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L. Rafael Reif, an electrical engineer who has been the provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the last seven years, has been chosen as the institution's next president. Mr. Reif, 61, will assume the presidency on July 2, succeeding Susan Hockfield, who in February announced her plans to resign. As provost, Mr. Reif led the development of MITx and edX, the institute's new online initiatives, expanded the institute's global reach with projects in Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Russia, and helped foster the emergence of an innovation cluster adjacent to M.I.T. in Kendall Square. During the financial downturn that began in 2008, Mr. Reif led a process that eliminated a 50 million structural deficit. Mr. Reif, who was born in Venezuela, has been at M.I.T. since 1980, serving as head of the department of electrical engineering and computer science, the institute's largest department, before he became provost. He is known for his research on semiconductors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
The fate of the N.F.L.'s proposed 10 year labor deal will reach a critical juncture this week. Though the players union's executive committee and the 32 representatives from each team did not agree last week to endorse the proposal, the entire union membership is expected to begin voting this week on the far reaching agreement. As in most labor negotiations, the proposed collective bargaining agreement resulted from a series of compromises, calculations and competing priorities. The calculus is compounded by the makeup of the roughly 2,000 N.F.L. players who will vote, a much more difficult membership to wrangle than the N.F.L.'s team owners, who quickly approved the proposal in late February. While highly paid veteran stars like Aaron Rodgers and Richard Sherman oppose the deal, the two thirds of N.F.L. players with contracts at or near the league's minimum salary see the deal's pros and cons very differently. Only a simple majority is needed to ratify the 400 page agreement. The N.F.L. Players Association distributed an eight page list of the proposal's highlights to agents last week, aimed at simplifying the economic implications of many weighty issues. Among the most divisive elements is the provision adding a 17th regular season game, which many prominent players have opposed as a health risk. To make the deal more palatable, owners proposed expanding rosters and practice squads, reducing the number of padded practices and raising minimum salaries, concessions that might win over rank and file players. Last week, the owners also removed their demand that players receive no more than 250,000 for a 17th game, a cap that highly paid players had rejected. 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. Even with the gradual concessions, talks among players have been fractious, with a lengthy meeting during last week's scouting combine ending in a 17 14 vote among player reps to put the proposed C.B.A. to a vote of the general body. (One team representative abstained.) As players publicly and privately debate the deal that will define the next 10 years of operating procedure in the N.F.L., here are the key items in the current proposal that are sticking points, according to players, agents, sports lawyers and consultants for retired players: If the players accept the deal, they will receive 48 percent of the league's revenue after deductions, starting in the 2020 season, about one percentage point more than the current 47 53 percent split with owners. That percentage point is worth about 150 million a year to the players, given the league's current revenue of about 15 billion. If the regular season expands to 17 games, the players will receive an additional half a percentage point. The amount of shared revenue would rise another three tenths of a percentage point if the value of the league's broadcast contracts grows by 120 percent or more, a gain that cannot be counted on just yet. Several players have questioned why the players will receive just an extra three tenths of a percentage point if broadcast revenues grow by 120 percent, a jump estimated to be worth many billions of dollars. Players' contracts cover only what they earn during the regular season; in the postseason, all players are paid depending upon how their team performs. In the first year of the proposed C.B.A., each player on a team that plays in the wild card round and goes on to win the Super Bowl would be paid 300,000, an increase of about 22 percent over the 245,000 such a player would have earned for this postseason. That is a substantial amount for a player on a rookie minimum contract earning just 31,000 per game during the regular season, but far less meaningful for a player like San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, who earns more than 1 million per game. The number looks even smaller when considering that the proposed C.B.A. will add two postseason games, which the players' union estimates will bring an additional 150 million into the league. The players will receive 70 million to 75 million of that windfall in the form of a higher salary cap, but the structure exposes the strange economics of the playoffs, as well as the divergent interests of highly paid and lowly paid players. The union persuaded the owners to raise minimum salaries by more than 20 percent. But counterintuitively, this could lead to less money for some players. That's because teams may push more players to sign "split contracts," which pay one amount for weeks they are on an active roster (whether they suit up for the game or not) and a far lower amount for weeks when they are injured. In the new deal, a rookie who signs a split contract for next season would receive a minimum salary of 610,000 prorated for the weeks he is on an active roster. For weeks when he is injured, his salary for purposes of proration would drop to 400,000. To offset the cost of the higher minimum salaries, teams may pressure rookies, free agents and older players to sign split contracts because they know such players have less leverage. So while the increase in minimum salaries is noteworthy, the practical effect may be less to celebrate. Disability benefits could net less money for inactive players. Given the brutal nature of the sport, hundreds of former players apply for disability benefits every year. Currently, some inactive players collect up to 135,000 year, or 11,250 a month, in disability benefits. If they also receive, say, 2,000 a month from Social Security, they collect 13,250 a month in disability payments. The N.F.L. wants to end that "double dipping" and reduce the players' N.F.L. benefits by offsetting the amount they receive from Social Security. So a player who now receives 11,250 from the N.F.L. and 2,000 from Social Security would see his football benefit fall to 9,250. The size of that N.F.L. benefit would shrink further over time as the player's Social Security disability benefit rose to account for the cost of living and as he started to receive his pension. The league "is playing chess for 2025, when the honeymoon from this C.B.A. is over," said Paul Scott, who runs Benefits Huddle, a company that helps former N.F.L. players acquire benefits. "That's when the older players are going to feel the kick." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Animated owls await in the Kindle in Motion edition of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," one of several digital interpretations of J.K. Rowling's wizarding world. The notion of losing yourself in a good book has taken on additional meaning, thanks to immersive experiences that let you wander around in the world built by the author. Several literary franchises designed for all ages readership have even leveraged the popularity of their film adaptations into real life attractions: New Zealand's Tolkien tourism industry offers a peek at the Hobbiton movie set, and there's now a corner of Dubai's Motiongate theme park devoted to "The Hunger Games," Suzanne Collins's dystopian Y.A. trilogy about teenagers competing to kill each other (and yes, there's a gift shop). However, when it comes to sharing an alternative reality with fans and making them want to live there it's hard to top J. K. Rowling's Wizarding World juggernaut. Years before official Harry Potter theme parks opened in California, Florida and Japan, readers were recreating Hogwarts on their own. Kids threw on striped scarves over Party City robes for midnight bookstore parties, and improvisational Quidditch leagues began to form on college campuses. But now, as Scholastic marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone," a new mobile role playing game that lets players become students at Harry's esteemed alma mater has arrived. In HARRY POTTER: HOGWARTS MYSTERY (free to play with in app purchases, on Android and iOS devices with an internet connection), Potterheads who always wanted to attend the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry finally get their chance. After Professor Minerva McGonagall (as in the films, voiced by Maggie Smith, who should be in all video games) welcomes you, you design your own student character, get sorted into a house Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw or Slytherin and start acquiring classroom supplies in the shops of Diagon Alley, the witching equipment commercial district. The game is set years before the enrollment of Harry Potter and his nemesis, Draco Malfoy, but you get your own instant enemy. Your in game alter ego is dogged by a Slytherin mean girl named Merula Snyde who, in an early confrontation, lays out the "mystery" here at Hogwarts: "Your brother lost his mind, disgraced his house, got expelled from school and was never heard from again." Your character's quest is to figure out what actually happened to that brother as you work through the game's levels. While the narrative is intriguing, the gameplay is not. Most of the early action consists of tapping glowing objects, dragging a finger in wand formations or answering multiple choice questions, but the plot is timed so that your character gets into trouble and runs out of energy relatively early into the game. To move on, you either have to wait until your energy level returns or spend real money for digital coins or gems to power yourself back up. When "Hogwarts Mystery" was first released, prices ranged from 99 cents for a "handful of gems" to 99.99 for a "vault of gems" a cost that may feel like out of state tuition to parents footing the app bills. The game's developers have been tinkering with the pricing, though, and as software is a malleable substance, perhaps the gameplay itself may evolve for the better with enough feedback from fans. But perhaps the best way to fully experience the Potterverse is to return to the original text, where the magic all began with words. If you don't feel like hauling out the seven original volumes (or eight, for those who consider the playscript of Broadway's current "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" as canon, as Rowling does), enhanced electronic versions of the books put a lively spin on familiar material. Last year, Amazon released the illustrated edition of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" as a "Kindle in Motion" e book ( 9.99, for Kindle tablets and the Kindle app for Android and iOS). In the motion edition, gently animated versions of Jim Kay's illustrations pepper the story, much like the way photos move in The Daily Prophet, the wizards' magical newspaper. With Rowling's Pottermore publishing division behind the project, expect the rest of the books in the series to be transformed. On the moving pictures front, Apple beat Amazon to the punch in 2015 when the company teamed up with Pottermore to release the exclusive Harry Potter Enhanced Editions of all seven books into its iBookstore for iOS devices. The novels, also priced at 9.99 each, feature occasional annotations by the author and interactive illustrations like a Golden Snitch that flutters away when you try to touch it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
He was a graduate student who seemingly had it all: drive, a big idea and the financial backing to pay for a sprawling study to test it. In 2012, as same sex marriage advocates were working to build support in California, Michael LaCour, a political science researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, asked a critical question: Can canvassers with a personal stake in an issue in this case, gay men and women actually sway voters' opinions in a lasting way? He would need an influential partner to help frame, interpret and place into context his findings to produce an authoritative scientific answer. And he went to one of the giants in the field, Donald P. Green, a Columbia University professor and co author of a widely used text on field experiments. "I thought it was a very ambitious idea, so ambitious that it might not be suitable for a graduate student," said Dr. Green, who signed on as a co author of Mr. LaCour's study in 2013. "But it's such an important question, and he was very passionate about it." Last week, their finding that gay canvassers were in fact powerfully persuasive with people who had voted against same sex marriage published in December in Science, one of the world's leading scientific journals collapsed amid accusations that Mr. LaCour had misrepresented his study methods and lacked the evidence to back up his findings. On Tuesday, Dr. Green asked the journal to retract the study because of Mr. LaCour's failure to produce his original data. Mr. LaCour declined to be interviewed, but has said in statements that he stands by the findings. The case has shaken not only the community of political scientists but also public trust in the way the scientific establishment vets new findings. It raises broad questions about the rigor of rules that guide a leading academic's oversight of a graduate student's research and of the peer review conducted of that research by Science. New, previously unreported details have emerged that suggest serious lapses in the supervision of Mr. LaCour's work. For example, Dr. Green said he had never asked Mr. LaCour to detail who was funding their research, and Mr. LaCour's lawyer has told Science that Mr. LaCour did not pay participants in the study the fees he had claimed. Dr. Green, who never saw the raw data on which the study was based, said he had repeatedly asked Mr. LaCour to post the data in a protected databank at the University of Michigan, where they could be examined later if needed. But Mr. LaCour did not. "It's a very delicate situation when a senior scholar makes a move to look at a junior scholar's data set," Dr. Green said. "This is his career, and if I reach in and grab it, it may seem like I'm boxing him out." But Dr. Ivan Oransky, A co founder of "Retraction Watch," which first published news of the allegations and Dr. Green's retraction request, said, "At the end of the day he decided to trust LaCour, which was, in his own words, a mistake." Marcia McNutt, editor in chief of Science, said editors there were still grappling with a decision on retracting the study. Drew Angerer for The New York Times Many of the most contentious particulars of how the study was conducted are not yet known, and Mr. LaCour said he would produce a "definitive" accounting by the end of next week. Science has published an expression of concern about the study and is considering retracting it, said Marcia McNutt, editor in chief. "Given the negative publicity that has now surrounded this paper and the concerns that have been raised about its irreproducibility, I think it would be in Michael LaCour's best interest to agree to a retraction of the paper as swiftly as possible," she said in an interview on Friday. "Right now he's going to have such a black cloud over his head that it's going to haunt him for the rest of his days." Only three months ago he posted on Facebook that he would soon be moving across country for his "dream job" as a professor at Princeton. That future could now be in doubt. A Princeton spokesman, Martin Mbugua, noting that Mr. LaCour was not yet an employee there, said, "We will review all available information and determine the next steps." Critics said the intense competition by graduate students to be published in prestigious journals, weak oversight by academic advisers and the rush by journals to publish studies that will attract attention too often led to sloppy and even unethical research methods. The now disputed study was covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among others. "You don't get a faculty position at Princeton by publishing something in the Journal Nobody Ever Heard Of," Dr. Oransky said. Is being lead author on a big study published in Science "enough to get a position in a prestigious university?" he asked, then answered: "They don't care how well you taught. They don't care about your peer reviews. They don't care about your collegiality. They care about how many papers you publish in major journals." The details that have emerged about the flaws in the research have prompted heated debate among scientists and policy makers about how to reform the current system of review and publication. This is far from the first such case. The scientific community's system for vetting new findings, built on trust, is poorly equipped to detect deliberate misrepresentations. Faculty advisers monitor students' work, but there are no standard guidelines governing the working relationship between senior and junior co authors. The reviewers at journals may raise questions about a study's methodology or data analysis, but rarely have access to the raw data itself, experts said. They do not have time; they are juggling the demands of their own work, and reviewing is typically unpaid. In cases like this one with the authors on opposite sides of the country that trust allowed Mr. LaCour to work with little supervision. "It is simply unacceptable for science to continue with people publishing on data they do not share with others," said Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "Journals, funding agencies and universities must begin requiring that data be publicly available." Mr. LaCour met Dr. Green at a summer workshop on research methods in Ann Arbor, Mich., that is part education, part pilgrimage for young scientists. Dr. Green is a co author of the textbook "Field Experiments: Design, Analysis and Interpretation." He has published more than 100 papers, on topics like campaign finance and party affiliation, and is one of the most respected proponents of rigorous analysis and data transparency in social science. Mr. LaCour, whose resume mentions a stint as the University of Texas Longhorns' mascot "Hook Em" as well as an impressive list of academic honors, approached Dr. Green after class at the workshop one day with his idea. His proposal was intriguing. Previous work had found that standard campaign tactics ads, pamphleteering, conventional canvassing did not alter core beliefs in a lasting way. Mr. LaCour wanted to test canvassing done by people who would personally be affected by the outcome of the vote. His timing was perfect. The Los Angeles LGBT Center, after losing the fight over Proposition 8, which barred same sex marriage in California, was doing just this sort of work in conservative parts of the county and wanted to see if it was effective. Dave Fleischer, director of the center's leadership lab, knew Dr. Green and had told him of the center's innovative canvassing methods. "Don said we were in luck because there was a Ph.D. candidate named Mike LaCour who was interested in doing an experiment," Mr. Fleischer said. Money seemed ample for the undertaking and Dr. Green did not ask where exactly it was coming from. "Michael said he had hundreds of thousands in grant money, and, yes, in retrospect, I could have asked about that," Dr. Green said. "But it's a delicate matter to ask another scholar the exact method through which they're paying for their work." Dr. McNutt said that for Dr. Green to be "in a situation where he's so distant from the student that he would have so little opportunity to really keep tabs on what was happening with him and with this data set it's just not a good situation." The canvassing was done rigorously, Mr. Fleischer said. The LGBT Center sent people into neighborhoods that had voted against same sex marriage, including Boyle Heights, South Central and East Los Angeles. The voters were randomly assigned to either gay or straight canvassers, who were trained to engage them respectfully in conversation. Mr. LaCour's job was to track those voters' attitudes toward same sex marriage multiple times, over nine months, using a survey tool called the "feeling thermometer," intended to pick up subtle shifts. He reported a response rate of the participants who completed surveys, 12 percent, that was so high that Dr. Green insisted the work be replicated to make sure it held up. Mr. LaCour told Dr. Green that the response rate was high because he was paying respondents to participate, a common and accepted practice. After he told that Dr. Green a second run of the experiment had produced similar results, Dr. Green signed on. Mr. Fleischer said that sometime during the project, "Mike had the strong opinion that we would find that the gay canvassers were doing much better." Dr. Green asked Mr. LaCour for the raw data after the study came under fire. Mr. LaCour said in the letter to Dr. McNutt that he erased the raw data months ago, "to protect those who answered the survey," Dr. McNutt said. She said that it was possible some voters had responded to some surveys, but that it was most likely that too few had done so to provide enough data to reach persuasive conclusions. Survey data comes in many forms, and the form that journal peer reviewers see and that appears with the published paper is the "cleaned" and analyzed data. These are the charts, tables, and graphs that extract meaning from the raw material piles of questionnaires, transcripts of conversations, "screen grabs" of online forms. Many study co authors never see the raw material. Mr. Kalla, trying to find out why he and Dr. Broockman were getting such a low response rate, called the survey company that had been working with Mr. LaCour. The company, which he declined to name, denied any knowledge of the project, he said. "We were over at Dave's place, and he was listening to my side of the conversation, and when I hung up," we just looked at each other, he said. "Then we went right back into the data, because we're nerdy data guys and that's what we do." On Saturday, they quickly found several other anomalies in Mr. LaCour's analysis and called their former instructor, Dr. Green. Over the weekend, the three of them, with the help of an assistant professor at Yale, Peter Aronow, discovered that statistical manipulations could easily have accounted for the findings. Dr. Green called Mr. LaCour's academic adviser, Lynn Vavreck, a professor, who confronted Mr. LaCour. Dr. McNutt of Science said editors there were still grappling with a decision on retracting. "This has just hit us," she said. "There will be a lot of time for lessons learned. We're definitely going to be thinking a lot about this and what could have been done to prevent this from happening." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LONDON Dancer, choreographer, ex heroin addict, prodigal son, perfectionist, art world darling, club world star: Michael Clark was for a long time the enfant terrible of British dance. Today he is 58 and the subject of a comprehensive exhibition, "Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer," at the Barbican Art Gallery that surveys his career and extensive collaborations. The visual splendor of the exhibition, which opens Wednesday, vibrantly displays the pop culture thrills of Mr. Clark's arrival on the scene in London in the early 1980s. With eye popping graphics ("Enjoy God's Disco" reads an early flyer for his company in Coca Cola red and white), film installations and high flyer art world contributions, the exhibition evokes a moment in which dance wove itself into the fabric of a newly charged youth culture. The exhibition, said Florence Ostende, the show's curator, is shaped as "a love letter" from Mr. Clark's artist friends and collaborators, showing his work through the multiple guises of film, photography, painting, graphic work, costumes and design. "So many exhibitions rely on archival material, and sometimes it can bury the artist," Ms. Ostende said. "I wanted a very live constellation of voices." That includes Charles Atlas, Jarvis Cocker, Elizabeth Peyton, Sarah Lucas, Peter Doig and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others. Mr. Clark's work never quite took off in the United States. (In The New York Post, Clive Barnes dismissed Mr. Clark's company's Brooklyn Academy of Music debut in 1986, saying he was trying "to shock the unshockable, surprise the unsurprised and make whoopee on an almost deflated cushion.") But it's hard to overstate his impact on London dance in the early 1980s, when fresh out of the Royal Ballet School and a stint with Ballet Rambert, he began to choreograph. Teaming up with scenesters like the performance artist Leigh Bowery (a frequent model for Lucian Freud), the experimental design duo BodyMap and rock bands like the Fall and Wire, Mr. Clark became known for his provocative, surrealist shows. Vaudeville, camp and comedy were all part of the mix. He and his dancers wore costumes with cut outs displaying their buttocks, used giant dildos as props, danced in syringe pierced bodysuits and mingled with non dancers onstage. But the dancing was inventive and rigorous, with strong influences from Merce Cunningham and the Cecchetti ballet technique that Clark was schooled in, as well as from Karole Armitage, whose company he worked with in New York in 1982. It displayed the clean lines, speed and precision of his ballet training along with surprising off balance tilts, pelvic thrusts that propel the legs and sudden shifts of weight. Critics mostly hated the costumes and music around the movement, but young audiences adored the spectacle. "He got curious Londoners from every walk of life," said Michael Morris, who presented "Mmm ...," Mr. Clark's take on "The Rite of Spring," in a King's Cross warehouse in 1992. "I can still remember the packed audience, the sense of event that Michael was always so brilliant at creating." These were Mr. Clark's golden years. In 1989 he started a relationship with the choreographer Stephen Petronio. In his memoir, "Confessions of a Motion Addict," Mr. Petronio writes that when the pair were struggling to create a performance for the Anthony d'Offay gallery in London, he insisted "that we perform the only real thing that we have a serious daily practice in: sex." (It was called "Heterospective.") Since then, he has remained an important, but intermittent presence in the British dance world, continuing to collaborate with an eclectic mix of artists, fashion designers and musicians, and becoming an associate artist at the Barbican in 2005. "The combination of drug problems and personal issues meant he couldn't sustain a career and hasn't had the impact his talent deserved," said Debra Craine, the chief dance critic of The London Times. "But when he came back after his hiatus, you felt he was more interested in the dance; in some of the later work, everything is sculpted, nothing is wasted. There are very few people who can make dance that clean and profound." Mr. Clark declined to be interviewed for this article, but in an interview with Ms. Ostende in the excellent exhibition catalog, he offers a succinct take on his art. "You are aware," he says, "that, for me, my work is a matter of life and death?" A number of the contributors to the exhibition and close associates talked about or emailed their memories of working with Mr. Clark and offered reflections on their collaborations and relationships with him. Here are edited excerpts from those interviews. Charles Atlas, filmmaker and video artist I met Michael at a gallery opening in London in 1981 when I was touring with Merce Cunningham. He was in a couple of films of mine, and then in 1984 I did the lighting for him and Ellen van Schuylenburch in a duet called "New Puritans," which was on his company's first program. I have done his lighting ever since. I love Michael's work, and I love him. Susan Stenger, musician The day Princess Diana died I was recording with my band in an old synagogue in east London. Cerith Wyn Evans was in the band, and he brought Michael along. He stretched out on a bench and the whole time we were playing I thought he was asleep, but afterward he asked me if I'd be interested in working together, and it was clear he had been immersed in it and taken in all the details. To find a new person who I had barely met, and immediately felt such an affinity for, was a beautiful shock. Charles Atlas Michael marched to his own drummer from the start. He was independent and making work at 21. I could see the rigor and ballet form in his work, but people in general couldn't see it because he was thumbing his nose, wearing platform shoes and outrageous costumes. He got a rock 'n' roll audience; there were always club people at his shows, his friends, and he often included them as part of the pieces. But the work was always crafted as well as entertaining. Sophie Fiennes He was coming out of the Thatcher era and an anti establishment wave was a big part of that time, but Michael was just in the present moment; even Stravinsky was in the present for him. I was drawn to the cottage industry feel of Michael's work. No one was thinking about careers and brands, they were just in Leigh's council flat, rolling along, cooking something up. Elizabeth Peyton, artist I think where other people make a big deal about certain things sitting side by side, for instance punk and classical ballet, for Michael this is natural all coming from the same place all can exist together. There is an attractive freedom to that. A lot of possibilities. Wolfgang Tillmans, photographer I don't feel at a loss in his performances, even if I don't understand what they mean. He confronts an absurd world with actions that are equally inexplicable. The secret is that they are never random. Given how enigmatic he is, and how in control of everything he does, I was surprised how easygoing and open he was when I photographed him. He allowed me to put him in unexpected places and contexts, and he was very playful with it. In that way it felt genuinely collaborative. Elizabeth Peyton He can sit classical ballet inside the shine of David Bowie's "Low" period red hair that's exciting! Silke Otto Knapp, artist He never quite gives in to the music. It's not like a rock concert where you are absorbed by the sound. Here you are also aware of the dance language, wanting to understand it. Dance and music exist in parallel, and each have a powerful effect, which is rare. Susan Stenger After the first rehearsal together, I just knew it was going to work. We were completely on the same wavelength about music; he loves Stravinsky and Satie, but also Bowie, Nina Simone, Iggy Pop. He didn't make distinctions between high and low art. They were all part of his musical world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Art museums are increasingly under an ethical searchlight. Recently, sources of patronage have been protested, leading one Whitney Museum of American Art donor and trustee, whose wealth comes from the manufacture of military supplies, to leave the board. And long before this development there have been demands that our big guns art institutions racially and ethnically diversify their boards, staffs and collections. Where the calls for accounting will lead remains to be seen. But they won't end soon, and will almost certainly shape responses to the fall's most noticed American museum event, the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art, after an extensive expansion and reinstallation. Will the "new" MoMA exchange its old, cramped Paris New York version of Modernism for an inclusive and accurately global one? Will women and artists of color finally find their rightful place in the mix? We'll have to wait for answers until the museum reopens on Oct. 21. But two solo exhibitions debuting then are clearly moves in the right direction. One, "Betye Saar: The Legends of 'Black Girl's Window,'" is a survey of prints by a veteran Los Angeles artist who, at 93, is still going strong. (A parallel display of the artist's notebooks titled "Betye Saar: Call and Response," will be at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from Sept. 22 to April 5.) The other show, titled "Pope. L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration," and one shared by a trio of exhibitors MoMA, the Whitney, and the Public Art Fund is a sampler of work, old and new, by an influential Conceptualist who once billed himself as "The Friendliest Black Artist in America" and is still one of the sharpest social satirists in the business. For one past performance, he devoured and vomited up entire sections of The Wall Street Journal. For another, he belly crawled the length of Manhattan dressed in a Superman costume. He'll do a repeat crawl, sponsored by the Public Art Fund, on Sept. 21 and is looking for volunteers to join him. Meanwhile, in a happy stroke of timing, this fall the New Museum offers a career view of one of the great museum shaker uppers, Hans Haacke. A 1970 installation created by the German born artist for a MoMA group show allowed visitors to cast votes of no confidence in then New York Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller, who was a MoMA trustee. A year later, the Guggenheim abruptly shut down a Haacke solo that seemed to connect dots between museum patronage and slumlord real estate money. Mr. Haacke has been a hero to many critically minded artists. And the New Museum treats him as one by giving "Hans Haacke: All Connected" the lion's share of its floor space. (Oct. 24 Jan. 26.) A major American political painter returns to view in "Robert Colescott: Art and Race Matters" at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (Sept. 20 Jan. 12) . Colescott, who died in 2009, came to international attention in 1997 when he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. His scorching fantasies of life in his homeland and burlesques of national icons (e.g. "George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware") blend outrageousness and formal beauty in ways that successive generations of African American artists Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker have learned from. Dark humor less raucous but no less caustic spikes the painting of the Colombian artist Beatriz Gonzalez, now in her 80s and the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Oct. 27 Jan. 20). With crisp figures and solid Pop colors Ms. Gonzalez has, for six decades, chronicled the sometimes murderous modern history of her homeland and the hopeless pretensions of art itself. (She once called her own work "underdeveloped painting for underdeveloped countries.") Her only substantial United States show was at El Museo del Barrio more than 20 years ago, so this one is real news. ' The Facade Commission: Wangechi Mutu, the NewOnes, Will Free Us ' Newsworthy too is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's first ever art commission for its Fifth Ave. facade niches: sculptures by the Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu. Ms. Mutu has sculptures in the current Whitney Biennial: sinuous mash ups of materials (earth, wood, stone, bone), forms (human, animal, botanical), and cultures ( non Western, Western , mythical). Comparable images installed on the Met's classicizing, foursquare facade would send a provocative message about the encyclopedic collection within, one suggesting that hybridity, not purity change, not fixity is what art is about and has always been ( Sept. 9 Jan. 12 ). So is the Renaissance sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio (1435 1488), who's best known as Leonardo da Vinci's teacher, but deserves serious props on his own, as will surely be apparent from "Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence," a show of 50 pieces assembled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Given the grace, the art and wave of Leonardo fever circling the globe, the museum could well have a hit on its hands. (Sept. 15 Jan. 12.). And the enthusiasm generated may spill over to "Bertoldo di Giovanni: The Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence" at the Frick Collection, a scholarly take on an older Verrocchio contemporary who was both a student and a teacher of stars: Donatello was Bertoldo's mentor; Michelangelo his pupil. (Sept. 18 Jan 12). The Best of Los Angeles As usual, Los Angeles has a high concentration of goodies, starting with "Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence" at the Hammer Museum, an eagerly awaited panoptic view of a world class painter who, through a 30 year career, has stuck close to his home city (Sept. 29 Jan. 5). At the California African American Museum, another L.A. native will have a single, new, object studded installation: "Timothy Washington: Citizen/Ship" (Sept. 25 March 1). Finally, Nayland Blake, a biracial, pansexual ex adopted Angeleno (make that Angelenx) gets the full career treatment at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The show, "No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake," (Sept. 29 Jan. 26), has been a long time coming. With luck it will later head east. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit...William England/London Stereoscopic Company, via Getty Images The Catskills have had more comebacks than Tony Bennett. The first wave came in the late 1880s when summer vacationers filled boarding houses. Decades later, Jewish families arrived by train to play shuffleboard and swim in opulent hotels. Remember Woodstock in the 1960s? That's when the hippies showed up. Nowadays, aging Brooklyn hipsters are bringing their Urban Outfitters aesthetic to Kerhonkson and Fallsburg. But while much has been made of the mountainous area northwest of New York City, its most recent rebirth as a summer escape (Hamptons, anyone?) is as much a story of resilience as it is one of reinvention. "People keep trying to impose different things on this swath of land," said Victoria Wilson, a senior editor with Knopf publishing who bought a home in Sullivan County 30 years ago. "It is different, but it remains the same. It exudes something that is a little mysterious." The Times has chronicled the changing culture of the Catskills, long a home to artists and the independent minded. Dutch immigrants settled there in the 1600s where they grew wheat and rye, making way for dairy and egg farming later on. A new group of artists and writers would arrive in the 1800s. The artist Thomas Cole settled there in 1825 after emigrating from Lancashire, England, seven years earlier, bringing a number of others with him. A painter and engraver, Cole became a founder of the Hudson River School, one of the country's first great American art movements. Celebrated artists like Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt were enamored with the area's stately peaks and valleys. They painted gauzy landscapes where fishermen plucked plump brook trout from Esopus Creek. The Catskills became notable, particularly among patrons who commissioned paintings to be hung in European salons and the drawing rooms of wealthy New Yorkers. By the mid 1800s, farmers and innkeepers began renting out bungalows to boarders from the city looking to escape the summer stew of humidity and heat. "There is a delicious sense of remoteness; a feeling of the completeness of nature's most bountiful gifts of expression," The Times wrote in 1872. Visitors, it explained, "will find here no modern hotel luxuries; no bells to ring; no waiters to conciliate; no baths to take unless they might fancy a plunge into the rushing foaming mountain stream that is calling all day from the twilight gorge." Tourists arrived mostly by train. The trek could take as much as a day from Manhattan, which meant middle class families who ventured there often stayed a week or more, especially during the summer. The mountains were a haven for painters. Women wore blue flannel dresses and waterproof cloaks as opposed to the frippery of Madison Square Park and climbed steep gorges with sketchbooks, paintbrushes and pencils in hand. In 1896, a physician, Alfred Lebbeus Loomis, founded a sanitarium in Liberty, N.Y., for tuberculosis patients who believed that the cure for the disease was fresh air and rest. Though Loomis died before the sanitarium was christened, its opening would have a chilling effect on summer travelers who were wary of making their way north with sick fellow passengers. "They were coughing and hacking on the train," said Stephen Silverman, the author of 2015's "The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America," of the sanitarium's patients. "The boarding houses were filled with consumptive patients. People could not sell summer homes. Real estate plummeted. The Catskills quickly went out of favor." Decades passed. And, eventually, the Catskills, which comprise Delaware, Greene, Schoharie, Sullivan and Ulster counties, were ready for a revival. In came the era of big hotels. Jewish proprietors set up self contained hospitality fortresses in the 1920s, which later gave Jewish families a place to summer when they were discriminated against elsewhere. The most prominent of these was Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel, a kosher establishment that started as a farmhouse in Liberty in 1919. Jennie Grossinger, the formidable daughter of the founder, oversaw its dominance as a major hotel that had its own airstrip and post office. Marisa Scheinfeld, the author of "The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland," used to visit the Concord Resort Hotel as a young girl. "'Dirty Dancing' is the cliche," she said, referring to the 1987 romantic comedy starring Jennifer Grey as a teenager who falls in love with a hotel dance instructor while vacationing with her parents in 1963. (Grossinger's was the inspiration for the film's fictional Kellerman's resort.) Some families moved up for the summer; others saw a two week stay as a substitute for a trip abroad. "You got menus for the day in the morning; the night life was bustling," Ms. Scheinfeld said. "There were meals, swimming, fox trot lessons. My grandpa was a card shark. He used to go play. I'd go with my grandma to the steam room. I remember a lot of bingo and swimming." Jewish musicians and comedians, too, became celebrities in the Catskills long before they achieved mainstream success. Among them: Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Sid Caesar, Joan Rivers and Jackie Mason. The comedian Jerry Lewis worked as a pool boy and busboy while his parents performed a vaudeville act. "It was here they honed their humor," Ms. Scheinfeld said. Much has been made of the era in movies and television shows. The second season of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," a comedy about a Jewish housewife in 1958 who wants to be a comic in New York, features several episodes set in the Catskills. At the same time, the Catskills were on the verge of another economic downturn as the Borscht Belt lost its cachet. By the mid 1960s, Ms. Scheinfeld said, "The Catskills felt stale." Phase three: The hippies and beyond The Catskills fell out of vogue for a combination of reasons, Mr. Silverman said. More women entered the work force, airfare became cheaper and families moved to bigger homes in the suburbs. Air conditioning was also widely available, which meant New York City denizens didn't have to escape the city to keep cool. And after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, Jews, like black people, could no longer be discriminated against, and thus had more places to go. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Tara Harper and Fritz Rahr were married at home on July 11 in Fort Worth, Texas. Tara Harper knew Fritz Rahr was "the one" after he volunteered to join her on a trip to rescue a German shepherd and then gave it a bath. In June 2018, when Tara Harper told Frederick Rahr that she was going to drive eight hours round trip, from Dallas to Pasadena, Texas, to pick up an elderly and neglected German shepherd, she never imagined the man she had been seeing for just a few months would volunteer to join her. When he did, she figured he was just trying to score a few points with her. But after both had spent time in the car with the rescued animal, Ms. Harper knew that having Mr. Rahr, 53, who goes by Fritz, with her at that time was so much more. "It didn't matter to Fritz that our new friend was dirty and smelled," she said. When they returned to Ms. Harper's Dallas home, Mr. Rahr jumped in the shower with the old dog and gave him what was probably his first bath. "After the shower, Fritz and I were sitting on the kitchen floor exhausted," Ms. Harper said. "The rescue came over to Fritz and put his foot on his arm, thanking him. I started bawling." The pair had first met at a Rahr Sons Brewing Company event in Fort Worth, Texas, where Ms. Harper was holding a dog adoption for the charity she co founded, Paws in the City. Though Ms. Harper teases that she's surprised Mr. Rahr remembers as she was in sunglasses and a ball cap all day. Even the date is a little fuzzy now, she says. "We think it was about nine years ago." In September 2017, Mr. Rahr messaged Ms. Harper on Facebook. "I reached out to her after I saw her comment on a mutual topic of interest." Mr. Rahr says he couldn't help himself. "I had to ask Tara out on a date," Mr. Rahr said, "There was something captivating about Tara. Her love and passion for dog rescue really hit home for me. I would do anything for my dogs and from what I could tell Tara would do that and a lot more." Ms. Harper didn't say yes at first. In fact, Mr. Rahr, who lived in Fort Worth, asked several more times before she finally agreed. It wasn't that she wasn't intrigued. "I immediately thought he was incredibly good looking, very nice and funny," she said. "The truth is I needed to do my research. Dallas and Fort Worth are two completely different worlds. I couldn't simply make one call and know everything about him like I could if he lived in Dallas" Their first date was in October 2017 at Del Frisco's Grill in Dallas, and it turned out to be more of a first meeting. When Mr. Rahr arrived at the restaurant, he spotted Ms. Harper at a table with a half dozen or so of her friends. "I thought she was just hanging out with some friends and we would move to another table for the evening," Mr. Rahr said. But that was not the case. She simply asked him to have a seat. "My friends are very important to me," said Ms. Harper, explaining why she was with her friends at the restaurant. "In order for a relationship to work everyone has to get along and enjoy each other. He passed the test with flying colors." Mr. Rahr wasn't bothered by the extra company. "I immediately fell in love with her and I did everything I could not to mess things up in front of everyone," he said. Neither Mr. Rahr nor Ms. Harper is used to messing up. Mr. Rahr started Rahr Sons Brewing, a microbrewery, in 2004, after a long and successful railroad career. He had worked at Southern Pacific, Conrail, and, ultimately, at the Kansas City Southern Railroad as the director of sales. Back then, microbrews weren't popular in Fort Worth, but he managed to grow the business over the years. In 2011, Ms. Harper left a job as the vice president in her family's design and manufacturing business only to return in February 2019 to be a co founder Blushly Beauty, a beauty accessories company which is a branch of her family's business. In July 2019, she moved into Mr. Rahr's Fort Worth home. This past February, they purchased a home together, also in Fort Worth. Mr. Rahr had planned to propose to Ms. Harper during a trip he organized to New York in July 2019. "New York City is a very special place for both of us," he explained. "It's the city Tara grew up in, and she still has family there." But their flight was canceled because of bad weather. Two months later, he planned another New York getaway. "I contacted everyone again, spun the trip to New York with Tara as a family outing this time with her family and my sister and boyfriend and her brother and husband," Mr. Rahr said. "I wanted to ask Tara to marry me at Rockefeller Center. That was the first place I told Tara I loved her." Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. On the trip were Ms. Harper's parents, Suzanne and John Harper of Ennis, Texas, and her brother, Brad Harper, and his husband, Pedja Arandjelovic, as well as Mr. Rahr's sister, Heidi Rahr, and a handful of close friends. They all met at the planned proposal spot and Mr. Rahr popped the question. "She was confused at first, but soon realized what was going on and that everyone else was in on it," he said. "She bent over, placed her hands around my face, and said, 'Yes. Yes. Yes.'" The couple originally planned to marry July 23 at Villa Balbianello on the western shore of Lake Como, Italy, with family and close friends, but they had to pull back those plans because of the coronavirus. (They are planning a vow renewal ceremony at Villa Balbianello in July 2021.) Instead, they married at home on July 11. They dressed their house in a bounty of pink roses, set up a Zoom call with 45 guests, and invited a small group to attend in person. Among those present were Ms. Harper's parents, her brother and his husband and Mr. Rahr's two sons from a previous marriage, Will and Hayden Rahr. A friend of the couple, Ron Corning, officiated, having been ordained by the Universal Life Church. And the couple's dog, Shep (that forlorn German shepherd they rescued), acted as ring security during the ceremony. With a recording of "Here Comes the Bride" playing, Ms. Harper, wearing a Monique Lhuillier gown, glided down the stairs of their home and down an aisle created in the dining room, which had been set up with chairs and a lush wall of pink roses. Mr. Rahr waited at the end of the aisle wearing a classic custom tuxedo and vest from Sean Marshall of Marshall Metcalf. The ceremony was a mixture of prayers and readings, and the vows included some personal jokes. Mr. Rahr vowed "to assist in rescuing dogs," and Ms. Harper promised "to share in long drives to the Duck Camp," a reference to Mr. Rahr being an avid hunter. "If there is a couple out there who is feeling sadness for not being able to have that 'dream wedding,' take a page out of Tara and Fritz's book," Mr. Corning said after the event. "Don't let the day be defined by where it is or how many people attend. Tara and Fritz are proof you can make it special and memorable under any circumstances." Where Home of Tara Harper and Fritz Rahr, Fort Worth, Texas Tears and Laughter When it came time for the vows, Mr. Rahr began to cry. That, in turn, caused the officiant, Mr. Corning, to cry. And when Ms. Harper saw his tears she teased, "You too?" Everyone began to laugh, and Ms. Harper said she could feel the mood in the room lighten instantly. Preparing Together Like most wedding couples, Mr. Rahr and Ms. Harper had expected to spend their wedding day apart up until the ceremony. But the two spent it together helping each other get ready. "If we were in Italy or any other location we would not have done it that way," said Ms. Harper. Words From the Groom "Love is my heart racing every time I see Tara at any given moment. Love is when my problems fall from my shoulders when Tara holds me tight. Love is when Tara understands my faults, accepts my apologies and tells me she loves me, even when I don't deserve it. Love is her and I love her for that." Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SANYA, China China's nationwide real estate boom became so manic last year that many would be buyers camped in tents on the sidewalks of this tropical island city to be at the front of the line when condominiums went on sale even though the condos had not yet been built. But the real estate market here has cooled so rapidly this autumn that the tents have disappeared and been replaced with 20 foot long banners on balconies with the phone numbers of speculators desperate to sell. Ads have grown on the Internet for unfinished apartments at up to 28 percent off the price at which developers were selling them a few months ago. "Last year, when things were good, we had over 100 people a day coming into our office," said David Zhang, the sales director at the Honor Link Investment Consultant Company, a real estate brokerage here. "Now we have three or four a day, and no one is buying." One of the world's few remaining real estate bubbles finally seems to be losing air. Real estate transactions have slowed so quickly that in the last two weeks, brokerages across China have laid off thousands of brokers and closed hundreds of offices. A 32 year old protester said that he and his wife had paid 173,000 last January for an 850 square foot apartment in a building on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the developer later cut the price for the remaining units of this size in the building to 124,000, wrecking the resale value of the condo. To add insult to injury, the building is not scheduled to be completed until May. The couple's mortgage is roughly equal to the new value set by the developer for the apartment, meaning that they have lost all of their equity. And the couple is paying 630 a month in mortgage interest out of a combined monthly paycheck of 1,100. "The government should pay attention to people like us and give aid to us, such as cutting interest rates," said the protester in an interview. He gave only his surname, Sheng, because he said some of those involved had received threatening phone calls urging them to stop protesting. The Chinese government is deliberately bringing down real estate prices to improve the affordability of housing and prevent the housing bubble from becoming worse. Premier Wen Jiabao said Sunday that the government had no intention of changing course. "We would like to stress that there is no possibility of loosening the real estate policies our target is to let the property price fall to a reasonable level," he said. Several cities affected by the real estate bust. The government has pushed up interest rates and set limits on bank lending, deliberately engineering a credit crunch with the goal of slowing inflation as well as making it harder for speculators to borrow money. The government has also limited the number of mortgages for each individual borrower, raised the down payments for mortgages to as much as 40 percent to protect the banking system from losses and begun experimenting with the introduction of real estate taxes in cities like Chongqing. Local and provincial governments have taken further measures. The provincial government here on Hainan Island has chilled sales to buyers from other provinces since last spring by requiring that they prove that they either paid income taxes last year or paid into China's version of Social Security; evasion of these taxes is widespread. Jamie Dimon walks back his quip that JPMorgan would outlive China's Communist Party. Stocks slip as interest rates rise, while jobless claims drop to their lowest point since 1969. The U.S. effort to cut energy costs may not have the intended effect. One clear sign of weakening in the property market comes from the China Real Estate Index System, a weekly survey done by the private SouFun Group in Beijing. It has found that the number of deals fell by more than 50 percent in six of the 35 cities surveyed in the first week of November, compared with the same week last year; over all, the number of transactions fell in 28 of the cities. A variety of government and other private indexes show fairly little change in the prices reported for the dwindling number of transactions still taking place. But real estate price data is notoriously difficult to collect reliably in China, and brokers in some of its largest cities say that steep declines are already taking place. Centaline Property Agency, a large Asian brokerage headquartered in Hong Kong, has temporarily closed 60 of its 385 offices in Shenzhen, a metropolis of 13 million people, and laid off 1,000 of its 8,000 employees there. "For primary sales of new units, the property developers have indeed reduced their asking price by 15 to 20 percent," said Andy Lee, the company's director of Shenzhen operations. "These are real cuts," he said, from prices that buyers would pay until very recently. "In the secondary market, we see homeowners only willing to reduce asking prices by 10 to 15 percent." The real estate market tends to be volatile here in Sanya because this city of 500,000 is a center of the emerging vacation home industry. Prices rose through the 1990s until the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and 1998, fell up to 80 percent until 2004, and then soared more than tenfold to a peak last summer of more than 300 a square foot. Economists at Barclays Capital suggested in a research note on Tuesday that the Chinese government might start reversing recent policies if the fall in real estate prices reaches 20 percent. The drop could reach 30 percent because the market might initially maintain its downward momentum, they said, but they suggested that an overall drop of 10 percent seemed more likely. The mystery now lies in how much effect the real estate slowdown will have on the broader economy. Down payments of 20 percent to 40 percent for mortgages seem high by American standards but are feasible here because of high Chinese savings rates. That may mean that banks are less likely to sustain the heavy losses on home mortgages that Western banks have had over the last few years, senior financiers and real estate developers said, although they said that some smaller banks have substantial exposure to developers. But the real estate downturn has only just begun, Mr. Zhang said, adding, "We are on the cusp of winter, and we don't know who will survive it and who will not." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
As part of a showcase for artists at La Guardia in New York, writers will create fictional tales for fliers and finish them before they land. You Have Airport Stories. Now, an Airport Will Write a Story for You. Terminal A in New York City's La Guardia Airport can be a disorienting place. It's a satellite terminal, meaning it isn't connected to the rest of the airport. Upon entering you find few of the amenities familiar in America's busiest airports today. There isn't a Starbucks or a Shake Shack. The terminal opened in 1939 to launch seaplanes, it has an Art Deco feel. A 235 foot James Brooks mural, "Flight," adorns one wall. It was done as part of the Works Progress Administration program under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal; during the Cold War it was painted over because critics suspected it carried a hidden Communist message. The terminal has its share of surprises. And now, passengers arriving or departing there are greeted with one more: a piece of live, performance art. In a space outside security that used to be a Hudson News kiosk, the writers and close friends Gideon Jacobs and Lexie Smith, who both live in Ridgewood, Queens, have set up a writing nook with stacks of books, wooden furniture, rugs and a vintage typewriter. There they are, writing unique, fictional stories for fliers. This specific initiative, named Landing Pages, is part of a residency program established by the Queens Council on the Arts and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs La Guardia Airport. Over the coming year Queens based artists are taking over the airport space for three months at a time to experiment with their mediums. Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Smith are the first (their project began May 2). There are a few rules. One, customers must approach them. Some visitors see a sign written in chalk on a blackboard that says, "We will write you a story. Ask Us!" More often, people come up looking for the bathroom or rental car facilities. "Some days I feel like I work here," Mr. Jacobs said. "I even have a parking spot." Those who choose to participate provide their flight number and contact details. The writers then draft a story for them while their flights are in the air, and text it to them before they touch down. "The time constraint is a fun challenge," Ms. Smith said. "We definitely follow flights to see if they are delayed. There was one that was by two hours. We were happy for the extra time." The duo writes an average of six stories a day. They hope to finish 50 by June 30, when their project ends, and compile them in a book. "We're probably going to self publish and give it to whoever will take it," she said. After Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Smith finish, Sandra Lopez Monsalve, a multimedia producer, will be up. She will record ambient noises around the airport and make an electronic map with them. Anyone will be able to go online, click on a spot on the map, and play the sounds heard every day in that exact location. After that Sherwin Banfield, a visual artist, will draw the passengers walking by him and then do a large mural based on the sketches. Finally, Brian Soliwoda, the co founder of Salt Tree Art, a design firm that focuses on using sustainable and regenerative products, will create a sculpture of a clipper ship in honor of the terminal's seaplane history. "A lot of airports have art," said Lysa Scully, the general manager of La Guardia Airport. "But having active and involved art that customers engage with, that is the unique model. I haven't seen that anywhere." The idea to have interactive artwork in the airport was first proposed at a Queens Community Board 1 meeting by a resident who lives close to the airport. Frustrated that so many tourists land in Queens but head straight to Manhattan, he stood up and asked if there was a way to showcase the borough's vibrant art scene at the airport. Ms. Scully, who was leading the meeting, was immediately hooked. She reached out to the Queens Council on the Arts, a nonprofit organization that had experience planting quirky artists in the path of visitors. For the past two years, the council has set up artists of all kinds in hotels around Queens the program is called the QCA ArtHotel Residency including those adjacent to the airports. An artist currently hangs out in the lobby of rate SpringHill Suites, a Marriott property at La Guardia, drafting sketches of the borough's many locations and events. The idea is to showcase Queens artists to travelers staying in the property. Daniel Bamba, the organization's grants and residencies manager, said he knew immediately that he could do the same type of project for the airport. "We found projects that really took into account the location they are going to be in and the people who will be passing through on a day to day basis," he said. "We want to give these artists exposure to an insane amount of people." Terminal A was chosen as the home of the ArtPort Residency, as it is officially named, "because it was a space we completely controlled," Ms. Scully said. But all parties involved agree the space is far from ideal. First, because it's located before security, passengers are stressed and don't have the time or mental bandwidth to focus on art. "There are people who are rushing because they don't have anything else to interact with them," Ms. Scully said. "So this is for people to be able to stop a moment." Sarah Burns, a 30 year old furniture designer from Ridgewood, said she almost missed her flight because she stopped to commission the artists, whom she knew from living in the same neighborhood, to write her a story. "I got to the gate just as they were doing the boarding call," she said. "If I could have done it after security, at a restaurant or coffee shop, it would be a little more accessible, I think." Another traveler, who had been in Brooklyn visiting her son and his girlfriend and asked to be identified only as Barbara, stopped to chat to the writers before her Monday afternoon JetBlue flight home to West Palm Beach. "This is cool," she exclaimed, before her husband stopped her from chatting further because they needed to get through the security line. Even passengers who have time don't seem to understand what this project is doing in an airport, Mr. Jacobs said. "We get a lot of people who just turn us down," he said. "We are this total weird anomaly and surprise. They don't get us." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
TROY WILLIAMS, an entrepreneur in health care technology, had no problem in figuring out the type of philanthropy he wanted to do: to give a small group of students at Brigham Young University the same type of full scholarship that paid his way there some 25 years ago. "For me, it made such a big difference," Mr. Williams, 44, said. "That was a moment that made a big impact on me." But he struggled, he said, with the logistics of philanthropic giving. He didn't know how to set up a foundation or how to invest the money to ensure that the foundation would continue to have enough scholarship money to pay for eight students a year to attend Brigham Young. And he had to figure out how to navigate Internal Revenue Service rules so that he could give the money directly to the students. It turns out Mr. Williams's experience is fairly typical for new philanthropists. In a recent survey of its members, Foundation Source, which provides administrative support to family and private foundations, found that most philanthropists with small foundations do not know the best ways to give effectively. The report, released on Friday, found that just 12 percent felt comfortable turning to their financial adviser for advice on giving. Instead, they sought out a "philanthropic peer" (35 percent) or asked no one at all (28 percent), preferring to make their philanthropic decisions on their own. Just 16 percent of philanthropists turned to the people who call themselves philanthropic advisers. "It's interesting, but not surprising, that the main source is people's philanthropic peers," said Robert Chartener, chief executive of Foundation Source. "You might think philanthropic consultants are the best source of information, but they won't have worked with some of those charities. They won't have visited the principals and seen the work. Other private philanthropists will have met the people." The need for advice is clear, but so, too, is the desire to try to figure out philanthropy on your own. Devon Cohn said she and her husband, whose wealth derived from Google stock, set up a family foundation with assets in the mid seven figures about a decade ago, but let the money sit there for years because they didn't know what to do with it. "We had been academics living on tight budgets," she said. "We didn't know how to do good things. We started the foundation so we could put the money away and it wouldn't be burning a hole in our pockets. It was clear you don't just multiply the giving you do as a grad student or in your first job." Instead of talking to their financial adviser or friends, they took a course offered by The Philanthropy Workshop. She said it helped them define what they wanted to do. "We had no theme or focus," she said. "We felt like we got hit by the golden meteor." Today, some seven years after taking the course, the Cohns' family foundation focuses on conflict avoidance and education. They recently made their largest grant to build a student center at Ashesi University in Ghana. The gift was 20 times the size of any of their previous gifts and represented about 15 percent of the foundation's assets. "At some point, we felt it wasn't risky enough or satisfying enough," she said. "We're scientists we wanted to know, did we make a difference?" Going so big on one institution may not be the type of guidance that philanthropic or financial advisers would typically give, which may be why philanthropists ask their friends or no one for advice. "If you're a high net worth individual, you're in a bubble, particularly if you're seeking advice on giving your money away," said Chris Addy, a partner at the Bridgespan Group, a philanthropic consultant. And part of that is based on fear, he said. "People are going to want to get some of that money." This desire for privacy or concern over exposure often leads philanthropists to give to traditional outlets, like universities, hospitals and religious organizations. That's fine, but it may run counter to a foundation's stated mission. Mr. Addy said research showed that 80 percent of organizations put social change on their websites as a goal, but only 20 percent of their grants went to those types of organizations. The bulk of the grants went to institutions. "Giving to an institution has little downside risk and all upside acclamation of your peers, name on a building," said William Foster, who runs the consulting practice at Bridgespan. "It's a 100 percent chance of accomplishing your goal. If you're doing it in social change, the risks of not succeeding are much higher." Mr. Foster added: "Our sense is there is widespread frustration that people don't know where to put their money to create change in areas they care about. Where do you turn to for advice and how do you get there is the limiter. It's not the desire." Henry L. Berman, chief executive of Exponent Philanthropy, which helps foundations with small staffs and also connects philanthropists, said another issue was determining if the person offering advice is truly qualified. "No one certifies you as a philanthropic adviser the way you pass the bar or become a C.P.A.," he said. "I could give you philanthropic advice, but I couldn't give you legal advice." He said experienced philanthropic advisers, however, could offer great value in guiding people to organizations that meet their goals. When philanthropists with smaller foundations seek out advice, it is often for help on the administrative and compliance issues of giving. "There is a lot of documentation with the I.R.S.," Mr. Williams said. "It was stuff we knew nothing about. We set up the endowment at the end of 2012, but it took a good year to work through the I.R.S. to get that designation and get it set up." He also talked to his financial adviser about giving eight scholarships to students at Brigham Young University versus only two or three at the more expensive University of Pennsylvania, where he did graduate work. "Eight felt better," he said. Financial advisers can also be helpful in aligning investments with the foundation's mission, structuring major gifts and helping with conversations about philanthropy among different generations, Mr. Chartener said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
COOL CAT: For a pretty chill dude, the children's book character Pete the Cat keeps himself impressively busy. Since 2010 he has appeared in 10 best selling picture books the first, "Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes," spent more than two years on the list and paved the way for Pete to admire the "four groovy buttons" on his favorite shirt, to wear magic sunglasses, to save Christmas and to offer groovy guides to life and love, among other things. ("Pete the Cat: Big Easter Adventure" is currently No. 2 in its third week on the picture book list.) And he's about to get busier still: A puppet show based on the character just opened in Atlanta, a musical opened in Connecticut and an animated TV show is coming from Amazon. (Elvis Costello and Diana Krall will voice Pete's parents an inspired choice, given the character's slightly louche vibe and his almost certain love of jazz standards and lounge rock.) Behind all of this is the author and illustrator James Dean, who collaborated on the first few books with Eric Litwin and has since worked with his wife, Kimberly Dean. "I didn't really want to be a cat artist," Dean told The Atlanta Journal Constitution last month. But after selling landscapes at art fairs for a number of years, Dean painted a picture of his cat (yes, his name is Pete) and found that it struck a nerve. "I took it to a show, and this lady who saw it on a Saturday came back on Sunday saying: 'I just have to have it. I couldn't get this thing off my mind,'" Dean said. "I've never had somebody have that reaction to something I'd painted." The move to children's books came naturally, after Litwin approached Dean with the idea for "I Love My White Shoes." "It's about stepping in blueberries and strawberries, but all the adults know it was about stepping in crap," Dean said. "I love that it's edgy, and it just has everything for me." THE WORKSHOP: Jessica Shattuck's historical novel "The Women in the Castle," about Nazi wives and war widows, enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 6. A couple of years ago, juggling the demands of writing and raising kids (she has three), Shattuck formed a writers' group with some other Boston area novelist moms: Emily Franklin, Rachel Kadish, Tova Mirvis, Heidi Pitlor and Joanna Rakoff. "Publishing is such a solitary profession," Shattuck told The Boston Globe last month, that meeting in a workshop atmosphere is a "relief valve" of sorts. "Writers can be competitive," she said. "This group was formed to be in opposition to that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When Daniel Heighes Wismer and Travis Wismer began looking for a weekend house in Sharon, Conn., as an escape from their weekday lives in Manhattan, they ruled out many homes simply because Daniel barely fit inside. "A lot of houses just didn't have the ceiling height for Daniel, who's 6 foot 3," said Travis, 38, an estate manager. "So many of the houses were built in the 1780s, and they were all conserving the heat with those ceilings," noted Daniel, a partner in the architecture and design firm Dufner Heighes. "They had 6 foot 6 ceiling heights. They're adorable, cute little houses, but I just couldn't do it." Within minutes of walking into the two bedroom, cedar shingle house and lingering at the oversized picture window in the living room their reservations evaporated. "We just stood and looked out that window, down the Oblong Valley," Travis said. "We fell in love with it right away." And with a ground floor ceiling height of about eight feet, he added, "Daniel could fit." There were other positives, too. The nearest Metro North train station was about 10 minutes away by car, and the previous owner had kept the house in good condition without doing elaborate kitchen and bathroom renovations they didn't want. "He replaced the windows, insulated the walls, put in a new furnace and did all the infrastructure stuff that we didn't want to do," said Daniel, who wanted to personalize whatever house the couple bought. "But he didn't do all that stuff where you're paying for someone else's renovation and then redoing it anyway." They closed on the house for about 350,000 that August and got to work. The biggest problem was the second floor attic, a finished, one room space with ceilings that sloped so steeply that Daniel once again had trouble standing up straight. "I could only walk in the center three feet, along the ridge," he said. To transform the room into a master suite with more head space, they raised the ceiling with a shed dormer on one side. It expanded the home's usable area from 1,000 to 1,600 square feet. "Of course, there were lots of unexpected things along the way," Daniel said. "It's never as easy as you think it's going to be." The biggest complication: They discovered that the joists weren't strong enough to support a habitable room upstairs, so they had to remove the ground floor ceilings to reinforce them from below. On the ground floor, they converted one of the bedrooms into a TV room with a bar and opened it up to the living room. Where there were side by side exterior doors opening into the kitchen and dining room, they replaced the dining room door with a window to create more uninterrupted living space inside, and re shingled the wall outside. Then they refinished the wood floors and broke out the paint. In the kitchen, they painted the cabinets gray, removed superfluous crown molding and installed new hardware. They kept the farmhouse sink and soapstone counters, adding a new subway tile backsplash and Miele appliances. For the dining room, Daniel designed a corner banquette that wraps around a dining table by the Danish designer Hans Wegner. In the living room, he took inspiration from the house of another Danish designer, Finn Juhl. "It's a tricky room because there's the fireplace on one side and the big floor to ceiling window on the other," he said. "It reminded me of a room in Finn Juhl's house outside Copenhagen, where he has a little fireplace on one side and doors out to a patio on the other." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen said late Wednesday that she and her husband, the singer John Legend, had lost their third child, a son, days after she posted on social media about suffering pregnancy complications. "Driving home from the hospital with no baby," Ms. Teigen wrote on Twitter. "How can this be real." Ms. Teigen posted a black and white photograph on Twitter and Instagram that showed her sitting on a hospital bed with her hands clasped in a prayer like position, seemingly in tears. Another Instagram photo shows her holding her baby as Mr. Legend kisses her shoulder. Such disclosures have resonated with women across the United States, where pregnancy discrimination is widespread, and organizations that provide family planning or abortion services are often targeted by conservative officials, and miscarriages are still largely spoken of in hushed tones. "What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you'd ever guess, given the relative silence around it," Mrs. Obama wrote in "Becoming," her 2018 memoir. "I learned this only after I mentioned that I'd miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories." Ms. Teigen was believed to have been halfway along in her pregnancy. Last month, she let it slip that she was expecting a baby boy. She said this week on Instagram that she was hospitalized on Sunday because of excessive bleeding from her placenta. She also posted a picture of a blood transfusion pamphlet. "But we, for some reason, had started to call this little guy in my belly Jack," she told her combined 44 million followers on the platforms. "So he will always be Jack to us." In many ways, Ms. Teigen and Mr. Legend, who live in Los Angeles and own property in New York City, are the quintessential American celebrity power couple for the social media age. She began carving out a public profile a decade ago, notably as a swimsuit model for Sports Illustrated. Her profile grew beyond the fashion world, and she used her love of cooking to publish cookbooks. Ms. Teigen, an avid user of social media, has amassed millions of followers who praise her candid statements on the platforms, her irreverent sense of humor and her willingness not to back down from a fight. Last year, Ms. Teigen and Mr. Legend publicly sparred with President Trump, who called her "filthy mouthed" in a Twitter post. Ms. Teigen fired back with expletives including one that Mr. Trump famously used in a recording that surfaced shortly before the 2016 presidential election and the spat went viral. She has also used social media to advocate for progressive causes. In 2015, for example, she spoke out in support of protesters in Ferguson, Mo., and led a celebrity driven campaign for reproductive rights after fatal shootings at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. She has also been the target of vitriol on the platforms. As reaction poured in on Wednesday after the couple's loss, with many people like the comedian Sarah Silverman expressing sympathy, a hash tag, "Oh Chrissy," was co opted by Ms. Teigen's critics, who mocked her. Two weeks ago, Ms. Teigen wrote that she had been placed on bed rest because of pregnancy complications. "On punishment for saying the first two pregnancies were easy peasy," she joked. Last week, she posted a photo of herself working from bed. During the early stages of her ordeal, she posted extensively about everything from baking to politics, including Mr. Trump's decision to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Ms. Teigen appeared to be in good spirits in the hospital. In one video, she joked with her husband, who had apparently thought that her hospital room came with a minibar. Another video showed him making a sandwich. But on Tuesday, Ms. Teigen wrote on Twitter that she had just experienced a "really scary morning." "Huge clot, almost save worthy," she wrote. "The scramble to hear the heartbeat seemed like hours. I never thought I'd relief sigh so much in my liiiiife." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
From November of 1955 to September 1957, my father played two games of chess with his friend Sam Frankenheim. My dad was in the Army, Sam was in the Air Force, and they mailed postcards back and forth detailing their moves. (Oh, to write the word "checkmate" before popping a triumphant card in the mail!) Playing games with people at a distance has a long history and now is as good a time as any to try it, given how badly we want to stave off boredom and bridge the distance between our islands of isolation. Digital gaming is an obvious path; my own son plays raucous online poker with vast groups of his friends. But there is something so grounding about rolling a handful of noisy dice, clacking our pieces around a board, and seeing each other's dear, missed faces (even if those faces are trash talking us about buying Park Place). To that end, my family has been experimenting with ways to play traditional, real life board games with people who are sheltering in different places. With a bit of patience and some video conferencing, games can help virtually erase the miles between children and isolated grandparents or teenagers missing their friends. Would it be more fun if your friends and cousins were crowded into your living room with you, eating jelly beans and Cheez Its and arguing over the rules? It would. Is there, nonetheless, something to be said for the videoconferencing version? There is. You can play with people you rarely get to see normally. You can gather spontaneously. And if the children (or adults) suffer from what my own kids have always called "a lonely feeling" the sensation of it being just your family in the world you can connect and play and feel less lonely. There are a number of two player games that work well as long as you are willing to painstakingly mirror each other's moves (be sure to use the front camera on your device so you're both seeing the board the same way). Chess, Checkers and Connect Four are all in this camp, and have the advantage of being known by many generations; grandparents will not need to learn game rules on top of the video conferencing specifics. And Mad Libs, while not a game per se, also work beautifully via video. Here are others my family has enjoyed, with just a few hacks. We're focusing on classic games that many people are likely to have in the house or may be able purchase easily. We've played a lot of this lovely old word game with other families, and it translates beautifully over the distance. For older kids and adults, we recommend bumping the minimum number of letters to four. Requirements: A video conferencing platform. Only one household actually needs the game. Special hacks: The household with the game joins the call with two devices: one for the people and one (muted, sound off) to show the game. In lieu of the second device, text a photo of the letter arrangement to the other households. The classic naval themed deduction game is a natural for videoconferencing, since you're not even supposed to see each other's board. Make sure to yell "You sank my battleship!" at the appropriate moment, or else why were you even playing in the first place? Requirements: A video conferencing platform (although you can actually play over the phone). Both players need to have the game, or you can download public domain game sheets here to play a similar pen and paper version. My 20 year old son and his friends have rattled their dice for hours over Zoom and have thus worked out all the kinks for us. "What's Shakin'?" is the game's tag line, and you can drive everyone crazy by asking this a lot right now ("Um, not much"). The games Farkle and Qwixx can be adapted almost identically. Maximum number of players: 6 (The game allows up to 10, but it can get slooow.) Requirements: A video conferencing platform. Every household needs the game or, if you have 5 dice, you can print score sheets from the public domain game Yacht. Special hacks: For maximum enjoyment, tilt your screen to show your (expressive) face(s) while other people are rolling and the dice when it's your turn. Roll the dice into a small box so everyone can see them all. Or play what my son calls "the Cadillac of Zoom Yahtzee," where each household joins from both a laptop and a phone. Angle the laptop toward the people and balance the (muted/sound off) phone camera down on something high (say an upended tissue box) to show the dice. Even my mom likes playing this word game remotely, which says more about its (or her) adaptability than you might realize. Plus, she appears to complain about her tiles no less over FaceTime than she does in person. Maximum number of players: 8 (but more than four households gets unwieldy) Requirements: A video conferencing platform. Everyone needs the game. (In a pinch, all households can use Scrabble tiles and adjust the rules accordingly.) Special hacks: The household with the highest number of players uses all 144 tiles; the other households use the appropriate fraction of tiles. If the biggest household had three people in it, that would be 48 tiles per person, and the other households would scale accordingly (a two person household would play with 96 tiles). Draw tiles from the center and play normally, except that you must eliminate the "Dump!" option. Be sure to share your grids after the game ends so you can admire each other's words. Zoom Pictionary is not the least chaotic game you'll ever play, but it's totally worth it for the zany factor. ("Sarcophagus!" "Wait, no. Cable car?") We've played over multiple time zones and generations, and recommend splitting up teams over households to keep the energy and engagement high. Requirements: A video conferencing platform. Thick pens (such as Sharpies) for drawing. Only one household needs the game and, honestly, not even that: You can use a random word generator for drawing prompts. Special hacks: Ideally, each household joins from both a laptop and a phone: angle the laptop toward your face(s) and balance the (muted/sound off) phone on something high (say an upended tissue box) to show your well lit drawing surface. Eliminate the too tumultuous "All Play." We also scrapped the fussy board: draw a card, roll the die, and pick the word on the card that your number corresponds to (six is wild); alternate play between teams and score one point for each correctly guessed word; play to 15 or 20. The drawer in a household without the game can generate a word randomly, or you can pick a card for them and hold it up while everyone else looks away. The game itself is fun, of course, but one added bonus of your kids playing with their friends right now is that your home will fill with those badly missed voices. Maximum number of players: 8 (over no more than four households) Requirements: A video conferencing platform. Each household needs the game. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
MEXICO CITY For Mexico, the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, an updated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement, is certainly better than having President Trump scrap the pact altogether, as he threatened to do in 2017. Beyond the debate about whether the agreement, which was finally approved by Congress recently and is to be signed into law by Mr. Trump today, has more pluses or minuses for Mexico, the real question is whether it can truly become a powerful lever for the country's long awaited modernization. At a cost, it could. The U.S.M.C.A. will put an end to the uncertainty that has rattled the Mexican economy since Mr. Trump became the Republican presidential candidate in 2016. Rules of trade, investment and intellectual property as well as dispute settlement mechanisms are enshrined in an international covenant, and not subject to the Mexican government's whims. Most importantly, the labor and environmental provisions established in the pact will push Mexico to modernize its economy, work force and institutions over the next decade or so. Rapid response dispute settlement mechanisms, international arbitration, the deployment of American so called labor and environmental attaches in Mexico and placing the burden of proof on the party that is said to violate the agreement not on the victim may insure that Mexican workers will enjoy rights that they have never known in real life. The rules set out in the agreement include provisions for free elections by secret ballot for unions and their leadership, public posting of labor contracts on which union members are free to vote, multiple unions in each plant and transparency and accountability in union business. Couldn't Mexico achieve all of this on its own? The experience of the last century suggests otherwise. The agreement may be the equivalent of what the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union, meant militarily, socially and economically for countries like Spain and Portugal more than 30 years ago. In addition to labor rights, U.S.M.C.A. also lays out environmental regulations, although its silence on climate change is not encouraging, which several Democratic senators in the United States pointed out in voting against it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Back in the mid 1980s, when Barry Lopez published his acclaimed best seller, "Arctic Dreams," the perils facing the ecosystems, animals and peoples of the Far North stemmed mostly from nature the basic hardships of existence in a rugged landscape. Signs of looming change were there, but apocalypse wasn't skulking on the horizon like a rising Arctic sun. Oil exploration and mining were starting to boom, though, bringing an explosion of roads and heavy machinery. Local communities were feeling the impact of that "rude invasion." Lopez fretted about the region's future, but concluded that "in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us." Looking back across the decades, you want to scream to the world to do things differently: Stop dismantling ecosystems, stop burning fossil fuels, start cooperating before everything falls apart. Today, as we watch the cascading impacts of industrial development and climate change transform the Arctic and many other parts of the globe, it's increasingly possible to imagine the "stifling ignorance" not as a distant memory but as our epitaph. With a very real environmental and existential crisis at hand, Lopez takes us back to the Arctic, as well as to other far flung places where he has spent time over the years searching both memory and meticulously recorded field notes to reconstruct his experiences, mining their accumulated wisdom, seeking glimmers of hope. "Horizon" unfolds over several decades, and many thousands of miles, in six main locations: the Oregon coast, the Canadian Arctic, the Galapagos, Kenya, Australia, the Antarctic. The book is autobiographical but not an autobiography except to the extent that Lopez's life of exploration has come to define him. It is his response to his own question: "Having seen so many parts of the world, what had I learned about human menace, human triumph and human failure?" The answer fills 500 pages that feel at once like a reverie and an urgent appeal. "Horizon" is beautiful and brutal, uplifting and bleak, a story of the universal human condition set in some of the most distinctive places on earth. "We are the darkness," Lopez writes, "as we are, too, the light." Now in his 70s, a grandfather, and facing down his own mortality (he has spoken publicly about coping with advanced prostate cancer), Lopez worries deeply about the world he is leaving behind. But he also sees eternal possibility in the power of telling stories, about the world and about ourselves. With "Horizon," Lopez has mapped the "enduring threads" of his own journeys, "at a time in our cultural and biological history when it has become an attractive option to lose faith in the meaning of our lives. At a time when many see little more on the horizon but the suggestion of a dark future." Lopez declines to provide specific dates for the travels he chronicles, except to place most of the book's trips roughly in the period from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. It's just long enough ago to feel vaguely quaint: no cellphones, only the earliest stirring of a GPS. 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. Camped in a logging clear cut above Cape Foulweather, Ore., sometime in the mid 1990s, Lopez reflects on the life of James Cook, the 18th century British explorer whose success in filling in gaps on the world's maps enabled us "to picture the entire planet, the whole of it at once." A fascination with Cook (and other explorers who populate the book) spurs Lopez, over the years, to follow some of Cook's sea routes and visit exact points where he disembarked. Often Lopez is struck by the differences between what Cook described and present conditions. On Cape Foulweather, he finds denuded slopes, vanished biodiversity, absent native Alsea people, a slew of invasive plants not to mention the appearance of a cellphone tower protruding from a mountaintop. But Lopez also cautions against embracing easy notions about ecological, or cultural, purity. Ecosystems are always in flux. A blanket contempt for invasive species carries an uncomfortable whiff of anti immigrant sentiment. One of the strongest messages Lopez delivers in "Horizon" is that without learning to embrace diversity, without listening to the tales told by cultures other than our own, we risk obliteration. Instead of simply lamenting Cape Foulweather's "ghosted landscape," he tries to use it as a point of departure for imagining what might come next. Still, wherever Lopez goes, he is never far from a disquisition on humanity's merciless ways. Rising from his bed one night in the tropical heat of Isla Santa Cruz, in the Galapagos, he walks alone (a frequent habit that makes for some of the book's best bits) to the beach and watches a group of brown pelicans asleep on the bay. The birds' vulnerability "oblivious just now to all that is hidden and potentially threatening in the lightless world we share" leads his train of thought to Spanish conquistadores releasing vicious dogs on Indians, and from there to the European bankers who underwrote the slave trade in West Africa, and on to the present horrors of Boko Haram. It's all, ultimately, in the service of pondering the roots of barbarism, and how we ignore the barbarism unfolding in our own society at our peril. Leah Nash for The New York Times Read our round up of recent books about climate change. Strangely, though, these relentless reminders of egregious acts don't diminish the appeal of seeing the world through Lopez's eyes. His reverence for exploring every corner of the world, even the sites of its most shameful histories, is infectious. Rarely does Lopez decline an offer of adventure, no matter how potentially grueling the trip might be. Traveling, he writes, "turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity. It helps one understand that all people do not want to be on the same road." Lopez's journeys often start in ways that make you shake your head. (More than a few trips begin with a banal sentence like: "In the austral fall of 1987 I was traveling through Namibia with a few people." You know, as one does.) One night he reads a paper in the scientific journal Nature about the discovery of some 4.27 billion year old zircon crystals in remote Western Australia. He immediately emails the researchers about visiting the field site because he just happens to be headed to Perth soon, "en route from Zimbabwe to the Northern Territory." The scientists initially ignore his request. But he persists, and several years later he's finally on his way to the Jack Hills. He flies from the United States to Sydney, and then goes by train to Perth, persuading the engineers to let him ride in the locomotive. One day, crossing the vast Nullarbor Plain, "the train suddenly ran into a wall of water," a drenching rainstorm. When the weather clears, a double rainbow appears. And then a mob of kangaroos arrives, over a hundred of them, leaping across the plain. "The sight of it was so exhilarating the three of us in the cab nodded an affirmation to one another. Whatever was wild and lyrical in the timeless world, we were in the middle of it now." Lopez proceeds in a rented four wheel drive to a sheep ranching outpost where a geologist has arranged lodging, 120 miles from the nearest town "on an unsigned dirt track." When he arrives, the rancher and his daughter have "a meat pie in the oven, and he wanted to know whether I took milk with my tea." One day, as Lopez is heading out to the geology site, the rancher offers him a rifle and asks if he'd mind shooting any wild goats he encounters. Lopez declines. But through evening chats on the veranda, the two men form a bond; the rancher ultimately visits Lopez at home in Oregon. This knack for making friends in the most unlikely places resonates long after you turn the last page. "Are we not bound," he asks, "to learn how to speak with each other?" Had we mastered that skill 30 odd years ago, would we be where we find ourselves today, grappling with violent xenophobia while forests incinerate, oceans rise and acidify, magnificent organisms everywhere fade away? Where will we be three decades on, if we don't take heed? There is still time, though not as much as there once was, to shape what's coming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
OUR BODIES, THEIR BATTLEFIELDS War Through the Lives of Women By Christina Lamb In one of the more haunting stories in Christina Lamb's urgent book, a 7 month old baby is raped. A mother returns from working in the fields in eastern Congo to find her house ransacked by a militia group and her daughter wailing from pain. The mother notices a red gash on the baby's bottom and takes her to a nearby medical center. From there, the pair is sent to the town of Bukavu, 160 miles away, to a hospital that has treated 55,000 victims of sexual assault since 1999. Even to the doctor, who has treated many such cases, the assault is shocking: The infant's anus has ruptured from the force. "I hope whoever did this will go to jail for years," the distraught mother tells Lamb. Most likely, he won't. The atrocities in "Our Bodies, Their Battlefields" horrify, as they should. Lamb, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, does society a service by forcing us to look. Rape, she writes, is the "most neglected" war crime of the 1949 Geneva Convention. It's rarely prosecuted. It's rarely written about. Here, she provides one of the first exhaustive examinations of sexual violence as a deliberate weapon, used to inflict terror and humiliation. Her book is painful to read but should be required for everyone interested in military and global affairs. In the canon of literature about conflict, rape barely figures. Most such books deal with military strategy, male heroism and suffering. Men soldier, bond, die or return home. But what about the women? Oh, right, they're spoils: Men are cannon fodder, women are man fodder. Yet rape in war wields as much destruction as guns do. It can destroy families and leave survivors permanently scarred. Combatants get away with sexual pillage, Lamb argues, because men in power haven't stopped them: "War rape was met with tacit acceptance and committed with impunity, military and political leaders shrugging it off as a sideshow. Or it was denied to have ever happened." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Stone leaves me cold. Yes, Connemara green marble can be luscious, and the fossils in Indiana limestone may be mesmerizing, but the setting of stone massive hunks of rock, which must be derricked into place removes all sense of handwork. A stone wall is the creation of machines. On the other hand, the human touch is all over brick. It is not difficult to imagine a mason setting each one, squishing down the mortar and filling the joints, moving on to the next, and then starting all over again. Any brick wall is barely a handshake away from the people who, a few months or years or centuries ago, created it; one degree of separation, if you will. This sense of antiquity is best displayed in Roman brick, usually 12 inches long as opposed to the more common 8 inches. This kind was used before the Romans, and it is not clear how it developed in the ancient world; perhaps in drying, the thinner form was more forgiving in shrinkage. But somehow the empire put its stamp on it, and the part ruined buildings of Classical Italy are full of these long, flat shapes: the arches of the fourth century Baths of Diocletian come to mind. In New York, Roman brick came to be used in all sorts of ways, but the kind I like is all over Park and West End Avenues, where it was fashionable in apartment houses of the early 20th century. The brick at 960 Park Avenue, on the 82nd Street corner, has deep struck joints; the mortar has been raked out, leaving the brick projecting. Because the brick is irregular and on the thin side, it has a fragile air, as if it might snap off. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
LOS ANGELES By just about any measure, it's been a long time since the street artist Shepard Fairey managed to capture the optimism of Barack Obama's candidacy in his "Hope" poster, the stylized portrait in red, white and blue tones that easily ranks as the most famous, also ubiquitous, artwork of 2008. Mr. Fairey's oldest daughter, then 2 years old, is now almost a teenager. The "Hope" image became the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit by The Associated Press that was both expensive and embarrassing for the artist. Mr. Fairey, who is 47, has since gone on to create art for activist movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the Women's March. And now "Damaged" his biggest gallery show yet, with about 200 new paintings, prints and illustrations made since 2015 is set to open on Nov. 11 in a Chinatown warehouse, the same day a documentary on the artist has its premiere on Hulu. The mood of the exhibition: what happens when hope gets trampled but not killed. You could call it an attempt at damage control, something Mr. Fairey knows about firsthand. As the Hulu documentary by James Moll shows, Mr. Fairey has gone from great heights to dramatic lows in the last decade. He's risen from cult figure to cultural reference point on "The Simpsons" to committing what he now calls his biggest blunder during the course of the A.P. lawsuit when he lied to his lawyers about exactly which A.P. photograph he used as the source of the "Hope" image and deleted files from his computer to cover up the truth. So on top of settling the A.P. lawsuit in 2011 for an undisclosed amount, he ended up paying 25,000 in fines and serving a two year probation for federal charges of tampering with evidence. Now, in the film, he is issuing his most public mea culpa, calling his lapse of judgment "the first time I felt so overwhelmed that I did something cowardly." During a recent interview at his studio north of downtown, where shelves were lined with spray paint cans and work tables were piled with stencils, Mr. Fairey explained, "I just panicked. I acted out of fear and vulnerability." He added, "But I never lied under oath or in a deposition I came forward to my lawyers first." His own sense of injustice has shaped many of his new, politically loaded artworks. Some take on the current administration's efforts to restrict the flow of immigrants from certain countries. Others focus on what he sees as continuing Wall Street excesses and destructive environmental policies. He has also produced a newspaper for the show called "The Damaged Times," containing his own art and fake ads, alongside articles he commissioned. The logo looks like it's been sliced with a razor blade. Still, much of the new work looks surprisingly friendly. Some mixed media paintings use rich blue and gold colors, not just his previous, propaganda style palette of red and black. They incorporate floral patterns, not just news clippings. And they feature stylized or idealized images of women African American, Mexican American, Asian American or Middle Eastern that he hopes will drive home the point of the show. "As angry as I am, I think that in times of division, scapegoating and hatefulness, it's important to look for common humanity," he said. "I think respecting human dignity is really punk rock right now." Wearing a black T shirt that says "obey" above a gnarly face (a 2002 design from his Obey Clothing line), Mr. Fairey was flipping through a pile of acetate film sheets, called rubyliths, on which he creates his illustrations, carving them out with a stencil knife before screen printing. One shows a Coca Cola bottle, the cursive lettering of its logo replaced with the words "Crude Oil" a classic gesture by Mr. Fairey, who has often riffed on print advertising. "Within the art world, I get accused of being too obvious," he quipped. "Within my world, I get accused of being too mysterious." Why not make it as a single piece? "It will function as one huge piece in the show," he said, "but it's difficult to place a piece that large in someone's collection." Many see such attention to sales and merchandising as a central fault line in the career of Frank Shepard Fairey, who began adapting his drawings for T shirts and skateboard lines after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992. As his mainstream popularity has grown, his reputation within the street art community has suffered. "Shepard has had rock star success, and part of the community that prides itself as indie, counterculture and anti establishment feels betrayed that he's become so successful," said Pedro Alonzo, who co curated the artist's 2009 retrospective for the ICA Boston. He pointed out that he has built plenty of giveaways into the "Damaged" show, organized by the Detroit gallery Library Street Collective. He's setting up a letterpress printer to make free copies of six artworks on select days. A set of lithographs made from stencil images will also be free for the taking another small disruption to the normal workings of the art market. Flaunting the rules has been one of his favorite sports from the start. Born and raised in Charleston, S.C., where his father is a family physician, he fell for the rebellious attitude of punk music and skateboarding culture while a teenager. (He took the title "Damaged" from the 1981 Black Flag album.) In 1989, still in college, he created his first meme worthy artwork: a sticker showing the wrestler Andre Rene Roussimoff, known as Andre the Giant. It read: "Andre the Giant has a posse." He plastered them throughout the streets of New York, Providence, R.I., and other cities. He began using the commands "OBEY" and "OBEY GIANT" in stickers and posters, hoping to incite "feelings of disobedience," he said. The images caught on and helped him land him his first solo show at CBGB gallery in the '90s. Jeffrey Deitch, who gave him a solo show in 2010 at Deitch Projects, calls the Obey campaign prescient. "What might have seemed cartoony or fun at first," Mr. Deitch said, has grown into "something serious that feels especially relevant today with a very important message about an encroaching authoritarianism." Mr. Alonzo, the curator, calls the artist's sticker campaign "pioneering," adding that it offered Mr. Fairey "a means to produce, disseminate and promote" his own images in the public sphere before "the viral dissemination of imagery we associate with 21st century social media." As a result of his street campaigns Mr. Fairey has been arrested 18 times for vandalism or related charges. He extended his left palm to reveal a scar near his wrist. He said it was from handcuffs fastened so tight in 2003 that they dug into his flesh. So far he has pleaded guilty to various misdemeanors, but a felony case is still pending over the defacement of multiple buildings in Detroit with Andre type images in 2015, when Mr. Fairey had a show in the city. A Wayne County circuit judge dismissed the charges last year; that ruling is now under appeal by the city. Mr. Fairey declined to comment on the case or even confirm whether he made those artworks. But given his history, it seemed fair to ask: Will your new exhibition spill out into the streets of Los Angeles? He mentioned plans for a small mural on the back of the Chinatown building and a billboard inside it. But he would not say whether he is planning any unauthorized work in the streets. "Based on my experience," he said, choosing his words carefully, "that's a question I would be smart not to answer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
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. On Wednesday, the Trump administration said it would ban the sale of most flavored e cigarettes after almost 500 cases of vaping related respiratory illnesses were reported this summer. "President Trump announced today that he will consider banning the sale of all nontobacco flavored vaping products, which is a shame, because vaping was the only way most American kids would ever find out what fruit tastes like." SETH MEYERS "I mean, just listen to the flavors. You've got mango, jelly bean, birthday cake those are clearly for kids, right? Adults don't flavor their drugs. Like, I watched 'Narcos' there was never a moment where someone was like, 'Let me sample your product, man. Ah, yeah, butterscotch, I like it.'" TREVOR NOAH During Mr. Trump's remarks on vaping, he told reporters that the first lady, Melania, had taken an interest in the subject because "she has a son" an odd reference to the couple's teenage son, Barron Trump. "Or so I hear, I've not seen him for a while. He better not be vaping!" JIMMY KIMMEL (as Trump) "At least Darth Vader claimed his son. If Trump was the dark lord, he would be like, 'Luke, she is your mother.'" TREVOR NOAH "The first lady has got a son together. It's a mutual son. Of course, I'm very involved with the doings of it, and so is the first lady, who is a lovely mother, together, who I love and know her name. So well that I won't waste your time saying it out loud." STEPHEN COLBERT (as Trump) "But, look, you can't fault Trump for not being super eager to claim responsibility for his son. I mean, the dude has been burned twice." TREVOR NOAH Mr. Trump continued to speak about the exit of his third national security adviser, John R. Bolton, from the White House this week. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Bolton as a "tough guy; so tough, he got us into Iraq." But he said that despite their disagreements, he wished Mr. Bolton well. "Sounds like a real dope. Who hired that guy? I mean, whoever did that must be an idiot." JIMMY KIMMEL "If you knew all that, then why did you hire him in the first place? It's like firing someone for embezzlement when they had 'embezzlement' under special skills on their resume." SETH MEYERS "Mr. Tough Guy got us into an unwinnable war, totally out of line with my administration. Dangerous, bad ideas, great guy, bright future. Wish him the best." STEPHEN COLBERT (as Trump) "Sorry, John, you're just not up to keeping us safe from America's greatest enemy. You know who agrees with me? America's greatest enemy." STEPHEN COLBERT (as Trump) "According to sources, President Trump is expected to be his own foreign policy adviser following the firing of John Bolton. So I was wrong he could find someone more dangerous than John Bolton." SETH MEYERS "Tomorrow night is the third Democratic debate. The top 10 candidates will all be there: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Mayor Pete, Comptroller Jim, probably Samuel L. Jackson he's in everything these days. The Progressive insurance lady, although Bernie thinks she's not progressive enough." STEPHEN COLBERT "ABC News sent an email that said, 'We will not be broadcasting on any delay, so there will be no opportunity to edit out foul language.' Which, I don't know, that doesn't seem fair to me. I mean, what if Bernie's sciatica is acting up? What if someone asks Beto if he likes Queens of the Stone Age?" JIMMY KIMMEL "Biden better watch his 'malarkeys' and his 'Jiminy Christmases.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "The third Democratic primary debate is tomorrow night 'and I'm going to be gaffe free this time,' said Joe Biden, naked from the waist down." SETH MEYERS "And tomorrow's debate on ABC is scheduled to be three hours long. Americans are like, 'Um, the only thing we'll watch for three hours on ABC is 'The Bachelor.'" JIMMY FALLON Kim Kardashian West shared a recent text from her husband and the last phrase she searched for on Google during Jimmy Fallon's "Show Me Your Phone." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Yoav starts his downward spiral after a gallery party where his best friend, Alma, announces her pregnancy. The news distresses him, while it awakens a strong paternal instinct in his partner of 15 years, Dan (Udi Persi). Leopold and Persi are both compelling performers, but the writer director Yuval Hadadi renders their characters with little subtlety. Early in the film, Dan cloyingly coos at a baby while Yoav looks disgusted. Later, at their anniversary dinner, Yoav lashes out rudely at his guests when the topic of children comes up. From there, the couple's relationship unravels: Yoav leaves Dan, hooks up with a teenager, and tells Alma he wishes she weren't pregnant. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
As the 20 year old Mavericks star makes his N.B.A. All Star game debut, he's thinking of the late Kobe Bryant, who once surprised him with trash talk in Slovenian. CHICAGO After Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks revealed that Kobe Bryant hit him with some Slovenian trash talk from courtside during a game, admiration for Bryant's linguistic versatility was a common reaction. Bryant had long been known to speak Italian and Spanish in addition to English. What was never clearly explained: how or when Bryant managed to pick up a few unprintable words in Doncic's native tongue. Sasha Vujacic knew. One of the first Slovenians to reach the N.B.A., Vujacic played alongside Bryant for more than six seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers and let's just say he helped Bryant expand his vocabulary. "Kobe and I connected in Italian from the very first day, but we would fight a lot in practice," Vujacic, drafted by the Lakers in 2004, said by telephone. "It was a big brother, little brother kind of thing," Vujacic continued. "I would cuss him out in Slovenian or Serbian when I got mad. He would find that interesting that I didn't back down. And then we would talk about it." Vujacic said he has struggled to talk about much publicly since Bryant's death in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26. He turned down numerous interview requests over the past few weeks but agreed to this one after he was told it had been inspired by the brief but now well chronicled interaction between Doncic and Bryant on Dec. 29 at Staples Center. Doncic was preparing to inbound the ball for the Mavericks in the second half, right in front of Bryant and his daughter Gianna, when he heard things in Slovenian that he never expected to hear. Doncic turned around, spotted Bryant and shook the iconic Laker's hand. Six weeks later, Bryant is tragically gone. Doncic has since turned the background of his Twitter page into a tribute to Bryant and an encounter he called "something amazing." The opportunity for an up close look at the Doncic phenomenon and a chance to take pictures with him after the game is what drew Bryant and his daughter to Staples that night. Although Doncic doesn't turn 21 until Feb. 28, he is averaging 28.9 points, 9.5 rebounds and 8.7 assists in his second season. He has quickly established himself as the new basketball darling in Dallas in the wake of Dirk Nowitzki's retirement at the end of the 2018 19 season. On Sunday, Doncic will become the third Maverick in franchise history, after Nowitzki and Jason Kidd, to start an N.B.A. All Star Game. He'll also become the youngest All Star starter since LeBron James, who was also 20 when he started in 2005. Vujacic has found that talking about the rising star from back home is a good way to try to detach himself from his sorrow over Bryant's death. "I think he's the best player in the league, to be honest," Vujacic said. "I love his demeanor. I love what I see in his eyes. His eyes talk championship." Over the top as some might find such praise, even for a fellow Slovenian, Vujacic is hardly the first to heap adulation on Doncic. The onslaught of positive reviews has meant that the three teams that could have had him at the 2018 draft Phoenix, Sacramento and Atlanta have been subjected to constant second guessing. (Atlanta drafted Doncic third overall but only as part of a pre arranged deal to trade him to Dallas for Trae Young, another All Star debutante this weekend, whom the Mavericks took on the Hawks' behalf with the fifth pick.) Doncic, of course, has yet to appear in a playoff game. He has also missed 11 games this season after spraining his right ankle twice, raising fears that the injury will linger. Doncic is shooting just 32.3 percent on 3 pointers and 76.5 percent from the free throw line two areas where he could clearly improve. He has likewise chided himself publicly about his penchant for arguing with referees. So the 6 foot 7, 230 pound playmaker is hardly infallible. But he is about to step onto one of the game's biggest stages. In earning this summons to Chicago, and a starting spot in Sunday's All Star game, Doncic has strengthened his case to be perceived as one of the 10 biggest stars in the league, through both his popularity and his statistical production. On Friday, at the request of N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver, Doncic appeared on a heavyweight panel at the league's annual technology summit alongside the TNT commentator Charles Barkley, 10 time All Star Chris Paul of the Oklahoma City Thunder, W.N.B.A. star Candace Parker and Vivek Ranadive, the owner of the same Sacramento Kings that selected Marvin Bagley rather than Doncic with the No. 2 overall pick in 2018. Doncic also will get a chance to meet the former Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan in person for the first time after he signed a five year sneaker deal with Jordan Brand in December. "It's everything I dreamed about as a kid," Doncic said. He returned to the Dallas lineup on Wednesday after a seven game injury absence. Mark Cuban, the Mavericks owner, has been joking all week that Doncic would have played in the game "in a cast" if he had to in order to prove his readiness for the All Star game on Sunday. "He's so excited," Cuban said. "Especially to play on the same team with someone he looked up to like LeBron. I know this is important to him." Miami's Goran Dragic is the only other Slovenian, of the 11 N.B.A. players born there, to earn All Star status. When Doncic was 18, he and Dragic combined to lead Slovenia to the EuroBasket championship in the summer of 2017, to the shock and delight of a basketball loving country of just 2 million people. Doncic was only 5 years old when he and Dragic met. Dragic, in his second pro season, had joined the team Slovan for the 2004 05 campaign and played alongside Luka's father, Sasha Doncic. Luka was a ball boy for the team who, as Dragic tells it, could not put the ball down. "He was just happy all the time that's what I remember," Dragic said. "Even now he always has that smile on his face. He's just enjoying, having fun. "In this league you have a lot of unhappy players. I don't know why, but sometimes they just lose that drive, that happiness. Luka is still young, but I feel like he's never going to lose that." Vujacic joined the Knicks before the 2015 16 season and eventually played alongside two fellow Europeans who were big Doncic fans: Kristaps Porzingis and Willy Hernangomez. They were eager to feed him updates on the rising prospect. Porzingis and Doncic, of course, are teammates in Dallas now. Daily exposure, not surprisingly, has given Porzingis, 24, an even higher regard for what the younger Doncic is doing. "He's just one of those, like, super talents," Porzingis said. "He's born with it. The way he plays, with his confidence, he just has it. It's something you can't learn. It's something you have or you don't. And he has it." Said Dragic: "Luka is huge. People don't realize how big and strong he is. And he plays at his own pace. Nobody can rush him. "You can see he never feels pressure. It's always a game to him. That's something rare." So rare that Dragic, even with the benefit of having watched Doncic from the beginning, said that things are coming together for him faster than anyone could have predicted. "It's Year 2 and he's already playing at an M.V.P. level," Dragic said. "I always thought he's going to do great things in this league, but if I'm honest, not so quick." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Many celebrities, politicians and so called social media influencers found their Twitter followings knocked down a few digits on Thursday as the company slashed tens of millions of suspicious accounts from the totals. For example, the actor Ashton Kutcher, an active member since the company's early days who led many other celebrities to embrace the platform, saw his follower count drop by more than a million. On Wednesday afternoon, he had 19.1 million. By Thursday evening, that was down to 18 million, a drop of nearly 6 percent. Oprah Winfrey, who sent her inaugural tweet in 2009, had her following cut by about 1.4 million between Wednesday and Thursday evening. Ellen DeGeneres lost two million, leaving her at 76.1 million followers. The basketball star Shaquille O'Neal also lost about a million, dropping from 15.3 million followers. Rihanna lost more than two million but she still has 86.8 million people watching her tweets. Katy Perry saw her count drop by three million to 107 million. Aly Pavela, a Twitter spokeswoman, said the work of eliminating the accounts from users' follower counts would continue over the coming days. The company is taking the action to restore trust in its platform. Many users have inflated their followings with automated or fake accounts, buying the appearance of social influence to bolster their political activism, business endeavors or entertainment careers. When the work is done, Twitter expects it will have reduced the total follower count on the platform by about 6 percent a substantial drop. President Trump, who has used Twitter as a way to speak directly to both loyal voters and critics, lost about 340,000 followers in the Twitter purge, knocked down to 53 million from 53.4 millon on Wednesday. His predecessor, President Barack Obama, took a much bigger hit, losing three million followers in about one day. (He started with many more, dropping to 101 million on Thursday from 104 million the day before.) And in the interest of full disclosure: The main account of The New York Times dropped by nearly 732,000 followers, starting at about 42.3 million on Wednesday and hitting 41.6 million on Thursday evening. But even more typical users saw losses in the hundreds or thousands. Many journalists with robust Twitter pages saw their followings reduced, although some took it in stride. Twitter's move could also be felt in high government offices around the world. Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, lost about one third of his Twitter followers in one day. On Wednesday, Mr. Kagame, who has been Rwanda's top leader for nearly two decades, had about 1.8 million followers. On Thursday evening, that number dropped to 1.2 million. Queen Rania of Jordan lost about 300,000 followers, dropping to 10.6 million in one day's time. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, lost more than 200,000, leaving him with 13 million. Even Pope Francis shed 100,000 from his digital flock. He has 17 million remaining. Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, noticed his shrinking following on his own. "If you are a fake person following me," he joked, "please raise your hand." An investigation by The Times in January found that one small company in Florida sold fake followers and other social media engagement to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, including politicians, models, actors and authors. The revelations prompted calls in Congress for intervention by the Federal Trade Commission and investigations in at least two states. In the aftermath of this week's follower purge, people who have built their celebrity on social media platforms took a hit as well. Kim Kardashian West lost about 3 percent of her Twitter following, dropping down to about 58.5 million as of Thursday evening. Justin Bieber had been stripped of about three million followers so far, while Ariana Grande lost about 932,000. Some celebrities saw more than just a meager cut. Kathy Ireland, the onetime swimsuit model who presides over a half billion dollar licensing empire, lost a whopping 77 percent of her followers between Wednesday and Thursday evening. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
For the past three weeks, Justin LaBoy, 28, a former professional basketball player and a social media personality, and Justin Dior Combs, an entrepreneur and P. Diddy's 26 year old son, have been hosting virtual pop up strip clubs on Instagram Live. "If it wasn't for Justin and his Lives I don't know what I would have done or how I would have paid my bills or gotten food in my house," said Sasha, a dancer who has been featured on the pop up show. Many bars and strip clubs were forced to close nearly overnight around much of the world. Thousands of bartenders, bottle service girls and dancers have been left with no income. As with many other organizations, from elementary schools to Twelve Step meetings, strip clubs have also sought to recreate the experience digitally. Magic City, a strip club in Atlanta, has started offering "virtual lap dance" performances on Instagram stories. Tory Lanez, a rapper, also recently began hosting dance nights for his 7.5 million followers, calling it "Quarantine Radio." "It's become larger than life," Justin Combs said. "It started out as us going to live together, and it turned into this crazy thing. People ask me every night if the Live is going on. Justin has this crazy cult like following, and it's just getting started." Mr. LaBoy said he got the idea at 1 a.m. to try to recreate the club atmosphere on Instagram after he was bored and livestreaming one night to his more than 60,000 followers. "I was like, man, I need a demon to call up," Mr. LaBoy said. "I said, 'Where my demons at?'" Women immediately requested to be guests on his livestream. His followers loved it. "I was like, hold up, we can't be doing this for free," Mr. LaBoy said. "Some girls were dancing, twerking, taking it all off." "People would post a picture of a red wine glass and be like, 'If your girl knows what this means, she's not your girl,'" said Alexis, a 24 year old dancer at a club in Atlanta who has performed in several of Mr. LaBoy's livestreams. "It's become a symbol of the show." Then women, or, as the audience calls them, "demons," are encouraged to request to join the stream. When Mr. LaBoy accepts a woman's request to dance, he pins her Cash App information to the top of the stream and tells followers that if they like what they see, they had better pay up. "Blue checks better pay," he said last Thursday, referring to verified Instagram accounts. Women said they have raked in thousands of dollars from Cash App donations. Alexis said she has made about 18,000 total from dancing on Instagram Live during a time when she'd otherwise be completely out of work. "Justin makes sure the girls make a substantial amount of money," she said. He also plugs his own handle, then distributes the funds as a bonus. The amount of money Alexis has been able to earn through the internet far outpaces what she was previously earning at her job at the club, and for far less effort. "If I'm in the club, I'm there for eight hours," she said. "On Instagram Live, it's five minutes. Five minutes compared to eight hours of work." Women who have appeared as guests have also amassed a larger following on their Instagram accounts. Alexis started a secondary Instagram account for her own Instagram Lives, after partygoers sent her messages with offers. "People ask me to send them a voice note saying their name for 500," she said. "They'll go on my page and send the eyes or a red heart like, 'Where you at? Where you from?' They're very active during this quarantine season." Several women who have been featured have become close friends. "We have a demon community now," said Sasha, 32, who usually works as a hostess at an upscale restaurant in Los Angeles. "We go on Lives together. We're a little Demon sisterhood." The women who perform don't show their faces and remain anonymous outside of their Instagram user names. (The New York Times agreed to identify them only by their first names.) Some, like Sasha, wear a ski mask while they dance; others simply film from the waist down. Sasha said she prefers to keep her offline identity separate from the work she has stumbled into online. "The other women, one is a mom, we all had jobs that were taken away," Sasha said. "We all have problems, which is why we're doing this. We're all trying to keep our identity private while gaining fans and trying to make money." Sasha said that amassing around 4,000 through performing on Instagram Live inspired her to start an OnlyFans account, a service where she can gain subscribers of her own. "My followers keep going up and up and up," she said. "It showed me that I have to do other things to get revenue. I have to pay my bills and get groceries." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The 42 year old man arrived at a hospital in Paris on March 17 with a fever, cough and the "ground glass opacities" in both lungs that are a trademark of infection with the new coronavirus. Two days later, his condition suddenly worsened and his oxygen levels dropped. His body, doctors suspected, was in the grip of a cytokine storm, a dangerous overreaction of the immune system. The phenomenon has become all too common in the coronavirus pandemic, but it is also pointing to potentially helpful drug treatments. When the body first encounters a virus or a bacterium, the immune system ramps up and begins to fight the invader. The foot soldiers in this fight are molecules called cytokines that set off a cascade of signals to cells to marshal a response. Usually, the stronger this immune response, the stronger the chance of vanquishing the infection, which is partly why children and younger people are less vulnerable over all to coronavirus. And once the enemy is defeated, the immune system is hard wired to shut itself off. "For most people and most infections, that's what happens," said Dr. Randy Cron, an expert on cytokine storms at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. But in some cases as much as 15 percent of people battling any serious infection, according to Dr. Cron's team the immune system keeps raging long after the virus is no longer a threat. It continues to release cytokines that keep the body on an exhausting full alert. In their misguided bid to keep the body safe, these cytokines attack multiple organs including the lungs and liver, and may eventually lead to death. In these people, it's their body's response, rather than the virus, that ultimately causes harm. Cytokine storms can overtake people of any age, but some scientists believe that they may explain why healthy young people died during the 1918 pandemic and more recently during the SARS, MERS and H1N1 epidemics. They are also a complication of various autoimmune diseases like lupus and Still's disease, a form of arthritis. And they may offer clues as to why otherwise healthy young people with coronavirus infection are succumbing to acute respiratory distress syndrome, a common consequence of a cytokine storm. Reports from China and Italy have described young patients with clinical outcomes that seem consistent with this phenomenon. It's very likely that some of these patients developed a cytokine storm, Dr. Cron said. In the case of the 42 year old patient, the suspected cytokine storm led his doctors to eventually try tocilizumab, a drug they have sometimes used to soothe an immune system in distress. After just two doses of the drug, spaced eight hours apart, the patient's fever rapidly disappeared, his oxygen levels rose and a chest scan showed his lungs clearing. The case report, described in an upcoming paper in Annals of Oncology, joins dozens of accounts from Italy and China, all indicating that tocilizumab might be an effective antidote to the coronavirus in some people. On March 5, China approved the drug to treat serious cases of Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and authorized clinical trials. On March 23, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted approval to the pharmaceutical company Roche to test the drug in hundreds of people with coronavirus infection. Tocilizumab is approved to quieten the chatter of immune molecules in rheumatoid arthritis and in some types of cancer. It mutes the activity of a specific cytokine called interleukin 6 that is associated with an over exuberant immune response. "That's the rationale for using the drug," said Dr. Laurence Albiges, who cared for the patient at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Center in Paris. Even as researchers look for treatments, they are trying to learn more about why some people's immune systems go into this dangerous overdrive. Genetic factors explain the risk, at least in some kinds of cytokine storms. Canada expands its list of vaccines accepted for travel. Michigan recommends that all residents older than the age of 2 wear a face mask indoors. The European Union's drug regulator recommends the use of Merck's antiviral pill. There are many variations on the phenomenon, and they go by many names: systemic inflammatory response syndrome, cytokine release syndrome, macrophage activation syndrome, hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis. Broadly speaking, they are all marked by an unbridled surge in immune molecules, and may all result in the fatal shutdown of multiple organs. But many doctors are unfamiliar with this niche concept or how to treat it, experts said. "Everyone's talking about cytokine storm as if it were a well recognized phenomenon, but you could have asked medics two weeks ago and they wouldn't have heard of it," said Dr. Jessica Manson, an immunologist at University College London Hospital. A patient battling a cytokine storm may have an abnormally fast heart rate, fever and a drop in blood pressure. Apart from a surge in interleukin 6, the body may also show high swirling levels of molecules called interleukin 1, interferon gamma, C reactive protein and tumor necrosis factor alpha. This storm, if it develops, becomes obvious a few days into the infection. But the sooner doctors catch on to it and treat it, the more likely the patient is to survive. Too late, and the storm may be beyond control, or may already have caused too much damage. There is a relatively simple, rapid and easily available test that can detect whether a patient's body has been taken over by a cytokine storm. It looks for high levels of a protein called ferritin. But if the test does suggest a cytokine storm is underway, what then? The seemingly obvious solution is to quell the storm, Dr. Cron said: "If it's the body's response to the infection that's killing you, you need to treat that." The reality is trickier, especially given the lack of reliable data for Covid 19. But noting that drugs like tocilizumab are taken regularly by people with arthritis, Dr. Cron said the benefit would probably outweigh potential harm if someone is facing death. "We need evidence based data, but in a pandemic, where we're flying by the seat of our pants, we always have to treat the patient in front of us," he said. Other drugs might also be useful against cytokine storms. For example, a drug called anakinra mutes interleukin 1, another of the wayward proteins. Clinical trials of anakinra for Covid 19 are also underway. A report published this week suggested that hydroxychloroquine, a much spotlighted malaria drug that also calms an overactive immune response, might also be effective as a treatment for those who are mildly ill from coronavirus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
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. Still Up for Debate The second of this week's two Democratic presidential debates aired Wednesday on CNN, and Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers all broadcast live for the occasion. As in the debate itself, most of the focus was on Senator Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. "That's right, tonight was Part 2 of the Democratic debate featuring Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and eight other candidates who were like, 'Oh, my God I'm so close to Joe and Kamala!'" JIMMY FALLON "Tonight it was all about the moderates, baby! It was the tempest of the centrists! It was the rage for incremental change!" STEPHEN COLBERT "Yeah, Joe Biden, this was an unlucky draw, man. Cory Booker on the one side, Kamala on the other and he's in the middle. It's like the world's most racially charged Oreo. I feel like Joe Biden got on the stage and instinctively tried to lock his car doors." TREVOR NOAH "Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, was funny. He said, 'When I am president,' and that was good." JIMMY KIMMEL "Oh, lead poisoning is a huge problem here. It's so bad that some people completely lose touch with reality and think they can be elected president." STEPHEN COLBERT, on Bill de Blasio's likening New York City's lead exposure scandal to the tainted water in Flint, Mich. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Q. I worry about my children's hearing from blasting music through their phone earbuds at high volumes. Is there a way to lower the universal volume? A. Depending on the device, you may have built in controls to limit the volume, or you may have to find an app that you like to do the job. With either approach, you can override and lower the phone's default maximum audio level and decrease it, say to 75 or 80 percent of what the phone can actually produce. Google's Android operating system (which often warns users when the volume is set too high) comes in many versions across the various phone and tablet models, so the controls you have will vary. Some Android versions do come with their own tools, like recent Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Note gadgets, which include a setting to limit the maximum volume. To use Samsung's controls, go to the Apps screen, open the Settings icon and select Sound and Vibration, and then Volume. (Menu names may vary based on Android version.) There you can set the default volume for many of the phone's functions, including ringtone, system alerts and media. To lock the levels, tap the three dot More options menu on the screen and choose Media Volume Limiter. Once you enable the feature, you can set a custom maximum volume level and secure it with a PIN code. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The wide ranging program of songs and some opera arias was divided: one half inspired by day (with its complement of flowers) and the other dedicated to nighttime and dreams. What unified the selections was a love of melody as a vehicle for beautiful singing with textual clarity an expendable extra. Ms. Netrebko performed songs in five languages, but without the help of the printed program it was hard to tell them apart. What felt most lacking over the course of the afternoon, though, was any discernible emotional connection. Ms. Netrebko's singing had much of the photo op calculation of her staging, especially in the way she freeze framed a high note and let it hang in the air like the star shaped helium balloon she brought on stage after intermission. She pressed the pause button on these notes in Rachmaninoff's "How fair this spot" and in both of her encores, Arditi's "Il Bacio" and Puccini's "O mio babbino caro" in that last one, long enough to draw giggles from listeners. Vocally, Ms. Netrebko smolders. But her performance could feel cold. Which is not to say that she is unmusical. She created lovely expressive arcs in Rimsky Korsakov's "The clouds begin to scatter," her voice changing from dark to bright and back again, and in Tchaikovsky's "Frenzied Nights," in which her singing grew more impassioned before settling into a tender calm. And she was beguiling in two duets with the mezzo soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano: "It is evening" from Tchaikovsky's "Queen of Spades" and the Barcarolle from Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffmann," with the singers hiding coyly behind a feathered black fan. In Strauss's "Morgen," with the violinist David Chan, she toyed with the tempo to arresting effect. Two French selections, Debussy's "Il pleure dans mon coeur" and Faure's "Apres un reve," brought out a more unusual side of Ms. Netrebko. Her voice took on a milkier, shimmering tone that for a tantalizing few moments at a time seemed finally to dissolve the performer's self and blend it into the mood of the music. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The threats began at the strike of noon, when Aleksey Krasovskiy, a Russian film director, started getting phone calls and messages about "Holiday," a movie he was working on. "Some men were waiting in the entrance to my old apartment building," he said in a telephone interview. "Luckily, I had moved. That saved me." He said that one tidbit that he was planning to make a comedy about the siege of Leningrad, a 900 day blockade of the city during World War II that led to the deaths of about one million civilians was popping up repeatedly in calls and messages, as well as on blogs, in newspapers and on political television shows. Without having seen the movie, media outlets accused "Holiday" and Mr. Krasovskiy of mocking Russian history and dishonoring veterans. Mr. Krasovskiy expected the harassment, which began in mid October, to last only a couple of days, but it continued for more than a month. One Russian lawmaker said on Twitter that he hoped the film would never see the light of day and that he would do everything in his power to shut it down. A top official in United Russia, the party of President Vladimir V. Putin, said he would ask the culture minister not to grant the film a distribution license, according to Tass, a state news agency. Rather than risk being censored, Mr. Krasovskiy decided not to apply for the license. On Jan. 2, he posted "Holiday" on YouTube, with instructions on making a donation to "pay" for a viewing. Production cost nearly 60,000, Mr. Krasovskiy said, and the money came largely from his own pocket, with help from a crowdfunding campaign and the movie's cinematographer, Sergey Astakhov. "Holiday" has since garnered nearly one million views and earned about 52,000. It has subtitles in Russian and Italian, with French and English forthcoming. "Before I shot this movie, I talked about the story with the relatives of survivors," Mr. Krasovskiy said. "I knew when it came out, people would realize that it's not offensive to their memory. If people never saw this movie, they could say anything about me that I eat infants. People have to see what it is." The film features six actors a family of four and two not entirely welcome guests and all of the action takes place in a Leningrad apartment. It is set on New Year's Eve as the blockade is in full swing, but somehow, the family appears well off, something they strive to hide and then to justify in the presence of their guests. Margarita Voskresensky, the matriarch, complains to her husband, Georgiy, a biologist of some value to the government, about having to cook a chicken without the help of their housekeeper. Liza, Margarita's daughter, strolls in wearing a fur coat, for which Georgiy reprimands her, saying someone could rob or murder her for it. "I'm cold in my other fur coats," Liza answers. In one telling scene, a starving girl brought home by Margarita and Georgiy's son, Masha, is tasked with slicing the bread; she turns a sheet of newspaper into a small tray for the loaf, so not a single crumb will be lost as she slices it. Mr. Astakhov, the film's cinematographer, said he would have opposed the idea of making a comedy about the blockade itself. But "Holiday," he said, is "not about the veterans and the people who suffered and died. It's about the people who survived and were dealing with questions of morality." On YouTube, commenters said that corrupt officials in Russia must have recognized themselves in the film's main characters. "This movie is an allegory for today's regime," wrote a user calling himself Andrew Usac, "in which officials are going crazy from greed, measuring themselves with yachts, cars and villas." Meanwhile, he added, Russians were "tightening their belts, economizing on even the basic necessities," and "working without a break until death just to feed themselves." The comment had been liked 2,400 times on Tuesday. Mr. Krasovskiy said he believed that misinformation had been spread about his movie as a form of distraction. In September, about a month before Mr. Krasovskiy began receiving the threatening calls, Russians took to the streets to protest a planned increase to the retirement age. More than 1,100 people were detained, according OVD Info, a rights organization. "This way people are not agitated by the actual problem but are mad at a crazy producer who shot a horrible movie and offended veterans," Mr. Krasovskiy said. Since "Holiday" went up on YouTube, the criticism has quieted, Mr. Krasovskiy said. And, he added, people who might never have heard of his work are reaching out and supporting him. "For the first time, the deputies and officials are working on my behalf," Mr. Krasovskiy said. "Like a P.R. department." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
For the first time in half a century, visitors to the world's largest cultural institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will have to pay a mandatory admission fee of 25 if they do not live in New York State under a new policy that begins March 1, the museum announced on Thursday. The change reflects the Met's efforts to establish a reliable, annual revenue stream after a period of financial turbulence and leadership turmoil, particularly given what the Met describes as a sharp decline in people willing to pay the current "suggested" admission price, also 25. But the move could provoke objections from suburbanites and tourists as well as outcry from those who believe a taxpayer funded institution should be free to the public. Our chief art critics call the new policy a mistake. "What we're trying to do is find the right balance in generating revenue to support this enterprise and admissions income has fallen behind," Daniel Weiss, the Met's president and chief executive officer, said in an interview. "Everybody who benefits from this institution is being asked to contribute to its well being because we are fundamentally a community resource." The required fee was borne of economic necessity, Mr. Weiss said, and is related to a planned decline in New York City funds to the institution. The Met is among the most prestigious institutions in the world, on par with the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim, but has long been distinguished from those museums for not charging a mandatory admissions fee. Instead, it has sustained itself through private donations and public dollars; the city contributes operating support every year, because it owns the Met's Fifth Avenue building. But the city's allocation is subject to the discretion of the Department of Cultural Affairs and changing economic conditions. In recent years, as competition for donations of money and art has increased, the Met has sought to keep up with expanding museums in New York like the Museum of Modern Art, now in the midst of a major renovation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which recently opened a new home in Manhattan's meatpacking district, where it is drawing large crowds. Over the last 13 years, even as Met attendance has soared from 4.7 million visitors to 7 million, the museum has seen a steep decline in the proportion of visitors who pay the full suggested amount, from 63 percent to 17 percent. Met admission fees provide 14 percent of its 305 million operating budget, or 43 million, which Mr. Weiss said puts the Met at the low end among its peers. That figure is expected to increase to 16 or 17 percent or 49 million with the policy change. "We're the only major art museum in the world that has recourse neither to mandatory admissions or significant government funding," he said, pointing out that both the Smithsonian in Washington and the Louvre in Paris receive considerable public support. The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim already charge 25 though, unlike the Met, they are not in city owned buildings nor supported by taxpayer dollars. "While we understand the Met's financial situation, we would hope they would find another solution that does not put the burden on the public," said Judith Pineiro, the executive director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, which has members around the globe. "This is a world class museum that should be for everyone to visit and not just for people who can pay full full price or are able to show an ID. It's sad news." The existing pay as you wish policy will continue for students from Connecticut and New Jersey, and full priced admission tickets will be honored for three consecutive days at the Met's three locations, which include the Met Breuer and the Cloisters. The new policy was approved by the city, which owns the museum's building. "Having a healthy Met is extremely important to New York City," said Tom Finkelpearl, the city's commissioner of cultural affairs. "The basic motivation was to help the Met balance its budget in a way that did not hurt New Yorkers." The Met currently receives about 26 million from the city. Under the new admissions policy, the 15 million that goes toward energy costs like heat and light will remain intact; the remaining 11 million which offsets the Met's operating costs (for security and building staff) will reduce on a sliding scale after the first full year, depending on how much incremental revenue the new admissions policy generates, with a cap at 3 million. The Met's reduced portion of city funds will be redirected toward cultural institutions in underserved parts of the city, Mr. Finkelpearl said. Fred Dixon, the chief executive of New York's tourism agency, NYC Company, said he did not believe the new policy would affect the flow of visitors to the city. "Most folks expect to pay when they attend an attraction or museum," he said. "When you look at the landscape of attraction pricing, the Met is an incredible value at 25." The admissions policy shift represents one of the ways in which the Met has been working to address a budget deficit that two years ago threatened to balloon to 40 million. While the museum now has a deficit of about 10 million, Mr. Weiss said it aims to balance its budget by 2020. The Met is also seeking to shore up revenue from other sources, including membership and restaurants, both of which are under review, and retail operations, which have already undergone an overhaul and are now profitable. "Our job is to get all of those to function in balance without in any way undermining our mission," Mr. Weiss said. The Met is also reviewing the possible sale of its executive apartment on Fifth Avenue; the previous director, Thomas P. Campbell, moved out this week. Mr. Weiss said the department heads are also continually evaluating their holdings for possible deaccession, for works that will not be displayed or have a distinct scholarly value, but that the Met's acquisition spending would remain steady at about 50 million (most of the museum's acquisitions come through gifts). Though the required admission for out of towners will result in a relatively modest revenue increase, Mr. Weiss said, "If every part operates a little bit better, we can get where we need to go." Mr. Weiss emphasized that this change was not undertaken lightly and that the Met had evaluated several possible options, including mandatory admissions for everyone at a lower price point ("We felt an obligation to New Yorkers to not do that") and charging for special exhibitions ("that would undermine access for New Yorkers"). If the museum did charge for special exhibitions, that might have forced the Met to chase revenue producing exhibitions, something it wanted to avoid, Mr. Weiss said. The Met's search for a director is expected to conclude by the end of the fiscal year in June, said Mr. Weiss, who added that he is not a candidate for that job. Though the new director will report to Mr. Weiss under a recent leadership restructuring, he said he is confident that the Met is attracting top candidates, including women. "It's the best museum leadership job in the world," he said. Asked to define the division of labor between himself and the next director, Mr. Weiss said: "It's a partnership where the primary sphere of responsibility for the director is the content related work exhibitions, curators including external relations and fund raising. This person will be more visible than I will be." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
BRUSSELS A plan to rescue the tiny European country of Cyprus, assembled overnight in Brussels, has left financial regulators, German politicians, panicked Cypriot leaders and a disgruntled Kremlin with a bailout package that has outraged virtually all the parties. In the end, a bailout deal that was supposed to calm a financial crisis in an economically insignificant Mediterranean nation spread it wider. Word of the plan unnerved markets across Europe, raised fears of bank instability in Spain and Italy and sent pensioners into the streets of the island's capital, Nicosia, in protest. As markets tumbled and the Cypriot Parliament fell into turmoil, salvos of blame were hurled back and forth across the Continent. Officials scrambled to explain what went wrong and how best to control the damage of what Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform, called a "completely irrational decision" to make bank depositors liable for part of the bailout. The deal flopped so badly that finance ministers who came up with it shortly before dawn on Saturday were on the phone to each other Monday night talking about ways to revise it. Whatever the outcome, the dispute is a vivid demonstration of why Europe, which until recently was congratulating itself on having weathered the worst of the financial storm, has trouble making decisions with so many different interests represented at the table. Politics, both domestic and international, get in the way of economics and make it difficult for wealthy countries to line up behind a plan to help the smallest ones. The northern European nations have grown so weary of bailouts for their southern neighbors that they were intent on exacting a hefty contribution from their latest supplicant. Germany in particular, with parliamentary elections looming in September, was set on driving a hard bargain. A wild card in this instance were the Russians, who have deposited billions in Cypriot banks, extended a 3.25 billion line of credit to Nicosia in 2011 and were in negotiations to help out Cyprus once again. Cypriot leaders apparently were so concerned with keeping their wealthy offshore Russian customers happy that they pushed their own citizens to pay even more than some of the lenders were demanding. The Russians reacted angrily to a so called stability tax on deposits in Cyprus, and at being left out of the negotiations. On Monday, Russia's minister of finance, Anton Siluanov, warned that Russia might not extend the existing credit line because the Europeans had not consulted authorities in Moscow about the deposit levy plan. On Sunday, one Russian official was reported by the Interfax news agency as advising Russians to withdraw funds from Cyprus, saying the banking system was untrustworthy. The all night discussions began Friday and ran for 10 hours, ending shortly before dawn on Saturday. Cyprus needed to come up with billions of dollars to help cover the costs of the bailout of the country's financial sector, or its European allies said they would leave it to face the prospect of collapse alone. Each of the major stakeholders, which included the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and euro zone finance ministers, entered the room with a conflicting goal. Protecting the small time saver was at the top of no one's list. The result was a compromise solution everyone is now unhappy with, officials say, one that stands to cost ordinary Cypriot depositors 6.75 percent of their savings. The Germans and their northern European allies wanted to exact a maximum contribution from Cyprus to ensure the deal could pass their recalcitrant, bailout weary parliaments at home. A confidential report by the German foreign intelligence agency, known by its German initials as the B.N.D., was making the rounds, one that painted the island as a haven for money laundering. The stigma attached to helping the Cypriots and the political cost in an election year was rising rapidly. The I.M.F. was dead set on keeping the debt at what its number crunchers considered a sustainable level. The Cypriots, meanwhile, wanted to spread the pain around. After midnight, negotiators thought they had a proposal that could work: a one time "tax" of 12.5 percent on depositors with 130,000 in the bank and milder but still painful cuts of around half that or less for everyday account holders the pensioners and laborers who thought their money was protected. The proposition, worked out by small group of finance ministers, including those from Germany and the Netherlands, and the European Central Bank, was taken to a different room in a sprawling, Brutalist Brussels office mocked by some as the Kremlin and shown to Nicos Anastasiades, the newly elected president of Cyprus. The president, who had left initial talks in the hands of his own finance minister, flatly rejected the offer. He insisted, according to European officials, that large depositors must not face a levy higher than 10 percent. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. This meant that small savers would have to take a bigger hit, but it did soften the blow on Russians and others who, looking for a safe place to park their money, have turned the tiny Mediterranean island into a financial center known for not asking too many questions. What happened next sealed the deal, which now appears to be coming apart amid strong protests from ordinary Cypriots. Jorg Asmussen, a German member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, told Michalis Sarris, the Cypriot finance minister, that stopgap financing for Cyprus would be cut off this week if no agreement was reached. Mr. Asmussen's message "really did sharpen the thinking of Mr. Anastasiades," said a European official with knowledge of what happened during the talks but who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were conducted in private. "The Cypriot president understood clearly he faced the collapse of his banking system and disorderly exit from the euro area," said the official. What emerged was a deal that took a bite out of average savers, one that made sense in the wee hours between the dealmakers. In the light of day, as Cypriots tried desperately to pull their savings out of A.T.M.'s, it looked like a threshold that many experts say should never have been crossed. "The result is a likely bank run in Cyprus alongside financial and sovereign instability in the wider euro area," said Mujtaba Rahman, a senior analyst with the Eurasia Group who has followed the European debt crisis. At several points along the path that led to the decision on Saturday morning, the European Commission, the union's policy making arm, tried to warn that imposing losses on bank accounts could be a recipe for panic and not only in Cyprus. In the weeks leading up to the meeting on Friday, Olli Rehn, Europe's commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, told a representative of the Eurogroup of finance ministers that the levy should probably be set at 2 percent, and certainly at a level no higher than 5 percent, across all types of deposits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
All meat should be hung. That was the directive Patrick Micheels, a chef in Omaha, Neb., took from reading "The River Cottage Meat Book," a 543 page tome by the British chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall that captivated the food cognoscenti in the early 2000s. It's also the philosophy Mr. Micheels is attempting to instill in the Midwest's unofficial capital of steak with Monarch Prime Bar, which opened in October 2017. Nebraska ranks just behind Texas as the state raising the most cattle (in less than a third of the area). Yet of the 25 steak joints in Omaha, Monarch is the first to dry age steaks in house. Dry aging "makes the fat taste like it's liquid gold," Mr. Micheels said. "Think of a sauce reducing on a stove you're losing water and condensing flavor, taking the meat to another level. It's like prime rib squared." As with almost all of what he serves in the restaurant, the steak is local butchered 27 miles away in Blair on Tuesday, delivered on Wednesday. "You have to start with the freshest product possible," he said. Mr. Micheels knows meat: He grew up across the state in Scottsbluff, hunting and butchering deer, pheasant, turkey and quail "everything the land had to provide." While the 45 day aged Wagyu prime rib my husband and I ate at our recent dinner at Monarch was melt on the tongue tender, it was the other dishes that left me wanting to drive back to Omaha from my home in Colorado, just for another bite. The fancified French onion dip was what I'd imagine gets served at Warren Buffett's Super Bowl parties: soubise white onion mousse, with pickled red onion, powdered potato chips and a lump of hasselback caviar (from Missouri). Cuddled with local cherries and peppery nasturtium flowers, my chestnut agnolotti tasted like November in Vermont, the pasta glistening with charred onion chestnut sauce. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Now Lives In a three bedroom apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with a high school friend and a classmate from Pratt Institute. Claim to Fame A year after graduating from art school, Ms. Ahlbom is a rising photographer and multidisciplinary artist who has shot "It kid" actors like Jack Kilmer and Lukas Ionesco, exhibited with the Still House Group and recently dipped her toe into the fashion world. The subjects of her minimalist portraits are often lithe teenagers with battle scars from skateboarding. "I like romanticizing the idea of growing up as a boy," said Ms. Ahlbom, who came out as a lesbian in college. "In high school, I just felt so repressed. I wish I did more of what I actually wanted to do instead of conforming. I'd be hooking up with girls. I would have gone to the prom in a suit." Big Break While studying at Pratt, Ms. Ahlbom was cast to model for Ryan McGinley, the influential photographer who documented New York skaters and graffiti artists. She used the opportunity to score a summer gig. "I was just standing there naked, getting shot, and I also applied for a job," she said. Two years later, Ms. Ahlbom's senior thesis, a photo installation with quarter pipe ramps called "Dig In Your Heels, Stick to Your Guns," earned attention from fashion and art circles. "I didn't anticipate it at all," she said. "I didn't think anything I was doing was that cool." Latest Project A collaborative show between Ms. Ahlbom and Julian Klincewicz, an artist and videographer who has worked with Kanye West and Gosha Rubchinskiy, was unveiled in March at the Temporary Contemporary gallery in Tokyo. Titled "Pure Desire," it was a study of male adolescence and ennui as seen through teenage Icelandic skaters. "Iceland was sick," she said. "It's beautiful and it smells like eggs." Next Thing Ms. Ahlbom shot a digital editorial campaign for Helmut Lang, scheduled to appear online and on social media this summer. She is also releasing a zine through Dashwood Books called "Why Can't We Be Friends?" that features photos from Los Angeles, New York, Reykjavik and Tokyo. Skater Cred After a childhood spent skating bowls and half pipes, Ms. Ahlbom is bemused by the sport's prevalence in pop culture. "It's so fashion now," she said. "You go into Opening Ceremony and there's a Thrasher section. I don't judge people; I just think it's funny." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WASHINGTON More than two years after Congress passed a landmark law meant to prevent the importation of contaminated food that sickens Americans, the Food and Drug Administration proposed rules on Friday that for the first time put the main onus on companies to police the food they import. Major food importers and consumer advocates generally praised the new rules, but the advocates also said they worried the rules might give the companies too much discretion about whether to conduct on site inspections of the places where the food is grown and processed. They said such inspections must be mandated. The law itself was grappling, in part, with problems that have grown out of an increasingly globalized food supply. About 15 percent of food that Americans eat comes from abroad, more than double the amount just 10 years ago, including nearly two thirds of fresh fruits and vegetables. And the safety of the food supply foreign and domestic is a critical public health issue. One in every six Americans becomes ill from eating contaminated food each year, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, F.D.A. commissioner, estimated. About 130,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The F.D.A. has tried to keep tabs on imports, but, in reality, manages to inspect only 1 to 2 percent of all imports at American ports and borders. The new rules would subject imported foods to the same safety standards as food produced domestically and require companies importing the food to make sure it meets those standards. American companies would have to prove that their foreign suppliers had controls in place with audits of the foreign facilities, food tests, and reviews of records, among other methods. The companies would also have to keep records on foreign suppliers. They would be allowed to hire outside auditors to make on site inspections if such inspections were ultimately required. The auditors would be vetted in a process approved by the F.D.A. Consumer advocates said that the test would be whether importers were required to conduct such on site audits, or whether that was left to the companies' discretion, as one option proposed in the draft rules would allow. If that option becomes final it would effectively allow the industry to police itself, advocates said. "Without more clarity, this could end up as a paper exercise," said Erik Olson, head of food programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts. He added, however, that the rules were "an important improvement over the weak current import system." These are the last major rules needed to put into effect the Food Safety Modernization Act, a law passed by Congress in 2010 that was the first significant update of the agency's food safety authority in 70 years. The Obama administration has been criticized for taking more than two years to propose the rules; some complained that the White House delayed acting to avoid Republican attacks, at the cost of public safety. Some of the biggest importers, like Walmart and Cargill, praised the proposed rules and said they already do much of what they would be required to do to avoid food outbreaks that could damage their global brands. "What we're really looking for is a level playing field here," said Michael Robach, vice president for food safety at Cargill. He said the company was still studying the rules to determine if it needed to make any changes. Consumer groups said that outbreaks had persisted under the current system, and noted that a significant share of imports were brought to the United States by smaller companies. The new rules on imports would cost 400 million to 500 million, Mr. Taylor said. The money reflects new costs, because, in the past, no one was legally accountable for ensuring safe food production before the food arrived in the United States. The F.D.A. is responsible for the safety of about 80 percent of the food that Americans consume. The rest falls to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for meat, poultry and some eggs. The current system "relies on the F.D.A. detecting and reacting to problems at the border," Mr. Taylor said. "The big paradigm shift is toward prevention and industry being responsible for documenting what they have done to prevent problems." The agency is also asking for more resources for itself since its employees will be responsible for auditing the new company records, though some observers say Republican opposition in Congress may make additional money to carry out the regulations difficult to obtain. The F.D.A. has about 1,600 investigators handling imports of everything from food to drugs and medical devices, a spokeswoman said. President Obama has requested about 260 million more in his 2014 budget, much of which would go to build the system to regulate imports. "If you look at the cost of doing it all by the feds, what you end up with is inadequate dollars," said Dr. David Acheson, a former F.D.A. official who is now with Leavitt Partners, a food safety and health care consulting firm in Washington whose clients include food companies. The current system, he said, "doesn't work anymore. So let's leverage the private sector." The rules proposed on Friday will be open to public comment for 120 days. They exempt seafood and fruit juices, which are subject to different rules. Mr. Olson of Pew Charitable Trusts said eight multistate outbreaks of illness linked to imported food products the F.D.A. regulates had occurred since January 2011, when the bill was signed into law. Caroline Smith DeWaal, the food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer health advocacy group, said the fact that there were two different options in the rule for on site inspections indicated that there was disagreement within government possibly between the F.D.A. and the White House over which policy to adopt. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
An elegantly eclectic duplex penthouse the master bathroom is encased in a custom built glass conservatory anchored by an oval bathtub of regal proportion with soothing views of Central Park to the west and the George Washington Bridge to the north is about to enter the market for the first time since 1975, when the owners bought it as a honeymoon present to themselves. The asking price of the 11 room residence, PH16/17B at 1158 Fifth Avenue, is 17 million, and the monthly maintenance fee is 7,845. With 90 feet of frontage on Fifth Avenue and an entrance on East 97th Street, the building, created as a 17 story co op in 1924 and designed in the French Renaissance style by C. Howard Crane and Kenneth Franzheim, has an opulent marble lobby that retains its original Old World aesthetic. There are four duplex penthouses, with PH16/17B situated on the northwest corner of the building, a vantage point that provides commanding views of the Reservoir from the 16th floor living room and the 47 foot wraparound terrace on the 17th floor, which is accessible by a curving staircase or an interior elevator. The lush terrace, immortalized in several gardening books and featured on multiple magazine covers, was designed by the seller, Pamela M. Scurry, an interior and landscape designer, author and collector. The conservatory, created from a section of the terrace in 1984, was a passion project commissioned by her husband, Richard G. Scurry Jr., who retired as an investment manager and partner at the Jefferson Financial Group. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
WASHINGTON Lawmakers sent Facebook a harsh message this week over how Russian agents used the social network to spread division in the 2016 election. On Wednesday, Facebook's top executives including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg spread a different message: one of profit. Around the time that Facebook wrapped up its attendance at hearings on Capitol Hill over Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election on Wednesday, the company reported another set of blockbuster financial results. Facebook said its revenue rose 47 percent to 10.3 billion in the third quarter from a year ago, with profit surging 79 percent to 4.7 billion, handily beating Wall Street expectations. The results showcased Facebook's moneymaking strength in online advertising, which is precisely what the Silicon Valley company has been under fire for in Washington this week. Lawmakers questioned Facebook as well as Google and Twitter about how Russians may have misused online ads and other parts of their platforms to sow discord and inflame tensions in the American electorate. Some lawmakers were particularly irked by the no shows of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg at the hearings, as well as the lack of attendance by top executives from Google and Twitter. Facebook tapped Colin Stretch, its general counsel, to answer questions; Google and Twitter also sent their top lawyers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Something has changed at Drudge Report, the influential site known for its tabloid poetry headlines and conservative take on the news, and don't think the president hasn't noticed. Matt Drudge, a web pioneer who went live with his site in 1995, was seen as an important media champion of Donald J. Trump's 2016 campaign. "A large measure of why Trump is the nominee goes to Matt Drudge," Carl Bernstein said four years ago. And Mr. Trump has expressed his appreciation for the fedora wearing web journalist, calling him "a great gentleman." But nowadays, like CNN, The New York Times and many other outlets, Drudge Report is just one more purveyor of "fake news," in the Trump view. For anyone who had not stopped by the site since it developed a reputation for lifting Mr. Trump and his brand of conservatism, the welcome page on Monday made for an arresting sight. At the top were images of stickers being sold by the Biden Harris campaign that read, "I paid more income taxes than Donald Trump." Below that appeared a scroll of headlines linking to news stories from various sites, all of them written in Mr. Drudge's staccato style, many of them related to a New York Times investigation of Mr. Trump's troubled financial history. "LOST MORE MONEY THAN MADE? ... FINANCED EXTRAVAGANT LIFESTYLE WITH USE OF BUSINESS EXPENSES ... FAKE BILLIONAIRE? ... CAN'T AFFORD TO LOSE: TRUMP OWES 421M." Mr. Drudge also did not pull any punches after Tuesday's presidential debate: "Chaos reigns in hell debate ... Undecided voters describe President as a 'crackhead,' 'arrogant' in focus group ... Joe faces down raging Don." It was a notable shift from four years ago, when Mr. Drudge heralded Mr. Trump's "rock star welcome in Florida" and highlighted stories that cast doubt on the health of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. His site, back then, also included links to coverage of Trump rallies as they happened. Cracks started to appear in the summer of 2019, when Drudge Report featured a headline about the slow progress on a barrier Mr. Trump had repeatedly pledged to build along the southern border with Mexico: "NO NEW WALL AT ALL!" In December, when the House of Representatives impeached the president for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the site went big once again: "TRUMP ON BRINK." The Washington Times, a conservative daily, noted the shift. "The Drudge Report has stoked alarm on the right for appearing to pivot on its support for President Trump," the paper reported last November, "increasingly linking to stories that are critical of the administration and to media websites that are accused of having an anti Trump bias such as CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post." In December, to raise awareness of a website he had started, Dan Bongino, a conservative radio host and frequent guest on Fox News programs, wrote on Twitter: "Drudge has abandoned you. I NEVER will." In April this year, President Trump weighed in on Twitter: "I gave up on Drudge (a really nice guy) long ago, as have many others. People are dropping off like flies!" The Fox News prime time host Tucker Carlson echoed the sentiment in a July episode of his show, saying that Drudge Report "has changed dramatically, 180 degrees" and calling Mr. Drudge "a man of the progressive left." 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. With the presidential campaign entering its final stretch, the attacks are mounting. On Sept. 1, Mr. Trump retweeted a post from Mark Levin, the host of a conservative syndicated radio show and a Fox News program, complaining about Drudge Report's all caps coverage of Mr. Trump's denial of having suffered a health crisis ("TRUMP DENIES MINI STROKE SENT HIM TO HOSPITAL ... VIDEO: DRAGGING RIGHT LEG"). In response, Mr. Trump tweeted, "Drudge didn't support me in 2016, and I hear he doesn't support me now. Maybe that's why he is doing poorly." Two weeks later, the president deemed Drudge Report "Fake News." "Our people have all left Drudge," he said on Twitter. "He is a confused MESS, has no clue what happened." The site has perhaps paid a price for jumping off the Trump train. It had 1.4 million unique visitors in August, down 42 percent from a year earlier, according to Comscore data provided by The Righting, which analyzes viewership of right leaning outlets. Its audience has trailed that of the right wing sites The Gateway Pundit and Daily Caller. New rivals looking to outdraw the once fastest news slinger on the web include Liberty Daily, Rantingly and NewsAmmo, The Washington Times noted. Mr. Drudge, who rarely gives interviews, did not respond to requests for comment. In "The Drudge Revolution," a book published this year, the journalist Matthew Lysiak described how Mr. Drudge, the child of two liberal Democrats, started out some 25 years ago from a Hollywood apartment equipped with a dial up connection. What began as a Sunday night online newsletter filled with musings on natural disasters and celebrities soon became a venue for scoops on media, entertainment and politics. Its founder displayed a knack for knowing what would make readers click when he started posting links to articles plucked from the fast growing internet. He has had many big scoops of his own over the years, but he made his name as an aggregator a digital journalist who highlights work published elsewhere and he moved with such speed that he often gave the impression of being first, even when he wasn't. When the relationship between President Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky a story he broke led to an impeachment in 1998, Mr. Drudge fully embraced the role of "sledgehammer to the media establishment complex," Mr. Lysiak wrote. The site had lurid scoops on Mr. Clinton alongside curios like "Sting says today's rock music is a bore!" Mr. Drudge "effectively invented clickbait," wrote the Columbia Journalism Review. Frank Rich, writing in The Times in 1999, said he was a "grandstander whom many, I included, once feared as the Devil of journalism incarnate." Drudge Report attracted plenty of conservative love and attention. Mr. Drudge worked with Andrew Breitbart, who later created the right wing news site Breitbart News, and he met Mr. Trump at Mar a Lago. In 2015, he sat off camera for a 45 minute interview with Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory peddling founder of Infowars. Mr. Lysiak, the author, said in an interview that rival websites are "licking their chops they see blood in the water." But he noted that there may be another factor in Drudge Report's recent loss of traffic: the rise of social media. "Matt Drudge was always first at everything, but not anymore, not even close Twitter's first," Mr. Lysiak said. "For years now, people have been wondering who the next Drudge is, but it isn't a person. It's a social media revolution, and he sees that writing on the wall." But Mr. Drudge has a deep desire, and a talent, for staying relevant, Mr. Lysiak said. Betting big on Mr. Trump did the trick in 2016. Betting against him could work this time around. Mr. Lysiak suggested that readers who expected Mr. Drudge's site to stay true to one line of political thought were misguided. "In reality, while Matt Drudge has his own personal political opinions, his website has absolutely no loyalty to any political party or ideology," he said. "Now he's thinking long term, really putting his political capital on a Biden candidacy. And if that happens, he will once again weaponize his site on behalf of more conservative causes." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The performer Nya plays the Queen of the Nile, who is served by a coterie of club kids, in "Cleopatra." Most shows simply require you to sit relatively still and look straight ahead. And there is no shortage of options on that front. But there are also shows that spill out of the usual confines. Shows that envelop you, or otherwise turn you into an agent of your own experience. There are a few fixtures in the loose genre known as immersive theater. You can still get lost in the sprawling Shakespeare ish waking nightmare of "Sleep No More" (the granddaddy of them all), or go down the rabbit hole in "Then She Fell," Third Rail Projects' asylum set take on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." More recently, "The Dead, 1904," is becoming a festive season staple, offering fine wining and dining and a snifter of drama in a Gilded Age mansion. But new immersive productions pop up all the time, in their different ways transcending sometimes bulldozing the fourth wall between performer and audience member. Here are the shows right now offering theatrical experiences that aren't so straightforward. A bootylicious electronic dance musical about the fall of Ptolemaic Egypt because why not? The scene is Alexandria, 49 B.C., though there's nary a lyre or lute to be heard in the music and lyrics by Jeff Daye and Laura Kleinbaum. Instead, "Cleopatra" delivers beats, bass and beefy hooks in a nightclub setting that makes most musical theater feel like ancient history. The Queen of the Nile herself, played by the performer Nya and served by a coterie of club kids, commands the runway stage with a soaring voice and cape emblazoned with hieroglyphics. With "RuPaul's Drag Race" alumnus Dusty Ray Bottoms as Mistress of Ceremonies, and costumes by the former "Project Runway" contestant Nicolas Putvinski, "Cleopatra" is a pop concert fashion show with standing room, a bar and some intense audience participation. Seriously, though: Spectators are hauled onstage for a catwalk contest, or called upon to be the furniture for gyrating dancers. And those sitting closest to the hectic choreography best be warned: You may be sweated on. Read more about how shows are making food part of the experience. As adrenaline charged as the Irvine Welsh novel and Danny Boyle movie from which it's adapted, "Trainspotting Live" is a scabs and all portrait of Edinburgh smack addicts, directed by Adam Spreadbury Maher and Greg Esplin. The show fully utilizes the in your face qualities (or on your face, depending on where you're sitting) of immersive theater, placing you right in its unsettling junkie haze. The space itself is terrifically grim, drenched in graffiti, including a pre emptive up yours to would be walkouts. But maybe the most thrilling thing about this story in this mode is the proximity to performers attacking their roles with rabid wildness. There's getting in your face, and there's getting inside your head. Tucked away in a secluded side room of the McKittrick, the home of "Sleep No More," is a banquet with some of that show's sense of mystery, though the lighting and vibe are warmer here, and the spirits are alcoholic rather than phantasmagoric. The mentalist Scott Silven wastes no time making origami of the minds of his assorted guests. He speaks and executes tricks with a zippy grace that suggests he knew what card, or number, or book page you just picked, about a week ago. A good magic show is interactive theater, after all, and the combination of communal candlelit dinner and mentalism in "At the Illusionist's Table" turns out to be ideal for trading looks of wonder with strangers and reveling in a sense of collective astonishment. (A couple of drinks might heighten the sense of awe, too.) Plus, with a quasi mystical through line about our overall interconnectedness, Mr. Silven persuades us that the current gathering of guests is uniquely special though the show is replicated eight times a week, twice a night sometimes. A pleasantly satisfying illusion indeed. In Shake Bake's dinner theater staging of this early Shakespearean rom com, the performers double as caterers. Expect the King of Navarre, or one of his sonneteering courtiers, to deliver your beef brisket tacos, or the Princess of France to drop off your tabbouleh. If dinner theater with a culinary concept sounds a bit cute, the show really isn't aiming for high nutritional value. There's a percussion number with stirrers and glasses, and tongs used as castanets. And, by Act 4, it's possible to discern the sweet music of a dishwasher backstage. Perfectly fine and fitting for one of Shakespeare's bubbliest works, the whole thing is about as effortlessly edible as a Cheeto dusted mac and cheese. Apart from that, what a delight to see Shakespeare's ladies call the shots, not to mention doing shots with Shakespeare's ladies. Neatly turning youngsters' inherent curiosity and disinclination to stay put into an advantage, the inaugural Up Close Festival presents two programs of enriching, all ages storytelling, with kooky neighborhood historian Ms. Pea as host and plenty of opportunities to interact. According to its curator Peter Musante, before the show begins, families will be encouraged to get hands on with the space, sort of a historical archive as playroom: artifacts, maps, boxes begging to be opened. Then they can pull up a seat, or cushion, or padded box, for playlets and pieces drawn from the true history of the West Village, including the story of the city's first integrated club, and the 1965 blackout. There will be a scavenger hunt, dress ups and songs, as well as an appearance by Pizza Rat. Mr. Musante, who served time with Blue Man Group, enlisted a bunch of experimental theater artists for this hearty helping of community spirit, with the aim of not just being immersive but embracive. While most shows will draw the line at letting you pick where you sit, here is one entirely driven by your choices, upgrading you from passive observer to protagonist in something like a real life video game. No pressure, then. According to its writer Ryan Hart, at the outset of "The Mortality Machine" (for ages 18 and up), small groups will be led into a subterranean laboratory and invited to sift for clues, among the scattered ephemera, about the mysterious fate of a deceased relative. From here, your investigative abilities and decision making skills or lack thereof will set you on a course to one of a number of different endings. No two shows will play out the same way. Mr. Hart and the team at Sinking Ship Creations, designers of 360 degree interactive experiences, prefer the term "live action role play" to "escape room." You can think of it as immersive, site specific theater too, with its own complex dramaturgical form and an improv trained cast ready for any eventuality. You just happen to be co author of the story, and in control of your own theatrical fate. Exhilarating! Or terrifying. It depends on you. Isn't that itself exciting? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
NASHVILLE On March 22, when Nashville's mayor John Cooper closed nonessential businesses here, it was a terrible blow to companies and shops still reeling from the tornado that tore through Middle Tennessee on Super Tuesday. Small businesses struggle in the best of times, and a one two punch like that a natural disaster followed by a lethal pandemic will almost certainly force some of them to close for good. But it had to be done. Nashville's courts and schools were already closed, but the crowds on Lower Broadway, the heart of Nashville's tourist district, showed no sign of dissipating. "Downtown Nashville is undefeated," tweeted a visitor posting a video of music fans crowded onto a dance floor. Even after the Nashville Board of Health voted unanimously to shut the honky tonks down, several bar owners said they would not comply unless ordered to do so by the governor of Tennessee. Such orders have been slow in coming here, and in nearly every other state in the American South. Tennessee governor Bill Lee was slow to end the legislative session and send members of the Tennessee General Assembly home to their districts, slow to close public schools, slow to suspend church services, slow to shutter restaurants and gyms. Many city charters in Tennessee prevent local leaders from issuing their own orders, and mayors begging for a statewide directive got none. Chaz Molder, mayor of Columbia, Tenn., urgently called on Mr. Lee to issue a statewide stay at home order: "One state, one response," he wrote on Twitter. But in a conference call on March 16, Mr. Lee told local leaders around the state that mandates weren't necessary to enforce social distancing guidelines: "We're not issuing orders, we're issuing guidance and strong suggestions," Mr. Lee said. "We don't have to mandate people not do certain behavior because Tennesseans follow suggestions." As it turns out, they don't. Last week I arrived to pick up a to go order I'd paid for on the phone and that the owner had promised to put directly into the trunk of my car. But where I expected to find a deserted parking lot, it was business as usual on a sunny spring Saturday. Nashville has received hundreds of reports of similar violations. Joelle Herr, owner of The Bookshop in East Nashville, which closed more than two weeks ago, wrote on Facebook about her "fury, despair and helplessness" at watching other businesses carry on as if nothing had changed. "It's frustrating when you feel like you're one of only a few doing the right thing (and at a great cost to my small business!) and those doing the wrong thing are the ones with the greater impact an impact that is going to be devastating." On March 30, when Mr. Lee issued an executive order shutting down nonessential businesses, he stopped short of requiring Tennesseans to stay home. "It is deeply important that we protect personal liberties," he said, ignoring tens of thousands of health professionals who argued that nothing less than a stay at home order would save this state from disaster. And not just this state. Out of fear of what Tennessee's delays might mean for their own populations, Fort Campbell, a U.S. Army base that straddles the Tennessee Kentucky border, restricted travel to Nashville. And Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, urged his citizens not to enter Tennessee: "We have taken very aggressive steps to try to stop or limit the spread of the coronavirus to try to protect our people," Mr. Beshear said. "But our neighbors from the south, in many instances, are not. If you ultimately go down over that border and go to a restaurant or something that's not open in Kentucky, what you do is you bring the coronavirus back here." Kentucky, which not only elected a Democratic governor but also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, is an outlier in the South. Most Southern states, like Tennessee, did not expand Medicaid, and in those states a perfect storm has gathered force. What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don't have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out. Finally, on April 2, Mr. Lee acknowledged epidemiological reality and issued a stay at home order. The rest of the red state governors will also capitulate to reality before this is all over. But the time for decisive action has long since passed, and their delays, like the president's, will end up costing thousands of lives. Viruses are not partisan. Science itself is not partisan. Nevertheless, Covid 19 has become a partisan issue here in the South because our governors have followed the lead of both the president, who spent crucial early weeks denying the severity of the crisis, and Fox News, which downplayed concerns about the pandemic as Democratic hysteria. That's why every governor who has issued a deeply belated shelter in place order is a Republican. In that March 16 conference call with mayors and county leaders around Tennessee, Mr. Lee offered some advice: "I want to encourage you to pray. I want you to pray for your citizens that are affected by economic downturns, by the sickness sweeping through the state. I want you to know that you're being prayed for as leaders in your community that you will have wisdom and discernment." I, too, pray for my fellow Tennesseans. I pray for the success of researchers racing for a vaccine. I pray for the safety of every medical team working to save lives. But I also pray for our leaders to lead, to put the safety of their citizens far, far above partisan pandering. And when the entire medical community people who are putting their very lives on the line for us are begging for help, the answer isn't prayer alone. It's also action. Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book "Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss." 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 |
Harry Styles holds the top spot on Billboard's latest album chart, as Christmas streaming sent seasonal collections by Michael Buble, Mariah Carey and even Nat King Cole to the Top 10. Styles's "Fine Line" had the equivalent of 89,000 sales in the United States in its second week at No. 1, according to Nielsen. That is an 81 percent drop from the album's opening, when it was credited with 478,000 sales helped by retail bundle deals, as many big albums are these days, but also by healthy streaming numbers and a strong week of vinyl sales. In its second week out, "Fine Line" sold 47,000 copies as a complete package, and its songs were streamed 55 million times. Buble's "Christmas," a seasonal hit each year since it was released in 2011, landed at No. 2 with the equivalent of 77,000 sales. Carey's "Merry Christmas," including her modern classic "All I Want for Christmas Is You" which finally made it to No. 1 on the singles chart this month after 25 years is No. 4. Nielsen's accounting week for music sales ended on Thursday, the day after Christmas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Max Dolgin, 15, on drums during a Face the Music rehearsal of Anthony Braxton's intricate, quickly careening works. High School Musicians Take On the (Almost) Unplayable Tensions are said to have run a bit high during the recording of the composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton's pathbreaking, style blending album "Creative Orchestra Music 1976." At the time, it was one of the Arista label's most expensive productions, requiring multiple sessions and almost two dozen musicians. One seasoned player temporarily fled the studio after deciding that one of Mr. Braxton's intricate parts was unplayable. You don't expect to hear high schoolers performing music deemed unplayable by professionals. But on June 10 at the Jazz Gallery near Madison Square Park in New York, three young ensembles from the Kaufman Music Center's Face the Music program featuring players between the ages of 12 and 18 will convene for a remarkable concert devoted to Mr. Braxton's work. Face the Music's improvisation collective, featuring some of the youngest students, will perform Composition No. 192, a ritualistic piece from Mr. Braxton's "Ghost Trance Music" series. And an advanced octet will play Composition No. 69b, blended with Composition No. 108b, in accordance with Mr. Braxton's dictum that "all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment." (Eat your heart out, John Cage.) For Face the Music, it's the latest iteration of a longstanding aim to delve into the music of living composers. It's also something of a soft launch for Braxton75, a multiyear project that will see various classical and improvising groups performing his works ahead of his 75th birthday in June 2020. (Sony's Legacy Recordings imprint celebrated his 73rd this month with a new compilation, "The Essential Anthony Braxton: The Arista Years," including that vintage recording of Composition No. 55.) Ms. Kitamura and Mr. Testa were on hand for a recent Sunday full of rehearsals, offering pointers and encouragement. When the high schoolers needed a break from the rigors of Composition No. 55, the adult musicians talked them through Mr. Braxton's "language music" system for improvisation. Based on a codelike series of line drawings rather than traditional notation, this approach allows any single instrumentalist or the conductor of an ensemble to select broad performance parameters, like staccato lines or wide interval hops, then shape what emerges. A few students took turns leading the others in this free (yet bounded) system. Finishing her stint in front of the group, the 17 year old electric bassist Maxwell Jensen Moulton, a student at the Brooklyn Latin School, turned toward Ms. Kitamura and said, "I felt like I had so much power." A meeting of an advanced experimentalist and even the most talented high schoolers is unusual, but Mr. Braxton seems to have planned for it decades ago. In notes for Composition No. 102 (for "Orchestra and Puppet Theater"), from 1982, Mr. Braxton said he intended "to become involved in the world of children and family centered music" because "all of these matters are related to world change." One of the operas in his "Trillium" cycle includes a double dutch jump rope troupe. For Mr. Mittal, the conductor, Mr. Braxton's interest in youthful creativity and future potential is an ideal fit with the openness pursued by Face the Music, which draws students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. "Braxton's whole thing is, he lets other people be creators," Mr. Mittal said. "That's what teenagers need. That's also what the world needs." When a student writes a piece for "wacky instrumentation," he added, Face the Music will work to field a new ensemble that can play it. "Students aren't forced into some pedagogical model." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, Sophie takes on glamour and artificiality, ASAP Rocky resurrects Moby's "Porcelain" and Sudan Archives plucks out a self empowerment anthem. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Self determination and plucked strings, high and low, frame the self produced environment for the songwriter, singer and violinist from Ohio who calls herself Sudan Archives because she was inspired by North African music. "Nont for Sale," from her second EP, moves on loops of pizzicato fiddle, loping bass lines, flickers of electronic percussion and fleeting nests of her own backing vocals, carrying advice that's all the more convincing because of her absolute aplomb: "Don't get into my flight path." J.P. Traditional Cuban dancers would probably have no problem finding a groove inside Dafnis Prieto's "Danzonish Potpourri," a buoyant, latticelike piece on his new disc, "Back to the Sunset." It's not simple music, but it maintains a lilting groove derived from the romantic Cuban dance music known as danzon. Mr. Prieto, a Cuban American drummer and MacArthur fellow, has just released "Back to the Sunset," his first recording with a big band. The group pulls down snugly around his elaborate compositions, creating a fluid momentum in a range of styles and comfortably welcoming a few big name guests on other tracks: the saxophonists Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman, and the trumpeter Brian Lynch. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Walter Wolfman Washington, a longtime New Orleans bluesman, and the indomitable New Orleans R B singer Irma Thomas share "Even Now," a breakup ballad (written by Dave Egan, previously recorded by Johnny Adams) that's suffused with the deepest regret on both sides. It's from his next album, "My Future Is My Past," due April 20. "Passion, suspicions, we took them all too far/All of the wrong decisions," he sings. "I still love you," she admits. "Sometimes I wonder how." The tempo is all aching slow motion with deliberative electric piano chords; the vocals are grown up, endearing and still estranged. J.P. Sarah Shook the Disarmers: 'Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don't' A hard nosed, old fashioned honky tonk singer and songwriter whose album "Years" arrives on Friday, Sarah Shook knows exactly how to make good on an opening line like "I didn't mean to stay out all night drinkin'." As the title (and chorus) suggest, explanations are not forthcoming when the singer returns home at dawn, urging, "Baby, it's gettin' light outside/let me in." But a frisky track with a rockabilly backbeat and droll, squiggly pedal steel fills are her best chance at getting away with it. J.P. One of the most appealingly lighthearted new rappers of the past few years, Amine returns to the hard thwacking West Coast bounce he dabbled in on his debut album on his new single "Campfire." He's limber and astute, and also fun: "Might catch me at a Whole Foods/and if you see that red Mercedes then you know who." J.C. On "Elephant Dust," as Chris Potter's tenor saxophone solo pulls rapidly away from center, squeaking at the hinges, the pianist Renee Rosnes feeds him in various ways. She tosses cold splashes of harmony, sketches out little countermelodies at a downward angle, opens up pockets of silence. By the time she picks up from Mr. Potter and begins her own solo, the rhythm section Peter Washington on bass and Lenny White on drums is slashing. G.R. As the song begins, Jeremy Zucker's earnest tenor and lightly plucked guitar chords might seem to place him alongside dweeby sincere pop boyfriend material like Charlie Puth and Shawn Mendes. But it's camouflage. Eventually the track switches over to the icy, minimal but tuneful electronic pop that fills Mr. Zucker's previous EPs. With those releases and this one, he has been working a different persona: bummed out, apathetic, confused, self pitying, unromantic yet still needy. With "All the Kids Are Depressed," he realizes he's not alone; plenty of his peers, even if they're not SoundCloud rappers, are drinking and popping pills too. "We're scared," he concludes. J.P. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Jimmy Kimmel Does What He Can to Help Disney Attract Advertisers None From a Lincoln Center stage, Jimmy Kimmel looked out at nearly 3,000 empty seats that, in any other year, would have been filled for the Walt Disney Company's annual presentation to advertisers. "I forgot to delete this from my iCal," he said on video presented to the media giant's advertising clients. In reality, the host of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on Disney's ABC network, was nowhere near the New York landmark, having filmed his segment in front of a green screen at home. The computer generated set was one of many concessions that networks have made as the coronavirus pandemic shut down the upfronts, a series of springtime events where advertisers attend canape and cocktail parties and celebrity studded showcases meant to hype the fall television season. "You want shrimp? Next year we'll give you shrimp," Mr. Kimmel told the ad buyers watching him from home this year. "But in the meantime, we need cash." The advertising industry is still feeling out how to do business in the pandemic. Major spenders such as Anheuser Busch and L'Oreal scaled back marketing. Many others are shying away from long term promises to buy commercial time and opting for deals made on short notice. Flexibility has never been more important as companies scrambled to adjust their reactions to the news: first opting for caution during the pandemic and then, in recent days, pausing some ad campaigns out of sensitivity to the nationwide protests against racism and police brutality. With theaters closed in New York, media companies have resorted to less elaborate presentations to keep advertisers interested. Following events by NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS and other companies, Disney put on what it called a "virtual roadshow" made up of seven presentations, shown to ad agencies over the past two weeks, filled with sizzle reels backed by triumphant music. Executives hyped upcoming shows from various Disney channels: an FX drama starring Jeff Bridges and Matthew McConaughey, a detective thriller on ABC from David E. Kelley, an ESPN documentary about Tom Brady. There were appearances by Alex Rodriguez, Gordon Ramsay, David Muir, Robin Roberts and Bear Grylls. In a presentation shown to reporters, Jeff Meacham, an actor from ABC's "black ish," had a conversation with a Barbie doll. Ryan Seacrest, who hosts "American Idol," called Disney a "reach machine" for its popularity with multiple generations. Kerry Washington, who stars in "Little Fires Everywhere" on Hulu, talked up product placement opportunities. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The topic of production delays laid bare the effect of the pandemic. The new season of the National Geographic show "Genius," featuring Cynthia Erivo as Aretha Franklin, halted filming with two episodes left. "Supermarket Sweep," an ABC game show hosted by Leslie Jones, was stalled just before filming was set to start. After the death of George Floyd, Disney added a note to the presentations expressing support for the black community, saying that the company was "struggling to make sense of all recent tragedies" and that it was "outraged by the killing of George Floyd among so many others." TV viewership has surged during the pandemic, but companies have slashed budgets for commercials by more than 40 percent, according to the research firm Kantar. Ad spots, which had grown steadily more expensive in recent years, have sold for 20 percent or more below their usual rates, media buyers said. Disney's ad revenue is expected to slump 1.4 billion this year and will not fully recover for another two years, according to a forecast from the research firm MoffettNathanson. "Many advertisers are unable to commit to budgets, and many TV networks don't have finished product to sell," said Tim Nollen, an analyst with Macquarie Capital, in a note to investors last month. Companies canceled between 15 and 20 percent of third quarter spending commitments with ABC, up from 5 to 10 percent normally, said Rita Ferro, Disney's ad sales chief, in an interview. Networks hope that sales recover as golf and other sports return. To lure advertising dollars, networks are dangling flexible payment terms. "People and brands are starting to feel a little more I'm not going to say 'comfortable' with the new normal, but understanding that they have to get back into the market," Ms. Ferro said. Disney has a new chief executive, Bob Chapek, who replaced Robert A. Iger in February and then had to announce that Disney's profit fell more than 90 percent in its most recent quarter. The head of streaming, Kevin Mayer, left Disney last month to become the chief executive of TikTok. The whiplash informed Mr. Kimmel's virtual monologue, which was dotted with fake applause. "We are a mess," he said. "We don't know who our boss is." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Katori Hall, an award winning playwright, has been named artistic director of the Hattiloo Theater, an African American repertory theater in Memphis. Ms. Hall, a Memphis native, won an Olivier Award for her play "The Mountaintop," which was set the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. It opened on Broadway in 2011, starring Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson. Ms. Hall's Memphis roots run deep and are often displayed in her work. Her 2012 follow up to "The Mountaintop" was "Hurt Village," set in a Memphis housing project. She is in the process of trying to turn that play into a movie. One of her most recent works was "The Blood Quilt" (2015), which opened in Washington, about four distant African American sisters who reconnect to create a quilt to pay tribute to their mother after her death. The Wall Street Journal called it a "richly crafted tale." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"What do you think of when I say 'archive'?" asked Rachel Lithgow, the executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society. A solitary place of research, perhaps, with "big old filing cabinets with dusty paper and some person with granny glasses?" she suggested. Certainly not the site of a new commission centered on that least sedentary, most physically alive of art forms: dance. Yet through Dec. 30, visitors to the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan (where the society is housed) will see just that, in "October 7, 1944," an exhibition by the choreographer Jonah Bokaer that involves dance, film, music and visual art. Mr. Bokaer's subject matter is even less likely: an inmate rebellion at Auschwitz made possible by the clandestine efforts of four young Polish women. Mr. Bokaer said he initially had reservations about the project. "A lot of questions for myself about: Do dance and choreography have the criteria to represent those events?" he said recently over lunch in Hudson, N.Y., where he was rehearsing his dancers. In 2012, Ms. Lithgow saw a dance on film work of Mr. Bokaer's, "Study for Occupant," in Philadelphia that prompted her to contact him. "Jonah is avant garde in many ways," she said. "But I was really compelled to stare at the screen, at these four women" in the film. Other colleagues asked Mr. Bokaer if the piece was meant to be a reference to European women's history or World War II, but his goal was simply to "make a powerful work for four female performers," he said. Ian Douglas for The New York Times Mr. Bokaer, 33, began a conversation with Ms. Lithgow. She described the chain of events that started in spring 1943, when three Polish Jews assigned to work in a munitions factory just outside the Auschwitz death camp Estera Wajcblum, Regina Szafirsztajn and Ala Gertner were recruited by Roza Robota, who worked at the camp's clothing depot, to smuggle gunpowder to members of the Sonderkommando (inmates with the job of moving bodies in the crematories). The powder, carried under the women's fingernails, in their pockets and even on corpses, destroyed one crematory and ultimately fueled a rebellion led by Sonderkommando members on Oct. 7, 1944. Three SS guards were killed; the women, after months of torture (during which they refused to give up any names), were hanged in front of inmates in January 1945, three weeks before Soviet troops arrived. "If you're a scholar of the Holocaust, you know who these four women are," Ms. Lithgow said. "But no one else does." She offered Mr. Bokaer a commission. Though he had not engaged so directly with historical material before, he accepted, in large part because he was struck by the quiet bravery of the women's act. He also hoped to help set the historical record straight. "There's a lot of very well known male writers who have written about resistance in World War II," he said. "But almost systematically they don't mention the women." As both Mr. Bokaer and Ms. Lithgow noted, creating Holocaust inspired art presents formidable challenges. "There's very little artistic representation of the Holocaust that's good," Ms. Lithgow said. Trivialization is a danger, Mr. Bokaer added. "That's part of why I was very clear from the outset to say: There will be no live element in this commission," he said. "I felt film and documentary have a much more developed history around this." Ms. Lithgow connected Mr. Bokaer with officials at the Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial and State Museum, which extensively screened him. "A choreographer researching the history of Auschwitz is for us a rare situation," Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the memorial, said in an email. He called the story of the four women "one of the most crucial" in the camp's dark history and praised Mr. Bokaer's "sensitivity and awareness." In August, Mr. Bokaer was given access to the State Museum's archives and to curators like Igor Bartosik, a Sonderkommando specialist who reconstructed the events of Oct. 6 and 7, 1944. To create a visual "architecture" for his work, Mr. Bokaer took a series of video shots of the grounds and the ruins of the factory where the women worked. "The strange thing is and this is in one of the films there were three young Polish girls there, kind of being rebellious and smoking," he recalled of his exploration of the factory. "They saw me, and there was a moment of the sort of feeling me out friend or foe and then they left. It was a haunting thing to see." Back in New York, Mr. Bokaer and Ms. Lithgow chose eight archival pieces to show in "October 7, 1944": four from the society, and four from YIVO, the Holocaust archive, based in New York. They were able to uncover two needles in the historical haystack, both now part of the exhibition: an account of life at the camp by Szafirsztajn's sister, and her father's name in an Auschwitz logbook. Mr. Bokaer's show has four main elements: the "Study for Occupant" film from 2012; a new dance on film featuring the same four female dancers, called "Four Women," and focused on the performers' gestural hand movements; the videos from his trip to Auschwitz; and the eight archival documents, displayed "inside a musical envelope." Each document is shown with part of a violin (deconstructed eight times, from the full instrument down to one string) and a segment of sheet music, handwritten by Mr. Bokaer, of the Bach Chaconne for solo violin. A recording of the Chaconne played by Henryk Szeryng, the Polish Jewish violinist who was a member of the Polish government in exile in World War II plays on a loop. Mr. Bokaer said he was attracted to the piece's "almost diabolical virtuosity." Mr. Bokaer envisions the exhibition as a lens through which to contemplate and honor the women's actions. "This is not women throwing grenades at the crematorium," he said. "It's not melodrama. The women didn't revolt. The women are the reason the revolt was possible, and the women were punished. The tragedy, for me, is that this happened only 21 days before liberation." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
On Sunday night, Ali Stroker became the first person who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony Award. "This award is for every kid who is watching tonight who has a disability, who has a limitation or a challenge, who has been waiting to see themselves represented in this arena you are," Ms. Stroker said while accepting her statuette for her role as Ado Annie in the Broadway revival of the musical "Oklahoma!." In addition to thanking the musical's cast, she thanked "her home team" "my best friends, who have held my hands and pulled me around New York City for years helping me." Read highlights from the Tony Awards. Ali Stroker talks to us about her Tony win. Ms. Stroker, a 31 year old New Jersey native who lost the use of her legs in a car accident when she was 2 years old, also thanked her parents "for teaching me to use my gifts to help people." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SAN FRANCISCO White House officials on Monday unveiled plans to increase federal funding for the development of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, two cutting edge technologies that defense officials say will play a key role in national security. The funding, part of the Trump administration's 4.8 trillion budget proposal, would direct more money for A.I. research to the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation. The administration also wants to spend 25 million on what it calls a national "quantum internet," a network of machines designed to make it much harder to intercept digital communication. For several years, technologists have urged the Trump administration to back research on artificial intelligence which could affect things as diverse as weapons and transportation and quantum computing, a new way to build super powerful computers. China's government, in particular, has made building these machines a priority, and some national security experts worry that the United States is at risk of falling behind. The proposed spending follows earlier administration moves. In 2018, President Trump signed a law that earmarked 1.2 billion for quantum research. The Energy Department recently began distributing its portion of that money about 625 million to research labs in industry, academia and government. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The death of the Detroit house music D.J. and producer Mike Huckaby on Friday, at 54, sent a shock wave through the music community he called home. Huckaby who died from complications of a stroke and Covid 19 at Beaumont Hospital in Detroit's Royal Oak suburb was one of global dance music's most widely beloved figures. A tall, quiet man with a sly sense of humor who made friends easily and often, Huckaby known widely as "Huck" was a pivotal scene figure, equally renowned as a D.J., producer, educator and tastemaker who was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost practitioners of the jazzy, mature house variant dubbed "deep house." Between 1992 and 2005, he worked at the Roseville, Mich., store Record Time as the buyer for the dance room a separate space within the shop dedicated solely to house, techno and hip hop 12 inch singles. This was a rich period for Detroit dance music, in particular, and Huckaby was a tireless champion of local music. "Tons of the music we sold was made right down the street," said Record Time's founder, Michael Himes. "We were the epicenter of a lot that was happening during the most formative and busiest years for Detroit electronic music." The dance promoter Adriel Thornton, who worked with Huckaby in 2002 on the third Detroit Electronic Music Festival, called him "an unspoken force, the unseen influencer on the music itself in the city." Huckaby was on the event's programming committee alongside fellow techno pioneers Juan Atkins, Mike Grant, K Hand and Alan Oldham. They all came with their own ideas for who should perform, but Huckaby's word carried the most weight, because he was responsible for most of the other D.J.s' playlists. "He made sure the music that needed to get to them, got to them," Thornton said. Rick Wade, a Record Time co worker and close friend of Huckaby's, said, "People would come to the store and Huckaby already had records in a bag, their name on the bag." He added, "They wouldn't even listen to the records. They'd pick up the bag and head to the register. If Huck pulled it, they bought it." Wade called Huckaby's sense of other people's taste "uncanny." Another Detroit D.J., Craig Gonzalez, recalled taking Huckaby's suggestions even when his own reaction was lukewarm. "I bought it anyway maybe I wasn't ready for it yet," Gonzalez said. "There were a couple I remember listening to at the store and wasn't feeling particularly at the time, but then a couple months later: 'Oh!'" Born Jan. 4, 1966, in Detroit and raised in the city, Huckaby began collecting records at age 10, initially enamored with rock; his early favorites included Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin and Elvis Presley. Huckaby came into Detroit's techno scene early, through his friend, the producer Anthony "Shake" Shakir. "I actually became his ride down to the studio he was engineering sessions for Derrick May and Juan Atkins," Huckaby told the journalist Joshua Glazer in 2017. Atkins and May were two of the city's pioneers, creating synth heavy dance grooves with a heavy sci fi element, and numerous Detroit artists would follow in their wake. "For guys in Detroit, music wasn't a way out, it was the way out," Huckaby told the dance website Resident Advisor in 2010. "I mean, we took it seriously. It's got to work, there ain't going to be an option to fail. That was embedded in your thought processes no matter how tough that was." Huckaby was soon collecting gear and working on his own tracks, as well as D.J.ing at parties beginning in 1988. He held a number of residencies in Detroit throughout his career, including a Friday night run during the early '90s called Three Floors of Fun, at Detroit's three story St. Andrew's Hall. (Industrial and hip hop D.J.s played the other two floors.) It was during this period that Huckaby started at Record Time, at a moment when "the only other store selling this music at the time was Buy Rite," said Daniel Bell, a techno D.J. and producer who worked at Record Time alongside Huckaby. At the store, Huckaby's hires included a veritable who's who of Detroit D.J. culture: Magda and Derek Plaslaiko, along with Wade and Bell. Huckaby's ear didn't just benefit locals. "Record Time was doing a lot of mail order," said Alan Oldham, a.k.a. DJ T 1000, a Detroit born D.J. active since the mid 80s. "He was dealing with foreign buyers and fans he was an ambassador and tastemaker all over the world." In particular, Huckaby's tastes affected the club scenes in London and Berlin. Bell said Huckaby was a library of house and techno knowledge, always eager to share. "This was a quintessential quality of Mike: He was ready to teach anyone who would listen." He was a rigorous self educator, too. Though his early recordings beginning with the 1995 EP "Deep Transportation," issued by Wade's label, Harmonie Park were largely based on samples, Huckaby soon grew tired of relying on found bits of others' work, and started taking music theory classes, something he continued for 10 years. In the early 2000s, he explored recording software programs such as Reaktor and Ableton Live. While working on the 2002 Detroit Electronic Music Festival, Huckaby made direct contact with some of the manufacturers, and began to run workshops, both internationally and in his hometown. "It's funny he did all these lectures but he wasn't a big talker," said Cornelius Harris, the manager for the Detroit techno label Underground Resistance. "He spoke with his actions." U.R. was instrumental in the founding of the Detroit youth center YouthVille, where, beginning around 2007, Huckaby hosted seminars for neighborhood kids. "He was the guy there working with young people, showing them how to produce just building and creating with electronic music," Harris said. One of Huckaby's YouthVille students, Kyle Hall, has gone on to an international D.J. career as well. "He'd even give me rides home afterward," said Hall of his days as Huckaby's pupil. "He was like an uncle figure, a real kind dude." Huckaby was scheduled to play Detroit's famed Movement Music Festival on Memorial Day weekend; it was postponed, like so many other events, as the coronavirus pandemic spread. He suffered a stroke on March 6. Another Detroit D.J., Delano Smith, started a GoFundMe for his hospital bills, raising triple the amount needed. "People could not wait to help," Oldham said. "He was the best Detroit had to offer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
APPLE is offering a new way for consumers to purchase iPhones, and while the company is calling the new system a "financing" plan, it is essentially a lease. The idea is to get people to constantly trade in their one or two year old phones for the newest models. And Apple is employing a tactic similar to one that luxury carmakers use to get more people driving Mercedes Benzes, BMWs, Audis and Lexuses that they could otherwise not afford to buy: creating a monthly payment that is appealingly low. True, Apple's plans starting at 27 a month to buy a phone over two years, or 32 a month to upgrade a phone every year lessen the pain of paying for a 700 iPhone. Added onto a monthly cellphone bill that probably tops 100 or 200 already, the charges may seem slight. But, of course, these relatively small charges not only accumulate, they never stop, adding one more perpetual charge to consumers' monthly bills. Why not simply buy something as utilitarian as a smartphone, especially since new iterations offer only incremental changes for the average user? For that matter, why lease a car as basic as a Chevrolet Malibu now 99 a month according to Swapalease.com, an online lease broker when you could buy a quality used car? According to consumer experts, economists and analysts, there are both smart and superficial reasons to lease anything. On the superficial side, a cynic could dismiss leasing a smartphone or a luxury car as just another example of racing to keep up with the Joneses. Some people crave the newest thing. Others judge their self worth by what they have and how they are perceived by peers. "Brands are offering this option to consumers who don't have the lump sum available for the upfront cost," said Andrea Woroch, a consumer finance and personal savings expert. "But it's almost about taking advantage of consumers. They can have this fake luxury lifestyle." But by now, most people know that. There is also a more concrete reason not to lease something: It costs more over the years of the lease. Ms. Woroch said that if people waited a few months, they could probably buy the newest phone at a lower price, or they could buy a refurbished model of the previous iteration for a few hundred dollars. The Apple plan also seems more expensive than getting an iPhone through a cellular carrier, which will generally charge a lower down payment and build the rest of the phone's cost into the monthly payment. Now, someone on the Apple plan could essentially be paying twice first for the phone, and then for the portion of the phone's cost that is embedded in a monthly bill. That difference is the key to the popularity of leasing luxury cars, said Bob Shullman, founder and chief executive of the Shullman Research Center, which tracks luxury consumer spending. "Leasing cars did not come from the mainstream," he said. "It had to do with when you financed a luxury car over the short term, the number was too big. There was a negative backlash." In other words, on some level you know that you will eventually pay more later, but focus on the payments that are lower now. There are upsides to leasing. Once you own a car, for example, you are responsible not only for maintaining it but also for finding a buyer when you ultimately want to sell it. "Even if the cost of ownership is lower, the time it takes to resell the car and the uncertainty of what you can get is not worth it for some people," said Jessie X. Fan, a professor in the family and consumer studies department at the University of Utah who has studied the thinking behind leasing and buying. "For some people, when these other costs are considered, they will make leasing look better," she added. And if that vehicle is leased through a person's business, the lease payments can be deducted as an expense against income for tax purposes. Scot Hall, executive vice president of Swapalease.com, said that typically 50 to 80 percent of luxury cars were leased. Another advantage to leasing is not having to worry that a car may break down or suddenly cost more to maintain. "The benefit of leasing a car is you get a new version on a schedule, you pay a constant price and, in general today, the lease includes maintenance because the companies realized if they didn't include maintenance, they get the cars back wrecked after two or three years," Mr. Shullman said. "Do you get the residual value? No. But it all depends on how important it is for you to have something new." Others see advantages to leasing outside of the luxury brands. "All the benefits of leasing a luxury car also apply to your more standard or basic transportation your Chevys, your Fords, your Toyotas," Mr. Hall said. "One thing people like about leasing is you can get more car than your monthly payment would typically allow." He gave the example of a Honda Accord, which a consumer might be able to afford as a basic model. With a lease, the buyer could upgrade to the top of the line model, with a nicer interior and larger engine. Given that a car loan can now stretch to six or seven years, the three years of a car payment allows the buyer to change cars sooner, he said. "From the younger generation, they treat their car payment like a cellphone payment they expect to have car payments and not have it go away," Mr. Hall said. "It's a good way for people to budget their money for their transportation needs." He said that in addition to the Chevrolet Malibu ( 99 a month), there were 10 other makes leasing for under 200 a month. There are other instances in which a leasing model seems to make financial sense. Rent the Runway allows women to lease gowns for special events for 5 to 16 percent of the gown's value, depending on demand. It has five million members and expects to lease close to 1 billion in clothing this year. Our customers "know that when they wear something that is emerald green or burgundy, it's likely the case that they'll wear it less frequently," said Jennifer Hyman, co founder and chief executive of Rent the Runway. "At least with a black dress or a pair of jeans, you can wear it many times and redecorate it." So instead of paying 6,000 for a gown, she said, someone could rent it for 600 and get a second size sent along in case the first one did not fit. The company has another model akin to the original Netflix system of sending users new DVDs after they returned the old ones. For 99 a month, a woman can have three pieces of clothing and change them out as often as she likes. In this case, the customers are typically choosing clothes for work. (The company does not cater to men, Ms. Hyman said, given their propensity to wear clothes in basic colors for years.) But back to the Apple plan. While it is certainly to the benefit of the company's production team to know how many phones will be coming off lease in any given month, consumers also stand to benefit from scheduled upgrades. This offer "plays into the firm's strengths," said Devavrat Debu Purohit, a professor of marketing at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. "While there is still a market for a three year old car or a five year old car, a five year old phone doesn't actually work that well. A one year old iPhone still works." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Opera is "the opposite of elitist," says the mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato, who stars in Massenet's "Cendrillon" at the Metropolitan Opera this month. Joyce DiDonato, the star mezzo soprano, admits she was slightly fearful when she first visited the Sing Sing maximum security prison in 2015. She had agreed to sing there as part of Carnegie Hall's Musical Connections program, but wasn't sure how an operatic voice would be received. She made an impact on at least one listener. On a follow up trip the next year, Ms. DiDonato encountered Joseph Wilson, an inmate and aspiring composer who had been at the recital. He said he had been overwhelmed by the performance, she recalled in a recent interview at the Metropolitan Opera, where she will sing the title role in the company premiere of "Cendrillon" Massenet's frothy, romantic, rarely done Cinderella adaptation starting on April 12. Eighteen hours later, Ms. DiDonato was at the Met performing in the "Live in HD" cinema broadcast of Bellini's "Norma." "My character, after a flame with a Roman soldier in woods," she said, "runs to Norma's hut, drops to her knees and begs her friend for forgiveness. And I did the same gesture I had done for five weeks of rehearsal: I collapsed on my knees and cradled my head the same physical gesture Joe had done. Now you go on and tell me how opera's irrelevant to normal people." The art form, she added, is "the opposite of elitist." There was a time when calling an opera star accessible might have counted as a criticism. Operatic characters an aloof pantheon of gods, monarchs, priests and countesses are generally more outsize than approachable; their exponents have traditionally been measured on a scale of perceived regality and remoteness. Such a world is tailor made for Ms. DiDonato, 49, opera's Miss Congeniality. "The key isn't changing what we do," she said. "It's making sure that we go to where the people are." So starting in April 2005, back when the opera world was still new to cyberspace, Ms. DiDonato blogged as Yankeediva about everything connected to her life as a globe trotting artist. She added an e newsletter, Opera Rocks, in 2015. She inflects her celebrated takes on Rossini with the dazzled wonder of a musical theater actress and delights in programming populist encores like "Over the Rainbow." Her plain spoken advice in master classes sometimes humorous, sometimes New Age y is all over YouTube. Her can do spirit is the subject of lore: At one London performance of Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia," in 2009, she fractured her fibula, then soldiered on in a wheelchair. Cinderella, that fabled optimist, is an ideal role for her. Born Joyce Flaherty on the edge of Kansas City to an Irish American family of seven children, Ms. DiDonato had an unlikely ascent to celebrity, and a rough time finding management after her time in the Houston Grand Opera's young artist program. "I saw the need for committed, devoted teachers," she said. "But the stage was calling me, and I loved it, and it felt really good. As a good Catholic Midwestern girl, that was bad. If something felt good, it must be bad." She approached her father, a longtime classical music lover, for advice: "He said, 'Joyce, there's more than one way to teach people, more than one way to connect.' " She embraced the public facing side of singing. For a while, she recorded her thoughts on Yankeediva several times a month as she recorded the Handel opera "Ariodante," sang for the celebrated mezzo Marilyn Horne's 75th birthday gala, combated isolation on the road and mourned the loss of her father. She aimed Opera Rocks, her e newsletter, at curious high school students who might feel lonely in their interest in high culture. Opera, she said, is about "bringing truth and beauty and astonishment to people, while reminding everyone who feels ignored or shunned or diminished that, actually, there's something bigger out there." Ms. DiDonato has the earnest zeal of a self help enthusiast. She said her main teachings these days "rarely come from the opera field" and run to mindfulness lessons from Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie and Joseph Campbell. Her views are liberal but mild; other than railing in 2011 against cuts to arts programs made by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, she's kept mostly quiet about more incendiary political topics. "I monitor myself carefully," she said. "I wish to provoke because I'm a citizen. But I never, ever want to impose so much in social media or offstage that the audience feels like it's seeing 'Joyce' onstage. People have paid to see 'Cendrillon.' They haven't paid to see me." Except, well, they have. The Met would never have put on this Massenet rarity if not for her, and fans are drawn to her personality, curiosity and dazzling voice as much as to the music she sings. For two decades Ms. DiDonato has taken on a strikingly mixed bag of mezzo repertoire, seesawing between centuries and styles. Her voice, adept at elastic runs and flowery embellishments, is also soulful and sincere. S he can glide up into the soprano stratosphere when she chooses. Pick any season of her early career for a sense of this unusual versatility: In 2002 3, for example, she darted from "Dead Man Walking," by the American composer Jake Heggie, to other works including Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro"; Janacek's "The Cunning Little Vixen"; and Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" and "La Cenerentola," that composer's Cinderella opera. That gift for understated lyricism has made "Cendrillon," a lesser known work from 1899 that shows its composer's knack for comedy, one of Ms. DiDonato's calling cards over the past decade. She opened the director Laurent Pelly's brightly colored production at Santa Fe Opera in 2006, and it has traveled with her to London, Barcelona and now the Met, which the company is presenting for the first time in its history with a cast that also includes Alice Coote, Kathleen Kim, Stephanie Blythe and Laurent Naouri, conducted by Bertrand de Billy. "The beautiful thing about Cinderella is that she's somebody who believes in goodness," Ms. DiDonato said. "She stays true to herself in a very quiet way." The character's authenticity was what first attracted her to the role. The show has not changed much for her over the years she has performed it. Yet in preparing for her latest run at the Met, she discovered new power in its unpretentious optimism. During a recent rehearsal, she and Mr. Pelly were startled to find themselves in tears. "I think what's happening in the world right now is so dark and heavy," she said. "When you're struck with this innocence, this freshness, there's this nuclear sensation of being hit. I think we're all drinking it in, unaware of how much we needed it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
As opening chapters go, this one from "The Need" does not mess about: A mother crouches in the corner of a darkened bedroom, straining to listen, holding her small children close and willing them not to make a sound. Molly has heard footsteps in the next room. An intruder is moving around her house. "Her desperation for her children's silence manifested as a suffocating force, the desire for a pillow, a pair of thick socks, anything she could shove into them to perfect their muteness and save their lives." There are several threats here. The reader is immediately on edge, fearful not simply for Molly, but about her. Are we safe with her? Are her children? "Another step. Hesitant, but undeniable. Or maybe not." In her other life Molly is a paleobotanist, a scholar specializing in plant fossils. Searching for clues and connections at the bottom of a 20 foot excavation pit, she keeps "pressing even farther into the earth, hoping that someday it would all fall into place. Nonsense converting, wondrously, to sense." She excavates her emotional life in the same manner, layer by layer, and because she knows herself well, she doubts herself. Even as she cowers in the bedroom trying to quiet baby Ben and Viv, her exuberant, chatty toddler; wishing her husband, David, weren't on a plane bound for another continent she suspects she might be imagining the whole thing. Attempting to orient herself in motherhood, Molly finds only "a cosmic precariousness." All her certainties have been upended, the rumble underfoot signifying an earthquake rather than a garbage truck. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of July. See the full list. Molly has lived in this state of heightened anxiety since Viv's birth, and Viv is about to turn 4, an event that will be marked with the usual festive junk: juice boxes, rainbow sprinkles, a pinata. But celebrations do not mean respite. At all times Molly is "acutely aware of the abyss, the potential injury flickering within each second." Perhaps the surges of adrenaline and cortisol have warped her perceptions a little because her grasp on reality seems to be slipping, both at home and at work, where the pit has started to yield unlikely items (most notably a Bible with a curious misprint). David attributes her state of mind to sleep deprivation and dehydration. He may have a point. Possibly it's more serious than that. So Molly does not feel equipped to confront the intruder, but she does it anyway. This is when 's novel begins to reveal itself, veering away from what looks initially like conventional suspense into something more speculative and philosophical with nods to both sci fi and horror. (Its preoccupations as well as its frankness reminded me a little of another recent genre busting exploration of motherhood: Diablo Cody's marvelous 2018 film "Tully.") Molly believes herself "immobilized by what ifs," but the what ifs animate this novel, the narrative splitting and looping back on itself as it tries out parallel possibilities, various fantasies and nightmares. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The story of the 1951 annual Explorers Club dinner is famous, at least among explorers, paleontologists and connoisseurs of exotic cuisine. In brief, mammoth was served. A club member and journalist reported on the menu shortly afterward in The Christian Science Monitor, and club members have been talking about it ever since. "At my first dinner, when I was a new member, they told me about it," said Jack Horner, a dinosaur paleontologist at Montana State University and an inspiration for the character of the paleontologist in the original "Jurassic Park" book. "And they were talking about having another." The story has to begin with the meat itself, originally billed on the menu as Megatherium, an extinct ground sloth, but recalled over the decades as mammoth, perhaps because that was what it was called in the article in The Monitor. What it was finally determined to be will, of course, have to wait until the end of the story. Eating fossil meat may seem hazardous, but animals that died thousands of years ago have been found frozen, and the Yale researchers point to credible reports of paleontologists sampling the ancient flesh of extinct bison and mammoth. Care is called for, however, since the meat may have rotted before the cold preserved it. The reason it was even possible to check what the diners ate is that some leftovers ended up on a shelf in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Paul Griswold Howes, a club member, was unable to make the 1951 dinner, which must have been a great disappointment because, as the researchers note, the annual dinners have made the club "as well known for its notorious hors d'oeuvres like fried tarantulas and goat eyeballs as it is for its notable members such as Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong." Mr. Howes was, however, the curator director at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., and even if he could not attend the dinner, he wanted to exhibit some of it at the museum. So Wendell Phillips Dodge, a theater impresario who had organized the dinner, sent Mr. Howes a sample, which he labeled Megatherium. That sample found its way to the Peabody in 2001, prompting years of puzzlement among students and professors. Was this jar of ethanol with a bit of flesh really cooked, extinct ground sloth from Alaska? Recently, Matt Davis, a graduate student at Yale studying ice age ecology and one of the authors of the new paper, was having lunch with Eric Sargis, another author, who was giving a course in mammalogy. Mr. Davis was a teaching assistant for the course, and at the lunch, Dr. Sargis lamented, "It's amazing that I can't get anybody interested in the piece of sloth meat we have." DNA analysis was called for, and they recruited Jessica R. Glass, another graduate student, and the first author on the paper, whose day job is studying the genetics of marine fish. As an undergraduate at Yale, she said, "I always knew about this specimen," adding, "I was fascinated by it." She and other scientists joined the team. They assumed the flesh was thousands of years old, which meant that testing for DNA was more complicated than testing a more recent bit of flesh. "Also," she said, "the meat was cooked." There was some legitimate science to be done. If the meat was really Megatherium, that would extend the species' known range from South America all the way to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Bernard Hubbard, known as the "Glacier Priest," brought back the supposed mammoth meat from the Aleutian Islands, off the coast of Alaska. In the end, after multiple tests, the team determined that the meat was neither mammoth nor sloth, nor ancient, nor even a mammal. Turtle soup had also been on the menu that night, before sea turtles were in such trouble, and the bit of flesh that the scientists tested turned out to be green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas. It seems that Mr. Dodge had been having a bit of fun, and that he was the only one in on the joke. "I do want to point out that it wasn't a big hoax from the Explorers Club," Ms. Glass added. Mr. Dodge even confessed, sort of. In a club publication soon after the dinner, he seemed to say that he had passed off turtle as sloth. The scientists write that he "fancifully described the sloth's fossil history but hinted that he may have discovered 'a potion by means of which he could change, say, Cheylone mydas Cheuba sic from the Indian Ocean into Giant Sloth.'" But nobody paid attention to him, and the story persisted. Several of the researchers are members of the Explorers Club, which gave grants to support the DNA analysis and research. Will Roseman, the club's executive director, said it was pleased with the research, although he pointed out that the world and the club had both changed since 1951, and the old taste for the exotic "has given way to a determined effort to introduce people to the foods that can sustain mankind well into the future." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Dutch documentary director Heddy Honigmann is a humanist. She listens to the ignored, sympathizes with the lonely and can ask questions so leading that when her subjects give her a skeptical look before trying to answer, she has to laugh, almost out of embarrassment. This is to say that she's also human. And she's been that way for most of her long, indicting career, which is now in its fourth decade. The indictments tend to be aimed at oppressive systems, in Europe and South America (she was born in Peru), that excel at squeezing the humanity out of citizens and refugees alike. But the only squeezing being done in "Buddy," her newest movie opening Wednesday at Film Forum involves service dogs and the people they serve. The movie follows six people in the Netherlands who have come to rely on the professionalism and unconditional loyalty of their dogs. The animals help them cope with mood swings and depression, blindness and post traumatic stress. One dog opens and closes kitchen drawers and can fetch paper from the printer. The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four legged assistants. Another director might have made something more explanatory: Here is how the service industry works. Another director might have attempted a rant about what doesn't constitute qualification for canine service. Another director might have just given you 86 minutes of licks and snouts. But Honigmann gets right down to the matter of emotional connection in just a shot or two. She wants to understand the symbiosis between, say, young Zeb and his labradoodle, Utah. She asks him what Utah does for his autism, and he actually shuts off the computer game he's been playing to do some ruminating on how his dog reroutes him away from anger. The most compelling stories here are the two that occupy a majority of the film. One belongs to Trevor, a veteran injured on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He witnessed horrors he can't forget and now moves through the world in physical and psychological discomfort. But Trevor's wife, Patricia, says his dog, a striking, powerfully alert sentinel named Mister, has been the glue that's helped keep their family intact. Mister stands watch whenever they're out together and, we're told, can sense when Trevor's on the verge of a flashback. The camera lingers longer on Trevor's faraway looks than on any particular dog. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
LONDON Stella McCartney has long been defined by fashion, music and her family name. So it was fitting that for the introduction of her first men's wear collection last week, the 45 year old British designer chose Abbey Road Studios, made legendary as the recording venue of choice for her father, Paul McCartney, and the rest of the Beatles during the 1960s. "It felt like such a natural place to pick for this; the heritage of this amazing space has always been really close to my heart, and I came here a lot as a child growing up," Ms. McCartney said, shivering in a black Neoprene minidress graphically emblazoned with the sorts of messages upon which she has built her brand: No Leather and No Fur. The location, she said, "means a lot to my dad and it means a lot to me." And, she added, "there's a great deal of my dad and of Abbey Road in the first men's collection." That Ms. McCartney, a Central St. Martins graduate who had an apprenticeship with the Savile Row tailor Edward Sexton after college, understands the essentials of designing men's clothing has long been clear from the streamlined "borrowed from the boys" tailoring that has become the backbone of her luxe infused sports offerings for women. At Abbey Road, there was an Everyman quality to the men's looks: boxy, striped pajamalike shirts with shorts or drawstring trousers; modish khaki anoraks and zip up cargo pants or slouchy rainbow hued Rasta knits; socks with open sandals, silky bohemian swallow prints and retro red and yellow soccer scarves saying "Members." The point, the collection seemed to say, was that we can all be on Stella's team. Women's wear was also invited to the party: In a larger second room, models sitting on speakers or standing behind giant microphones in recording booths sported Ms. McCartney's women's pre spring 2017 collection all fluid, layered silhouettes, nature inspired prints from flowers to dachshunds and dramatic ruffles and pleats as part of her first foray into the see now, shop now movement. (The men's wear, which is categorized as seasonless, will be available in stores beginning in January.) But while the fashion felt inclusive, the party raging around it with beer, Champagne and cocktails, a killer sound system and two stages with gigantic, multicolored, light up "Stella"' signs felt rather more exclusive. Twiggy was there. So was the singer and rapper M.I.A. The artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst mingled in the crowd, while outside in an alleyway, the model Kate Moss chatted with friends about the fallout of the American presidential election. Holding court was Ms. McCartney's husband, Alasdhair Willis, who had given the world a first glimpse of his wife's men's wear by wearing a black peak lapel, four button, double breasted jacket and matching trousers on the front row of her Paris Fashion Week show last month. On Thursday, he chatted with the actor Orlando Bloom, also sporting Stella from head to toe, who had newly blond hair for the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie. "I've known Stella since I was 16 years old," Mr. Bloom said. "We have hung out forever and as a result, well, we are just really good mates. I love her to bits." Guests included, from left, Kate Moss, Francois Henri Pinault of Kering, Salma Hayek and Orlando Bloom. "I'm so happy she's doing men's stuff now," he continued. "Her stuff is right up my alley, and I think many men will feel the same once they see it. It's effortless and stylish, with the right amount of attitude. The red carpet needs more of her on it." Guests whooped with delight at the musical performances, including Neneh Cherry, Mike D from the Beastie Boys, D.M.C. of Run D.M.C., and Basement Jaxx, and culminating with the debut of Stella's Supergroup, a five piece band fronted by Beth Ditto. Greeted with equal enthusiasm, however, was the arrival of several hundred gigantic pizza boxes from the cult London eatery Homeslice, all branded in black and white with Ms. McCartney's face. The actress Salma Hayek, in tasseled leather boots and on the arm of her husband, Francois Henri Pinault, the billionaire chief executive of Kering, which owns a 50 percent stake in the Stella McCartney brand tucked into the pizza with particular gusto. "It's beyond delicious," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Like riders charging across the plains, the men come, yelling and beating on drums. From the thrust of their chests and the tightness of their faces, they look to be spoiling for a fight. And battle they do, with one another, trading rhythms struck by boots. Before long, they whip out more weapons: weights attached to ends of ropes and swung like lassos. These whir in the air and pummel the ground and catch the light like helicopter blades. Who are these fierce men, you ask? They're eager to tell you, screaming: "Che Malambo!" "Che Malambo," a touring production, charges into the Joyce Theater in Manhattan for a weeklong run starting Tuesday. It takes its name and technique from malambo, a folkloric dance at least two centuries old, developed by Argentine cowboys, or gauchos. "Che Malambo," though, was created in this century by a French choreographer, Gilles Brinas. To these questions, Mr. Brinas has a plain answer: "I don't take, I give," he wrote in an email. "I didn't exploit the malambo or any of its artists," he explained further. "I gave them recognition and nobility by taking them on well renowned stages." A former ballet dancer with Lyon Opera Ballet, among other troupes, Mr. Brinas said he first encountered malambo in the 1970s when he saw an Argentine folkloric troupe performing in a Parisian cabaret. He found himself captivated by the drumming and the percussive footwork, or zapateo. "I had caught malambo fever," he said, "but it was asleep in me." In spring 2004, the fever reawakened. "My decision was immediate and irreversible," he wrote. "I knew I had to pursue malambo." He flew to Buenos Aires to recruit dancers and face skepticism. "Nobody believed in this idea," he said. Unlike the tango, malambo had never gained an international following. It was a part of folkloric presentations and competitions, not commercial theater. It was a dance for two or four or, especially, one, not for an ensemble of 14. Malambo routines typically lasted two to five minutes, not the length of a show. And, Mr. Brinas was an outsider. "Knowing nothing about Argentine folklore at the beginning, I naively believed that anything was possible," he said. "I had no barriers, and I was free." "Che Malambo" opened in Paris in 2007. One off presentations followed, but interest didn't really blossom until after a 2015 appearance on a mixed bill at New York City Center's Fall for Dance festival. Then came big, 30 date tours of the United States. The show played Queens in 2016 and Brooklyn in 2017, but only now, with this Joyce run, does the full production arrive in Manhattan. In the meantime, others have been popularizing malambo in their own ways. In 2016, a group called Malevo appeared on the NBC show "America's Got Talent," doing malambo in motorcycle jackets. Backed by heavy metal guitar, they splashed in water, surrounded by flames. Sweetly, they compared themselves to "Magic Mike," the movie about male strippers, and that's how they were received. ("There's so much good looking testosterone on this stage," remarked the supermodel judge Heidi Klum.) "Che Malambo" isn't like that. But it does differ from the malambo at folkloric festivals, especially the most conservative one, held annually in the Argentine town of Laborde. There, the contestants, almost all men, dance to guitars and drums and strict rules. They dress in 19th century gaucho attire: tall hats, short jackets, cravats, vests, big buckled belts, fringed shawls worn like skirts over pants. Quartets perform synchronized routines but the highest respect is reserved for the soloists, who show their prowess in accelerating five minute sprints. The young man crowned champion must never compete again, in Laborde or anywhere else. Like many folk forms, malambo is obscure in origin. (The word may be traced to the languages of Africans in Peru.) For the gauchos nomadic horsemen who hold a place in Argentine culture similar to that held by cowboys here malambo was a competition of footwork, a test of vigor. There are 19th century accounts of dance battles lasting all night. It retains its character as a dance of horsemen: upright above the waist. Below, malambo is distinguished by a near constant twisting of hips and knees, a flicking and crossing of legs and feet. It's a ride on a wild stallion, or a one man tango. By tradition, there are two principal styles. The northern one is faster, flashier, more forceful. Danced in high heeled boots, its footwork flows to the edges of soles, twisting ankles too. It looks like someone trying to kick cow manure off the bottom of his shoe or trying to show that it's been removed. The southern style is slower, gentler, more elegant, though still fierce. It is danced in thin boots of soft leather that leave the toes exposed. Its footwork speaks in a quieter voice, with more flourishes in the air. "Che Malambo" both pares away and heightens all this. It drops the gaucho costumes in favor of chic, simple black. The men are sleeveless, but not shirtless. When they dance southern style, they do so entirely barefoot, in soft light. Yet the aggressive gaucho attitude is retained. In the second half, when the men finally smile, they grimace like kids in awkward school photos. Where the show transforms skill into spectacle is with those lasso like weights attached to ropes. Known as boleadoras, these weapons, invented by the indigenous people of Patagonia, were adopted by the gauchos to ensnare cattle. The 20th century folkloric choreographer Santiago Ayala seems to have added them to the dance, but "Che Malambo" takes the technique to another level: one in each hand, spinning at different rates, behind the back, through the legs. It's like the plumage flourishing mating dance of an exotic bird. When the stage fills with men and boleadoras, the theatrical impact of a malambo ensemble is undeniable. But throughout the show, the men interact in various ways, not just facing off or exchanging solos but mirroring one another and responding in relay. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
JON WITTENBERG and Bill Sawyer have never met. One lives in Walnut Creek, Calif., the other in Wilsonville, Ore. But if they did, the conversation might be littered with exclamations like, "That's exactly what happened to me!" Their stories start with a mid decade home purchase and turn sharply as they simply walk away from those homes and the mortgages that accompany them. What was supposed to happen next was that their financial lives would crash and burn for years. Or so the dire warnings went. In reality, both men said, walking away turned out to be the best financial decision they made. In 2005, Mr. Wittenberg, 42, was working in the pharmaceutical industry in Boulder, Colo., when his employer told him he would be relocated to Southern California. It was two years to the day since he had bought a house, and he had no trouble selling it. When he got to Agoura Hills, north of Los Angeles, Mr. Wittenberg said, he could not believe the pressure to buy another home. "Everybody was making tons of money," he said. "My company had a relocation expert who said, 'I'm going to have to insist that you buy property.' My only hesitation was it seemed like prices were inflated. Little one bedroom condos were half a million dollars." Mr. Wittenberg bought a two story, 1,300 square foot condominium for 450,000 in April 2006, putting 20 percent down on a 30 year fixed mortgage with Wells Fargo. And the bank promptly offered him a line of credit, he said: "They were handing mortgages out like candy, and I was able to borrow from the house on Day 1 of signing the loan." A Wells Fargo mortgage spokeswoman, Vickee Adams, confirmed last week that Mr. Wittenberg had been a customer but said that because of confidentiality laws, the bank could not release any additional information. A year and a half after getting his mortgage, he was laid off, along with 3,300 co workers. But he found a new job almost immediately, with a renewable energy company. It meant yet another relocation, to San Francisco. So he turned the condo into a rental and headed north. But Mr. Wittenberg found himself agreeing to lower and lower rents, eventually resulting in a monthly shortfall of 1,200 between the rental income and his mortgage payment. By 2009, comparable homes in the area were selling for 210,000, and he still owed more than 300,000. He tried for a year and a half to get the bank to modify his loan, he said, to no avail. So with the help of YouWalkAway.com, he decided to stop paying. YouWalkAway.com is a company that sprang up in 2007 to help homeowners through the foreclosure process, specifically what is called a strategic default. In that instance, even if you can afford to make mortgage payments, you stop paying to force the bank into foreclosing. The company charges clients an enrollment fee of 199 to 395, and monthly membership fees ranging from 29.95 to 99.95, depending on which assistance plan a homeowner chooses. Then it essentially coaches clients through the process of walking away from their mortgages, helps them figure out which threatening letters to pay attention to and which to ignore and provides access to lawyers versed in each state's property laws. As YouWalkAway.com points out in its materials, there is usually no paperwork or response required from homeowners: they should track what documents the bank sends, but other than that, the process is fairly simple. "We looked at how much my home was under water, how much I'd lost thus far and how much I would continue to lose until I started to break even," he said. "And that could be 20 years away. It was a no brainer." YouWalkAway.com's chief executive, Jon Maddux, said that was how it should be a no brainer for hundreds of thousands of people who were underwater on their mortgages. "I think as more and more people know someone that's done it, they know that, O.K., these people have moved on, they kind of pushed the reset button, and they're starting over," he said. For many Americans, a mortgage is about more than money. It's a contract that should not be broken, a debt that should under almost all circumstances be paid. In this context, walking away has been framed as an ethical or moral issue. But many economists, and legal professionals, say it's not and is simply a matter of contract law. "If your home is a financial asset, and it's financially rational to walk away, that's what you do," said Nicolas Retsinas of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. Mr. Maddux of YouWalkAway.com said his site had helped more than 7,000 homeowners walk away and that, for most of them, a change in their all important credit score was the biggest downside. Among the company's clients, the average score drops 100 points, he said. Fair Isaac, which provides the industry standard FICO credit score, released a study this year showing similar results. But if someone's original score is on the high end, say a 780, that person will take a bigger hit (150 points on average) in a foreclosure or short sale than someone who has a lower score of 680 or 720 to begin with. The bigger surprise, according to YouWalkAway.com, is that many clients are finding their scores begin to recover within the first few months of a foreclosure's becoming final. Mr. Wittenberg said he knew the decision to walk away could spell doom for his score, which was in the low to mid 700s, and he didn't know what other financial complications might arise. "Am I going to have to pay this back? What are these banks capable of doing to me? Buying a house again? Out of the question," he said. "So here I am, upper middle class, I have two degrees, and I'm stuck. Just because I wanted to end the hemorrhaging." The impact so far? There hasn't been any. At least for him. Mr. Wittenberg lives in his girlfriend's house in Walnut Creek, so he didn't have to worry about a landlord checking his credit. He has a job he enjoys. And he said he was done with debt forever. He doesn't have any credit cards. His car is paid off. "I live in a cash world, and I want to keep it that way," he said. He hasn't checked his FICO score and doesn't want or intend to. He shredded every last piece of paperwork from his mortgage and foreclosure. That's not to say he has not paid a price, though. He lost his entire down payment and drained a significant portion of his savings account to make up for the monthly rental shortfall. Mr. Wittenberg said he never planned to walk away from his debts and if the bank had lowered his interest rate by a percentage point or two, he could have continued to rent it out. In the end, his financial stability, both short term and long term it would take up to 20 years to break even on the home trumped any ethical or moral questions he had about honoring his contract with the bank. What saddens Mr. Wittenberg, he said, is the loss of a home. "I did a lot of work on it, did it all myself, and it was nice," he said. "But it's O.K. I've moved on." He did note that the lack of permanence in the job market made owning a home for any length of time more difficult. "It's not like our parents, where they worked at the same place for 40 years," he said. "So when you own a house, it's a huge burden. It's almost like renting is peace of mind." SIX hundred miles north, in the rural community of Wilsonville, Ore., Bill Sawyer, 50, sat at a desk just off the kitchen in his apartment in a multiunit complex near the I 5 freeway, about 17 miles south of Portland. Mr. Sawyer, who works as an operations and policy analyst for a state government agency, said a couple of years ago, his credit score was in the low 700s. That's about average on the Fair Isaac scale, which tops out at 850. He knows his score has gone down, because he stopped paying the mortgage on his former residence, a small town house in nearby West Linn, more than a year ago. But he has no idea how much. He bought the town house in 2000 for 138,000, with a loan from the Federal Housing Administration and a small down payment. Mr. Sawyer was a single father to Vanessa, who was 12 at the time, and Daniel, who was 11. Over the next few years, the town house's appraised value grew to 256,000. The mortgage holder, Wells Fargo, approved two cash out refinancings, and Mr. Sawyer said he used that money to pay down other debts. "They just crunched the numbers like a car salesman might, and, you know, you sign the dotted line," he said. Then in 2007, his son, then 18, was killed, along with a friend, in a head on collision with a truck. Aside from the emotional and psychological devastation, the accident sent Mr. Sawyer into a financial tailspin. Insurance coverage was minimal, he said, and he was billed by the towing company and the volunteer fire department that responded to the accident. "There were financial hardships as a result of funeral expenses and so forth," he said in a low voice. "That started a chain reaction. A maxed out credit card and line of credit. When you have a limited income, and you make minimum payments, well, that debt just keeps going." Within a year, the housing market collapsed. Similar town houses started selling for 180,000, and with the equity he had taken out over the years, he owed more on the mortgage than his home was worth. He said he spent months trying to negotiate with the bank for a loan modification. When he was unsuccessful, he abandoned the property in March of this year, with the help of YouWalkAway. Mr. Sawyer had not wanted to check what that had done to his credit scores, but he did. "Oh, boy," he said, with a small, uncomfortable chuckle, as he waited for numbers to pop up on his laptop's screen. "Oh gosh. Never has it been that low. TransUnion 535. Equifax 520. Pretty much start over from the bottom of the barrel now." It's not the bottom of the barrel, but it's close, and it was made worse by a bankruptcy filing over the summer. The resulting damage to his credit history is what Mr. Sawyer worried about most. He has what he thinks is a stable job, he said, and he made sure to secure his current apartment before leaving his other property, in case a low score scared away potential landlords. But if something happened with his job, and he had to move, he said his decision to walk away could make everything more difficult. A future landlord could decide not to rent to him. Insurance companies could decide to raise his rates. One thing Mr. Sawyer and Mr. Wittenberg do not have to worry about is banks coming after them for the mortgage debt they left behind. California and Oregon are nonrecourse states, which means that lenders cannot take homeowners to court to get that money back. Many other states including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as Nevada, a foreclosure hub do allow recourse. In those cases, walking away can exact a much higher price. For now, Mr. Sawyer said he felt relief. "We were happy in that home," he said. "But I didn't see any other way to resolve this matter without pretty much putting money down the drain for years to come." And the financial recovery appears to have started already. Mr. Sawyer was approved last month for a credit card through Capital One. It has a 300 limit and a 22 percent interest rate, but he said he planned to use it and pay it off each month. "I'm going to live within my means and kind of start from scratch," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
ExoMars 2016, a spacecraft launched by the European and Russian space agencies, is to arrive at the red planet on Wednesday and begin gathering data on gases that are barely present in the atmosphere but may provide important clues about geological processes, or even hints of life. The main part of the spacecraft, the Trace Gas Orbiter, will move into orbit with instruments able to sniff gases in the thin Martian atmosphere including methane. Observations by Earth based telescopes and by spacecraft including the European Space Agency's previous Mars orbiter, Mars Express found transient signs of the gas. The finding surprised researchers. Methane is broken down by sunlight and chemical reactions in the atmosphere; any methane there now must have been released recently. The gas can be generated by microbes or by a geological process requiring heat and liquid water. The new orbiter carries a better instrument than the one on Mars Express. "We expect to obtain test exposures soon after orbit insertion, and are finalizing the instrument settings now," said Michael J. Mumma, a senior scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who led one of the teams that had earlier detected methane. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A couple of months ago, Cynthia Nixon sent Alec Baldwin an e mail that had nothing to do with a potential film project, a play that either of them might have been considering or even what to do about pesky tabloid reporters (although both actors are familiar with those). Instead, Ms. Nixon was writing because she had seen Mr. Baldwin on television discussing the New York mayoral race and saying that he was leaning against the perceived front runner, Christine Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, and toward Bill de Blasio, the public advocate. Ms. Nixon explained that she was thrilled to hear this and that she hoped she might be able to persuade him to deliver a formal endorsement on behalf of her candidate. Soon enough, an e mail came from Mr. Baldwin that Ms. Nixon later described as "completely adorable." In it, he apologized for having assumed "lamely," in his words that Ms. Nixon would be supporting Ms. Quinn (both, after all, are famous lesbians), and that he would be happy to endorse Mr. de Blasio. Ms. Nixon's entreaties didn't stop with the "30 Rock" actor. Over the next several weeks, she piled up endorsements and donations from Tony Kushner, Susan Sarandon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jon Robin Baitz, among others. She organized an LGBT benefit for Mr. de Blasio that featured gender bending performers like Justin Bond, Flotilla de Barge and Tina Turnstyle. She is also a key member of the Women for de Blasio committee. "There are weeks where four or five days in a row, I'm doing something with Cynthia," Mr. de Blasio said. "She's that fully involved with the campaign." None of this comes as much of a surprise to Ms. Nixon's friends, who, over the last decade, have seen her become more and more involved with a number of high profile progressive causes and emerge, along with Mr. Baldwin and Sean Penn, as one of the more prominent celebrity activists on the political left. In the last two years, Ms. Nixon has traveled around the country to campaign in states where amendments to legalize gay marriage were on the ballot. She has gone to Washington to speak for Planned Parenthood and to protest rollbacks of Roe v. Wade. She went to Florida and Virginia on behalf of President Obama's re election effort and to Minnesota, on behalf of Al Franken, a senator from that state. "She's not dabbling at all," Mr. Franken said in a phone interview. "We had given her material on what I had done, but she really internalized it and put it together in her own way. She knows what she is talking about." And, with her spouse, Christine Marinoni, the former New York director of the Alliance for Quality Education, Ms. Nixon has been a tireless advocate for increasing financing to New York City's public schools. "She's incredibly bright, and she understands that there is an opportunity for her to be a voice when others might not have that opportunity," Ms. Parker said. "Cynthia can stand in the front at a rally and speak because she will bring attention; she will have a presence that creates curiosity." Ms. Nixon's work as an activist dates back to roughly 2001, when she was on "Sex and the City" and became an advocate on behalf of public education. She had grown up in Manhattan and had attended public schools. Her father was a radio journalist who spent much of the '60s covering the civil rights movement, and her mother was an actress who trained with Uta Hagen. When Ms. Nixon had children, she said she never considered sending them anywhere other than public schools. Then, a recession hit and the city was faced with budget cuts, just as Ms. Nixon's daughter was entering kindergarten. So Ms. Nixon sprang into action. (Ms. Parker called it "kind of her gateway" into politics). What to Know About the 2021 New York Election None Meet N.Y.C.'s New Mayor: The win for Eric Adams, who will be the city's second Black mayor, signals the start of a more center left leadership. G.O.P. Inroads: While Mr. Adams easily won the mayor's race, Republicans gained seats on the City Council for the first time since 2009. The party also won seats typically held by Democrats across the state. Buffalo's Write In Winner: After a surprising primary defeat, Mayor Byron Brown seemingly triumphed in a write in campaign for a fifth term. Election Results: See the full results from New York here. "Anything that could be cut was cut," Ms. Nixon said last week over a late lunch at the NoHo Star, where she was sitting in a booth in a trim black peacoat from Bendel's, a pair of fitted jeans and cowboy boots. "The school was so overcrowded, kindergarten classes were housed in trailers in the back." Soon enough, Ms. Nixon met Ms. Marinoni, who until recently worked for the Alliance for Quality Education, as well as Mr. de Blasio. "Bill was then, as he is now, very much the education guy," Ms. Nixon said. "Not only from being a public school parent himself, but sitting on school boards and seeing as I see that public schools are the cornerstone to how our city works and how our city offers opportunity and plans for its economic future." Still, it was the actress's relationship with Ms. Marinoni that garnered the most attention in the tabloid press. Before their involvement, Ms. Nixon had been heterosexual. She had two children with Danny Mozes, a teacher and photographer she had met in high school. But once Ms. Nixon fell in love with Ms. Marinoni (they married in New York last year), she quickly came out publicly and began doing work on behalf of gay rights. Last year, Ms. Nixon drew the ire of a number of gay activists when she gave an interview to The New York Times Magazine in which she discussed her relationship with Ms. Marinoni and seemed to question the idea that being gay is a fixed identity for everyone and cannot ever be a choice. "I probably should not talk about this now," Ms. Nixon said, pointing out that any attempt to extricate herself from a controversy invariably winds up prolonging it. Nevertheless, the experience annoyed her, because she thought she was being attacked, and because she believes gay men and lesbians have a multiplicity of experiences that ought to be acknowledged and celebrated rather than muzzled for the sake of political correctness. "Different strokes for different folks," she said. "My view of my sexuality is just my view. It has nothing to do with your view of your sexuality or even my view of your sexuality." Today, Ms. Nixon and Ms. Marinoni live near SoHo with Ms. Nixon's two children from her relationship with Mr. Mozes, as well as a child Ms. Marinoni conceived in 2010. They buy groceries at Whole Foods and ride the subway everywhere. "What am I going to do, take a limousine?" said Ms. Nixon, who is proud of what "Sex and the City" did for women but somewhat less enamored of the way it celebrated conspicuous consumption. "It's an aspect of the show I never liked," she said. "I remember when we screened the first movie in London, when Mr. Big shows Carrie that closet he's built for her and the entire audience clapped. I found that devastating. Maybe that's a strong word, but I was disheartened. Because I thought: 'Is this what these women in the audience think true love is? A man who has enough money to buy you a walk in closet?' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Deventer, The Netherlands The small boy, all in white, lies still, his tiny hands cupped together, his eyes serenely shut. A wooden torch lies across the bedsheets, its flame conspicuously snuffed out. This striking painting, "Little Boy on His Deathbed," by the 17th century Dutch master Bartholomeus van der Helst, was among more than 1,200 artworks seized by the Nazis from an Amsterdam gallery during World War II. Recovered by the Allies, the 1645 picture should have been returned to the family of Jacques Goudstikker, a well known Dutch art dealer. Instead, it hung in a Dutch museum for a half century until the family won a restitution battle. The journey of van der Helst's work is emblematic of a period in Dutch history when a cold cynicism toward Holocaust survivors meant that thousands of masterly works were rescued from the Nazis only to end up as Dutch national property. "It was a lack of compassion," said Rudi Ekkart, an art historian the government hired in 1997 to track looted art and help find the rightful owners. Six years in the making, the show features 75 works, including the portrait of the boy, and explores the uneven history of art looted by the Nazis from the Netherlands. Once ridiculed for its obtuse efforts at recovery, the Netherlands in the late 1990s embraced progressive and pioneering efforts that have led it to be considered a model for enlightened restitution. But the country's recent restitution efforts are coming under scrutiny as some international critics say Dutch policies for returning looted art have become stricter once again. Of particular concern is a policy that in recent years requires the government panel that judges restitution cases to balance the interests of national museums against the claims by Jewish survivors or their heirs. The policy asks the panel to weigh "the significance of the work to public art collections" against the emotional attachment of the claimant. In 2013, for example, a claim for the Bernardo Strozzi painting "Christ and the Samaritan Woman," filed by the heirs of a German Jewish refugee, was rejected because it was important to the Dutch museum that housed it. "The balance of interests test means that even if a claimant submits a claim to the restitution committee for a work of art, and even if the panel finds that the claim is good, is right, the claimants don't automatically get their painting back, nor do they get any remedy," said Anne Webber, the chairwoman of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which is based in London. Gideon Taylor, the chairman of operations for the World Jewish Restitution Organization, said, "This is having a chilling effect on claimants." While there were efforts in Germany and other European countries after the war to compensate victims of Nazi looting, new scholarship and media coverage in the 1990s on the full extent of it persuaded some countries, like France and Austria, to revisit their own policies and to improve the restitution process. "When you consider the Netherlands in relation to the other European countries, it took an early lead, and they're still doing a much better job than some other countries," said Christopher A. Marinello, the chief executive of Art Recovery International, an Italian company that specializes in stolen and looted art. "But the efforts seem to have tailed off, as of late." The new exhibition focuses on a broader arc of Dutch restitution, stretching back to the war. It was conceived by Eva Kleeman, a curator based here, who, with her husband, Daaf Ledeboer, an urban development consultant, established a foundation to mount exhibitions in the historic Bergkerk. They were looking through government storage areas to find art worth displaying and said they kept coming across impressive paintings with so called NK numbers on them. They were all from the NK Collection, a trove of some 3,800 looted works that have yet to be returned for a variety of reasons. "We asked if we could borrow a work of art, and they said, well, it could be complicated, there could be a claim on it," Ms. Kleeman said. "We were intrigued by that." After the war, the Allies returned some 8,000 to 9,000 works of art to the Netherlands that had been found in Germany. Those represented less than half of the works reported missing by the surviving Jewish claimants. By 1951, when the Dutch government announced that the restitution process had been completed and had stopped accepting claims, only about 500 to 1,000 artworks had been returned to their rightful owners. In their later research, Mr. Ekkart and the organization he led, the Origins Unknown Agency, found that the Netherlands had auctioned off some 2,500 looted works. Others had been folded into national museum collections. Jewish claimants were sometimes blocked from retrieving their art by tactics like charging them exorbitant "storage fees" for the time it had been held. "I was shocked by the bureaucracy and the formalizing of so many things, and I'm myself a member of the after war generation, born in 1947, and I was educated in a rather anti German atmosphere," said Mr. Ekkart, who continues to lead Dutch restitution efforts and curated the current exhibition with Eelke Muller. "It was rather frustrating to find out how much was wrong. My impression is that after the war, the authorities thought that the financial compensations that the people who came back got was enough." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Independent Lens series features a portrait of the writer behind "Tales of the City." And "Lovesick" returns to Netflix. THE UNTOLD TALES OF ARMISTEAD MAUPIN (2017) 10:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The writer Armistead Maupin came out as gay in 1977, the year after he began writing his seminal newspaper serial "Tales of the City," a daring account of love, sex and L.G.B.T.Q. culture in San Francisco. In this documentary, Mr. Maupin explains, "I knew that I had landed on something that was going to make me famous because I had this subject matter that wasn't being covered." His hunch was right: "Tales" has been morphed into a nine part novel series, an Emmy nominated television mini series and a musical. The documentarian Jennifer M. Kroot traces Mr. Maupin's conservative upbringing, naval service and journalism career to his later success spurred by his groundbreaking stories. The biopic is available to stream on pbs.org on Tuesday. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (2014) 7:30 p.m. on FX; also on iTunes and Amazon. This spin on the 1969 Marvel comic, the first of the franchise by the director James Gunn, introduces us to a ragtag team of intergalactic criminals turned heroes: A brawny Chris Pratt leads as Peter Quill (with a hint of the cluelessness that makes his role as Andy on "Parks and Recreation" so endearing), alongside a fiery Zoe Saldana as a tough Amazon who goes by Gamora. Joined by a walking tree (voiced by Vin Diesel), a bad mouthed raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and a formidable destroyer (Dave Bautista), the crew must defend the planet of Xandar from the Kree villain Ronan. While the story may be "confusing and generic by turns," Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times, "what sticks are the fantastical landscapes, the beautiful creature designs and the actors delivering lively performances, even with strata of makeup and digital wizardry." LOVESICK on Netflix. Despite starting out with the questionable title "Scrotal Recall," this British sitcom has been described as a pleasant "How I Met Your Mother" for millennials. When Dylan (Johnny Flynn) discovers he has chlamydia, he retraces his romantic past to share the news with his former lovers. His friends Luke (Daniel Ings) and Evie (Antonia Thomas) help him navigate the sticky situation, even though Evie and Dylan are caught in a Ross and Rachel like love story. Season 3 picks up with Dylan in a blossoming relationship, clueless as to Evie's feelings. A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (1992) on iTunes, Amazon, Hulu and Starz. This fictionalized account of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League looks at the women who stepped into the spotlight when much of the country's men were off fighting in World War II. Geena Davis leads the Rockford Peaches, and Tom Hanks plays a has been home run champion who is called in to coach the team. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
From about 350 Canadian dollars, or about 262. Sometimes referred to as the Tiffany of Canada it even has robin's egg blue boxes the Canadian jeweler Birks sold its four story Beaux Arts headquarters to the Montreal hotel operator Le St. Martin in 2016. A meticulous renovation added two glass enclosed floors, restored original decorative flourishes, carved out 132 high ceilinged rooms, and installed a soaring lobby and airy brasserie. The Montreal designer Nicole Vekemans outfitted the property in a palette of whites, grays and taupes, with inlaid floors and accents of gleaming metal and burnished wood. Objets d'art, like sleek gold sculptures near a marble fireplace, dot the main floor. While it imparts zero sense of place the mood's more Mitteleuropa than Montreal the hotel's bling y opulence does create a plush cocoon. Birks maintains a retail presence, linked to the lobby through tall glass doors; at 7,500 square feet, the store is about a third the original's size. On paper, Hotel Birks's location in Montreal's commercial center makes an ideal perch. Anchoring the west side of Phillips Square, a pocket park named for a Montreal industrialist, the hotel abuts Sainte Catherine Street, a main shopping drag; across the street, you'll find both the Metro and Montreal's Underground City. Old Montreal is a 15 minute walk south; strolling east to the Quartier des Spectacles entertainment district takes five minutes. In reality, though, Phillips Square is undergoing a major restoration, and getting to the hotel by car can involve epic detours. A City of Montreal spokeswoman said the work wouldn't wrap up until 2021. Infrastructure repairs along Sainte Catherine Street have also intensified the sclerotic nightmare of downtown traffic. At no point in the reservations process did Hotel Birks warn me about the obstacle course to the front door. Visiting in frigid February meant off season rates. I booked a deluxe view room, with east facing windows over Phillips Square and ample natural light. The gray carpeted room melded modern and classic. A sweeping, studded white leather headboard created a striking frame for the king bed. Dark wood side tables held lamps with O shaped chrome bases, along with a squat JBL radio/docking station. Feather duvets and crisp sheets made the firm mattress exceptionally welcoming. Embedded in a wall of Italian marble, a rectangular, glass enclosed gas fireplace faced the bed; above the fireplace, a 55 inch LG high definition TV tilted at an ideal angle for bedtime viewing. A sturdy dresser and half moon writing desk, in polished dark wood with brass handles, felt discordant among the room's clean lines and pale palette. Few outlets near the desk meant unplugging a lamp to charge my laptop or phone. Smooth jazz from the hallway Muzak infiltrated my room; I cranked up the TV to block it. Instead of a wall, sliding frosted glass doors hide one side of the bathroom. Opening those doors exposes the transparent shower stall a bit of upscale naughtiness. A long marble vanity and single sink take up one bathroom wall; thick waffle knit towels occupy the alcove underneath. A countertop shelving unit held tissues, a hair dryer and vanity kit, along with a tiny sculpted bird and a stone colored vase. Hotel Birks branded bath products come from Sparium, a local manufacturer of hotel amenities. Separate temperature controls for the bathroom added an especially thoughtful touch; so did a lush green plant at the edge of the sink. Inside my room, a Nespresso Essenza Mini coffee maker sat atop a mini fridge stocked with Voss water, Coca Cola, Fever Tree mixers and Labatt Blue beer the sole Canadian product. A tiny welcome box from Montreal's Suite88 Chocolatier delighted me, until I noticed prices on a little placard (6 to 11 dollars). The hushed, subterranean Le Spa, which touts Valmont and Phytomer treatments and a eucalyptus scented steam hammam, sat empty; I couldn't find anyone to answer questions. On the same basement floor, the hotel's low ceilinged gym squeezes an exercise bike, Stairmaster, and treadmill by the Spanish maker BH Fitness into a bedroom size space. Free Wi Fi was fast and consistent throughout the property. Though inspired by Paris, not Montreal, the majestically columned Restaurant Henri became my favorite part of the hotel. Designed by Montreal's Atelier Zebulon Perron, the buzzing brasserie boasts stained glass accents, green velvet banquettes, pendant lighting and a lively elevated bar. A table near the entrance gave me unobstructed views of the soaring space. Breakfast brought lukewarm coffee (4 dollars) and a wan spinach and cheese omelet (17 dollars) with requested greens in place of potatoes. A generous fruit plate (9 dollars) glistened with fresh pineapple, mango, grape and kiwi. Later, creamy butternut squash soup (8 dollars) and beautifully composed beet salad (8 dollars) made a perfect lunch filling, but refined. Restaurant Henri's kitchen pauses between meals, so if you crave room service between, say, 10:30 a.m. and noon, you're out of luck. Posh but anonymous only its exterior, circa 1894, roots you in Montreal Hotel Birks makes a glossy home base in a central location. If service polishes up, Hotel Birks might blossom into the ultraluxury experience to which it aspires. Once construction ends on Phillips Square, it might also become convenient. 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 |
The rubbery corporate mascot we know as the Michelin Man actually has a name: Bibendum, drawn from a Latin phrase once used in the tire company's advertising: "nunc est bibendum," best translated as "time for a drink" odd advice, perhaps, for drivers, but good news for diners. Bibendum is also the name of the restaurant that the designer and tastemaker Terence Conran and the publisher Paul Hamlyn opened in 1987 in Michelin House at the edge of London's Chelsea neighborhood. Michelin built this ornate headquarters cum service station in 1911, incorporating exuberant tire and motoring imagery into its design, including the big Bibendum themed stained glass windows that account for much of the airy second floor dining room's whimsical charm (there's informal dining on the ground floor). This year saw a total renovation and reopening under a prominent new chef and partner: The room looks more open, with sleek gray leather banquettes on either side of the large front window and the elimination of a tall serving console that used to dominate the space. Happily, the stained glass remains, along with plenty of Michelin Man knickknacks. And the sign over the door now reads "Claude Bosi at Bibendum." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Theatrically, this is very thin stuff, a sugar wafer of a play. Only two credited actors appear: Ostroski's tweed jacketed, self satisfied author and Paloma Nozicka as Andrea, his overeager protegee. (Andrea hosts a podcast called "Hit Me Baby With True Crime.") There's also a house manager, uncredited, who does a lot of heavy preshow lifting the party chat equivalent of CrossFit. Is there also a celebrity cameo? Let's leave that a mystery. The flimsiness of character and dialogue shifts the burden of both narrative and proof onto the audience, though participation remains voluntary. How much crime and true crime entertainment a given crowd consumes shades the evening. A woman in my group briskly dismissed a suspect as too obvious. "In 'Law Order,' in the first half, you always think it's that person, but it's not," she said. Personal experience also colors case theory. The leader of one group, the Creative Types, proposed an alternate suspect, the victim's accountant. "It's because I'm a C.P.A.," he said. "I'm just trying to give equal time to the accountants of this world." This interactivity, however idiosyncratic, doesn't alter the show much. The script rolls on regardless, though a choose your own adventure element does surface toward the end. But Marcantel clearly enjoys the online form, neatly juxtaposing the workaday tools of contemporary online culture polls, slides, breakout rooms, screen sharing, chat, the mute button with a lurid case nearly a century cold. And the case itself is fascinating. So fascinating, in fact with its cocaine, blackmailers, child starlets, two (two!) sinister valets and Mabel Normand that I didn't realize it was a real incident until embarrassingly late in the evening. (I then stayed up even later, reading.) Those who have seen the musical "Mack Mabel" will have a virtual leg up. They won't have to use that leg to kick themselves, like I did. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A 1990 performance of Trisha Brown's "Set and Reset" (1983), with from left, Trish Oesterling, Brown and Wil Swanson. This photo by Mark Hanauer is part of Brown's archive, which is going to the New York Public Library. In a video recorded in 1989, the choreographer Trisha Brown demonstrates a few restless seconds of movement, as dancers in her studio try to follow along. An arm darts across the torso; the legs appear to slip and catch themselves. It happens fast. As the dancers attempt to do as she does, a viewer can imagine how useful the video would be for anyone learning this material. There's no easy way to explain what she's doing; you just have to keep watching. In her decades of dazzling experiments with the body, gravity and momentum, Brown invented movement so complex so capricious yet precise it could be hard to remember from one day to the next, let alone years later if the work were to live on. As if to keep tabs on her discoveries, the camera became a regular presence in her studio, a tool as pragmatic as her choreography was wild. By recording the building of a dance, she could revisit what had rushed forth in a solo improvisation, or retrace how a group of dancers had achieved an improbable lift. "Her movement is so sequential, and there's a whole logic for how it spills through the body," said Cori Olinghouse, a former dancer with Brown's company, who served as its archive director from 2009 to 2018. "I think recording it was a way to try to recover something of that logic when nobody could remember." Over the years, thousands of hours of rehearsal footage accumulated in Brown's archive, most of which make up 1,200 videotapes known as the Building Tapes. These invaluable records of her creative process, long used almost solely by the Trisha Brown Dance Company, are now poised to become available to a much broader public. After an extensive search for the right home, the company is placing its founder's archive including the Building Tapes and corresponding notebooks, known as the Building Notebooks at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Barbara Dufty, the company's executive director, said that Brown, who died in 2017 at 80, had hoped for her archive to be widely accessible. "She wanted to feel like what was there from her legacy, and the record of her creating her work, was offered freely for people to look at," Ms. Dufty said. The company considered more than 20 potential sites for the archive, before narrowing the options to four. On its long list of criteria was geographic location. Brown grew up in the Pacific Northwest but established her career in New York, part of the fertile downtown scene that gave rise to postmodern dance in the 1960s. In some of her early works, the city itself was her stage: She sent a man walking down the side of a building in "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building" (1970), and stationed dancers across a network of SoHo rooftops in "Roof Piece" (1971). "Trisha was a New York girl," Ms. Dufty said, so it seemed fitting that her archive not travel too far. Home to the world's largest dance collection, the performing arts library also holds the archives of other artists in Brown's milieu, including David Gordon, Deborah Hay and Elaine Summers, who, like her, were founders of the 1960s collective Judson Dance Theater. But Linda Murray, the curator of the Dance Division, said that Brown's archive stands apart for its sheer volume of rehearsal footage, paired with the abundant rehearsal notes that fill the Building Notebooks. "When you take those two elements together, you have this incredibly complete picture of the choreographer's intent," Ms. Murray said. Dance researchers, she explained, often go to great lengths to piece together clues about the thinking and editing behind a finished work. "What's so beautiful about the Brown archive is we have a clear path from inception point to completion point. It's really, really rare to see that in an archive." The items going to the library, which date back to 1966, also include photographs, slides, lighting plans, music scores, correspondence, financial records and Brown's personal papers, among other personal and institutional materials. Brown had a way with words, and some of these documents bristle with her love for language and punctuation. In a letter to her collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, a jumble of exclamation points leaps off the page. In a 1973 notebook entry, she has etched the phrase "4 thyroids performing a theory" below her drawings of as many stick figures. Because of its limited exhibition space, the library will not acquire Brown's costumes and sets, some of which were designed by venerable artists like Rauschenberg and Donald Judd. Ms. Dufty said the company was in conversation with museums about housing and displaying these pieces. (Though most famous as a choreographer, Brown was also a visual artist, known for her drawings; the New York gallery Sikkema Jenkins Co. manages those works.) The archive's audiovisual material has been meticulously organized in a database practically an artwork in itself created by Ms. Olinghouse in collaboration with the choreographer David Thomson, who is also a former member of Brown's company. By allowing users to view the same dance or specific sections of a dance at different stages of development, the database invites exploration of Brown's choreographic process, not just her completed works. Ms. Olinghouse said she wanted the archive, even while highly ordered, to reflect "the wildness" of Brown's spirit and to impart "something of that felt sense of the work itself." While some dance archives emphasize finished products, she tried to resist this approach. "I really wanted it to be messier and more contrarian and more alive and haptic, because that was the way Trisha worked," she said. "I wanted it to center around an artist's creative practice." To decipher some of the more cryptic aspects of the archive, Ms. Olinghouse turned to Carolyn Lucas, the company's associate artistic director, who was instrumental in documenting Brown's work. Ms. Lucas joined the company as a dancer in 1984, but after a serious injury in the mid 1990s, she shifted into the role of choreographic assistant, responsible for videotaping rehearsals, taking notes and later editing both the tapes and the notes for more efficient use. It was out of this process that the bulk of the Building Tapes and Building Notebooks emerged. Looking through the tapes (most of which were recently digitized through a Mellon Foundation grant), Ms. Lucas has been struck by just how much movement Brown generated, often through improvisation and how much she discarded. "There's so much that's been recorded that Trisha did not use in the choreographies, but it's gorgeous material," she said. "Not everybody goes into a studio and keeps what they make, but Trisha really threw out tons. She danced so much, until she found the groove that she wanted to be in." Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the final stages of the acquisition process have taken longer than planned. Ms. Dufty said that about half of the archive has been delivered to the library; she hopes the rest will arrive by the end of 2020. After that, by Ms. Murray's estimate, it could take up to three years to process the collection for public access. In the meantime, the archive remains essential to the company's work, which hasn't stopped in the wake of Brown's death. Ms. Lucas described the excitement of unearthing, a few years ago, documentation of "Ballet," a 1968 solo that Brown performed only once, in which she traversed a tightrope in a pink tutu. A reconstruction of the long lost piece opened the company's 2018 season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with Cecily Campbell in Brown's adventurous role. More recently, the company has been celebrating its 50th anniversary online, streaming past performances and rehearsals while devising new interactive digital projects. From Sept. 21 to 26, followers of trishabrowncompany on Instagram will be invited to create and post their own sections of "Solo Olos," a dance from 1976, based on a given set of instructions. When the archive is, at last, publicly available, researchers may find themselves pleasantly inundated with new ways of understanding Brown's work, even those already well acquainted with her choreography. Ms. Olinghouse, for example, was introduced through the archive to Brown's writings. "I suddenly was learning about her writing style, her sense of poetics, her wit, her humor," she said. "It gave me a very different window into her as a maker." In one notebook entry from the 1970s, Brown observes her own inclination to erase or erode what she has made. "When I first started choreographing in NYC," she writes, "I had the habit of reducing what I was doing down to the bare bone. The trouble with this practice is that when I went into the studio to work, I came out with much less than what I started with." She stopped working on one three minute dance "just before it disappeared altogether." Lucky for us, she kept on making, and she held on to a lot. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
For French Open Contenders, Serving Is Mental. So Stop Thinking So Much. PARIS Raffaella Reggi rose to 13th in the world in women's tennis in the late 1980s despite a serve so balky she once recorded 28 double faults in a match in Rome. With the shrill voices of fans pleading with her to use an underhand motion still ringing in her ears, Reggi said she walked into the press room afterward and professed, "I have no idea how to serve." Watching a player repeatedly start points by hitting balls into the net or, in the German Alexander Zverev's case, beyond the baseline, can be excruciating. "I had some flashbacks," Reggi said of Zverev's double fault filled performance in his United States Open final defeat to Dominic Thiem. It's akin to actors forgetting their lines during a soliloquy. You sit there, helpless to assist, willing them to get back in the flow. If all the court's a stage, double faults are a tennis player's inner heckler lashing out. Mary Carillo, the NBC analyst and former French Open doubles champion, said, "It's almost always the same culprit: nerves." How the anxiety seeps into the technical execution varies. It can be a wandering ball toss that throws off one's rhythm or a tightening of the limbs that makes it harder to bend the knees and execute the natural arm swing. The challenge for those struggling with their serves, Carillo said, is to fight the instinct to bend the ball into the box slowly and carefully and instead accelerate their racket head speed. "More action at the point of contact gives more margin, not less," she said. The serve is the only stroke in the sport where the player exercises complete control of the moment. It is a stand alone action, so when the moment goes awry, there is stand alone accountability. The 23 time major singles champion Serena Williams, who has one of the most potent serves in the game, said that on those rare occasions when her best weapon is misfiring, "My brain is like: 'Oh, my God! I never miss this!'" The embarrassment of being a professional unable to execute this elemental shot faithfully can be acute. "I mean, in practice I make the serves," said an exasperated Coco Gauff, who opened the French Open stalking the baseline between service points yelling, "Focus!" as she piled up 12 double faults in a victory against Johanna Konta. In the next round, Gauff had 19 in a three set loss to Martina Trevisan of Italy. The 16 year old Gauff has averaged almost 15 doubles in her last four matches. "It's just confidence, just a mind thing," said Gauff, who added: "I don't really think it's a technical thing. I mean, we talk to a lot of people. Sometimes I mess up and hit a bad toss. I mean, when I'm out there on the court, I know I double fault a lot, but I try not to think of it." Players bring different self protective postures to postmatch interviews, where they often face reporters who bring different preconceived notions to their questions, creating verbal exchanges that feel more like psychological evaluations. On Wednesday, Sara Errani of Italy committed 14 double faults and threw in a few underhand serves in a 7 6 (5), 3 6, 9 7 loss to Kiki Bertens of the Netherlands. Afterward, she was asked: "What is the reason for your toss? It went wrong about 60 times. How come?" "Yeah, I have many problems with that in two years," Errani said evenly. "Happens to me." The previous day, Karolina Pliskova, the No. 2 seed from the Czech Republic, needed three sets to dispatch the qualifier Mayar Sherif. She also struggled with her ball toss, contributing to eight double faults. When asked about it in her virtual news conference, she nearly froze the screen with her stare. "Next question," she said. On Thursday, she lost in straight sets to Jelena Ostapenko. Pliskova's short reply was revealing. Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist and, since 2017, the president of Barnard College, said psychology research has shown that when experts reflect on, or try to dissect, their performance, it can disrupt what should be more of an automated, effortless process. "I imagine that there is some tendency for high level players to feel it's better not to overanalyze their step by step movement," she wrote in an email. "It could prompt them to think too much about what they are doing and screw up." In his first two matches at Roland Garros, the seventh ranked Zverev, an 11 time ATP Tour winner, had 13 double faults, which is two fewer than he recorded in his five set loss to Thiem in New York. What did he do between the end of the U.S. Open and the start of the French Open to fix his second serve? "I didn't need to fix it," Zverev said. "There is something unclear in his mind and his technique about his second serve that makes it very inconsistent and scary," Mouratoglou said. John Isner, another big man with a big serve, said, "Any time you have the yips in any sport, it's mental." In Zverev's case, Isner added: "If that's the part of his game he's got to worry about, he's going to be fine because I know he's going to fix that. Every other part of his game is so, so solid." Beilock, of Barnard, suggested that it might be helpful for struggling servers to adopt a mantra, a one word key to help them focus on the process. "Anything to take their mind off of the importance of that serve and the very nitty, gritty details of what they are actually doing with their body," she said. Expounding on what he was doing between the end of the U.S. Open and the start of the French Open, Zverev said: "I was on a boat in Monaco doing nothing at all. Then I came here. Then I practiced. Now I'm going to play hopefully seven matches here, and then we'll see." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
BRYN MAWR, Pa. Batman has the Batcave. Superman has the Fortress of Solitude. Michael F. Finn has two upstairs rooms in the house he shares with his family here. One room, where Mr. Finn reads and relaxes, is a paradise of rarities. On a wall is the cover, drawn by Fred Ray, of the 1941 Superman No. 12, a surviving piece of art from the industry's earliest days, when original pages were destroyed, used to sop up ink or given away. Mr. Finn bought this pencil and ink cover at auction last year for 77,675. He also owns the 1980 cover of Captain America No. 250, by John Byrne, which shows a campaign button with the slogan: "He's the people's choice. Captain America for President!" Like many superheroes, Mr. Finn has a dual identity. He is a lawyer as well as a fan. His roles intersect in his "One Minute Later" commissions. These begin with published comic book covers and illustrate what happens next. The result is a portfolio of stunning images by a "Who's Who" of elite comic talent. He pays for them with his legal services. Mr. Finn's next project is a 75 page comic he wrote about heroes of the Golden Age who have lapsed into the public domain. Here are edited excerpts from a conversation about his collection. How did you go from comic fan to art collector? I read my first comic when I was about 6. My cousin had a collection: romance, Archie, Sad Sack, some Mad magazines and just a couple of superheroes. They blew me away. Sometime around 2001 or 2002, I had gotten every Silver Age to current Marvel comic. So what do I do now? This can't be the end! I started buying some art and collectors told me, "You're going to end up selling all your comics." I scoffed, but sure enough, I started selling comic books to buy artwork. That "Giant Sized Invaders" with Captain America cover by Frank Robbins and John Romita cost me my first Spider Man and my first Fantastic Four comics. What is so appealing about original art versus a copy of the comic? The art is one of a kind. It appeals to the collector's mentality to own the first page of the first superhero comic I ever read. I had a friend whose brother owned 30 comics. We must have read them 1,000 times. I now own one of the covers. It is just seared in my mind. Every time I see it I smile. Why did you turn to commissions? Art can be expensive, so I had some artists draw re creations, and it didn't feel original. It was a one of a kind imitation. I came up with the "One Minute Later" concept. It reminds me of the original, but it's not the original. I try to have good dialogue with the artist and pick a cover that will get them excited. I like to see the hero from the front, and I tell them I don't want modern gore or nudity. I want it to look like a comic book that could have been sold at the bookstore or pharmacy in the 1970s. You're researching Golden Age characters for a project. Who have you encountered? Many of the heroes of the '40s were very strange. There were three homeless superheroes: the Fighting Hobo who was in Marvel Comics; there was the Vagabond who was secretly, I think, a police officer but he dressed up as a vagabond; and there was Driftwood Dave! You must have stories from your research. What's one notable comic you uncovered? There was a comic published in Philadelphia called All Negro Comics, of which there was one issue. I wanted to use one of the African American characters from that in our book. There's a whole back story to what happened. The founder was a fairly prominent journalist. The way I understand the story, he published the comic and wasn't able to publish issue No. 2 because no one would sell him ink. It's not clear if they were racist or didn't want the competition. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
At the Groom Expo there are poodles everywhere: poodles dyed a kaleidoscope of colors, poodles with tribal designs shaved into their fur, a poodle that is shaved and dyed to look like a reindeer with a fawn carved into its side, a poodle whose hair is dyed in the shape of Tweety of "Looney Tunes," a "Seasons Greetings" poodle dyed to look like a jack o' lantern on one leg and Santa on another. Over 5,000 people, many of whom are pet groomers, recently gathered in Hershey, Pa., for the world's largest grooming industry event. A few of them, easy to spot in the crowd or the parking lot by their dogs, have traveled from around the United States and Canada to compete. Creative grooming is an offshoot of traditional grooming in which dogs, mostly standard poodles (but also goldendoodles, bichon frises, and even the occasional husky) grow out their fur and then have it cut and dyed by their handlers to represent a theme as living canvases. The first grooming conference was held in Chicago in the early 1980s. Questions have been raised on social media and at the conferences about the welfare of the dogs, including how long they are asked to stand and the safety of the dyes. Today, dogs are dyed with nontoxic permanent and semi permanent dyes and chalks and have designs airbrushed into their fur. "Just as with humans, some dogs may have allergic reactions to dyes and other chemicals, which can lead to complications and endanger their health," says PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange in her statement on creative grooming. Nicole Beckman, 26, and her dog Ira, 8, shown above, are used to getting attention. Ms. Beckman and Ira, along with Ms. Beckman's mother, Martine Gold, are at the expo where, for once, they kind of fit in. Ira was painted like a rainbow how you might draw a dog if you were given a package of neon highlighters and a hit of acid. Ms. Beckman is a dog groomer from Ithaca, N.Y., one of over 70,000 in the country and part of a rapidly growing pet industry estimated to reach 72.13 billion in 2018, according to the American Pet Products Association. (That includes a modest 6.47 billion spent on pet services like grooming.) "This is what happens when you lay your baby next to your dog when she's two, three days old," Ms. Gold said, laughing and waving a hand toward her daughter. "They grow up like this!" Lori Craig, 41, of Moore, Okla., a third generation groomer, has been practicing "creative," as groomers call it, for 15 years. Her grandmother ran a grooming salon in Tulsa starting in the 1960s , the age of the pink and blue pastel poodle. "I would run around her shop and try to steal all of the puppies and bring them home," Ms. Craig said. Now, she owns five dogs as well as her own grooming business, called Doggie Styles. Her standard poodle, Taboo, is 5 and has competed in four creative competitions: as an ostrich; in a sugar skull theme; as an entire butterfly garden with a fur monarch protruding off his back; and with flames, roses and another butterfly for a motorcycle chic look Ms. Craig called "Firestarter." For this competition, Taboo has a "Game of Thrones" theme dyed into his fur including a deer, a three eyed raven, a lion, a white walker and a dragon along his whole body. She spent 500 on dye. But beyond the festive feel of the competition, there are widespread calls for more regulation in the grooming industry. Rosemary Marchetto, 53, an interior designer from Northzale, N.J., who was not at the event and has no affiliation with creative grooming, has introduced Bijou's Law: an unpassed bill that would require state by state oversight and ban heated cages, after her Shih Tzu, Bijou, died during a grooming appointment. She asked for a necropsy and sued, settling out of court. The bill is currently being decided upon in New Jersey, California and North Carolina. In trying to place controls and require state licenses, she said, "We will be saving lives." PetSmart, which says on its website that it has saved over 8 million animal lives through adoption, recently came under scrutiny after an investigative report was published by NewJersey.com that uncovered 47 pet deaths related to grooming in its stores in the last 10 years. (PetSmart responded saying the company is "not aware of any evidence suggesting that PetSmart services caused the deaths of these pets.") "Anyone can pick up a pair of shears and call themselves a groomer," said Stephanie Shermer, 31, who works out of a privately owned grooming salon in Doylestown, Pa. "But a lot of dogs are brought to us unhealthy, and we may not know that. At the end of the day, we're not vets. We don't know if there's an underlying health issue." Because so many groomers rely on word of mouth for referrals and new clients, safety is paramount. Working with sharp instruments and live animals, they consider it their responsibility to ensure that the dogs or cats they work with are safely restrained when bathing or at the grooming table, are never left alone, and are put at ease so that they don't harm themselves or the groomer. The American Kennel Club offers courses for safety in the salon at trade shows and online. The course runs about five hours and costs 149 to certify a groomer or up to 349 to certify a salon as a "safe salon." (Groomers do not need to be certified to compete in competitions at Hershey.) Jess Rona, a comedian and celebrity dog groomer based in Los Angeles, is famous on Instagram for her glamorous dog videos (she grooms for celebrity dogs like Katy Perry's Nugget). Ms. Rona thinks that licensing will increase the legitimacy of the grooming industry. A session with Ms. Rona costs 215, and takes about three hours. "There's so many layers to dog grooming," she said. "You need to have studied it. You need to understand each dog's bone structure, anatomy, you have to know the breed standards for the haircuts. Our grooming looks different from the 'crop shop' groomers. We want to show how gorgeous dogs can be." Ms. Pope said that "Picasso has a canvas, a white canvas. My dog is my canvas. Any artist has a canvas. I look at my dog as my art, as my canvas. But it's a living, breathing, moving canvas." She extends this to herself as well; she dresses up as the character Rafiki and paints her face when showing her 3 year old poodle, Encore, in a full "Lion King" themed presentation. On Sunday, the last day of the expo, 14 women lined up on the stage at the creative grooming competition, the headliners of the weekend. Each groomer has had two hours and 45 minutes to work on her dog. Judges look for clean cuts, the consistency of the dye, and the creativity of the groomer. First place went to Cindy Oliver for her 1980s "Wuzzles" theme. Leslie Waldrep came from Alabama. Her dog, Sterling, won people's choice and third place for her Alabama themed design, which included a white tailed buck, a fawn, an aggressive blue jay flying after the acorn of an eastern gray squirrel and the state butterfly: a yellow tiger swallowtail. "I've had this design in the back of my mind for two years," Ms. Waldrep said, "and I'm very happy to bring it to you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Adapted from the writer John Brandon's eponymous 2008 novel, "Arkansas" intercuts the escapades of a pair of low level drug couriers with the back story of their mysterious mafia boss. Less a mob thriller than a ruminative drama about a life built around orders and betrayals, the movie takes an unusual perspective on a familiar genre but is weighed down by its dull, uneven pace. The problems begin right from the film's verbose opening, in which Kyle (Liam Hemsworth), a drug runner, delivers a voice over monologue about lacking a "philosophy of life." There's a lot more talk after this, as Kyle is dispatched on an interstate errand with a fellow cog in the machine, Swin (the movie's director, Clark Duke). They're stopped on the way and taken underwing by John Malkovich's Ranger Bright a loathsome minion of the big boss, Frog, whose identity remains a mystery well into the film. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The cluster of six collector car auctions that get underway in the Phoenix area this week and a 3,000 car sale by Mecum Auctions a week later in Florida come five years after a major market correction, possibly providing clarity and insight on the state of the recovery. After the boom times of the early 2000s, the vintage car market hit the wall in late 2008, with American muscle cars taking a particularly hard fall. Today, with the Dow over 16,000 and interest rates relatively low, the top reaches of the market seem in good form, and Detroit muscle has staged a quiet, if somewhat uneven, comeback. The results from this year's Scottsdale auctions are likely to provide a better barometer of values than the sales held on the Monterey Peninsula of California last August, collector car experts say, because the Arizona auctions cover a broader cross section of the market. Monterey where 75 cars sold for 1 million or more and one Ferrari brought 27.5 million skews decidedly to the high end. By comparison, about half as many cars have the potential to break the million dollar mark in Scottsdale, though treasures like a 1931 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Sport Spider and a 1952 Cunningham C 3 promise to elevate the sales totals. Colin Comer, a Milwaukee based collector and the author of "Million Dollar Muscle Cars," said in a telephone interview that while he didn't see a cooling in the market now, there was little prospect that prices would be soft. "If Scottsdale appears weak in comparison to Monterey, it's because Pebble Beach happens first and pulls a huge number of big cars," Mr. Comer said. "If anything, there's an issue of supply right now." John Kraman, consignment director at Mecum Auctions, said things look different when the broader market is considered. "Your bread and butter high production numbers muscle cars like SS Chevelles and 389 GTOs lost ground in the market correction," he said, and they are not back to where they were at the peak. Rare models like limited production, high performance Corvettes and Camaros are back, though. Hemi powered muscle car prices remain depressed. Mr. Comer explained that they appreciated the most and they also fell the furthest. "People are reluctant to invest in them again," he said. In terms of its unevenness and the attention lavished on the very top of the market, the classic car market has several parallels to the current fine art market. Last month, an economics column in The New York Times included a comment from Michael Moses, a retired professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business and a co founder of the Mei Moses Art Index, saying it was not surprising that a few trophy paintings were selling for more than 100 million even as the broad market languished. "There are over 2,000 billionaires," he said. "And a lot of them have many billions." Like the art market, record setting prices for the 1 percent cars are diverting attention from the lower prices, auction experts say, and from stagnant values in the broader portion of the market that most classic car owners are part of. The obsession with the top of the market is also making the collector car market appear far less accessible than is actually the case. In Scottsdale, for example, there are plenty of interesting cars under 100,000 on offer even at the sales of Bonhams, Gooding Company and RM Auctions, as well as many in the 45,000 to 75,000 range at Barrett Jackson and Russo Steele, with the level of under 25,000 cars well represented by Silver Auctions. An inferiority complex also extends to the classic car world. Just as American paintings seldom break the 10 million mark, the cars vying for major world records are almost never American made. Changing tastes are also affecting the market, driving the prices of some newer collectibles higher, perhaps at the expense of more established cars. "Pontiac Trans Ams from the Smokey and the Bandit era of the mid 1970s have gone nutso," Mr. Kraman said, noting that these cars can now bring more money than the prototypical 1960s muscle car, the Pontiac GTO. "It's a new generation of collectors getting into the hobby and starting to exert some influence." Grayson Wolf is part of the future that Mr. Kraman alludes to. Mr. Wolf, 29, a San Francisco based collector of European cars from the 1970s and 1980s, said he did not see many that excited him in the lineup of Scottsdale cars. "Good examples of the rarish imports from the late 1970s and 1980s like first generation Audi Quattro coupes and BMW M6s are hot," he said, but "most of the '80s cars consigned look like superlow mileage examples of fairly common cars." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
For decades, scientists have embarked on the long journey toward a medical breakthrough by first experimenting on laboratory animals. Mice or rats, pigs or dogs, they were usually male: Researchers avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments. That laboratory tradition has had enormous consequences for women. Name a new drug or treatment, and odds are researchers know far more about its effect on men than on women. From sleeping pills to statins, women have been blindsided by side effects and dosage miscalculations that were not discovered until after the product hit the market. Now the National Institutes of Health says that this routine gender bias in basic research must end. In a commentary published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the N.I.H., and Dr. Janine A. Clayton, director of the institutes' Office of Research on Women's Health, warned scientists that they must begin testing their theories in female lab animals and in female tissues and cells. The N.I.H. has already taken researchers to task for their failure to include adequate numbers of women in clinical trials. The new announcement is an acknowledgment that this gender disparity begins much earlier in the research process. "Most scientists want to do the most powerful experiment to get the most durable, powerful answers," Dr. Collins said in an interview. "For most, this has not been on the radar screen as an important issue. What we're trying to do here is raise consciousness." Women now make up more than half the participants in clinical research funded by the institutes, but it has taken years to get to this point, and women still are often underrepresented in clinical trials carried out by drug companies and medical device manufacturers. Partly as a result, women experience more severe side effects from new treatments, studies have shown. The Food and Drug Administration last year told women to cut in half their doses of the sleeping pill Ambien, for example, because new studies showed they metabolize the active ingredient more slowly than men do. Although statins are the most widely prescribed drugs in America, they were tested mostly in men, and evidence of their benefit to women is limited. Indeed, women respond differently from men to a broad array of treatments, and often do not derive the same benefits from them as men. The ideas for new treatments are often generated in the laboratory, where gender bias in basic biomedical research and neuroscience is ingrained. Bias in mammalian test subjects was evident in eight of 10 scientific disciplines in an analysis of published research conducted by Irving Zucker, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The most lopsided was neuroscience, where single sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females by 5.5 to 1. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in laboratories, there is far more variability among males than among females on a number of traits and behaviors, Dr. Zucker has found. Yet even when researchers study diseases that are more prevalent in women anxiety, depression, thyroid disease and multiple sclerosis among them they often rely on male animals, according to another analysis led by Dr. Zucker, who has written extensively on gender bias in scientific research. Jill Becker, a senior research scientist at the University of Michigan who studies gender differences in addiction, has found that women increase their drug use much more rapidly than men and that the hormone estradiol plays a critical role in the escalation, especially during ovulation. Nonetheless, researchers studying escalating drug use in rats and mice rely almost entirely on males, she said. "One of the underlying assumptions has been that females are simply a variation on a theme, that it isn't a fundamentally different mechanism, that if you've learned about the male you've learned enough to deal with both males and females," she said. "We've discovered that's not always the case." The N.I.H. is directing scientists to perform their experiments with both female and male animals, and grant reviewers will take the balance of each study design into account when awarding grants. (If the subject is gender specific, like ovarian cancer or prostate cancer, then the rule will probably not apply, Dr. Clayton said.) Researchers who work with cell cultures are also being encouraged to study cells derived from females as well as males, and to do separate analyses to tease out differences at the cellular level. "Every cell has a sex," Dr. Clayton said in a telephone interview. "Each cell is either male or female, and that genetic difference results in different biochemical processes within those cells." "If you don't know that and put all of the cells together, you're missing out, and you may also be misinterpreting your data," Dr. Clayton added. For example, researchers recently discovered that neurons cultured from males are more susceptible to death from starvation than those from females, because differences in the ways their cells process nutrients. N.I.H. officials will start rolling out the new policies in October, and the details are still being ironed out. But they are likely to be met with resistance from scientists who fear increased costs and difficulty in performing their experiments. "There's incredible inertia among people when it comes to change, and the vast majority of people doing biological research are going to think this is a huge inconvenience," Dr. Zucker said. Studying animals of both sexes may potentially double the number required to produce meaningful results, some experts say. Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown University, said she was concerned researchers would "just throw in one or two females" and then conclude that "everything is the same." "If they do it, but don't do it correctly, then it's going to lead to misinformation," she said. Margaret McCarthy, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who studies sex differences, agreed that the new policies will meet resistance. "The reactions will range from hostile 'You can't make me do that' to, 'Oh, I don't want to control for the estrous cycle,' " she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
WASHINGTON It seemed like a chummy reunion between friends. Chris Wallace, the Fox News anchor, was chatting amiably in his studio here on Sunday with Paul J. Manafort, Donald J. Trump's new campaign chief, reminiscing about Ronald Reagan as the seconds ticked down to airtime. Then the cameras switched on. Mr. Wallace's tone sharpened as he pressed Mr. Manafort about his lobbying work for a Filipino dictator and his description of Mr. Trump as playing a "part." One halting answer was dismissed with a sly Wallace riposte: "Forgive me, it does seem a little bit like spin." By the time Mr. Manafort removed his microphone, tweets were swirling about his uneven performance. Mr. Wallace, who compares interviews to cross examinations, shot a glance at his producer: success. As Fox News grapples with how to cover Mr. Trump who has tested the network's influence and battled its anchors, even as he stokes its ratings Mr. Wallace has stood out as Fox's moderate, occasionally contrarian voice, irritating Mr. Trump with tough questions and, on occasion, tweaking his opinionated colleagues, too. When Mr. Trump pledged in an interview to act more presidential, Mr. Wallace parried: "When are you going to start?" Then there was the time he ticked off Roger Ailes, Fox's powerful chairman, after chastising the hosts of the network's morning show, "Fox and Friends," for their carping coverage of Senator Barack Obama in 2008. "They were very unhappy," Mr. Wallace recalled. "I had called them out on the air." He added: "There's a phrase that we all talk about, which is, 'You do not fire inside the tent.' That's the ultimate transgression in Roger Ailes's mind." Over eggs and tea here on Sunday, Mr. Wallace, whose "Fox News Sunday" is experiencing its highest ratings since starting 20 years ago this week, did not hesitate to take his industry and even his network to task, saying that Mr. Trump has been granted too much exposure on cable news. The control room during Mr. Wallace's interview with Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Drew Angerer for The New York Times "If we put Donald Trump on for a rally now, and it's going to spike our audience, it's pretty hard if you're a news executive to say no," he said. "Did everybody do it too much? Yes." Mr. Wallace singled out CNN as a notable offender. Would he include Fox in that group? "Absolutely," he replied. And asked if Fox's right leaning commentators, who often support the Republican nominee in presidential years, would rally around a Trump candidacy, Mr. Wallace laughed. "That'll test it, won't it?" he said. "I don't know. It'll be interesting to see." Mr. Wallace, 68, is a registered Democrat in order to vote in local Washington elections, he explains and he spent decades as a correspondent on NBC and ABC before joining Fox in 2003. The move to Fox prompted him to review what he calls his "unexamined assumptions" about traditional network news. "If there's a story on same sex marriage, it's like this is a celebration of a new civil right," Mr. Wallace said. "I'm not saying I disagree with that. What I'm saying is there are two sides to the story, and I don't think, generally speaking, the broadcast networks will portray both sides evenly." Wry and punchy on air, Mr. Wallace has long had a rebellious streak. Bill Clinton accused him in an interview of having a "little smirk on your face"; Newt Gingrich goaded a crowd into mocking him at a 2011 debate; President Obama's refusal to appear on his show prompted Mr. Wallace to describe his administration as "crybabies." (Mr. Obama ended his drought this month, in an interview that lured millions of viewers.) In the Fox studio in Washington on Sunday, Mr. Wallace could not resist making mischief. After grilling Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Mr. Wallace reassured her during a commercial break that the segment had gone fine. That would be Mr. Wallace's father, Mike Wallace, the famous correspondent whose legacy has been a complicated backdrop to his son's career. For years, the men were not close; Chris Wallace still considers his stepfather, Bill Leonard, a former president of CBS News, as "more of a father than my father was." Mike Wallace once stole an interview, with the comedian Chris Rock, away from his son; the two did not speak for several months. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Chris Wallace said there was a time when Mr. Trump's remark might have bothered him, adding: "It doesn't anymore." "At some point, I realized, I was never going to be Mike Wallace, but neither was anybody else," he said. He and his father, who died in 2012, bonded later in life; Mr. Wallace has also borrowed bits of his father's interviewing style, prefacing tough questions with a polite "Forgive me," and occasionally placing a deferential arm across his chest. "He's a dignified, smart, fairly quiet guy, who came up under a legend," Mr. Ailes said in an interview. "He's now pretty much achieved what his old man did." So what does Mr. Ailes make of Mr. Wallace's contention that news networks, including Fox, have over covered Mr. Trump? "Did he get too much coverage? Yes," Mr. Ailes said, after a pause. "On the other hand, it's not just cable news, but all news." "The broadcast networks are just as guilty," Mr. Ailes added, noting that Mr. Trump, in addition to being the Republican front runner, has been more accessible to the news media than his opponents. "When you go try to drag another candidate to talk about another serious issue that day, he's not available," Mr. Ailes said. "I understand the need to entertain, but I think it would suit him, and serve democracy, if it was conducted on a higher plane," he said. That hasn't stopped Mr. Wallace from displaying a "Make America Great Again" cap, signed by Mr. Trump, among the mementos in his office. (Also on display: his father's old Rolodex.) "It's a great hat," he said, urging a reporter to try it on. His brow arched, he said he likes to wear it while visiting one of his daughters, "a raving liberal," in New York. Why? "I knew it would really tick her off." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
One answer, I suspect, is that like all too many Americans, Trump has a hard time grasping the fact that other countries are real that is, that we're not the only country whose citizens would rather pay a heavy price, in money and even in blood, than make what they see as humiliating concessions. Ask yourself, how would Americans have reacted if a foreign power had assassinated Dick Cheney, claiming that he had the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands? Don't answer that Suleimani was worse. That's beside the point. The point is that we don't accept the right of foreign governments to kill our officials. Why imagine that other countries are different? Of course, we have many people in the diplomatic corps with a deep knowledge of other nations and their motivations, who understand the limits of intimidation. But anyone with that kind of understanding has been excluded from Trump's inner circle. Now, it's true that for many years America did have a special leadership position, one that sometimes involved playing a role in reshaping other countries' political systems. But here's where Trump's second error comes in: He has never shown any sign of understanding why America used to be special. Part of the explanation, of course, was raw economic and military power: America used to be just much bigger than everyone else. That is, however, no longer true. For example, by some key measures China's economy is significantly bigger than that of the United States. Even more important, however, was the fact that America was something more than a big country throwing its weight around. We always stood for something larger. That doesn't mean that we were always a force for good; America did many terrible things during its reign as global hegemon. But we clearly stood for global rule of law, for a system that imposed common rules on everyone, ourselves included. The United States may have been the dominant partner in alliances like NATO and bodies like the World Trade Organization, but we always tried to behave as no more than first among equals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
President Barack Obama on a visit to Midway Atoll in 2016. Literature is more important than ever, he says. "We need to explain to each other who we are and where we're going." Barack Obama's new memoir "A Promised Land" is unlike any other presidential autobiography from the past or, likely, future. Yes, it provides a historical account of his time in office and explicates the policy objectives of his administration, from health care to economic recovery to climate change. But the volume is also an introspective self portrait, set down in the same fluent, fleet footed prose that made his 1995 book "Dreams From My Father" such a haunting family memoir. And much like the way that earlier book turned the story of its author's coming of age into an expansive meditation on race and identity, so "A Promised Land" uses his improbable journey from outsider to the White House and the first two years of his presidency as a prism by which to explore some of the dynamics of change and renewal that have informed two and a half centuries of American history. It attests to Mr. Obama's own storytelling powers and to his belief that, in these divided times, "storytelling and literature are more important than ever," adding that "we need to explain to each other who we are and where we're going." In a phone conversation last week (a kind of bookend to an interview I did with him during his last week in the White House in January 2017), Mr. Obama spoke about the experience of writing his new book and the formative role that reading has played, since his teenage years, in shaping his thinking, his views on politics and history, and his own writing. He discussed authors he's admired and learned from, the process of finding his own voice as a writer, and the role that storytelling can play as a tool of radical empathy to remind people of what they have in common the shared dreams, frustrations and losses of daily life that exist beneath the political divisions. 'We come from everywhere, and we contain multitudes. And that has always been both the promise of America, and also what makes America sometimes so contentious.' Talking about his favorite American writers, Mr. Obama points out that they share certain hallmarks: "Whether it's Whitman or Emerson or Ellison or Kerouac, there is this sense of self invention and embrace of contradiction. I think it's in our DNA, from the start, because we come from everywhere, and we contain multitudes. And that has always been both the promise of America, and also what makes America sometimes so contentious." Mr. Obama's thoughts on literature, politics and history are rooted in the avid reading he began in his youth. As a teenager growing up in Hawaii, he read African American writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois in an effort "to raise myself to be a Black man in America." And when he became a student at Columbia University in the early 1980s, he made a concerted effort to push aside the more desultory habits of his youth sports, parties, hanging out to try to become "a serious person." He puts "serious person" in quotes, he explains, "because I was very somber about this whole process and basically became a little bit of a recluse for a couple of years, and just was going to classes, wandering the city, mostly by myself, and reading and writing in my journals. And just trying to figure out what did I believe, and how should I think about my life." Mr. Obama says he "was very much the list keeper at that time." He would "hear about a book, and then I'd read that book, and if it referenced another book, I'd track that one down." And, sometimes, "It was just what was in the used book bin because I was on a pretty tight budget." He read everything from classics by Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, to novels like "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowry, Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook," and works by Robert Stone. He read philosophy, poetry, history, biographies, memoirs and books like "Gandhi's Truth" by Erik Erikson. "I got outside myself, right? You know, the self indulgence of young people who take themselves too seriously, who have the luxury because they don't really have responsibilities of wondering who they are and should I eat this peach? And suddenly, I was in neighborhoods where people are trying to pay the bills and keep their kids safe and make sure that neighborhoods don't fall apart and they've been laid off. And my job was to help, and the wisdom, the strength, the fortitude, the common sense of the folks I was working with who were all my mother's age or older reminded me that work wasn't about me." 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. While in Chicago, Mr. Obama began writing short stories melancholy, reflective tales inspired by some of the people he met as a community organizer. Those stories and the journals he was keeping would nurture the literary qualities that fuel "A Promised Land": a keen sense of place and mood; searching efforts at self assessment (like wondering whether his decision to run for president stemmed, in part, from a need "to prove myself worthy to a father who had abandoned me, live up to my mother's starry eyed expectations"); and a flair for creating sharply observed, Dickensian portraits of advisers, politicians and foreign leaders. He describes then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as a leader whose voice evinced a "practiced disinterest," indicating "someone accustomed to being surrounded by subordinates and supplicants," and, at the same time, a man who curated his photo ops "with the fastidiousness of a teenager on Instagram." The reading Mr. Obama did in his 20s and 30s, combined with his love of Shakespeare and the Bible and his ardent study of Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr, would shape his long view of history a vision of America as a country in the constant process of becoming, in which, to use the words of the 19th century abolitionist Theodore Parker, frequently quoted by Dr. King, that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." By looking back at history at the great sin of slavery and its continuing fallout while at the same time calling for continued efforts to bring the country closer to a promised land, Dr. King and John Lewis situated the civil rights struggle within a historical continuum, while invoking the larger journey in Scripture from suffering and exile toward redemption. From his studies of these thinkers and activists, Mr. Obama took what he called the "Niebuhrian" lesson that we can have "a cleareyed view of the world and the realities of cruelty and sin and greed and violence, and yet, still maintain a sense of hope and possibility, as an act of will and leap of faith." It's a deeply held conviction that animates Mr. Obama's most powerful speeches, like his commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Selma march and his 2015 "Amazing Grace" speech, delivered in the wake of the massacre at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. That determination to find "hope in the face of uncertainty" also sustains his optimism today he's been buoyed by the engagement of a new generation of young people, demonstrated so powerfully during last summer's George Floyd protests. The personal and the political are intimately entwined in African American literature from the early slave narratives to autobiographies by Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X and while the young Mr. Obama was constructing the philosophical tentpoles of his beliefs, he was also writing a lot in his journal, sorting through the crosscurrents of race and class and family in his own life. 'When I think about how I learned to write, who I mimicked, the voice that always comes to mind the most is James Baldwin.' His belief that Americans are invested in common dreams and can reach beyond their differences a conviction that would later be articulated in his 2004 Democratic convention keynote speech, which introduced him to the country at large not only echoes the ending of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" (in which the narrator concludes that "America is woven of many strands," that "our fate is to become one, and yet many"), but is also an intrinsic part of his family history, with a mother who was born in Kansas and a father who grew up in Kenya. In high school, Mr. Obama says, he and a "roving pack of friends" many of whom felt like outsiders discovered that "storytelling was a way for us to kind of explain ourselves and the world around us, and where we belonged and how we fit in or didn't fit in." Later, trying to get his stories down on paper and find a voice that approximated the internal dialogue in his head, Mr. Obama studied authors he admired. "As much as anybody," he says, "when I think about how I learned to write, who I mimicked, the voice that always comes to mind the most is James Baldwin. I didn't have his talent, but the sort of searing honesty and generosity of spirit, and that ironic sense of being able to look at things, squarely, and yet still have compassion for even people whom he obviously disdained, or distrusted, or was angry with. His books all had a big impact on me." Mr. Obama also learned from writers whose political views differed from his own, like V.S. Naipaul. Though frustrated by Naipaul's "curmudgeonly sort of defense of colonialism," the former president says he was fascinated by the way Naipaul constructed arguments and, "with a few strokes, could paint a portrait of someone and take an individual story or mishap or event, and connect it to larger themes and larger historical currents." So, Mr. Obama adds, "there'd be pieces of folks that you'd kind of copy you steal, you paste, and you know, over time, you get enough practice that you then can trust your own voice." The scholar Fred Kaplan, the author of "Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer," has drawn parallels between Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Obama, pointing out that they share a mastery of language and "a first class temperament" for a president stoic, flexible, willing to listen to different points of view. Like Lincoln's, Mr. Obama's voice in person and on the page is an elastic one, by turns colloquial and eloquent, humorous and pensive, and accommodating both common sense arguments and melancholy meditations (Niagara Falls made Lincoln think of the transience of all life; a drawing in an Egyptian pyramid makes Mr. Obama think how time eventually turns all human endeavors to dust). The two presidents, both trained lawyers with poetic sensibilities, forged their identities and their careers in what Mr. Kaplan calls "the crucible of language." When Mr. Obama was growing up, he remembers, "the very strangeness" of his heritage and the worlds he straddled could make him feel like "a platypus or some imaginary beast," unsure of where he belonged. But the process of writing, he says, helped him to "integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole" and eventually gave him "a pretty good sense" of who he was a self awareness that projected an air of calmness and composure, and would enable him to emerge from the pressure cooker of the White House very much the same nuanced, self critical writer he was when he wrote "Dreams From My Father" in his early 30s. Although Mr. Obama says he didn't have time as president to keep a regular journal, he would jot down accounts of important moments as they transpired. Like the time at a climate summit in Copenhagen, when he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton crashed a meeting of the leaders of China, Brazil, India and South Africa because they were "avoiding me and a deal we were trying to broker that would, ultimately, many years later, lead to the Paris Accords." After the meeting, he wrote down what had been said and what the scene felt like he knew it was a good story. 'You just have to get started. You just put something down. Because nothing is more terrifying than the blank page.' Whereas 20 years ago, Mr. Obama says, he would have needed an army of researchers to help him with a presidential memoir, the internet meant he could simply "tap in 'Obama' and then the date or the issue, and pull up every contemporaneous article or my own speeches, or my own schedule, or my own appearances in an instant." The actual writing remained a painful process, requiring him to really "work at it" and "grind it out." "This is a really important piece of business that I've tried to transmit to my girls and anybody who asks me about writing," he says. "You just have to get started. You just put something down. Because nothing is more terrifying than the blank page." Mr. Obama wrote "A Promised Land" the first of two volumes about his presidency much the same way he's worked on speeches and earlier books. Because he thinks the computer can lend "half baked thoughts the mask of tidiness," he writes his first drafts longhand on yellow legal pads; the act of typing it into the computer essentially becomes a first edit. He says he is "very particular" about his pens, always using black Uni ball Vision Elite rollerball pens with a micro point, and adds that he tends to do his best writing between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.: "I find that the world narrows, and that is good for my imagination. It's almost as if there is a darkness all around and there's a metaphorical beam of light down on the desk, onto the page." "You don't have to be glued to the news broadcasts to sometimes feel as if we're just locked in this Tower of Babel and can't even hear the voices of the people next to us," he says. "But if literature and art are good at "reminding us of our own folly and our own presumptions and of our own selfishness and shortsightedness," he adds, "what books and art and stories can also do is remind you of the joys and hope and beauty that we share." "I think whether you're talking about art or politics or just getting up in the morning and trying to live your life, it's useful to be able to seek out that joy where you can find it and operate on the basis of hope rather than despair. We all have different ways of coping, but I think that the sense of optimism that I have relied on is generally the result of appreciating other people, first and foremost, my own children and my family and my friends. But also the voices that I hear through books and that you hear through song and that tell you you're not alone." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
According to the tacit protocols of gala dressing, women, and not men, are meant to shine. Thus whether by instinct or because that is what their Svengali stylists taught them the best dressed men at the 88th annual Academy Awards ceremony evinced faith in the simplicity of proper evening clothes, with the result that this was among the most stylish Oscars ceremonies in recent years. Asked on the red carpet if he was going to any of the post Oscars parties, Liev Schreiber said, "I'm so exhausted from tying my own bow tie, I'm not sure we'll make it out," underscoring an unvarying truth about the tuxedo and all that goes with it: Guys fear and despise the thing. That is a pity because, as a uniform for formal dressing, it is hard to improve on a centuries old formula constituted of four essential elements. While women confront a daunting array of choices when embarking on such an evening, men have it easy. Imagine having to worry about whether to bare one's shoulders or arms or back, or submit to torso waxing in order to allow for diamond peekaboo abdominal cutouts or decolletage. Think about how much can be concealed by a garment that leaves only head and hands unconcealed. Even the Spanx worn by a surprising number of men are easy to hide beneath a suit. Largely absent were the satin ruffles and Santa fur trim of previous awards shows (Isaac Hayes, Oscars 1971); the widespread deployment of inappropriate four in hand ties; the open collar shirts (Tom Cruise, 2001) better suited to the opening of an insurance policy than a winner's envelope. Gone were the awful frock coats (Russell Crowe, 2001); the hog caller get ups (Billy Bob Thornton, 1997); the tone on tone blunders that are a John Travolta specialty. Missing, too, was the wacko experimentalism that, while it may make sense in other settings, probably has little place at an event as inherently conformist and anachronistic as the Oscars. True, Jared Leto got minor renegade points by wearing a Gucci suit whose lapel and trousers were outlined in contrast red piping accessorized not only with a silk carnation pin and evening pumps embroidered with silver serpents, but also with Alessandro Michele, Gucci's creative director, on his arm. Yet more notable to this viewer's eye than Mr. Leto's inoffensively modish get up was the matinee idol chic of a Dunhill suit as worn by the British actor Henry Cavill; or a taut Prada version that rendered the perennially rumpled looking Benicio Del Toro impeccable; or a structured Alexander McQueen tuxedo worn as casually as sweats by Eddie Redmayne, probably the most innately stylish man in Hollywood; or a crisp white Dolce Gabbana version worn by Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr. (Common to you). Anyone with doubts about the bulletproof utility of a tuxedo had only to look to Jacob Tremblay from "Room." Clad in an immaculate scaled down dinner jacket from Armani, he proved himself a paragon of style at age 9. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
After employees at the online media company Vox Media announced plans to form a union last month, German Lopez, a senior reporter at the company's general news website Vox.com, posted a thread on Twitter that inspired a heated debate more than 1,000 comments in length. In the first tweet, Mr. Lopez said, "I am against VoxUnion." He followed that one by arguing that some writers wanted a union "as protection for laziness." He added that Vox was "a generous company" and "some people want to take advantage of that." Then a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Lopez changed his mind, swayed by the idea that the company's generosity isn't set in stone and that new management could roll back benefits. The organizing effort at Vox is part of a growing union movement at more than a dozen digital publishers. When they entered the media fray, these and other online players sought to shake up the status quo, but while their traffic soared, their profits didn't. Now they confront the same job cutbacks and financial uncertainty as their more established brethren. Employees at now defunct Gawker Media joined the labor union the Writers Guild of America East in the summer of 2015. Members of the editorial staffs at Vice Media, ThinkProgress and HuffPost followed suit, organizing unions that their companies recognized and that subsequently ratified contracts. Writers and editors at other digital publications including The Intercept, Salon, Thrillist and MTV News have since affiliated themselves with the Writers Guild of America East, citing a need for better wages and benefits. Their unions have been recognized by the people who run those companies and are negotiating contracts with management. Daniel Marans, a reporter at HuffPost, said the treatment of employees at digital media companies should not remain stuck in a time when websites were small and scrappy, staffed by younger workers who were happy to see their names in pixels. "That comes to things like transparency on pay, having a decent pay scale that allows a ladder of sustainability where you can support yourself on such an income, and having due process and a guarantee of severance in the case of layoffs," Mr. Marans said. Kim Kelly, an editor at Noisey, Vice Media's music and culture section, said fair wages had played a central role in Vice Media employees' decision to go union. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. "People were fed up and broke and anxious about the future, and the union gave them a way to take control and force things to change," Ms. Kelly said. It's a labor model that has been in place for years among the big media operators. The New York Times, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal all have unions. That digital players are moving in that direction reflects the broader business troubles in the media industry as a whole. Digital writers and editors live with the uncomfortable possibility that their bosses could enact a sudden change in strategy, resulting in layoffs. In recent months, 50 employees at Mashable were let go after the digital publisher Ziff Davis bought the website for 50 million, BuzzFeed fired 100 business and British editorial employees after missing its 2017 revenue targets, and Refinery29 laid off 34 staff members. "They just open their email inbox and go, 'Oh, dear, what next?'" he said. The owners of several digital publishers even those with a decidedly liberal editorial voice have opposed their employees' attempts to form unions. Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, has repeatedly spoken against the need for a union at his company. In October, employees of the New York news sites Gothamist and DNAinfo voted in favor of forming a union through a National Labor Relations Board formal vote. Rather than negotiate an agreement with a union, the websites' owner, Joe Ricketts, closed both sites. And Mr. Lopez, the Vox reporter, said he had received text and Twitter messages from people both inside Vox Media and outside thanking him for his tweets, saying they were too scared to voice these concerns and were happy he was bringing up counterpoints to unionizing. Vox Media's publisher, Melissa Bell, said in a statement: "We've been in productive discussions with W.G.A.E. for the past few weeks with the collective goal of ensuring that our company is one of the best places to work in all of media. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with our growing team on building the strongest modern media company out there." Mr. Lopez said he had taken his doubts to the Vox Media union organizing committee, which explained to him that if the company was bought out or the current management retired, the generous benefits and comfortable salaries could disappear. On Dec. 14, he wrote on Twitter that he had signed a union card, but added that the onslaught of Twitter comments was not what had changed his mind. The population of Twitter users who skew to the left "is pretty big and obviously pro union," Mr. Lopez said. "In some ways, I understand the response. They're fighting for unions in a broad political and philosophical sense, and one guy downing on unions is pretty annoying." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Simon Spurr stood on his tippy toes to fetch a shoe box from a wardrobe in his West Village apartment. There were 20 dark blue boxes there in an otherwise clutter free aerie given over to Modernist furniture, coffee table books and art. As he cracked open the box, the smell of fresh Italian leather filled the room. "Beautiful," Mr. Spurr said, as he caressed the handmade, black and white horsehair Chelsea boot that he spent the last year perfecting. This 1,195 boot is not only an example from the first run of a luxury footwear brand, March NYC, that Mr. Spurr is unveiling this week, but it also reflects the 43 year old's return to the fashion spotlight. Five years ago, Mr. Spurr was an ascendant star in the city's fashion firmament. Alongside Patrik Ervell, Billy Reid and Thom Browne, he was a promising young designer in a rapidly expanding men's wear market. Handsome and with a plummy English accent, Mr. Spurr embodied a sort of fine tailored Savile Row meets rock 'n' roll swagger that bewitched American men's wear. But his progress ended suddenly in 2012, when Mr. Spurr shocked the fashion industry and announced that he was walking away from his brand. Now he is trying to make a creative comeback. "It's basically like being back at square one again," he said. Mr. Spurr's meteoric rise began in 1997, when he landed a job designing jersey knits at Nautica straight out of Middlesex University in London. His sharp tailoring and rakish flair led to a stint with Hedi Slimane at Yves Saint Laurent, before he was plucked to head men's wear design at Calvin Klein's CK line in New York. Then, from 2003 to 2005, Mr. Spurr was the design director for Ralph Lauren's Purple Label. In 2006, he set out on his own, with the label Spurr. The idea was to start with something simple, like denim, and expand every season until he reached a full range of men's wear. He would show at New York Fashion Week, earn accolades, expand his retail reach, dip into accessories, perhaps, and, if all went well, be bought out by an established fashion house. For a while, he seemed well on his way. The 38 pairs of his jeans he sewed by hand sold out immediately at Bergdorf Goodman. He added sportswear the next year, and suiting the year after that. In 2010, he started Simon Spurr, a line of elevated suiting, and showed his first runway collection. But then things went sideways. In 2012, a few days after he was nominated for a Council of Fashion Designers of America award for men's wear designer of the year, Mr. Spurr announced that he was quitting his brand. At the time, he cited an unexplained disagreement with Judd Nydes, his business partner. Even now, Mr. Spurr remains circumspect about the falling out. But he did say that he and Mr. Nydes disagreed about the brand's direction (he wanted to go luxe, while Mr. Nydes wanted to go mass) and that Mr. Nydes had surreptitiously trademarked the name Simon Spurr. "They told me they owned my name," Mr. Spurr said. "But I will never be owned. So I walked." Mr. Nydes, who retains control of the defunct label, did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Spurr banished himself. "I took six months to get my head together and then began looking for work," he said. He was the creative director for a couple of English brands, including Kent Curwen, before spending much of 2016 traveling (Cannes, Burning Man, the Bahamas) and reclaiming, if not his name, at least his passions. When it came time for his next project, Mr. Spurr shunned men's wear, with its high manufacturing cost and smaller market, for the more profitable world of footwear. "That it's unisex makes the project a lot more financially feasible," he said. He was also put off by the constant churn of men's wear seasons. "I wanted to do something that lasts." The March NYC boots come in two styles Chelsea boot and zip Cuban heel and are handmade in a small factory in Reggio Emilia, Italy, from high quality calfskin, which may explain the aggressive pricing ( 795 to 1,195). Unlike his last venture, this one is self funded. "I relied on a combination of savings, my severance packages and selling old clothes," he said. In addition to boots, Mr. Spurr has branched out into furniture design. An edition of five modern chairs, crafted out of Carrara marble, is currently on a cargo ship from Italy, and he hopes to sell them for 28,000 each. "They're between art and furniture, but you're definitely not supposed to sit on them," he said. Still, Mr. Spurr has not ruled out a return to men's wear. He is fielding offers from two fashion houses, he said, waiting for the right fit. "I've also got 20 years in the men's wear field," he said. "I still have a lot left to say." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LOS ANGELES During a 1960s renaissance, California's public university system came to be seen as a model for the rest of the country and an economic engine for the state. Seven new campuses opened, statewide enrollment doubled, and state spending on higher education more than doubled. The man widely credited with the ascendance was Gov. Edmund G. Brown, known as Pat. Decades of state budget cuts have chipped away at California's community colleges, California State University and the University of California, once the state's brightest beacons of pride. But now Pat Brown's son, Gov. Jerry Brown, seems determined to restore some of the luster to the institution that remains a key part of his father's legacy. Last year, he told voters that a tax increase was the only way to avoid more years of drastic cuts. Now, with the tax increase approved and universities anticipating more money from the state for the first time in years, the second Governor Brown is a man eager to take an active role in shaping the University of California and California State University systems. Governor Brown holds a position on the board of trustees for both Cal State and UC. Since November, he has attended every meeting of both boards, asking about everything from dormitories to private donations and federal student loans. He is twisting arms on issues he has long held dear, like slashing executive pay and increasing teaching requirements for professors ideas that have long been met with considerable resistance from academia. But Mr. Brown, himself a graduate of University of California, Berkeley, has never been a man to shrink from a debate. "The language we use when talking about the university must be honest and clear," he said in a recent interview. "Words like 'quality' have no apparent meaning that is obvious. These are internally defined to meet institutional needs rather than societal objectives." California's public colleges so central to the state's identity that their independence is enshrined in its Constitution have long been seen as gateways to the middle class. Mr. Brown said his mother had attended the schools "basically free." Over the last five years tuition at UC and Cal State schools has shot up, though the colleges remain some of the less costly in the country. Governors and legislatures are trying to exert more influence on state colleges, often trying to prod the schools to save money, matters that some say are "arguably best left to the academic institution," said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow of public policy and higher education at Berkeley. So far, Mr. Brown has not taken such an aggressive approach, but half of the 250 million increase for the university systems is contingent on a tuition freeze. "He's creating stability, but basically he's looking at cost containment with an eye on the public constituency," Mr. Douglass said. "But the system has been through a very long period of disinvestment, and this may meet an immediate political need, but it is not what is going to help in the long term." Over all, the University of California receives 44 percent less from the state than it did in 1990, accounting for inflation. The governor's proposed increase still leaves the schools with about 625 million less than they received in 2007. At the same time, a record number of students applied for admissions to the system's 10 campuses for next fall. While the California State University system has capped freshman enrollment, administrators at the UC system, which has about 190,000 undergraduate students, have been reluctant to formally do so, in part to prevent limiting access to in state students. Spurred by grumbling from voters, legislators have repeatedly complained that too many out of state students are enrolling in the University of California, arguing that they take spots away from talented local students. But others argue that without the out of state students, who make up less than 9 percent of undergraduates and pay much more in tuition, the university would have to make even deeper cuts. Timothy White, the newly appointed chancellor for California State University and the former chancellor at UC Riverside, said the systems were facing a fundamental dilemma over access. "Our budget is not going to allow us to grow enrollment at all, so I'm concerned that we are going to disappoint a lot of people in a lot of communities," he said. So far, the governor has focused his attention on whether the universities should be offering more courses online, requiring faculty to teach more classes and cutting administrators' pay. His plea that faculty members, particularly at the University of California, teach more undergraduate classes has been met with resistance, with one trustee fretting that doing so would "turn this place into a junior college in about 15 years." Faculty members say that requiring more teaching would take away from crucial research areas, which will bring in roughly 5 billion this year. "You can talk abstractly about faculty teaching more, but that begs the question of what you give up by requiring them to teach more," said Daniel Dooley, the senior vice president for external relations for the University of California. Mr. Dooley, who worked in Mr. Brown's first administration in the 1970s, has had several conversations with the governor about the state colleges. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
"Must you fight the same fight again? Do you not recall how it ends?" In the season premiere of the Frasers' American adventure, "Outlander" prompted big questions: Why bring Claire and Jamie to this place, at this moment in history? To what purpose did they cross the ocean into the tumult of colonial America? The season has struggled to answer. For one thing, it spent more narrative energy on bringing familiar faces back into the Frasers' circle than on giving those characters much to do. Some of those reunions were satisfying, as when Brianna joined her family through the stones. Some were convenient, as when Lord John moved in next door. And then there was Bonnet, whose ability to appear in every aspect of the Fraser story strained credulity. All this busy work pushed some characters into the background. Take Ian particularly noticeable this episode after he agreed to stay with the Mohawk in exchange for Roger. The show made time for a heart wrenching goodbye, and the actors John Bell and Sam Heughan did a great job. But that moment brought into relief how scattered this season has been. And Claire's darting in for a last second goodbye reminded us that she was practically demoted to a supporting act for large stretches of this season. That is even more unfortunate considering that when Claire was at the fore, it was usually during strained, and often failed, attempts to engage race issues. Slavery didn't stop anyone from accepting hospitality at River Run even Brianna. Jamie honored the Cherokee's fight against land grabs, only to claim ten thousand acres. When the Cherokee were upset by that, Jamie won them over with a classic white savior move. Some beats like this episode's "Cowboys and Indians" opening vignette suggest the show is aware of the fraught history here. But watching this episode, that's hard to imagine. In the Mohawk village, Claire discovers her necklace belonged to Otter Tooth, a fellow time traveler. He came back to warn the Mohawk against encroaching colonials. Many dismissed him, but some remembered his words a generation later: "You will be forgotten. The nations of the Iroquois will be no more. No one will tell your stories. Everything you are will be lost." There's a lot going on in that pronouncement. As a warning about genocide, it is correct. There is also a fatalism about the disappearance of culture that touches on a discussion as old as America. (I'm not in a position to parse the issues of erasure and cultural preservation this line touches upon, but Native American nations still exist, and projects like "Reel Injun" and "American Indians in Children's Literature" have explored the importance and impact of these stories and of who gets to tell them.) One thing is for sure: It's hard to fault Otter Tooth's point here, given how things play out. As Claire bargains for help with rescuing Roger, she promises a small group of Mohawk to "help you preserve the memory of the man who fought for your future." This word salad oath heralds a rush to put this whole plot to bed. The jailbreak collapses in violence and their Mohawk ally is banished. Claire and Jamie offer no assistance. And as soon as Roger is back, the episode drops the Mohawk entirely, returning to the plantation and the Frasers. Sure, the Frasers are the center of this story, but after learning about the crushing tragedy of Otter Tooth's mission and after the disaster the Frasers wrought among the Mohawk, cutting back to Brianna's labor and her inevitable reunion with Roger in the last act felt a little hollow. "Outlander" is clear about the difficulty of changing history: After two seasons of striving, Culloden still happened. But it is equally clear that individual choices count, and that working toward a better future gives the present meaning. Several moments this season made Claire aware of the precarious position of Native Americans: the government's bigotry, Otter Tooth's ghost, Adawehi's murder, settlers' violent suspicions. This episode made her debt to history explicit and immediately forgot it Otter Tooth's worst fear coming true. So much for "New world, new ending." This season had its moments. The Fraser fallout was compelling, Lord John's ascent to Best Beard in the Colonies was fun, and some supporting characters got moments to shine. But over all, the season was marked by scattered storytelling, rushed relationships and engaging history to no good end. Let's hope next season finds focus, and remembers a few of those promises. Done well, the cyclical reappearance of characters in each other's lives reflects something deeper: inevitability, mythology, the rhythms we understand and expect in stories. Otherwise, you get the Eagle River scene in "Hot Shots." (Watch Roger process the news that the man who raped Brianna is the only other person he knew in the entire 18th century.) "How could you think such a thing?" The manhandling, Roger. The public arguing and manhandling is how. Duncan Lacroix and Kennedy sell the connection between Murtagh and Jocasta. That said, Jocasta has been an amoral force who isn't bidding for our sympathy, and putting her with Murtagh is definitely a bid. I wonder if the "it's better to fight than stand by and do naught while good people suffer" stuff changes her mind about the slave owning. It was also a little jarring to see Murtagh in bed with Jocasta immediately on the heels of this call to action then again, it's not as if watching Brianna and Phaedre make friends was any less awkward. The ethical implications of hanging out on a plantation is an issue this season just could not manage. I wonder about the timeline of the parallel Fraser plots. Obviously they kept back Roger's big rescue and Ian's farewell for the finale, but that trip was several months north and several more back. How long were Claire and Jamie trudging back without Ian or Roger while Brianna was hanging out with Lord John? Was Roger learning about Brianna's pregnancy while she was in labor? It's interesting to think about how a less elliptical chronology might have changed the season's pace. Imagine several episodes of Claire and Jamie riding home alone, worried about Ian and Brianna, with Roger nowhere to be seen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
For Simona Halep, Deciding to Not Play Made Her Want to Return Even More With a new roof on its main court, new dates and few fans, this year's French Open is a world away from last year's French Open. While the reigning women's champion Ashleigh Barty was hoisting a beer and jumping out of her seat in far off Brisbane at an Australian rules football match, Simona Halep, the favorite to succeed her, was crushing any suspense out of a rematch at Roland Garros. The opponent was the American teenager Amanda Anisimova. In 2019, Anisimova broke through in Paris, upsetting Halep in the quarterfinals 6 2, 6 4 and dropping her racket on the red clay in shocked delight after hitting a winner on match point. But that was on a sunbaked day in June, not a gloomy afternoon in September. It was a time when Anisimova was in a more carefree place in her life and Halep was still lugging what she perceived as the burden of being the defending French Open champion after finally breaking through to win her first major in 2018. But the top seeded Halep looked like a champion back on a mission Friday, fighting off five break points in her opening service game and then accelerating to win 6 0, 6 1 and advance to the fourth round in just 53 minutes. "Every defeat is important in my opinion, because you realize what you did wrong," Halep said. "I got better after that match from last year. I was very, very disappointed, and if I remember really well, it is because of the way I played, not because I lost the match." Halep and her coach Darren Cahill had the right game plan, with Halep tighter to the baseline and frequently hitting behind the 5 foot 11 Anisimova to exploit the gaps in her footwork and keep her off balance. "When she suffers a loss, Simona analyzes it pretty well," Cahill said. "She might lose to a player two times in a row but she won't go down playing the same way." But Anisimova, 19, was still far from her best. She went for too much too soon, missing too many first serves and hitting the net with her powerful groundstrokes again and again as the frustration and the unforced errors more than 30 in all piled up. She looked tight from the start, and though she has the big weapons to succeed at this level, she lacks the aim and the confidence right now. "This year has been very difficult for me, especially mentally," Anisimova said. "I'm doing a lot better now, so I'm just happy. Honestly, today I'm just looking at the positives. This isn't the worst thing in the world for me." Anisimova's father and longtime coach, Konstantin, died suddenly of a heart attack in August last year at age 52 not long after Anisimova's parents had separated. She withdrew from the 2019 United States Open and returned to the circuit later in the year but has struggled to match her earlier results. Her earnings have increased dramatically since she signed major sponsorship deals, including one with Nike, but she is still searching for consistency on court. She has shuffled through traveling coaches this season while continuing to work with e mentor Nick Saviano when she is at home in Miami. Halep, 29, needed time to find the keys to playing her best when it matters most. Her counterpunching game demands great focus and a high work rate. Her nerves were sometimes brittle; her body language and running dialogue too often negative. But she is now a major threat on all surfaces. Her straight set victory over Serena Williams on grass in last year's Wimbledon final was her most immaculate performance under major pressure. "That match was perfect," she said this week. But clay remains her most natural habitat, even if she also played often on hardcourts growing up in Romania. The heavy, cool conditions in Paris this year are not her nirvana, however. Cahill says she prefers when the ball bounces higher and moves faster. "A bit like Rafa," he said of Rafael Nadal. "But we've worked long and hard on knowing that it's going to going to be like this for the whole tournament. During May, when the French Open usually happens you get individual days like this. You don't have a tournament like this." Halep often trains on clay in the preseason. "I just think it's a much better building surface for your game," Cahill said. "And also for your leg strength, for crafting points and for your education in tennis." But she has had even more time than usual on clay in this strange, disrupted season.After winning a title in Dubai in February, she needed an extended break because of a foot injury but that turned into a six month break when the coronavirus pandemic shut down the tour and much of the rest of the sports world. She let her foot heal and did not play tennis at all for nearly two months and has been training almost exclusively on clay since returning. She skipped the abbreviated hardcourt season and the U.S. Open because of concerns about traveling, which was also in line with her decision to skip the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro because of concern about the Zika virus. "She would always err on the side of safety when it comes to those types of decisions, so she has no regrets," Cahill said. She was still eager to come back. "The pandemic actually showed me how much I love tennis and how much I want to get back on tour," she said. She has yet to lose since the restart, winning the Prague Open and Italian Open and extending her clay court winning streak to 13 on Friday. Next up: a fourth round match with another teenager, 19 year old Iga Swiatek of Poland. Focusing on the tournament at hand seems particularly appropriate at this French Open. The men's tour still has big events ahead this year, including the ATP Finals in London. But the women's tour has canceled its finals, scheduled to be held in Shenzhen, China, and confirmed on Friday that it will not move the tournament elsewhere in 2020. Some tennis stars have already checked out for the season. Barty, who won a local club golf tournament near Brisbane last month, skipped both the U.S. Open and the French Open because of concerns about having to quarantine and being able to prepare properly. Halep chose to make Paris her only major target, and on Friday as she eagerly read the flow of the play on clay like an expert, that looked like the right move. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Dr. J. Mario Molina, the outspoken chief executive of the California health insurance company founded by his father, was abruptly removed from his position at Molina Healthcare, according to an announcement by the company on Tuesday. His brother, John, the company's chief financial officer, was also immediately replaced. Dr. Molina, the subject of a profile in The New York Times earlier this year, was one of the foremost critics of the steps taken by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress to overhaul the federal health care law. Under his leadership, Molina, which specializes in providing care to low income individuals under the Medicaid program, had become a mainstay of the individual insurance markets created by the law. The company signed up about one million customers in the state marketplaces, and it offers Medicaid plans in 12 states and Puerto Rico. Attempts to reach Dr. Molina for comment were unsuccessful, and the company declined to make any executives available for interviews. But Molina had been struggling financially in the individual marketplaces and stunned investors when it reported that it had lost hundreds of millions of dollars last year, for which executives blamed a flawed government formula. Dr. Molina repeatedly warned that the company could withdraw from the markets if federal officials failed to make changes to the program. Molina's stock fell significantly on the news of its 2016 results. The ouster of two brothers did not seem to be an indication that the company's financial performance in the marketplaces had worsened, with executives emphasizing on a call with analysts on Tuesday that its results had improved this year and were in line with earlier expectations. Like other insurers, Molina also stressed the uncertainty over the individual market's future, pointing to the lack of clarity over whether the federal government will provide critical funding for low income customers. Just last week, Dr. Molina had written a letter to Congress urging them to fund the subsidies. "We are currently evaluating all our options," said Joseph W. White, who had been the company's chief accounting officer. He will temporarily fill the role of chief executive. He was also named the company's chief financial officer as part of the management changes. Like other insurers, Molina indicated it would make decisions about whether to sell plans and at what price in the coming weeks, although Mr. White said it would be difficult to continue without the subsidies. Analysts on the conference call Tuesday pressed for an explanation as to why the Molinas were removed, and were told that the board wanted to improve the company's performance and pay more attention to day to day details. Dale B. Wolf, a former health insurance executive and board director who was named chairman as part of the changes, assured analysts that the company's "business remains strong." "It was just our sense, all things considered, that this was necessary and a right thing to do," he said. Mr. Wolf declined to specify any further changes Molina might be contemplating. The company said it would be conducting a search for a chief executive. The Molina brothers remain directors, and Dr. Molina is up for re election at the next annual meeting, which was postponed until next week. The family no longer has a majority ownership in the company, founded by Dr. C. David Molina in 1980. On Tuesday, analysts speculated that the board could also be preparing the company for a possible sale. The megamergers by some of the nation's largest health insurers, including Anthem and Aetna, were blocked by the Justice Department as being harmful to consumers. As a result, the large insurers remain on the prowl for possible acquisitions. Among the potential buyers, according to Ana Gupte, an analyst with Leerink Partners, is WellCare Health Plans or Aetna, although UnitedHealth Group, Anthem and Centene could also be interested if they thought they could pass the possible regulatory scrutiny. Molina's shares rose sharply on the news, closing Tuesday at 59.75 a share, an increase of about 18 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
More than 3,000 people gathered at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Thursday to celebrate Toni Morrison, a giant of American literature whose work won acclaim for its groundbreaking style and complex exploration of black American identity. Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Fran Lebowitz, Edwidge Danticat and Ta Nehisi Coates, among other speakers from the worlds of literature, journalism and the arts, shared memories of their time with Morrison and her impact on their work and lives. "She took the canon and broke it open," said Winfrey, who selected many of Morrison's novels for her book club. Reading them, Winfrey said, she experienced "a kind of emancipation, a liberation, an ascension to another level of understanding." For Coates, author of the novel "The Water Dancer" and nonfiction that includes "Between the World and Me" and "We Were Eight Years in Power," Morrison taught him that "Black is beautiful, but it ain't always pretty," he said, and that good work sometimes required ugliness. Morrison, who died in August at 88, published 11 novels as well as children's books and essay collections over her career. She was praised for her style, which sometimes contained a mythic quality, incorporating multiple voices and story lines and exploring the legacy of slavery in incandescent prose. 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. A number of Morrison's early novels are now considered classics, including "The Bluest Eye" (1970), "Sula" (1973) and "Song of Solomon" (1977), for which she won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Morrison was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993, and also received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for "Beloved," widely considered her masterwork. Winfrey recalled feeling star struck when she first met Morrison. It was at Maya Angelou's house in 1993, at a party to celebrate Morrison's Nobel Prize. "My head and my heart were swirling," Winfrey said. "Every time I looked at her I couldn't even speak. I had to catch my breath." When Winfrey noticed Morrison trying to get the waiter's attention for some water, she almost "tripped over myself trying to get up from the table to get it for her," she said. The commentator Fran Lebowitz, a longtime friend of Morrison's, recounted times when Morrison would comfort her after a bad review. Morrison herself was impervious to criticism, Lebowitz said, so she "assigned myself the task of holding Toni's grudges for her." Toni Morrison: a writer who "enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand." Read our critic's appraisal. Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Morrison was survived by her son Harold Ford Morrison and three grandchildren. Before she started writing her own books in her late 30s, she was an editor at Random House, working with such writers as Angela Davis, Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara. "Editing was her job, but it was also her activism, her community work," said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. Davis echoed this idea, saying that though Morrison did not march or participate in protest, she wanted to "make sure there was a written record of those who did march and put themselves on the line." "So many of us feel that we had found ourselves through, because of and in relation to Toni and her work," Davis said. For those who knew Morrison, she said, the greatest challenge is "to envision the world without the glorious laughter of our dear, dear Toni." St. John the Divine was filled to capacity by admirers of Morrison's work. The mood was at times jovial, at times somber. Some attendees snapped their fingers and clapped their hands, while others bowed their heads. The Rev. Thurselle C. Williams came from New Jersey for the event but said she would have traveled much farther. "When she passed, I knew wherever there was going to be a memorial, no matter where it was, I needed to be there," she said. Morrison's work, she added, "not only shaped the lives of African Americans but helped them understand themselves even more." Waiting outside the church in a line that wrapped around the corner, Arielle Isack, a 21 year old student at nearby Columbia University, said that through books like "Sula" and "Beloved," Morrison had given her "access to a reality" she would not have been privy to otherwise. "You learn the history of black people in America, but I feel like she brought me there," Isack said. Another Columbia student, Delia Anderson Colson, called it a historic event that she could not miss. In a moving speech, the novelist and National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward recalled the horrors of slavery with detailed descriptions of Africans being stolen from their homes. "We wandering children heard Toni Morrison's voice, and she saved us," she said. She did it by telling her readers, "You are worthy to be seen," Ward said. "You are worthy to be heard. You are worthy to be sat with, to be walked beside." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LONDON If any British artist has reached the status of a national treasure, it's Grayson Perry, who is adored both by art critics and by those who rarely step into a gallery. He won the Turner Prize in 2003 for his subversive pots, and has since become known as much as a television personality as an artist, presenting documentaries on the changing nature of masculinity in Britain and the country's persistent class divides. Now Perry, 60, has turned his attention to how the British public is dealing with lockdown, hosting a show called "Grayson's Art Club" on Channel 4. Each week, Perry chooses a theme and asks viewers to send in art they have made. He and his wife, the psychotherapist Philippa Perry, also make works themselves, and talk to celebrities and members of the public about their output over video calls. At the end of the pandemic, a selection of the works will be exhibited. When Perry asked for portraits, someone submitted a bust of Chris Witty, England's chief medical officer, who was then often on television advising people to wash their hands. For an episode themed on "fantasy," someone sent in a painting of a closed pub. And another show asked for works based on the view outside people's windows. In response, one woman sent in a painting of trash cans, and another painted the closed dental office opposite her home. "I have very bad tooth ache," she said in her video submission. The show is filmed by cameras installed in Perry's London studio, and the show's director sits in a tent in the nearby garden during filming. Viewers see Perry working and talking enthusiastically with his wife and guests about the public's submissions. In the interview, Perry also talked about the compulsion to make art while in lockdown, the mental health benefits of creativity and the future of Britain's cultural institutions. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Why has there been such a boom in art making during the pandemic? Art is a process. It's expressing yourself and doing something, and throwing yourself into it and getting better at it and trying again. That's what it's about. And people are responding to that now. It's going right back to cave painting: You pick a charcoal stick from the fire and draw on the wall. There's something very primal about it, and it's a lot more accessible than other crafts. You can do it with your phone, you can do it with some sticks from the garden, your pen and a pit of old paper. So you don't think it's about people wanting to get their emotions or anxieties out? Not really. How art works is really interesting. It comes from our unconscious, a lot of it. And we're communicating in ways we're not completely aware of when we're making it. How did that appear when you asked the public for depictions of animals? I was once judging some prisoner art, and you wouldn't believe the number of eagles and tigers and symbols of freedom and wildness that came up. It was a really strong trope. The ones we got this time were all dogs, cats and the birds out of the windows. There were very few wild and exotic creatures. For a lot of people those pets are the only ones that are around, and so they are symbolic of having a friend, a family. When you've been looking at the art people have sent in, what themes have you noticed? The thing that crops up the most are the headlines: The virus, the National Health Service, masks, the P.P.E. (personal protective equipment), the rainbows. All those things are endlessly repeated, but we only choose a tiny selection of the works that are sent in. I don't think people want to look at pictures of coronavirus all the time. A lot have revealed stories. What's stuck out for you? There was a lad called Alex who made these little creatures. He was quite autistic, and like most autistic people he liked routine and calmness, so I suppose the lockdown was a bit traumatic for him. And he had this comfort that every Saturday he made four figures, and it was one of the things in the confusion and disruption that kept him calm. I thought that was really poignant, such a good example of the power of making things and disappearing into a world of his own creation. The government here has spoken a lot about the importance of keeping physical distance, but the mental side of this experience is being discussed far less. Oh, there's going to be a massive (problem) the longer it goes on. If you have anxiety, lying in bed in the middle of night, thinking about something, (normally) we wake up in the morning saying, "Why was I so worried about that?" The problem with lockdown is we're not waking up from it it goes on and on. So art can be a help in this moment? Your show seems to be another example of just how important culture has become at the moment. There's a lovely post in The Paris Review about how unimportant culture's become in lockdown. We've got this whole thing about key workers now, and I always wonder if there'll be this generation of kids growing up: "When I grow up, I want to be a food supplier." Because suddenly these guys are the heroes making the world run. And I think it's interesting that culture's had to be put on the back burner a bit. The British government has been criticized for paying little attention to how the culture sector is going to emerge from lockdown. How do you feel about what's been happening? For me personally, and all the institutions I'm involved with, it's tragic. They're all struggling with how they're going to deal with it. And particularly things like theaters they're going to be the last thing that comes back to life. It's happening to everybody and every institution, so people are going to be forgiving of it. They're going to say, "Get it together when you can, and pay for it when you can." Culture is a collaborative exercise, and I think everybody will do their bit to help it grow. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Most Americans recovering from Covid 19 can come out of isolation without further testing to show they no longer carry the coronavirus, federal health officials said on Wednesday. Instead, patients may be judged to have recovered if 10 days have passed since they first felt ill; they no longer have any symptoms, such as shortness of breath or diarrhea; and they have not had a fever for 24 hours without taking fever reducing medicine. The new recommendations are not rules but guidelines intended for patients, doctors and health policymakers. The revisions should help relieve the burden on the country's testing system, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Previously, one way to get out of isolation was to have two negative diagnostic tests, also called PCR tests, for the virus taken 24 hours apart. But now there are testing delays of up to two weeks in parts of the country, and numerous studies show that mildly ill people are almost never infectious 10 days after symptoms begin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
If the thought processes within Twyla Tharp's dances could be written down in book form, it would be the world's most densely packed, intelligent, artful guide to high entertainment dance making. Already the author of a series of American dance classics, she is celebrating her 50th anniversary as a choreographer by presenting a double bill of premieres. This week, that program, after two months of touring the United States, has reached the David H. Koch Theater (though it's the Joyce Theater that's presenting it). The first half is to Bach ("Preludes and Fugues"), the second to jazz ("Yowzie"). Both halves of the program leave me at once cold and irritated and yet throughout the New York premiere on Tuesday, I kept thinking, "How very much she knows about the art of making dances." The mind within the movement is exceptionally fast, accomplished, diverse, unpredictable. Solos, duets and trios happen at different speeds simultaneously only to melt into a unison ensemble. Symmetry, asymmetry, peripheral space: Ms. Tharp draws on a lexicon of contrasting resources; at times she aims movement to address the audience, while at others she focuses it as if the fourth wall were down. Ballet, modern, ballroom, slapstick: A plethora of styles fluently coexist. You sense not just the experience of all her career but lessons learned, too, from watching choreographers who have gone before. Does this make it sound as if this is merely dancing as virtuoso organization? The opposite proves true. This is performance as bravery in action. You can see how boldly the 12 Tharp dancers all vividly individual seize the moment. They spin and then stop on a dime, crash bang! to the floor, happily hold long balances, casually leap and leap again as if over a brink. There's something silent movie about Tharpism. (Each half of the program is introduced by choreographed fanfares, to music by John Zorn; and the dancers enter to these with the heightened vitality of beloved silver screen players.) On Tuesday night, the easy courage of her dancers reminded me how Gloria Swanson entered the lion's den for Cecil B. DeMille and how Harold Lloyd hung on to the hands of a clock above the street below. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Last year, more than 31 million people visited the Caribbean, more than half of them from the United States. I was one of them. Together, we contributed 59 billion to the region's 2019 gross domestic product accounting for a whopping 50 to 90 percent of the G.D.P. for most of the countries, according to the International Monetary Fund. I admit that in moments of pandemic weariness I have been one of those people eyeing cheap tickets to the Caribbean, wondering when I might feel ready to jump on a flight. Now, though, our business comes with a mortal threat that for the sake of a vacation we will bring the coronavirus to islands that are ill prepared to handle a major outbreak. But staying home could be equally ruinous. The Covid 19 lockdown and the severity of the epidemic in the United States has been a disaster beyond any hurricane for the Caribbean economy. The pandemic has closed airports and cruise ship docks, shut down restaurants and dive shops and deprived the Caribbean of tens of billions of dollars. "To not have visitors arriving for any period of time, but particularly for an extended period of time, has brought immense hardship to a number of people throughout the Caribbean," said Hugh Riley, the former head of the Caribbean Tourism Office, and a partner with Portfolio Marketing Group, which represents some islands. "Caribbean countries face an important dilemma: Try to hermetically seal their borders from visitors until there's an effective vaccine, or tackle the risks of restarting tourism now. It is the classic risk/reward decision," he said. As of August 3, 22 islands in the region have reopened to tourism, with 14 allowing visitors from the United States with negative Covid 19 tests and, usually, periods of quarantine. It has not always gone smoothly: The Bahamas allowed Americans to visit beginning in July, slammed the door shut as coronavirus cases surged in that nation, reopened and then this week shut down again, indicative of the efforts to manage a moving crisis. Puerto Rico opened to Americans from the mainland on July 15, but pushed that date back to August 15 after a weekend of viral videos showing incoming visitors ignoring mask and social distancing rules. On the other end of the spectrum, Barbados is offering a 12 month visa to any American interested in moving a work from home office to the island. Tourists looking to escape to a coronavirus free tropical island have a responsibility to weigh the risks and take precautions. So does the airline industry, says Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of St. Lucia and a former airline executive nominated by CARICOM, the 20 nation Caribbean consortium, and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States to develop recommendations for reopening the region. Mr. Chastanet has been urging the airlines to push for the development and implementation of rapid preboarding airport testing for all passengers. "You have to have testing sites, the way you have a Dunkin' Donuts kiosk in every airport," he said. "The airlines in many ways acted like they had ostrich syndrome, and said it is somebody else's problem, but ultimately it is their problem. They have to use their advocacy strength to make it happen." As Caribbean tourism exploded and got cheaper, local tour operators raked in money, but faced unexpected problems. Tropical infrastructure, local police and medical systems were overwhelmed on some islands even before the virus. One island friend, a divemaster at a major site, who asked that his name not be used for fear of losing his job, told me he has seen increasingly obese, relatively unhealthy American tourists who feel entitled to be squished into neoprene suits and taken to the depths as cruise lines and cheap tours market scuba diving once reserved for scientists, Navy SEALs and the ultrawealthy and sporty to all. The Caribbean is the biggest source of business for the global cruise industry, which is notoriously callous about the environment. Cruise lines were the first global heralds of the coronavirus disaster and will likely be the last travel industry to come back once the virus is under control. The cruise industry always had the upper hand on the islands. When a cruise ship docks and thousands of people are disgorged, the impression of prosperity is illusory. Most of the islands pay a per head fee to the cruise lines for each passenger who disembarks, the cruise ships are notoriously bad for reefs, and they have a stranglehold on the discretionary dollars their passengers are spending. "Everything that can be sold on board is already sold, and anyplace on the island that could benefit has already made arrangements with the cruise company," said Noel Mignott, a former deputy director of tourism for Jamaica and a founding partner of Portfolio Marketing Group. "If one good thing could come of Covid, I would be encouraged to see governments take this opportunity to renegotiate the relationship with the cruise lines. And if I was a cruise line, I would wave that green flag and try to be as good as I can to the environment if only to say we are not dumping our garbage in the ocean two miles off Ocho Rios." The Dutch island of Bonaire is one of the ports of call for behemoth and often super discounted cruise ships plying the Caribbean. In the last few years, two building size ships have daily disgorged up to 4,000 passengers at a time during the cruising season. The ships have sometimes sparked food shortages by taking up dock space needed for cargo. Now, in the pandemic lull, tour providers, officials and some citizens have been quietly discussing what to do about the ships when they return. Facebook groups like Bonaire Future Forum: Opportunity From Crisis are debating whether the island should limit access to specific ships that cost more and are therefore more selective in their choice of passenger. The island has one of the most pristine reefs in the Caribbean, and animal behavior has changed since the number of daily human divers dropped from thousands to the single digits. Local divers are noticing animals come closer, and the elusive seahorse has been a common sight these last months. The pandemic has already changed life by necessity. The Caribbean has a "ridiculously high" food import bill because of an assumption that tourists don't want to eat local food, Mr. Riley said. The pandemic may change that. "We have been laboring under the misconception that tourists want something other than what we have. We think people want hamburgers and hot dogs. Now that we are consuming what we have, I think this will lead to an increased variety in what we produce locally," he said. Sven Olof Lindblad, the chief executive of Lindblad Expeditions, which offers high end, small ship, environmentally conscious cruises around the world, sees the pandemic as a moment in which destinations can seize control of the downside of overtourism and demand changes. "This clearly is a time to rethink but it won't be led by businesses who are, by and large, too fat and happy with the way it is. Create working groups to totally rethink the relationship of tourism focused on value and not just financial value." Stepping out of an aluminum tube in the dead of winter and into a blanket of tropical humidity is, in my view, one of life's singular pleasures. And I've endured many a discount middle seat to get some "last minute" sun and sand in the Caribbean. But these jaunts have sometimes come with a measure of self loathing. Quaffing wintertime margaritas poolside at an inclusive Jamaican resort next to my fellow pasty North Americans while our sunburned kids went sugar mad refilling plastic cups at a Willy Wonka style eternal soda fountain is not a look I'm proud of. More, I can never fully repress the awareness that these trips are not ecologically friendly. Even before flight shaming, the rampant construction of resorts, the ribbons of new roads and the abomination of air conditioning all struck me as a blight on the natural beauty of the islands. Everyone I talked to about a post Covid Caribbean mentioned one thing: a hope that the pandemic might result in a different kind of tourist: a traveler, not necessarily richer in money, but more conscious, more of an explorer and less of a sybarite. It is a hope shared by many overtouristed spots around the globe, from Venice to the beaches of southern Thailand. For the Caribbean, a long history of being seen as a playground for visitors from the mainland United States might make things harder. The tourist industry itself trained Americans to think of the Caribbean as "sun, sand and sea," and to think of the diverse islands as interchangeable, Mr. Mignott said. Other than the sea they share, the islands are different, each with a unique geological and human history. The older islands to the west, including Cuba, are formed of limestone and billions of shells and skeletons of ancient marine life, while the black cliffs and crags of the younger islands along the eastern edge where the Caribbean and the Atlantic tectonic plates grind against each other are relics of violent prehistoric volcanic events. In my years exploring the Caribbean, I've visited Guadeloupe, Bonaire, St. John, Vieques, Jamaica and Tobago, and met people who have in common that they were born with the sound of the sea in their ears, but otherwise possess unique traditions, history, language and culture, that reward visitors with a little curiosity. The Caribbean tourism industry could take this opportunity to differentiate the islands, and maybe even put responsibility on travelers to go beyond the resort walls or cruise ship all inclusives and explore local food and culture. Can it happen? As airlines and cruise ships reduce capacity, and the tourist industry consolidates, the islands need to act deliberately, said Mr. Riley. "Are we going to leave it to happenstance or are we going to plan for more socially responsible tourism and put policies in place that redress and undo damage to the environment?" he asked. The premier of the island of Nevis, Mark Brantley, said the pandemic has taught the Caribbean that overreliance on tourism is not the best model and that Covid 19 could mark the end of the era of cheap tourism and mega cruises. "Jurisdictions are going to pivot to more tourism pitched at the luxury market, with smaller numbers of people and arguably a better yield," he said. Additionally, he predicted that local industries, especially agriculture and agri processing, will become more important sectors of the Caribbean economies. "Countries will be trying to diversify, where tourism continues to be important, but not the only game in town anymore." Mr. Chastanet said that when the pandemic struck, St. Lucia was already midway into a national program to promote what he called "village tourism," sprucing up hamlets with new infrastructure and training and providing seed money for resort workers and hotel chefs to open up their own small scale, boutique operations. "The things we were doing just got reinforced by Covid," he said. "We really hope if one good thing happens from the pandemic, it will be that travel is more thoughtful, and travelers are more conscious about the environment," said Mr. Mignott, the former deputy tourism director for Jamaica. "We don't think people are just going to go back like Covid never happened. We really think it will be different." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
KABUL, Afghanistan As the major warring parties in Afghanistan sit down for peace talks in Doha, Qatar, an old, unresolved debate is emerging as the central question: What should be the role of Islam in Afghanistan? A humid seaside resort on the Persian Gulf, where the delegates are gathered, has become the unlikely venue for a search for answers acceptable to most Afghans. The Taliban, who fought for decades to establish an Islamic political system, struck a deal with the United States in February that calls for American troop withdrawals conditioned on the Taliban engaging in peace talks and promising not to allow the country to be used by transnational terrorists. They started the peace talks on Sept. 12, aware of the difficulty of persuading other Afghans and the international community to accept their understanding of Islam. The Taliban also seem to have reached a conclusion internally that their 1990s model of government is not tenable today. When the Taliban seized territory across Afghanistan in the 1990s, the group founded a new "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," but they consulted almost none of the country's diverse political and religious groups. The result was a style of government which enforced at gunpoint the norms and lifestyles of rural southern Afghanistan on the entire country. Imposing an extremely austere lifestyle on Afghans, banning women from work and education and ignoring the pleas of the international community, turned the Taliban into an international pariah. Establishing an "Islamic system," of governance is now the thrust of the Taliban's demands as it negotiates with Afghan officials and representatives of the political opposition. But the Taliban need to clearly detail their ideas about the role of Islam in society and governance. The country already has a constitution that holds Islamic jurisprudence above all other laws. Afghan officials consider the character of their system sufficiently Islamic. Their emphasis in the peace talks is on protecting the gains of the last two decades, including women's rights, freedom of expression and electoral democracy. If peace is going to result from these talks, those two perspectives on what Islamic governance in Afghanistan looks like will need to be reconciled. What is it about the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan that the Taliban reject so vehemently? The Taliban say the current system was created under the shadow of Western military forces, caters mainly to Western norms and gives an insufficient role to religious authorities. I have interviewed members of the Taliban and its leadership over many years. They see the Kabul government elites as secularists who seek to Westernize Afghan society. Instead, they see the active promotion of Islamic values and morals in society as one of the primary functions of a "true Islamic government." In my interviews, the Taliban cited as un Islamic the absence of gender segregation in the current Afghan public sphere; they see the relatively free Afghan media as encouraging "moral corruption," and they object to the banking system designed on international rules and want Islamic banking. They want a greater role for religious leaders in policy and lawmaking and greater promotion of religious education. Many Afghans fear that the Taliban favor a return to their heavy handed rule of the late 1990s. It is true that the Taliban are uncomfortable with the liberalizing society with degrees of freedom of expression, lack of gender segregation and Westernizing influences that has flourished in some parts of Afghanistan in recent years. But there are hints emerging from Taliban ranks that they could be influenced by public opinion, perhaps allowing room for compromise. For instance, the Taliban now allow schools for girls in areas under their control where there is strong popular demand. It is a break from their strict rules restricting education for women during their earlier rule. The Taliban banned technology and communications during their earlier rule. They have since become pretty proficient users of the internet and mobile phone technology, and, in some areas the group controls today, when local elders petitioned for their community's internet access the Taliban granted it and guarded the telecommunications towers. The Taliban seem to understand that they need to go further than tolerating girls' education. Last month, Hibatullah Akhunkzada, the leader of the Taliban, deputed Mawlawi Abdul Hakim, the movement's senior most religious scholar, to lead the Taliban negotiators in Doha. Mr. Hakim has no experience in political negotiations, but the personal involvement of such an authoritative religious figure seems to suggest that the Taliban intend to clarify their positions on the role of Islam in governance after the actual negotiations start, and that they will want to convince Taliban fighters that any agreement signed by the group's leaders will uphold Islamic values. I have gleaned from conversations with Taliban officials recently that they have certain positions for the negotiations, but they have not nailed down a definitive vision of what they will agree to, leaving the specifics to evolve during talks. The Taliban cite the composition of their delegation for the intra Afghan talks it includes a deputy leader, the senior most religious figure and over 60 percent of its most authoritative body, the leadership council as evidence of their seriousness about reaching a deal with their rivals. A compromise on the state system will most likely require drafting a new constitution for the country. President Ashraf Ghani has already offered the Taliban the opportunity to amend the current constitution, but only through the existing constitution's amendment procedures, which would give the government control over the process. Afghan opposition political figures and groups have signaled their willingness to consider structural reforms to the current constitutional order while preserving protections for civil and political rights. Significant questions remain: Would the Taliban accept elections? Would they accept a coalition government? An elected parliament? In recent weeks, the Taliban leaders have revealed that they envision a religious authority at the apex of a future Afghan government if not the chief executive position, then a body with power to oversee the executive. Peace negotiations will be strained on questions such as the Taliban's refusal to accept the current share of women's participation in public service. Without the Taliban agreeing to a compromise on individual rights and freedoms, an agreement won't be reached. In fact, the Taliban's positions and attitudes stem from Afghan cultural norms as much as they do Islamic doctrine, which influences them in both strongly conservative and relatively progressive directions. The socially conservative views the Taliban espouse are common among rural Afghans, as well as a substantial share of urban educated youth. Unlike other modern jihadist groups, the Taliban are not fixated on a literalist reading of textual sources. Their movement was born out of a combination of Islamic oral tradition and pre Islamic cultural norms, and does not have a single ideological document. In fact, that absence of a definitive intellectual foundation in the Taliban has driven some of its more educated radicalized youth to join rival groups such as the Islamic State in Afghanistan. The absence of core, rigid ideological texts might enable the Taliban to integrate into mainstream Afghan politics. There are many in Afghanistan who are deeply skeptical about genuine change in the Taliban and the prospect of future transformation. But there are no easier ways to test and build on those possibilities than through political engagement in the context of ongoing peace negotiations. The evolution of the Taliban's political thinking, though, is likely to be slow. Rushing the negotiations would risk producing an unstable result that only papers over the two sides' differences; successful negotiations will require not only patience but also a more hands off approach from other governments than they are usually comfortable with. The shaping of the post Taliban Afghanistan by the Western governments, primarily the United States, eventually turned out to be its vulnerability and undermined its legitimacy in the eyes of many Afghans. A new dispensation in Afghanistan will need the support of conservative elements of Afghan society if we want the long war in the country to finally be over. Borhan Osman is a senior consultant on Afghanistan for the International Crisis Group. 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 |
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. Nominees for the coming Academy Awards gathered inside the Beverly Hilton on Monday to eat a lunch of Chilean sea bass with mango and assemble on risers for a class photo. "I'm so thrilled for you," Dawn Hudson, the chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said to a beaming Greta Gerwig, a nominee for her direction of "Lady Bird," as Steven Spielberg and Jim Gianopulos, Paramount's chief, held conversations nearby. The scene outside, however, was considerably less celebratory. Several dozen people carrying placards gathered near the hotel's driveway at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Merv Griffin Way to protest the lack of Hispanic characters on movie screens. "Hire Brown Tinseltown" read one sign. One activist, Brenda Castillo, shouted into a bullhorn, "Not asking! Demanding!" Car horns sounded in support. Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a watchdog organization that staged the demonstration, said his anger was aimed not at the academy, but at the movie executives who were attending the Oscar luncheon. "Unless something changes very fast, we are going to start boycotting individual studios this year and calling executives out by name," he said. Latinos make up 18 percent of the population in the United States, but only 3 percent of speaking characters in films during the last decade were Latino, according to a study released in July by Stacy L. Smith, an associate professor at the University of Southern California. For the sixth year in a row, no Hispanic actors or actresses were nominated for Oscars, which will be awarded on March 4. Only one Hispanic man has won the best actor Oscar Jose Ferrer, for "Cyrano de Bergerac" in 1951 and no Hispanic woman has been named best actress. "When people think of diversity, they think of black and white," said Moctesuma Esparza, a producer of films like "Selena" and the chief executive of Maya Cinemas, a multiplex chain. "Nobody thinks of other minorities unless it is pointed out." Growing animated, Mr. Esparza added, "Latinos, like all human beings, want to see themselves represented on screen." 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. Joining Mr. Nogales and Mr. Esparza outside the Beverly Hilton were people like Santiago Pozo, the chief executive of Arenas Entertainment, which focuses on marketing studio movies to Hispanic audiences; and Gloria Molina, a former Los Angeles County supervisor. "The movie industry should be ashamed of itself," Ms. Molina said. Inside the hotel, John Bailey, the academy's president, pointed out that it continues to work to increase diversity and referred to the MeToo movement against sexual harassment, saying that he was thrilled that "fossilized bedrock" in Hollywood was being "jackhammered into oblivion." Because its high wattage guests draw media attention, the Oscar nominee luncheon has become a platform for demonstrations before. In 2013, for instance, two anti torture groups protested "Zero Dark Thirty," a best picture nominee that was criticized for its depiction of "enhanced interrogation" in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Monday's gathering came as "The Shape of Water," a fantasy from the Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, garnered acclaim as the Academy Awards approach. Over the weekend, Mr. del Toro won the top prize at the Directors Guild Awards. "The Shape of Water," about a mute janitor who falls in love with a sea creature, is nominated for 13 Oscars, with Mr. del Toro receiving nods for his producing, direction and screenwriting. The purpose of the lunch is to gather nominees (205 this year, 175 of whom were in attendance) for the class photo and a celebratory glass of Champagne while pleading for brevity at the podium by the eventual winners. In remarks before lunch, Mr. Bailey told attendees not to begin acceptance speeches by going on about how heavy the statuettes are. "And thank your mom," he said, "not your personal trainer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
It's worth noting (sotto voce, nudge nudge) that it took a Belgian to do it. Held in the brand's headquarters, the show took place under a permanent installation by Mr. Simons's frequent collaborator, the artist Sterling Ruby, entitled "Sterling Ruby Imagined America," all colorful yarn mop heads and industrial detritus conveying the optimism of the everyday, and before a crowd that stretched from Calvin past to present (Lauren Hutton, Brooke Shields, Millie Bobby Brown) to celebrity royalty (Gwyneth Paltrow, Julianne Moore) to Friends of Raf (Cindy Sherman, Rachel Feinstein, ASAP Rocky). And it represented, read the show notes, "the coming together of different characters and different individuals, just like America itself." That's a big claim, but it was largely justified. Both men and women were on the runway, and Mr. Simons (working with his creative director, Pieter Mulier, whom he also included in his final runway bow) dressed them in almost identical looks, emphasizing the fact that ease, action and modernity are not gender specific concepts. It wasn't so much about confronting stereotype the men didn't wear the skirts, or the dresses but rather nodding to equal opportunity across genres. In sportswear, for example, via slouchy trousers that hung on the hip, with athletic stripes up the side, paired with buttoned up Western pocket shirts over turtlenecks, all in contrasting shades. For the power set, with Prince of Wales double breasted trouser suiting paired with sheer nylon muscle shirts. Via a rethinking of past classics and familiar iconography: thick varsity rib knit sleeves severed from their sweaters and layered over jackets; an updated classic denim in a dark wash and a 1970s vibe; black leather biker jackets embossed in silver roses; draped asymmetric stars and stripes skirts; and bedquilts cum Crombie coats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LOS ANGELES What's the only art form big enough to hold Kanye West's grandiosity, his grievances, his cast of thousands collaborations, his musical lushness and toughness, his religiosity, his self appointed skill at design? Has anyone in music has anyone, ever been so operatic? But being an operatic person doesn't mean you'll create a good opera. And "Nebuchadnezzar," the passionate, puzzling work West billed as an opera announced on Nov. 17 and performed at the Hollywood Bowl just seven days later, on Sunday wasn't really an opera, and it wasn't really good. What it was, more or less, was another of this year's loud declarations of West's born again bona fides. Sitting off to the side of the stage and speaking with inflamed urgency, he read passages from the biblical Book of Daniel the story of a mad king who finds God as an enormous gospel choir milled around in pale gowns and wailed phrases in Latin. This was Sunday Service, the group West has been presenting in church like performances since January mainly in Calabasas, Calif., but also at Coachella and elsewhere in which he has tended to recede from the spotlight, more ringleader than performer. The group was also featured, to earbud popping effect, on West's ninth album, "Jesus Is King," released last month, and is said to be central to his next, "Jesus Is Born," scheduled for, yes, Christmas. Sunday Service makes a cleansing roar. And West has clearly been searching for purification and healing after a tumultuous period of canceled tour dates, opioid addiction, hospitalization for mental illness, public support for President Trump that has infuriated a good chunk of the country, and incoherent statements about slavery that have infuriated almost everyone. His latest provocation is his salvation. "Jesus has won the victory because now the greatest artist that God has ever created is now working for him," West said onstage at Joel Osteen's Houston megachurch earlier this month. And what better way to emphasize the seriousness of his faith than to translate it into the very serious form of opera, an easy signifier of dazzling spectacle that also connotes old fashioned substance and significance: something lavish, but also earnest. "We're going to a Kanye opera," a woman declared to her friend with mock pomposity as she walked into the Bowl. "We're sophisticated." Over two hours after the ticketed start time, the 56 minute "Nebuchadnezzar" began with the choir filing onstage and beginning to chant as a figure in a royal blue outfit raved, writhed and screamed in the middle. (You could be forgiven for thinking of "Jesus Christ Superstar.") This was Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who, in the Bible's telling, conquered the Jews and enlisted a few of them as servants. There was something intriguing about West having Nebuchadnezzar (played by the young rapper Sheck Wes, whose song "Mo Bamba" went viral last year) express himself largely in screams and moans, a vision of masculinity rendered unintelligible by its own toxicity. A male soloist seemed to be portraying Daniel, though for some reason there was also a female soloist singing much of the same music mostly wordless and hyper operatically soaring, in an Andrea Bocelli kind of way. Occasional harsh, buzzing electronic tones, recalling the grim industrial production of West's 2013 album "Yeezus," offered glimpses of a grittier musical engagement with this subject matter. But the sounds in general most new, though the lonely hook of "Wolves," from "The Life of Pablo" (2016), figured in the textures were more ingratiating, with Latin dance beats, warm strings, and gentle singer songwriterish guitar fingering that felt unconnected to the ostensibly intense story. There was little text, and it was nearly impossible to make it out from the audience; a musicologist watching a livestream of the performance said on Twitter that she had heard "Lux aeterna" and "Rex gloriae," which are phrases from the Requiem mass, and "Animus deum," which is not. The smoke shrouded staging, directed by the performance auteur Vanessa Beecroft, a longtime West collaborator, only intermittently clarified matters or offered her characteristic immaculate polish. There was a thrown together quality to the show that wasn't without charm but was nevertheless, especially given the price of some of the tickets, disappointing. The most impressive sequence involved the statue that Nebuchadnezzar orders built for worship. Here it was an actor on a large plinth, draped in shiny gold fabric, a vision of moving sculpture as eerie and elegant as Beecroft's best work. But otherwise the stage was cluttered and awkward, with pantomime battles and swirling circular dances crowded into the uneasy stasis. None of this would automatically disqualify "Nebuchadnezzar" as opera: There are wordless operas, spoken operas, unclear operas. There has even been room in the art form for another abstract meditation on an ancient leader's religious awakening: Philip Glass's "Akhnaten" is running at the Metropolitan Opera through Dec. 7. But the starkly presentational style of "Nebuchadnezzar" the dominance of plain narration; the lack of real characters; the overtly religious content, with biblical texts playing a key role places this more in the class of oratorios, like Handel's "Messiah." This is an academic distinction, sure, but it suggests that West was more interested in evoking the trappings of opera the bombast it represents and the anticipation it could conjure for his potential audience than in actually shaping this fascinating material into a dramatic form expressed through music. "Nebuchadnezzar" was content to literally tell its story; you got the sense, despite the hordes onstage and the many dozens of extras periodically flooding the aisles, that everything was an afterthought besides the words West was reading. It happens that Verdi's first lasting success, in 1842, was a Nebuchadnezzar opera, "Nabucco." The work enlarges the mad king to tragic stature yet keeps him recognizably human, translating his journey to faith into emotion with music that follows the shifting landscape from pride to brokenness to humility. It's not that West's self declared opera needed to sound like Verdi, but it did need to offer some persuasive connection between music and theater. The seeds of something were here. It's clear that West sees himself in this story, and doubly: He's Daniel, the consummate storyteller and interpreter, the prophet and hero, and he's also the suffering leader who's found peace in God. But he hasn't not yet, at least been able to turn those identifications into art. That, at this point in his career, means less to West than bluster: shouting the Bible in front of many thousands of people, a sidewalk preacher on a mass scale. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
By most measures, the personal finances of Anne Zimmerman, a small business owner in Cincinnati, have little in common with those of Oracle's chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison. Ms. Zimmerman runs an accounting business and a cloud based Internet service company with combined annual profit of 250,000 to 500,000 in recent years. Mr. Ellison made nearly 15 million in salary, bonuses and perks in 2011, even without the 62 million he received in stock options from Oracle. In the deficit reduction debate now consuming Washington, however, both Mr. Ellison and Ms. Zimmerman are grouped in the same, sprawling category: wealthy Americans targeted for tax increases. President Obama has focused efforts on raising revenue from the wealthiest 2 percent of taxpayers individuals earning more than 200,000 a year and families with adjusted gross incomes above 250,000 calling them "millionaires and billionaires who can afford to pay a little more." Republicans have thus far resisted those efforts, countering that the high earners are job creators and that increasing their taxes would discourage hiring. But for all the broad brush rhetoric of political debate, the rate increases and limits on deductions now being discussed by the president and Congressional Republicans are calibrated to take the biggest bite out of the highest earners. They would lead to a smaller increase for those who earn less than 500,000 a year. The figures are all adjusted gross incomes, and since some deductions would be preserved, a household would probably have more than 250,000 in total income, perhaps 300,000, before it would fall into the wealthy definition used by the president. If all Mr. Obama's tax proposals for wealthy Americans were enacted, they would raise 1.6 trillion over the next decade. And an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research firm, found that the increases would be heavily weighted toward the wealthiest. Taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes over 1 million would see average increases of 184,504, the study found, with higher taxes on the ultrawealthy bloating that average. Those with adjusted gross incomes from 200,000 to 500,000 would face a tax increase averaging 4,446, with people toward the lower end having only a modest increase and people on the higher end paying several times more. A married couple with two children earning 300,000 would see its effective tax rate increase to 21.1 percent from 16.5 percent, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. A married couple with two children earning 2 million would see its effective federal income tax rate rise to 26.8 percent from 21.6 percent. To Ms. Zimmerman, the Cincinnati businesswoman, that amount sounds reasonable. "I'm not going to change my business decision making process based on a few percentage points of tax increases," she said. "If it helps get the country on a better path, well, we're all in this together." But some conservatives and business advocates warn that the proposed increases could stall the sluggish economic recovery. "There is a price that comes with these tax increases on the very wealthiest because that is where the capital is concentrated," said William McBride, chief economist at the Tax Foundation, a conservative research firm. "That price is economic growth and hiring." About four million of the 114 million American households face a possible tax increase. And while they are a narrow slice of the overall population, they are nonetheless a swath of well to do Americans so varied that they defy easy categorization. Census data indicates that they cut across a broad range of occupations: doctors, auto dealers and dilettantes, professional athletes and financial planners, family farmers, entrepreneurs, two income couples, corporate executives and hedge fund managers. 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. Although they are dispersed across the country, they live in the highest concentrations in South Florida, the suburbs of the Northeast and the West, and in major cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Because the profits of many companies are taxed as the owners' individual income, the group facing increases also includes 3 percent of all small businesses, like Ms. Zimmerman's. But the United States tax code is such a blunt instrument that small business may encompass anything from the neighborhood florist shop to the multibillion dollar private equity company KKR and the Tribune Company. Data from the Internal Revenue Service indicate that 237 of the country's 400 highest earners also qualify as small businesses, as does President Obama. Decades ago, the tax code made distinctions between gradations of wealth by using more income brackets. In 1970, there were 14 tax brackets for the top 2 percent of earners, with a top rate of 91 percent. Today there are just two brackets, 33 percent and 35 percent. Meeting with Republican Congressional leaders on Friday, President Obama said he would not sign any bill to extend those top rates, which were lowered by President George W. Bush. That means the top rates would revert to the higher levels of the Clinton era, 36 percent and 39.6 percent (the higher rate would be charged on the portion of income that exceeds the threshold of 200,000 for individuals and 250,000 for families). Republicans have said they will oppose any deal that raises the rates. But both sides have agreed in principle on raising revenue by reducing or eliminating loopholes, tax subsidies and deductions at the high end of the income scale. Even if the top rates do not rise, the efforts to limit deductions would make the tax system more progressive, with the biggest impact felt by those at the very top in incomes. Negotiations over the coming weeks will determine whether a compromise can be reached between the president and the Republicans. If not, automatic spending cuts and tax increases will take effect on Jan. 1. One of the most closely watched variables will be whether President Obama wins support for increasing the tax rate on dividends and long term capital gains, which now top out at 15 percent. Mr. Obama's budget calls for the tax on capital gains to rise to a maximum of 20 percent and for dividends to be taxed at the same level as ordinary income, which could increase to 39.6 percent. Because investment income for those with adjusted gross income of more than 200,000 will also be subject to a 3.8 percent Medicare tax beginning in January, as part of the new health care law, the total federal tax on dividends could rise to 43.4 percent and on capital gains to 23.8 percent. Those capital gains and dividend tax increases are likely to have the most impact at the very highest reaches of the income scale because wealthy Americans derive more of their earnings from investments. An analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that in 2011, people in the top 0.1 percent of earners saved an average of 356,000 in federal income taxes because of the preferential rate for capital gains. Middle income Americans were spared an average of just 23 because of the lower taxes on capital gains, the study found. "Capital gains are extremely concentrated by income," said Len Burman, a former Treasury official who has written extensively about taxes on investment income. "There's no source of income more focused on the very, very wealthiest. A lot of people own stocks indirectly through their 401(k)'s. But most Americans can't afford to own any shares directly." Another policy change that has some support from both parties is a plan to limit the total amount of deductions. Mr. Obama's proposal would treat deductions for the wealthy as if they were in the 28 percent tax bracket, reducing their value. But the negotiations have also considered a plan championed by Mitt Romney during his unsuccessful bid to unseat Mr. Obama. That would cap the amount of deductions any taxpayer could claim amounts including 17,000 and 28,000 have been discussed publicly. In some ways, limits on deductions would appear to duplicate the goal of the alternative minimum tax, which was enacted in the 1970s to ensure that the wealthiest Americans would not completely escape paying federal income taxes. But tax planning has become so sophisticated in the decades since then that even some Republicans acknowledge that a new cap could help raise revenue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In 1974, the Iranian American artist Nicky Nodjoumi took his City College M.F.A. back to Tehran, where his politically charged painting quickly antagonized first the Shah's secret police and then Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards. In 1981, he was given a major show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, but it was closed after a single day, and he hurried back to New York, which has been his home ever since. For a few years in the late '90s, Mr. Nodjoumi made a daily practice of painting or drawing on a shellacked front page of The New York Times. He made portraits of his family; Picasso like figures with latticework faces; explicit sexual scenes that are both funny and tender; and clearly political but nonspecific images, like a dense black silhouette of a man playing with a bloody red cat's cradle. One appeal of a serial project like this, over and above the often wonderful drawing, is how it seems to encompass the endless days and scenes of the world at large even as it reduces them to a comprehensible number. I can count 60 spreads in Mr. Nodjoumi's current show, "New York Times Sketchbooks (1996 1999)," at Helena Anrather; note that these include one Metro section cover and one interior spread painted early on, before he committed to front pages, as well as one flower for the day Princess Diana died; and feel as if I've really gotten to grips with something. Still more appealing, though, is the sense of fleet footed possibility that the work transmits when hung en masse: If today's nefarious silhouette can turn into tomorrow's couple in flagrante or the next day's bear on stilts, anything might be around the corner for all of us. The last five months have brought two solo shows of early work by the restless German painter Albert Oehlen that were previously unseen in New York. In September, 12 paintings from the artist's 1989 90 Fn (Footnote) series went on view at Skarstedt, full of improvisatory abstract brushwork in off key colors infiltrated by fragments of images from popular culture. These sardonic mash ups of Pop Art, Surrealism and Neo Expressionism exemplify the ugly gorgeousness that is something of an Oehlen signature. Now Nahmad is showing 13 canvases from Mr. Oehlen's "Spiegelbilder" or "Mirror Paintings" series, which began in 1982, around the time of the artist's solo shows, and extended to 1990. They are dark, dour, loosely painted interiors, consistent with his early interest in representation. Some, with titles like "Abolition of a Military Dictatorship," "Oven I," and "Hell, I" or featuring depictions of bunkerlike cinder block structures conjure the Nazi period. But all the scenes whether the grand but decrepit spiral stair in "Staircase Old," or the untitled image of a slovenly library devoid of furniture suggest messy aftermaths. Of course Mr. Oehlen's impatient brushwork contributes to the desultory mood. Countering it are a few random mirrors affixed to the surface of each canvas. These irreverently disrupt the painted images with blank patches or glimpses of reality, depending upon where you stand, at once punching holes in the medium's spatial integrity and also implicating us in history's devastations. Ugliness has the louder voice in these works, flanked by tragedy on one side and on the other by the engaging intentional lightness of Mr. Oehlen's pictorial sensibility. Since the late 1990s, Clarity Haynes has been painting portraits of people's breasts. They aren't descended from the sexy and sexist classical nudes of art history, nor do they have the fleshy weight of the paintings of more contemporary artists like Lucian Freud or Jenny Saville. Instead, in "The Breast Portrait Project," Ms. Haynes who works from life over a series of sessions with her sitters that can take years depicts the torsos of women, trans, and gender nonconforming people in remarkable, caring detail. She relishes the tattoos, wrinkles, scars, veins and folds that our dominant society may deem unsightly. In her current show, "Altar ed Bodies," which was curated by Benjamin Tischer, co founder of the recently closed Invisible Exports gallery, several of Ms. Haynes's breast portraits share space with new paintings of her own altars, which the news release calls "self portraits of sorts." The altar pieces lack something of the same magnetic force of their counterparts, but the combination of the series is fruitful. In "Genesis" (2009), the pioneering body artist Genesis Breyer P Orridge wears a necklace whose charms echo the hanging pendants and small totems in "Rainbow Altar (Spring into Summer)," from 2019, while one of her tattoos mirrors the placement of a dangling pink ribbon. Such parallels charge us to treat bodies as sacred, like altars. Rather than sources of worry or shame, they should be sites of empowerment and worship. We are playing historical catch up at the moment, driven partly by the art market's incessant quest for fresh products, but also by a widespread desire to create a more global narrative of art in the 20th century. A good candidate for this is Kim Tschang Yeul, a Korean born artist who, along with Park Seo Bo and Lee Ufan, helped introduce Western modernism to Korea and whose terrific paintings from the 1960s and '70s are currently on view in the exhibition "New York to Paris" at Tina Kim. Mr. Kim studied art in South Korea and was part of the Korean Informel, a movement that originated in France and favored vigorous, expressive abstraction. Living in Paris and New York, however, Mr. Kim produced work that evolved into what you see here: a radiant, abstract brand of Pop Art, with concentric forms rendered in an unusual mix of acrylic and cellulose lacquer on burlap or canvas. Some of the paintings, like the "Composition" series from 1969 and 1970, have centers that look almost photo realistic. This propensity was pushed even further in canvases from the mid 70s and one here, from 1980, which have naturalistic droplets of water painted against a monochromatic ground that look so real they might seep off the canvas. My favorites are the "Compositions," though, which look like psychedelic vortexes rimmed with neon or spectral rainbows. They feel very contemporary, partly because we're in a moment of historical remix and revival that benefits lesser known strains of art history: Mr. Kim's work looks as if it were painted today, rather than 40 years ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A private investor from Queens has bought this 52,896 square foot 1912 six story building with 48 apartments seven one bedrooms, 10 two bedrooms, 19 three bedrooms and 12 four bedrooms. 110 West 40th Street (between Broadway and Avenue of the Americas) An online retailer of security and surveillance products has signed a four year, 10 month lease for the entire 4,650 square foot penthouse of this 26 story building. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The artist Mark Dion's home cum studio in Upper Manhattan conjures the vision of a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, those "wonder rooms" crammed with eccentric treasures before the age of museums. The walls and bookcases of the apartment he shares with his wife, the artist Dana Sherwood, and their baby, are teeming with taxidermy animals, antique prints of flora and fauna, shells, cages, oil cans and tools, as well as books and field guides. The unruly display betrays Mr. Dion's fascination with natural history and scientific methodologies, which he investigates in his own meticulously ordered art installations. Mr. Dion, 55, just reimagined the laboratory of the early 20th century plant hunter David Fairchild for the Kampong botanical garden in Miami. This week, he installed an array of found kitchen objects, including fillet knives and poultry shears, as surgical implements for the set of "Anatomy Theater," a macabre opera that he wrote with the composer David Lang (it opens Saturday at BRIC Arts Media Ballroom in Brooklyn). Following are edited excerpts from our conversation. How deliberate are these arrangements that seem so haphazard? I love to accumulate but not necessarily order. As you can see, some of the books are arranged in a pretty precarious way. I try to get away from the fussiness of collecting and talk more about exuberance. You might find a book about bicycles next to a book about birds next to a book about shells next to a book about space exploration. It's the closest thing to self portraiture that I could imagine, because these objects are the real things I use every day. They're the tools I use to develop my own ideas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times Bridget Moynahan doesn't understand people who don't understand the appeal of watching golf. "I don't think it's boring," said Ms. Moynahan, 48, a star of the police drama "Blue Bloods," which was just renewed for a 10th season. "I find it really relaxing." But when it comes to playing golf, relaxing is not quite the word she'd choose to describe her sorties around the course. More like agonizing. Terrifying. Stomach churning. Eager to address those fears, and to better address that little dimpled ball, Ms. Moynahan booked a private lesson at Chelsea Piers Golf Academy. She showed up on a windy morning not long ago, hair bundled into a ponytail and wearing the comfortable clothes that had been advised: cropped khaki pants, the legs decorated with cave style drawings of the faces of cats and dogs; a gray button down shirt; very white Adidas shoes. She shook hands with her instructor, Chance Scheffing, and was directed to a simulator on the fourth floor overlooking the Hudson River. "I find golf an intimidating game because when you're bad you're really bad," said Ms. Moynahan, also the author, with, Amanda Benchley, of "Our Shoes, Our Selves." The recently published coffee table book features 40 high profile women (including Christiane Amanpour, the four star general Ann Dunwoody and Senators Tammy Duckworth, Susan Collins and Patty Murray) discussing their most meaningful footwear. Ms. Moynahan writes about a pair of black leather Miu Miu motorcycle boots that were bought on impulse during a trying period in her life. "Any injuries that we should be aware of?" said Mr. Scheffing, who seemed very fond of the majestic first person plural. "There is, like, a shoulder neck issue, but I think we'll be O.K.," Ms. Moynahan said. "Have we played golf before?" Mr. Scheffing wanted to know. "And then I had a child," she continued, referring to Jack, her son by the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, with whom she was in a relationship from 2004 to 2006. "And then I had no time to play golf. Who can carve out time in their day to play even nine holes, let alone 18?" Now Ms. Moynahan's son is turning 12, and he has taken up the game. Her husband of three years, Andrew Frankel, a businessman, plays. Her three stepsons play. "The last couple of family trips we went on, everybody went out to play golf and I did not," Ms. Moynahan said. "So it's time for me to get back into it. So this is me making a commitment. But I'm scared." She was generally able to make contact with the ball, she told Mr. Scheffing. "But I feel I never understand how to create the direction." "Yes, control the direction," Ms. Moynahan said. "The last time I played, I was using the driver, and the ball kept going to the right. I would love to get it to go more straight." Mr. Scheffing reached into a bag of clubs and handed Ms. Moynahan an iron (shorter and easier to control than a driver) for some warm up swings. "This will give you a better understanding of how to strike with the club face," he said. She nodded, holding the iron aloft and doing some side stretches before getting down to business. "Yes," Mr. Scheffing said. "No. 1 goal: hit it. No. 2 goal: get it in the air. Let's do one more and then we're going to talk about it." On his phone he showed Ms. Moynahan the videos he had taken of her swing, and murmured some guidance about proper sequencing lead with the hips followed by the torso, then the arms, then the club. She nodded attentively, taking a few practice swings to demonstrate her comprehension. "We're looking for more of a trophy finish," Mr. Scheffing told her. "All the weight on the outside of the left heel over the left leg." "Lovely, I like that shot a lot," Mr. Scheffing said as one ball soared. "When you make solid contact, you're hitting it 115, 120 yards. That's a good thing." "So I'm ready to join the pro tour?" Ms. Moynahan said, then scolded herself over the next several shots. This one was a little choppy. On another one she was swinging her club like a baseball bat. "Oh, that one was tense," she said. Consistency eluded her. "Don't be so hard on yourself," Mr. Scheffing said. "Jack Nicklaus said if golf were only 12 holes it would be a lot more enjoyable." Ms. Moynahan nodded. "When I'm playing," she said, "I always wish there was a nachos stand like around the sixth hole." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The artist Simone Leigh working on her sculpture "Brick House," which will be displayed on the High Line in Manhattan starting in April. The sculptures were hard to miss at the 2016 Art Show in the Park Avenue Armory an arresting line of ceramic female busts with rosette heads and raffia torsos, both majestic and ethereal, figural yet abstract. That may have been the moment when Simone Leigh, the Chicago born artist behind those sculptures, moved into the mainstream, since the busts quickly sold out including to the prominent collector Glenn Fuhrman, making other buyers take notice. Ms. Leigh's career has taken off since then. She moved from a modest gallery (Tilton) to a larger one (Luhring Augustine) and saw her work acquired by important museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and the Perez Art Museum Miami. "She's driving a cultural shift at large where black women are being acknowledged as aesthetic leaders," said Rashida Bumbray, a curator who has worked closely with Ms. Leigh. "It feels like a moment, but it is really just that the wool has been lifted from everyone's eyes." At 50, the artist is hardly an emerging talent her work has been presented by the New Museum, Creative Time and the Kitchen. The daughter of Jamaican missionaries, Ms. Leigh has steadfastly explored the experiences and social histories of black women through the ceramic tradition for more than 25 years. But the medium and the artist were long overlooked by the art world. "I was told by everyone I knew in ceramics there was no way I would ever be included in the contemporary art space," said Ms. Leigh, perched on a small couch at her studio in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the only place to sit without getting coated in clay. Her work didn't quite fit into any single category, given its multilayered references to African traditions, feminism, ethnographic research, post colonial theory and racial politics. "Because I was largely ignored, I had a long time to mature without any kind of glare, which worked out for me quite well," said Ms. Leigh, a regal presence with dangling silver earrings framing her round face. With her newfound success, she said, "I'm more concerned with having the space and the time to be creative." Testifying to the current demands on the artist, including a gallery debut, were the many sculptures crowding every surface of her studio on this hot July day (no air conditioning). The project for the High Line to be displayed on a plinth anchoring the newest section of the elevated park known as the spur had been dominating her attention: At 16 feet tall, the sculpture is by far the largest she's ever created, as big as the plinth would allow. The towering bronze sculpture, titled "Brick House," depicts an African American woman with braids whose torso evokes a skirt like house. "It's an icon, it's a goddess this very powerful feminine presence in a very masculine environment, because all around you, you have these towering skyscrapers and cranes," said Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art. "It's very rare that in the public sphere you see a black person commemorated as a hero or simply elevated on a pedestal." (In New York, Ms. Leigh's goddess will be in good company with statues of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Duke Ellington, among others.) Ms. Leigh said she thought "it would be a great opportunity to have something about black beauty right in the middle of that environment." She named the piece in part after the Commodores song of the same title, which she listened to on the radio as a child. "It was a celebration of black womanhood that we hadn't really heard," Ms. Leigh said. "That was what was resonant about it not necessarily a male gaze but that beauty was associated with mightiness and strength, as opposed to fragility. Being solid." Another change was the hair, which morphed from rosettes to cornrows. The hairstyle was inspired by the character Thelma from the 1970s TV show "Good Times," which Ms. Leigh described as "an extremely problematic show," adding, "but it's one of the earliest representations of black women I knew." "I really like the way they read as cornrows but also to me look like flying buttresses an older architectural detail," she added of the braids. "They've probably become the most important part of the sculpture right now." As in most of Ms. Leigh's sculptures, the head's eyes are erased. "When I first started making this, I was trying to abstract the face entirely," she said. "Gradually, I wanted some African features, to be a little bit more specific." The torso echoes the bullet shaped domed houses of mud and grass that were the traditional dwellings of the Mousgoum communities in Cameroon, and were reproduced at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris. The High Line project has been "generative," Ms. Leigh said, feeding the work for her Luhring Augustine show. The new sculptures for that show conflate women's heads with pitchers and vases, inspired by historical objects like African American face jugs that "fuse the black body with a tool," said Ms. Leigh. In her hands, however, the shape of a water pot may serve as a crown. To produce them, Ms. Leigh went to Maine for its wood salt kilns. The sculptures are fired as many as five times, a process that requires at least nine people to monitor the process on four hour shifts. "There's an unpredictability to the result," Ms. Leigh said. Ms. Molesworth, in her essay, said she has come around to Ms. Leigh's point of view, having once been put off by it. "Given the lack of any such systematic inclusion of black women in the fields of Western culture," she wrote, "this recalibration seems both deeply necessary and positively exhilarating." Despite Ms. Leigh's formal engagement with sculpture, she never went to art school but instead earned her bachelor's degree in art and philosophy at Earlham College in Indiana. When she first moved to New York, she worked in an architectural ceramics firm, reproducing tiles for the subway. She lived in Williamsburg, married her roommate, got a Volvo and a brownstone and "was really unhappy." They divorced and shared custody of their daughter, Zenobia, now 22 and interested in photography. Ms. Leigh said she felt as if her career really started in 2010 with a residency at the Studio Museum. Thelma Golden, its director, said she was struck by Ms. Leigh's "commitment to her medium, the way she was invested in clay its history, its connection to African Art and African American art." The artist's work now sells for 40,000 to 125,000. In 2016, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., included her sculptures in a group exhibition. "They have a fabulous presence," said Julian Zugazagoitia, the museum's director, "something both so contemporary and ancestral." Also that year, Ms. Leigh had a solo exhibition at the Hammer. "Her approach to social practice which insists that institutions expand their purview to create more space for a diversity of representations of black women," said Ann Philbin, the museum's director, "have encouraged museums to be more attentive to the needs of these audiences." Among her many loyal collectors is Mr. Fuhrman, who keeps the bust he bought at the Art Show, the annual fair of the Art Dealers Association of America, prominently displayed in his living room. The sculpture sits alongside works by Cy Twombly, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Saville. "It gets comments as much as any work that we have," Mr. Fuhrman said. "It's just a beautiful thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
There once was a man named Albert Alexander. He was a policeman " American accent Hey." in England. " British accent Hello." One day on patrol, he cut his cheek "Ouch!" which led to a terrible infection. See, this was back in 1941, before patients had antibiotics. These were the days when a little scratch could kill you. "Or you got an ear infection and you died. A cat bite and you died. Or you stepped on a stick and you died. All of a sudden, antibiotics come along and bang." The antibiotic era had begun. Soon a slow and painful death became a seven day course of antibiotics and a 10 copay. And Albert? Albert was the first patient in the world to receive the antibiotic penicillin. And it worked. "We just came up with a lifesaving, life extending drug, one of the greatest developments in human history. Except not." That's Matt Richtel, a science reporter for The New York Times. For the past year, Matt's been talking to health experts to find out if we are reaching the end of the antibiotic era. Modern medicine depends on the antibiotic. "And having used it so much, we're now putting it at risk. Is our fate sealed?" "First off, I don't think people respect bacteria enough." This is Ellen Silbergeld, one of the leading scientists studying antibiotic resistance. "Bacteria rule the world. We are just a platform for bacteria. Within the human body, there are more bacterial cells than there are human cells. So we are, in fact, mostly bacteria." "Alexander Fleming " the man who discovered penicillin " in his Nobel speech said, hang on, be aware. When you start killing this stuff off, it's going to fight back." "Did we pay any attention to that? No." "The C.D.C. got our attention today with a warning about what it calls 'nightmare bacteria.'" "These are bacteria that are resistant to most, if not all, antibiotics." When we take antibiotics to kill infections, some bacteria survive. It used to be they'd replicate, and eventually resistance would grow. But now, they're way more efficient and share drug resistant genes among themselves. So every time we take an antibiotic, we risk creating stronger, more resistant bacteria. And stronger, more resistant bacteria means less and less effective antibiotics. And this is a problem because we take lots of antibiotics. "Money gets made over the sale of antibiotics." Big money. Globally, the antibiotics market is valued at 40 billion. And in the U.S., the C.D.C. estimates that about 30 percent of all prescribed antibiotics are not needed at all. That's 47 million excess prescriptions. And in many places outside of the U.S., you don't even need a prescription. "You can walk into a pharmacy. A pharmacist will diagnose you and give you antibiotics. I tend to think of it as a story of Darwinian forces multiplied by the pace and scale of global capitalism. In an interconnected world travel, import, export we're moving the bugs with us." "I can go to a meeting in China or Vietnam or some place " This is Lance Price, the director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center. "I can become colonized by untreatable E. coli. And I might not have any symptoms. But you can get colonized. And you can become this sort of long term host." So you could be healthy and still spreading bad bacteria without even knowing it. "Drug resistant bacteria have never been able to travel the world as fast as they do today." And that's just part of the problem. "You should know that about 80 percent of antibiotic production in this country goes into agriculture." "Why on earth did somebody think putting antibiotics in agriculture was a great idea?" "We've said, hey, look, cram these animals together. Don't worry too much about hygiene or trying to keep them healthy. Just give them antibiotics. And then in a couple weeks, you're going to have full grown animals that you can chop up and eat. Right? And you can make money off of that." "Nobody was making the connection between feeding animals antibiotics and the fact that the food would be carrying drug resistant bacteria." So Ellen did a study. She compared different kinds of store bought chicken. And she found that poultry raised with antibiotics had nine times as much drug resistant bacteria on it. "Now, let's talk about the vegetarians. I just want you to understand, you're not safe. You know all these outbreaks that take place among the lettuce and the things like that. Have you ever wondered how that happened? It's because animal manure is used in raising crops. Organic agriculture lauds the use of animal manure." "Unless you're just a complete, 'I'm a vegan, and I only hang out with vegans, and I eat sterilized vegetables,' you know, it's very likely that you're picking up the same bacteria." Resistant bacteria seep into the groundwater, fly off the back of livestock trucks and hitch a ride home on the hands of farm workers, all of which makes trying to pinpoint exactly where resistant bacteria is originating extremely difficult. And even when it seems like there is a clear source, things still aren't so simple. "No one wants to be seen as a hub of an epidemic." Say your grandmother makes you a rump roast. And then that rump roast makes you sick. Well, if you live in France, or Ireland, or pretty much anywhere in the E.U., packaged meat has a tracking label. You can figure out exactly what farm that meat came from. But in the U.S., not even the top public health officials can do that. "Most countries have animal ID laws. We don't." Pat Basu, former chief veterinarian for the U.S.D.A.'s Food Safety and Inspection Service, basically one of the top veterinarians in the country. "Let me start at the beginning. We got a case where we had resistant bacteria causing illness in people. There were sick people that C.D.C. identified." "More than 50 people in eight counties have gotten an unusual strain of salmonella linked to pork." "This is not your grandmother's pathogen anymore. This is a new bug." Health officials traced the outbreak back to the slaughterhouse and identified six potential farms where the outbreak could have come from. But then the investigation shut down. "The individual farmers have to agree voluntarily to share the data with these investigators who go out. We couldn't go any further back. It was a dead end." 192 people sick, 30 hospitalizations and zero access for health officials to investigate the farms. "The secrecy is maintained because there are big economic forces behind it. Farms are scared of losing their ability to get antibiotics. Hospitals are scared of driving away patients." "Well, as a physician, I do get very upset. I get very upset, as a patient, that information is being withheld." This is Kevin Kavanagh, a doctor and a consumer advocate for patients. "Drug resistant bacteria is a huge problem. If it occurs at a restaurant, if it occurs in a cruise ship, you know about this immediately " "A salmonella outbreak " "within days or hours of an outbreak occurring." "This morning, Chipotle is keeping dozens of its restaurants in the Pacific Northwest closed " "But yet, in a hospital, it can take you months or even over a year until this data appears on a governmental website or reported by the C.D.C." In the U.S., hospitals are under no obligation to inform the public when a bacterial outbreak occurs. "Defend and deny. They are very concerned about the short term economic benefits, rather than looking at long term problems." "There's always this response like, well, but there's still a drug, right? Like, this isn't the end." Remember Albert Alexander? "Hello. Ouch!" the first patient to be given penicillin? Well, his story didn't end there. Five days after he started recovering, the hospital ran out of the new drug, and Mr. Alexander died. Today, we don't have to worry about antibiotics running out. We have to worry about using them so much that they stop working altogether. " want to know why a metro health department didn't shut down a restaurant " "It's a very resistant bacteria " "We really need to change the way we use antibiotics. Because the way we use antibiotics is destroying them." "It's putting at risk the entire system of care that we depend on for lengthening our lives and improving the quality of our lives." The British government commissioned a study which predicted a worst case scenario where more people will die by 2050 of these infections than will die of cancer. "That's a generation from now." "It takes 10 years to identify, develop, test and bring to market a new antibiotic. And it takes a billion dollars." "This is a common issue for humanity." "Very similar to global warming." "You can't control it as a single company. You can't control this as a single government." And because the bacteria are now working together so efficiently "Unless the world acts consistently together, it doesn't make a difference." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
After 340 days in space, Scott Kelly is back on Earth. Mr. Kelly, who spent the time about 249 miles above the planet aboard the International Space Station, and the Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko landed on Tuesday at 11:26 p.m. Eastern in Kazakhstan. Mr. Kelly, in a bulky, white spacesuit, pumped his fist and smiled as he was helped out of his space capsule. From Kazakhstan, Mr. Kelly will travel to Houston. He is scheduled to arrive at 11:45 p.m. Wednesday, and will be greeted by NASA officials; Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; and his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, also an astronaut. Scientists will study Mr. Kelly for the health effects of extended space travel, expecting it to be a steppingstone for a potential trip to Mars. They will have an unusual partner in the research: His twin will also be analyzed. If you're waiting to hear Scott Kelly's perspective on the experience, you'll have to be patient a little while longer. He won't address the news media until 2 p.m. Friday. NASA scientists will answer questions on Reddit at 11 a.m. that day, and the agency will also hold a news conference to discuss research accomplishments at 1 p.m. Mr. Kelly has documented much of his trip on his Instagram and Twitter accounts, which became popular largely because of his distant views of Earth and its otherworldly sunrises and sunsets (he witnessed 10,880 of them). On Day 141, he posted a spectacular video of the aurora borealis. Combined with his other three trips to space, Mr. Kelly has now spent 540 days of his life in orbit. The 340 day stay far surpassed the previous American record 215 days set by Michael Lopez Alegria in 2006 and 2007. The international record is nearly 438 days, set by the Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov on the Mir space station in 1994 and 1995. "I could go another year if I had to," Mr. Kelly said last week in a wide ranging news conference. He was looking forward to jumping in his pool, he said, adding that the hardest part was being away from friends and family. But Mr. Kelly managed to maintained a sense of levity, including dressing up in a gorilla suit. Highlights of the trip included a spacewalk and enjoying the first lettuce grown and harvested in space. "Kind of like arugula," Mr. Kelly said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Marie Ponce, a dancer of Cherokee and Taino descent, performed a Hoop Dance at the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers' annual concert.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Round (and Hoop, and Eagle and Deer) Dancing on First Avenue The Round Dance, a Native American dance of friendship, happens at powwows and other gatherings of Indigenous people all over the country. But as Louis Mofsie, the director of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, noted on Friday night: "We have some of the best round dancing right here on First Avenue in New York." Mr. Mofsie was hosting his company's 44th annual concert, a vibrantly costumed showcase of Native American dances, at the Theater for the New City in the East Village. While new events led by Indigenous artists have recently taken root in New York including the expansive First Nations Dialogues and, at the Park Avenue Armory last fall, the First United Lenape Nations Pow Wow the Thunderbirds, as they're known, have been dancing in the city for more than 50 years. An all volunteer troupe the oldest of its kind in New York the company also set out to raise scholarship funds for Native American students, a focus that continues today. Mr. Mofsie said that back when the group first came together, "if you didn't come from a reservation, you could not get any federal help to go to college." The company's repertory has grown to encompass dances from across the United States and parts of Canada. Friday's program featured a Deer Dance from the Yaqui Tribes of southern Arizona and New Mexico; Jingle Dress and Grass Dances from the Northern Plains people; an arresting Hoop Dance performed by Maria Ponce, a dancer of Cherokee and Taino descent; and many others. Mr. Mofsie prefaced each with a few words on its origins or significance. The Eagle Dance, from the Hopi in Arizona, was formerly a sacred dance asking for rain. The Robin Dance, from the Iroquois, celebrated early signs of spring. The Fancy Dance, from the Oklahoma tribes, is popular in competition at powwows, where dancers are judged on their rhythm and regalia. When you introduced the Eagle Dance tonight, you mentioned the difference between sacred and social dances. The dances we do are not ceremonial or sacred. They're social dances, and that's because today on many of the reservations, they still practice their own Native religions. And as part of that religious practice those dances and songs are closed to outsiders, so of course we wouldn't do them. The social dances have a reason, but it isn't necessarily religious. I might wear something because I like the color, and I like the way it looks. Somebody might say, "Why do you carry a fan?" and I say, "Well, if you get hot, you have something to fan yourself with!" Laughs. That's all there is to it. How did the Thunderbirds begin? Myself and some other founders of the group are what I often call the first generation off the reservation. Our parents all came from reservations, but we were born here in the city. When did you become a full fledged company? We all went off to college, and when we came back we reorganized and called ourselves the Thunderbird dancers, after the clan my mother belonged to in the Winnebago tribe. As we got older, we started traveling to learn dances from around the country. I think some of the dances we do now are no longer done on the reservations where they come from, and I'm so happy that we had an opportunity to learn them and keep them alive. That's primarily what the group is for, to preserve the dances. There's also an educational purpose, it seems. We wanted to perform for non Native audiences, so they could have a better understanding of what these dances are all about that they have an origin, a story, a purpose. We don't just get out there and move around like you see in the movies. How are the dances passed down? For us, we travel to the reservations where they're doing the dances. For instance, we've been up to the Iroquois people, to many of the reservations where they live in upstate New York, and we've been invited to come into the longhouse and dance with them. So that's how we learn, by going there and participating in the dance. It's also about growing up with it, the people you meet. I started dancing when I was about 5 or 6. I always tell people there isn't a school where you can go to learn how to do Native American dancing. It has to come through family. As they're going around in the circle, turning one by one? Yes, and I was curious when we learned the dance: Why is it that they turn around? And they said that's to represent and recognize the duality and the opposites in life. As they dance, they're mindful of the fact that there's always one side, then the other side, so they always turn. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In certain states in southern India, anesthesiologists know to ask anyone undergoing surgery whether they belong to the Vysya, a regional group traditionally associated with traders and businesspeople. Anecdotally, medical workers know that some people with Vysya ancestry who live primarily in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have had fatal responses to common muscle relaxants, so doctors will use a different combination of drugs. The Vysya may have other medical predispositions that have yet to be characterized as may hundreds of other subpopulations across South Asia, according to a study published in Nature Genetics on Monday. The researchers suspect that many such medical conditions are related to how these groups have stayed genetically separate while living side by side for thousands of years. South Asians should be viewed not as a single population but as thousands of distinct groups reinforced by cultural practices that promote marrying within one's community. Although recent changes to cultural norms have resulted in more marriages between members of different groups like castes or subcastes, especially in some urban areas, gene flow between populations was restricted for millenniums, the authors report. Marriage within a limited group, or endogamy, has created millions of people who are susceptible to recessive diseases, which develop only when a child inherits a disease carrying gene from both parents, said Kumarasamy Thangaraj, an author of the study and a senior scientist at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. Along with David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Thangaraj led an effort to analyze data from more than 2,800 individuals belonging to more than 260 distinct South Asian groups organized around caste, geography, family ties, language, religion and other factors. Of these, 81 groups had losses of genetic variation more extreme than those found in Ashkenazi Jews and Finns, groups with high rates of recessive disease because of genetic isolation. In previous studies, Dr. Reich, Dr. Thangaraj and colleagues found that social groups in South Asia mixed between around 4,000 and 2,000 years ago. After that, the solidification of India's caste system resulted in a shift toward endogamy. "You can see writ in the genome the effects of this intense endogamy," Dr. Reich said. Today, South Asia consists of around 5,000 anthropologically well defined groups. Over 15 years, the researchers collected DNA from people belonging to a broad swath of these groups, resulting in a rich set of genetic data that pushes beyond the field's focus on individuals of European ancestry, Dr. Reich said. The scientists then looked at something called the founder effect. When a population originates from a small group of founders that bred only with each other, certain genetic variants can become amplified, more so than in a larger starting population with more gene exchange. Most people carry some disease associated mutations that have no effect because they're present only in one parent's genes. In an endogamous group, however, it's more likely that two individuals carry the same mutation from a common founder. If they reproduce, their offspring have a higher risk of inheriting that disease. Rare conditions are therefore disproportionately common in populations with strong founder events. Among Finns, for instance, congenital nephrotic syndrome, a relatively rare kidney disease, is uniquely prevalent. Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews are often screened for diseases like cystic fibrosis or Gaucher disease. To measure the strength of different founder events, Dr. Reich and Dr. Thangaraj's team looked for long stretches of DNA shared between individuals from the same subgroups. More shared sequences indicated a stronger founder event. The strongest of these founder groups most likely started with major genetic contributions from just 100 people or fewer. Today, 14 groups with these genetic profiles in South Asia have estimated census sizes of over one million. These include the Gujjar, from Jammu and Kashmir; the Baniyas, from Uttar Pradesh; and the Pattapu Kapu, from Andhra Pradesh. All of these groups have estimated founder effects about 10 times as strong as those of Finns and Ashkenazi Jews, which suggests the South Asian groups have "just as many, or more, recessive diseases," said Dr. Reich, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage himself. The next step, the authors say, is to map out and study the genetic origins of diseases prevalent in different groups. As proof of concept, they screened 12 patients from southern India for a gene mutation known to cause a joint disease called progressive pseudorheumatoid dysplasia. Of the six people that had the mutation, five instances could be traced to founder effects, and one case could be traced to a marriage between close relatives. This distinction is important because it's well documented that marriage between close relatives can increase the possibilities of recessive disease. But many South Asians are not yet aware that they should also look out for genetic risks among broader populations, said Svati Shah, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University who was not involved in the research. "There's a tendency to think, 'This will never happen to me because I will never marry my first cousin,'" Dr. Shah said. "But that's not what's happening here, according to the data." There are many other suspected examples of disease associations that have yet to be systematically studied in South Asia. Some medical caregivers speculate that people with the surname Reddy may be more likely to develop a form of arthritis affecting the spine, Dr. Thangaraj said. Others think people from the Raju community, in southern India, may have higher incidence of cardiomyopathy, which affects the heart muscle. If recessive disease mutations are cataloged, they could potentially be used for prenatal or premarital screening programs, which can be "immensely powerful," said Priya Moorjani, an author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. An example of successful genetic cataloging can be found in Dor Yeshorim, a Brooklyn based organization that screens Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews for common disease causing mutations to inform marriage matchmaking. The program is credited with virtually eliminating new cases of Tay Sachs disease, a neurodegenerative disorder, from these communities. Beyond rare diseases, groups with founder effects hold lessons about common diseases and basic biology, said Alan Shuldiner, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland and a genetics researcher for Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, who was not involved in the study. He and his collaborators have gained new insights into heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, for instance, from studying Old Order Amish. Scientists often try to manipulate, or knock out, genes in mice or flies to better understand human disease. But populations like those found across South Asia provide a powerful opportunity to study how gene changes manifest naturally in humans. These are "genetic experiments of nature that have occurred across the planet," Dr. Shuldiner said. The sheer number of people and different groups in South Asia means there's a huge, untapped opportunity to do biological and genetic research there, Dr. Reich said. He suggested that knockouts of almost every single gene in the genome probably exist in India. "I would argue that it's unequal to anywhere else," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
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