury residential buildings and upscale retailers," Ms. Davar said. "Even the older buildings are getting face lifts. It has a domino effect. I would never dismiss living on a crosstown street again; I feel like I'm getting the best of the best for my investment." Josh Fox also bought at Gramercy Starck in 2008, paying 1.865 million for a three bedroom unit. "The building is built so well that once you're inside, it's like a cocoon," said Mr. Fox, the chief executive of Bottom Line Concepts, a firm that helps corporations streamline costs. "It's not like being in an older building where you can live on the sixth floor and hear people having conversations on the sidewalk." Because he is moving first to Miami and later to Los Angeles to expand his company's footprint, Mr. Fox recently put his condo on the market for 2.65 million. What he will miss most, he said, is the 23rd Street vibe. "For people with cars, it is amazingly convenient to the Midtown Tunnel and the F.D.R., and you've got everything you could possibly need right here within a block of our building. You can literally go downstairs to CVS in your pajamas in the middle of the night if you want." Farther downtown on West 14th Street, a thoroughfare once shunned for its unsavory meatpacking district and fly by night retail shops, mannequins outfitted in couture creations have replaced the carcasses in storefronts, and tourists seeking the High Line crowd the sidewalks. But initially, the change came incrementally. The unusual building and the immensity of its units, 10 with outdoor space, attracted interest, Ms. Bohn said. "We had a lot of wealthy lookers, movie star hipster types, but nobody wanted to commit to living there. The neighborhood was still too grubby." 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. The couple moved into the duplex penthouse and waited for the block to catch up with their vision. "We started to slowly sell the other units, mainly to investors who used them as pieds a terre," she said. "And then, with the High Line and the designer boutiques moving in, the street turned around completely: It's seriously hip and a desirable place to hang your hat." After the penthouse sold, the couple moved to the ground floor unit, which has 15 foot ceilings and an enormous back garden. "The apartment we live in now, we couldn't have given it away back then," she said. Their unit is on the market for 6.4 million because Ms. Bohn and Mr. Fiore are ready for the next project. This one is done. "When meatpacking moved out, the first wave of lofts moved in," said Michael Namer, the chief executive of Alfa Development, whose Village Green West, a 27 unit condo at 245 West 14th Street, sold half of its units within three months of releasing an offering plan. "I've come to see 14th Street as the gateway to the new version of the meatpacking district," he said. "It's gone from being a precarious place to be around to being the heart of a commercial district that has a boulevard feel and offers a litany of things people want. It used to be a place where the rats were bigger than cats, but now it's a destination. I can think of 10 new projects opening up on 14th Street, and it probably all goes back to the renaissance of Union Square. That area was a supermarket of vices. Now it's a Greenmarket." Cynthia Perry and her husband, Robert Herman, lived for 18 years in a West 10th Street brownstone before moving to the Upper East Side in 2002. Homesick for the Village, they decided to move back downtown a year ago, and their search for an interim rental eventually brought them to 1 Union Square South, the 27 story luxury tower built by the Related Companies. "Ten years ago you would have had to drag me kicking and screaming into an apartment on 14th Street," said Ms. Perry, an owner of Curtis Perry, a small advertising agency. But 1 Union Square South not only felt homey and welcoming to her, it offered practical personal amenities like in unit laundry facilities and enticing communal ones like an outdoor deck with a lawn and barbecue area. "The area feels safe, and the retailers aren't ratty anymore," Ms. Perry said. "If you can open your mind to viewing cross streets like 14th and 23rd differently, look at where the neighborhood is going instead of where it's been, you're going to find out that developers like Related are redefining what it means to live on a crosstown street. They're giving you incentives to think twice about living on a block you wouldn't have considered before." The couple's original plan was to rent briefly and then buy a co op or condo in their former West Village neighborhood, but the agenda has changed: "My husband says, 'Why move when we've already got everything we need right here?' Whenever we have guests, they always say the same thing: 'Who knew there was something like this above Best Buy?' " The boundary breaking residential options in these four lane neighborhoods are probably not the optimal destination for "the noise sensitive or the crowd averse," said Robert Dankner, the president of Prime Manhattan Residential, who has placed clients in buildings like 345 Meatpacking (345 West 14th Street), One Madison, One57, and 123 Third Avenue (on the corner of 14th Street). Often they weren't the client's first choice. "But sometimes behind Door No. 3 is just the prize a buyer has been waiting for," he said. "I've had clients say, 'I don't want to live on 14th Street, it's too noisy, there's a subway stop on every corner, it never sleeps.' And they've said the same thing about 23rd and 57th. Often they're right, and it isn't for them. "But occasionally I'll say, 'I have a suggestion: Exactly what you're looking for happens to exist exactly where you don't want to live, but just take a look at it and let the building do the talking.' It either grabs them or it doesn't." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Some microscopes today are so powerful that they can create a picture of the gap between brain cells, which is thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. They can even reveal the tiny sacs carrying even tinier nuggets of information to cross over that gap to form memories. And in colorful snapshots made possible by a giant magnet, we can see the activity of close to 100 billion brain cells talking. Decades before these technologies existed, a man hunched over a microscope in Spain at the turn of the 20th century was making prescient hypotheses about how the brain works. At the time, William James was still developing psychology as a science and Sir Charles Scott Sherrington was defining our integrated nervous system. Meet Santiago Ramon y Cajal, an artist, photographer, doctor, bodybuilder, scientist, chess player and publisher. He was also the father of modern neuroscience. Last month, the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis opened a traveling exhibit that is the first dedicated solely to Ramon y Cajal's work. It will make stops in Minneapolis; Vancouver, British Columbia; New York City; Cambridge, Mass.; and Chapel Hill, N.C., through April 2019. Ramon y Cajal started out with an interest in the visual arts and photography he even invented a method for making color photos. But his father pushed him into medical school. Without his artistic background, his work might not have had as much impact, Dr. Swanson said. "It's fairly rare for a scientist to be a really good artist at the same time, and to illustrate all of their own work, brilliantly," Dr. Swanson said. "There seems to be a real resurgence of interest between the interaction between science and art, and I think Cajal will be an icon in that field." The images in "The Beautiful Brain" illustrate what Ramon y Cajal helped discover about the brain and the nervous system, and why his research had such an effect on the field of neuroscience. Ramon y Cajal's life changed in Madrid in 1887, when another Spanish scientist showed him the Golgi stain, a chemical reaction that colored random brain cells. This method, developed by the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi, made it possible to see the details of a whole neuron without the interference of its neighbors. Ramon y Cajal refined the Golgi stain, and with the details gleaned from even crisper images, revolutionized neuroscience. In 1906 he and Golgi shared a Nobel Prize. And in the time in between, he wrote his neuron doctrine the theory that neurons were individual brain cells, leading to his realization of how individual brain cells send and receive information, which became the basis of modern neuroscience. Ramon y Cajal's theory described how information flowed through the brain. Neurons were individual units that talked to one another directionally, sending information from long appendages called axons to branchlike dendrites, over the gaps between them. He couldn't see these gaps in his microscope, but he called them synapses, and said that if we think, learn and form memories in the brain then that itty bitty space was most likely the location where we do it. This challenged the belief at the time that information diffused in all directions over a meshwork of neurons. The theory's acceptance was made possible by Ramon y Cajal's refinement of the Golgi stain and his persistence in sharing his ideas with others. In 1889, Ramon y Cajal took his slides to a scientific meeting in Germany. "He sets up a microscope and slide, and pulls over the big scientists of the day, and said, 'Look here, look what I can see,'" said Janet Dubinsky, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota. "'Now do you believe that what I'm saying about neurons being individual cells is true?'" Albert von Kolliker, an influential German scientist, was amazed and began translating Ramon y Cajal's work, which was mainly in Spanish, into German. From there the neuron doctrine spread, replacing the prevailing reticular theory. But Ramon y Cajal died before anyone proved it. Ramon y Cajal studied Purkinje neurons with fervor, illustrating their treelike structure in great detail, like this one from the cerebellum. Axons, such as the one indicated by an "a" in the picture, can travel long distances in the body, some from the spinal cord all the way down to your little toe, said Dr. Dubinsky, who wrote a chapter in "The Beautiful Brain" about contemporary extensions of his work. Ramon y Cajal traced axons as far as he could, she said. In addition to showing how information flowed through the brain, Ramon y Cajal showed how it moved through the whole body, allowing humans to do things like vomit and cough. When we vomit, a signal is sent from the irritated stomach to the vagus nerve in the brain and then to the spinal cord, which excites neurons that make us contract our stomach and heave. Similarly, a tickle in the back of your throat can make you cough: The larynx sends a signal to the vagus nerve, then the brainstem and the spinal cord, where neurons signal the muscles in our chest and abdomen to contract. Ahem. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Emmy and Tony Award winning production designer Derek McLane regularly creates sets for Broadway shows ("Beautiful: The Carole King Musical" and Arthur Miller's "The Price," which stars Mark Ruffalo, with previews starting Feb. 16). On Feb. 26, millions will see his work on the Academy Awards telecast. He has designed its set five years in a row. Mr. McLane, who grew up mostly in Evanston, Ill., said he has whittled down his wardrobe choices into a reliable uniform. Shirt My favorite shirt is by James Perse. It's not a T shirt. I rarely wear T shirts and then only around the house. It's a button down and super comfortable. They come in a lighter weight cotton that you can wear tucked or not tucked. In the winter, I'll add a V neck sweater. I have a bunch by Ted Baker. Jeans Most of the time, I'm in 484 cut J. Crew jeans in a dark blue. I never wear distressed jeans. It seems weird to have the distressing done by a machine or a lab. These are a slimmer cut, though I'm not a particularly skinny guy. But they're not tight on the butt. My look used to be described as slightly preppy, but I don't think of myself that way. I definitely dress more neatly than some people on Broadway. There are certain people on Broadway who dress conspicuously messy. There are also artist types who are very flamboyant. There are signatures. There are real eccentricities. I suppose it's just become my uniform. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Up to 30 Million in U.S. Have the Skills to Earn 70% More, Researchers Say None Stuart Isett for The New York Times For the past four decades, incomes rose for those with college degrees and fell for those without one. But a body of recent and new research suggests that the trend need not inevitably continue. As many as 30 million American workers without four year college degrees have the skills to realistically move into new jobs that pay on average 70 percent more than their current ones. That estimate comes from a collaboration of academic, nonprofit and corporate researchers who mined data on occupations and skills. The findings point to the potential of upward mobility for millions of Americans, who might be able to climb from low wage jobs to middle income occupations or higher. But the research also shows the challenge that the workers face: They currently experience less income mobility than those holding a college degree, which is routinely regarded as a measure of skills. That widely shared assumption, the researchers say, is deeply flawed. "We need to rethink who is skilled, and how skills are measured and evaluated," said Peter Q. Blair, a labor economist at Harvard, who was a member of the research team. In recent years, labor experts and work force organizations have argued that hiring should increasingly be based on skills rather than degrees, as a matter of fairness and economic efficiency. The research provides quantified evidence that such a shift is achievable. "The goal is to shine a bright light on a problem and on what can be done on the ground to help this whole group of people who are struggling in the labor market," said Erica Groshen, an economist at Cornell, a former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and one of the researchers. The researchers published a broad look at the jobs, wages and skills of workers who have a high school diploma but not a four year college degree as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper this year. They found a significant overlap between the skills required in jobs that pay low wages and many occupations with higher pay a sizable landscape of opportunity. For skills, the researchers used Labor Department classifications. They defined low wage jobs as those paying less than the nation's median annual salary of 38,000. Middle wage occupations were those paying from 38,000 to 77,000, with the midpoint of 57,500. High wage jobs paid more than 77,000. The highest paid workers without college degrees were in computer, technical and management jobs. The lowest paid were clustered in personal care and food preparation jobs. A report published this week, involving most of the same researchers, examined the pathways to higher paying jobs for these workers, their experience and the obstacles encountered. It employed proprietary data and interviews, as well as the government data used in the first study. An office administrative assistant is a typical example of a low paying job that can be a portal to a better one. The skills required, according to employer surveys by the Labor Department, include written and verbal communication, time management, problem solving, attention to detail and a fluency with office technology. In short, a skill set that is valuable in many jobs. Robert B. Johnson Jr. was an office administrative assistant who received training in computing, and is now a cloud programmer at a software company. Jake Dockins for The New York Times Robert B. Johnson Jr. worked as an administrative assistant at a finance company in Dallas for a year and a half. It was his first experience in an office, picking up professional skills like working in teams and business communications. He was interested in technology, and while there he heard of free computing coursework offered by Merit America, a nonprofit, that could be done on nights and weekends. Mr. Johnson, 24, finished the computer programming course in six months. Soon after, he was hired by a local software company, where his annual salary is about 55,000, compared with 30,000 before. Today, he has savings in the bank, and he and his girlfriend moved into a new apartment in January. They are looking to buy a house and talk of starting a family. "It's the American dream stuff that didn't seem feasible for me until now," Mr. Johnson said. Moves to higher paying jobs are typically a combination of personal initiative, foundational skills and some additional preparation like an outside course or company sponsored training, said Papia Debroy, vice president for research at Opportunity Work, a nonprofit social venture that worked on both studies. In the pandemic economy, labor experts have called for increased government funding for skills training programs, especially to expand ones that have proved to help lift workers into middle class careers. It is lower wage workers, disproportionately Black and Latino, who have been hardest hit by the current slump. And there is concern that the economic recovery, when it comes, may only widen income gaps among workers. Government must play a role, the researchers said. But they point out that the private sector, which is by far the largest employer, must alter its perceptions, hiring habits and career development programs to increase opportunity for workers without college degrees. "Companies have to see this talent pool and mainstream it," said Byron Auguste, chief executive of Opportunity Work. "Systems change in the labor market has as much to do with employers practices as public policy." There are signs of progress in the business community. For example, the Rework America Business Network, an initiative of the Markle Foundation, is a group of major companies that has pledged to adopt skills based hiring for many jobs, often dropping a college degree requirement. The companies include AT T, Kaiser Permanente, McKinsey Company, Microsoft and Walmart. But they are the exception. For 74 percent of new jobs in America, employers frequently require four year college degrees, according to a recent study. Screening by college degree excludes roughly two thirds of American workers. But the impact is most pronounced on minorities, eliminating 76 percent of Blacks and 83 percent of Latinos. The college degree filter, Mr. Auguste said, is "self harm for the economy, and racially and ethically." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Behind the Scenes on the Set of 'Glow' A 360 Degree View of the March for Our Lives Protest Speed Down the Luge Course in 360 Get Down on the Ice and Start Sweeping | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
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