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The fashion on the Grammys red carpet always gets a little weird. Remember Margaret Cho's sheer peacock dress, Jennifer Lopez's low low low cut Versace dress (which, in retrospect, actually seems almost demure), and Nicki Minaj's Little Red Riding Hood like cape? This year had a few of its own unforgettable styles. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The luxury brands Coach and Givenchy joined Versace on Monday in apologizing to China for producing T shirts that were regarded to have undermined the country's sovereignty. The apparel, which identified the semiautonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau as countries, set off an angry online backlash from Chinese consumers who perceived the designs as violations of the "One China" policy. Millions of social media users across China called for boycotts of the Western luxury companies' products on Monday, after images of the three garments, which are no longer for sale, circulated over the weekend by users on social media platforms such as Sina Weibo, China's Twitter like microblogging site . The furor comes as pro democracy demonstrations continued to grip Hong Kong. The protests have heightened political sensitivities, particularly around China's territorial claims and Hong Kong's status. The outcry over the luxury apparel also underscores the growing pressures faced by foreign companies that seek to do business in China. In recent months, Beijing appears to have increased its policing of how overseas companies refer to semiautonomous Chinese territories such as Hong Kong and Macau . Versace, Givenchy and Coach are the latest foreign companies to draw fierce criticism from consumers in mainland China over sovereignty sensitivities, and boycott calls and online backlashes have been on the rise in recent months. Chinese shoppers are a top consumer group of luxury goods, accounting for at least a third of luxury sales worldwide and two thirds of the luxury industry's growth, according to figures from Bain Company, a management consulting company. The latest fallout began Sunday when images surfaced on Weibo of a black Versace T shirt that paired cities next to apparently corresponding countries. "Macau, Macau" and "Hong Kong, Hong Kong" sat beside pairings such as "Beijing, China" and "Rome, Italy" on the back of the garment . Hong Kong is a semiautonomous territory under Chinese sovereignty, meant to maintain a range of freedoms; the gambling enclave of Macau is another special administrative region. In a post published on its Instagram and Weibo account s, the Italian luxury house said that it had made a mistake, stopped selling the product and destroyed the remaining T shirts on July 24. "Versace reiterates that we love China deeply, and resolutely respect China's territory and national sovereignty," the company said in the statement, subsequently echoed by the designer Donatella Versace. The Chinese actress Yang Mi, who was a spokeswoman for Versace, later said she had terminated her contract with the company. "The motherland's territorial integrity and sovereignty are sacred," she said in a Weibo post. Then, a T shirt by the American fashion house Coach emerged on Weibo that also did not identify Hong Kong as part of China. The designs, which were removed from sale in May 2018 , also appeared to imply that Taiwan a self ruled democratic island considered a breakaway province by Beijing was an independent country. The company posted a public apology. "We are fully aware of the severity of this error and deeply regret it," said the message, which was posted on Coach's official Twitter and Instagram channels. "Coach is dedicated to long term development in China, and we respect the feelings of the Chinese people." Coach, which is owned by Tapestry, a luxury fashion holding company based in New York, also lost a prominent China spokeswoman thanks to the gaffe. "I apologize to everyone for the damage that I have caused as a result of my less careful choice of brand!" the model and actress Liu Wen wrote on Weibo on Monday, as she confirmed that she planned to end her contract with the company. "Coach" was one of the most popular terms on Weibo early Monday morning, receiving 1.2 billion views. Also on Monday, the French fashion house Givenchy issued an apology on Instagram for a T shirt design that appeared to characterize Hong Kong and Taiwan as autonomous countries. It was being sold for 3,990 renminbi ( 565) on the Chinese website of the luxury e commerce platform FarFetch until the page was taken down Monday. The brand, owned by the luxury goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, also apologized in a Weibo statement, saying it "always respects Chinese sovereignty." The backlash comes less than a year after a Dolce Gabbana advertisement showing a Chinese model struggling to eat spaghetti and pizza with chopsticks prompted outrage and a boycott of D G goods. Airlines, carmakers, hotel operators and other consumer brands have all come under fire for appearing to flout Beijing's territorial claims on their websites or product labels. In July last year, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines began to list only Taipei's airport code and city on their websites, but not the name Taiwan, conceding to months of Chinese pressure. In January 2018, J.W. Marriott also publicly apologized when the wording of a customer survey prompted questions over its support of separatist movements. And last year, the American retailer Gap apologized for selling T shirts that it said showed an "incorrect map" of China. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WORD POWER With multiple books about race appearing on several of our lists, we checked in with two best selling authors to hear their thoughts on the work they've done and the road ahead. Layla F. Saad, author of "Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor" (No. 6 on the hardcover nonfiction list): How have the past few weeks been for you? They've been a roller coaster of emotion and energy and both anger and frustration. Also, grief and cautious hope and awe of this new era that we're entering into. What is the first step for people trying to dismantle biases and understand their privilege? To accept that this work isn't going to be a smooth, clean, safe, sanitized experience where you get to examine racism in the world and racism within yourself without feeling emotion. People have reported indigestion, sleeplessness, nervousness that's your awakening to even just a portion of what black and brown people are walking around with every day. What's your greatest hope for change? I hope black people will no longer have to be the only ones whose anger is used to ignite and sustain the movement. ... I want black people to feel ease, joy, peace and safety. It's ironic to me when white people say to black people, "Why are you so angry? Your anger isn't helpful." My question is, "Why aren't you angry?" Because when you all collectively start being angry, that's when change can actually happen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Credit...Andrea Wyner for The New York Times It was Saturday night in Athens, and I was surrounded by dozens of young Greeks on the packed veranda of Six d.o.g.s., a cafe bar and arts space that runs the length of an alleyway in the Monastiraki neighborhood. It was the 10 year anniversary party for Laternative, a local radio show launched in the wake of the country's debt crisis, and people spilled into the gallery space, gathered under light strung trees in the back garden and in the club area where the first of several bands was about to play. Most of the partygoers looked to be in their early and mid 20s, just like I was the first time I came to this exact spot nearly 12 years ago, back when it was a tiny indie rock bar called Kinky. Standing here now, I could almost see myself as I was then: a 24 year old backpacker sitting alone in the corner, smoking cheap Greek cigarettes and nursing a raki, unaware that my life had come to a crossroads. There are places we live and places we visit, and then there are the other places. Places we return to, where we put down roots, but not strong enough roots to hold us places that change us, that we haunt and are haunted by. Nowhere embodies this for me more than Athens, a city I've watched shift and evolve, endure crisis and chaos and economic collapse, and yet emerge from the wreckage as one of the continent's most vibrant and significant cultural capitals, more popular than ever as a tourist destination. (Last year Athens welcomed a record 5 million visitors, double the 2012 figure.) After a week or so bouncing around the Cyclades, I arrived in Athens, planning to stay only a few days before moving on. People had told me the city was ugly and congested, basically a stopover, yet I remember the first romance of its winding, cracked stone alleyways overgrown with jasmine creepers and bitter orange trees, the roving packs of stray dogs, cats sunning on ruins, the smell of leather, honeysuckle and dust. Planning a trip to Athens? Here are five places to visit in the city. One night I wandered into Kinky Bar, where the D.J. was playing obscure postpunk records I happened to love. I drank until I was brave enough to approach him. He introduced me to his friends Athenians, a bit older than I was and at the end of the night, they did something I couldn't imagine happening back home: They invited me to move in with them. They all lived on or near a small, leafy street called Semitelou on a hill near the Athens Music Hall. Over the next weeks, I lived between their apartments, typical residential buildings with wraparound balconies and sun bleached awnings that faced each other over the street. They were journalists, D.J.s and architects. Two were identical twin brothers, one gay and one straight. They lived with the straight twin's girlfriend, a biologist who traveled with a suitcase of human sperm samples. They showed me the city, its chaotic cafes and dusky tavernas. We packed into the car they all shared and drove around the gasworks of the Gazi district in search of after hours bouzouki bars, saw concerts in Orthodox churches, prepared huge home cooked dinners that we washed down with wine and vodka and other substances of varying toxicity and legality. "It's like the show 'Friends' but with sex, drugs and balconies," I wrote at the time in my journal. It was a period in my life when I kept one rigorously, documenting nearly every romantic and philosophical quandary, every insight, not least of which was my decision to stay abroad and try to write professionally. I loved Athens but wanted to see more of Europe, and it was my Athenian friends who directed me to Berlin, somewhere I'd had no desire to visit, but where I would end up spending the next decade, settling down, becoming a writer, meeting my husband. I returned to Athens with some frequency at first, but eventually my friends and I fell out of touch, just at the time their lives were growing increasingly difficult. The downgrading of Greece's credit rating in 2009 kicked off a series of tough austerity measures that crippled the economy. "We are trying to be O.K. in this sinking country," one friend wrote in an email in 2011. Like the rest of the world, I watched most of it from afar: shutdowns, riots, civil unrest, mass unemployment, deepening recession. Then there are the major public arts institutions, which were either donated to the state by private philanthropic organizations or funded before the crisis, in part with foreign money: the spectacular, largely European Union funded Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009, that rises next to the Acropolis like a glass and concrete mirror image; the Onassis Cultural Center, which opened in 2010 and encompasses two state of the art performance halls, an open air theater and an exhibition space; and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, a Renzo Piano designed cultural complex, completed in 2016, some three miles down Siggrou Avenue from the Onassis Center on the Bay of Faliro. It includes facilities for the National Library of Greece, the Greek National Opera and a five acre park, all of which the foundation donated to the Greek state. The joke in town is that the most famous rivalry in modern Greek history between Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, shadowy shipping magnates who spent their lives feuding over business and romantic interests now plays out along Siggrou Avenue and through the prolific cultural programming, grants, residencies and public works of their respective legacy foundations. Last year, among many other events, the Onassis Center staged its annual Fast Forward Festival, focused on techno futurism and new media, a science fiction festival and an Afrofuturism series, which included a concert by the Sun Ra Arkestra with tickets as low as 5 euros. In the same year, the Niarchos Center made numerous high profile performances entirely free to the public, including a Yo La Tengo concert and a presentation by the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe. In so many ways, Athens feels more alive, more culturally prolific, than ever, and it's hard to understand how this could have happened in the midst of the worst economic catastrophe in the history of the European Union. "It's been interesting and hellish," said Theodosis Michos, raising his voice over the music at the Six d.o.g.s. party. With his thick black rimmed glasses and tattoos, his rake thin build and wild, Richard Hell esque hair, he looked exactly as I remembered him when I was staying at his place on Semitelou, give or take a decade of worry lines. Back in 2006, he was a staff writer for Esquire Greece, but like almost all the Greeks I know, the crisis left Theodosis out of work. "We all got fired or we quit because we weren't getting paid," he said. And yet in 2013, arguably the lowest point of the crisis, Theodosis was part of a collective that launched Popaganda, an online magazine that covers culture and city life through an Athenian lens. "The first thing we did to resist the crisis psychologically was to tell ourselves again and again: O.K., we are artists, we are writers, this is the best time for us, because when artists have nothing, they can do anything," he said, adding that this isn't actually true. "We told ourselves this so many times, that we started to believe it." Even on a shoestring budget, Popaganda managed to establish itself as a platform on par with the city's top culture magazines. Theodosis also wrote a novel, Take the Show, loosely based on the Semitelou years that's been an indie hit (A bit character in the book is an American backpacker inexplicably living in their apartment). Here's how you can have an affordable vacation in Greece. "It's not like oh, the crisis, I'll start painting. That's not happening!" said Konstantinos Dagritzikos, who opened Six d.o.g.s. with a partner, Panagiotis Pilafa, in 2009 in the space that used to hold Kinky Bar and four other venues. And yet the place they launched at the start of the crisis did evolve into the ambitious cultural venue they imagined, which now attracts droves to shows by Greek artists like the fuzz rock outfit The Noise Figures and the chill wave duo Keep Shelly In Athens, as well as international acts. This year, they're launching an electronic music festival, ADD, which will bring artists like Apparat and Speedy J to Peiraios 260, a reclaimed 1970s era furniture factory on the city's outskirts. The day after the party, I headed to Exarcheia, the graffiti covered anarchist and student district that was the site of a scene I described in my 2006 journal, which now feels to me like an omen: "Saw a shop with a 10 foot hole bashed through the window, riot cops everywhere, employees crying." Exarcheia remains a hub for anarchists, but the tatty graffiti I remember now accompanies a multicolored profusion of street art, evidence of the neighborhood's emergence as a center for artists, who were drawn from Greece and abroad to the cheap rents, derelict spaces and unique cultural history. Galleries like Hot Wheels Projects and CHEAPART exhibit Greek and international artists, and Documenta 14 set up its headquarters here in 2017, the first time since its inception in 1955 that the international art exhibition took place (in part) outside the German city of Kassel. Though it didn't come without controversy, including accusations of cultural colonialism, Documenta turned the scene into a topic of international import. "I think Documenta accelerated something that was already going on," said Kosmas Nikolaou, one of three artists behind 3137, an artist run space that puts on several exhibitions a year, as well as performances, presentations and cultural talks. When 3137 moved into the neighborhood in 2011 it was the only one of its kind; now it's one of many. But it remains to be seen whether Documenta's bolstering of the art scene will last. And despite recent talk of Athens being "the new Berlin," the city still struggles with poverty, riots and drug crime, not to mention continued reverberations of the refugee crisis something perhaps most visible in Exarchia, where many migrants from war torn countries in Africa and the Middle East live in squats run by anarchists and activists. "You're living in uncertainty all the time," said Meropi Kokkini, another writer friend I stayed with back in 2006. I had come to meet her and George her longtime partner who was the D.J. that first night at Kinky Bar at a new poke bowl stand in the city center. I often stayed with George and Meropi when I visited Athens in the years after my first stay, sitting up all night talking and drinking until I had almost missed my flight and on at least one occasion, actually had. Like most everyone, Meropi and George struggled through the crisis years. Meropi spent a year unemployed before becoming a freelancer. "But then all the magazines I was writing for shut down," she said. Now she's working as a staff writer at Lifo.gr, one of Greece's most popular websites, and soon to spend a month in New York on a Niarchos grant, but like everyone, she fears continued volatility. As we spoke, people streamed by us in the cooling evening air, some dragging suitcases or holding phones open to Google Maps. "There's a feeling now that things are getting better," she added, "but I don't know if it's real." "It's crazy, the tourists in recent years. It's like the whole world is coming on vacation to Greece." said Fotis Vallatos, the travel editor of Blue Magazine, the in flight publication of Greece's largest airline, Aegean Airlines, and a co founder of Popaganda, as well as the person who first invited me to move in to Semitelou. As tourism has increased, Aegean Airlines expanded from 18 mostly Greek destinations in 2001 to 145 all over the world today. Fotis is now often on the road, exploring those destinations and the many inventive restaurants and visitor attractions that have emerged in Greece since the crisis, from a wave of young chefs using Nordic, French and East Asian cooking techniques on local ingredients, to a multitude of "second act producers," people left unemployed or underemployed who returned to the villages where they grew up and began to sell homemade, organic, artisanal Greek products to phenomenal results. "I think everybody became more creative after the crisis, more cooperative," he said. We talked about the Semitelou days, how much fun it was to be so young and dumb. Back then, he said, "it was still a big party. We earned good money. We worked a lot, but it was a period when everybody was happy. We thought this party would last forever, and because of this, we lived that way. We never thought this might be over in a few years." Listening to Fotis, I realized that for my friends, even more than for me, those years must feel foreign like a distant dream. As often happens when I'm in Athens, I was introduced to friends of friends and wound up in the hours just before I had to head to the airport at a party I didn't want to leave. This one, though, was fancier than I was used to. It was thrown by Afroditi Panagiotakou, the director of culture for the Onassis Foundation. Formidable and eccentric in the way of Mediterranean aristocrats, she is the guiding force behind the foundation's rebirth as an important engine of the city's cultural scene. "I have to say, I've never felt closer to this city," said Afroditi, as we sat on the roof terrace of the villa she shares with her partner, Anthony S. Papadimitriou, president of the business and public benefit wing of the Onassis Foundation. We looked out over the Mets district, a palimpsest of red tile and concrete housing blocks behind which the Acropolis rises like a revelation. "I think that Athens lies beyond good and evil, beyond beauty and ugliness," she said. "I don't think that cities are supposed to be beautiful anyway. I think they're supposed to be interesting. They're supposed to be alive. Athens is definitely alive. It doesn't have this constipated, sclerotic thing that cities like New York, London, Paris have, where whatever you do, nobody will notice." She added, "Athens is a city that is changing all the time." As we spoke, guests began to arrive gallerists and producers, artists and writers on Onassis grants, mostly Greek but some Lebanese, part of the foundation's effort to build more cultural exchange with the Middle East. Wine flowed and the music got louder, jumping from Bossa Nova to Italo disco to Greek rebetiko as the sun began to set over Athens. By the time I left for the airport, nearly everyone was dancing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Jimmy Buffett's tropical paradise will land in a chilly New York this winter with the opening of the musical "Escape to Margaritaville" on Broadway. The show, which features new songs as well as past hits that embody Mr. Buffett's beach resort brand, is to begin preview performances at the Marquis Theater on Feb. 16, the producers announced on Monday, with opening night planned for March 15. "Well, going to Broadway is a dream come true, but to be coming to the Marquis is like having a great margarita with a tequila floater," Mr. Buffett said in a statement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Logan Roy has an odd vocabulary tic, which pops up whenever he is faced with his company's latest scandal. "What's the protein?" he'll ask. He used those words last week, while skimming through New York magazine's Brightstar Cruises expose. He says it again this week, during a flight to London, while he, Kendall, Roman and Rhea Jarrell rip apart a memo Siobhan wrote to clarify her "dinosaur purge" Argestes comments. Again, Logan asks if anyone can find "the protein." Is anything Shiv wrote worthy of his attention? Logan has a high bar for "protein." He has already argued that the cruise scandal isn't "real" because his enemies will latch onto any opportunity for performative outrage. He is also unconvinced that Shiv really cares about the culture at Waystar perhaps because he thinks his daughter's convictions, like his own, are more strategic than deeply held. (Later, when Shiv finally gets a face to face meeting with her dad, she says, "I know you haven't always been happy with my words, but we can discuss it," which is like a prelude to that old line, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others.") Because of his stubborn refusal to take blame for anything, Logan barely flinches when he wakes up in London to tabloid headlines that implicate him in the death of the young man Kendall drove into a lake. His rivals' newspapers claim the kid was "Bullied to Death" while in the Roys' employ. Logan won't acknowledge fault, but he does let his lawyers talk him into visiting the young man's family. "I suppose everyone has to apologize for everything nowadays," he grumbles. In the end, he is glad he makes the trip because it reminds him that for all his billions, he is still in his own mind a man of the people. He can relate to the dead man's parents because they're the target audience for Waystar's programming, which he describes as "some decent TV" and "news that doesn't talk down to them." "There's nothing be ashamed of, our stuff," he says to Kendall, conclusively, as if that were the main lesson from his son's having accidentally killed someone. But Ken poor Ken has a different reaction to their visit. First, he's not even supposed to be there. He is supposed to be spending a romantic, lighthearted, "Simon Garfunkel song" kind of afternoon at the zoo with Naomi Pierce. Instead, his dad drags him into a home filled with heartbreakingly happy pictures of the person he is trying most to forget. Does Logan not understand how punishing this might be? Or is he just being casually cruel, part of his continuing policy of preventing his children from living their own lives? This week's episode of "Succession" is somewhat of a letdown in comparison to the previous three, all of which have been tightly constructed, genuinely tense and often explosively funny. This episode, titled "Return," is more of a showcase for the series's unique character dynamics than for its dramatic storytelling. The plotting feels more scattered, with the action in London spread across multiple locations. Even the reliable comic relief of Tom and Greg is removed from the main action, taking place in New York while nearly everyone else is overseas. There are four major narrative developments this week: Tom harasses Greg into destroying (most of) the Brightstar Cruises paper trail; Logan, we learn, is having an affair with Rhea; Rhea hatches a plan to rid Logan of his obligation to Shiv; and Logan decides to start looking outside the family for a successor. Only the Shiv Rhea material generates that wonderfully queasy, "watching a disaster unfold in slow motion" feeling common to the show's best episodes. The catastrophe happens so fast, too. The two women meet for coffee, during which Rhea disarms Siobhan by owning up to her romance with Logan before suggesting that Shiv regain some leverage at Waystar by pursuing a position at Pierce Global Media. Shiv gets thoroughly suckered by Rhea. When she confronts her father about her status, he berates her for her disloyalty in even considering moving to Pierce. The scene between the two of them is shocking, sickening ... outstanding stuff. For the most part, though, the memorable moments in this episode are more about what it's like to be a Roy. Logan's mood swings this week are startling. One minute, he is utterly confused about where he is. The next, he is snarling threats. In one of the episode's most painful scenes, he attempts to apologize to Roman for smacking him at Argestes, then questions whether it actually happened. (Roman, meanwhile, stares out the window, trying to change the subject, awkwardly muttering "cars, buildings, everywhere.") And Logan isn't the only monster casting a shadow over the Roy siblings' lives. Ken, Roman and Shiv are in London, in part, to persuade their mother, Caroline (Harriet Walter), to commit her Waystar voting shares to their cause in the proxy fight. Almost as soon as they arrive, she treats them to a line of self pity and emotional manipulation before eventually agreeing to meet Logan's terms in exchange for a 20 million payout and a promise that the kids will spend Christmases with her. Does she even want to be with them? Apparently not, given that when Ken comes to her in deep emotional distress, intending to open up about the car accident, she waves him off. "Might be better to do it over an egg," she says, before hustling off to bed ... and then fleeing the house before breakfast. There's a good running joke throughout this episode about how the kids fill up on snacks before they visit Caroline, who can't cook. She serves Roman and Shiv a sorry looking dinner of freshly shot pigeon, and warns them there are still some buckshot and feathers in the birds. That's one powerful symbol for life as a Roy. One parent hollers for protein. The other serves inedible meat. The Rich Are Different From You and Me: None As usual, Tom and Greg's scenes produce the episode's funniest moments, from Greg's getting a haircut because "I think I just wanted someone to touch my head" to Tom's maniacal grin when he sees that his underling stashed damning documents in an envelope marked "Secret." None As Greg, Nicholas Braun does some of his best physical and verbal comedy this week, as Greg nervously tests out different strategies for trapping Tom into a recorded confession. ("Put on the disappearing sauce!" he shouts into his hidden cellphone, as his boss squirts lighter fluid onto the evidence.) Matthew Macfadyen is just as sharp, as Tom carefully explains why Greg's "insurance policy" of the Brightstar Cruises paperwork puts him at risk. ("If you were uninsured you'd be a lot safer, ironically.") None Roman looks positively giddy this week watching his sister get kicked around. He giggles with glee as the family skewers Siobhan's memo, mocking its pictures of smiling children and its quotes from Thomas Aquinas and Amelia Earhart. Later, he teases her mercilessly about how little she is being kept up to date on the latest Waystar news. "Do you know nothing of the company you're supposed to be taking over?" he asks Shiv. "We do hate speech and roller coasters." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
CHICAGO Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller and Ishmael Houston Jones have been friends for a long time, since at least the early 1980s. But until a few days ago, these celebrated choreographers had never danced with one another in front of an audience. How had this not happened before? And will it happen again? To wish for more is perhaps to miss out on the full beauty of "Relations," a program lasting just two nights, Friday and Saturday, in which the artists came together to improvise at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Like any improvisational work, this one was about being there then, both for the performers and the audience about making choices in the moment and watching that process unfold, as unpredictable and unrepeatable as life. The program grew out of a conversation between the curator Tara Willis and Mr. Houston Jones, a longtime improviser in New York's experimental dance scene. In 1982 Mr. Houston Jones organized Parallels, a groundbreaking series featuring black choreographers who, like him, were working outside of the modern dance mainstream. Among those colleagues were Ms. Miller and Mr. Lemon. Now in their 60s, the three are like family, or so it seemed on Saturday as they supported, teased, challenged, embraced, evaded and grappled with one another. (I didn't see Friday's show, but Mr. Lemon described it as the more "kumbaya" of the two.) Like most familial relationships, theirs were complicated, at least as they played out onstage, capable of holding affection and aggression, intimacy and distance, compassion and conflict, all at once. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Tucker Carlson, the veteran cable television host and conservative writer, will succeed Megyn Kelly in the coveted 9 p.m. slot on Fox News, solidifying the network's right wing identity in prime time as it prepares to cover the administration of President elect Donald J. Trump. The move, announced on Thursday, comes just weeks after Mr. Carlson, a former co host of CNN's "Crossfire" and founder of the Daily Caller, the right leaning news and opinion site, took over Fox News's 7 p.m. hour. In that role, he has scored high ratings while generating provocative exchanges with guests that earned traction and some criticism online. Mr. Carlson's elevation means that Fox News, for the first time in its two decade history, will have an all male anchor lineup from 8 to 11 on weeknights, after a year in which the network faced serious questions about its treatment of female employees and in which its chairman, Roger Ailes, was ousted in a sexual harassment scandal. It also marks a swift conclusion to an anchor sweepstakes that only emerged on Tuesday, when Ms. Kelly, the network's No. 2 anchor behind Bill O'Reilly, announced that she would be leaving Fox for NBC News, where she planned to host a daytime news show and Sunday newsmagazine. Even senior officials in Fox's newsroom were startled on Thursday when news of Mr. Carlson's appointment emerged on The Drudge Report. Martha MacCallum, co anchor of Fox News's morning news show "America's Newsroom," is to succeed Mr. Carlson at 7 p.m. Her program, "The First 100 Days," which begins Jan. 16, will air for the first 100 days of Mr. Trump's administration, with its future to be determined later, network officials said. Fox's announcement was the start of a day of musical chairs in the cable news industry. Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News anchor whose departure last fall opened the door for Mr. Carlson's return to the nighttime lineup, is joining MSNBC for a daily 6 p.m. show. Few in the television world might have expected that by week's end, two of Fox News's best known female anchors, Ms. Kelly and Ms. Van Susteren, would end up together at NBC. The choice of Mr. Carlson to replace Ms. Kelly suggests that any inclination by senior Fox management to temper the network's conservative ideology or to place a straight news reporter into its prime time lineup, as opposed to a right leaning commentator may have been quashed by Mr. Trump's election. Ratings for Sean Hannity, a Trump champion, are up since election day, and Mr. Carlson's quick success at 7 p.m. suggested that conservative viewers remain a potent force for Fox News, financially and politically. The Murdoch family, which controls Fox News's parent, 21st Century Fox, has said publicly that it has no plans to significantly alter the network's in house voice in opinion programming. Still, the absence of Ms. Kelly, who became the target of vitriolic criticism from Mr. Trump, removes the Fox News anchor who had most consistently challenged the president elect during the campaign. Mr. Carlson, 47, whose father is a former president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, made his reputation as a conservative provocateur, though his style leans more toward William F. Buckley than Andrew Breitbart. Natty and quick witted, though he has shed his once signature bow tie, Mr. Carlson splits his time between preppy enclaves like Georgetown and Maine, and was a magazine writer before turning to television punditry. 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. He has weathered his share of ignominious career moments, including an on air dressing down from the comedian Jon Stewart that led to the cancellation of "Crossfire." An MSNBC showcase, "Tucker," was canceled after less than three years, and he later made an ill fated appearance on ABC's reality show "Dancing With the Stars," where he was cut in the first round. He has also been routinely criticized by liberals and feminist groups for making remarks seen as patronizing or sexist. When his brother, Buckley Carlson, sent an obscene sexist email in 2015 to a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, Tucker Carlson laughed off any concerns. Just last month, he ended a heated exchange with a Teen Vogue writer about politics by encouraging her to "stick to the thigh high boots," referring to her magazine's focus on fashion. Some left leaning sites said Mr. Carlson had embarrassed himself; other right leaning sites said that Mr. Carlson had embarrassed the writer. Regardless of reception, the segment went viral, and even critics of Fox News concede that Mr. Carlson is skilled as a broadcaster. His 7 p.m. show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," routinely wins its time slot among the younger viewers that advertisers crave and whom Fox News, with its aging overall audience, is particularly keen to attract. In December, Mr. Carlson's show beat Ms. Kelly's program among viewers 25 to 54 years old, although Ms. Kelly was off for part of the month. And even without the combative Mr. Ailes, Fox News remains an organization willing to ignore outside pressures. Hours after Mr. Carlson's job was announced, the network said that it was awarding its correspondent Jesse Watters a weekly hourlong show on Saturdays. Last year, Mr. Watters used stereotypes about Asian Americans in a segment filmed in New York City's Chinatown, earning widespread criticism. Mr. Carlson was one of several personalities rumored to be in contention for Ms. Kelly's position, a group that included several female Fox News anchors. One of those anchors, Shannon Bream, will temporarily fill in for Ms. MacCallum in the mornings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A two year old dog named Djalibe getting a Guinea worm pulled from her leg by Laures Dossou, second left, of the Carter Center, a philanthropy founded by former President Jimmy Carter. Scientists have worked for decades to eradicate the painful, parasitic worm, and have nearly succeeded but a spate of infections in dogs worries health officials.Credit...Jane Hahn for The New York Times Nearly Eradicated in Humans, the Guinea Worm Finds New Victims: Dogs Jane Hahn for The New York Times Jane Hahn for The New York Times Credit... Jane Hahn for The New York Times A two year old dog named Djalibe getting a Guinea worm pulled from her leg by Laures Dossou, second left, of the Carter Center, a philanthropy founded by former President Jimmy Carter. Scientists have worked for decades to eradicate the painful, parasitic worm, and have nearly succeeded but a spate of infections in dogs worries health officials. KAKALE MASSA, Chad Martoussia, the celebrity of the moment in this remote fishing village, pants heavily under the awning where he lies chained. Still, he remains calm and sweet tempered as the crowd presses in. Children gawk as volunteers in white surgical gloves ease a foot long Guinea worm from the dog's leg and American scientists quiz his owner, a fisherman, about how many worms Martoussia has had. The village chief, Moussa Kaye, 87, is asked the last time one of his people had a worm. "Not since 40 years ago," he says. In this arid central African country, the long global struggle to eliminate a horrifying human parasite has encountered a serious setback: dogs. They are being infected with Guinea worms, and no one knows how. "They haven't caused a big human outbreak yet, knock wood, but that's my nightmare," said Ernesto Ruiz Tiben, who directs the Carter Center's campaign. Read more about Dr. Ruiz Tiben and his efforts to end a human scourge. To prevent that, Chad is paying villagers to tether dogs like Martoussia until all their worms wriggle out. The reward is 20 cash, plus a stout chain with two locks. (Dogs chew through ropes or are freed by children who take pity on them.) The reward is 100 to humans with worms. To generate publicity, the cash is handed out at ceremonies held in the weekly roadside markets where villagers gather to barter meager fish hauls for goods like plastic buckets or quart bottles of gasoline. At one such ceremony in Dangabol, in southeast Chad, Dr. Hubert Zirimwabagabo, who heads the Carter Center's work in the country, played a quiz game with the audience, handing out bars of soap as prizes. Ultimately, the female exudes acid from her head, creating a painful blister, usually on the leg or foot, but sometimes even in eye sockets or on genitals. When the blister pops, she emerges a yard long uterus as thin and translucent as a Thai noodle. Because the worm must be wound out on a stick, an inch or so a day, some say she inspired the rod of Asclepius, the ancient symbol of medicine: a snake twisted around a stick. The agony inevitably drives the victim to cooling water, where the female releases her microscopic larvae. To continue the life cycle, they must be consumed by tiny aquatic creatures called copepods. After decades of backbreaking work, dracunculiasis is one of two human diseases on the brink of eradication. The other is polio, which persists only in Pakistan and Afghanistan. (The only disease eradicated in humans is smallpox.) Last year, worms were found in humans only in Chad and Ethiopia, and in nine dogs and one cat in Mali. Ethiopia's outbreak may have ended: the cases were all in laborers on one farm where the contaminated pond has been treated. Experts hope the Malian animal cases were dead ends. The country is a strange mix of disciplined soldiers and neglected civilians. In the multinational battle against the terrorist group Boko Haram, Chad's army is a feared force. The gendarmes watching its main highways are alert and ride new motorcycles. But the highways are badly potholed, though tolls are collected every few miles. Roadside markets are often made of sticks and thatch instead of bricks and tin. Even the tomb of Francois Tombalbaye, the nation's first president, is just a car sized lump of tile ringed by barbed wire not a statue in sight. The worm ridden areas lie at the end of this cascade of neglect. The Chari River is wide but shallow, flowing sluggishly toward Lake Chad. The larvae need stagnant water, so the worst affected villages are those beside muddy pools left during the dry season. Reaching these places means bouncing for hours down sandy riverbeds, or even piling motorcycles into a pirogue, crossing the river and riding them in. In the village of Tarangara, a large pond was nearly fished out. Recently six men sieving it for an hour with a 100 foot net came up with only two dozen four inch creatures that elsewhere would be called crappies and catfish. But people are obviously attached to their dogs, and here they are needed for hunting and to protect huts against thieves, crops against baboons, and livestock against hyenas. Culling "would be a big challenge," said Dr. Philippe Tchindebet Ouakou, Chad's national coordinator for Guinea worm eradication. "I would put emphasis on education for behavior change instead." It could also cause an outcry, the Center fears. "In the end, it's the government's program and we can't stop them," Dr. Ruiz Tiben said. "But the Carter Center and the donors want nothing to do with dog killing." "They need to put more skin in the game," Dr. Ruiz Tiben said. He described Chad's President Idriss Deby, who took power in a 1990 coup, as "passive" about the effort. "He says the right things on the phone to President Carter, but doesn't visit the villages to talk to people and make the local governors do more. They're happy for us to do the work, but they don't contribute money." Bureaucrats are paralyzed by fear of losing their jobs, and simple tasks like license plates for the center's vehicles take months. Local officials say they are aware that the world is watching. "Yes, I feel pressured," said Youssouf Mbodou Mbami, the newly appointed governor of Moyen Chari province, where many of Chad's worm cases are. "I might not have chosen this job because this problem persists, but I won't hesitate to help." Dr. Ouakou said the government is keenly aware that national pride is on the line. But "since the dogs and even cats have entered the dance, it is difficult to predict when we will have mastered the situation," he said. President Deby wants to finally end the plague, Dr. Ouakou said but has not, he conceded, given him a deadline. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
THE ad is tantalizing, aimed at pulling you through the showroom door: a brand new midsize sedan for just 199 a month, plus tax, after you've put 2,199 down. For your money, you get a specific version Model CP2F3AEW of the base trim 2010 Honda Accord LX on a three year lease. It comes with an automatic transmission, a decent CD player, air conditioning, cruise control, remote locking, power windows and power mirrors. Sure, the car is just another anonymous corpuscle in the traffic stream; the engine has a mere 4 cylinders, the steel wheels have cheesy plastic covers and the only leather in the interior is your wallet. But 199 is the chump change you get back after you buy something for chump change. If the cut rate Honda isn't to your taste, you can find similar deals, on a national or regional basis, on similarly ordinary cars from Ford, Hyundai, Mazda, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota and Volkswagen. (The Accord offer is set to expire on March 1.) Yes, the killer lease deals are back. But it's not quite 2005 all over again. Leasing declined markedly last year as credit got tight and automakers cut their lease programs, though it has increased in the last few months, according to Joe Spina, an analyst who tracks the auto market for Edmunds.com. "And it's probably going to stay at the same level it is now for a while," he added. "But it's not going to take off to where it has been in the past." One reason leasing has become more attractive is that as new car sales have dropped over the last three years, the supply of high quality used cars has also declined. With the supply down, the values of used vehicles, both at wholesale auctions and on retail lots, have firmed up and residual values have risen. With higher residual values the projected value of the cars at lease end there is less depreciation for the lease to cover. That results in lower monthly payments. PLAINLY PRESENTEDAccord LX has some popular features, like a CD player. John Pearley Huffman for The New York Times Also contributing to the brighter leasing climate are low interest rates, the vast production capacity of assembly plants that build mainstream models like the Accord, automakers' desire to keep those plants busy and their willingness to subsidize the leases (a 2,000 "capitalized cost reduction" on the Accord for example). "We mainly focus our leasing on what I call our five main products: Civic, Accord, CR V, Odyssey and Pilot," said Steve Jaros, Honda's assistant vice president for sales in the Eastern region. Over the last two to three years, amid rising gasoline prices, uncertainty about new vehicle sales and unstable used car valuations, Honda and other automakers pulled back from leasing. "It made all the manufacturers rather conservative on where they were going to place their residual values," Mr. Jaros said. "So we wanted to give time for the market to stabilize and gasoline to stabilize so we could get a better feel for where the market was going, and then slowly get back into leasing. And that's what we've done." Read the fine print in ads for a special promotion lease, however, and a big change is apparent: high credit scores are mandatory. Forget hazy language about offers being contingent "on approved credit." On its Web site, Honda reserves the 199 Accord deal to customers who qualify for the American Honda Finance Corporation's "superpreferred credit tier." While there are other offers for potential lessees with less than glistening credit scores, the best deals are usually reserved for customers with scores of about 710 or higher. Leasing remains, as always, subject to negotiations, just like buying a car outright. And it's a negotiation between the customer and the dealership, not the manufacturer. DCH Honda of Oxnard in Oxnard, Calif., for example, recently advertised new Accord LX sedans for 179 a month. The dealership used Honda's national offer as a starting point, but cut the car's purchase price to lop off an additional 20 a month. "We're being competitive," said Christian Allen, one of the dealership's sales managers. "It's a matter of doing something to attract customers. Very rarely does the customer coming in do exactly what the dealer is advertising." After all, alongside the 199 Accord LX lease, Honda is also offering the better equipped Accord EX sedan for 219 a month (with 2,599 paid at signing) and the EX sedan with a V 6 engine for 269 (with 2,199 at signing). Other midsize cars with 199 deals include the Nissan Altima. Potential Accord lessees can choose to increase their mileage allowance beyond the modest 1,000 miles a month average of the promotional lease. In fact there are more elements to negotiate in a lease car price, initial payment, interest rate, mileage allowance and even, perhaps, the residual value than in a straightforward purchase. The manufacturer's feature lease is often just a starting point. If your credit rating is stellar, if you drive fewer than 1,000 miles a month and if you can resist the temptation to pack on gadgets and upholstery that used to moo, you are likely to find the 199 a month Accord LX sedan a satisfying transportation appliance. The Environmental Protection Agency rates the current Accord, based on its interior and cargo volume, as a full size car, and it feels fairly huge inside. The front seats aren't shaped to hold you in place on a slalom course, but they are cushy and covered in a high grade synthetic mouse fur that feels good even against bare skin. The cabin is sparely decorated, but all of the plastic surfaces and there's nothing but plastic surfaces are nicely textured and soft to the touch. Every switch works with precision, the stereo has an auxiliary jack to pump in music from an iPod and the instruments are easy to read. It's a comfortable, if austere, environment behind doors that close with satisfying thuds. The current generation Accord was introduced as a 2008 model, though Honda has used essentially the same chassis, with double wishbone independent suspension at all four corners, for many years. The car rides well, but there's nothing aggressive about the 215/60R16 all season tires, which keep the handling just short of entertaining. Since the 2.4 liter engine is rated at just 177 horsepower, it's a good thing the car weighs just over 3,200 pounds a modest number for a car this size. Compared with a V 6, the 4 is a bit raucous, but it's well matched to its 5 speed automatic transmission. The engine doesn't feel strained even when climbing hills with a full load of Presbyterians. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Memorial Day weekend celebrates service members who died in the line of duty in tributes across the country, including ceremonies at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In Gettysburg, Pa., site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War with over 50,000 casualties, the 149th Memorial Day Parade is scheduled for May 30, honoring veterans in and attending the event. The route ends at the Soldier's National Cemetery, where President Lincoln gave his famous address. At the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park, run by the National Park Service, Civil War historians dressed in period style bivouac the battlefield Memorial Day weekend, and every weekend from April 2 to Oct. 30, offering a living history look at the armies. Visitors can walk among them to learn about battle strategy and period weapons. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Burt Reynolds's 1977 Pontiac Trans Am, which was used to promote "Smokey and the Bandit," was sold at auction for 450,000. The 400 cubic inch V8 equipped muscle car, which did not appear in the film, had a presale estimate of only 60,000 to 80,000. (USA Today) According to a report from Automotive News, Toyota executives last year rejected a nearly finished redesign of the Prius. Mitsuhisa Kato, an executive vice president for Toyota, said the design had been refined and would be ready for production late next year. (Automotive News, subscription required) Volvo said this week that its presence at auto shows would be diminished as it put more of its resources into revamping its web presence with expanded social media outreach and a "massive" website redesign. Alain Visser, the automaker's sales and marketing chief, said Volvo would hold more of its own events, too, and planned to unveil the XC90 crossover next summer. (The Wall Street Journal, subscription required) Local Motors will offer rides in its 3 D printed car, the Strati, on an indoor track at the Detroit auto show next month. The car, which is made from carbon fiber reinforced ABS plastic, can be printed in about 40 hours. It is then milled and assembled. The roadster made its debut at the International Manufacturing Technology Showcase in September. (DBusiness) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
There's never been a worse time for a show about an abusive man coercing teenagers into sour sexual discourse and insisting they keep his disturbing behavior a secret. And yet Thursday night brings the arrival of NBC's "A.P. Bio," an abrasive sitcom that isn't merely unfunny, it's also deeply unpleasant. Created by the "Saturday Night Live" alum Mike O'Brien, with Seth Meyers and Lorne Michaels among its executive producers, the show debuts in a "special preview" this week before disappearing from the schedule until after the Winter Olympics. The first three episodes will be available online until then, and given how NBC usually operates, one expects promos for the show to be in heavy rotation during the Games. And in promo sized bites, some of the caustic cynicism of "A.P. Bio" might seem refreshing in contrast to more wholesome network comedies. In episode form, though, it's tiring; in the four installments made available for review, the scattershot misery is ironically adolescent. Worse, the show doesn't seem aware of its fixation on skeezy sexual misconduct never a tremendous well for humor, but even less so today. Glenn Howerton ("It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") stars as Jack, a Harvard philosophy professor who slinks back to Toledo, Ohio, in disgrace after being denied tenure. He takes a job teaching advanced placement biology at a high school, though he refuses to actually teach anything. He announces this on the first day, and declares that he and his charges will spend their class time developing potential revenge strategies against his nemesis. He wears scuzzy sweatpants. He is mean. He says if the students tell anyone about what he's doing, he'll give them an F. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Rachel Weisz, a star of "The Favourite," won the prize for best supporting actress this past Sunday at the Bafta Awards, the British equivalent of the Oscars. The night before, she received an even more important vote of confidence. "A woman came up to me at dinner," Weisz recalled, "and she looked me in the eyes and said, 'On behalf of all the lesbians, I wanted to say thank you.'" So it goes for the 48 year old Weisz, who spent the last cinematic year exploring same sex attraction in very different milieus. In "Disobedience," released in April, Weisz and Rachel McAdams played women whose passionate affair scandalizes the Orthodox Jewish community they grew up in, while in "The Favourite," from November, Weisz jousted with Emma Stone as court advisers willing to bed the feeble Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) if it would bestow an advantage in their 18th century games of manipulation. Weisz, Stone and Colman all received Oscar nominations for "The Favourite," but Weisz may have the best shot at winning her wide open category, and she has become the film's trending topic online. Her crafty, confident performance has so bewitched viewers that after a fan on the Bafta red carpet asked Weisz to record a smartphone video saying "gay rights," the two second clip quickly went viral among her female admirers. "I think almost every other film I've done has been in relation to a man," said Weisz, who is married to Daniel Craig and is best known for roles in "The Mummy" and "The Constant Gardener," which earned her an Oscar. "It's unbelievably refreshing and invigorating for me to have now done two films opposite women." While on her way to speak to Oscar voters at a London screening Tuesday night, Weisz called me up to discuss what that female energy meant to her, as well as how she has navigated this awards season alongside Yorgos Lanthimos, the absurdist auteur behind "The Favourite" who first directed Weisz in "The Lobster." Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. In a controversial move, the Oscars will be announcing the winners of four categories during the commercial breaks of the telecast, then editing those results into a clip package. "The Favourite" is nominated in two of those races, for cinematography and editing. What do you make of that decision? I didn't know that was the case! I don't think that's right at all; cinematography and editing couldn't be more important. It was lovely that at the Oscar nominees' luncheon you got to be among people who work in special effects, editing, sound "egalitarian" is the best way of putting it. If I was in charge, I wouldn't do that. In Hollywood, an actress can make multiple movies where she's the only notable female character. It must be gratifying to make a film like "The Favourite," where three women go toe to toe. I don't believe I've been in many films where I've been in deep conversations with women, let alone in bed with them! I really savored exploring those relationships. They're kind, cruel, sadistic, needy, vulnerable, Machiavellian, ridiculous and absurd. They have many, many things going on, which is what makes us human. Olivia Colman won the best actress award from Bafta, and in her speech, she said the three of you were all leads in "The Favourite." Would you concur, or do you consider yourself a supporting actress, as you and Emma have both been campaigned all season? Olivia told me, "I must say how incredible it is that you and Emma agreed to that," but I don't think either of us gave it a second thought. It was decided by people who are specialists in these things, and it seemed incredibly natural: Narratively, we're both supporting the queen, so she's got to be the lead. She is the center of England and the center of our lives even if she desperately needs us to prop her up in the story, which is what my character thinks. I mean, it's just heaven, isn't it? She's got a potty mouth, and what you saw is the polite version. But she's delicious, and so full of love. What has Yorgos made of this Oscar season, which involves so many months of handshakes, Q. and A.s and awards ceremonies? He seems to me to be very proud and happy, but he's not a schmoozer in any way. It was the thing that I immediately liked about him when we met. I actually reached out to him after I saw his film "Dogtooth," and the person I met then in a pub in north London spoke in exactly the same way as the person who received the Bafta award for outstanding British film the other night. I always use the word "deadpan," but he hates it! He doesn't think of anything he does as deadpan. He just sees it as truthful. By now, you must have a sixth sense of how to modulate your acting based on where the camera is. But in "The Favourite," the camera is frequently put in the most atypical places. How does that affect things? I did notice Yorgos wasn't telling us, "You have to stand there," but then again, he doesn't tell you he's going to use a low angle, fish eye lens. He doesn't tell you anything! He doesn't even talk to you about the scene or your motivation. You can't ask him a question like, "Why is my character doing this?" because he wouldn't answer you. He might say something like, "Do it a bit faster." Or "Do it a lot faster." Laughs. He may not want to be called deadpan, but Yorgos can certainly keep a straight face. Do you have the power to make him laugh? I can make him laugh over a glass of wine, but do you mean in a performance? No, I don't recall having made him laugh in any film. He would never want to let us know that it was funny, because then we'd be trying to make it funny. The very first awards ceremony you ever attended was the 2006 Golden Globes, where you won for "The Constant Gardener." What do you remember about that night? That I had big hair. It's very surreal the first time you attend an awards ceremony, and I was pregnant, so I couldn't have a drink to relax. It's like a dinner party where there are cameras in your face, and you're surrounded by people you don't really know but you recognize. I remember seeing Oprah Winfrey at the next table and thinking, "Oh my goodness!" Did you have any idea then just how much your feet would hurt after a season spent primarily in high heels? Oh, forget it! Laughs. I'd love to just go in sneakers to these things, but that would just call attention to itself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
If you are already elbow deep in holiday cake and cookie batter, you may just want to take your chances and stop reading here. But to become wiser and safer, though indisputably annoyed, step away from that bowl and read on. Tasting uncooked foods made with flour can make you dangerously ill, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The report, which recounts the detective work that led to a recall of more than 10 million pounds of flour in the summer of 2016, confirms that a type of E. coli bacteria previously discovered lurking in wet environments like hamburger meat and leafy vegetables can also thrive in arid hosts. "We're not trying to ruin people's holidays but we want them to be aware of the risks," said Samuel J. Crowe, the lead author of the study and an epidemiologist with the division of food borne, waterborne and environmental diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The bacteria is not uniformly distributed in a two and a half pound bag of flour," he said. "A small amount could get you really sick. I've had E. coli and salmonella and it's pretty darn unpleasant." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
I'm staring over the edge of a cliff into a seam of coal some 80 feet thick running along a chasm cut deep into the earth. A gargantuan claw rips a massive bite from the slab and swings it into the bed of a preposterously large dump truck. Scott Durgin, who manages the mine for Peabody Energy, tries hard to communicate its enormous scale. In a typical day, Mr. Durgin tells me, 21 trains depart the mine, pulling 135 cars each. Each car bears 120 tons of coal. At this pace, he says, there is more than 20 years' worth of coal ready to mine under my feet. North Antelope Rochelle is among the biggest coal mines in the world. It produced 108 million tons last year about 10 percent of all the coal burned by the nation's power plants. Standing at the precipice, staring into the thick black mineral vein, I find it difficult to envisage how an enterprise of this magnitude could be stopped, and what could take its place. North Antelope Rochelle is only 30 years old. It wasn't around during the first oil shock of 1973 or during the Iranian revolution of 1979, which led to a second oil shock. It hadn't opened for business when a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania melted down, when 200,000 people gathered in New York City's Battery Park to hear Ralph Nader demand the end of atomic power and Carly Simon sing yearningly about the "comforting glow of a wood fire." Those events set the nation on a hurried quest for alternative sources of energy. Coal was the big winner. In April 1977, President Jimmy Carter call ed Americans to arms, urging a vast increase in coal production to "protect ourselves from uncertain supplies" of oil. North Antelope Rochelle and the other vast strip mines cutting through the plains of Wyoming's Powder River Basin whose low sulfur carbon met standards imposed by the Clean Air Act were the result. Since then, coal production west of the Mississippi has multiplied by four times, to about 640 million tons a year. While nuclear power also ranked high in President Carter's speech, it proved no match against cheap coal and gas especially after the force of American public opinion, scarred by visions of Three Mile Island and Ukraine's Chernobyl disaster, contributed to delays and regulatory hurdles that made building a new nuclear power plant prohibitively more expensive. Today, the world is staring at a similar inflection point in energy policy. Glowing wood fires are now understood to be a problem, spewing heat trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most scientists see coal what James Schlesinger, the nation's first energy secretary, called America's "black hope" as one of the biggest threats to the world's climate. But even as the consensus among experts builds that coal and other fossil fuels must be sharply reduced and eventually removed from the energy matrix, there is no agreement on what sources of energy could feasibly take their place, and how to get from here to there. As in the 1970s, environmental activists remain enthralled by the sun and the wind. But three decades' worth of renewable energy dreams have yielded too little to entrust them with the job of replacing fossil fuels. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. Today renewable energy supplies only about 6 percent of American demand. And most of that comes from water flowing through dams. Solar energy contributes next to nothing. Averting climate change is likely to require much less eco friendly sources of power. This includes natural gas, of course, which emits about half the carbon dioxide of coal. But over the long term it is likely to require much more investment in a big bugaboo of the environmental movement: nuclear power. The arithmetic is merciless. To make it likely that the world's temperature will rise no more than 2 degrees Celsius above the average of the preindustrial era a target agreed to by the world's governments in 2010 humanity must spew no more than 900 billion more tons of carbon dioxide into the air from now through 2050 and only 75 billion tons after that, according to an authoritative new study in Britain. The question is how to square that both with the energy that we need and the energy that we have. The United States Energy Information Administration forecasts that global energy consumption will grow 56 percent between now and 2040. Almost 80 percent of that energy demand will be satisfied by fossil fuels. Under this assumption, carbon emissions would rise to 45 billion tons a year in 2040, from 32 billion in 2011, and the world would blow past its carbon ceiling in fewer than 25 years. "We have trillions of tons of coal resources in the world," Vic Svec, spokesman for Peabody Energy, told me. "You can expect the world to use them all." The only way around this is to put something in coal's place, at a reasonably competitive price. Neither the warm glow of the sun nor the restless power of the wind is going to do the trick, at least not soon enough to make a difference in the battle to prevent climate change. An analysis of power generation in 21 countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Energy Agency projected that even if the world were to impose a tax of 30 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, neither wind nor solar could outcompete gas and coal. A new generation of nuclear power, by contrast, is potentially the cheapest energy source of all. The study projected that the typical nuclear generator in North America could produce power at 50 to 75 per megawatt hour, depending on assumptions about construction costs and interest rates, against 70 to 80 for coal fueled power. Wind powered electricity would cost from 60 to 90, but there are limits to how much it can be scaled up. A megawatt hour of solar power still costs in the hundreds. The study concluded that nuclear power would prove even more competitive in Asia and Europe. It is easy to despair about the climate's prospects. Sure, President Obama's new energy policy calls for tight limits on coal fired power plants. But nuclear power barely merited a mention in his speech at Georgetown University. The odds that Congress will pass a tax on carbon emissions seem as low as ever. Without one, any alternative energy source will have a hard time competing against fossil fuels. Public opinion around the world has become vehemently against nuclear energy after the tsunami damage to the power reactor in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. Germany, one of the most committed nations in the combat against climate change, has turned its back on nuclear power and, intentionally or not, increased its dependence on carbon heavy coal. China, the world's fastest growing energy hog, is building reactors at speed, but it is building coal fired power plants even faster. Robert Stone, a documentary filmmaker who directed "Pandora's Promise," about the environmental case for nuclear power, argues that atomic energy's time is coming. Younger environmentalists don't associate nuclear power with Chernobyl and the cold war. Studies have revealed it to be safer than other fuels. In the movie, Michael Shellenberger, an environmental activist whom Time magazine once named a Hero of the Environment, argues that beliefs that solar and wind power can displace fossil fuels amount to "hallucinatory delusions." Still, the hurdles are substantial. There are fewer nuclear generators in the United States than in 1987. Just maintaining nuclear energy's share of 19 percent of the nation's electricity generation will require adding several dozen new ones. Each will take some 10 years and 5 billion to construct. If nuclear power is to play a leading role combating climate change, it should start now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Alan Brinkley, one of the pre eminent historians of his generation, with a specialty in 20th century American political history, died on Sunday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 70. The cause was complications of frontotemporal dementia, a neurological disorder, his daughter, Elly Brinkley, said. Mr. Brinkley's work spanned the full spectrum of the last century's seminal events and influential characters, including the Great Depression and World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. His "Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression" (1983) won the National Book Award. And his high school and college history textbooks "American History" and "The Unfinished Nation" were best sellers and frequently updated. "For the 20th century, Alan set the agenda for most political historians, especially about the New Deal," Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University and co editor of Dissent magazine, said in a telephone interview. But his interests ranged widely, and he was devoted to teaching. He received teaching awards at both Harvard and Columbia and held the rare distinction for an American historian of teaching at both Oxford and Cambridge in England. Eric Foner, a fellow historian at Columbia, wrote in a foreword to "Alan Brinkley: A Life in History" (2019), a collection of essays written in tribute, that the central themes of Mr. Brinkley's scholarship were "the strengths, limits and vulnerabilities of the 20th century American liberal tradition; the challenges to it, both internal and external; the connections between popular movements and partisan politics," as well as the New Deal's legacies. Mr. Brinkley grew up in Washington, a son of David Brinkley, the longtime NBC News anchor, who died in 2003. His brother Joel was a reporter and editor for The New York Times and died in 2014; his brother John is a writer at Forbes. Although journalism was the family business, Alan was less comfortable in that world than his brothers were and toyed with alternatives. After graduating from Princeton, he applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted, but his father's loathing of lawyers intimidated him and he abandoned that plan. Alan did not escape journalism entirely. He became a singularly public kind of historian, someone who reached out beyond his academic scholarship and engaged with the world at large through the media in an accessible style. Nancy Weiss Malkiel, a historian and later dean at Princeton who was Mr. Brinkley's adviser on his senior thesis, said he had written with a grace and flair unusual for an undergraduate. "Even then, he had an uncanny feel for language a sense of pace, style, composition and felicitous phrasing all too rare among historians in general, let alone history students," she wrote in the tribute book. Mr. Brinkley wrote his senior thesis on the Louisiana politician Huey P. Long. He once described the thrill he felt doing research with primary documents. "I'll never forget the feeling of opening, for the first time, a box of papers, and holding in my hand a letter that Franklin Roosevelt had written and signed," he wrote after his first trip to the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. Touching that letter, he added, gave him "the sense of being a part of the great tradition of historians who have built their work around this exposure to the immediate product of the minds of the great figures, and not so great figures, of our history." His senior thesis became his Harvard dissertation and, later, his first book, "Voices of Protest." He was fascinated by how both Long and the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, the chief subjects of that book, had used the radio in the 1930s to mobilize their supporters. "The thread that ran through Alan's work that American political history was made as much by popular figures wielding cultural influence as by officeholders and policymakers was fully developed in this magisterial rendering of Luce's life," Lizabeth Cohen, a friend and Harvard history professor, wrote. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Being attuned to contemporary journalism perhaps allowed Mr. Brinkley to be one of the first historians to see the rise of the conservative movement in American politics. "Very few historians were writing about conservatives, but he had his eyes open," Mr. Kazin said. "They were changing the political dialogue, and he wanted to understand it. It's become a major theme in American political history." Alan Brinkley was born on June 2, 1949, in Washington. His mother was Ann (Fischer) Brinkley. He was born in the same hospital room on the same day as Frank Rich, the future New York Times chief theater critic and opinion columnist, now a television producer and writer for New York magazine. Their mothers were good friends, both part of a relatively small enclave of Jewish families in Chevy Chase, Md. The boys remained close friends. Together they watched the first installment of "The Huntley Brinkley Report," the nightly news program co anchored by David Brinkley and Chet Huntley, from the Brinkleys' living room couch in 1956. Alan attended Landon, a private boys' school in Bethesda. He graduated from Princeton with a degree in public policy in 1971 and earned his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1979. He taught history at M.I.T. before returning to Harvard in 1982 as an assistant professor. He was a popular teacher, with classes so oversubscribed that admittance was determined by lottery, and he won the prestigious Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize. After just a few years, the history department recommended him for tenure. To the astonishment of many, it was denied. Mr. Brinkley, who was then in his late 30s, was apparently deemed by senior faculty members too young to deserve tenure, Jonathan Alter, a journalist and former student of his at Harvard, wrote in the tribute book. "And rumor had it," Mr. Alter added of those who denied him tenure, "that his popularity including occasional television appearances rendered him suspiciously unrigorous in their jealous eyes." The denial of tenure to a popular professor became a cause celebre on campus and renewed debate over the role that teaching ability, rather than scholarship alone, should play in the selection of senior faculty. In any case, Mr. Brinkley was snapped up by the City University of New York, where he taught before being recruited by Columbia in 1991. He served as chairman of the history department there from 2000 to 2003 and as provost from 2003 to 2009. He retired in 2018. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FANNIE DAVIS My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers By "The World According to Fannie Davis" opens with an extraordinary story. The author, , recalls going to school in 1960s Detroit as a 6 year old black girl. She brings her work to the front of the class for her teacher to inspect but the teacher, a white woman, has something else on her mind. "You sure do have a lot of shoes," she says. She asks Davis what her parents do. Davis says her father "doesn't work" and that she doesn't know what her mother does. Her teacher then asks for an inventory of Davis's shoes, and after the little girl stammers out a list she is told, "Ten pairs is an awful lot." The next day, when Davis wears a pair she forgot to mention, the teacher snaps, "You didn't mention you had white shoes." What makes this incident extraordinary is what happens next, when Davis reports it to her mother, the Fannie Davis of the book's title. Fannie takes her daughter to Saks Fifth Avenue and buys her yet another pair of shoes, yellow patent leather ones that she pays for with a 100 bill. Bridgett notices that the white clerk looks at Fannie the way her teacher had looked at her. Fannie, unfazed, tells her daughter, "You're going to wear these to school tomorrow. And you better tell that damn teacher of yours that you actually have a dozen pairs of shoes." The teacher "never says another word" to Bridgett. All of this is possible because Fannie is a numbers runner. "The fact that Mama gave us an unapologetically good life by taking others' bets on three digit numbers, collecting their money when they didn't win, paying their hits when they did, and profiting from the difference, is the secret I've carried with me throughout my life," Davis writes. "We lived well thanks to Mama and her numbers ... My mother's message to black and white folks alike was clear: It's nobody's business what I do for my children, nor how I manage to do it." Fannie was able to buy the trappings of middle class life while laying the foundation for generational wealth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
For decades, Dr. Daniel R. Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, has crisscrossed the globe to study epidemics and their origins. His attention now is on the Covid 19 pandemic, which first came to public notice late last year in Wuhan, China. Its exact beginnings are sufficiently clouded that the World Health Organization has begun a wide inquiry into its roots. The advance team is to leave for China this weekend, and Dr. Lucey has publicly encouraged the health agency to address what he considers eight top questions. "It's not a legitimate investigation if the team doesn't ask them," Dr. Lucey said in a recent interview. He cited public reports and scientific articles as starting points for his queries, adding that Beijing "has never come out and answered these questions." Clear answers, Dr. Lucey said, would cast light on how the deadly pathogen spread so rapidly and, perhaps, how exactly the outbreak began. China has not been forthcoming with information, and the Trump administration has inflamed the situation with threats and bullying. It has charged, without presenting evidence, that the microbe jumped to humans from a Wuhan lab. On Tuesday, after long threatening to do so, the administration began formal steps to end its W.H.O. membership. A student of epidemics, Dr. Lucey has traveled to Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, at times as a caregiver. In 2014, working for Doctors Without Borders, he treated Ebola patients in Liberia. He posed his eight questions last month in a post for his blog, which he writes for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. The post came in response to an announcement by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the W.H.O., that the agency would be sending a team to China to investigate the pathogen's source a move long sought by the Trump administration. "We can fight the virus better when we know everything about the virus, including how it started," Mr. Ghebreyesus said on June 29 at a regular briefing in Geneva. In May, the World Health Assembly, the W.H.O.'s top decision making body, passed a resolution calling on the agency to work with other international groups to identify the "source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population." Ever since the outbreak erupted late last year in central China, the global rumor mill has buzzed with speculation and conspiracy theories. Experts have ruled out the idea that the pathogen was concocted as a bioweapon. They agree that it began as a bat virus that probably evolved naturally in another mammal to become adept at infecting and killing humans. But so far, after months of concentrated research at sites and laboratories in China and elsewhere around the globe, no clear intermediary has come to light. The first three of Dr. Lucey's eight questions center on the Wuhan wet market a sprawling marketplace that sold fresh fish and meat before being shut down. It was initially viewed as the viral point of origin. That idea was quickly thrown into doubt when a study by Chinese scientists reported that roughly a third of the earliest hospitalized victims including the first had never visited the market. In a May blog, Dr. Lucey quoted the head of China's Center for Disease Control as ruling it out as the pandemic's place of origin. The market, the Chinese health official said, "is just another victim." Hundreds of environmental samples were reportedly collected at the wet market, producing 33 positive results, but few details have been made public. Dr. Lucey asks: Were any of the positive results linked to human infections? And from what kinds of surfaces doorknobs, cutting boards, sewage, garbage trucks were the samples collected? So far, none of the reported positive tests have come from animals. His fourth question widens the scope of investigation to other markets in Wuhan and across China. Were any samples collected from animals "now known to be susceptible to the virus" including cats, tigers, mink and ferrets? (Ferrets are routinely used to gauge the transmissibility of human flu viruses.) He also asks about pangolins, which were initially considered a possible intermediary in the human outbreak. Dr. Lucey's fifth question addresses a detailed report in The South China Morning Post, published in Hong Kong, that identified an early human coronavirus case on Nov. 17 in Hubei province. The province is the size of Washington State, and Wuhan is its capital. In March, Dr. Lucey wrote a blog post about the report, which described the virus's rapid spread in Hubei, based on information that the report said came from the government. Now, Dr. Lucey is urging the investigators from the World Health Organization to determine where each of these early Hubei cases were reported, if indeed they occurred, and whether any other "documented or suspected" human infections may have occurred even earlier. The sixth and seventh questions go to whether the deadly pathogen leapt to humans from a laboratory. Although some intelligence analysts and scientists have entertained that scenario, no direct evidence has come to light suggesting that the coronavirus escaped from one of Wuhan's labs. Even so, given the wet market's downgrading in the investigation, "It is important to address questions about any potential laboratory source of the virus, whether in Wuhan or elsewhere," Dr. Lucey wrote in his blog post. To that end, he urges the W.H.O. investigators to look for any signs of "gain of function" research the deliberate enhancement of pathogens to make them more dangerous. The technique is highly contentious. Critics question its merits and warn that it could lead to catastrophic lab leaks. Proponents see it as a legitimate way to learn how viruses and other infectious organisms might evolve to infect and kill people, and thus help in devising new protections and precautions. Debate over its wisdom erupted in 2011 after researchers announced success in making the highly lethal H5N1 strain of avian flu easily transmissible through the air between ferrets, at least in the laboratory. In his blog, Dr. Lucey asks "what, if any," gain of function studies were done on coronaviruses in Wuhan, elsewhere in China, or in collaboration with foreign laboratories. "If done well scientifically, then this investigation should allay persistent concerns about the origin of this virus," he wrote. "It could also help set an improved standard for investigating and stopping the awful viruses, and other pathogens, in the decades ahead." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Joseph Cornell's "Homage to Juan Gris," 1953 54. His shadow boxes are the focus of "Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell's Homage to Juan Gris," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Joseph Cornell, the homebody artist known for his glass fronted shadow boxes, made no secret of his infatuations. He openly dedicated his works to other artists, preferably dead or distant ones who originated in different centuries and countries. His own life was less glamorous than theirs. He spent his adulthood in Flushing, Queens, in an ordinary wood frame house that he shared with his mother and younger brother. Working in his cramped cellar, he arranged five and dime objects into richly poetic tableaus that prove that sometimes it's better to think inside the box. "Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell's Homage to Juan Gris," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a small, hyper specialized, stunning exhibition that seeks to track the fluttery ways of artistic inspiration. It occupies just one gallery, bringing together a dozen boxes by Cornell and a Cubist masterwork that he cited as their direct inspiration. Juan Gris's "The Man at the Cafe," of 1914, a painting adorned with scraps of glued on newsprint, might seem like a surprising fascination for Cornell, who was neither a painter nor a Cubist. He and Gris never met. They did not inhabit the same city or even the same continent. But Gris came to inhabit Cornell's thoughts in the fall of 1953, a time when you could still make the rounds of the Manhattan galleries in the space of an afternoon. Chancing upon "The Man at the Cafe" in a group show at the Janis Gallery, Cornell was riveted by this image of "a man reading a newspaper at a cafe table covered almost completely by his reading material," as he noted later in his journals. The sentence is ambiguous. Was Cornell saying that the tabletop was strewn with papers? Or rather that the man was hidden behind the opened pages of his newspaper? Either idea accurately describes the Gris painting. Rendered in dramatic contrasts of mustardy yellow and powder black, "The Man at the Cafe" is one of those hide and seek Cubist compositions whose flattened and diligently tilting planes conceal as much as they reveal. After a few seconds of looking, your eyes start to pick out figurative details the outline of a man's hat, the curve of his left shoulder, the coal black shadow cast by his body on a back wall. You can read the headline of his morning newspaper (Le Matin), although presumably morning has passed. A mug of beer is on the table, pressed against a yellow triangle that hints at the day's last light. Most striking is the fastidiously painted surface of the tabletop. It could almost pass for a plank of real wood. The wood grain seems to be of a higher order of reality than either the collaged on snippets of newspaper or the human figure who is represented. The man lacks the sharpness, the physical thereness, of the objects around him. Cornell, too, was a shadow of a man who read voraciously and disappeared into his books. As the writer Susan Sontag, a friend of his, once observed, "Cornell seemed to be a person who lived in his head rather than in his body." He no doubt felt a temperamental affinity with Gris's idiosyncratic version of Cubism, which was more cerebral than Picasso's, more measured, less an evocation of omnivorous appetite than of calm and patient craftsmanship. Much about Gris's life appealed to the part of Cornell that valorized the marginal. A Spaniard who settled in Paris, Gris was the overshadowed, tag along third in the Cubist triumvirate that featured Picasso and Braque. By the 1950s, Picasso was an international celebrity posing bare chested for photographers at his villa in Cannes, but Gris didn't live long enough to garner worldly perks. He died of uremia in 1927, at the age of 40. Cornell always worked in series, and his Juan Gris boxes, of which there are more than a dozen, would consume him intermittently from 1953 into the '60s. They're easy to recognize. They stand about 18 inches tall and feature the same attractive bird a paper cutout of a great white crested cockatoo that the artist lifted from a 19th century British book on ornithology. Gris's influence at times asserted itself with remarkable specificity. For starters, Cornell adapted the telltale human shadow that appears in the upper right of the Gris painting. Cutting out silhouettes and reverse silhouettes from black paper, and pasting them to the back wall of his boxes, Cornell equipped each bird with an inseparable companion. At other moments, the Gris influence feels more generalized, especially in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's magnificent "Homage to Juan Gris" (1953 54). The interior is wallpapered with pages from a French history book, as if to lend the bird never ending hours of reading pleasure. The lesser boxes, by contrast, lack such unity. In "Untitled (Juan Gris Series)," circa 1953 54, the familiar cockatoo rests amid bare white walls, and assorted paper cutouts including the bird's shadow lie in loose disarray on the bottom of the box, as if the artist became distracted and forgot to finish what he had started. Its presence is understandable in a show that aims to offer a complete inventory of Cornell's Gris themed boxes and to thereby initiate a new series of "dossier exhibitions" under the direction of the Met's Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. The Cornell show was conceived, at least partly, to draw scholarly attention to Gris's "The Man in the Cafe," which entered the Met as a promised gift from Mr. Lauder. Curated by Mary Clare McKinley, the show has been given a wonderfully elegant installation. The boxes are displayed toward the center of the room, in four glass vitrines. This allows you to admire the nifty verso embellishments. Two tall windows in the gallery overlook Central Park and create the possibility that a real bird (though probably not a white crested cockatoo) might wing into view. In the end, Gris's influence on Cornell's art was relatively limited. Cornell's greatest works the blue hued Medici boxes from the 1940s, the palaces twinkling in European forests were already completed by the time he stumbled upon Gris's masterwork. It was Surrealism, not Cubism, that first alerted Cornell to the power of art, and which gave him permission to devise a style in which common objects could be made to shed their usual meanings and acquire an aura of jarring strangeness. On the other hand, it is moving to think of Cornell's late life embrace of Cubism, though not the textbook version of Cubism, with all that implies about cold analysis and a fixed program designed to compress multiple views of an object into a single image. What's interesting is the way Cornell came at Gris from an unfamiliar aisle of appreciation. He never exactly explained it, but I suspect his attachment to "The Man in the Cafe" was rooted in its realistic looking wood grain. Standing in front of the Gris, for a second I saw the squarish shapes of the tabletop and the newspaper combine into a long rectangle tilted at a 45 degree angle a wooden plane rising out of shadow to the forefront of the picture. The uncanny part was that the rectangle had the scale and timbered texture of a Cornell box. Perhaps Cornell described Gris as "a warm fraternal spirit" because the painting shows a man in the midst of tinkering with a wooden box. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
AS the world has grown smaller, Americans have acquired tastes that were once foreign. Soccer, si. Sushi, yum. The Euro style sport wagon? Forget it. Like most others who write about cars, I can't drive a station wagon without bemoaning their withered sales. I've worn down my shrink asking why we Yanks, given the choice between a wagon and an S.U.V. a vehicle that's heavier, clumsier and often no roomier will choose the S.U.V. every time. It's especially illogical that more fuel efficient wagons are getting the bum's rush when gas prices have soared. But there's little sense fighting it. So ignore my praise of the 2011 Acura TSX Sport Wagon, just as you would dismiss a glowing review of the latest Senegalese pop sensation. Instead, throw those conformist bucks at, oh, an Acura RDX, a turbocharged crossover sport utility that costs more, gets six to eight fewer miles per gallon on the highway and offers no appreciable advantages in roominess or roadworthiness. With an RDX, at least you won't need to justify your choice to the neighbors, already hemming you in with their BMW X Box, Mercedes High Class or other status flaunting luxury S.U.V. And while the TSX isn't as splashy as upscale wagons like the Audi A4 Avant, BMW 3 Series or Cadillac CTS, it costs 7,000 to 14,000 less. But a handful of smart iconoclasts with a taste for driving or maybe Senegalese pop will find this TSX a slick driving, money saving delight. Maybe they can start a club with other wagon owners, including the Volvo die hards and Caddy come latelys, to somehow make the station wagon cool again. Until then, this TSX, a version of which is sold in Europe as the Honda Accord wagon, will fly under the radar and around many S.U.V.'s. The Acura benefits from being built on a strong foundation, that of the TSX sedan, a car known for the supernatural refinement of its engines and suspension; it is, come to think of it, an ideal donor on which to base a nimble, practical and reasonably priced wagon. Removing the bandages from Acura's sedan to wagon surgery also reveals a more striking car. The TSX wagon looks strong but not stolid, with a handsomely draped body and a rising beltline that wraps an aggressive yet elegant rear end. And as on the 2011 sedan, Acura's shieldlike "power plenum" grille has been blessedly toned down. Despite a mere 3.6 inch stretch over the sedan, this smartly packaged wagon carves out more cargo space, both behind the second row and with that seat folded, than its Audi, BMW or Cadillac rivals and more than nearly any compact luxury S.U.V. There's 25.8 cubic feet behind the split rear seat and 60.5 with the seat down. Yet the Acura is 5.7 inches shorter than the current Honda Accord sedan (the TSX is based on the shorter Accord sold abroad). I helped my friend Matt move in Manhattan, and we crammed a surprising amount of gear into the TSX, filling every cranny of its 70 inch cargo floor long enough for a surfboard, Acura boasts. (Fortunately, our target was Tribeca, not Pismo Beach). My achy back was grateful for the low load floor, barely 24 inches off the ground. Inside, the TSX's finishes, like those in other Acuras, are becoming redolent of old camcorders. It looks well constructed, but there's a periodic table's worth of faux metal surfaces and a creeping sense of design complacency. After recent struggles to find its identity and increase its prestige, Acura has dropped plans to directly take on first tier luxury brands like BMW and Lexus, in favor of a smart luxury strategy. And while bang for the buck may well be where Acura's true soul resides, it must tread carefully: it is still a luxury brand, and if it doesn't fulfill that promise, buyers may decide they're better off with a loaded Honda. Or a Hyundai. Another issue is Acura's too busy central control panel. I counted 37 switches, despite the presence of a double ring, rotary knob controller that should theoretically help relieve the button overload. There are 15 switches on the steering wheel. On a more positive note, the TSX wagon delivers on sophisticated performance, technology and value. The TSX starts at 31,845, which is 1,350 more than the sedan. That rises to 35,495 for the Technology Package version, which adds Honda's navigation system, perhaps the industry's best in terms of mapping, route calculation speed and ease of use. The TSX wagon's 2.4 liter, 201 horsepower 4 cylinder (the only engine available in the wagon) sounds like a paper tiger, and its acceleration time of 8.8 seconds to 60 m.p.h., according to Edmunds Inside Line, would give some powerful 6 cylinder rivals time to stop for coffee. But when a 4 cylinder is this good, it's no chore to drive. This signature supple Honda soars to 7,100 r.p.m., emitting an eager intake whoosh as the tachometer needle climbs. One disappointment is the lack of an all wheel drive option, something that's available on nearly every wagon rival. But pay no mind to critics who grouse about a shortage of cylinders. When Acura first offered the Accord's V 6 in the TSX sedan, all it did was drive up the price and drive down the mileage; it stumbled badly with critics and buyers. The 4 cylinder, on the other hand, literally pays you back, holding down the price and improving fuel mileage. Rated at 22 m.p.g. in town and 30 on the highway, the TSX returned an exceptional 33 m.p.g. on one long highway run, easily beating the federal estimate. Crocodile tears have been shed over Acura's decision not to offer a manual transmission. But with Acura forecasting sales of about 4,000 TSX wagons a year, and fewer than 3 percent of sedan buyers choosing the manual, the company could not justify the investment to satisfy the 100 to 150 Americans who might buy one. The 5 speed automatic transmission, however, remains a soft spot, especially in light of the 6 speed in the larger Acura TL. There's a Sport mode, though, which prevents unwanted upshifts when the car flirts with the red line, the maximum recommended engine speed. As for sporty credentials, it's worth recalling that the TSX sedan is already a longtime benchmark among budget sport sedans. And because the wagon weighs just 129 pounds more, the sedan's well groomed nature is part of the deal. You get the same finely weighted steering, as sensitive as a Bennington poetry major. I only wished for an optional sport package, with a firmer suspension and performance tires. For years, when I've thought about cars I'd buy for myself, I've often homed in on the Volkswagen GTI, or dreamed of a used BMW M3. But with a young daughter at home, those thoughts have expanded to include roomier machines. The TSX Sport Wagon is now officially on that list. This is the rare, do everything family car that automakers are always going on about: handsome, practical, entertaining, technically advanced and fuel efficient. Yet unlike, say, a Porsche Cayenne, its price is solidly mainstream. In other words, Americans will hate it. INSIDE TRACK: What's a wagon got to do to get some love? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
FORT MONMOUTH, N.J. When the Pentagon decided to close Fort Monmouth almost a decade ago, the community lamented the loss of more than 5,000 jobs and wondered what would happen to the sprawling Army base. With 1,126 acres in parts of three boroughs, the base, at the northern end of the Jersey Shore, remained well positioned, relatively close to New York City an hour away by commuter train and to the Garden State Parkway, a highway that runs close to the base's western boundary. As real estate demand in central New Jersey grows more competitive, the site is generating increasing interest. The base's prospects for reuse are brightened by the recovering property market, especially for retail and residential space, in Monmouth County, an affluent area where developable land is at a premium. The Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority, a state agency that manages the sale of the property, says it has been receiving more inquiries from national developers recently than in recent years, multiple proposals for every offer and competitive bids for parcels. The redevelopment has been propelled by the decision by CommVault, a data and information management software company, to move its global headquarters from nearby Oceanport to a new 100 million building on the base. The company's decision is a major step forward for the base's redevelopment, officials say, as well as for the authority's plan to establish a technology hub on the campus and for New Jersey's efforts to expand its technology industry. "With CommVault spending that kind of money here, it was a huge statement," Bruce Steadman, the authority's executive director, said in an interview. "It put New Jersey on the map in large bold letters." The CommVault investment shows that a former military base can be successfully redeveloped quickly, Mr. Steadman said, easing concerns that such efforts may fall victim to bureaucratic delays. The company is expected to begin moving 900 workers into the building next month, less than two years after closing on its purchase of a 55 acre lot for 5.9 million, Mr. Steadman said. He attributed the speed of the move in part to the cooperation of the three boroughs that cover the base Eatontown, Tinton Falls and Oceanport in expediting permits. Gerald M. Turning, mayor of Tinton Falls, welcomed the development as a source of tax revenue and said local schools had the capacity to accommodate extra children, making up for the students they lost when staffing was reduced at a nearby naval weapons station about six years ago. While the borough's land area will expand, it will be able to tax the structures that are built there, he said. "When you're starting at zero and you are able to build on that land, everything you get is a plus," Mr. Turning said. "This development is a godsend to the borough of Tinton Falls." In another sign of growing demand, the authority is in exclusive negotiations with the home builder Lennar to construct a town center consisting of 241 residential units and 40,000 square feet of retail space on the western edge of the base, next to the municipal center of Tinton Falls. Officials are also in talks with RPM Development, a New Jersey based developer of affordable housing, for the renovation of 117 units of officers' housing, and with Kiely Realty Group, also of New Jersey, for the conversion of the 40,000 square foot Russel Hall, the former garrison headquarters and a research center for the Army Signal Corps. "Demand is strong," said Les Smith, senior director at Cushman Wakefield, the broker for the authority. "We've had pretty good success with the properties." For example, Mr. Smith reported significant demand for a 70 acre parcel where 250,000 square feet of retail space and about 300 residential units were planned. "We're continually talking to developers who have expressed strong interest in bidding on that property," he said. "As every day goes by, the market is getting stronger in those areas," Mr. Smith said, referring to residential and retail space. "If you come up with a good development site, they want it." Housing at Fort Monmouth will be renovated and repurposed as rental units. Laura Pedrick for The New York Times While some newer Army buildings are expected to be refitted for new uses, most, dating from the 1940s and 1950s, are set for demolition because they were purpose built and cannot be economically converted. From a total of some five million square feet of space in about 500 buildings, around four million square feet are expected to be demolished. Some buildings, like a 1920s golf clubhouse that has been nominated for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, will be preserved, but the Myers Center, a 673,000 square foot Cold War research center and the largest building on the base, is not expected to survive. Also scheduled for demolition is a formerly top secret structure known as the Star Wars Building, where the Army conducted research into a missile defense shield in the 1980s. The cost of demolition and construction is expected to be borne by the purchasers, who must participate in a public bidding process. "There are no private sales or side deals," Mr. Steadman said. In an effort to dispel any hopes that the disposal of military real estate might mean handouts for those with the right connections, Mr. Steadman stressed that land and buildings were being sold at market rates. "Nobody gets anything for free," he said. "When a military base closes, everybody holds their hands out." But the authority, which is legally required to reinvest sale proceeds in redevelopment, may accept payments in kind for property that has valid social uses, Mr. Steadman added. He cited a former school for children of Army personnel that could have been sold for some 2 million if it had been converted into offices. Instead, it was given to the Tinton Falls School District in return for street improvements and a new water line, both of which will be provided by the borough. Mr. Steadman said the authority had an "excellent" relationship with the three boroughs but acknowledged that some in the community were still uneasy about the impact of the huge development project. While residents were angry and tried to fight the Defense Department's Base Realignment and Closure Commission's decision to close the base in 2005, many are now focused on how infrastructure like roads and schools will cope with the expected new community, Mr. Steadman said. "People are still very worried about what's going to happen to their town," he said. "If you are a resident of Tinton Falls, your borough is going to get an extra 255 acres of land. That's a concern when you are the business officer of a borough." Those concerns led to the communities negotiating a firm limit of 1,600 new residential units on the base. To ease local concerns, the authority aims to make sure that any new or renovated buildings become sources of tax revenue as soon as possible, Mr. Steadman said. The authority is adding more retail space and space expected to be occupied by technology companies to its master plan, as well as cutting back on planned office development in response to a glut in the local market. "In some instances, we are looking at alternate uses for areas that were zoned for office under our master plan," said David E. Nuse, the authority's deputy executive director. Mr. Nuse said the authority was planning to increase its retail area by as much as 100,000 square feet compared with the master plan, and to use some areas that were originally set for office development as part of the planned technology cluster. The authority has also incorporated sustainability into its plan. Some 40 percent of the base will be preserved as open space, crossed by bike lanes and walking trails. The Army's heating and cooling systems will be reused where possible, and an electric vehicle charging facility will replace a conventional gas station. The plan's environmental focus is a nod to anticipated young technology workers, who are demanding more walkable communities where they live and work. "Millennials are less car dependent," Mr. Nuse said. "We don't want this to be some suburban real estate development." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Everyone knows that cats love to shred. But the shredding Pete enjoys is far more likely to damage your eardrums than your couch. This cat plays a mean guitar, and while some members of his species merely expect to be treated like rock stars, Pete really is one. Now he's brought his grooves, his hip swivels, his beats and his bandmates to the Lucille Lortel Theater, where Theatreworks USA is presenting "Pete the Cat" as the latest production in its free summer theater program. Many children already know Pete from the book series created by James Dean. (Not that James Dean, but the cool Pete, often in sunglasses, would probably love to think so.) Mr. Dean, an illustrator, frequently works with either his wife, Kimberly Dean, or Eric Litwin, and their story collaborations have taken Pete to schoolrooms, the ocean depths and outer space. Those destinations all appear in this musical adaptation, along with Paris, where Pete is scheduled to play. But a mean cat catcher interrupts his plans by making him spend a week with the Biddle family, to learn how to be a well mannered house cat. This horrifies Pete: He's nobody's pet. What follows is a high energy, irrepressibly cheerful whirl, more charming than it is hilarious. Directed and choreographed by Dan Knechtges, the show is so thoroughly wholesome that I waited in vain for a litter box joke. But Sarah Hammond, who wrote the book and lyrics, does have fun with the allergy Pete causes in the Biddles' cat loving preschooler, Olive (Brandi Porter), and the panic he inspires in her brother, Jimmy (Adante Carter), a studious second grader. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Australian actress Ruby Rose, 31, may be known for her kick butt roles in "John Wick" and "xXx," but this holiday season she'll be trying out her comedic timing and singing talents in "Pitch Perfect 3," out Dec. 21. Now living in Los Angeles, Ms. Rose, who is the face of Urban Decay, is often traveling to movie sets or on promotional tours. Still, she carves out plenty of time for her beauty regimen (or "self care, as she thinks of it), for which she has dedicated a (dream) closet at home. Find out what she's using, below. I think the oils my skin creates overnight are a good thing and not really dirty. So when I wake up, I just use organic coconut oil on my face in the shower. I like the Nutiva Organic Virgin Coconut Oil best. I work it in as a hair mask, too, and I use it as an eye makeup remover. And I have a spoonful of it once or twice a day. What changed my routine and really my life is the Think Dirty app. I'm obsessed. All these things I thought were good, or natural, were actually loaded with carcinogens. Now I shop a lot online at the Detox Market. They've curated and done the work for me. I use this vitamin D spray it's by One Love Organics. Then I have this little guy by Odacite, which is the Pomegranate Rose Geranium Serum. You add two drops of that to your moisturizer. For SPF, Skinceuticals has a broad spectrum one that's so good. If I'm doing a mask, I have the Mahalo Petal mask, which is hydrating. It's good for red carpets and things like that. I also like a charcoal one from Odacite I'm obsessed with anything charcoal. And also sheet masks. There are very expensive ones for, like, 105 a packet, and then there are the cheaper ones. I tend to have a mixture of the two so I don't go broke. The truth is, I have a whole closet dedicated to my skin and hair care. I consider this all self care. I don't really think about it as "beauty." I really enjoy the process. At night, I use May Lindstrom Blue Cocoon beauty balm. It's the wildest thing. It's bright blue, and you only need a small amount. It's so nice on my skin. I also have the Dr. Spiller Cellular Cream Mask. And there's this Molecular Mist by Sircuit Skin. It says things like "supercharged, anti aggression" and all that, but it's basically a bunch of stuff we need that we don't get from our diets. If I'm not working, I keep it pretty simple. I use Urban Decay One Done foundation and the Troublemaker mascara. It's really good because it gets all of my stray lashes. I do a tiny bit of eye shadow on my lids my favorite palette is the Naked 1, which are bronzes, golds and neutrals and then lip balm. I also like to do a little bit of contouring on my jaw and cheek if I'm going somewhere. And I love highlighting. It gives you a unicorn effect. I have a fragrance cabinet. I collect different fragrances when I travel. A friend of mine got me Tom Ford Neroli Portofino Forte when we spent a week in Ibiza. She said it was so we could always remember this trip. Then I have this wild looking Lubin called Upper Ten; it looks like an old lady's perfume. I was in New Zealand when I picked it up. It smells like heaven. A la Rose from Maison Francis Kurkdjian. I was in Rome shooting "John Wick" when I found it. And there's a cool perfume I love when I don't want to smell overbearing in a meeting: Escentric Molecules. My friend Joey created this company called Eleven Australia. He uses a lot of natural ingredients. The shampoo and conditioner smell like coconut and remind me of the beach. I also like Shu Uemura. I can never pronounce it it's too fancy for me. The Eleven Miracle Hair Treatment is really good. I always use that when I blow out my hair. I also like the R Co Dry Shampoo Paste, but it's literally like I paid for a bottle of dirt. It's great, perfect dirt, though! I love meditation. I love cleansing my chakras and getting crystals and lighting candles. I take about 30 minutes to an hour to focus on calming and cleansing and getting rid of anxiety and getting out of my head. I do a lot of my own stunts so I get massage and acupuncture. I don't love the needles. You'd think with all my tattoos, I'd be fine with them. When I'm in L.A., I go to Dr. Khalsa, an Eastern doctor. I have a Western doctor and an Eastern doctor, and I see them for different things or for the same thing to see what they'll prescribe. At Dr. Khalsa, they'll do allergy tests, acupuncture, vitamin drips and cupping. I had a lot of skin problems for a while. And every time I ate, I would get crazy bloating even if it was just an apple. It turns out I had SIBO. You have to fast for a day and then cut out certain things. My skin cleared up, and it changed everything for me. I've been an on and off vegan for 15 years. I don't drink. The only thing I never eat is red meat. I did reintroduce fish at one point because we need it for our brains. Then I had some tests done, and it turned out I had crazy mercury poisoning. I was only eating fish maybe, three or four times a week at that point. I had to quit altogether. It took me six months to get down to a good level. I have a great trainer. His name is Patrick Murphy. I met him through "John Wick" because he was training Keanu (Reeves). He's so different. You're at the gym and everyone is lifting a gazillion pounds, and you're just standing against the wall moving your hands like a butterfly. You feel like the crazy person, but he's not just putting you through the usual drills. I have a bad lower back, so I do more body weight and low impact exercises. Yoga and stretching is a big part of my routine. I get up at 6 every morning, lie down on a yoga mat and do an hour of strength and stretching. It gets me centered. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
On the second floor of a stately brick building across the street from the Gowanus Canal, an electrical wire dangled over a dusty desk on a recent Monday afternoon, and the sounds of light construction drifted through an open doorway. Until last year, this rather remote building had been home to Retrofret, a niche guitar repair shop. But now it was just weeks away from becoming Public Records, a state of the art music venue and watering hole that hopes to become a beacon for a neighborhood in flux. The club's three youngish partners Francis Harris, Shane Davis and Erik VanderWal sat around the desk along with the saxophonist Rob Reddy, who will be booking an ongoing weekly jazz series there, and explained their idea. During the day, Public Records will serve as a vegan cafe, and at night as a bar. On weekends and many weeknights, the back room will host concerts. The audio systems throughout the space will be profoundly high fidelity, and at the bar a different record collector will spin vinyl each evening. "We want to be a community based performance space that supports avant garde or experimental music, while at the same time feels like a neighborhood spot," said Mr. Harris, the member of the triumvirate in charge of all things musical. Public Records is perched at the northern tip of Gowanus, a postindustrial neighborhood of warehouses and former factories along the edge of the East River, hidden away between the tonier Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. Gowanus has long been hospitable to small manufacturing businesses and artists seeking affordable studio space, but it tends to clear out at night. Club owners prize the cheap rent, but often have trouble drawing a crowd for gigs. "There's not a built in audience. You have to bring your own crowd," said the trombonist and pianist Brian Drye, who runs iBeam, a cooperative studio and performance space about 10 blocks south of Public Records. "Generally what works best here is music that has smaller audiences, and requires an attentive listening crowd." Still, a small syndicate of offbeat stages has sprouted up across the neighborhood in the last decade, helping to fill a vacuum left by the disappearance of experimental music clubs in the Lower East Side and the East Village. (Tonic and Fez closed in the early 2000s, and the Knitting Factory eventually decamped to a smaller space in Williamsburg. The Stone left last year to be absorbed into the New School.) iBeam is run by the roughly two dozen musicians who use it to rehearse and teach. Mr. Drye started the club 11 years ago when an adult student offered to rent him an empty space that he owned on Seventh Street, just a half block off the canal. (A similar institution, the Douglas Street Music Collective, also run by jazz musicians, sprang up soon after but eventually closed down.) On weekday evenings, members of the iBeam cooperative present their own music there; on weekends, Drye books other acts typically a mix of outre improvisers and young composers looking to showcase new work. In 2012, the bassist Matthew Garrison and the entrepreneur Fortuna Sung opened ShapeShifter Lab around the corner from iBeam. It was founded as a music club, but attendance was not strong enough for it to survive on shows alone. So Ms. Sung and Mr. Garrison have turned it into a flexible event space and recording studio. As the neighborhood around it has gradually grown more residential, it has begun to host weddings, bar mitzvahs and student recitals as well as regular concerts: "Shape shifting with the hood," Mr. Garrison said in a recent interview. The shifts have been slow, partly thanks to zoning laws, which have warded off rapid real estate development while keeping the area friendly to the small businesses that use it for storage and light manufacturing. As a result, while many artists have work spaces in Gowanus, few actually live there. But with Public Records open, the area may start to have more of a nighttime ecosystem. In nearby Red Hook, Pioneer Works has become one of New York's essential multi arts spaces, and in Park Slope, just three avenues over from iBeam, Barbes is one of Brooklyn's most creatively curated pint size music rooms. And the team is also devoted to flexibility. Mr. Harris imagines that Mr. Reddy's Wednesday night jazz series which will be in the barroom, rather than the back might open the door to more spontaneous musical happenings throughout the week. "Our hopes were to create an environment where great players can drop in and do a set," Mr. Harris said. Public Records' early bookings for performances in the main space include Damo Suzuki, the Japanese musician known for his stint singing with Can; the ambient music giant Laraaji; and the minimalist techno artist Jan Jelinek. It isn't a rock room or a dance hall, and it's not a jazz club. You could think of Public Records as a kind of genre agnostic music festival in residence (like Big Ears in Brooklyn), or as a contemporary expansion on what Tokyo's jazz record spinning cafes used to be. It's a little bit of both. "I come from a jazz and creative music background, and I've seen a lot of venues come and go really quickly," Mr. Reddy said. He remembered that the Knitting Factory in particular had felt like "a home base where you could go any night of the week and hang," and said that he senses "a real hunger" for something similar again today: something as reliable as it is eclectic. "I wanted to be conscious of programming artists of different ages, different genders and different races," he said, listing some of the jazz musicians that he's already lined up to perform: James Brandon Lewis, Patricia Brennan, Adam O'Farrill. "I wanted it to be inclusive as inclusive as I could." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
UPDATE: We are no longer accepting submissions. You can read the story here. It doesn't take an expert to tell you that relationships can flourish or wither in times of stress. Add months on end without the ability to significantly mingle with others, along with the physical and emotional toll that comes with a pandemic, and this period we're living through may just be the ultimate relationship test. As always, though, humans are creative. There are those who have decided to isolate together after knowing each other only briefly, and those who have chosen to separate from partners, roommates or families. There are stories of people who have moved back in with exes, those who have formed quarantine pods with multiple people, and once happy house shares that have broken down. According to one survey, married and engaged couples are fighting more. Some matrimonial lawyers report rising divorce inquiries while others note that couples are delaying their splits, at least for now. A few weeks ago, we asked readers who were isolating alone to tell us how they were coping. These were their answers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The 1936 presidential election was mere days away, in a United States brought to its knees by the Great Depression, when the Federal Theater Project rolled out a headline grabbing new show "It Can't Happen Here," a play by the Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis based on his sweeping anti fascist novel that a skittish Hollywood had recently, notoriously, pulled from the production slate. Adapted by Lewis and John C. Moffitt, the stage version ran simultaneously in 18 cities, and Lewis himself called it propaganda for American democracy. But when, at a press conference, someone asked whether it might incite people to disorder, he answered, truthfully, "It isn't that good." It's hackneyed, actually a dumbed down agitprop streamlining of the novel, with cardboard villains and dialogue to match. The happy news about Berkeley Repertory Theater's audio production of "It Can't Happen Here" streaming on YouTube, with more than 100 theaters across the country named as "broadcast partners" is that Tony Taccone and Bennett S. Cohen have written a far stronger adaptation than Lewis and Moffitt's blunt instrument. Taccone and Cohen get much closer in substance and spirit to the novel, which warns about the vulnerability of American freedoms, decries the rigidly doctrinaire across the political spectrum and extols active, vigilant liberalism. Directed by Lisa Peterson, who also directed the script's world premiere at Berkeley Rep in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, it stars David Strathairn as Doremus Jessup, the mild Vermont newspaper editor who turns daring rebel after the American people vote an autocrat into office. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Harry Glickman, the founder of the Portland Trail Blazers, at a news conference in April 1971, after the end of the team's first season. Six years later, the Trail Blazers would win the N.B.A. championship. Harry Glickman, who founded the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association and was widely considered the father of professional sports in Oregon, died on Wednesday in Portland. He was 96. His death, at an assisted living center, was confirmed by his son, Marshall. Mr. Glickman held many titles for the Trail Blazers: executive vice president from 1970 to 1987, general manager from 1976 to 1981, president from 1987 to 1994. He was also a tireless promoter and a civic minded entrepreneur in an era that predated the rise of billion dollar sports franchises. "He was just one of those pure guys who loves the state and the city he came from," Chris McGowan, the Trail Blazers' president, said in a phone interview, "and he did everything he could to enrich it." Mr. Glickman helped shape the Trail Blazers into one of the N.B.A.'s great success stories. Like most expansion teams, they got off to a slow start. But, led by Bill Walton at center, they won a championship in their seventh season, and they frequently made the playoffs and consistently drew capacity crowds for many years. Mr. Glickman had long since retired from his front office position when Mr. McGowan took charge of the team in 2012, but he still valued the organization and the city he called home. He sought out Mr. McGowan, who was relocating from Los Angeles, after his introductory news conference and extended an invitation: How about they take a tour of Portland the next day? "He came and got me, and we literally spent three hours driving around Portland," Mr. McGowan recalled. "He showed me all the landmarks, where the Blazers had their championship parade, the basketball courts where Bill Walton spent time. I'll never forget it." Harry Glickman was born in Portland on May 13, 1924, and raised there by his mother, Bessie, who worked in the garment industry, after she and his father, Sam, divorced. He enrolled at the University of Oregon to study journalism, but left to spend three years with the Seventh Army's 12th Armored Division during World War II. He was elevated to the rank of staff sergeant while serving in Europe, and was awarded a Bronze Star. After returning home, Mr. Glickman completed his degree and hoped to write about sports for one of Portland's two daily newspapers. But, unable to land a job right away, he gravitated to the business of promoting sports. He staged boxing events and lured the Harlem Globetrotters and the National Football League to Portland for exhibitions. Mr. Glickman was the president of a company called Oregon Sports Attractions and, in 1960, founded a minor league hockey team, the Portland Buckaroos, which went on to win three league championships in front of adoring crowds. Convinced that Portland was a viable home for big time sports, he sought to land one of the N.F.L.'s expansion franchises in the mid 1960s. He received assurances from his friend Pete Rozelle, then the league's commissioner, that it would happen if the city were to approve the construction of a 40,000 seat stadium, the Delta Dome. But the proposal fell short by about 10,000 votes, and the Delta Dome was doomed. Mr. Glickman was undeterred. As the N.B.A. sought to expand in 1970, he lined up several wealthy investors to buy one of the league's new franchises for 3.7 million. The Trail Blazers were not an immediate success. Fewer than 5,000 fans showed up on Oct. 16, 1970, for the team's first home game, a 115 112 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers that provided false hope: The Trail Blazers were one of the worst teams in the league through their first four seasons of existence. But Mr. Glickman had a motto, "You win with good people," and the Trail Blazers eventually grew into a winner. Walton joined the team in 1974 after an All American career at the University of California, Los Angeles, and later helped lead the Trail Blazers to the championship, an achievement that Mr. Glickman described as "total, complete ecstasy." Mr. Glickman's autography, "Promoter Ain't a Dirty Word," was published after that season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Whether you're a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, or just looking to get away from anything related to the presidential election, hotels around the country have you covered with special packages. Some offers are valid only for election night, Nov. 8, while others are also available for a few days before and after the event or up until Inauguration Day, Jan. 20. "The election is on everyone's minds, and hotels are using the event as a clever marketing tool to bring in business," said Ignacio Maza, the executive vice president of the Signature Travel Network. Below is a selection of packages with an election theme. Kimpton Hotels Restaurants has 10 hotels in Washington, and from now through Nov. 9, the brand is offering a Race to the White House package at all of them. Included are accommodations, two cocktails, an in room massage and a running map of routes that pass the White House and other landmarks. Prices from 289 a night. Rooms can be booked online with the code RACE or at 1 800 546 7866 with a mention of the rate. The Dupont Circle in Washington gives guests the chance to pick between a Democratic or Republican themed stay with its package, Slice of the City: Your Vote, Your Stay, available through Jan. 21. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It's hard for an elder statesman to get respect anymore, even in auto showrooms. Take the Toyota RAV4, which created an entirely new vehicle segment when it arrived on the scene in January 1996 as the original "cute ute." The RAV4 formula a small vehicle with a carlike unibody and a dose of sport utility attitude was right for the time. Honda, which was simultaneously distilling its own secret sauce, brought out the CR V later in the year. After 17 years, the compact crossover class continues to grow, and almost every automaker has an entry. Toyota considers the RAV4's main competitors to be a more select group: the Chevrolet Equinox, Ford Escape, Honda CR V, Hyundai Tucson, Kia Sportage, Mazda CX 5 and Nissan Rogue. But as competition has intensified, the RAV4 though now a larger, more capable, family friendly wagon has lost its distinctiveness. By last year, it had settled into fourth place, with sales of about 166,000, far behind the CR V and trailing the Escape and Equinox as well. The entries from Honda and Ford have been recently redesigned. Now it's Toyota's turn with this fourth generation RAV4, which went on sale in February. Shoppers will find that while something has been lost, something has been gained. Gone is the V 6, and the sole remaining engine, a 2.5 liter 4 cylinder, now gets better gas mileage. Also gone are the side hinged rear door and the outside mounted spare tire, replaced with a more practical, conventional top hinged liftgate and a spare tire beneath the cargo floor. I doubt that many RAV4 owners will miss the tiny, impractical third row of the previous generation. If they do, they will be mollified by more cargo space. Toyota offers the RAV4 in LE, XLE and Limited trim levels at base prices from 24,145 to 27,855 with front wheel drive. All wheel drive costs 1,400 more. A rear camera is standard on all versions. Blind spot monitors with rear cross traffic alert it lets you know if a car approaches from the side while you're backing up is an option on only the Limited. I tested the midgrade XLE with all wheel drive and a price of 27,565, including 1,030 for the only option available on the XLE. Called Display Audio, it includes a 6.1 inch screen, navigation system and the Entune infotainment features. While the wheelbase remains the same as last year, the RAV4 has shrunk two inches in overall length and about an inch in height. And, as happens when you've been around for a while, the Toyota has gained an inch in width. The exterior redesign is an improvement, with a more modern, aerodynamic look. The in line 4 is carried over and is now rated at 176 horsepower, 3 less than before, with 172 pound feet of torque. A new 6 speed automatic brings the 4 cylinder RAV4 out of the transmission Dark Ages. The 4 speed is finally banished. The engine and gearbox work together smoothly with quick first to second shifts that provide better acceleration around town. Fifth and sixth have taller gear ratios aimed at improving highway mileage. Despite this, the fuel economy figures don't blow away the competition. The front wheel drive CX 5 does better than the front drive RAV4, and the Forester with a 2.5 liter engine and a variable transmission beats the all wheel drive Toyota. The front drive RAV4 is rated at 24 miles per gallon in town (2 more than before), and 31 on the highway (a gain of 3). With all wheel drive, the RAV4 is rated 22 in the city (up 1) and 29 on the highway (up 2). ECO mode regulates the engine output and the climate controls to improve fuel economy. In ECO, the engine response seemed a bit more leisurely because, in the quest for fuel efficiency, the transmission did not downshift to a lower gear as quickly as in Sport mode. Toyota does not have an official estimate of the fuel savings. But when I switched from Auto to ECO mode, the needle of the tachometer routinely dropped by 400 to 500 r.p.m. In Sport mode, the transmission downshifts quicker and holds gears longer, providing more get up and go. And the Sport setting improves the steering feel, which in other modes I found a bit light. By reducing the amount of electric assist by about 20 percent, Sport mode gives the steering more weight and a sense, at least, of a better connection to the road. The suspension doesn't change, however, and I found the ride a bit stiff for a vehicle that tries to appeal to everyone. My all wheel drive test car handled reasonably well, whether in Auto or Sport mode, on winding roads in northern New Hampshire. But with the improved all wheel drive system, Sport mode offers an advantage. As soon as the driver turns the steering wheel, 10 percent of the torque transfers to the rear wheels. This offers improved agility and stability over the previous system, which according to Mario Apodaca, Toyota's product education administrator, did not use the steering wheel angle to start a torque transfer. In any mode, the torque distribution in all wheel drive can vary from 100 percent to the front wheels under normal driving conditions, for the best fuel economy to a 50 50 split. And the system automatically shifts from front wheels to all wheels during acceleration or when the wheels start to slip. While the interior feels airy, it is not a particularly Zen space. First, there is a fair amount of tire and road noise, despite added sound suppressing materials. Still, many rival crossovers are noisy as well. As for aesthetics, there's a nicely padded scalloped dash panel, but it seems an attempt to distract from all the other hard plastic bits. There are at least three different plastic finishes in the cabin, which may be why it seems rather busy. With their side bolsters, the XLE's front buckets have a cradling effect even though the seatbacks feel thin. Perhaps it's because the backs are carved out to increase rear knee room by 1.6 inches. (Rear legroom was reduced by about an inch.) Yet all but the very tall will find enough room in the back seat. And as an aid for comfort, the rake of the rear seatback can be adjusted. The RAV4 has 38.4 cubic feet of cargo space, 2 more than the previous model. If you fold the second row, you create a spacious cargo hold of 73.4 cubic feet, virtually the same as in the 2012 model. When it comes to making everything inside the vehicle work, you can either use old fashioned knobs or the Display Audio touch screen. That system works everything from audio to navigation to the heating and air conditioning. As someone who isn't all that tech savvy, I found Display Audio, and the voice controls, easy and intuitive to navigate. The RAV4 is well equipped with safety features and has eight air bags instead of the usual six. One is for the driver's knees and another is in the front passenger's seat cushion to help keep the passenger from sliding under the seat belt in very severe front collisions. The front seats are also designed to help protect against whiplash. The RAV4 received four stars (out of five) in the federal government's New Car Assessment Program crash test regimen. The Toyota is rated a Top Safety Pick by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which means it has a Good rating in four of that group's crash tests, though it has not been tested in the newest, more severe small overlap front test. The institute said Toyota asked for a delay so it could make changes to improve the RAV4's test performance. The RAV4 is therefore not eligible for the institute's new Top Safety Pick award. Toyota is aiming for 200,000 sales this year, which is many fewer than the record 281,652 CR Vs that Honda sold last year and fewer than the Escape and Equinox. With all the changes, the RAV4 is a sensible and pleasant choice for someone shopping for a compact crossover. And certainly Toyota's reputation for reliability is reassuring to many consumers. But there is one hurdle that keeps the RAV4 from becoming the supreme leader of compact crossovers: despite all the changes and upgrades, it still doesn't stand out from the crowd. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A wild haired spirit who calls herself Care has come to taunt and haunt the avaricious Faust. Spending his days with Mephistopheles doesn't ruffle him a bit, but Care? She is freaking him out. "Thank you for your question," Care says, appearing, and with this simple line imbued with mocking humor by the wondrous, mellifluously voiced Karen Kandel Mabou Mines's "Faust 2.0" bursts into life. Her scene with Faust (Benton Greene) is just a cameo, really, and she delivers her half on video. But even as Care multiplies, surrounding Faust on several screens at once, there is no question that she and he are in the same space, in dialogue with each other, however fraught. In her thrilling intensity, Ms. Kandel overcomes the trouble that hamstrings the rest of Sharon Ann Fogarty's complexly ambitious production at the theater's new home at 122 Community Center: mixing a live cast of six actors with more than 20 who appear on flatscreens arrayed around the handsome nouveau medieval set. (Scenic design is by Jim Clayburgh; video design, by Jeff Sugg.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
After 11 seasons, "The Walking Dead" is finally going into the grave. The long running gritty AMC drama, which is based on the popular comics by Robert Kirkman, will conclude in 2022 with an extended 24 episode season, AMC announced on Wednesday. The episodes are scheduled to air over the course of two years. But its fans can take solace in the fact that, like its signature zombies, the franchise isn't dead for good. The show's current showrunner, Angela Kang, will return to oversee a spinoff series starring the cast members Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride as Daryl Dixon and Carol Peletier, planned for 2023. The new series is being created by Kang and Scott M. Gimple, the chief content officer of the "Walking Dead" television and cinematic universe. "'The Walking Dead' flagship series has been my creative home for a decade, and so it's bittersweet to bring it to an end," Kang said in a statement. "But I could not be more excited to be working with Scott Gimple and AMC to develop a new series for Daryl and Carol." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In New York at the end of the 1970s, many people thought painting was all washed up. And if not washed up, it had to be abstract the more austere, unemotional and geometric, the better. Then came the 1980s and a generation of young painters, like Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and everything changed. With "Fast Forward: Painting From the 1980s," an irresistible if flawed exhibition, the Whitney Museum tries to sort out how that happened. The '80s artists were initially called Neo Expressionist, an insufficient term, given their stylistic diversity, but one that signaled their accessibility and flair. They drew from art history, the news, graffiti and pop culture. Their work embraced different forms of narrative, often with psychological or erotic overtones, and new kinds of self awareness and worldliness. Even those who painted abstractly had it, in the form of humor or outside references. Across the board, many worked in large scale, often physically eccentric ways. Mr. Schnabel's habit of painting on broken crockery became an emblem of the moment, but was only one variation on the bulked up or expanded forms of collage devised by these artists. The Neo Expressionists were an instant hit. The phrases "art star" "sellout show" and "waiting list" gained wide usage, sometimes linked to artists you'd barely heard of. Appearances in glossy magazines became routine. And many people were not happy. The Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd wrote that "talent may strike" Mr. Salle and that Mr. Schnabel "may grow up." Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, a leading art theorist, labeled them "ciphers of regression" insignificant, backward daubers who would soon disappear. For a long time, that seemed to be the case. Over the last quarter century, '80s painting has tended to be ignored, if not maligned for the macho persona projected by some of its practitioners, and for reheating the art market after the relatively quiet, supposedly pure '70s. The Whitney show is the first attempt by a New York museum to survey this period, to feature the art stars of Neo Expressionism but also to include lesser knowns and to demonstrate as with any period that there was much more going on. The heady sense of the 1980s is felt right off the elevator in three works rooted in street art and graffiti, each presenting a complex world in a distinct style. Kenny Scharf's mural size "When the Worlds Collide" (1984) is a cartoon graffiti outer space fantasy, mostly in red. Basquiat's 1982 painting "LNAPRK" (for the Luna Park outside Milan) half turquoise, half black, with an idiosyncratic use of stretcher bars presents a bristling stream of consciousness overlay of cartoon faces, a bull's head scavenged from Picasso, the phrase "Italy in the 1500's" and "essen" eat in German repeated three times. These works are hung on walls covered with Haring's black and white graffiti figure patterns as well known as Mr. Schnabel's plates along with an untitled and unusual Haring piece. Rendered in felt tip on synthetic animal hide, like a jazzed up prehistoric work, it presents the implicitly moral Haring universe with figures and symbols signifying love and war, life and death, the satanic and the religious, all interlocking. Drawn from the Whitney's collection, "Fast Forward" has great moments, in individual efforts and the groupings worked out by its organizers, Jane Panetta, an associate curator, and Melinda Lang, a curatorial assistant. They allow the paintings to complement, but also challenge, one another. In the first gallery, we can compare the different styles and emotional urgencies in three big paintings by Mr. Fischl, Mr. Schnabel, and Leon Golub. The 1983 Fischl diptych "A Visit To / A Visit From / the Island" contrasts frolicking white people and struggling Haitians on different tropical beaches, starkly raising the issues of the world's refugee crises and what is now called white privilege. Its loosely painted realism owes something to both news photos and the Ashcan School. Opposite is Golub's "White Squad I," from 1982, in which three mercenaries or soldiers (who are not all white by the way) stand over the prone bodies of a brown skinned man and woman who seem to have been beaten. All the figures float against a background stained rust red, evoking heat, violence and blood but also the heroic color fields of Abstract Expressionism. The huge canvas, unstretched, and flat to the wall, has the grandeur of a Renaissance fresco. Between them, Mr. Schnabel's vibrant "Hope," from 1982, conjures a diffuse existential unease grounded in European motifs. A skull, a crucifix and the suggestion of a sorrowing Rubenesque nude press in on a naked man (possibly the artist) who may be leaving them behind. At once absurd and solemn, it is rendered in big splintery brush strokes of gorgeous colors on a patchwork collage of gold and blue velvet (the blue resembles an overheated Titian sky). On view at the Whitney for only the second time in 20 years, this painting is a breathtaking sight. The second gallery groups together stars, like Mr. Salle, with others, including Joyce Pensato, overlooked until recently, who dallied in the images of popular culture, pulling its meanings in provocative directions. Mr. Salle's harlequin figures, painted from color reproductions against tones of blue and orange, are splayed across the top half of his "Sextant in Dogtown," from 1987. Below this elegant mix of old and modern are three inky renderings, indelibly contemporary, based on photographs Mr. Salle took of a seminude woman holding a garment in one instance and a Noguchi lamp in another. The work is an outstanding example of Mr. Salle's visual sophistication. In comparison, Kathe Burkhart's blunt "Prick: From the Liz Taylor Series (Suddenly Last Summer)," from 1987, reprises a movie scene with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in exuberantly trashy paint, vinyl and fake gold leaf. Walter Robinson's painting "Baron Sinister" (1986) places a heavy breathing pulp fiction cover on a demure field of white Rymanesque brushwork, and Peter Cain's hyper real "Z" (1989) reduces a gleaming ad ready image of a car to a phallus on wheels. The Whitney show is quite satisfying even revelatory since many works have not been on view in years. But the exhibition's unrealized potential is equally visible. To start with, the Whitney's collection has some unfortunate gaps. Among the most glaring is the absence of one of Philip Taaffe's burnished reprises of the '60s Op Art paintings of Bridget Riley or Victor Vasarely, which operated in the gray area between the Neo Expressionists and the Pictures Generation. Also, "Fast Forward" has not been given enough room to even take advantage of outstanding '80s paintings the museum already owns. Over a dozen artists are represented with small works mostly on paper crowded salon style on one wall, which is insulting. But there are pleasant surprises here: early works by Andrew Masullo; a Nancy Spero collage; and a painterly, highly personal Glenn Ligon. With more space, some of these artists could have been represented by larger efforts. The show reminds us that art doesn't adhere neatly to decades; what we consider '80s painting began in the 1970s and extended into the 1990s. Too bad the curators didn't stretch the decade a bit more. They could have added Joe Zucker's funny beautiful "Merlyn's Lab," from 1977, whose mosaiclike surface of color soaked cotton balls presages Mr. Schnabel's broken crockery. Elizabeth Murray's great 1978 painting "Children Meeting" also deserves to be here. With its bold scale, brilliant colors and grand biomorphic evocations of cartooning and Surrealism, this is among the first paintings of the American 1980s and would have given Mr. Scharf's "When the Worlds Collide" a run for its money. Nonetheless, "Fast Forward" reveals a complex subject crying out for attention by outlining how the Neo Expressionists and their '80s cohort broke painting wide open. Their legacy is a sense of freedom and possibility that infuses the medium to this day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When you fly into Palm Springs, the geometry of pool centric living is clearly laid out below, in the repeating grid of aquamarine rectangles, ovals and odd little squiggles. What is it about the swimming pool that grabs us by the hand and pulls us in? Nowhere is it more entwined with the history and culture of a place than the bright, sun baked desert oasis of Palm Springs. I'd always wanted to pool hop through this place, touring midcentury modernism through its fabled and fabulous hotel and private swimming pools. By 1955, Palm Springs already had 900 swimming pools within its city limits, and Esther Williams was the pool cover girl of the era, swimming it up at El Mirador Hotel, with its Olympic sized pool with five diving boards and an underwater observation window. (She once guessed that she'd swum, oh, about 1,250 miles for all of her films.) Today, there are some 40,000 pools within the city limits, which, astoundingly, amounts to about one pool for every year round resident (in the winter, the population doubles as snowbirds fly in for the season). Recently, I came to Palm Springs for a refresher course in where pool hopping can take you a kind of old and new look at the sensory romance around the American swimming pool. I'm in the water most mornings. While I like the wildness of the ocean, I love the comfort of a pool. This comes from an adolescence spent swimming with a local team, and as a lifeguard when I was a teenager. As an adult, I've begun to appreciate the pool as a mode of transport. Pools can be anywhere, and are especially necessary in a landlocked locale. Enter and you may go anywhere in your thoughts; enter in the specific geographic environment of Southern California and you gain insight into the American optimism of the post World War II era. The pools of Southern California have stood in for so many American ideals optimism, yes, but also "wealth, consumerism, escape, physical beauty, and the triumph of people over nature." So begins the expansive exhibition catalog for "Backyard Oasis," a show organized by the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2012 that explored the swimming pool in Southern California photography between 1945 and 1982. The pool is both entertainment and escape. Under the palm trees in a desert town built over an aquifer, the symbolism of the pool as oasis is particularly resonant. It is refuge and relief from the heat, from daily difficulties, from the 24 hour glare of nearby Los Angeles. Screen idols had been fleeing the pressure cooker of Hollywood for the poolside pleasures of Palm Springs' resorts since the 1930s. You could alternately seek entertainment and silo yourself away. Classic hotel pools still in existence include the one at the Riviera, a hangout for Sinatra, Elvis, and Sammy Davis Jr. Opened in 1959, the resort showcased the iconic Palm Springs pool through the decade that followed. Part of the allure, of course, is pure nostalgia for the panache with which these film stars pulled off this lifestyle. When I visited, the mirrored glitz of the Riviera's lobby and the vintage pinups in the poolside cabanas made clear the two rather opposing faces of pool life in 2017: party and retreat. One must choose carefully. The size of the Riviera, with 400 rooms and 24 acres, is more conducive to the party side of things. This and other latter day playgrounds, many fashionably reincarnated from old roadside motels the Ace Hotel and Swim Club, once a desert modern Westward Ho motel with a Denny's attached to it; the rainbow hued Saguaro, a former Holiday Inn are popular with weekenders from Los Angeles and with the Coachella music festival crowd. Maybe I'm old fashioned, or maybe just old, but to me the lavish pool party side of things is secondary to the spirit of the swimming pool as a simple extension of daily living. By this I don't mean vast pools to do laps in, but diminutive gems with which to enjoy the languid, liquid lifestyle of an afternoon drink outside, countering the heat with the sensory pleasures of submersion, so necessary in a place where daytime temperatures soar to 110 degrees in the summer. Coming closer to my ideal is the 17 room Del Marcos, a groundbreaking example of desert modernism when it was designed by the architect William F. Cody in 1947; the heated saltwater pool is situated squarely in the midst of a U shaped building constructed from local stone, redwood and glass. The saltwater in the pool makes a difference, I think. It feels a little like a secret like smuggling in an imaginary vial of ocean all your own, here in the middle of the desert. I ended up making my poolside home at the tranquil, rustic Sparrows Lodge, built in 1952. Two little birds beckon from the roadside sign. There's a cheerful summer camp for grown ups vibe to the airy, high ceiling ed barn and rectangular pool, lined with 20 intimate, dark wood bungalows tucked under the shady canopy of desert foliage. I spent three happy days hopping from pool to hot tub and back again, novel in hand. Rinse, repeat. Keeping me company were a group of young women on a writing retreat, a canoodling newlywed couple from France, and a solo male traveler in his 40s from New York, slipped loose for a time, he said, from his everyday urban responsibilities. "I just want to float in the pool and forget everything," he said with a deep, world weary sigh. The lodge's lofty barn houses a bar, a tall communal table and a cozy book strewn sitting area. One afternoon, I spotted the perfect distillation of poolside Palm Springs then and now in a framed, postcard size photo of the Sparrows' original, circa 1950s property. Though the barn and bungalows were painted white, the scene around the pool was familiar: couples on lounge chairs, guests swimming in the pool, a young woman in a red bikini in the foreground with one toe dipped in the water and dreamy eyes looking off into the middle distance. Maybe she's waiting for a drink. Maybe she's contemplating the possibilities of some other life. Maybe she's doing both. After all, Palm Springs is a place where you can escape by diving in. And when you're ready to emerge, the bartender will ask if you want your drink by the pool. Out on a patio strung with lights, the evening water shelled with pink, the only answer is yes. I discovered perhaps the best iteration of pool life one morning while overlooking the whole of Palm Springs at the Frey House II, perched on the side of the city's striking San Jacinto Mountain. Designed and built into the slope by the Swiss born modernist architect Albert Frey in 1963, the house is only 1,200 square feet, including a guest room addition the architect made years later. But the effortless flow from indoors to out and back again is the aesthetic that governs the living space, and it makes the house seem less a house than some extension of this environment, with a tiny bean shaped pool fed by a secret spring. Turquoise, cholla cactus green, the yellow of a brittlebush flower: the colors of the simple, elegant house, constructed of inexpensive materials and needing little maintenance just concrete block, steel columns, glass and corrugated aluminum mirror the particulars of the desert. As the rippling light from the pool at the front of the house echoed on the blue green aluminum ceiling of the interior space, I thought that being here was like sitting inside a sunlit desert aquarium, if there could be such a thing. "It's about enjoying life, but paired with a thoughtful consideration of scale, function, and environmental soundness," Ms. Williams, of the Palm Springs Art Museum, said. I came here for a tour with her because, well, private homes have some of the best pools. I couldn't resist dipping a hand into the cold, clear water; I imagined myself as Mr. Frey, still in his swimsuit, sitting at his drafting table after a mind cleansing swim in the pool, that glorious view of the desert floor laid out before him. At the time it was built, his was the highest house in the Coachella Valley. Ms. Williams told me that the museum's sunset hour tour of the house is particularly special. It includes wine and cheese, yes, but also a metaphysical luxury: that of expanded time, to lounge poolside on those built in stone benches, to take in that magical view. It was then that I came to appreciate that in Palm Springs, pool hopping is akin to time traveling, each expanse of water reflecting the past and present; the possibilities of multiple slices of life; the intense blue stillness of the sky, so glassy above and below, a forever mirror of the other. Bonnie Tsui, a writer in Berkeley, Calif., is working on a book about swimming, to be published by Algonquin Books. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
PARIS Has President Francois Hollande let the nationalization genie out of the bottle? After Mr. Hollande and his industry minister raised this week the possibility that the French state would take over an ArcelorMittal steel factory in a dispute over the foreign company's plans to close two blast furnaces, union workers in another industry shipbuilding are calling for the government to seize their foreign employer's property. The French corporate establishment is bracing for a global backlash, if the nationalization impulse takes hold. On Thursday, unions representing workers at the STX shipyard in Saint Nazaire, on the Atlantic coast, issued a joint statement demanding that the French government "do everything possible to keep the shipyard open, even, if necessary, breaking European Union rules." The shipyard is already partially owned by the French government, but is controlled by STX, a South Korean business group. With business slow in the yard's mainstay cruise ship building industry, about half of the shipyard's labor force of 2,100 is now idled. The unions are betting that the current Socialist government, if it controlled the shipyard, would put everyone back to work. "The door is open, and we want to open it as wide as possible," Jean Marc Perez, the representative of the Force Ouvriere union at the STX shipyard, told the media. The nationalization of the shipyard, where almost half of the 2,000 workers are furloughed on partial pay, "is essential," he said. An STX spokeswoman in Saint Nazaire and a spokesman in Seoul both declined to comment on the unions' demands. The office of the French industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, did not respond to requests for comment Thursday. There is a potential strategic rationale for nationalizing the STX site in Saint Nazaire, on the Atlantic coast near the mouth of the Loire River. It is the last large shipyard in France and builds warships for the French navy. Unions have long called for government intervention at the shipyard, given the labor lull. But the dispute with ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel company, and based in Luxembourg, is giving new life to their demands. The industry minister, Mr. Montebourg, earlier this week called for a "temporary nationalization" and resale of the steel plant, at Florange, near the German border, if the company followed through on a planned closure of two blast furnaces there, with the loss of more than 600 jobs. Mr. Hollande, addressing journalists before a meeting Tuesday with the ArcelorMittal boss, Lakshmi Mittal, said that nationalization of the Florange plant might be an option. ArcelorMittal agreed two months ago to give the government until this Saturday to find a buyer. But no investor is thought likely to want only the blast furnaces, which transform iron ore into slab steel. And the company refuses to divest itself of a part of the plant that processes steel for the auto industry. Mr. Montebourg said Wednesday that he had lined up a buyer for the Florange steel site which he did not identify and said the purchaser was willing to invest EUR400 million, or 519 million, to renovate it, assuming it was sold in its entirety. 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. Giles Read, a spokesman in London for ArcelorMittal, said discussions with the French government were continuing, but declined to comment further. Talk of nationalization is being applauded by some in a country where the jobless rate is over 10 percent, and where intervention is not a dirty word. In the early 1980s, the last Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, nationalized much of the economy, before later reversing course. Jean Luc Gironde, a Force Ouvriere spokesman in Paris, said the union did not advocate nationalization as a general policy. But "in a case like ArcelorMittal, where the enterprise has been the beneficiary of public funds, why not?" But there has also been a sharp reaction from business leaders. "If the point is to add pressure and blackmail in the negotiations, it is inadmissible," Laurence Parisot, president of the Medef employers' lobby, told RTL television on Thursday. "Our society is built on the basis of property rights," she added. "To undermine that principle is scandalous, and it's expensive." Le Monde, the center left French daily, despaired in an editorial this week that Mr. Montebourg had become in effect the government's chief spokesman on economic matters, overshadowing even Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici. Mr. Montebourg's statements, including his declaration that "We don't want Mittal in France," the paper said, "have frightened Anglo Saxon investors and dismayed the Germans," as they "can't understand how we could denigrate companies in our own country." The Business Standard, a leading Indian business daily, argued that Mr. Mittal, a native of India, "has become a scapegoat for the malaise in France over job losses." Other Indian commentators have suggested that racism is playing a role in the conflict. Mr. Hollande's tone has been more measured than that of his outspoken industry minister. Mr. Montebourg comes from the left wing of Mr. Hollande's Socialist Party, while Mr. Hollande himself is a centrist. Early this month, in fact, Mr. Hollande won kudos from economists by breaking a long held taboo of the left, acknowledging that France's high labor costs and strict work rules were holding back the job market. Jean Christophe Caffet, an economist with Natixis, suggested that Mr. Hollande's government, which has been less militant than its left wing had hoped, might be using this week's heated rhetoric as a sop to dissidents on the left to ensure their support in Parliament. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
President Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, held their first official black tie event at the White House in late February. They used gold rimmed china commissioned by the former first lady Laura Bush, and centerpieces of white flowers and grapes. "I thought it was refined and elegant," said Laura Dowling, who until her tenure ended abruptly in 2015 was the White House chief floral designer. "I was surprised to see such a pared back aesthetic from them." Ms. Dowling, 57, was walking around the flower district in New York on the first day of spring, discussing her new book, "Floral Diplomacy at the White House," which contains a number of juicy details about decorating drama at her former place of employment, along with anecdotes about flower arrangements and craft projects. Like the time the juxtaposition of cotton candy machines and burlap linen tablecloths at a South Lawn picnic for members of Congress and their families led to the guests getting shocked. (Ms. Dowling got a roll of dryer sheets from the housekeeping staff and used them to cut through the static electricity.) "My image of it is the bees chasing the guests back and forth while the butlers removed the arrangements," Ms. Dowling said. She won the job through a competition in the fall of 2009 not unlike those on "The Apprentice" (little did they know). After an eight month process of applications and interviews, three florist finalists were sequestered separately on the ground floor of the Executive Mansion for four hours. During that time, they had to fully deck out a table for a State Department dinner, and create an arrangement for the Blue Room and another for the soon to be beige ified Oval Office for which, Ms. Dowling said, she used "orange and amber, and a modern cube vase." She added: "When Mrs. Obama came in and talked about this piece, I noted that if I added blue it would be a Chicago Bears theme. She said, 'The president would like that.'" Ms. Dowling was hired. For six years, she oversaw the large number of floral arrangements in the private and public spaces of the presidential residence, in addition to the "tablescapes" of private Obama family parties and official galas (including state dinners, for which she was sometimes allotted a 7,000 budget for flowers alone). She began to think of flowers as tools of diplomacy after she accepted an assignment from the Chinese embassy in Washington. "They gave me a list of requirements, dos and don'ts, colors that should be used and shouldn't," she said. For one event, Ms. Dowling needed to fill a space on a table so large that she used a children's wading pool, covered it with moss and leaves, and filled it with several hundred flowers. The table still looked bare, so she made seven satellite arrangements to surround the pool. An official told her after she assembled it that seven Chinese moons circling the sun had symbolic meaning (thankfully positive). "It was something of an accident," she said. In her years working at the White House, Ms. Dowling tried to tailor flowers to occasions. When the German chancellor Angela Merkel, who holds a doctoral degree in chemistry, visited, Ms. Dowling made topiaries resembling molecules. She generally avoided white blooms, which are considered funereal in many cultures. She did not avoid all the pitfalls though. In 2015, under somewhat unexplained circumstances, Ms. Dowling's employment at the White House ended. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
As museums face increasing financial pressures and industrywide demands from staff to create more equitable workplaces, a second institution is taking advantage of the Association of Art Museum Directors' temporary pandemic era loosening of its deaccessing guidelines: They now allow the selling of art from museum collections to fund the direct care of collections not just the acquisition of other artworks. The Baltimore Museum of Art is deaccessioning three paintings, by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol, and expects to receive approximately 65 million from a combination of an auction and a private sale at Sotheby's in the next several weeks. Unlike the Brooklyn Museum, which announced the sale of 12 paintings in September after it had to make substantial layoffs, the Baltimore Museum has a balanced budget. With some creative juggling of revenue streams, it intends to use its 65 million windfall to help advance salary increases across the board, invest in diversity and inclusion programs, offer evening hours and eliminate admission fees for special exhibitions. "This is a vision based initiative, not desperation based," said Christopher Bedford, the Baltimore Museum's director. Whether his priorities should be funded through deaccessioning long a flash point in the museum field where the directors association has previously sanctioned members that have sold off artworks to pay for general operating expenses is likely to be widely debated. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, while praising the move as "a radical and creative idea that needs to be taken seriously by every museum in the country," also cautioned that this is not the solution for every museum. "There is a slippery slope here because there are museums that have the wherewithal to solve this issue of inequality with the ranks of museum staff right now without selling one work of art," he said. "If they wanted to, they could solve this problem." In 2018, Mr. Bedford led the museum's deaccessioning of seven paintings by blue chip names to bring into the collection new works by lesser known artists of color, better reflecting the city's majority Black population. Now he is taking a parallel action to respond to demands from his own staff members to address the extraordinary disparity of compensation between the lower end of the hierarchy and the top that is found at museums around the country. "This is done specifically in recognition of the protest being led by museum staff to be paid an equitable living wage to perform core work for an institution with a social justice mission that symmetry between who we say we are and what we actually are behind our doors," said Mr. Bedford. He has not experienced staff insurrection of the scope being led at some institutions, including the Guggenheim Museum, but he has received substantial feedback that the B.M.A. needs to improve. The B.M.A.'s game plan is, in fact, in line with how the museum association defined its new resolution active until April 2022, said Christine Anagnos, its director. The first 10 million of proceeds from the Sotheby's sale will go into the museum's endowment fund for acquisitions, with an emphasis on artists of color of the postwar era. The rest of the proceeds, approximately 55 million, will be used to create a new endowment for direct care of the collection. This fund should generate approximately 2.5 million annually in income, to cover the salaries of curators, registrars, conservators, preparators, art handlers, administrative staff and fellows, and other collection related expenses. The liberal interpretation comes in Mr. Bedford's choice to reallocate an equivalent 2.5 million freed up from his 20 million operating budget by the income from the new endowment to fund his equity and accessibility initiatives that fall outside the purview of collection care. As part of this, every staff position starting with entry level security officers will be individually evaluated through the lens of market rates and fairness, with pay increases of 3 percent to 48 percent rolling out incrementally over the next three years. "What the B.M.A. is doing doesn't surprise me because it feels like a logical extension of the concept about diversifying their collection," Ms. Anagnos said. "They are using the money that was once used for direct collection care to invest in a range of equity initiatives essential to its mission." The choice of which works the museum has selected to sell could also be seen as unconventional. Typically, a museum interested in deaccessioning looks for redundancies or lesser works not often exhibited by major artists. Warhol's "The Last Supper" (1986), being offered by Sotheby's through private sale, is a significant work from a major series but it is one of 15 paintings by the artist in the collection, many also late career works. Mr. Marden's "3" (1987 88), with an estimate from Sotheby's of 10 million to 15 million, is the only painting by the living artist in the museum's collection."There is an implicit rule that a museum doesn't deacquisition a living artist," Mr. Marden's dealer, Larry Gagosian, said on Saturday. Still's painting "1957 G" (1957), with a Sotheby's estimate of 12 million to 18 million, is the only work in the collection in any medium by the artist. The painting dates to the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, of which Still has long been considered a pioneer, and was a gift of the artist in 1969 when he lived in Maryland. Mr. Bedford described applying "a different definition of redundancy" based on the museum's deep holdings of the entire Abstract Expressionist period. "It will enable us to further deepen and complicate the story by adding women and people of color not traditionally part of that canon," he said. The works to be deaccessioned were approved by the museum's board of trustees on Thursday. Franklin Sirmans, director of the Perez Art Museum Miami, has been more conservative in his approach to deaccessioning at his own institution. "I think it's strange to throw certain things back out there into the public market space," he said, noting that the B.M.A. works aren't likely to be bought by another museum. While Mr. Sirmans praised the Baltimore museum for leading the discussion on how to diversify a collection, he suggested that museum trustees could help achieve that aim by just purchasing new work by artists of color rather than deaccessioning older works in the collection. "What does that mean for the board that perhaps doesn't work as hard to collect the work of these Black and Latinx artists, as it might have for some of those earlier artists?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Jazz at Lincoln Center's 2019 20 season will begin with an orchestral tribute to South Africa and end with a celebration of Duke Ellington. In between, leaps across generations and oceans will define the organization's 32nd season, which features 27 separate programs from September through June, Jazz at Lincoln Center announced on Tuesday. The South African concerts (Sept. 12 14) commemorate the 25th anniversary of apartheid's defeat, and feature Wynton Marsalis leading his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra alongside eight guest South African musicians. It's one of nine programs that the orchestra is scheduled to perform over the year, including the world premiere of "Supernova" (April 23 25), a new suite by the saxophonist Sherman Irby, and the season closing program devoted to some of Ellington's major works (June 12 13). Check out our Culture Calendar here. Mr. Marsalis will pay tribute to the drummer Art Blakey, his former employer, in honor of Blakey's centennial. He will perform items from the drummer and bandleader's repertoire with a group of younger musicians. That same weekend, May 1 2, the drummer and former Blakey apprentice Ralph Peterson Jr. will also lead a group featuring other veterans of Blakey's Jazz Messengers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"An architecture of desire" is what Heather Kravas calls the duets among six women divided into three couples in her piece "play, thing." But before this convergence takes place, they'll evoke states of fear, anxiety, playfulness, power and eroticism through symmetrical floor patterns, rhythmic shifts, and precise and repetitive dance steps. And these movements, based on quotidian activities, will be combined with simple words. Ms. Kravas, who comes from Seattle, says her works "grapple with inevitable disorder," and has expressed a desire "to reflect something vital about the brutal and beautiful condition of being alive." It seems likely that the rigorously structured "play, thing" will be something more than fun and games. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A wood burning fireplace anchors the library of this sprawling co op apartment at 120 East End Avenue. The room has built in bookcases and decorative faux bois wall designs. A grandly proportioned 14 room apartment on the 11th floor of the 120 East End Avenue co op building, opposite Carl Schurz Park and facing the East River, is being put on the market by the family that has owned it for more than four decades. The seller is the estate of Christine Beshar, one of the first female partners of a Wall Street law firm. She died in January. The asking price will be 8.95 million, said Serena Boardman of Sotheby's International Realty, who is the listing broker, along with her colleague, Meredyth Hull Smith. Monthly maintenance is 10,485. Mrs. Beshar specialized in trust and estate law at Cravath, Swaine Moore, and was made a partner seven years after she was hired, in 1971. The following year, she and her husband, Robert P. Beshar, also a lawyer, moved into No. 11A at East End Avenue, on the northwest corner of 85th Street, with their son and three daughters. The young family's move came at a time when the city was experiencing soaring crime and serious financial issues, and many residents were fleeing to the suburbs. "New York City was really in tough shape, but my parents saw value in this apartment, with its enormous, sun filled rooms and magnificent views," said Cornelia Beshar Spring, one of Mrs. Beshar's daughters, estimating that her parents paid "less than 200,000" for the place back then. Not too much has been done to the apartment since the Beshars settled in 47 years ago, and remained until their deaths. (Mr. Beshar died in 2014.) "They were very good stewards of the architectural integrity of the apartment," Ms. Boardman said, "which is very rare today." For potential buyers, Ms. Smith said, the unchanged state of the apartment represents "an opportunity to have all the prized prewar details that haven't been ruined or removed by poorly done renovations along the way." The apartment, which offers striking park and river vistas from its many floor to ceiling windows, is roughly 5,250 square feet, with five bedrooms and six and a half baths. The unit has a private elevator landing that opens to a stately gallery with a black and white checkered floor and a powder room. The gallery leads to the three main public spaces: a library with built in bookcases and a fireplace, a formal wallpapered dining room and a 30 by 20 foot living room with built in display cabinets and the second fireplace. Off the dining room are a breakfast room and a large eat in windowed kitchen, with a service elevator, laundry and two staff rooms sharing a bath nearby. At the back of the apartment, off a long hallway, is a private wing that contains the five en suite bedrooms and a family room/playroom fashioned from two maid's rooms. The large master suite has two walk in closets and a tiled bathroom. "It's all so properly laid out," Ms. Boardman said. "It's a real family apartment." Ms. Spring, who is a managing director of J. P. Morgan Private Bank, said she and her siblings have fond memories of their childhood home. "There were always a lot of people there," she said, recalling the holiday parties her parents had with their German relatives in attendance and the many after school gatherings with classmates. "We'd come home in the middle of the day and bring our friends, and sit down at the kitchen table with a gallon of ice cream and several spoons." The East End Avenue apartment house a block from the Chapin School, which the Beshar girls attended was developed 87 years ago by Vincent Astor and designed by the architect Charles A. Platt. Although the building's 17 story limestone facade is free of embellishment, except for grillwork around its oversize windows, the apartment interiors were designed to be as spacious and ornate as many of those found in Fifth Avenue contemporaries. Mr. Astor wanted to attract wealthy families to the Far East Side of Manhattan, once a threadbare area of walk ups and factories. Mr. Astor and his wife, Brooke Astor, also lived in the building. Other early tenants included Thomas Hitchcock Jr., a well known polo player, and Lawrence Tibbett, a star baritone at the Metropolitan Opera. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
When it comes to personalizing wedding drinks, more couples are going well beyond the signature cocktail. Home brewed beers, which are made and bottled mostly by amateurs, have been finding a place at weddings, where they are being served to guests during cocktail hours or given out as favors. For some couples, home brewing is a good way to showcase a shared hobby and passion. The love of beer initially brought Mandy Naglich and Wesley Carmichael together. The two met in 2012 at a friend's party in Austin, Tex. Ms. Naglich, now 28 and a freelance food and beer writer, had brought Shiner Light Blonde, a pale, lager style craft beer, to the gathering. "I didn't want to drink the swill!" she recalled. Mr. Carmichael, 29, was immediately impressed, and on their subsequent first date, he brought a six pack of the same beer to share. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
But in words broadcast live to millions of viewers, Mr. Trump, without evidence, alleged that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son had profited from dealings in Ukraine. He insulted journalists and accused The Washington Post of publishing a "fake article." He asserted without evidence that Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut had "threatened" Ukrainian officials and claimed that Democrats had timed their impeachment inquiry to disrupt his trip to the United Nations. Cutting away from the remarks would deprive Mr. Trump of a pulpit for his claims. But news producers often defer to the public's right to know what its president is saying, especially at a crucial time in the country's politics. Several news networks on Wednesday chose to fact check Mr. Trump after the fact. "The president leveled several distortions, falsehoods in the course of that 45 minutes," the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer told viewers once Mr. Trump concluded his remarks. Mr. Blitzer's network colleague Jeffrey Toobin called the appearance a "torrent of lies." On ABC, the anchor George Stephanopoulos appeared onscreen halfway through the event, informing viewers that there was "no evidence" to support Mr. Trump's claims about the Bidens. Andrea Mitchell, on NBC, said the accusations against Mr. Murphy were "contrary to any information we have." With the 2020 campaign looming, television producers are likely to face more of these thorny choices. "Broadcast journalists in particular are reassessing how they deal with this president in a live context," said Mark Lukasiewicz, a former NBC News producer and now the dean of Hofstra University's school of communication. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
CAMBRIDGE, England At 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, as shadows lengthen, candles flicker, and a solemn quiet envelops the medieval chapel of King's College, Cambridge, Stephen Cleobury, the music director there, will point to one of his boy choristers. The boy who won't know in advance that he's the chosen one will steel himself and sing into the darkness the first verse of "Once in Royal David's City": Plaintively alone, but heard around the world. Nobody knows exactly how many people listen to the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's, but it's a worldwide broadcasting phenomenon. The BBC says 370 million people hear it through its global broadcasts, but there are countless others in the United States, Australia, Africa and Asia. And this year will be special: Partly because it's the 100th Lessons and Carols, but also because it's the last time Mr. Cleobury who has held one of the most coveted jobs in church music for longer than most people can remember will be in charge. Something about the Lessons and Carols' serene liturgy of music, words and wonder touches a nerve. It seems embedded in the DNA of Christmas, a tradition from the ancient past. Except it isn't. It was started in 1918 by a young Anglican priest who had returned to Cambridge after serving in the trenches of World War I. He called it a "festival," but it was also a commemoration for the war dead, with a so called Bidding Prayer for "those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light." It established a precedent, and churches and cathedrals copied the new liturgy for themselves to the point that the format of Nine Lessons and Carols became a standard at Anglican churches around the world. The choir is certainly old, established in 1441 when King Henry VI gave money to the chapel to establish a choir of boys and men. But it fell into decline by the 18th century: The choir's boys were rough and unruly, and the men were aging local tradesmen juggling chapel duties with their jobs as butchers, bakers or occasionally servants at the university's colleges. The choir only approached its current status in the early 1900s when the organist A. H. Mann started to turn things around, training the boys properly, replacing the men known as "lay clerks" with musically gifted university students on special scholarships. And it wasn't until the 1930s that his successor, Boris Ord, developed what became known as "the King's sound": soft, reserved and according to its critics emotionally inhibited. Emotion certainly took second place to beauty under David Willcocks, Mr. Ord's successor from the 1950s to the 1970s. It was Mr. Willcocks who made the King's choir a recording star, through more than 60 LP.s that became the benchmark for ambitious choirs worldwide. And it was done with discipline: The choir had to deliver pure, ethereal perfection, every note immaculately tuned and placed. The baritone Gerald Finley sang in the choir as a student in the 1980s, before progressing to stardom of his own as a soloist. In a recent interview, he recalled that Mr. Willcocks used the chapel's resonant acoustics to justify his ultra strict approach. "Because if you made a bad sound you'd have to suffer it for six seconds," he said. "One geeky choral scholar calculated that if you made a mistake on Christmas Eve, the combined number of people listening on radio with the chapel echo would be like one person hearing that mistake continuously for 24 years." But a new double CD issued to celebrate the Lessons and Carols centenary, including excerpts from old broadcasts, proves that things have changed over the years. The sound is more robust, less precious than it was. The cut glass vowels of the 1950s are gone. And there's a more idiomatic response to a wider range of music. Each year since Mr. Cleobury's arrival, a new carol has been sung there on Christmas Eve. It doesn't always please members of the listening public, who write in to say so, but it has refreshed the Christmas repertoire with modern classics like John Tavener's "The Lamb." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Two people sharing a bright, clean room: Kazuki, a still, silent man in stocking feet, and Honoka, a cheerful, chatty, barefoot woman who roams the space, tracing and retracing the minutiae of her memories or maybe his. She, too, is a memory, the ghost of the wife who once lived here with him. "Remember?" she keeps asking him. "Remember?" At last he answers: "I remember." And this is the root of his distress. In "Time's Journey Through a Room," by the Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada, Kazuki (Kensaku Shinohara) is a young man dazed and numbed by his own sadness, still stunned by his wife's death the year before. In the middle of the night, four days after an earthquake caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, she died horribly and unexpectedly of an asthma attack. The thing about that timing the thing that makes this stark and quiet play such an arresting portrait of trauma and its aftermath is that Honoka (Yuki Kawahisa, in a beautiful central performance) died happy, still caught up in the exhilaration of having survived that calamity. She marvels now at the petty banality of the fight the two of them had just before it struck. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In "Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made," streaming on Disney Plus and based on the first book in Stephan Pastis's children's series, the amateur gumshoe Timmy (Winslow Fegley) uses a gargantuan vocabulary to indicate his precocity, his work as a detective tantamount to his sense of self. As he runs a little agency out of the cramped home he shares with his two job juggling single mother and a C.G.I. polar bear named Total as his sidekick, "normal is for normal people" becomes one of his mantras to explain his idiosyncrasies. The elementary schooler would probably be at home in a Dashiell Hammett novel on the trail of a chocolate Maltese Falcon, as he speaks semi exclusively in detective/cop dialogue, saying things like, "affirmative," asking about Russian operatives (read: Portland hipsters) and repeating his other mantra: "Mistakes were made." When a backpack goes missing, a hamster turns up dead and the "Failure Mobile" (his mother's Segway) disappears, Timmy Failure is on the case, an imagined Holmesian intuition on hand. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Months after the chart topping rapper Megan Thee Stallion said she had been shot in the feet by a fellow musician in the Hollywood Hills, the rapper Tory Lanez has been charged in the episode, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office announced on Thursday. Mr. Lanez, a Canadian artist whose real name is Daystar Peterson, faces one count of assault with a semiautomatic handgun and one count of carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle. He would face up to 22 years and eight months in prison if convicted, the district attorney said. Mr. Lanez, 28, was initially arrested on July 12 and charged with concealing a firearm in the vehicle, the police said at the time. But in the days and weeks that followed, the matter became the subject of intense speculation, gossip and finger pointing after Megan Thee Stallion, 25, born Megan Pete, said via Instagram on July 15 that she had "suffered gunshot wounds, as a result of a crime that was committed against me and done with the intention to physically harm me." She did not name her assailant at first, and the police declined to say that shots had been fired, confirming only that one person had been taken to a hospital to receive medical treatment for a foot injury. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
This Artist Got His Start as an I.C.U. Nurse The artist Nate Lewis left his job as a nurse three years ago, but life on the neurocritical intensive care unit produces memories that don't readily fade. The patients battling strokes, seizures, and head injuries. The specialists debating treatment based on test numbers and images. The anxious families keeping watch, looking to the nurse for explanation and reassurance. "I would show up and these families are giving me everything, telling me their life stories," Mr. Lewis, 34, recalled of his years at a hospital near Washington, D.C. "I realized what an honor it was to take care of them at this time in their lives." One high stakes drill became familiar: When a patient's brain, heart or lung functions exceeded the safe range, an alarm would sound, and the monitor would start printing out the relevant graph until the situation was addressed. The discarded printouts, Mr. Lewis realized, were a visual distillation of the experience. "I was really invested in care for these people," he said. "It was really dense. So I started to make work with the rhythms of patients. Like, let me try this." A mixed media piece from 2013, titled "this is your heart on a prelude," greets visitors entering Mr. Lewis's first New York solo exhibition, at Fridman Gallery. (The gallery is open by appointment and has posted images and video from the show online.) The small collage includes four strips of patients' electrocardiogram readings carefully cut and backed onto sheet music. Mr. Lewis recalled that he wanted to use the original printouts, despite their low grade paper, until a friend convinced him to scan them onto more resilient archival stock. "I wanted the real thing," he said. "But he was like, 'It's contemporary art, it's cool.'" Before then, Mr. Lewis's creative work consisted mainly of T shirt designs. He hung out with a Washington crowd of artists and musicians, but knew little about art history or formal practice. Admission to the residency program at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, in 2017, prompted him to quit his nursing career, move to New York City, and commit to art full time. Black and white with sparse flashes of color, the pieces resemble collages but are in fact single sheets, exactingly detailed, with a deconstructed energy. The kinetic charge extends to a two channel video of a man shadowboxing. The show has a soundtrack, too: Five experimental jazz musicians supplied loops that Mr. Lewis produced into a single work. It plays continuously in the gallery like a sonic sculpture. From his emphasis on the body to his attraction to working with paper, which he likens to an organism, Mr. Lewis carries into his art concerns with diagnosis and care forged in the I.C.U. "My whole practice is about an assessment of something," he said. "The slightest detail matters." He arrived in New York with a beginner's mind. He read his first art history book. He keyed in on influences Hank Willis Thomas, Titus Kaphar, Rashaad Newsome, Jacolby Satterwhite. He merged into the artist community, at once keen for input and to develop his own voice. The curator Regine Basha, who directed the residency at Pioneer Works when Mr. Lewis took part, said he stood out for his seriousness and motivation from his medical experience. Mr. Lewis credits the residency for breakthroughs in technique, notably the addition of color and, crucially, working with ink. Another inspiration came on a visit to the Prado, in Madrid, where he saw a video installation by the Iranian artist Farideh Lashai that, in turn, built on altered reproductions of etchings from Goya's "Disasters of War," set to Chopin nocturnes. Mr. Lewis uses the same music in his boxer video. A self described jock, Mr. Lewis grew up obsessed with basketball, boxed a little and practices capoeira. He implicates his own body in his work, making self portraits by the same method as portraits of his friends. They are black, as is he he grew up in Pennsylvania, the son of a mixed race couple and he fielded some criticism at first, he said, for seeming to mutilate black bodies. The accusations of "trauma porn" took him aback. "At that time, I was still thinking in the hospital sense," he said. But he has also read Harriet A. Washington's "Medical Apartheid," on medical experimentation on African Americans a theme explored by contemporary artists such as Doreen Garner. He recalls realizing, while still working in hospitals, that the medical system was subtly biased toward white patients. His series on the Richmond monuments scrambles the image of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders, dissecting the smooth statuary into phantom horsemen with many patterns and textures. It alludes to current debates about representation, less as a call to replace the statues than an inspection of how they operate. "The city orbits around them," he said. "I understand why people are so intent on them not coming down." Mr. Lewis's work with music, too, connects to the I.C.U., and to the subtle shifts in a patient's functions he overheard. "I was already into music, but there was something extra in the listening," he said. He pulled up a short video of an echocardiogram on his phone, to demonstrate. "You have to listen for diminished sounds, or absent sounds. It's hard." When one of his musical collaborators, the drummer and producer Kassa Overall, held a residency at the Jazz Gallery last year, Mr. Lewis photographed each concert, then used a composite image as the basis of a work on paper that was shown at the final performance. Mr. Overall and four others Melanie Charles, Ben Lamar Gay, Matana Roberts and Luke Stewart have provided the tracks that Mr. Lewis melded into the sound work in his show (you can hear them on the gallery's website), but left Mr. Lewis to shape it, an act of trust. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Tennessee's combination of power running and a few deep passes does not look particularly modern but it just might give the Baltimore Ravens a taste of their own medicine. The Tennessee Titans were running the ball toward the sideline again which left New England's defense flowing quickly to its left. It looked like a panel cribbed from a Stan Lee comic: the Titans running back beating all 11 Patriots to the edge, pushing forward with a full head of steam. With his No. 22 jersey perpetually riding up to show a wide swath of his abdomen, and shoulder pads that barely reach his massive arms, Derrick Henry has the look of a running back hit with gamma radiation, suddenly finding himself too big for his equipment, not unlike Lee's Incredible Hulk. And, in their A.F.C. wild card game last week, the Patriots appeared to have made him angry. The only thing in Henry's way on that fourth quarter play was J.C. Jackson a fairly large player by defensive back standards, but one who still gives up two inches and almost 50 pounds to the 6 foot 3, 247 pound Henry. Jackson delivered his best attempt at a hit, but Henry knocked him backward and dragged him for nine extra yards, securing the 10th of his 11 first downs on the way to 204 yards from scrimmage in the Titans' 20 13 upset of New England last week. If you had not been paying attention over the last few months, Tom Brady's season ending on a wild card Saturday to a team that appeared to run the same play on nearly every down may have been a shock. But to anyone who watched the Titans' transformation over the final 10 games of the regular season, the result hardly qualified as a surprise. "When you can run it when the other team knows you're going to run it, that says a lot about your running game," Coach Mike Vrabel said afterward of Henry, who had dominated the best defense in football on his 26th birthday. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Can Henry and the Titans (9 7) deliver another upset, this time in the divisional round of the playoffs against the No. 1 seeded Baltimore Ravens (14 2)? Tennessee is a justifiably large underdog in Saturday's game, but reaching the divisional round at all is a triumph for a team that looked lost in a 2 4 start to the season. The formula for their success certainly starts with Henry, who built on a legendary high school career his 12,124 yards for Yulee High School in Florida are still a national record to win the Heisman Trophy for Alabama in 2015. But progress at the pro level had come in fits and starts for Henry, and to truly unlock his potential and save the team's season, the Titans did something drastic: They benched Marcus Mariota, the quarterback they had drafted with the No. 2 overall pick in 2015 to be the face of the franchise. Mariota won the Heisman a year before Henry, and tantalized during his first four pro seasons. But he was inconsistent and sometimes downright bad over this season's first six games, and in the third quarter of a Week 6 loss to Denver, Vrabel finally pulled the plug. He was replaced by Ryan Tannehill, who had signed as a backup after seven mediocre seasons in Miami. Tannehill moved the ball with some confidence in that loss and the understated Vrabel shocked plenty of people by quickly naming him the starter for Week 7, saying, "It just felt like now was the time." The results have proved Vrabel right. With Tannehill as starter, the Titans led all N.F.L. teams in passer rating (119.5), net yards per passing attempt (8.19), and yards per rush (5.64). And that suddenly potent offense, combined with an opportunistic defense, went 7 3 over its final 10 games, earning the A.F.C.'s second wild card spot on the final day of the season. Tannehill struggled against New England's otherworldly secondary last week, and was largely written off as a nonfactor this week by Baltimore safety Earl Thomas, who said the Ravens were mostly preparing for Henry, since trying to pass the ball wouldn't "go in their favor." But Tennessee's symbiotic relationship between quarterback and running back had been undeniably effective during the regular season. Henry went from barely breaking 1,000 rushing yards last season, and only topping 100 yards once in this season's first six games, to leading the N.F.L. with 1,540 yards and 16 rushing touchdowns. Tannehill, who came into the year with a 42 46 career record and a career passer rating of 87, finished the regular season with the highest rating in the N.F.L. (117.5) and set himself up to potentially cash in on free agency this off season. And along the way, A.J. Brown, a rookie wide receiver out of Mississippi, developed into one of the game's premier vertical threats, averaging 20.2 yards a catch and tying Henry for the N.F.L. lead with four touchdowns of 50 or more yards. If there is something striking about Tennessee's approach (beyond Henry's ability to wear out a defense), it is the strategy of having Tannehill throw far fewer passes than most of his contemporaries, but making sure each of those passes counts by airing the ball out. Once Tannehill took over under center, the Titans' offense led by coordinator Arthur Smith, the son of the FedEx founder Fred Smith attempted the second fewest passes per game of any team, but gained the 10th most yards per game through the air. Tannehill's passes this season traveled an average of 9.7 yards third longest in the N.F.L. behind Matthew Stafford and Jameis Winston but according to the N.F.L.'s NextGen statistics, his 70.3 percent completion rate was an N.F.L. best 8.1 percentage points higher than he should have been able to produce based on the riskiness of his throws. That combination of a high volume of runs and a few deep passes got more effective as games progressed: The Titans averaged just 10.3 first half points over the 10 games Tannehill started, but pushed the average to 20.1 in the second half. All of that has led to a matchup against a Ravens team that does many of the same things often with much more explosive results. Quarterback Lamar Jackson is both a devastating runner and a hyper efficient passer. Running back Mark Ingram II, who is hoping to come back from a calf injury, can churn through defenses, and wide receiver Marquise Brown can nearly keep up with A.J. Brown in producing highlight reel touchdowns. No matter who wins, though, the game will serve as proof that teams at the vanguard of the N.F.L.'s offensive revolution do not have to pass the ball on every down to thrive. And while Tennessee may have finally met its match, the Ravens will need to keep their collective foot on the gas all game to avoid the Patriots' fate. Under Vrabel, the Titans keep playing until the final gun, and any play in which Tannehill, Henry and A.J. Brown are involved has the potential to turn into a touchdown. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The locals, known as portenos , take their drinking traditions and the amazing variety of places where they can indulge them very seriously. To get a general idea of how the people of Buenos Aires drink, you need only go inside any grocery or convenience store. It won't be too many steps before you're confronted with an end of aisle liquor display. But it won't be vodka or rum on sale. It will be Campari, Fernet Branca, Cynar, Cinzano vermouth or Gancia, an aperitivo. Each is an Italian product, but portenos (as residents here are called), many of whom are of Italian or Spanish descent, have made them their own. Cynar Juleps are more common than Mint Juleps, perhaps partly because bourbon is hard to come by here. Negronis and Negroni variations are everywhere; Argentina is the world's third largest market for Campari. And Fernet and Coke might as well be the national drink. It's not for nothing that Argentina has its own Campari and Fernet Branca distilleries. Thirsts must be met. These longstanding drinking traditions have been interwoven into Buenos Aires' robust cocktail scene, which encompasses more than 50 bars. They include every recognizable variety of drinking den, from hidden joints like the Harrison Speakeasy, to restaurant bars such as Casa Cavia; from historical standard bearers like Los Galgos, to the theme park extravaganza Uptown, whose entrance exactly resembles a New York subway station tile walls, turnstiles, sliding train doors and all. While they all keep an eye trained on global cocktail trends, each saloon has a distinctly Argentine edge. "There are small and personal bars, and there are large and popular bars," explains Rodolfo Reich, a local journalist and cocktail authority. "The lack of some imported drinks is supplanted with artisanal recipes from each bartender." And none of the watering holes are too far from a purveyor of Buenos Aires style pizza, which is heavy on the cheese, may come on a flatbread made with chickpea flour, and could possibly be the best drunk food in the world. (Guerrin and El Cuartito are two recommended pizzerias.) Also, the Argentine peso has fallen by nearly 50 percent against the U.S. dollar this year, making Buenos Aires an even more affordable destination for travelers. The country's currency crisis is extremely tough on Argentina's citizens, but helped boost tourism arrivals in September by 12 percent, according to government statistics. If you want to take in the full gamut of porteno cocktailing, here is a suggested six stop itinerary that covers most of the culinary and cultural bases. Doppelganger is a darkened cove painted in deep shades of green and red. It may be the best place in town to order classic cocktails. The menu is littered with them. Of course, "classic" can mean something different here. Take the Old Fashioned, the bar's biggest seller. As with pizza, locals make this international staple their own way. A mixture of sugar and plenty of Angostura bitters is muddled at the bottom of the glass, then swirled about until it coats the entire inside. At Doppelganger, an orange slice is then lightly muddled at the bottom. This is covered with ice, and then bourbon. The result is basically an Old Fashioned crusta, an old genre of cocktail that involves a sugar rim. The first sip is strong. You'll want the spoon they serve it with to stir the drink and integrate that sugar coating into the spirit. The Gibson is a good bet here, too, as it is the favorite of the owner, Guillermo Blumenkamp. They serve a dry version, with little vermouth and three onions. It is said that, if someone orders one, Mr. Blumenkamp will take one, too. Federico Cuco is the owner of this whimsical and warmhearted bar, which is named after the author Jules Verne. He is a veteran bartender and an amateur cocktail historian. Mr. Cuco can serve you one of his house originals, such as the smoky Opium Old Fashioned, or he can tell you about Buenos Aires' rich mixological history, which includes mid 20th century bartender celebrities like Santiago Policastro. Known as "Pichin," Policastro cut a big enough figure to appear on television and publish a book, "Tragos Magicos" (or "Magical Drinks"). Mr. Cuco was behind a campaign a decade ago to "Save the Clarito," the Clarito being a forgotten dry Martini riff by Pichin. It worked. You can order a Clarito anywhere in the city now. (The chief difference between the original Clarito and a Martini was a sugar rim. That touch, gratefully, has since been dropped.) If you ask for other historical Buenos Aires cocktails, there's a good chance Mr. Cuco will know how to make them. He is also a big advocate of local heritage brands like Amargo Obrero, a mild regional amaro, and Hesperidina, an orange liqueur that, in 1876, became Argentina's first patented product. Oddly enough, Hesperidina was created by Melville Sewell Bagley, an immigrant from Maine. Floreria Atlantico is Buenos Aires' most famous cocktail bar, a reputation it may have secured solely through the energies of its owner, Tato Giovannoni, a charismatic man who knows how to fill up a room. He also knows how to paint up a room; the pictures of sea monsters on the walls are his. Mr. Giovannoni describes his bar as being a tribute to the multiethnic history of the city's population. Fittingly, the menu is divided by national influence, with sections dedicated to Spain (sherry drinks), Poland (vodka) and England (gin, Scotch). The bar's signature drink is, naturally, a Negroni variation, but the dizzyingly complex Balestrini Negroni tells a distinctly Argentinian story. The Campari is locally distilled. The gin, Principe de los Apostoles, is the creation of Mr. Giovannoni, boasting botanicals such as yerbe mate and eucalyptus. Averna amaro replaces the usual vermouth. And a dash of seawater from the actual Atlantic Ocean provides a saline accent. (The bar is called Atlantico, after all.) This is all infused with eucalyptus smoke and garnished with pine nuts. The eucalyptus branches could conceivably have been fetched from the flower shop upstairs, which serves as a false front for the bar. That money has found its way into the Buenos Aires bar scene is evident upon entering the chic Presidente, which opened last year. The Presidente is extravagantly appointed, with chandeliers, high ceilings, a library like private bar in the back and staff members who look like models. On the wall is a painting of 19th century American bartender Harry Johnson who, I was told, is the bar's spiritual guide. An LED counter above the bar tracks the number of Negronis sold; the night I was there, it was up to 10,912. It's a trick borrowed from Dry Martini, a Barcelona bar that counts well, you know. If you don't want to follow the herd, the Milano Torino, a gin less predecessor of the Negroni, is just as good. And the Buenos Aires Zombie makes an impression, arriving in a tall, white, custom tiki mug meant to resemble the Obelisco de Buenos Aires, an inescapable city landmark. Buenos Aires' longstanding aperitivo tradition extends to vermouth. Cinzano, the Italian vermouth company, has been a big presence here since the late 1800s; Argentina is, in fact, the top consumer of Cinzano in the world. La Fuerza which was opened in January by Julian Diaz, a prominent local bar owner, the writer Martin Auzmendi and two partners, and occupies a bright, cheery corner storefront offers a traditional, yet fresh approach to the apertivo ritual. It is a vermouth bar, or vermuteria, a sort of bar that was once common in Argentina, but is now scarce. La Fuerza sets itself apart in that makes its own vermouth, using wines made in Mendoza and flavored with botanicals handpicked in the Andes. The owners tout it as the first vermouth to ever be produced in the Andes region. There's a rojo and a bianco and both are on tap. Try them by themselves over ice with a twist; or, as portenos sometimes do, pair the rojo with fernet, and the bianco with Campari. The concise food menu has everything you'd ever want to nibble on while sipping a vermouth, including various olives, cheese, papas fritas, local salame del Tandil, lupin beans and pallares, which are like lima beans. American whiskey presents a particular challenge to the city's drink makers. Few bourbons are exported here; Wild Turkey was recently added to a short list that includes Jim Beam, Maker's Mark and Evan Williams. And there is no rye at all. Flying in the face of these privations is Bourbon Brunch Beer, an American style honky tonk that opened in September. Yankee touches includes a picture of Johnny Cash on the wall and a food menu that features hot dogs, mac 'n' cheese and bagels. Its casual bar cred is further proven through its attitude toward that fernet and Coke habit, a drink that is shunned by some mixologists as too common, but heartily embraced here. (The Fernet Branca made in Argentina, by the way, is considerably drier and more astringent than the Italian version, which is what the U.S. gets. So the pairing with the sweet Coca Cola makes more sense.) Bourbon Brunch Beer was created by the same folks who own the over the top Uptown. The owner told me he wanted to open a more relaxed bar, a place to hang out. The back bar is lined with dozens of bourbon brands that the owner smuggled back from trips to the United States, and intends to sell by the glass. When asked how that was possible, legally, he shrugged. "It's Buenos Aires," he said. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
MELBOURNE, Australia What better way to kick off Australia Day weekend than with a win one, get No. 1 free special at Melbourne Park? That will be the holiday bargain on offer inside Rod Laver Arena on Saturday when Petra Kvitova and Naomi Osaka square off in the Australian Open women's final for the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup and the top spot in the women's world rankings. Kvitova, a two time Wimbledon titlist from the Czech Republic, advanced with a 7 6 (2), 6 0 defeat of the American Danielle Collins in the first of Thursday's semifinals. Osaka, the reigning United States Open champion, engineered a 6 2, 4 6, 6 4 victory over Kvitova's compatriot Karolina Pliskova, who described Osaka's play as "unbelievable" and said, "There was not much that I could do." "Of course that's a very big deal for me," Osaka said, adding, "I'm just really happy that I'm in the position that I am now, and I'm not going to take it for granted." Kvitova, who rose as high as No. 2 in 2011, didn't know that No. 1 was within her reach here. "I don't really care, to be honest," she said. Pointing to her head, she added, "I don't think there's any room here to think about it." She feels especially blessed to be playing for another major title. This is her first Grand Slam final since she fought off a knife wielding burglar in her Czech Republic apartment in 2016. She sustained nerve and tendon damage in all five fingers of her dominant left hand in the attack, requiring hours of surgery to repair and sidelining her from competition for five months. "I didn't know even if I was going to play tennis again," Kvitova said, adding, "It wasn't only physically but mentally was very tough, as well. It took me really long while to believe." She started 2019 on a high note, prevailing in the tuneup event in Sydney. But for all her success, she had struggled in the majors; after winning Wimbledon for the second time in 2014, Kvitova didn't advance to the semifinals in her next 16 Grand Slams. Her best showing was two quarterfinal appearances at the U.S. Open. "For the mental side, it wasn't really easy to kind of deal with that every time, coming to the Grand Slam and losing," Kvitova said. "Maybe that's why it's probably more sweet." Osaka may be in her second consecutive major final, but she can remember when making it to the second week was a major victory. Before her breakthrough against Serena Williams last year in Flushing Meadows, Osaka lost in the third round of Grand Slams seven times and got as far as the fourth round only once. "Man, for me it feels like it took awhile," Osaka said. Laughing, she added, "Maybe my time goes slower than your time. But definitely I remember all the matches that I lost in the third round." Osaka used to become easily frustrated. The biggest change that her coach, Sascha Bajin, has noticed in this tournament is that she is controlling her emotions better when points don't go her way. Collins, an American, in action in the semifinals. "I just have to tell her grass is green, water flows and everything is all right sometimes," Bajin said. "Over all, she's very hard on herself. She has very high expectations. She wants to do well. She wants to get better." Kvitova was the same age that Osaka is now when she claimed her maiden Wimbledon crown, in 2011. Back then, her career stretched before her like a clear ribbon of highway. Sure, there were a few potholes, but nothing she couldn't get past. Then came the attack in her apartment. Kvitova said she found out only recently that in the early months of her recovery, her doctor wasn't optimistic about her returning to competitive tennis. "Luckily he didn't tell me, like, during that period," Kvitova said. Last summer, Kvitova met Monica Seles, who arranged the introduction. "It was such a nice feeling to meet someone who kind of went through same things and thoughts and everything," Kvitova said of Seles, who was stabbed by a spectator during a match in 1993. Seles returned to competition, and won the Australian Open in 1996 for her ninth major championship. "I didn't know that, actually," Kvitova said. "It's nice then." Whatever happens Saturday, Kvitova feels as if she has already won. "To be honest, I think not very many people believe that I can do that again, to stand on the court and play tennis and kind of play on this level." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Apple has struggled to find its footing as it tries to go Hollywood. Critics were lukewarm at best about "The Morning Show," the star studded, big budget flagship series on Apple TV Plus, the streaming platform that went live Nov. 1. And now one of Apple's first films, "The Banker," starring Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Mackie, is in limbo after the company pulled it from a theatrical run that was scheduled to start Friday. It seemed like just the right project for Apple to introduce itself as a player in the movie business. With two stars from the "Avengers" series leading the cast, "The Banker" is based on the real life story of two black entrepreneurs who triumphed over the racist business practices of mid 20th century America. Apple had announced a theatrical release and started an awards push, only to halt the plan after a daughter of one of the film's protagonists raised allegations of sexual abuse involving her family. It's an inopportune stumble for the company, which has pitted itself against Netflix and Amazon, not to mention the Walt Disney Company, as it tries to make headway in a business that has nothing to do with the selling of iPhones and MacBook Pros. On Nov. 20, Apple pulled "The Banker" from the prestigious closing night slot at the American Film Institute's annual festival in Los Angeles. The company said it and the filmmakers needed time to look into the accusations by Cynthia Garrett, whose father was the basis for Bernard Garrett, the character played by Mr. Mackie. Two days later, Apple scrapped the December release. Since then, the company has declined to comment on whether it will put "The Banker" in theaters or make it available on Apple TV Plus. Under the original plan, the movie was scheduled for a January debut on the platform. Ms. Garrett, a television personality who runs a ministry in Los Angeles, accused her half brother, Bernard Garrett Jr., a son of the man played by Mr. Mackie and one of the film's co producers, of sexually abusing her and her younger sister when they were children in the 1970s. Apple removed his name from publicity materials, and he no longer appears as a producer of "The Banker" on the website IMDB, which lists film credits. Cynthia Garrett, a daughter of the man played by Anthony Mackie in "The Banker," said Apple was right to cancel the film's December premiere. Mr. Garrett denied the accusations, saying in an email, "These allegations against me simply are not true." Adapting true stories for the screen has long been a fraught endeavor, with films like Oliver Stone's "J.F.K." and Norman Jewison's "The Hurricane" drawing criticism for mixing fact and fiction. Universal Pictures faced complaints this year over "Green Book," a fact based film centered on the relationship between a black concert pianist, Donald Shirley, and his white chauffeur in midcentury America. Although the Shirley family condemned the portrayal, Universal backed the film through awards campaign season, and it won the Oscar for best picture. Ms. Garrett, who was a V.J. at VH1 in the 1990s and the host of the NBC talk show "Later" in 2000, said Apple was right to shelve "The Banker." "I applaud Apple for doing the right thing and choosing to stand with women and children," she said in an interview. "As a woman of color, I feel pretty vindicated by the fact that Apple recognized us." But some people in Hollywood have questioned whether Apple was overly cautious. "When you are in the business of distributing content, unless you have an indefensible claim against you, you don't let issues and protests get in the way," said Blair Westlake, a media strategist and a former media executive at Universal Studios and Microsoft. "In this case, it's regrettable that Apple would let the displeasure and concerns of a small group of people, which may be justified and fact based, change their business plans. "Once you open that door, any other topic or film could run the same risk," Mr. Westlake continued. "It will likely have a chilling effect on those wishing to produce content for them." 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. Tim Bajarin, the president of Creative Strategies, a Silicon Valley market research firm, said the company was right to tread carefully. "Like Disney, Apple has a relatively squeaky clean position with consumers, and they are known for protecting their customers, guarding their privacy and their security," he said. "I think Apple's position of cautiousness is important at this early stage in their streaming business. They don't need the negative criticism on a particular movie. They need to prove their capabilities, and that their quality and their content is acceptable." In an interview last month, Mr. Van Amburg and Mr. Erlicht described the company's film strategy as modest and carefully considered no more than 12 movies a year, each given a tailor made promotional push. They contrasted the strategy with that of Netflix, a company that spends billions on content and makes roughly 90 feature length movies annually, including documentaries and animated films. "Netflix has chosen to be in the volume business," Mr. Erlicht said. "But you can't event ize 80 movies a year. Each and every one of our movies will be special." With its largely positive message and strong performances by its two stars, "The Banker" had the potential to be a box office and streaming hit while generating some Oscar buzz. "You have an incredibly exciting and entertaining story with an A plus cast, but it's also saying something about the world we used to live in and the world we still live in today," Matt Dentler, the head of Apple's film division, said in an interview before the original release plan was canceled. The film's journey to almost making it to the screen goes back to 1995, when the original screenwriter, David Lewis Smith, conducted eight hours of taped interviews with the elder Mr. Garrett. Mr. Garrett described his rise as an entrepreneur in California decades ago, his efforts to buy banks in Texas and how he and his business partner, Joseph Morris, wound up drawing the attention of the federal authorities. Both served time at Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles and testified before Congress in 1965. The tapes made by Mr. Smith, along with more than 1,000 pages of the congressional transcript, became source material for the script. In 1996, Mr. Garrett signed a deal giving the rights to his life story to New Day, a production company he formed with Bernard Garrett Jr. and Mr. Smith. (The New York Times reviewed a copy of the contract.) The project languished until 2012, when the producer Joel Viertel bought the rights from New Day. As part of that deal, Mr. Viertel acquired the life rights of Bernard Garrett Jr. and his mother, Eunice Garrett, played in the film by Nia Long. The producer enlisted the screenwriter and director George Nolfi in 2015, along with the screenwriter Niceole R. Levy. According to two people close to the project, the filmmakers met with the younger Mr. Garrett only once for dinner in Los Angeles, at Mr. Nolfi's request before filming started in September 2018. The shoot wrapped in November 2018, and Apple bought the worldwide rights in June for 20 million based on an eight minute sizzle reel. Before his half sister made the filmmakers aware of her accusations, Mr. Garrett was set to have a role in promoting "The Banker." He took part in a panel discussion hosted by the film site IndieWire on Nov. 5. There is no character in the film based on Cynthia Garrett's mother, Linda Garrett, the second of Bernard Garrett's three wives. Married in 1962, the two stayed together for more than a decade, Ms. Garrett said. In her telling of events, it was her mother, not Eunice, who helped Mr. Garrett make the business deals central to "The Banker." The filmmakers learned of Ms. Garrett's objections on Nov. 8, when she posted them in the YouTube comment section beneath a trailer for "The Banker." In her comment, Ms. Garrett accused the filmmakers of stealing her mother's story without permission. On Monday, the filmmakers issued a statement signed by 53 members of the cast and crew. It read in part, "Though we have no way of knowing what may have transpired between Mr. Garrett's children in the 1970s, including the allegations of abuse we have recently been made aware of, our hearts go out to anyone who has suffered." Interviewed on Thursday, Ms. Garrett, who said she had not seen the movie, held firm. "My sister and I spoke up about our sexual abuse because we don't feel that a predator should profit off of stealing our mom's and our life story with our father," she said. "It's pretty simple to me. All the rest of this, the chain of title and the movie rights, all these other arguments, they are just cloud cover." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Inside the Democratic Party, Bloomberg's ascent would put a sharp brake on the two major post Obama trends in liberalism: The Great Awokening on race and sex and culture, and the turn against technocracy in economic policymaking. Yes, Bloomberg has adapted his policy views to better fit the current liberal consensus, and his views on social issues were liberal to begin with. But he has the record of a deficit and foreign policy hawk, the soul of a Wall Street centrist, and a history of racial and religious profiling and sexist misbehavior. More than any other contender, his nomination would pull the party back toward where it stood before the rise of Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter and MeToo, and root liberalism once more in professional class interests and a Washington Wall Street mindmeld. These are good reasons to assume that he cannot be the nominee, and excellent reasons for social progressives and socialists alike to want to beat him. The only way they will fail is if Bloomberg succeeds in casting himself as the unusual answer to an unusual incumbent combining the Democratic fear of a Trump second term, his own reputation for effective management and the promise of spending his fortune to crush Trump into a more compelling electability pitch than the race's other moderates. But Democrats considering this sales pitch should be very clear on what a Bloomberg presidency would mean. Bloomberg does not have Trump's flagrant vices (though some of his alleged behavior with women is pretty bad) or his bald disdain for norms and rules and legal niceties, and so a Bloomberg presidency will feel less institutionally threatening, less constitutionally perilous, than the ongoing wildness of the Trump era in addition to delivering at least some of the policy changes that liberals and Democrats desire. However, feelings can be deceiving. Trump's authoritarian tendencies are naked on his Twitter feed, but Bloomberg's imperial instincts, his indifference to limits on his power, are a conspicuous feature of his career. Trump jokes about running for a third term; Bloomberg actually managed it, bulldozing through the necessary legal changes. Trump tries to bully the F.B.I. and undermine civil liberties; Bloomberg ran New York as a miniature surveillance state. Trump has cowed the Republican Party with celebrity and bombast; Bloomberg has spent his political career buying organizations and politicians that might otherwise impede him. Trump blusters and bullies the press; Bloomberg literally owns a major media organization. Trump has Putin envy; Bloomberg hearts Xi Jinping. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
ON Sunday evening, just ahead of two press preview days for the 2013 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Chevrolet will unveil the seventh generation of the Corvette. While the two seat sports car accounts for a small fraction of Chevy's total sales, it is a vital element of the brand's image and, in fact, its longest running passenger car nameplate. The debut of the redesigned 2014 model, known among the Corvette faithful as the C7 and set to go on sale in the fall, will answer questions that have swirled around enthusiasts' online forums for years. Among the unknowns to be resolved is the car's basic layout: will the engine be in the front as it has been for 60 years (most likely), or will it at last be positioned behind the passenger compartment (quite doubtful), as many fans of exotic sports cars have long felt it needed to be? As details of the new car are being revealed in Detroit, some 600 miles to the east a storied Corvette engineering prototype will be progressing toward the final phases of a restoration. The XP 819, a one of a kind research vehicle developed by General Motors engineers in the 1960s, is one of the cars that has given rise to recurring rumors that each new generation of Corvette may be the breakthrough model elevating the Chevy to supercar status. Long out of sight after a crash during testing, the XP 819 is being brought back to life at the Long Island shop of Kevin Mackay. "We have over 3,500 hours into the restoration to date," said Mr. Mackay, whose Corvette Repair in Valley Stream, N.Y., has revived significant Corvettes like the Briggs Cunningham team racecar that won its class at Le Mans in 1960 and the 1963 Corvette Coupe Speciale Rondine, a one off Pininfarina designed show car. "This is a one of a kind vehicle," Mr. Mackay said of the XP 819. "So unlike a regular Corvette, most of the parts on this vehicle have to be handmade. This is by far the most challenging project we have ever worked on." Mike Yager, founder of Mid America Motorworks, a Corvette and VW parts and accessories supplier based in Effingham, Ill., bought the XP 819 at a Monterey, Calif., auction in August 2002. "The original focus of my collection was on low mileage, highly original Corvettes," Mr. Yager said. But Mr. Yager didn't like it when people who saw his collection said they had seen cars like his before, he said. So he decided that one off cars experimental cars and design concepts would be the focus of the collection. Chevrolet has released only engine specifications for the 2014 car. The rumors of a midengine design repeatedly denied by General Motors seem unfounded once again, as they have proved throughout Corvette's rich history. From what is known, the C7 is decidedly evolutionary, using advanced technologies like direct fuel injection but maintaining the basic pushrod design of the small block V 8 Still, G.M. built, tested and, in some cases, displayed at public shows more than a dozen experimental prototypes that featured mid or rear engine layouts from 1958 to 1973. The period was a long, dreamy exploration into advanced sports car design and reflected the optimism of the times. "This was the golden era of G.M., where because of their market share and incredible profits, they had the resources to create these skunk works," said Jerry Burton, a Corvette historian, referring to various development efforts within G.M. Despite all of the noteworthy innovations and forward looking design cues that came out of these experimental vehicles, Corvette has retained the same basic front engine V 8 layout. "The design staff was really calling the shots back then," Mr. Burton said, noting the fondness for the long hood look held by the vice president of styling, William L. Mitchell. Zora Arkus Duntov, the engineer most closely associated with the Corvette's early years (though he did not become the car's official chief engineer until 1968) had long wanted to build a rear engine development car, according to members of the engineering staff in that period. After all, Porsche and VW had made rear engine layouts work and, as Duntov saw it, a rear engine Corvette came closer to the purist midengine layout he craved in a sports car without incurring the problems of engine cooling, passenger space and crashworthiness. Duntov provided basic mechanical specifications for coming research cars but did not have direct involvement in the XP 819 design. That was the responsibility of Frank Winchell, a top engineer who had worked on rear engine sports racing cars and the Corvair production model. "Zora and Winchell were big rivals," said Mr. Burton, who wrote a biography of Duntov (Bentley Publishers, 2002). "Winchell was introverted and quiet. Zora was a showman who resented not being more involved. He felt that anything to do with Corvettes should be under his control." For legal reasons relating to the Corvair lawsuits that were starting to appear and the handling challenges that arose when rear engine vehicles were pushed to the limit, those who worked on the XP 819 knew that mounting the engine behind the rear axle, rather than in the middle of the car, was not necessarily the best plan. Instead, they viewed the project as a way to learn more about optimal engine placement. One of the things engineers did to compensate for the vehicle's 69 percent rear weight bias was to run the gas tank a flexible urethane bag instead of a traditional steel fuel tank through the large central backbone that formed the main section of the chassis. "It was one of the most beautiful shapes I had ever seen," Mr. Van Valkenburgh said, in contrast to the view held by Duntov, who had named the XP 819 the ugly duckling. "I walked past it every working day for two years and would have taken a second mortgage on my house to buy it at the time." "I did have negative comments about the handling after driving it, but I wasn't a development driver and wasn't tasked with pushing it to the limit," said Mr. Van Valkenburgh, who went on to publish several auto racing books after he left G.M. "We all realized the fundamental physics of a car like that." The car did eventually spin out one day at G.M.'s proving grounds in Milford, Mich., while doing a double lane change test, ripping the front end off. The car was repaired after the crash for continued testing, but Chevrolet decided not to continue development as a production vehicle or to keep it around for history's sake. Semon E. Knudsen, the head of Chevrolet at the time, sent the car to the shop in Daytona Beach, Fla., of Smokey Yunick, the legendary engine expert and stock car builder, with instructions to chop it up. As happened with many experimental vehicles and concept cars that came out of G.M. in those days, Yunick didn't dispose of the car as instructed. The remains of the XP 819 were left in one concentrated huddle in a paint booth inside the shop. Years later, a Chevrolet dealer named Steve Tate recognized the unique XP serial number in the parts pile and promptly bought the car from Yunick, eventually reassembling it. The car changed owners a number of times and was displayed at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., for several years. "We discovered the car was put together very crudely, after taking delivery," Mr. Mackay said. "It was a diamond in the rough. The entire center section of the frame was missing. We rebuilt the chassis and reskinned the car by grinding the body down and adding layers and layers of fiberglass." A drivable chassis sans body, but with functional brakes, steering column and two seats will be prepared and driven onto the Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance show field in March. The plan is that the XP 819 will be shown as a finished car, body and all, next year at the same show. "When I think about 819, I know that I will be able to confidently tell people who visit my museum, 'You have definitely never seen one of these before," ' Mr. Yager said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Abby Howell chose to have a biopsy when a mammogram showed some calcification two years ago. Instead of being definitive, the biopsy found atypia abnormal duct cells that are not cancerous but which some doctors recommend having removed. Because of the uncertainty, women whose results fall into the gray zone between normal and malignant with diagnoses like "atypia" or "ductal carcinoma in situ" should seek second opinions on their biopsies, researchers say. Misinterpretation can lead women to have surgery and other treatments they do not need, or to miss out on treatments they do need. The new findings, reported Tuesday in JAMA, challenge the common belief that a biopsy is the gold standard and will resolve any questions that might arise from an unclear mammogram or ultrasound. In the United States, about 1.6 million women a year have breast biopsies; about 20 percent of the tests find cancer. Ten percent identify atypia, a finding that cells inside breast ducts are abnormal but not cancerous. About 60,000 women each year are found to have ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S., which also refers to abnormal cells that are confined inside the milk ducts and so are not considered invasive; experts disagree about whether D.C.I.S. is cancer. "It is often thought that getting the biopsy will give definitive answers, but our study says maybe it won't," said Dr. Joann G. Elmore, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and the first author of the new study on the accuracy of breast biopsies. Her team asked pathologists to examine biopsy slides, then compared their diagnoses with those given by a panel of leading experts who had seen the same slides. There were some important differences, especially in the gray zone. An editorial in JAMA called the findings "disconcerting." It said the study should be a call to action for pathologists and breast cancer scientists to improve the accuracy of biopsy readings, by consulting with one another more often on challenging cases and by creating clearer definitions for various abnormalities so that diagnoses will be more consistent and precise. The editorial also recommended second opinions in ambiguous cases. A second opinion usually does not require another biopsy; it means asking one or more additional pathologists to look at the microscope slides made from the first biopsy. Dr. Elmore said doctors could help patients find a pathologist for a second opinion. A surgeon not involved with the study, Dr. Elisa Port, a co director of the Dubin Breast Center and the chief of breast surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, said the research underlined how important it is that biopsies be interpreted by highly experienced pathologists who specialize in breast disease. "As a surgeon, I only know what to do based on the guidance of my pathologist," Dr. Port said. "Those people behind the scenes are actually the ones who dictate care." In Dr. Elmore's study, the panel of three expert pathologists examined biopsy slides from 240 women, one slide per case, and came to a consensus about the diagnosis. "These were very, very experienced breast pathologists who have written textbooks in the field," Dr. Elmore said. Then the slides were divided into four sets, and 60 slides were sent to each of 115 pathologists in eight states who routinely read breast biopsies. The doctors interpreted the slides and returned them, and the same set was sent to the next pathologist. The study took seven years to complete. The goal was to find out how the practicing pathologists stacked up against the experts. The task was tougher than actual practice, because in real cases pathologists can consult colleagues about ambiguous findings and ask for additional slides. They could not do so in the study. There was good news and bad news. When it came to invasive cancer cancer that has begun growing beyond the layer of tissue in which it started, into nearby healthy tissue the outside pathologists agreed with the experts in 96 percent of the interpretations, which Dr. Elmore called reassuring. They found the vast majority of the cancers. For completely benign findings, the outside pathologists matched the experts in 87 percent of the readings, but misdiagnosed 13 percent of healthy ones as abnormal. The next two categories occupied the gray zone. One was D.C.I.S. For this condition, the pathologists agreed with the experts on 84 percent of the cases. But they missed 13 percent of cases that the experts had found, and diagnosed D.C.I.S. in 3 percent of the readings where the experts had ruled it out. The finding is of concern, because D.C.I.S. sometimes becomes invasive cancer, and it is often treated like an early stage cancer, with surgery and radiation. Missing the diagnosis can leave a woman at increased risk for cancer but calling something D.C.I.S. when it is not can result in needless tests and treatments. The second finding in the gray zone was atypia, in which abnormal, but not cancerous, cells are found in breast ducts. Women with atypia have an increased risk of breast cancer, and some researchers recommend surgery to remove the abnormal tissue, as well as intensified screening and drugs to lower the risk of breast cancer. But in the study, the outside pathologists and the experts agreed on atypia in only 48 percent of the interpretations. The outside pathologists diagnosed atypia in 17 percent of the readings where the experts had not, and missed it in 35 percent where the experts saw it. "Women with atypia and D.C.I.S. need to stop and realize it's not the same thing as invasive cancer, and they have time to stop and reflect and think about it, and ask for a second opinion," Dr. Elmore said. Abby Howell, 57, who lives in Seattle, two years ago had some calcifications show up on a mammogram, which are sometimes a sign of cancer. She was given the option of just mammograms every six months or having a biopsy. She chose the biopsy, thinking it would be definitive. But instead, it showed atypia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Misty Copeland was fast becoming the most famous ballerina in the United States making the cover of Time magazine, being profiled by "60 Minutes," growing into a social media sensation and dancing ballet's biggest roles on some of its grandest stages. But another role eluded her: She was still not a principal dancer. Until Tuesday, when Ms. Copeland became the first African American woman to be named a principal in the 75 year history of American Ballet Theater. Even as her promotion was celebrated by her many fans, it raised all too familiar questions about why African American dancers, particularly women, remain so underrepresented at top ballet companies in the 21st century, despite the work of pioneering black dancers who broke racial barriers in the past. And it showed how media and communications have changed in dance, with Ms. Copeland deftly using modern tools an online ad she made for Under Armour has been viewed more than 8 million times to spread her fame far beyond traditional dance circles, drawing new audiences to ballet. "I had moments of doubting myself, and wanting to quit, because I didn't know that there would be a future for an African American woman to make it to this level," Ms. Copeland said at a news conference at the Metropolitan Opera House on Tuesday afternoon. "At the same time, it made me so hungry to push through, to carry the next generation. So it's not me up here and I'm constantly saying that it's everyone that came before me that got me to this position." Fittingly, the moment of her promotion was captured on video and shared on Instagram. "Misty, take a bow," Kevin McKenzie, Ballet Theater's artistic director, could be seen saying, before colleagues congratulated Ms. Copeland, who seemed to be fighting back tears. Her promotion was lauded on social media by, among others, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Prince, who had featured her in a video. Over the past year, whenever Ms. Copeland, 32, danced leading roles with Ballet Theater, her performances became events, drawing large, diverse, enthusiastic crowds to cheer her on at the Metropolitan Opera House, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. After she starred in "Swan Lake" with Ballet Theater last week becoming the first African American to do so with the company at the Met the crowd of autograph seekers was so large that it had to be moved away from the cramped area outside the stage door. In a break with ballet tradition, Ms. Copeland was unusually outspoken about her ambition of becoming the first black woman to be named a principal by Ballet Theater, one of the country's most prestigious companies, which is known for its international roster of stars and for staging full length classical story ballets. She wrote about her goals and struggles in a memoir published last year, "Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina." A number of leading dance companies and schools, including Ballet Theater, have begun new efforts to increase diversity in classical ballet, but there is a long way to go. Jennifer Homans, the author of "Apollo's Angels," a history of ballet, said that ballet had fallen far behind other art forms, like theater, in that regard making what she called the "phenomenon" of Ms. Copeland all the more important. "What she has come to represent is so important in the dance world, and in the ballet world in particular," said Ms. Homans, who is the director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. "I think it's about time. But I don't think it's enough." This history made Ms. Copeland's chances for promotion a much discussed topic in the dance world, and put a rare public spotlight on Ballet Theater as it weighed the kind of personnel decision that, in the rarefied world of ballet, is seldom talked about openly. That race could still be such an issue in 2015 and that African Americans could remain so rarely seen in elite ballet companies has been depressing to many dancegoers, and has led to impassioned discussions in the dance world and beyond about race, stereotypes and image. The dearth of black women in top ballet companies has been attributed to a variety of factors, from the legacy of discrimination and lingering stereotypical concepts of what ballerinas should look like to the lack of exposure to ballet and training opportunities in many communities. Ms. Copeland was featured on one of the five different covers for Time magazine's "100 most influential people" issue. More than a half century has passed since the pioneering black dancer Arthur Mitchell broke through the color barrier and became a principal dancer at New York City Ballet in 1962, and a generation has elapsed since Lauren Anderson became the first African American principal at Houston Ballet, in 1990. But City Ballet has had only two black principal dancers, both men: Mr. Mitchell and Albert Evans, who died last week. Ballet Theater officials said that the company's only African American principal dancer before now was Desmond Richardson, who joined as a principal in 1997. In ballet, principals earn not only the respect of the dance world but are also paid more, dance bigger roles and see their photos in programs, as well as their names in larger type. Ms. Copeland last seemed on the verge of promotion in 2012 after a breakthrough performance in the title role of Stravinsky's "The Firebird," but she was sidelined by injury. Ms. Copeland's promotion was announced by Mr. McKenzie at a company meeting on Tuesday morning. Three other dancers, enormously respected in the dance world but far less famous outside of it, were also made principals. Stella Abrera, who has been a soloist with the company since 2001, was promoted, and two more principals were hired from outside: Maria Kochetkova, a principal with San Francisco Ballet, and Alban Lendorf, a principal with Royal Danish Ballet. Skylar Brandt, Thomas Forster, Luciana Paris, Arron Scott and Cassandra Trenary were promoted to soloist, and Jeffrey Cirio, a principal with Boston Ballet, will join the company as a soloist. While Ms. Copeland has earned many good reviews when she has danced big roles, including some calling for her promotion, other critics have suggested that she still has work to do to make some classical roles fully her own. When she danced the double role of Odette/Odile in "Swan Lake" for the first time, in New York last week, she did not do some of the traditional bravura fouette turns which critics forgave, but noted. But she has also established herself outside traditional dance circles with her books (her memoir and "Firebird," an illustrated children's book), ads and public appearances, and has received help shaping her public image from her manager, Gilda Squire. In last week's "Swan Lake," cheers for Ms. Copeland repeatedly stopped the show. Smartphones came out to record her curtain calls, and she was handed bouquets onstage by Ms. Anderson and Raven Wilkinson, who danced with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the late 1950s. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
It isn't hard to guess what you're hearing from most of your fellow Republicans as they try to persuade you to cast a vote for President Trump's Supreme Court nominee before the election. In a nutshell, it's this: "The Democrats didn't play by the rules in the past, and you'd be a fool to think they will play by them in the future. So why should we not fill a seat that's constitutionally ours to have?" It's bad advice. Bad for the country. Bad for the party. Bad for you. Lest you think I don't get the argument, let me rehearse it. There used to be a bipartisan tradition of confirming well qualified nominees for the court. Democrats trashed it with their trashing of Robert Bork. There used to be a bipartisan tradition of approving well qualified nominees for lower courts. Democrats trashed it by filibustering George W. Bush's appellate court nominees. There used to be a bipartisan tradition of respecting the filibuster. Democrats trashed it by blowing up the filibuster in 2013. There used to be a tradition of the Judiciary Committee treating nominees with a sense of fairness. Democrats trashed it when they used uncorroborated allegations to try to block and besmirch Brett Kavanaugh. In short, whatever sin is involved in moving forward on Trump's next nominee this close to a presidential election, it's a venial one compared with what the other side has done, and may still do. Nor, I imagine, is that everything your caucus colleagues are telling you. The left, they say, is engaged in a full scale attack on traditional American values, from freedom of speech to the presumption of innocence to the right to bear arms to the need to enforce our immigration laws to the broader concept of law and order. These things are too important to hazard on a bare 5 4 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, especially now that John Roberts has succumbed to the lure of being the swing vote. A 6 3 majority might be the only sure defense against this cultural revolution for a generation to come. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Shuttered D.I.Y. rock clubs rarely get an encore. But Market Hotel, a rollicking space under the tracks of the J/M/Z subway lines, defied the odds and rose again in January, six years after the police raided it over the lack of a liquor license. Market Hotel first opened in the late 2000s, when bare bones clubs flourished in Brooklyn, hosting then underground dance parties like Mister Saturday Night and providing a launchpad for homegrown bands like Real Estate and Titus Andronicus. While its unlikely return delighted indie fans, the resurrected club also reminded them of other D.I.Y. music shrines that have vanished, including Glasslands, 285 Kent and Death by Audio. Bordered by auto shops and check cashing outlets, the triangular club is up a precarious flight of stairs, practically within arm's reach of the elevated subway platform at Myrtle Avenue. Passing trains rattle the walls, which, combined with the undulating floor, rounds out the rough hewed experience. This is the sort of music club where drummers haul their kits through the crowd after the show. Obstructing nearly everyone's views is a pillar notorious enough to have its own Twitter account ( marketpillar). Despite the all ages designation, the crowd on a recent Thursday night was filled with late 30 somethings, many of them coupled off and a few dead asleep as the clock neared midnight. Patrons blamed tardiness on band practice and talked about how cool and alternative Philadelphia is. There was a Pacific Northwest attitude in the air, owing perhaps to the Thermals, a recent headliner out of Portland, Ore. Sub Pop tote bags and sensible fleeces provided relief from the neighborhood's edgier nighttime fashion norms. Some crowd surfing and a gentle mosh pit emerged late into the set. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
We're Getting More Sleep. A Whole 18 Minutes. It's Not Enough. Years of scolding from health experts about a good night's rest may be breaking through. Americans are finally getting more sleep about 18 minutes more per weeknight compared with 2003. It may not sound like much, but researchers say it's a positive sign. "If we only got more sleep, we would then see that we actually perform better and would probably be more creative and more productive during the day," said Dr. Mathias Basner, the associate professor of sleep and chronobiology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the analysis of federal survey data, published this month in the journal "Sleep." The incremental gains took place over 13 years. Dr. Basner and his colleague, Dr. David F. Dinges, found that Americans gained about 1.4 minutes of sleep per weeknight each year between 2003 and 2016. On average, Americans get more than eight hours of sleep on weeknights and more on weekends, according to the data. But sleep length varies widely. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third of adults get insufficient sleep, which it defines as less than seven hours. Many studies have pointed to the potential health benefits of a good night's sleep. Poor sleep has been linked to weight gain, focus issues and even an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. It can even exacerbate relationship problems. To prevent those problems and ensure quality sleep, experts suggest limiting screen time before bed, creating a consistent routine, avoiding naps and maintaining a relaxing environment. "When you enter the bedroom, it should be a sign for your body that it's time to go to bed," Dr. Basner said. Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to improve your hours in bed. None Four out of five people say that they suffer from sleep problems at least once a week and wake up feeling exhausted. Here's a guide to becoming a more successful sleeper. Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Try this short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. Nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in a recent study reported having more or much more trouble than usual during the pandemic. Follow these seven simple steps for improving your shut eye. When it comes to gadgets that claim to solve your sleep problems, newer doesn't always mean better. Here are nine tools for better, longer sleep. That's why he found the results of his analysis so encouraging: The public, it seems, is developing a healthier relationship with sleep. Americans were able to eke out extra sleep largely by heading to bed sooner and, to a lesser degree, by waking up later, the researchers found. That changing weeknight bedtime a shift earlier of 66 seconds each year was made possible in part by less reading and television watching before bed. While Americans added about 30 seconds of television watching to their weekday routine each year, they were doing less of it in the hours before bed, freeing themselves to go to sleep a bit earlier, the researchers found. Each year, the number of people who said they watched television or movies before bed on weeknights shrank by about 0.22 percent. That finding aligns with data from Nielsen, the television research firm, which suggests that Americans are taking more control over how they view shows and movies by watching less live television late at night and more through other means, such as internet connected devices. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is known for its muscular collection of industrial architecture. Here, the battleship Missouri and other warships were built and repaired until the yard closed five decades ago. The regular weekend tours of the Navy Yard cover that and more, but at the end comes an unexpected treat: the magnificent, slightly sagging Naval Hospital, a ghostly marble temple built in 1838 and empty for two decades. A new plan may sweep away the cobwebs. The New York Naval Shipyard began building ships in 1806, as the early republic began to build up its navy. In 1838 one of the largest structures opened, the 200 foot long hospital, on a rise overlooking the yard, but now screened by trees. The architect Martin E. Thompson designed a spare C shaped building of near white marble, as severe and straight as a nun's ruler in parochial school. Although two stories in height, the Doric styling and extreme length of the front evokes the taut modernism of the International Style, like Mies van der Rohe's flat fronted School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Before steamships, by the time sailors and Marines injured in places like the Halls of Montezuma got back to the United States any dramatic wounds would have stabilized or proved fatal so the Navy probably dealt with invalids rather than the freshly injured. That the hospital had a rural character is suggested by an 1851 ad in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle for a lost "RED COW with a white face," for which a 5 reward was offered "for her delivery at the hospital." In 1871 The Eagle reported that 32 patients were in house, and that although such a "quiet and comfortable" location might attract malingerers, "the sham is so easily detected" that it was rare. In 1878 The Eagle noted an outbreak of yellow fever, although at least one of the cases was a false alarm, caused by what the newspaper described as "an overdose of very questionable whisky and an inordinate feed of cucumbers." In the Spanish American War of 1898, the hospital ship Solace delivered to the hospital 43 Marines and sailors from the Cuban campaign, most suffering with diseases like dysentery. One of the actual injured, a Rough Rider named Mason Mitchell, could hardly be accused of malingering; despite a shrapnel wound in the back he hopped a ride with some reporters on their tug and went ashore in Manhattan. On the other hand, another trip by the Solace to the hospital carried "men whose faces and heads were bandaged, others whose faces were pale and sunken from long sufferings, men who shuffled about the decks with crutches." In December 1944, The New York Times reported that volunteers were visiting the wounded at both the Navy Yard Hospital and the new St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, collecting Christmas shopping lists. The most popular request: "black, lacy and sheer lingerie" from stores like B. Altman and Lord Taylor. The hospital had a rural character, as suggested by an 1851 ad in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. After the Navy decommissioned the yard in the 1960s, it held onto the hospital for administrative headquarters. When it did leave, in 1989, the Navy did a conscientious seal up job, and careful monitoring by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation has prevented the usual devastation. In most cases an empty building in such an isolated position would be a near ruin, but the plywood that covers most the windows is intact, the gutters and roof appear to be in good shape, and there is no graffiti; even the remaining glazed windows in the entry loggia are unbroken. It is a preservation miracle. Photographers have occasionally made trips inside, like Richard Nickel Jr., who posts his pictures at his blog, kingstonlounge. They show the entire interior completely coated with a thin coat of whitewash; it looks like a burial shroud. The rooms are empty, except for some fallen plaster and peeling paint, like something from a Stephen King novel, half dream, half nightmare. It isn't a ruin so much as something you might run across in a haunted lost and found, an architectural orphan. Now the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital looks as if it might be found. Steiner Studios, a film and television studio, is a major presence in the Navy Yard, and plans to spend 400 million to take over and restore the hospital, constructing additional space for media and tech purposes. Douglas C. Steiner, the chairman, said in an e mail that he first saw the hospital in 1999 and "it screamed movie studio to me." You cannot just stroll into the Navy Yard, except for the visitor's center, Building 92 on Flushing Avenue, which has an intriguing exhibition on its long history. That's where two hour shuttle bus tours of the yard, operated by Turnstile Tours leave from on Saturdays and Sundays. The hospital is the last stop, and visitors can walk around outside (but not inside). A quiet peace will wash over you as you circle the building through the overgrown grass. It's rare in the city, and unique in the Navy Yard, otherwise a combination of hipster Silicon Valley high tech and ragged industrial archaeology. Hurry. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. What do we talk about when we talk about abstraction? Two small, illuminating exhibitions of work by Helen Frankenthaler at the Clark Art Institute, one of paintings and the other of woodcuts, together suggest nature lurks throughout the imagery of this ostensibly unyielding formalist. At nearby Mass MoCA, the question is what makes figuration go live, raised by Elizabeth King in work that marries exacting handcraft and digital technology. "There are no rules," Frankenthaler proclaimed, in a statement about the importance of risk taking that gave the woodcut show at the Clark its title. She applied this to the processes of art making: Frankenthaler defied rules about painting as well as printmaking, most consequentially when she thinned her paint with turpentine and poured it directly onto raw canvas, in a manner that radically redirected so called Color Field abstraction. But she also applied her declaration to maintaining that movement's firm renunciation of any subject matter other than painting's own material conditions. The scant dozen paintings chosen for "As in Nature," curated by Alexandra Schwartz, are not necessarily "about" the landscape, but rather reflect a kind of parallel play with natural forces. Early on, Frankenthaler reported the "magic moment" of being "caught between the making of an abstract picture and the emergence of certain images." Even with her help, the images she identifies are elusive. The earliest work shown at the Clark, helpfully titled "Abstract Landscape," dates to 1951, when the artist was 22. (It precedes by a year her breakthrough "Mountains and Sea," not on view.) Tawny hills and colorful vegetation are clearly outlined amid washes of blue; clear, too, are the influence of Gorky and Matisse. "Milkwood Arcade" (1963), an early use of acrylic, places a passage of cool, tree shaded light above a marine blue oblong; an excitable band of brown above and a hot sunny yellow embracing the whole complete a composition both Rothko esque and allusively naturalistic. By the later 1970s, Frankenthaler was departing from her signature style to capitalize on the tactile heft achievable with acrylic, as in "Jockey," with its thick dabs of bright green. Least known are such late paintings as "Red Shift," in which clashing crimsons and deep pinks create a toxic glow along the horizon of an irradiated landscape, and "Barometer," a rare grisaille that suggests a frozen wasteland of churning seas and joyless snow. By way of a coda, the exhibition ends in 1992 with "The Birth of the Blues," a vibrant chord of rich blues and greens swept in horizontal lines, like notation for a bar of music. With "No Rules," the show surveying Frankenthaler's woodcuts, the curator Jay Clarke demonstrates how well a refractory medium can suit an artist who favors intuition and chance. Although she made a greater number of lithographs and (particularly) monotypes, both more conducive to spontaneity, the woodcuts, which span the years 1973 to 2009, offer a fascinating overview of her thinking and process. From the '90s comes the sumptuous "Freefall," in silky blues and greens on a hand dyed sheet 78 inches high a feat of papermaking as well as printing. Bravura workmanship reached its height in "Madame Butterfly," a slightly fussy triptych involving 46 woodblocks and 102 colors. But most of the late prints are marvels of freshness and lucidity. "Japanese Maple," with its deep, wet reds, seems effortlessly evocative, as does the final, ethereal "Weeping Crabapple," completed two years before Frankenthaler's death in 2011. Recently returned to attention after a long hiatus, Frankenthaler is being hailed not only as a covert naturalist and, to be sure, a heroine of formalism but also an unfortunate victim of her era's implacable misogyny. (Notoriously, the critic E. C. Goossen, comparing her to her towering predecessor, Jackson Pollock, wrote, "What she took from him was masculine," i.e., enamel paint flung onto canvas with a stick; "What she made with it was distinctly feminine: the broad, bleeding edged stain on raw linen." More pithily, Harold Rosenberg accused her of being a passive "medium of her medium." By association, even men were at risk, as when Arthur Danto said of Morris Louis's poured paintings known as "Veils" famously cribbed from Frankenthaler that viewing them was like "walking through racks of negligees at Bendels.") No feminist herself, Frankenthaler was often defined by her romantic relationship with formalism's ruthless arbiter, Clement Greenberg, and her later marriage to the painter Robert Motherwell, another polemicist of high modernism. She is further dogged by her privileged upbringing, and the irrepressible elegance it is seen to have produced. Ms. Schwartz argues that these emphases obstruct recognition that Frankenthaler's work could be tough and even ugly; that she sketched outdoors (which no purist of abstraction would do); and that her very considerable success makes her a role model for younger women. The Clark Art Institute is a string of Apollonian galleries set amid rolling hills and wooded trails as in a landscape by Poussin. The atmosphere is meditative. On the other hand, Mass MoCA, as its name implies, aims successfully to engage eager crowds. Within its newly augmented industrial era spaces, visitors of all ages line up for James Turrell's rooms of mesmerizing color and light, and for the goggles and handsets that make Laurie Anderson's two irresistible virtual reality animations come to life. Elizabeth King's sculptures, stop motion animations, and photographs might, in this context, similarly appear bent on spectacle. Theatricalized by spot lighting in dim rooms, the exhibition "Radical Small," curated by Denise Markonish, even includes a simulated film set. But pensive, old fashioned interiority is afoot. No stranger to cutting edge technology, Ms. King (born in 1950) is also a close student of historical automatons. Facing you on entry is a stop motion animation, projected high on the wall, of a huge staring glass eyeball, its lids held open by a spring loaded, "Clockwork Orange" y device. After a few moments it blinks quickly; you have to watch for it, and you may blink sympathetically when it does. The subject of the film is a sculpture nearby. Set atop a brass stand on green baize inside a wood framed glass vitrine, and illuminated like a figure onstage, the naked eye seems touchingly abashed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER at New York City Center (Dec. 13, 8 p.m.; Dec. 14, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Dec. 15, 3 and 7:30 p.m.; Dec. 17 19, 7:30 p.m.; through Jan. 5). Ailey's robust season lineup is enhanced this week with two company premieres. On Friday, the troupe, for the first time, performs"Busk," created in 2009 by the meticulous, idiosyncratic choreographer Aszure Barton. It gets an encore on Saturday evening with two new works by Jamar Roberts and Darrell Grand Moultrie. On Tuesday, the company adds to its repertory "City of Rain," a galvanic 2010 work by Camille A. Brown that reflects her physical fervor and acuity. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org DORRANCE DANCE at the Joyce Theater (Dec. 17 18, 7:30 p.m.; Dec. 19, 8 p.m.; through Jan. 5). This popular company divides its three week residency into three distinct programs. The one thing they all have in common is "The Nutcracker Suite," a new work set to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's effervescent rendition of Tchaikovsky's standard holiday soundtrack. We're used to experiencing that familiar tale through the delicate vocabulary of ballet; here Dorrance tells it with gusto through tap, letting us feel and hear it in a fresh way. Joining that work on the first program (through Dec. 22) is "All Good Things Come to an End," a sweet, incisive, vaudeville inspired work set to the music of the jazz great Fats Waller. 212 242 0800, joyce.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
To love motorcycles is to love some measure of suffering. Hugh Mackie knows this. H e has had the smashed collarbone, cracked ribs, cracked shoulder blade and broken thumb to prove it . "I can tell when the rain is coming," he said in an interview earlier this year. As the barometer rises, so does the pain from those old injuries. Like a lot of guys who ride, he lives by intuition: You can't think your way out of an unexpected pothole or a hairpin turn when riding through New York City. There are many ways to get around New York in 2019, though not all of them beckon. The subway is broken. Clunky CitiBikes throng the bike lanes and bridges, and now they have zippy Revel mopeds to compete with on the road. Cars are a pain to park. The bus is ... fine, if it goes where you need. Motorcycles have always come with their own headaches, but now those headaches are worse. "Now, you get ticketed and towed relentlessly, no matter where you go, so there's no advantage in having a bike anymore," Mr. Mackie said. You might as well walk. Mr. Mackie, who is Scottish, opened the garage at this location back in 1986 , about five years after moving to New York, and he is still here , servicing, tearing down, building, rebuilding and customizing British bikes. His apartment is in the back. His wife lives there, too. The sign whispering the shop's existence is so inconspicuous that you would never notice it if you didn't already know it was there. There's a particular kind of yellowish film that coats the walls and windows of an old garage; it's like stepping into a sepia tone photograph. I grew up hanging out in my grandfather's garage in Indiana. The warm, familiar smells of gasoline, smoke and dust, of scorched oil and chemical soaked rags, felt like home. Xavier Bessez, 30, rolled up to Sixth Street on a 1964 Triumph because a pin had fallen out of his brake caliper while riding. That's dangerous. On the way, a cop pulled him over for not putting both feet on the ground at a stop sign. Mr. Bessez said he had been intimidated the first time he came here. "This place was too cool for me to come in," he said. "I felt nervous, you know? And then I got to know the guys, and I've been coming ever since." On Fridays, Mr. Mackie said, the place often fills with guys like Mr. Bessez: fellow enthusiasts for British bikes who gather just to hang out. He pointed to a large clock in the back; etched beside the number 6, faintly, was the word "beer." "Six o'clock is beer o'clock," he said. Fair enough. There used to be more places like this in Manhattan: four or five in the East Village, Mr. Mackie guessed, and maybe a dozen more farther downtown. Now they're in North Brooklyn. Some resemble fashion boutiques, tailored to the tastes and money of upwardly mobile guys who want the glamour but not the grease. Mr. Mackie calls them "credit card customers." But times were different when Mr. Mackie first opened in a small, dank section of the basement. "This entire area was just completely burned out," he said of the East Village in the '80s. "Vacant tenements. Empty lots. Junkies. Hos. Just everything you can imagine in a neighborhood that has been evacuated. We were the first kind of, like, positive thing on this block for a long, long time." Lot by lot, the neighborhood changed fewer addicts but also fewer artisans. As auto parts stores vanished, so did the sidewalk mechanics, the stitched together vehicles. And with them, something of the D.I.Y. spirit. "By getting rid of those auto parts stores, they completely cleaned the whole street work in the city," Mr. Mackie said. "That was just gone overnight." A garage like Mr. Mackie's, which sits on a residentially zoned block, is allowed because its certificate of occupancy was grandfathered in from before the 1961 Zoning Resolution, which implemented much of the city's current zoning. If someone tried to open a garage next door today, the New York City Department of Buildings wouldn't issue a certificate because the block isn't zoned for it. Most non riverfront property in Manhattan isn't. A survey of zoning map changes indicates that only a few blocks east of Bowery and south of 14th Street ever allowed for new garages after 1961. Once an auto shop is closed, it usually stays gone (and legally must stay gone if closed for two years). Better a high value condo than a noisy, smelly motorcycle shop with God knows what kind of riffraff hanging around. Suddenly last year, my bike was towed three times. This year it was towed again. My bike wasn't running, so I had to pay to tow it off the impound lot. All told, that single parking violation cost about 450. I've heard similar stories, from mechanics, riders and my tow guy. It seemed like a trend; a spokeswoman for the police department confirmed my suspicion. From 2015 to 2016, motorcycle tows more than doubled citywide. After a tiny dip in 2017 , they more than doubled again in 2018. Tows for cars held steady. Walking through Mr. Mackie's garage, I tried to take it all in. He was working on a Triumph that looked as if it were built for the apocalypse. A sun bleached cow's skull dangled from a hook in the pressed tin ceiling. Racing trophies crowded a front window that is not very easy to see through. I returned home to find that my own motorcycle, which in recent months had cost me thousands and still didn't run, had been knocked over for probably the dozenth time. Whoever did it had not left a note. But someone had placed my broken off clutch lever on the seat: Usefulness? Exactly zero. I went inside and ordered a replacement lever on Amazon. The fact that I had just been commiserating about these very sorts of mishaps with Mr. Mackie was not lost on me; neither were the implications of paying a company that was helping put guys like him out of business. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
BERKELEY, Calif. Robin Sloan has a collaborator on his new novel: a computer. The idea that a novelist is someone struggling alone in a room, equipped with nothing more than determination and inspiration, could soon be obsolete. Mr. Sloan is writing his book with the help of home brewed software that finishes his sentences with the push of a tab key. It's probably too early to add "novelist" to the long list of jobs that artificial intelligence will eliminate. But if you watch Mr. Sloan at work, it is quickly clear that programming is on the verge of redefining creativity. Mr. Sloan, who won acclaim for his debut, "Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore," composes by writing snippets of text, which he sends to himself as messages and then works over into longer passages. His new novel, which is still untitled, is set in a near future California where nature is resurgent. The other day, the writer made this note: "The bison are back. Herds 50 miles long." In his cluttered man cave of an office in an industrial park here, he is now expanding this slender notion. He writes: The bison are gathered around the canyon. ... What comes next? He hits tab. The computer makes a noise like "pock," analyzes the last few sentences, and adds the phrase "by the bare sky." Mr. Sloan likes it. "That's kind of fantastic," he said. "Would I have written 'bare sky' by myself? Maybe, maybe not." He moves on: The bison have been traveling for two years back and forth. ... Tab, pock. The computer suggests between the main range of the city. "That wasn't what I was thinking at all, but it's interesting," the writer said. "The lovely language just pops out and I go, 'Yes.' " Mr. Sloan's debut novel, written the old fashioned way, was described by a New York Times critic as a "slyly arch novel about technology and its discontents." His software is not labeled anything as grand as artificial intelligence. It's machine learning, facilitating and extending his own words, his own imagination. At one level, it merely helps him do what fledgling writers have always done immerse themselves in the works of those they want to emulate. Hunter Thompson, for instance, strived to write in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he retyped "The Great Gatsby" several times as a shortcut to that objective. But the input can be pushed in certain directions. A quarter century ago, an electronic surveillance consultant named Scott French used a supercharged Mac to imitate Jacqueline Susann's sex drenched tales. His approach was different from Mr. Sloan's. Mr. French wrote thousands of computer coded rules suggesting how certain character types derived from Ms. Susann's works might plausibly interact. It took Mr. French and his Mac eight years to finish the tale he reckoned he could have done it by himself in one. "Just This Once" was commercially published, a significant achievement in itself, although it did not join Ms. Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" on the best seller list. A tinkerer and experimenter, Mr. Sloan started down the road of computer assisted creation driven by little more than "basic, nerdy curiosity." Many others have been experimenting with fiction that pushes in the direction of A.I. Botnik Studios used a predictive text program to generate four pages of rather wild Harry Potter fan fiction, which featured lines like these: "He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione's family." On a more serious level, the Alibaba Group, the Chinese e commerce company, said in January that its software for the first time outperformed humans on a global reading comprehension test. If the machines can read, then they can write. Mr. Sloan wanted to see for himself. He acquired from the Internet Archive a database of texts: issues of Galaxy and If, two popular science fiction magazines in the 1950s and '60s. After trial and error, the program came up with a sentence that impressed him: "The slow sweeping tug moved across the emerald harbor." "It was a line that made you say, 'Tell me more,'" Mr. Sloan said. Those original magazines were too limiting, however, full of cliches and stereotypes. So Mr. Sloan augmented the pool with what he calls "The California Corpus," which includes the digital text of novels by John Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick and others; Johnny Cash's poems; Silicon Valley oral histories; old Wired articles; the California Department of Fish and Wildlife's Fish Bulletin; and more. "It's growing and changing all the time," he said. Unlike Mr. French a quarter century ago, Mr. Sloan probably will not use his computer collaborator as a selling point for the finished book. He's restricting the A.I. writing in the novel to an A.I. computer that is a significant character, which means the majority of the story will be his own inspiration. But while he has no urge to commercialize the software, he is intrigued by the possibilities. Megasellers like John Grisham and Stephen King could relatively easily market programs that used their many published works to assist fans in producing authorized imitations. As for the more distant prospects, another San Francisco Bay Area science fiction writer long ago anticipated a time when novelists would turn over the composing to computerized "wordmills." In Fritz Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads," published in 1961, the human "novelists" spend their time polishing the machines and their reputations. When they try to rebel and crush the wordmills, they find they have forgotten how to write. "The bison were lined up fifty miles long, not in the cool sunlight, gathered around the canyon by the bare sky. They had been traveling for two years, back and forth between the main range of the city. They ring the outermost suburbs, grunting and muttering, and are briefly an annoyance, before returning to the beginning again, a loop that had been destroyed and was now reconstituted." "I like it, but it's still primitive," the writer said. "What's coming next is going to make this look like crystal radio kits from a century ago." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Fans of Edward Cullen, the brooding vampire hero from Stephenie Meyer's best selling "Twilight" series, will have something fresh to bite into this summer. Ms. Meyer announced on Monday that "Midnight Sun," the new novel in her vampire romance series, will be published on Aug. 4, more than a decade after the original story concluded. "I thought seriously about delaying this announcement until things were back to normal," Ms. Meyer said in a statement. "However, that felt wrong, considering how long those who are eager for this book have already waited." She added: "I know how much I personally need distractions right now, how much I need something to look forward to, and most of all, how much I need more books to read. So, I hope this book gives my readers a little pleasure to anticipate and, after it arrives, a chance to live in an imaginary world for a while." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"I wanted to create something uninhibited, spontaneous, in the same way that I started dancing, without a place to do it or the means of production," Ms. Ouizguen, 37, said, speaking in French in a telephone interview from Portland, Ore., where "Corbeaux" was being performed. The work has been all over the world, including the Marrakech Biennale, the Cour Carree at the Louvre and the Serpentine Pavilion in London. In each location, roughly half the women are locals, some professional dancers, others not. The Moroccan born Ms. Ouizguen (pronounced "WEEZ gen"), grew up in Marrakesh and danced from an early age, without any formal training. At 14, she started to give concert performances; she had a contract to perform every two weeks in her neighborhood. At 20, she began to create pieces "that didn't necessarily please people," she said, without understanding that it was contemporary dance, which she had never seen. Her professional break came in 2006, when Jean Paul Montanari, director of the Montpellier dance festival, commissioned two pieces after seeing a film of her work. Ms. Ouizguen said "Corbeaux" was not in any sense "traditional," even if it referred to traditions. The inspiration for the piece, she said, was a specific gesture: the abrupt, thrown back movement of the head, throat and neck that she had seen in ritual ceremonies in both Morocco and Senegal. "I am interested in the richness of my culture, but this is not an archaeological work," she said. Nor, she said, did the women's black robes and head scarves refer to traditional Muslim female attire. "The head scarves are very Mediterranean, not just Arab," she said. "The costumes are all about focusing on the head and neck." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
For viewers charmed by the Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky's "Gunda," an immersion in the sights and sounds of farm life from something close to a pig's eye point of view, Film Forum is streaming an intriguing portrait of agrarian living that the director filmed in 1992. Likewise shot in black and white and just as hermetic in its purview, "The Belovs" retrospectively plays like a human centered companion piece. It focuses on a sister and a brother Anna, a double widow; Mikhail, left by his wife presumably long ago who live together on a farm in western Russia. But it's also a different kind of documentary. In "Gunda" and the preceding "Aquarela," Kossakovsky turned his gaze on nature's wonders. "The Belovs" finds him working closer to the direct cinema tradition of the Maysles brothers ("Grey Gardens"), giving eccentric personalities the space to reveal themselves. "Why bother to film us?" Anna asks in "The Belovs." "We are just ordinary people." Initially, it's tempting to agree. Kossakovsky shows Anna talking to her cows and even the wood she's chopping. The film, periodically scored with eclectic, global song selections, delights in observing a dog run ahead of a tractor or torment a hedgehog. The human angle comes to the foreground when the siblings receive a visit from Vasily and Sergey, their brothers, and Mikhail's ramblings about the Soviet system (which had just ended) threaten to derail a pleasant tea. Kossakovsky stations his camera in a corner, in a voyeur's position. Later in the film, he cuts the sound during a nasty argument. As in "Gunda," this is behavior to watch, not explain. The Belovs Not rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. Watch through Film Forum's Virtual Cinema. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Armand Duplantis, a 20 year old Louisiana native who has been as shrewd in choosing the nation he represents as he has been in choosing his fiberglass poles, broke the world record in the pole vault on Saturday with a jump of 20 feet 2 3/4 inches, or 6.17 meters. At an indoor meet in Torun, Poland, Duplantis edged by a centimeter the previous record set in 2014 by Renaud Lavillenie of France, the 2012 Olympic champion. Duplantis, known widely as Mondo, has already been selected to compete at the Tokyo Games, where he will be a favorite to win gold. But he will wear the blue and gold uniform of Sweden, his mother's home country, instead of the red, white and blue of the United States. Among other things, Duplantis's decision is a cunning bit of strategy. If he had sought to represent the United States at the Olympics, Duplantis would have had to finish among the top three vaulters at the Olympic track and field trials in June. One bad day, trouble with his technique or adverse weather conditions would present the risk of having to wait another four years to compete in the Summer Games. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
That's the "Paquita" that the ballet world currently knows. Mr. Ratmansky, working from notation recorded in 1902 and 1903, shows us, as best he can, what it was. Startlingly, it turns out that almost the entire work was notated. (There is just one short solo for "Paquita," in Act II, that is original choreography.) Why has no one reconstructed it before? Perhaps simply because it's an enormous amount of work. Of course, the result isn't exactly what would have been seen at the turn of the century. In a program interview, Mr. Ratmansky notes that the final poses of dances were often omitted and that in solo variations, the positions of the arms are undefined, suggesting that the dancers had some liberty to choose. But he is a keen dance historian who has been collecting photographs and drawings of 19th century ballets for years, and the choices he makes have the ring of authenticity. So does the dancing. There is no shying away from mime sequences. Legs do not rise much above hip height, contrary to prevailing balletic fashion, which likes extensions around the ear. ("Unimaginable while you are wearing a tutu," Mr. Ratmansky said in the interview. "You can't show your underwear.") Supported arabesques have a forward inclined upper body. Curved lines permeate almost all of the dancing. Everything is rounded, pliant, angled. A number of solos end in a bent legged stance. Small scale, beaten footwork is extensively deployed; the dynamics of speed and accent keep changing, even when a sequence of steps is repeated. The movement is thrillingly full of detail. Epaulement, the use of contrasting angles of the head, shoulders and hips, is paramount. The upper body is constantly twisting in opposition to the legs, and the use of the head and eyes is ravishing, as is the attention paid to the hands, which are often inverted so that palms angle upward. The result is to make most 19th century dance that we see today look as two dimensional as a photograph. What seems dated is the story. Set in Napoleonic Spain, the ballet has the Spanish governor (Norbert Graf) plotting with the Gypsy Inigo (Cyril Pierre) to kill the French Lucien d'Hervilly (Tigran Mikayelyan), who is in love with the beautiful Gypsy Paquita (Daria Sukhorukova). Various antics ensue, including a scene in which Paquita thwarts Inigo's plot to poison and stab Lucien along the slapstick comedic lines of Basilio's fake death in "Don Quixote." (The Munich dancers, not natural comedians, could have made more of this.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Premiere has four 43 millimeter models ( 1,195) and four 36 millimeter ( 1,095), each named for a famous Los Angeles road or area, including Wilshire, Bel Air, Mulholland and Rodeo. Only 1,923 pieces will be made in each dial dimension, and buyers may select either steel or rose gold plated steel, light or dark dials and a choice of straps. The Swiss private label watchmaker Roventa Henex produced the timepieces, which are powered by a Ronda 715 quartz movement and have a date display. The watch was introduced on Kickstarter in September with a half price offer, and the company said it met its sales target in less than four hours which didn't surprise Hossam Antar, the company's chief executive. "People like to collect cool things with a story behind it, and there's nothing better than a Hollywood story," Mr. Antar said. He had tested the idea two years ago, partnering with the American watchmaker RGM to create a limited edition Founders watch, also accented with plaques made from the sign. Twelve of the models, which had mechanical movements made by the Swatch owned manufacturer ETA were sold; now the company plans to make the remaining 11 in the edition, and has been offering them at 9,500 each."The Hollywood sign is a symbol of inspiration," Mr. Antar said, "of inspiring you to do it your own way and live your dreams. That resonated with us, in owning and building a brand." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
IRVINE, Calif. When administrators at the University of California, Irvine, decided to suspend the Muslim Student Union for a quarter over the disruption of a speech last year by the Israeli ambassador to the United States, most thought the latest controversy on campus had ended. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas of Orange County, however, disagreed and filed misdemeanor criminal charges last week against the 11 student protesters, accusing them of disturbing a public meeting and engaging in a conspiracy to do so. The charges have not only reignited campus debate about the event but have also prompted a feisty argument about the role of free speech on a college campus, in this case one whose politics can seem as complicated as peace negotiations in the Middle East. When the ambassador, Michael B. Oren, came to speak last February, several students stood up, one at a time, and interrupted him with shouted complaints about Israel. When the repeated outbursts continued deep into Mr. Oren's speech, the ambassador huddled with his security aides to decide whether to continue speaking. He did, but by the time the speech was over, 11 Muslim students had been arrested. The group became known as the "Irvine 11," although three were students from University of California, Riverside. As students walked through campus one recent afternoon, most hardly batted an eye at the colorful fliers advertising some coming campus events. They may have missed the lecture "Islam the Misunderstood Religion." But they could pick up a pamphlet about Islamic philosophy from a nearby table where signs proclaimed "Free Egypt." During the fall quarter, while the suspension was in place, none of this kind of activity by the Muslim Student Union had been allowed. Over the last decade, the university has become a symbol of what some Jewish groups say is a growing anti Israel sentiment on campuses. But for others, the school is quickly becoming a symbol of problems Muslim students face when they are viewed as too outspoken. "People are afraid to be seen as with us," said Hamza Siddiqui, a senior and a leader of the Muslim Student Union. "It's like they went after them, how do we know they aren't going to come after us next? Everyone is afraid and looking over their shoulder." Mr. Siddiqui, 22, said even his parents have warned him to keep quiet and not involve himself too closely with the student group, worrying that he could get suspended or jeopardize his prospects for law school. Because university officials are prohibited from asking about religion, it is impossible to know how many students are Jewish or Muslim. Many Muslim students come from the surrounding cities in Orange County, where there are vibrant Middle Eastern communities. For years, Jewish and Israeli advocacy groups have said that the Muslim Student Union has fostered a hostile environment on campus. In 2007, the Office of Civil Rights of the federal Department of Education examined complaints from the Zionist Organization of America that the university was not doing enough to respond to the problem. The investigation cleared the campus administration of any wrongdoing. In 2009, the same organization complained that an event sponsored by the Muslim Student Union was used to raise money for an organization that helps Hamas, the Islamic militant group, in Gaza. The university asked the F.B.I. to investigate, but no charges were ever filed. Much of the controversy on campus centers on Palestinian Awareness Week, which the Muslim Student Union has sponsored each spring. In the past, the week has included bloody Israeli flags and speeches delivered under signs that read "Holocaust in the Holy Land" and "Israel the Fourth Reich." Many students came to dread the events, which some began to refer to as "hate week." A few students have said they felt uncomfortable walking across campus wearing a Star of David or any other overtly Jewish symbol during the week. Some have had loud shouting matches, while others have chosen to stay home and avoid campus altogether. By last winter, it seemed that the talk had been toned down and that much of the discomfort for Jewish students had subsided. But students said they caught wind of plans to interrupt Mr. Oren's speech. The students who were arrested said that the protest had not been a Muslim Student Union activity, but an investigation by university officials concluded that that the group had coordinated the protest in an effort to shut down the event. Similar outbursts have occurred during speeches by Israeli officials on other college campuses. But it appears that none prompted disciplinary actions from either the college or law enforcement officials. Reem Salahi, a lawyer who represented the students in their administrative hearings, said that the decision to suspend the Muslim group was "very harsh" and that prosecutors were acting in a "very selective manner." "It's not only the punishment, but the vilifying of these students that's concerning," Ms. Salahi said. "Whether it was rude or disrespectful is not the issue, the issue is that they were trying to air their grievances in a peaceful way." Muslim students say that they have faced stricter scrutiny from the administration than other student groups and that they, too, face harsh language. Last spring, several students complained about a large poster on campus comparing the Muslim Student Union to Hamas and Hezbollah. A similar flier included a photograph of several students. Since the charges against the students were filed on Friday, the district attorney has come under fire from several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. The chancellor's office has not taken any position on the prosecution, but on Wednesday, 100 faculty members urged Mr. Rackauckas to drop the charges. But Mr. Rackauckas is showing no signs of backing down. A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, Susan Schroeder, said in an interview: "It seems that the basic question is what if we substituted different groups what if this were the Klu Klux Klan who conspired to silence a speech by Martin Luther King." Most Jewish groups involved on campus have avoided taking a position on whether the protesters should be prosecuted, although some outside groups say they support the action. Matan Lurey, a senior and the president of Hillel, the largest Jewish student group at the university, said he worried that there could be a backlash from students who want to blame Jewish groups for the district attorney's actions. "I am very aware that we had nothing to do with that process, but the line can get blurry in other people's minds," Mr. Lurey said. "I am worried this could cause more tension when things are getting better." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
While the 800 pound gorillas of New York's classical scene, the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic, prepare for their season opening galas, a pluckier, scrappier operation took center stage this week. Over three evenings at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn, the Resonant Bodies Festival presented 45 minute sets by nine different vocalists, three per night. Not a single performance was dull. And at least one set per performance was astonishing. Now in its sixth year, Resonant Bodies is beginning to spin off satellite presentations elsewhere (in Chicago and Melbourne, so far). But its strength in New York is still in the way it can draw together musical scenes in the city that aren't always connected. For example, the singer and multi instrumentalist Jen Shyu's profile is more prominent in jazz circles than in the contemporary classical world. But her music informed by a truly cosmopolitan range of global traditions existed easily on Wednesday with a set by the recent Pulitzer Prize winning composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw. (They shared billing with the young composer performer Nathalie Joachim.) All it takes is someone to program a new music festival that way: in this case, its founder and director, Lucy Dhegrae. In semistaged excerpts from "Nine Doors," Ms. Shyu wove together a dizzying variety of moods. The piece contains music of mourning, dedicated to friends of the composer who were killed in a car accident. There are comic storytelling jaunts that incorporate elements of folklore. Ms. Shyu's vocal solidity whether tender and contemplative, or more overtly theatrical is what made the set cohere. Her sensitive instrumental work (on percussion, piano and Taiwanese moon lute) was a generous bonus. Her take at Resonant Bodies ran half as long as the 90 minute version I saw last year at the Stone. This necessary compression robbed the work of some of its mystical, meditative dimensions. But there was a new element: a booming, prerecorded percussion part that helped drive the narrative forward in the final stretch. That layering of live and canned elements drew Ms. Shyu's work into closer connection with Ms. Shaw's set, in which she used found sound fragments of testimony from elderly quilters as part of a solo rendition of her "Really Craft When You" (which was recently recorded, in a different arrangement, by the Bang On A Can All Stars). Folk influences were also in Tuesday's program, particularly when the singer composer Helga Davis's group stirred together R B melismas, bel canto flourishes, and swing and hip hop rhythms. Ms. Davis invited the audience to sing an abstracted "Star Spangled Banner" a reflection on the 17th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that day before closing with a rousing arrangement of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day," a tune she has arranged before. That evening, Paul Pinto performed a recent dramatic piece, "15 Photos," which involved drones, dramatically lit passages of shadowboxing, growling vocalizations that alternated with more angelic writing, and some furiously compressed renditions of medieval epics. By the time Ms. Dhegrae took the stage, alongside the Talea Ensemble, to perform Christopher Trapani's "Waterlines," it was possible to feel exhausted by the sheer variety of styles being presented. But aesthetic overload can also be the sign of a festival suffused with purpose and ambition. The closing concert on Thursday gave a sense of how wide the world of vocal music really is. A set by the German soprano Sarah Maria Sun, supported by musicians drawn from the International Contemporary Ensemble, touched on a broad array of experimental practices (and even some Dadaist theatrical elements). Her performance of "The Flame," a playful piece by Thierry Tidrow, made space for both the sass of Weimar cabaret and the tightly wound vocal acrobatics characteristic of late Stockhausen. Next up was Gelsey Bell, with a performance that included tunes built on extended rolled consonant sounds sung hard into a wall, producing strange acoustical beats and also some protest songs written for a gleaming new vocal trio. (This week, Ms. Bell released an EP of those protest songs on Bandcamp.) But perhaps the most impressive set of the entire festival came last, when the electronic musician Pamela Z took the stage. Placed between interactive electronics and a pair of laptops, this visionary singer and composer produced a rushing stream of looped and layered vocals, often falling into consonant harmonies. These lines were often supported by clattering soundscapes of digitally fractured percussion. She also included visual art elements: filmed material, as well as live video of her performance. She didn't need to introduce or explain the concepts behind these pieces; they made a case for themselves. Even a slight technical glitch toward the end, during her arrangement of Meredith Monk's "Scared Song," couldn't stop her momentum. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"The church influenced a lot of my development as an artist, as a musician." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
For Democratic presidential candidates, this week's debate in Atlanta comes with the political equivalent of home field advantage: A lead sponsor is the cable network MSNBC, whose liberal leaning talk shows are as mandatory on the campaign trail as diners in Des Moines. So what happens when the home team runs into trouble? MSNBC is part of NBC News, a division of the Comcast owned NBCUniversal that has faced a new round of criticism over its handling of sexual harassment and misconduct issues, including an on air scolding from Rachel Maddow, the star MSNBC anchor. On Tuesday, four Democratic candidates, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, weighed in less than 48 hours before they are scheduled to appear on the debate stage. In a letter to Democratic Party officials, the candidates called for an outside review of the workplace culture at NBC News. "We, the undersigned candidates, are very concerned about the message it would send to sexual assault survivors if our next debate is sponsored by MSNBC without clear commitments from Comcast, the parent company of NBC and MSNBC, to conduct an independent investigation into the toxic culture that enabled abusers and silenced survivors," the letter reads. NBC News has vehemently denied any mishandling of harassment matters. And the letter, organized by the women's advocacy group UltraViolet, stops short of any kind of ultimatum. The candidates have not suggested that they would skip the debate Wednesday or stop appearing on NBC or MSNBC shows. Nor was it clear why the letter was addressed to the Democratic National Committee, which has no control over NBCUniversal, rather than Comcast itself. Still, the candidates' entry into the controversy marked an uncomfortable turn for NBC News during what is meant to be a marquee week for the organization. The network, which is co sponsoring the debate with The Washington Post, had been looking to move past a public relations battle with Ronan Farrow, the former MSNBC host whose book, "Catch and Kill," is a sharp indictment of NBC leadership. In the book, published last month, Mr. Farrow claims that NBC managers were aware that the "Today" show host Matt Lauer behaved inappropriately with colleagues before he was fired in 2017. NBC has maintained that Mr. Lauer was fired as soon as managers learned of a misconduct complaint against him. After the firing, the network commissioned an inquiry overseen by NBCUniversal's general counsel, Kimberley D. Harris. It led to a report clearing NBC News management of wrongdoing. Other media organizations that have dealt with accusations of workplace misconduct, including Fox News, CBS and NPR, hired outside law firms to conduct similar investigations. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Mr. Farrow also accuses the NBC News president, Noah Oppenheim, of smothering an investigation into the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, which Mr. Farrow later published to acclaim in The New Yorker. NBC has said that, at the time, Mr. Farrow's reporting fell short of NBC standards and that the network was "profoundly disappointed" not to have aired his eventual findings. The candidates' letter, first reported by HuffPost, seems to embrace Mr. Farrow's reporting and analysis. "It is critical that the Democratic National Committee make clear that they support survivors of sexual harassment and abuse by ensuring that Comcast and NBC News take steps to clean up the toxic culture that exists across their networks," the letter reads. The letter also asserts , without evidence, that network managers covered up incidents of abuse. Last month , Andrew Lack, the chairman of NBC News, sent a memo to the staff, saying that "any suggestion" that NBC News executives had known about Mr. Lauer's behavior before the accusation or tried to cover it up "is absolutely false and offensive." The Democratic National Committee has no direct way to ensure that Comcast takes any action. UltraViolet's executive director, Shaunna Thomas, who has organized protests outside NBC's Manhattan headquarters, said in a statement on Tuesday that Democratic officials have "leverage as a critical media partner in the 2020 election" to "push Comcast and NBC to do the right thing." The Democratic National Committee said on Tuesday that it had not received a formal copy of the letter and had no further comment. Comcast did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. NBCUniversal referred to its previous statements that the news division was confident in the results of its internal review, and that network executives had taken swift and appropriate action to address accusations of misconduct. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In the summer of 2001, Debi Mazar was visiting a pianist friend in Florence, Italy. Her flight was delayed three times. When she finally arrived at her host's home, she met Gabriele Corcos, a good looking musician who, when he walked through the door, "looked like sun rays were coming out of his head and he emanated happiness," said Ms. Mazar, a Queens born actress best known for her roles in "Goodfellas," "Entourage" and "Younger." The following night, both arrived at a party the friend was throwing, who sat them next to each other. "He asked if I wanted to get some cigarettes," Ms. Mazar said. "We sat on the steps of this 12th century church for two hours. When we went back to the party, he turned to me and said, 'You're fantastic. We should have kids together.' " And they did. Less than a year later they were married, had relocated to Los Angeles and Ms. Mazar was pregnant with their first child. What Have They Learned? Ms. Mazar "To compromise, be patient, what battles to fight, how to cook better, what it is to feel true love and want to die for someone. There's no profound wake up call. I'm not the easiest person to live with, but neither is he. I'm a control freak, and my husband has a military precision to him. Sharing space is challenging. I had to learn to let go on the small details. If he throws his jeans on the back of a chair, who cares. At the end of the day none of it matters. The thing that does is being on the same page when you parent children. There's no book on how to grow these people. I learned how to be myself with him. I've never been that trustful of people in general, and I learned I could trust someone. He's helped me grow while making me a better person. He makes me feel beautiful during my most down times. We make the effort to have a good sex life, to keep it fun, but mostly to laugh. I can tell him anything, but I don't think he needs to know everything. You have to create some mystery. Let him guess what's under my clothes. We really are a team, as corny as it sounds. We're on our own personal journeys, but they collide together. With him I'm able to see the future." Mr. Corcos "Meeting Debi was a moment that said, 'Wow, you exist.' I've learned about love in a more complex way than I thought I would. I was very independent and self centered. I like being the center of attention, but when she arrived I learned to share and make space in my emotional and personal world, and I've grown my sense of life through her and through my children. The passion and push we have toward each other isn't easy to come by. We had a hot summer love, and that's always a big gamble. She was passing by for two nights, and we just happened to meet each other at the right time. When we have our issues, it all happens here. We're honest and transparent. There's no holding back in this house. There's nothing we don't talk about. We've figured out how to sail this ship. I thought marriage was young people's way to define a relationship. But the vow we have is sacred. We might end up sleeping mad, but we never let a fight keep us apart. I've learned a lot about us, and how to nurture this relationship. I'm more of the dreamer, she's the creative one. I'm the hands on guy, she's the settler. Deborah is my little drink at night. She's my bourbon, that she's there smiling, blinking her lashes at me every night is everything. We have a way of dealing with each other that's off the cusp. And that moves us forward." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Ron and Staci Schnell have a special affection for Marvin Hamlisch's romantic musical even after seeing it 25 times. 'They're Playing Our Song,' Over and Over and Over Again ARLINGTON, Tex. This is a love story. It began in New York City and wended its way through eight states and 24 theaters, some of them on Broadway, before we end up at the 199 seat Theater Arlington, a few minutes from the original Six Flags Over Texas amusement park. Ron and Staci Schnell are here to see "They're Playing Our Song," the 25th time they've seen the musical together, and their first time seeing it in Texas. The Schnells love this show. It's about a boy and girl meeting cute, falling in love, falling out of love and finding each other again before the final curtain. And this is a story of how two people Ron and Staci Schnell (now 51 and 48) fell in love, stayed in love and have scheduled their lives around performances of "They're Playing Our Song" wherever they may occur. That the Schnells have seen this one musical so many times doesn't make them peculiar; it puts them in the category now known as theater "superfans," not dissimilar to Trekkies or Deadheads. There's even a 2017 documentary about the type, called "Repeat Attenders." Those fans tend to gravitate to the biggest or cultiest shows, "Wicked" or "Hedwig" or "Rent." But that's not what moved Ron Schnell, in 1979, when our story began. He was 13 and it was a special day: his grandma, Bernice Klein Schnell, was taking Ronnie to Broadway for the first time. She picked "They're Playing Our Song," at the Imperial Theater. Based on the romantic and professional history of its composer Marvin Hamlisch and its lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, the musical had a book by Neil Simon. Even better, Grandma was friendly with somebody in the ensemble. Young Ron was enchanted. He loved the music and the performances, notably Robert Klein as Vernon Gersch, the neurotic Hamlisch stand in, and Lucie Arnaz as the free spirited lyricist Sonia Walsk. And since his grandmother knew Hal Shane, who had a supporting role in the show, they were invited backstage and got autographs. All in all, it was a magical night. The only further thing Ron could do was to buy the cast album, which he played endlessly. And when Tony Roberts joined the cast a few years later , succeeding Mr. Klein, he saw the show again. In 1991, Mr. Schnell moved to Miami, where he met Staci Lee, a graduate student in marriage and family therapy. After a reasonable amount of time, he felt he trusted her enough to share his affection for the "They're Playing Our Song" album, which was now a fixture in his car's 8 track player, alternating only with The Carpenters. He had faith that Staci would "get it" and therefore get him. "It's not the most manly of shows," he confided. They came to agree that "their" song was the second act opener, "When You're in My Arms." In 1993, Ron relocated to Los Angeles for business and asked Staci to join him. But she was still studying at Nova Southeastern University and didn't want to move in with him just like, you know. But if he was willing to wait until she finished her master's degree, she'd agree to come for a long visit. The understanding was that a life changing decision was imminent. "I wanted our engagement to be memorable," Ron told me over a bowl of chips con queso at the Tipsy Oak restaurant in Arlington. "I decided if there was some way, maybe a high school was putting on the show, I could somehow find it." This was before the internet, reader, and it wasn't easy to research. And remember, too, that although "They're Playing Our Song" was the couple's favorite show, and that it ran on Broadway for 1,082 performances, Staci had never actually seen it. Mr. Schnell was undeterred. He came to learn about theater licensing, and Samuel French publishing, and discovered that there would be a production in Long Beach, Calif., in March 1994. On March 8 of that year, Ron told Staci he wanted to go to Long Beach for the evening. She didn't know he'd done a full reconnaissance the day before, figuring out which way to approach the Long Beach Civic Light Opera theater so that Staci wouldn't immediately see the marquee, nor that he had already filled a room at the Four Seasons Dana Point with rose petals, beauty products and contact lens solution ("So thoughtful," Staci recalls). When she saw the sign for "They're Playing Our Song," she burst into tears. The proposal happened later that evening at the hotel. However, the theater, informed of Ron's plan, gave the couple a pair of front row seats to see the production again the following Saturday night. "We sat next to star Jack Wagner's mother," Staci said, as if it were yesterday. Once, Sure, But So Many Times? Why seeing "They're Playing Our Song" over and over became their thing is the one vague answer the Schnells offer. "We never actually said to each other 'Let's keep doing this,'" Ron said. "It was just sort of understood. I would say something like, 'Hey, it's playing in San Diego,' to which Staci replied, 'Which day do you want to go?'" The passion continued when they moved back to Florida. "The next time we saw it was when I was pregnant with our son in 1996," Staci recalled. "It was a local production in Hollywood, Fla., close to home." (They'll kill me for saying so, but that 1996 version was the worst version the Schnells have seen so far.) At best, "They're Playing Our Song" garnered mixed reviews, praised mostly for its score, which features a sprightly title song and a few other piano bar favorites. And yet the Schnells keep on seeing it. They've seen it with full orchestras and just a piano accompaniment. They've seen it with actors on book, and with recorded music. They've seen it with Jack Wagner and Lorna Patterson, Jason Alexander and Stephanie J. Block, and with people who had day jobs at Home Depot. They've seen it in summer stock, of course, though never at a high school or dinner theater. Now the parents of two grown children, both inducted into the Frequent Viewing Club, every now and then they use revivals as a way to plan travel to various American cities. (Sometimes Ron, an expert witness on digital antitrust issues, can do some business nearby, too.) The most they've spent is 3,000 for tickets and travel, which got them to New York in February for a very special event: the 40th anniversary performance of "They're Playing Our Song" with its original stars, Ms. Arnaz and Mr. Klein, as a benefit for the Actors Fund. It was there at the post show party that I found myself sitting with a married couple from Florida, he in a black polo shirt embroidered with the logo from the original Broadway run. He had it made for himself, and he tends to wear it whenever he sees the musical. Which brings us to Texas. It is opening night the first "They're Playing Our Song" opening the Schnells have ever attended. Steven Morris, the executive director of Theater Arlington, has directed this revival. Before joining the theater full time, he was in charge of the theater program at Lamar High School in Arlington for 27 years. The school's theater is named after him. As the performance is about to begin, he tells the crowd about the couple that fell in love with "They're Playing Our Song" and traveled all the way from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to see it. Murmurs ripple through the audience. The show starts. An orchestra of three plays in a cleverly designed loft above the stage. B.J. Cleveland, a local celebrity, is Vernon, 35 years after he made his Theater Arlington debut as one of the character's singing alter egos. His Sonia is Lori Woods Blondin, the full time head of the dance department at Lamar High. After the show, as the cast and the crowd sample the Cooper Street Bakery's opening night cake and the hummus and pitas donated by Prince Lebanese Grill, Staci and Ron stand to one side, being interviewed by Arlington media. "It was very, very good," she said of the production a bit later. "The set design was outstanding," Ron added. Business commitments will keep them from the Players of Utica production in upstate New York starting May 31. But they have a 2020 trip set: "They're Playing Our Song" in Bay City, Mich. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
BOSTON It has been months now, but the brown paper bags are still here piled on the shelves in the hospital conference room where the residents cautiously lower their masks to eat lunch, stored in corners throughout the unit, each bearing the name of its owner written across it in Sharpie. Some are empty, others still hold used personal protective equipment, now forgotten. In the room where doctors rest when we're on call, the paper bags blanket an entire bunk. My own name must be there somewhere. When I close my eyes on an overnight shift, I sleep beneath the reminders of the spring surge. Nine months after the first Covid 19 cases were reported in the United States, it is a strange time in the hospital. We spent the summer in what felt like a sort of haze, treating the usual critical care diagnoses of cancer and heart failure and sepsis, under the shadow of the coronavirus. Perhaps it was the warm air and the bright sun, perhaps it was the sight of people outdoors, eating and drinking and laughing, but it was easier to feel that normalcy might be around the bend. But now, as the air grows crisp here in Boston and the nation endures an average of 59,000 new cases a day levels that we have not seen since August the threat of a "third wave," or a winter surge, of this virus builds. And we find ourselves once again in limbo, haunted by the ghosts of the spring while steeling ourselves for the resurgence of illness and isolation that might come. At the start of the night I pace the unit, checking in with the masked nurses who sit in front of the patient rooms. It is just 7 p.m., but it is already dark outside. We used to watch the sunset over Boston through these windows, a beautiful explosion of color in the midst of unending sadness. I join two of the nurses who are midway through their conversation. For the past few days, I learn, everyone has been gearing up for a wedding. It was a dying woman's last wish. There were plans for the cake and the marriage license, everyone excited for a celebration even one bookended by tragedy when the patient decided to call it off. Maybe she was delirious, maybe it was just last minute jitters, but she had made her decision. A critical care version of a runaway bride. This is what passes for humor these days. I smile cautiously under my mask, uncertain whether I am meant to laugh or cry. An alarm beckons one of the nurses into a patient room. Alone again, my thoughts turn to the virus. Our last Covid 19 patient died a few weeks ago. Standing outside the room that had been hers, I think of her final days. How her husband sat on a folding chair, watching his wife through the glass. He did not want to enter if he could not hold her. I wonder now if we let things go on too long. Perhaps the unexpected recoveries we saw during the spring had blinded me to the reality of my patient's decline. Perhaps I was so eager for a success that I offered hope where there was none to be found. I am thinking about this, remembering my patient's husband as he left the hospital that last time, soft spoken and so unfailingly polite, when I see one of the residents approaching. He wants to tell me about a patient on the general medical floor who might need to be transferred to the intensive care unit overnight. It's an elderly man with Covid 19, he begins, and I can't help but interrupt him. "Is this a new diagnosis of Covid?" I ask, surprised, although I shouldn't be. He nods. He is taking care of a handful of patients on the general medical floor who have been newly infected with the coronavirus. I want to ask more, about how this patient might have gotten sick, about whether the patterns are similar to what we saw in the spring, but of course I know the answers already. These are the vulnerable and the unlucky, the lives that would be sacrificed were we to pursue a strategy of herd immunity through widespread infection. This is what might lie ahead as we enter the winter. It is the sentinel bleed, the few drops of rain that herald a storm. "At least we know more now," I offer. This is not false reassurance. We know that masks and distancing, testing and contact tracing, can prevent spread. Though there is no magic bullet for this disease, we know that a simple inexpensive steroid seems to save lives. The data for remdesivir, the antiviral so many families sought so desperately early on, are less clear, but it is likely helpful for some patients particularly early on in their disease course. Perhaps more important, we have learned what doesn't work. We no longer rush to intubate earlier than we would in other diseases. For those patients who do need intubation, we recognize that meticulous critical care itself the daily drudgery of managing volume status and checking labs and titrating ventilator settings is a lifesaving intervention. Indeed, recent studies have demonstrated a significant drop in mortality among hospitalized patients with the virus. This should give us reason to be hopeful. But mortality is not the only outcome that matters. We have also learned that infection with the coronavirus can bring with it a host of prolonged, debilitating symptoms now termed "long haul Covid" even for those with only mild disease. And the impact of this virus is not isolated to those who are infected. I think of the rest of the patients in the hospital, their long and lonely admissions. I think of the families who struggle with our visitor policies, the pain of having to tell them that their loved one is critically ill but because the patient is not actively dying, the family can't spend the night. To say nothing of the cost to the elderly and isolated. I cared for a man recently who lived alone and had barely left his home in about six months. Only after he died did I realize that our central lines and breathing tube and finally chest compressions might have been the only physical contact he had felt since the spring. The true cost of this pandemic will not be measured in a body count. So we control what we can. Looking ahead to the possibility of another surge here in the Northeast, as the cold air drives us indoors, we refine our protocols and procedures. We arrange schedules. We make cautious plans to see the people we love. We laugh when we can, even if nothing is actually funny, because that is better than the alternative. A few days after my overnight shift, I check in on the patient list in the unit. The elderly man has worsened despite our most current therapies, and he is now intubated in the intensive care unit. As I read through his notes, I feel it all rush through me, the anticipation and the dread and the frustration and sadness of avoidable suffering. I close my eyes and I find myself thinking again of those brown bags of personal protective equipment. I hope that we will not need to make room for more. Daniela J. Lamas is a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. 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 |
As an influence on social change, the gospel according to Marx has few rivals. In his economic works, Marx predicted that capitalism would inevitably collapse; and in "The Communist Manifesto," he exhorted the workers of the world to unite and seize political power, then forge a stateless, classless society of perfect harmony. Neither has happened yet. But what has happened, as a result in part of Marx's work, is impressive enough. In the late 19th century, his teachings informed the rapid rise of what became, for a time, the largest mass political party in Europe, the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Eschewing the reformist policies of the Social Democrats, Russian Marxists, led by Lenin in 1917, and Chinese Marxists, led by Mao in 1949, treated Marx's writings as the authoritative basis for designing despotic new forms of rule as a means for realizing Communism. More recently still, millennial socialists in the United States, following in the footsteps of the New Left of the '60s, have rejected both reformist political parties and totalitarian Communist regimes, in hopes of realizing a more fully democratic version of Marx's original vision of social justice. As the headline of a 2017 New York Times Op Ed piece by Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of the contemporary American Marxist journal Jacobin, put it, "Socialism's Future May Be Its Past." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Honda has come a long way since it became the first Japanese automaker to assemble cars in the United States in 1982. The 10 millionth Accord sedan rolled off the assembly line at Honda's plant in Marysville, Ohio, on Thursday, bringing the total number of vehicles the automaker has built in the United States to 20 million. (American Honda) The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that BMW would expand its factory in Spartanburg, S.C., to build its seven seat X7 crossover there. The expansion would increase annual production there to 400,000 vehicles, The Journal said. (Wall Street Journal, subscription required) Although the dealerless direct sales at the core of Tesla Motors's business model recently met with defeat in New Jersey, the Arizona Legislature is considering a bill that would legalize direct sales for electric cars there. In January, Arizona lawmakers killed similar legislation, but the state has since emerged as one of four possible hosts for Tesla's planned battery pack "gigafactory." (Green Car Reports) An annual report by AAA says that owning a new car costs the average person more than 760 a month. AAA estimated that for a person who bought a midsize sedan new and drove it about 75,000 miles over a period of five years, the cost of fuel, insurance, maintenance, tires and license and registration fees would amount to about 9,150 a year. (Market Watch) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
When Bill Nighy sang "Christmas Is All Around" in "Love Actually" 16 years ago, he could have been discussing the state of holiday movies in 2019. Among this year's nearly 100 new releases, viewers can choose to celebrate "Christmas in Rome," "Christmas in Montana," "Christmas in Louisiana," "Christmas at Dollywood," "Christmas at Graceland," "Christmas Under the Stars" or "Christmas at the Plaza." While holiday movies have long been reliable box office staples "Home Alone" was the top grossing domestic movie of 1990 and there are several new theatrical releases this season, recent years have seen an explosion of fresh content on cable and streaming services. It's probably no surprise that Hallmark channels have increased their annual Christmas movie count by 20 percent since 2017, but Lifetime has more than quadrupled its output in the last two years and Netflix has doubled its in that same time. "No matter what the state of the economy, no matter what the state of chaos or stability, there is an extraordinary appetite for simple, cheesy, unsophisticated, easy to watch programming," said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television Popular Culture at Syracuse University. "And all the better if it's wrapped up in the bunting and ribbons of Christmas." By the numbers, Hallmark is TV's undisputed Christmas king. This year Countdown to Christmas, the brand's 24/7 holiday programming block, celebrates its 10th anniversary. It officially began in late October and runs through New Year's Day with 24 new titles on the Hallmark Channel (and 16 more on Hallmark Movies Mysteries), but past holiday originals have been playing to stellar ratings on Friday nights throughout the year. In 2018, the Hallmark Channel was the most watched cable network for the entire fourth quarter among the key demographics of women 18 to 49 and 25 to 54, and outperformed broadcast networks on Saturday nights among all households during the Countdown to Christmas. "It's almost our obligation to give people everything they want and need to celebrate this time of the year," Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and publicity for the Hallmark networks, said. Lifetime targets a similar audience with the It's a Wonderful Lifetime lineup, which also premiered in late October, runs around the clock and will debut 30 films this year. Both brands' films follow the same romance formula often an overworked woman finds herself in a quaint, Christmas loving town that also happens to be home to an eligible bachelor but that consistency is considered an asset. "They are purposely slightly predictable," Meghan Hooper, senior vice president of original movies, co productions and acquisitions at Lifetime Networks, said. "I think viewers know that the couple's going to end up together in the end. You're going to be satisfied after spending two hours of your time, and hopefully, you're getting exactly what you came for." The lesser known UPtv also aims for comfort with its holiday movies, which this year include the meta "A Christmas Movie Christmas" among 10 premiere titles. But it's not enough to just attract viewers. Hallmark and Lifetime have expanded their Christmas empires to offer merchandise like holiday movie pajamas, wine totes, aprons and sherpa blankets. For Hallmark, there's also a podcast and movie checklist app and it's sponsoring the first ever Christmas Con, a (sold out) three day fan convention in Edison, N.J., featuring a nostalgia inducing roster of cable Christmas stars including Melissa Joan Hart, Lacey Chabert and Holly Robinson Peete. "It's become something even bigger than a programming phenomenon," Vicary said. "It's become a lifestyle. It's become, 'How do I live like I'm in a Hallmark Christmas movie?'" One criticism of the Hallmark Christmas aesthetic has been its lack of onscreen diversity, something Vicary said the channel was "catching up" on and prioritizing. Lifetime and Netflix have outpaced it: roughly half of their new holiday movies feature a romantic lead of color. "It's really important to us that the movies we're doing reflect the world that we actually live in," Hooper of Lifetime said. Both cable brands are also adding Hanukkah related movies this year, Hallmark with "Double Holiday" and "Holiday Date," and Lifetime with "Mistletoe Menorahs." Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey's OWN Network is debuting its first ever TV Christmas movies, all three with black leads, while the original movies of Freeform's 25 Days of Christmas speak specifically to its millennial and Gen Z audience. "Ghosting: The Spirit of Christmas," for example, includes a same sex romance a rarity in cable Christmas movies. "If you program to young people, you have to program in the language and style that is authentic to who they are," Freeform's president, Tom Ascheim, said. "They are a generation that is much more inclusive, and looks a little bit different than older America." Theatrical holiday releases haven't proliferated the way TV titles have, presumably because they take up valuable real estate on a studio's much smaller slate and because they cost more. "Last Christmas," one of several new titles vying at the box office this season, was made for 30 million, about 10 times the budget of the average Hallmark movie. The rom com, loosely inspired by the Wham! song, pairs Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding underneath the twinkling Christmas lights of London. "The general feeling that I'm picking up from people I talk to is one of just, 'Oh, thank God, one of these movies that just looks nice and sweet and emotional,'" the director, Paul Feig, said. "And I really do feel that we'll represent that for people. It's fun to hope that you are going to add something to the Christmas canon." Also due in theaters this season: the indie romances "A New Christmas" and "Feast of the Seven Fishes," and Blumhouse's slasher "Black Christmas" remake, in which sorority girls are stalked before heading home for the holidays. So, has the Christmas movie phenomenon been pushed as far as it can go? Not quite at least not on cable. With 232 Countdown to Christmas movies already produced and a reported 85 million plus viewers last year, Hallmark's ratings are soaring. As are Lifetime's: The channel recorded its strongest month of growth in more than 17 years last December. Vicary said Hallmark, which is already working on its 2020 productions, had no intention of backing off anytime soon. "I could be flip and say we're going to do at least 41 movies next year, but in all honesty, I don't have the number yet," she said. "We're not going backwards, for sure." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"Quantum Entanglement," a new painting by Virginia Jaramillo.Credit...Heather Sten for The New York Times A Painter Who Puts It All on the Line HAMPTON BAYS, N.Y. The abstract painter Virginia Jaramillo has gotten very good at lines physically, drawing them to great effect, but also metaphorically crossing them, as a woman of Mexican heritage in the art world. At age 81, she has spent the last 60 years or so thinking about "how important one line can be," she told me when I arrived at her Long Island studio on a Saturday morning in August. She was eager to discuss her paintings and her career, especially her exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston, "Virginia Jaramillo: The Curvilinear Paintings, 1969 1974," on view from Sept. 26 to July 3. "It's a scientific theory about two particles in space that interact," she said, explaining the title. "No matter how far away they are in a galaxy, they can still relate to one another. It could be one one hundredth of a second, but there's still a vibrancy." Ms. Jaramillo (pronounced hara ME oh) has vibrancy to spare. She laughs and swears easily, and she had put out some nuts and some chocolate doughnuts for me. We had our masks on, but she didn't seem overly concerned about an in person interview during a pandemic. The Menil exhibition has just eight paintings but it demonstrates her ability to squeeze impact out of a deceptively simple composition. "Green Dawn" (1970), for instance, is a verdant rectangle with just one thin, wavy yellow line that seems to be wandering away from the upper right corner. "That little line is off on a journey but it changes its mind, it's a flirt," said Kellie Jones, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University who helped give Ms. Jaramillo a career boost in 2011. Ms. Jones included Ms. Jaramillo in the show "Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960 1980," at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Within abstraction, Ms. Jaramillo has experimented and evolved, spending more than a decade making works on paper and then coming back around to painting. Her adroitness with her materials was, and remains, keen; a reviewer wrote in The New York Times in 1984 that she was able to use "paper's natural absorbency to develop subtle forms that the eye just barely grasps." Over the years, she has moved toward using brighter, more varied colors that offer multiple entry points for viewers. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None 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. Taylor Swift's 'All Too Well' and the Weaponization of Memory. The new version of the bitter breakup song luxuriates in its details and its supersize length, correcting a power imbalance in the relationship it describes. The Crypto Capital of the World. Ukraine has an ambitious plan to both mainstream the nation's thriving trade in crypto and to rebrand the entire country. Her art began as an experiment in color blocking, the pairing of contrasting tones, and it got even leaner as she went along. "I just kept simplifying, simplifying," she said. "I dropped the form and kept the line." The curvilinear works in the Menil show are a hinge point of sorts. "They represent a breakthrough for her, and set the stage for her works to come," said Michelle White, the museum's curator, who organized the show. The paintings start to emphasize negative space, fueled by Ms. Jaramillo's growing interest in Japanese art. Ms. Jaramillo didn't flinch. She raised her hand and said, "Yeah, hi!" "A lot of people say, 'Oh, wow, I never knew that you did this kind of work,' " Ms. Jaramillo told me. "I say, 'Where have you been?' " "A lot of people my age would have thrown in the sponge by now!" she added, laughing so heartily that she lurched forward. "It's very serious, so all you can do is laugh." Ms. Jaramillo was born in El Paso, Texas, but her parents moved to Los Angeles when she was 2. When she was 11, her father, a truck driver, gave her a drawing how to book. He wanted to encourage her talent and he also gave her a piece of advice: "Never be ashamed of your heritage." Ms. Jaramillo said that growing up in a multicultural part of East Los Angeles where white, Latino and Japanese residents mixed gave her the confidence to pull from any art tradition she liked. Her biggest early influences were the Abstract Expressionists Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman, and the designer Charles Eames; later, in the 1970s, she was wowed by Mexican muralists, especially David Alfaro Siqueiros. She attended Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design) with a student whom she had met in a high school art class, Daniel LaRue Johnson; they married in 1960. Mr. Johnson, who was also an accomplished abstract artist, died in 2017. In her 20s, Ms. Jaramillo was the early success story of her circle. "In our age group, she was the first one to make significant public progress," said the sculptor Melvin Edwards, a longtime friend, referring to a Ford Foundation purchase grant she got in 1962. "She's a fine painter," Mr. Edwards added. "She was always quiet, strong, subtle and profound." A 1965 trip to Paris was formative for Ms. Jaramillo and Mr. Johnson. "That was the opening of my consciousness, aesthetically," Ms. Jaramillo said. They decided to move to New York, where they lived for 45 years, mostly in SoHo. In 1971, she was part of a landmark exhibition, "The DeLuxe Show," initiated and funded by the Menil Collection's founders, John and Dominique de Menil. (The museum's current show of Ms. Jaramillo's work is meant to commemorate the approaching 50th anniversary of the "DeLuxe Show.") Curated by the artist Peter Bradley, the original exhibition was held in the derelict DeLuxe Theater in Houston's Fifth Ward, a poor and largely Black neighborhood at the time, a daring and unusual venue for abstract art. It was a promising early success for a painter, and in 1972, Ms. Jaramillo was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art's annual show, the precursor to the Biennial. But Ms. Jaramillo and Mr. Johnson, who was Black, noticed something. "We were invited to the openings, but not to the after parties," she said of her art world interactions. "That's where the real business was being done." She added that for artists of color, the system was "geared to make you fail." As for today's ongoing racial reckoning, Ms. Jaramillo said she recognized the importance of movements like Black Lives Matter, and that she sees it as part of a long struggle. "I was married to a Black man during the civil rights movement," she said. "I lived it." When a longtime dealer of hers, Douglas Drake, moved away from New York, he set up a meeting for her with the well known gallerist Mary Boone. Ms. Boone who pleaded guilty to tax fraud in 2018 and went to prison for 13 months sat down with the artist in the 1990s, still at the height of her power as a dealer, and reviewed her portfolio. She seemed underwhelmed, Ms. Jaramillo recalled. "I said, 'Well, is there a gallery that you think I might fit into or you could recommend for me?' She said, 'Well, if I said that you were such a great artist, they'd wonder why I didn't take you.' " She recalled, "Danny would load up the car like twice a week or so with little pieces that we had made, and he'd say, 'Well, I'm going to bring back some money for groceries.' " Did she ever think of quitting? "Never, not once," she said, and the same went for Mr. Johnson. "We had decided early on we weren't going to work for anyone. It was a mutual partnership." Something of that perseverance and economy made it into Ms. Jaramillo's art. "They are disciplined," Ms. Jones said of Ms. Jaramillo's abstractions. "All of those paintings from the '60s and '70s show someone who is after very specific effects." Science and science fiction, which grabbed her attention when she was a little girl, still keep her interest today. "I'm working on five pieces now which are going to deal with brain waves, and using colors to show calmness, excitement and other activity, but in an abstract way," she said. "When I hear some kind of scientific theory, I visualize it." The victory lap of sorts offered by the Menil show certainly helps her momentum, which has been steady despite a lot of obstacles. "I just keep working," Ms. Jaramillo said. "It would've been nice if this moment had come earlier, but, hey, it came." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
She was concerned because he was vaping so frequently. Of course, when you smoke, you generally have to go outside and do it. But John was vaping indoors, sitting at dinner. And she also just had this kind of gut sense that there was something kind of wrong about it. And she couldn't quite shake the feeling, even after the reunion was over and years had gone by. And she and John really didn't keep in touch, but earlier this year, when John was sick, she had heard that he was in the hospital. And then she heard that he died in May. So she waited all summer, and she started seeing things in the news about people getting sick and dying from vaping. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
STAMFORD, Conn. The sculpture, about 10 feet long and weighing some 700 pounds, is a huge depiction of the sort of spoon addicts use to cook heroin before injecting it. On Friday morning, the spoon, by the Boston based sculptor Domenic Esposito, was unloaded here outside the headquarters of Purdue Pharma, the makers of the painkiller OxyContin. Some of Mr. Esposito's work exploring the ways that addiction affects lives will appear in a new exhibition at a gallery a few blocks away. He and the gallery owner, Fernando Luis Alvarez, said they were at Purdue to shame the company, asserting that its much abused drug had led countless people to dependence and served as a gateway to other narcotics like heroin. "I think this is an important matter," Mr. Alvarez said. "People are dying." As the opioid epidemic rages on, Purdue Pharma has become a magnet for criticism from legislators, regulators and the relatives of the dead. On Friday it was the artists' turn, however briefly. The spoon was gone by noon, carted off on the orders of the police. And the gallery owner was arrested and led away in handcuffs after he refused to move the piece from where it had been blocking Purdue's driveway. A statement Friday from a Purdue spokesman, Robert Josephson, said, "We share the protesters' concern about the opioid crisis and respect their right to peacefully express themselves." Mr. Josephson said the company is committed to working on meaningful, collaborative solutions to help stop deaths related to opioid overdoses. Over the past year, increasing attention has been directed at Purdue and the members of the Sackler family who owned and ran the company while it aggressively marketed OxyContin as a painkiller that was less prone to abuse than other drugs. In 2007, the parent company of Purdue pleaded guilty to a federal felony charge of misbranding OxyContin with the intent to defraud or mislead. Multiple states have since sued the company, saying it employed deceptive marketing practices, an allegation Purdue has denied. The photographer Nan Goldin, who said that a prescription for OxyContin led her to addiction, has organized protests including one inside the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which members of the family had supported with sizable donations. Mr. Esposito said he spent about six weeks fashioning the spoon from steel. The idea, he said, was to reflect the experience of a relative who had begun using OxyContin and Percocet experimentally before turning to heroin. The bent spoon became an emblem of the relative's struggles, Mr. Esposito said. The family would sometimes find similar implements around, disappointing discoveries at a time when they believed their loved one had been in recovery. "And then all the pain started over," he said. The addiction related works in Mr. Alvarez's gallery are part of a show titled "Opioid: Express Yourself." They include an image of a giant white capsule with damaged ends depicted against a bright red background, and an abstract painting meant to project depression and anxiety. There is also a work that represents a section of bathroom wall that also includes pill bottles peeking from behind tiles affixed to the wood, and a medicine cabinet shaped like a tombstone. As for the spoon, Mr. Alvarez, Mr. Esposito and a few friends towed it to the Purdue building around 8 a.m. on Friday in a trailer emblazoned with an image of a skull. The police arrived before long and over the next two hours officers negotiated with Mr. Alvarez, telling him "your giant spoon" has to go. Finally a commander issued Mr. Alvarez a ticket for "obstructing free passage." When he declined after that to remove the sculpture Mr. Alvarez was placed under arrest on a charge of "interfering with police," the commander said. He was detained briefly before being released. Back at the building, a yellow front loader arrived. Several men wrestled the spoon into the shovel of the frontloader, and it was then hoisted up, placed onto the back of a truck and driven away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You. Very Soon. LOS ANGELES Conventional wisdom in Hollywood has long held that big, lumbering "tentpole" movies require protracted promotional campaigns. Walt Disney Studios spent more than three years promoting "Tron: Legacy," which came out in 2010. Warner Bros. began beating the drums for "Godzilla" nearly two years before its 2014 release. Universal Pictures first publicized "The Secret Life of Pets 2" in August 2016; it arrived last month. But moviedom's top three marketers, who together control more than 4 billion in annual advertising spending worldwide, say that drawn out campaigns no longer make sense for most movies. With studio slates now dominated by franchises, these executives are moving in the opposite direction, tightening efforts to as little as four or five months for major releases like "Aquaman," "Avengers: Endgame" and the coming "Cats." "We're living in an on demand society where people don't like to wait," said Michael Moses, Universal's president of worldwide marketing, citing the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Spotify. "The long journey you used to be able to take the audience on a teaser to a trailer to TV over a year or longer isn't as available anymore." Shorter campaigns are becoming "the new normal," he said. His push for "Cats" started this week with the release of a provocative trailer that tore across the internet. "Cats," a big budget adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, will arrive in theaters on Dec. 20. Universal is also planning more compact advertising windows for "Minions: The Rise of Gru" and "Fast Furious 9," both due next year. "There's an entire generation that is very skilled at skipping marketing," Mr. Moses said. "They don't see television advertising. They can easily navigate around it in the digital space. But what does grab their attention is new content, especially that first trailer. So you are better off waiting until you can really pack a punch." Blair Rich, Warner's worldwide marketing chief, said that she started to recalibrate campaign length after analyzing how materials were reverberating online. "We found we could do much, much better creating a lot less material and more strategically timing the material to connect with our target audience," she said. "If we're not re examining the way that we put movies out to market, how we use our dollars, how we talk to an audience, we're not doing our jobs." Ms. Rich gave "Aquaman" a five month campaign last year, a gutsy move for a movie about a character without the profile of a Batman or Superman. The result was striking: 1.1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. To compare, "Suicide Squad," released by Warner in 2016 to 747 million in ticket sales, had a 13 month campaign. "When you start campaigns so far out, you are basically turning a machine on, turning it off and then restarting it again," Ms. Rich said. "We're more interested in starting late, having a very high peak right at the start, and then having a very consistent pulse rate, crescendoing at the end." 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. For the year, Warner is second in domestic market share. Universal is a whisper behind. The leader is Disney, where Asad Ayaz runs worldwide marketing. "The thinking used to be that you had to keep the fan base constantly excited show a special effects test two years out," Mr. Ayaz said. "We now think it makes sense to create those moments not that far in advance." Mr. Ayaz cited "Avengers: Endgame" as an example of a late breaking campaign. The promotional onslaught started in December, and the Marvel movie arrived in theaters in late April. "Endgame" took in 2.8 billion worldwide. Disney has truncated campaigns for Marvel movies for three reasons. Certain characters Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk already command significant audience awareness. Because Marvel movies have been arriving at a steady clip, one organically promotes the next. Long promotional pushes would also overlap, resulting in fan confusion, Mr. Ayaz said. With better data tools, "we're really able to find the audience and put materials under its nose," Mr. Moses said. "You're not doing as much shouting into a hurricane and hoping someone hears you." Shorter does not necessarily mean less. "Endgame" may have started late, but the advertising bombardment was aggressive when it did arrive. The biggest Universal movies receive a three week barrage of "symphony" marketing support leading up to release from other NBCUniversal divisions, which include cable networks and theme parks. And the marketing chiefs emphasized that one size does not fit all. There will continue to be different timelines for different films. Universal has given "Fast Furious Presents: Hobbs Shaw" a longer campaign, in part because it's a spinoff and not a sequel. Mr. Moses released the first trailer for "Trolls World Tour" in June the animated movie does not arrive until April in part because Universal wants to expand the "Trolls" audience beyond primarily young girls. "It's different for different films and different filmmakers," Ms. Rich said. "It may not work every time, and it also may be temporary it could shift again." Adding to the squishiness, studios measure campaign length in different ways. Most consider the first trailer the start; others count teaser posters and early magazine photo spreads as the kickoff. But the trend is pronounced. Look at how studios have changed their approach to Comic Con International, the annual convention for pop culture enthusiasts that began on Thursday in San Diego. The carnival like event, which ends on Sunday, was once seen by Hollywood's top marketers as a crucial launching pad. It's where Disney pushed "Tron: Legacy" for three years running starting in 2008. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Back in Week 1, the Chiefs expected to be playing this weekend, and the Packers were certainly hoping to still be alive. The 49ers, however, did not start to feel like a real contender until they had strung quite a few wins together, and the Titans were still fighting for a playoff spot in Week 17. But regardless of expectations and a regular season dominated by the Ravens all four of these teams survived to this weekend, and each is a victory away from playing in Super Bowl LIV. Here are our predictions for the conference championship games, with each pick made against the spread. Last weekend's record against the spread: 3 1 To get here, the Titans had to beat the team with the best defense in football (the New England Patriots) and the team with the best offense (the Baltimore Ravens) with both wins coming on the road. Next up are the Chiefs, a team with a radically improved defense, one of the most intense home crowds in the N.F.L., and an offense led by Patrick Mahomes that on its best day is even more explosive than Lamar Jackson's Ravens. Case in point: The Chiefs were down by 24 0 to the Houston Texans in the second quarter of last weekend's divisional round game, and they still managed to win by 20 points. But after two weeks of relying on a largely one dimensional offense, the Titans may diversify now that they have gotten past New England and Baltimore, which had two of the three most suffocating secondaries in the N.F.L. Quarterback Ryan Tannehill has shown a keen ability to take advantage of any opportunity afforded him, and the Chiefs, who are missing their standout rookie safety, Juan Thornhill (A.C.L. tear), and do not yet know the status of Pro Bowl defensive tackle Chris Jones (calf), may just give him a few provided he keeps the ball as far away from safety Tyrann Mathieu as possible. Tennessee used a blend of Henry and Tannehill in Week 10 to beat the Chiefs, 35 32, in Nashville. But Mahomes, in his first game back from a knee injury, passed for 446 yards and three touchdowns in that game. He could be capable of even more against a Titans defense that seemed to wear down as the season chugged along, finishing in the middle of the pack in most rankings. While Tennessee creates some chaos with turnovers, it is also fairly soft against the pass. That should be an extreme liability against Mahomes, who has his choice of Tyreek Hill, Sammy Watkins and Travis Kelce on every play. For Tennessee to pull off its third consecutive upset, it will need to get a few huge plays from Tannehill, grind up the clock with Henry and hope the defense can take advantage of a mistake or two from Mahomes. Each of those things is possible, but getting all three is not very likely. A narrow defeat is a better bet. Pick: Titans 7 The efficiency with which the 49ers demolished the Packers in Week 12 is hard to forget. San Francisco forced a fumble on Green Bay's opening drive and then scored a touchdown on its first offensive play. The Packers' seven other drives of the first half ended in six punts and a turnover on downs, while the 49ers built a 23 0 lead. In the end, a highly touted matchup of N.F.C. heavyweights became a 37 8 drubbing in which the 49ers' defense limited Aaron Rodgers to 104 passing yards and held running back Aaron Jones to 38 yards on 13 carries. And that was when San Francisco was missing Dee Ford, one of its star defensive ends, because of a hamstring injury. Ford, however, was not the only key player missing. Green Bay played almost the entire game without Bryan Bulaga, a mainstay at right tackle, and that was painfully obvious as Nick Bosa and the rest of the 49ers defense poured into the backfield on play after play. Green Bay lost only three games this season, and it is telling that Bulaga missed huge chunks of two of them. He has been limited in practice this week with an illness but is expected to be on the field Sunday as is Ford and the game could easily be won or lost based on how Green Bay's offensive line handles San Francisco's ferocious pass rush. The 49ers had one of the best offenses in the N.F.L. this season they were ruthlessly efficient in the passing game and rushed for more yards than any team other than Baltimore but even quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo made it clear this week that the primary difference in the team from last season is the defense. Garoppolo went so far as to suggest that his own season ending knee injury in 2018 helped make the transformation happen, as San Francisco ended up with a record worth the No. 2 pick in the N.F.L. draft. "I always told myself it was a blessing in disguise, the A.C.L.," he said. "We got Bosa out of it." It would be fairly shocking if Rodgers, Jones and wide receiver Davante Adams did not have at least a little more success against the 49ers this time around. But nothing the Packers have done indicates that they are playing at San Francisco's level, and their fine first season under Coach Matt LaFleur seems destined to end one step before the Super Bowl. Pick: 49ers 7.5 | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In the days since The New York Times broke the story of allegations of decades of harassment and assault by Harvey Weinstein, torrents of heart wrenching stories have poured forth from at least 30 women who say they were victimized by Mr. Weinstein. So have unstinting condemnations from many who worked with Mr. Weinstein or benefited from their relationship with him, both in film and in Democratic political circles. "Behavior like this is appalling and unacceptable," said Anna Wintour, the artistic director of Conde Nast, breaking her silence on the issue. "I feel horrible about what these women have experienced and admire their bravery in coming forward. My heart goes out to them, as well as to Georgina and the children. We all have a role to play in creating safe environments where everyone can be free to work without fear." Ms. Wintour has put stars of Mr. Weinstein's films on more than a dozen of her Vogue covers over the years; prominently featured Marchesa, the label co founded by his wife, Georgina Chapman, in her magazine; and hosted political fund raisers with him. Her words make all the more stark the realization that from fashion, the third pillar of Mr. Weinstein's power base, an industry in which he made major investments going back more than 15 years, and with which he hoped to burnish his empire, the overwhelming response has been a ringing silence. "I've been struck by it," Steven Kolb, the chief executive of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, said on Tuesday. After all, many fashion stakeholders spoke out vociferously earlier this year against President Trump's policies on women's rights. In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Weinstein's spokeswoman, Sallie Hofmeister, said: "Any allegations of non consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances." For his part, Mr. Weinstein acknowledged, in a larger statement to The New York Post, that his actions could have a negative impact on Ms. Chapman's company. Marchesa's public profile depended largely on its connection to Hollywood the label does not advertise and, fair or not, Ms. Chapman and her line are now swept up in this unfolding story. The refrain from major department stores in response to requests for comment? "We just don't want to be part of this story." Mr. Weinstein, more than perhaps any film executive of the modern era, seemed to understand the role fashion could play as he built an upmarket brand in which box office performance was important, but so were glitter and good reviews. He introduced "Project Runway." Along with the shoe designer Tamara Mellon he was instrumental in the revival of Halston, for which he corralled Sarah Jessica Parker, the celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe (who often dressed her clients in Marchesa) and the private equity firm Hilco as partners. He licensed the option to revive the Charles James brand the same year the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured a Charles James exhibition. When actresses from his films campaigned for Oscars, there and elsewhere, guess whose dresses they often wore? "We all knew celebrities were asked to wear Marchesa if they were in a Weinstein movie," said the co owner of a fashion communications company who asked not to be identified. "They were supposed to wear it at least once. We all knew that cycle." Going all the way back to his days at Miramax, the first of two studios Mr. Weinstein co founded, he put out fashion themed films. In 1994, Mr. Weinstein released Robert Altman's "Pret a Porter." In 2009, he acquired the North American distribution rights for "A Single Man," the designer Tom Ford's debut film. In 2011, he acquired Madonna's "W.E.," a period drama about Wallis Simpson in which the gowns were almost the only thing that got good notices. Mr. Ford would never have held up Mr. Weinstein as the poster boy for how to treat women. Still, Mr. Ford said Thursday, it was a far cry from what was revealed over the last week and a half, through two exposes in The New York Times outlining allegations of a pattern of sexual harassment and assault and a third from The New Yorker detailing accusations of rape. "What Harvey has done is shocking, indefensible and disturbing on many levels," Mr. Ford said. "I knew that Harvey certainly liked beautiful young women." But, he added: "I had no idea of his predatory and abusive behavior or that he had paid settlements to anyone." Mr. Ford noted that since he himself is a gay man, Mr. Weinstein's "sex life would certainly not have been something that he would have felt the need to share with me." Mr. Weinstein's increased presence on the fashion circuit seemed to coincide with his shrinking presence in the film world. Optics had always been essential to his prestige brand, so it made some sense that he leaned on an industry selling illusions to help maintain his myth. The razzle dazzle of Harvey and his wife on red carpets all over the world was a good distraction when fewer awards were coming his way. "Project Runway" helped, too. It made stars out of the designer Michael Kors, the model Heidi Klum and the editor Nina Garcia. Lauren Zalaznick, then the head of the Bravo network, where the show debuted, said: "On the surface, of course, it was a logical extension into TV. But what it really did was help build a firmer network within the fashion and publishing industries. It lent even more proximity to the power of relationships with designers, editors and models, and the scepter of magazine covers, more and different awards, political and socially minded fund raisers, and the attendant money, glamour and even more power that comes along with that territory." A spinoff, "Project Runway All Stars," which debuted in 2012, features Ms. Chapman as a judge; the next season has already been filmed. A person familiar with LVMH said the two men barely knew each other. Mr. Weinstein was also a regular at the Met Gala, which has been co chaired by Ms. Wintour since 1999, and at the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards. (In 2016, there were plans for the Weinstein Company to produce a television special on the CFDA awards, but it fell through, Mr. Kolb said, when they realized that the event was not paced for television.) Mr. Weinstein appeared in front rows, including those of Marchesa, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Burberry. It was at a fashion show that the actress Lea Seydoux met Mr. Weinstein, she wrote in The Guardian. He then requested a private meeting with her, she said, which quickly turned inappropriate. (She also wrote about watching him pursue another woman at the Met Gala.) The model turned actress Cara Delevingne recently accused Mr. Weinstein of pursuing her and repeating to her details of her personal life as reported in the tabloids. Trish Goff, a model who was a regular in the pages of Vogue and appeared in campaigns for Chanel and Dior, said she met Mr. Weinstein at a cocktail party at Ms. Wintour's house in 2003 when she was 25. "He came in and someone said, 'Oh, there's Harvey Weinstein,' so I turned to look at him, and he was looking at me," she said. Shortly thereafter her agent got a call from his office inviting her to lunch. She recalled: "This was at a time in my career when I was starting to think about what's next. I was nervous about it, because he had a reputation, but I was equally nervous about not going because I was a single mother, and what if he made it so I didn't work anymore? So I said, 'O.K., tell him I'll have lunch.'" They ended up at the Tribeca Grill. "When I arrived, I discovered we were seated in a private room," she said. "I asked him why he had wanted to have lunch, and he said 'You were looking at me' as if to imply I was interested. I said, 'Yes, I was looking at you because you are Harvey Weinstein, and I had never seen you before.' "Then he started asking me if I had a boyfriend, and if we had an open relationship. I said I wasn't interested in an open relationship, but he was relentless, and I kept trying to shut that down and move on. Then he started putting his hands on my legs, and I said, 'Can you stop doing that?' When we finally stood up to go, he really started groping me, grabbing my breasts, grabbing my face and trying to kiss me. I kept saying, 'Please stop, please stop, but he didn't until I managed to get back into the public space. "The horrible thing is, as a model, it wasn't that unusual to be in a weird situation where a photographer or someone feels they have a right to your body." Ms. Hofmeister, Mr. Weinstein's spokeswoman, said he could not be reached for comment on Ms. Goff's allegations and directed a reporter to a previous statement denying allegations of nonconsensual sex. But Hollywood stylists who work with such stars and fashion houses to find dresses for premieres, award shows and red carpet events, appear to be taking a wait and see approach on the label. Of a half dozen top stylists who have used Marchesa, not one would comment on how the Weinstein revelations would have an impact on their use of Marchesa. "There's a mob mentality that has developed," said Lauren Santo Domingo, a founder of Moda Operandi, an online fashion retailer, who said she was standing behind Marchesa. On Wednesday, the brand postponed a planned preview of its spring 2018 collection to an unspecified "later date." The company is hunkering down, and could not be reached for comment. "I think the issue is no one knows what to say to Georgina, or the words to use," Mr. Kolb said. "But as a creative power and as a CFDA member, she is someone who deserves the industry's support and backing." Indeed, said Julie Gilhart, a fashion consultant and the former fashion director of Barneys New York: "We are living in a time right now when we should try to find the words." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
SHANGHAI A decade ago, this city had five car dealerships selling Buicks, the top selling General Motors brand in China. Today it has 27. And the crowds of shoppers that fill many of them are young, ready to pay cash and not inclined to haggle over the sticker price. As G.M. prepares a public stock offering later this year, China is emerging as a crucial piece of its appeal to potential investors and a surprising down payment of sorts for American taxpayers, who would begin shrinking their 61 percent equity stake in the company. In the first half of this year, G.M.'s China sales rose 48.5 percent over the same period last year, and for the first time ever, the automaker sold more vehicles in China than in the United States. Just 13 years after entering China, G.M. now says the country accounts for a quarter of its global sales blistering growth that even G.M. did not expect this soon. "China's a big piece of the value of the company," said Stephen J. Girsky, G.M.'s vice chairman for corporate strategy and business development. "And since we pull cash out of China, it helps fund investments in other parts of the company as well." Analysts estimate G.M. is worth 50 billion to 90 billion, with China accounting for about 15 billion of that total. The United States government converted about 43 billion of aid to G.M. into its equity stake, which is expected to be sold off over time after the company is publicly traded. A valuation above 70 billion or so would allow the government to earn a profit on its stake. Through joint ventures with China's S.A.I.C. Motor Corporation and other local manufacturers, G.M. is this country's largest vehicle manufacturer, accounting for about 13 percent of the nation's fragmented car market. Its product line aims to cover the broad spectrum of needs, like the 5,000 Wuling Sunshine, a barebones minivan wildly popular in rural areas, and the luxurious Cadillacs that can be seen in the wealthy neighborhoods of Beijing. This week, G.M. announced plans to create a seventh brand to sell small passenger cars. In the United States, G.M. is down to just four brands, after shedding Pontiac, Saab, Saturn and Hummer during its bankruptcy. "This is not some sort of flash in the pan investment strategy," said Michael Robinet, an analyst with the research firm IHS Automotive. "During the bankruptcy process, G.M. China was the beacon in the night that G.M. always had in its back pocket, and China will be a vital cog in G.M.'s machine going forward." G.M. said it earned about 400 million from its China joint ventures in the first quarter of this year, when it earned a total of 1.2 billion outside of North America and Europe. Its total corporate profit for the quarter was 865 million because of losses and other costs elsewhere. While GM's fast growing China operations are helping to offset the automaker's problems in the United States, it ultimately will need to do better on its home turf to restore its financial health. On that score, G.M. earned a first quarter profit of 1.2 billion in North America, after losing 3.4 billion the previous quarter, but its market share in the United States so far this year is down from 2009. Analysts said G.M.'s overall prospects still hinge more than anything else on its North American operations being healthy, because that is where it can generate the most income. The company's success in China has been helped by the fact that Chinese consumers do not have the skepticism about G.M. that is commonly seen in the United States. In China, many shoppers know little about cars and go to a dealer for guidance. "What we offer is accepted at face value," said Kevin Wale, the president of G.M. China. "We don't carry any baggage, basically. We get treated for what we deliver." G.M. officials say no American taxpayer money has been used to expand in China, though a Chinese government stimulus program that encouraged sales of clean vehicles and helped farmers and other rural residents buy vehicles has fueled consumer demand here. "I was so fascinated by the shape of this car," said Xu Tianpei, who bought a Buick Regal at the Yongda dealership in Shanghai for 230,000 renminbi ( 34,000), including taxes and insurance. " Shen Hui, the general manager at the Shanghai Yongda Buick dealership, said discounted prices were a rarity because of the psychology of the Chinese car market, which for many years evolved around scarcity. "People will not buy if the price is discounted because they think it will fall even further later on," he said. "But when there is no discount and tight supply, they will worry that there won't be any cars left." G.M. expects to sell more than three million cars and trucks in China annually by 2015; from January to June of this year it sold 1.2 million vehicles, versus 1.08 million in the United States. G.M.s sales in China in the first half of 2010 were quadruple those of the Ford Motor Company. G.M. has been a part of the American industrial landscape for more than a century, but it has been in China only since 1997. Still, that was early in the development of China's consumer market for cars and trucks, which has given G.M. an advantage over rivals that only began arriving after it became clear how quickly demand was rising. G.M. has for years been heavily focused on investing in China and other emerging markets, and it has been introducing some vehicles, like the Buick LaCrosse and Chevrolet Cruze sedans, in China before the United States and other countries. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Two Very Smart Kids Stacked on Top of Each Other Jimmy Fallon roasted Pete Buttigieg, the 37 year old mayor of South Bend, Ind., after he kicked off his campaign for president on Sunday. Buttigieg who has surged in the polls over the past few weeks is the youngest candidate in the race, and he would be the youngest president in U.S. history. Fallon interrupted his monologue to give an impersonation of Buttigieg, slicking down his hair, rolling up the sleeves of his starched white shirt, and pitching his voice up just a notch. Mostly, he poked fun at the mayor for being wet behind the ears. "By age 14, I knew I wanted to be president of the United States. And, boy, the two years since have just flown by." JIMMY FALLON, impersonating Buttigieg "I'm a Rhodes scholar, a lieutenant in the United States Navy, and the two smartest kids in the world stacked on top of each other." JIMMY FALLON, impersonating Buttigieg "Nowadays, most of you recognize me from the rallying cries of hope and unity that I've stirred across the nation. But the rest of you know me from my hit series 'The Boy Who Became Mayor,' only on Disney Channel." JIMMY FALLON, impersonating Buttigieg | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Buyers Brian Shirey and Jill Schwartzman went farther into Queens to find a reasonably priced apartment. Jill Schwartzman moved often within Manhattan and Brooklyn, always happy to sample a new location. When she and Brian Shirey met in 2006, he lived in Astoria, Queens. She found the borough interesting, diverse and delicious. The couple, who married five years ago, made their home there in a sunny but small two bedroom. Their books and DVDs barely fit. The rent was around 1,880 a month. They decided to buy a place of their own. Ms. Schwartzman, 38, an executive editor at Dutton, yearned for a tree outside. Mr. Shirey, 45, who works at Kino Lorber, a film distributor, craved more elbow room, both outside and in. Astoria's popularity was becoming apparent, he said. Recently, their 15 minute weekend wait at Brooklyn Bagel had turned into a 45 minute wait. The Greystone A one bedroom at a building on 80th Street was in the desired area, Jackson Heights, Queens. But the layout was not right. Yoann Stoeckel for The New York Times They knew it would be "difficult to live affordably close to Manhattan," Mr. Shirey said. "I didn't mind going farther out." Jackson Heights seemed right. Their budget for a two bedroom co op, or a one bedroom with some kind of extra space for guests, was up to 400,000. They had no interest in a dishwasher or washer dryer. They didn't generate too many dishes, and were used to the inconvenience of trudging to the laundromat. "We thought carrying a 20 pound bag of laundry is what you do," Ms. Schwartzman said. Early in their hunt, they saw a nice two bedroom at an open house at Carlton House, a 1946 brick co op building. "The buildings all have names," Ms. Schwartzman said. "That's one of the things I love about Jackson Heights." The apartment had a balcony and a too high price of 435,000; monthly maintenance was around 1,100. The Elm Court The verdict on a two bedroom in a building on 80th Street was: too big, too nice and too expensive. Yoann Stoeckel for The New York Times The refrigerator had an ice maker something that interested Mr. Shirey, an iced tea aficionado. Friends in the suburbs "have these fancy refrigerators with icemakers," he said, "and they don't give you those when you are renting." Acquiring an icemaker became a running joke, though friends warned them about breakage and leakage. Another two bedroom on a higher floor, not as nice, was listed at 279,000. They disliked the wall of mirrors in the living room. They hunted with the help of Rhoda Dunn of the Corcoran Group, a former colleague of Ms. Schwartzman's in publishing. At the Greystone, a small walk up 1917 building on 80th Street, they saw a one bedroom for 249,000 and maintenance of 440 a month. It had a large kitchen but was otherwise boxy and small. (The apartment sold for 237,500.) Elsewhere, the couple ran into similar places too little living room; too much kitchen. In many older buildings, though handsome on the outside, "the layouts weren't really doing it for us," Ms. Schwartzman said. "You open the door and you can see the whole apartment right there." The Fillmore A two bedroom at a building on 35th Avenue had a living room with so many doors it was a puzzle where furniture would go. Yoann Stoeckel for The New York Times They checked out pricier listings. A two bedroom at Elm Court, also on 80th Street, for 505,000, with monthly maintenance around 800, had two bathrooms and a dining room. It was too big and too nice. They felt about the extra space the way they felt about a dishwasher and a washer dryer. "There are things I know are nice to have, but I didn't want to stretch," Ms. Schwartzman said. (That apartment sold for the asking price.) Places were either below their price range and too small and plain, or above their price range and too big and fancy. There was little available in the middle. Layout was again a problem at a two bedroom at the Fillmore on 35th Avenue, built circa 1935. "There were all these doors that came out of the living room," Ms. Schwartzman said entrances to the kitchen, the foyer and the hallway. That meant "no good place to put bookshelves and a couch and a TV." (Listed for 359,000 with monthly maintenance in the high 900s, it sold for 390,000.) A few months later, a new listing for a two bedroom arose at Carlton House. The couple almost didn't go, because it was in the same line as the mirrored place they disliked. But this one was different. It had a pretty treetop view and plenty of original detail. The price was 319,000, maintenance in the mid 900s. With around 1,000 square feet of space, it would not obligate them to "pile up magazines on the floor or keep stuff in boxes," Mr. Shirey said. The couple paid the asking price and moved in last fall. Unlike many apartment hunters, Ms. Schwartzman said, "we adjusted our budget downward because we realized we could get what we wanted for less money. I think we had changed. This was everything we liked, at a reasonable price." In Jackson Heights, as in Brooklyn, Ms. Dunn said, "in my experience, if you aren't coming in at or close to asking for a prime apartment, you are going to lose it because there's more demand now. There isn't that room for bargaining anymore." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Ms. Valencia is a co founder and the president of EquisLabs, an organization that seeks a better understanding of the Latino electorate through research and digital innovation. The stars are aligned for 2020 to be a breakout year for the political participation of the Latino community, the largest minority group in the electorate at 32 million. Joe Biden will have a hard time beating Donald Trump without achieving new levels of support. But if Democrats don't act, we predict nearly 60 percent of eligible Latino voters in battleground states will stay home. My organization wanted to create a fuller picture of our community and figure out what might get more of them to cast ballots. So we collected nearly 30,000 interviews of Latino voters in 11 battleground states. Of our many findings, two stand out: Increased turnout among Latinas and ambivalent voters are the keys to winning in November. Latina women are the glue of our families and our communities, our matriarchs, soccer moms and college aged kids. Our research shows Latinas are deeply anti Trump, far more so than Latinos. They are driven by concerns over his moral failings, especially in his handling of immigration. Family separation is an issue that disturbs even those who agree with the president on some other policies. Yet Latina turnout rates are 14 percent to 20 percent lower than non Hispanic black or white women. One reason is the excitement gap. While Latinas feel motivated to vote, they report lower levels of excitement about doing so, and in some cases, the disparity is vast. We have to close this gap because high levels of excitement could influence not just someone's decision to go to the polls, but also her ability to take others with her. Our second major finding is that there is an enormous pool of registered but ambivalent Latino voters (38 percent) in the battleground states, who are vital to winning back the White House. They are mostly young and female, and in a given battleground, they make up 28 percent to 41 percent of registered Latinos. Some are undecided, and some are considering a third party. Most are supporting their preferred candidate (Joe Biden), but they say they're "probably" voting for him, not "definitely." Lower turnout among this group isn't driven by apathy. Instead, ambivalent voters don't believe their vote will make a material impact on election outcomes, much less on their lives, based on past experience. Or they don't feel confident that they'll cast an informed vote, even when they have all the information they need. Or they respond to the violent anti immigrant environment not with anger, which is mobilizing, but justifiably with fear, which can be demobilizing. "It's really difficult to be excited about something that seems as though it's out of your hands," a focus group respondent told us. Ambivalent voters need to be persuaded to cast ballots. It's a problem that campaigns tend to think about Latinos (and most other voters of color) as only "mobilization" voters who just need a nudge to vote right before the election with the assumption they'll vote for their side. It's true that most Latinos are fairly set in their vote choice; few are traditional swing voters weighing both parties. But Democrats should be concerned that an ambivalent voter will swing to the couch. Latinos who were ambivalent broke for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, but nearly 30 percent ended up not voting. That's nearly double the rate of nonparticipation as among ambivalent white voters, and slightly higher than among ambivalent black voters. And the Latinos who skipped the 2016 and 2018 elections tend to give Trump worse approval numbers than those Latinos who voted in both contests; they are the rare demographic in which nonvoters are more progressive than voters. If we want to expand the Latino electorate, we need to convince this group to vote in the first place. Instead, many Democratic campaigns over the past 15 years have let the rising nativism of the Republican Party do the job for them. It mostly worked, but that strategy left a scar. It signaled that Latinos weren't a priority, at least not compared with the kinds of voters who were courted with post convention TV ads. Latino voters are more likely than other voters to feel chilly toward both parties. Young Latinos are more likely than their peers to believe public officials don't care about what they think. Perhaps partisanship fueled by disgust for one party instead of loyalty to the other has left large numbers of Latino voters feeling sapped, neglected and unimportant. Democrats could easily choose a more engaged approach. Take Bernie Sanders's primary campaign this year. After losing the Latino vote to Hillary Clinton, he ran an early, well resourced operation in the 2020 primary. It was an effort that leveraged all parts of the campaign, from organizing strategies and direct voter contact, to paid and digital spending and Mr. Sanders's time. In short, the campaign treated Latinos as persuadable voters, not mobilization targets. And it worked. In our polling, Mr. Sanders was well liked across Latino age and gender groups. And uniquely among the top Democratic contenders, he did very well with ambivalent Latino voters. In Nevada, where his campaign really dug in, his favorability among Latino Democrats grew 23 percentage points from December to February. He did not run a similar operation in Colorado, however, where his numbers barely budged. Latinos will turn out to vote this year in historic numbers. The threats to our community are that acute. But the future of democratic governance depends on whether Latino turnout is high or sky high. President Trump hopes to win partly by skimming off a few Latino voters and he can, if his opponents take us for granted. Democrats who want to see higher levels of support from Latinos need to act with the urgency that this moment demands. Stephanie Valencia ( stephanievalenc) was a special assistant to President Barack Obama and the principal deputy director of public engagement in the White House. She is a co founder and the president of EquisLabs. 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 |
Michael Elliott, a journalistic anomaly who held management positions at the world's three major English language newsweeklies before mutating from editor to humanitarian, died on July 14 in Washington. He was 65. The One Campaign, the advocacy group co founded by the rock star Bono to combat extreme poverty and preventable disease, announced his death. Mr. Elliott was the group's president and chief executive from 2011 until he retired this year. His wife, Emma Oxford, said the cause was complications of bladder cancer. Mr. Elliott had earlier been editor of Time International and Newsweek International, and Washington bureau chief and political editor of The Economist. Born in Britain and educated at Oxford, he was an accidental journalist. He had been a college teacher and, at 33, was about to be hired as a management consultant when Andrew Knight, the editor of The Economist, persuaded him to join the magazine. "He told me, 'You will make much less money but you will have much more fun,'" Mr. Elliott once said, "both of which were true." Mr. Elliott went on to distinguish himself as an infectiously passionate and buoyant, if sometimes discombobulated, editor. (Sartorially, he could be picked out by his signature kangaroo skin Akubra bush hat.) At Time, he wrote more than 20 cover articles. At The Economist, he inaugurated the Bagehot and Lexington columns on British and American politics. He made his turn toward humanitarianism while working for Newsweek, after the magazine ran an article in 2000 titled "Can Bono Save the Third World?" When a headhunter for Bono's organization came calling, Mr. Elliott was primed to decide that after years of writing about problems, it was time to do something about them. "As a journalist he was special because he had a huge amount of heart," Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time, said in an email, "and that helped him make the unusual leap into the humanitarian realm and be so inspiring at it." "Above all else, he wanted his life to be useful," Bono, of U2, said in a recorded tribute played at Mr. Elliott's retirement party two days before he died. "His decades as scribe and editor had not made him cynical," Bono continued. "Rather he saw himself as an evidence based optimist." Michael John Elliott was born in Liverpool on May 31, 1951, the son of William Stewart Elliott, a secondary school headmaster, and the former Evelyn Barclay. He was raised in a home where, he recalled, "the 'Messiah' was considered light entertainment." While his parents never flew in a plane and lived and worked within four miles of where they were born, Michael began his global travels by hitchhiking to London when he was 15. After earning a bachelor's degree in jurisprudence in 1972 and a bachelor of civil law degree at Worcester College, Oxford, he taught at Northwestern University in Illinois and had a tenured professorship at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughters, Roxana and Gina Elliott; his brother, Ian; and his sister, Angela Rees. In 1986, two years after joining The Economist, Mr. Elliott moved to the United States as Washington bureau chief. He left in 1993 for Newsweek, where he was diplomatic editor and then editor of the international edition, and later in 2000 went to Time, where he became international editor in 2005. He was also a presenter for a current affairs program on the British ITV network. Mr. Elliott wrote four books, including "The Day Before Yesterday," a rosy view of his adopted country. (Although he had an honorary knighthood, he became a United States citizen in 2006.) "Mr. Elliott's brisk account is so sharply written, so relentlessly fair minded and so packed with unexpected asides and bright mini essays that it will probably engage even those who are bound to resist its sunny thesis," John Leo, a columnist for U.S. News World Report, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1996. At his retirement party, Mr. Elliott ended his speech by reciting a passage from Derek Walcott's poem "Omeros," about women lugging coal. It expressed his hope that fellow writers would articulate the struggles of ordinary people: Look, they climb, and no one knows them They take their copper pittances, and your duty From the time you watched them from your grandmother's house As a child wounded by their power and beauty Is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
To promote a new camera, Nikon enlisted 32 photographers from Asia, Africa and the Middle East to try it out and tell their stories on the company's website. But Nikon couldn't or didn't find any women to participate. All 32 were men. It was a baffling oversight to many female photographers, who have no shortage of challenges finding opportunities in a notoriously male dominated industry. In photojournalism, for example, women are underrepresented in staff jobs, awards, front page placements and on conference panels, among other areas. Still, the Nikon slight had people wondering: Not a single woman? Not one? Nikon's explanation, posted in a not quite apologetic statement on its Asia focused Twitter account, cited a lack of "better participation from female photographers." "Unfortunately, the female photographers we had invited for this meet were unable to attend, and we acknowledge that we had not put enough of a focus on this area," the company said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Charles Smith Wines Jet City, a new urban winery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle, will open tomorrow in a 32,000 square foot former soda bottling plant that its owner, the winemaker Charles Smith, says will be the largest urban winery in the country. Charles Smith Wines will produce its seven brands of wine in the facility, which will include a rustic first floor lounge and a second story tasting room with 21 foot tall windows overlooking the runways of Boeing Field as well as interior windows to the winemaking operation. The winemaker formerly made wines in western Walla Walla, Wash., and, seeking to expand, decided to move his operation to town in part to be closer to consumers. "For all the people who visit Seattle, maybe one in 1,000 visit Walla Walla," Mr. Smith said. "I'd like to have access to the other 999." Last week, Regent Seven Seas Cruises announced its first round the world cruise in six years, while a second line, Oceania Cruises, will begin selling another global tour next week. The 490 passenger Seven Seas Navigator will launch in January 2017 on a 128 night itinerary to six continents, 31 countries and over 60 ports of call, with excursions to dozens of Unesco World Heritage sites. In 2016, Regent will add a new ship to its current fleet of three, freeing the Navigator, an existing ship, to make the longer trip. Fares start at 54,999. Oceania Cruises, which launched its first round the world trips this year, will begin selling its fourth such itinerary, coming in 2017, on July 29. The 180 day trip aboard the 684 passenger Insignia will hit 36 countries and 50 Unesco sites. Fares start at 39,999. "This is our first year and there's been a lot of demand for it," said Jason Montague, president and chief operating officer of Oceania and its sibling line Regent. He said the new Regent sailing has sold 75 percent of its cabins since its announcement July 15. Launching in time for summer in Australia, American Airlines' new direct Los Angeles to Sydney flights will go on sale beginning this Sunday, July 26, for departures beginning Dec. 17. The nonstop route was announced in June as part of an expanded codeshare relationship with Qantas, the Australian based airline. American's Boeing 777 300ER planes serving the route include three classes of service, with all aisle, lie flat seats and a walk up bar in the front cabin. All seats will have access to Wi Fi and power outlets for keeping those personal electronic devices charged during the roughly 15 hour flights. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Jane Austen's novels may epitomize Regency England, but she didn't think much of the man for whom the period was named. Like many of her compatriots, Austen loathed the Prince Regent, once railing in an 1813 letter against the man whose gluttony, profligacy and infidelities scandalized the nation. In 1815, when she was strong armed into dedicating her fourth novel, "Emma," to the future George IV, she produced a tribute so strained that a scholar called it "one of the worst sentences she ever committed to print." But now, in a delicious irony that Austen herself might have appreciated, it turns out that the man who was counted among her most reviled readers might also have been one of her very first. This month a graduate student working in the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle came across a previously unknown 1811 bill of sale from a London bookseller, charging the Prince Regent 15 shillings for a copy of "Sense and Sensibility," Austen's first novel. Oddly, the transaction took place two days before the book's first public advertisement making it what scholars believe to be the first documented sale of an Austen book. The discovery caused a stir in the Royal Archives, which are housed in the castle's flagpole topped medieval Round Tower (and whose contents are the private property of the Queen). "It's quite exciting," said Oliver Walton, a curator who is leading an effort to increase access to voluminous holdings relating to the reign of George III, the Prince Regent's father. "This is something that highlights the collection while also tapping into the enormous interest in Jane Austen." The find is also stirring interest among Austen scholars, whose eye rolling take on the Prince Regent can seem only a few notches off the novelist's own. "This is a wonderful discovery that connects some literary dots," said Devoney Looser, the author "The Making of Jane Austen," a recent study of Austen's path to literary celebrity. "It certainly shows that the people procuring books for him had good taste." Janine Barchas, an Austen scholar at the University of Texas, Austin, called the discovery "wonderfully cool," before inquiring, "Did the Prince Regent pay full price?" Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The prince who became regent during the mental illness of George III did, as it happens. But Professor Barchas can be forgiven for asking. The man's reputational troubles began at birth, when a courtier in attendance announced that he was a girl. By the time of his death in 1830, he had spent so extravagantly, and entertained such a long string of mistresses, that an early biographer accused him of contributing more "to the demoralization of society than any prince recorded in the pages of history." The bill of sale for "Sense and Sensibility" was discovered by Nicholas Foretek, a first year Ph.D student in history at the University of Pennsylvania, who was combing through the Prince Regent's papers as part of his research into connections between late 18th century political figures and the publishing world. The Prince Regent was known to have literary interests, if not necessarily of the high minded sort. In 1788, the same year his father became incapacitated by mental illness, the prince secretly bought the newspaper The Morning Post, to stop it from publishing embarrassing information about his love life. He also spent profligately on books for his grand library at Carlton House, his opulent home on Pall Mall in London. "Debt is really great for historians," Mr. Foretek said. "It generates a lot of bills." "Quite frankly, I was delighted that a man with as many foibles and flaws as the Prince was reading Jane Austen," he said. The discovery highlights the potential of the Georgian Papers Program, an effort to open up and ultimately post freely online more than 350,000 pages of largely uncataloged documents relating to George III and his household. Already, researchers have turned up previously unknown documents relating to epochal events, like memorandums about the slave trade in West Africa and a cache of letters by Sir Samuel Hood, the second in command at the Battle of the Chesapeake in September 1781, which set the stage for the British defeat at Yorktown. But for sheer archival sex appeal (and publicity), it's hard to beat even a modest seeming Austen find. "There are few private archives in the world to rival this one for the depth and richness of materials on the Anglo American 18th century world," said Karin Wulf, the director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William Mary, the project's main American partner. "To find something relating to Austen is a thrilling bonus." To fevered Janeites (and perhaps Hollywood screenwriters), the discovery of the Prince Regent's early interest might be the seed of a fanciful historical romantic comedy in which the rakish royal book stalks the tart tongued, independent minded (and never married) commoner. But the real life connection between the Prince Regent and Austen is delectably awkward social comedy enough. In October 1815, a few months after finishing "Emma," she was visiting her brother in London, when word came through a chance encounter with the Prince Regent's doctor that His Royal Highness was a great admirer. An invitation for a visit to his library at Carlton House followed, during which his librarian, James Stanier Clarke, conveyed that the Prince Regent (who was not present) would not object if she dedicated her next book to him the royal equivalent of an offer you can't refuse. This posed a dilemma for Austen, who in an 1813 letter had expressed her sympathies for the Prince Regent's wife, Caroline of Brunswick, despite her own bad behavior. "Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, because I hate her husband," Austen wrote. When she proposed a terse dedication, her publisher insisted she punch it up. She eventually landed on this respectable but wooden tribute: "To his Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, this work is, by His Royal Highness's Permission, most Respectfully Dedicated by his Royal Highness's Dutiful and Obedient Humble Servant." Austen continued to correspond with Clarke, who even went so far as to suggest some ideas for a novel, including one about a curate (like himself), or perhaps even "a historical romance" about the royal family a suggestion she delicately parried. "I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life," she said, adding: "I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No I must keep my own style go on in my own way." She did, and today, in yet another Austenian irony, it's the Prince Regent who gains by association with Austen's chronicles of provincial life, rather than the reverse. "Who would have thought the Prince Regent would be eclipsed by a mere novelist?" Professor Looser said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Birds aren't the only creatures migrating in spring. In May, many college students swoop home for the summer, landing with their loads of dirty laundry and cravings for the comforts of home. As glad as we may feel to have our children return to the nest, adding them back into family life is rarely as simple as rebooting their high school days. Finding a new equilibrium usually requires work on all sides, but the process can be smoothed when parents and teenagers alike bear in mind that they are entering a new and unfamiliar phase of the parent child relationship. Adolescence and young adulthood are marked by tremendous personal growth, so it should come as no surprise that the child who returns from college is not the same as the one who left. Some changes will be entirely welcome. Anna Yarinsky, an 18 year old freshman at Vanderbilt University, wants "to try to be more helpful around the house" this summer. Accordingly, she's planning to help with buying groceries and making dinner now that she's back with her family in Manhattan. Other developments will be easy enough to absorb. While away at school, Jackie Green, a 20 year old junior at The Ohio State University, traded the meat and pasta of her childhood for a diet of fish and vegetables. "My mom is pretty accommodating, and willing to make new things," she explained, "but the rest of the family isn't into the food that I like." They came to a compromise. A couple nights each week, the family has fish and vegetables while Ms. Green is home with them in Orlando, Fla. "And my mom said that if there was anything I really didn't want, she wouldn't make that while I'm around." The rest of the time, they eat as they always have. "But it's all right," Ms. Green said, "a decent balance." And some shifts may test family bonds. Hawk Anderson, a 22 year old senior at the University of California, Riverside, from San Diego, was initially disowned by his mother, his primary parent, when he came out as bisexual at age 19. "Through patience and time and my own hard work, I've been able to reconnect with my mom," he said. We cannot always know the nature or scale of the changes we'll be greeting when our college students return home, but we can prepare for their return by remembering that young adults are, by their nature, unfolding. So it would not be surprising if there is some friction in the window between the return from college and the beginning of summer jobs, internships or travel plans. It can help to have a conversation about expectations, maybe saying that it's O.K. to spend a few days on the couch eating Doritos, if it's done with respect for established family patterns. After months of independence, it can be an adjustment for young adults to be expected to pick up after themselves or text us if they'll be missing dinner. Jac Guerra, a 19 year old freshman at Brandeis University who will soon return home to Guilford, Conn., reflected that he is "going to have to remember that my mom doesn't want dirty dishes in the sink." Fitting back into family life can be especially awkward for college students whose bedrooms have been claimed by younger siblings, or who have lost their exclusive access to a car. While most young adults don't expect that their high school life will be preserved in amber, a little empathy on parents' part can still go a long way. Saying something along the lines of, "We appreciate that you're not used to sharing a car with your sister let's figure out new routines that meet everyone's needs," may help ease the transition home. Issues May Go Beyond Housekeeping It's important for parents to remember that their returning students sometimes need support around experiences they may not have mentioned in texts or weekly phone calls, from helping a roommate who has blacked out from drinking to facing psychological problems such as depression and anxiety. For a college student who is among the more than three million teenagers using nicotine through vaping, an attempt to stop upon arriving home for the summer may cause increased moodiness and irritability. If you feel the need to adopt a "no smoking or vaping under my roof" policy, you may want to offer some resources to help your young adult break the addiction to nicotine as house rules are not always enough to get someone to quit. Young adults who have gotten used to not having to account to anyone else for their behavior may chafe at parents' restrictions around alcohol or expectations that they will revert to high school curfews or even that they will routinely wake up in their own beds. It can be valuable to lay out clearly what your expectations are at the start of the summer, from "Please let me know if we're out of milk" to "Just text us if you decide to sleep over at a friend's" and revisit them as new wrinkles emerge. Rules are always unique to each family, but it's a solid guideline to remember that responsibilities and privileges often go hand in hand. When we ask our older children to carry more of the weight that comes with keeping a household in order, we can reasonably extend more privileges to them as well. Parents should not be surprised when returning children seem to care more about attending to their high school friendships than communing with us. It may feel insulting, but it might be a compliment: They trust that we're not going anywhere, but they often harbor a sense of anxiety, longing or both with regard to their hometown peers. Instead of taking it personally when our adult children are more excited to stop by a beloved pizza joint than join us for dinner, we might take this as a vote of confidence in the strong relationships we've built and maintained with them. "I can have a sense of family in other places," Mr. Guerra said, "but I can't replicate the feeling of being at the top of that bluff anywhere else." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve affirmed its commitment to stimulate the economy on Wednesday in a policy statement that said labor market conditions remained well below the level that most of the central bank's officials consider healthy. The Fed announced, as expected, that it would reduce its monthly bond purchases to 25 billion, but it gave little indication that recent signs of stronger growth had altered its determination to hold short term interest rates near zero into 2015. Instead, the Fed emphasized its concern about the millions of Americans who still cannot find jobs. "A range of labor market indicators suggests that there remains significant underutilization of labor resources" even as the unemployment rate is falling back toward normal levels, the Fed said in a statement released after a two day meeting of its policy making committee. The emphasis on unemployment was particularly striking as it came just hours after the government reported stronger economic growth in the second quarter. The Fed's statement acknowledged that growth had "rebounded," but its tone was measured. It described the chances of faster growth as roughly balanced against the chances that the expansion would slow down. The statement also gave little ground to critics who worry that the Fed is ignoring signs of rising inflation, although it said Fed officials had become less concerned that inflation would continue to run below their desired annual pace of 2 percent. In effect, the Fed concluded that recent data was consistent with its expectations neither more nor less and so it held to its course. "This dovish message about slack in labor markets was balanced by a somewhat more hawkish message on inflation," Michael Gapen, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital, wrote in a note to clients. On balance, he said the Fed was "acknowledging the improvement in the economic data and labor markets, but not signaling that it is in any hurry to move to rate hikes." The Fed has already said that it plans to stop buying more bonds in October after making a penultimate purchase in September. The looming question is how long it will then wait to start raising interest rates. Officials are struggling to reconcile the slow pace of growth with continued declines in unemployment. The government estimated on Wednesday that the economy expanded at a 1 percent annual rate in the first half of 2014, as stronger growth in the second quarter offset a brief contraction in the first quarter. The unemployment rate, however, fell by half a percentage point over the same period and by 1.4 percentage points over the last year. Some Fed officials see evidence that the economy is settling into a new pattern of modest growth, and that monetary policy has substantially exhausted its power to improve the situation. They want the Fed to retreat more quickly from its stimulus campaign, fearing that holding down interest rates will result in higher inflation, or that it will encourage excessive risk taking by investors. "I believe we are at risk of doing what the Fed has too often done: overstaying our welcome by staying too loose, too long," Richard W. Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, wrote in an op ed article published this week in The Wall Street Journal. Fed officials normally avoid public comment leading up to the Federal Open Market Committee meeting in Washington. Charles I. Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, has expressed concern about how how long it will take for the Fed to begin raising interest rates. Charles I. Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, dissented Wednesday, citing his concern about the Fed's intent to maintain short term rates near zero for "a considerable time" after the end of the bond buying program. Mr. Fisher, despite his remarks, was one of nine votes in favor. The Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, and her allies have taken a more cautious view, arguing that the decline in the unemployment rate appears to overstate the improvement in the labor market, because it counts only people who are looking for work. Ms. Yellen has said she expects some people who dropped out of the labor force to return as the economy continues to improve, and she has pointed to tepid wage growth as evidence that it remains easy to find workers. "The recovery is not yet complete," she told Congress this month. The statement suggested that the committee continued to back Ms. Yellen's view, said Tim Duy, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon. "The committee as a whole is still willing to give Yellen the benefit of the doubt," Mr. Duy said. "And honestly they have good reason. Until you get upward pressure on wages, it is terribly difficult to say that she's wrong." In recent conversations with Oregon businesses, Mr. Duy said, he heard repeatedly that it was becoming harder to hire workers, but also that businesses were unwilling to offer higher wages as an inducement, because they doubted their ability to recoup the cost through increased sales or higher prices. The Fed also continues to grapple with the details of how to raise interest rates. It must decide on a role for the federal funds rate, the Fed's primary tool before the financial crisis, which has lost much of its practical significance but remains a familiar benchmark for investors and the public. The International Monetary Fund said in a recent report "there seems to be no clear benefit" to changing horses, noting its use in many financial contracts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
On Jessie Ware's new album "What's Your Pleasure?," the British singer imagined herself in circumstances far from her own.Credit...Ana Cuba for The New York Times The British pop singer and songwriter was feeling stalled. A food podcast with her mother showcased her charming personality and unlocked her creativity. On Jessie Ware's new album "What's Your Pleasure?," the British singer imagined herself in circumstances far from her own. In late April, Jessie Ware sang "Spotlight," a sensual, disco inflected single that showcases the velvety tone of her voice, on "The Graham Norton Show." Her face was bathed in swirling, jewel toned light, and she sometimes grinned and closed her eyes, as if momentarily lost in a dance floor reverie. Then, all at once, the song was over the camera zoomed out, and viewers were reminded that Ware, 35, was not in a moodily lit nightclub but a bare corner of her 3 and a half year old daughter's bedroom, illuminated by a disco ball she'd borrowed from a friend. Ware's husband, Sam Burrows, was watching from a corner of the room with their daughter and 1 year old son, "bribing them with Disney," as Ware recalled, and "enough snacks so they wouldn't sing or speak or ask for something." Set designing a makeshift discotheque in a toddler's bedroom is, for Ware, just another day at the office: The past few years have been a crash course in going with the flow. In the time between her last album, the understated "Glasshouse" from 2017, and the upbeat and self assured "What's Your Pleasure?," due on Friday, she's become the author of a best selling cookbook and the co host of a popular podcast, "Table Manners," with her hilarious mother, Lennie. "It's so wonderful to watch Jessie's incredible personality and presence capture all of our hearts," said Sam Smith, a longtime friend of Ware's and the inaugural "Table Manners" guest, via email. "She's honestly one of the kindest and most authentic people out there." During a Zoom interview in mid May from her London home, Ware was as down to earth and bluntly funny as she is on her podcast. She'd just put her children to bed and poured herself a glass of wine; she wore a black mock neck top, gold hoops and a slash of red lip tint she admitted she put on just for our chat. At times, she affected a goofy, self deprecating, exaggeratedly American accented voice to say phrases including "celebrity cookbook," "baby number two," and "ssshowbizzz." As I was telling her that her new album has turned the quarantined confines of my apartment into a one person dance floor, she cut me off before those last two words and instead suggested, " ... sex dungeon?" That effusive personality did not exactly come across in Ware's early music, which was minimalistic and icy smooth. Her voice at once muscular and vaporous, soulful and cool first started drifting through the ether about a decade ago, as a featured guest on tracks by British electronic acts like Disclosure and SBTRKT. An excellent debut solo album, "Devotion," followed in 2012; it went to No. 5 on the British album chart and was nominated for the esteemed Mercury Prize. Smith, a fellow breakout guest vocalist from Disclosure's 2013 album "Settle," described Ware's music as "the soundtrack of my 20s." That her most famous song has become famous without her is the sort of irony she has accepted maybe in some sense even expected. Music was never consciously part of Ware's long term plan (she studied journalism in college and clerked for solicitors during the summers, figuring she'd become a family lawyer), so suddenly finding herself on the main stages of Glastonbury and Coachella "was very unusual and didn't feel real." "I've always appreciated it, and I've also appreciated that it can be taken away from me at any time," she said, explaining that she limited her hopes to prevent future disappointment. "But then it kept working out. And so I kind of felt like I was getting away with it." Until she didn't. After "Tough Love," Ware experienced what she now refers to as her "weird ol' time in the industry." Her third album, the sleek, ruminative and highly personal "Glasshouse," also hadn't sold as well as her debut; the phrase "adult contemporary" cropped up (though not necessarily derisively) in several reviews. An ensuing U.S. tour that she admits "hadn't been planned well" put her an ocean away from her young daughter for nearly a month and left a dent in her own finances. Her fan base which skews hip and indie adjacent, especially in the U.S. was geographically lopsided. "I'd sell out two shows in Brooklyn," she said, "and then I'd be in, where was I? Was it Kansas? And you had, like 25 people. Wicked, amazingly funny people, but it was very weird and varied and confusing." "This is not me getting my tiny violins out at all," she added, "but I was losing a lot of money. It's really expensive to tour. It was just a bit of a mess. I was like, Why am I doing this? It was a big old soul searching moment." Ware's parents split when she was 10, leaving Lennie to hold down the fort. (Ware has an older sister and a younger brother; her father is an investigative journalist and broadcaster for the BBC.) Big Friday dinners featuring, among other things, Lennie's famous chicken and matzo ball soup became a weekly tradition for family and friends. Sometime in 2017, the Wares figured the dinners' homey, loquacious vibe might translate well to a podcast. Lennie would cook, Jessie would chat, and one of the many celebrity acquaintances Jessie had made along the way would eat a meal specially prepared for them, all while giving the sort of candid, unguarded interview that comfort food and optional wine tends to facilitate. "The thing about this podcast is that it was a complete accident," Ware said. "I mean, I like talking about food, and I thought people would always have a story about their upbringing and whatnot, but it's become limitless!" Jessie and Lennie (who is still a social worker) have evolved into a comedic double act, with the brand of loving sparring that only a mother daughter duo can provide. They've hosted the chef Nigella Lawson, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and Sheeran (who, over several helpings of Lennie's sausages, revealed an old nickname: "Two Dinners Teddy"). "Everyone that knows my mom knows she's a bit of a star," Ware said. "She definitely doesn't hold back now. She's hilarious and people like her and she doesn't care what anyone thinks." In a Season 9 episode, Lennie effused about her crush on Bill Pullman while Jessie muttered in affectionate embarrassment. Listeners frequently tell them that their banter reminds them of their relationships with their own mothers. Ware is now more frequently recognized on the street for her podcast than her songs, which she finds "so funny." Still, "Table Manners" has an indirect but beneficial impact on Ware's music. "I needed to feel creative again, because I felt like it was all turning far too business," she said. "And that's ugly as soon as that happens, you don't make the right music. So thank God I had the podcast, which was actually becoming a business. It meant I could take more liberties creatively with the music. It's amazing how it unleashed me." After her music biz slump, Ware immediately went back into the studio with the intention of doing something completely different: "I just want to escape all this and me, and I want to write about other people, and imagine I'm a man and that I'm dancing and meeting strangers and wanting to have sex with them immediately." Ware made the entirety of "What's Your Pleasure?" with James Ford, a member of the British electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco and an acclaimed producer for acts like Arctic Monkeys and Florence the Machine. "I definitely got the feeling that she wanted to make a record for herself, rather than trying to please other people," Ford said over FaceTime, after providing a tour of his cozy, synth filled attic studio where most of "Pleasure" was made. At the time, Ware lived within walking distance of Ford's house, which gave their sessions a casual ease. Because Ford and Ware both have small children (Ware got pregnant shortly after starting work on the record), they recorded mostly during the day. Family life didn't impede on the process so much as put it in perspective. "What's Your Pleasure?" is a sparkling highlight in a year that has found pop artists from Lady Gaga to Dua Lipa (a recent "Table Manners" guest) reimagining disco for the 21st century. Ford and Ware wanted to pay homage to what they lovingly call "wedding jams," along with Minnie Riperton soul and "weirdo New York boogie/underground disco." But "Pleasure" pulls from a varied palette: "Soul Control" has the kinetic energy of Minneapolis funk; "Ooh La La" struts like a long lost ESG B side. "I wanted the sophistication that disco offers, and the melodrama," Ware said. "It just felt like a bit of a fantasia, and a step away from my real life. Not because I was miserable in my real life I love my life and my family. But I'd already said all that on my last record. I wanted instead to be a storyteller of these imagined, heightened moments that maybe I wasn't being able to take part in, in that very moment." (She and Burrows have been together since they were 18, which she admits does not always make for the most exciting autobiographical songwriting: "Not much salacious hardship. It's pretty dull. I love it.") "It's a time where people should be able to listen to music that can help them fantasize and move away from reality," she added. "And that's the record I made." Maybe it's the podcast, maybe it's the record, maybe it's her Impostor Syndrome hitting its expiration date, but after years of feeling like she was just "getting away with it," Ware finally feels steady on her feet. "I don't know what shifted that for me," she said. "I can't put my finger on it. I don't feel like I'm just surviving anymore. I feel like I've totally earned my place." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
PICASSO AND THE PAINTING THAT SHOCKED THE WORLD By Miles J. Unger Illustrated. 470 pp. Simon Schuster. 32.50 In biography, struggle is invariably more interesting than success. The most irresistible memoirs prefigure celebrity entirely, from Moss Hart's "Act One" and Emlyn Williams's "George" to David Niven's "The Moon's a Balloon" and Dirk Bogarde's "A Postillion Struck by Lightning." These are tales of lightness, possibility and wonder. It was in this spirit that I welcomed Miles J. Unger's "Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World," which traces the artist's childhood in Spain through the creation of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in 1907, to the otherwise heaving shelves of Picasso literature. Picasso's pre 1900 work is marked by his father's art school conservatism, as seen in the dark, unpainterly "First Communion" of 1896 and "Science and Charity" from the following year. Picasso was liberated from the 19th century's heavy handed conventions in Paris, which he first visited with his friend and fellow aesthete Carles Casagemas in October 1900. There he found inspiration in the Louvre, in the retrospectives of the flickering Impressionist generation, in his acquaintance with would be painters and poets and, it appears, in the invigorating camaraderie of la Vie Boheme. On the way to the hothouse, proto Cubist summer of the "Demoiselles," the shocker of his book's title, Unger ably covers the El Greco influenced "Blue" and "Rose" periods; the patronage of the Steins; and Picasso's path altering discovery of African art in the collection of the Trocadero museum, the precise dating of which has divided scholars. Unfortunately, insistent platitudes and pigeonholing tend to mar Unger's efforts. Picasso is "bathed in the dazzling aura that surrounds all famous men"; Montmartre is the "ground zero of the worldwide avant garde"; Picasso is compared to "an athlete before the big game," an actor on "the stage of history" and "an ingenue making her way to Hollywood." In one passage, Picasso's rivalry with Matisse is described as an aesthetic "game of thrones." Elsewhere, Picasso and Braque are said to knock Matisse "from his perch atop the leadership of the avant garde," imbuing painting with all the nuance of Flywheel. Unger plays up the "tortoise and hare" caricature of the contest of Matisse and Picasso, "the plodding striver against the facile genius, the introvert against the extroverted gadfly." In his view, "Picasso was a born rebel, Matisse a rebel through circumstance, and a reluctant one at that." When it comes to Montmartre and the "making of" the "Demoiselles," Unger's book pales next to the first installment of John Richardson's three volume (and counting) life of Picasso, Roger Shattuck's delightful history of the prewar avant garde, "The Banquet Years," and the artist's former mistress Fernande Olivier's reminiscences, which were published in "Loving Picasso." On the other hand, Unger appreciates Picasso's boyhood talent without overegging its merits. He's good on the Steins (particularly Leo's insufferable condescension). And certain of Unger's details were new to me. I had never, for instance, heard the rumor that Puvis de Chavannes was Maurice Utrillo's biological father. "Have you ever known a famous man before he became famous?" So begins Herman Wouk's 1962 novel, "Youngblood Hawke." "It may be an irritating thing to remember, because chances are he seemed like anybody else to you." The young Picasso with his otherworldly precocity and hypnotic mirada fuerte was perhaps the exception. Writing in 1906, the year before the "Demoiselles" was conceived, the novelist and critic Eugene Marsan took his measure. An imagined interlocutor marveled at "a compelling picture" on the wall of the Lapin Agile: "'The young artist who painted that in two hours will become a genius, if Paris does not destroy him. ...' 'The painter of this Harlequin,' I said, 'Monsieur, already has a reputation. ... You might call him, to help you remember, the Callot of the saltimbanques, but you'd do better to remember his name: Picasso.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
And, not incidentally, to the locals, from whom she intends to pluck a new crop of devotees, like the frenzied Bacchae of ancient days. She sets her sights on a group of female pals, neighbors on a comfortable cul de sac who weathered the last lethal storm together. In Leigh Silverman's lopsided world premiere production, the friends make a cracking ensemble, each fully human and with her own comic charge: the aggressively chipper Sandy (Mia Barron); timid Beth (Kate Wetherhead), with her failed marriage and disheveled lawn; tough talking Pam (Danielle Skraastad), as fierce as the stilettos she wears to coffee (costumes are by Kaye Voyce); and Renee (Nikiya Mathis), an editor at a gardening magazine. She thrills to Diane's radical landscaping plans and the possibility of a fling with her. Diane is problematic, though. Ms. George ("The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence") describes her in a stage direction as "a butch charm factory," and charisma is as vital to the success of Diane's mission as it is to the success of the play. She needs to get the women in her thrall and seduce the audience as well. Yet Becca Blackwell's tentative performance as Diane has no magnetism. Subdued to the point of flatness, it drains the life out of Ms. George's humor a particular shame for the beautifully written monologues. Instead of an enigmatic god, the Diane before us is closer to a nonentity, and the sexual energy among her and the women, vital to moments of attraction and abandon, is nowhere to be found. It's not credible that this outsider would succeed at not only insinuating herself into the group but also commanding it. The other odd thing about this staging, whose set (by Rachel Hauck) is a suburban kitchen, is how little sense it conveys of the natural world beyond. Ms. Silverman doesn't ask enough of the lighting (by Jen Schriever), but leans hard on the excellent sound design (by Bray Poor), which is particularly vivid when a new storm comes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
ASK a well informed rider to name the venerable motorcycle maker whose gutsy air cooled V twins are a longstanding source of national pride and you might get this surprising, but correct, answer: Moto Guzzi. The pride is felt in Italy, of course, not America, and the company, which sold its first bikes in 1921, does not date back nearly as far as Harley Davidson (1903). But like Harley, it has a rich history, and its current array of models seems to promise a competitive future for this niche brand. A winner on the racetrack from its earliest days, with a string of world championships and memorable machines, including outrageously complex V 8 grand prix bikes in the 1950s, Moto Guzzi has, like Ducati, MV Agusta and other Italian brands, a devoted following. More than 20,000 fans arrived in the brand's hometown, Mandello del Lario, for its 90th anniversary celebration last month. And like other Italian makes, it has changed hands a number of times, rarely a precursor of product integrity. Moto Guzzi's fortunes in the United States have had highs and lows, the company struggling at times as its bikes were overshadowed by the features and technology of Japan's makers. Worldwide, the company is projected to sell fewer than 6,000 motorcycles in 2011. But nine decades after its founding, Moto Guzzi is part of Piaggio, the conglomerate that also makes Vespa scooters and Aprilia motorcycles. Though Guzzi is small, the Piaggio parentage has given it the ability to develop a diverse line of bikes in the touring, naked and custom cruiser categories and even a lithe sports entry. What ties the models together is a common architecture of 90 degree V twin engines with a literal twist: the cylinders jut left and right, with the crankshaft in line with the bike's frame rather than across it. This makes it logical and simple to engineer a shaft drive system, a brand hallmark that Guzzi's current models use. This engine layout solves other problems, too, making cooling somewhat simpler (a Harley type V twin, with cylinders placed fore and aft, typically runs hotter on the rear cylinder). But it also brings challenges, including a characteristic torque reaction, felt when the engine is revved, that wants to rotate the bike to the right. A rider soon acclimates, but a new owner would find it disconcerting. The latest of Moto Guzzi's big twins use a four valve per cylinder design that the company has been spreading to a wider selection of models. For instance, the Norge GT 8V, a large scale touring machine with a deep sporting streak, now carries the Quattrovalvole engine in 102 horsepower form. The Norge feels lighter than its 567 pounds, agile in traffic and easy to manage in stop and go situations. The thrill of riding it is in shooting through the gears with the engine pegged around 5,000 r.p.m. (At a stoplight, though, figuring out which gear the transmission is in can be tricky; finding neutral is easy, but the indicator light doesn't always come on.) The seat is very comfortable, meaning you could easily cruise for hours. It feels quite capable, though it doesn't have the set it and forget it feel of stately ocean liners like the Honda Gold Wing or BMW's touring flagships. The gauges and user interface are, like the air cooled engine, a bit of a throwback. There's no temperature gauge and no gear indicator, which seems odd for a 16,470 machine. The adjustable windscreen is nice, but the need to use two buttons to control it (one moves the screen up, the other moves it back down) is annoying. Guzzi's line also includes the naked Breva 1100, the adventure class Stelvio and laid back motorcycles aptly carrying the California name. But perhaps its boldest statement comes in the form of the Griso SE, a fascinating mix of retro styling touches, cruiser proportions and sporting capabilities. Powered by essentially the same 1,151 cc engine that's in the Norge (though tuned to 110 horsepower), the 14,970 Griso is a handsome brute, the satin green finish of its tank, side panels and fenders offset by a complementary brown seat. Wire spoke wheels reinforce its retro demeanor (though mercifully, they carry tubeless tires). There are touches of the modern, too, in the single shock rear suspension and inverted fork front end. Radial mount Brembo brake calipers and wave rotors deliver first class stopping power. At slow speeds, the steering requires only the lightest touch of the wide handlebars, but the bike proves stable on the highway. A mellow rumble spills out of the slightly too modern over and under exhaust pipes. The Griso's handsome presentation has its flaws. The upper frame tube outdoes Ducati for being an exposed, in your face structural member. Tucked below the right side cylinder is an oil cooler so out of place that onlookers might well mistake it for a lunchbox. And the kickstand is so far forward that it's easy to accidentally brush the shift lever into gear. The model in Moto Guzzi's current offerings that sport minded riders ought to find most appealing is the 10,230 V7 Racer. This retro styled bike, along with its siblings, the V7 Classic and the V7 Cafe, uses a 49 horsepower 744 cc engine with two valves per cylinder. The V7 Racer is a jewel, bristling with beautiful craftsmanship in its details. Like earlier Guzzi sportbikes the LeMans and Daytona, notably it is drenched with Italian style, continuing a worthy tradition even if it doesn't much advance it. Rich black paint is offset by a candy finish red frame and anodized bits; the bike seems to have been art directed as much as it was designed. The theme is cafe racer, and it is no halfhearted effort. There is a small headlight fairing and a classic one up seat with racing style number plates (easily removed in minutes). There are dual shocks at the rear, fully adjustable, so this seemingly dated layout doesn't really limit handling, and the conventional front fork has gaiters that seem right out of the '60s. The tapered tip of the mufflers (the exhaust system incorporates catalytic converters without any compromise to the appearance) is a perfect finishing touch. The V7's smaller engine is in perfect scale to the frame, and its decreased displacement also results in smoother running and a shortage of reserve power at highway speeds. It is sweet at 4,500 5,000 r.p.m., though a serious buzz sets in as the revs approach the 6,800 r.p.m. power peak. A hard look for shortcomings will reveal turn signals that are cheap looking for a bike in this price class. But there's little else to detract from the enjoyment of this thoroughly delightful back road companion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
"An annual tradition like carving a jack o' lantern can become a mindful moment by cultivating what is known as beginner's mind. With beginner's mind, you are fully present, engaged, curious and open to discovery." Dr. Michelle May, founder of AmIHungry, which teaches mindful eating. When selecting your pumpkin, observe the variety of sizes, shapes, textures and colors of the pumpkins. Notice whether any of the pumpkins inspire creativity. What ideas pop into your mind? As you lift the pumpkin, feel its heft and weight. Tap it and listen for whether it sounds hollow and ripe. Draw a circle around the stem for a lid. Using pumpkin carving tools, pierce the skin of the pumpkin, feeling it give way. As you remove the lid, inhale the aroma of the fresh pumpkin. As you clean the inside of the pumpkin, feel the slimy, stringy strands and seeds. Draw your design on the pumpkin's face, incorporating its natural curves. Using a gentle back and forth motion, carve your design, observing it take shape. Place a candle in your pumpkin and appreciate your work. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
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