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CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. Tucked among mansions in this affluent Boston suburb, Pine Manor College was long a finishing school, a place for well heeled women to receive an education and for Ivy League men to find wives earning it the pejorative nickname "Pine Mattress." Photographs around campus show alumnae clad in white gloves, pearls and shirtwaist dresses. "It was an acceptable place to send your daughter," said Nia Lane Chester, dean of the college. But quietly and deliberately, this small women's college has undergone a radical change, from a place that sought daughters of privilege to one that recruits underprivileged women who might not otherwise enroll in college. And Pine Manor is not alone. A handful of small, private women's colleges, including Alverno College in Milwaukee, the College of New Rochelle in New York and Trinity Washington University in Washington, are shifting to enrolling and graduating low income minority students. The change was made in the past two decades largely as a survival tactic for small colleges in dire straits. Despite that, the institutions and observers say the shift is, at its core, another take on the mission of a women's college. "Women's colleges were founded in the mid 1800s because of access. Women couldn't go to college, by and large," said Susan E. Lennon, executive director of the Women's College Coalition. "There's still an access issue. And while women's colleges are small in number, they're doing some extraordinary and in some cases revolutionary work that I think is a great model, not just for educating women, but for educating women who have been traditionally underrepresented." U.S. News World Report ranked Pine Manor as the nation's most diverse liberal arts school this year. More than half of the undergraduates identify themselves as black or Hispanic, and about 13 percent as white. About 7 percent of them are international students. Meanwhile, Trinity Washington has nearly tripled its enrollment in the past two decades. "Twenty years ago we were 95 percent white and predominantly middle class," said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington, which counts Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, and Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, among its alumnae. "Today we're 90 percent black and Hispanic. We had to rediscover the change agent that was always lurking within our institution." At Pine Manor, the decision to change was borne out of a desire to widen the spectrum of college graduates and shake up a stagnating institution. When she arrived in 1996, Ms. Nemerowicz inherited a dispirited staff, plummeting enrollment and little money. "Who are we, and what are we doing?" Ms. Nemerowicz said she asked at the time. "Who do we want to be?" Unlike some women's colleges faced with declining enrollment, Pine Manor did not want to open its doors to men. Ms. Nemerowicz decided that Pine Manor should cater to students on the financial and academic cusp of being able to attend college. "We said, 'Why don't we try to crack that a little bit and open this place up to kids who haven't gotten the message that they're able to go to college, never mind a private liberal arts college?' " she said. The college set up a partnership with public schools in Boston, about six miles to the east, and with organizations that work to help students in poor urban areas get to college. The first class under the new plan enrolled in 1998 and contained 70 students. About 180 students will be entering as freshmen this fall, and total undergraduate enrollment is about 450, up from about half that in 1996. Pine Manor now recruits women from cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and is reaching out nationwide with the help of college access programs. Admissions officers said they tried to look beyond SAT scores and grade point averages, asking applicants, for example, how they had overcome difficult family or personal situations or how they achieved goals. "Self appraisal, motivation, those sorts of things have more predictive value than a flat transcript," said Bill Boffi, dean for student retention. While nearly everyone here said the change had revitalized the college, the shift continues to be difficult. The college lowered tuition in 1996, and it remains relatively low, about 20,000 per year (with room, board and books it rises to about 34,000 a year). Most students receive generous financial aid, and two thirds are eligible for Pell grants. Pine Manor brought in only 1.5 million in fund raising and 1.4 million through dorm and other facility rentals last year, barely making a dent in the institution's 20 million annual operating budget. Like most institutions, its 8 million endowment has taken a hit in recent years. Faculty and staff members have eschewed raises, taken furloughs and accepted reduced contributions to the pension fund. The college has deferred maintenance on its grand buildings, some of which have peeling paint and distressed furniture along with leaded glass, marble fireplaces and oak paneling. "We're right on the line, and we worry about that," Ms. Nemerowicz said. "We worry about sustaining the mission, especially in difficult financial times." To raise money, Pine Manor is hoping to tap deeper into its alumnae base, some of whom did not know about the shift. Alumnae who do are mostly pleased, though a small few have called to say they do not think the school is taking the right course, Ms. Nemerowicz said. Brenda Shapiro, a member of the board of trustees and class of 1958, said that while the school was completely different, it offered now what it did then: a quality education for women. "Everything has changed. The population has changed, the mission of the college has changed, there's nothing about the college that's the same except the things that matter," she said. "It's a small college that has the luxury of being able to give a very personal, hands on education to the women who go there, and that in itself is extraordinary." But for some students, adjusting to the serene 60 acre campus and to college academics has not been easy either. "I saw a deer, and I was like, 'I need to go back home,' " said Sharon Hillman, a freshman from Brooklyn. Ms. Hillman, 19, said the school's small classes and supportive staff she said faculty members whom she did not know greeted her by name in the hallway had helped her navigate the first year of college. She and Jammy Tores, a 21 year old senior, said the school's focus on inclusive leadership the notion that everyone should strive to be a leader and mentor and social responsibility had resonated with them. "As cliche as it sounds, it makes a lot of sense," Ms. Torres said. "We learn, 'what is a leader?' and you get an almost overwhelming sense of what it means." Tainara Candido, 19, a freshman from Malden, Mass., was drawn to Pine Manor when the school worked with her during the application process. Ms. Candido is the first person in her family to go to college, and her parents, who do not speak English, could not help her apply. "It's not that my parents weren't interested in my grades; they didn't know what to do or what to say," Ms. Candido said. Angelina Rodriguez, who sometimes looks at photos of alumnae past, thinks things are now very different. "It's very unique to see all the ladies were taught to be ladies, and now it's 'You're a woman, you have to stand up,' " Ms. Rodriguez said. "Here's your education, and this is what you have to do with it.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Almost anyone who works in the Washington Post newsroom can look inside its publishing system, Methode, to see what stories are coming. And at the height of the furor over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court in 2018, some who did saw a shocking article awaiting publication. In the article, Bob Woodward, the Post legend who protected the identity of his Watergate source, Deep Throat, for 30 years, was going to unmask one of his own confidential sources. He was, in particular, going to disclose that Judge Kavanaugh had been an anonymous source in his 1999 book "Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate." Mr. Woodward was planning to expose Mr. Kavanaugh because the judge had publicly denied in a huffy letter in 1999 to The Post an account about Kenneth Starr's investigation of President Bill Clinton that he had himself, confidentially, provided to Mr. Woodward for his book. (Mr. Kavanaugh served as a lawyer on Mr. Starr's team.) The article, described by two Post journalists who read it, would have been explosive, arriving as the nominee battled a decades old sexual assault allegation and was fighting to prove his integrity. The article was nearly ready when the executive editor, Martin Baron, stepped in. Mr. Baron urged Mr. Woodward not to breach his arrangement with Mr. Kavanaugh and to protect his old source's anonymity, three Post employees said. (The three, as well as other Post journalists who spoke to me, insisted on anonymity because The Post prefers that its employees not talk to the media.) Mr. Baron and other editors persuaded Mr. Woodward that it would be bad for The Post and "bad for Bob" to disclose a source, one of the journalists told me. The piece never ran. And the steadfast adherence to the longstanding rules of newspaper journalism and the defense of the institution, which have defined Mr. Baron's tenure at The Post, prevailed. Happy newsrooms are all alike but every unhappy newsroom is unhappy in its own way. And in this moment of cultural reckoning, most American newsrooms are unhappy places. They're reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and under attack from the president of the United States even as they reckon with America's racial inequalities in their own institutions. At The Post, black staff members' discontent burst onto Twitter, as a set of high profile journalists who have left the paper discussed how they felt pushed aside or pushed out. Their complaints, along with previously untold stories recently shared with me, paint a picture of an essential American institution caught in fierce cultural crosscurrents. The revival of The Post by Mr. Baron and its owner, the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, is perhaps the greatest news business success story of the past decade. But that journalistic revival has in some ways masked a messier story, one of many contradictions. The Post has published some of the best reporting in the 20th century American newspaper tradition that's ever been done, like the sprawling expose of America's war in Afghanistan all wrapped in a digital marketing, advertising and publishing machine that The Post licenses lucratively to news organizations around the world. It's a faceless institution in an era of influencers and personal brands. It's a place where one of the managing editors, Tracy Grant, still hands new reporters a copy of Katharine Graham's 1997 memoir, though, of course, The Post is no longer owned by the beloved Graham family, but by the world's richest man. Mr. Baron's fearless focus on White House coverage and investigations has put it at the center of the American media's response to President Trump. But it's also a top down institution whose constrained view of what journalism is today has frustrated some of the industry's creative young stars. At the heart of The Post's identity is Mr. Baron, 65, the ultimate old school editor. He rose through the ranks of The Miami Herald and The Los Angeles Times, then arrived at The New York Times in 1996, where he took over the powerful role of night editor, the stern gatekeeper and final approver of any article headed into the print newspaper. But he frustrated reporters with his punctiliousness, and didn't play the internal politics of succession. He left The Times in 2000 to take over The Miami Herald, leading its staff to a Pulitzer Prize, and then The Boston Globe, where he published a historic investigation of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. That showdown became the movie "Spotlight," in which Liev Schreiber played Mr. Baron as introverted, irascible and unbending a depiction that Post employees describe as uncannily accurate. He arrived at The Post in 2013 "stubbornly retro," according to a National Journal profile, but when the Amazon founder, Mr. Bezos, bought the paper later that year, Mr. Baron proved the perfect ballast: He wasn't personally a man of the internet, but he made clear he was all for it. And his journalistic gravitas gave the newsroom comfort during its frantic, overdue shift to the digital age. When other publications seemed unnerved by the election of President Trump, Mr. Baron's assertion, "We're not at war with the administration, we're at work," seemed to fortify journalists everywhere. When I asked, repeatedly, for an interview with Mr. Baron, The Post's spokeswoman, Kris Coratti, instead sent me 4,000 words of excerpts from his many speeches about journalism. The speeches reflected his sophisticated articulation of the importance of open minded, rigorous and brave journalism. But the speech excerpts didn't include the credo that stuck with me from a recent memo written by Mr. Baron. "The Post is more than a collection of individuals who wish to express themselves," Mr. Baron wrote. "The reputation of The Post must prevail over any one individual's desire for expression." This principle reflects Mr. Baron's frequently expressed frustration that his reporters' tweets could undermine The Post's journalism. It sometimes seems that Mr. Baron is standing athwart Twitter yelling, "Stop!" and nobody's listening. The intensity of the debate inside The Post over its journalists' tweets emerged in an internal survey of reporters' attitudes, commissioned by the national editor, Steven Ginsberg, without Mr. Baron's participation. The report, which was circulated in April, described Post management as "ill equipped to deal with social media in the modern era" and suggested that managers are more forgiving of mistakes "by white men and newsroom stars than they are of women, minorities and less high profile reporters." The Post survey presaged the more intense concerns expressed this month by current and former black journalists about the news industry, in general, and The Post, in particular. Such concerns are not new. 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. But many Posties (which is how some on the staff refer to themselves) date the current gap between black staff members and leaders of The Post Mr. Baron and his three managing editors, Cameron Barr, Ms. Grant and Emilio Garcia Ruiz to the departure in 2015 of Kevin Merida, then The Post's managing editor, to lead the ESPN sports and culture site The Undefeated. A handful of black journalists followed him. The union that represents newsroom employees, The Washington Post Guild, now says it has assembled 32 pages of concerns from current and former employees of color. Black staff members active with the union are pushing for a Twitter campaign to highlight the issues, modeled after a similar recent demonstration at The Los Angeles Times. But such a step would be more provocative at The Post, given the paper's institutional unease about expressing opinions on Twitter. Some have already surfaced. Kimbriell Kelly, who left The Post last year for The Los Angeles Times after being passed over for an editing job, tweeted that she was the "only black investigative reporter on WaPo's Investigative Unit for most of my 7 years there." "The notion that only you had to prove yourself as an editor, while sooo many others who didn't look like you, never did, steamed many of us," replied Dana Priest, a white veteran national security reporter. Questions have also arisen within The Post's video operation, which, like other areas outside Mr. Baron's core obsessions, has suffered from a lack of clear strategy. Employees said in a meeting this month that personal favoritism had substituted for clear goals, according to detailed notes of the meeting by a participant. One employee said black video editors felt they had to ask permission to get up even to go to the bathroom, when white producers didn't. Two black editors, who spoke on the condition they not be named, said they'd felt that difference in treatment. "Staff are always free to take breaks," Ms. Coratti said. "They are just asked to give others a heads up that they will be away to ensure that the video hub is not unoccupied in the event of unanticipated news developments." "I was appalled," said Mohamed Soltan, a former Egyptian political prisoner and friend of Mr. Khashoggi, who described Ms. Attiah as one of the key journalists on the story. The Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, defended the decision in an email to me: "What you have to leave out in such situations, in this case including excellent work by Jackson Diehl, Karen Attiah and several others, is never easy." One thing that is clear is that The Post which prides itself on providing not just jobs for its staff but long enriching careers has lost some people any newsroom would want to keep, including Ms. Kelly and Wesley Lowery, who left to become a correspondent for a new "60 Minutes" project on the streaming service Quibi. Another is Soraya Nadia McDonald, who said she had hoped to stretch beyond blogging twice a day on pop culture, which she did at The Post, and wanted "permission and support to be ambitious." She followed Mr. Merida to The Undefeated, where she was a Pulitzer finalist this year for "essays on theater and film that bring a fresh, delightful intelligence to the intersections of race and art." "I don't think any of that would have been published there," she said of The Post. "This place just seems to run off its best people." "You may have seen the announcement of our new initiatives focused on race, ethnicity and identity," Mr. Baron wrote to Ms. Hilton. "I have seen over the years that diversity roles, particularly for black women, are the fastest way to be sidelined out of the most important conversations about coverage and hiring," she wrote back. "The moniker lets other managers think the work of improving representation and newsroom culture doesn't fall on them." Mr. Barr, one of the managing editors, said the job would, in fact, focus on coverage, even if it might not involve directly managing reporters. "This is a job that brings together the journalism and the leadership of the room," he said. That new editor will face questions about identity and journalism that extend beyond race. Two Post employees said editors had barred a Post reporter who publicly accused another journalist of sexual assault, Felicia Sonmez, from writing about the subject, citing the appearance of conflict of interest in her public comments. But it's hard to imagine reporters are expected to be neutral on the issue of sexual assault and the decision seems almost a caricature of the old idea that only people imagined to have no stake in an issue, often white men, can cover it. It can, in this fraught moment, be difficult to untangle the forces driving the arguments about newsroom culture, objectivity and fairness. There are, no doubt, real disagreements around the issue of how much journalists' opinions, identities and experiences should shape coverage and be shared with their audience, and when "objectivity" simply means a dominant point of view. But one clear strain in the tensions at The Post is simply, and sometimes hilariously, generational. In the happier times of early January 2020, the writer Maura Judkis blew up the internet with the article "People are seeing 'Cats' while high out of their minds." It featured irresistible testimonials from people who described watching the film of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical while on marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms or other substances, such as: "The most terrifying experience of my life. I swear to God my soul escaped me." Mr. Baron, who had not seen the piece before it was published, erupted, two Post employees said, furious that the story was "glorifying recreational drug use," one of them said. Ms. Coratti said that Mr. Baron was not "upset" but did "advise that we should be careful not to be seen as celebrating or championing recreational use of drugs." So the dispute seems to be less about journalistic principle than about whether you like edibles. Even those who are frustrated by Mr. Baron's strong willed style of management speak with reverence of his obsessive commitment to reporting. Still, some of The Post's challenges will probably be left to his successor. Mr. Baron has told colleagues he will be around through next year's presidential inauguration, but perhaps not much longer. "Marty will give us a great deal of notice before he retires, and that notice has not been given," Ms. Coratti said. But what separates today's cultural conflicts inside newsrooms from previous generations' is that they now play out, in real time, in public on social media. And they offer a window into an industry, and society, struggling to find its moral footing around issues of racism. That seemed a painful takeaway from the recent Post article about a white woman who came as Megyn Kelly in blackface to a Halloween party at the home of a Washington Post cartoonist in 2018. The woman lost her job when she told her employer about the coming article, which readers reacted to with outrage and questions about its news value. "Was this story intended to be a spoof of our culture?" Patrick Gaspard, who served as ambassador to South Africa during the Obama administration and is now the president of the grant making Open Society Foundations, asked on Twitter. "Did they really invest all this Investigatory resource on this piece to shame this average person who holds no discernible power?" The story's handling inside The Post underscores some of the paper's underlying tensions. After a guest at the party who believed the woman was a Post employee complained to the paper, editors assigned it to two trusted veterans: Sydney Trent, an experienced former editor, and Marc Fisher, a reporter whom The Post also turned to when someone had to write about Mr. Bezos's explicit text messages. Mr. Fisher, who is white, reportedly told people he had doubts about the news value of the costume party story, though he led the reporting and writing. Ms. Trent, who is black, saw it as worth doing, three Post journalists said. White senior editors, including Mr. Baron and Mr. Barr, signed off on the story and sided with Ms. Trent on some questions of tone. That played to old reflexes and new ones: They chose to address a complex moment with the most traditional reportorial form, and they trusted the judgment of a black reporter with a long history of writing and reporting about race. And while many Posties were conspicuously silent about the story on social media, Ms. Trent stood by it, and posted it to her Facebook page to a positive reception. But black reporters are, of course, not monolithic, and many reporters of all backgrounds at The Post found the 3,000 word investigation puzzling. A random person "dressing like a famous lady in blackface at a party 2 years ago seems the least of our concerns right now," Ms. Attiah tweeted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
One patient, admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China, infected at least 10 health care workers and four other patients with the coronavirus that has sickened more than 34,000 people, killed 700 and reached two dozen other countries. The case was just one disturbing detail in a new report on 138 patients in Wuhan that helps explain how the illness progresses and how it spreads. The report, one of two published on Friday by JAMA, is among the most comprehensive articles to date about people infected with the newly identified virus. The patient who infected so many health workers had been placed in a surgical ward because of abdominal symptoms, and the coronavirus was not initially suspected. Four other patients in that ward also contracted the disease, presumably from the first patient. The incident was a chilling reminder of the "super spreaders" in outbreaks of other coronavirus diseases, SARS and MERS patients who infected huge numbers of other people, sometimes dozens. The phenomenon is poorly understood and unpredictable, an epidemiologist's nightmare. Super spreaders led to considerable transmission of MERS and SARS inside hospitals. Reporting on Friday in JAMA, the authors said their data suggested that rapid person to person spread of the virus had occurred among their cases. That was in part because of patients like the one admitted to the surgical department, whose symptoms misled doctors into suspecting other illnesses and failing to take precautions to prevent spread of the virus until it was too late. About 10 percent of the patients did not initially have the usual symptoms, cough and fever, but instead had diarrhea and nausea first. Other uncommon symptoms included headache, dizziness and abdominal pain. Another cause for concern was that some patients who at first appeared mildly or moderately ill then took a turn for the worse several days or even a week into their illness. The median time from their first symptoms to when they became short of breath was five days; to hospitalization, seven days; and to severe breathing trouble, eight days. Experts say that pattern means patients must be carefully monitored, and it is not safe to assume that someone who seems to be doing well early on is out of the woods. The finding is a "heads up" to doctors to keep an eye on these patients, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a recorded interview posted by JAMA. Like previous reports on coronavirus patients, this one found that older people and those with underlying health problems like diabetes, heart disease or cancer tended to become more severely ill than younger, healthier patients. Over all, about 26 percent of the 138 patients needed intensive care; their median age was 66, compared with a median of 51 years for those who did not require intensive care. For this series of patients, the death rate was 4.3 percent, which is higher than the estimates coming from other parts of China. The reason is not known, and the figures may change as more information is gathered. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Unlike some earlier reports, the new one did not find many more men than women to be infected: 54 percent of the patients were male. The data on the patients shows that the illness caused pneumonia and a systemic viral infection that set off a powerful inflammatory response in the body, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, said in an interview. "There are biochemical indicators that a number of the body's organ systems are likely affected and you have an inflammatory response that is disrupting their function to some extent," Dr. Schaffner said. The lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and the systems that control blood clotting are all affected, Dr. Schaffner said, though it is not clear that the virus itself infects organs other than the lungs. The inflammatory response is a hallmark of a serious viral disease, he said, adding that in recent years it has become apparent that heightened inflammation from diseases like the flu can persist for a month or so after the acute illness is gone, and can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes in older people. The second JAMA report concerns 13 patients treated in three hospitals in Beijing from Jan. 16 to Jan. 29. They were younger than the Wuhan group, with a median age of 34, and no underlying diseases. Only one was over 50. The youngest was a 2 year old. They did not become as ill as the Wuhan patients, and none died. The cases, mostly in healthy, young adults, should dispel the notion that only older people contract the illness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
As winter sports resorts in North America closed in response to the coronavirus outbreak, skiers and snowboarders began flocking to backcountry trails or to slopes where they could trek uphill and then take a downhill run. Though the activities are not forbidden, public officials have begun imploring the skiers and snowboarders to scale back. The crowds not only add to the risk of spreading the virus, but they have also alarmed emergency workers in many mountain communities, who see an increased threat of avalanches and of severe injuries that can divert medical resources needed to cope with the pandemic. A snowboarder near Telluride, Colo., was seriously injured on Tuesday in what officials described as a human triggered avalanche, necessitating the deployment of a search and rescue team. "We had more than 30 people involved in that rescue, 30 people who would otherwise not be together at all," Tor Anderson, one of the rescuers with San Miguel County Search and Rescue, said. "When you think about everyone involved the helicopter pilot, the local residents who showed up to help this is totally unnecessary contact because someone made a bad decision." The snowboarder was airlifted to a hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., Anderson said, and was expected to be occupying a bed in the intensive care unit for quite a while. "What happens in two weeks when people need all those beds for people dying from Covid 19?" Anderson said, referring to the disease caused by the virus. "What happens when that person gets Covid from being in the hospital? This is an unbelievably unprecedented time. We have to think more responsibly." A Colorado stay at home order, which went into effect on Thursday, does not prohibit activity on the state's mountains. But on Friday, Gov. Jared Polis held a news conference to clarify the order and strongly discouraged traveling to the mountains for exercise. "It is not a competition to see what you can get away with," said Polis, who had ordered the resorts to close on March 15. "If you need to recreate and you love our outdoors," he added, "do it in communities close to your home. This pandemic is not a vacation. It's not the time to drive two or three hours from Denver to mountain communities, many of which are reeling from the crisis." Backcountry trails near major cities and closed ski areas with so called uphill access have been especially crowded since resorts shut down operations, officials said. "The last couple of weekends have been downright nuts," said Scott Schell, executive director of the Northwest Avalanche Center in Seattle. "A lot of people living in the Seattle metropolitan area people who are pent up are skiing even though ski areas are closed. The parking lots have been packed." Officials in mountain communities have advised low risk options for example, cross country skiing rather than backcountry turns on steep slopes. "Your day of fun should not come at the expense of us dropping everything while dealing with this public health crisis to come save you," Susan Lilly, the San Miguel County public information officer, said after imploring people to be careful. Across Canada and the northwestern United States, avalanche forecasts have been halted, at least in part because they might promote mountain activities and steer skiers and snowboarders to sites far from home. The forecasts have continued at the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, yet the snowboarder injured near Telluride, for example, rode in an area that the information center had specifically cited as a high avalanche risk. "From a broad perspective, it's great people are getting out and doing activities that help them during these difficult times," Ethan Greene, the director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, said. There's a lot of ways to recreate safely, but people flocking to one area is difficult from a public health perspective." Another worry for search and rescue groups is that many people heading to avalanche prone slopes do not have appropriate equipment or awareness of safe routes. They are also congregating in large groups in parking lots and on trails, officials said. "Besides not social distancing, our biggest concern is that people who would normally be on the ski areas feeling safe are in the backcountry unprepared," Dawn Wilson, a spokeswoman for Alpine Rescue Team, said. "People are going out without transceivers and beacons. They don't know the avalanche dangers. They don't know what they're doing." Even among those accustomed to the rigors of the backcountry, expectations have changed quickly. Tim Wenger of Palisade, Colo., met last week with a friend on Vail Pass at a popular trailhead parking lot that has since been closed for a morning of backcountry snowboarding. The pair chose the area because the Colorado Avalanche Information Center rated it "low" for avalanche risk. "I'm glad we got there early," he said on Thursday. "A lot of people had the same idea. We kept our distance. We made a plan beforehand to break our own trail and stick to our own route. I don't recall seeing people congregating or being disrespectful. It seemed like a lot of avid local backcountry skiers on top of their game." Nonetheless, Wenger, who lives about two hours away, said that trip might have been his last for a while. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LOS ANGELES, Calif. Around 9 a.m. on Saturday, a long line of artfully clad young women was forming around a beige corporate park. They had flown, driven, pleaded with their parents and assembled posses for the inaugural Teen Vogue Summit: a two day event, costing from 299 549 per ticket. "This has been a dream come true," said Karishma Bhuiyan, 18, surveying her peers walking down a boardwalk lined with socially conscious vendors, a sort of "woke" mall. "I didn't think it was going to be this diverse. I'm shook. Like, wow, I do not want to go back to Dallas." Under its editor Elaine Welteroth and digital editorial director Phillip Picardi, Teen Vogue added the political issues of today to coverage of party frocks and makeup tips, and became a glossy guidebook for readers disenfranchised by the current presidential administration. The summit was organized to inspire, educate and yes, sell to the young readers of what ceased to be a traditional magazine in November, when Conde Nast announced it would stop printing it regularly. Ms. Bhuiyan initially applied for one of 50 scholarships for this particular experiential activation, which was attended by 650 people on Saturday. When she didn't get accepted, she and her friend, Muram Ibrahim, 17, started a GoFundMe campaign. They raised over 2,900. Still, "it took a lot of convincing of my mom to let me go," Ms. Ibrahim said. "I made a Google presentation for my parents and I presented for one hour," Ms. Bhuiyan said. Ava Liversidge, 13, started reading Teen Vogue because she aspires to work in fashion she wore an Ikea T shirt procured from a vintage store the previous day but said it had opened her up to politics. "It encourages you to be interested in other things," she said. "It's a great, great resource." Ms. Welteroth, in a blush colored dress, ascended the stage to a hero's welcome. "Where my activists at?" she called, inciting cheers. A keynote speaker was Hillary Clinton, interviewed by Yara Shahidi, a 17 year old actress best known for her role on the sitcom "black ish." Ms. Clinton urged her audience to combat mansplaining ("Be willing to say, 'I'm so glad John agrees with my idea'") and adjust their expectations at the polls ("Don't look for the perfect campaign and the perfect candidate"). Attendees broke into smaller groups for workshops, "mentor sessions" and panels. Cindy Gallop, a British advertising consultant, told one of these smaller audiences that "we need to build our own financial ecosystem because the white male one isn't working for us,"and suggested that would be employees walk into salary negotiations with "a number in your mind so large, you almost want to laugh when you say it." Those who bought tickets for Friday's program were also able to meet female bosses at the Los Angeles offices of Instagram, YouTube, Netflix and other companies. Back on the lawn, a panel called "How to Be a Better Ally" was wrapping up. The sun was setting, and some girls had wrapped themselves in blankets. "Now is not the time to get tired," commanded a hype man by the stage. "We are as woke as we were this morning, we are more woke than we were this morning." There remained discussions, mentor sessions, workshops. Maxine Waters, the California congresswoman, would be on soon. There would be ice cream before her, and a poetry performance afterward. "Old Karishma is not here anymore," said Ms. Bhuiyan, springing up from a beanbag. "I'm totally new and improved. I want to go out and change the world right now, but, like, the event is still going on." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
On the first day of December, a fleet of trucks illuminating the words of activists, poets, artists, educators and people living with H.I.V. and AIDS will travel through the city, competing with the billboards, neon and other distractions, in a mobile art exhibition for World AIDS Day. The interactive experience, on LED screens, was created by the artist Jenny Holzer in collaboration with the New York City AIDS Memorial as part of " LightTheFight," a ceremony and performance that starts at dusk at the AIDS Memorial park in the West Village. The five trucks will begin their journey there. "It's crucial to maintain awareness that the AIDS epidemic is live, in New York and around the world," Ms. Holzer said in a statement. "The messages on the trucks' screens, contributed by feeling people, could comfort those affected by AIDS and reignite fires in bellies to end AIDS forever." The texts to be displayed on the LED screens were selected by the artist to represent a variety of responses to AIDS. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
AMG, the in house tuner shop for Mercedes Benz, has consistently found ways to push the performance abilities of production vehicles without betraying their luxurious nature. The AMG machines can be ridiculously powerful, but they've also been as fully useful and indomitable as any other Mercedes. The 2014 CLA45 AMG 4Matic, however, is something different. For the first time, AMG is working with 4 cylinders. Starting with the same basic 2 liter engine found in the tamer CLA250, AMG builds its version around a specially sand cast aluminum block, stuffs it full of fortified components like a forged crankshaft and pistons, drops the compression ratio and adds a specially constructed Borg Warner twin scroll turbocharger that heaves in its impressive 26.1 pounds of boost through a special water to air intercooler. Pushing the advantages of direct gasoline injection toward their limits, the result is a towering 355 horsepower compared with 208 for the CLA250. That's an almost unfathomable 178 horsepower per liter. While that lofty output is more high strung than the mellow torque production of the CLA250's engine, this isn't an ill behaved beast. Feeding a 7 speed dual clutch automated transmission that turns an all wheel drive system, this engine feels flexible and fun under most circumstances. And thanks to some neat tricks with the exhaust system, it sounds great too, with sweet trills on downshifts and some resonance as it accelerates. According to Car and Driver, the CLA45 rockets to 60 miles per hour in a scalding 4.2 seconds and blasts the quarter mile in 12.8 seconds at 110 m.p.h. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The exit interview had just about ended last week when I asked Maria Sharapova if she would consider coaching in retirement. Sharapova, standing tall as usual, doubled over with laughter. Safe to say that was a no. She also closed the door on a comeback as a player even though comebacks are a staple of women's tennis. Kim Clijsters, a mother of three, recently returned to the tour at age 36 after more than seven years away from competition. Serena Williams, Sharapova's kryptonite, is playing on in search of a record tying 24th Grand Slam singles title at age 38, as she raises her 2 year old daughter, Olympia. "It's tough to compare everyone's positions when it's time," Sharapova said. "I think everybody has very different things going on in their life, and I think for women there's also the conversation of family, which is obviously a big part of Serena's comeback after stepping away from the game for a little bit of time. But I think if there's someone who can break records it's her, and I have no doubt that she can." Sharapova, who wants to have children, said she had never envisioned playing after becoming a parent. She said she "wouldn't know how to do both" and would struggle to sacrifice time with her children to "dedicate hours and hours on your body and on your strength and on the court." She added: "Those are never the circumstances I wanted to have a child around." Some people might take umbrage at that perspective, especially as many athletes strive for more work life balance. But Sharapova said her thinking was shaped in part by a two year separation from her mother, Yelena, after she left Russia at age 6 with her father, Yuri, to train in Florida. Visa problems kept Yelena from joining them. "That definitely influences a lot of decisions that I'll make in the future," Sharapova said, adding: "There's the expression, 'You make plans and God laughs,' and I really hope he doesn't laugh." Sharapova recognizes that her parents did the best they could in a challenging situation after the move to Florida. "I've really had such good relationships with my mother and my dad," she said, "but I want to give my children a sense of peace and a sense of just home." So how will Sharapova spend her time now that she has retired with five Grand Slam singles titles, chronic pain in her right shoulder and her forearms, and millions in the bank? She appears well positioned no matter what she decides. "She has got the experience. She has the brains for it and the know how. Take your pick, commissioner of women's sports, head of the I.O.C., I don't know. She could go anywhere with it," said Martina Navratilova, the tennis great who spotted a young Sharapova at a Moscow clinic and recommended that she train at IMG Academy in Florida. "It just depends what would be her next passion." For now, sports administration is not in her plans and might be politically complicated considering her suspension for use of the recently banned substance meldonium in 2016. The ban has left an undeniable stain even though an arbitration panel that reduced her ban from two years to 15 months concluded that she had not intentionally cheated. Social media posts on her retirement have been awash in good riddance commentary like "drug cheat" and "Sharadopa." "It was a situation I had to go through, and I did it in the most honest and humbling way," Sharapova said. "And to be in my position and be so vulnerable and to say I made this mistake and to go through two trials, keep training the way I did and then come back and go on court and compete with the same amount of love for the sport is an incredible example. And I'm proud of that." Still, her suspension could be a potential obstacle going forward. Her 2017 autobiography, "Unstoppable," delivered underwhelming sales in North America despite her remarkable life story. A global star at 17 after upsetting Williams to win Wimbledon in 2004, Sharapova was among the first female athletes to build a personal brand rather than just a portfolio. "When I retired in 2006, somebody said to me, 'You need to work on your brand.' And I said, 'What is that?'" Navratilova said. "I was 50 years old, and I didn't know what that meant. I thought, Coca Cola? I mean, I'm a brand? Me? So she was ahead of her time, and she capitalized on it, and that shows her multi dimensionality." "That's a lot more than the 900 Maria and her dad came with to the U.S.A.," Eisenbud said. "As an 18 or 19 year old, she was sitting in board rooms with Nike and helping design dresses and all those types of things," he continued, adding: "She just has this ability to understand, learn and ask questions. I've gone to photo shoots with so many clients, and she's the only one who will meet with the photographer and creative team and really try to understand what they are looking for." Eisenbud said Sharapova's long term endorsement deals with Nike, Evian and Porsche would continue in retirement. She is interested in studying architecture, designing tennis and sports facilities and focusing on the management of her candy company, Sugarpova. "I wish she would do less with the candy bit," Navratilova said. "Sugar is just not good for kids." Sharapova said she would soon be headed to a business conference in Salt Lake City that she had been unable to attend as an active player. "I'm more forward driven, and I am also incredibly competitive," she said. "And there are a lot of aspects in life and in business that I want to sink my teeth into." But as she leaves what she calls her "day job" for something new, she has continuity elsewhere. She and her boyfriend, Alexander Gilkes, a British businessman who founded an online auction site, have been together for more than two years. "He's been an incredibly positive influence in my life, and he's very happy that he gets to spend more time with me," Sharapova said, though she conceded that her more stable schedule might be disorienting. "He's slightly worried. He keeps calling me 'Hurricane Maria.'" That is because during her peripatetic career she made a habit of dashing into his life and then suddenly disappearing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
As movie buffs already know, "The Post," the Steven Spielberg journalism thriller starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, hits theaters in wide release on Jan. 12. Set in 1971, the film follows the Washington Post's first female publisher, Katharine Graham, and its editor Ben Bradlee as they grapple with the decision to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers. While Mrs. Graham's unshakable grit and hard won success would not be easy to emulate, her wardrobe in the film, a veritable tribute to 1970s office wear, is easier to mine. And the pussy bow blouses and A line midi skirts look startlingly fresh in 2018. Here, how to wear these retro staples. With a smart A line skirt and pussy bow blouse, a white double breasted blazer is promotion worthy. Worn with matching white pants and chunky platforms, it channels quite another '70s icon: Bianca Jagger (who most certainly never saw the inside of a cubicle). The Ferragamo Vara pump has stood the test of time. Introduced in 1978, the polished shoe has the magic ability of going with practically everything, from frayed denim to a throwback skirt suit. These stacked heel loafers in navy patent leather put a fashion forward spin on the masculine style. Slip them on and walk straight up that corporate ladder. Almost nothing is more versatile than a wrap dress. With stack heel loafers and a structured blazer, this one has a retro vibe that works 9 to 5. An easy way to earn those stripes (at least the sartorial variety) at the office. The bold color scheme keeps it from feeling dated. Straight out of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Mary Richards would have flipped for this sophisticated (but cheery!) ensemble. Tory Burch polyester bow blouse, 229, and wool blend pants, 249, on sale at Tory Burch, toryburch.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WASHINGTON Russian agents intending to sow discord among American citizens disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on Facebook, published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google's YouTube service, according to copies of prepared remarks from the companies that were obtained by The New York Times. The detailed disclosures, sent to Congress on Monday by companies whose products are among the most widely used on the internet, came before a series of congressional hearings this week into how third parties used social networks and online services to influence millions of Americans before the 2016 presidential election. The new information goes far beyond what the companies have revealed in the past and underline the breadth of the Kremlin's efforts to lever open divisions in the United States using American technology platforms, especially Facebook. Multiple investigations of Russian meddling have loomed over the first 10 months of the Trump presidency, with one leading to the indictments of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chief, and others on Monday. In its prepared remarks sent to Congress, Facebook said the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin, had posted roughly 80,000 pieces of divisive content that was shown to about 29 million people between January 2015 and August 2017. Those posts were then liked, shared and followed by others, spreading the messages to tens of millions more people. Facebook also said it had found and deleted more than 170 accounts on its photo sharing app Instagram; those accounts had posted about 120,000 pieces of Russia linked content. Previously, Facebook had said it identified more than 100,000 in advertisements paid for by the Internet Research Agency. The Russia linked posts were "an insidious attempt to drive people apart," Colin Stretch, the general counsel for Facebook who will appear at the hearings, said in his prepared remarks. He called the posts "deeply disturbing," and noted they focused on race, religion, gun rights, and gay and transgender issues. Facebook, Mr. Stretch said, was "determined to prevent it from happening again." The new information also illuminated when Facebook knew there had been Russian interference on its platform. Several times before the election last Nov. 8, Facebook said its security team discovered threats targeted at employees of the major American political parties from a group called APT28, an agency that United States law enforcement officials have previously linked to Russian military intelligence operations. Facebook cautioned that the Russia linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds everyday. Between 2015 and 2017, people in the United States saw more than 11 trillion posts from Pages on Facebook. Twitter, in its prepared remarks, said it had discovered more than 2,700 accounts on its service that were linked to the Internet Research Agency between September 2016 and November 2016. Those accounts, which Twitter has suspended, posted roughly 131,000 tweets over that period. Outside of the activity of the Internet Research Agency, Twitter identified more than 36,000 automated accounts that posted 1.4 million election related tweets linked to Russia over that three month period. The tweets received approximately 288 million views, according to the company's remarks. Twitter noted that the 1.4 million Russia linked election tweets represented less than three quarters of one percent of all election related tweets during that period. Google, in its prepared statement, said it had also found evidence that the Internet Research Agency bought ads on its services and created YouTube channels to upload short videos about divisive social issues including law enforcement, race relations or Syria. Google said it had found 18 channels that were "likely associated" with the Russian agents that posted political videos to YouTube. All told, those accounts now suspended uploaded more than 1,100 videos totaling 43 hours of content from 2015 through the summer of 2017. Google said, in general, those videos had very low view counts that added up to 309,000 views between the middle of 2015 and late 2016. Only three percent of the videos had more than 5,000 views and there was no evidence that the accounts had targeted American viewers, the company said. The internet search giant also confirmed earlier reports that the Internet Research Agency had purchased search and display ads from it. Google said the group had bought 4,700 in ads but none of them had targeted users by their political leanings, which was a targeting tool that Google added before the election. Google had been investigating a separate 53,000 in ad purchases with political material from Russian internet or building addresses, but discovered that those were not related to the Kremlin. "While we found only limited activity on our services, we will continue to work to prevent all of it, because no amount of interference is acceptable," wrote Richard Salgado, Google's director of law enforcement and information security, and Kent Walker, Google's general counsel. The two men were scheduled to testify at separate congressional committees on Tuesday and Wednesday. For Facebook, Google and Twitter, the discovery of Russian influence by way of their sites has been a rude awakening. The companies had long positioned themselves as spreading information and connecting people for positive ends. Now the companies must grapple with how Russian agents used their technologies exactly as they were meant to be used but for malevolent purposes. That has led to thorny debates inside the companies. For Facebook, the problem is less straightforward than finding Russia linked pages and taking down content. Executives worry about how stifling speech from non American entities could set a precedent on the social network and how it could potentially be used against other groups in the future. So Facebook has focused on the issue of authenticity or the fact that the Russian agencies did not identify themselves as such as a reason for taking down the accounts. "Many of these ads did not violate our content policies," Elliot Schrage, vice president of policy and communications at Facebook, said in a company blog post earlier this month. "That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform." Earlier this month, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner introduced a bipartisan bill to require internet companies to identify those who paid for political ads on the tech companies' platforms. Facebook has been promoting its strengthened advertising disclosure policies as an attempt to pre empt the bipartisan bill. Last week, Facebook began rolling out new features that provide insight into who is paying for ads, and it will maintain a publicly viewable database of ads purchased on the network. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
To improve a Mets team that has not made the playoffs since 2016, the new general manager, Brodie Van Wagenen, has made a flurry of moves this winter, like trading for second baseman Robinson Cano and closer Edwin Diaz and signing catcher Wilson Ramos, infielder Jed Lowrie and reliever Jeurys Familia. On paper, the Mets are already better and deeper than last season's 85 loss squad. But have they done enough to contend for a playoff spot in a crowded National League East? If they intend to be as bold as the confident Van Wagenen has said, should they not pounce on Manny Machado or Bryce Harper, the prize free agents who remain unsigned with spring training less than three weeks away? Speaking to reporters on Thursday, the Mets' chief operating officer, Jeff Wilpon, and Van Wagenen lauded the front office's off season, said the bulk of the work had been done and essentially ruled out any pursuit of Machado and Harper, superstars who have not found as rich a free agent market as once expected. "From a price to value point of view, I don't think they've come to me to say, 'Listen, we really need to do this because it's come down to the point where we think the cost has value,' " Wilpon said of the front office. Then, referring to Yoenis Cespedes, who has underperformed or been injured during his four year 110 million contract, Wilpon added, "We do have a 29 million outfielder on the roster we hope will come back sometime this year to be productive." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. From across the room, Van Wagenen, who was Cespedes's agent during those contract negotiations before his switch to front office work, chimed in. "He was awarded that contract for a reason," Van Wagenen said. "We believe in him and we believe he can make a high impact, and we hope that he will in the coming season and beyond." When Van Wagenen took over the Mets, he talked about eliminating as many "ifs" on the roster as he could in other words, improving the team's ability to withstand injuries and said he expected to "be in on every free agent." Yet his citing Cespedes, who is not expected to return from major operations on his feet until the second half of the 2019 season, as a reason for not pursuing Harper or Machado seemed counter to those statements. "I don't know how may teams have two 30 million players, so I think that's a bit of the answer," Wilpon said, referring to Cespedes and another potential high prized addition. Money is always a hot topic when it comes to the Mets. The team plays in the largest market in the country, yet its annual payroll since 2012 has ranked closer to the middle of baseball or lower. After its busy winter, the Mets' payroll, according to RosterResource.com, is about 145 million. That figure includes the money the Seattle Mariners kicked in to offset Cano's contract and the insurance savings from the deals for David Wright (who retired) and Cespedes, but it is less than the Mets' 2018 opening day payroll, 150 million, and significantly under the luxury tax threshold, 206 million. Wilpon said Van Wagenen still had some wiggle room for more spending, but the amount was not specified. Van Wagenen said the Mets talked this winter about every player available via free agency or trade, but concluded the team's best plan for improvement was to spread its resources, to address multiple needs and not just commit themselves to a single, huge investment. "The goal from the beginning was to address all of our needs in the most efficient way we could," Van Wagenen said. With Lowrie and Cano joining an infield that may include, among others, Amed Rosario, Todd Frazier, J. D. Davis and perhaps the prospect Peter Alonso, Wilpon said the Mets were crowded there. In the outfield, Van Wagenen said the Mets had multiple options, too. Michael Conforto and Brandon Nimmo will return, as will the oft injured Juan Lagares. Keon Broxton, an athletic but light hitting outfielder, was acquired in a trade earlier this month, and Jeff McNeil is a converted infielder who has not played the outfield regularly since college. "One of things we looked at last year and a reason we failed: We just weren't deep," Wilpon said. That problem, the Mets said, has been addressed. But the solution does not appear likely to include Machado or Harper. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
When Samantha Flores wasn't taking classes at the University of Maryland for her master's degree in cello performance this past academic year, she could often be found hanging out with a bunch of 80 somethings. Ms. Flores, 28, along with another music student, was participating in a new artists in residence program at Collington, a nonprofit retirement community in Mitchellville, Md. In return for free room and board, Ms. Flores gave concerts to the residents, accompanied the choir on her cello and taught them about music while getting to know them through happy hours and dining hall meals. The program at Collington, an affiliate of the Kendal Corporation, is one of many new programs bringing together old and young people, from babies through graduate students, with the idea that each generation has something to offer the other. "It's the way people were meant to grow up and grow old in connection with each other," said Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United, a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit organization that aims to build bridges between old and young. On Tuesday, Generations United and the Eisner Foundation released an expansive survey the first in 20 years of 180 intergenerational programs. With 39 percent of grandparents having a grandchild living more than 500 miles away, according to a study by Generations United and MetLife Mature Market Institute, these programs create new ways to foster intergenerational interaction. "Resources are more wisely used when they connect the generations rather than separate them," Ms. Butts said. The survey, conducted with the Ohio State University, found strong public support for these programs. Benefits included reducing loneliness for older adults and increasing levels of engagement for dementia patients who interacted with children. Among adults who participated in such programs, 97 percent indicated it allowed them to feel happy, interested, loved, younger and needed. Children involved in the programs demonstrated higher levels of empathy and a greater ability to regulate their behavior than those who hadn't participated in such programs. "This is the wave of the future among senior housing providers," Ms. Butts said. She pointed to another common example of such programs: a preschool class located in the middle of a skilled nursing home. Marilyn Haskel, a 72 year old resident of Collington involved in selecting the students, said the young people often invited fellow music students to practice on the grounds, resulting in pop up concerts. With no family nearby, Ms. Haskel said, "it was delightful for me to sit down and have conversations about their careers and what they're planning." When residents learned that Ms. Flores didn't have a car, they often drove her to campus. Ms. Flores struck up close friendships with many of the residents, including one she met in September who had recently been given a brain cancer diagnosis. "We bonded over Bach," she said, engaging in lengthy conversations about him. When the man died in February, Ms. Flores played a piece he had requested at his funeral: Bach's "Sarabande: Suite for Solo Cello No. 5 in C Minor." "I promised I wouldn't cry, but you can't help that," she said. "It was a very emotional moment." College students at other campuses will have the opportunity to interact with older adults in a program being rolled out this fall called Intergenerational Solutions in Housing. Started by Generations United and New York University and partially supported with a grant from the AARP Foundation, it aims to address two problems: social isolation among older adults and student debt. Graduate students in social work will be matched with older Americans who have a spare room. Ernest Gonzales, an assistant professor of social work at New York University, felt these students were prime candidates, since they have high levels of maturity and altruism and many carry a significant amount of student loan debt. Students will either live rent free in exchange for services like grocery shopping and shoveling snow, or they can opt to pay below market rent with no formal exchange of services. A licensed social worker will oversee the recruitment of graduate students who will handle the on the ground matching services, run background checks and home inspections and provide routine check ins to ensure the matches are successful. A rigorous vetting process will aim to safeguard against thefts and other types of abuse. "Every city is wrestling with social isolation" among older adults "and high housing costs, so there's a real hunger for launching this," Dr. Gonzales said. The program will debut this fall at N.Y.U. and Washington University in St. Louis; the goal is to expand it to many college campuses across the country. Though an AARP survey found 38 percent of those 45 and older indicating a willingness to share their homes, it's unclear how many would actually participate, said Emily Allen, senior vice president at the AARP Foundation. She says this could be an important income generator for low income older adults, but it needs to be tested. The Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Center's new Anita May Rosenstein Campus, scheduled to open early next year, will connect and provide expanded services to two of the most vulnerable populations in the area: seniors and youth. It will contain 99 units of affordable housing for seniors, 100 beds for homeless youth, and new senior and youth centers. Many elderly L.G.B.T. people in Los Angeles live at or below poverty level and face isolation and discrimination in traditional senior facilities. In addition to health care and social services, the center will provide intergenerational programs. In promoting social engagement, such programs provide "one of the pillars of healthy aging," said Dr. Annette Medina Walpole, chief of the division of geriatrics and aging at the University of Rochester School of Medicine Dentistry. "This is very much in line with what needs to be happening to engage our older adult community," she said. Yet the Generations United report identified barriers to getting the programs rolled out on a wide scale. Facilities for young and old each have their own requirements on things like staff ratios and square footage which may not be in sync. One recommendation is to ensure that accreditation is more uniform and best serves both populations. Ms. Flores hopes those challenges can be overcome, since her experience left such a lasting, positive impression. As her year at Collington comes to a close this August, she plans to stay in touch with the residents, many of whom she now views like family. "I came here thinking I was going to teach them, but I really think they taught me," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'THE DAMNED' at the Park Avenue Armory (performances start on July 17). And the beautiful. The visionary director Ivo van Hove storms the armory with his adaptation of Luchino Visconti's screenplay, performed by actors of the Comedie Francaise. The script traces the fragmentation of the wealthy, wretched, amoral Essenbeck family during the Nazi party's rise to power. 212 933 5812, armoryonpark.org 'FIDLER AFN DAKH' at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (in previews; opens on July 15). "Fiddler on the Roof" is a theatrical translation of Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish language tales, and the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene has translated it right back, with English and Russian supertitles. Under Joel Grey's direction, the first Yiddish production of this show in 50 years stars Steven Skybell and the kvetcher extraordinaire Jackie Hoffman. Mazel tov. 866 811 4111, nytf.org 'FIRE IN DREAMLAND' at the Public Theater (in previews; opens on July 16). In Rinne Groff's play, a Dutch filmmaker sees the trash strewn shores of Coney Island and envisions a paradise. In this three character drama about hope and disaster, directed by Marissa Wolf and starring Kyle Beltran, Enver Gjokaj and Rebecca Naomi Jones, real worlds clash with imagined ones. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'GETTIN' THE BAND BACK TOGETHER' at the Belasco Theater (previews start on July 19; opens on Aug. 13). Strike it up. In this musical comedy, a finance bro falls off the corporate ladder and picks up his high school guitar. John Rando directs this battle of the bands, hearts and moms, with a book by the producer and blogger Ken Davenport and the theater troupe Grundleshotz, music and lyrics by Mark Allen, and additional material by Sarah Saltzberg. 212 239 6200, gettinthebandbacktogether.com 'THE ORIGINALIST' at 59E59 Theaters (previews start on July 14; opens on July 19). A fresh Supreme Court vacancy greets John Strand's play, based on the life of Antonin Scalia and starring Edward Gero. When the play, directed by Molly Smith, premiered at Arena Stage in 2015, a critic from The New York Times called it "a series of debates dressed up in the robes of drama." 212 279 4200, 59e59.org 'THE PECULIAR PATRIOT' at the National Black Theater (in previews; opens on July 13). Liza Jessie Peterson draws on two decades of working with teenagers at Rikers Island for this one woman show, in which she plays Betsy LaQuanda Ross, a cheerful motormouth who devotes her time to visiting incarcerated friends. Reviewing a performance last year, Laura Collins Hughes wrote that the play is "a comedy about a tragedy, and a patriotic call for reform." 866 811 4111, nationalblacktheatre.org 'TRAINSPOTTING LIVE' at Roy Arias Stages (in previews; opens on July 15). Ever wanted to creep a little closer to grime, disease and debilitating addiction? In Your Face Theater's immersive adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel, set among heroin users in Edinburgh in the late 1980s, features nudity, violence, strong language and an intimate encounter with the worst toilet in Scotland. trainspottingnyc.com 'TWELFTH NIGHT' at the Delacorte Theater (previews start on July 17; opens on July 31). The whirligig of time has returned a reimagining of Shakespeare's comedy to Shakespeare in the Park. Oskar Eustis and Kwame Kwei Armah direct this musical visit to Illyria, conceived by the writer composer Shaina Taub and Mr. Kwei Armah. When the Public Works version premiered in 2016, The Times described it as a "free spirited, thoroughly delightful gloss on Shakespeare's beloved comedy." 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'CONFLICT' at the Beckett Theater at Theater Row (closes on July 21). Miles Malleson's interwar fairy tale about a Parliamentary election reaches its happy ever after. Despite the occasional creak, the play's wit and complex characters, as well as a couple of terrific 1920s gowns, are a treat. In Jenn Thompson's production, Jessie Shelton is a standout as an aristocratic miss torn between two candidates. 212 239 6200, minttheater.org 'GIRLS BOYS' at the Minetta Lane Theater (closes on July 22). Dennis Kelly's harrowing solo show, starring a translucent Carey Mulligan, puts away its toys. Ben Brantley wrote that this play about love, violence and gender, narrated by a character called Woman, is "a dark tease of a tale that never quite rises to its own, earnest ambitions." 800 982 2787, minettalanenyc.com 'LOG CABIN' at Playwrights Horizons (closes on July 15). Jordan Harrison's comedy about a group of L.G.B.T.Q. friends, set in the very recent past, reaches the end of its rainbow. Jesse Green wrote that while Mr. Harrison's "hot button gay versus trans comedy," precisely directed by Pam MacKinnon, is "marginally less homogeneous than the traditional gay play," it is also less coherent. 212 279 4200, phnyc.org 'PASS OVER' at LCT3 (closes on July 22). Inspired both by "Waiting for Godot" and the continuing violence against young black men, Antoinette Nwandu's play leaves its urban street corner. Danya Taymor's production, of what Jesse Green described as a "blazingly theatrical" debut, "creates a vivid world of injustice while riffing on earlier ones." 212 239 6200, lct3.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
That the N.C.A.A. bars athletes from receiving compensation isn't the only issue Congress has with the organization. Health, safety and systemic racism were the main topics of discussion in the third Senate committee hearing this year debating whether to implement federal oversight for name, image and likeness rights for student athletes who want to monetize their personas through endorsements and promotions. "The N.C.A.A. has failed generations of young men and women, even when it comes to the most basic responsibility: keeping the athletes under their charge safe and healthy," Senator Cory Booker, Democrat from New Jersey and a former tight end at Stanford, said in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday. The rights at the center of the hearing, commonly known as N.I.L., would allow college athletes to make money through sponsorships and by promoting themselves. Laws regarding N.I.L. rights have passed in three states Florida, California and Colorado and are under consideration in 28 more. But the N.C.A.A. would prefer a federal policy, rather than disparate regulation across schools and states. Both the N.C.A.A. and its Power Five conferences have devised proposals to address athlete compensation. And both are asking for an antitrust exemption that would protect the N.C.A.A. and its member schools from lawsuits related to the proposed rule changes. "I don't believe the N.C.A.A. should be the entity that's in the middle of this arrangement," Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A.'s president, said. "I think that's inappropriate." The proposals themselves have several limitations on the organizations with which athletes can partner: They would not be able to sign deals with companies that sponsor their universities, which would be able to block deals with companies that compete with school sponsors. Athletes also would not be able to sign endorsement deals until after their first semester of college. Part of the N.C.A.A.'s hesitancy in developing N.I.L. rules stems from its recruiting model. Emmert and Dan Radakovich, Clemson's athletic director, said they feared colleges would compete in "bidding wars" to attract talent without regulation a concern vocalized by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, as well. Athlete representatives say it doesn't matter: That is already happening. Athlete representatives say granting federal antitrust protection to the N.C.A.A. could perpetuate underpaid labor, as student athletes generate billions of dollars for the college sports industry but never see any themselves something especially harmful for athletes from low income backgrounds. "N.C.A.A. sports use amateurism as cover to systematically strip generational wealth from predominantly Black athletes from lower income households to pay for lavish salaries of predominantly white coaches, athletic directors, commissioners and N.C.A.A. administrators," Ramogi Huma, the executive director of the National College Players Association, said in his testimony on Wednesday. The N.C.A.A. expects to finalize a plan by November and put it to a vote in January. Graham, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said he would like to assemble a bipartisan group to address N.I.L. rights by Sept. 15, but that it's unlikely a bill will be passed before Congress's term ends. "We're talking here about lives and dollars," said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and a former swimmer for Harvard. "A lot of both. And the point is that those lives need to be put first." But those aren't the only rules that infringe on athletes' economic rights, senators said. The single year guarantee for scholarships that colleges can strip from athletes who sustain injuries or who take longer than their four year eligibility to complete their degrees was also at the center of sweeping reforms that Booker and Blumenthal hope to address in a new venture of a "student bill of rights" focused on athletes. "African Americans are disproportionately represented in the sports that bring in billions of dollars for what acts like a cartel, and yet can't even afford to have meals when they're hungry," Booker said. Some legislation to protect student athletes has been put forward: Booker and Blumenthal last month introduced the College Athlete Pandemic Safety Act, which would prevent schools from requiring an individual to sign a waiver of liability regarding Covid 19 and from canceling financial aid for athletes who refuse to participate over coronavirus concerns. Several schools including Ohio State, Indiana and Southern Methodist have made athletes sign waivers to return to play during the pandemic. Some ask students to acknowledge they could lose their scholarship should they be seen in public unmasked or to waive school liability should they contract Covid 19, the disease caused by the virus. The senators wrote to the N.C.A.A. that it was "morally repugnant," and the N.C.A.A. agreed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Jan Fabre Is Renowned for Pushing Boundaries. Did He Go Too Far With His Dancers? BRUSSELS Jan Fabre is a big deal in international dance, theater and art circles. Since the 1980s, Mr. Fabre, a multidisciplinary Belgian artist, has pushed dance, especially, in new directions. He created visually opulent pieces in which performers obsessively repeat actions like running on the spot or waving giant flags, or enact scenes involving violence, sex and nudity. He may have started as a revolutionary, but today, Mr. Fabre, 59, is a firm member of Belgium's establishment. His company, Troubleyn, receives about 1 million a year from the government and tours internationally to great acclaim. Mr. Fabre's visual art has been exhibited at the Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2003, the Belgian royal family invited him to redecorate the ceiling of the main hall of their palace, which he did with the shells of almost a million beetles. Soon afterward he became a Grand Officer in the Order of the Crown, one of Belgium's highest honors. But now, many in Belgium are questioning whether he deserves such recognition. On Sept. 12, eight former members of Mr. Fabre's company signed an open letter to the magazine Rekto Verso accusing him of sexual harassment. The letter said 12 current or former members had also endorsed it anonymously. Mr. Fabre ran a company where "humiliation is daily bread," it said. The signees also accused Mr. Fabre of running a semi secret project in which dancers were pressured to pose for provocative photos in exchange for off the books payments. "He calls us 'warriors of beauty,' but you end up feeling like a beaten dog," an anonymous former performer said, according to the letter. The public prosecutor in Antwerp, where Troubleyn is based, started a criminal investigation in response, while government officials are also investigating. In a statement after the letter was posted, Troubleyn said that "nobody is forced to do anything that is experienced as being unacceptable." It said that the photography project was no secret, as Mr. Fabre exhibited the pictures publicly, and that he did not offer solo dance roles in exchange for sex, as the letter claimed. "It is painful to read so many untruths," the statement said. It said Mr. Fabre "responds emotionally" to the allegations. "As a producer I know I can come across as very direct," Mr. Fabre said in the statement. "It was never my intention to intimidate or hurt people psychologically or sexually. I would like to urge women who claim my behavior was unacceptable to use the available procedures. I will fully cooperate." In November, his company is scheduled to present a 24 hour show, "Mount Olympus," at New York University's Skirball Center. It will feature 27 performers portraying characters from Greek tragedy who fight and engage in simulated orgies, as well as dance, sing and take naps. The Skirball Center said that it was aware of the allegations but that it had no comment. While the allegations against Mr. Fabre are specific, they have also raised larger questions: whether dancers, trained from an early age to obey teachers, directors and choreographers, in an environment where physical proximity is a given, find it difficult to refuse inappropriate or excessive demands. The news follows sexual harassment allegations at both the New York City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet. The letter in Rekto Verso made front page headlines here for several days. Belgian newspapers also reported anonymous accounts of sexual harassment and intimidation from dancers who worked with Mr. Fabre. The New York Times has spoken with three performers who signed the letter to Rekto Verso about their experiences. In response to a detailed list of questions about the women's accusations, a spokesman for Reputations, a public relations agency representing Mr. Fabre, said that he would not respond to specific allegations in the media. "We believe such allegations should be judged by the authorities," the spokesman, Frederik Picard said. One woman who spoke with The Times, Genevieve Lagraviere, 42, first auditioned for Mr. Fabre's company in 2001, and he offered her a job, starting a year later. During the wait to begin, she said, Mr. Fabre called her and left a voice mail message giving a hotel name and room number. She did not call back, and she did not respond to a similar text message he sent another time, she said. "I was, like, 'I'm not going to be the girl who slept with the director to get her parts,' " Ms. Lagraviere said. "I have my dignity." When she joined the company in 2002, Mr. Fabre treated her miserably, Ms. Lagraviere said. In rehearsal for a work called "Parrots and Guinea Pigs," Ms. Lagraviere took part in an exercise where two dancers repeatedly bit her thighs while she screamed. She said that Mr. Fabre told the other dancers to bite hard so that her screams would be real, and that Mr. Fabre kept coming back to that exercise even when her legs were so bruised that she struggled to walk. Her vocal cords were eventually damaged from all the screaming, she added. According to Ms. Lagraviere, one night after a performance on tour for that piece, cast members invited themselves to Mr. Fabre's hotel room for drinks. She went back to her own room first, and when she arrived at Mr. Fabre's, he was alone. Out of nowhere, she said, he started kissing her: "On my face, on my mouth, on my neck," she added. "He pulled off my T shirt." He made animal noises while doing this, she said, and she quickly asked him to stop. "You know what it means if you don't go to bed with me?" Mr. Fabre said, according to Ms. Lagraviere. She asked if he meant she would not get a solo project. According to her, Mr. Fabre replied, "Exactly." Ms. Lagraviere said she left the room in tears and immediately called her boyfriend at the time. (In a telephone interview, Ms. Lagraviere's ex boyfriend confirmed that she called and gave him the same account of the night.) Erna Omarsdottir, 45, the artistic director of the Iceland Dance Company and a former performer with Troubleyn, said in a Skype interview that her experience there had "been a trauma for almost 18 years." Ms. Omarsdottir joined the company in 1998, when she was in her mid 20s. Calling dancers fat or stupid was normal in the company, she said. "In the end you get a bit numb," she added. "It just becomes part of the working day." Ms. Omarsdottir enjoyed her time there at first. But her experience changed, she said, when Mr. Fabre called her into his office and asked her to work on a private project, she said: a magazine photo shoot, where she was supposed to masturbate while Mr. Fabre photographed her eyes. "I didn't dare say no," she said. "You knew if you said no to something like this, it would affect your role in the company." He was good at psychological games, she added. "He has this way of talking to you: 'You don't have to do this. There are many others that are waiting.' " Ms. Omarsdottir said that when she arrived at his apartment for the shoot, Mr. Fabre was alone. He gave her wine, she said, and later brought out cocaine, saying it would help her relax. Ms. Omarsdottir said she had never taken drugs before and refused, but he kept offering until she took some. "I was completely drunk and a bit out of it, so I did things I would not have done otherwise," she said. She felt ashamed during the whole experience. According to Ms. Omarsdottir, Mr. Fabre paid her in cash and later showed her some of the photos. Afterward, Mr. Fabre kept pressuring her to meet, she said. She refused until she felt she couldn't say no. She would not talk about what happened in those meetings and said she only told her family about her experiences 18 months ago. She was only talking now out of a duty to other dancers, she said. "You feel really strongly the need to talk about these things as he has to stop," Ms. Omarsdottir said. Another dancer who signed the letter, Merel Severs, 27, said she left Troubleyn in May after another dancer emailed the entire company saying she was resigning, in part, because of an unspecified " metoo experience." Ms. Severs said she had not experienced any harassment, but had witnessed regular bullying, including an incident in which Mr. Fabre mocked a dancer about her weight until she cried. When Ms. Severs joined the company, she felt Mr. Fabre's way of pushing dancers, including by shouting at them, delivered better results. "But now I really don't see how this is meant to push people for artistic reasons," she said. "This is just being mean." The accusations in the open letter have led to much soul searching though not much surprise in Belgium's dance community. On Wednesday, 126 choreographers who work in the country signed another letter published in Rekto Verso saying, "We have been part of a system, sections of which have silently tolerated and even enabled reprehensible behaviors." The group wants to work with Belgian government bodies to develop guidelines that will end abusive practices. The signees include the founders of the theater company Peeping Tom, and the well known choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Wim Vandekeybus, who started his career working with Mr. Fabre. Art that pushes boundaries, the letter said, can be made "without being the result of a violent working environment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
If you seek the socialist vision of this country's founders, it's no longer in the Knesset it's on the wall. MA'ALEH HA HAMISHA, Israel In a modest building at this kibbutz in the hills outside Jerusalem, brawny workers in strong colors labor across three high walls, breaking rocks and plowing dark earth. Forgotten, then rediscovered, they've been here since 1953. They stare back at you, confident and grave, like saints in a medieval church. They want to tell you something. Not many are listening. This kibbutz, founded 82 years ago as a commune that grew peaches and cherries, was privatized in 2005. Where the orchards once stood are new rows of homes built for the next generation: middle class houses that evoke not socialism but the suburbs. One of the last reminders of what this place was, and why it was founded, are the workers on the wall. Art, as one ideologue put it in the heyday of the kibbutz movement, is "a mission, not a game." This mural, and similar works that are now being rescued from oblivion and neglect around Israel, were created to express the hopes of their creators, the socialists who built the kibbutz and founded the state, and whose Labor Party dominated Israeli politics for decades. Historians argue about when the decline of the left began: Was it in 2000, with the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings that destroyed the peace process and discredited the Labor leaders behind it? Or was it the mishandling of the Yom Kippur War of 1973? Did the slide actually begin even earlier, with the first cracks in kibbutz socialism, like the decision to let members own their own kettles instead of drinking coffee together in the dining hall? But as for the end point, there's unlikely to be much debate: It's this month, April 2020. When the dust settled after Israel's last national election in February, the Labor Party had a mere three members of Knesset out of 120. But that's rosy compared to what it just got in a poll on April 13: Zero. Just like that, the party of David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin no longer mattered. Because Israeli news coverage has been preoccupied with pandemic panic, almost no one noticed. Many casual observers of Israel from abroad still associate the country with kibbutz pioneers. But you won't find that Israel in the Knesset anymore. You'll find it instead on out of the way walls that became canvases in the glory days of Labor Zionism. The fresco at Ma'aleh Ha Hamisha is a socialist realist sermon in the style of Diego Rivera and the great Mexican muralists who thrived between the world wars art for the masses, set in the brute world of nature, violence, and work. The people are huge and wonderful, colorful and full of action. They're going somewhere important and they want you to come. Everyone can agree that's good. But there's something melancholy about it all, like a ferocious hieroglyphic inscription from the court of a king that third graders file by on their trip to the museum. One lovely example from 1951, with graceful youth dancing and working in the sun, was discovered under a few layers of paint in an ultra Orthodox yeshiva in Haifa; the building turned out to have once been a socialist club. Others have surfaced in banks and factories. "In the early years of the state, with this art, everyone wanted to say: I'm not just a capitalist, even if I'm running a bank," Ms. Shalev Khalifa said. "I'm a Zionist who's building the homeland." The main characters in the mural at Ma'aleh Ha Hamisha are five workers killed in an Arab attack while clearing a road in 1937. (The kibbutz, "Hill of the Five" in English, is named for them.) The artist's theme isn't revenge or glory, but the regeneration of the Jewish nation by manual labor. On one wall, the five workers clear rocks. On another wall, in a kind of abstract blur of earth tones, their bodies sprawl on the ground, but the workers are also standing above their bodies, as if they've come back to life. They don't seem angry, just determined. One of them hands a sacred object to some children: a simple pick, representing labor. The painter was an American from Los Angeles, Sheldon Schoneberg, who spent time in Mexico with disciples of Rivera at the Taller de Grafica Popular, the People's Graphic Workshop. Inspired by the kibbutz idea, he arrived the same year the state was founded, 1948. According to the story still current among members here, the American was sent first to the dairy barn, where he didn't win any prizes for excellence in manual labor. When the kibbutz secretariat saw his sketchbook, they decided he'd better serve the socialist future if they gave him a few walls and some paint. Mr. Schoneberg left other murals around in Israel before returning to the U.S. in 1956. His last one, on the wall of a community center in Haifa, showed a crowd of citizens moving uphill toward a white building representing progress. The artist made sure to include a man who, by his white headdress, was identifiably Arab, because the Zionist left believed the new state would join Jews and Arabs in common citizenship and free everyone from capitalist exploitation. (The mural was painted over years ago and survives only in photographs.) By the time Mr. Schoenberg was at work here, the leaders of Israel and the Labor Party they were the same people had rejected the Soviet Union and entered the American orbit, which offered Israelis different models not just for their economy but also for their art. The last great mural in the old spirit was painted in 1972 by the artist Avraham Ofek, who covered a wall at Jerusalem's central post office with the classic theme of the rebuilding of the land through labor. This mural was commissioned by Shimon Peres, the Labor minister then in charge of the postal service. Like many other party leaders and voters by that time, Mr. Peres might have spoken the language of the kibbutz, but he led a middle class life in the city. By that time voters from the actual Jewish working class, who tended to come from Islamic countries like Morocco, had been alienated by Labor and were showing a clear preference for the right. The next year, 1973, came the earthquake of the Yom Kippur War, a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria which killed more than 2,500 Israeli soldiers. That led to fury at the Labor elite over its failure to adequately prepare the army, and four years later came the party's first election loss to Likud after three uninterrupted decades in power. After that war, the old collective style lost ground to individualism. Israeli songs stopped using the socialist accordion and the word "we." No one wanted any more murals. The people who left the great wall art also bequeathed their political DNA in many important forms, like our public health system and social safety net, for which Israelis have reason to be grateful in the spring of Covid 19. But with the notable exception of the tiny faction of nominal Communists led by the Arab lawmaker Ayman Odeh, there's no longer a party dedicated to workers' solidarity or protecting the weak from the wolves of the free market. A country willed into existence by radical leftists no longer has any political left at all. By the time Tal Elmaliach, an historian of the Israeli labor movement, was a kibbutz teenager in the 1990s, the country's energy was in the cities, not in rural communes like Snir, where he grew up in northern Israel. The death of Labor is real, he said: "The party has hit bottom." But he isn't sorry. "The Labor Party was a monument to something that once existed, and now that it's gone we can see the real landscape," he said. He sees potential for a grass roots left unencumbered by rusted party bureaucracy or kibbutz nostalgia. The building with the fresco at Ma'aleh Ha Hamisha was where the kibbutzniks used to watch movies together on a reel to reel projector adults on Tuesdays, children on Wednesdays. Nurit Ganani was one of those children. She was born here in 1952, as Schoneberg began work. As an adult, she watched the kibbutz nearly fall apart. After the secretariat allowed families to have TV sets in their own homes in the late 1960s, she recalled, the structure fell out of use and the mural was forgotten for years. An economic crisis forced the kibbutz, like many others, to privatize. Communal assets were sold off, the young people left, and in the early aughts there weren't enough kids to justify day care. When Ms. Ganani was young, she remembered, if one member voted for a party other than Labor, everyone knew who it was. Her mother and father paid their party dues until the end of their lives at ages 85 and 90. She doesn't. "Today no one is going to shame anyone else in the dining hall for voting wrong," she said. "The place isn't political anymore." But the kibbutz, like the country it helped found, is still very much alive, even if neither ended up following the path laid by the workers in the fresco. Ms. Ganani still lives here, and it was she who pushed for the mural's restoration. After the members dropped socialism, 100 families moved into the new neighborhood where the orchards used to be. Most were kibbutz kids who'd left, including her son and five grandchildren. They were drawn not by ideology but by life in a place that's beautiful and good for commuters, near the highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The population has more than doubled in 15 years. The ideas went away, but the kindergartens are full. Matti Friedman ( MattiFriedman), a contributing opinion writer, is the author, most recently, of "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel." 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 |
Some say crises don't so much alter the course of history as accelerate changes already underway. That's certainly the case when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic and the offshoring of American jobs. In recent years, businesses have been rethinking the way that overextended, overseas supply lines expose them to unacceptable risks, a reassessment that got a boost from President Trump's reorientation of U.S. trade policy. A lemming like desire for "efficiency" had caused many of them to move manufacturing over the past two decades to China, Vietnam and Indonesia, among other places. They did so to save on labor costs or to avoid environmental standards, but that wasn't the whole story. Offshoring was a trend that morphed into a craze. Egged on by Wall Street analysts and management consultants, or simply swept up by the herd mentality of their peers, businesses came to see offshoring as something they were expected to do to serve the interests of shareholders. Many failed to weigh independently the long term costs or meaningfully consider alternatives. For business, this strategy paid off in the short term. Cheap labor meant higher profits. But for America, the effects were traumatic. The United States lost five million manufacturing jobs. That, in turn, devastated towns and contributed to the breakdown of families, an opioid epidemic and despair. Trade policy actions in the 1990s and 2000s magnified this disaster by making offshoring easier. The decision in 2001 to establish permanent normal trading relations with China is the most regrettable example. Until then, the president had to make a determination every year whether to renew so called most favored nation status, which allowed China to export to the United States at mostly single digit tariffs, and Congress could challenge that determination. China's most favored nation status was always renewed, but the uncertainty effectively raised the risk adjusted costs of investing there. After 2001, that uncertainty went away along with at least two million American jobs. Trade accords during this time, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, zeroed out tariffs on imports from low wage countries, worsening manufacturing job losses. These agreements made gestures toward "leveling the playing field" for workers by requiring our trading partners to take on token labor and environmental obligations. But these measures proved toothless and unenforceable. A result was pure regulatory arbitrage: Companies could avoid U.S. labor and environment standards by manufacturing abroad while still enjoying unfettered, duty free access to our market. These trade agreements also undermined a key remaining competitive advantage for the United States commitment to the rule of law and a functioning, independent legal system. The agreements allowed companies to litigate disputes with foreign governments over expropriations and other issues not through local courts, but through so called investor state dispute settlement provisions. In doing so, the federal government effectively purchased political risk insurance for any American company that wanted to send jobs abroad. Recently, however, we have seen a change both in business attitudes and government policy. Many companies have realized that offshoring creates risks that often outweigh the incremental efficiencies. Long supply lines flow at the whim of local politics, labor unrest and corruption. In some countries, like China, there have been governmentwide efforts to steal intellectual property for the benefit of domestic companies that become the main competitors for the victims of the theft. At the same time, the trend in trade policy was also shifting rapidly. Businesses have seen that President Trump did not support their blind pursuit of efficiency in the global economy manifest in the policy of theological free trade unconstrained by competing societal imperatives. Instead, his focus was on jobs, particularly in manufacturing, because he recognized the importance of productive work not only to our G.D.P., but also to the health and happiness of our citizens. Business success and economic efficiency, of course, remained important considerations. But they were no longer the be all and end all of trade policy. The new policy consisted of aggressive enforcement of prior trade commitments, renegotiating job destroying trade deals like NAFTA and the United States Korea Free Trade Agreement, and taking on China's predatory trade and economic policies. Many businesses protested that this policy shift created uncertainty. President Trump's response was simple: If you want certainty, bring your plants back to America. If you want the benefits of being a U.S. company, and the protection of the U.S. legal system, then bring back the jobs. As a result of these developments, the offshoring frenzy started to abate. Since the administration first imposed duties on Chinese imports in July 2018, American companies including Apple, Whirlpool and Stanley Black Decker have either scrapped offshoring plans or announced decisions to move production to the United States. Automotive companies have announced 34 billion in new U.S. investment as a result of the new United States Mexico Canada Agreement. The Kearney Reshoring Index, which measures companies' global production strategies, shifted significantly in 2019: Reversing a five year trend, imports of manufactured goods from low wage Asian countries fell while U.S. domestic manufacturing output remained strong. Our experience of the past two months will only accelerate this reversal. As companies prepare to reopen their U.S. operations, many have found themselves held hostage to decisions made by foreign governments about whether their suppliers are "essential" or not. Every day I talk to business leaders who now acknowledge they underestimated the risk in decisions to move jobs overseas or to rely on the production of small but crucial parts in some far off and often unstable country. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Our columnist, Jada Yuan, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2018 list. This dispatch brings her to Kigali, Rwanda; it took the No. 31 spot on the list and is the 39th stop on Jada's itinerary. "Everyone is coming. Let's grab that table," said Nathalie Gatesi, a new friend, as she commandeered a high top in a prime location at Kigali's hip urban beach club, Pili Pili. Nathalie was referring to the imminent arrival of some 20 members of her family who were all texting her at once. Kigali doesn't have a club scene so much as it has night life spots that, perhaps out of sense of fairness and unity, each get to be hot one night a week. Thursdays are for happy hour drinks at Inema Arts Center, followed by jazz night at Repub Lounge, which serves a coconut curry fish I could have eaten every night of my trip. Fridays, after midnight, are for dancing at the red lit Cocobean club while sipping whiskey and amarula. Saturdays are for concerts and birthday parties, and clubs you didn't hit up on Friday. M.A., as most people call her, went to boarding school in France before the 1994 genocide, and is now an investment banker splitting her time between Paris, Dubai and Kigali. She's been coming back here more often to take care of her aging parents and manage their family cattle farm. The city, she said, seems to be ripe with opportunities for women. "You can open your company online in three hours. It is so easy," she said. Parliament, she pointed out, is over 50 percent women. Now women can inherit property, whereas not too long ago, family wealth was passed on to men. A woman can open a bank account, she said, instead of asking her husband or father to open it for her. And if that woman doesn't like her husband, she can divorce him. "We are allowed to vote," chimed in Nathalie, who does marketing for a telecommunications firm. The head of RwandAir, she pointed out, is a woman. "If you see a woman as the head of a company, you think, 'I can do it.'" While gender equality, in practice, still has a ways to go, the women I met said they feel the changes every day. "Before, people were afraid," said Angeline Kajeguhakwa, another member of the family and a petroleum executive, who recently moved back to Kigali after 20 years in Florida. "Now you could take a cab by yourself if you are drunk or tipsy and you are going to get home safe." Angeline wasn't the only family member to move back. I met new transplants from Boston and New Orleans, as well as Annabelle Uwera, who may be the pioneer of the bunch. She's about to celebrate a decade back, after 10 years in London, and is now a super plugged in trade officer for the British High Commission. I felt the sense of safety that Angeline had mentioned. I took walks alone at night and even hopped on a few motorcycle taxis to get around. (They're 10 times cheaper than regular taxis, and thrilling to ride.) As M.A. explained, the government changed the constitution to ensure women feel less vulnerable, after the horrific rapes of 1994. "Women can have the power to do anything they want. They can say 'no'. And men know they can't beat you. They know if they do something wrong, they will go to jail." There is a dark side to the sense of opportunity. Adult men over the age of 35 are largely dead and gone; two generations were wiped out in three months. "One of the consequences of genocide is we have a lot of young people and a lot of women," said Serge Kamuhinda, another family member, and a Volkswagen executive, who grew up in Germany after fleeing Rwanda at age 12. He remembers his village in flames and people running at him with machetes. Then there are the critics of the government who have left the country for fear of political persecution, or who fled during the genocide and still feel unsafe coming home. Certain topics politics, ethnic identity are rarely discussed. The people I met in Kigali do talk about the genocide, though, and often. It comes up in the fabric of everyday conversation as something that changed their country so distinctly that there is only a before and after. Almost everyone you meet has suffered loss and trauma. M.A. and Angeline lost their grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Annabelle, from London, encouraged me to go to the city's powerful Kigali Genocide Memorial to better understand the history. When I later told her I had cried in the Children's Room, which features portraits of kids as young as 15 months who were burned alive or had their skulls bashed in, she told me that she cannot go into that room. She has relatives in there. Still, for every one of my new friends that night at Pili Pili, the rewards of being together with their remaining loved ones in the country that is their home seemed to far outweigh the possibility of being re traumatized, or the fact that they all had to take massive pay cuts to move back from overseas. "When you are elsewhere, you are replaceable," Serge said. "But here you have a once in a lifetime opportunity to contribute to building this society." A fan of similes, he added, "coming here is like visiting your old auntie who went through cancer and beat it and is now a fitness coach with life lessons. You feel uplifted." Transport Kigali is a driving city. I was very happy hiring a driver translator, starting at 100 a day, through a cooperative run by Jean Pierre Sagahutu. This saved me from having to worry about logistics, and allowed me to see the city through the eyes of a wonderful Kigali resident. Should you take a taxi, rides anywhere in the central city should cost no more than 6,000 Rwandan francs (about 7). Motorcycle taxis are around 500. Stay I loved the luxurious new Kigali Marriott, the first Marriott in sub Saharan Africa, until I got my bill. What looked like a steal online had a significant, not so transparent rate increase two days into my seven day stay. It's a great hotel incredible massages, best Wi Fi in the city but double check the math on the reservation web page to avoid similar surprises. For a real steal, Ivuka Arts Center has an Airbnb that goes for 20 to 25 a night. Eat Beyond Repub Lounge, my favorite Kigali food were the delicious, tiny bananas you can pick up at any grocery store. For a wider variety of fruits, head to Kimironko and Nyabugogo markets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Around 2004 at a government hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone, a team of American scientists and West African medical personnel found what appeared to be Ebola antibodies in nearly 9 percent of blood samples. A growing body of scientific clues some ambiguous, others substantive suggests that the Ebola virus may have lurked in the West African rain forest for years, perhaps decades, before igniting the deadly epidemic that swept the region in the past year, taking more than 10,000 lives. Until recently, Ebola had been considered a threat mostly to Central African nations. Yet studies tell of possible Ebola antibodies in human blood samples drawn in West Africa long before the current outbreak. And genetic analysis suggests the West African virus broke off from a parent strain in Central Africa at least 10 years ago, possibly as long as 150 years ago. "My gut feeling," said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who helped discover the Ebola virus in 1976, is that the evidence points to "infection before the current epidemic." Medical detectives in West Africa are now seeking to establish whether the virus had previously infected people there. The research is part of a broader push to better understand where Ebola might strike next, and to strengthen surveillance and health systems in hopes of preventing future outbreaks. Zeroing in on African rain forests, a team of scientists from Oxford University, Harvard and other institutions recently used ecological data and patterns of known human and animal outbreaks to construct a detailed prediction of other likely Ebola danger zones. It stretches across 22 nations from West Africa as far east as Madagascar. The team stressed the low probability of humans picking up the virus, which can be transmitted only by direct contact with bodily fluids like blood and vomit. But the scientists also warned of new dangers because of encroachments on primal forests and sharp rises in populations and mobility. Stuart Nichol, the chief of the viral special pathogens branch at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, said there was a growing consensus "that in this broad area of Africa, we should be doing all we can to improve surveillance." The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been working to prepare African countries considered at high risk for Ebola epidemics. The nations are prioritized by their proximity to the current outbreak zone and the fragility of their health systems, among other factors. Many, though not all, of the countries on the C.D.C.'s and W.H.O's lists overlap with countries in the scientific studies. Dr. Thomas Frieden, the C.D.C. director, said that ideally, every nation in need should receive preparedness assistance, but that agencies have given priority to "countries that have a lot of people and a lot of travel." For decades, scientists have searched for the presence of Ebola in West Africa, though few outside experts knew of their detective work. It is generally assumed that the virus survives in an animal host, perhaps bats, from which it is periodically transmitted to humans. But the host has never been identified, and researchers have struggled to understand how often humans have been exposed. In 1982, German scientists, examining blood from hundreds of Liberians, reported antibodies to the Ebola virus in 6 percent of the samples. Four years later, Dutch scientists found the antibodies in 13 percent of blood samples from Liberia. World health authorities had long promoted a test known as indirect fluorescence because it was fast, sensitive and relied on inexpensive microscopes. By the early 1990s, experts had concluded that its reliability was overly dependent on skilled interpretation. Then, in 1994, came the first and until the current outbreak only confirmed human Ebola case in West Africa: a Swiss scientist who had examined a dead chimpanzee in an Ivory Coast rain forest near the Liberian border. She was flown to Switzerland for treatment and survived. More than 10 years later, a team of American scientists and West African medical personnel working at the Kenema Government Hospital in eastern Sierra Leone made a strange find. They had been treating people suspected of having Lassa fever, with its swelling, vomiting and bleeding. But more accurate tests showed that only about a third of patients actually had that disease. Led by Randal J. Schoepp, the head of diagnostics at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., the team sought to solve the puzzle by analyzing blood drawn from more than 200 patients at the hospital from October 2006 to October 2008. They found antibodies for a range of diseases, including what appeared to be Ebola antibodies in nearly 9 percent of the blood samples. The scientists appealed to American groups, including the United States Agency for International Development, for money to expand and verify their results. Dubious officials expressed skepticism. Years passed, and no significant funds materialized. In August 2013, the team submitted its findings to a journal published by the C.D.C. After the Zaire strain had been identified as the cause of the current outbreak, the C.D.C. journal published the team's report online in June. In July, Dr. Sheik H. Khan, the chief physician of the Lassa ward in Kenema, Sierra Leone, exhausted after treating waves of Ebola patients, died of the infection that he and other team members believed they had identified in the blood samples. In January, another virology team at the Kenema hospital reported Ebola antibodies in blood samples of patients who entered the Lassa ward from June 2011 to March 2014. The team, led by Robert F. Garry, a virologist at Tulane University, found the antibodies in up to 22 percent of 242 patients. He said "a lot more validation" is needed to confirm that Ebola was indeed present before the current outbreak. Several experts cautioned that antibody evidence from the blood studies so far, the only direct sign of early Ebola infections in West Africans is especially murky given that some antibodies can react more widely than intended with blood tests and produce misleading clues. "You have to take those with more than a pinch of salt," Dr. Nichol said. He and other experts said one possibility was that tests were picking up antibodies to an unknown nonlethal filovirus, the group that includes Ebola. "I think we're still locked in uncertainty," said Dr. Daniel G. Bausch, a tropical medicine expert with Tulane and the United States Navy, who helped start Kenema's Lassa research program but was not involved in the new research. Although the investigators took steps to limit false reactions, antibody tests can be imprecise. Dr. Thomas Ksiazek, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, who has long worked with such blood tests, said people in poor African countries often carried "all kinds of bad infections" and may produce a host of confusing antibodies. But clues that Ebola might have been hiding in forests throughout Africa does not come just from blood tests. Scientists have sequenced the genes of the virus in the current epidemic and compared it to the Zaire strain responsible for most Central African Ebola outbreaks. In September, 58 researchers from Harvard, M.I.T. and the Broad Institute, among other institutions, reported sequencing results from a much larger group of Ebola viruses in the West Africa outbreak. The genetic split, they contended, occurred more recently, around 2004. "There's evidence that these things have been around for a while," said Dr. Pardis C. Sabeti, a Harvard geneticist who led the team. Dr. Ksiazek said he considered the gene analysis much more reliable, but noted that the genetic findings do not prove the virus infected people in West Africa before this outbreak. It is possible the virus was present only in animals like chimpanzees and other apes. Still, the scientific clues through the decades should not be discounted, several experts said. Ebola may be more deeply rooted in the African landscape than anyone guessed. Jens H. Kuhn, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health, pointed to the detection of possible Ebola antibodies in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1980s, saying those sketchy findings now seem prescient. That nation, once called Zaire, has since had eight Ebola outbreaks, most recently last year. "These are hints that need to be followed," Dr. Kuhn said. "They should raise the level of vigilance." And Stephen S. Morse, an infectious disease expert at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said it now seemed likely that Ebola had long smoldered in the West African jungle. Perhaps, he said, years of limited encounters between people and the virus had produced a relatively small number of human cases that were never identified and never spread: "None of the embers reached the stage of a fire." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
This year has been a career making one for the tennis player She is ranked No. 11 in the world, won her second Women's Tennis Association title in June, and will be competing at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Ms. Keys doesn't do much vacationing, preferring to spend her limited time off with her family. When she does travel for pleasure, she isn't the type to lounge around. "I love to be outdoors and doing activities," she said. "I'm not a person who can just go to the beach and then the spa and then the beach again I'd rather be jet skiing or kayaking or hiking. Or surfing, although right now I can only float on the surfboard; that's as far as my capabilities go. I don't ski or snowboard because I'm kind of a klutz, and that's a bad combination for a tennis player." One of her favorite destinations is Rome. "Everything is so close to everything else; you can walk from the Trevi Fountain to the Colosseum. Everywhere you look it's something that's been there for thousands of years, or an alleyway with window boxes of flowers and cute little cafes. And the food is great. Nutritionists probably don't love it, but in Rome you have to eat the pasta, maybe some pizza occasionally, and the gelato ... your diet kind of goes out the window the whole time you're there." When in Rome and not booked in at the tournament hotel, she heads to the Westin Excelsior. "It's comforting to be somewhere familiar and always get the same service when I'm traveling a few months at a time for tennis. Not a lot of hotels in Rome have gyms, and I work out a lot, so I need to be somewhere with a good gym. It's where I stay when I'm with my family." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
This article is part of our continuing Fast Forward series, which examines technological, economic, social and cultural shifts that happen as businesses evolve. Jennifer Turner's algebra classes were once sleepy affairs, and a lot of her students struggled to stay awake. Today, they are active and engaged, thanks to new technologies, including an artificial intelligence powered program that is helping her teach. She uses the platform Bakpax that can read students' handwriting and auto grade schoolwork, and she assigns lectures for students to watch online while they are at home. Using the platform has provided Mrs. Turner, 41, who teaches at the Gloucester County Christian School in Sewell, N.J., more flexibility in how she teaches, reserving class time for interactive exercises. "The grades for homework have been much better this year because of Bakpax," Mrs. Turner said. "Students are excited to be in my room, they're telling me they love math, and those are things that I don't normally hear." For years, people have tried to re engineer learning with artificial intelligence, but it was not until the machine learning revolution of the past seven years that real progress has been made. Slowly, algorithms are making their way into classrooms, taking over repetitive tasks like grading, optimizing coursework to fit individual student needs and revolutionizing the preparation for College Board exams like the SAT. A plethora of online courses and tutorials also have freed teachers from lecturing and allowed them to spend class time working on problem solving with students instead. While that trend is helping people like Mrs. Turner teach, it has just begun. Researchers are using A.I. to understand how the brain learns and are applying it to systems that they hope will make it easier and more enjoyable for students to study. Machine learning powered systems not only track students' progress, spot weaknesses and deliver content according to their needs, but will soon incorporate humanlike interfaces that students will be able to converse with as they would a teacher. "Education, I think, is going to be the killer app for deep learning," said Terrence Sejnowski, who runs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and also is the president of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, which each year puts on the largest machine learning conference in the world. The first computer tutoring systems appeared in the 1960s, presenting material in short segments, asking students questions as they moved through the material and providing immediate feedback on answers. Because they were expensive and computers far from ubiquitous, they were largely confined to research institutes. By the 1970s and 1980s systems began using rule based artificial intelligence and cognitive theory. These systems led students through each step of a problem, giving hints from expert knowledge bases. But rule based systems failed because they were not scalable it was expensive and tedious to program extensive domain expertise. Since then, most computer teaching systems have been based on decision trees, leading students through a preprogrammed learning path determined by their performance if they get a question right, they are sent in one direction, and if they get the question wrong, they are sent in another. The system may look like it is adapting to the student, but it is actually just leading the student along a preset path. But the machine learning revolution is changing that. Today, learning algorithms uncover patterns in large pools of data about how students have performed on material in the past and optimize teaching strategies accordingly. They adapt to the student's performance as the student interacts with the system. Bakpax asks teachers to notify parents how their children's data will be used, and parents can opt out. But Bakpax and other companies say they mask identities and encrypt the data they do collect. Studies show that these systems can raise student performance well beyond the level of conventional classes and even beyond the level achieved by students who receive instruction from human tutors. A.I. tutors perform better, in part, because a computer is more patient and often more insightful. One of the first commercial applications of machine learning to teaching was by the company Knewton, founded by Jose Ferreira, a former executive at the private education company Kaplan. Knewton uses a mix of learning algorithms to evaluate students and match material to their needs. "After a few questions we could very quickly figure out what level you are at and the optimal piece of content for teaching," Mr. Ferreira said. "The more you worked with the system, the better our profile of you got and the more we could give you better and better content." Nonetheless, Knewton ran into financial difficulties and was sold in May to the education publisher Wiley. Mr. Ferreira said the company's troubles were not because its technology did not work, but because the company had relied heavily on one customer, which dropped Knewton in favor of an in house system. Mr. Ferreira, 51, left to start Bakpax. At its core, Bakpax is a computer vision system that converts handwriting to text and interprets what the student meant to say. The system's auto grader teaches itself how to score. "Instead of handing your homework in, you just take a picture of it on your phone, and a few seconds later we can tell you what you got right and what you got wrong," Mr. Ferreira said. "We can even tell you what the right answer is for the ones you got wrong." Mrs. Turner said her students loved the immediacy. The system also gathers data over time that allows teachers to see where a class is having trouble or compare one class's performance with another. "There's a lot of power in all this information that, right now, literally is just thrown in the trash every day," Mr. Ferreira said. Riiid claims students can increase their scores by 20 percent or more with just 20 hours of study. It has already incorporated machine learning algorithms into its program to prepare students for English language proficiency tests and has introduced test prep programs for the SAT. It expects to enter the United States in 2020. Still more transformational applications are being developed that could revolutionize education altogether. Acuitus, a Silicon Valley start up, has drawn on lessons learned over the past 50 years in education cognitive psychology, social psychology, computer science, linguistics and artificial intelligence to create a digital tutor that it claims can train experts in months rather than years. Acuitus's system was originally funded by the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for training Navy information technology specialists. John Newkirk, the company's co founder and chief executive, said Acuitus focused on teaching concepts and understanding. The company has taught nearly 1,000 students with its course on information technology and is in the prototype stage for a system that will teach algebra. Dr. Newkirk said the underlying A.I. technology was content agnostic and could be used to teach the full range of STEM subjects. Dr. Newkirk likens A.I. powered education today to the Wright brothers' early exhibition flights proof that it can be done, but far from what it will be a decade or two from now. The world will still need schools, classrooms and teachers to motivate students and to teach social skills, teamwork and soft subjects like art, music and sports. The challenge for A.I. aided learning, some people say, is not the technology, but bureaucratic barriers that protect the status quo. "There are gatekeepers at every step," said Dr. Sejnowski, who together with Barbara Oakley, a computer science engineer at Michigan's Oakland University, created a massive open online course, or MOOC, called "Learning How to Learn." He said that by using machine learning systems and the internet, new education technology would bypass the gatekeepers and go directly to students in their homes. "Parents are figuring out that they can get much better educational lessons for their kids through the internet than they're getting at school," he said. Craig S. Smith is a former correspondent for The Times and hosts the podcast Eye on A.I. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
HUNTER JOHN HURST, 16, of Raleigh, N.C., is a living example of a modern day conundrum. Like many others his age, he needs to earn money this summer. But finding a job is tougher than ever, with the number of teenagers employed nationwide at a near historical low. He watched some of his friends land work often with the help of their parents. But when his search failed to turn up a single offer, he decided to turn one of his chores washing his parents' cars into a business. He printed up some fliers offering car cleaning services known in the trade as detailing at 35 for a car, 45 for a sport utility vehicle. A few days into his new business, he's feeling the glow of early success. "It takes about an hour a car and I can make more money than I would at a regular job," he said. And it's more fun than the lawn mowing he did last summer. Mr. Hurst has company in his desperate quest for summer work and the need to get creative. About 25 percent of the nation's 16 to 19 year olds were in the work force in 2013, compared with 45 percent in 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Failing to find work doesn't just mean a shortage of cash in the near term. A study released in March by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program said finding a job when you're older is harder if you haven't worked during your teenage years. In addition, "research shows those who work in high school have wages 10 to 15 percent higher when they graduate from college," said Ishwar Khatiwada, a co author of the study and an associate director of research at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies. Since 1948, the percentage of teenagers in the work force had stayed relatively flat at 40 percent or so, dropping to 37 percent in the mid 1960s and rising to a high of 48.5 in 1979. But that trend began to reverse in the early 2000s and never rebounded, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The trend holds true when looking solely at summertime employment. Low income and minority teenagers are particularly hard hit; only about 17 percent of African American 16 to 19 year olds were employed in 2013. The story behind the low employment numbers is more complex than it first appears. While many teenagers are unable to find jobs, others place a higher value on summer school and pre college summer programs, which are far more popular than in the past, according to a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on declining summer employment rates for teenagers. In more affluent areas, large numbers of teenagers play year round sports that leave little time for work. Others, with an eye toward building resumes, perform community service or find unpaid internships. "Real work experience is being displaced by summer and travel programs," said John Challenger, executive officer of the outplacement company Challenger, Gray Christmas. But he says he doesn't think that is necessarily a good thing. "A lot of kids are missing out by not learning what working is," he said. They're also missing the process of job hunting. Part of the experience is developing persistence and the all important skills of shaking hands, answering questions clearly and looking someone in the eye. For many teenagers, jobs are much more than an experience; they're a necessity. But over the years, the lower level jobs that were once the entryway to employment for young people are being filled by older people who have remained in or returned to the work force, or by foreign born workers, Mr. Khatiwada said. In addition, the number of federally funded summer jobs has diminished. Entrepreneurs like Renee Ward have turned to helping teenagers find jobs. Her site, offers some free advice and job hunting tips, but charges a 39 fee for premium options. Detailed cleaning "takes about an hour a car and I can make more money than I would at a regular job," Hunter John Hurst said. Ted Richardson for The New York Times She encourages teenagers who can't find work to think about creating their own jobs. "If someone says, 'I went to 15 different pet stores and got nothing,' maybe start a dog walking business." While starting your own business is one option, she said, sometimes accepting unorthodox working arrangements might be another. One teenager, she said, asked her if he should take a job with a moving company that wouldn't officially hire him, but would pay him off the books. "I told him to start there, document all your experience and use that to move as quickly as you can to a reputable company," she said. Deshawn Childress, 18, of Brooklyn, is using the website as one way to look for a job. He just finished high school and has applied to many places, including fast food and retail stores, so far without success. He's hoping a relative might help him land a position where he could continue working when he goes to community college in the fall, but he admits he's discouraged. "There's a lot of competition," he said. And he's frustrated that his volunteer work doesn't seem to make a difference. "People say volunteering is part of the work experience," but employers don't seem to view it as real experience, Mr. Childress said. While job seekers can try innovative ways to attack the job shortage problem, the Brookings Institution study said high teenage unemployment also needed to be addressed through public policy. More programs in high schools and community colleges, for example, like work based learning, where students learn technical, academic and employability skills in a real work environment, could help. More subsidized job programs are also needed, as well as classes that teach teenagers skills like interviewing and resume writing, the report said. The Boston Private Industry Council, financed with state, city and corporate money, works in Boston public high schools, where the students "are hungry for jobs," said Josh Bruno, the council's director of school to career and employer engagement. "They depend on summer job earnings to supplement their family income." The organization provides mock interviews, job shadowing and resume help during the school year and then works with employers to place most of the students in private sector jobs at places like banks and hospitals. "We're trying to educate employers about how valuable it is to hire teenagers," Mr. Bruno said. "Some we have are trilingual, many are really good at technology. They have a lot of energy and see things differently." Energy is one thing that Lauren Castro, 17, of Yorba Linda, Calif., needed. She just graduated from high school and had been looking for a part time job for a year. "I applied to about 30 companies fast food, Target, Sports Chalet," she said. She got a few interviews and then "the inevitable email saying they hired someone with more experience. I was tired of getting email after email saying I needed experience when I couldn't get it." In the end, Ms. Castro found out that the adage that it's who you know holds true. She begins her summer job at a pizza parlor this weekend, thanks to her sister's soccer coach, who knew the owners. And she's in good company. She's working alongside a college graduate with a bachelor's in biochemistry. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Mixing a lathered up love triangle with a ghostly murder mystery, Derek Nguyen's "The Housemaid" wraps a painful chapter in Vietnamese history in Gothic melodrama trappings. The result is a good looking but overstuffed genre pileup that confuses as often as it compels. Set in 1953 when Vietnam was under French colonial rule, the story inspired by the recollections of Mr. Nguyen's grandmother, a former housemaid takes place on a sprawling rubber plantation belonging to Sebastien (Jean Michel Richaud), a handsome French officer. When an orphan named Linh (Nhung Kate) joins his small house staff, she enters a terrifying world where creaks and whispers and vibrating strings follow her from room to room. Everyone, it seems, harbors shameful secrets, not least the house itself, where Sebastien's wife and baby died and a wraithlike apparition flits and hovers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"In Texas, as 'Giant' so brilliantly points out, big is always better than small; and if the only way to be big is to lose big, then well, so be it," Larry McMurtry wrote in The New York Times in 1996. The director George Stevens's film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, and based on Edna Ferber's 1952 novel of the same name, was released in 1956. It earned Stevens an Oscar and was nominated in several other categories, including Best Picture. (It lost to "Around the World in 80 Days.") Don Graham's new book tells the story of how this epic about the ranching life, the oil business, clashing cultures and the changing fortunes of generations made it to the screen. Below, Mr. Graham, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses how his students' reaction to the movie helped inspire the book, how Stevens's experiences during World War II influenced the film and more. When did you first get the idea to write this book? I could have written it 30 years earlier. In 1986, my wife and I went to Marfa, Tex., on our way out to California. We were invited to spend three nights at the ranch right beside the decaying house where "Giant" was made. It was the 30th anniversary, and Marfa was going to hold this celebration. It turned out to be kind of a farce because they never got the film, so they couldn't show it. They had a rodeo, but that didn't seem to have much to do with anything. So the film was much on my mind, but I was working on another book. I've taught a class called Life and Literature in the Southwest for many years, and I started putting films back into it. I put "Giant" in, in 2004 or 2005. Most of the kids had never heard of it, but it really struck a chord with them. They complained about the length, but I told them that they watch the NFL and pro baseball; it's the same length. The film feels very modern to them. They're surprised at Elizabeth Taylor's feminism. They love the scene where she denounces the men for being Neanderthals. And the question of racial prejudice is very powerful in the film. The more I talked about it and thought about it, the more I thought this is the book I need to write now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Dear Jets: There's Hope to Be Found in a Winless Season. Take It From Someone Who Knows. Only two N.F.L. teams in history have gone 0 16 since the regular season expanded to 16 games in 1978: the Detroit Lions in 2008 and the Cleveland Browns in 2017. It appears the 2020 Jets (0 10) are making a run at joining them. Yet here are some reassurances that fans should keep in mind: No team gives up, even in the face of injuries, smack talk or other adversity on and off the field. And no coach guides a team toward losing in order to gain a top draft spot, though some people have suggested that is the case with the Jets' Adam Gase. At least that is the view from someone who has been there, Hue Jackson, who was the head coach of the Browns during their 0 16 season. Jackson had to keep his team focused, ready and excited every week throughout a season with little hope of a win. That year, the Browns were the youngest team in the league. "We could see that we needed to go get better talent to provide a winning opportunity for our players," said Jackson, who was fired in October 2018 with a record of 3 36 1 over his two and half seasons with the Browns. "But we kept going by the grace of God, and belief in our players and selves as coaches." The Jets, after shedding some older players, are relying heavily on rookies, and Gase has said that the team is aiming to train younger players for the coming years. 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. After going 23 25 in three years in Miami, Gase is 7 19 with the Jets and he might not be around for long if things don't improve. Mathematically, the Jets have no way of getting to the playoffs. But there is a good chance they will acquire Clemson's dynamic quarterback, Trevor Lawrence, with the No. 1 pick next spring, assuming he enters the 2021 N.F.L. draft and the Jets continue being worse than the Jacksonville Jaguars, who are 1 9 after Sunday's loss to Pittsburgh. Gase and his players have insisted they are not tanking. "Nobody's talked about that," Gase said in a call with reporters on Wednesday. On Sunday against the Los Angeles Chargers, Joe Flacco made his fourth start at quarterback for the Jets while Sam Darnold continues to recover from a shoulder injury, and he performed well in the second half, but ultimately the Jets lost, 34 28. The timeline for Darnold's return is blurred; many fans and Twitter users have wondered if Darnold, in his third year out of Southern California, will be out of a job after the 2021 draft. "I have social media, I've seen some of the things," Darnold told reporters last month. Giving up on Darnold, though, would mean the Jets had already failed to convert a highly drafted quarterback into an N.F.L. success. He was the No. 3 pick in 2018, the same year that the Browns used the No. 1 spot the fruit of their 0 16 season to take quarterback Baker Mayfield, who is often credited with helping to move the franchise toward respectability. In his N.F.L. debut, in Week 3 of the 2018 season, Mayfield helped the Browns end their winless streak by defeating against the Jets. Cleveland went 7 8 1 in his rookie year and 6 10 last year. After a win over the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, the Browns are 7 3, good for second place in the A.F.C. North, and vying for a playoff spot. Throughout his time with the Browns, Jackson reminded players that nothing was over until the final whistle of the last game. Which, to some extent, could not come fast enough. "People are not built to lose, especially when you're a leader," he said. "In order to continue to be your best, you have to keep those down feelings away from the players, your family, the office and even yourself." Boosting morale can be difficult in the face of steady losses and shaming by fans. In an "All Things Covered" podcast episode last week, Jamal Adams a First Team All Pro safety last year said that frequent losing had left him depressed for much of his three seasons with the Jets. After a 7 9 record last season and disagreements between Adams and the front office, he was traded to the Seattle Seahawks this summer. Many of the current Jets have said they are hopeful about ending their losing streak. "We just want to go out there and win, we don't care about the draft," offensive tackle Mekhi Becton said in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. "Football is a game of love, so I can't ever be that depressed," linebacker Jordan Jenkins said on Thursday. Jackson said the road through a difficult season can lead in several directions. Since 2017, he has built a foundation that aims to fight human trafficking, helped manage a tequila company and created an organization in Cleveland called Strangers 2 Changers, which helps bring together people from different backgrounds for community projects. Jackson said he still hoped to take his expertise back to football, adding that he often summons memories of the scent of grass from the field. Gregg Williams, the Jets' defensive coordinator, was by Jackson's side as the Browns' defensive coordinator from January 2017 until he was appointed interim head coach in October 2018. Gase brought Williams on in January 2019, and he coached the Jets' defense to seventh place over all in the N.F.L. last season, despite a 7 9 record. This season, the defense was ranked 28th in the league and the offense was at the bottom entering Week 11. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Fran Cannon Slayton is a children's book author who received a diagnosis of brain cancer in 2016. She has Affordable Care Act coverage and is concerned she will lose protections for pre existing conditions. Fran Cannon Slayton, a children's book author with brain cancer, has summoned a hopeful energy since her diagnosis last year. But she is near despair about the resurfaced Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which the White House and Republicans are pushing for a vote as soon as this week. "I don't think people really understand how serious this is," said Ms. Slayton, 50, of Charlottesville, Va. Her chief concern is the amendment to the Republican bill that would allow states to opt out of several requirements, including what some say is the crux of the current health law: the ban on insurance companies charging higher premiums to people, like Ms. Slayton, with pre existing medical conditions. The complex amendment to the bill has stunned Ms. Slayton and other Americans with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses who rely on the law's protections, not least because President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress have consistently promised to make sure sick people will not face the same discrimination they did in the past. With most polls finding that both Republicans and Democrats favor protecting coverage for people, the proposed changes to such protections have become the flash point that could derail yet another attempt by the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers to vanquish President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement. The change was negotiated as part of an amendment to attract the support of conservative House members who opposed an earlier Republican health bill because it retained too much federal insurance regulation. But in gaining their support, it has repelled a number of moderates and sent Mr. Trump flailing as he insisted in a series of interviews that the bill would still protect people with pre existing conditions. Most major patient advocacy groups have come out against it, and on his late night talk show, the comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a tearful case for retaining the protections, recounting his infant son's recent open heart surgery and noting that before the Affordable Care Act, "If you were born with congenital heart disease, like my son was, there was a good chance you'd never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre existing condition." While insurers would not be able to deny coverage altogether under the Republican bill, the revised legislation allows states to seek a waiver from the existing rule that requires them to charge the same price to everyone who is the same age in the same region, regardless of how healthy they are. People who went uninsured for 63 days or more in the previous year could be charged based on their health status and see their premiums increase sharply. Healthier people might see their prices drop. To get a waiver, a state would need some other way to cover people with potentially serious medical conditions, ranging from a reinsurance program that helps pay for customers needing very expensive care to a high risk pool. Such pools existed in 35 states before the Affordable Care Act, but they served only a small fraction of the people who needed coverage and most were underfunded, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. States could also seek to opt out of a requirement that all insurance plans cover 10 "essential health benefits," including prescription drugs, maternity care, mental health care and addiction treatment. By allowing insurers to cover less, the change could bring down premium prices, but also leave people without access to services that hundreds of thousands have received under the Affordable Care Act, including treatment for opioid addiction. It is hard to predict how broadly the waivers would affect the millions of people with pre existing conditions. Many people do have lapses in coverage between jobs or at other times, and they could be priced out of any program a state set up. Healthy people would most likely gravitate to plans that offered minimal coverage, which could greatly increase costs for those who need more comprehensive care. Governors have so far remained quiet about whether they would seek waivers, but for many people who rely on the individual insurance market, these provisions hark back to a time when insurers scrutinized the health of all individuals before they could sign up. In some states, policies were available with riders that excluded a given condition. Insurers could also just charge those with medical conditions much higher prices. Larisa Thomason, of New Market, Ala., remembers the day 15 years ago when her husband got a letter from Humana informing him that his policy would not cover any cancer care because a preventive colonoscopy had turned up several benign polyps. Likewise, an insurer in Wisconsin refused to cover any treatment related to Alice Thompson's reproductive system, starting in 2003, because a doctor had written in her medical record that she should have a hysterectomy to eliminate painful menstrual periods. "Had I gotten ovarian or uterine cancer, I wouldn't have been covered," said Ms. Thompson, 62, of South Milwaukee. "For 10 years, I was living under this uncertainty of 'what if.'" Before the Affordable Care Act mandated essential benefits to help make sure people had broad coverage, insurers routinely excluded various medical services. Almost two thirds of people who bought their own policies did not have maternity benefits, a third did not have coverage for substance abuse services and about a fifth did not have care for mental health issues, according to a federal analysis of coverage before the law. Ellen Paquette, 48, remembers losing her insurance when she moved back to Pennsylvania in the late 1990s. A freelance artist and musician who lives in Warren, she has never gotten coverage through an employer. Because she had depression, "I had a terrible time finding insurance," she said, even though she had never been hospitalized and was otherwise in good health. When Ms. Paquette eventually found a policy, it had a rider that excluded any treatment for mental health. The prospect of allowing insurers to once again determine which benefits to cover "feels like such a raw kind of discrimination," she said. She and her husband, Thomas, 58, are now covered under the federal law. Studying the details of the replacement bill, she said, "I've gone through phases where I feel almost panicky." In the past, excluding certain conditions from coverage sometimes left people with crushing medical debts. John Gillespie and his wife, Beth, ran their own small auto repair shop. In the late 1990s, the couple, who live in Beaver Falls, Pa., could not find an insurance company willing to cover her epilepsy. At one point, Ms. Gillespie had to go to the emergency room because she was having seizures, and the doctors worried that she had developed meningitis. She was in the intensive care unit for three days. Her seizures were in fact because of the epilepsy, and the couple faced nearly 20,000 in medical bills. "We ended up making payments on that for several years," Mr. Gillespie said. When the couple was finally able to find a plan that covered her disease, the premiums were astronomical about 2,400 a month for both of them. "It was easily the single largest expense we had," Mr. Gillespie said. The couple could barely make ends meet, despite his working 60 hours a week and teaching some night classes. They refinanced their house three times. The couple now pay 1,200 for coverage. They are both 58 and semiretired, with little in the way of savings if they were to face another medical emergency. Ms. Slayton and her husband, a lawyer, are paying nearly 1,500 a month for a plan that covers their 13 year old daughter and them. They earn too much to qualify for a subsidy to help with the cost. While more expensive than they would like, the plan covered her surgery last year to remove a brain tumor, and Ms. Slayton, who has been blogging about her experience, is doing well. In the past, even the state high risk pools proved an unaffordable solution to many people. Janice Elks, 50, a small business owner in Omaha, had cervical cancer and suffered from neuropathy when she looked for a policy. "I could not get insurance at all, of any type, for years," she said. "I would apply over and over." Her only option was Nebraska's high risk pool. Ms. Elks calculated it would cost her about 15,000 in premiums a year for a policy, while her medical expenses amounted to only a few thousand dollars a year for her seizure medications and some steroid shots. She now pays just 640 a month. Ms. Elks, who describes herself as a "liberal leaning independent," says she is "terrified" over the talk about changing the protections for people like her. She now has tachycardia, which causes her heart to beat faster than normal when under stress, and worries she will eventually need an operation. "Those kinds of surgeries are expensive," Ms. Elks said. But, at 50, she is 15 years away from being eligible for Medicare. "Will I live to get Medicare?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
TORONTO Soulpepper Theater Company isn't moving everything to New York for the month of July. Its theater in Toronto's Distillery District will still be open, with six productions on two of its three main stages. But a dozen other Soulpepper shows are headed for Manhattan, and 65 artists are making the trip. Add support staff, and it's quite a hefty operation. "I look forward to seeing nothing in New York because I'll be busy," Gregory Prest, an ensemble member who is cast in four of the New York shows, said amiably one May afternoon at the Young Center for the Performing Arts, Soulpepper's home. He'd been writing a play in an empty classroom when the company's founding artistic director, Albert Schultz, popped in to say hello, then brought up a field trip planned for Yankee Stadium. More than 60 members of the Soulpepper crowd have signed on to watch their beloved Toronto Blue Jays play there on July 3, a day off from performing. In Mr. Schultz's office upstairs, a long wall was covered with framed photographs, including one of him at 23, playing Romeo 30 summers ago at the Stratford Festival. But the eye catcher was on the opposite wall: a giant horizontal grid, hand drawn by Mr. Schultz in overlapping hues of fat tipped marker. Likely inscrutable to anyone but him, this was his rendering of the schedule for New York, with each of the scores of activities assigned to its segment of a day. He called it his "crazy Basquiat thing." It looked like a calendar of frenzy. Originally, this plan, Soulpepper's American debut, wasn't meant to be such a giant undertaking. When Mr. Schultz and Leslie Lester, the company's executive director, flew to New York a couple of years ago to scout spaces, they were aiming for a two or three week run, with just a few plays in repertory, requiring maybe 25 artists in all. Such modest ambitions went out the window as soon as they walked into the Frank Gehry designed Pershing Square Signature Center on West 42nd Street. The block, where traffic funnels out from the Lincoln Tunnel, couldn't be more different from the Distillery District, an area of stylishly restored Victorian industrial architecture: lots of red brick everywhere. But the Signature Center's multiple stages and radiating layout reminded them of their own theater complex, right down to the way actors exit through the lobby just like the audience, which encourages conversation. Visions of what they could do if they had the run of the place overtook them. "I went: 'I want the whole thing. I want the whole building,'" Ms. Lester said. Canada has already been having a bit of a moment in New York, thanks partly to the feel good Broadway musical "Come From Away," about the kindness of Newfoundlanders toward stranded Americans in the days after 9/11. On Canada Day, July 1 which this year marks the country's 150th anniversary Soulpepper will glide into the Signature Center on that show's hospitable coattails, beginning four weeks of plays, musicals and concerts, as well as free cabarets in the lobby, to be hosted by Mr. Schultz. Almost all of the artists will be making their New York debuts, and most of the company is staying uptown, in City College housing. Of the dozen ticketed productions, the three biggest will be Vern Thiessen's "Of Human Bondage," based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham; "Spoon River," a musical adapted from Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology," by Mike Ross and Mr. Schultz, and composed by Mr. Ross; and Ins Choi's "Kim's Convenience," a comedy set in a Korean Canadian mom and pop shop that spawned a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sitcom of the same name, now going into its second season. Others include "Cage," a John Cage inspired piece partly set in an eight foot acrylic cube, one of many Soulpepper shows created and rehearsed with designers in the room from the start; Asha and Ravi Jain's "A Brimful of Asha," a comic two hander about arranged marriage starring an Indian Canadian artist and his mother, who is not a professional actor; and "Alligator Pie," a musical based on the children's poems of Dennis Lee, who is famous for them in Canada but more familiar to Americans for his work on the 1980s Jim Henson series "Fraggle Rock." "Every single thing that we're taking was developed from the ground up," Mr. Schultz said, and each piece "has a Canadian pen attached," even if it's an adaptation. Having such close ties to the scripts heads off performance rights issues, but it's also in keeping with the idea of Canadian pride, which will be on flagrant display during the Soulpepper run. The building's Gehry connection, then, is especially apt; Ms. Lester and Mr. Schultz each pointed out the architect's Toronto roots. At home, Soulpepper is well established: a nonprofit with an annual budget of 12 million Canadian dollars (just over 9 million), staging about 30 shows a year and running a training program, Soulpepper Academy, whose students are paid to learn their craft. The company has branched into television, with "Kim's Convenience," as well as audio recordings and podcasts. Physically, Soulpepper is looking to expand; the Young Center, its base since 2006, is now too cramped for all of its activities. When Mr. Schultz mentioned this, he mimed the feeling, rolling his shoulders and jabbing his elbows outward as if his jacket were too tight a gesture of constriction but also of restlessness, a quality that seems built into Mr. Schultz's constitution. In his work for Soulpepper, he is forever in pursuit of what he calls "big shiny objects," and a new building is one of them. Another is the Manhattan trip, which comes with the not inconsiderable price tag of 2.5 million Canadian dollars (about 1.9 million), supported by public and private donors. But it's an investment, too, in what Mr. Schultz hopes will be "a bigger playing field of possibilities" the international kind. More people live in California than in all of Canada, so when he says that it's a small country, he means that everyone knows everyone there, or just about. It makes him crave a different kind of creative infusion, for himself and the company. "We need to have colleagues and collaborators thinking about issues outside our borders," he said. He wants to work with Americans, and since the American theater is not going to come to Soulpepper, Soulpepper is going to it. The company will place itself in New York long enough, and offer a wide enough selection of its work, to give audiences and theater professionals a sense of what it does. Mr. Schultz hopes to foster discussion, both formal and informal, with fellow artists. Ideally, new relationships will follow with theater makers he already knows by name and reputation who don't yet know him or his company. July is meant to be an introduction. If it works the way he dreams it will, he'll be able to do something afterward that he can't do now: call up any number of prominent artistic directors in the United States and simply say: "Hey, it's Albert from Soulpepper. I got an idea. Can we have a talk?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In January 1965, John Phillips, Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot and I wandered into the exotic beauty of St. John's Caneel Bay pitching our tents in the campsite, a gem of the Virgin Islands National Park. We lived in our bathing suits and snorkeled with the millions of fish that swam among the coral reefs. We chartered a catamaran every full moon, dipping in and out of the warm Caribbean. We cooked on the grill and drank rum out of freshly opened coconut shells. When we wanted more glamour, we hopped on our motorbikes and rode up to the Caneel Bay Plantation (now called the Caneel Bay Resort), the Rockefeller resort up the road, to indulge in more drinks and a great tropical lunch once more abusing our American Express cards. The hotel had a wonderful gift shop, where I bought my first bottle of French perfume Cabochard, the same I use today. We made bonfires on the beach at sunset, wrote love songs and sang to John's sweet guitar. It was truly heaven on earth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A bite size sampling of concours, cruise nights, auctions, club races and other upwellings of car culture happening across America this weekend: Greyhound is bringing some of the buses it has used over the years on two separate tours in celebration of its 100 year history. Among the coaches on the north tour, which will be stopping in St. Louis this weekend, is a 1937 Supercoach and a 1948 ACF Brill. The south tour, which stops in Birmingham this weekend, features a 1937 Mack coach and the 1914 Hupmobile. The tour will stop at various locations through the end of the year. More info. Although participant registration for this judged show is sold out, fans of classic air cooled Volkswagens are invited to take the ferry to Governor's Island to see a collection of about 100 Beetles, buses, dune buggies, things and more. Admission is free, and ferries to the island leave from Manhattan and Brooklyn. More info. After a monthlong hiatus, Formula One is back, this time at the Circuit de Spa Francorchamps in Belgium. Nico Rosberg is tops in points, but Lewis Hamilton isn't far behind. More info. Nascar's races at the Bristol Motor Speedway will take place at night this weekend, with the Nationwide race on Friday and the Sprint Cup race on Saturday. There are only four spots left on the Sprint Cup Chase for the Championship grid. More info. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Update: The writer's father is recovering, and plans to return to work when he is able to. YONKERS, N.Y. On Monday, around 5 a.m., I drove my father to Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, where he works as an emergency room doctor. He sat in the back seat, just as I did when he used to drive me to school, and slept. The coronavirus is exhausting. Since he developed a fever, muscle aches and a cough last week, we've spent time together, six feet apart, in the bedroom he usually shares with my mother. While he sleeps, I sit cross legged on the floor, working. When he is awake, I read David Sedaris aloud, and we talk about some of our favorite family vacations. For dinner a few nights ago, we opened one of our nicest bottles of wine. We might as well, he joked. We haven't had a how much you mean to me conversation, or a take care of your mother conversation. Then again, we don't need to. He's 68, and if he dies, that's not the time I will want back. Instead, I'll miss the most everyday things imaginable: eating dinner, reading to each other, sharing silence. So this is how I am choosing to say what might be goodbye. "It's dawning on me that this is going to be more difficult than I thought," he told me. "We have to prepare for that." He knows what he's talking about. For weeks, he has been treating patients with the coronavirus. He has sent some home, knowing that they might come back. He has intubated others, easing breathing tubes down their throats and attaching those tubes to ventilators. He has watched people die as their liquid filled lungs stop being able to absorb oxygen. A week ago, these patients were fine. "This is a nasty disease," he told me after he treated his first few patients. "It's nothing like the flu." At the end of a 12 hour shift a few weeks ago, just as he was leaving, a patient went into cardiac arrest. As he has been trained to do, as he has done thousands of times before, my father bent close to the patient to try to save his life. He was wearing an eye shield and a mask, but in the rush, they were not tightly secured. This, he thinks, is when he became infected. He tested positive on March 18. Although I know that even for people of his age, chances are good that he will survive this, that doesn't make me feel better. In the beginning, we were more optimistic. But this period, in the second week, is when patients either improve or get sicker. And his fever still remains stubbornly over 100 degrees. "I'm not getting better," he told me on Wednesday. "I'm not turning around." After an overnight stay at the hospital, we made the difficult decision that he should be at home. If he stayed at the hospital, he would be closer to help if he couldn't breathe. The coronavirus acts fast, and he could go from a dry cough to drowning on dry land in a matter of hours. But, as he wondered to me on the phone before I drove to get him, "Is it the best use of three relatively healthy days to be sitting alone in this room?" I've never, ever seen my father admit that he is sick. He has no underlying health problems. But now, at home, he sleeps under two thick comforters, barely stirring when I come to collect laundry and dirty dishes. His normally too loud for the restaurant voice is muted. When he has the energy, I see him writing and rewriting a letter on a yellow legal pad. I hope I never have to read it. We think loss looks the way it does at funerals, shivas and wakes, when the immediate slap still stings. Over rugelach and coffee, family and friends tell the remember when stories and talk about achievements. There, on the immediate other side, death is baroque. This is what we call mourning. And, in part, this social exegesis of a life is what death looks like. It's a group activity, a ritual with a clearly defined order. If he dies, I will say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer repeated three times a day after a death. But after 11 months, as is tradition, I will stop. Sometimes, I wonder if I should make some sort of declaration, to try to tell him all the things that don't need telling. But anything I imagine saying seems forced and, somehow, unnecessary. He knows what he needs to know. We do not need to mourn together. That is not his job. But, in a way, I am already grieving, squaring my shoulders to the possibility of an eternal not there ness that might become a new normal. Most bereavement therapists call this missing someone while they're still alive "anticipatory grief," the purgatorial wait before death. That started when we went through the logistics driving home from the hospital on Tuesday. He told me that he does not want to be kept alive without hope for recovery. He told me how he would want me to hold memorial services in New York and Los Angeles, where he grew up, when it's safe for people to come back together. I know, I think, what grief will look like. In my reporting on food and death, I spoke to widows across the country who could barely eat, barely cook, because food was so integral to their memories of family life. Even years after their spouses died, dinnertime that daily habit of sharing a meal was where it hurt the most. I'll miss him drinking coffee in his favorite brown bear mug, his voice at the other end of the telephone. I'll want to call him and then remember that I can't anymore. He's still very much alive, but I'm bracing for a future where he isn't. I know I have to be ready for another 5 a.m. drive back to the hospital, doing 40 in the right lane, windshield wiping away silent tears. But no good musical ever ended on a ballad. And I don't know how to say "I love you, Dad," better than to do so often and simply. So for now, we're just going to enjoy each other's company, open another bottle of wine and hope for the best. Amelia Nierenberg ( AJNierenberg) is the newsroom fellow for The Times's Food section. 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 |
Margaret and Katherine Kleveland, sisters and founders of Doen, with their children at a farmers' market in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. Silky and saloon ready, Ms. Chung's ensemble seemed a fitting cap to a summer that has seen a resurgence of prairie chic. Over the past six months it is as if the Donner Party has set out to brave the wilds of DeKalb Avenue instead of Hastings Cutoff. Suddenly, "My Antonia" is everyone's Antonia! The prints are Laura Ashley esque micro florals, calicos and gingham, the necklines are high, sometimes there is a bib or apron, there is usually at least one ruffle. Some women have embraced the straightforward prettiness of the trend, adding a wicker basket and clog sandals; others have paired them with Dr. Martens or Air Force Ones and a knowing scowl. It's a whole new breed of Pioneer Woman. Call her the Urban Prairie Girl (U.P.G.?). On a scorching day in late August, to the bafflement of my husband, I tried on a high necked, mutton sleeved, fitted frock actually called the Prairie in the comfort of our apartment's central air conditioning. Across town, in a carriage house in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, a friend texted me a photo of herself wearing a dress by the same designer. Hers was two pieces: a ruffled pinafore in a pale blue calico over a Peter Pan collared, bell sleeve blouse in a contrasting floral, called the Apron. Both garments sell for around 400 apiece and are designed by a woman who has come to be known by one name, Batsheva (her surname is Hay). The recent crush of Lower East Side Laura Ingalls Wilders is in large measure attributable to her and a selective but influential group of acolytes, who manage to make the dresses' Amish dowdiness seem a provocative fashion choice. Ms. Hay added: "Some of the women who wear my clothes are just being pretty and simple, going to a Venice Beach brunch where they want to look feminine and relaxed. Others are being feminist and radical and wearing the dresses with hard core boots and are going more Cindy Sherman, playing with the look." Many of Ms. Hay's fans are 20 and 30 somethings in creative industries, who grew up virtually "dying of dysentery" while playing the Oregon Trail computer game. They tend to be slender enough that their Mannerist necks are accentuated rather than squashed by a gingham pie crust collar, with just the right number of Instagram followers over 20,000 but under 100,000 to signal that no one is paying them to tag a selfie with calico dress and matching bonnet, they really do just want to channel "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," albeit irreverently. "I have a fondness for a puffy shoulder," said Hailey Gates, 28, the host of Viceland's "States of Undress" and a devoted wearer of Batsheva's line, having learned about it from Ana Kras, a photographer and furniture designer. "I had an eBay alert set for 'vintage moire' and then I saw she had this moire dress in the color of really salty butter." But Ms. Gates associates Batsheva's dresses less with an actual butter churning milieu than with memories of a lost New York of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the last time prairie chic was in fashion here. The style has also surfaced on runways, suggesting the power of nostalgia for Americana at a moment of national turmoil. At Coach, Stuart Vevers fused American Gothic with American Goth Chick with ruffled hemlines sweeping a dirt runway. Erdem has long designed prairie looks, citing Laura Ashley as inspiration for its flutter sleeved, floral pre fall offerings (the cornflower blue taffeta worn by Evan Rachel Wood's frontierswoman robot on "Westworld" would have looked right at home). For the formerly minimalist Calvin Klein, Raf Simons constructed a sinister barn set and sheer, breast exposing, bib front gingham dresses paired with knit balaclavas and metallic leather gloves. And as part of a series of advertisements hashtagged myCalvins, Mr. Simons placed those most American of superstars, the Kardashian Jenner sisters, in an abandoned horse barn with the reality pioneers swathed in red and white patchwork quilts. Though many would argue that prairie dressing in its modesty of cut and price is a corrective to the five figure, stripper style of the Kardashian Jenners' Calabasas homestead, it could also be seen as a conscientious counterpoint to fast fashion and the current street wear trend (though a Doen new season alert is pounced upon with the same zeal reserved for a Supreme drop and sells out almost as quickly). "There is a slowness to it, even the visual identity of it feels slow," said Aurora James, the designer of Brother Vellies. "You're not running in it. It's the complete opposite of those gigantor Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga sneakers. There's something very gentle and thoughtful about wearing dresses." On my walk down Franklin Street I passed a vintage boutique called Walk the West; Home of the Brave, a design store selling homemade earthenware ceramics; and a cafe, Littleneck Outpost, which sells cowboy ready enamelware mugs and bowls and tea towels made from antique, homespun hemp linen. Old timey Brooklyn is nothing new if only to never again see another Mason jar! but it does provide a fitting backdrop for this particular trend. (Indeed, the breakfast eaten by the Ingalls family in "Little House" cornmeal mush with prairie hen gravy is eerily similar to a recent brunch special at Diner.) "I feel like with all the new information about food safety and organic living, people are trying take that into their own hands," Margaret Kleveland said. "I think we're living in a time of fear and uncertainty and there's a certain level of self sufficiency that people are seeking." The sisters know families on the Central Coast of California, where they grew up, who are trying to live solely by trade and barter. The Klevelands' father boasts that he lives off the grid at his ranch, "I think he knows that if everything goes crazy he has a well and a garden, a survivalist plan," Katherine Kleveland said. "Homesteading brings about a different style of life and that's really desirable right now." And even for (perhaps especially for) people who live in 9,000 per month lofts in TriBeCa, the survivalist aesthetic has appeal. The Best Made Company Axe Shop there promises customers "a lifeline in the wilderness, and at home it's a magnificent window into that wilderness" and includes 400 styles with names like Lincoln, Fortitude and Smithereens. Meanwhile back to butter Food52's online shop seduces customers to "channel a day on the farm," with its hand crank Mason jar churner. "Churning butter, making your own almond milk, these are innate reactions of 'how can I reclaim a safe space for myself," Ms. James said. "With everything that's going on in politics a lot of us got really burnt out. How do you maintain yourself and your spirit?" This more modest style of dress has also coincided neatly with the MeToo movement. When Sarah Sophie Flicker, an activist, attended the reopening of Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" swathed in Batsheva ruffles, it felt like a deliberate feminist stance. Though others may feel that ascribes too much meaning on what is, at the end of the day, just a dress with frills. Ms. Gates heard someone describe a Batsheva design "as the perfect dress for the MeToo movement, which I found truly asinine," she said. "People still seem to believe that the amount of clothing a woman wears dictates whether she will be assaulted or not." And yet the last revival of this style was the late 1960s to the early '70s, when feminism was also in high gear. Jessica McClintock started her Gunne Sax line (the name comes from gunny sacks: the Old West burlap carryalls) during the tumultuous Summer of Love; Laura Ashley and "Little House" soon followed. But that era's iteration was more Woodstock meets Willa Cather. There was a bohemian, hippie overtone that is absent this time around. It also is arguably more inclusive. "Politically speaking, my head space right now, I'm trying to maintain my love for this country and for some reason that makes me gravitate toward wearing a certain style of prairie dress, which is interesting because that was never, as a woman of color, something I was included in," said Ms. James, who described the discomfort she felt seeing the way a black model was styled in a prairie dress by Sandy Liang, a designer. It felt jarring to her, Ms. James said: "I was like, 'Wow that makes me feel like it's in the South a long time ago. So there is a fine line there, being able to reclaim something versus not having that thing be positioned properly." For her part, Margaret Kleveland is looking at the "Little House" series with a new perspective. "Rereading it through a new lens I totally understood that it was problematic," she said. "What we take from it is more of a visual library," said Katherine Kleveland, whose children are named Wilder, Shepard and Prairie. "I mean ... can I wear this in public? I look like I'm about to go milk a cow?" my friend texted with the photo of her up to here in the pinafore. Indeed, she looked like a waifish version of Kirsten Larson, the 1860s pioneer American Girl Doll. However, I also liked it. Was yes to both a possible answer? When I sent back my own fitting photo she replied, "I can't tell if I love it or if it's your 'Big Love' Halloween costume," followed by a still of Chloe Sevigny from the HBO show about Mormon fundamentalists, wearing almost the identical ensemble, down to the ruffled collar and oxen tongue pink color. I know she's right. But I'm definitely going to wear it again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Mario Molina, who shared a Nobel Prize for work showing the damage that chemicals used in hair spray and refrigerators wreak on the ozone layer, which led to one of the most successful international efforts to combat environmental risk, died on Oct. 7 at his home in Mexico City. He was 77. The cause was a heart attack, said Lorena Gonzalez Villarreal, a spokeswoman for the Mario Molina Center for Strategic Studies on Energy and the Environment, the environmental research and policy center he founded in Mexico City in 2004. Dr. Molina, a United States citizen born in Mexico, was a "trailblazing pioneer of the climate movement," former Vice President Al Gore said by email, adding that Dr. Molina's efforts "to understand and communicate the threat to the ozone layer changed the course of history." Dr. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland of the University of California, Irvine, found that chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, would deplete the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere. Their discovery reshaped global environmental policy. The implications of their findings were dire: Without the protective ozone, an increase in ultraviolet radiation would put the health of many species, including humans, at risk. The two scientists pushed for a ban on CFCs, beginning for both of them a lifetime of science based environmental advocacy through congressional testimony and interviews. Their work was attacked by industry; the president of one company said that the criticism of his products was "orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the K.G.B." Their work led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, a landmark international environmental treaty to phase out the production of the compounds. That treaty had a unanticipated beneficial effect: It would later turn out that many of the ozone destroying gases are also potent greenhouse gases. Without the treaty, climate change would have progressed even more rapidly than it has. In 1995, the two men shared the Nobel Prize with Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its announcement of the award that "the three researchers have contributed to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences." In congressional testimony in 2010, Dr. Molina said that those who attack climate science focus on the areas of uncertainty as if it were a house of cards, which collapses if one card is removed. He compared it instead to a jigsaw puzzle, which reveals its image even before all the pieces are in place. With global warming, he said, "there is little doubt that the overall image is clear namely, that climate change is a serious threat that needs to be urgently addressed." Jose Mario Molina Pasquel y Henriquez was born on March 19, 1943, in Mexico City to Roberto Molina Pasquel and Leonor Henriquez Molina. His father was a lawyer and judge who served as Mexican ambassador to Ethiopia, the Philippines and Australia. His mother was a homemaker. He was fascinated by science from his youngest days, as he wrote in a memoir that appears on the Nobel site: "I still remember my excitement when I first glanced at paramecia and amoebae through a rather primitive toy microscope." He converted a little used bathroom in his home into a laboratory for his chemistry sets, guided by an aunt, Esther Molina, who was a chemist. His family, following their tradition, sent him abroad for his education, and at 11 he was in a boarding school in Switzerland, "on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn." He decided that of his two passions, chemistry and the violin, science was what he would devote himself to, and in 1960 he enrolled in the chemical engineering program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. After studying in Paris and Germany, he began graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968. He received his doctorate in physical chemistry there in 1972. The experience of studying at Berkeley was not just important to his development as a scientist, he would recall; he arrived in the wake of the free speech movement, and political awareness was part of everyday life. He initially worked in the young field of chemical lasers, but he found himself "dismayed" to find that some researchers at other institutions were developing high powered lasers to use as weapons. "That was important," Felipe Jose Molina, Dr. Molina's son and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in an interview. Thanks to Dr. Molina's experiences at Berkeley, his son said, he felt driven to do work "that had a benefit to society, rather than just pure research, or things that could potentially be harmful." 1n 1973, Dr. Molina joined Dr. Rowland's laboratory group at the University of California, Irvine, where they developed their theory of ozone depletion. Dr. Rowland and Dr. Molina realized that, as the CFCs reached the upper atmosphere, where they could be destroyed by solar radiation, the chlorine atoms produced in the process would destroy ozone. "We were alarmed," Dr. Molina recalled. They published their findings in the journal Nature in 1974. He would later work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; the University of California, San Diego; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the Molina Center in Mexico City, he focused on alleviating that city's choking pollution. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"It was a very long time ago, and certainly it was a very difficult piece to do," she said. "It was a baptism of sorts. I worked with lots of really great actors, but I couldn't have chosen something more difficult, and I learned a lot." Ms. Thurman said she had been looking for years for an opportunity to return to the stage. "I've given my whole life to performance; many of the pieces I've done have been very dramatic and rehearsed," Ms. Thurman said. "That's the part I've enjoyed the most the exploration of language, the theatricality and I'm looking forward to something of real depth and complexity." "The Parisian Woman" has been in the works for years and is being revised for Broadway. The Flea Theater, a small Off Off Broadway nonprofit, commissioned it in 2011 from Mr. Willimon, a onetime Democratic political operative whose "Farragut North" ran Off Broadway in 2008 and was adapted for film three years later, directed by George Clooney under the title "The Ides of March." In 2012 the new play, at the time with the film director Joel Schumacher attached, was looking for a larger theater than the Flea, and Mr. Willimon said that Broadway was one possibility. But the project instead went in a different direction; in 2013 it was staged at South Coast Repertory in Southern California, directed by Pam MacKinnon, with Dana Delany in the title role. It received mixed but encouraging reviews. Ms. Thurman said that Ms. MacKinnon, a Tony Award winning director whom she met through a mutual acquaintance, suggested that she read "The Parisian Woman." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
For all his youthful energy and ambition, could Yannick Nezet Seguin have taken on too much by simultaneously holding the music directorships of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra? He maintains that he can handle both, and even sees potential advantages. The proximity of New York and Philadelphia could generate collaborative projects, he has said. Audiences at Carnegie Hall got a glimpse of how this might work when he led a French program on Monday with the Met Orchestra and a Russian one on Friday with the Philadelphians. He conducted both with tireless stamina and palpable spontaneity. The players of each orchestra seemed and sounded inspired. I was curious about how similarly, or differently, these two orchestras might come across under Mr. Nezet Seguin's direction. But these questions were pushed aside by his urgent, every moment matters approach on both nights. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Twice every year Earth collides with a ring of debris left behind by Halley's comet, creating a pair of sibling meteor showers that can dazzle in the night sky. This entire week you can catch the first of the two displays, called the Eta Aquarids. It began on April 19, and will peak on May 5 before ending around May 28. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
From left, the actors Clark Gregg and Chloe Bennet and the husband wife showrunners Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen of "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." "Melting brains is what we do," Tancharoen said ahead of the series finale. "I'm still confused a bit, too." This interview includes spoilers for the series finale of "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Almost exactly eight years ago, the husband and wife writing partners Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen were having a pitch meeting at a Brentwood sushi restaurant in Los Angeles with Jed's celebrated older brother Joss and two Marvel Television executives. The Whedon Tancharoen trio had already collaborated on the musical "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog" (along with another Whedon brother, Zack) and had written the short lived Fox TV show "Dollhouse." Their latest idea was a TV show set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe about the fictional Marvel Comics agency S.H.I.E.L.D. (the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), which is dedicated to investigating the paranormal and supernatural. The budget for the proposed series was to be a fraction of what is spent on Marvel films, but it would place one of the movies' characters at its center: Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg). "We knew that our show would be character focused, about getting to know these people, and slowly building a team that becomes a family," said Jed Whedon, who oversaw the show with Tancharoen and Jeffrey Bell. (The elder Whedon, credited as a creator, stayed focused on directing the "Avengers" films.) The resulting series, "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," went on to have a successful seven season run on ABC, which ended Wednesday with a complex two hour series finale. That didn't seem especially likely after its rough debut in 2013. Some critics wanted flashier connections to Marvel cinema where was Iron Man? and the show had to operate in the shadow of the movies: The existence of magic couldn't be acknowledged until it was first revealed by the 2016 film "Doctor Strange" first; "life model decoys," a kind of android, weren't permissible until an android character appeared in "Avengers: Age of Ultron." But about halfway through its run, the show began reinventing itself, with characters ping ponging through space, time and alternative realities. Once the writers freed themselves of the timeline and narrative restraints established by the movies (and even ignored a few), the series started to soar. "We could just make up our own stories," said Jed Whedon. "It was liberating." In the final season, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents hopped around different decades, with a pit stop in the 1980s that provided pure pop geek joy. (Agent Coulson as Max Headroom? Check.) But the show never lost its emotional core: the relationship between Agents Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), who crossed the galaxy more than once to be together, only to be repeatedly pulled apart. In the finale, they reunited, as Fitz helped the ragtag team save both S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Earth from a takeover by an alien android race. In a phone interview Monday, Tancharoen and Jed Whedon discussed bringing "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." to a conclusion. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. MAURISSA TANCHAROEN It's so strange because we feel that we've said goodbye to the show a number of times now. We tied everyone's arcs up with a nice little bow back in Season 5. JED WHEDON We wanted this to be different, not another goodbye. We landed on the feeling of nostalgia, a feeling of moving on as life changes around you. It's not a sense of loss. Lives change. Paths diverge. You have that sense of longing, nostalgia and connection with people with whom you spent lots of time. TANCHAROEN I was not only working with my show family but with my actual family. My father was there from Day 1, working in transportation. My brother Kevin Tancharoen came on and directed over a dozen episodes. I have countless memories where my daughter is sitting on the producer Megan Thomas Bradner's lap, I'm watching my husband talking to my brother, setting up a shot, and my father is nearby, at craft service. So much of our experience bled into what we were trying to say. Jumping the characters ahead a year also amplifies the bittersweet feeling, because it's clear they have moved on. They're settling into new lives. TANCHAROEN We had no idea we were predicting the near future with our social distance ending, our virtual Zoom call between the characters. Of course, we conceived of all that before 2020. If we were developing the last season right now WHEDON There would be a virus story line. It would have a different tone. If you were developing it now, would you have expanded upon the sexism and racism of the 1930s and 1950s that the characters encounter when they time travel to those decades this season? TANCHAROEN There would have been more of an opportunity to do that with Mack Henry Simmons , obviously. But we were able to turn those issues into metaphor and address them with time travel and have Deke Jeff Ward , being a man out of time, comment on how absurd the racial and social injustice is. Just him learning about white privilege was a fun thing to play with. When we first pitched the show, we all wanted it to reflect the world that we live in and what it aspires to be a world full of diversity, where men and women are on equal footing when it comes to fighting the good fight. That's been evident throughout the series, in front of the camera, behind the camera, and also in our storytelling. It was a show about hope and love, filled with beautiful, diverse faces. Losing Iain De Caestecker to other productions meant he was absent for much of this season. How did you sort that out? Did you ever worry about keeping Fitz and Simmons apart too much? WHEDON As we were ending Season 6, we knew we were going to have very little Fitz. So we sort of jumped in with time travel, knowing that we were creating a puzzle that would be very hard to solve. For Fitz, one of the things that justified it is that for him, only a moment in time has passed. And we knew it would a fun boost of adrenaline for the production and the actors to be able to play in different time periods and tell stories based on S.H.I.E.L.D. history. Did the altered timelines in "S.H.I.E.L.D." actually shift time enough to enable events in "Infinity War" and "Endgame"? Did the show ultimately reconnect with the Marvel movies in the end? Some of the Time Stream is melting my brain. TANCHAROEN Melting brains is what we do. I'm still confused a bit, too. WHEDON Some of the stuff they did with time travel in "Endgame" indicated that there are other timelines where other adventures are occurring. We're following the multi verse rule. The only way that someone survives Thanos's snap in the movies is go into the quantum realm, and we originally did plan to give that a mention because we used the quantum realm to move between timelines but it got cut for time. TANCHAROEN It's very clear that Fitz and Simmons now live a life that they want to live, retired and raising a daughter. WHEDON With everyone else, they're on a new journey, which allows the audience to fill in what they believe could happen next. TANCHAROEN That iconic image at the end of Coulson, flying off into whatever lies ahead? I'm just going to cry. There are so many spinoffs that could happen because there's Quake in space, with Sousa and Kora ... WHEDON All the adventures on Kitson. The stories will continue. I think of it as when a song you love fades out, and we're sort of allowed to keep singing it in our heads. I assume Deke continues to use his knowledge of the future, singing songs in the '80s before they've been written? We don't see how he fares in his alternate timeline. WHEDON There was talk of flashing to what he was doing, but that would have undercut the emotional development. He's playing Madison Square Garden, singing "Money for Nothing," but it's a S.H.I.E.L.D. operation. TANCHAROEN That would have our dream end credit sequence. Any other wish list items left unfulfilled? A musical episode, maybe, considering Jed writes music and Chloe Bennet used to be a pop singer? TANCHAROEN Was that our secret wish of wishes? Yes. If there were a Season 8, our entire cast would jump at the chance, and all of them can dance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Matt Haag wasn't exactly dressing to impress during his teenage years on the competitive Call of Duty circuit. The 26 year old recalled, sheepishly, the basketball shorts and Payless kicks he wore on flights to tournaments around the country back in 2008. All of his gamer friends and teammates looked the same way: schlubby. But in the last decade, something changed. "I just wanted to look better," Mr. Haag said. "I needed a girlfriend. I was trying to be cooler. It was as simple as that." Today, Mr. Haag, known as Nadeshot, is the chief executive of 100 Thieves, an esports organization that makes apparel for competitive gamers and their fans. He has more than 1 million followers on Instagram and routinely uses the platform to model the latest in 100 Thieves merchandise: splashy graphic tees, athleisure hoodies and starchy camo pullovers, which pair nicely with Mr. Haag's vast collection of Creamsicle colored sneakers. The price point for 100 Thieves merchandise compares to many midpriced athleisure brands; shoppers can expect to pay 85 for a hoodie. Other gamers are spending much more on their looks. "The professional players have probably spent 500 to 1,000 on what they're wearing," Mr. Haag said. "They've got Gucci and Balenciaga. It's absolutely ridiculous." And, he said, "as soon as the players started elevating their wardrobe, that's when all the fans started doing it too." Since its founding in 2017, 100 Thieves has attracted high profile investors. It's co owners include Drake and Scooter Braun. The last time the company held a merch "drop," Mr. Haag said, the online storefront sold out in "about 18 minutes." The line has boosted Mr. Haag's celebrity status in the gaming world, despite his retirement from competition. That's partly because video game culture is more visible than ever; the streaming app Twitch's audience has come to rival that of the largest cable news networks, with hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers. And the gamers in those broadcasts want to look good. At the same time, athletic brands are striving to make themselves relevant to young people through celebrity partnerships and brand collaborations. Cue the deals with pro gamers. Adidas has inked deals with the pro FIFA Online 4 team Lyon EDG and the Portuguese esports organization Grow uP eSports. In February, Nike announced a four year partnership with the entire Chinese professional League of Legends league, which encompasses 16 teams. John Fryer, the president of sports apparel and graphics for Champion, said the company spent two years researching the market before partnering with Dignitas, an esports team owned by the Philadelphia 76ers, last fall. Esports organizations have outfitted players with custom jerseys since the early 2000s. But the influx of apparel brands treating those players as they would athletic stars is tied to how lucrative the pro gaming industry has become. Emmalee Garrido, for example, has played for the all women team Dignitas Female since 2017. When she started competing in esports tournaments in 2014, she made her own jerseys and ironed her name on the back. But in 2018, she was courted by a sports apparel company and asked how she'd like to be dressed. "Champion sat me and my team down, and they listened about how long we game for, and what we need fabric wise," Ms. Garrido, 28, said. "We're competing onstage, we have all these lights shining on us, we can get really hot. The jerseys that we have now have airflow, so we're not sweating as much." For most of her life, Ms. Garrido, who plays as EMUHLEET, would not have described herself as a particularly fashionable person. But after joining Dignitas, she became enamored with the style of the 76ers point guard and former rookie of the year Ben Simmons. "We follow him on Instagram and always try to wear what he's wearing," she said. "And he's always wearing Champion too!" The N.B.A.'s style renaissance think Russell Westbrook's denim suits, James Harden's floral prints or P.J. Tucker's trademark extra pair of shoes gave many of the insurgent esports generation clear role models. "A lot of the kids who grew up to play competitive video games probably played competitive sports at some point," said Mr. Haag. And some are betting that gaming will become just as much of a phenomenon. Collette Gangemi, a former executive at Converse and DC Shoes, now serves as the vice president of consumer products and merchandising for the Overwatch League team New York Excelsior, where she organizes pop up shops that sell exclusive gear emblazoned with the Excelsior logo. (Like, for instance, this New York Excelsior Starter jacket.) Ms. Gangemi believes that the roots of esports style run a bit deeper, toward another movement orchestrated by young, talented outsiders. "The best parallel is in late '90s, mid 2000s skateboarding, where skateboarders started making seven figure salaries, and started buying into the car culture, the jewelry culture and the apparel culture," she said. "They created some of the biggest brands in the world." Mr. Haag cited Supreme as a company that benefited from the commodification of skate culture: "If you were skating you knew what it was, but if you weren't a part of it, you wouldn't understand it." "Now," he said, "it's doing collaborations with Louis Vuitton." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Jose Limon's "The Traitor," a dance drama made in 1954, looks and sounds like cultural programming on 1950s television. The arches of the cutout set, the anguished brass and percussion of the Gunther Schuller score, the portentous atmosphere: Even when performed live, the work seems to transpire in black and white. The characters have archetypal names the Leader, His Followers, the Traitor but everyone can recognize Jesus and Judas, the Last Supper table, the kiss of betrayal. No one makes dances like this anymore. That fact carried a force of justification at the Joyce Theater on Saturday, as "The Traitor" closed Program D of the two week Jose Limon International Dance Festival. The work opens at a run and doesn't let up through its final moment, when the Traitor snaps a noose tight around his own neck. The dramatic compression is incredibly high, with physically and poetically potent images coming in a thick, inexorable flow. This is a dance made to last and to retain its power, but someone has to keep it alive and that is what the Limon Dance Company does. One aim of the festival was to show that the namesake troupe isn't alone in doing that preserving. On Saturday, Carolina Avendano from the Venezuelan company Coreoarte performed the Limon solo "Chaconne" (1942). Although the strength of her legs didn't match that of her arms, the dour Ms. Avendano nevertheless caught the work's weighty momentum in close harmony with its recorded Bach score. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Once upon a time, everyone hoped that the internet, instead of becoming a bottomless pit of iniquity, would be filled with good and interesting information about large cattle. And lo, it is. But the viral photos of Knickers, the very large Australian steer, perhaps the largest steer around, have raised more questions than a leak from the Mueller investigation. The main one being, how did he get to be 6 feet 4 inches at the shoulder, and weigh about 3,000 pounds, so big that he escaped the abattoir. The answer seems to be if you're a good sized Holstein steer and you live long enough, you too could be a contender. They are the Ben and Jerry cows, black and white. They are bred to produce milk. The breed is 2,000 years old and originated in Europe. They are also raised for their meat, and, since Knickers was a steer (a castrated bull), he unfortunately had no future in the dairy business. How big do cattle usually grow? It depends on the breed. According to Daren M. Sheffield, production records specialist at the Holstein Association USA, the average Holstein cow is about 4 feet, 10 inches tall at the shoulder and weighs about 1,500 pounds. Steers are usually slaughtered around 15 months at a weight of 1,300 to 1,400 pounds. It is rare for a steer to reach seven years of age. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Alexander Boyce performed a magic segment in Prospect Park for a Halloween convention hosted by the Magic Castle. Like many other magicians, Mr. Boyce has had to take his performances virtual, with varying results.Credit...Pat O'Malley for The New York Times What if They Could Make the Pandemic Go Poof? Alexander Boyce performed a magic segment in Prospect Park for a Halloween convention hosted by the Magic Castle. Like many other magicians, Mr. Boyce has had to take his performances virtual, with varying results. It was a Sunday evening, and Ken Scott's audience was spellbound. Parents and children were oohing and ahhing as he delivered a string of miracles. A wave of the hand over a Statue of Liberty postcard and the statue vanished. A Crunch bar morphed into a Rubik's Cube that was solved in a flash. And a spectator's chosen card was found without Mr. Scott even handling the cards. Next he asked a boy and his mother to help, displayed a yellow luggage tag and said he would send their pet on an imaginary trip anywhere they want. The boy volunteered his dog's name (Louie), a flight number (116), and a destination (New York City). Mr. Scott instantly opened the tag to show those exact things written on it. As the coronavirus snuffed out live entertainment, magicians, like so many others, have been forced to adapt, trading traditional in person performances for virtual shows. The shift has been particularly jarring for people of this specialty, who've long argued that magic is best experienced in person. "I think a lot of guys were realizing they had no backup plans," said Stephen Bargatze, 65, the president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the largest organization devoted to the practice. (Only about 500 of its more than 14,500 members are women, but he said that number is growing.) "This idea that something like this could happen never entered their minds." Mr. Bargatze has worked as a magician for more than 40 years. All of his shows including a planned tour with his son, the comedian Nate Bargatze, 41, were canceled earlier this year. Mr. Bargatze said the majority of his group's members are amateurs or are fortunate enough to have other sources of income besides magic, like a pension or day job. The crisis facing full time magicians is unprecedented. "It's a scary, scary time right now," he said. "We're doing whatever we can to pay the bills and hoping it turns out OK at the beginning of the year." Mr. Scott used to make a living performing 200 to 300 shows a year, mostly for schools and libraries in his area. One morning in mid March he was walking offstage after a school show when he checked his phone and realized every email in his inbox was a request for cancellation. "That all came to a big screeching halt," he said. "I literally saw my calendar just disappear." Alexander Boyce, a dapper 23 year old magician in Brooklyn who favors reinterpreting classics of magic, was performing 350 shows a year, mostly corporate performances and at "Speakeasy Magick," a show in the McKittrick Hotel in Manhattan in far West Chelsea. But the show closed, and his corporate work dried up. "That all went away very quickly," Mr. Boyce said. "And like everybody else I expected to just kind of take some time to work on some new material and rehearse alone and enjoy a few weeks off and jump right back into things." Shawn Farquhar, 58, was crisscrossing the globe up to 285 days a year, mainly performing in 1,250 seat theaters on Disney cruise ships. He traveled so much that he received Christmas cards from pilots. But last fall he traded the long stretches away for his own theater in Vancouver. Along with Mr. Farquhar, magicians everywhere were realizing in person events wouldn't be returning soon and approached virtual shows with varying degrees of enthusiasm and equipment; setups ranged from a computer and webcam to elaborate makeshift studios. Mr. Scott was already teaching magic classes to children after school and decided he could continue the classes and avoid issuing refunds by going virtual. He was able to salvage about a third of his normally lucrative summer library show business with virtual shows. He borrowed some equipment and bought the rest, transforming his basement office into a studio complete with lights, cameras and green screen. There was a significant amount of trial and error; during an early show the sound cut out. He added a person to run the computer, redeveloped his show and slowly began doing birthdays, office "parties" and public shows. "I'm doing some virtual shows, but it's definitely not what it was," Mr. Scott said. "Obviously I want to go back to work full time." Mr. Farquhar turned to virtual magic out of boredom. Homebound and desperate to perform for an audience, he arranged a free Facebook Live show. He committed to an hour, thinking he could adapt existing material. He was struggling after 15 minutes. "I realized I was talking to a green light on a camera and there was no interaction," he said. "It wasn't Zoom, it was just me talking and trying to keep an energy up." He found not being able to interact with an audience in real time to be "soul sucking." He tried Instagram Live, but he soured on that too. It wasn't until a friend recruited enough paying customers for a Zoom show that Mr. Farquhar changed his mind. There were stumbling blocks, like keeping people engaged and dealing with dozens of audio and video feeds. But when he learned he could interact with the audience, he developed a dedicated virtual show. In addition to traveling for shows, Mr. Thomas, 43, performed his brainy sleight of hand at bars and restaurants in the Buffalo area. That work has quickly faded, but Mr. Thomas, who has consulted for David Blaine, took a few months to figure out the best way to design a virtual show. "Most magicians I see just kind of took their show and tried to put it on Zoom," he said. "And that works to some extent." But Mr. Thomas took a step back to reimagine what a virtual show could allow him to do. The central challenge he faced was how to convince a virtual audience that what they were seeing on the screen was genuine. He couldn't have a spectator pick any card from a deck or use a borrowed dollar bill to show it was ordinary. In television these challenges are addressed by including a live audience or spectators to act as a stand in for the viewer, he said. Even then, people often assume C.G.I. or camera tricks are used. For Mr. Blaine's television specials, Mr. Thomas said the programs were presented almost as documentaries about people enjoying magic, because there was no way to convince the viewer what they saw was a genuine illusion as opposed to television trickery. Mr. Thomas concluded that the best option was to take advantage of the opportunity presented by performing virtually. Camera angles, lighting and optical illusions can be employed and manipulated. Many of the effects in his 45 minute virtual show couldn't work in person. "I want to remind people that just because you see it on a video doesn't mean it happened that way," he said. Mr. Farquhar finally reopened his theater, Hidden Wonders, in a new space in late summer. The speakeasy style site is hidden by an ordinary looking curio shop. Guests learn the address after buying a 50 ticket. That doorknob on a shelf? Put it in the right spot and the hidden door opens. Local guidelines in Vancouver allowed Mr. Farquhar to begin weekend shows with 12 people in the 30 seat space. He's preparing to roll out a hybrid show that will include the audience physically in the theater and a few dozen virtual patrons. Both will be able to see each other on a large screen. And he'll be able to pick volunteers from either audience. He said he designed the show to be interactive; the audience chooses the direction of the show and magic by selecting items from a cabinet. It's all meant to keep the audience's attention, especially the virtual audience. "You have to find a way to engage them and keep them engaged while you're doing it because they can easily be distracted by a thousand things in the room," he said. He said entertainers have a responsibility to not endanger their audience's health, but that most magicians have used virtual shows just to stay afloat and are eager to return to live performances. He's heard from magicians who have returned to smaller, socially distanced venues in areas with low infection rates. He said he's started doing a handful of school shows, with hand sanitizer, face masks and smaller groups of students. Though they can't perform the ultimate trick of making the coronavirus disappear, magicians hope and expect there'll be a significant amount of pent up demand for their trade after the pandemic fades. "Magic thrives when people are at their worst because people at their worst need hope," Mr. Farquhar said. "And that's what magic is." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Like a chameleon encountering a new environment, the top 13 floors of MiMA, a 63 story tower on West 42nd Street in Manhattan, have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to market trends. They were originally envisioned, designed and built as 151 condominium units atop floors of rental apartments, but the Related Companies, which developed the building, had a change of heart just as construction was completed. In late 2011, rather than starting sales, the company introduced them as luxury rentals under the name One MiMA Tower. "Related and its partner decided to capitalize on the strength of the rental market," a Related spokeswoman wrote by email. Now, those top 13 floors are being converted back to condominiums after being sold last year for 260.8 million to Kuafu Properties, a New York based developer with Chinese and other Asian investors, and SCG America, the United States arm of the Shanghai Construction Group. Condominium sales are currently strong, and "the market is dictating that there are just not enough one bedrooms and studios available," said David E. Perry, the director of sales at the Silk Realty Group, Kuafu's in house sales division. The conversion will meet that need, he said, because about half the units are studios and one bedrooms, and the remainder are two and three bedroom apartments. But the new developers have no intention of selling off the units as is. "We would like to present a nice, premium product," with even more luxurious finishes, said Winfred Zhang, the president and chief executive of SCG America. To do so, they hired Drake/Anderson, an interior design firm founded by the veteran designer Jamie Drake, whose clients have included Madonna and Michael Bloomberg, and his former protege Caleb Anderson. The firm is renovating the apartments, while also overhauling the hallways and the condominium's dedicated entrance at 460 West 42nd Street. The developers also gave the project a new name Manhattan View at MiMA. It is Mr. Drake's first multiunit residential project, and although he is frequently lauded in shelter magazines for his masterful use of bold colors, the apartments have a more restrained palette. The renovations include minor layout tweaks in some apartments, like reorienting a closet or repurposing a bedroom as a family room. All units will get new wide plank oak floors stained a dark hue that Mr. Drake called "toasted pecan," as well as new kitchens with white lacquer cabinetry, Carrara marble, Gaggenau appliances, and peninsulas faced in taupe lacquer and wood. Bathrooms will be a mix of full and partial renovations, Mr. Drake said, as the designers decided to keep some existing Calacatta marble details. New features include gray lacquer vanities with stainless steel legs and marble tops, lacquer and mirror medicine cabinets, and custom faucets and hardware designed specifically for the project. The lobby design features an opulent mix of materials, including a reception desk clad in strips of artist made mirrored glass, glossy mahogany panels, and a floating gilded ceiling in the corridor to the elevators. Sales began earlier this month, with the opening of three model units created by three different design firms: Drake/Anderson, Gabellini Sheppard Associates and Champalimaud Design. The development team is also in the process of building a sales gallery in Shanghai, which Mr. Zhang said should open this summer. "I believe a lot of international buyers are going to be interested," he said. Studios start at 1.37 million, one bedrooms at 1.7 million, two bedrooms at 2.9 million, and three bedrooms at 4.8 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Preparations for the Cadaver Ball, at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, begin in the fall. Radial Grooves, an a cappella group, selects two songs to perform; the campus hip hop and bhangra groups choreograph routines. This year's theme was the "Roaring 2020s," which was a relief to the class president, Varun Menon, because it meant that the only costume he needed was a tuxedo. (Last year's class president had the unfortunate task of tracking down a full P.T. Barnum get up, when the theme was "The Greatest Show.") But plans for the event, which celebrates the "matching" of fourth year medical students to their residencies, were cut short this year. On March 10, students were notified by email that their match day ceremony would be virtual. The Cadaver Ball was canceled. Instead of spending the weekend eagerly comparing residency assignments with fellow students, Mr. Menon found himself in an unusual position: cheering match results outside the window of a friend, who was self isolating after he had been exposed to the coronavirus. Last Friday, more than 40,000 medical students across the country found out where they will be doing their residencies, a three year commitment at minimum and the first step in their medical careers. But at most universities, match day ceremonies were either canceled or held virtually on Zoom. And for students, the experience was shaped by thoughts of the role they will play on the front lines of the Covid 19 pandemic. "We're entering as the class that was minted by the pandemic," Mr. Menon said. "Our matches aren't going to be a slow process of getting our feet wet. It'll be the middle of the crisis and we'll have to use everything we learned in medical school. It's this immediate sense of responsibility." "Welcome to our first ever virtual match celebration," Dr. Lisa Mellman, associate dean for student affairs at Columbia Medical School, said to her Zoom camera on Friday. Typically, she kicks off the ceremony in an auditorium filled with proud parents; this year, she faced a computer in a sterile office. "What an incredibly talented class this is," she said to the screen. "They're ready to be doctors, doctors who are needed more than ever in this global health crisis." This message was heard by medical students nationwide: Their work will be sorely needed. To many, this is both welcome and anxiety inducing. They have grown used to feeling as if they are underfoot, asking technical questions while trying not to disturb the residents at work. Now, given the surge in hospital intakes as the coronavirus spreads, they see the essential role they will play in the medical work force. With near daily reports from medical providers that struggle with shortages of personal protective equipment, now is a particularly challenging time to enter the field. "Our students are very excited about matching and being able to pursue their dreams," Dr. Mellman said in an interview on Friday. "But I would not be true to all the different emotions without also acknowledging that there's an anxiety that some students have about beginning work at this particular time." A grave sense of duty has already taken hold for some students. Kendall Kiser, a fourth year student at McGovern Medical School in Houston, did a critical care rotation earlier in March at a local hospital and saw a patient admitted who was a possible coronavirus case. There were no known cases in the city at the time, and the attending physician "freaked out," Mr. Kiser said. For 24 hours the staff waited for the county to determine whether they could administer a test, as hospital administrators began to re evaluate the number of intensive care beds that had been designated for Covid 19. "The experience really imprinted on me the chaos from competent professionals being placed in a setting that's unprecedented," he said. His lessons on rotation in the I.C.U. felt more urgent. "I was like, 'Pay attention, Kendall.'" he said. "As I was learning about ventilators, in the back of my mind I was thinking, 'What if the pandemic gets so much worse and this is what I'm doing starting June 15?'" Most fourth year medical students will begin their residencies in early June or July. Until then, there is little they can do clinically. In Italy and Britain, final year medical students are being fast tracked into service, beginning their work months ahead of schedule, but no such arrangements have been made in the United States. On March 17, the Association of American Medical Colleges and Liaison Committee on Medical Education called on medical schools to suspend student clinical rotations. Dr. Alison Whelan, the chief medical education officer of the association, said that students might be needed to provide assistance in clinical settings as the outbreak worsens, but would be called to serve only in a voluntary capacity. She added that the association continued to advise that students refrain from patient care to limit the spread of the virus, especially with current restrictions on testing. That is a public health directive that most students understand but given their skills, some wish they could do more. "We're all here because we want to help, and yet we are helpless," said David Edelman, a fifth year student at Columbia Medical School. "How do we reconcile our reason for coming here with our inability to do anything?" For Mr. Edelman, that question became a call to action. Earlier this month, he helped establish the Covid 19 Student Service Corps, which coordinates medical students to support health care providers. On Sunday, the group released a tool kit listing support roles that students can play: staffing coronavirus community hotlines, providing technical support for telemedicine platforms, coordinating food deliveries for health care workers and creating educational briefings with up to date research and news on the virus. Some tasks, like staffing the hotline, require clinical experience. Others, like meal deliveries, do not. The Covid 19 Student Service Corps is based at Columbia, but members say they are coordinating with medical students nationwide to establish other chapters. Mr. Edelman, like so many of his classmates, had spent recent months preparing for match day. His fiancee planned a trip to New York City from Ithaca, N.Y., his parents booked flights from Cleveland and he excitedly made restaurant reservations. But spending the last two weeks preparing students for a coronavirus response made the festive weekend feel less significant. Still, there was time for some levity. Mr. Edelman began growing out his facial hair in January, what he called a "match day beard." He promised his girlfriend that he would shave during a Zoom conference with their families if he matched into his top choice, at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. At 11:58 on Friday, he saw the email notification and pulled out his razor. "It was so refreshing to share something silly and fun," he said. "There was nothing else in that moment." Minutes later, he pulled up an email he had drafted to his faculty mentors sharing his gratitude. His chest tightened, remembering the reason that they could not be together in person. "If it was any other time, I would have hugged these people and said thank you," Mr. Edelman said. Instead, he fired off the message and went right back to sending emails for the Covid 19 Student Service Corps. "There's no space to feel emotions, because there's so much to be done," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It was an economic quarter no one wants to repeat. Even as the winter fades in the rearview mirror and growth shows signs of picking up, it is becoming clear just how weak the economy was in the first quarter of 2014. The Commerce Department said on Thursday that the nation's overall output shrank at an annual rate of 1 percent in the first three months of the year, revising downward its initial estimate from late April, which showed a very slight gain for the period. It is the first quarter in three years in which the nation's output of goods and services has contracted. The figures are bad news for the White House as well as for Democrats running for Congress in November's midterm elections. Although there's still time for growth to rebound before then and recent data on hiring has been more encouraging little room remains on the runway for an economic takeoff this year. Republicans were quick to seize on Thursday's report as more evidence that President Obama's policies are not working. "The president promised the American people an economy 'built to last,' but instead he's got us caught in a game of Chutes and Ladders: one step forward, two steps back," Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement. "Americans asking 'Where are the jobs?' deserve better than this new normal of fits and starts." Other G.O.P. members of Congress, like Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority whip, had even more acidic comments. "It appears that the imperceptible recovery has now dipped into another economic downturn," he said. "This administration has done more to hinder than promote growth. The American economy does not wallow for six years on its own." For example, in a separate report from the Labor Department on Thursday, initial claims for unemployment benefits last week dropped more sharply than expected. The four week moving average of 311,500 for claims, which is more closely followed by economists than the volatile week to week number, is now lower than it has been since before the recession in 2007, an indication that the labor market may finally be on the mend. Reinforcing that point, the bulk of the downward revision in gross domestic product for the first quarter was driven by businesses' adding less to their inventories suggesting that another inventory adjustment won't weigh on growth in the second quarter. Businesses aggressively added to their inventories in the second half of 2013, one major reason they didn't need to restock their warehouses and back rooms as quickly in the first three months of 2014. 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. Still, the 1 percent contraction rate was twice as steep as what economists had expected the Commerce Department to report. "The only bright spot is that this was from last quarter," said Tara M. Sinclair, a professor of economics at George Washington University and an economist at Indeed.com, one of the nation's largest sites for job postings. "This is about a period that ended two months ago, and we can let it go and move on." Other experts agreed that although the first quarter contraction represents a serious pothole, it doesn't show a recession on the horizon. "The first quarter numbers shouldn't be read as a bad omen of a much weaker economy in the spring and summer," said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group. "It coils the spring even more for a bounce back in the economy this quarter." For the second half of 2014, Mr. Hoffman predicted the economy would grow at a rate of roughly 3 percent. But the longer term growth rate in this recovery, he noted, remained well below the pace of past rebounds. Even if his prediction of a 4 percent rate of expansion this quarter proved right, when averaged with the 1 percent contraction rate of last quarter, Mr. Hoffman said, "it's not a breakout." Indeed, the on again, off again pattern of economic expansion helps explain why so many Americans remain skeptical that things really are getting better, despite an improving job market, strong corporate profits and a robust stock market. While the growth rate has swung sharply from quarter to quarter, the underlying pace hasn't changed as much. "In sum, there is little in the G.D.P. report to suggest anything other than a reiteration of the economy's 2 percent to 2.5 percent real growth rut," said Steve Blitz, chief economist at ITG Investment Research. "The weak Q1 growth number sets up for a strong Q2 growth rate, but neither this nor the Q1 decline reflect the middling path along which this economy travels." Both the Standard Poor's 500 stock index and the Nasdaq rose by half a percent in trading on Thursday, in spite of the disappointing growth figure. The S. P. 500 hit 1,920.03, a fresh high, and is up nearly 5 percent so far this year. In 2013, the S. P. 500 rose almost 30 percent. Despite the likelihood of a pickup this quarter, economists have been reassessing the prospects for growth over the next year or two, said Michael Hanson, a senior United States economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Credit...Christaan Felber for The New York Times In February, the Bravo host and executive producer Andy Cohen sent his beagle, Wacha, to live with his animal trainer in Connecticut. Experts said Wacha needed to be rehomed for his safety and that of Mr. Cohen's one year old son, Benjamin. "It truly was so traumatic, and so upsetting." Mr. Cohen said recently. "I thought, 'Wow, 2020 really stinks. Like, it could never, ever get worse than this.'" He had no way, of course, of knowing that the next month, and the next nine months after that, things would get so much worse, unbelievably worse, just so, so bad, and that he, specifically, was going to experience those things coronavirus; stay at home orders that forced the workplace online; figuring out how to parent during all of this; social justice, the election and cancel culture in a deeply personal way. And so, in the realest year in recent history, things got really real for the king of reality TV: Andy Cohen. If any year has bent our sense of reality, it's been 2020. You think you know someone and then all of a sudden a pandemic hits and you find out your neighbor Lisa is deeply into QAnon. And that guy you went to law school with? Oh, now he's a left wing radical prepper. Your mother in law won't wear a mask to the grocery store. At the end of this brain melter of a year, because of filming schedules, people who watch Bravo are watching March and April unfold all over again, but this time it's through the network's wine splattered lens. "It's a bummer to relive," Mr. Cohen said of the Covid 19 shutdown arc at the center of three shows currently airing, "but it's kind of sociologically fascinating to see how people that we are invested in dealt with it." Mr. Cohen, 52, isn't humble about the cultural significance of his shows, and he thinks anyone who doesn't value them appropriately is clueless. His friend Anderson Cooper, a year minus a day older, with whom he hosts "New Year's Eve Live With Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen" on CNN, agrees, up to a point. "From what I've seen of time capsules, frankly, they're generally disappointing," Mr. Cooper said. "So this would be the most entertaining and compelling time capsule that one could possibly imagine opening up years from now." Entertaining the idea of Mr. Cohen as Ken Burns, he added with a laugh, "I would hope for our future generation that that is not all they would see. But it's certainly part of who we are." In production in March when stay at home orders were issued, "The Real Housewives of Orange County," is in Mr. Cohen's view, "a microcosm of a rainbow of sentiments relating to Covid, from wacky theories to the Fox News perspective, to just trying to take care of your family." He points to a similar tableau unfolding on "Southern Charm," a show that follows a multigenerational group of friends living in South Carolina. "Now, let's go down to Charleston and that show that started as a kind of romp through a beautiful city about a bunch of lovable and sometimes clueless fops" but in the past two years, has tackled story lines that include sexual assault, the glorification of Confederate culture and the summer's social justice movement. "As much as you might try to tell a story of X, Y or Z, real life will come barging through the doors," Mr. Cohen said. "And that's what these shows are about. Those are sociological intersections that I can appreciate and celebrate." You Be the Judge Mr. Cohen called the firings "decisions for that moment," but he'd much rather the shows' stars and we stick around as their journey plays out. Some fans in online forums thought Bravo should take the show "Southern Charm" off the air, and he bristled at the suggestion. "Why shouldn't it be on? Do we want to cancel the South?" In an increasingly polarized country, Mr. Cohen is making good TV in the murky, mucky middle by doing, in the language of 2020, the work with people. "I'm the guy that people have their reckonings with. On Bravo, I'm the designated debate moderator." Some think Mr. Cohen lets his stars too easily off the hook for their transgressions, a complaint which he dismissed because he sees it as his job to remain neutral and let the audience do the judging. He has another reason to maintain neutrality: While the predominant "voice" of the Bravo viewer leans blue, the network's audience is actually split fairly evenly between conservative and liberal. "Tomi Lahren, the great conservative voice, was advocating that Bravo should do a 'Housewives' of all conservative woman," he said. Mr. Cohen's response to that was, "Watch 'The Real Housewives of Orange County,' watch 'The Real Housewives of Dallas,' watch 'The Real Housewives' ... maybe ... of 'New Jersey' and maybe 'Salt Lake City.' I would argue, even, maybe a little 'New York?'" If it sounds ridiculous that the face of Bravo seriously aspires to one day host a presidential debate, consider Mr. Cohen's uncanny ability to shape shift. Some people find him pernicious and manipulative; others think he's hopelessly corny. He's like the Macarena in that way. Another way in which he is like the Macarena is that he's just a lot of fun. Mr. Cohen quarantined in New York while he was sick in March. Of course Mr. Cohen got Covid. If it happened in 2020, it happened to Andy Cohen. "It was lonely," he said of being isolated in his apartment, "hearing my son down the hall but not being able to see him. I don't want to overdramatize it, because I didn't think I was going to die, but there were a few moments at the beginning of feeling like, 'OK, well, this is incredibly isolating, this is scary.'" He stayed even after recovering. "It was important for me to stay. Everyone else " Mr. Cohen stopped himself "I mean, not everyone a lot of people that I know, you know, went to the Hamptons." He talked about walking Ben, who loves to clap, through the West Village to applaud frontline workers every night at 7 p.m.; about the 9/11 feeling of it all; about handing out sandwiches to homeless people because "it became a way for me to kind of feel useful." And just when his storytelling veered into treacly self aggrandizement, here comes Mr. Cohen with his big "Hey, macarena!" energy, doing a bit about how an empty New York City made for desperate paparazzi. "There were paparazzi every time I walked outside. I kept saying to them, 'Well, you guys must be really I mean, honestly there must be no one here.' And they were like, 'There's no one here.' At one point they told me a list. They go, 'It's you, and Amy Schumer, and like two other people.' I was like, 'Oh, I'm sorry, guys. Listen, this is bleak. This is really bleak.'" After the long New York spring, Memorial Day weekend arrived and an exhausted and thin Mr. Cohen ("I was, like, my high school weight. Which I didn't hate!"), decamped for his home on Long Island where he and Ben frolicked, and where Mr. Cohen indulged. He grew his hair out. He hit the rose and the carbs. He said, quite proudly actually, "I got lazy." Mr. Cooper disapproved of this period of post Covid sloth. "Why would you ever do that?" For all his openness about his fame, his waistline, and his place in the discourse, when asked if he's single possibly taking a note from the Housewives and remembering that if you don't say it, it can't be held against you Mr. Cohen went literally tight lipped. He typically has not liked to speak about his personal life, but he softened when asked what choices he made knowing he was entering fatherhood single. "The only thing that I knew was that he had to live in a home that was alive, and that there were people around," Mr. Cohen said, "and that I was going to need my friends and family to help me." His guard thus dropped, Mr. Cohen charged headlong into the matter of his dating status (his last public relationship was with John Hill, a musical theater actor). "In terms of what did I decide about dating? I didn't decide anything. I just decided I'm going to let this happen." He described himself as a complicated person to be involved with romantically, even before he had a kid. "I'm fairly set in my ways. There's a lot of baggage that comes with me, whether you want to call it good baggage or bad baggage, it is baggage. And add a child to that? That's like, whoa." Mr. Cohen talked about going on dates, about excitedly taking out his phone to show off photos of baby Ben, "which I think wound up freaking people out?" He paused. "Yeah. You know, whatever. I'm still single. What can I tell you, OK?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In the first two minutes of Netflix's hit reality show "Indian Matchmaking," Sima Taparia, a Mumbai based matchmaker, declares, "In India, we don't say arranged marriage. There is marriage and then love marriage." A large majority of the country's population that opts to be set up is a testimony to the popularity of this timeless tradition. The eight binge worthy episodes by Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker Smriti Mundhra follow Ms. Taparia on her quest to find suitable spouses for hopeful singles of Indian descent from around the world. Reviews of the show have been polarized sparking debates on patriarchy, colorism, gender stereotypes and regressive mentalities, and also bringing this centuries old practice under a scanner. Does the system have a lot of growing up to do? Ample. But does that automatically mean everyone associated with an arranged marriage is scathed, pursuing it only under pressure? Such has been the general and sometimes unfair assumption. Because of my Indian heritage, I have been on the receiving end of questions like, "Do you have to marry someone you've never met?" and "Will your parents choose your husband?" by my non South Asian friends in the past. Aparna Shewakramani, a 35 year old Houston based lawyer and luxury travel consultant, one of the participants on the show, adds: "A lot of women outside the South Asian diaspora messaged me on Instagram to say that up until they saw "Indian Matchmaking," they thought that an arranged marriage meant a forced one." Ms. Shewakramani, who is currently single, says that while the definition is different for everyone, her bottom line in seeking this route was straightforward: to find a partner who was as serious about commitment as she was. She first sought the services of a matchmaker when she was 27. "I remember paying 400 just to have a 30 minute conversation with this U.S. based matchmaker," she said. "She did not think I needed her services at the time, but obviously I was open to the concept." Not unlike her, there are others well educated, independent and successful Indian women who view arranged marriages as a means to an end: to navigate the minefield of modern dating that involves more heartache, disappointment and swiping than commitment. "The human need to find love has remained unchanged over time," said Anju Nanda, a 53 year old culinary artist in Nashik, India. Her husband of 30 years, Chandan Nanda, an entrepreneur, was a match suggested by a rishta auntie (a local matchmaker) from her hometown Amritsar. "Using your parent's social network or a matchmaker need not be the last resort just because you are modern," she said. "It's simply another way." Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. The rationale is echoed by Anokhi Shah, 28, a Mumbai born public relations consultant in Antwerp. She married Swapnil Bhansali, an Antwerp based diamond trader, earlier this year, after being introduced by their respective aunts in March 2019. "'Love' or 'arranged' marriages are just terminologies," she said. "Does it matter if you find happiness in the end? I was always open to every avenue to find my life partner." The common connections between the two worked in Ms. Shah's favor. "It definitely adds a layer of security," she said. "You have access to this person's family background, values and lifestyle. Someone you know can vouch for them." It also helped that they were able to broach important subjects as you need to with the person you will share your hopes, dreams and bank accounts, and raise children with without tiptoeing around them. "These are conversations you'd typically have after years of dating," Ms. Shah said. But since you are both in it with the same intention, you can be honest from the get go." So is romance replaced with rationality? Anoli Udani, 32 year old fashion designer raised in Ahmedabad, India, doesn't think so. Ms. Udani met her husband, Arjun Udani, a health care and pharmaceutical entrepreneur who lives between Mumbai, Dubai and Lagos, through a distant aunt who is also a matchmaker in 2016. "We had a first date, traveled together during our courtship, and he even proposed," Ms. Udani said. "No part of our love story was diluted just because we were introduced formally." She added: "Everyone wants the serendipitous meet cute. But if you are self employed or live in a small town, the opportunities to meet someone new can be limited. It's not very different from broadening your search through your friend circle or a dating app." In this case, filtered profiles are replaced with equally precise biodatas, and families need to swipe right, too. Despite success stories, the framework is far from perfect. For every progressive mind set, there is a peculiar criterion. Cue: the excessive focus on "fair, tall, slim and trim" on "Indian Matchmaking." Appearance, education, age, community, family background and horoscopes play no minor role in narrowing down prospects, either. Assessments like "too stubborn" or "too picky," and unsolicited advice on "adjustment and compromise" are liberally directed toward women. "The process had its highs and lows," Ms. Udani said. "There was a societal expectation for me to get married when I turned 25. But my parents had a more realistic and modern view that aligned with mine." The proverbial hunt did not overshadow every other aspect of Ms. Udani's life. "It was one of the many focuses of my life, not the only one," she said. "Yes, there were times when I met two suitors in one week. But also periods when I did not meet anyone for, say, nine months." She attests to having found clarity in what she sought from a life partner along the way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
GANDHI The Years That Changed the World, 1914 1948 By Ramachandra Guha Illustrated. 1,083 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. 40. "The number of books that people write on this old man takes my breath away," complained the politician B. R. Ambedkar of the proliferation of Gandhiana. That was in 1946. Ramachandra Guha must have smiled when he quoted that line in his new book, the second and final volume of his biography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Few figures in history have been so extensively chronicled, including by himself (Gandhi's own published collected works run to 100 volumes and over 50,000 pages). The really surprising thing is that there is still so much to say. "Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914 1948," encompassing both world wars and the struggle for Indian independence, is a portrait of a complex man whose remarkable tenacity remained constant, even when his beliefs changed. It is also extraordinarily intimate. Gandhi drew no distinction between his private and public life. He made his own body a symbol, mortifying it through fasting or marching for political and spiritual change. He even went public with his sexual life and the negation of it through brahmacharya, or chastity. It is difficult to write about a man who was a revered spiritual leader as well as a keen political operator. Guha, the author of "India After Gandhi" and "Gandhi Before India" (the first volume of the monumental biography that this book concludes), approaches Gandhi on his own terms while trying not to gloss over his flaws. Perhaps inevitably, with one who has been regarded almost as a saint, it is the flaws that will capture many readers' attention. A key theme that emerges is Gandhi's effort to control himself and those around him. This extended from his own family to his political allies and opponents. The most compelling political relationship Guha reveals is the antagonism between Gandhi and the aforementioned B. R. Ambedkar, the pre eminent politician of outcaste Hindus then known as "untouchables" and now as dalits. Guha's book charts the two men's interactions over decades, along with Gandhi's own changing views on caste. 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. Even while he still saw some value in the caste system, Gandhi opposed untouchability. Guha is at pains to refute Arundhati Roy's dismissal of Gandhi as a reactionary on caste. He details Gandhi's exhaustive campaigns to allow untouchables into temples, and his many attempts to persuade other Hindus of his caste to accept them. Certainly, Gandhi did much brave and important work. Yet he still characterized untouchables as "helpless men and women" who required a savior namely, him. As Guha says, Gandhi's rhetoric "sounded patronizing, robbing 'untouchables' of agency, of being able to articulate their own demands and grievances." Gandhi fought Ambedkar over establishing separate electorates for untouchables, arguing that these would "vivisect" Hinduism. "I want political power for my community," Ambedkar explained. "That is indispensable for our survival." Gandhi's reply, as quoted by Guha, was that "you are born an untouchable but I am an untouchable by adoption. And as a new convert I feel more for the welfare of the community than those who are already there." Gandhi cared passionately about untouchability: He repeatedly emphasized his willingness to die if that was what it took to end it. What he could not seem to do was let untouchables themselves take the lead. Some of the most interesting parts of this book concern another group Gandhi sought to instruct: women. Two sections in particular are likely to raise eyebrows. The first is Guha's account of Gandhi's relationship with the writer and singer Saraladevi Chaudhurani in 1919 20. Gandhi was, by then, celibate; both he and Sarala were married to other people. Yet their letters speak openly of desire "You still continue to haunt me even in my sleep," he wrote to her and he told friends, "I call her my spiritual wife." He signed his letters to her Law Giver, which, as Guha observes, was "a self regarding appellation that reveals his desire to have Sarala conform to his ways." Gandhi's friends appear to have talked him out of making this "spiritual marriage" public. Eventually he distanced himself, confessing that he did not have the "infinitely higher purity" in practice "that I possess in thought" to maintain a "marriage" that was perfectly spiritual. The second section that will provoke controversy tackles an even more sensitive subject: Gandhi's notorious brahmacharya experiments, beginning in 1946. When Gandhi was involved with Sarala, he was 50 and she was 47, a mature woman exercising her own free will. Nearly three decades later, when he was 77, he made the decision to "test" his vow of chastity by sleeping in a bed with his teenage grandniece, Manu Gandhi. Manu was vulnerable. She had lost her mother at a young age and had been taken in by Gandhi and his wife (who was deceased by the time the "experiments" started). Manu grew up in an ashram in which everyone was devoted to her great uncle. She wrote a diary mentioning the "experiments" that Guha quotes, though it is a compromised source: Gandhi read it as Manu wrote it and his own writing appears in the margins. Guha has found a letter written by Horace Alexander, a close friend of Gandhi's. Alexander said that Gandhi told him Manu wanted to test her own vow of chastity. Guha suggests that this puts a new light on the "experiments," and that Manu may have become involved partly to deter another man who was pursuing her romantically: "There may have been, as it were, two sides to the story. Both Gandhi and Manu may have wanted to go through this experiment, or ordeal. To be sure, there was a certain amount of imposition from his side." That caveat is important, for, as Guha allows, there was an enormous power differential between Gandhi and Manu. It is not clear that the letter from Alexander changes how we view the "experiments": He spoke only to Gandhi, not Manu. In the wake of MeToo, we know that the powerful may delude themselves about the willingness of those they manipulate, and that their less powerful victims may go along with things they do not want because they are overwhelmed by the status of their abuser. Lest anyone think this applies modern standards to a historical event, Guha provides extensive evidence of the horrified reaction of many of Gandhi's friends and followers at the time. Most were appalled that a young woman should be used as an instrument in an "experiment," and some of his political allies, like Vallabhbhai Patel, feared it would become a scandal. At least one, the stenographer R. P. Parasuram, left Gandhi's entourage when Gandhi refused to stop sharing a bed with Manu. Guha does as much as any reasonable biographer could to explain the "experiments" with reference to Gandhi's 40 year obsession with celibacy. Ultimately, though, the reader is left feeling that Gandhi's own defenses of his behavior are riddled with self justification, and Manu's voice may never truly be heard. Gandhi posed a huge challenge to his world in his time, and still does. Guha's admiration for his subject is clear throughout this book. He tries to explain controversial aspects of Gandhi's life by contextualizing them within Gandhi's own thinking. Some of Gandhi's fiercer critics may feel this is soft pedaling, but it does help build a fair, thorough and nuanced portrait of the man. Gandhi spoke for himself more than most people in history, but even the most controlling people cannot control how history sees them. Guha lets Gandhi appear on his own terms, and allows him to reveal himself in all his contradictions. There is much truth in a verse Guha quotes, written by Gandhi's secretary, Mahadev Desai: To live with the saints in heaven Is a bliss and a glory But to live with a saint on earth Is a different story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. In 2013, Sonos scored a coup when Google agreed to design its music service to work easily with Sonos's home speakers. For the project, Sonos handed over the effective blueprints to its speakers. It felt like a harmless move, Sonos executives said. Google was an internet company and didn't make speakers. The executives now say they were naive. On Tuesday, Sonos sued Google in two federal court systems, seeking financial damages and a ban on the sale of Google's speakers, smartphones and laptops in the United States. Sonos accused Google of infringing on five of its patents, including technology that lets wireless speakers connect and synchronize with one another. Sonos's complaints go beyond patents and Google. Its legal action is the culmination of years of growing dependence on both Google and Amazon, which then used their leverage to squeeze the smaller company, Sonos executives said. Sonos advertises its speakers on Google and sells them on Amazon. It built their music services and talking virtual assistants directly into its products. Sonos workers correspond via Gmail, and run the business off Amazon's cloud computing service. Then Google and Amazon came out with their own speakers, undercutting Sonos's prices and, according to Sonos executives, stealing its technology. Google and Amazon each now sell as many speakers in a few months as Sonos sells in one year. Like many companies under the thumb of Big Tech, Sonos groused privately for years. But over the past several months, Patrick Spence, Sonos's chief executive, decided he couldn't take it anymore. Sonos executives said they had decided to sue only Google because they couldn't risk battling two tech giants in court at once. Yet Mr. Spence and congressional staff members have discussed his testifying to the House antitrust subcommittee soon about his company's issues with them. Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesman, said Google and Sonos had discussed both companies' intellectual property for years, "and we are disappointed that Sonos brought these lawsuits instead of continuing negotiations in good faith." "We dispute these claims and will defend them vigorously," he added. A spokeswoman for Amazon, Natalie Hereth, said the company did not infringe on Sonos's technology. "The Echo family of devices and our multiroom music technology were developed independently by Amazon," she said. Sonos sued Google in Federal District Court in Los Angeles and in front of the United States International Trade Commission, a quasi judicial body that decides trade cases and can block the import of goods that violate patents. Sonos sued Google over only five patents, but said it believed Google and Amazon had each violated roughly 100. Sonos did not say how much it sought in damages. The evolving relationship between Sonos and the tech giants reflects an increasingly common complaint in the corporate world: As the biggest tech companies have become essential to reach customers and build businesses, they have exploited that leverage over smaller companies to steal their ideas and their customers. After mostly keeping those grievances private for years because they feared retaliation, many smaller companies are now speaking out, emboldened in an age of growing scrutiny of America's largest tech firms. Mr. Spence and other Sonos executives said they had agonized over the decision to sue Google, largely because Google still underpins their business. Sonos executives suspect that their pressure on the patent issue has complicated other areas of the relationship, though they can't say for sure. After Sonos intensified its demands that Google license its technology, Google pushed Sonos to comply with stricter rules for using Google's virtual assistant. Those proposed rules included a mandate to turn over the planned name, design and targeted start date of its future products which Google would compete directly against six months in advance, up from 45 days in the current deal, Sonos executives said. "The fear of retaliation is a real fear. Any of these companies could bury them tomorrow. Google could bury them in their search results. Amazon can bury them in their search results," said Sally Hubbard, a former assistant attorney general in New York's antitrust bureau who now works at Open Markets Institute, a think tank. "It's really hard to find any industry where corporations are not dependent on one of the big tech giants." Fifteen years ago, home sound systems typically meant a tangled network of wires and speakers and complicated instructions on how to make it all work. Then Sonos came along in 2005, promising wireless sound throughout a house, seamlessly controlled from a hand held device. Its early ads boasted: "Any song. Any room." Sonos quickly began patenting its innovations, a stockpile of intellectual property it now proudly displays on its website. Its devices made life a bit more comfortable for consumers who could afford them, and they made for a nice little business for Sonos, which is based a few miles from the Southern California coast in Santa Barbara. Sales of its devices took off after the advent of the smartphone and music streaming. Sonos now employs about 1,500 people and sells more than 1 billion in speakers a year. When Sonos teamed up with Google in 2013, it gave Google engineers detailed diagrams on how its speakers interacted wirelessly with one another. At the time, Google was not a competitor. Two years later, Google released a small device that could turn an old speaker into a wireless one, much like Sonos's original product. A year after that, Google released its own wireless speaker, the Google Home. The device, marketed around Google's talking virtual assistant, quickly began outselling Sonos's offerings. Sonos bought the Google devices and used a technique called packet sniffing that monitored how the speakers were communicating. They discovered that Google's devices used Sonos's approach for solving a variety of technological challenges. Sonos executives said they had found that Amazon's Echo speakers also copied Sonos technology. In August 2016, Sonos told Google that it was infringing. Google had little response. As Google released more products, it violated more patents, Sonos executives said. Over the next three years, Sonos told Google four more times, eventually handing over a list of 100 patents it believed Google had violated. Google responded that Sonos was also infringing on its patents, Sonos executives said, though it never provided much detail. When Sonos delivered a proposed model for Google to pay licensing fees, Google returned its own model that resulted in its paying almost nothing, Sonos executives said. Sonos executives said their complaints were hardly just about patents, however. They are concerned that Google and Amazon are flooding the market with cheap speakers that they subsidize because they are not merely conduits for music, like Sonos's devices, but rather another way to sell goods, show ads and collect data. Sonos's entry level speaker is about 200. Amazon and Google's cheapest speakers are 50, and they often offer them at much steeper discounts. In the third quarter of 2019, Amazon shipped 10.5 million speakers and Google six million, according to Strategy Analytics. For the 12 months ending in September, Sonos said it had sold 6.1 million speakers. "Amazon and Google are making it a mass market product at a price point that Sonos can't match," said Jack Narcotta, a Strategy Analytics analyst. Amazon said that it was focused on creating the best experience for customers and that its virtual assistant had generated "billions of dollars" for developers and device makers. To compete, Sonos has had to yield even more power to the companies. When consumers became hooked on Google's and Amazon's virtual assistants, Sonos also built them into its speakers. But Sonos had a strategy to still stand out on store shelves. Instead of being locked into using just one of the assistants, Sonos customers could use both simultaneously. Sonos engineers patented the technology to enable the assistants to work side by side, and executives lobbied Amazon and Google to let it happen. At first, the companies hated the idea. Hours before a New York news conference in October 2017, Sonos was preparing to unveil its first speaker with virtual assistants when the Amazon product chief Dave Limp called Mr. Spence. Mr. Limp had just found out that Google would also be onstage, and he said Amazon was now pulling out of the event as a result, according to two people familiar with the conversation. After negotiations, Amazon relented. Sonos executives said Google and Amazon had ultimately forced them to make users select one assistant when setting up their speaker. Amazon said it had never asked Sonos to force users to choose its assistant or Google's version. Amazon later changed its position and joined an alliance with Sonos and other companies to make virtual assistants like Alexa function together. Google, along with Apple and Samsung, did not join the alliance. Google has maintained, Sonos executives said, that it will pull its assistant from Sonos's speakers if it works alongside any assistant from Amazon, Apple, Microsoft or Baidu, the Chinese internet company. Sonos has followed Google's orders. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
BUILDERS in parts of Westchester and counties farther afield are finally venturing forth into the market once again but steering well clear of the megamansions that were popular before the real estate market tanked. "The builders I work with know the market isn't there for these monster houses anymore," said Sally Slater, a sales agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Bedford. "What buyers of new homes don't want now is to rattle around in an 8,000 square foot house with huge living rooms that sit empty because they've spent so much on the house they can't afford furniture." A survey by the National Association of Home Builders forecasting the characteristics of the average home in 2015 confirms what is already evident in new construction: that the living room is being merged with other spaces in the house, and that supersize master suites are no longer a must have. Moreover, the study predicts, the typical size of a new home nationwide will shrink to an average of about 2,152 square feet in the next three years; that is 10 percent smaller than the average new home built in 2010. Gopal Ahluwalia, a vice president of the trade group, attributed the trend to the frugal and eco conscious mind set of many buyers in the wake of the downturn. Or, as Ms. Slater said, "The emphasis on how we live is clearly shifting." "Out of the boom years comes this nice kind of reaction with people thinking of basic needs instead of conspicuous consumption when it comes to homes," she explained. "It all ties in with the idea of minimizing one's carbon footprint. Buyers are unwilling to commit to the high costs of heating and cooling a supersized home and the huge property tax bills that go with them." In Mount Kisco, Mike Nast, an owner of Nast Brothers Construction, is about to start building a colonial with four bedrooms and two and a half baths on a quarter acre lot; it will have less than 3,000 square feet, a first of that size for his company. It will have a small living room, with the focus instead on the kitchen family room area. "What's really selling now are houses under 1 million," said Mr. Nast, whose firm is based in Bedford. He has not yet determined the price of the Mount Kisco house. Even the company's larger new construction in the Bedford Pound Ridge area is not as large as it once was. "I'm building 6,000 square foot homes that would have been at least 8,000 square feet before the market crashed," said Mr. Nast, who temporarily ceased building in 2007 and started up again just last year. Now Mr. Dudyshyn has downsized, constructing homes in the range of 2,100 to 3,000 square feet. As in a 2,500 square foot colonial he recently sold for about 650,000, the open layouts of some of his newer homes do not include separate living rooms at all. "You have to go with the times or else you're not going to sell anything," Mr. Dudyshyn said, adding that his customers seem less interested in the extras of a decade ago than they are in practicalities like energy efficient oil burners and windows. "When the market was hot, you could build anything the bigger the better and it would sell," he added. "Not so anymore. And I never build on spec. The times are still too uncertain." The shift to smaller is better is also being felt in the resale market. One Harrison resident recently bought an unrenovated 1950s four bedroom colonial, surrounded by homes of the same vintage that had been greatly enlarged over the years. "My wife and I want to expand our home, too," he said, "but the questions is, by how much?" For privacy reasons, the couple, who paid close to 1 million for the house, did not want their address or names used, but they were willing to discuss the pros and cons they were weighing. "We looked at the house next door and said to ourselves, 'We're not going to do that!' " the man said. Joe Houlihan, a partner in the Bronxville real estate firm Houlihan O'Malley Real Estate Services, who sold the house in question, described the buyers' concerns as not at all unusual in the current economic climate. "We definitely see that people are being much more careful about renovations," Mr. Houlihan said, "and a large part of their thought process is minimizing energy costs. People talk about that all the time." The couple, who have two preschool age children, have decided to enlarge the house to 3,700 square feet from 2,700, to "strike that optimum balance between the amount of living space we need and being excessive," the husband said. "There is that point between what you need and space just for the sake of space." None of this means the bigger is better ethos has exactly vanished. Some builders especially in upscale southern Westchester communities are finding customers, Lorenzo Signorile of Tri Crest Realty in Eastchester reported. "In Scarsdale, Larchmont and Rye," he said, "builders are purchasing older homes and knocking them down. They're building the maximum square footage allowed, for a lot, because many buyers, especially those from Manhattan, want supersize homes, even if it isn't the politically correct thing to do." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"I'm not going" is a phrase parents dread this time of year, but a book as clever and friendly as this one may ease the situation. As the first day of school dawns, Mae is holding out, arms crossed, imagining disaster as her mom and dad hustle her out the door, insisting that fun lies ahead. She climbs a tree, where she's joined by a girl named Rosie. Then a "tall lady" climbs the tree too, and tells the kids her own reasons for not wanting to go. She's their teacher, of course a playful stroke by Berube ("Hannah and Sugar"), whose loose lined art makes even scrunchy scowls seem delightful. WE DON'T EAT OUR CLASSMATES Written and illustrated by Ryan T. Higgins Penelope, a young T rex in pink overalls, wants to be a good classmate. She just has to kick her habit of ingesting her peers, who all happen to be children. Higgins ("Mother Bruce") knows how to make big, scary animals seem vulnerable, lovable and funny, adding a strategic touch of gross out when our heroine spits her victims back up. But this story of a reformed predator Penelope changes her ways after a goldfish chomps her finger is really about empathy. Starting a new school year is hard enough. Add in feeling different from your classmates, and it can shake a kid to the core. The incomparable Woodson ("Brown Girl Dreaming") and Lopez ("Drum Dream Girl") extend a reassuring hand in this verbally and visually poetic book that soothes concerns about having the wrong hair, bringing strong smelling lunches, speaking imperfect English or spending the summer vacation at home. The kids we meet all take a first step toward making the most of school: finding the bravery to tell their own stories out loud. This fourth book featuring Mr. Tiffin's class (the previous one was "A Poem in Your Pocket") takes on both the excitement of a field trip to a natural history museum and one girl's struggle to feel confident sharing her vast knowledge of prehistoric creatures especially after a boy informs her, "Girls can't be scientists." Mr. Tiffin to the rescue: He steers her to an exhibit featuring Dr. Brandoni Gasparini, dinosaur expert. As always, McNamara and Karas excel at telling a story that balances facts and feelings. BEST FRINTS AT SKROOL Written and illustrated by Antoinette Portis. Did you know that "on planet Boborp, childrinx go to skrool"? Of course they do! This exuberant follow up to "Best Frints in the Whole Universe" explains the ins and outs of the little aliens' raucous way of learning (with a little lunch throwing in the mix). The language Portis has invented for these colorful characters is hilarious and easy to follow silly perfection, and maybe even an inspiration for little linguists to make up their own. Starting school also means letting go of the trappings of little kid life. This wise book bears witness to the transitions that lead up to that big one: growing out of favorite clothes, moving from trike to bike and from crayons to pencils. White ("Blue on Blue") and Wiseman ("Play This Book") keep the tone encouraging and gentle, offering a chance for even the youngest kids to indulge their nostalgia. It's tough being a stick insect. You blend in easily all too easily, as Heidi, the new girl at bug school, finds. When it comes to making friends, long, lean, woody brown Heidi suffers, because no one can see her beyond her camouflage until the kind spider teacher comes up with a solution (a scarf). Truth be told, there's not much to the story, but this adorable debut by Parker teems with delicate details, many of them visual puzzles. This upbeat graphic novel the beginning of a promising new series chronicles the activities of a bustling class of fourth graders and their devoted, slightly overwhelmed teacher, Mr. Wolf. Yes, he's a wolf; the students are a host of animals, including a frog, a duck, a dog and a rabbit. Everyone has hands and feet and walks upright, though, and their problems and behavior are strikingly like their counterparts in schools for human children only funnier. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
I learned a lot from my time in the youth civics program namely that I don't want to commit my life to electoral politics. It was the summer of 2018, and I was 17. My mom's Volkswagen Passat shook to the riffs of Kierra Sheard as she looked for a place to park, and I shook along with it, nervously. I was about to embark on an intense weeklong social experiment. My mom spoke. "It looks really conservative Rene. Where are the Black people?" I looked around, and could count the people of color on my hands. "Rene, do you want to go home?" Boys State the subject of a recent documentary, in which I was featured is an annual program run in almost every state by the American Legion. It was founded in 1935 with the aims of fighting socialism and teaching civics. (Girls State, its counterpart, was started in 1937.) In Texas, about 1,000 mostly white and conservative leaning high school seniors gather at the University of Texas at Austin campus for an elaborate mock exercise: building their own local, county and state governments. The focus is more on the electoral process than the job in office. It's a competitive, rowdy and intellectually rigorous crucible created to churn out more civic minded young men. And in some ways, for me, it worked: I did emerge from Boys State more inclined to be civically engaged. But what it also taught me was that I want to stay away from politics. What I learned is that the electoral process makes people complacent. It is not intended to accommodate those of us who are Black, or brown, or queer. To effectively represent my identities and communities is to be labeled "radical" and unelectable. It's not that I didn't get how to play the game; in fact, I was good at it. I quickly learned the value of trying to reach people who have no interest in what you have to say. Armed with three years of speech and debate experience, I won over hundreds of unfamiliar, mostly white peers to be elected a state party chair. I praised the values of bipartisanship, though it troubled me to make concessions to viewpoints I didn't necessarily agree with including anti abortion, pro gun rights and anti immigration policies. That is how I survived the program. Yet even as I touted compromise, I had to deal with an old devil: racism. A counter movement formed to impeach and recall me. Nothing was off limits. Images of Black caricatures were shared on Instagram with captions comparing me to them. I once overheard some fellow Boys Staters make racist jokes about me while I was in a bathroom stall. I received anonymous phone calls with threats of lynching. This brand of demagogy is a familiar strategy that my fellow Boys Staters learned from the current political climate. They brought in race and paired it with ideals around nationalism, using fear as a mobilizing tactic. I learned that a lot of my fellow Boys Staters were great politicians but I don't necessarily consider that a compliment. The program engenders a culture of stringent competition, chest thumping and underhanded tactics. We were teenage boys whose only understanding of government was what we had seen adults doing. We were all participating in theater. Now that I've been through Boys State, I can see why electoral politics on the national level works the way it does: Anti black racism appears in (and is often rewarded by) the political sphere. Almost as soon as Kamala Harris was announced as Joe Biden's vice presidential running mate, President Trump attacked her with a birther conspiracy just as he had done with Barack Obama. For decades, Black leaders like Shirley Chisholm and Maxine Waters have been pressured to de radicalize their politics to prove to white people they are "safe" so that they can remain politically viable. I've decided I'm not going to commit my life to electoral politics. We're all disheartened, and I definitely plan to vote. But Boys State taught me that my skills can be valuable elsewhere, and I've grown increasingly cynical about the system itself. Instead, I've spent the past six months researching policy and scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin, overseen by Dr. Peniel E. Joseph, to better understand the community around me. I've protested the public execution of Black people by police officers. I'm developing an antiracist curriculum to introduce in an elementary school. This is labor I perform to preserve what I hold dear but it seems as though none of it matters to the establishment if it doesn't benefit the electoral process. People twice my age express disappointment that I'm not planning a future run for office: "We need you!" But we also need activists, educators and researchers. In the premiere episode of "The Michelle Obama Podcast" last month, Barack Obama said of my generation that we "take for granted all the things that a working government has done in the past." "The danger for this generation is that they become too deeply cynical in government," he added. But I embrace the cynicism, because with it comes brutal honesty. Even Ms. Obama understands that. In her address at the Democratic National Convention this month, she echoed this sentiment: "You know that I hate politics, but you also know that I care about this nation." She noted that "going high" and playing the game do not mean you can't critique the system. This is where we align. Through my brand of civic engagement marching in the streets, research, advocacy, education I am marrying my cynicism with action. Boys State immersed me in a culture that refuses to criticize America, confusing praise with patriotism while ignoring the fact that with love comes accountability. I believe that to love America is to be as cynical about our political system as necessary until real change is made, because faith in what worked in the past won't get us through. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The director Greta Gerwig names paintings by Winslow Homer, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Warren Beatty's "Reds" as a few of her inspirations for "Little Women." The novel was just the beginning. Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" is so teeming with references literary, artistic, cinematic that it cries out for a syllabus. "Every line and every moment in this movie could be footnoted," Gerwig said. "I hope this doesn't make it sound utterly dull, but it's a thesis." On a recent visit to the American Wing of the Met, Gerwig delivered a partial accounting of her influences in writing and directing the film, which premieres Dec. 25. "Some things I can't say," she said. "They feel like they're secret." To sketch out the world of Concord, Mass., in the 1860s where the March family lives, Gerwig studied paintings by Winslow Homer, Lilly Martin Spencer and Seymour Joseph Guy. "Paintings are helpful in a way that most photographs aren't," she said. In the Civil War era, "you could paint a scene from life in a way that you couldn't photograph a scene from life. You could get a moment." Guy's oil painting of children reading fairy tales in bed evoked the very hue of childhood. In the film, "everything, whether it's the sunlight or the firelight, feels golden," Gerwig said. When the sisters reach adulthood, the light turns white. "It's not cold," she said, "but it's less magical." Gerwig gave her cast and crew cinematic homework, including adaptations of classic novels (David Lean's 1946 "Great Expectations" and Martin Scorsese's 1993 "The Age of Innocence") Francois Truffaut's fourth wall breaking "Jules and Jim," Ingmar Bergman's ghostly "Fanny and Alexander," and the musical films of Vincente Minnelli. Among them was "Gigi," the story of a girl who befriends a French womanizer as she navigates the Parisian social scene. As Gigi matures, their relationship grows romantic, a dynamic mirrored by Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) and Amy (Florence Pugh) on their own Parisian adventure. "Gigi" became the aesthetic template for an encounter between Amy and Laurie on a Paris promenade. Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me The Carriage held but just Ourselves Emily Dickinson lived and wrote through the time of "Little Women," and Gerwig saw her an intensely private artist who wrote often about death as a "spiritual companion" to Beth (Eliza Scanlen). As soon as she cast the film, "I started guiding all of the girls" with reading materials, Gerwig said. For Scanlen, "I wanted her to read all of those poems." JOHN REED: Why do you even expect to be taken seriously if you're not writing about serious things? ... With everything that's happening in the world today, you decide to sit down and write a piece on the influence of the goddamned Armory Show of 1913! Are people supposed to take that seriously? "Reds," Warren Beatty's 1981 film about the socialist journalist John Reed (Beatty) and his relationship with the feminist writer Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), planted a seed for Jo's relationship with her own writerly companion, the German professor Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel). In one scene, Reed and Bryant spar over the seriousness of Bryant's writing. "He's criticizing her work, but you love him, and you love them," Gerwig said a mood conjured by an oddly charming exchange between Jo and Bhaer after he reads her stories, dislikes them and tells her so. George P.A. Healy's painting of an Albany heiress evokes the elevated social milieu visited and ultimately rejected by the eldest March sister, Meg (Emma Watson). "This is a good Meg reference, although I didn't use any bonnets, because I don't love bonnets," Gerwig said. "I just don't like 'em. I feel like I'm allowed to not do things I don't like." By design, Gerwig's Marches feel a little out of time. Working with the film's costume designer, Jacqueline Durran, she established the mainstream culture of Concord in the 1860s, and framed the March family in opposition to it. "I wanted them to come across as what they were, which was essentially a hippie family," she said. Gerwig's script drew from Louisa May Alcott's private letters, scholarship on Alcott's life, and Alcott's later novels, in which Gerwig spied even more modern heroines than the ones in "Little Women." Though Alcott compromised her plots to appease the expectations of readers, "as the books went on, they became more and more like her life," Gerwig said. A speech delivered by Alcott's stand in Jo (Saoirse Ronan) in the film is borrowed from Alcott's 1876 novel "Rose in Bloom," about a young woman who goes off to live (and spar) with her seven male cousins: Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as beauty, and I'm so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I'm so sick of it. Gerwig added her own final line: "But I'm so lonely." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It's splendid to see the performers of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater again. They burst onto the City Center Theater stage with heroic vitality: The texture of their dancing is powerful and juicy, brilliant in speed and marvelous in slowness. You feel as if you've always known them. Watching the first three nights of the company's five week season it opened on Wednesday, with a gala reminded me just how fabulously individual the dancers all are. Each is an immediately distinct character. The gorgeous Linda Celeste Sims, strict within her voluptuousness, and her husband, Glenn Allen Sims, with his feats of effortless seeming partnering; the amazingly tall (6 foot 4), broad and long limbed Jamar Roberts, calmly titanic in presence and power; the ultra vivid Hope Boykin, whose huge eyes are part of her bold attack and easy charm; Clifton Brown, a cool technical powerhouse, back after several years with other companies: These are well known wonders, but it does you good to renew acquaintance with them. These dancers have all been with the company for 15 years or more. (The rehearsal director Matthew Rushing, who joined Ailey in 1992, danced at the gala as if time had stood still for him.) Younger dancers register with comparable clarity. The go for it eagerness of Samantha Figgins (who joined the company in 2014) and Chalvar Monteiro (2015) is terrific. The boyish Daniel Harder (2010) is forceful, sweet and devout; Akua Noni Parker (2008) is lithe, precise and sunny. There are many others who dance as if longing to be known. But the difference between the items of the Ailey repertory, other than "Revelations" itself, matters much less. Each work has its own character: Very few are worth revisiting for their own sakes. I derived minimal pleasure from one new work, Gustavo Ramirez Sansano's "Victoria" (2017), a world premiere, though it's marred by Michael Gordon's score, "Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh Symphony" (2006). The taped music's sections each reiterate one tiny figure from Beethoven's score, while electronic sounds slide down and, later, up; it's like watching a great painting being systematically defaced. "Victoria," a group number, builds up kinetic excitement in a number of ways, not least by shunting groups of dancers purposefully around the space. The idiom often resembles, or borrows from, hip hop style, with isolated movements of limbs and muscles passing like currents through the body. For that reason, it suffered on Friday by being programmed after Rennie Harris's "Exodus" (2015), a more fully developed study in that style. The main fault of "Exodus" is that it gets stuck in several ruts, but its exposition of hip hop style has many stylistic marvels, while Mr. Roberts, in its messianic central role, often creates a visionary drama with his skilled control of slow motion and his gentle giant interactions with other characters. Another addition to repertory is Robert Battle's "Mass," a 2004 work now joining Ailey repertory. Mr. Battle became Ailey's artistic director in 2011; as a choreographer, he has a number of styles. "Mass," brightly costumed by Fritz Masten, is helped by being placed immediately after his dissimilar, short "Ella" (2006), which joined Ailey repertory last year. "Ella" is to Ella Fitzgerald performing scat; on Thursday, it was a happy vehicle for Ms. Figgins and Mr. Monteiro, fizzing away excitingly through a wide range of dynamics and moods in response to Fitzgerald's gleeful virtuosity. "Mass," by contrast, is for 16 dancers to an earnest score by John Mackey. Intense, serious, it shows the architectural skill with which Mr. Battle contrasts groups as well as individuals. I find it effective rather than appealing. Different from all these is "The Winter in Lisbon" (1992), choreographed by Billy Wilson (1935 1994) as a tribute to Dizzy Gillespie, and restaged this season by Masazumi Chaya. This, in four segments, is bubbly, likable, forgettable. Mr. Harder roguishly leads one guys and gals quintet; Ms. Sims and Mr. Sims follow this with an atmospherically smoldering duet. Wednesday's gala was quite something for celebrity hunters. Queen Latifah and Janelle Monae, ecstatically greeted by the audience, spoke in honor of both Debra L. Lee, the Alvin Ailey board president (and the chief executive of BET Networks), and the Ailey enterprise. The dancing began with the "Modern American Songbook," a judicious sampler of dancers and styles showcasing the company's varied skills. And Mr. Battle is becoming one of the great gala speakers: He teases others, the audience and himself with winning humor and authority. All three programs ended with "Revelations." The Ailey dancers certainly know how to sell their repertory, so it's impressive to see the severity with which they play the opening sections of this classic. There are thrilling technical challenges the audience knows and applauds them but the dancers deliver them coolly, reminding us that this is not about stunts but the opposite: transcendence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"The Simpsons" did it. So did "Sex and the City" twice. And "Breaking Bad" and "The Sopranos" are about to. Though we may be living in a golden age of television, the small screen isn't a large enough canvas for some showrunners. IMDb.com is littered with beloved TV shows that made the leap to the big screen, some more valiantly than others. While it's a tactic that has paid off for plenty of properties, for every hit Muppet or "Star Trek" movie, there's also a "Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas." This weekend you can add "Downton Abbey" to the ever growing list of TV series that have tried to make their mark on the box office, as the creator Julian Fellowes has raised the stakes and the costume budget on his lavish series. Picking up in 1927, just one year after the original series left off, the movie finds the Crawley household frantically preparing for a visit from King George and Queen Mary. They're the kind of houseguests that only a show like "Downton Abbey" could get away with and part of Fellowes's and the producer Gareth Neame 's plan to go bigger, which is just one of the lessons they learned about how to turn a series into a film. Being given a chance to revisit a thought to be completed project could tempt any writer to dig up a long abandoned story line or to perfect something they wish they'd changed in the first place. For Fellowes, however, focusing the script on what viewers would want to see was the guiding principle. He said he set out to decide "what the audience would have missed about the series." To Neame, the stakes had to be the absolute highest of the characters' lives, and a visit by the king and queen "would be the biggest honor paid to both the family but also the servants there." That would also mean "lots of set pieces that played to our usual strengths whether those were balls or lavish dinners or parades, the multiple changes of costumes, all of that kind of stuff but on a bigger and more glamorous scale than ever." Fans of the original series were probably most interested in seeing all of their favorite characters together again, which, considering the size of the cast, was a substantial challenge. "That's what we managed to succeed in doing," Neame said, "but that was working up until the eleventh hour." "Downton itself is one of the main characters in the show," Fellowes said. "Sometimes when they do a film of a series, they will go to Honolulu or something. I didn't think that was available for us as an option." "It's got to be a little splashier, but at the same time, it needs to stick to the spirit of the original," he added. A larger budget allowed for audiences to see much more of Highclere Castle than they had in the past, with sweeping, wide screen views from a variety of angles. "Certainly these great rooms the library, the great hall, the staircase seemed kind of bigger, better and bolder," Fellowes said. While new is good, different is not. "You want to make it so that it is recognizable and enjoyable and familiar to the fans," Fellowes said. "You don't want them to go in and find something completely alien, pretending to be a movie version of their show when it isn't at all. But at the same time, you want to try and give them a dimension that they haven't really had on television so that it was worth getting the car out and going down to see the film. So in a sense those are quite contradictory in a way, those two goals, and you somehow have to synthesize them." Given the grand scope of "Downton Abbey" and its enormous cast, one could be forgiven for wanting to cram in a few seconds of screen time for the dozens of characters fans have come to love over the years, but that's not realistic which is why you won't see Rose (the Dowager Countess's great niece, played by Lily James ) or Rosamund (the Earl of Grantham's sister, played by Samantha Bond ). "I just felt that I had reached the limit of how many characters I could find a story for," Fellowes said, adding that he was partly guided by Neame and that they knew there wasn't time to go to the Dower House, home to the Dowager Countess ( Maggie Smith ) and her bickering servants Spratt and Denker. "I regret that, and if we ever go back again, who knows?" The "Downton Abbey" finale ran in Britain on Christmas Day 2015, and American audiences got their last peek at the show's "Upstairs, Downstairs" like antics a few months later which means it's been over three years since we last traveled to the abbey. "If you leave it much too long then people have got out of the habit of it, and I think it's more difficult to get them to take an interest," Fellowes said. But when it came to the story, Neame said, the filmmakers wanted to feel that time had changed the family a bit. "You come back and the other children are older and life is moving on," he explained. "So it wasn't just static, but not too far advanced or unrecognizable from where we left off." For Fellowes, leaving too much time between the series' end and the movie's premiere could be risky. "If you start making a five year gap, then you've got a lot of explaining to do," he said, adding that "fans of the show don't really need any back story explanation because the back story is what they watched in the series." Takeaway 5: Remember the fans and the newcomers But what about those who don't know the show? It was important to Fellowes and Neame that even people who had never seen an episode could understand the movie. "What I've tried to do is to make sure that there is no missing back story that affects your ability to follow the film," Fellowes says. "Something like Sybil's death is referred to, but really all the viewers have to know is that Branson was once married and is now widowed. They don't need the story of his marriage, but they need to know he's a widower, and that's what I've tried to do." Whether all these lessons result in a box office success remains to be seen. But the film is open ended enough that it's practically begging for a sequel. Neame said if the movie worked commercially, "I can't see any reason why it couldn't continue." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
LONDON In early April, Maruthalingam Thiyakumar, a 58 year old employee of the corner shop in my neighborhood in South London, died from the coronavirus. While some of my neighbors and I were able to follow Prime Minister Boris Johnson's injunction to "stay at home" and "save lives," Mr. Thiyakumar continued to provide toilet paper and tea bags to the anxious customers who crowded the tiny shop where he had worked for 20 years. The government had designated him a "key worker" but failed to give him personal protective equipment. He was exposed to a deadly virus and left to fend for himself. Mr. Thiyakumar's fate is tragic and typical. The pandemic may affect us all, but its effects are not equal. In Britain, which has the highest death toll from the coronavirus after the United States, they are unfolding to reveal a gross inequality. As in America, ethnic minorities exposed at work and subject to social neglect are disproportionately falling victim. And the government is doing little to stop it. The ethnic divides in the data are stark. In England and Wales, according to a recent report, black people are nearly twice as likely to die of the coronavirus as white people, while Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are also at a significantly higher risk. Thirty three percent of critically ill coronavirus patients are from ethnic minorities, another study found. Given that ethnic minorities make up only 19.5 percent of the population and are on average younger than white Britons, the figures are damning. But not necessarily surprising. As we know, underprivileged people are much more likely to contract the virus. And in Britain, people of color have, on average, a lower standard of living than whites. The pandemic's disproportionate toll was foreseeable. Take housing. Ethnic minorities are more likely to rent and less likely to live in households where social distancing is possible. Two percent of white British households live in overcrowded conditions; this figure is 30 percent for Bangladeshis. These groups are also more likely to live in economically deprived urban areas. Newham, the borough with the highest death rate in London, and Birmingham, which has one of the highest death rates in the country, have large ethnic minority populations and above average poverty and pollution. Densely packed into impoverished neighborhoods, many of Britain's ethnic minorities are in effect primed to suffer most in this pandemic. Ethnic minorities are overexposed on the job as well. Not only do they directly deal with the ill Indian men are 150 percent more likely to work in health or social care than their white counterparts they are heavily represented in "key worker" roles dealing directly with the public, in corner shops, the postal service and waste disposal. What's more, many work in the parts of the service industry as hospitality staff, taxi drivers and food workers that have been worst affected by the lockdown. Black African and black Caribbean men, for example, are 50 percent more likely than white British men to be in shutdown sectors. As the government eases restrictions, some, out of economic necessity, may rush back to work, endangering themselves anew. Others won't even have that opportunity. Inadequately supported by the government's measures, they will suffer financial distress. Culture is a factor, too. One reason for overcrowding is a preference for multigenerational families, which puts elderly relatives at risk and intensifies the spread of the virus. Low English proficiency makes it difficult for some to use emergency hotlines. And those with uncertain immigration status may even refuse to go to the hospital, out of the understandable fear of being caught in the government's cruel system of detention and deportation. It should be no surprise, then, that ethnic minorities are prone to heart disease, hypertension and diabetes making them all the more vulnerable to developing dangerous cases of Covid 19. More shocking, perhaps, is that patients of color are less likely to receive attentive care from health professionals. Before the pandemic, black women were five times more likely to die from complications around pregnancy and childbirth than white women. During the pandemic, that inequality is present, too: Ethnic minority women who are pregnant, a study found, are four times more likely to be hospitalized with the coronavirus than white women, showing that preventive care at an earlier stage is lacking. So not only are people of color more likely to become infected and severely ill, they also receive a lower standard of treatment. Nowhere is this differential approach clearer than within the National Health Service. It is heavily reliant on the skills of ethnic minorities, many of whom are immigrants: 20.7 percent of N.H.S. workers hail from an ethnic minority. And they account for a staggering proportion of deaths from Covid 19 in the service 94 percent of doctors, 76 percent of nurses, and more than half of all health care support workers. In a survey of ethnic minority health workers last week, 50 percent felt that "discriminatory behavior" lay behind the decision to deploy them to the most at risk, front line roles. Despite the proven vulnerability of people of color, the government is conducting only a broad review of the situation. But then, it is of a piece with Brexit, the Windrush scandal and the "hostile environment" policy, all of which have targeted immigrants and made foreigners out of British nationals. On Thursday, the government agreed to scrap an annual surcharge of 400 pounds, or 489 set to rise to 624 pounds, or 763, in October that health care workers from outside most European countries must pay to use the N.H.S. The gesture provides some relief. But it has much more to do with averting a revolt within the ranks of the Conservative Party than with addressing the inequalities faced by ethnic minorities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. The way the San Francisco 49ers played on Sunday afternoon, missing quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo and several other starters was not an issue against the woeful and winless Giants. Nick Mullens, the backup quarterback, threw for 343 yards and a touchdown, and the Niners controlled the ball on offense, took it away on defense and had another easy day on the East Coast in a 36 9 win at MetLife Stadium. "I'm real happy with this week," said Coach Kyle Shanahan, who wore a mask on Sunday after being fined 100,000 for failing to do so last week in a game against the Jets at MetLife Stadium in which his team lost six starters to injuries on a new field his players criticized. "We pulled together throughout the week," Shanahan said of the concern about the field. "I just got real good energy and vibes from the guys from Wednesday, when we started practicing, all the way to last night at the hotel meeting. And then today. I thought they played very hard all four quarters. I was very proud of our team." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
CHEFS, DRUGS AND ROCK ROLL How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession By Andrew Friedman 464 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. 27.99. When he first thought of it, "Chefs, Drugs and Rock Roll" must have struck Andrew Friedman as a ripsnorter of a name for his account of what happened after members of the Woodstock generation decided that it would be fun to cook for a living. Now, of course, it calls to mind the slew of recent news articles documenting the groping and grabbing, insults and insinuations that certain male chefs with rock star status have doled out to women who work for them. Could any title, with the possible exception of "The Harvey Weinstein Massage Manual," sound more off key now? A full on reckoning with sexual harassment in the restaurant business is more freight than this respectful, ambling book was meant to carry. Friedman is not here to investigate chefs; he wants to listen to them, typically at great length. "Chefs, Drugs and Rock Roll" seems to have been conceived as an oral history about the rule breaking, creative leap in American cooking that started in the 1970s and 1980s. Friedman's narrative stitches it all together, but the bulk of his book is made up of blocky quotes from the chefs who were there. He has written books with several of them and thinks of others as friends. He approaches them with deference, even apologizing in a preface because "many godlike talents, including some who took precious time to treat me to deeply revealing interviews, are scarcely mentioned." As to what these godlike talents treated other people to, he leaves us in the dark. "Certain people known industrywide for a range of illicit behaviors and weaknesses don't show any powder on their noses here, either because they wouldn't cop to it themselves or denied it on the record," he writes. 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. He does mention the discrimination and bullying the chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken experienced early in their careers, and has a passage about Cindy Pawlcyn's time working for a male chef who, in one of his milder remarks, blamed her "woman juju" when anything went wrong. But Friedman doesn't go out of his way to address the damage done by chefs who see themselves as rock stars. Drug habits probably sank careers if not entire restaurants in the era he's writing about, but you won't find any of that in his book. Most of the drug references are brought in as quaint period scenery; you keep waiting for a chef to end one of these stories by saying, "Different times, man, different times." The book opens on Christmas, 1972. Bruce Marder, a child of Beverly Hills whose parents are hoping he'll come home from his backpacking hegira and go to dental school, is lying in a Volkwsagen van on a Moroccan beach, sorting out his career options with a popular decision making tool of that era, LSD. He decides that he wants to be a chef, a realization that many other young Americans were coming to around the same time, though they, like Marder, had been raised for more respectable employment. Cooking then was a distinctly working class job, and not an especially reputable one. As Mario Batali tells Friedman, it "was the first thing you did after you got out of the Army, and the last thing before you went to jail." Friedman is describing a class revolution in reverse. Tracing the similar paths taken by chefs both well known (Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Jonathan Waxman) and more obscure (Len Allison and Karen Hubert of the long gone New York restaurant Huberts; Marder, who now runs Capo in Santa Monica), he is very astute about the ways the blue collar roots of kitchen work were scrubbed away. These chefs had often been raised by parents who took them out to eat in expensive restaurants. An upper middle class background gave them the means to fly to Europe and stumble into restaurants where nouvelle cuisine was being hammered out. Later, it gave them the connections to raise funds for their own restaurants, a crucial step that brought creative freedom and, for a few, financial success. So much of what is now routine chef behavior ambulating in the dining room, posing for photo shoots, talking about the artistic intention of a dish might be traced to an original anxiety that spurred young chefs to prove they were contributing at least as much to society as dentists. This didn't mean they knew anything about the actual work. Barry Wine remembers the unwashed spinach served to customers on the night he opened the Quilted Giraffe in 1975. The first time David Waltuck got a delivery of fresh soft shell crabs, he realized he had no idea how to clean them. At City Cafe in Los Angeles, Feniger and Milliken cooked on two hibachis, a hot plate and a prep table in the parking lot for two years before the Health Department discovered what they were up to. As Jeremiah Tower puts it, "We didn't know what you're not supposed to do." By no means do I wish "Chefs, Drugs and Rock Roll" were longer, but it might have been leaner. The long quotes grow rambling and repetitious, and the chapter on what may have been the first dinner where each course was cooked by a different famous American chef proves only that such events were no more interesting then than they are now. By rendering some of the fat, Friedman might have made space for the earlier generation that was being pushed out of the spotlight. When he writes of his chosen subjects, "They took a centuries old profession with no real American strain and made it their own," he seems to have forgotten about all the mom and pop restaurants serving regional American dishes from Texas chili to New England chowder. Also left out are the Italian chefs whose dishes from the southern end of the peninsula were about to be downgraded in favor of risotto, osso buco and other northern specialties. Chinois on Main opened in 1983, almost two decades after the Immigration Act of 1965 had allowed more Asians into the country than ever before. Among them were some highly trained Chinese chefs escaping Mao's Cultural Revolution who would go on to earn three and four star reviews in The New York Times. What we are seeing in that Chinois on Main anecdote is the moment when cooks of European descent learned they could translate Asian ideas into their own idiom and sell it for more money, more prestige, than the real thing. "Ironically" doesn't quite cover it. Even if Friedman doesn't manage to tell the whole story, the one he does tell is still essential. The chefs he interviewed did change American culture, and changed it so thoroughly that it's impossible to imagine a similar crew of neophytes knocking over the current order. As he puts it, "The idea that couples with scant, if any, formal training could even contemplate becoming chefs and restaurateurs in Manhattan would be laughable today." After the revolutionaries stormed the palace, they drew up the drawbridge. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The relative weakness of the older selections made the new ones, neither likely to last, seem better. In Ms. Orihara's own "Prologue," a work about mourning a mother, she applied lessons of clarity learned from her modern dance mothers a bit too well. The structure of nearly but not sitting in three chairs was too schematic, the music (by Mica Nozawa and Janis Ian) too close to sentimental, and yet again Ms. Orihara's control was remarkable and her choice to do nothing but clench and unclench her fists for the duration of a song was bold and effective. Adam Barruch's contribution, "Memory Current," was the most contemporary in style. Though it drew upon Ms. Orihara's Graham technique, it applied it in a new flow. Ms. Orihara, impressively different in each piece, looked youngest here. Accompaniment by the flutist Daniel James and the pianists Marko Stuparevic and Senri Oe helped give immediacy to "Satyric Festival Song," "Maenad" and "Memory Current." Between each piece, Mr. Oe played stylistically eclectic reflections, getting into the modern dance spirit by going barefoot. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Is there anything more sentimental than a home video of a little kid dancing? What if you extracted only the motions and put them in a different body, on an empty stage? "Helga and the Three Sailors," a richly detailed dance by Netta Yerushalmy, begins with an exercise in that vein. Alongside short, looping clips of herself as a child, Ms. Yerushalmy does again what she did back then, but with no emotional inflection. The physical facts of flailing in the living room or wobbling along a garden path, it turns out, make for compelling choreography. "Helga," first presented last fall at Danspace Project, had a reprise on Tuesday at New York Live Arts, slightly altered for the setting but no less rigorously constructed. As part of the Joyce Theater's offsite series, Joyce Unleashed, it shared a bill with Hillel Kogan's hilarious parody of didactic art, "We Love Arabs." (This year's series has a Middle Eastern focus: Mr. Kogan lives in Tel Aviv; Ms. Yerushalmy grew up in Israel.) She has described "Helga" as a "(largely doomed) attempt to see the body as an abstract entity." That impossible aim, starting with the childhood movie challenge, yields imaginative movement for herself and three dancers (Amanda Kmett'Pendry, Sarah Lifson, Marc Crousillat) that cleverly contorts bodies and faces and dodges logical pathways: the musculoskeletal system rewired. Judith Berkson's fitful score, with its cawing vocals and deep electronic tones, prevents any moment from getting too comfortable. Against the blank canvas of a white floor and partial backdrop (designed by Lenore Doxsee), Ms. Kmett'Pendry (in blue), Ms. Lifson (in red) and Mr. Crousillat (in brown) make bold imprints, as colors, as creatures, as shapes. Motionless at first, anchoring Ms. Yerushalmy's increasingly feverish prologue, they take on a life of their own until only Ms. Lifson remains. She circumscribes the space with a tiptoeing shuffle and a rhythmic contraction in her upper spine, like the motor, or heartbeat, of the piece. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
With so many details of his death in doubt, we may never really know what happened to Michael Brown and why. Incontestably, the 18 year old was unarmed when a police officer fired 12 shots at him on Canfield Avenue in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, 2014, two days before he was to enroll in a technical college. The officer, Darren Wilson, was white. Mr. Brown, it almost goes without saying, was black. What the younger man had done earlier that evening, or not done; what racist thoughts Mr. Wilson harbored, or didn't; whether Mr. Brown was surrendering, with his arms up, or threatening Mr. Wilson through the patrol car's window: The answers to all these questions seem irretrievably lost in a cloud of contention. What we can say is that one man, having avoided indictment, is free three years later and the other is still dead. Neither that conclusion nor the uncertainty of what came before it releases us, though, from the burden of trying to understand the meaning of the killing, and in that sense Dael Orlandersmith does a great public service in her new play "Until the Flood," which opened on Thursday at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Portraying only eight people nine if you include her own alter ego she nevertheless brings the questions, the pain and even the unspeakable thoughts of hundreds, if not millions, to life. "Until the Flood" is an urgent moral inquest. Its technique will be familiar to those who have followed the genre of quasi documentary, monologue based theater, particularly as honed by Anna Deavere Smith and, in some of her earlier plays, Ms. Orlandersmith herself. To research "Until the Flood," whose title ties together the many images of flow and overflow in the script, she conducted a series of interviews in and around Ferguson. (The play was commissioned by the Repertory Theater of St. Louis, some 15 miles away.) From the interviews she fashioned the local characters black, white, male, female, young, old she inhabits here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In 2016, Lida Xing was combing the amber markets of Myanmar when a merchant enticed him over to his booth with what he said was the skin of a crocodile trapped in amber. When Dr. Xing inspected the specimen through its honey colored encasement and noticed the diamond shaped pattern of its scales, he realized what he was holding was actually a 99 million year old snakeskin . Dr. Xing, who is a paleontologist from the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, had previously recovered a feathered dinosaur tail and a baby bird in the amber markets. But he said that of the hundreds of thousands of amber pieces discovered in the area, no one had ever before found a snake. He purchased the snakeskin and set up a meeting with Michael Caldwell, a snake paleontologist at the University of Alberta. A few minutes before Dr. Xing boarded his flight to Canada, a different colleague alerted him to another recently discovered snake specimen that was more amazing than the first: entombed in a silver dollar sized chunk of amber was a baby snake. "The fossil is the first baby snake and the oldest baby snake to yet be found," said Dr. Xing. Before this finding, paleontologists had not uncovered a fossilized baby snake even in the rock fossil record, said Dr. Caldwell. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"With its DNA in motorsports, its advanced engineering and coachbuilders like Rollston, LeBaron and Murphy, Duesenberg was the most impressive and important American car of its era," said Sandra Button, chairman of America's premier automotive judged competition, the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. Duesenbergs have made more trips up the ramp to accept Pebble's Best of Show award than any American marque. Indeed, Duesenbergs are regarded as so superior to their domestic peers that, out of fairness, they compete in their own class, Ms. Button said, adding that among European cars, only Mercedes Benz and Rolls Royce share this distinction. In 2011, a 1931 Duesenberg Model J known as the Whittell Coupe brought 10.3 million at Gooding Company's Pebble Beach sale at the time, the most expensive American car ever sold at auction. "In looks, sportiness and speed, nothing could compare to a Duesenberg," said Randy Ema, an authority on Duesenbergs based in Orange, Calif. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
While snow fell outside this weekend, dancers indoors were performing naked, on both the East and West Sides of Midtown Manhattan. In the premiere of "Basketball," performed and choreographed by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith at the Howard Gilman Performance Space at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, nakedness was integral to a wholly serious, original, absorbing and peculiar production. It also occurred in more than one of the five pieces shown at Japan Society in the 17th Contemporary Dance Showcase: Japan East Asia; there, however, it remained among several coy effects. Ms. Lieber and Ms. Smith have been making dances together in New York since 2006; I'm sorry not to have encountered their work before. "Basketball," at an hour long, was remarkably suspenseful: These women have the rare ability to make you wonder, moment by moment, "What will happen next?" even when they hold long stillnesses. (I have no notion why it's called "Basketball," by the way. No matter.) They took off and put on various items of clothing. When they were naked, there was no sensationalism. Intimacy, trust and symbiosis characterized the event. In an opening duet (clothed), the women continually swapped active and passive functions, one propelling or lifting the other across the floor, in fluent alternation; sometimes they rolled together, bodies interlocked. Sexual meanings were certainly among those that arose; there was, however, no lewdness. Often, they seemed in the state of mutual knowledge where one started to become the other. Yet their main performing manners were calm, matter of fact and often brisk. Beauty of physique was never the point. Yet, to use a distinction made famous by the art historian Kenneth Clark in his classic study, "The Nude," they were nude rather than naked. Something transcendent occurred that's truly rare when performers keep moving while in the altogether. (My mind turned especially to Degas's paintings of women in the bathroom.) At times, the line of an arm or the through the body arc of a position became startlingly beautiful; and at times the strength of these women's movement as when they forcefully rotated their upper bodies from the waist was powerfully affecting. The early stages of "Basketball" didn't prepare you for the dance skills shown later and that surprise was part of the work's spell. But it was drama rather than loveliness that kept "Basketball" so taut with interest. I was shocked only once when Ms. Smith had dressed herself again (bra and skirt). Suddenly, she started to play a game of standard seduction, skillfully striking a series of conventionally flirty poses, as if to say "Come hither" and "Don't you want me?" This playacting at first felt dismaying, a denial of what had gone before; it was the only time they deliberately seemed psychologically distanced from each other. Another episode brought quite a different change of key, toward the end. The audience is on two sides of the "Basketball" performing area, and the dancers were farthest from me and facing the mirrored wall with bright smiles when Ms. Smith says, through clenched teeth: "I'm Eleanor. Fifteen years ago I was raped." (Other words she spoke were unclear, but that much carried.) She says it without rage or trauma. That forced smile says what it says. The memory has not vanished; but, like the flirty section, it's now part of a larger context. The women's proximity in most of the action here was breathtaking, with heads often adjacent and sometimes with noses touching and eyes interlocked as if they were about to kiss. Even when one naked woman rests her head between the other's legs or breasts, the mood remains dispassionate, natural, cool. The scenes had no narrative continuity, adding up as multiple facets of a relationship. Their variety and pacing helped to give "Basketball" its marvelous tension. At Japan Society, the solo "TranSenses," a world premiere, conceived and directed by Akiko Kitamura (Japan) and Navid Navab (Canada) with choreography and dancing by Ms. Kitamura, was technically impressive, with elaborate interactive audiovisual effects. At every point, Ms. Kitamura was brilliantly controlled; she began by building a long crescendo from the rotation of her torso, center stage. The solo, however, was overpolished, slick. The four duets that followed North American premieres, by choreographers from Taiwan (two), Korea and Japan, two of them featuring nakedness were exercises in naive cuteness. I saw Friday's performance; "Basketball," which I saw on Saturday, seemed not just on the other side of Manhattan but light years away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In the 2006 movie "Borat," an American humor coach explains the concept of a "not" joke to Borat Sagdiyev, the disarmingly moronic Kazakh journalist played by Sacha Baron Cohen. "We make a statement that we pretend is true, but at the end, we say, 'not,'" the coach explains. But Borat struggles to grasp the pause required to make the joke work. First he pauses for too long before "not"; then, too briefly. The joke falls flat. Baron Cohen's postmodern comedy hinges on that pause. Traveling through America as a bigotry spewing buffoon, he confronts people with a series of "not" jokes posed as ethical litmus tests. He's an anti Semite ... not. He's a misogynist ... not. He's an ignorant foreigner ... not. If you can detect the pause, you're the audience for the joke; if you can't, you're its butt. In the long awaited sequel, "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm" (streaming on Amazon), Baron Cohen and the director Jason Woliner bring that guerrilla concept back into a strange new world. Borat emerges as if from a time capsule: All these years, the film's nudgy winky opening montage tells us, he's been serving time for embarrassing Kazakhstan with his prior exploits. But now, he's being dispatched to America again to curry favor with President "McDonald" Trump. In an inspired (and ludicrously contrived) turn, he has a new partner in his madcap mockumentary: his 15 year old daughter, Tutar (played by Maria Bakalova), whom he plans to gift to "Vice Premier" Mike Pence as a gesture of good will. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A particular strain of moody romanticism pervades "One Discordant Violin," a monologue with music adapted by Anthony Black from a jejune short story that Yann Martel ("Life of Pi") wrote in his 20s . A play about the life sustaining power of art making and the soul extinguishing peril of selling out , it valorizes suffering in the pursuit of greatness . The show itself, though handsomely designed, is a wan affair, presented by the Canadian troupe 2B Theater Company at 59E59 Theaters. Light, shadow, music, sound, voice these are the vivid elements of a production with a less than scintillating tale to tell. The narrator, portrayed by Black, is the kind of guy who will go on at length about Joseph Conrad's semicolon usage. He is struck to the core by an encounter with an alcoholic janitor who is also a brilliant, unrecognized composer. Or so the narrator judges him to be; he knows nothing about music. In the short story, the narrator is 25, relating a recent episode set in 1988. In the play, directed by Ann Marie Kerr and Black, he is somewhere in mild middle age, looking back on a visit he made to Washington, D.C., in August 2001. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
DESPITE what F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe said, you can go home again and you can have a second act or a third. And you can even find meaning, purpose and social justice along the way. Volunteering to do difficult and meaningful work is part of this new path. According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, a government agency that runs the AmeriCorps and Senior Corps programs, some 24 percent of older adults volunteered in 2013, providing nearly 190 million hours of service. Despite the disruption of a recession six years ago, that rate has held fairly steady over the past decade. Gloria Carter Dickerson, 61, went back to her hometown, Drew, Miss., deep in the Delta, after retiring in 2009. One of 13 children of sharecroppers, she had a 35 year career as an accountant, working for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich., and Jackson, Miss. Ms. Dickerson and her siblings integrated the local high school in the 1960s, largely because her parents believed in education, justice and change. But when she went back to Mississippi, she noticed that her hometown and surrounding Sunflower County had become poorer and was heading in the wrong direction, as people continued to leave. The state had taken over the failing school system. There were no grocery stores in town. Nearly every public service was inadequate. The county had become one of the poorest in the country: Per capita income was just over 12,000 (in 2013 dollars), compared to about 20,000 for the state. Life spans were declining. Ms. Dickerson was undaunted and started worked in the schools for five years under the Pen or Pencil movement (Pen being short for penitentiary), which combined civil rights and literacy. Starting her own nonprofit We2Gether Creating Change she began working directly with children, focusing on changing their mind set, which was largely shaped by the surrounding culture of poverty. "Morale was down and getting worse," Ms. Dickerson said about the children in her hometown. "I came back to address all that. I started a food pantry, drama club, small businesses, a dance team, weekend workshops, and counseled on teenage pregnancy. I took kids to Disney World. I believe poverty is a state of mind. I wanted to show them how middle class people live." With just two part time workers, Ms. Dickerson's organization is funded by grants and her own money. Her efforts have paid off: Since 2012, some 98 percent of the students she worked with have graduated from high school and 97 percent have enrolled in college, according to Encore.org, a nonprofit that promotes postretirement service. She also offers college scholarships and summer jobs. All told, she has helped more than 1,500 children. "I teach them how to navigate life," said Ms. Dickerson, who said she also acted as a life coach. "If they don't love themselves, they will not love life." Josephine Rhymes, executive director of the Tri County Workforce Alliance, a nonprofit based in Clarksdale, Miss., that focuses on vocational education for local youth, said Ms. Dickerson's programs helped "expose children to life outside the Delta." "She does things that need to be done," Ms. Rhymes said. "Gloria is very dedicated to her work and wants to see a change in her community," she added. "She has a great love for people and is filling a void." At risk students and the sense of finding a spiritual home also attracted Peter Rosten, 66, a former Hollywood movie and TV producer, writer and film editor. After 35 years in an ultracompetitive business, he moved to Darby, Mont., in the shadow of the Bitterroot Mountains. Seeing a lack of arts and career education and opportunity in the local school districts, Mr. Rosten started MAPS: Media Arts in the Public Schools with 10,000 of his own money. The program teaches film, technology, music and entrepreneurship. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Now in its 11th year, Mr. Rosten's organization offers free after school courses in filmmaking to some 150 students in the area. His students have even received paid work, producing public service announcements on topics including the value of high school graduation, the dangers of teenage smoking and the benefits of studying math and science. "Similar to the rest of the country, some Montana kids come from challenging, heartbreaking environments," Mr. Rosten said. "We help them find their voice so they can personally experience success and know how to achieve it in the future." Mr. Rosten was executive producer and creator of the 1989 film "True Believer," which starred Robert Downey Jr., and associate producer of the television series "Scarecrow and Mrs. King," but has also had his share of failures. He once owned the film rights to the Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays stories, and the best selling Carlos Castaneda books, but could not find interest in Hollywood. "Hollywood is a very interesting environment," Mr. Rosten adds. "In a way, I've always been a 'true believer,' but like many projects, the studios didn't believe in them as much as I did. By my mid 50s, and having more yesterdays than tomorrows; it was time to make a change." Crediting his passionate parents as his inspiration to help others, Mr. Rosten who describes himself as a "recycled hippie," and a "nice Jewish boy, and now a Buddhist born in Brooklyn" has found his home in Montana, taking the guidance he received from his parents and instilling it in teenagers in the Rockies. "It only takes one 'yes' to change a life," Mr. Rosten said. "Be realistic, but demand the impossible." Like Ms. Dickerson, Josephine Mercado, 73, also headed south to fill a niche in social services. After practicing as a lawyer in New York for 17 years, Ms. Mercado, who grew up in Spanish Harlem, headed to the Orlando, Fla., area. Mostly she wanted to get away from the cold weather with her husband, Hector Willems, who was also a lawyer. "When I moved," Ms. Mercado recalled, "I did not know what kind of work I would do, as I had decided that I did not want to practice law. The only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to work with the community." When she arrived in Florida in 1999, Ms. Mercado found a paucity of health services for low income residents, particularly Hispanics. The following year Ms. Mercado started Hispanic Health Initiatives, to bridge the disconnect between health providers and the underserved Latino community of Central Florida. Over the last 14 years, she has helped spearhead health screenings and mammograms, and provide health education, for tens of thousands in the Orlando area. The group is funded by grants. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam had 10,000 visitors a day before the pandemic. These days, it's about 800. AMSTERDAM Visitors to the Rijksmuseum's vast, vaulted galleries of Dutch old master paintings can feel as though they've got the whole place to themselves these days. Before the pandemic, around 10,000 people used to crowd in each day. Now, it's about 800. In theory, even with strict social distancing guidelines visitors must book ahead, wear a mask, follow a set path and stay at least six feet apart the Dutch national museum could accommodate as many as 2,500 people a day. But the public isn't exactly jostling for those limited tickets. Across town, the Hermitage Amsterdam museum has extended an exhibition of imperial jewels from the Russian state collection that was attracting 1,100 visitors a day last year. Now, the museum has limited daily ticket sales to 600, though it's only selling about half. As cultural institutions reopen across the United States, with new coronavirus protocols in place, many have been looking to Europe, where many museums have been open since May, for a preview of how the public might respond to the invitation to return. So far, there's little reason to be optimistic. Almost all European museums are suffering from visitor losses, but their ability to cope depends almost entirely on how they are funded. Institutions supported by government funding are able to weather the storm with a little belt tightening, while those that depend on ticket sales are facing tougher choices. Many are laying off employees and restructuring their business models. Visitor information from across Europe tells a fairly consistent story: Museums that have reopened have about a third of the visitors they had this time last year. The Louvre in Paris reports about 4,500 to 5,000 visitors a day, compared with about 15,000 a year ago. The State Museums of Berlin, a group of 18 museums in the German capital, reports about 30 percent of its usual attendance. Others are faring worse. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is down to about 400 visitors a day, when it used to welcome 6,500. "It's really very, very quiet in the museum," said its director, Emilie Gordenker. Travel restrictions and border closings have dramatically reduced the numbers of international tourists in European capitals. Over the summer, institutions in the Netherlands reported a boost in tourism from neighboring Belgium and Germany. That waned again when the school year started in September, and a surge of new coronavirus cases in the Netherlands led to "code red" alerts in several Dutch cities, including Amsterdam. European governments support many national cultural institutions, but there is a broad range of business models across the continent, from privately established museums that receive virtually no government money to those that are wholly subsidized by taxpayers. In recent years, however, governments in many countries, including the Netherlands, have been cutting support of museums, as politicians have encouraged the "American model" of funding, with more reliance on earned income. The Rijksmuseum and the Hermitage Amsterdam, less than a 10 minute bike ride from each other, represent two points on that spectrum. While the Dutch national museum receives one third of its financing from the government, the Hermitage, a private initiative, has no government subsidy, and relies on ticket sales for 70 percent of its budget. "Seniors have been our core business," said Paul Mosterd, the deputy director of the Hermitage Amsterdam. "We had a lot of senior groups, a group of friends of pensioners, or grandpa celebrates his 80th birthday with a guided tour and a lunch." Such patrons are now wary of indoor spaces and public transportation, he said, making the museum more reliant on younger visitors. But, he added, "That generation isn't coming." Several European countries including Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands have already announced government bailout packages for the arts. But many local institutions are still projecting shortfalls. "We foresee huge losses for the next few years, and just a very slow return to normal," said Lidewij de Koekkoek, the director of the Rembrandt House, a museum in the artist's former home and studio. Before the pandemic, 80 percent of the museum's visitors were international tourists. Ms. de Koekkoek said that Rembrandt House had lost about 2.5 million euros, or around 3 million, because of the decline in visitors more than half its overall budget. A bailout from the Dutch government and support from the city of Amsterdam have helped recoup about 1 million, she said. "On the positive side, it's back to basics, and there's a lot of creativity in thinking towards the future," she added. Yilmaz Dziewior, the director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, said that the country's museums were lucky because they have long received generous government subsidies. Few, he said, are in danger of failing, even if visitors don't come. "What the crisis also showed is how robust or healthy the German system is, in comparison with the U.S., for example," he said. "We need the visitors, but they do not make up such a big part of our overall budget." He said that in the museum's annual budget of roughly EUR13 million, about EUR3.5 million comes from earned income, with EUR1.8 million of that from ticket sales. He anticipates a loss of half of that. The museum's financial situation has nonetheless prompted a rethink, Mr. Dziewior said. "One thing that it showed us is that we need to work more with our own collection," he said. "We do so many shows where we ship works from across the world, which is not good ecologically, economically and in other ways. Through the crisis, these issues became clearer." Mr. Mosterd of the Hermitage Amsterdam said the crisis had compelled the museum's staff to rethink exhibitions and try to appeal to a different kind of visitor. An exhibition of medieval art, "Romanovs Under the Spell of the Knights," for example, has been recast with greater emphasis on armor, weapons and battles. "It's more suitable for families with young kids, which is for us in some ways a new audience," Mr. Mosterd said. "That's 100 percent a change we made for marketing reasons." Mr. Dziewior said that reorienting the Ludwig Museum, and finding a more sustainable, more inclusive approach to visitors especially those who live locally was unlikely to be a temporary shift. "One thing that the crisis showed us was that the so called normal wasn't normal," he said. "It's not our aim to go back to where we left off." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
NATURE'S MUTINY How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present By Philipp Blom From around 1570 to 1710, temperatures in the earth's Northern Hemisphere plunged by an average of about 2 degrees Celsius roughly the same amount by which the planet's temperature is supposed to rise under the more catastrophic predictions of our warming futures. Two degrees colder meant a growing season shortened by three weeks. The apocalyptic changes that are coming bigger storms, higher seas, longer heat waves, more insect born disease remain, for now, a task for the imagination. But the impact of those long ago icy winters, frigid summers and torrential autumns requires no imagination: It's all recorded in contemporary sources. In "Nature's Mutiny," Philipp Blom, a German historian, treats this one well documented period of climate change, the so called Little Ice Age, as an experiment in what can happen to a society when its baseline conditions, all ultimately dependent upon the weather, are shaken. The premise of treating historical sources as a way of answering current questions is so good that Blom should have stuck to it. He is tempted, however, into making everything new in the 17th century a result of climate change, and this can only be true by so diluting the notion of causation as to render his claim meaningless or just plain vulnerable. The initial crisis was food insecurity, much as it will be for us. Hunger hit the countrysides of Europe first. If peasants starved and then abandoned the country for the cities, the aristocrats, who lived off peasant production for both food and wealth, went down with them. People living on the land at least had direct access to whatever food there was; those in cities were dependent on rural surplus reaching them, and when it didn't, they rioted. They were also pushed into even more extreme measures: During the siege of Paris in 1595 the starving defenders of the city discussed breaking into a cemetery, removing the bones, grinding them into a fine flour and then using it to bake bread. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"Lichnos" (2008) by Jack Whitten. The artist carved carob wood he found in Crete and reinforced it with a plate, then inserted ceramic, bone, glass and metal. The tapered shape is inspired by the local spiny Lichnos fish.Credit...Gabriella Angotti Jones/The New York Times "Lichnos" (2008) by Jack Whitten. The artist carved carob wood he found in Crete and reinforced it with a plate, then inserted ceramic, bone, glass and metal. The tapered shape is inspired by the local spiny Lichnos fish. Surprises abound in "Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963 2017," a gorgeous, loquacious exhibition at the Met Breuer. The show's title contains the first hint of the unexpected: the word "sculpture" following the name of an artist known until now as a painter. Mr. Whitten was born in segregated Bessemer, Ala., in 1939, and he said he always knew he wanted to paint. He settled in New York in 1960, studied at Cooper Union and had his first solo show at Manhattan's Allan Stone Gallery in 1968. Soon he was part of a sprawling generation of abstract painters Al Loving, Elizabeth Murray, Alan Shields, Brice Marden, Mary Heilmann, Howardena Pindell who not only explored new materials and processes, but sought new ways to imbue seemingly pure, abstract form and the materiality of paint with narrative meaning. But Mr. Whitten had a secret art life: Away from the pressures of the New York art world he made sculpture, not as a sideline, but as an essential part of his work. He was an expert carver and many pieces were rooted in African tribal and functional objects. He went so far as to say that his sculptures were the single greatest influence on his painting. In the 1960s he made sculpture in upstate New York, including two robustly carved heads with shoe polish glaze that were inspired by African American face jugs and resemble Old Testament prophets. After 1969 he shifted his activities an ocean away to Agia Galini, a small village on the Greek island of Crete, to which he and his family returned summer after summer. In both locations he had easy access to his main material wood, which he used alone or combined with marble, stone and found materials, including bits of metal, fishing wire, fish and animal bones and as time passed, electronic detritus. In the year or so before he died, in January, at 78, Mr. Whitten decided it was time to go public with his sculpture, agreeing that the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Met would present this exhibition, organized by the critic and independent curator Katy Siegel and Kelly Baum, a curator of postwar and contemporary art at the Met. Their project unveils 40 Whitten sculptures, almost his entire output in three dimensions. Interspersed among them are 18 of his paintings from the last four decades, including his often astounding "Black Monolith" series a group of 11 homages to important African Americans that this show unites for the first time. Their shimmering mosaic like surfaces are made from hundreds of small "tiles" fashioned from dried acrylic paint, a technique directly related to some of his sculptures. Furthering the show's visual combustion are an ancient Minoan octopus vase and Mycenaean statuettes excavated on Crete and eight sculptures and masks from various African peoples. This dynamic combination finds its earliest expression in the magnificent "Homage to Malcolm" from 1965, the year Malcolm X was assassinated. Something like a horizontal totem, it combines a block jammed with metal; a section of light raw wood; a darker carved one and finally a sleek black horn curving up into space. These four sections can be read as the stages of Malcolm X's life, as petty criminal, prison inmate and Muslim convert, rising Nation of Islam star and finally as visionary leader, ruthlessly cut down. Mr. Whitten's additive processes achieve a new level of invention, and serenity, in "Lichnos" (2008), a homage to a fish local fishermen found especially hard to catch. Another Greek connection: It evokes the "Winged Victory of Samothrace." Like many confident people he recounts his life as a series of epiphanies. Studying pre med at the Tuskegee Institute he stood up in the middle of R.O.T.C. class, said, "What am I doing here?" and promptly transferred to Southern University in Baton Rouge so he could study art. He had a spiritual side, was guided by dreams and visions, and drawn to pieces of wood that he felt exuded mystical presences, like the tall upstate birch from which he carved the 10 foot high "Ancestral Totem" of 1968, a subtly swaying stack of heads inspired by Northwest Indian art that culminates in a depiction of the artist as a llama. Before his first trip to Crete, he dreamed of a voice telling him to take his carving tools with him and sculpt a living tree into a totem, which he did. It still stands in the yard in Agia Galini, belonging to a family that became the Whittens' lifelong friends. At Southern University Mr. Whitten helped organize a civil rights protest that turned violent, which he later said changed him forever. Realizing that he might be killed if he stayed in the South, he took a Greyhound bus to New York, where his uncle was a policeman, and after his acceptance into Cooper Union he immersed himself in all the city had to offer, frequenting art bars and jazz clubs, meeting Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Jacob Lawrence. "I had a dialogue on what I called both sides of the divide" black and white he said in the documentary "Extended Play." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Paul Taylor's "Sea Lark," which had its New York premiere on Wednesday, is entirely disappointing. A trivial frolic set to Poulenc's irresistibly energetic "Les Biches," the dance, new in October, is a boating adventure, with painted waves, a large toy sailboat and boring young people being frightfully jolly. There are pleasures to be found in the bright color schemes of the costumes and sets by Alex Katz, a long term Taylor collaborator, but they can't save the day. Since Mr. Taylor is known as a musical choreographer, the central cause of dismay here is how little he discovers in Poulenc's rhythms. Listen, and you hear witty stops and starts, intriguing changes of meter and terrific brio (all of which are brilliantly used in the original Bronislava Nijinska ballet to this score); watch, and you see only cheerily regular blandness. "Sea Lark" is just a crayon daub of the painting Mr. Taylor couldn't be bothered to paint. That would hardly matter, though, if it were just a passing blip in Mr. Taylor's illustrious career. As things are, however, he has been disappointing his public with most of the new pieces he has created over the last 25 years. At Thursday's gala at the David H. Koch Theater, the performance of the delectable "Company B" (1991) reminded me how, when it was first presented in New York, the reaction of many was "Thank God!" it showed Mr. Taylor had gotten out of a rut. (Not for long. Within a few months he presented "Oz," perhaps the most dismal piece he has put before the public.) Mr. Taylor will be 85 this summer. If you want to know why many people think of him as a desperately old fashioned, lazy and cliche laden choreographer, you don't need to ask. You have only to look at most of the dances he has made since 1986. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
BOSTON With the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession still a raw and painful memory, many economists are asking themselves whether they need the kind of fundamental shift in thinking that occurred during and after the Depression of the 1930s. "We have entered a brave new world," Olivier Blanchard, the International Monetary Fund's chief economist, said at a conference in 2011. "The economic crisis has put into question many of our beliefs. We have to accept the intellectual challenge." If the economics profession takes on the challenge of reworking the mainstream models that famously failed to predict the crisis, it might well turn to one of the few economists who saw it coming, Wynne Godley of the Levy Economics Institute. Mr. Godley, unfortunately, died at 83 in 2010, perhaps too soon to bask in the credit many feel he deserves. But his influence has begun to spread. Martin Wolf, the eminent columnist for The Financial Times, and Jan Hatzius, chief economist of global investment research at Goldman Sachs, borrow from his approach. Several groups of economists in North America and Europe some supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking established by the financier and philanthropist George Soros after the crisis are building on his models. In a 2011 study, Dirk J. Bezemer, of Groningen University in the Netherlands, found a dozen experts who warned publicly about a broad economic threat, explained how debt would drive it, and specified a time frame. Most, like Nouriel Roubini of New York University, issued warnings in informal notes. But Mr. Godley "was the most scientific in the sense of having a formal model," Dr. Bezemer said. It was far from a first for Mr. Godley. In January 2000, the Council of Economic Advisers for President Bill Clinton hailed a still "youthful looking and vigorous" expansion. That March, Mr. Godley and L. Randall Wray of the University of Missouri Kansas City derided it, declaring, "Goldilocks is doomed." Within days, the Nasdaq stock market peaked, heralding the end of the dot com bubble. Why does a model matter? It explicitly details an economist's thinking, Dr. Bezemer says. Other economists can use it. They cannot so easily clone intuition. Mr. Godley was relatively obscure in the United States. He was better known in his native Britain The Times of London called him "the most insightful macroeconomic forecaster of his generation" though often as a renegade. Mainstream models assume that, as individuals maximize their self interest, markets move the economy to equilibrium. Booms and busts come from outside forces, like erratic government spending or technological dynamism or stagnation. Banks are at best an afterthought. The Godley models, by contrast, see banks as central, promoting growth but also posing threats. Households and firms take out loans to build homes or invest in production. But their expectations can go awry, they wind up with excessive debt, and they cut back. Markets themselves drive booms and busts. Why did Mr. Godley, who had barely any formal economics training, insist on developing a model to inform his judgment? His extraordinary efforts to overcome a troubled childhood may be part of the explanation. Tiago Mata of Cambridge University called his life "a search for his true voice" in the face of "nagging fear that he might disappoint his responsibilities." Mr. Godley once described his early years as shackled by an "artificial self" that kept him from recognizing his own spontaneous reactions to people and events. His parents separated bitterly. His mother was often away on artistic adventures, and when at home, she spent long hours coddling what she called "my pain" in bed. Raised by nannies and "a fierce maiden aunt who shook me violently when I cried," Mr. Godley was sent at age 7 to a prep school he called a "chamber of horrors." Despite all that, Mr. Godley, with his extraordinary talent, still managed to achieve worldly success. He graduated from Oxford with a first in philosophy, politics and economics in 1947, studied at the Paris Conservatory, and became principal oboist of the BBC Welsh Orchestra. But "nightmarish fears of letting everyone down," he recalled, drove him to take a job as an economist at the Metal Box Company. Moving to the British Treasury in 1956, he rose to become head of short term forecasting. He was appointed director of the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge in 1970. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. In the early 1980s, the British Tory government, allied with increasingly conventional economists at Cambridge, began "sharpening its knives to stab Wynne," according to Kumaraswamy Velupillai, a close friend who now teaches at the New School in New York. They killed the policy group he headed and, ultimately, the Department of Applied Economics. In 1995 he moved to the Levy Institute outside New York, joining Hyman Minsky, whose "financial instability hypothesis" won recognition during the 2008 crisis. Marc Lavoie of the University of Ottawa collaborated with Mr. Godley to write "Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth" in 2006, which turned out to be the most complete account he would publish of his modeling approach. In mainstream economic models, individuals are supposed to optimize the trade off between consuming today versus saving for the future, among other things. To do so, they must live in a remarkably predictable world. Mr. Godley did not see how such optimization is conceivable. There are simply too many unknowns, he theorized. Instead, Mr. Godley built his economic model around the idea that sectors households, production firms, banks, the government largely follow rules of thumb. For example, firms add a standard profit markup to their costs for labor and other inputs. They try to maintain adequate inventories so they can satisfy demand without accumulating excessive overstock. If sales disappoint and inventories pile up, they correct by cutting back production and laying off workers. In mainstream models, the economy settles at an equilibrium where supply equals demand. To Mr. Godley, like some Keynesian economists, the economy is demand driven and less stable than many traditional economists assume. Instead of supply and demand guiding the economy to equilibrium, adjustments can be abrupt. Borrowing "flows" build up as debt "stocks." If rules of thumb suggest to households, firms, or the government that borrowing, debt or other things have gone out of whack, they may cut back. Or banks may cut lending. The high flying economy falls down. Mr. Godley and his colleagues expressed just this concern in the mid 2000s. In April 2007, they plugged Congressional Budget Office projections of government spending and healthy growth into their model. For these to be borne out, the model said, household borrowing must reach 14 percent of G.D.P. by 2010. The authors declared this situation "wildly implausible." More likely, borrowing would level off, bringing growth "almost to zero." In repeated papers, they foresaw a looming recession but significantly underestimated its depth. For all Mr. Godley's foresight, even economists who are doubtful about traditional economic thinking do not necessarily see the Godley Lavoie models as providing all the answers. Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics called them a "gallant failure" in a review. He applauded their realism, especially the way they allowed sectors to make mistakes and correct, rather than assuming that individuals foresee the future. But they are still, he wrote, "insufficient" in crises. Gennaro Zezza of the University of Cassino in Italy, who collaborated with Mr. Godley on a model of the American economy, concedes that he and his colleagues still need to develop better ways of describing how a financial crisis will spread. But he said the Godley Lavoie approach already is useful to identify unsustainable processes that precede a crisis. "If everyone had remained optimistic in 2007, the process could have continued for another one or two or three years," he said. "But eventually it would have broken down. And in a much more violent way, because debt would have piled up even more." Dr. Lavoie says that one of the models he helped develop does make a start at tracing the course of a crisis. It allows for companies to default on loans, eroding banks' profits and causing them to raise interest rates: "At the very least, we were looking in the right direction." This is just the direction that economists building on Mr. Godley's models are now exploring, incorporating "agents" distinct types of households, firms and banks, not unlike creatures in a video game that respond flexibly to economic circumstances. Stephen Kinsella of the University of Limerick, the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Mauro Gallegati of Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy are collaborating on one such effort. In the meantime, Mr. Godley's disciples say his record of forecasting still stands out. In 2007 Mr. Godley and Dr. Lavoie published a prescient model of euro zone finances, envisioning three outcomes: soaring interest rates in Southern Europe, huge European Central Bank loans to the region or brutal fiscal cuts. In effect, the euro zone has cycled among those outcomes. So what do the Godley models predict now? A recent Levy Institute analysis expresses concern not about serious financial imbalances, at least in the United States, but weak global demand. "The main difficulty," they wrote, "has been in convincing economic leaders of the nature of the main problem: insufficient aggregate demand." So far, they are not having much success. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Netflix has deleted a graphic scene from the first season of "13 Reasons Why" in which a teenage girl kills herself, more than two years after the episode premiered. "We've been mindful about the ongoing debate around the show," Netflix said in a statement posted on Twitter on Tuesday. Netflix said the decision had been made "on the advice of medical experts," including Dr. Christine Moutier, the chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "No one scene is more important than the life of the show, and its message that we must take better care of each other," Brian Yorkey, the show's creator, said in a separate statement on Twitter on Tuesday. "We believe this edit will help the show do the most good for the most people while mitigating any risk for especially vulnerable young viewers," he added. The first season of "13 Reasons Why" appeared in March 2017. The plot is set in motion when a teenage girl, Hannah Baker, kills herself. Before her suicide, she makes 13 cassette recordings detailing the agonies of her life, both to explain her actions and to accuse those she holds responsible, including a man who raped her, bullies and fickle friends. The show was a hit, but it also gave rise to a chorus of complaints from educators and mental health experts who said the show's portrayal of suicide was potentially dangerous, and risked inspiring copycat behavior among vulnerable teens. The suicide scene, in the final episode of the first season, originally showed Hannah graphically cutting her wrists in a bathtub. Now it shows her staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, and seconds later, her parents entering the bathroom and discovering her body. In May 2017, Netflix said it would add an extra warning at the start of the series, on top of warnings appearing before the episodes that depicted rape and Hannah's suicide. "While many of our members find the show to be a valuable driver for starting important conversation with their families, we have also heard concern from those who feel the series should carry additional advisories," Netflix said in a statement at the time. The issue returned in April, when a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that suicide rates spiked among boys aged 10 to 17 in the month after the release of the first season. That month, April 2017, had the highest overall suicide rate for boys in that age group for the past five years, the study found. "It was our hope, in making '13 Reasons Why' into a television show, to tell a story that would help young viewers feel seen and heard, and encourage empathy in all who viewed it," Yorkey said in his statement on Tuesday. The show portrayed suicide "in such graphic detail" to show the horror of the act and to "make sure no one would ever wish to emulate it," he added. Dan Reidenberg, the executive director of SAVE, a suicide prevention organization, said in a telephone interview that he was glad Netflix had made the change. "However, that doesn't change the entire first season that had many problematic messages in it," he added. He said those problems included presenting suicide as a way to get revenge and giving the impression that people experiencing suicidal thoughts could not get help. Reidenberg said he had been a consultant for the first season of "13 Reasons Why" after it finished production, but before it was broadcast. "It would have been better if these issues were addressed prior to it being made," he added. Colleen Creighton, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, said in a telephone interview that Netflix had taken a while in acting, but the program makers should be praised for deleting the scene. After season one was broadcast, Netflix formed an advisory team of people working in suicide prevention to discuss the program, she said. "A lot of the issues with series one they fixed for series two, and they've talked to us about season three as well," she added. Yorkey said in his statement that the third season of "13 Reasons Why" would be released soon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
ST. KILDA, Australia On any given night, as the sun sets at the bottom of the world, dozens to hundreds of people gather along the pier at St. Kilda Beach, just off the coast of Melbourne, Australia. Their black silhouettes punctuate the sherbet sky. But they're not there for the sunset. They're there for the penguins. And when only a dozen or so show up, they are disappointed. Little penguins, the smallest penguin species in the world, are supposed to return to their nests after dark. But the city lights reflecting on the water mean there is never a moment of true darkness, so St. Kilda penguins waddle in at all hours of the night. "They are fat, lazy, city penguins," said Zoe Hogg, 81, a retired nuclear physicist and teacher who now organizes research on these penguins. And fat, lazy, city penguins are not inclined to show up on any particular schedule, even if tourists from across the world are waiting. For 30 years, volunteers have been conducting research on the penguins. Every two weeks, the volunteer group, Earthcare St. Kilda, ventures out onto the rocks at night to microchip the penguins and weigh them in polka dot cotton sacks. Over the years, the researchers have found that this cosmopolitan colony stands out from the typical communities of their species in other ways as well. St. Kilda little penguins don't go out to sea, for example. They stay close to home and nest more often because they get plenty of food in Port Phillip Bay. And since they don't have to swim far, their flippers are shorter, too. But St. Kilda's little penguins aren't the only ones in Australia acting a bit differently. Southeast of St. Kilda, on Phillip Island, the parades have become bigger and younger as a result, researchers believe, of climate change. "In the past, they started breeding in the middle of spring," said Andre Chiaradia, a research scientist at Phillip Island Nature Parks. "Now the breeding has advanced a month, sometimes two months, before the long term average. By doing this, they've been more successful." That's because parents avoid dangerous summer storms that affect their ability to find food for their chicks. Some penguins even get the chance to breed twice in the same year. For now, it's unclear how these penguins, which are top predators in the area, will affect the rest of the ecosystem. "I realize that it's a special sort of situation here," Dr. Chiaradia said. The Port Phillip little penguins are also breeding earlier and more often because of the abundance of food in the bay, where they fish, as well as the island's unique location and geography, which have protected the penguins from extreme ocean temperature increases and most predators. To see the parade, go any time of year. Because the nights are longer now, so is the show if you have the patience to wait in the cold winds from the Southern Ocean. But during the summer months of November, December and January, when the chicks should be feeding, more penguins return to shore, even if the show is shorter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A baseball prospect getting the Call the news that he is being promoted to the major leagues for the first time is a momentous occasion. Managers and executives often take it upon themselves to deliver this news memorably, often with a prank, but the story that the San Diego Padres rookie Ryan Weathers shared of his experience is the quintessential tale of 2020. A 20 year old left hander, Weathers was standing next to the club's general manager, A.J. Preller, in the team's hotel while waiting to grab a swab for the team's daily Covid 19 tests when Preller posed a question: Which test was for the minor leaguers and which was for the big leaguers? Weathers said he didn't know there was a difference, to which Preller replied, "Grab one from the big league side today because you're on the roster" for the playoffs. Hours later, Weathers appeared in relief during Game 1 of the Padres' National League division series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, becoming the fifth player to make his major league debut in a playoff game and the third such player this postseason, after Minnesota Twins outfielder Alex Kirilloff in the wild card round and Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Shane McClanahan in his American League division series against the Yankees. Oakland A's infielder Mark Kiger was the first to do so, during the 2006 A.L. Championship Series, and Kansas City Royals shortstop Adalberto Mondesi was next, in the 2015 World Series. "I couldn't really feel my body for the whole first inning, but it was a lot of fun," Weathers said, before adding: "I think the only thing that went through my head was, 'I'm in the big leagues right now.'" Weathers, who had never pitched above Class A before facing the Dodgers' star laden lineup, acquitted himself well, throwing one and a third scoreless innings, even if he was only partially aware of the experience. He also confessed to reporters that he did not realize Dodgers shortstop Corey Seager had swung at the first pitch he threw. All three debutants in this postseason were former first round picks who had appeared on top 100 prospect lists, but none had reached Class AAA. Their professional timelines accelerated in 2020 because of a confluence of factors: the expanded rosters (up to 28 players this year); the format of the playoff series (with no days off); clubs' willingness to be more aggressive in this unorthodox season; and the level of competition among the intermingled players at each organization's alternate training site a new feature for this season so clubs could keep reserve players in shape in the absence of a minor league season. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "I think it's just a whole different environment now," said Logan White, a Padres senior adviser and their director of player personnel. "At the alternate site, they're competing against more polished guys who played Triple A and major leagues, so you're seeing them in an even more competitive environment in some ways." "It was a bunch of good guys who are starters anywhere else or competing for jobs anywhere else," McClanahan said. "Good clubhouse guys, great staff. That was a very good atmosphere. Every single person there got better." He appeared twice in Tampa Bay's A.L.D.S. series win against the Yankees, allowing one earned run over one and two thirds innings while featuring a fastball that reached 99 m.p.h. enough to earn him a spot on the Rays' A.L.C.S. roster, too. "Lot of power, got a lot to like," Rays Manager Kevin Cash said. "I don't know if it's the ideal scenario to have your debut come in Game 1 of a D.S., but I was encouraged. Certainly, the stuff speaks for itself." Experiences varied. Kirilloff became the first player to make his debut while starting a playoff game when he batted sixth and played right field in the Twins' second wild card round game against the Houston Astros. He singled in four at bats while making a sliding catch to rob Josh Reddick of a hit. "I didn't find out until after I got to the field that I was going to start, so there wasn't really much time to think about it," Kirilloff said in a telephone interview. "I just said a prayer for peace and focus and all that before the game, and once I got out there I felt pretty OK, to be honest." None of the three had played a meaningful game in roughly 13 months, since their 2019 minor league seasons ended. Weathers moved back to his family home in Tennessee, working out and playing long toss with his sister and father to stay in shape. At the alternate sites, each tried to create a degree of normalcy during intrasquad scrimmages. Kirilloff took to keeping his own statistics despite many of his at bats coming during live batting sessions or with an incomplete fielding alignment. (One event with scorekeeping: a Twins home run derby during which Kirilloff lost in the final round to LaMonte Wade Jr.) "It was more for me just to have an idea of how over all I was doing and to just hold myself accountable," Kirilloff said. "I would jot down notes of what happened that day in the game, how many balls I hit hard." The three players will not receive any big league service time for the days spent on the playoff roster, but at least immediate family members were able to attend their debuts in person, which wasn't possible in 2020 until the postseason. McClanahan said his father's first postgame comment was to jokingly chide him about the full count walk he issued, to which the pitcher replied, "Hey, Dad, good to talk to you, too." David Weathers said his son's blurry memory of his initial outing sounded familiar to his own experience while making his debut in 1991 though on the day of Ryan Weathers's first game, his parents did not relax until after their son's first pitch strike. "We'd been a little bit nervous and antsy all day," David Weathers said. "Especially today's social media, they don't have the glasses that we have to say, 'OK, this is a 20 year old making his debut in the postseason.' In their eyes, this is just the postseason, so whoever you put out there better do the job." Even though all three either recorded a hit or struck out a batter in their debuts, they'll have to complete those firsts again, as postseason stats aren't counted in their career numbers. Their officially recognized debuts should come in the regular season though fate can be fickle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
PARIS Euro zone manufacturers met with unexpectedly strong demand for industrial goods in June, a report showed Tuesday, suggesting Germany's export driven factories will continue to strengthen output even as the American economy slows and fears linger that the debt crisis could return to hamper the Continent's recovery. Eurostat reported from Luxembourg that industrial new orders in the 16 countries sharing the euro rose 2.5 percent in June from May, and 22.6 percent from June 2009. Excluding the volatile transportation related sector, orders grew 1.6 percent from May. Demand for capital goods was the largest component of the increase, rising 5.3 percent in June. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected overall June orders to rise about 1.5 percent. The report came as the German government said gross domestic product expanded 2.2 percent in the second quarter from the first quarter, confirming its earlier estimate, showing growth well above its European peers and the fastest pace of expansion since East and West Germany were reunified in 1990. German exports rose 8.2 percent in the quarter, aided by the 12 percent decline in the euro against the dollar this year. That juggernaut performance helped the overall euro area economy to grow by 1 percent in the second quarter, Eurostat, the European Union's statistics office, said Aug. 13, the fastest in four years. "The upswing in Germany has much more solid basis than people thought," Ralph Solveen, an economist at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, said. Overseas demand is still the main driver, he said, but investment in machinery and equipment has also risen, and even private consumption which rose 0.6 percent for its first gain in a year "is looking a little better." "There's a good chance that we'll see an ongoing recovery of the German economy," Mr. Solveen said, "but we can't be sure that will be true for all of Europe. "And the pace of growth will likely slow, because what we've seen was at least partly a countermovement to the sharp drop after the Lehman Brothers shock, which might now run out," he added, referring to the bankruptcy of the investment bank in September 2008 that is widely thought to have exacerbated the global financial crisis. In the factory report, Eurostat also revised upward May's figure to show a 4.1 percent rise from April, compared with the 3.8 percent rise it previously reported. The data, which are seen as a leading indicator because they refer to orders received but not completed, added to the picture of a relatively solid economy, in line with Markit's euro zone flash composite purchasing managers' index Monday that showed services and manufacturing activity at 56.1 in August, down from 56.7 in July, but still above 50, the dividing line between growth and contraction. The German Federal Statistics Office also reported Tuesday that the government deficit had reached 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the first six months, above the 3 percent limit dictated by the so called Maastricht criteria for membership in the euro. While investors have little doubt that Chancellor Angela Merkel's government, which projects the deficit will rise to 4.5 percent of G.D.P. this year, can handle its spending, the announcement served as a reminder of the precarious state of public finances across the Continent. Like other European governments, Germany has said it will move aggressively to cut the gap, even at the risk that doing so will weigh on growth. The debt concerns, which were partly allayed in May after aggressive intervention by European leaders and by the European Central Bank, have continued to simmer throughout the summer. The yield on Greek 10 year government bonds has climbed back to around 10.9 percent, despite central bank purchases on the secondary market; that is down from the May 7 peak of 12.4 percent, but shows steady upward movement since their recent low of 6.1 percent on March 17. German bond yields, on the other hand, fell to new lows. The 10 year bund fell to 2.18 percent from 2.28 Monday. Mr. Solveen attributed the move to fears that the United States might fall back into recession and expectations that major central banks would keep rates at ultralow levels for some time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
He spent Sundays in his villa outside the city. Surrounded by orchids, he would eat a solitary lunch prepared by his housekeeper, and silently contemplate the collection of rare paintings, sculptures, furniture and books he had discreetly amassed over the decades of his successful business career. This vision of fin de siecle refinement seems like something out of the pages of Proust. But such were the Sunday lunches routinely enjoyed by Francesco Federico Cerruti, an entrepreneur in Turin, Italy, who founded a company that specialized in producing perfect bound telephone books. A reclusive bachelor who hated to travel, Mr. Cerruti died in 2015 at 93, leaving an exceptional but little known collection valued at about 600 million, including masterworks by Francis Bacon, Giorgio de Chirico and Jacopo Pontormo. The Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, in a former residence of the Savoy royal family outside Turin, announced this month an agreement with the Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti per l'Arte to safeguard and display Mr. Cerruti's 13th to 20th century treasures. The collection, on permanent loan to the Castello di Rivoli, is a rare case of a contemporary art museum incorporating an encyclopedic and historical art trove, and it will be the centerpiece of a museum expansion scheduled to open to the public in January 2019. Mr. Cerruti's collection, compiled over seven decades, contains about 300 paintings and sculptures, 200 rare books (including fine hand bound editions) and 300 pieces of furniture and other decorative objects. He owned some outstanding paintings: Bacon's 1957 canvas "Study for a Portrait IX" is a postwar highlight, while the 1918 portrait "Woman in a Yellow Dress (La Belle Espagnole)," by Amedeo Modigliani, and a group of five rare "Metaphysical" oil paintings by de Chirico from the 1910s are among his early 20th century Italian works. Sotheby's valued the collection at 570 million to 600 million in 2015, considerably more than the 443 million raised in 2009 by the Christie's auction of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge, which at the time was called the "sale of the century." Mr. Cerruti kept his art, and ate those Sunday lunches, in the villa he commissioned in the late 1960s, just a 10 minute walk from the Castello di Rivoli, then a war damaged ruin. The restored Castello opened as a museum in 1984, and the Cerruti villa will be renovated and incorporated as an annex. A rotating selection of works from the collection will also be shown "in conversation" with contemporary art at the Castello di Rivoli Museum itself, which strikingly combines grand old spaces with state of the art galleries. What appears to be a growing disconnect between present and past is a concern of those invested in historical art. Paintings by old masters, for example, are not as popular among wealthy private collectors as they once were, prompting auction houses to come up with increasingly inventive (some might say desperate) ways to make the old feel new. Last week Christie's sold a Francesco Guardi painting of Venice with help from a video of it sailing on a barge down the Grand Canal; last month Sotheby's used New York street artists to promote a sale of old masters. Admittedly, Mr. Cerruti was from a generation that did not buy 21st century art. His last major purchase was an 1897 Renoir, "Jeune Fille aux Roses," at Sotheby's in June 2014 for 842,500 pounds, or about 1.4 million at the time. "He was very unusual in the way that he collected art from the 13th century to contemporary," said Giovanni Sarti, a dealer based in Paris who first encountered Mr. Cerruti in 1992, at the Paris Biennale. Mr. Sarti, then based in London, said he was showing a painting by the medieval Florentine artist Gherardo Starnina, priced at about 1.4 million. Mr. Cerruti admired the work but did not add it to his collection. "He always regretted not buying that painting," Mr. Sarti said, adding that he later sold a different work by Starnina to Mr. Cerruti for a similar price. Over the years, Mr. Sarti and his wife, Claire, were among the small group of trusted advisers with whom Mr. Cerruti discussed potential purchases. Mrs. Sarti, a granddaughter of the French Surrealist poet Paul Eluard and his wife, Gala, who later married Salvador Dali, advised the collector on Modern art. "He was not an easy person," Mr. Sarti said. "In the morning, we would make plans, then in the evening he would change everything. He was difficult, but once he had decided, he would pay within 24 hours. Financially, he was very solid. His life was work and collecting. He was a true collector." Mr. Cerruti had trained as an accountant and went on to found a commercial binding business. When buying in Italy, he benefited from a Mussolini vintage regulation prohibiting the permanent export of artworks more than 50 years old officially designated as having cultural interest. These works could not be sold on the international market. In 2011 Mr. Cerruti bought a portrait by the admired Florentine Mannerist Pontormo, depicting a man holding a book. Dating from the 1540s, the oil on panel had been offered to him by the Milan dealer Carlo Orsi. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Paleontologists excavating a basin in southern Tanzania have uncovered 245 million year old fossils belonging to one of the earliest relatives of dinosaurs. The carnivorous creature, which is not a direct ancestor to dinosaurs but more of a close cousin, is called Teleocrater rhadinus. The discovery, which was reported Wednesday in Nature, may help scientists fill in gaps in our understanding of how dinosaurs evolved as well as provide insight into what their earliest relatives looked like. "For the first time we have a good idea of what the very first forms on the lineage leading to pterosaurs, dinosaurs and birds looked like," Randall B. Irmis, a curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah who was not involved in the study, said in an email about the study. "I think this will spark a lot of research into how and why pterosaurs and dinosaurs evolved into such different forms from their early relatives." The Teleocrater is an archosaur, a group that includes all birds, dinosaurs and the flying reptiles pterosaurs, as well as crocodiles and alligators. About 250 million years ago, at the beginning of the Triassic Period, the archosaurs broke into two main branches: the bird bunch, which includes dinosaurs, and the crocodile crew. Teleocrater is considered an early member of the bird line archosaurs, appearing some 10 million to 15 million years before dinosaurs entered the lineage. What paleontologists found most surprising about the creature were the bones in its ankles, which were more similar to those found in crocodiles than those found in dinosaurs and birds even though Teleocrater was on team bird and not team croc. The unexpected finding suggests that features previously thought to have evolved in one branch may have existed in a common ancestor of both groups. "This is along the lines of rewriting our understanding of the very earliest history of the bird and dinosaur lineage," said Kenneth Angielczyk, a paleobiologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and an author on the study. "It changes our understanding of what that first step in the evolution of dinosaurs was like." The first Teleocrater remains to be discovered were found in the 1930s by Francis Rex Parrington, a famous paleontologist from Cambridge University. Unsure of what he had collected, he stored the bones away until they were uncovered by his graduate student Alan Charig in the 1950s. He identified it as an archosaur and named it Teleocrater, but the designation was never made official, nor was the creature ever placed on the dinosaur family tree. It wasn't until 2015 that Dr. Angielczyk, Sterling J. Nesbitt, a paleontologist from Virginia Tech, and their colleagues uncovered an unusual set of bones in Tanzania that proved Dr. Charig was right. "It seemed like a fairly strange animal," Dr. Angielczyk said, "but it wasn't until we got it back to the lab and got it cleaned that the full implications of its relationship to birds and dinosaurs became apparent." The team, which includes researchers from the United States, England, Argentina, South Africa, Sweden and Russia, identified several features, like a depression in its skull, that further showed the Teleocrater was an archosaur from the bird lineage. But by also finding that it had a crocodile like ankle, the team connected the dinosaur and bird branch to the crocodile branch in a way that was not previously known. Kevin Padian, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviewed the paper, said the findings showed that the features that have traditionally been associated with the bird dinosaur line did not evolve in lockstep. "The bottom line is that we have so much new information that we're seeing a far more complex picture than we had 30 years ago," he said, "and that's an important evolutionary insight." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Built in 1905, this two story, 4,040 square foot commercial building in the Clinton Hill neighborhood has one unit, which is vacant, and a basement. It was previously occupied by Samui, a restaurant. Buyer's Brokers: Ali Raza and Troy Gordon of R New York | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Lisa Gibes and Alejandro Gac Artigas share their first dance as newlyweds at Big Daddy's Antiques in San Francisco. Alejandro Gac Artigas is known to family and friends as someone who gets a lot done quickly. "My brother gets 36 hours out of a 24 hour day, every day," said Melina Gac Levin of her younger sibling. By age 12, Mr. Gac Artigas published a book, "Yo, Alejandro," about the challenges he faced as a young Latino in the United States. His family had moved from Puerto Rico when he was a toddler. And he started college early, graduating from Harvard at age 20. But Mr. Gac Artigas moved with uncharacteristic caution in the summer of 2009 when he met Lisa Gibes on a yellow school bus in Philadelphia. Both were starting two year commitments there with Teach for America, an organization that sends top college graduates to teach in some of the nation's most troubled schools. Mr. Gac Artigas, now 29, said he was drawn to Ms. Gibes's upbeat personality and quirky sense of humor. But he had reason to enter a friendship haltingly: Both were attached to college sweethearts. During their daily 15 minute commutes to a North Philadelphia elementary school, the stress of their overcrowded classrooms melted away. They laughed constantly, sharing details about their diverse backgrounds and celebrating the small victories (and the many defeats) in their challenging days. They also delighted in each other's sartorial flair. Mr. Gac Artigas, an early adopter of the man bun, takes bold fashion risks, whether with colorful sneakers or wild overalls. Ms. Gibes, an aficionado of jumpsuits and onesies, could also rock a pajama top printed with cartoon dinosaurs. Yet even as Mr. Gac Artigas rode the brakes with Ms. Gibes, cracks were appearing in his long term relationship; his worldview was diverging from that of his girlfriend at the time, an investment banker. For many of the children in the first grade classroom to which he was assigned, English was a second, or even third, language. In these students, he saw himself, and in their parents, he saw his own. His mother, Priscilla Gac Artigas, born in Puerto Rico the youngest of 12 and the first in her family to attend college, is a professor of Latin American literature at Monmouth University. His father, Gustavo Gac Artigas, a writer and playwright from Chile, was arrested as a political prisoner there in 1973 and eventually exiled from his country. They live in Eatontown, N.J. Mr. Gac Artigas, a United States citizen, was born in the Netherlands, where his parents who had met in Paris, were then involved in political theater. In 1991, then living in Puerto Rico, the family relocated to Georgia, then moved to Fair Haven, N.J., seeking top notch education for their children. "What we couldn't give our children in money, we gave in time, ideas and love," Priscilla Gac Artigas said. "Life was not easy for Alejandro," said his father. "We did not have much but if you know how to think, you have everything." Ms. Gibes's family also valued education and had to make some financial sacrifices to send her to a Roman Catholic school. Ms. Gibes described her upbringing in suburban Detroit as "rich in support but not always in resources," and "all the Jell O salads you could want." Growing up the youngest of three, she excelled in academics, cheerleading and dance. (With Polish grandparents on both sides, she danced the polka in many summer parades in traditional Polish dress.) Soon Ms. Gibes became a regular at Mr. Gac Artigas's apartment, where his roommates, all Harvard guys, welcomed her upbeat presence at their communal dinners. For quite a while she eschewed the label "boyfriend," instead describing Mr. Gac Artigas as her "oasis." "My sister is very pragmatic," said Megan Gibes of her younger sibling. "She was thrilled with Alejandro, but she is a strong woman with lots of ambition and was not afraid of being on her own." To outsiders, the pairing was implausibly perfect. "They are entirely focused on the greater good but are also the right amount of weird for each other," said Jake Segal, a close friend to both. Ms. Gibes helped to slow down Mr. Gac Artigas, while he motivated Ms. Gibes to the next big thing. And their humor meshed and popped. They'd spin out a goofy dance move anywhere and were game to don a costume anytime. In choosing get ups, Ms. Gibes insisted on gender equity; her character had to be as empowered and recognizable as Mr. Gac Artigas's. This led to some amusing twinning. For one party, they both dressed as Vincent Vega from "Pulp Fiction." Another time they were each Rocky, the boxer. The couple made routine a heartfelt morning hug before entering the chaos of their classrooms and exchanged witty notes rife with movie puns. "T.Hanks for being a Big part of my life in Philadelphia, you never Cast Away my love," wrote Mr. Gac Artigas, shoehorning three Tom Hanks films onto a single card. "We had so much fun playing at marriage, I couldn't help but daydream," Mr. Gac Artigas said. But his dreams were soon shelved. In 2011, after completing their Teach for America commitments, the couple's expanded dedication to education landed them once again in different cities. Ms. Gibes, who earned a bachelor's degree with honors from Michigan State University in journalism and interdisciplinary humanities, and a master's degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania, returned to Washington to join 50CAN, a nonprofit education advocacy group for which she is currently a vice president for strategy and external relations. Mr. Gac Artigas stayed in Philadelphia and followed his bachelor's degree in social studies from Harvard College with a master's degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania. Turning down a lucrative job offer in the corporate business world, in 2012 he instead founded Springboard Collaborative, a nonprofit dedicated to closing the literacy gap by cultivating reading habits in low income and immigrant families. As the chief executive, he has earned accolades from Forbes magazine and the Chronicle of Philanthropy, among others. For years, the couple maintained a long distance relationship, visiting on weekends and championing each other's successes. In December 2015, a yearning to make a home together took them to San Francisco. As they fell for their new city, they fell more deeply for each other. "I vow to show my love so often, that you see it when you close your eyes," said Mr. Gac Artigas, who wore a head turning purple velvet jacket piped with gold with slim fitting tuxedo trousers, and purple velvet slippers topped with grosgrain bows. ("I look like a bottle of Crown Royal," he said.) At the close of the ceremony, Mr. Bouquet introduced the newlyweds with their freshly chosen surname: Gibes de Gac, a blending of their families, cultures and ideals. "With Lisa I found my other half, the kind of love that I saw in my parents," said the groom, before adding a line from one of his father's poems, "a love beyond questions and beyond answers." After a buffet of traditional Mexican food, the bride joined her mother on the dance floor for a traditional polka and then paired with her husband for a sexy tango that delighted the crowd. But the party truly ignited when husband and wife took the spotlight to enact the final dance scene in their favorite movie, "Dirty Dancing." Their moves were slick and perfectly executed as "The Time of My Life" played, and by the time the groom held his bride aloft everyone had mobbed the dance floor and sang in unison: "This could be love!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
BOLOGNA, Italy The artist Christian Boltanski sat on a bench in a Bologna museum facing one of the 20 works he had allocated throughout this city and mused on a favorite theme: mortality. He offered what he smilingly said was a "very pretentious" thought. "I hope that when I shall be dead, somebody that I don't know in Australia is going to be sad for two minutes," Mr. Boltanski, who is 72, said. "It would be something marvelous because it means you've touched people you've never seen and that is something incredible." The installation before him included a video with dozens of bells on long metal wires set in a blustery snowscape in northern Quebec, the gray sky blurring into the snow so that at times the two were indistinguishable. The suggestion of looming hypothermia was strong. A neon sign next to the installation announced "Arrivee" ("the end") while another sign at the gallery entrance established "Depart" ("the beginning"). "I am old, I am arrivee; for me that's my future," he said. "It's something so strange, to die." The piece is part of a retrospective of some 25 installations by Mr. Boltanski at MAMbo, Bologna's municipal museum of contemporary art. With old, new and revisited work, the exhibition, curated by Danilo Eccher, touches on leitmotifs that have infused Mr. Boltanski's forceful production of Conceptual works since the 1960s, addressing human suffering, the complex relationship between memory and the past, and mortality. In Bologna, memory is inextricably linked to a painful episode in the city's history. In 1980 a plane that took off from Bologna crashed near the island of Ustica, killing 81 passengers en route to Sicily. The cause is still a mystery, and the crash remains a raw, open wound for the city. Mr. Boltanski, who is French, holds celebrity status here for a permanent installation he designed 10 years ago that defined a commemorative Museum for the Memory of Ustica. Recently he was invited back to create a citywide project in different mediums a play, billboards, installations including a public art "intervention" he will curate in a parking lot in September and the exhibition at MAMbo that opened in late June. The special project is "Anime. Di Luogo in Luogo" ("Souls. From Place to Place"). "In the Renaissance, artists were invited by a prince or a bishop," Mr. Boltanski said of the project. "And I am like that; the people of Bologna invited me." During the past five years, Bologna has honored artists in various mediums who have had strong connections to the city, including John Cage, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Romeo Castellucci. His art, with its focus on "one humankind, fragile but specific," also spoke to Bologna's sense of self, Ms. Gambarelli said. "We were interested in this notion of memory, put into a contemporary key, which fits perfectly in our history," she said. "It was there, and he was able to seize it, as a great artist does." Ms. Gambarelli added that the artist had accepted the challenge of "inhabiting various territories." He has installed gigantic billboards of oversized eyes throughout the city's more remote neighborhoods, taking as his models the eyes of Resistance fighters who were killed in World War II, whose photographs are part of a memorial in the Piazza del Nettuno, a plaza abutting Bologna's main square. "I don't like so much to see my old works, because you can't change it anymore," he said, taking a tour through his installation at the Museum for the Memory of Ustica, which houses the shell of the plane and dozens of (unseen) objects belonging to the victims that were recovered after the crash. Black mirrors with audio line the walls one per victim murmuring possible last thoughts. "I like the idea that if you die in a very quick way, your last thought is not for the past but for the future," he said. "Each one says something optimistic." A similar but more sobering reflection plays out in what Mr. Boltanski described as "something between theater and an installation" that ran at a Bologna auditorium for a few nights in late June. With his longtime collaborators, the set designer Jean Kalman and the composer Franck Krawczyk, Mr. Boltanski created a fog filled labyrinth of old furniture covered in white sheets, where black clad actors mingled with audience members. With Mr. Krawczyk's score as a haunting background, the actors paused occasionally to whisper into a spectator's ears: "Did you suffer much?," "Why did you die?," "Did you see the light?" Another installation in an abandoned 19th century powder keg bunker in an outlying Bologna neighborhood involved a pile of clothing representing the countless immigrants who have drowned in the Mediterranean on their perilous crossings from Africa covered by dozens of gold colored thermal blankets. It created the illusion of a sea of low waves, a powerful reminder of the migration phenomenon. "The blanket is at the same time something tragic and something incredibly beautiful and rich," Mr. Boltanski said to those attending the premiere. "But everyone can see in it what they want to see." Sitting in MAMbo later in the day, Mr. Boltanski spoke of an coming project in Patagonia, of past projects in Japan and Tasmania, and on being an artist. "I believe that at the beginning of all the lives of artists is a trauma, and after, all your life, you try to speak about this trauma," each time in a different way, he said. He recalled his underlying trauma stories of the Holocaust that he heard from his parents' friends, all survivors, when he was a child in Paris. They formed his art. "Now that I am so old," he said, "what I try to do is to create mythology, to create legend." "And at my age, what I wish is that people remember the legend not me, but the legend." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The star of Laurie Berg's "The Mineralogy of Objects" is an inflatable sex doll named Tanya. She appears midway through the 55 minute dance, which made its debut on Thursday at Danspace Project, in line with Ms. Berg and the three other female dancers who make up the cast. They toss Tanya around and try to keep her aloft like a beach ball. They engage her in an absurdly acrobatic ballroom duet. They roll with her on the ground as she deflates. This is amusing fun, as is the satire in Tanya's program bio and the moment when the dancers replicate the sunburst image from George Balanchine's "Apollo," including Tanya's limbs in the array of arabesques. But much else about the show is less clear in tone. There's a lot of dance in it. Karl Scholz's score lays down a heavy, metronomic beat that changes texture but rarely relents. After the beat goes quiet, the women pick it up again with their footfalls, and throughout they worship it like dancers in a club. There's something funny, though, about their manner and their moves. They reminded me of Pee wee Herman or Devo. (Was it a melodic hint of "Burning Down the House" by the Talking Heads that made me think of the 1980s?) Even before Tanya shows up, the dorkiness suggests a joke Ms. Berg has a good deadpan face and yet the dance is constructed intricately, with a sophisticated interplay of independence and unison. It's hard to know what to take seriously. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Male fiddler crabs are lopsided. Females have two claws of about the same size. Males have one regular size claw and one outsized claw, really outsized. "The other is huge, it's greatly enlarged to the point that it can be approximately half of his body weight." They use the large claw for fighting, communicating and courtship. That little mud colored crab getting all the attention, that's the female. Yes, females do prefer males with larger claws. But they also care about how males wave those big claws when they're trying to attract mates. They prefer faster waving, probably because it indicates a more fit potential mate. That was shown very clearly in an earlier experiment when a robot claw left living crabs struggling to keep up. But as scientists in Australia found out in a new experiment, also using robot claws, females prefer males that accelerate their waving when they see a female approach. "So we had robot replica males that we could then program to either escalate, as if they are increasing their signaling effort, or de escalate as if they're getting fatigued." Sure enough, faced with a choice of robot claws, females notice the acceleration and preferred it. That's if they were even paying attention. To be fair, that's not the robot claw's fault. The very same thing happens with real crabs. Better luck next time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In recent weeks, John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg, has sometimes felt, as he put it, like "a character in a Graham Greene novel. There's an element of 'there's no perfect answer to it.'" As part of a wide ranging interview about his first year at Bloomberg, Mr. Micklethwait was discussing the latest in a line of complex balancing acts he has performed since he began running one of the world's largest news organizations in this case, how Bloomberg should cover its founder, Michael R. Bloomberg, as Mr. Bloomberg considers a presidential run. At his previous job, as the top editor of The Economist, where he oversaw a staff of about 150, Mr. Micklethwait did not have to concern himself with such things. But his arrival at Bloomberg coincided with, among other changes, a broad refocusing within the organization's newsroom. Late last month, after it was reported that Mr. Bloomberg was seriously considering a bid for the White House, Bloomberg journalists received notice that they were to refrain from covering the news in depth. One memo, obtained by The New York Times, said that Mr. Micklethwait had "directed all of us across news to stick for now with our policy of not doing our own reporting on Mike. If there is a big news development, we can cite other media. We should not opine whatsoever on this topic. If we need to refer to it, because in the context of our other news coverage it would be absurd not to mention it, we can do so by citing other media reports on the subject." Days later, Kathy Kiely, a news director in Washington for Bloomberg, resigned, citing those restrictions as unacceptable. Mr. Micklethwait described that resignation as "a little odd," given the company's stated policy of not covering itself or its founder to avoid the appearance of bias. "If he did declare, then we would probably come up with a more formal set of things, and that's something I'm looking at with our Washington people," Mr. Micklethwait said. Since finishing his tenure as mayor of New York City at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has returned to run the company that is the source of his personal fortune, which Forbes estimates at nearly 40 billion. Sweeping changes have followed. At the end of 2014, it was announced that Matthew Winkler who oversaw Bloomberg's news operation as it became one of the largest in the world, with a staff of about 2,400 would take an emeritus title and that Mr. Micklethwait would join the company. In addition, Daniel L. Doctoroff, the chief executive at Bloomberg who led a new media strategy and hired a number of people to execute it, said he would be leaving. Other important news staff members left in the weeks and months that followed. And so a broad reconsideration of Bloomberg's news and media offerings fell to Mr. Micklethwait, 53, a relative of the Duke of Norfolk and a descendant of William the Conqueror, the nobleman who led the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066. (It is perhaps this heritage that led some in his newsroom to think, incorrectly, that he owned a castle in England.) Mr. Micklethwait was educated at the Ampleforth College, an upscale English boarding school, and subsequently at the University of Oxford. He worked for Chase Manhattan Bank before switching to journalism and joining The Economist in 1987. By 2006, he was editing The Economist, famed for lively and collegial discussions at its weekly meetings discussions that form the basis for some of its distinctive articles. 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. If the World Economic Forum, held each year in Davos, Switzerland, decided to elect a mayor, the highly connected Mr. Micklethwait might be considered. He is also associated with the Bilderberg Group, a society that includes some of the world's richest and most powerful people, including politicians, executives and financiers precisely the people that Bloomberg News aims to reach who gather annually to discuss global issues. "It's a way to meet people," Mr. Micklethwait said. (He could not remember precisely where or when he had met Mr. Bloomberg, but the two have known each other for several years.) John Elkann, who leads the investment group Exor, which owns a stake in The Economist, described Mr. Micklethwait as "poised and calm," with a gift for British understatement. He acknowledged that The Economist was a very different organization from Bloomberg News, but he said that in Mr. Micklethwait, Mr. Bloomberg had a leader who could push the news organization's global growth. Though Mr. Bloomberg has a reputation for concerning himself with details as small as the on air gestures of Bloomberg's television presenters and how the paper towel dispensers in the company's offices are labeled, Mr. Micklethwait said he had no difficulties with his boss. The two are aligned in their thinking about the company's news offerings, he said, adding that Mr. Bloomberg generally doesn't make any journalistic decisions. They disagree from time to time, he said, but in that case they "come to an arrangement." Mr. Micklethwait declined to cite specific examples. A recent memo Mr. Micklethwait sent to his staff outlined a long list of new endeavors, and achievements, including an opinion site, Gadfly, and a morning news service, Daybreak. And most of the efforts focus on the six areas at which he has said the company's reporting should be aimed: business, finance, markets, economics, technology and power (political and governmental). But some Bloomberg staff members are concerned with the company's new direction, which they fear could mean a retreat from pursuing ambitious journalism. It is hard, they have suggested, to afflict the comfortable when some of those same people are paying more than 20,000 annually to subscribe to Bloomberg's financial information terminals a computer system that provides users with data especially when those terminals account for about 80 percent of Bloomberg's annual revenue of about 9 billion. Mr. Micklethwait denied that Bloomberg had cut back on investigative reporting. But he said it was true that the organization had refocused, a process that seemed to have resolved a tension between those who saw it as a media company with bold ambitions fueled by the terminals' profits, and those who saw it as a more measured media company in the service of those terminals. Last fall, Bloomberg's media group produced a graphic to clarify how it interpreted its customer base. It looks like the cross section of a planet. The large, gray core is "Terminal Customers." Around it are thinner layers that represent audiences of "Global Finance Professionals" and "Global Business Professionals." More general audiences are not mentioned. Mr. Micklethwait disagreed that his newsroom had become more reflexively establishmentarian. Bloomberg, he said, is a kind of "parish magazine of finance. And when we say this hedge fund is messed up this way or this bank has done this thing wrong, that particular banker may not particularly love us at that moment, but the rest of finance wants to know about it. And that I think is key." The tension has been particularly acute in its reporting on China, which represents a vast potential market for Bloomberg but is also strictly controlled by an authoritarian government that has punished journalists and news organizations that have displeased the country's leaders. In June 2012, Bloomberg, which had hired a decorated group of investigative journalists to cover China, published a series of articles on the family wealth of Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, who at that time was the incoming Communist Party chief and is now the country's president. After publication, government officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe to the service. Several Bloomberg employees, including some who still work there, subsequently accused the organization of shying away from similar reporting in the aftermath. Some of the investigative staff members resigned. Mr. Micklethwait said that though he was not at Bloomberg when the issue arose, there was not currently a policy to cover China less aggressively. The company has continued to report there, he said. "But let me just be clear on one thing," Mr. Micklethwait said. "Our license within China is just to be a business and finance wire." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Glassmaking is one of the world's oldest arts. Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians made glass glazes more than 5,000 years ago, and glassblowing was developed in the early days of the Roman Empire. Since the mid 1900s, glass has been made in factories by melting sand, then floating sheets of it in vats of molten tin (or, you know, as a byproduct of testing atomic bombs in the desert). Researchers now hope to make glass with a more versatile, modern day technology: 3 D printing. In a study published in Nature on Wednesday, a team from Germany presented a new glassmaking method based on a "liquid glass" that can be shaped into complex structures with a 3 D printer, and then heated into a solid. The technique may reduce the time and costs of creating complex or detailed glass pieces, and yield high quality glass that is smooth enough to make lenses and mirrors, said Bastian Rapp, a principal investigator at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and an author of the paper. Three dimensional printing is more pervasive than ever, yet it remains mostly limited to plastics, ceramics and metals. People thought glass would just not be accessible to 3 D printing, Dr. Rapp said. "We wanted to close this important material gap." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE FIRSTS The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress By Jennifer Steinhauer This year brings not only a presidential election but also the centennial of the 19th Amendment's ratification, which prohibited abridgment or denial of the right to vote "on account of sex." It's an arresting convergence. In an era that has seen a woman come within striking distance of the presidency and an influx of female candidates and officeholders at every level of government, we continue to debate, as did those who supported and opposed women's suffrage a century ago, women's impact on American politics. Have women changed the culture of politics, its institutions and governance itself? Or have they behaved as voters and officeholders pretty much like men? The persistence of these questions informs Jennifer Steinhauer's lively study, "The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress." Steinhauer focuses on the 35 women newly elected in 2018 who helped make the 116th the most diverse (by gender, race, ethnicity, age and socioeconomic background) Congress in the nation's history. Among their number were several notable congressional firsts including Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first Muslim women elected to the House; Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, the first Native American women representatives; as well as, at 29, the two youngest women ever elected to the House, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Abby Finkenauer. All but one of the new representatives were Democrats, part of the blue wave that allowed the party to reclaim the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Steinhauer sees "this younger, more diverse and more female legislative branch" as one that became "immediately consequential." Their election, she writes, marked "a historical turning point both for Congress and for American women." However, she also wonders what difference their presence as well as their impatience, sense of urgency, drive to advance thoughtful policy and, yes, their diversity will make in the hoary institution they joined. Steinhauer pursues her subjects and these larger imperatives in the warrens of Congress, through hearing rooms, private offices, rented apartments, endless functions and then across the country as the freshwomen make their way through their first eventful year in office. She tacks with them between their duties in Washington, their attention to constituents back home and briefly, as their first year closes, in the presidential impeachment that would soon consume the House of Representatives. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
'Sonic the Hedgehog' Tries Again: Does the Redesign Work Now? None Please allow him to reintroduce himself: "I'm Sonic, a little super ball of energy in an extremely handsome package," the titular alien says in the new trailer for "Sonic the Hedgehog." That package looks a lot different than it did in a trailer that was released back in April. After a huge online backlash over Sonic's creepily humanlike appearance, the film's release date was delayed by three months while the character was redrawn. "The message is loud and clear," tweeted director Jeff Fowler. "You aren't happy with the design you want changes." Thank you for the support. And the criticism. The message is loud and clear... you aren't happy with the design you want changes. It's going to happen. Everyone at Paramount Sega are fully committed to making this character the BEST he can be... sonicmovie gottafixfast Jeff Fowler ( fowltown) May 2, 2019 Sonic 2.0 looks more like he did in the original 1991 Sega video game, with larger eyes, fewer teeth, a less pointed nose, creamier fur and a more compact body. The new trailer gives less screen time to Jim Carrey's mustachioed villain, Dr. Robotnik, while emphasizing the bromance between Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) and his human friend Tom (James Marsden). The clip features the speedy Sonic playing baseball and pingpong with himself and suggests a jokey version of "E.T. the Extraterrestrial," as military forces pursue the space creature. Of course, he eludes them, leading Dr. Robotnik to exclaim, "Oh, give me a big fat break!" Paramount hopes fans won't have the same reaction when "Sonic the Hedgehog" hits theaters on Feb. 14. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The "Blurred Lines" case has resulted in one of the biggest jury verdicts in the history of music copyright, and it's not closed yet. In the first signs of what may be a protracted post trial battle, lawyers for both sides have filed documents with the court raising questions about the verdict. Last week, a jury found that Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," a top hit in 2013, had copied elements of Marvin Gaye's 1977 song "Got to Give It Up" without permission, and awarded the Gaye family nearly 7.4 million. Late Tuesday, lawyers representing the Gaye family who inherited Mr. Gaye's copyright in the song after his death in 1984 asked the court to "correct the jury's verdict" by holding more than just Mr. Thicke and Pharrell Williams liable. According to the jury's decision, only Mr. Thicke and Mr. Williams two of the song's three credited writers were found to have infringed on the Gayes' copyright. The third writer, the rapper T.I. (whose real name is Clifford Harris Jr.), was not found to be liable, and neither were the record labels that released "Blurred Lines": Star Trak, Mr. Williams's label, and Interscope, a division of the giant Universal Music, which distributed it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Mushrooms, it turns out , are just the visible part of an awesome organism known as mycelium, most of which lies below ground. Neither animal nor vegetable, this vast network of cells has been sharing nutrients and forming connections for billions of years, breaking down decaying matter and transforming it into living soil. Making visible this endless cycle of decomposition and regeneration and much more besides Louie Schwartzber g's lightly informative, delightfully kooky documentary, "Fantastic Fungi," offers nothing less than a model for planetary survival. Our primary guide to 'shroom splendiferousness is the mycologist Paul Stamets (at one point sporting a Grateful Dead hat), who, vividly assisted by time lapse cinematography, leads us through fungus related science, history and even a dash of politics. (As some of you might remember, President Nixon wasn't a fan of the psychedelic properties of some mushrooms.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SAN FRANCISCO The last time that Congress approved a sweeping overhaul of the federal tax code, in 1986, it created a tax credit meant to encourage the private sector to invest in affordable housing. It has grown into a 9 billion a year social program that has funded the construction of some three million apartments for low income residents. But the Republican tax plan approved last month amounts to a vast cutback, making it much less likely that such construction will continue apace. Because the tax rate for corporations has been lowered, the value of the credits which corporations get in return for their investments is also lower. "It's the greatest shock to the affordable housing system since the Great Recession," said Michael Novogradac, managing partner of Novogradac Company, a national accounting firm based in San Francisco. According to an analysis by his firm, the new tax law will reduce the growth of subsidized affordable housing by 235,000 units over the next decade, compounding an existing shortage. Already, developers and city agencies are scrambling for new financing and scaling back longer term plans. Don Falk can see the fallout from his window. Mr. Falk is the chief executive of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, an affordable housing developer in San Francisco's impoverished Tenderloin district. Directly across the street from his office sits a new project, a rising eight story building that will have 113 units, a third of those set aside to serve the city's swelling homeless population. A year ago, as the market for tax credits started falling in expectation that a Republican president and a Republican Congress would steeply lower taxes, the project developed a 3 million deficit. The city stepped in to cover the shortfall, but the financing problem was an early indication of what affordable housing groups and developers expect to be a declining pace of new building. Kate Hartley, director of the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development the agency that backstopped Mr. Falk's development when it needed help said the lower corporate tax rate had increased the cost of building affordable housing in the city by roughly 50,000 per unit. That adds up to a lot of multimillion dollar leaks, she said, "and we have less money to build the units we want to build." For renters like Sandy Hernandez, who lives south of San Francisco in a two bedroom apartment with her ex husband and two children, this is coming at the worst possible time. Her building was recently purchased by a group of investors, and next month her 1,900 rent is scheduled to go up 850 more than 40 percent to 2,750. Ms. Hernandez said there is no way she can pay that much, but she's stuck because the list for affordable housing is so long. "It's hard because there's a lot of people in the same situation," she said. Programs to build subsidized rental housing date back to the Great Depression, and were greatly expanded during President Lyndon B. Johnson's "war on poverty." Support for these programs started to wane under President Richard Nixon, and they were vastly scaled back under President Ronald Reagan. But unlike public housing programs, which tended to expand under Democratic administrations and shrink under Republican ones, tax credits proved enduring and politically popular. Conservatives saw the approach as a tax break and a way to use private markets to solve public problems. Liberals saw it as a way to direct federal money to local communities. Since 1987, it has funded construction and rehabilitation of about 30 percent of the nation's 10 million affordable units, which are defined as units that people making 60 percent or less of a city's median income could afford. 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. "It's the most successful social program that nobody has heard of," said David Erickson, director of community development at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the author of "The Housing Policy Revolution." The need is particularly great today. The number of renters has surged over the past decade, with the country adding about one million renters a year since 2010 about twice as many as the previous rental peak in the 1970s and '80s, according to a 2017 report by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. Developers have responded with an apartment building boom. But since renters tend to have higher incomes than in years past households making more than 100,000 a year accounted for a third of the growth in renters over the past decade many of the newer units are in the pricey glass and steel buildings that have sprouted in downtowns across the country. There are some indications that the rush of building is helping increase affordability, especially at the upper end of the market, where vacancies are rising and rents are falling. Still, low income housing remains undersupplied. About half of renters pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and a quarter pay more than half. In California, legislators have proposed a range of fixes, from more money for affordable housing to fewer building regulations and increased tenant protections. State Senator Scott Wiener, the author of a recently enacted law that makes it harder for cities to block housing developments, has followed up with several proposed bills that would, among other things, increase construction around train stations and other transit hubs. At the federal level, Senators Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, and Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, sponsored a proposal to increase the number of low income housing tax credits by 50 percent. For now, there is little to suggest the rental burden will get better anytime soon. Over the next decade the younger half of the millennial generation will move into their 20s and 30s, adding to the pool of renters. Over that same period, more than a million units of affordable housing financed by low income housing tax credits and other government programs are set expire and shift to higher rents, according to the Joint Center. In Redwood City, on the peninsula between San Francisco and the heart of Silicon Valley, private equity firms have been snapping up buildings that house lower income service workers and repositioning them for higher income tech workers. The pitch to investors is straightforward: With housing scarce and demand rising, there are returns to be made buying old buildings, marketing to new tenants, and steadily increasing the rent. That has put a squeeze on tenants like Ms. Hernandez, a 41 year old holding down two low wage jobs, one cleaning houses and another at an elder care facility. She has spent a decade waiting for a subsidized rental apartment to open up. Jesshill Love, an attorney for the investors who now own Ms. Hernandez's building, said that with demand exploding, the rents could have actually been raised even more. "The decision was made by the property management company not to raise the rent to full market value in an effort to minimize the impact upon the families," he said. The backlash has been fierce. Rent control measures have popped up in cities across the Bay Area. Last week, Ms. Hernandez and other tenants in her building gathered at the offices of Redwood Landing, the building's management company, chanting things like "Hear our cry, rent's too high," while holding signs that read "Stop Displacement Now." The protest attracted lots of honking horns and a visit from Redwood City's mayor. Directly across the street from the hubbub sat a recreational vehicle parked for the evening. Its two homeless residents popped their heads out to see what was going on. Lisa Hannibal, 52, who lives in the vehicle and is unemployed, said that she was also on a list for affordable housing, but that nothing had opened up. "We're at the hard suffering point," she said. "But it can happen to anybody these days." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Celebrate the end of winter at the meatpacking district's fourth annual Open Market block party on Thursday from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. There will be bites from neighborhood spots, including Scarpetta and Bodega Negra, fashion finds from local labels like a Rebecca Taylor floral print blouse ( 100, originally 275) at sample sale prices, and Theophilus London and Coco and Breezy on deck. Tickets ( 150) at openmarketnyc.com At Highline Stages, 441 West 14th Street. That same day, Bloomingdale's will open a Knockout Beauty shop in shop at its SoHo location. It will be stocked with natural products like Kat Rudu liquid lift serum with silk amino acids ( 82). Barneys is hosting a Love Yourself event through Saturday: You'll receive a beauty bag or men's dopp kit filled with samples from more than 20 brands, including Byredo, Diptyque and La Mer, with any 200 cosmetics, fragrance or apothecary purchase. The Danish organic beauty guru Kirsten Kjaer Weis will be at the Madison Avenue store on Thursday to introduce the Beautiful Oil ( 225), a dual moisturizer/makeup primer made from the extract of Chinese yams. From Friday to Sunday, the online fine jewelry marketplace Kavador will have a pop up featuring one of a kind pieces like an emerald cut citrine and diamond ring ( 1,330). At Dreams on Air, 120 Wooster Street. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Worker protections are critical during the pandemic yet the Trump administration has issued only voluntary guidance instead of enforceable rules. As states and municipalities relax shelter in place orders, the nation seems to be racing to get the economy back to something resembling the pre pandemic era. Restaurants, malls, cinemas, day care centers and retail stores are reopening sooner than most medical professionals think is wise. The risk is obvious to many businesses that stayed open as the coronavirus swept the country. Meat processing plants, for instance, have had among the highest rates of infection. Employees continued to show up to work at many such facilities, even as thousands of their colleagues tested positive for the virus. By one estimate, more than 27,000 workers in meatpacking have tested positive for the coronavirus, up sharply from 17,000 just last month. Yet the federal agency meant to protect America's workers continues to sit on the sidelines. Even as state after state reopens, and the number of infections continues to climb, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has so far refused to give employers clear rules to follow, allowing those that neglect worker safety to operate without fear of government penalty. For months now, OSHA has relied on general guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, without making them mandatory, meaning businesses face no threat of enforcement action for noncompliance. The courts have offered workers no relief the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia this month dismissed a lawsuit by the A.F.L. C.I.O. that would have compelled OSHA to issue emergency rules for worker protection, saying the agency can determine its own standards. The result has been millions of essential employees forced to work under hazardous conditions. Now that threat is spreading to nonessential workers, too. OSHA's top administrator, Loren Sweatt, explained during a congressional hearing last month that general guidelines, rather than rules, allow the agency and businesses to adapt more quickly as the scientific and public understanding of the coronavirus changes. "Regulations are very cumbersome to revise," Ms. Sweatt said. But even when it has received credible complaints of unsafe conditions, OSHA has failed to act. Workers at a Nebraska JBS beef processing plant alleged in April that they and their colleagues remained in close quarters during lunchtime and in the locker room despite "a number of positive cases of Covid 19." OSHA didn't inspect the site and issued no citations; some 300 workers contracted the virus. OSHA has received more than 5,000 complaints related to the coronavirus since the pandemic began. It has issued only a single citation, to a Georgia nursing home for failing to report employee hospitalizations within 24 hours. The United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents about 1.3 million laborers in grocery stores, meatpacking, retail and other sectors, estimates that 29,000 of its members have contracted the coronavirus and 225 have died from Covid 19. Even before the pandemic, OSHA was too overwhelmed to meet its mandate. Its current number of inspectors, about 860 to cover the whole nation, is 240 fewer than it had in 1975. The agency has conducted 5,000 fewer inspections per year on average than it did during the prior two presidential administrations, according to data from the National Employment Law Project, a labor friendly nonprofit. Nearly half of OSHA's leadership positions remain unfilled, according to the project's data. The need for enforceable rules specific to the coronavirus has taken on greater urgency as states move to fully reopen. In its lawsuit, the A.F.L. C.I.O. had argued "infections and death among workers will rise" if the agency doesn't draw up emergency temporary standards. And indeed, Texas and Florida, populous states that were early to open, have had a record number of new positive virus cases in recent days. Without a federal standard, city officials in Texas are pleading with Gov. Greg Abbott for the authority to mandate face masks in public settings. Schools and summer camps, too, will begin opening up over the next few months with no clear mandates on how to ensure safety, needlessly putting workers, children and their families at greater risk. Congress has done little to help businesses with clarity or workers with protections. When the House passed its latest stimulus package linked to the crisis, it included requirements that OSHA adopt an emergency standard for enforcing safety measures related to Covid 19. But the Senate has not voted on that bill, as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell holds out for special legal protections for businesses that could otherwise be sued for failing to provide safe workplaces. That means, in its current form, the stimulus bill looks likely to fail, further delaying worker protections. The coronavirus crisis has put more than 30 million Americans out of work. The lucky ones who are still on the job or who can hope to return to one soon deserve to know that the federal government wants to protect their health as much as their bosses' economic well being. OSHA can help. 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 |
CHECKED your retirement savings plan lately? January's global stock market plunge is one of those moments that stoke fear among baby boomers that they might run out of money before they run out of years. The fear is understandable: Older Americans are living longer. A man who reached his 65th birthday in 2015 has an average remaining life expectancy of 18.6 years, according to James M. Poterba, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A typical 65 year old male also has a 20 percent chance of living an additional 25 years or more. For women in the same age group, average remaining life expectancy is 20.3 years; one in five will live to age 93. Many economists have a favorite solution for those eager to get off the market's roller coaster ride while also hedging against a long life: a single premium immediate annuity or lifetime annuity, preferably one with protection against inflation. In exchange for a lump sum investment, this type of annuity guarantees a steady income for the rest of your life. The payment stream depends on your age and the level of interest rates. But when you die, the value of the annuity typically goes to the insurer, not to your heirs. Despite all the support for annuities among economists, there are good reasons for consumers to be wary. While returns vary among insurers, according to the calculator at Immediateannuities.com, 100,000 invested in a single premium immediate annuity would typically earn a 65 year old man a 558 monthly income for life. A woman who is 65 would receive 535 monthly for the same investment. In essence, you're buying yourself a pension. Ross Rezac, 67, and her husband, Martin Skoro, 63, are intrigued. Ms. Rezac and Mr. Skoro are semiretired graphic designers in Minneapolis who are gradually winding down their firm, accepting business if it comes but no longer marketing their services. Their household portfolio is over 1 million. "What attracts us to the annuity is the steady income," Ms. Rezac said. "The advice we've had is that the stock market will implode over the next few years, and this is a way to solve that problem." Still, Ms. Rezac and Mr. Skoro are uncertain about taking the plunge. Do they really want to give up control over their savings in return for a monthly income? They worry that they don't understand the trade offs. "Some people hate them and others think they're great," she says. "It's confusing." Today, only about 10 percent of participants in defined contribution retirement savings plans like a 401(k) annuitize their savings when they retire. And the total amount is even more modest: In 2012, sales of individual fixed immediate annuities were just 7.7 billion, but households transferred 301 billion to individual retirement accounts from employer sponsored plans. Behavioral scholars have come up with reasons annuities aren't highly regarded. These include "money illusion" (lump sum investment is so much larger than the monthly income stream) and "availability errors" (fear of dying right after signing the contract). Another reason is "smell of death" pessimism (buying an annuity means giving up hope of investing for gain). But the reluctance to buy annuities is not irrational. For one thing, a broad based stock index fund is far more likely to outperform the return on an annuity over most time frames, particularly when interest rates are extremely low, as they are now. At the same time, there are other techniques people can use to reduce the risk of outliving their assets. These strategies include working longer, delaying filing for Social Security benefits until age 70 and cutting down on fixed household costs. Moreover, buyers should be wary of tying up all their savings in an annuity. Besides the risk of outliving your investments, "other risks may be more serious," Arnold Kling, entrepreneur, economist and teacher, writes on his blog. "You could easily find yourself needing to take out a loan if your savings are tied up in an annuity and your spouse requires a home health aide." Felix Reichling of the Congressional Budget Office and Kent Smetters at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania researched that insight. The model they developed suggests that annuitization is a risky strategy once health care shocks for the elderly are taken into account. Fidelity estimates that on average a couple, both age 65 and who retired in 2015, can expect to spend an estimated 245,000 on health care during their retirement. Fidelity's figure does not include nursing home and long term care expenses. "Most Americans in our model should not annuitize," Professor Smetters said. He does recommend considering annuities if you have at least 500,000 set aside first, half for medical expenses and half to tap when needed. His financial rule of thumb eliminates most boomers. The median balance for people age 65 to 74 with retirement savings in 2010 was 138,000 for married households and 49,000 for single households, according to Professor Poterba of M.I.T. The comparable numbers for those age 55 to 64 is 130,000 married and 45,000 single. "Certainly, there is the dynamic that people who can afford a significant allocation to annuities don't need to," says Michael Kitces, a certified financial planner and director of research at Pinnacle Advisory Group. "The rest can't really annuitize all their wealth." What are the alternatives? Social Security is an inflation adjusted creditworthy annuity far superior to anything offered in the marketplace. Working longer, even earning a part time income, makes it easier to delay filing for Social Security benefits until age 70. Waiting will produce real returns of 4 , 5 or even 6 percent a year for those living to age 90 and more. "Social Security is an awesome annuity," Professor Smetters said. Moreover, people heading into the traditional retirement years often underestimate how much they can reduce their financial risks by paying off their mortgage and reducing other fixed expenses. "This is a better way to reduce risk," says Ross Levin, a certified financial planner and co founder of Accredited Investors Inc. in Edina, Minn. "Manage your expenses. Manage your cash flow. Pay attention to debt. Pay attention to taxes." What if you still think you would be safer putting a portion of your savings into an annuity? A starting place is comparison shopping at a website like Immediateannuities.com. Check the offerings of low fee providers like Vanguard, TIAA CREF and USAA. You should also work with a fee only financial planner to evaluate the pluses and minuses and work through the costs and benefits of several policy enhancements. A policy that protects against inflation, for example, is increasingly valuable the longer you own the annuity. Married couples typically choose a joint and survivor policy, meaning the payments will continue to the widow or widower. You can buy an annuity that returns some money to heirs. The price for each policy enhancement is a lower monthly payout. Don't let a financial adviser or insurance broker talk you into wasting your money on variable annuities, an overly complex, high fee product with mutual fundlike accounts wrapped in a tax shelter. You can do better keeping it simple. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
If Bangkok's Ari neighborhood could write its own autobiography, it might be called "From Bureaucrats to Baristas." For decades, the low lying leafy district was known mainly for its federal ministries, municipal administration offices and gated quasi suburban homes. Increasingly, however, Ari is a thicket of sleek high rise buildings and indie cool kid hangouts with international flavors: German beer gardens, Latin American restaurants, Korean canteens, Japanese izakayas, American style food trucks and numerous freshly minted cafes stocked with Italian espresso makers. All that's missing is the crowds. Even on weekends, Ari's hot spots have free seats and ample breathing room a rarity in bustling Bangkok. With its outdoor seating, picnic tables, rock 'n' roll music and constant smoke from grilling meats, this beer and burgers haven feels more like a backyard barbecue than a restaurant. Created by the Thai British cook Patrick Stall who studied hospitality management in Perth, Australia and his Thai girlfriend, Parichart Payungwong, the laid back hangout serves everything from Japanese style chicken wings in ginger garlic sauce to the signature Chiang Mai Spicy burger, a patty of shredded pork with Cheddar cheese and Thai herbs. If such combinations sound like a recipe for indigestion, request the house made black hamburger buns. The color comes from activated charcoal a digestive aid. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The American economy slowed in July as the pace of hiring eased from the robust rate of the previous two months, a victim of waning momentum and the resurgence of the coronavirus in many parts of the country. Employers added 1.8 million jobs, well below the 4.8 million jump in payrolls in June, the Labor Department reported, after virus related restrictions caused some businesses to close for a second time. The unemployment rate fell to 10.2 percent. Hours after the report underscored the slowing recovery, talks between administration officials and congressional Democrats on how to pump more aid into the economy were on the verge of collapse. On Friday night, President Trump threatened to bypass Congress and act on his own though his power to do so was unclear. Even with July's gains, fewer than half of the 22 million jobs lost in March and April have been restored. And economists warn that the rest of the lost ground will be a challenge to regain. "The easy hiring that was done in May and June has been exhausted," said Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America. "With many companies not running at full capacity, it becomes harder to get that incremental worker back in." Over all, the job market reflects the crosswinds buffeting the economy less than 100 days before the presidential election. Retailers continue to file for bankruptcy, while airlines and hotels operate at a small fraction of capacity. Some companies are calling back laid off employees, even as other employers continue to shed workers. The longer the crisis goes on, the greater the toll for businesses, especially smaller ones. "We're going to start to see a lot of small businesses fall by the wayside, a lot of people who are unemployed become chronically unemployed," said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a Harvard University economist who has written extensively on financial and economic crises. "We're in very, very dangerous territory." She applied for unemployment benefits, but had to wait two months for the payments to begin. Then, in early July, as New York allowed restaurants to open for indoor dining, Ms. Lane was recalled to her job. "I went back into work, clocked in, went back on payroll, the whole nine yards," she said. She had spent just one day there when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo reversed course and prohibited dining inside restaurants. Ms. Lane was laid off again, and found herself back on unemployment and looking for work. The leisure and hospitality industry was hit hard in the downturn and faces new restrictions on bars and indoor dining in states like California, Florida and Texas. Last month, it added 592,000 jobs, or one third of the net gain for the economy over all. July's job growth in the industry followed a jump of 3.4 million in May and June, seasonally adjusted, but employment in the field is still 4.3 million below where it was in February. 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 retail industry, another hard hit sector that has seen numerous bankruptcies in recent months, added 258,000 jobs last month. The pandemic's toll on jobs in those categories has hit lower paid workers especially hard, including millions who depend on tips. For big increases in hiring at restaurants and bars, employees may need to wait until indoor dining is again permitted in states like New York something unlikely to occur until a vaccine is found. While the survey of households released on Friday counted 16.3 million Americans as unemployed, the Labor Department has reported that over 30 million are receiving some sort of unemployment benefit. The household survey does not count people as unemployed if they have given up the search for work and are not considered part of the labor force. There are also differences between the Labor Department's definition of unemployment and state requirements for benefits. Policymakers have noted the differing impact. "The rise in joblessness has been especially severe for lower wage workers, for women, and for African Americans and Hispanics," Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said at a news conference in late July. "This reversal of economic fortune has upended many lives and created great uncertainty about the future." For some workers, securing a position has meant accepting lower pay. When the pandemic hit, David Espy was a safety manager overseeing the construction of a resort hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida. But in mid March, when virus related shutdowns forced entertainment venues to close, Mr. Espy lost his job. After being unemployed for one month, Mr. Espy, 59, was hired by a consulting company called Safety, Solutions and Supply. Before the pandemic, he was making 125,000 a year. Now, he earns 75,000. The new job does not pay him enough to cover his expenses, including two car loans and the mortgage on his house in Valrico, Fla., where he lives with his wife and a 20 year old son. To make ends meet, he is spending 2,000 of his savings each month. Even as some employers recall laid off workers, others are concluding they can no longer stay in business. That has caused financial and emotional damage for owners and employees alike. For Jackie Anscher, the closing of the boutique fitness studio where she taught spinning classes in Long Beach, N.Y., until March meant more than the loss of a job. It was the end of something she was passionate about and halted the deep connections she had built with clients. "I miss it like I've lost a limb," she said. "What started as an exercise class encompassed so much more. I'm a therapist on a bike. I'm sure a lot of people can relate to the emotional loss." Ms. Anscher, who taught eight to 10 classes a week, said her financial situation was stable because of her husband's job. But there is nowhere to go to keep teaching as gyms remain closed. "This was a forced retirement," Ms. Anscher, 58, said. "I'm not ready to retire. I'm waiting to see how I can pick up the pieces." Stephanie Horowitz, the studio's owner, didn't think the moratorium on classes would be the end of her business, Ocean Ride, when it was imposed in March. She offered spinning classes over the internet, she said, "but it never took off the way we needed it to." By mid July, the financial drain was too great, and she decided to shut down after seven years. Some of the bikes have been sold, and Ms. Horowitz has been cleaning out the space on the South Shore of Long Island, a few blocks from the Atlantic. Seven part time workers, including Ms. Anscher, have lost their jobs. "We were a staple in the community, and we had a good run," Ms. Horowitz, 40, said. "It's emotional. We had just bought new bikes last year. Who knows what the future holds for any of us?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
John D. Roberts, an organic chemist who pioneered the use of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and other techniques to reveal the structures of molecules and the dance of atoms as they rearrange in chemical reactions, died on Oct. 29 at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 98. The cause was a stroke, his daughter, Anne, said. In the 1950s, Dr. Roberts played a crucial role in the explosive growth of physical organic chemistry, a field that studies the reactivity of biological compounds. One notable contribution was in popularizing nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which was developed by physicists, to understand chemical structures and reaction mechanisms. "This was a real revolution for organic chemists at the time," said Peter B. Dervan, a professor of chemistry at Caltech, where Dr. Roberts worked for more than 60 years. "Jack saw the potential use of this spectroscopy and mastered it, and then, by publishing papers in this area, convinced other organic chemists that this was a powerful tool." Dr. Roberts was a leader in understanding how organic reactions occurred, and he shared his techniques with the scientific community. "He helped enable the development of everything that involves organic compounds," said George M. Whitesides, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University who received his Ph.D. under Dr. Roberts in 1964. "So, if you eat it, take it as a drug, use it in your clothes all that stuff uses techniques that he didn't necessarily develop, but that he taught to the chemical community." In addition to spectroscopy, Dr. Roberts helped popularize the use of isotopes as tracers to monitor where atoms move during chemical reactions. Isotopes are forms of an element that have different atomic masses but retain similar chemical properties. Dr. Roberts saw their usefulness as labels to help organic chemists decipher the short lived intermediaries between starting material and product. "He worked out this quite mysterious and marvelous way of looking at things that are so ephemeral that you can't see them," Dr. Whitesides said. "It's envisioning the invisible." Dr. Roberts also wrote about molecular orbital theory, which is one of the fundamental concepts within organic chemistry used for predicting where electrons in a molecule go. "Jack is an absolute supreme educator," said Jacqueline K. Barton, who leads the chemistry department at Caltech. "He didn't come up with molecular orbital theory, but he could beautifully apply it, and explain it and teach us all about it." John Dombrowski Roberts was born on June 8, 1918, in Los Angeles. As a teenager he frequented science open houses at Caltech, and was fascinated by the chemistry experiments and electrical machines that shot sparks and blew up blocks of wood. He took his love for chemistry to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he completed his undergraduate degree in 1941 and received a doctorate in 1944. In 1945, he went to Harvard to begin a postdoctoral program, and then in 1946, he became a professor at M.I.T. Around this time, Dr. Roberts performed perhaps his most famous experiment, which produced the short lived molecule benzyne, a form of the molecule benzene that contained a triple bond, which people at one time did not think could exist. He left that position in 1953 to return to California for a job at Caltech, where Linus Pauling, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize twice, was the chemistry division chairman. At Caltech, Dr. Roberts persuaded Dr. Pauling and the university's board to buy a nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy machine, which was the first sold to a university. Dr. Roberts won a number of awards for his contributions to chemistry, including the Priestley Medal in 1987 and the National Medal of Science in 1990. He wrote his autobiography, "The Right Place at the Right Time," in 1990. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2008 and a fellow of the American Chemical Society in 2009. Besides his daughter, Anne, he is survived by three sons, Donald, John and Allen; nine grandchildren; and one great grandchild. His wife of 68 years, Edith, died in 2010. Dr. Roberts was well regarded as a mentor to budding chemists, especially to women. When he was offered a position at Caltech in 1953, one of his graduate students, Dorothy Semenow, presented a problem. At that time, Caltech did not admit women, and there was fierce controversy over whether to let her in. But Dr. Roberts would not take the position without her. "He spearheaded the campaign to get Caltech to admit women," Dr. Semenow said. "He and Linus Pauling were very courageous in doing that." In recent years, Dr. Roberts said that bringing Dr. Semenow with him to Caltech was "clearly the best thing I have done at Caltech in the 60 years I have been here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The wristbands at the Bafta tea on Saturday were black, which these days seems terribly significant. The party, sponsored by the British film and TV academy, is held every year at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills the day before the Golden Globes, and it's an altogether dignified affair, with cucumber sandwiches, famous people, and of course lots and lots of tea. ICYMI, actresses and gents plan to wear black to the Globes to protest sexual misconduct, and as a young man signing people into the tea confirmed, the wrist bands were making a statement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It is a rare unifying moment. Hospitals, doctors, health insurers and some consumer groups, with few exceptions, are speaking with one voice and urging significant changes to the Republican health care legislation that passed the House on Thursday. The bill's impact is wide ranging, potentially affecting not only the millions who could lose coverage through deep cuts in Medicaid or no longer be able to afford to buy coverage in the state marketplaces. With states allowed to seek waivers from providing certain benefits, employers big and small could scale back what they pay for each year or reimpose lifetime limits on coverage. In particular, small businesses, some of which were strongly opposed to the Affordable Care Act, could be free to drop coverage with no penalty. The prospect of millions of people unable to afford coverage led to an outcry from the health care industry as well as consumer groups. They found an uncommon ally in some insurers, who rely heavily on Medicaid and Medicare as mainstays of their business and hope the Senate will be more receptive to their concerns. "The American Health Care Act needs important improvements to better protect low and moderate income families who rely on Medicaid or buy their own coverage," Marilyn B. Tavenner, the chief executive of America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's trade group, said in a strongly worded statement. Others were even more direct about the effects the bill would have, not only on patients but also on the industry. "To me, this is not a reform," said Michael J. Dowling, the chief executive of Northwell Health, a large health system in New York. "This is just a debacle." Hospitals that serve low income patients "will just be drowning completely when this happens," Mr. Dowling said, noting that more people would become uninsured at the same time that government payments to cover their costs were reduced. In contrast to hospital and doctor groups, insurers had largely remained silent about their reservations, perhaps in the hopes of bartering their low profile in exchange for assurances that billions of dollars in subsidies for low income coverage would continue. The White House and Congress have gone back and forth about their willingness to pay for the subsidies, prompting anxiety among some companies. Several, including Anthem, have threatened to sharply raise their prices or leave markets altogether without the funding. After the House passed the bill on Thursday, the industry's two major trade groups urged lawmakers to increase the tax credits available to help people pay for coverage, and to adjust them to assist those who are older, live in high cost areas or have lower incomes. But the overriding concern for insurers, many workers and officials throughout the health care systems in many states is the broad reductions proposed for Medicaid. Even for insurers that have largely abandoned the individual market, like UnitedHealth Group and Aetna, a substantial portion of their business is providing coverage under Medicaid. The same is true for many local nonprofit plans, said Ceci Connolly, the chief executive of the Alliance of Community Health Plans. Employers and others said they were also concerned about the effects on freelancers, who do not have a traditional employer but are self employed or contract workers in the so called gig economy. Depending on their income, those workers have shuttled between Medicaid and the individual insurance market under the federal health care law, which offered a greater level of stability, said Nell Abernathy, vice president for research and policy at the Roosevelt Institute, a left leaning economic research organization. "A huge swath of Americans are in insecure work arrangements," she said. "This repeals that level of security, which was not perfect, but it was a step in the right direction." Small businesses, which were sharply divided over the original law, remained mixed in their response to the Republican bill, and there seemed little doubt that some companies would drop coverage in the absence of any penalty. The National Federation of Independent Business, which opposed the Affordable Care Act, said the House legislation was "a crucial first step toward health care reform." The Main Street Alliance, a group of small business owners that supported the Affordable Care Act, said four million small business owners, employees and self employed entrepreneurs had gained insurance under the law, and that an additional six million small business workers had signed up for Medicaid through the law's expansion. "This bill leaves small business owners in a terrible position, one they were all too familiar with before the A.C.A.: unable to afford premium hikes year to year, unsure their employees will be healthy and able to work, and uncertain of the future of their businesses," said Amanda Ballantyne, national director of the Main Street Alliance. The recent amendments to the bill also raised questions about coverage for people with pre existing medical conditions, which has become an emotional flash point for opposition. The bill would allow states to waive some of the current rules banning insurers from charging sick people more or excluding certain benefits, and those waivers could have broad effects if employers are no longer required to provide comprehensive coverage. Before the Affordable Care Act, many employers capped how much they would pay for care over a person's lifetime at 2 million, said Tracy Watts, a senior partner at Mercer, a benefits consultant. While it is unclear what states would allow under a waiver or when such waivers would go into effect, employers could revisit the limits and drop types of benefits if a state deemed them nonessential. A January survey of 666 employers by Willis Towers Watson, a benefits consultant, found that while many employers planned to keep most of the mandatory benefits, a significant minority were already mulling changes. While half indicated that they were unlikely to reinstate lifetime limits, 15 percent said they would consider doing that. And employer groups generally favored provisions of the bill that would reduce taxes, particularly the so called Cadillac tax on high cost health plans, which was delayed for several years. Employers favor its overall repeal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Moments after parking our car and loading into a compact, one propeller bush plane, my three friends and I were looking down at a lush boreal landscape, newly green after the long winter. The view of soft, wooded peaks interspersed with creeks and lakes extended as far as we could see, evoking the northern territories of Canada or Alaska. But what lay below us was closer to home: the heart of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, its vast wooded expanse concealing the isolated campsite where we would ensconce ourselves. The campsites they service cannot be formally reserved and are available for free on a first come first served basis, but the pilots keep a diligent calendar of which ones are open. In years past, many of the pilots have even helped the state steward the campsites, flying in supplies and occasionally helping stock certain varieties of hatchery raised fish ahead of the fishing season. They also supply paddles and life jackets for those who want to use the canoes that are stashed in the various camping areas, a practice that is officially frowned on by the park. That the four of us could drive from our scattered homes and have an entire lake to ourselves is a testament to the remarkable success of New York state's preservation movement. Ironically, though, the efforts that have made this singular experience possible have also taken a toll on the floatplane pilots who enable people like us to disconnect from the world. Before 1972, commercial floatplanes were allowed to land on 57 bodies of water across the region, offering a wealth of options for visitors looking for solitude. Since then, the state has reclassified broad tracts in the park as "wilderness," a designation that prohibits the presence of motorized vehicles. Today, floatplanes are permitted on just 15 lakes and ponds in sections of the preserve designated as "wild forest," and only six fall in the immediate vicinity of Long Lake. Days before our flight, our pilot pointed us toward Pine Lake, a small, forked pool in a newly incorporated section of the park that the state acquired in 2013. The parcel of land that encompasses Pine Lake was previously owned by the paper company Finch, Pruyn, once the largest private landowner in New York state. But today, gaps and logging roads where timber was harvested years ago have mostly filled in, leaving seamless stands of old, soaring trees, resplendently reflected in the water. Our campsite fell just east of Raquette Lake, around which the titans of the Gilded Age once built sprawling summer estates at the turn of the century. Camp Uncas, once owned by J.P. Morgan, and Great Camp Sagamore, the former stamping grounds of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt and his relatives, are both situated on their own small lakes some 20 miles away, nearly indistinguishable from the lake we set up camp on. Our much humbler site was also alongside the Cedar River, which we could hear flowing through gentle, nearby rapids before the river bends east and empties into the Hudson four miles downstream. But these momentary nuisances are offset by the divine things, like the calls of loons and hoot owls we heard at nightfall, and the perfect clarity of the night sky, unspoiled by artificial light pollution. These conditions only improve deeper into the summer and autumn, as the water warms up enough to swim and the northern foliage takes on early fall hues. Small natural mysteries are always a source of intrigue as well. Besides the birds, each evening after dark we heard a sequence of heavy splashes from the water that resonated like giants' steps or small boulders falling from above, often coming too close for comfort. It wasn't until we arrived back in town and talked to locals that we discovered the origin of the sounds: slaps of a beaver's tail. Not only does the floatplane open up isolated sites that often don't connect to established hiking trails, but it also makes the experience feasible for almost any traveler. Other than the tediousness of getting out of the plane, which sometimes involves wading to shore, it is a straightforward journey doable for most people of any age. And while the environs are primitive, the usual restraints campers face with regard to the weight and size of their gear don't apply when flying in. On my first trip by floatplane six summers ago, my father brought a cooler stocked with butter and pancake makings, intent on recreating a boyhood memory of watching a more fortunate family indulge in flapjacks and maple syrup in the Allagash wilderness in Maine. Over the years, my experiences with cooking have grown more ambitious. This year, my friends and I armed ourselves with a variety of heavy equipment such as a steel fire top grill and a cast iron pan, things that minimalists might consider extravagant, but that open all sorts of culinary possibilities. But even with the freedom to attempt wilder feats of campfire gastronomy, we opted for a vegetarian menu of egg and potato scrambles, grilled cheese sandwiches, three bean chili, and roasted vegetables, followed by beers and spirits after dinner. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"I am a man of honor," Tommaso Buscetta insists. It's a familiar enough assertion for a man in his profession he describes himself as a "simple soldier" in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and one that Mafia movie fans have heard many times before. The context this time is a little different, though, since Buscetta (who goes by the nickname Masino) invokes his honor to justify his betrayal of the organization he had loyally served for his whole adult life. No omerta for him. Buscetta, the real life subject of Marco Bellocchio's tremendous and meticulous new film, turned on his former colleagues in the 1980s, testifying against them first in interviews with the Italian judge and prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and later in open court. "The Traitor," anchored by Pierfrancesco Favino's shrewd, subtle and volcanic lead performance, is less an exploration of the man's motives than a chronicle of his actions. Bellocchio's approach to the story is at once coolly objective the movie is part biopic, part courtroom procedural and almost feverishly intense. He has a historian's analytical detachment, a novelist's compassion for his characters and a citizen's outrage at the cruelty and corruption that have festered in his country for so long. Now 80, with a career stretching back to the mid 1960s, Bellocchio has long been preoccupied with the endless, tumultuous, tragicomic question of Italian identity. The dialectic of loyalty and betrayal within families, local communities, political movements, subcultures and the nation itself is his great theme, and Masino Buscetta supplies him an aptly contradictory hero. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A creator of the iPhone called the device "addictive." A Twitter founder said the "internet is broken." An early Facebook investor raised questions about the social network's impact on children's brains. Now, two of the biggest investors on Wall Street have asked Apple to study the health effects of its products and to make it easier for parents to limit their children's use of iPhones and iPads. Once uncritically hailed for their innovation and economic success, Silicon Valley companies are under fire from all sides, facing calls to take more responsibility for their role in everything from election meddling and hate speech to physical health and internet addiction. "Companies have a role to play in helping to address these issues," said Barry Rosenstein, managing partner of Jana Partners, an investment firm that wrote an open letter to Apple this weekend pushing it to look at its products' health effects, especially on children. "As more and more founders of the biggest tech companies are acknowledging today, the days of just throwing technology out there and washing your hands of the potential impact are over." The backlash against big tech has been growing for months. Facebook and Twitter are under scrutiny for their roles in enabling Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and for facilitating abusive behavior. Google was hit with a record antitrust fine in Europe for improperly exploiting its market power. But until now, Apple had escaped largely unscathed, and concerns about the deleterious effects of excessive technology use have not been among the most pressing matters for Silicon Valley executives. Jana, an activist hedge fund, wrote its letter with Calstrs, the California State Teachers' Retirement System, which manages the pensions of California's public school teachers. When such investors pressure companies to change their behavior, it is typically with the goal of lifting a sagging stock price. In this case, Jana and Calstrs said they were trying to raise awareness about an issue they cared deeply about, adding that if Apple was proactive about making changes, it could help the business. "We believe the long term health of its youngest customers and the health of society, our economy and the company itself are inextricably linked," the investors said in the letter. Jana, which is often vilified for its aggressive focus on short term profits, also said it would be raising a fund this year that would engage in more such campaigns, an effort that could help soften its image. Whatever the motivations, the two large investors are tapping into the growing anxiety among parents about their children's preoccupation with devices, at the expense of activities like reading and sports. "Over the past 10 years, there's been a bottom up backlash," said Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other." "You see it in things like people not sending their kids to schools that use iPads, and kids telling their parents to put their phones down." For years, researchers have been sounding the alarm over the ubiquity of mobile phones and social media. A 2015 study by Common Sense Media, a research group that studies technology use, found that more than half of teenagers spent upward of four hours a day looking at screens, and that for a quarter of teenagers, the figure was more than eight hours. In another survey, in 2016, half the teenagers said they felt addicted to their mobile devices. "These things can be incredibly addictive," said Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who helped create the iPod and iPhone. "It's amazing, but there are a lot of unintended consequences." A growing roster of prominent technology executives have grown worried about the creations that brought them fame and fortune. Sean Parker, an early investor in Facebook, reflected on the sprawling influence of the social network. "It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other," he said in an interview with Axios in November. "It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains." Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, last year lamented the degree to which the messaging service had become a bastion for hateful speech. "The internet is broken," he said. Chamath Palihapitiya, an early Facebook executive and the chief executive of Social Capital, a venture capital firm, said in November that he felt "tremendous guilt" about his role in building the social network. "The short term, dopamine driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works," he said. "No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. And it's not an American problem. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem." By going after Apple, Jana and Calstrs, which together own about 2 billion worth of the company's stock, have selected the tech giant that is perhaps least dependent on its users' time. Because Apple makes most of its money selling hardware, rather than through digital advertising, it theoretically could afford to encourage its users to spend less time with its products. "Apple's business model is not predicated on excessive use of your products," Jana and Calstrs said in their letter to the company. For this reason, said Ms. Turkle, the M.I.T. professor, "it turns out that Apple is the company best positioned to act." In a statement, Apple said that the parental controls already on its devices "lead the industry" and that "we think deeply about how our products are used and the impact they have on users and the people around them." "We take this responsibility very seriously," the statement continued, "and we are committed to meeting and exceeding our customers' expectations, especially when it comes to protecting kids." Fears about technology addiction are not new. The BlackBerry, an early smartphone, was nicknamed "CrackBerry." Adam Alter, a social psychologist and the author of "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked," documents instances of internet addiction spanning the globe. But some tech executives now acknowledge that far from being an accident, their products were designed to be addictive. Mr. Parker said that when Facebook was getting started, the thought process was about "how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" Mr. Palihapitiya said as Facebook was rapidly growing, "in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds, we kind of knew something bad could happen." Mr. Fadell said that at the time Apple was designing the iPhone, "we had no idea this was going to happen." But, he added, people today are simply spending too much time looking at their phones. "Now it needs to be addressed," he said. "It's been 10 years in the making." Even Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook and usually a staunch defender of his company's influence, has appeared more reflective in recent days. "The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do whether it's protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent," he said in a Facebook post last week. "My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Donatella Versace has found her new Anthony Vaccarello which is to say, her new designer for Versus Versace, the younger, hipper Versace sibling line that has been without a creative director since Mr. Vaccarello resigned to take the top job at Yves Saint Laurent this year. Except her new designer is not, actually, a designer. He is a 23 year old R B singer with a bad boy reputation, a former member of one of the biggest pop bands of the 21st century, a social media magnet with more than 35 million followers on Twitter and Instagram combined and the boyfriend of a very famous model, Gigi Hadid. "Versus is the rock and roll soul of the Versace family and has always been associated with music," Ms. Versace said during an interview backstage after the recent Versus Versace show during London Fashion Week. "Everyone from the Foo Fighters to Lenny Kravitz has played at the shows, and it is all about rebellion. For me, Zayn was the perfect fit." Ms. Versace added that she first met Mr. Malik alongside his former One Direction bandmate, Harry Styles, several years ago and that his quiet, mysterious demeanor had immediately intrigued her. "That said, I was not exactly a fan of that band," she continued, wrinkling her nose in disdain. "But then I met him again when he started to date Gigi, who I work with all the time. And he impressed me very much he was so mature, so thoughtful, treated her like such a gentleman. They are very nice young people, a lovely couple, in fact. And then he told me how much he loved fashion. It was then I knew he was the right face for what I had in mind. "Many celebrities do clothing lines that just aren't relevant," Ms. Versace said with a grin. "This one? It will be. He's smart to do it with me." Together Ms. Versace and Mr. Malik will design Zayn X Versus, a capsule collection of men's and women's clothing that will be presented to buyers and the media in the spring and then, in May, will be available in Versus stores and online. Mr. Malik, who wore a Versace robotlike arm sheath to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute ball in May and introduced a 23 piece streetwear line under his own name earlier this year, will also become the face of Versus in advertising campaigns. Not that Mr. Malik was anywhere to be seen when reporters, including this one, tried to talk to him about the project after the brand's show during London Fashion Week last month. Mr. Malik, who had spent the evening in the front row holding hands with Ms. Hadid, had been scheduled for a batch of top secret interviews, once the crowds melted away. But he, too, vanished, without warning nor a clue to his whereabouts, sending a small army of sleek black clad publicists into a panicked tailspin. Ms. Versace, for her part, seemed nonplused as she sipped a mineral water backstage and greeted well wishers, though the no show was in keeping with the vision she has always had for her younger, more streetwise fashion brand. "Versus is everything that the Versace line is not. It is loud, it is rebellious I don't want shoppers buying both from Versus and Versace. The houses have different souls," Ms. Versace said. "I wanted Zayn because he can help me talk to his followers. I want to listen to their language. I want to learn more about them, what they think and what they like. They are a new generation that without working with someone like Zayn, I will never reach." For his part, the elusive Mr. Malik agreed, at least via an email earlier this week. "I think Versus has always been a very cool brand and is a great brand for me and for people in my generation," Mr. Malik wrote. "I've always wanted to design clothes and there's no brand I'd rather design for than Versus. I like to learn about things I'm interested in and I enjoy being around creative people so I think it will be cool. The bonus is that I get to collaborate with Donatella, whom I love and admire. I know we'll create something amazing." In the difficult trading climate that many luxury brands have been facing recently, Versus Versace has proved a resilient performer; in the 12 months to March this year, the group announced that retail revenue from sales of the secondary line had doubled, just as it had the period before. Clearly Ms. Versace, whose daughter, Allegra, also works on the Versus brand, has her eyes on further growth fueled by the millennial consumer. "This isn't just a breathing season this is the beginning of a whole new era for Versus," she said, adding that a percentage of the proceeds generated by the partnership with Mr. Malik would be donated to charity. "Zayn is clearly our plan for now. But I think going forward I will keep doing collaborations with other musicians and rock stars as guest designers. It will be like our version of taking the brand on tour." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
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