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"Star Trek: Lower Decks," the latest "Trek" extension from CBS All Access (following "Discovery" and "Picard"), goes where no series in the franchise has gone before, at least not intentionally: full time laughs. The "Trek" shows have had their playful elements from the start. But when your primary source of humor over the years has been making fun of Vulcans or androids who have no sense of humor well, you see the issue. "Lower Decks," whose 10 episodes appear weekly beginning Thursday, also stands out for being animated, but that's not a first. The earliest "Star Trek" spinoff, back in 1973, was "Star Trek: The Animated Series," a straightforward continuation of the original for which most of its cast supplied voices. (Its two seasons are also available from All Access.) The new show goes its own way, in keeping with the somewhat freewheeling vibe the television side of the franchise has exhibited under the supervision of Alex Kurtzman. Developed by Mike McMahan, a specialist in animated, adult oriented science fiction comedy he was a creator of Hulu's "Solar Opposites" and an executive producer of the category's ne plus ultra, "Rick and Morty" it's about half "Star Trek" fan service and half smutty workplace sitcom. Apparently, that's not an easy formula. Through four episodes, "Lower Decks" feels caught in between. It's a smooth and zippy package, but it doesn't register very strongly as either a geekfest or a transgressive satire. Which is another way of saying it's not all that funny. Wherever it's going, it's not doing it very boldly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"The Winter's Tale," one of Shakespeare's final works, is an odd play: a devastating portrait of jealousy that ends in redemption, and a changeling's tale that moves from joy to tragedy and back again. Over the course of its five acts, oracles are ignored and then fulfilled; a man is mauled by a bear; and a statue comes to life. Not an obvious choice for a new ballet. But then again, epic emotions and magical goings on are not so rare in dance. Perhaps this affinity for magic is what persuaded Christopher Wheeldon that it might be worth a try. His three act version, created for the Royal Ballet in 2014 as a co production with the National Ballet of Canada, is being brought to New York by that Canadian company as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Alastair Macaulay's review of the National Ballet of Canada's performance in January Mr. Wheeldon's adaptation involved some serious pruning, yet it hews surprisingly close to the play's themes. Strangely enough, the translation from words to movement has made tricky passages easier to swallow, particularly the magical ending. As the ballet opens, we see a prologue in which two young princes, Polixenes of Bohemia and Leontes of Sicilia, play together. Soon, they are replaced by their older selves, now kings of their countries. One of them (Leontes) meets a girl (Hermione); they get married. All this takes less than a minute. Sometimes, pantomime can be more efficient than words. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
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. 'A CHORUS LINE' at New York City Center (Nov. 14 18). A singular sensation is back for just a few nights. For the annual Encores! gala presentation, the director Bob Avian and the choreographer Baayork Lee offer this high kicking, low varnish look at auditions for a Broadway dance corps. The revival stars the marvelous dancer Tony Yazbeck as the director Zach. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org 'HYPE MAN: A BREAK BEAT PLAY' at the Flea Theater (previews start on Nov. 10; opens on Nov. 20). In Idris Goodwin's play, racial injustice pushes a warm up guy center stage. Verb, who is black, works as a hype man for the white rapper Pinnacle. When Verb wants to take their music in a more political direction, Pinnacle resists. Kristan Seemel and Niegel Smith direct, with members of the Flea Theater's resident company, the Bats, starring. 866 811 4111, theflea.org 'NETWORK' at the Belasco Theater (previews start on Nov. 10, opens on Dec. 6). The suave Belgian director Ivo van Hove has never seemed mad as hell, but he is taking an adaptation of the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film to Broadway. When Ben Brantley saw the production in London last fall, he called it a "a bravura exercise in torturously applied pressure." Bryan Cranston, "in a state of radioactive meltdown," stars as the newscaster Howard Beale. 212 239 6200, networkbroadway.com 'THE OTHER JOSH COHEN' at the Westside Theater (in previews; opens on Nov. 12). Hello again. In this show by Steve Rosen and David Rossmer, a lovable schlub has his heart broken and his apartment burgled. But with the aid of one Neil Diamond CD, his life might be looking up. When the production premiered in 2012, The New York Times described it as "an endearing and consistently funny crowd pleaser." Hunter Foster directs the revival. 212 239 6200, otherjoshcohen.com 'THE PROM' at the Longacre Theater (in previews; opens on Nov. 15). When one door closes, the double doors to a high school open. In this musical comedy from Bob Martin ("The Drowsy Chaperone") and Chad Beguelin ("Elf"), an out of work Broadway troupe descends on an all American town to support a teenage girl who wants to pin a corsage on her girlfriend. Casey Nicholaw directs a cast that includes Beth Leavel, Brooks Ashmanskas and Christopher Sieber. Let's hope not all the dances are slow. 212 239 6200, theprommusical.com 'THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI' at Classic Stage Company (in previews; opens on Nov. 14). It's unfortunate that Bertolt Brecht's 1941 parable on fascism always feels relevant. It's luckier that in this revival the 1930s gangster and cauliflower enthusiast Arturo Ui will be played by Raul Esparza. Classic Stage Company's production, directed by John Doyle, also stars Elizabeth A. Davis. 866 811 4111, classicstage.org 'THOM PAIN (BASED ON NOTHING)' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (in previews; opens on Nov. 11). Michael C. Hall, resurrected from "Lazarus," stars in Will Eno's philosophic dazzler, an existentialist one man show that throws words around like so much confetti. When the play debuted in 2005, The Times said it "is as unassuming in its means as it is astonishing in its impact." Oliver Butler directs. 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'WILD GOOSE DREAMS' at the Public Theater (in previews; opens on Nov. 14). In Hansol Jung's play, a North Korean defector and a South Korean father separated from his family, try to connect, first online and then, with emotions rather than emojis, in real life. Under Leigh Silverman's direction, the cast, portraying humans and avatars, includes Peter Kim, Michelle Krusiec and Francis Jue. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'BERNHARDT/HAMLET' at the American Airlines Theater (closes on Nov. 18). Good night, sweet prince. In Theresa Rebeck's semi biographical play, Janet McTeer gives her final performances as the tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt, taking on one of the greatest challenges of her career: that melancholy Dane. The play, according to Jesse Green, "is so clever it uplifts, so timely it hurts." 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'OKLAHOMA' at St. Ann's Warehouse (closes on Nov. 11). Your honey lamb and you have only a few more chances to see Daniel Fish's radical and immersive reimagining of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. When Ben Brantley and Jesse Green reviewed it, both gave it a critic's pick, with Green writing that for the most part Fish "is audacious in ways that feel dead on and delightful." 718 254 8779, stannswarehouse.org 'RAGS PARKLAND SINGS THE SONGS OF THE FUTURE' at Ars Nova (closes on Nov. 10). A hard travelin' bard departs our neck of the solar system. In this inventive, poignant folk opera, written and performed by Andrew R. Butler, Rags appears onstage at an underground club on Earth and tells us, wrenchingly, about America 250 years from now. Directed by Jordan Fein, this musical is both a stealthily political show and an outright toe tapper. 212 352 3101, arsnovanyc.com 'SAKINA'S RESTAURANT' at the Minetta Lane Theater (closes on Nov. 11). Get your orders in now. Audible's revival of Aasif Mandvi's one man, many entree show about a family run Indian restaurant, which first premiered 20 years ago, finishes its run. "At its funniest, which is often also its most uncomfortable, it has gained a new resonance," Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote of Kimberly Senior's production. 800 982 2787, sakinasrestaurantplay.com 'UNCLE VANYA' at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College (closes on Nov. 18). Richard Nelson's hushed staging of Chekhov's tragicomedy, in a new translation by Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, empties its samovar. Ben Brantley wrote that the production, which features Jay O. Sanders in the title role, "is as naked and fully human an 'Uncle Vanya' as we're likely to see." 212 772 4448, hunter.cuny.edu/kayeplayhouse/tickets | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The latest in a flurry of sales at the Greenwich Lane, an almost blocklong condominium complex on the site of the former St. Vincent's Hospital campus in the West Village, was filed with the city this past week a spacious duplex penthouse with a private rooftop terrace that sold for 25,489,849.99 and was the most expensive closed sale, according to public records. The purchase of the sponsor apartment on the ninth and 10th floors marked the fourth recorded transaction at 145 West 11th Street, off Seventh Avenue. The red brick and limestone apartment building is the first of five to be completed in the 200 unit project, which also includes five separate townhouses, developed by the Rudin family and Global Holdings. FXFowle, the architect, preserved some of the red brick facades from the original hospital campus to better assimilate into the neighborhood within the Greenwich Village Historic District. Thomas O'Brien of Aero Studios was the interior designer, while the landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg and Partners created the formal internal garden, which features a reflecting pool. "We're about 90 percent sold," said Dan Tubb, a sales director for the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, which is handling sales, "so that leaves us with less than 20 units remaining." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Long awaited improvements in insurance coverage for mental conditions and addictions are expected to become more widely available this year as a result of two major steps that the Obama administration has taken. The president's signature Affordable Care Act includes mental health care and substance abuse treatment among its 10 "essential" benefits, which means plans sold on the public health care exchanges must include coverage. In addition, rules to fully carry out an older law the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 were issued in November, after a long delay. The parity law says that when health insurance plans provide coverage for mental ailments, it must be comparable to coverage for physical ailments. For instance, plans cannot set higher deductibles or charge higher co payments for mental health visits than for medical visits, and cannot set more restrictive limits on the number of visits allowed. While many plans are already complying with certain aspects of parity, the final rules fill in gaps about how the law must be applied, advocates say. For instance, plans cannot limit mental health care to a specific geographic region, if they do not do so for physical illnesses. And the rules clarify that the law also applies to "intermediate" treatment options for mental health and addiction disorders, like residential treatment or intensive outpatient therapy. Insurance plans also must be consistent when deciding whether treatment for physical or mental ailments is medically necessary, and they cannot make getting prior approval for inpatient mental health treatment more difficult than that for admission to an acute care hospital, said Andrew Sperling, director of federal legislative advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They must also let patients and doctors know what criteria are used to make those decisions, which can be helpful if coverage is denied and a patient wants to file an appeal. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times In the past, when health plans offered mental health coverage, it was often at less generous levels than benefits for medical care, said Debbie Plotnick, senior director of state policy at Mental Health America, an advocacy group. "All these discriminatory practices kept people from getting mental health care, and they are no longer allowed under the parity law," she said. Still, consumers will have to take time to understand details of their health coverage, so they can raise questions if they think their plans do not follow the rules, said Carol McDaid, a lobbyist specializing in behavioral health issues. "Consumers have to know what their rights and benefits are," she said. Expanding insurance coverage does not necessarily mean everyone who needs care can easily find it. Many office based psychiatrists, for instance, do not accept insurance, partly because reimbursement for services has been inadequate. A study published in December in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that only about half of psychiatrists accept private insurance. It's also still unclear just how the parity rules apply to some coverage under Medicaid, the federal state health plan for low income people; further guidance is expected on that, advocates say. (The parity law does not apply to Medicare, the federal health plan for people 65 and older. But payment for psychological services under Medicare is now comparable to that for medical services, under the requirements of a different law.) Here are some questions to consider: What should I look for when evaluating a plan's mental health benefits? Advocates say one of the most important features to consider is a plan's network of mental health professionals. Check to see if providers are in your area; otherwise, you may pay higher fees for seeing an out of network therapist. What if my health plan is unfairly restricting mental health benefits, or has denied my claim? The Parity Implementation Coalition, formed to promote compliance with the law, offers a tool kit to help you file an appeal, at parityispersonal.org. Steps beyond an appeal with your insurer depend on what type of plan you have. For instance, private companies that buy insurance for their employees, rather than paying claims directly, are considered "insured" and generally are regulated by state insurance departments. But if your company is "self funded" and pays health claims directly, your appeal most likely would be handled by the federal Labor Department. Coverage through state or local governments, meanwhile, may be regulated by the federal Health and Human Services Department. If you don't know what kind of plan you have, call your plan administrator and ask. What if I can't find a therapist who accepts my insurance? Contact your county behavioral health department, which coordinates mental health care and can help you find affordable treatment. The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration also offers a service locater, samhsa.gov/treatment/index.aspx on its website. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The Justice Department ordered a digital news network based in the United States and owned by Al Jazeera, the media company backed by the royal family of Qatar, to register as a foreign agent, surprising a high level delegation from Doha just as officials from the two nations met to strengthen diplomatic and economic alliances. Al Jazeera suggested the move was part of a separate deal, signed on Tuesday and brokered by the Trump administration, in which the United Arab Emirates, a Qatari rival, normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. The Emirates ambassador to the United States said that was not true. In a letter dated Monday that was obtained by The New York Times, the Justice Department said that AJ , a network that primarily produces short videos for social media in English as well as Arabic, French and Spanish, engages in "political activities" on behalf of Qatar's government and should therefore be subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Qatar, the letter said, provides the network's funding and appoints its board of directors. "Journalism designed to influence American perceptions of a domestic policy issue or a foreign nation's activities or its leadership qualifies as 'political activities' under the statutory definition," said the letter, which was signed by Jay I. Bratt, the chief of the Justice Department's counterintelligence division, "even," the letter added, "if it views itself as 'balanced.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Emma Chamberlain, 18, is the funniest person on YouTube. What does she do? So far the content of her videos has not been the point: She makes cupcakes, or tries her hand at sewing. Like Phoebe Waller Bridge of "Fleabag," an artist close to twice her age, she interrupts the proceedings constantly to speak to her audience. That's where her videos actually happen. Watch a video from 2018 called "MY BIRTHDAY IS RUINED." It has no introduction, just Chamberlain, talking, pointing to the recipe pages she has taped to a cabinet. "Can you believe I literally printed out the recipe, like we're in literally like the Middle Ages, using a printer?" she says. She claps her hands, apparently hurting herself. The video freezes and text appears: "clapped too hard :/" Growing up now means that you watch a lot of videos, and make them as well. Chamberlain filmed videos for school in religion and math classes, videos were required and for fun. During her sophomore year of high school, a few of Chamberlain's friends began combing SoundCloud for trap rap remixes of Christmas music. They would find the funniest song they could and make up a jokey dance routine for it and film it. Chamberlain would edit videos during fourth period and post them on a private Instagram. Her instinctual editing style involved zooming, adding text to the screen and pausing to point out the best parts. "I felt like that made my friends and I laugh a lot more when I was emphasizing these things," she said. "Rather than us just having to catch it while watching and then it doesn't really land as much because most people aren't going to notice the funny little things that I would notice." She started filming herself right when she learned that the test had been deleted. She was sobbing. She said it was one of the worst moments of her life. She reacted by turning a camera on. "When something's really significant, whether it's good, bad, ugly, I like being able to look back at a moment in time that was high emotion," she said. "Whenever I'm crying I like, weirdly, to document it. Every time I cry I always take one photo of myself afterwards because I like to look back and think 'Remember when I was so upset about X, Y and Z? Look at me now I don't care about that anymore!'" It's been two years. Chamberlain now has 8 million YouTube followers. She brought in the editing tricks that first set her friends and family rolling on the floor, but now they take longer to perfect. Chamberlain edits each video she makes for between 20 and 30 hours, often at stretches of 10 or 15 hours at a time. Her goal is to be funny, to keep people watching. It's as if the comic value of each video is inversely proportional to how little humor she experiences while making it. During her marathon editing sessions, she said, she laughs for "maybe, maybe 10 seconds max." "It's almost like when you're doing your homework, you're halfway through a math work sheet, you're really in it right there. You can't hear anything, you can't see anything," she said. "Or if you're watching a movie and you're so zoned in you don't even remember what real life is. You just think you're in the movie. That's exactly how it is, but times five. I'm so zoned in. I have this weird mind set where it's me quickly analyzing every five seconds, 'Is this boring, is this stupid, can I cut this? Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.'" Like other professional social media users, the work has taken a physical toll on her. (She releases roughly one video a week.) She used to edit at a desktop, but she developed back pain. Now she works from her bed. She keeps blue mood lighting on, but her vision has deteriorated. She wears reading glasses "like I'm 85 years old, because my eyes do actually get really strained." She's training herself for long distance editing. "I've actually gotten to a point now where I feel like I'm really, really mentally strong and I don't really lose my marbles as often," she said. In May of 2020, she will turn 19. Over these two years, Chamberlain invented the way people talk on YouTube now, particularly the way they communicate authenticity. Her editing tricks and her mannerisms are ubiquitous. There is an entire subgenre of videos that mimic her style, and a host of YouTubers who talk, or edit, just like her. The Atlantic recently noted this and declared she is "the most important YouTuber" working today. "It messed with my head a little bit when people started to imitate what I was doing," Chamberlain said. "Although I was flattered, absolutely flattered. And also, the way I film and edit, it's really fun and so I'm glad that other people have found inspiration in that and have taken that and done what they can with it. I think that that's great. But at times it can be kind of uninspiring and that's no one's fault but my own." When someone introduces a new vocabulary to a medium, they don't have much say in who uses it and who doesn't. "I always fed off the fact that I was in uncharted territory and I liked that," she said. "And then it got to a point where I wasn't in uncharted territory anymore and people were calling me unoriginal. Which was a huge blow to me in my head! Because I was like, I created this kind of style that was super cool to me and super exciting for me, and now that other people are doing it, now all of a sudden I'm unoriginal, which is something that I've always really tried to be. That's what makes me feel good creatively. So when people started to say that, I kind of had a full, you know, not like mental breakdown, but we could also say that. Not a mental breakdown! But I definitely freaked out." Chamberlain's parents have supported her unconventional choices, like dropping out of school in the beginning of her junior year and moving to Los Angeles to live by herself while still a teenager. She says that they were and are her best friends. Both of them worry about her working too hard. "I just want her to be healthy and happy," her father said. " Her mom and I are not dance parents. My feeling is, and I tell her this often, you can walk away from this at any time. If it's not good for you and it's not healthy for you, it's not worth it." Chamberlain has now decided upon a new approach. "I'm just going to not stick to one thing so strictly," she said. Her recent videos are less jittery, less edited. She has been trying to let her narrative and her scripts speak, with fewer interruptions than before. Recently, she has tried anthologies and also stunts , like spending 24 hours on the balcony of her house. She thinks those videos have been different, and that she has, to some degree, broken out of the box she made for herself. The balcony stunt, for instance, she said, was one of the more emotionally challenging things she had ever done for video. She said that the more she puts into what she makes, the less she has to do to make the video work in the edit. "I'm trying to make the stuff that I'm filming more dynamic so that when I'm editing there's less pressure on me to kind of create something that's not there," she said. "I'm starting to realize that editing is very personal, and 90 percent of the editing is just so that I'm not bored. So I don't have to overdo it. I'm trying to find that balance right now, so that I don't overwork myself." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This is choreography that changes your breathing, but we're still not halfway through the pas de deux. In one phrase that seems close to several Astaire duets, the couple simply walk slowly, intimately down a diagonal, his arm around her waist; as she tenderly steps forward on point, he can't resist lifting her only just off the floor, but again with her head, arms and legs poetically indicating her quietly full bodied rapture twice. Another, bigger lift a moment later is entirely different: She's static but upside down, and the way her face and arms address the floor reveal her complete trust. Later, in an image that was surely prompted by Astaire's "Never Gonna Dance" duet with Ginger Rogers, Cinderella softly spins in one circle around the Prince and then another; here we feel her mystery to him. He allows her to elude him, only to return to him each time. Finally, there's one last low lift: With her body pressed against his heart and her arms and legs outstretched, he runs softly around the stage as if carrying her around the world. In the finale of Act III, their pas de deux is really just a single extremely long phrase of supported adagio. What makes it phenomenal, apart from the high sweetness of the strings in Prokofiev's melodic line (first heard in the overture and here like a promise fulfilled), is that now the couple is in public not among her stepsisters or his courtiers but with the Stars and the Seasons, the figures of magic and classicism who have blessed the couple's union. Every step Cinderella takes here is amplified by this retinue; in one sequence, while the couple dance center stage, four men take about 10 seconds to raise their arms and then 10 more to open them wide, to tremendous effect. This "Cinderella" abounds in such wonders; even though some of its comedy is creaky, I love it deeply. Ballet Theater, which first performed this production a year ago, has returned to it with enriched understanding this year. In terms of classical dancing that is, most of the ballet the company here out Royals the Royal Ballet, for which Ashton made this work and which has been its chief custodian. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Ivy League presidents placed all sports on hold Wednesday until at least January, making it the first Division I conference that will not play football as scheduled in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, a broad array of sports, from football and men's basketball to cross country and sailing, have been placed in limbo. Practices could take place in the fall, beginning with limited individual and small group workouts, but conditions would have to improve dramatically for sports to be played next year. The presidents said in a statement that sports could not be played under campus wide policies that include restrictions on student and staff travel, social distancing requirements and limits on group gatherings. "With the information available to us today regarding the continued spread of the virus, we simply do not believe we can create and maintain an environment for intercollegiate athletic competition that meets our requirements for safety and acceptable levels of risk," the statement read. As for the possibility of playing football in the spring, Princeton football Coach Bob Surace characterized it thusly: "One word. Hope." He added that a vaccine, better therapies and people following health guidelines would be necessary if there were any chance of playing in the spring, but there is also the fear of a second wave of the virus this winter. Though the caliber of football in the Ivy League, which plays at the Football Championship Subdivision level and does not allow athletic scholarships, is far below that of the best programs in the country, the decision made by the eight presidents could have great influence among university leaders nationwide tasked with deciding when and how sports will return to college campuses. "I think other conferences around the country are going to follow," Columbia athletic director Peter Pilling said Wednesday night. The same day the Ivy League announced its decision, Ohio State and North Carolina became the latest schools to suspend voluntary workouts after outbreaks among athletes. Hints that the Ivy League was leaning this way became clearer on Monday when three of its schools announced plans for reopening their campuses to only some students in the fall. One of those schools, Harvard, said it would only allow 40 percent of its students mostly freshmen back on campus and that all classes would be held remotely. For the spring semester, Harvard said, freshmen would be sent off campus and seniors would be allowed to return for their final semester. Football coaches had anticipated this decision since the Ivy League announced last week that it would decide on the fate of fall sports on Wednesday and in the intervening days two coaches said they had been not asked about making contingency plans. Robin Harris, the executive director of the Ivy League, declined an interview request before the decision was announced. "It's been kind of like Santa Claus and the Easter bunny," Dartmouth Coach Buddy Teevens said. "You kind of knew they didn't exist and then finally you were told." The Ivy League universities, which are buoyed by large endowments and a powerful academic brand, have largely been able to remove money from decisions regarding athletics. For example, the Ivy League became the last Division I league to hold a conference basketball tournament and is the only league that prohibits its football teams from playing in bowl games or a playoff. And as the start of the college football season has crept into August, the Ivy League has steadfastly stuck to a 10 week season ending on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. This year, it was due to begin on Sept. 19. The Ivy League also did not flinch on March 10, when it became the first conference to cancel its men's and women's basketball tournaments, just before the coronavirus began to run rampant in the Northeast. Almost immediately, the Ivy League was criticized for overreacting, with some of the harshest criticism coming from its own players and coaches. But within two days, the N.C.A.A. tournaments had been canceled, and the N.B.A., the N.H.L. and Major League Baseball's spring training suspended games.The circumstances now, though, are different. The country is firmly in the midst of a pandemic, not on its nascent edges. "There was a suddenness that doesn't exist now," said Pilling, the Columbia athletic director. "Obviously there's a tremendous amount of disappointment because everyone here wants to compete but people recognize the severeness of the pandemic." There is a sense, in the Ivy League, that even playing football in the spring is a moonshot. The Ivy League spokesman Matt Panto said that the conference had not sought a waiver from the N.C.A.A. to move football (or other sports) to the spring, something the official believed would be required. An N.C.A.A. spokeswoman, Stacey Osborn, declined to answer questions about the waiver process. And in a sign of how impactful the loss of a season may be on a broad swath of athletes, the Ivy League said it would consider granting a fifth year of eligibility for athletes something it stood steadfastly against when spring sports were canceled. While pro basketball, soccer and baseball have experienced halting moments in their recent returns with sprinklings of positive tests and hiccups in the testing process, a return of college sports is even more problematic because its players unlike the professionals are not paid. Also, the surge in cases in many pockets of the country over the last month has created more obstacles for the return this fall of college football, which many schools count on for millions of dollars in television, ticket and advertising revenues that fuel athletic departments. The relatively simple task of bringing football players back to campus for voluntary workouts has in some cases proved so problematic that schools have been forced to abandon them because of Covid 19 outbreaks within their ranks. In the last week, Kansas, Louisiana Tech and Texas El Paso became the latest to shut down. Colleges at the lower levels of the N.C.A.A., which is made up of more than 1,100 schools, have already begun to cancel fall sports. Williams, Bowdoin, Swarthmore and Grinnell all small liberal arts colleges that play at the nonscholarship Division III level are among those to call off their fall sports seasons. So, too, have the dozen Division II schools in the California Collegiate Athletic Association, which in May announced that it would cancel fall sports shortly after the Cal State University chancellor said that courses this fall would be held online with few exceptions. But those schools, like Swarthmore, do not play football. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Wyatt Cenac was lapping the competition. He was speaking softly in paragraph long thoughts about his HBO show, "Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas," his love for animation and his relationship with his modest fame. Simultaneously, he was winning an unspoken competition at Buzz a Rama, the only place in New York City where a comedian can destroy all takers in a slot car race while seemingly not trying. Mr. Cenac's drowsiness is an illusion. "Problem Areas" combines elements of a talk show, an animated show and a documentary series, and is perhaps the most structurally ambitious news comedy hybrid on television. (The second season will have its premiere on April 5.) Among the show's executive producers are John Oliver and Ezra Edelman (an Oscar winning documentarian), and its writing staff includes Emma Carmichael, the former editor of Jezebel. Mr. Cenac has a knack for choosing talented collaborators. And also, apparently, for slot car racing. "You're doing pretty good," said Frank Perri, as he watched Mr. Cenac's initial runs around the circular track. Mr. Perri, whom everyone calls Buzz, opened Buzz a Rama in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1965. Now 83, he runs the place with his wife, Dolores. He stayed with Mr. Cenac until 2 p.m., when he had to rush off to host a birthday party for a 6 year old boy named Rocco. Slot cars (so called because their chassis are fitted with nibs that slot into racing tracks) are operated by remote control. The simplest ones, which are about the length of an adult man's hand, are fairly easy to get the hang of. The fastest can reach speeds well over 100 miles an hour. Children love them, and so, it turns out, does Mr. Cenac. His earnest response when Mr. Perri showed him some previously operational steering wheels was: "Wow. They're amazing. Wow. These are great." It makes sense that Mr. Cenac, who had a peripatetic childhood, would be taken with model cars. Born in New York, he moved to Dallas when he was a young child and returned to Brooklyn over the summers to stay with his grandmother, who lived in Crown Heights. After a friend moved to Cleveland, he started spending parts of the year there as well. "When I was very young, I was given a St. Christopher's medal," Mr. Cenac said. "I guess he's the patron saint of travelers." Now, he wears a pendant with a picture of a bird on it, which he was wearing at Buzz a Rama along with a Muhammad Ali sweatshirt and a patch from the Houston apparel company Grits featuring its cartoon mascot Roscrow. Mr. Cenac, who turns 43 later this month , is single and has lived in his Brooklyn neighborhood for close to a decade . Asked about his personal life, he said: "I don't think I have much of one. Work kind of dominates everything." Episodes of "Problem Areas" consist of three sections. In the first, Mr. Cenac explores topics like energy policy and worker protections, adding jokes and animated bits. The second features comic riffs on civic problems (say, the glut of umbrellas whenever it rains) and solutions (government mandated retractable awnings on every building). The final section, which takes up most of each episode, concentrates on a single subject throughout a season. In the first, the subject was policing; the second will feature education. Mr. Cenac talks about his goals for "Problem Areas" as a journalist might, saying that he is interested in starting a conversation about the issues he has chosen, rather than presenting easy answers. He is less glib about his reporting than his former boss at "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart, who was known to dismiss questions about the dual role he pioneered. With "Problem Areas," Mr. Cenac said, "I'm not necessarily saying 'Oh, here's the answer for everything.' But maybe if I show you someone who's building a staircase you might think, 'Oh, it's maybe not as challenging or weird as I thought to build a staircase.' It's maybe something worth tackling as opposed to getting caught up in the intractability of 'we'll never be able to do this.'" Several times, Mr. Cenac's blue car went so fast that it plowed into an orange one he was racing, knocking it out of the slot. He would then get up to place them back on track. Asked if, in his fifth decade, he ever felt concerned that his peers were passing him by in some way, he responded that he sometimes felt envious of people who had gotten cool new jobs or bought houses. But, he pointed out: "The only person who's really keeping score in any way is me. And if I'm keeping that score, is that the healthiest thing for me to be doing?" He would prefer to think about what his show can do better. He returned several times to the idea of change, suggesting that it should be the goal of any good policy, whether it pertains to policing, education or eradicating the accursed umbrella. As he continued to race his car, he made his priority clear: "How do you make it actually work so we don't have to do the same things over and over again?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
British automakers like Austin Healey, Lotus and MG may have originated the tidy, nimble roadster, but it was Mazda, a Japanese company, that mastered the formula decades later. An early proposal for the Mazda MX 5 Miata billed the car as an MGB that would start on rainy days and not leak oil on the driveway. That initial concept became an apt description of the original 1990 model, both in its debut and decades later, when many examples show more than 100,000 miles on the odometer. At the New York auto show, which opened last week and continues through April 27, Mazda is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Miata with an exhibit dedicated to the roadster. Examples from the three generations trace the roadster's history to its beginning; two of the cars at the Javits center were displayed at the 1989 Chicago auto show, where the Miata made its first public appearance. The Miata forged its reputation on serpentine roads, favoring a poised chassis over sheer speed. Its lightness and balance let the driver slice through corners, with an open air rush to heighten the thrill. With the engine humming and the tires singing, the roadster establishes a man machine connection few automobiles can match. Mazda calls it jinba ittai, the notion of horse and rider as one. The small steering wheel sits in your lap and the gearshift slips through the gates as naturally and effortlessly as scribbling your signature. Both the driving experience and the design highlight a minimalism rare in modern cars. Power steering was optional, the original 1.6 liter 4 cylinder made 116 horsepower and the car weighed 2,100 pounds. The nonpower fabric top could be lowered from the driver's seat with one hand. The Miata name, from the Old High German word for reward, is arguably the most literal badge ever affixed to a car. And at just 13,800, it was a reward within reach of the masses. The Miata's creation followed an unlikely course. Bob Hall, an automotive journalist at the time, first pitched the car to Mazda's head of research and development in 1979. Three years later, Mazda hired Mr. Hall, not to work on the roadster but as a designer of wheel covers for compact cars and front end clips for the small B series pickup, a rebadged Ford. Within 18 months he was told to spend his free time mornings, lunches and after hours plotting a sports car program. It was an unusual project for a low volume manufacturer focused on building economy cars, especially since precursors like the Alfa Romeo Spider and the Fiat X1/9 suggested the demand for such models peaked at a few thousand per year. The Miata's program manager, Toshihiko Hirai, wasn't passionate about sports cars. Instead, he relied on fastidious research to develop the car that radiated passion. "He knew nothing about sports cars and he knew that he knew nothing about sports cars," Mr. Hall, who is no longer with Mazda, said in a phone interview. "He was doing the car the way he wanted, but he was making the car other people wanted." Then and now, those people are sun seeking retirees, auto enthusiasts, Sunday drivers and amateur racers alike. Mazda sold more than 35,000 Miatas in the United States in the car's first full year on sale. The same traits that give it such broad appeal reliability, affordability and spirited dynamics have also, Mazda says, made the MX 5 the world's most popular roadracing car. The Miata has been imitated, though its success has never been duplicated. Honda offered a more powerful and more expensive take in 1999 2009 with its S2000. General Motors followed Mazda's philosophy even more closely with the 2006 Pontiac Solstice and 2007 Saturn Sky. While sales initially topped those of the Miata, they soon dipped and the cars disappeared for good when G.M. shuttered both brands. In 25 years, Mazda made few concessions to changing tastes and trends. The more powerful turbocharged 2004 5 Mazdaspeed MX 5 Miata was the sole deviation from the low power recipe. Safety regulations dictated a larger and heavier Miata, particularly with the third generation car that debuted in 2006. Mazda also truncated the name of that model at MX 5 in a bid to boost the car's masculinity. Buyers refused to call it anything other than Miata, and the full name was back for the following year, the same year that Mazda introduced an optional retractable hardtop to raise the car's all season appeal. Even as the details changed, subsequent models remained true to the spirit of the original. Today's Miata weighs about 2,500 pounds. The lively steering, compliant ride and light footed handling are intact. A considered succession of engineers preserved the continuity between generations. Takao Kajima, chassis engineer for the original car, served as the project manager for the second generation and current models. Nobuhiro Yamamoto, a dynamics engineer during the development of the current car, is the top engineer for the fourth generation Miata, expected to arrive next year as a 2016 model. Mazda has sold more than 920,000 Miatas globally, but the future of this enduring roadster is hardly guaranteed. Sales in the United States have declined from their peak in 1990 to about 5,000 a year. Twenty five years of experience show that Mazda can develop a roadster that's as deft as the best European sports cars while sweating the details of cost effective engineering, economies of scale and keeping oil from dripping on the driveway. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Jacob Weisberg, the chairman and editor in chief of the Slate Group, announced in a Twitter post on Wednesday that he was leaving the company to start a new audio venture with the author Malcolm Gladwell. "After 22 years, there's no good moment to leave, but you start to feel like it's now or never if you're ever going to," Mr. Weisberg, 54, said in an interview. In recent years at Slate, Mr. Weisberg focused on how to make digital journalism sustainable while leading the online magazine into podcasting. It now offers 25 podcasts, including "Slate Political Gabfest," which has been running for 13 years; "Trumpcast," which is co hosted by Mr. Weisberg; and "Slow Burn," which received 11 million downloads in its Watergate focused first season and has recently returned to delve into the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Julia Turner, the editor in chief of Slate, credited Mr. Weisberg for developing the publication's distinctive voice, which she described as a "mix of rigor and playfulness." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Executives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan are preparing for an economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic that could be worse than initially projected. Facing a potential shortfall for the next fiscal year that might swell to 150 million 50 percent larger than what was forecast in March the museum announced layoffs for more than 80 employees and executive pay cuts upwards of 20 percent in a letter to staff on Wednesday. "While we are not immune from the impact of this pandemic, the Met is a strong and enduring institution and will remain one," Daniel Weiss, president and chief executive of the museum, said in a statement. "Our two primary objectives continue to be doing all that we can to support the health and safety of our community and to protect the long term financial health of the Museum." A museum spokesperson said that the layoffs would amount to a 26 percent reduction in staff across the Met's visitor services and retail departments, because of an expected decrease in attendance for a sustained period of time. Affected staff members will be paid through the first week of June. The museum had previously planned to reopen in July, but is now looking farther into the future after having to cancel its 150th anniversary summer celebrations. Faced with the dimming prospect of a fast recovery from the pandemic, many museums are now winnowing their events calendars for the fall and forecasting prolonged closures. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In about 100 jaunty, poignant minutes, "Soul," the new Pixar Animation feature, tackles some of the questions that many of us have been losing sleep over since childhood. Why do I exist? What's the point of being alive? What comes after? It's rare for any movie, let alone an all ages cartoon, to venture into such deep and potentially scary metaphysical territory, but this is hardly the first time that the studio has directed its visual and storytelling resources toward mighty philosophical themes. "Soul" follows "Coco" in conjuring a detailed vision of the afterlife and also, in this case, the before life and joins "Inside Out" in turning abstract concepts into funny characters and vivid landscapes. The world that human souls pass through on our way into and out of life is a glowing, minimalist realm of embodied metaphors and galaxy brain jokes, populated by blobby, ectoplasmic souls and squiggly bureaucratic "counselors" named Jerry. But at the same time, "Soul," directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers from a screenplay they wrote with Mike Jones, represents a new chapter in Pixar's expansion of realism. (Slated to open in theaters earlier this year, it is streaming on Disney .) Having conquered fish scales in "Finding Nemo," beastly fur in "Monsters Inc.," metal in "Cars" and vermin in "Ratatouille," the animators have set themselves more subtle challenges. As such, it traffics in a brusque urbanist sentimentality that isn't immune to or afraid of cliche. The sensory riot of the city includes squalling car horns, clattering trains, bagels, slices of pizza, barbershops, subway platforms and the perpetual motion bustle of pedestrians, strollers, yellow cabs and more. Everything we used to complain about and miss desperately now. All of this is rendered "drawn" isn't the right word; some combination of "sculpted" and "orchestrated" is what's needed with graceful, kinetic precision. Like other great New York movies, it invites you to identify particular intersections and storefronts, to compare its imagined geography with the city of your own experience. It isn't all noise and crowds. Part of the Pixar aesthetic over the years has been to collapse the distance between animation and other kinds of cinema, and you would swear that the New York scenes in "Soul" were filmed in natural light. There is a beauty that is almost spiritual in the way the sun falls across a block of rowhouses, through the windows of a storefront or along the floorboards of a walk up apartment. Or maybe not "almost." The apartment belongs to a pianist named Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), whose literal struggle to keep body and soul together drives the plot across the city and into the beyond. Joe, a jazzman like his late father, is at a crossroads. No longer young though we don't know exactly how old he makes a living teaching music to middle schoolers while chasing after gigs. His mother (Phylicia Rashad) worries about his prospects. A full time job offer and a chance to sit in with a band led by an A list saxophonist (Angela Bassett) arrive on the same day, which also turns out to be the last day of Joe's life. Sort of. The sheer inventiveness of "Soul" makes it impossible to spoil, but because it's dedicated to surprise, to the improvisational qualities of existence, I want to tread lightly. Suffice it to say that Joe finds himself suddenly transported from Manhattan to a limbo where he meets a rebellious soul known as 22, who speaks in the voice of Tina Fey. Not yet assigned to a definite human form, 22 has chosen that voice for its annoying qualities, and she has spent much of eternity driving everyone crazy except for the Jerrys, who possess infinite patience (and speak in the soothing tones of Wes Studi, Alice Braga and Richard Ayoade). There's also someone called Terry (Rachel House), the resident bean counter, who is a pricklier character, and as much of a villain as this gentle, melancholy fantasy needs. Anyway, 22 doesn't see the point of going down to Earth to take up residence in a body. Joe is desperate to get back into his, and their conflicting, complementary desires send them back to Earth in a switched identity caper. Each one is the other's wacky sidekick, and each teaches the other some valuable lessons. The didacticism of the movie is sincere, not unwelcome, and inseparable from its artistry. Jazz, far from being incidental to "Soul," is integral to its argument about how beauty is created, sustained and appreciated and to its grounding of a specifically Black experience in New York. Joe's playing is energetic and serene, and it carries him into a zone that is wittily literalized as an area between Earth and the spirit world. (Other visitors to this liminal region include a street corner mystic named Moonwind, voiced by Graham Norton.) Jon Batiste's lovely jazz compositions take turns with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's subtle, cerebral score, building a sonic bridge between the sensual and the abstract, the physical and the metaphysical. Like other Pixar films, "Soul" is aware of its own paradoxes. The "Toy Story" cycle is a humanist epic about inanimate objects. "Inside Out" is an exuberant fable about the importance of sadness. This is a mightily ambitious warning against taking ambition too seriously. Every soul, the Jerrys explain, has a spark that sends it into the world. Joe and 22 take this to mean that everyone has a unique purpose, a mistake that reflects a competitive, careerist ideology that the movie can't entirely disown. But it is nonetheless open to other possibilities, which may be all that any work of art can be. "Soul" tries, within the imperatives of branded commercial entertainment, to carve out an identity for itself as something other than a blockbuster or a technologically revolutionary masterpiece. It's a small, delicate movie that doesn't hit every note perfectly, but its combination of skill, feeling and inspiration is summed up in the title. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The detecting and inspecting have already begun. Using telescopes on the island of La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands, a team of astronomers led by Alan Fitzsimmons of Queen's University Belfast detected cyanogen in the gaseous cloud around the comet. Cyanogen, a toxic gas, is common in comets. In 1910, when Earth passed through the tail of Halley's comet, a rumor spread that all of humanity would be poisoned. (A comet tail is too dilute to do any damage.) The discovery by Dr. Fitzsimmons' team marked the first time that astronomers had detected gas emitted by an interstellar object. The most remarkable thing about the comet, they found, was how unremarkable it appears. "Overall, we find the gas, dust and nuclear properties for the first active Interstellar Object are similar to normal Solar system comets," Dr. Fitzsimmons and his co authors wrote in a paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters. That is to say, nature seems to work the same out there as it does here. Likewise, it seems, for the origin of these interstellar wanderers. Astronomers theorize that comets are fragments of ice left over when planets form in the chilly outer realms of planetary systems. Subsequent encounters with large planets like Jupiter can toss these cosmic icebergs willy nilly toward their parent stars or even outward into interstellar space, as evidenced by the intrusions of the comets Oumuamua and Borisov. However, none of the 4,000 or so known or suspected exoplanets orbit in the icy regions around their stars, where this process could happen. So Malena Rice, a graduate student at Yale, and her adviser, Gregory Laughlin, went looking for more. They found evidence for what they call "hidden planets" in the form of gaps in icy debris disks surrounding about 20 stars observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array radio telescope in Chile. The gaps, they found, are consistent with having been carved by planets that orbit at least as far from their stars as Jupiter is from the sun, and that have masses between Neptune's and Jupiter's. About half the young stars in the Milky Way galaxy could have such disks and gaps and be spewing comets outward, the researchers concluded in a paper to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. They wrote the paper in July, just before Borisov was discovered. "The timing has been incredibly exciting," Ms. Rice said in an email. "Right as we proposed this idea, a new interstellar object that nicely fit our theory fell right into our laps!" She added, "It's very likely that interstellar objects have been passing through the solar system regularly, and we just haven't had sensitive enough telescopes to see them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE AUDACITY OF NOPE On Dec. 28, 2019, Jenny Odell was at home in Oakland, Calif., getting ready to meet friends at the movie "1917," when her boyfriend suddenly called out to her from the next room. "He said, 'I have some weird and good news for you,'" she remembers. He had just clicked on a tweet from former President Obama, announcing his list of favorite books from 2019. Listed at No. 6 (titles were in alphabetical order) was Odell's first book, "How to Do Nothing," which our reviewer described as "a complex, smart and ambitious book that first reads like a self help manual, then blossoms into a wide ranging political manifesto." The gist: Stop toggling. Pay attention. Notice nature. For Odell, a multidisciplinary artist and an avid bird watcher, news of Obama's enthusiasm was "totally out of the blue." She says, "I'm honestly surprised that anyone had the patience to wade through what is at times a dense, strangely shaped book." She continued on with her day: She went to the movie. She checked on some ducks that were using a nearby lake as a way station on their journey south. (In her book, Odell writes, "Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility"; she is an author who practices what she preaches.) Generally, a title destined for best sellerdom will land on the list within weeks of publication. This was not the case for Odell's debut. Eight months after it came out, 14 days after Obama gave it the nod, "How to Do Nothing" touched down at No. 10 on last week's hardcover nonfiction list a rare feat for a book of its age. So how much did the presidential endorsement help? According to Dennis Johnson, the publisher of Melville House, which brought "How to Do Nothing" into the world, "The book had been doing really, really well it's been an indie phenomenon, making various regional lists throughout the year but there's no question Obama's plug gave it the rocket fuel to land on the best seller list." Melville House declined to share exact sales figures, but a spokeswoman said that Obama's selection increased demand by 450 percent over the book's preholiday sales pace. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN ANTONIO Austin Wondzell's midnight blue S.U.V. was one of the nearly 2,000 vehicles winding through a stadium parking lot on a Friday morning in mid May. Like millions of Americans, he turned to a food bank for help when he lost his job. "I can't believe there are so many people that need food," he said, as he inched closer to the San Antonio Food Bank's second mega distribution of the week. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, food bank lines stretching for miles and jam packed parking lots across the United States have come to symbolize a new food security crisis set off by sudden and unprecedented job losses. While states have begun to loosen restrictions, surges in new cases will likely keep people home, out of work and in need of assistance. Surveys conducted amid the pandemic by the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation found "38 percent of households reported moderate to high levels of food insecurity," compared with 11 percent of households in 2018. Food banks nationwide have reported increased demand. For the San Antonio Food Bank, which serves 16 counties in Southwest Texas, demand has doubled. Before the pandemic, they were feeding approximately 60,000 people per week. That number is now closer to 120,000. In March, April and May, the food bank reported distributing over 23.3 million pounds of food, serving over 240,000 cars at drive through distributions and completing over 5,800 home deliveries. To meet the demand, the food bank has organized twice weekly mega distributions, where up to 2,000 vehicles receive two weeks' worth of food. They are also carrying out and supporting smaller scale distributions at locations across southwest Texas. In May alone, 27,595 vehicles were served during mega distributions in Bexar County, home to San Antonio. At the city's mega distribution sites, dozens of volunteers, clad in gray "San Antonio Strong," T shirts, colorful masks and disposable blue gloves are fanned out across a stadium parking lot temporarily filled with tents and pallets of food. Starting at 9 a.m., drivers, some of whom have been waiting since dawn, are guided down lanes to different stations, where items like bread, squash, apples, bacon and more, are packed into trunks, truck beds and back seats with assembly line efficiency. Over the years, Rudy Riojas, 66, has traveled across the United States in his minivan, often folding down the seats and sleeping on a mattress in the back. At 11 p.m. on a Thursday night, after helping his fiancee with her small commercial cleaning business, the couple closed their eyes in the van, this time in front of the Alamodome, where the San Antonio Food Bank would hold another mega distribution the next morning. They were second in line. "San Antonio is going out of their way to hand out food for people," Mr. Riojas said. "That's one of the most beautiful things that can happen." Mr. Riojas is retired and receives Social Security benefits. Before the pandemic, his fiancee's business had nine clients, now it has one. "That's enough to get us through," he said, adding that the government stimulus check helped. "We're not on top of the world. But we're OK, we're surviving." "I've cleaned up after a dozen hurricanes and this is what you do," Mr. Kuberski said. "When your friends and neighbors are in trouble, you find out a way to help them." Eric Cooper became C.E.O. of the San Antonio Food Bank in 2001, at age 32. With the support of the State of Texas, the San Antonio community, food bank employees, an army of volunteers and more, Mr. Cooper has steered the food bank through the Covid 19 crisis. After a recent mega distribution, "worn out and tired," and still wearing his food bank shirt, Mr. Cooper went shopping for groceries of his own. As he pushed his cart down an aisle, several families noticed his shirt, turned to him, started clapping and gave what he described as "a standing ovation in the middle of a grocery store." Moments like these, he said, have offered "tender mercies" amid the crisis. Yolanda Calderon, 54, never had trouble sleeping. Now, waves of bad news, the fear of getting sick and the new reality of living paycheck to paycheck have kept her up at night. Ms. Calderon stopped working late last year, when dealing with a cancer scare became her priority. Her partner, who worked at an auto body shop until Texas shut down in March, went on unemployment their only source of income. "It's hard. We have a mortgage, we have our bills, our food," Ms. Calderon said. "Thank God they do have the food banks and stuff, because we can't make it." Ms. Calderon is taking the pandemic in stride. She took up landscaping and planted daisies, elephant ears, petunias and native wildflowers in her front yard. Winter vegetables in the backyard are next. She has also started using the apples she receives from the food bank to bake pies for her neighbors. "If they were to give me lemons, I would have made lemonade," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The actor Leonardo DiCaprio recently announced his plans to build an eco resort on private Blackadore Caye in Belize, a property expected to open in 2018. But he's far from the first celebrity to enter the hospitality game. He joins a cadre of fellow actors, musicians and athletes, including the 11 below, who have broadened their portfolios (and their brands) with properties around the world. Belize, it seems, is a relative hot spot for celebrity hoteliers. The film director Francis Ford Coppola has two properties in the Central American nation, including Turtle Inn on the beach in the sleepy south coast town of Placencia. The 25 room resort is the luxury leader in the district, with thatch roofed bungalows filled with Balinese furniture and deep Japanese baths, some with outdoor showers and private gardens. But the resort's Mare Restaurant draws diners from beyond the hotel for fresh fish and organic vegetables grown on the property, and the beachfront bar offers bocce in the sand. Rates from 309. The Scottish tennis star Andy Murray branched into the hotel business last year with Cromlix, a 19th century estate near Dunblane, just over 40 miles northeast of Edinburgh, which he renovated and turned into a 34 acre luxury resort. The 1880 vintage house offers 15 rooms, most with individualized floor plans and generous bathrooms with free standing tubs. It is also home to Chez Roux, a restaurant by the French chef Albert Roux. While Cromlix offers classic estate activities such as fishing, falconry and archery, it has just one tennis court. But it has a mission: Mr. Murray opened it with the goal of spurring tourism in his hometown. Rooms from 250 pounds, or about 360, at 1.44 to the pound. Richard Gere, the actor, is behind the Bedford Post Inn in Westchester County, N.Y. The dormered property dates back to the 1780s and now hosts eight guest rooms, most with fireplaces and marble bathrooms, some with terraces. The 15 acre Relais Chateaux member also features a yoga studio with daily classes and periodic workshops. Recently the New York based chef Michael White took over the inn's two restaurants, opening Campagna, which serves Italian food, and the Barn, a more casual, all day option. Rooms from 395. If you didn't know that the 5,000 acre Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah was owned by the actor Robert Redford, you might get a clue from a clutch of photos hanging outside the Tree Room, the rustic chic restaurant built around a spruce tree. The restaurant exemplifies the close to nature experience the resort aims to impart through both activities (skiing in winter, hiking in summer) as well as design. One hundred accommodations range from basic rooms to those with kitchens, many paneled in knotty pine. Mr. Redford's cultural interests shape the event schedule, featuring theater, concerts and author lectures on site. Rooms from 199. The former mayor of Carmel, Calif., the actor and director Clint Eastwood preserved a nearby 19th century dairy farm to stave off condo developers, turning it into the Mission Ranch Hotel and Restaurant. Sheep still graze in a meadow at the 22 acre ranch, now host to 31 rooms, distributed among a farmhouse, barn and cottages. The original creamery serves as the restaurant, with live piano music nightly and a jazz brunch on Sunday. (Mr. Eastwood is himself a musician and composer.) Guests also have access to the Mission Ranch Tennis and Fitness Club, which includes six courts. Rooms from 125. The singer Gloria Estefan and her husband, the producer Emilio Estefan, own Costa d'Este Beach Resort Spa in Vero Beach, about 140 miles north of Miami on the Atlantic Ocean. The couple renovated a 1970s vintage hotel, reopening it in 2008 with 94 rooms in two five story towers spaced by an oceanfront infinity pool. The hotel includes a contemporary restaurant that serves a selection of Cuban dishes created by the Estefans (who have also published a cookbook), a full service spa and a bar where, fittingly, acoustic musicians play on most Wednesday through Saturday nights. Rooms from 229. Robert DeNiro has been active in the hotel world, partnering on Nobu Hotels in Las Vegas and elsewhere. In New York, he has opened the Greenwich Hotel, which houses 88 rooms, each uniquely designed with deluxe appointments that might include Tibetan rugs and Moroccan tile. Amenities include a Japanese spa, indoor swimming pool, courtyard and the Italian restaurant, Locanda Verde, from the chef Andrew Carmellini. Rooms from 575. You will need a "Godfather" worthy bankroll to check into the hotel's 6,800 square foot TriBeCa Penthouse, with a three bedroom suite and a bi level terrace including a Jacuzzi and wood burning fireplace ( 15,000 a night). In the heart of the entertainment centric Temple Bar district of Dublin, U2's Bono and The Edge own The Clarence, which is, according to its website, "the kind of place that they would choose to stay themselves." Its theme, fittingly, is rock 'n' roll, best represented by a strong emphasis on food and drink, especially the subterranean Prohibition evoking cocktail bar, the Liquor Rooms. Its 50 rooms above are more serene, filled with blond wood Shaker style furniture. The best overlook the River Liffey, including a penthouse with a rooftop terrace. Rooms from PS92. In Brooklet, Australia, about 100 miles south of Brisbane, the singer and actress Olivia Newton John co owns Gaia Retreat Spa. The lush 25 acre property acts like a destination spa with packages that address weight loss, fitness and meditation, and daily activities such as cooking or sculpture classes. Facilities include a gym, yoga room, pool and tennis court. The restaurant serves chicken, fish and vegetarian dishes, using produce from its own organic garden. Nineteen rooms are in bungalows spread across the property for privacy. Two night packages from 1,145 Australian dollars, all inclusive, or about 900, at 1.27 Australian dollars to the U.S. dollar. Not every celebrity goes the luxury route. The actor John Malkovich co owns the budget friendly The Big Sleep Hotel, with branches in Cardiff, Wales, as well as Cheltenham and Eastbourne in England. The design centric hotels are boutique in size, ranging from 50 to 81 rooms. They are amply furnished and have private baths and come in a variety of configurations, including standard twins and family studios. The public areas tend to be brightly decorated, and a free breakfast is included. Rooms from PS29. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When one thinks of the First World War, which the United States entered 100 years ago this month, certain images are inevitably evoked: miles of muddy trenches, clouds of poison gas creeping over the battlefield, biplanes and triplanes jousting balletically above the clouds. If the first two sound like something you would have avoided at all costs, trust me, you wouldn't have wanted any part of the last one, either. Aircraft back then were tiny and flimsy. Their engines stalled; their guns jammed. If they had been flown even once, they were certainly grimy and probably covered with haphazardly applied patches. To merely go aloft in one was to risk your life, even if you didn't encounter an enemy who might try to shoot you down. But you probably would, since there was no point in just flying safely behind your own lines. That we have largely forgotten all that today, and focus instead only on romantic images of fearless men in long scarves and sleek machines, redounds to a couple of culprits. There's Snoopy, of course, but well before he ever climbed atop his doghouse and took on the Red Baron, there were the aviators themselves, tireless curators of their own legends. They were special, and they knew it; they wanted you to know it, too. Almost all were highborn. Most had prepped together, gone to college together, joined up out of a sense of noblesse oblige but also a thirst for adventure. They chose to fly went to great lengths just to get aloft not despite the fact that it was exceedingly dangerous, but because of it. The romance of the venture was not lost on them. Nor was the fact that the eyes of the entire world were on them. It was, they firmly believed, their due. Proportionate to their small numbers, many more of them died, and much sooner, than those down below, who were subject to a daily barrage of explosive shells and mustard gas. And when they did die, their families spared little expense in commemorating them. They installed plaques in the French countryside where the airmen fell; or, in at least one case, a cement bench that beckons you, explicitly, to pause, rest and consider the 21 year old life that ended right there. One grieving father left a bequest to the town that buried his son that brought running water to the place for the first time. Theodore Roosevelt installed a handsome fountain in the village where his son Quentin crashed. But the grandest monument can be found deep in a verdant park called Domaine National de St. Cloud in the commune of Marnes la Coquette, just outside Paris. This is the one built by the fliers themselves those who managed to survive for their dead. I say "for," rather than "to," because they are actually in there. Well, most of them, anyway. A total of 68 Americans were killed flying for France in the war; that's 68 out of only 200 or so who were part of what is known as the Lafayette Flying Corps, an unofficial designation that encompassed all Americans who did so, even those who later transferred to squadrons in the American Expeditionary Forces. (The better remembered term Lafayette Escadrille applies to just one all American squadron under French command; most in the "corps" flew as part of French squadrons.) While all 68 are commemorated on the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial an open gallery with a central arch that is said to be a half scale model of the Arc de Triomphe the remains of 50 are entombed in a crypt directly beneath it. The whole thing is very French. The names of the dead "mort pour la defense du droit et de la liberte" are engraved on both the face of the arch and on its sides, where they are inscribed in order of enlistment. The plaza is filled with insignia, some carved into the arch, others depicted in mosaics underneath. People come to pay tribute; the first time I visited there were wreaths left by, among others, French chapters of both the Sons and the Daughters of the American Revolution. The second time, the memorial had just completed a 1.5 million restoration, the cost split 50 50 by American and French benefactors.The memorial was rededicated last April 20. It fairly gleams now. The crypt, though, remains dark. If you know someone who has a key, you can stroll among its sarcophagi, which look like marble but are papier mache, an impressive feat of trompe l'oeil. The 50 Americans are arrayed in chronological order, the first having fallen in June 1916, 10 months before the United States entered the war; the last on Nov. 6, 1918, just five days before it ended. There are names that history and aviation buffs will recognize: Victor Chapman, the first to die, shot down, it is said, while flying oranges back to a friend wounded at Verdun; Raoul Lufbery, America's first great ace, with 17 confirmed kills; and Norman Prince, a founder of the Lafayette Escadrille, whose father later had him interred in the National Cathedral in Washington. There is also a beautiful series of 13 small stained glass windows, made by the sadly defunct concern Maumejean, depicting some of the greatest battles of the war, and featuring images of biplanes, barbed wire, howitzers, early tanks and burning cathedrals. It's a reminder of why these sarcophagi are here, in this park outside Paris. So is the epigraph you pass on your way back up the stairs into daylight and life: And in their death they were not divided They were swifter than eagles They were stronger than lions If You Go Domaine National de St. Cloud is in the commune of Marnes la Coquette, outside Paris. For information on visiting the crypt, contact Suresnes American Cemetery: Suresnes abmc.gov; 33 1 46 25 01 70. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Your Building Can Make You Sick or Keep You Well This article is part of the developing coronavirus coverage, and may be outdated. Go here for the latest on the coronavirus. In 1974, a young girl with measles went to school in upstate New York. Even though 97 percent of her fellow students had been vaccinated, 28 ended up contracting the disease. The infected students were spread out across 14 classrooms, but the young girl, the index patient, spent time only in her own classroom. The culprit? A ventilation system operating in recirculating mode that sucked in the viral particles from her classroom and spread them around the school. Buildings, as this historical example highlights, are highly efficient at spreading disease. Back to the present, the most high profile evidence of the power of buildings to spread the coronavirus is from a cruise ship essentially a floating building. Of the 3,000 or so passengers and crew members onboard the quarantined Diamond Princess, at least 700 are known to have contracted the new coronavirus, a rate of infection that is significantly higher than that in Wuhan, China, where the disease was first found. What does that mean for those of us who are not on cruise ships but are concentrated in schools, offices or apartment buildings? Some may be wondering if they should be fleeing to the countryside, as people have done in the past in times of epidemics. But it turns out that while dense urban conditions can aid the spread of viral illness, buildings can also act as barriers to contamination. It's a control strategy that is not getting the attention it deserves. The reason is there is still some debate about how the new coronavirus that causes Covid 19 is spread. This has resulted in an overly narrow approach taken by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. That's a mistake. Current guidelines are based on evidence that the virus is transmitted primarily through respiratory droplets the large, sometimes visible droplets expelled when someone coughs or sneezes. Thus the recommendation to cover your coughs and sneezes, wash your hands, clean surfaces and maintain social distancing. But when people cough or sneeze, they expel not only large droplets but also smaller airborne particles called droplet nuclei, which can stay aloft and be transported around buildings. Previous investigations of two recent coronaviruses showed that airborne transmission was occurring. This is supported by evidence that the site of infection for one of those coronaviruses was the lower respiratory tract, which could only be caused by smaller particles that can be deeply inhaled. This brings us back to buildings. If managed poorly, they can spread disease. But if we get it right, we can enlist our schools, offices and homes in this fight. Here's what we should be doing. First, bringing in more outdoor air in buildings with heating and ventilation systems (or opening windows in buildings that don't) helps dilute airborne contaminants, making infection less likely. For years, we have been doing the opposite: sealing our windows shut and recirculating air. The result are schools and office buildings that are chronically underventilated. This not only gives a boost to disease transmission, including common scourges like the norovirus or the common flu, but also significantly impairs cognitive function. A study published just last year found that ensuring even minimum levels of outdoor air ventilation reduced influenza transmission as much as having 50 percent to 60 percent of the people in a building vaccinated. Buildings typically recirculate some air, which has been shown to lead to higher risk of infection during outbreaks, as contaminated air in one area is circulated to other parts of the building (as it did in the school with measles). When it's very cold or very hot, the air coming out of the vent in a school classroom or office may be completely recirculated. That's a recipe for disaster. If air absolutely has to be recirculated, you can minimize cross contamination by enhancing the level of filtration. Most buildings use low grade filters that may capture less than 20 percent of viral particles. Most hospitals, though, use a filter with what's known as a MERV rating of 13 or higher. And for good reason they can capture more than 80 percent of airborne viral particles. For buildings without mechanical ventilation systems, or if you want to supplement your building's system in high risk areas, portable air purifiers can also be effective at controlling airborne particle concentrations. Most quality portable air purifiers use HEPA filters, which capture 99.97 percent of particles. These approaches are supported by empirical evidence. In my team's recent work, just submitted for peer review, we found that for measles, a disease dominated by airborne transmission, a significant risk reduction can be achieved by increasing ventilation rates and enhancing filtration levels. (Measles comes with something that works even better that we don't yet have for this coronavirus a vaccine.) There is also ample evidence that viruses survive better at low humidity precisely what happens during winter, or in the summer in air conditioned spaces. Some heating and ventilation systems are equipped to maintain humidity in the optimal range of 40 percent to 60 percent, but most are not. In that case, portable humidifiers can increase humidity in rooms, particularly in a home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The clock was ticking. The kidneys of a 14 year old girl who had died in a Virginia hospital had been removed from her body with her parents' consent, in the hope that the organs might extend the life of others. But with only a rudimentary computer network available to help them in 1979, officials at the hospital, Norfolk General, could not find a suitable recipient for one of the kidneys, and they knew they had only 72 hours, at most, to do so. So they reached out to St. Luke's Hospital Center in New York, where Dr. Robert E. McCabe Jr., an early specialist in kidney transplantation, was head of the renal preservation laboratory. He began scouring the New York area for potential recipients but found none. Nationally, not a single compatible recipient could be found among 6,000 or so people awaiting a transplant. He called colleagues in Italy and Kuwait. No luck. Then, cutting through the cold war tensions of the time, he called the Soviet Embassy in Washington and told them to relay a message to Dr. Valery I. Shumakov, a prominent transplant surgeon he had met that April: a kidney was on the way please find it a home. The girl, who had suffered head trauma in a traffic accident, had died shortly after noon on a Tuesday in June. The next day, working with the embassy, St. Luke's put the kidney on a Soviet Aeroflot flight to Moscow out of Kennedy International Airport (after fending off security officials who wanted to check the storage container for explosives). The kidney arrived safely, and Dr. Shumakov soon reported that he had successfully transplanted the organ into a 36 year old man that Thursday afternoon. (The girl's other kidney was implanted in a 51 year old man in Newark.) In the worlds of medicine and international politics, Dr. McCabe's determination to link donors with recipients had brought about a rare collaboration with the Soviets. But for Dr. McCabe, who died at 88 on Aug. 29, the episode underscored the shortcomings in the American system of kidney donations. "We should have been able to use those kidneys at home, but we weren't organized adequately in New York City to use them all locally, or in the States themselves," he said in a recent interview on the Web site of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, of which he was a founding member. "We shouldn't have had to go that far." The first successful kidney transplant was conducted in 1954, and the procedure was rapidly adopted around the world. But by the late 1970s, hospitals faced challenges in preserving an organ during the out of body interim and in matching donors with recipients. Dr. McCabe, who performed transplants at St. Luke's, taught himself to become a specialist in organ preservation using cold storage as well as a machine developed by the transplant surgeon Dr. Folkert O. Belzer. The process, known as machine perfusion, uses a blend of fluids to simulate a kidney's natural function until the kidney is transplanted. Dr. McCabe helped refine the blend. The 1979 episode was not the first kidney transplant between the United States and the Soviet Union there had been at least two others but it exemplified the improvisational nature of transplant surgery and organ donation at the time. Dr. McCabe's photograph, showing him helping to push free a police car that had become stuck in the mud while transporting a kidney into Manhattan, had once appeared in The Daily News in New York. On another occasion he delivered a kidney to Italy using a perfusion machine, the fluid inside frothing as the car in which he transported it through Rome bumped along cobblestone streets. "In those days it was a free for all," said Dr. Thomas G. Peters, a surgeon who is the historian for the transplant society. "This was cowboy time." But the New York to Moscow episode had a positive effect in generating publicity for the transplant program the account appeared on the front page of The New York Times and that in turn led to a noticeable rise in kidney donations. Over time, databases of kidney donors and recipients became more sophisticated, as did preservation methods, enabling transplants to be accomplished far more speedily. In 1984, to prevent entrepreneurs from profiting from transplantation and hospitals from moving wealthy patients to the top of the waiting list, Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act, which outlawed the sale of organs and established a regulatory framework for donations. Dr. McCabe said that one benefit of tighter regulations was a more efficient process of determining when an organ donor was dead so that the organ could be harvested. "We'd hear about a donor on Tuesday or Wednesday, and we couldn't get the neurologist to declare brain death," he said in the online interview. "They were some of the skeptics too, frankly, and they would not declare brain death until Friday afternoon at 5, when they were tired of caring for the patient and wanted us to take over. So we would be busy every weekend." Robert Emmet McCabe Jr. was born on Feb. 20, 1925, in Charleston, W.Va. His father, Robert, was a lawyer, and his mother, the former Margaret Ward, was a homemaker. He graduated from Williams College in 1948 and received his medical degree in 1953 from Cornell University Medical College in Manhattan. He served as a surgeon in the Army from 1955 to 1957. Dr. McCabe died of cancer at his home in Londonderry, Vt., his family said. Survivors include four daughters, Elsie Smith, Coco McCabe, Rue Sherwood and Kay McCabe; a son, Robert Emmet III; and nine grandchildren. His wife of 58 years, the former Katherine Robinson, died last year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The University of Tennessee is the top ranked team in men's college basketball. The Volunteers have won 16 consecutive games, the longest active winning streak in the country but only because Hofstra, on Long Island, got upset by Northeastern on Saturday. That is not a misprint. From late November until the second day of February, the Hofstra Pride did not lose a game, and almost no one noticed. When a program like Duke or Kentucky wins 16 games in a row, the team is featured on ESPN's "SportsCenter" every night and makes the cover of Sports Illustrated. When the Hofstra Pride win 16 games in a row, they are lucky if their fellow students even know about it. That was not entirely their fault; Hofstra's winter break ran from mid December until the end of January, so students weren't on the Long Island campus for six home games. Still, Hofstra's average home attendance this season is 1,720. The lack of attention has had little effect on how the team experienced the streak, though, or its determination to begin another one. When the streak finally came to an end Saturday with the defeat in Boston, Hofstra Coach Joe Mihalich watched the tape of the 75 61 loss twice on the four hour bus ride back to Long Island. "As I said to the team, 'If everyone looks in the mirror and says, what could I have done better?, then we'll get better," Mihalich, 62, said Sunday. "It was great. It was fun. We enjoyed the ride. But it's not the end all and be all." Hofstra, which plays in the Colonial Athletic Association, has not been to the N.C.A.A. Tournament since 2001. Because the C.A.A. generally receives only one bid, the Pride (19 4) most likely will have to win the conference tournament in Charleston, S.C., next month just to qualify. Winning streaks, even long ones, usually aren't enough to sway the selection committee when it hands out the at large spots. Hofstra's hopes to win its way in largely rest with a 6 foot 2 senior guard from Queens, Justin Wright Foreman, who gave serious consideration to transferring away from the university after scoring a total of 44 points during his freshman year. Wright Foreman had expected a bigger role coming into college. Then he averaged only 4.1 minutes a game for a team that won the C.A.A. regular season title, lost in the conference championship game and qualified for the National Invitation Tournament. He spoke to his mother, Janice Wright; his uncle; and to the Hofstra assistant coach Craig Claxton, a former Pride star known as Speedy before deciding to stay. The decision, he said, was in part to remain close to his ailing grandmother and his three younger brothers. His mother's message? "Everything is going to get better in due time." Now Wright Foreman is averaging 25.5 points a game, third best in Division 1, and 4.6 rebounds and 3.3 assists. He has reached double figures in scoring in 76 consecutive game and is now 35 points shy of 2,000 for his career. N.B.A. scouts have begun to chatter about him, turning up at Hofstra games even when others do not. "He scored 44 points as a freshman, he scored 42 points in a game this year," Mihalich said, referring to a Wright Foreman outing that he capped with a buzzer beating 3 pointer in the final seconds of a 75 72 home win over Northeastern on Jan. 5. He is not a one man show, though. The junior guard Eli Pemberton is averaging 15.5 points and 4.9 rebounds, and the senior point guard Desure Buie averages 10.2 points and 5.0 assists. Still, the crowds at Hofstra have been a far cry from the days when ticket scalpers sold tickets to see Claxton play in the late 1990s. Back then, Hofstra was in the America East Conference, and Claxton was on his way to the N.B.A. "I don't think the community has embraced us like that yet, and it's a shame because they're not going to get to see a really talented kid play," said Claxton, who helped lead Hofstra to the N.C.A.A. Tournament in 2000 and later won an N.B.A. championship with the San Antonio Spurs. "I mean, we only have four more home games, and they really missed out." Wright Foreman and his teammates don't seem bothered by the lack of attention. "We're just more focused on what's going on in this moment now," Wright Foreman said. "We just want to win a lot of games. Hofstra's success hasn't gone completely unnoticed; the former Hofstra coach Jay Wright, now a national title winner at Villanova, talked up his old team after a recent win. Wright also texted Mihalich, saying, "Our entire family always follows HU keep up the great work! Proud of you!" While Wright Forman's teammates bonded this past summer over Monopoly games in a dormitory lounge that involved as many as seven players, Wright Foreman was often in the gym working on his game. Mihalich called Wright Foreman an N.B.A. level scorer. "Is he an N.B.A. defender? Probably not," he said. "Is he an N.B.A. rebounder? No. But he's an N.B.A. scorer." Claxton said that he sees parallels between this team and the 1999 00 Hofstra team that made the N.C.A.A. Tournament; each, he said, had a star complemented by those around him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Last spring, Connor Gressitt, then a senior at New York University, traveled to Mexico with friends. As they cruised down back roads far from any cellular towers, the notion of accessing Spotify through their iPhones became laughable. Mr. Gressitt's friends were desperate for some kind of soundtrack for their road trip, and they didn't know what to do. That is, until Mr. Gressitt pulled out an archaic device. A holdout in a generation of music fans who rely on streaming services, Mr. Gressitt had been listening to music on his trusty old iPod since 2007. "As soon as they saw music on it," Mr. Gressitt said, "they were like, 'O.K., sick.'" As he told the story of the Mexico adventure on a recent evening at his apartment in Brooklyn, the device, an iPod Classic he had received as a Christmas present almost 10 years ago, was charging next to him. It was still in the original plastic case, and it showed little wear. Part of a cohort that came of age when people owned the songs they listened to and stored them on their digital devices rather than streaming them, Mr. Gressitt, 21, finds himself an outlier. "I definitely get odd looks," he said. "I was using it on the subway two weeks ago, and someone my age asked me, 'Is that, like, an iPod?' and I said, 'Yeah, dude.' I get weird looks, but people are stoked, actually, because most everyone had an iPod at one point of their lives." Indeed the early iPods de emphasized and partly phased out by Apple as the iPhone became ubiquitous were the means for an entire generation to know music. If baby boomers and Generation X ers can wax lyrical about the glory of vinyl, millennials can be forgiven if they do the same with their MP3 players. Had Mr. Gressitt been willing to part with his device, he may have found an eager buyer in Lance Totten, the Atlanta set decorator for the recently released film "Baby Driver." In the movie, old iPods (along with Jon Hamm, Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx) play a supporting role to the music besotted protagonist, a getaway driver played by Ansel Elgort. In a pivotal flashback scene, one sees the character in his youth opening up the first version of the product and then using it to listen to music during a car crash that takes the lives of his parents. As a young man, the hero, known as Baby, listens to music on a series of vintage iPods. When he first began work on "Baby Driver" in 2015, Mr. Totten was unaware that Apple had discontinued the production of its much beloved iPod Classic. Soon he and his staff went about tracking down as many as they could, spending roughly 2,500 on some 100 iPods of all varieties and vintages. "It forced me to look more analytically at something I hadn't given much thought about," Mr. Totten said, "because you see they went through all these iterations. Just sourcing them was a challenge. It was time consuming but fun. I got to see iPods I never even heard of." Mr. Totten, who clings stubbornly to the same iPod he has used since 2005, did not understand why the film's hero would have so many iPods until the film's director, Edgar Wright, explained that Baby had taken the devices from the many cars he had stolen over the years. "To me, it made sense as to why the soundtrack is as disparate as it is," Mr. Totten said. "The music is all over the map because he's learned about this stuff from the people's iPods." With software marching ever onward, with the never ending update prompts, those who own old iPods worry that they could lose the music stored on their devices. Mr. Gressitt, for one with 5,998 songs on his 2007 iPod, including some he has not been able to find on Spotify or Pandora said he can no longer download music onto his device because the external hard drive that served as his music collection's backup crashed last January. If he tries an update, he said, he risks watching in horror as his iPod reverts to its factory settings and his thousands of songs vanish into the digital ether. "What do I do when it all disappears?" Mr. Gressitt said. "It's provided the soundtrack for these beautiful moments in my life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Lincoln Center's White Light Festival this fall will offer a range of works, from Haydn to hip hop dance to "Waiting for Godot." The eclectic festival has often explored the themes of spirituality and transcendence, and this year is no different. Performances will kick off on Oct. 16 with the return of the piece "Sutra," which the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui brought to the festival in 2010. The piece features high flying dancing by 17 Shaolin monks from China. Akram Khan will stop by on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 as part of a worldwide tour in which he bids farewell to dancing; he will be the sole performer in his own piece "Xenos," which portrays a shellshocked Indian soldier in World War I. On Oct. 19 20, Company Wang Ramirez, based in France, will present "Borderline," in which airborne dancers attached to cables combine hip hop and contemporary dance forms. The classical music portion of the festival contains works both new and hallowed. On Nov. 15, Les Arts Florissants, led by the conductor William Christie, will perform Haydn's triumphant "The Creation." The Takacs Quartet will play Schubert (Oct. 18), and the violinist Hilary Hahn plays Bach (Oct. 23). In contrast, the composer Kaija Saariaho will present the U.S. premiere of "Only the Sound Remains," a chamber opera inspired by Japanese Noh theater, with set design by Julie Mehretu, a MacArthur fellow (Nov. 17 18). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Prince Philip, the 97 year old husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, overturned his Land Rover on Thursday in a car crash on a rural road north of London. He was unhurt; two women in an oncoming minivan suffered scrapes and a broken wrist. It's not known exactly what happened or who was at fault. The prince told police officers at the scene that he was momentarily blinded by the sun while pulling onto a main thoroughfare. The incident has prompted some reflection in Britain about when an aging driver ought to consider surrendering the car keys. Sound familiar? The question has long tormented families everywhere. Over the years, reporters at The Times have written extensively about the thorny issues involved. Here are a few articles about a controversy that won't be going away anytime soon. Now I learn that the "car key conversation" is the one that caregivers dread most. Thirty six percent of adult children polled by the website Caring.com and the National Safety Council said that talking to their parents about the need to stop driving would be harder than discussing funeral plans (29 percent) or selling the family home (18 percent). Alas, among the takeaways of the guidebook are the great difficulties physicians have at this fraught moment, and how much easier it would be for them if the decision did not involve them. As it is, physicians must wrestle with laws that vary by state on a variety of issues: if and how elderly drivers are assessed differently than younger ones; whether it is mandatory or optional for doctors to report their concerns; how they are supposed to go about it and strike the right balance between confidentiality and safety; and whether they risk legal liability if, on the one hand, they alert the state authorities or, on the other hand, they keep silent and a subsequent accident occurs. True or false? Most older drivers drive as safely as anyone else. It's just that a few bad apples, particularly those behind the wheel despite poor vision or dementia, make mistakes and produce the statistics showing that per mile driven, drivers over age 75 are almost as dangerous as teenagers. I want this to be true, given how dependent Americans of all ages are on automobiles. But researchers in Australia, using a novel method to gauge how well people drive, have concluded that serious errors are alarmingly commonplace. "We are seeing a ubiquitous increase in driver errors with age," said Kaarin Anstey, a psychologist at Australian National University and lead author of the report, just published in the journal Neuropsychology. My Solution to the Driving Problem: Vandalism Sneaking into my mother's garage to disable the engine of her 1997 Honda Accord was not something I ever imagined doing in my role as daughter and caregiver of a parent in failing health. I had every possible legal authority to secure her health and safety, including medical and legal powers of attorney that enabled me to unravel paperwork problems, manage home repairs and participate in medical decisions. But messing with her right to drive, I discovered, was a huge, neon lighted, statutory no no in New York State. I'm intrigued by the idea of a family driving agreement, by which an older person who may now be a perfectly fine driver acknowledges that with age related changes, "there may come a day when the advantages of my continuing to drive are outweighed by the safety risk I pose not only to myself, but also to other motorists." With this document, the driver designates a trusted relative or friend to notify him when he should either stop driving or continue only with certain restrictions. He pledges to listen and accept that person's recommendation. Then the driver, his designated adviser and a witness, or several, affix their signatures. Take the question of whether people with mild dementia not just older drivers in general should be behind the wheel at all. "Clinicians may present patients and their caregivers with the data showing that, as a group, patients with mild dementia ... are at a substantially higher risk for unsafe driving, and thus should strongly consider discontinuing driving," a new report suggested. Yet it also noted that several studies had shown that a considerable number of those with mild dementia 41 percent to 76 percent, depending on the study could pass an on road driving test. Given that, in many parts of the country, not being able to drive can lead to isolation and a host of other real problems, should those people have to give up their cars? Safer Cars Help Keep Older Drivers on the Road After years of advising others on how to get older drivers to relinquish the car keys, which often resulted in lost independence, isolation and depression (as well as family disputes), driving experts now focus on helping the elderly select vehicles that can accommodate their physical disabilities and certain sensory or cognitive losses. An Alternative to Giving Up the Car Keys While that is a scary thought for some people, the common perception, that the only real choice is between ignoring the difficulties faced by elderly drivers and taking away the car keys, is wrong. "We're evolving in our thinking," said Jodi Olshevski, a gerontologist and executive director of the Hartford insurance company's Center for Mature Market Excellence. "We're not just looking at the transition from driver to passenger, but how we can empower drivers to extend their driving as long as possible." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. 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Over the past five days, executives from the largest American clothing brands and department stores have been engaged in urgent late night phone calls and marathon video conferences in which they game out scenarios for their future in a world with a coronavirus pandemic. In the end, they have decided to request a stimulus package from the United States government that would defray the worst of the effects for both big and small businesses alike, framing it as a "bridge," not a "bailout." The discussion of coming economic carnage as municipal and federal shutdowns have changed lives and businesses has primarily focused on the airlines and the cruise ships, on restaurants and hotels. But the larger American retail industry and its associated industries represent 52 million jobs one in four of all workers and almost 4 trillion worth of gross domestic product, according to data from the National Retail Federation. "There will be tens of millions of job losses in the industry," said Sonia Syngal, the chief executive of Gap Inc., which includes Old Navy, Banana Republic and Athleta. "People don't understand how deeply fashion which is often seen as nonessential is connected to the U.S. economy." Gap Inc. has 80,000 employees nationwide working in stores alone. Without immediate relief, said Tory Burch, the founder and co chief executive of an eponymous brand that employs 4,000 people in the United States, "our industry will fail." "I don't understand why no one is talking about this," said Stephen Smith, the chief executive of L.L. Bean, which has 5,000 full time employees in the United States. Mr. Smith said L.L. Bean had "modeled out countless different scenarios" until the company ultimately settled on "bad, worse and worst." John Idol, chief executive of Capri Holdings, which owns Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo and Versace and has 9,000 employees in the United States, said that, of the scenarios his company had examined, a realistic, not alarmist industry assessment still saw "north of 10 million people who will be unemployed." "Taking China as a model, it's likely nothing will reopen until between 30 to 60 days from now," Mr. Idol said. "It will be approximately a year before business gets somewhat back to normal and it won't be the normal we are used to; it will be a new normal. Many companies won't make it through." The result will be a domino effect. It begins with just the stores that are closed and their employees, which then hurts the brands whose clothes they sell in fact, many are already hurting from canceled wholesale orders. Then come the factories that produce the clothes for those brands, and the mills that spin the fabric, and even the farmers that produce the raw materials. Spillover includes the ads that will be pulled from glossy magazines, the landlords without tenants, logistics companies and transporters who will lose their clients. "It will come to a point where there will be pressure on cash flow even for a company of our size, with what I thought was a fortress balance sheet," said Emanuel Chirico, the chief executive of PVH, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, among other brands, and employs approximately 20,000 people in the United States. "The formula has always been you create inventory, borrow against the inventory and then sell the inventory," he said. But when you can't sell the inventory because no shops are open and no one is buying, the whole chain falls apart. Already, Mr. Chirico said, his stores had accepted their clothing for spring which is now sitting in darkened rooms. Online, some already have sale prices on new merchandise. (About two thirds of L.L. Beans sales are online, directly to consumers; Mr. Smith said business was "holding on," but was still "down 40 percent.") Either way, the full value of the products will never be recouped. Many department stores have simply stopped accepting spring orders, sending them directly back to designers without payment, though the designer has already paid the production costs. Small companies are having to consider the possibility of bankruptcy. "I don't think anyone would step in if there was an orderly long term change as people migrate from stores and do more online shopping," said Jay Sole, a retail analyst at the investment bank UBS. "But if we're going to a very fast disorderly change in the retail landscape, I think some of these retailers could be deemed too big to fail." It began on Wednesday, when the Council of Fashion Designers of America contacted Ms. Burch and asked her to lead the initiative. The American Apparel and Footwear Association was already on board. Ms. Burch in turn contacted over 20 executives to create a working group, including executives from Ralph Lauren, Nordstrom, Saks and Tom Ford International. The next day, the National Retail Federation, an advocacy group for more than a century, came on board. Mr. Smith said he had "never seen anything like" the coordination taking place across the industry. During multiple group chats, three targets were agreed upon. First, they would ask for financing loans for real estate companies, so brands and department stores could have their rent forgiven until they could reopen. Second, they would ask for grants that cover at least 80 percent of employee salaries if they were kept on payroll. And finally, they would request tariff and duty relief for the next 12 months. "Retail after the tariffs was already struggling," said Deborah Weinswig, founder of Coresight Research, an advisory and research firm that specializes in retail and technology. "You've taken a weakened industry and you're weakening it even further. I'm apolitical but overall, we haven't seen the support we've needed for U.S. retail from the U.S. government." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Is the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi drawing nearer? The director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation has told a European news outlet that construction on a long planned and much delayed outpost in the United Arab Emirates is "on track." "We're on budget and we're looking forward to the commencement of the building construction soon," Richard Armstrong, the director, said earlier this month in an interview with Euronews during an event called Culture Summit Abu Dhabi. Sarah Eaton, the Guggenheim's chief spokeswoman, said Thursday that the museum does not have a specific timeline for building. Delays to the Guggenheim project have made it a high profile test of the attempts by the Persian Gulf monarchies to diversify their economies away from petroleum. The U.A.E. has been at the forefront of that effort, and Abu Dhabi announced the Guggenheim project in 2007 as a cornerstone of its bid to attract western tourists to the city. The Emirate's quest for international cultural cachet, however, has collided with Western human rights concerns, and the construction of the museum has been delayed as artists and academics have protested the treatment of the legions of foreign migrant laborers that the U.A.E. is relying on to build both the museum and the luxury developments around it. The Guggenheim said in 2007 that its 450,000 square foot satellite designed by Frank Gehry would be part of the Saadiyat Island Cultural District, a square mile complex just off the shore of Abu Dhabi island. The district also includes the Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel. About 85 percent of the roughly 10 million residents of the U.A.E. are foreigners, most of whom are migrant laborers, usually from Southeast Asia, working for the Emirati minority. Critics of working conditions in Abu Dhabi say laborers must pay large recruitment and transit fees, and there have been reports that some employers or contractors have seized the workers' passports, housed them in substandard conditions and paid them less than expected, all while enforcing demanding work schedules. The laborers usually live in giant, men only barracks on the outskirts of the city, and they are ferried to and from their work sites in employer run buses. Over the years some people concerned with the plight of the workers held protests inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Museum officials have said that they were working closely with partners in Abu Dhabi to improve the welfare of workers. It was unclear, though, how much influence the museum might wield in a project that is being led by the Emirates' government. Ms. Eaton, the Guggenheim spokeswoman, referred questions about the museum's construction to an official with the Emirates culture and tourism authority, the agency responsible for building the museum. That official did not respond to an email asking when museum construction would get underway. Mohamed Al Mubarak, the chairman of the authority, is also the chief executive of Abu Dhabi's largest real estate development company and has close ties to the emirate's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the U.A.E. In a written statement on Thursday, Hiba Zayadin, of Human Rights Watch, which has documented what the group called "systematic human rights violations" of migrant workers on Saadiyat Island, said serious concerns remain about workers' rights there. "While U.A.E. authorities have made important reforms to Emirati labor law and policy, we've documented the government's failure to rigorously investigate violations and enforce the new laws," she said. "Given U.A.E. government restrictions on human rights investigators operating independently in the country we cannot say how widespread abuses continue to be." In an email, Ms. Eaton of the Guggenheim wrote: "We remain committed to securing clear, enforceable worker practices and protections." Mr. Armstrong told Euronews that the Guggenheim was working "to put together what we think is really the first global collection since 1965." He added that it would include works "in the wake of Pop Art" by younger artists and by "the likes of James Turrell or Ernesto Neto or Monika Sosnowska." Abu Dhabi is in the process of building several new hotels to accommodate the tourists it hopes to attract, and hotel industry executives have acknowledged that the draw of the Louvre Museum on its own has so far failed to meet their projections. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
This article is a collaboration between The Times and ProPublica, the independent nonprofit investigative journalism organization. More than a decade ago, Italy tried a novel approach to help bring down drug costs: asking pharmaceutical companies to return money to the national health system if some of their medicines failed to work as expected. The effort largely flopped. The Trump administration is now considering whether to encourage a similar approach. Pharmaceutical executives presented the idea to President Trump at a meeting in January, and the general concept was raised last month in a draft executive order aimed at combating rising drug prices. A number of drug companies have recently entered into such deals, which they call outcomes based contracts. Merck has done so for its diabetes drugs Januvia and Janumet, promising to return money if patients' diabetes did not meet goals for control. And Novartis, which makes the heart failure treatment Entresto, is refunding money if too many patients taking the drug are hospitalized. In more typical deals, drugmakers pay rebates to insurers based on the number of drugs sold and to gain easier access for members to their products. But there is scant evidence this new approach lowers costs. Pharmaceutical companies still set the drug's list price and have to agree to the criteria upon which they will be measured. Some experts say such arrangements are a ploy to deflect attention from substantive changes that could hurt companies' bottom lines, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Moreover, the savings don't always trickle down to consumers. "Most of them get launched with great fanfare," said Dr. Steve Miller, the chief medical officer at Express Scripts, which manages the drug benefits of more than 80 million Americans. "But then you never hear anything about it after the launch because most of them collapse under their own weight." In a recent note to investors, David Maris, an analyst at Wells Fargo, described the approach as a "carnival game" and said he did not know of any such arrangements "where a drug company did not consider it a win for them." Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group, said the approach was in keeping with a trend toward paying doctors and hospitals for the quality of care they deliver rather than the number of services they provide. To understand how these deals work, consider the one that the drugmaker Amgen made with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a nonprofit insurer in Massachusetts and one of the insurers to most aggressively test the concept. It has entered into at least eight such deals over the past two years. This spring, Amgen agreed to pay a full refund to Harvard Pilgrim if patients who took its pricey new cholesterol drug, Repatha, suffered a heart attack or stroke. Repatha is intended for patients with very high cholesterol levels, for which cheaper drugs, known as statins, do not work. As part of such deals, insurers eased restrictions on which patients could gain access to the drug, said Dr. Joshua J. Ofman, a senior vice president at Amgen. Sales of Repatha and similar drugs have disappointed in part because insurers have been reluctant to pay for them given their price. If Harvard Pilgrim patients taking Repatha have a heart attack or stroke, they share in the refund, getting back all out of pocket payments that they have made toward the drug, said Dr. Michael Sherman, chief medical officer at Harvard Pilgrim. Doctors who prescribe Repatha said the deals do not affect how they treat patients. "We're completely agnostic to it," said Dr. Frederic S. Resnic, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Lahey Hospital Medical Center in Burlington, Mass., who sees patients with Harvard Pilgrim insurance. The drugs are so costly that doctors still only prescribe them when patients really need them, he said. Dr. Peter B. Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, is skeptical. He said the pharmaceutical industry is conflating setting drug prices based on the value they bring to patients and the health care system, which he supports, with negotiating givebacks when patients don't respond to drugs, which he sees as too little, too late. The arrangements, he said, carried "bells and whistles" that made them look good in theory. "But as long as you control all the contract terms, it can be a lot of optics but no substance," he said. Dr. Bach and others say the pharmaceutical industry is using this approach to justify seeking major changes to federal regulations that could benefit them even more including rolling back a requirement that Medicaid programs for the poor get the lowest drug prices, and another that bars companies from giving kickbacks to health providers. The industry says the changes are needed to allow more flexibility in the type of deals they can offer. Drug companies and insurers touted these contracts when they were announced, but participants in several deals either declined to comment recently or provided little information about their programs. At a conference last month in Virginia, a senior director with Prime Therapeutics, a pharmacy benefit manager, offered a blunt assessment of such contracts, saying they were not cost effective. But in a phone interview, his boss, David Lassen, the chief clinical officer, was a bit more measured, saying that though the deals carry promise, the work to track patient outcomes is expensive and burdensome. "In their current state, where they're falling short is where you look at the return on investment," Mr. Lassen said. Dr. Sherman at Harvard Pilgrim said the deals would not work for every drug and that drugmakers typically showed no interest when there were no competing brand name drugs that worked in a similar way. Some pharmaceutical executives acknowledge the model should not be seen as a panacea. Leonard S. Schleifer, the chief executive of Regeneron, questioned how such pricing would work for a drug like Dupixent, an eczema drug his company makes that was approved this year. "Are we going to start calculating the surface area of the rash that's improved?" said Dr. Schleifer, whose company has entered into some outcomes based deals for Praluent, a competitor to Repatha. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Penelope Ann Miller and Al Pacino in "Carlito's Way." In the documentary "De Palma," the director himself remembers watching this movie and thinking, "I can't make a better picture than this." Gateway Movies offers ways to begin exploring directors, genres and topics in film by examining a few streaming movies. One of the most enduring questions among cinephiles has been what exactly to do about Brian De Palma. Detractors used to dismiss him as a talented recycler who riffed on the movies of great auteurs (Alfred Hitchcock most obviously and consistently) without achieving those auteurs' nuance or depth. Admirers cast him as one of the most gifted stylists of his generation every bit the peer of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who came up in the film industry at the same time. In this view, he's also a serious artist who has preserved classic Hollywood traditions even as he has slyly toyed with them. The 2016 documentary "De Palma," now streaming on Netflix, gave the feeling of resolving the matter. The director sat down with fellow filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, much as Hitchcock had with Francois Truffaut, and went film by film through his career. No one who saw the documentary could doubt De Palma's sincerity, the range of his work or, particularly, his command of film language. De Palma turned 80 this month, and at this point it seems uncontroversial to rank him among the living masters of the cinematic form. My own enthusiasms, as Robert De Niro's Al Capone might call them, have varied wildly over time, from skepticism to appreciation and back. But if even inveterate De Palma watchers sometimes get tsk tsked for their taste, where does that leave newcomers? I propose that a good middle ground is to start with a De Palma classic from his freewheeling 1970s '80s period, "Blow Out," and to continue with one of his finest studio efforts, "Carlito's Way." Aficionados may howl at that one as insufficiently pure grade. (David Koepp, not De Palma, wrote the script, which mostly plays it straight.) But in "De Palma," the director himself remembers watching "Carlito's Way" and thinking, "I can't make a better picture than this." "Blow Out" (1981): Stream it on Amazon Prime through Sept. 30 or on Tubi; rent or buy it on Google Play or iTunes. "Carlito's Way" (1993): Stream it on Peacock; rent or buy it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu. Part of what makes "Blow Out" quintessential De Palma is that it wears its influences proudly but also recombines them to make them fully the director's own. The basic premise is consciously indebted to Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up" (1966), which concerns a photographer who accidentally captures evidence of a murder. But De Palma's film uses the setup to create a thriller, something that Antonioni's study of disaffection in swinging London steadfastly refused to be. "Blow Out" centers on a movie sound man, Jack (John Travolta), who unwittingly records audio that could prove a fatal car accident was a political assassination. Antonioni is only the most superficial influence. De Palma borrowed the car accident off the bridge from the Chappaquiddick scandal involving Ted Kennedy. Jack pores over individual frames of the murder scene as if parsing the Zapruder footage, which gets a shout out. De Palma has cited the Watergate operative G. Gordon Liddy as his inspiration for the villain (John Lithgow), who has vastly exceeded his mandate by killing and goes to extreme lengths to cover his tracks. Although the film has something to say about what was at the time recent American history and the public's capacity to turn a blind eye to corruption, on several levels "Blow Out" is a movie about movies and the apparent contradiction they contain. On one hand, movies offer the promise of capturing the truth. Jack, who recorded the accident while making audio of whooshing wind for a horror movie, turns increasingly to film to prove his case. He cuts still photos of the accident from a magazine and animates them, synchronizing them to the audio he's recorded to create a mini documentary of the crime scene. On the other hand, movies are inherently constructions, with the capacity to fabricate. "Blow Out" has already lied to us by opening with an elaborate fake out: a sequence from the point of view of a slasher stalking coeds that turns out to be a film within the film. (This sequence represented De Palma's first use of the Steadicam, which was then a novel device, and a tool he has used to extraordinary effect ever since.) The sequence ends with the stalker about to murder a showering woman, and she lets out a pitiful scream; cut to the screening room, where we learn that Jack hasn't bothered to dub the actress. The search for a believable fake scream frames the movie. In the final irony, he will hear that perfect scream in real life. De Palma, who has repeatedly mined Hitchcock's "Rear Window" for inspiration, plays ingenious tricks with vantage point. He frequently shows events from different perspectives or illustrates simultaneity with split screens. The first time we see the car accident, we're watching Jack, as De Palma subtly attunes us to sounds (a hooting owl, a couple's banter, a zipping noise that turns out to be garrote wire from the killer's wristwatch) that we'll need to recognize later on. We'll see the accident again, but never quite in the same way: When Jack plays his audio back for the first time, we watch the sequence from his point of view, as he matches sounds to the images in his mind. Few filmmakers are as adept at leading viewers through the geography of a sequence. My favorite example is in the final 20 minutes of "Carlito's Way," which is simply one of the most thrilling chases ever filmed. The reformed criminal Carlito (Al Pacino) plans to escape by train to Miami with his girlfriend, Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), avoiding mobsters who want him dead and have shown up at his Harlem club just as he's about to make his getaway. Sneaking out through a panel in the floor, he must take a subway from 125th Street to Grand Central Terminal, all the while evading his pursuers. De Palma doesn't leave the setup at that but continues exploiting the various complications that scenario offers. When the subway is held at 125th, it's not by Carlito's pursuers but by rowdy strangers just trying to catch the train. Officers who board at a later stop offer Carlito some cover. But the sequence reveals its full virtuosity when Carlito arrives at Grand Central. De Palma, in a Steadicam shot that runs longer than two minutes, follows Carlito and his would be killers around an escalator bank and over two floors, all the while keeping everyone's placement perfectly clear and the mechanics of suspense in motion. It's a shot so complex, so filled with moving parts, that it's difficult to map out in words. As ever, De Palma pushes purely cinematic tools to their limits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The 1823 church was untouched by time maybe a little too untouched. And solving the plumbing problem wasn't going to be easy. It Was the Ideal Antique Building. Who Needs Bathrooms, Anyway? The first time Matthew Bremer saw the listing for the church he would eventually buy in Phillipsport, N.Y., it arrived like so many unwanted emails, as inbox clogging spam. But rather than immediately hitting delete he scrolled down the email while eating lunch and was intrigued by what he saw: a simple white clapboard church dating to 1823 that was so untouched by time its only bathroom was an outhouse. "It was this sort of perfect, almost child's drawing of the idea of a church," said Mr. Bremer, 51, the founder of Architecture in Formation, a Manhattan based firm. "The white Colonial box." Fantasizing about converting it into a private country escape, he and a friend took the two hour drive north from New York City for a look. "It was in this bucolic setting," he said, and had impressive architectural bones, as well as 14 foot tall, triple hung, divided light windows that gave it a magical sense of light. "I was like, 'You're crazy,'" said Mr. Skura, 40, a relationship manager at LinkedIn. "However, I also saw instant potential, and I knew he would do something extraordinary with it." The reality at the outset, Mr. Skura added, was clear: "We knew it was going to take a lot of blood, sweat and tears." Before committing to buying it, Mr. Bremer wanted to be sure the church could legally be converted to a private residence, and that a septic system could be added so they could have indoor bathrooms. After studying the half acre property, he came to the conclusion that there was nowhere he could reasonably add a septic system. But he noticed an awkward vacant lot across the street with only a billboard for Shadowland Stages, a theater in nearby Ellenville. "I reached out and said, 'Hey, is there any way that we could share this property," Mr. Bremer said. Eventually he struck a deal with the theater that allowed him to buy the property to use for his septic field for next to nothing, with the promise that the billboard would remain. Then he spent the better part of the following year working on getting his unconventional plans approved by local authorities. "It took a somewhat masochistic architect to go through and get four very specific variances to legalize the disused church to a residence," Mr. Bremer said. Two years after he first visited the church a 2,200 square foot United Methodist Church that had been vacant for several years, and had an additional 1,100 square feet on the basement level Mr. Bremer finally felt confident that a conversion was possible and bought it for 100,000, in the spring of 2017. He and Mr. Skura had contractors largely dismantle it down to the enormous structural timbers, in order to add the insulation, HVAC, plumbing and electrical systems it needed. "It was ostensibly an old pole barn, uninsulated," said Mr. Bremer, who sought to keep the basic character of the building intact while "channeling Donald Judd, Gordon Matta Clark and a little bit of John Waters." Upstairs, they designated the altar as the dining area and cut a large opening in the wall, to create an enormous picture window that also reveals some of the building's original framing. They tucked a stainless steel kitchen under the loft, which they converted to an office and media lounge with a retractable projection screen. And they built a second bathroom behind the kitchen with a one way mirror that allows occupants to look out over spice jars to see activity in the main living space. Because there was no fireplace, they suspended a shapely steel Fireorb a product more commonly associated with modernist glass boxes than old clapboard churches. "I'm interested in how we, as a culture, have sort of moved beyond binaries of sacred and profane, and public and private," Mr. Bremer said. "Of course, when converting a church, all of that comes to the fore." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"The Band's Visit" can add a happy tune to its song list. Harry Potter can cast a celebratory spell. And "Angels" can rejoice. Our annual survey of Tony Awards voters suggests that, after a season that some found frustratingly unoriginal, a handful of shows have emerged as clear industry favorites, including "The Band's Visit," "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," and "Angels in America." We talked to 110 of the 842 voters over the last few days; they were granted anonymity because the balloting process is secret. Their ballots are due at noon on Friday, and the ceremony, a presentation of the American Theater Wing and the Broadway League, begins at 8 p.m. Sunday, broadcast on CBS from Radio City Music Hall. Without further ado, here's what we learned: In the big race, the little show is winning. Best new musical is the one Tony category that generally has a significant box office impact. And the winner this year is likely to be the show that needs it the most: "The Band's Visit." Nearly 80 percent of the voters we surveyed said they were voting for the musical, which is adapted from a fictional 2007 Israeli film about an Egyptian police orchestra that unexpectedly spends a night in a Jewish desert town. A gentle show about longing for connection, the musical has been selling solidly, but not amazingly, at the box office. The musical wowed critics, and its admirers were rapturous. "I would vote for it 10 times if I could," one voter said. Another opined, "It's interesting, it's new, it's fresh it's the thing we all want when we go to the theater, to be surprised." Sign up for Theater Update, a weekly email of news and features. The also rans in this category are all far better known titles "Mean Girls," "SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical" and "Frozen." Both "Frozen" and "Mean Girls" have been selling strongly at the box office; "SpongeBob" has been underperforming. Others said they weren't sure what the fuss was about: "What a terrible year for musicals. This was the least worst choice." Another said, "Had it been any other season with compelling competition my vote would have possibly gone elsewhere." A few voters even said they were boycotting the category. As one put it, "I didn't vote for best musical because there isn't one." Get ready for 'Harry Potter and the Multiple Tonys.' "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is the costliest play Broadway has ever seen, it got excellent reviews, and it's selling strongly. And in a season short on conversation starting dramas, about two thirds of our voters said they went for "Cursed Child," the only nominee still running, as the best play. The two part production, written by Jack Thorne, was universally praised for its stagecraft. And it appeared to benefit from low expectations on the part of some theater industry veterans who had doubted whether a play based on a series of wildly popular children's books about a boy wizard would make quality drama. "I expected to hate it," one voter said. "And then I loved it." Another voter called it "truly an all around spectacle of storytelling and presentation." Of course, "Cursed Child," which originated in London, is not for everyone; some, especially those unfamiliar with the books or films, said they found it difficult to follow. There were only three musical revivals this season, but all three "Carousel," "My Fair Lady" and "Once on This Island" got good reviews and have enthusiastic partisans, leaving that race too close to call. In our survey, 39 percent of voters supported "My Fair Lady," 35 percent favored "Once on This Island," and 25 percent chose "Carousel." Given that our survey is not a scientific poll, those percentages are too close to make a prediction with any confidence; anything could happen. Among plays, the outcome seems clearer. Voters were enthusiastic about both "Angels in America," by Tony Kushner, which was a Broadway sensation in 1993 and 1994, and "Three Tall Women," by Edward Albee, which had never previously run on Broadway. But about 60 percent of the voters we surveyed chose "Angels" as the best, and about 27 percent went for "Three Tall Women." The other contenders are "The Iceman Cometh," "Lobby Hero" and "Travesties." Many voters went out of their way to tell us how much they loved "Angels" as a feat of playwriting. "Greatest American play ever written," one voter said. "He's a present day Shakespeare," another said of Mr. Kushner. And a third voter explained: "'Angels in America' is just one of those plays for which you have to bow down and give full respect. It's the winner." Nine out of 10 voters said they were going to vote for her performance as the imperious matriarch in "Three Tall Women," and they weren't shy about why: "Transcendent." "Just absolutely, absolutely thrilling." "An old pro at the height of her abilities." "I feel lucky to have seen this." Ms. Jackson, who is 82 and took a long detour from acting to serve in the British Parliament, has been nominated four times previously for a Tony Award; she has never won. Voters also loved Katrina Lenk as the sultry cafe owner at the heart of "The Band's Visit." This is Ms. Lenk's first Tony nomination, but many voters were also impressed with her performance last season in "Indecent," and 65 percent of those we surveyed voted to give her a Tony. "There was so much emotion inside her, and she moved me," one voter said. "A nuanced elegant performance," another noted. And a third: "Exotic and sexy and funny and enigmatic. Who wouldn't fall in love with her?" Andrew Garfield is a favorite, but for musical actors it's still a race. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The question of which engine type is best for powering the cars of the masses may never have a single, unchanging answer. When the V8 prevailed on American roads, it was an appropriate choice for large vehicles in an era of cheap fuel. Times have changed; the workhorse auto engines of our era are those that fit in the narrow engine compartments of the millions of front wheel drive cars. For that reason, the V6 has become ubiquitous in full size family sedans, and in line 4 cylinders have come to dominate the overall market as vehicles shrink. Many factors have been considered in establishing these norms. The in line 6, once dominant, is still favored by BMW and others because of its naturally smooth operation, but aside from a handful of exceptions, it is too long to fit under the hood of front drive models. In line 4s that typically power small front drive cars are attractive to automakers; with fewer parts, they are cheaper to build. But such engines have shortcomings. Their natural imbalance requires the complication of a counterbalancer system to offset vibration, and their less frequent firing pulses two per revolution, or half as many as a V8 can generate a driveline vibration felt by passengers under some driving conditions. That makes engines with more cylinders desirable, but they must be contained in a package of short overall length. Today's answer is a V6 engine. These same requirements existed in the late 1930s at Lancia, a small Italian manufacturer. The company needed a smoother, more powerful engine that would fit into an existing, rather narrow engine bay. Lancia had previously solved such problems by building compact engines that arranged the cylinders in a narrow V shape, with both cylinder banks sharing a single cylinder head. Such extreme compactness compromised performance (though Volkswagen was later successful in adopting a similar scheme for its VR6 engine). Something new was needed. Lancia had been founded in 1906 by a racing driver, Vincenzo Lancia. The company made its place by building cars known for exceptional construction and driving qualities, yet priced below the top end of the expanding auto market. (Lancia became part of Fiat in 1969.) The company was a pioneer of unit body construction and 4 wheel independent suspension. A young engineering graduate, Francesco De Virgilio, was hired at Lancia in 1939 and put to routine tasks. He soon attracted management's attention by improving and simplifying the suspension of a Lancia model. In 1941 he was transferred to the test department, working under Vittorio Jano, one of the outstanding designers of the 20th century. De Virgilio spent the summer of 1943 analyzing the vibration of alternative V angles for a possible V6 engine. Engine balance been given little attention in the early days of motoring because engine speeds, and therefore shaking forces, were low, but as engines were made smaller and higher revving, controlling vibration became more important. Today, engineers let their computer workstations pop out solutions to deal with vibration problems. Easy answers of this kind have been a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing because junior engineers no longer need to spend weeks in pencil and paper calculation as De Virgilio did. They are a curse because instant computer solutions do not confer the insight that De Virgilio gained. De Virgilio's career is chronicled in a new, generously illustrated book, "Lancia and De Virgilio at the Center," by Geoffrey Goldberg (David Bull Publishing, 2014). The book has the graceful quality and range of an artist's biography, properly treating De Virgilio's entire life as relevant to his work. He is depicted with his family, at work and at the racetrack. (Fangio was a Formula One champion in the Lancia D 50, fielded by Ferrari, in 1956.) There are reproductions of many of his sketches and drawings as well as photos of the hardware he created. De Virgilio showed his superiors that a V6 with its cylinder banks positioned at a 60 degree V angle and a crankshaft with six crankpins the section where the connecting rods attach spaced at 60 degree intervals could be made uniquely smooth running. There was official resistance to his conclusion, because, as the automotive historian Karl Ludvigsen has noted, the V6 was a "virtually unknown engine type in the 1950s." Even so, Lancia's team built, evaluated and rejected as less smooth alternative designs before accepting De Virgilio's solution. In the end, Jano, Lancia's chief engineer, chose De Virgilio's V6 to power the very influential 1950 Lancia Aurelia. De Virgilio's solution was a crankshaft with four main bearings and six crankpins; his design resulted in evenly spaced firing intervals and a low vibration power plant. (By contrast, many of the V6s that followed were built like V8s, with pairs of connecting rods bolted side by side on each of the three crankpins.) Offsetting the crankpins, as De Virgilio did, weakened the crankshaft because each pair of crankpins was joined to a disc between them, with almost no overlapping metal between each pair of pins. Like most engineering decisions, this was a compromise; at the engine speeds prevalent in that era, the engines were reliable, and the result was a new kind of smooth, compact automotive power plant. The Aurelia it powered was a streamlined sporting sedan that strongly influenced subsequent European auto design. When, in 1956, Enzo Ferrari wanted a head start on 1957's new Formula Two racing class, he engaged Jano as a consultant. With the Aurelia's competition success in mind, a six crankpin V6 to power the Ferrari racecar was drawn up, widening the V angle to 65 degrees to make room for three dual throat carburetors. Later production V6 auto engines had a less elegant origin as utilitarian cost cutters. Buick built an aluminum V8 during the early 1960s (later used in Land Rovers), but it was expensive. The project manager, Joseph D. Turlay, made a simplifying proposal: Chop off two cylinders to make a shared crankpin V6 and give it a low cost iron block. This saved money by allowing V6s to be produced on modified V8 tooling, even though the result was neither ideally balanced (the engines are sometime called paint shakers) nor did it have an even firing interval. These shortcomings were masked by the use of soft engine mounts. Buick's first Fireball V6 arrived in 1962, and a smoother even fire engine with six separate crankpins came late in 1977. De Virgilio's V6 work was modern in the sense that he was trying to package engine functions to fit external requirements. Automakers in need of a short engine with more than 4 cylinders have made millions of 90 degree V6s, saving money by sharing tooling with V8s. Those compromise V6s were not as smooth as De Virgilio's solution of 1943 a configuration now broadly embraced but they were effective automobile power plants. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. PAUL JACOBS at Paul Recital Hall (Sept. 10, 7:30 p.m.). That the organ of Notre Dame Cathedral survived the fire in April is little short of a miracle, so it's a good time for Jacobs, one of our leading organists, to celebrate the culture that this instrument still represents. In the first of three concerts this month under the rubric of "The Great French Organ Tradition," Jacobs plays works by Marcel Dupre, Nadia Boulanger, Cesar Franck, Jehan Alain, Naji Hakim, Camille Saint Saens and Alexandre Guilmant. 212 769 7406, juilliard.edu METROPOLIS ENSEMBLE at 1 Rivington Street (Sept. 7, 7:30 p.m.). Now in its 13th year, this vibrant collective opens its season with a concert that takes in music from the French Baroque, the Swedish folk tradition and the contemporary era, in the shape of works by Gabriella Smith and Paul Wiancko. Alexi Kenney, Ayane Kozasa, Gabriel Cabezas and Wiancko play strings, under the artistic director Andrew Cyr. metropolisensemble.org NOVUS NY AND THE CHOIR OF TRINITY WALL STREET at St. Paul's Chapel (Sept. 12, 7 p.m.). In the 10 seasons that the conductor and composer Julian Wachner has been director of music at Trinity Wall Street, he has turned its artistic programming into a genuine cultural force, as adept in Baroque music as it is in the most modern sounds. I am not sure there is a more valuable musical institution at work in New York today. As part of a celebratory weekend, Wachner leads a concert looking back at just some of the contributions he and his forces have made, whether downtown, elsewhere in the city or on record, with music by Paola Prestini, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Jessie Montgomery, Ellen Reid, Edward Thomas, Trevor Weston, Du Yun, Philip Glass and Wachner himself. As is the norm, the concert is free. 212 602 0800, trinitywallstreet.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Peak tourist season in Paris may be winding down, but several new and innovative tours in the city are keeping it a vibrant destination in the fall and winter, too. Many of the sites these excursions cover aren't new; the way to see them, on the other hand, is. How about solving a murder mystery, for instance, to learn about the French Revolution? With the interactive French Revolution: A Murder Mystery Tour from the tour company Paris Muse, visitors take a trip to 18th century Paris and crack the case of a real life political assassination. Along the way, they meet the suspects a literature hawker and a prominent socialite are among the bunch learn their views on the Revolution and visit the sights where they worked and lived, including the Palais Royal, the Louvre and Ile de la Cite. Clues at each spot lead to the real murderer at the end (two and a half hours, 320 euros or about 352 for groups of six or fewer). A private tour of the under the radar Musee Jacquemart Andre, a jewel box of a museum in an ornate 19th century mansion near the Champs Elysees, is available with the registered guide and art expert Jean Jacques Serres. This former estate of Nelie Jacquemart and Edouard Andre, a couple who were passionate art lovers, houses their collection of works by renowned artists like Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Rembrandt (two hours, 150 euros for up to five people). For those who want to avoid crowds, the Paris based bespoke travel company My DMC can arrange a historian led tour of Notre Dame, the Gothic cathedral dating to the 12th century, before its doors open to the public (90 minutes, 1,150 euros). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Businesses are beginning to reopen and new coronavirus cases are declining, but Americans don't expect life or the economy to return to normal any time soon. Only one in five Americans expects overall business conditions to be "very" or "somewhat" good over the next year, according to a poll conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research platform SurveyMonkey. Sixty percent said they expected the next five years to be characterized by "periods of widespread unemployment or depression." Those numbers are little changed from a month earlier, and may even reflect a slight decline in outlook, signaling that the reopenings and federal and state political moves to deal with the pandemic have had little impact on confidence. Consumers have good reason for that pessimism. Economists, who once expected a swift, "V shaped" recovery, now say unemployment is likely to remain elevated for years. In testimony before a Senate committee on Tuesday, Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, both warned that further job losses were likely although they disagreed sharply about the best policies to foster growth. Consumers' bleak outlook, however justified, could have serious implications for the economic recovery. If Americans fear that their jobs are in jeopardy or that business will remain slow, they may be less likely to spend even if their personal finances are stable. Emily Williams, a financial analyst for a mortgage servicing company in South Carolina, has been able to do her job remotely. Her husband, who sells tires for construction equipment, has lost some work, but they have saved money on day care now that both are at home. Ms. Williams is cautiously optimistic about the prospects for an economic recovery, which she thinks will be faster than after the 2008 9 recession. But she and her husband are saving money and preparing for the worst. "Obviously we're very thankful for our situation, but it also makes us kind of cautious," she said. "We're making sure that we save, because we don't know what's going to happen, especially with my husband's job. We're kind of preparing in case we later are impacted." Among those surveyed who were working before the pandemic, about one in 10 had lost their jobs in the last two months, and roughly one third had had their hours cut or otherwise lost income. Of those who had kept their jobs, about one in three were at least somewhat worried about losing them. Democrats are more pessimistic than Republicans, as they have been throughout President Trump's term. But confidence has fallen sharply among members of both parties. In February, before the coronavirus outbreak began to spread widely in the United States, nearly 80 percent of Republicans said they expected business conditions over the next year to be good; in May, just 35 percent said so. Among Democrats, that share fell to 8 percent from 18 percent. Perhaps the starkest divide, however, is between those who have already lost jobs and those who have been relatively unaffected by the pandemic's economic toll. Among those who have kept their job and their hours, more than 80 percent say their finances are at least as good as a year ago. They are relatively unconcerned about the health risks of returning to work. Most are confident that their finances will remain steady over the next year, even as they worry about the broader economy. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. For those who have lost their jobs, however, the picture is different. Two thirds say their finances have taken a hit, and most don't expect their situation to improve over the next year. Many are skeptical that they will quickly find a new job, and are worried about the health risks if they do return to work. And despite the federal government's steps to expand access to unemployment benefits during the crisis, most were not yet receiving benefits as of early May. "There's a lot of frustration," she said. Without her brother, "I don't know what I would have done." Ms. Gutierrez is optimistic that she'll collect unemployment benefits. But they will be a stopgap. Massage studios fall under Phase 3 of California's reopening plan, meaning it could be weeks or months before they are allowed to reopen in big cities. Even then, Ms. Gutierrez doesn't know what business will look like. The massage therapy business in the Bay Area has thrived in recent years, in part because tech firms have offered in office chair massages to their workers. Now those programs are suspended, and even when offices reopen, it isn't clear whether companies will bring massages back in what is likely to be an era of cost cutting. Ms. Gutierrez said that after 12 years as a full time massage therapist, she would probably have to find other work. But that, too, is daunting, with millions of other people unemployed. "It's definitely unsettling," she said. For workers who have kept their jobs and are able to work from home, the experience has been different. They have kept their incomes, and in many cases their expenses have fallen, leaving them in better financial shape than before the crisis. Logynn Hailley lives in Austin, Texas, and works as an artist for a company that makes games like slot machines for mobile phones a rare example of a business that is thriving at a time of stay at home orders. She has received three job offers since the pandemic began. Ms. Hailley's life has changed in recent months, but it isn't necessarily worse. She is working from home, doing yoga in the morning in place of her commute and cooking at home instead of eating out. Her only outings have been a handful of trips to the grocery store. "Other than that, my car hasn't left the driveway, and I haven't missed it personally at all," she said. Ms. Hailley, 40, said she felt fortunate, and a bit uncomfortable with how little she had been affected. She knows people who have lost jobs or gotten sick. She worries that states including Texas are opening up too quickly. She has stepped up her charitable giving. "I definitely have some survivor's guilt," she said. The pandemic, she added, "is absolutely horrifying, and I have nothing to worry about, and I've been doing really well financially." About the survey: The data in this article came from an online survey of 5,733 adults conducted by the polling firm SurveyMonkey from May 4 to May 10. The company selected respondents at random from the nearly three million people who take surveys on its platform each day. Responses were weighted to match the demographic profile of the population of the United States. The survey has a modeled error estimate (similar to a margin of error in a standard telephone poll) of plus or minus two percentage points, so differences of less than that amount are statistically insignificant. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
There is something seriously wonky about a world where a famous person wearing the same outfit more than once is exciting news. Ever since Tiffany Haddish appeared in her white halter neck Alexander McQueen dress at the MTV Movie TV Awards last weekend for the fourth time fourth time! after wearing it in July 2017 at the premiere of "Girl's Trip," then the following November when she hosted "Saturday Night Live," and then to present at the Oscars in March, and it became something of a cause celebre, I can't stop thinking about it. The same thing happens every time that another celebrity known for shopping her closet, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, appears in a look she has previously worn. It could be the yellow Alexander McQueen coatdress she wore to her daughter's christening in 2015, at Trooping the Colour in 2016 and during a trip to Belgium in 2017; or the beaded Jenny Packham gown she wore in 2016 to a gala for the East Anglia Children's hospices and in 2011 to the ARK 10th Anniversary Gala Dinner. Among many others. Every time they do it, we throw up our hands in excitement. Yet what we should really be asking ourselves is: Why this is the exception rather than the rule? In our culture of disposability and influencers, wearing something in public more than once is often perceived as a sign, somehow, of failure: of not being rich enough, or powerful enough, or desirable enough, to continually acquire things. We avidly check Instagram and street style (even though we know how manufactured it is) to see What Boldface Names Are Wearing Now! and the Top 10 Best Looks! all of it feeding our seemingly unending need for the new and different. This is what drives stylists to demand clothes straight from the runway for their clients, before they even reach stores, and what spurred the see now/buy now moment a few years ago, when brands decided they were losing out on market share because consumers simply could not wait for whatever appeared on said runway or on said celebrity to hit the shop floor. And it is what made fast fashion into such a phenomenon (it started out as affordable style for all, a laudable goal, but was quickly transformed into quick hit purchasing addiction). It is what is powering the rental market, which allows the experience of a new dress without the guilt, and what is causing the sudden trend among our favorite clotheshorses, including Kendall Jenner, Kardashian Co. and Chloe Sevigny, to sell off chunks of their closets. It's all spun as entertainment: visual candy, a celebration of design, an example for us all to get ideas about how to dress. Innocent fun. But it is also creating a glut of overstock (H M's 4.3 billion of unsold clothes, anyone?) and undermining the local industry of countries swamped by secondhand donations made to allay the guilt of purchase. And it is skewing our value system in a way that isn't good for anyone. There's some talk about "men get to wear the same tux over and over again, why shouldn't we." Michelle Obama made that point at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 2017, when she said her husband had worn one tuxedo all eight years he was in the White House, but she couldn't do the same thing because "people take pictures of the shoes I wear, the bracelets, the necklace." That's true, but I also think the issue is about more than gender equality. Ms. Haddish may have joked about it on "S.N.L.," when she said, "I feel like I should be able to wear what I want, when I want, however many times I want, as long as I Febreze it," but the point is a serious one. It's about the fact, as Ms. Haddish told W magazine, that her approximately 4,000 dress was the equivalent of "a down payment on a car, that's a medical bill. So, even though everyone says I shouldn't wear the dress in public again, I'm wearing it." It's about the fact she actually bought her dress herself, as opposed to borrowing it, or being contractually obliged to wear it, as so many celebrities do and are on the red carpet. I think the last time I remember an actress copping to purchasing her own dress was in 2016 when Bryce Dallas Howard announced she had bought her Golden Globes Jenny Packham (size 6!) from Neiman Marcus. And when you buy something yourself, especially when it is an expensive something, it has value it doesn't necessarily have when it isn't directly linked to your own labor and bank balance. You have usually weighed the pros and cons, sacrificed a bit, had an internal debate, and then made a decision. In celebrating her purchase and how it makes her feel, and in wearing it over and over, Ms. Haddish (and the Duchess of Cambridge, for that matter) is modeling a different kind of value system one we used to have but seem to have forgotten. One that appreciates the work that goes into a really wonderful garment, says it is worth the investment, especially if you amortize it over many wears and aren't afraid to admit it. Because this kind of revisionist (or old fashioned) thinking is in everyone's interest, brand and consumer alike. It says one well considered garment is worth 10 here today recycled tomorrow equivalents, and can be priced accordingly. It puts a premium on time and quality. It holds both sides of the equation to a higher standard. We should value our clothes. They are part of our identity. We should think about them. We should take care of them. They should protect us. They should make us feel secure. They should contain memories. Not all of them, to be fair. But a lot of them. Maybe that sounds like a load of sanctimonious hooey, but it seems to me that the applause greeting Ms. Haddish's choices should be a sign. Wear it again, Sam. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A contagious variant of the coronavirus spreading through Britain has left that nation grappling with new lockdowns, curtailed air travel and a surge in infections. Now it has appeared in Colorado and California, threatening to complicate what had seemed a hopeful, if halting, path to recovery from the pandemic. Scientists do not know how widely the new mutant may have spread in the United States. But the answer to that question will color virtually every aspect of the response: hospital treatment, community lockdowns, school closures and more. "The overall picture is pretty grim," said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The variant's arrival also makes it all the more imperative that Americans receive vaccinations in great numbers, and more quickly, scientists said. A pathogen that spreads easily is more difficult to contain, and a greater percentage of the population must be inoculated to turn back the pandemic. Yet even as the variant surfaced, officials with the Trump administration acknowledged on Wednesday that the vaccine rollout was going too slowly. Just 2.6 million people had received their first dose as of Monday morning, far short of the 20 million goal. "We agree that that number is lower than what we hoped for," said Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to accelerate vaccine development and distribution. The federal government has enrolled 40,000 pharmacy locations in that program designed to accelerate vaccine distribution, Mr. Slaoui and other officials said. The variant, called B.1.1.7, is not thought to be more deadly than other versions of the virus, nor does it seem to cause more severe illness. Masks, physical distancing and hand hygiene are still the best ways to contain its spread. Current vaccines are likely to be effective against it and any others that may emerge in the short term. But given the mutant's apparent contagiousness, scientists fear that its toehold in the United States augurs another difficult chapter in the pandemic. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced on Wednesday that a case of the variant had been discovered in the state. Officials in San Diego County later identified the patient as a man in his 30s who had not traveled outside the United States, suggesting the virus was transmitted by someone else in the community a sign that the new version is already spreading. A household contact of the man has developed symptoms, the officials said, and is being tested. Officials in Colorado confirmed one patient and identified a second suspected case, both men in the National Guard assigned to a nursing home in Simla, Colo., about 80 miles southeast of Denver. The confirmed patient also had not traveled. "There's no reason to think that that community is particularly special in any way," Dr. Hanage said. "It's completely reasonable to think it's in a lot of other places, but we just haven't looked for it yet." Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday that they were working with state laboratories in California, Delaware and Maryland to analyze patient samples for infection. Agency scientists also plan to analyze up to 3,500 viral genomes each week to detect the new mutant and others as they emerge. The virus's debut in the United States underscores the need for urgent steps to tamp down transmission, experts said. If the variant is spreading in this country, it will bring not just an increase in the number of cases, but also of hospitalizations and deaths. The number of people hospitalized for Covid 19 daily has been rising relentlessly since October, totaling nearly 125,000 on Wednesday. Those numbers are expected to swell as a result of family gatherings over the holidays. "In places like the U.S. and the U.K., where the health care system is already at its breaking point, a huge surge of new cases on top of the exponential spread we're already seeing is going to be really, really bad," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist affiliated with Georgetown University in Washington. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. "Not only is that going to potentially increase the number of Covid deaths, but it's also probably going to increase the number of deaths from other causes as well." People infected with the variant may need different care than earlier coronavirus patients, further burdening the health care system, experts said. "We're still learning how these variants might respond to drugs and other Covid 19 treatments, including monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma," Dr. Henry Walke, the C.D.C.'s incident manager for Covid response, said at the news briefing. The news ramps up the urgency to get Americans vaccinated because it raises the threshold for so called herd immunity the percentage of people who must be inoculated to contain the threat. That threshold may be 90 percent now, versus the 70 percent experts previously estimated. The mutant virus seems to spread in the same ways that the coronavirus always has, suggesting that well known precautions shutting down nonessential businesses and instituting mask mandates and physical distancing will hold the virus at bay. "It's not like this variant suddenly has new capabilities, or that it can suddenly cross over large distances outdoors," Dr. Rasmussen said. But the ease with which the new version spreads implies that even more stringent restrictions may be needed, scientists said. "This variant was not stopped by the stronger interventions that were put in place in the U.K. in November," Dr. Hanage said. "And that means that we need more." That is likely to prove difficult at a time when many Americans are already defying restrictions. On Wednesday, about a quarter of the shoppers going into the Simla Food Store in Colorado left their faces uncovered, only half a block from the nursing home where the mutant virus is believed to have surfaced. "They chew us out because they don't think all this is real," said Cene Kurtchi, 71, who runs a cafe in town and requires patrons to wear masks. "I think part of it is politics, part of it is denial. People don't want to admit even a little place like Simla is at risk." British authorities first detected the mutant virus in September. They reported earlier this month that the variant quickly became predominant, accounting for more than 60 percent of new cases in London and surrounding areas. "I would expect a similar trajectory" in the United States, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The variant probably accounts for fewer than 1 percent of cases now, he estimated, but might constitute the majority of cases by March. The variant has 23 mutations, compared with the original virus discovered in Wuhan, China. Seventeen mutations appeared since the virus diverged from its most recent ancestor, said Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a scientific adviser to the British government. The speed with which the virus acquired so many alterations worries scientists, who had expected the coronavirus to evolve far more slowly. Current vaccine candidates should continue to protect people from illness, several experts said. But the appearance of the new variant, which contains at least one mutation that weakens the body's immune protection, makes it likely that vaccines may need regular adjustment, much as they do to remain effective against the influenza virus. Scientists are still unsure how much more easily the mutant spreads. Initial estimates were around 70 percent greater transmissibility, but the figure has since been revised to 56 percent and may dip even lower, Dr. Cevik said. But with every new person it infects, the coronavirus also has more chances to mutate, and therefore more chances to happen upon mutations that give it an advantage by making it more transmissible, for example, or less susceptible to the immune system. "If you have enough of that going on, huge amounts of virus replication throughout the world, then you are going to get many different variants," said Dr. Dan Barouch, a virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "If a virus essentially is better adapted to the human host, then it will quite rapidly overtake the global population." Dr. Cevik offered one nugget of optimism. Early reports from Britain hinted that the new variant spreads more readily among young children. But those suggestions were based on trends in older teenagers, who respond to the virus much as adults do, and can be explained by clusters in high schools, Dr. Cevik said. "It was really early speculation and caused a lot of distress," she said. "There is no evidence to suggest this new variant was more common in certain age groups." Rebecca Robbins contributed reporting from Bellingham, Wash., and David Philipps from Simla, Colo. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Edwidge Haunting the book throughout is a fear of missed chances, long overdue payoffs and family secrets withering on the vine: a familiar anxiety when one generation passes to another too quickly. In the first chapter Danticat learns she is pregnant with her first child just as her father, Mira, receives a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis and loses his livelihood as a New York cabdriver after more than 25 years. At a family meeting, one of his sons asks him, "Have you enjoyed your life?" Mira pauses before answering, and when he does, he frames the response entirely in terms of his children: "You, my children, have not shamed me. ... You all could have turned bad, but you didn't. ... Yes, you can say I have enjoyed my life." That pause, and that answer, neatly encapsulates an unpleasant, though obvious, truth: Immigration often involves a kind of generational sacrifice, in which the migrants themselves give up their personal ambitions, their families, native countries and the comforts of the mother tongue, to spend their lives doing menial work in the land where their children and grandchildren thrive. Read the rest of the review. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The singer Alicia Keys will host the 61st annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 10, she announced on Tuesday in a nearly 10 minute celebratory video that emphasized the show as female driven a year after the Grammys faced controversy over gender diversity. Keys succeeds the late night host James Corden, who presided over the Grammys for the last two years and took over from LL Cool J, who hosted for five years beginning in 2012. Previous hosts include Queen Latifah, Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres and Garry Shandling. The Grammys host is traditionally onscreen for about 15 minutes of a nearly four hour show. From 2006 to 2011, there was no host. A 15 time Grammy winner who has frequently performed on the show, Keys has also acted in films like "The Secret Life of Bees" and the show "Empire." Though not known as a comedian, she represents a straightforward choice at a time when the Academy Awards has battled weeks of bad press over the selection and subsequent withdrawal of Kevin Hart because of his past homophobic comments. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Groundbreaking laws in two Western states will soon make access to birth control easier for millions of women by allowing them to obtain contraceptives from pharmacists without a doctor's prescription. Even as the Supreme Court prepares to consider another divisive case involving access to contraception, public health advocates hope these arrangements could spread across the country, as states grappling with persistently high rates of unintended pregnancy seek to increase access to birth control with measures that so far have been unavailable under federal law. Most Western countries require a doctor's prescription for hormonal contraceptives like pills, patches and rings, but starting sometime in the next few months, women in California and Oregon will be able to obtain these types of birth control by getting a prescription directly from the pharmacist who dispenses them, a more convenient and potentially less expensive option than going to the doctor. Pharmacists will be authorized to prescribe contraceptives after a quick screening process in which women fill out a questionnaire about their health and medical histories. The contraceptives will be covered by insurance, as they are now. "I feel strongly that this is what's best for women's health in the 21st century, and I also feel it will have repercussions for decreasing poverty because one of the key things for women in poverty is unintended pregnancy," said State Representative Knute Buehler, a Republican who sponsored Oregon's law. About half of the 6.6 million pregnancies annually in the United States are unintended, a higher proportion than in Europe. Reproductive health groups and medical associations increasingly say the ultimate goal should be to make contraceptives available without a prescription, and some worry that the push for pharmacist prescribed contraceptives could thwart that. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is one of the few groups to express opposition to these laws, arguing that hormonal contraceptives should be available solely over the counter. "My basic tenet is there should be nobody between the patient and the pill," said Dr. Mark DeFrancesco, the president of the organization. "I'm afraid we're going to create a new model that becomes a barrier between that and over the counter. I worry that it's going to derail the over the counter movement." But supporters of over the counter contraceptives acknowledge that getting Food and Drug Administration approval could take a long time because the agency often requires additional studies. Cost is another possible drawback of over the counter sales. The Affordable Care Act does not explicitly require plans to cover over the counter medications, so women might wind up paying hundreds of dollars a year for over the counter birth control instead of obtaining it free with a prescription. A bill introduced in Congress in May by Republican senators would help expedite the process in which contraceptive manufacturers apply to the Food and Drug Administration for over the counter approval, but some Democrats and women's groups say it might ultimately reduce birth control use because it does not specify insurance coverage for over the counter methods. In response, Democrats have introduced a bill stipulating that contraceptives would remain covered if they were to become available without a prescription. In the absence of federal action, states are stepping in. Jill Vincik, a high school teacher who recently moved to Bend, Ore., said that being able to get her birth control pills without a doctor's appointment would make her life easier. "I would certainly take advantage of it," said Ms. Vincik, 37, a single mother, who noted that she had a gynecological exam before moving and had not yet found a gynecologist in Oregon. "I shouldn't be in a position to have to go to a doctor when my pills run out. I'm not going to do another Pap smear; I just did one." Advocates of this approach, including pharmacists' organizations, plan to lobby for it across the country. "We are actively going to come up with a statute to spread to other states, and I think it can spread pretty quickly," said Mr. Buehler, the Oregon legislator, who is also an orthopedist. Pharmacy board representatives from states including Arizona and Idaho observed a recent meeting in Oregon about the new rules. A New Mexico proposal that failed in 2012 is expected to be revised to reflect the Oregon and California measures, said Dale Tinker, the executive director of the New Mexico Pharmacists Association. Raley's, a grocery store and pharmacy chain with 80 stores in Northern California and 16 in Nevada, is urging Nevada to follow California's lead, said Lee Worthy, the chain's vice president for pharmacy and wellness. "It's going to take a lot of the barriers away from that underserved community that we see surrounding every store," Mr. Worthy said. Many reproductive health experts have come to support pharmacist prescribed contraceptives, persuaded that pharmacists can safely dispense contraception without a doctor's prescription and that women can assess their health risks on questionnaires. "There's a growing body of evidence that there isn't a safety concern," said Dr. Daniel Grossman, vice president for research at Ibis Reproductive Health and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco. "There are studies showing that women can really accurately identify the conditions that make it appropriate to use certain contraceptives, using a simple checklist." Some people have argued that a need for contraception brings women to the doctor, ensuring that they get other important screening tests, like Pap smears to detect cervical cancer. But Dr. Nancy Stanwood, an obstetrician and chairwoman of the board of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said a study of Texas women who received over the counter contraceptives in Mexico had found that many still visited doctors for Pap smears. And she noted that Pap smears were now recommended every three years, not annually, and not until women turn 21. "We were holding pregnancy prevention hostage to cancer screening," Dr. Stanwood said. "They're both worthwhile goals, but one should not be held hostage to the other." The new laws are extensions of arrangements now found in almost every state: collaborative practice laws that allow pharmacists to administer vaccines or prescribe certain medications if they have agreements with physicians or other health providers. The laws vary widely, and some include only specific diseases or drugs. But in some places, like Washington State and Washington, D.C., collaborative practice laws are broad enough for pharmacists to prescribe birth control if their physician agreements permit it. In Seattle, Beverly Schaefer, a co owner of Katterman's Sand Point Pharmacy, has a physician's permission to prescribe various medications, including antibiotics and antihistamines. She charges a 35 fee, and will prescribe hormonal contraceptives for women who say they have previously been prescribed them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
NEARLY as soon as Daniel Zarabi, a builder in Port Washington, completed a pair of two family homes on Manhasset Isle in Manorhaven, he rented out each duplex for 3,500 a month. He is eager to build more such housing nearby. "There is always a demand for it," Mr. Zarabi said. "It's a nice size, and you get to use what the community has to offer," including parks, a pool, golf and fine schools. Despite calls across the Island for more multifamily housing, Manorhaven is one of only a handful of communities with zoning that allows for two family construction. Most permit such housing only if it's grandfathered in. Among buyers, the benefits include living in one half while renting out the other to cover property taxes, if not the mortgage. For renters who cannot or are not yet ready to buy, two family homes often provide more space for instance, the three bedrooms that are hard to come by in apartment buildings. In fact, to hear Mr. Zarabi and others tell it, two families are the answer to a number of the Island's housing problems a way to draw younger residents while avoiding the blight that can sometimes gain a foothold if a community has too many rentals. The "young professionals" drawn to his housing, Mr. Zarabi said, often replace more "transient" tenants. And the popularity of two families is only being bolstered by the strength of the rental market, with prices ranging from 2,800 to 3,800 a month for new construction depending on size, location and views. Jonathan P. Fielding, the Manorhaven village clerk, says that code permits two family houses on lots with a minimum of 4,000 square feet, and that single family homes are eligible for conversion if they meet that standard. There are 1,550 properties in Manorhaven, he said, and the "lion's share" are two families. In quite a few, "the owner lives in one unit and rents out the other unit," Mr. Fielding said. "We have a lot of residents who rely on the income from renting out the other unit in their house to make ends meet." With owner occupied units, he pointed out, people have "that same pride in ownership. That doesn't create a problem for a community the way you could have if you have all rentals." Mr. Zarabi, given the green light by the village board of trustees late last year on a pair of slightly larger two families, recently knocked down a single family on a corner lot in preparation. Replacing it will be a pair of Hamptons style shingle postmodern two family homes, each with 1,600 square feet over two stories, and two and a half baths, a basement and a porch to call its own. One will have three bedrooms; the other will be laid out for two bedrooms and an office. One tenant's front door will be on Sintsink Avenue West and the other will face Mohegan Avenue, making the dual residences look more like single family homes. "We don't like to put the two doors next to each other because it is not very private," Mr. Zarabi said. Ed Mayourian, a builder and a partner in Putnam Development, says his two family homes in Manorhaven sell for 650,000 to 900,000. "The demand is there," he said. "We have plenty of customers. We sell them; we rent them." When first time buyers eventually move up to a single family residence, Mr. Mayourian said, they often keep the two story home as an investment property. On the South Shore in Long Beach, the Island's other two family home stronghold, there has been a moratorium on two family home construction since 1999, to stem overcrowding, except for properties grandfathered in. The Multiple Listing Service of Long Island has 55 two families on the market there. According to Alex Rubin, an associate broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman, Long Beach's multifamilies command a premium. Mr. Rubin's recent listing for an owner occupied contemporary two story two family home "in perfect shape" on a beach side street for 699,000, a short sale, received an accepted offer "fairly quickly," he said. Rent for the lower level runs 2,000 a month; the upstairs, including a roof deck, commands 3,000. He said two family homes made sense for downsizers who sometimes have difficulty shedding enough belongings to move to a two bedroom apartment from a five or six bedroom home. Many empty nesters are also concerned about common charges and assessments in co ops or condominiums. In a two family home, Mr. Rubin said, they feel "more in control." At the high end in Long Beach, Gosia Malgorzata Onufrik, a sales agent with Paul Gold Realty, has a 2.65 million listing for a new two story two family contemporary oceanfront home that replaced an older two family home. Each unit has three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a deck, a tandem two car garage and an elevator. Rent runs about 5,000 a month for the lower level and 6,500 for the upper. In Brookhaven, meanwhile, a town code amended last year is opening up a new possibility for builders. In a new 10 lot subdivision in Port Jefferson Station called Sweet Woods by Island Estates, Len Axinn, a developer, just started framing a model home with an accessory apartment that can legally be rented. "It is a two family house," Mr. Axinn said, "but it cannot be owned by an investor who seeks to rent out both parts." The basic three bedroom one and a half bath model runs 499,900, with the apartment on a walkout lower level with its own entrance. "It is a house to grow into," Mr. Axinn said, envisioning first time buyers needing the rental income. During child rearing years, the space can be converted for family use as an extra bedroom or a media room. Later, grown children returning to their parents' nest can relish the privacy of a separate apartment. And downsizers have yet another option: "The homeowner could live in the apartment and rent out the main house," Mr. Axinn said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The Federal Reserve's vice chairman, Stanley Fischer, said that it was time for the central bank to bring a little more mystery to its relationship with financial markets, suggesting on Friday that the postcrisis era of detailed guidance was drawing to a close. The Fed has sought to increase its influence over markets since the Great Recession by talking about its future plans: how much money it intended to invest in securities; how much longer it expected to hold its benchmark rate near zero. Most recently, the Fed said in January that it did not plan to raise rates before June. "It seems to me that you unnecessarily constrain yourself," Mr. Fischer said of such guidance during a panel discussion at an annual monetary policy conference sponsored by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "There's no good reason that I can see for us to telegraph every action that we have to take." The comments came just days after Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, told a Senate committee the central bank would announce as soon as March that it would consider raising its benchmark rate at each meeting of its policy committee. Ms. Yellen emphasized that such a change in forward guidance did not mean the Fed would move immediately to raise rates. And Fed officials at the conference Friday similarly suggested the trajectory remained unchanged. They do not plan to move before June. After that, they do not know how much longer they will wait. John C. Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said he agreed with Mr. Fischer that the Fed needed to "wean" investors of the expectation that policy makers would describe their plans months or years in advance. He said the Fed should try to restore the primacy of the latest economic data, rather than its own guidance, as an indicator of the likely course of monetary policy. The remarks by Fed officials contrasted with the keynote presentation at the conference. The authors two academics and two Wall Street economists said that because of uncertainty about underlying economic conditions, the Fed should wait longer before raising its benchmark rate. Then when the Fed does move, it should raise the rate more sharply. Ms. Yellen, however, has said repeatedly that the Fed plans to act once officials are "reasonably confident" inflation will rebound, a less stringent standard. William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the vice chairman of the Fed's policy making committee, said he agreed with the authors' basic argument that uncertainty about underlying economic conditions was a reason for the Fed to move slowly. Mr. Dudley said he also viewed the risks of moving too soon as greater than the risks of moving too late. But he emphasized that the Fed already was moving slowly. "It is important not to overemphasize uncertainty to justify a policy of persistently low short term interest rates," he said. Loretta Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, also pushed back against the advice of the paper. She noted that the analysis did not consider the risk that holding down rates was worsening financial speculation. "Our models aren't well developed enough to allow us to quantify the risks to financial stability of holding rates at zero for a long time, yet the crisis showed us that financial instability comes at a very high cost," Ms. Mester said. None of the Fed officials offered a specific timetable. Mr. Fischer became the latest to express frustration with "the excess attention to liftoff and the relative lack of attention to what happens the next day." Fed officials say there is little difference for the economy whether the Fed acts in June or September. Mr. Fischer also cautioned that investors should not assume the central bank will raise rates in regular increments, as when the Fed raised interest rates by 0.25 percentage points at 17 consecutive meetings from 2004 to 2006. "I know of no plans to behave by following one of those deterministic paths for the next two or three years," he said. "I hope that doesn't happen. I don't believe it will happen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
JONAS KAUFMANN at Carnegie Hall (Oct. 5, 8 p.m.). With Jochen Rieder conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the superstar singer reprises parts of his 2014 album, "You Mean the World to Me," which features tunes written or adopted in interwar Germany, when radio and film made songs from cabaret, operetta and other genres famous as never before. Expect Lehar by the bucketload. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at David Geffen Hall (Oct. 10, 7:30 p.m.; through Oct. 13). David Robertson is on the podium for this week's subscription program. Garrick Ohlsson joins the orchestra for Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," and Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 is the main work, but perhaps the most interesting music on offer is Louis Andriessen's "TAO," part of the Philharmonic's continuing tribute to the composer. Synergy Vocals and Tomoko Mukaiyama lend a helping hand. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org 'PLACE' at BAM Harvey Theater (Oct. 11 13, 7:30 p.m.). Ted Hearne has made himself a vital, politically inclined composer with pieces like his oratorio about Chelsea Manning, "The Source," and "Sound From the Bench," a cantata decrying the corporate takeover of the Supreme Court. With a libretto by Saul Williams and directed by Patricia McGregor, his new piece thinks broadly about the political and personal nature of space. 718 636 4100, bam.org SOUND ON at the Appel Room (Oct. 7, 3 p.m.). Hosted and curated by Nadia Sirota, the Philharmonic's creative partner, this occasional Sunday series is one of the orchestra's several attempts to put some juice into its contemporary music offerings. The first concert, "Going Dutch," focuses on the music of Louis Andriessen, including his "Image de Moreau," "Hout" and "Symphony for Open Strings," and on the composer's influence, with works by Martijn Padding and Vanessa Lann. Jaap van Zweden conducts. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The N.B.A. sent a memo to teams on Sunday advising them on how to handle the rapid spread of the coronavirus, as the death toll in the United States has risen to six all in Washington State. Among the league's recommendations was that players should opt for fist bumps instead of high fives when interacting with fans. The memo also suggested players steer clearing of borrowing items like pens and markers from fans when signing autographs. The memo was first reported by ESPN. Many of the recommendations in the memo are the same as ones from the government, such as: "Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds" and "Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth." The memo also says that the league and the players' union are "closely monitoring the coronavirus situation, including by consulting with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and working with infectious disease experts." The coronavirus is a respiratory illness that originated in China and has infected tens of thousands on multiple continents. It has stirred unrest in many countries, and its spread has coincided with a precipitous drop in the stock market. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams in "Fosse/Verdon," a new FX series chronicling the romantic and professional partnership between Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. "Fosse/Verdon" looks fantastic. Typographically, I mean. The title, set in a so '70s sans serif typeface that echoes the poster for "All That Jazz," announces this FX mini series, starting Tuesday, as a work with flair and attention to detail, for enthusiasts and connoisseurs. Literally, the title "Fosse/Verdon" describes a long partnership, between the choreographer director Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) and the dancer actress Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams). It also implies a hierarchy him first, her second which set in as his career took off and their marriage fell apart. And it captures the problem of the series "Fosse/Verdon," which for all its technical panache, puts stage center an overfamiliar biopic story of a brilliant, difficult artist. As the action begins, with the film shoot of Fosse's 1969 bomb, "Sweet Charity," the power dynamic is initially the opposite. Verdon is the celebrity; reviews blame the movie's failure on her not playing the lead as she did on stage. It's Verdon who helps land her husband a second chance directing "Cabaret," for which he won an Oscar. And as the production grows troubled, she smooths over his clashes with his producer Cy Feuer (Paul Reiser). "I just know how to speak Bob," she tells Cy. "It's my native tongue." There are the seeds of an intriguing story here, about the compromises of artistic partnership, particularly for the women who end up effacing themselves for the comfort and success of the men in their lives. This theme is paralleled in family friend Joan Simon (Aya Cash), who gave up a dance career so her husband, the playwright Neil (Nate Corddry), wouldn't have to "play wife at a cocktail party." In its detail rich recreation of period showbiz, "Fosse/Verdon" whose producers include Thomas Kail, Steven Levenson, Joel Fields and Lin Manuel Miranda might recall Ryan Murphy's "Feud: Bette and Joan." But the relationship isn't a war so much as an intricate dance. Verdon isn't portrayed as a doormat but as an artist making trade offs to serve her vision. Williams transforms remarkably, with a performance always conscious of the effort and microadjustments it takes Verdon not to lose herself in partnership and parenting. (Fosse and Verdon's daughter, Nicole Fosse, serves as a producer and consultant.) Fosse rendered by Rockwell with intense mutters and tics and an edge of sadness isn't presented as monstrous so much as myopic, so preoccupied by his drive that he can't see past the end of his own nose, or, as his philandering increases, other appendages. This is their unequal burden; he seems never to think beyond himself, she can never stop thinking of everything and everyone. But as his career takes off, the series's attention shifts to the old, sad soft shoe of fame gone sour. There are women; there are pills; there are flashbacks to Fosse as a young dancer pushed to the breaking point. His frenzied tap dancing becomes a stressed out leitmotif: slapping on tables, rapping on doors, clapping to indicate the cuts while editing a film, tap tap tap tap. This may be crazy talk, but usually the most interesting thing about artists is their art. Yes, it's tough to dramatize creativity, but "Fosse/Verdon," given such visual subject matter, should have a reasonable shot at it. We get a glimpse of the pair's intellectual sync as Verdon coaches dancers through a sequence: "It's not a seduction, it's a con job." And the series emphasizes how Fosse's choreography all those bent bodies and splayed hands could use delightful motion to convey agony, as in "Who's Got the Pain?" from "Damn Yankees," portrayed as a kind of subliminal horror number. "Fosse/Verdon" becomes overwhelmed by the pain, hitting every signpost of too much too fast breakdown stories, an avalanche of awards trophies and bottles of Seconal. Verdon becomes professionally lost and her character often recedes. The series is based on the biography "Fosse" by Sam Wasson, and it has the feel of a Fosse story to which the "/Verdon" was appended. (The third episode delves into her early life, steering hard into melodrama.) There's something vampiric about Fosse, as his previous wife, Joan McCracken (Susan Misner), describes it: "He takes what's special in a girl and makes it his own." This often extended to predatory relationships with his female cast members. "Fosse/Verdon" is conscious of this but also feels burdened by the responsibility to indict him, which only makes it more heavy handed. But the show is still something to look at. A re creation of Liza Minnelli's "Mein Herr" from "Cabaret" is a sexy, terrifying, centrifugal whirl. The fourth episode, centered on Fosse's production of "Pippin," ends with a musical interlude likening him to that show's self absorbed protagonist. It's both terrible and amazing, thematically bludgeoning but audacious and emotional. The last and best of the five episodes screened for critics slows down to focus on a nostalgic beach weekend with old friends and new lovers. Verdon tells Fosse's new partner, the actress and dancer Ann Reinking (Margaret Qualley), that she needs "to pull him back when he goes too far" and "remember, it isn't personal." Reinking is appalled: "So that's my job? To keep him alive?" Says Verdon, "It's worth it." Is it? The episode, written by Charlotte Stoudt, doesn't telegraph an answer; it just paints in full two talented women caught in Fosse's gravitational field and lets them speak. It's subtle in the ways the preceding four hours aren't, a character piece set in the '70s that feels like a character film made in the '70s. It's a glimpse of what "Fosse/Verdon" might have been, if it were less attached to its showbiz downfall template. This series tap dances as fast as it can, often stunningly. But look past its sleek moves and what you're mostly left with, in a MeToo era, is another HimAgain? story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In mid March, when the coronavirus pandemic shut New York City down, television production came to a sudden halt, sabotaging whole seasons for some shows and postponing season finales for others. But NBC's "The Blacklist," which follows James Spader's Raymond "Red" Reddington as he helps the F.B.I. bring down the world's most nefarious criminals, soldiered on. The showrunners John Eisendrath and Jon Bokenkamp decided that if they couldn't make it to the season ending Episode 22, the narrative in Episode 19, which they had already begun shooting, would work as the Season 7 finale. But they had only shot half of its scenes, and out of order how to salvage the material? They considered various ways to finish the episode audio only scenes, static comic book style images before landing on a solution. "The show is sort of a graphic novel to begin with," Eisendrath said. "It has a larger than life antihero and Gotham style side villains. Why not try to animate it?" Eisendrath's brother in law, Ron Frankel, is the president of a previsualization (previz) animation house called Proof, which has worked on "Wonder Woman," among other blockbusters. The producers charged Proof with creating about 20 minutes worth of action in five weeks a "ridiculous" request, Eisendrath said and at the end of that time, "The Blacklist" had a completely revamped hybrid finale. In a phone interview, Eisendrath and Bokenkamp discussed the episode, which premieres Friday night, and the new possibilities animation opened up for them. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Is animation a way forward for other shows to try in a pinch? JOHN EISENDRATH: Yes. I do think it's a viable alternative to fill out the parts you were unable to fill out, and because it's cool and people will enjoy it. JON BOKENKAMP: Not to be a downer, but it has been far more work than most of our episodes. I'm surprised at how intricate it is. Not that it's not a reason to do it in the future, but it has been a totally different process, in terms of time and the way we use resources. It's just a totally different language. EISENDRATH: In the beginning, we thought, "Everybody's going to do this. Animation companies might not even be available." We had no idea how much time and effort this was going to take. Zero. So maybe people didn't do it as much as I thought they would because they knew how difficult it would be! BOKENKAMP: It really was 24 7. We had people in all kinds of time zones working around the clock, just to get a full assembly of the piece. Our postproduction team sent microphones to the actors in Massachusetts, California and New York, and they recorded in closets, bathrooms, God knows where, trying to get quality audio. The London animators would work while we were asleep. The editors were working on their editing bays at home. We just got some final shots on Wednesday . We still haven't seen the final mix, and it airs Friday. It's as close to doing live television that I feel comfortable participating in. Once you knew that you could use animation, what story elements did you revise? BOKENKAMP: It's not dramatically different, structure wise. We did accelerate certain elements to build a better forward throw into Season 8, to create a little more of a cliffhanger. I think we realized that we had more of an opportunity to rework some scenes. EISENDRATH: I would say that there are two distinct ways in which it's different. One, we address head on that we were doing this because of being shut down. We didn't have a narrative reason to make it half animated, and so we decided not to pretend that we did. And two, we took liberties that we would not have been able to do in live action. It turned out, fortuitously, that the large action sequences had yet to be filmed, and we were able to make those considerably larger. In the script, the villain throws some papers up under the rotor blades of a helicopter, and we were told we would have to rewrite that, for safety reasons. Well, since no one was actually driving the helicopter in animation, we were able to throw the papers up, and it looks amazing. While you were in the middle of tweaking this episode, one of your actors, Brian Dennehy, died. How did that affect your planning? BOKENKAMP: Brian was a big part of the show. It's terribly sad to lose him. EISENDRATH: Originally, the episode was going to end with the grandfather waking up out of his coma. That was the last scene, and we changed it once we heard the terrible news. So that did change. And obviously it will affect the story going forward. BOKENKAMP: The footage that we used of Brian was salvaged from a previous episode. We had other elements like that, which we had to take apart and reconstruct, like one side of a phone conversation where we hadn't shot the other side. So there were a few magic tricks to finish up those elements. How did you figure out a new visual language to account for what this style of animation could and couldn't do well in an accelerated time frame? BOKENKAMP: There was a bit of a learning curve: How can it look and feel like "The Blacklist"? As John and I were talking with the animators, we started thinking, do we do super close ups, and then all of a sudden big wide shots? Dirty frames? Linger on Red's hat, or behind him? And in the beginning, we didn't think that the mouths of these characters were going to move we didn't have enough time so we were partly trying to hide the mouths. EISENDRATH: We were a little nervous. In the beginning, all the scenes had these featureless avatars that didn't look like anybody. The purpose of that, we learned, was to block the scenes. Then with only a couple weeks left, we started getting images of one character at a time, and we could say, "The eyebrows are too thick. The forehead is too narrow. The chin is too big." BOKENKAMP: It's not only, "What does James Spader look like?" but, "Let's get him into the fedora. Let's get him into the trench coat. Maybe pop the collar." BOKENKAMP: We can be looking down the cord of the light bulb that's hanging over this dimly lit room. EISENDRATH: That to me conveyed a stark, intense, dangerous feeling better almost than we could have done in live action. BOKENKAMP: As we started embracing that, it sort of flipped a switch: "Wow. We can do whatever we want here." There is a scene in a car in the live action version, we'd be on the soundstage with green screen. But as we were considering animating that, we didn't know what these characters were going to look like, let alone how they could emote, so we turned to Proof and said, "Get us out of that car." So in that scene, you'll notice that we're covering for what we can't do by leaning into what the animation does really well, which is cars whizzing past, running red lights, close ups of the tires, shots of people's eyes in rearview mirrors. We're really opening up the visual scope of the show to compensate for what we can't say with the actor's faces. Did you want to channel the comic book aesthetic specifically? EISENDRATH: In the middle of the shootout, Liz is standing fairly close to the Kazanjian brothers and she says, "Katarina Rostova, know her? Maddie Tolliver?" In live action, you would have been able to read more of the emotional wheel turning in her head. We didn't necessarily think that animation would be able to access her inner thinking, so we added a chyron. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"Intrigo: Death of an Author," the first of three movies directed by Daniel Alfredson based on mysterious tales by the Swedish author Hakan Nesser, has an intricate plot that reaches for numerous emotional resonances. It starts off small: A middle aged translator and would be writer (Benno Furmann) visits a much older, revered author (Ben Kingsley) on a private island. There the younger man reads a tale, soon to be revealed as autobiographical, which is reenacted onscreen. In that story, a man contrives the "accidental" death of his adulterous wife. His feelings of guilt are complicated when, years later, he recognizes her cough on a radio recording of a classical concert. This leads him to the town of Maardam the fictional setting of all the stories in Nesser's trilogy where he also undertakes a translation of a final opus by a writer who's committed suicide. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Almost nothing seems clear cut by the end of "Cold Case Hammarskjold," a controversial new documentary from the Danish journalist Mads Brugger, except maybe this much: On Sept. 18, 1961, a plane carrying Dag Hammarskjold, then the secretary general of the United Nations, crashed near Ndola, in what was at that time Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia. The crash, initially attributed to pilot error, has long been the source of speculation and conspiracy theories. But if you were to assign a filmmaker to sift fact from conjecture, one of the last people you would trust is Brugger, who has built a career in movies like "The Red Chapel" and "The Ambassador" on combining reportage with pranksmanship. Most documentarians don't know where their movies are heading while they shoot, and Brugger, our onscreen guide, cops to his fear of not finding a smoking gun. Toward the end, he admits that most of his sillier gambits he dresses all in white like a Bond villain, dons a pith helmet to dig for the wreckage of Hammarskjold's plane and hires secretaries to type up his brainstorms for the camera are for show. "I was hoping this charade would cover up my failures as a journalist," he says, jokingly. But such game playing only casts doubt on the seriousness of the conspiracy theory that the movie, apparently in earnest, lays out. After raising provocative questions about the circumstances at the crash site and the condition of Hammarskjold's body when it was found, Brugger goes down a rabbit hole that leads somewhere else. The spoiler wary might want to stop reading here. The movie posits that a secretive organization calling itself the South African Institute for Maritime Research actually consisted of mercenaries. According to Brugger's star witness, the group's purpose was to destabilize certain countries. The man also says that the group had an operation to spread H.I.V. to black Africans through vaccines. Scientists who spoke to The New York Times in January after the film's premiere at Sundance called that claim medically dubious. A closing title card added since the festival acknowledges as much. Most of the evidence ultimately traces back to two sources. One is a mysterious figure named Keith Maxwell, the head of the nominal maritime research institute (and the inspiration for Brugger's all white tailoring). Although we see some documentation, it sounds like Maxwell, who wrote what Brugger describes as a "fictionalized account" of his life, had a penchant for fabulism. Maxwell's wife, interviewed over the phone by Brugger, says she believes that he was mentally ill in his later years. The second source is that star witness, a man called Alexander Jones who claims to have worked with the maritime institute. (He is not the infamous Infowars conspiracy peddler Alex Jones, although it is odd that Brugger has rested a film of outlandish claims on the testimony of someone whose name triggers skepticism in American audiences.) Jones answers Brugger's leading questions with confirmations and provides little in the way of new information. The Times reported that Jones's responses evolved over the course of several interviews something that is not indicated in the film. To be fair, Brugger warns viewers not to take the movie at face value. "This could either be the world's biggest murder mystery or the world's most idiotic conspiracy theory," he says at the beginning. But "Cold Case Hammarskjold" is finally poised unsatisfyingly between an explosive expose and a self conscious put on. Even a full acceptance of its assertions doesn't do much to illuminate Hammarskjold's death. The case may be muddier, but it's still cold. Not rated. In English, French, Swedish, Bemba and Danish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The brainchild of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, New York Fashion Week: Men's is entering its fifth season. This time around, more than 50 brands will show their spring 2018 collections in the hopes of winning the attention of editors and retail executives as Lower Manhattan becomes a playground for dandies and fops and the street style photographers who track them. While the majority of the big brands and luxury houses are content to display their wares in Milan and Paris, the New York iteration of men's fashion week has become known for its emphasis on scrappy brands from all over the world. Bruce Pask, the men's director at Bergdorf Goodman, predicts that there will be lots of easy sportswear at the runway shows and presentations. "That's always going to be a significant portion of what's shown here," Mr. Pask said. "The casual lifestyle and the clothing that goes along with that is an American creation." The New York event follows a month of men's wear shows in London, Paris, Milan and Florence, Italy. While attending those events, Mr. Pask noticed a few changes reflecting a refocusing on proportion likely to be on view here. "We're looking at clothing that is bigger, a bit more fluid," he said. "Pants that are full, shorts that are oversized, referencing late '80s early '90s fashion, but it's interpreted." Christopher Bevans, the designer of Dyne, has a fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has worked on apparel with Kanye West, Billionaire Boys Club, Sean John and Rocawear. July 11, 4 to 5 p.m., Cadillac House, 330 Hudson Street Maria Jahnkoy, the Siberian born Brooklyn artist who created this label, was a finalist for the LVHM prize in March and picked up a collaboration deal with Puma. At Bergdorf Goodman, she will unveil a capsule collection called the Messenjah. July 12, 6:30 p.m., Bergdorf Goodman Men's Store, 754 Fifth Avenue This is the seventh season for Raun Larose, a native New Yorker, but only his second showing in his hometown. His collections are youthful and gender agnostic. July 13, 3 to 4 p.m. This is the second New York men's week outing for the You As designer Tony Liu, who once dared to accent his collection with Crocs. July 12, 11 a.m. Death to Tennis proffers "adult streetwear" in the form of graphic T shirts, creatively pocketed Oxford shirts and short cropped jean jackets (with insignia) on its website, along with short films made by the label's founders, William Watson and Vincent Oshin. One of them features the Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali. July 11, 6 p.m. For this collection the designer Jace Lipstein is collaborating with the headwear brand Mitchell Ness, as well as with his alma matter, Indiana University. Go Hoosiers. July 13, 6 p.m., Dream Downtown, 355 West 16th Street The lovably cranky designer Mark McNairy has reinvented men's footwear several times in his career. His latest contribution is New Republic, a line of affordable loafers, drivers, Oxfords and boots. His bucks are priced at an unusually reasonable 51. He'll show these, along with brightly patterned belts, ties and socks, and a promotional film. July 11, 8 p.m., 79 Crosby Street Patrik Ervell's last collection was heavy on '90s nostalgia, with lots of rave signifiers (clear plastic rain ponchos). Whatever he is into now, expect Mr. Ervell to come up with a collection that makes a statement while also being something you can actually wear. July 11, 7 p.m. In the seven years of their label's existence, the boys (Shimon and Ariel Ovadia) from Brooklyn have become hometown heroes and a favorite of athletes and the hip hop set with collections that find a happy medium between streetwear cool and preppy. July 12, 8 p.m. The department store favorite designed by Michael Maccari has been looking to redefine itself over the past few seasons without alienating fans of the shirt and tie basics that form the basis of its sizable business. July 11, 9 to 10 a.m. The mega label Hugo Boss, with a men's line rendered as "BOSS," is getting around this fashion season, having mounted an elaborate evening runway show in Florence last month during the Pitti Uomo men's wear exhibition. July 11, 1 p.m. Look for Theory part of the Fast Retailing giant that also owns Uniqlo to continue doing what it does best: creating a uniform for the modern working man. July 13, 5 to 7 p.m. Nick Graham's show will have the climate change appropriate theme of Atlantis and a soundtrack by the 16 year old D.J. and composer Truman Gaynes. July 11, 11 a.m. to noon Last season, the Honduran born Carlos Campos reinvented the guayabera shirt. Look for more updates on Latin American specialties and staples this time around. July 11, 3 p.m. The Matiere designer Scot Shandalove has moved beyond the althleisurewear that made the brand's reputation with collections that make use of corduroy and references to punk style. July 12, 4 to 5 p.m., Cadillac House, 330 Hudson Street The New York label Rochambeau is moving toward more sophisticated suits without losing its streetwear influence. July 13, 8 to 10 p.m., Cadillac House, 330 Hudson Street The name of this collection from the designers Brandon Capps and Shane Fonner, who favor a luxurious, beachy look, is "Abundant Life Crusade." July 12, 9 p.m., Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel, 2 Lexington Avenue The N. Hoolywood designer, Daisuke Obana, who hails from Japan, always does his own thing, grounding his occasionally out there looks in tradition. July 11, 5 p.m., 459 West 15th Street Critics have fallen for Emily Bode's patchwork sensibility, like her quilted workwear jacket. Ms. Bode is a collector, a remixer, a postmodern fashion dreamer. July 13, 11 a.m. to noon. The Korean designer behind this label, Bumsuk Choi, has named his spring 2018 collection Phono Sapiens. July 13, 2 p.m. New York Men's Day is an appetizer of sorts to the three main days of New York Fashion Week: Men's, and it focuses on 12 up and coming or out of the mainstream brands during its morning and afternoon sessions. Krammer Stoudt: The designer Mike Rubin takes his cues from the Southern California skate and surf scenes for his five year old brand, which also offers a made to measure program. David Hart: For spring 2018, this New York designer looks to Cuba for inspiration. Bristol: Luke Tadashi and Tommy Nowels of Los Angeles fabricate their sportswear in elite Japanese mills. Daniel Hechter: Showing in the United States for the first time in the brand's 55 year history, Christophe Blondin Pechabrier will look to match classic spring fabrics like seersucker with computer designed floral patterns. Wood House: Lots of men's wear designers take their inspiration from the military; Julian Woodhouse lives it. The full time soldier marks his return to the United States after being stationed in South Korea, with forward looking athleisure and outerwear. Head of State: Started in 2016 by then 17 year old Taofeek Abijako, the line looks to African colonialism for its upscale, graphic heavy streetwear. Dune Studios, 55 Water Street, 10:30 a.m. to noon. The label EFM Engineered for Motion, designed by Donrad Duncan, will take another stab at the future of sportswear. July 12, 10 a.m. Kenneth Ning, who got his training at Michael Kors, takes the traditional American sportswear archetype and infuses it with the looseness of his hometown, San Francisco. July 12, noon, Cadillac House, 330 Hudson Street The designers behind Deveaux Matt Breen, Patrick Doss and Andrea Tsao are dedicated to tailoring and dressing men like grown ups. Their made in the U.S.A. collection offers clean takes on luxurious sportswear for both men and women that look impressive, as opposed to "OMG" or "tight." July 12, 1 to 2 p.m., En Japanese Brasserie, 435 Hudson Street The Landlord designer, Ryohei Kawanishi, specializes in blasts of color, with proportions borne of an unfettered imagination. This season's collection is reggae inspired. July 12, 3 p.m. For Luar, Raul Lopez, a founder of Hood by Air, makes minidresses and thigh highs for men, as well as too long on purpose T shirts and shorts. His clothes don't challenge gender; they're postgender. July 13, noon, Cadillac House, 330 Hudson Street Sam Linder and Kirk Millar, who own the boutique Linder in SoHo, ventured into women's wear in February. It seemed like a natural progression for a brand known for its experimental men's wear. July 13, 1 p.m., 237 East 18th Street George Sotelo's swimwear for men is all funky colors and patterns applied to traditionally cut bathing trunks that come in two styles: Apollo and Titan. July 12, 5 to 7 p.m., 172 Madison Avenue, penthouse. The Scotsman Nicholas Elliott has his own idea of streetwear that has included such pieces as a military jacket reminiscent of the one worn by Chairman Mao. July 11, 2 p.m. One of the few women showing during the week, Feng Chen Wang has previously displayed her namesake label's wares with VFILES. Look for inventive outfits that have, in the past, balanced leather briefs with the world's puffiest jacket. July 11, 10 a.m. Manchester, England, is home to Represent. After the city's traumatic spring, it will be fascinating to see if, and how, the collection reflects the turbulent times. July 13, 10 a.m. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In May , when the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled its mega Costume Institute show, "Camp: Notes on Fashion," Jeremy Scott , creative director of Moschino and founder of his own line, was the single most represented name in the show. It featured 15 or so of his pieces, including a prosciutto dress from early in his career and the TV dinner gown from the Moschino show last season and that, in its train/tray, beef 'n' mash glory, became a talking point for almost anyone who went to the museum, whether or not she had ever paid attention to the fashion show. And it was hard not to wonder this season: How could he possibly top that? At a moment when all of life seems like a high camp performance, from Boris Johnson's hair to Billy Porter's various entrances, how would Mr. Scott assume the mantle as the bard of the absurd? Instead of going low, he went high. Eschewing his usual pop culture punning McDonald's, paper dolls, TV game shows his riff was on Picasso: the artist's muses, his most famous paintings, his passion for bullfighting. All given Mr. Scott's signature made for the small screen treatment: Cubist portraits mocked up in bright colors on a minidress; a black and white body sketched onto a canvas with its own semiportable baroque frame; multiple versions of the artist's "G uitar ;" a harlequin bodysuit (plus a few wearable derivations, to remind you this was a commercial venture, including shifts speckled with naif flowers and a draped sheath dress with a picture frame pin at the shoulder). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Rhode Island may be the smallest state, but its culinary scene is anything but small. From Cambodia to Cape Verde, Providence, R.I., restaurants span the globe in a big way. Big King is the latest restaurant in that city from James Mark , the chef owner best known for North, a critically acclaimed Asian fusion restaurant. Before that, Mr. Mark, a graduate of Johnson Wales University, worked for David Chang at the Momofuku restaurant group. He opened the Japanese inspired Big King in June in the West Side of Providence. The neighborhood is home to a mix of residences, youth arts organizations and some of the city's best brunch spots. North previously occupied the space that Big King now does, but moved to larger accommodations at the Dean Hotel, a hip establishment located in downtown Providence. In contrast to North's bustle and long wait times, Mr. Mark makes a move toward simplicity with Big King (a tribute to his grandmother, Big King Lee). For the new concept, he introduced reservations and orchestrated a physical redesign, extending the bar, but reducing the numbers of seats to an intimate 21. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
48 West Eighth Street (between Macdougal Street and Avenue of the Americas) Frevo, a new French restaurant, has taken a lease for 10 years and five months in this five story Greenwich Village walk up. Its chef, Franco Sampogna, who was born in Brazil and moved to France as a teenager, was the chef at Jema, owned by the shopping guru Joy Mangano in Huntington, N.Y. Bernardo Silvao is to be the manager of the restaurant, which is to open this spring. The 850 square foot ground floor space, with a usable 630 square foot lower level, will also feature a gallery displaying works by Toma L, a contemporary French painter. Il Bambino, an Italian restaurant, was the previous tenant. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
There is something about Sally Rooney's novels that makes people embrace (and occasionally reject) them like a long sought romantic partner. Though both her 2017 debut, "Conversations With Friends," and her new novel, "Normal People," are set in an exactingly depicted Dublin and West Ireland in the 2010s, her books describe the kinds of all consuming romantic attachments that have bolstered narratives since Dido and Aeneas, or, O.K., Emma and Mr. Knightley. (There's as wide a streak of affinity with the 19th century novel in these books as there is with Sheila Heti.) Her characters are drawn irresistibly to one another (consistently consummating their attractions with phenomenal, heart stopping sex), and come apart over petty misunderstandings, after which they tend to have "anxious, upsetting sex" with other people before reconnecting. Her prose, much like Salinger's her predecessor in philosophical post adolescent neurosis is sharp, dialogue heavy and unadorned, written to be absorbed into the bloodstream quickly. Part of the excitement of reading Rooney is seeing this old school sensibility applied to what feel like acutely modern problems. In "Conversations," Frances moves between an affair with a married older man and an on again off again relationship with her female best friend. All four involved are self consciously cool, progressive individuals who find themselves overwhelmed (in Frances' case, to the point of self harm) when pressed into action by brute desire. Rooney's novels have the unusual power to do what realist fiction was designed to do: bring to light how our contemporaries think and act in private (which these days mostly means off the internet), and allow us to see ourselves reflected in their predicaments. "Normal People," even as it is almost physically impossible to stop reading once begun, feels in some ways like the slightly less impressive follow up album by a beloved band, the "Contra" to Vampire Weekend's self titled debut, if you will. (There's an extremely generationally accurate scene in which the central couple listen to Vampire Weekend while drinking gin and arguing, in 2012, about the Reagan administration.) It's wonderful to hear the sound of Rooney's voice on the page again, and the pleasures of her storytelling are even more immediate than in the first novel. But the book can also seem rushed and conventional in ways her debut did not, particularly in its final third. Much more so than in her first novel, the clarity of Rooney's language gives way to cliches and not terribly convincing similes ("Marianne's face looked bright like a light bulb"; "the heat beats down on the back of Connell's neck like the feeling of human eyes staring"), as though the urgency of writing the story were so great that she was reluctant to pause to find the more perfect phrase. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of April. See the full list. But that urgency is also thrilling, and there are very few contemporary writers who can pull off what Rooney accomplishes with narrative and character in this book. In chapters that alternate between two perspectives, she dramatizes, with excruciating emotional insight, the intertwined lives of Connell and Marianne, beginning with their final year of high school in the West Ireland town of Carricklea, and ending with their final year at Trinity College, Dublin. When we first meet them, Connell's mother is working as a housekeeper for Marianne's family, and their full set of dichotomies is quickly established: Marianne is openly brilliant, wealthy and friendless, while Connell is secretly brilliant, poor and popular. They can't be seen together at school for fear of social opprobrium, so they begin meeting secretly to talk and have sex, discovering parts of themselves that have previously lain dormant. Though the plot devices couldn't be more familiar the first major rift between the couple occurs when Connell invites a popular girl to the formal dance instead of Marianne Rooney expertly imbues this time of life with the gravity one feels in the midst of it. (In this respect her book shares a kinship with, among others, Edna O'Brien's classic first novel, "The Country Girls," and Elif Batuman's recent undergraduate epic, "The Idiot.") | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Teen Vogue will become an online only publication as its publisher, Conde Nast, reduces its print efforts. Conde Nast, a company once known for its lavish spending and its visually rich glossy magazines, continues to move away from its former identity. Conde Nast, the publisher of The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair, plans to cut roughly 80 employees across the company. It will also publish one fewer issue per year of the now monthly magazines GQ, Glamour, Architectural Digest and Allure. The company will also close the quarterly print edition of Teen Vogue, which emerged this year as a voice of resistance against President Trump. "We are aggressively investing in the brand and all of its consumer touchpoints," the statement said, "including events like the upcoming inaugural Teen Vogue Summit next month in Los Angeles." Conde Nast also left open the possibility of publishing special print editions of Teen Vogue. The company will also reduce the number of yearly issues of Conde Nast Traveler and W from 10 to eight, while Bon Appetit will publish 10 times a year instead of 11. (Vogue, Vanity Fair and Wired will still be published monthly, and The New Yorker will remain a weekly.) The changes reflect Conde Nast's's ongoing shift away from print as it makes itself leaner and more digitally oriented. "As audiences continue to evolve around content consumption, we will continue to modernize and calibrate how, where and when we produce and distribute our content to be in sync with the cultural moments and platforms most important to our audiences," the company said in its statement. WWD first reported the job cuts and changes to the publication schedules. As it lowers costs tied to print, Conde Nast plans to devote more resources to other aspects of its titles, including their digital operations, said an executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. The company expects to bring in 100 million less in revenue than it did in 2016, and it has pared down the budgets at its titles. Two of the company's veteran top editors, Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair and Cindi Leive of Glamour, have recently said they were stepping down, and their (most likely cheaper) replacements are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The shuttering of Teen Vogue's regularly published print edition marks the end of a much hyped title. Introduced in 2003 as Vogue's petite sibling, the magazine was a favorite of Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor in chief and Conde Nast's artistic director. Print publications for teenage girls have struggled Teen People and CosmoGirl are both long gone and in many ways Teen Vogue the magazine was a throwback to the golden age of print. Last year, Conde Nast turned Teen Vogue, which had been published nine times a year, into a quarterly. The election of Mr. Trump breathed new life into the magazine, however, and its aggressive coverage of the president garnered praise from the left. A Teen Vogue article, "Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America," went viral, and earned the editor of its print edition, Elaine Welteroth, much praise and adoration. Conde Nast relished and helped feed the publicity. It appears that Ms. Welteroth will stay on at Teen Vogue she is scheduled to lead the coming Teen Vogue summit and Conde Nast is also considering an additional role for her. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Nick Cave in his studio at Facility, his new multidisciplinary art space in Chicago. The work is called "Arm Peace." CHICAGO Stretching across the windows of three conjoined storefronts on the Northwest Side of Chicago is a 70 foot long mosaic made of 7,000 circular name tags with a mix of red and white backgrounds. They spell out the message "Love Thy Neighbor." The simple declaration could be read as the mission statement underpinning the activity in the two story brick building, a new multidisciplinary art space dreamed up by Nick Cave, the artist and educator, and his personal and professional partner, Bob Faust. "It is our way of introducing ourselves to the community," said Mr. Cave, best known for his dazzling "Soundsuits" that double as full body sculptures and garments. Based for more than 20 years on Chicago's South Loop, this 59 year old artist has recently consolidated his studio, the couple's home and Mr. Faust's design studio in this 20,000 square foot former mason's workshop in South Old Irving Park, a largely working class neighborhood across town. Named Facility, the space has been conceived as an incubator for collaboration to inspire "a young artist's aspirations or put designers and chefs and dancers in one room and see what using the building as a facility makes," Mr. Faust, 51, said during a tour of their just renovated ground floor studio and upstairs residential loft. A cavernous space downstairs could also easily host a fashion show, musical or dance performance. For the "Love Thy Neighbor" installation, they distributed blank name tags to local businesses, schools and block associations. People wrote in their first names or otherwise embellished them. "They are these amazing little artworks," Mr. Faust said. In the future, those storefront display spaces will host artist exhibitions and pop up retail for emerging designers, free of charge. "There are interesting fashion designers that just haven't had a break, so why not give them a storefront for half a year and have an amazing opening?" Mr. Cave said. "The flux of it all is really what's interesting for us it's how we think," added the artist, who is funding Facility himself and plans to offer stipends for some of the projects. "There's a lot we want to do other than our studio practices bigger work in terms of being more accountable for civic responsibilities." Mr. Cave has held a tenured position in the fashion, body and garment department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2001 and now teaches two days a week. He spent years scouting sites around Chicago before finding this uninhabited commercial building at the intersection of North Milwaukee and West Addison, and a city official willing to work with him and Mr. Faust on zoning changes to allow for residential use as well as production. Alderman John Arena said he saw their proposal as an economic opportunity that would help attract "businesses and cachet to this blue collar area." He led a community meeting where the only concerns raised were over parking. "The folks that came exhibited excitement for the prospect that this could be quite a catalyst for changing the personality of that stretch of roadway and for casual engagement with an artist of his stature," Mr. Arena said of Mr. Cave Heather Yutzy, principal of the nearby Belding Elementary School, had never heard of Nick Cave. But she was taken with the concept of the "Love Thy Neighbor" project and had her 6oo students each decorate a name tag as a back to school activity. "I wanted our children to be a part of transforming an area that needs a lift," Ms. Yutzy said, "so they could walk over and say, 'Look, we helped do that.'" The spirit behind Facility resonates with another ambitious artist run project investing in an underserved neighborhood of the city, said Naomi Beckwith, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, referring to Theaster Gates's Rebuild Foundation on Chicago's South Side. "What they're both asking is: Can I as an individual bring some of the social capital and financial capital that I've acquired in my life to somewhere outside the city center, so that those who do not have access to the center, or don't feel comfortable there, can still have an encounter with art," Ms. Beckwith said. Facility is part of a broader shift for Mr. Cave, who for two decades has been closely associated with his crowd pleasing "Soundsuits," acquired by many museums. "They're always going to be part of my practice," he said, while noting that in recent exhibitions at Mass MoCA and the Jack Shainman gallery, no "Soundsuits" were included. "Wanting to move forward, it's about how do you transfer the essence of that work," he said. One of seven brothers raised in Missouri by his mother after his father's early death, Mr. Cave received his B.F.A. in 1982 at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri and studied dance at Alvin Ailey summer programs. As the only African American graduate student at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in the late 1980s, he described having the feeling of being a "black male" for the first time. Mr. Cave made his first "Soundsuit" in 1992 in response to the police beating of Rodney King. The figural sheath made of twigs was a form of protection that obscured race, class and gender, and made a striking noise when worn. To date, he has made more than 500, ever more flamboyant. "I have to feel like this looks," he said, pointing to a "Soundsuit" covered in exuberantly colored synthetic hair in his studio. He is interested in the power of these fantastical second skins, both for the people wearing them in performances and for the viewer. He would like to think their visual seduction will "unify and set us all in a room together for difficult conversations," he said. Mr. Cave said the most meaningful part of his work in recent years has been collaborating with underprivileged children on "Soundsuit" performances. "It's almost like a rite of passage,," he said, recalling how they learn to stand up and move in these 40 pound armatures that can make people look and feel like shamans. What he calls "the brutality" in all his work will be laid bare in his new show, "If a Tree Falls," opening Nov. 1 at Jack Shainman in Chelsea. It is filled with darkly monochromatic works referring to gun violence devastating African American communities. A long, low platform teeming with black hands cradling carved wooden heads evokes a mass grave. Fragments of arms in bronze protrude from the walls; they are draped with funeral wreaths.For children growing up in these communities, he said, "somebody gets shot, but nobody's talking about it." A goal of Facility is to find more ways to influence young people. Mr. Cave and Mr. Faust are collaborating with students and teachers at Schurz High School, across the street, on a 70 foot long fence made from recycled shipping containers running along the south side of Facility. The art department and a group of students will design imagery. "It's going to be very guerrilla like, all spray paint," Mr. Cave said. . The men plan to charge a small fee to art groups requesting tours of the studio, which will go toward a scholarship fund for projects with young artists. Tony Karman, director of Expo Chicago, the international art exhibition, said he anticipates "there will be huge interest from collectors and curators and arts professionals," given Mr. Cave's stature. Mr. Cave will exhibit his extensive personal art collection here for the first time works by Kerry James Marshall, Beverly McIver, Titus Kaphar and Kehinde Wiley. "It's going to feed creativity," he said. Mr. Cave now often buys work from his students. "I remember someone bought a piece of mine when I was an undergrad," he said. "That validation and motivation it's just what that does to a young person." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Making Impeachment Sexy Again Is Not a Concern, Late Night Says Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Despite 13 million people tuning in to the televised public impeachment hearings on Wednesday, much of the news coverage seemed to suggest that the hearings themselves were severely lacking in the "pizazz" needed to draw viewers. "Even NBC News tweeted that the testimonies 'lacked the pizazz necessary to capture public attention.' Yeah, that's what I'm looking for in deeply troubling congressional hearings: pizazz. Yeah, that's why, during Iran Contra, Oliver North came dressed as Elton John." STEPHEN COLBERT "And since when is pizazz the benchmark of trustworthiness? I don't want a pilot who says, 'Attention, passengers, we'll be touching down in Denver in just a moment. But first: barrel roll, barrel roll, shimmy, shimmy, water landing.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "These were two career civil servants giving sworn testimony about a potential attempt to undermine our democracy. They're also supposed to have pizazz? Is this an impeachment hearing or an episode of 'Dance Moms'? I'm confused." JIMMY KIMMEL "Here's the thing, people: these hearings are investigating whether the president of the United States committed high crimes or misdemeanors. So they're supposed to be serious, not about excitement. You know, impeachment is like a family reunion: If it's sexy, something has gone horribly wrong.'" TREVOR NOAH "And even though millions of people have been talking about these hearings, over on Fox News their analysis of this impeachment is 'meh.'" TREVOR NOAH "You know what's funny is how when it was Hillary's scandal, Fox News was like, 'Now as we well know, Benghazi isn't just home to Libya's signature dish, bazin, it's also a hotbed of support for Ansar al Sharia, especially around Tahrir Square. This is a big thing in Libya.' When it's a Donald Trump scandal, all of a sudden they're like, 'What's a Ukraine? Ukraine? Do you crane? Do I crane? Frasier Crane? The bird crane?'" TREVOR NOAH "And you know it says in the Constitution, a sitting president cannot be found guilty of a crime if the trial leading up to it is boring." JIMMY KIMMEL "Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick announced today that he is joining the Democratic presidential race and sure, why not? I mean, at this point the Democratic primary is an option under Uber Pool." SETH MEYERS "Deval Patrick was the governor of Massachusetts, and then spent years working for a company called Bain Capital. Which, this is just what the Democrats need, someone with the exact same resume as Mitt Romney. Perfectly done." JIMMY KIMMEL "And can I just say, Democrats, what the expletive are you doing? You don't have to keep replenishing the stock when the candidates drop out. This is an election, not sustainable fishing." TREVOR NOAH "Are you allowed to join this late? This is like if during Game 3 of the World Series, the Mets showed up asking to play." JIMMY KIMMEL | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Meghan Gerard and Ellis Rosen shared a fourth floor walk up in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. It had a narrow railroad layout, with balky heat and finicky windows. Ms. Gerard had a 50 minute subway trip, with a bad transfer, to her job in Manhattan as a hospital administrator at N.Y.U. Langone Health. Mr. Rosen, a cartoonist and illustrator, works from home. After the couple, who married two years ago, decided they wanted an upgrade, the debate went on for months: Rent or buy? "We asked everyone we knew, and we Googled," Ms. Gerard said. "The more information we got, the more undecided we were." But the couple, both 32, were inclined toward buying. Through a chain of acquaintances, they met Thomas Rozboril, a licensed salesperson at Compass. They were interested in a dog friendly two bedroom that was within reasonable commuting distance for Ms. Gerard and had a good work from home setup for Mr. Rosen. "You can go places and sketch, but that's not as appealing to me," he said. Initially, the neighborhood wasn't important to them. It was more about location: Some neighborhoods were too far into Brooklyn, meaning a longer commute, few train options and an almost suburban feel. "I realized how nice it was to walk down the street to a coffee shop and have proximity to things we care about work, friends, family and general conveniences," Ms. Gerard said. "We became more particular about what things matter to us more." Their price range, about 600,000 to 750,000, might be a challenge if they wanted a real second bedroom, Mr. Rozboril told them. Near the Brooklyn Museum in Prospect Heights, a large and lovely two bedroom co op unit was asking 789,000, with maintenance in the high 700s. A nearby construction zone on the former site of a Key Food roared outside. The apartment was on the ground floor, and the new building replacing the supermarket would likely have blocked much of the sunlight. "Construction was literally outside the window of every single room except for the kitchen, which looked out on a brick wall," Mr. Rozboril said. Mr. Rosen, who grew up near the Holland Tunnel, didn't think the noise would bother him, but the dim light would. "This was the first one where there were so many more pros than cons, but there was one big con," Ms. Gerard said. It soon sold for 850,000. In Park Slope, a beautifully renovated two bedroom in a small condominium building on a lovely tree lined block was asking 699,000, with monthly charges in the low 600s. A large two bedroom in a Prospect Heights co op was on the ground floor and near a construction site. Katherine Marks for The New York Times The couple were number 36 on the open house sign in sheet. If one bedroom was small, the other was tiny. Closet space was minimal. The kitchen included a combination washer dryer rather than a dishwasher, which they found weird. The home wasn't suitable for them; it quickly sold for 809,000. In Concord Village, the seven building co op complex, circa 1950, near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, Ms. Gerard and Mr. Rosen were intrigued by a corner two bedroom with around 900 square feet, plenty of closet space and a large, open kitchen. The asking price was 799,000, with maintenance of around 1,100 plus assorted amenity fees. "I knew immediately where I wanted to put my office," Mr. Rosen said. With quick access to multiple subway lines, it was easy to get anywhere. The bedrooms came outfitted with soundproof windows, which reduced the traffic noise from outside. Ms. Gerard discussed the situation with colleagues, one of whom lived in the complex. "There were all these people in our lives who had lived in Concord Village and had good things to say," she said. "Hearing it from people who live there, it was so wonderful." The unit they were interested in had been on the market for months, and had already had one price drop. The sellers had long since departed for California. The couple held firm to their offer and bought the place for 720,000. A beautifully renovated two bedroom in a Park Slope townhouse had small bedrooms, minimal closet space and a washer dryer in the kitchen. Katherine Marks for The New York Times But there was still money to be spent. The inspector noted that there were not enough circuit breakers. "It seemed like an easily fixable problem," Ms. Gerard said. But every time the electrician came, he found something else wrong. "The electrician was a bearer of bad news for, like, six weeks," Ms. Gerard said, to the tune of about 12,000. Apparently, some previous owner had improperly installed overhead lights. The couple finally arrived in the spring, with Crusher the dog in tow. Mr. Rosen arranged his desk in a corner, near two windows. Their new home, he said, represents "a huge life upgrade." Their floor has a trash chute and recycling area. There is a laundry room in the basement. "Something about not having to go out for the laundry makes my life so much easier," he said. "All these little amenities, I love them. They make it great." Packages are announced with computerized notifications. "In the old place, you would hear the door buzzer so loud it would freak me out," Mr. Rosen said. "When I walk the dog and come back, there's a screen in the lobby. I like that a ton better than being interrupted periodically during the day." Ms. Gerard enjoys a shorter and easier trip to work, with no transfers. "When I describe it to others, I say it's the ugly building near the bridge," Ms. Gerard said of the couple's new home. "I really liked living on smaller streets that were quiet, but it has so many conveniences, it became easy for me to overlook that." Katherine Marks for The New York Times "We are on the wait list for everything," she said. "We are on a five year wait list for a parking spot, a three year wait list for a storage locker and a one year wait list for bike storage." For now, they store their bicycles in the master bedroom, which is so big it begs for more furniture. "When I describe it to others, I say it's the ugly building near the bridge," Ms. Gerard said. "I never imagined myself living near a busy highway. I really liked living on smaller streets that were quiet, but it has so many conveniences, it became easy for me to overlook that. I was expecting what I wouldn't like, and it turned out not to matter to me." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Peter James Emmerich and Jared Malcolm Hammond are to be married Sept. 2 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the performing arts space in Los Angeles. Dana M. Kirkland, who is the sister of Mr. Hammond and who was designated a deputy commissioner for civil marriage by Nevada County in California, is to officiate. Mr. Emmerich (left), 44, is the art director for "Harvey Street Kids," a production of DreamWorks Animation Television that debuted on Netflix in June; he works in Los Angeles. He graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology. He is a son of Gary A. Emmerich of Summerfield, Fla., and the late Concetta J. Emmerich. Mr. Emmerich's father retired as a senior vice president for operations, in New York, at CIBC Oppenheimer, an investment bank. Mr. Hammond, 55, is the associate director for finance at the University of California Los Angeles's Hammer Museum. He graduated from Pomona College and received an M.B.A. from the University of Texas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
General Motors in 2006 sent dealers a technical service bulletin warning that because of an ignition problem, a heavy key chain hanging from the ignition could turn off the engine on six models. But only two of those models were covered in last week's recall of 778,000 vehicles in the United States and Canada for the problem that the automaker now says could keep air bags from deploying in a crash. Had General Motors recalled the other four models covered by the technical service bulletin, it would have more than doubled the size of the recall in the United States, where the 619,000 vehicles now subject to recall include the 2007 Pontiac G5 and the 2005 7 Chevrolet Cobalt. In a Feb. 13 letter, G.M. told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that the "ignition switch torque performance" was not up to specifications. If the vehicles were jarred or the owner had a heavy key ring, the engine could be turned off, which would disable the air bags, the automaker said. G.M. said it was aware of six deaths in five crashes in which the front air bags did not deploy. But the automaker said some of the crashes involved alcohol, the failure to wear seatbelts and high speeds. In the United States, the models covered by the bulletin but not subject to the recall were the 2006 7 Chevrolet HHR, the 2006 7 Pontiac Solstice, the 2003 7 Saturn Ion and the 2007 Saturn Sky. According to an analysis by Experian Automotive, about 643,000 of those vehicles are still registered, including 403,000 Ions, 191,000 HHRs, 35,000 Solstices and 14,000 Skys. Asked why the additional models were not recalled, Alan Adler, a General Motors spokesman, wrote in an email that "G.M. has devoted significant time and resources to evaluating this issue, and has concluded that the 2005 7 Chevrolet Cobalt and the 2007 G5 should be recalled." He declined to answer additional questions. But Michael Brownlee, a former associate administrator for enforcement at N.H.T.S.A., who retired in 1997, said that if the ignition switches were all of the same type, there was a "strong presumption" for recalling all of the vehicles listed in the technical service bulletin. The document shows that G.M. knew it had a safety problem years ago and should have recalled all of the vehicles, Joan Claybrook, who was chief of the agency from 1977 to 1981, wrote in an email. "This defect is not rocket science," Ms. Claybrook said. "General Motors and its executives should be fined the maximum penalties under civil and criminal law for their reckless disregard to the safety of their customers." An agency spokesman said it was "reviewing recall documents, available data and will take appropriate action as warranted." Mr. Adler, the G.M. spokesman, said the service bulletin "was based on the facts as understood at the time. Safety of our consumers is paramount to G.M.; given our present understanding of the 2005 7 Cobalt ignition switch torque capabilities, we have announced a recall." Mr. Adler did not immediately respond when asked whether G.M. knew when the technical service bulletin was sent out advising that turning off the engine would disable the air bags. Automakers routinely send dealers technical service bulletins to make them aware of problems and provide remedies. The 2006 bulletin was titled "Information on Inadvertent Turning of Key Cylinder, Loss of Electrical System." "The concern is more likely to occur if the driver is short and has a large and/or heavy key chain," the bulletin said. "In these cases, this condition was documented and the driver's knee would contact the key chain while the vehicle was turning and the steering column was adjusted all the way down. This is more likely to happen to a person who is short, as they will have the seat positioned closer to the steering column." Dealers were informed that customers should be told to remove "unessential items from their key chain." They were also advised that an insert was available that would "result in the keys not hanging as low as in the past." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
In the summer, Sicily is the color of flax. The valleys, the hillsides, the horizon all bear the same overexposed quality, the burned out yellow of haystacks. But if you fly into Palermo and head east by car, the hues slowly start to change, getting deeper and greener with altitude. Roll down the windows and, as you approach the mountain, the oppressive heat of the island's parched interior gives way to the shady, dank feeling of a forest. And once you see foreboding black rocks dotting the landscape of ominous volcanic soil, you will know you have arrived. "If you go to the top of Mount Etna it will feel like northern Europe," said Bernardo Scammacca del Murgo, one of eight brothers who own Tenuta San Michele, a vineyard and agriturismo on the eastern side of the mountain. "When you are at the bottom, it is summer in the desert." Mount Etna, the 10,922 foot high active volcano that claims a vast chunk of the eastern side of Sicily, has a storied past. It was immortalized by Virgil in "The Aeneid." Some of its most famous eruptions, such as in 1669, have actually reconfigured the coastline. In more recent times, it has exploded almost regularly with notable eruptions in 1981 and 2002 sending rivers of lava down its slopes. And the people who live in the ancient towns that surround the volcano Randazzo and Zafferana Etnea, Trecastagni and Bronte have a special connection to the mountain. "I have a love hate relationship with Etna," one local woman told me. "It's beautiful. But the other night it was glowing red. This scared me." "My family has been here since ... I don't know," Mr. Scammacca del Murgo said. "Let's say 1,400 years. Approximately." Spend enough time on this island, and you will be told that Sicily is not Italy. Spend enough time on the volcano, and you will start to hear that Mount Etna is not Sicily. For me, it happened almost as soon as I arrived. "This is a microclima," said Michele Scammacca del Murgo, the brother in charge of wine production at Tenuta San Michele. "Etna soil has a unique minerality. It is something very special here that you cannot find anywhere else." There were six of us on the terrace that evening: my travel companions, Lisa and Raffaele; the vintner; his brother; the oenologist Vito Giovinco and me. Under a muslin tarp, the warm evening air seeping through, we watched the last sunlight of the day painting the peaks of Mount Etna a dreamy, golden color. The journey here the thousands of miles on a plane, the many hours in a car, the weariness, the exhaustion quietly melted away. We nibbled on salty aged parmigiano and sweet sun dried tomatoes as we worked our way through the vineyard's lineup: the Murgo brut, the Etna white, the Etna red, and somewhere in there, the Murgo brut rose. Inevitably, jet lag found us. Once we had finished off a platter of penne alla Norma with its earthy tang of tomatoes, salty slivers of ricotta and meaty slices of eggplant we strolled up the hill to our rooms. The smell of burning ash and the ribbons of steam drifting out of the crater served as a reminder that Etna had erupted only a few days earlier. Walking up the side of the volcano in the dusky evening had an ethereal feeling as if we were walking closer to history. The next day we headed to the town of Zafferana Etnea, close to the top. Zafferana has been damaged by lava streams off the eastern crater of Mount Etna, and as recently as 2013, was covered in a layer of ash. But on that crisp spring day, sitting in Piazza Umberto I, all I could see was green above and clouds below. By late morning, the piazza was bursting with life. The flag of Sicily called the Trinacria, with its image of Medusa's head and three disembodied legs was whipping in the air. Church bells rang, a young bride and groom were having their picture taken, and elderly Sicilian women with small dogs were gossiping on a bench. It's almost impossible not to be swept up in Mount Etna's romance. As we drove away from Zafferana, I was concocting ways to persuade my husband to uproot our family and move here. That's when I saw graffiti painted on a hillside boulder: "NO MAFIA". Organized crime, Cosa Nostra, is a constant threat even if the tourists can't see it. Scratch the surface, ask about the Mafia, and one of two things will happen: People will clam up and walk away or get really angry. "This area is very interesting to the Mafia," said one farmer, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. "The Mafia will set the price of the crops; there is nothing you can do. It's invisible control. The moment that you do something they don't like they cut down your trees. They steal your tractors, they take your unripe crops and leave them in the sun to rot. They don't look like Mafia from Hollywood movies. They look like regular people." Organized crime may be the only thing that Etna has in common with the rest of the island. The flavors, colors and landscapes of the volcano vary even from one slope to another. "The main misunderstanding is thinking of Etna as a unity," said Giuseppe Catalano di Melilli, an architect who runs a family citrus farm called San Giovanni, outside Catania. "There are as many Etnas as the ever changing soil, climate, landscape and historical events have generated." Wake up early enough on Mount Etna and something magical happens. It was 6 in the morning, and I threw open the shutters of my hotel room on the eastern slope. In every direction, everything below my window was enveloped in a fluffy white cloud. It was as if the volcano and I were tucked in together under the same silent, thick blanket of mist. Of course, by midmorning the scorching Sicilian sun had burned off every last wisp. And for the rest of the day, I would be nostalgic for my quiet, intimate moment with the mountain. Lisa, Raffaele and I piled into the car and headed toward Bronte. We had a meeting with a pistachio farmer named Vincenzo Pecorino. You know what happens when you arrive at a Sicilian farmer's house at lunchtime? You get a seat at the table alongside his wife and daughter. And when that farmer is a pistachio farmer? Lunch is green pale, dusty, pistachio green. There was a plate of raw pistachios, platters of farfalle pesto di pistachio, a bowl of ground pistachio to sprinkle on top, pistachio cake and, finally, pistachio candy. "Our main competitor is Turkey, but really there is no competition this is the best place for pistachios," Mr. Vincenzo said, adding, "Pistachios put bread on our table." Over lunch, Mr. Pecorino illustrated the depth to which his town honors tradition. "The families have nicknames," he said. "People know us as Tramontane, not Pecorino. Tramontane is the name of the northern wind. There is another family Perdere Le Scarpe, the family of Losing Shoes. And there is Balla Calzette, the family of the Dancing Socks. I don't know why this started, but it has always been." When I complimented the meal, Mr. Vincenzo, who grows a variety of fruits and vegetables and owns a market in Bronte called Primizia e Delizie, was clearly proud. Until his wife corrected him. "It's not you," she scolded him. "The volcano makes the fruit." A short while later, stuffed with pistachios, we were back on the road, hugging the curves of the mountain. After almost a week in Sicily, I had come to think of Etna as a benevolent maternal figure watching over her island. She provides almost all of the greenery here. The fruit, the minerals, the wine, the soil, the history, the legends, the fertility of the island are hers to give. As I stood on her western flank, Sicily spread out before me like a faraway ocean, a dusty, roiling sea that was motionless, vistas and waves that faded slowly to the end of the earth. This is the hazy sunlit filter that Etna will reward you with. As with any strong mother, if you respect her she will take care of you. She will love you. Underestimate her, take her for granted, ignore her and she has the power to make the earth tremble. We drove past orange groves, plots of olive trees, terraced hills of vines farms that grow the good life. And we arrived in Randazzo billed as the most beautiful of the volcano's villages in the early evening. "Randazzo is the most Etna of the Etna towns, and I'm not saying that because I'm the mayor," said Michele Mangione, sitting in a hotel lobby in his town. "This is the gateway to Messina and Palermo. The road to Palermo has passed through here since the dawn of time." Romano House (Via Giovanni Di Prima 20, Catania; 39 095 352 0611), in the heart of Catania, has smartly appointed rooms and all the creature comforts you could want in a 17th century palazzo. Il Castello Di Bacco (Piazza Umberto 25, Zafferana Etnea; 39 095 709 3009) has views, a pistachio rich menu and plenty of people watching, as long as you sit outside. Have a glass of vino rosso at Enoteca Agora (Via Francesco Fisauli 7, Randazzo; 39 349 862 2715) and grab a table under the archway it's as close as you can get to feeling as if you're in the Middle Ages. On the northern side of the volcano, Vino Di Anna (Via Crasa 1,Solicchiata; 44 785 735 2339; vinodianna.com), an organic vineyard with an impressive selection of reds, is run by Australian and French expats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Sid Ramin, an orchestrator, arranger and composer who won both an Oscar and a Grammy for his work on the film "West Side Story" and whose career outlets ranged from revered Broadway musicals to perfume commercials, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 100. The death was confirmed by his son, Ron. Mr. Ramin (pronounced RAY min) was one of two orchestrators three, if you count the contributions of the composer, Leonard Bernstein, a lifelong friend on the original Broadway production of "West Side Story," which opened in 1957. According to "The Sound of Broadway Music" (2009), by Steven Suskin, Mr. Ramin worked on the haunting ballad "Somewhere," the evocative "Something's Coming," the sweetly comic "I Feel Pretty," the bravado of youth anthem "Here Come the Jets" and the irreverent "Gee, Officer Krupke." Sid Ramin could easily have put the letters EGOT after his name, as one of the small group of artists who have won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. But the Tonys did not formally honor orchestration until 1997, four years after his last Broadway show ("The Red Shoes"). His 1983 Emmy was not usually the first award he talked about; it was for his work on the daytime drama "All My Children." "Music to Watch Girls By," a peppy, Latin accented instrumental he wrote for a Diet Pepsi commercial in the mid 1960s, became something of a phenomenon. It was recorded by a diverse group of musicians, including Al Hirt, Chet Atkins, the Bob Crewe Generation and (with lyrics added) Andy Williams. Both the Crewe and Williams versions were Top 40 hits. The consumer products for which he wrote or arranged lively jingle music included a Revlon fragrance ("Kind of free/Kind of wow/Charlie!"), a laundry liquid ("You'll look better/In the clothes you trust/To Woolite") and a toothpaste ("How's your love life?/How's your love life?/Use Ultra Brite" sung to the tune of "The Hallelujah Chorus"). But Broadway was his major platform. Shows whose orchestrations he worked on, in addition to "West Side Story," included "Gypsy" (1959), "I Can Get It for You Wholesale" (1962), "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1962), Bette Midler's "Clams on the Half Shell Revue" (1975), "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" (1989) and "Crazy for You" (1992). His overture for "Gypsy" was particularly lauded. The British actor John Gielgud once said it was the only recording he would need with him if he were stranded on a desert island. Mr. Ramin made the decision not to include song excerpts in chronological order, as most Broadway overtures do, but to begin with the opening notes ("I had a dream") from "Everything's Coming Up Roses," originally sung by Ethel Merman in the role of Gypsy Rose Lee's mother. Mr. Ramin's work seemed omnipresent in 1960s popular culture. He wrote the music for the "Patty Duke Show" theme ("They're cousins/Identical cousins ..." and he was also the show's conductor and music supervisor) and for another popular series, "Candid Camera." Although he was the arranger and conductor for "Stiletto," a 1969 crime drama, and for a 1973 television movie remake of "Miracle on 34th Street," the movie business was never a major part of Mr. Ramin's career. In a 2011 interview sponsored by the New York Philharmonic, he recalled going to the West Coast to work on the film of "West Side Story" (1961) and deciding that he and his collaborator, Irwin Kostal, should do as the Romans do. "Let's set up a bridge table at the pool and work poolside," Mr. Ramin said he suggested. When the two men, who had also worked together on the Broadway production, decided to take a break and a swim, all their pages flew into the pool beside them and they had been working in ink. The moral: "We decided we should not go Hollywood." Sidney Nathan Ramin was born in Boston on Jan. 22, 1919, the older of two sons of Ezra Ramin, a Russian born visual merchandiser (the job was called window dresser at the time) for the department store Jordan Marsh, and Beatrice (Salamoff) Ramin. He grew up in the Roxbury neighborhood and at age 12 made a best friend for life: a neighbor named Leonard Bernstein, who was 13. "We created little songs together," Mr. Ramin recalled decades later in a Film Music Foundation video interview, and they exchanged constructive criticism. Bernstein assumed the role of teacher early on. When Bernstein enrolled at Harvard, Mr. Ramin arranged for them to continue studying together. "I'll pay you a dollar a lesson and a candy bar," he told Bernstein. Reports differ as to whether the bars in question were Three Musketeers or Milky Way. Mr. Ramin always contended that aside from his early colloquy with Bernstein, he had no training in orchestration and that he never learned to play a musical instrument. Before joining the Army, though, he did attend the New England Conservatory of Music, as well as Boston University. He spent five years in the Army, much of it in France, where he created original productions for the Army band. In 1946 he moved to New York City, where he attended Columbia University with the help of the G.I. Bill. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The advertising industry has tried for decades with little success to shed its "Mad Men" like reputation as a profession dominated by white men. Now, some of the world's biggest brands are viewing that lack of diversity as a liability. In the last two months, three major brands have publicly put pressure on the agencies they work with to hire more women and minorities. The latest was Verizon, which joined General Mills and HP Inc., formerly a part of Hewlett Packard, in telling agencies that a failure to do so could drive its business elsewhere. The efforts reflect a growing concern among marketers that Madison Avenue's largely white, male leadership may be hindering their efforts to connect with American consumers. Diego Scotti, chief marketing officer for Verizon, sent letters to 11 of the agencies the company works with on Sept. 16, describing diversity as "an explicit business objective." He gave the firms a month to submit details on how many women and minorities they employed across different roles and in senior leadership and asked for "action plans" describing how they would increase those numbers in the future. "Marketers are expected to have a deep understanding and insight about their markets, about decision makers and about customers," Mr. Scotti said in the letter, which has not been made public but was provided to The New York Times by Verizon this week. "We are more likely to create solutions that amaze our customers if our work force and suppliers represent the communities we serve." Verizon borrowed some of the language it used from letters HP sent to its agencies in August, urging them to hire more women in part because women buy about half of its computers and printers. General Mills, in seeking a new creative agency this summer, made headlines for saying it wanted creative departments it worked with to be staffed 50 percent by women and 20 percent with minorities. "You don't need to be a mom to make some Cheerios ads, but if we have more moms on the team making Cheerios ads, maybe we increase the probability we do work that connects with moms in a richer, deeper, more powerful, meaningful way," Michael Fanuele, the chief creative officer of General Mills, said this week during an onstage discussion at an event hosted by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, known as the 4As, for Advertising Week. "That's really where our drive for diversity came," Mr. Fanuele added. "It wasn't some sort of moral high horse stance about the failing ad industry." Ad agencies have already been grappling with accusations of racism and sexism and the sense that the industry's approach to diversity is retrograde. In the last year, the chief executive of the J. Walter Thompson agency resigned after a lawsuit accused him of racist and sexist behavior, and dismissive remarks about gender equality were made by other top industry executives. Several sessions held this week as part of Ad Week, the annual industry gathering in Manhattan, touched on those concerns, with panels on subjects like "Our Challenge to Erase Gender Stereotypes In Ads" and "Sexism in Advertising and What Brands Should Do." 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. But the prospect of losing marketing dollars could drive change in a way that societal pressure has not. Verizon, for example, is one of the biggest advertisers in the United States, spending 1.3 billion on ads in both 2014 and 2015, according to Kantar Media. "In order to push yourself to have a more diverse work force or a more humane work force, you have to be intentional about it and nothing will drive intent faster than a client's dollar," Nancy Hill, president and chief executive of the 4As, said in an interview. Women now make up nearly 50 percent of those working in the advertising industry, but only 11 percent of creative directors, according to a survey by the 3 Percent Conference, which supports female creative leadership at agencies. Mr. Fanuele, when describing the dominant creative "wizards" in the industry, described them as "a bunch of middle aged white guys with baseball caps and funny beer jokes up their sleeves." "We're still in a very male dominated and nondiverse industry," Mr. Scotti, who is from Argentina, said in an interview. "In order for us to create work that's more connected with the consumer, it needs to come from a deeper connection to what's going on in society and what's going on in culture." Mr. Scotti said the commitment to diversity was "an important requirement" of doing business with Verizon, but that the company was not setting specific goals, quotas or penalties for the agencies it works with. HP, in its Aug. 30 letter, said it expected agencies to "make good" on formal plans for hiring more women within 12 months. General Mills said the percentages it mentioned were "meant to be directional" and that the company was focused on "the importance of working toward diversity goals over time." However, perhaps illustrating the challenges of enacting change in the industry, even those pushing for it can struggle to articulate how they respond to attempts to diversify. Mr. Fanuele, answering a question during Tuesday's event about how agencies pitched General Mills after learning about its diversity goals, said at times it felt "tokenistic" to him. "Some show up with all the right people around the table and it almost does feel like a quota of tokenism; it's like 'Oh, thank you. You found the, you know, Southeast Asian transgender woman who works somewhere in your network to come to our meeting to talk,'" he said. "And then other times it just looks beautiful and diverse and it's very genuine and real and you're not even, even though this has been a criteria, you're almost not even conscious that it's happening." It has been particularly exciting, he said, when the traditional creative directors arrive "looking like they look" and express a "genuine commitment to building teams and building departments that want to be magnets for more diverse talent." "When you see their eyes sparkle about the possibilities of teaching and mentoring and being taught and mentored by people who don't look like they do, that's been cool," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
There's no need to shelve that summer vacation you wanted to take but never got around to planning: the last two weeks of August may be the most popular time to get away for the season, but there are still plenty of options available for travelers who are game for a last minute escape. Jack Ezon, the president of travel company Ovation Vacations, said that July is actually an opportune time to book a late August trip. "Room cancellations in coveted places like the Mediterranean happen in July just before hotels impose cancellation fees, cities in Europe are quiet, and many resorts all over the United States have space, especially if you're willing to go midweek," he said. "Africa, South America and Canada are possibilities, too." Here are a few options for a memorable summer vacation that you can plan right now. The luxury travel company Royal Travels Tours is offering a private seven night trip to Argentina that includes three nights in Buenos Aires with a city tour, tango lesson and museum tours; two nights in Salta, in the northwest, with a city tour, a winery visit and tasting and a cooking lesson; and two nights in Iguazu Falls with hiking and white water rafting excursions. Stays are at upscale hotels throughout, and breakfast is included in the cost. Prices start at 1,900 a person. Because the tours (and the agency) are private, you'll need an agent to set up the trip. Book by emailing travel agent Ben Adams directly at badams royal travel.com. Maybourne Hotel Group, a collection of three high end properties in London, including The Berkeley, Claridge's and The Connaught, has an offer in August where guests who book a four night stay enjoy one of those nights for free. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Visitors to Old Havana usually come to the neighborhood to take in its faded beauty, the vintage cars cruising cobbled streets and the colonial buildings dating back to the city's Spanish roots in the 16th and 17th centuries. This photogenic neighborhood, a Unesco World Heritage site, isn't typically thought of as a shopping destination. But worth exploring are a number of appealing spots; generally Cuban owned, these establishments sell a diverse range of mostly locally made goods, from art, jewelry and home goods to, of course, cigar boxes. Cuban designer Idania Del Rio, 37, opened her store a few years ago on a heavily trafficked street bustling with tourists, with the intention of offering more stylish souvenirs to buy than the requisite T shirt or postcard. The items sold here have a stylish flair, such as the burlap and cotton totes printed with catchy logos in bright colors. One white cotton tote was imprinted in bright blue with "se acabo el drama" "the drama is over." Merchandise also includes pouches, pillowcases, aprons and T shirts. From one Cuban peso, or about 1. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
WASHINGTON Seven months after Maine voters approved a ballot measure to expand Medicaid to tens of thousands of additional residents, a state judge on Monday ordered Gov. Paul LePage's administration to stop stonewalling and move ahead with the plan. It was the second victory in a week for Medicaid expansion, which became possible under the Affordable Care Act. Lawmakers in Virginia voted last week to open the program to an additional 400,000 residents. Advocates in Utah have succeeded in getting a question on the November ballot about expanding Medicaid, and similar efforts are underway in Idaho and Nebraska. In Maine, Medicaid expansion advocates sued the LePage administration in April after it missed the deadline for submitting a plan to the federal government to expand the program. Residents who are newly eligible for Medicaid as a result of the ballot measure were supposed to get coverage starting in July, but Mr. LePage, a Republican, has repeatedly said the state doesn't have the money to pay for it. Maine was the first state in the nation to expand Medicaid through a public referendum. Governors and legislatures in 17 other states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act are watching closely. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
From 200 euros a night, or about 215 at 1.07 to the euro. Lille prides itself on its heritage, but few hotels have been able to encapsulate the richness of the city's history while offering modern comforts. This independent boutique hotel, opened last April, successfully does both, honoring its past by preserving original design features like parquet flooring, chimneys and period mirrors, and lending contemporary touches through wall murals and furnishings. Housed in a former hotel particulier, or private mansion, erected in 1736 by the Count and Countess of Hespel, the 19 room property benefits from its own expansive garden, a fine dining restaurant and common spaces featuring contemporary works by French and international artists. In the heart of the Vieux Lille, the city's charming Old Town, and within a 10 minute walk to Meert, the patisserie, chocolate shop and tea salon that opened in 1761 (known for its delectable waffles), and landmarks like the Grand Place and the Opera de Lille. La Piscine, an art and industry museum, is 20 minutes away in Roubaix, requiring a car or a ride on the local train. A poem by Baudelaire acts as the welcome message on a plaque outside each of the 19 rooms and suites, all appointed differently. I stayed in the Prestige room, one notch above the basic unit, overlooking the garden. Design flourishes like jeweled light fixtures, Art Deco wall prints and long drapery were set amid a sophisticated palette of creams, taupes and grays. Large windows opened to the sound of chirping birds and the hourly ring of church bells at St. Catherine's, just behind the garden. My room's cozy reading banquette was the perfect spot to take in the view and relax. The midsize bathroom fit two people comfortably. However, as add ons to the original structure, the modern bathrooms lack the historical cachet of the rest of the hotel. Mine featured an off white pedestal sink with a spacious pullout drawer, energizing ginseng bath products by Clarins, a Bluetooth equipped mirror that allows guests to play their own music (the only mirror in my room), and a walk in rain shower that was only partially enclosed. While sleek in design, it did little to prevent water from spraying outside the shower stall. There's a complimentary mini bar, Bluetooth speaker system, coffee machine and high powered Wi Fi. Public spaces are comfortable and welcoming. Bicycles are free, supplied by Le Grand Huit, a local bike tour and outdoor excursions company. It also offers city bike tours that can be reserved through the hotel concierge ( 20 per person; four riders minimum). The hotel's modern French restaurant, La Table, is presided over by a Michelin star honored chef, Nicolas Pourcheresse, and is a popular destination among well heeled locals. The food skews seasonal and hearty, incorporating herbs foraged from the garden. Room service is a slightly edited version of the restaurant menu and available a la carte around the clock. I ordered the continental breakfast ( 32), which was delivered on time; generous portions were a pleasant surprise. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Tragedy was born, old school anthropologists will tell you, when a dithyramb singer stepped out of the chorus and decided to act out the story instead. Western theater owes everything to that scene stealer. "The Invention of Tragedy," Mac Wellman's semi choral, pleasantly baffling ode to theater and mob mentality, part of a festival at the Flea Theater devoted to his work, re creates that moment. But with cat tails, communion wine and, as the chorus says, "words and greater words of estuarial conviviality." Get it? Probably not. For three decades and counting, Mr. Wellman, a professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College and a guru to a generation of writers, has manufactured dozens of wordy, cheerfully inscrutable plays. Even calling them plays can seem like a stretch as they mostly take an ax (in "The Invention of Tragedy," that ax is literal, if rubber) to frills like plot and character and basic grammar. You could call his works stream of consciousness, except that they are more like torrents. Torrents that love wordplay. That the Greek word "tragedy" loosely translates as "goat song" might explain the menagerie here. "The Invention of Tragedy" begins, like ancient rituals before it, with a choral ode, though this one discusses "hope apples, hope apples and donuts of every silvery degree" and is delivered by ten young women in matching robes and ruffs . (Why ruffs? I'd bet it's a dog pun.) One woman, the Answerer (Drita Kabashi), arrives late, and just can't seem to chant in time with her sisters. Unable to lose herself in the chorus, she outs herself as a cat person; the other women seem to be dog identified. (It would explain the butt sniffing.) Threatened, she flees to a forest and meets a disenfranchised hare (Susan Ly). The chorus returns, in cat form . Twice. They are accompanied by an organist (Sarah Alice Shull), who voices stage directions like, "Macrurous pause of feline strangeness." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Seeking to increase pressure on McDonald's, Wendy's and other fast food restaurants, organizers of a movement demanding a 15 an hour wage for fast food workers say they will sponsor one day strikes in 100 cities on Thursday and protest activities in 100 additional cities. As the movement struggles to find pressure points in its quest for substantially higher wages for workers, organizers said strikes were planned for the first time in cities like Charleston, S.C.; Providence, R.I.; and Pittsburgh. The protests have expanded greatly since November 2012, when 200 fast food workers engaged in a one day strike at more than 20 restaurants in New York City, the first such walkout in the history of the nation's fast food industry. "There's been pretty huge growth in one year," said Kendall Fells, one of the movement's main organizers. "People understand that a one day strike is not going to get them there. They understand that this needs to continue to grow." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"This is maybe the first time in documented history that we've seen someone not thinking out loud." TREVOR NOAH "Injecting disinfectant into your body? This is the problem when the dumbest person in the room thinks they're the smartest person. Trump is like Neville Longbottom but with Hermione's confidence." TREVOR NOAH "And I almost don't even blame Trump, because there's no way he even understands what bleach is. Like, do you think Donald Trump has ever cleaned anything in his life? Do you think he has ever actually used disinfectant? Cleaning supplies might as well be magical potions to him. imitating Trump 'I dropped a hamburger on the carpet, then some Mexican lady came in with some Clorox, sprayed it on the carpet, said some spell in Spanish, and then it was gone.'" TREVOR NOAH "Now as crazy as the disinfectant line was, I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss Trump's UV light idea. Because Trump spends most of his time under UV lights, and other than looking like hickory smoked bacon, he's the healthiest man in the world." TREVOR NOAH "And honestly, I love that people were actually calling calling their local health departments to ask if they should try to cure themselves with disinfectants. Because that means that even the people who are dumb enough to drink bleach are still smart enough not to trust something Donald Trump said." TREVOR NOAH | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A clown fish uses his fins to fan water across a glistening mass of eggs, keeping them aerated. A silver arowana scoops up his fertilized eggs with his mouth and holds them gently for two months, until a host of miniature adults swims free from his jaws. A seahorse drifts through coral, his belly pouch swollen with unborn young. Most fish are uninvolved parents. They dump their eggs and sperm, then swim off and let nature take its course. But some species of fish take their parental duties more seriously and among them, the majority of caring parents are dads. Care from mothers, or from both parents at once, is much less common. In a study published last fall in Evolution, researchers found evidence that paternal care, the system in which dads are the sole caretakers, has evolved dozens of times in fish. These fish aren't exactly helicopter dads. Their most common parenting style is simply guarding eggs after they're fertilized. "Some people are surprised this is considered care," said Frieda Benun Sutton, an evolutionary biologist at the City University of New York. But it does count. To learn more about why this type of care in fish usually comes from dads, Dr. Benun Sutton and her co author, Anthony Wilson, of Brooklyn College, took a deep dive into the family history of fish parents. They started with an evolutionary tree, built by other researchers in 2017 using genetic data, that shows how almost 2,000 fish species are related. Then they mapped onto the tree all the information they could find about parental care in those species: Were young cared for by fathers, mothers, both or nobody? They also added other factors including the size and number of each fish's eggs and how they're fertilized. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
But I had completely missed his point. He wasn't suggesting that I be careless about money or unrealistic about living within my means. His counsel was not about trivial matters like what shoes to buy. He also didn't mean that money shouldn't be a factor in my decisions. What he meant is that it shouldn't be the only factor in my choices. From my older and wiser perspective, the warning is so legitimate that it is deceptively simplistic. Yet I see people making major life decisions for the wrong reason money nearly every day. So I question the young person who wants to take the job that pays more over the one that inspires her, the graduate who pursues the field he thinks will be more lucrative instead of the one in which he will thrive, the bride or groom who marries the financially secure mate over the one who offers true compatibility, partnership and love. They ought to anchor personal life choices with long term consequences in something more meaningful than money. My younger self might judge me now and say, "Sure, it's easy to say money doesn't matter when you have plenty of it." But John's words echoed in my head when I was just 30. A Fortune 500 company offered me a higher paying, more prestigious position, but it would have meant abandoning a job I not only loved, but that also provided a platform for me to promote financial literacy, which had become my life's calling. Weighing the relative importance of money instead of making it my singular consideration, I chose to stay at Ariel and have never regretted it. Today, I consider the advice in my business decisions, too: When making a new hire, I want the best person for the job, not the most economical one. Money is without a doubt a practical element that we should carefully measure in our decisions we need to be pragmatic about paying the bills but it should never be the solitary driving force behind them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
If there was ever a science experiment you'd want to participate in, it might be this one: sitting in a booth and inhaling the tangy, intense aromas of dark chocolates. But not just anyone gets to join this research. The people doing the sniffing were trained to detect subtle differences in scent, helping chemists uncover just which odor molecules are behind the distinctive smell of these rich treats. In a paper published last week in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the researchers behind this endeavor reveal that dark chocolate's aroma comes down to 25 molecules, in just the right concentrations some of which you might find rather disgusting if you sniffed them on their own. The sensory panel was part of a study on chocolates with cacao contents from 90 to 99 percent, which are growing more popular, said Michael Granvogl, a chemist at the University of Hohenheim in Germany who wrote the paper with Carolin Seyfried of the Technical University of Munich. While chocolate flavors which, like all flavors, are a combination of taste and smell working together have been studied for decades, this was one of the first times chocolate of such high cacao concentrations has come under the microscope. Or rather, perhaps, the sniff o scope. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Fed through a battery of analytical machines, the chocolates yielded 77 compounds that could contribute to the chocolates' aroma. Some were at levels too low to be detected by the human nose. But around 30 others made the sensory cut. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE RENTERS CeCe and Isaac Boyack and their three children have enough room inside for a tournament. The Sound of Waves Gives Way to Horns Before he moved to New York in the spring for his final two years of medical school, Isaac Boyack had never set foot in the city. But when he chose where to spend those two years, New York topped his list. Mr. Boyack, a student at St. George's University School of Medicine in Grenada, was assigned to Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx. He would have to relocate his family of five to the city. Mr. Boyack met his wife of 10 years, Sydney, who is known as CeCe, in high school; both graduated from the University of Utah. Last winter, the Boyacks left their two bedroom duplex apartment on the beach in Grenada, spent some time back home in Salt Lake City and prepared for the move. Mr. Boyack knew he would have a difficult time hunting on his own in an unfamiliar city. So he contacted Citi Habitats, which matched him with Joanne Gamel. EAST SIDE Three places on East 79th Street had their moments. Although in the target area, they smelled of cigarettes. In the spring, Mr. Boyack, with his father's help, drove straight through to New York, a 34 hour trip, in a rented S.U.V. He had done some research and intended to land a two bedroom rental on the Upper East Side, near both Lincoln Medical Center and the Mormon chapel on East 87th Street. His budget was 2,500 a month. Ms. Gamel warned him to brace himself. The hunt started at an eight story postwar building on East 79th Street, where Mr. Boyack saw three units with monthly rents in the mid to high 2,000s. All had interesting triplex layouts. Still, natural light was limited. Worse was the pervasive smell of cigarette smoke. It was unclear whether it came from the departed tenants, others in the building or the on site construction workers. Regardless, Mr. Boyack said, "I have young kids. I am in the health care industry, and that was unacceptable." Most other places on the list were fifth floor walk ups. Before a full day of real estate shopping, he had not thought that would be a problem. Afterward, he imagined his wife "doing that routine in the middle of winter with three children, groceries and a stroller," and decided an elevator was a must have. EAST SIDE An otherwise eligible place on East 95th Street was a fifth floor walk up. Not so great for maneuvering a stroller. "I was a bit stressed," Mr. Boyack said. "I knew we were going to be downsizing quite a bit, but I just didn't think it would be that much." One relatively spacious fifth floor walk up was on East 95th Street for 2,550 a month. The view was of a Shell station around the corner on First Avenue. Across the street, for 2,500, a walk up on a low floor in a larger building seemed well kept. But the apartment was tiny. "I thought I was consigned to small, dark buildings," Mr. Boyack said. "It kind of got me down. Every apartment to this point was an unhappy compromise." As he learned that not every building had a laundry room, he became increasingly interested in buildings that did. "If my kid wets the bed, I've got to do laundry the next day," he said. EAST SIDE Too small was the verdict on another East 95th Street two bedroom walk up, albeit on a low floor. Ms. Gamel persuaded him to look north to East Harlem, which he had heard was dangerous. "I told him East Harlem has changed," she said. "It's not the Harlem you once thought of." She took him to the Heritage, a three building rental complex on Fifth Avenue near Central Park North. It was different from every other building he had seen. The area seemed lively, with plenty of people going in and out. He checked out several two bedroom apartments, going back and forth between the complex's two Fifth Avenue towers. Mr. Boyack wavered between a better view or a balcony, finally deciding a balcony would go unused. He chose an apartment with a vista of city rooftops in one direction and Central Park in the other. At almost 2,700 a month, the rent was above budget, but "once I saw it I was very willing," he said. The whole family sons Declan, 5, and Cohen, 4, and their baby sister, Eleanor, 3 months arrived in the late spring. "He had emphasized over and over again that it was very small," Mrs. Boyack said. "So when I got here, I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't nearly as small as he had made it sound, and I loved the view." Now, she takes the children across the street to Central Park every day, and does laundry in the building's laundry room every second or third day. Out in the city, "people are so kind," she said. "They will come running and say, 'Can I take your stroller; can I open the door?' I never have to ask anyone for help. They are so willing to offer it." She is, however, perturbed by some neighborhood chatter. "Everyone here curses like sailors," she said. "I am shocked. My 4 year old is starting to say all these swear words. I don't swear, so it's really crazy to me." Mr. Boyack has an easy commute to the hospital, and the family now attends the Mormon church on West 129th Street. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Now Lives: She splits her time between a studio loft in Downtown Los Angeles and her parents' townhouse in the West Village. Claim to Fame: Ms. Keenan is the daughter of Cynthia Rowley, the fashion designer. And although she is still in college (she is a second year film student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles), she is already following in her mother's footsteps. Last year, Ms. Keenan started a youth centric clothing brand called KIT. The line, which is sold exclusively through the company's website, includes a mishmash of styles including graphic hoodies and white prairie dresses (prices range from 45 to 220). The randomness is by design. "What I want to do with the brand is have every drop be a complete reinvention, so it's not like having to stick to one image of the brand," Ms. Keenan said. Big Break: Ms. Keenan got the idea for her clothing label during her freshman year of college and used savings from modeling gigs to start the line. Having family connections certainly didn't hurt. Her mother advised her on production and which factories to use. And when the site went live last June, it was covered by Elle and Women's Wear Daily. KIT also had a pop up shop last summer at the Surf Lodge in Montauk, where her parents have a home. "I didn't have a business plan or fancy investors," Ms. Keenan said. "I had a few thousand dollars and some good advice." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
CHICAGO The first day of school in one neighborhood on this city's far South Side brought a parade of security workers in neon vests, police officers on patrol, an idling city fire truck and, briefly, a police helicopter hovering above. All this to make sure that students from a shuttered elementary school could make it safely past abandoned lots, boarded up houses and gang territory to get to their new school less than a half mile away. And to some parents that did not seem like enough. "It's still really too dangerous," said Larissa Henderson as she walked her 4 year old son, Adrian Wright, to his first day of kindergarten. When Chicago leaders announced last spring that they would close 47 elementary schools this fall, the move stirred worries far beyond education. Many parents feared it would require some children, particularly those on the city's poorer South and West Sides, to walk down more crime ridden blocks and across ever changing gang boundaries. Ms. Henderson and Adrian were headed to Curtis Elementary School on Monday, which some neighborhood residents said had a long history of tension and fighting with the school that closed, Songhai. "I don't know if my baby has a chance out here," Ms. Henderson said, adding that even Adrian had witnessed a shooting on a street nearby a few months ago. While many cities have programs to help children get to and from school safely, experts said few appear to be as elaborate and comprehensive as Chicago's a fact that advocates held up as proof of the city's intense commitment to education and critics described as an unhappy reflection of the city's struggle with violence. Known as Safe Passage, Chicago's program began after the beating death in 2009 of a 16 year old student, Derrion Albert, after he left his South Side high school one afternoon. But with the closing of so many schools, city officials say the number of routes has more than doubled this year and the cost of the program has also nearly doubled, to 15.7 million. By Monday, along the Safe Passage routes, some 1,200 unarmed workers, wearing neon vests, carrying cellphones that doubled as walkie talkies and making 10 an hour, had been trained to stand watch as students passed by. To prepare, city employees in recent weeks demolished 41 vacant buildings along the routes, trimmed 4,900 trees, removed 2,800 instances of graffiti and fixed hundreds of streetlights. "The ultimate goal of all efforts both in the building, on the way to the building and at home is so kids will think about their studies, not their safety," Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who spent part of the morning along Safe Passage routes around the city, said later in an interview. "The city is diverse. This isn't everywhere. But it does address certain parts of the city and certain communities so every child has a level playing field." In 2012, more than 500 people were killed in Chicago, drawing national attention to hundreds of gangs and the gun violence that has flourished in some neighborhoods. The killings have decreased since then; 266 people have been killed here this year as of Sunday, the police said, a drop of about 26 percent compared with a year ago, and seven fewer homicides than this time in 2011. While Chicago Public Schools officials had said that the closings, which are expected to save 43 million in operations costs this year, were needed because the schools had too few students, opponents worried about safety. "I hope they'll be safe and I want them to be safe, but I don't know if this is enough," said Inez Jackson, whose said her daughter, a third grader, wept when Songhai closed. City officials said that safety had improved significantly along the existing Safe Passage routes, reporting that crime had dropped by 20 percent on the routes over the last two years while school attendance had improved. The police said no incidents were reported on Monday along the city's 92 Safe Passage routes. Still, some parents said they were skeptical that the program would truly last beyond a few days or a few weeks, and pointed to shootings, deaths and fights that have plagued some of the city's roughest neighborhoods. Early Sunday, a 14 year old boy was shot to death in a vacant lot about a block from a West Side school near what would, a day later, be considered a Safe Passage route. Early Monday, in a South Side alley not far from a Safe Passage route, the body of an adult was found in a garbage can by sanitation workers; the police said the death, which had apparently happened the night before, was being investigated. Around Ms. Jackson's neighborhood, residents said the school cuts and the notion of merging schools carried special worries. Some recalled fights and old disputes between students from Curtis and Songhai, including one altercation, residents said, that involved baseball bats more than a decade ago. Others said they were taken aback Monday by the heavy police presence, and the signal that seemed to send to new students on their first day at Curtis. "This is a zoo," said Shay Moore, who was trying to sort out where her boys, a second grader and a fourth grader, were supposed to go. "Everybody told me I don't want to bring them here, but I've got no choice. They've got all these police here but no one knows where the kids are supposed to go." But Harold Davis, the director of an agency that hired 14 Safe Passage workers to stand on the blocks near Curtis, said families from both schools had been holding meetings, working out old disputes. "This is the kind of place where you once had adults telling the kids not to play with each other," Mr. Davis said. "This community has to heal." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
It is not a crime for parents to let their children play unsupervised in a park or walk home from school alone under a law signed by Utah's governor last week. The law, which reflects a movement known as free range parenting, goes into effect on May 8 and is the first of its kind in the nation. But its backers say lawmakers in several other states are considering introducing similar bills. "The fact that we need legislation for what was once considered common sense parenting a generation ago and is considered normal in every other country in the world is what surprises me," said Danielle Meitiv, the Silver Spring, Md., mother who made national headlines three years ago after she and her husband were charged with child neglect for letting their two children, ages 6 and 10, walk home from a park by themselves. "I'm glad Utah has put these protections in place after what I discovered when I tried to parent the way I was parented." State Senator Lincoln Fillmore, who introduced the Utah bill in January, said he was motivated by situations like Ms. Meitiv's. The bill specifies what constitutes child neglect in the state, and what does not. Under the law, neglect does not include "permitting a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities" such as going to and from school by walking, running or bicycling, going to nearby stores or recreational facilities and playing outside. "The statutory definition of neglect in Utah was broad enough that anyone could say a child playing alone in a park was being neglected," said Senator Fillmore, a Republican. "Neglect should not mean letting your kids play by themselves in the park or walk home from school alone." State Representative Brad Daw, the bill's House sponsor, said he views the law as an "anti nuisance" measure. "The law says that you can't just call authorities if you see a child playing alone in the park. It frees up authorities from investigating these nuisance calls while allowing them to focus on children who are actually being neglected," Mr. Daw said. In brief comments to the House Health and Human Services Committee, Diane Moore, executive director of the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, praised the legislation, saying, "we agree that kids should be kids and parents should be parents." Lenore Skenazy, the former New York Daily News columnist who is credited with starting the free range parenting movement, has been advocating for such a law for four years. Ms. Skenazy was called "America's worst mom" after writing a column 10 years ago about why she let her 9 year old son ride the New York City subway by himself. "No one should have to second guess their decision if they feel their kids are safe, the neighborhood is safe," she said. In the case of Ms. Meitiv and her husband, they were cleared of the charges, and she is now running for public office, seeking the county council at large seat in Montgomery County, Md. "It was a complete shock that I was in the situation where I had to fight back against my local government who were literally interfering with what I thought was best for my children," Ms. Meitiv said. Connor Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute in Utah, who worked with Senator Fillmore on the Utah bill, said his organization, a libertarian leaning think tank that works on state policy issues including parental rights, is pushing for similar bills in other states next year. Mr. Boyack said a bill is set to be introduced in Idaho in 2019, and Libertas has reached out to officials in Arizona, Colorado and Texas. In New York, Phillip Steck, a state assemblyman, said he was considering introducing a similar bill but needed to do further research. Although similar legislation failed last year in Arkansas, free range parenting advocates say the issue is embraced by many across the political spectrum. "It appeals to conservatives who value the sanctity of family and keeping the government out of their lives, and for liberals, it means giving their children freedom to be kids," Ms. Skenazy said. Mica Hauley of Lehi, Utah, a mother of five children ranging in age from 3 months to 9 years, said she supports the law because she believes it encourages children to learn how to be self sufficient and think for themselves. "I can now make the decisions that are best for my children and not live in fear I am being judged and could be arrested," Mrs. Hauley said. "I trust that my kids can walk a short distance home from school. I may be looking out the window for them and praying for angels to be at their sides but I have to give them the freedom that will make them confident and independent adults." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
LAS VEGAS The annual Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show here can sound rather boring when just the facts are recited: about 2,500 vendors showing some 2,000 new products in one million square feet of exhibit space. But up close, the SEMA show, in all its colors, splendors and tastes, is a Willy Wonka caliber candy factory for automotive enthusiasts. Still, there's one problem: the typical enthusiast can't get in. Too bad, since the enthusiasts are the ones who last year alone bought 31 billion worth of the kinds of products shown here. "There's so much consumer interest in this show that a few sneak in every year," Peter MacGillivray, a SEMA vice president, said in an interview Wednesday. "I'm sure they have a great time, but they erode the quality of the experience, the trade nature of the show. It's something that we work very hard to protect." Of the 130,000 or so people estimated to be in attendance this year, as many as 70,000 are buyers; the rest are media, company representatives and industry insiders. About 20 percent are from outside the United States, Mr. MacGillivray said, an indication of emerging interest overseas in automotive personalization a pursuit that historically has been of interest mostly to Americans. "I'm struck by the resurgence of youth oriented vehicles," Mr. MacGillivray said when asked to identify any other noticeable trends this year. "The notion that new drivers are losing interest in automobiles is contrary to the cars and trucks on display at this year's show our largest ever." An excellent example might be the Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Gran Turismo 6 Concept being shown here ostensibly a marketing tie in with the Corvette rendition in the popular PlayStation game. But look closely and you may catch a hint of a possible 2015 Corvette Z07. Yes, automakers are not above using the SEMA venue as an adjunct auto show, or as a sneak preview of concepts and production models. "We use our SEMA vehicles as a test bed for concept parts that may find their way into production," said Michael Albano, a spokesman for Chevrolet. "A good example this year is the Sonic. Last year we showed the stage kit as a concept and this year it was introduced for production." Mr. MacGillivray said that youth oriented vehicles were prominent among the showcased offerings from General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Honda and many other exhibitors. "We have 11 automakers this year," he said. "Technology, eye catching styles and one of a kind modifications are standard fare." Among the other notable vehicles from automakers unveiled at SEMA this year are a remastered 1956 Ford F 100 pickup called Snakebit that features a 550 horsepower Shelby V8; an ordinary Honda Odyssey with an extraordinary 1,029 horsepower twin turbo V6 under the hood that is designed to push the minivan up to 180 m.p.h.; a Chevrolet SS sedan reimagined by the Nascar driver Jeff Gordon; and a Toyota Highlander S.U.V. with an onboard aquarium. The new is shown happily alongside the old: Chevrolet engineers disassembled a 1978 Silverado pickup and reassembled it with a modern V8 crate motor and transmission, ECU computer and up to date wiring harness essentially making it better than it was when showroom new 35 years ago. Meguiar's wanted to show what kind of shine it could produce on a 1939 Bugatti 57C with modern car care products, and Ford had its own classic to show off. "The 1932 Ford coupe on display at our stand was built entirely from reproduction parts, now currently available from Ford or its licensed parts sellers," Mark Schirmer, a Ford spokesman, said. While many of these vehicles are "dream machines" meant to inspire, entertain and delight industry enthusiasts, others have wider appeal in the market of millions of car owners whose vehicles serve as daily personal or professional transportation. "SEMA is everything you want, but nothing you need," Mr. MacGillivray said. The products shown here are, for the most part, mere discretionary purchases, meant to enhance the styling and performance of stock cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles. But it's not all fluff, like enormous wheels and crayon colored tires. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
One of the least famous but most revealing radical arguments of Hannah Gadsby's breakthrough special, "Nanette," is that we should only dress babies in the color blue. Sorry pink. Pointing out how blue is associated with coolness as well as the hottest part of the flame, she said with admiration that it's full of contradictions. So is her comedy. Gadsby earned rapturous reviews and a ferocious backlash pushing the boundaries of stand up by insisting on its limits in that show. The cultural phenomenon of "Nanette" haunts her follow up, "Douglas," now on Netflix, and in typical self awareness, she acknowledges that specter at the start. In a daring formal move, she says she will manage expectations by providing a road map for the show. There will be some needling of the patriarchy, a little observational comedy, some stuff about her autism, a lecture for her haters and a Louis C.K. joke she promises will be great. (It's fine.) This is an old magician's trick, telling the crowd what you are going to do, only to still startle them with it. This new work seems less ambitious but isn't. If anything, it's formally more complex and denser intellectually, if far less confessional. Whereas "Nanette" needed to stop the comedy to make its most serious points, Gadsby works hard to blend the two here, and the result is an intricate, heady show whose cleverness gets in its own way. She refers to it, aptly, as her "difficult second album." Doubling down on the comedy of contradiction, Gadsby tells you the show has not started during the actual show. "Confidence makes you stupid," she says in a bit about Americans. "I'm very confident in that." That is the kind of delightful quip you might say out of the corner of your mouth while shaking a cigar. But like her meta commentary, it keeps you at a distance. When she performed this show in New York last year, Gadsby, in a discussion of her autism, built to a story about a girlfriend who insulted her with a slur. This made the audience gasp but also threw the show off balance. She cut it for Netflix. It was a smart edit that story felt like a strained and doomed attempt to capture the gut punch emotional climax of "Nanette" and the omission suits the prickly puppet master vibe of this new effort. Often tagging her jokes with a statement of purpose, she says quite explicitly: "I'm not here to collect your pity. I'm here to disrupt your confidence." In a raging bit about the anti vaccination movement, Gadsby pokes fun at her fan base, calling her core demographic "rich white entitled women," and when she finishes a point about the corrosiveness of the phrase "boys will be boys," she hushes the clapping. "This is not a rally," she says, flashing a smile. Gadsby saves most of her scorn for her critics, particularly those whose response to the novelty of her work was to write her out of comedy. Not only does she list all the ways people derisively classified her work as a lecture, a one woman show, a TED Talk she spoofs each mode. Gadsby often seems so annoyed by the (dumb) idea that she wasn't trying to be funny that she overcompensates, proving she can do conventional stand up jokes, too. She goes after big targets Taylor Swift, Harry Potter, fad diets, golf and leans on some familiar joke conventions (the women in the crowd are thinking this, the men are thinking that). There are riffs on language that you could have found on BuzzFeed years ago (Why do Americans call petrol gas when it's a liquid?). She warns us early on that her observational comedy isn't that good, but self awareness does not turn a mediocre joke into something better. Gadsby is an artist who thinks like a critic, but her critical side sometimes functions as a protective mechanism, a safety net she doesn't need. Gadsby is at her best and most distinctive when she is talking about art, and she uses the history of paintings the way "The Daily Show" employs clips of politicians spouting rhetoric. Her jokes here balance smart and silly, skewering, for instance, the vast number of artworks in museums showcasing naked women on rocks. She does another funny bit about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which she also mentioned in "Nanette"), zeroing in on their art world names. For Gadsby, names and naming matter. It's perhaps the ultimate power. This may be why she seems so fixated with how others label her work. Early on, she describes her show, dryly, as a romantic comedy. She categorizes constantly and in so doing, makes categories seem ridiculous. Another contradiction. But on this subject, how to define her work, she does not leave it there. After she does a comic bit about prepositions, Gadsby lays her cards on the table. "What this show is," she says dramatically and at a speed that is tough to follow, "is a metaphorical preposition that explains the relationship between what you think you think you see me think and what I'm genuinely able to think." It's a mouthful, and invites analysis. One thing it suggests is that Gadsby remains skeptical about the ability of comedy to express oneself honestly. There's enough of a difference between what she says onstage and how it's perceived that her show is about that incongruity. But what's also important about her language here is that she emphasizes the act of thinking as much as its conclusions. As renowned as she is for righteous political comedy, Hannah Gadsby is an aesthete alert to form, a comic whose means of mocking sexist systems of power is to home in on the meaning of the color blue. Contradictions are a problem for a debater, but not necessarily an artist, or certainly a comedian. They are often where the fun is. And so when she says, "There is beauty in the way I think," you have to agree, but also wonder: Is this confidence or the opposite? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Casual observers would find little in common between the smartphones in their pockets and the funky backbeat of the Beastie Boys' Car Thief. But these two creations will go down together in the annals of creativity as reminders of the flaws in our intellectual property laws. TufAmerica, which manages the rights to the catalog of the go go band Trouble Funk, sued the Beastie Boys this month, saying they had illegally used samples from Trouble Funk's classics "Drop the Bomb" and "Say What" in several tracks on their 1980s albums "Licensed to Ill" and "Paul's Boutique." To fans of 1980s hip hop, the suit was a bitter reminder of how copyright law changed the music they loved. Back then, a new generation of artists rapped over elaborate musical mosaics made of brief samples from other songs. "Paul's Boutique" included hundreds of samples from artists ranging from the Beatles to Afrika Bambaataa. A series of court decisions in the 1990s, though, made this kind of musical collage all but impossible, forcing artists to get permission for every snippet they used a logistical and financial nightmare. Lawsuits flew against several rappers, and a form of cultural expression virtually disappeared. Hip hop may have little to do with high tech. But its experience carries a stark warning for the future of technology. High tech behemoths in a range of businesses like mobile computing and search and social networking have been suing one another to protect their intellectual property from what they see as the blatant copying and cloning by their rivals. Regardless of the legitimacy of their claims, the aggressive litigation could have a devastating effect on society as a whole, short circuiting innovation. The battle raging over smartphone technology is the latest case in point. Since 2010, Apple and Microsoft have led a frenzy of patent and copyright litigation against the makers of smartphones running Google's Android operating system, hoping courts around the world will force their rivals to pay license fees, remove features from their devices or even leave the market altogether. Apple and Microsoft have spent billions to acquire the patent portfolios of old technology companies to bolster their case. Though Google has mainly played defense, its 12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility and its thousands of patents have helped Android device makers go on the offensive. The confrontation could have a reasonable outcome a detente in which the companies licensed each other's technology on reasonable terms and coexisted in peaceful rivalry. But the smartphone wars could easily escalate, reducing competition in mobile computing and, like hip hop mash ups, knocking technologies out of the market for good. This would defeat the very purpose of intellectual property law. Patents on inventions, like copyrights on songs, are not granted to be fair to their creators. Their purpose is to encourage innovation, a broad social good, by granting creators a limited monopoly to profit from their creations. While companies like Apple may believe they are insufficiently compensated for their inventions, the evidence often suggests otherwise. The belief that stronger intellectual property protection inevitably leads to more innovation appears to be broadly wrong. It's not that we don't need to protect intellectual property at all. But the protections must take into account that innovation is often a cumulative process, with each step piggybacking on the ideas before it. Like "Paul's Boutique," the software that drives smartphones is composed of a vast array of ideas from multiple sources. Everybody infringes to some extent on everybody else. Overly strong intellectual property laws that stop creators from using earlier innovations could slow creation over all and become a barrier for new technologies to reach the market. One of Apple's patents, for instance, appears to grant it ownership over any application based on a user's location. Think of the Google map feature that pinpoints where you are. Or imagine an app showing nearby hospitals or the best deals in nearby pizzerias. If Apple enforced the patent aggressively, it could foreclose a vast array of innovation. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. To compound the problem, critics argue, the Patent and Trademark Office regularly issues patents on inventions that are obvious or not new. Sometimes the patents are written too broadly. Apple, for instance, has patents on the concept of moving objects around on a mobile device's screen using multiple touches. Not the specific instructions; the concept. Broad patents can even capture applications that the patent holder never envisioned. Facebook did not succeed because it was the first social networking technology. It succeeded because of how it unfolded the social networking model among student communities. Still, two months before Facebook's initial public offering, Yahoo sued it for patent infringement, arguing that "Facebook's entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo's patented social networking technology." Broad patents can hinder innovation by allowing dominant businesses to stop future inventions that would disrupt their business model. "Who has patents?" asked the Stanford economist Tim Bresnahan, an expert on technology policy. "It's the guys who have been around for a while, not the guys who have done a lot of innovation lately." Overly broad patents have given birth to an entire new industry of "patent trolls," whose only business is to buy patents and sue for royalties. TufAmerica, for instance, has made a business out of buying the rights to old songs and suing artists who sample them without permission. Intellectual property rights could be improved to better serve their purpose of encouraging innovation. Carl Shapiro, an expert on information technology on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, has suggested patent reforms, including making it easier to challenge patents after they are issued, culling the roster of overly broad or ambiguous claims, and allowing those accused of infringement to claim independent invention as a defense. Perhaps software should not be patentable at all. In rulings since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has determined that abstract concepts like mathematical formulas cannot be patented. It has struck down two software patents and ruled against patents on diagnostic techniques because they were based on laws of nature. And it has asked an appeals court to reconsider a decision on patents over advertising online. Yet for all the concern over excess, intellectual property protections seem only to grow stronger. In 1998, for instance, Congress extended copyright protection to 70 years after the death of the author, from 50. Notably, the legislation applied to works of art that had already been created and hence needed no further incentive to come into being. Software patents will never be banned, of course. Indeed, software patents exploded after an appeals court in 1998 upheld a patent on a method to pool the assets of mutual funds using a mathematical algorithm, establishing the patentability of a business method and the software to run it. And the America Invents Act of last year, a measure expected to curb some of the excesses of patent law, came up short, allowing only a small window of time for companies to challenge new patents and forcing companies that challenged a patent to waive the right to do so again in court. Intellectual property, meanwhile, keeps growing. The United States patent office awarded 248,000 patents last year, 35 percent more than a decade ago. Some will spur innovation. But others are more likely to stop it in its tracks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
That can mean something as seemingly small as creating processes for making clothing that minimize waste and transportation of materials, or planning urban environments that are more resilient and attuned to extreme weather events, he said. The school will study its own facilities to find ways to reduce its carbon footprint and save energy costs, and reduce paper use and waste. And it plans to promote environmentally sensitive food services through such measures as working with small scale suppliers in the Hudson Valley. The school has consulted with Bill McKibben, the writer and environmental activist, on its initiative. Climate change, said the New School's chief operating officer, Tokumbo Shobowale, is "a wicked design problem." Shifting the curriculum across all of the school's disciplines, he said, is a way to go beyond divestment, a step that he said drew skepticism at first from many faculty members. "A lot of people said this is not going to make a difference in terms of hurting these companies or hurting their ability to conduct oil and gas exploration," he said about the divestment plan. Still, he added, divestment can be used as a teaching tool economics students are studying the companies in the school's 340 million endowment and their practices to help devise principles to add some nuance to their decisions about which stocks to keep or sell. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Colbert on the Polar Vortex: 'Viral Marketing for "Game of Thrones" Has Gone Too Far' Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. With a polar vortex sweeping much of the United States, Stephen Colbert took a short break from Trump bashing on Tuesday to make a few jokes about the bone chilling cold. "The viral marketing for 'Game of Thrones' has gone too far. We get it! Winter is coming." STEPHEN COLBERT "Wisconsinites have sought shelter under a thick layer of melted cheddar!" STEPHEN COLBERT Jimmy Fallon poked fun at President Trump while commenting on the extreme weather: He pointed out that the president's Twitter post about the cold front misspelled "global warming" in addition to apparently misunderstanding the way that climate change can cause cold fronts. "He was like, 'Global warming is a hoax but global waming is very real.' Then he said, 'I recommend staying indoors and drinking a wame cup of tea.' " JIMMY FALLON "I heard experts say that during a polar vortex, you shouldn't leave items like beer, eggs and medicine in your car. Though if that's what you're keeping in your car, the polar vortex is the least of your problems." JIMMY FALLON As the former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz explores a run for president, many people on the left of the political aisle have been expressing their dismay. Fallon suggested they all calm down a little. "Some Democrats are threatening to boycott Starbucks. Yeah, then Starbucks said, 'Don't worry, the food in the display case will still be here when you get back.' " JIMMY FALLON "Over the weekend, the United Arab Emirates held 'gender equality awards' that were won entirely by men. Congratulations, guys, but I gotta say, men are the ones creating the inequality. That's like giving a 'perfect attendance award' to the kid who gave the whole class E. coli contaminated cupcakes." STEPHEN COLBERT "Denmark is building a 43 mile long fence along its border with Germany to keep out wild pigs. Just to mess with Trump, Mexico agreed to pay for it." JIMMY FALLON "To kick things off, none other than President Trump has agreed to sit for a pregame interview. And the Super Bowl, you know, is his third favorite bowl right behind taco and toilet." JIMMY KIMMEL "A hummus brand in England called MeToo! will be changing its name of 14 years after the company suffered a significant drop in sales, possibly due to the MeToo anti harassment movement. 'We feel your pain,' said the owners of Toys 'R' Kelly." SETH MEYERS What We're Excited About on Wednesday Night Desus and Mero the comedy duo behind Viceland's late night show, which comes back from a break next month will sit down with Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The New Orleans Jazz Heritage festival has proved ambitious and resilient, surviving deficits, rainouts and the aftermath of hurricanes over its half century history. It started small, half a century ago, but with a mission. The first New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival was held in 1970 in Beauregard Square, previously and afterward known as Congo Square, where African drumming and dancing had persisted through the era of slavery. It was modeled on the traditional music showcases at the Newport Folk Festival, but filled entirely with Louisiana's own styles jazz, blues, gospel, brass bands, zydeco, Mardi Gras Indians and much more. Duke Ellington, the only performer without Louisiana roots, was commissioned to write and perform a "New Orleans Suite." Nearly two dozen food vendors offered jambalaya, etouffee and other specialties. Tickets were 3. But only about 300 people showed up, and the overstocked vendors ended up feeding children from a nearby orphanage. "Jazz Fest is everything that you love about New Orleans to begin with," said Ivan Neville, the keyboardist who made his first appearance there in 1977; he is performing this year with his band Dumpstaphunk and in the Foundation of Funk with the rhythm section of the Meters, the band co founded in 1965 by his uncle, Art Neville. "It's the most variety of music that you'll ever see in one given place, so that's first, and then the best food that you will ever eat in your entire life." Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder. In recent years, Jazz Fest has drawn between 400,000 and 500,000 attendees across its two extended weekends; its peak, in 2001, was 618,000. Festival organizers estimate that it brings 300 million into the New Orleans economy. This year's event includes nationally known headliners and hitmakers, among them Katy Perry, J Balvin, Chris Stapleton, Diana Ross and Pitbull, as well as habitual Jazz Fest performers including Santana, Bonnie Raitt, Jimmy Buffett, Al Green, Herbie Hancock and the Dave Matthews Band. Yet while visiting attractions have boosted attendance, they have never defined the festival. Quint Davis, who has booked music for Jazz Fest since it began and is now the C.E.O. of Festival Productions New Orleans, noted that this year's lineup includes 688 groups, "and 600 of them are from New Orleans and South Louisiana." Jazz Fest has maintained its mandate because it operates far differently from other American festivals its size. Its music encompasses vintage jazz to chart topping reggaeton; its audience is genuinely all ages. It takes place in daylight, ending at 7 p.m. which not only encourages visitors to seek out night life, but also rules out stage spectacles dependent on lights and video, emphasizing old school musicianship instead. More significantly, Jazz Fest is nonprofit, channeling revenues back into Louisiana music. "The mission of the festival all along has been to make a full circle," Davis said. "To go back and support the culture that you're promoting." Jazz Fest generates about 3 million each year for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, according to the foundation's executive director, Don Marshall. The foundation owns the license of the New Orleans public radio station WWOZ FM which plays the kind of music heard at the festival year round and provides the bulk of its funding. The foundation also gives 8,500 Jazz Fest tickets to community groups; runs the free Heritage School of Music and supports other music education programs; presents four free annual music festivals in New Orleans; subsidizes performances by Louisiana musicians across the state; underwrites a musicians' clinic; documents the region's musical history, and steps in with other efforts at maintaining New Orleans traditions. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the foundation arranged to buy beads and feathers for the Mardi Gras Indian tribes who, in a New Orleans tradition, sew new, eye popping costumes each year and dance in the streets and did so even after losing everything in the storm. And when the city raised the price of police permits for street parades, affecting jazz funerals and other community events, the foundation helped pay for them. The festival's own legacy began with the producer George Wein. He had presented the Newport Folk Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival, and in the early 1960s he was approached by New Orleans city officials and its hotel association. He told them he could not produce a jazz festival in a city that enforced segregation. Eventually, years after the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, he seized the chance to create a New Orleans festival "combining the two festivals I had done in Newport, the folk and the jazz," he said in an interview. He didn't want to simply import well known musicians for jazz concerts in auditoriums; for him, the "heritage" aspect of the festival, bringing all of New Orleans's musical subcultures to the stage, was paramount from the start. "We had in mind to create a permanent relationship with the culture of New Orleans," he said. Davis, a New Orleans native, had coinciding ambitions. "My first idea was to have the world's biggest backyard barbecue, like the old rent parties," he said. That first festival in 1970 lost 40,000, then a sizable downside. But it survived a few shaky years and soon outgrew Beauregard Square, moving to its current site, the Fair Grounds racetrack, where it could add more stages and more food vendors, all still homegrown. This year's festival has 14 stages, large and small, and five dozen food vendors. The festival became self supporting by the mid 1970s, and Wein's Festival Productions considered turning it into a for profit corporation. But the New Orleans based staff resisted that idea, and Wein conceded. In his memoir, "Myself Among Others," he wrote, "It was probably the biggest financial mistake I ever made." Decades later, the many repeat visitors to Jazz Fest often wearing past years' souvenir New Orleans themed Hawaiian shirts bask in its routines. They welcome the annual reappearance of favorite performers, including New Orleans R B stalwarts like Irma Thomas and Clarence (Frogman) Henry, long running groups like the Rebirth Brass Band and members of Louisiana music dynasties like the Neville, Chenier and Marsalis families. In 1970, the pianist Ellis Marsalis advised the first festival on booking the city's up and coming jazz bandleaders. "George didn't know the musicians yet, and I knew all of the musicians that could play," Marsalis recalled. "I said, yeah, no problem." Now 84, Marsalis will be performing his compositions at Jazz Fest on April 28 with his four sons: Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason. After years of growth, the first decade of the 2000s brought challenges for Jazz Fest. The 2003 festival was a financial and physical washout, rained out for five days and running a large loss. The foundation's executive committee courted new producers, until Davis and Festival Productions New Orleans arranged a partnership with A.E.G. Entertainment, the second largest promoter of music events worldwide (after Live Nation). "Up till then," Davis recalled, "We're down here doing this, we've got no connections professionally to the outside world, we've got no clout, we're not connected to the music industry. When we partnered with A.E.G., now, if we needed a big gun, we had the second biggest company in music behind us." A continuing question for Jazz Fest, Ramsey said, is, "How does the festival change and adjust to keep its focus on the heritage music, and also still satisfy an audience and draw the numbers that it needs to survive financially?" But in 2019, Jazz Fest will proudly serve up its familiar pleasures. Over five decades, it has become a tradition of its own. "The real bulwark of our success," Davis said, "is not knowing any better." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
JUDEX (1963) Stream on the Criterion Channel. Rent on Amazon and iTunes. This Georges Franju film is not only a remake of Louis Feuillade's serial from 1916, it's also his tribute to film of that era. Channing Pollock, an American magician, plays the eponymous vigilante hero. He is after Favraux, a shady banker who has defrauded several people. But Judex's pursuit of Favraux is only part of the story. He is not the only one concerned with the corrupt financier. Diana (Francine Berge), his granddaughter's nanny, is too, but her motives are mercenary . In keeping with its source material, the film is mainly concerned with expressive exuberance, visuals and atmosphere. STREET FLOW Stream on Netflix. As he moves toward adulthood, Noumouke, a 15 year old boy being raised by his mother in the suburbs of Paris, finds himself caught between his two older brothers. One, Soulaymaan, is a law student and scholar, while the other, Demba, is a criminal. Noumouke struggles to find his path as he contends with the pressures of adolescence and the added stresses of racism and poverty. The film was written and co directed by Kery James, a French hip hop artist who was raised in Orly, a southern suburb of Paris. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Any curious kids who have caught a butterfly by hand, only to find their fingers coated in messy powder, have unknowingly brushed off the fluttering insect's scales. These microscopic plates cover almost every part of a butterfly, and are what help paint their wings a variety of colors, from shimmering cobalt blues to patterns of orange and black. While most people go to a garden if they want to see a butterfly's scales in action, Timo van Eldijk's search for wing scales required drilling more than a thousand feet into the ground. Then, he extracted fossilized insect bits from black sludge using a probe tipped with human nose hair. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, Mr. van Eldijk and his colleagues uncovered approximately 200 million year old wing scales belonging to ancient members of the insect order Lepidoptera, (named for the Greek words for "scale" and "winged") which include butterflies and moths. The scales may also provide insight into the early evolution of the insect's tubelike tongue, or proboscis, which the authors suggest evolved tens of millions of years before nectar rich flowers existed. Mr. van Eldijk made the discovery while working with Bas van de Schootbrugge, a geoscientist at Utrecht University, on a project to investigate ancient pollen in the fossil record, particularly during the mass extinction about 200 million years ago that ended the Triassic Period and ushered in the Jurassic. For that project, the team drilled deep below northern Germany in what was once an ancient lagoon to collect sediment from the time of the extinction event. They then dissolved the rock in chemicals that eat away any material that was not organic, leaving pollen samples behind in a black goop which the team could search through, drop by drop. But in analyzing the murky solution they stumbled upon a new mystery: several unknown scales were left behind in the gunk. The team soon discovered that the scales belonged to long extinct relatives of modern butterflies and moths. Mr. van Eldijk was tasked with fishing out more, and for that job he was given a dissection probe with a single nostril hair. "The nose hair has just the right length and springiness for getting a pollen grain, or in this case the butterfly scale, to adhere to it," Mr. van Eldijk said. "I was just provided these by my professor, I don't know whose nose hair it was. It's probably best not to ask." He and his team uncovered about 70 scales or scale fragments, which they dated to about 200 million years ago. Using an electron microscope, they also found that about 20 of the scales were hollow. The hollow scales provided clues for another mystery, this one concerning the insects' mouths. Until this point, many of the most ancient moths and butterflies found were thought to have had mandibles, which they used to chew, rather than a proboscis, which is the strawlike mouthpiece for sucking up flower nectar that most Lepidoptera now use to feed. The proboscis is a famous tool of this insect group, with some like the Morgan's Sphinx moth, or Darwin's moth, using its foot long tongue to wiggle deep inside orchids. Just about every butterfly and moth that has hollow scales today has a proboscis, Mr. van Eldijk said. That, he said, suggested there were butterflies and moths with proboscises fluttering around 200 million years ago. Previous studies had suggested that moths and butterflies with proboscises, which belong to the Glossata group, appeared only about 130 million years ago, when flowers first bloomed on land. The finding pushes back the date of this group of insects by about 70 million years, and refutes the idea that the proboscis first evolved alongside flowers. "That creates this problem," said Mr. van Eldijk. "If they had a proboscis, what were they using it for?" The team suggested the insects used their tongues to suck up sugary droplets produced by nonflowering plants that made seeds, a group that includes today's pine trees. "I totally agree with them," said Conrad Labandeira, a paleoentomologist at the Smithsonian Institution of Natural History who was not involved in the study. He added that the finding may provide evidence that the iconic way moths and butterflies pollinate wildflowers today, flying from petal to petal, evolved millions of years ago with a completely different type of plant. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
At the start of George Nierenberg's 1985 documentary, "About Tap," Gregory Hines ambles into the alley behind the Apollo Theater in Harlem and recounts the tap training he received there as a child in the 1950s. He remembers the dancers, like Sandman Sims, who took the time to work on steps with him, and he recalls what they taught him: that imitation wasn't enough, that he had to assimilate what they did and forge his own style, as they had. "I found myself through them," he says. This lesson about tap tradition and individuality is the core theme of "About Tap," as it is of Mr. Nierenberg's earlier documentary "No Maps on My Taps," from 1979. The films, which I consider the two best ever made about the art, didn't just record tap history; they became part of it, helping to stoke a revival. Milestone Films has restored them from the original negatives and is presenting them as a double feature at the Quad Cinema (Friday, July 7, to July 13). That's just in time for this year's edition of Tap City, the New York City Tap Festival (July 8 to July 15). Many of its young leading lights, like Sarah Reich and Caleb Teicher, had not yet been born when the documentaries were released, but they've grown up studying them, finding themselves through the films. This Style Comes Out of That Person Before he made "No Maps," Mr. Nierenberg had little notion of tap and its history. In his mid 20s, he was a young filmmaker searching for a subject for his second movie when someone suggested black tap dancers. He looked up Mr. Sims. "Sandman was trying to keep tap alive, and he saw me as a vehicle," Mr. Nierenberg recalled in a recent interview. Mr. Nierenberg began spending all his time with Mr. Sims, getting to know him and other dancers. After a year or more, he decided to focus on three Mr. Sims, Chuck Green and Bunny Briggs whose life stories would illuminate the connections between dancer, dance and culture in an art that Mr. Nierenberg feared was dying. That's what "No Maps" does. Mr. Nierenberg constructed the film around an artificial, anachronistic scenario a competition performance with Lionel Hampton's big band at a Harlem nightclub. But as the camera watches the three men prepare for the show and dance in it, they talk about their lives and reveal themselves. Mr. Sims is a sinewy show off whether scuffing sand like a drummer with brushes or tossing off flashy tap steps; he both provokes the other guys and promotes them. Mr. Briggs is delicate, courteous, sentimental; his dancing is at once the most eye pleasing and the most musically abstruse. Revered by the others, Mr. Green lays down the cleanest, clearest rhythms even as his large body teeters and lumbers. He's abstracted, poetically strange. We learn that he spent more than a decade in a mental hospital, where he continued to dance. Mr. Nierenberg folds in footage of some of the men's distinguished predecessors, like Bill Robinson and the highly influential but mostly forgotten John Bubbles. But the connections to tap's past stay personal how Mr. Bubbles mentored Mr. Green, how Robinson offered to take Mr. Briggs on the road when he was only a boy so the film feels present and alive, rather than dryly historical. "This is probably the last hooray," Mr. Sims says in the film. But it wasn't quite. "No Maps," which toured the United States and Europe packaged with live performances by its stars, was part of a tap revival and a wave of renewed interest in dancers of Mr. Sims's generation. Mr. Nierenberg, though, wasn't satisfied, so he raised money for another film, "About Tap." Again, he focused on three veteran dancers: Mr. Green joined by the supremely cool Jimmy Slyde and the ebullient innovator Steve Condos. But in the interviews, adroitly braided with solo performances, the men don't speak of their lives, as in "No Maps," but about their approaches and the broader aesthetics of tap. Their personalities color their pithy elucidations of musicality, discipline, imagination and the hard work of making it all look easy. "No Maps" had a last of a dying breed tone, but Mr. Sims's prediction in it that "there will be others" had already come true by 1985, most notably in the person of Mr. Hines, a movie star who generously introduced "About Tap." And another generation was growing up, soon to be led by Savion Glover. These young dancers would experience the firsthand transfer that Mr. Hines describes in "About Tap," with the same dancers now serving as surrogate grandparents. Yet they also studied Mr. Nierenberg's films closely. Three of its top dancers titled their extraordinary show at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival last summer "And Still You Must Swing," quoting Mr. Slyde in "About Tap" as if his words were scripture. But as generation followed generation, opportunities diminished for direct interactions with the dancers of Mr. Sims's vintage, all of whom are now dead. This has given Mr. Nierenberg's films a new importance for today's young hoofers. 'Home Movies of Relatives You Never Met' Already an acclaimed figure in tap at 23, Mr. Teicher recalls first seeing Mr. Slyde in "About Tap," in 2008, as a pivotal experience in his life, provoking an epiphany about the link between tap and jazz. A few months later, Mr. Slyde died. "What I go back to most are not the clips of the dancing," Mr. Teicher said, as he prepared for a busy summer that includes Tap City's "Tap Ellington" concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center on July 14. "It's hearing them talk. That's what my generation is missing. The films are like home movies of relatives you never met." Ms. Reich, who will dance a duet with Mr. Teicher during "Tap Ellington" and will duel him in a free program in Union Square on July 14, is another rising star, at 28. Her videos with the retro band Postmodern Jukebox have attracted millions of views. She was around 10 when she found "About Tap" in a bag of tap videos given by a benefactor and started watching it over and over. Once, she stayed home sick and watched it all day long. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
How Many Graduates Does It Take to Be No. 1? There will be no valedictory speech at Jericho High School's graduation on Sunday. With seven seniors laying claim to the title by compiling A plus averages, no one wanted to sit through a solid half hour of inspirational quotations and sappy memories. Instead, the seven will perform a 10 minute skit titled "2010: A Jericho Odyssey," about their collective experience at this high achieving Long Island high school, finishing up with 30 seconds each to say a few words to their classmates and families. "When did we start saying that we should limit the honors so only one person gets the glory?" asked Joe Prisinzano, the Jericho principal. In top suburban schools across the country, the valedictorian, a beloved tradition, is rapidly losing its singular meaning as administrators dispense the title to every straight A student rather than try to choose the best among them. Principals say that recognizing multiple valedictorians reduces pressure and competition among students, and is a more equitable way to honor achievement, particularly when No. 1 and No. 5 may be separated by only the smallest fraction of a grade from sophomore science. But some scholars and parents have criticized the swelling valedictorian ranks as yet another symptom of rampant grade inflation, with teachers reluctant to jeopardize the best and brightest's chances of admission to top tier colleges. "It's honor inflation," said Chris Healy, an associate professor at Furman University, who said that celebrating so many students as the best could leave them ill prepared for competition in college and beyond. "I think it's a bad idea if you're No. 26 and you're valedictorian. In the real world, you do get ranked." Darvin Yi, one of nine valedictorians at Cherry Hill High School East in southern New Jersey. The school picked one graduation speaker by lottery and printed speeches from the others. Not, though, at graduation from Stratford High School in the suburbs of Houston, which accorded its 30 valedictorians about 6.5 percent of the class gold honor cords. Nor at Cherry Hill High School East in southern New Jersey, which has revised its graduation tradition, picking a speaker among this year's nine co valedictorians by lottery and printing speeches from the others in the program. In Colorado, eight high schools in the St. Vrain Valley district crowned 94 valedictorians, which the local newspaper, The Longmont Times Call, complained in an editorial "stretches the definition." And north of New York City, Harrison High School is phasing out the title, and on Friday declared 13 of its 221 graduates "summa cum laude." William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions at Harvard, said he had heard of schools with more than 100 valedictorians, and had seen home schooled students praised as No. 1 out of one all of which has helped render the distinction meaningless. "I think, honestly, it's a bit of an anachronism," he said. "This has been a long tradition, but in the world of college admissions, it makes no real difference." Even some principals who have named multiple valedictorians acknowledge that the honor no longer carries the same weight. "If you've got one in a population of 500, it has special significance," said John O'Breza, the principal of Cherry Hill East. "When you have 9, 10 or 30 in a population of 500, the numbers speak for themselves. The more rare it is, the more distinguished." Still, being tapped as valedictorian resonates deeply. "I feel like as long as you reach that point, it doesn't matter how many you have," said Yvette Leung, one of the Jericho seven, who is bound for Harvard. "To be named valedictorian is an honor and a testament to how hard we've tried." The word valedictorian Latin for "farewell sayer" appears as early as 1759 in the diary of the Rev. Edward Holyoke, then president of Harvard College. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as "the student usually having the highest rank in a graduating class who delivers the valedictory address at the commencement exercises." The top seniors at Jericho High School will perform a 10 minute skit instead of giving speeches. School officials contend that there are more valedictorians than ever before because the frenzy over college admissions has made students more serious about grades and has spurred them to load up on advanced courses beginning in freshman year. In addition, some schools have adjusted their formulas to give more students a shot at the top spot by counting more courses toward the grade point average, or limiting the weight given to any one particular subject. Don Haddad, the superintendent of the valedictorian laden St. Vrain Valley district, where all 94 honored seniors earned a cumulative G.P.A. of at least 4.0, said his schools had simply produced stronger students with more rigorous coursework in early grades. "We have not lowered the bar to achieve more valedictorians," he said. "More kids now are getting over the bar." Santa Monica High School in California recognized all 23 students with a 4.0 G.P.A. this year as "valedictorian candidates" and displayed their pictures at the entrance to the cafeteria. But for graduation, the school winnowed that pool to two valedictorians and one salutatorian by giving extra points for advanced placement, honors and college courses. As the principal put it, "If we had 23 speeches along with everything else, we'd still be graduating right now." Jericho selects its valedictorians through a formula that does not distinguish between honors and nonhonors courses, with the result that any student who earns all A pluses all four years automatically receives the honor. The most valedictorians previously was four, in 2008; last year, there was one. Henry L. Grishman, the Jericho superintendent, said there were no plans to move to a weighted formula that could break, say, a seven way tie for valedictorian because "it levels the playing field to say a course is a course is a course" and encourages students to focus on learning rather than competing. The district does not rank students. This year's co valedictorians all friends since middle school are an illustrious group. Ms. Leung just returned from meeting President Obama as a presidential scholar. Brandon Li, who is headed to Yale, invented a water filtration system for third world countries. Four of the seven placed in international research competitions. Mr. Prisinzano, the principal himself valedictorian of his upstate New York high school in 1994 said Jericho's co valedictorians had spent more than 20 hours developing and rehearsing their graduation skit over the past two weeks. There is no star: everyone has about the same amount of speaking time. Jeremy Feinstein, who plans to study engineering at Cornell, said he was surprised to learn that he was one of seven valedictorians. "I've never even heard of more than one or two," he said. "Then I thought, 'They worked as hard as I did and they deserve it as much as I do.' They're all great people." Anyway, he added, "I wouldn't know what to do with 10 minutes on the podium." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
NEVER GROW OLD (2019) Stream on Amazon. This dark western plays like a morality tale, blurring the line between good and evil through the goings on in an American frontier town called Garlow. Set in the late 1800s, the film follows Patrick Tate (Emile Hirsch), an Irish undertaker whose job had been steady until a local preacher banned liquor in the town. Suddenly, bodies stopped piling up. That changes when an outlaw, Dutch Albert (John Cusack), strolls into Garlow and unleashes a wave of violence and corruption. Patrick is left contemplating whether to carry on with his work with his head down, or to muster the courage to stand up to Cusack's villain. CHIEF OF STAFF Stream on Netflix. Fans of "The West Wing" and "House of Cards" may want to give this South Korean drama series a try. The show centers on Jang Tae jun (Lee Jung jae), a former police officer and an aide to a lawmaker in the National Assembly. He works wonders for his boss but also has ambitions of his own. As he tries to climb the political ladder, Jang strikes up a secret relationship with a lawyer who works for a rival faction of his party. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Twyla Tharp threw down a gauntlet in 1973: She mixed classical and modern dance to make the first crossover ballet, "Deuce Coupe." It was a revolutionary work, and to pull it off she needed both the Joffrey Ballet and her own company. Its impact still reverberates through the dance world. "'Deuce Coupe' said, O.K. look, we have modern dance over here and we have ballet over here and we have this big void in between," Ms. Tharp said. "Why is there this gully in dance? I think everybody should be able to do everything." Set to songs by the Beach Boys pairing pop music and ballet wasn't the norm, either "Deuce Coupe" was the introduction to a different world for Ms. Tharp too. Before its premiere, she said, she had never taken a bow. When she was handed a bouquet of flowers during the curtain call, she threw it back. Even at a run through in the studio, "Deuce Coupe" has an incandescence that has nothing to do with nostalgia. For "Catch a Wave," the dancers slide dangerously, even defiantly across the floor; the solo, "Got to Know the Woman," originated by Sara Rudner and now danced by Misty Copeland, is seductive and earthy, a statement of female strength. In "Don't Go Near the Water," eight women line the back of the stage and give way to improvisatory, twisting spurts of motion. Ms. Tharp remains among the very few female choreographers to have had a lasting influence on ballet. Her Ballet Theater program a retrospective of sorts shows how she integrated modern dance into the ballet vernacular ("Deuce Coupe") and then expanded that mission ("In the Upper Room") and, finally, made the two forms into a seamless new movement language ("The Brahms Haydn Variations"). Recently, Ms. Tharp and Ms. Rudner sat down with Isabella Boylston and Ms. Copeland, the dancers performing their original parts in "Deuce Coupe," at Ballet Theater's studios to talk about the revival. It was lively on occasion, their voices tangled together as they spoke over one another but certain points became clear: How important is it to work with the artist who actually created a ballet? Very. And how scary is it to step into the roles of two of the finest dancers of their generation, classical or otherwise? Ditto. Ms. Boylston, in Ms. Tharp's part, keeps falling. "That's O.K., you're going for it," Ms. Tharp told her. "I'll have to teach you how to fall if you're going to do that." She had more advice too: Ms. Boylston and Ms. Copeland should keep a spoon and peanut butter in their lockers fast nourishment for brutal rehearsal schedules. More important, Ms. Tharp said, she wants them to realize that they "are now the experts" on "Deuce Coupe." "It becomes you," she said. "It's not Sara anymore, it's not me anymore, it's you." And that is how a ballet is reborn. What follows are edited excerpts from our conversation. What do the ballets on the program have in common? TWYLA THARP The three pieces are actually about the same thing: What's classical, what survives, what's important and what's going to last? That is the big question. Is your longevity there? What was foremost on your mind in bringing back "Deuce Coupe"? SARA RUDNER Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. I had to relearn my parts from the beginning, and things that were just so natural are like, how'd she do that? It was a lot of analytical work, but it really paid off, because we gave everybody a really firm basis from which to begin and then create their own phrasing and timing. But the framework is as solid as we could make it. What has it been like to learn and dance "Deuce Coupe" so far? ISABELLA BOYLSTON After we learned the steps we got to watch a little bit of archival video , and Twyla is such a force. I'm just watching this thinking there is literally no way I can recreate what she did, so I feel like it's been very much like starting from scratch and very collaborative. I feel like I had a turning point in the past two runs where I hit another level. I think I was going from "Am I doing this right?" to "I'm doing it." Sara, talk about the "Woman" solo. How have you passed that along to Misty? RUDNER I danced as much as I could at the beginning with Misty. Physically, it was very exhausting for me. Getting on my feet and doing that movement over and over and over. Getting all the accuracies going on and what were the oppositional actions, where's the head? MISTY COPELAND No matter what we were doing, I was always trying to find you in the studio your eyes, because I wanted to be, "Is this right?" It just feels so real and authentic. The way we grew up hearing music and dancing just in the club or something is so much about your hips. There's such a different way of moving in "Deuce Coupe." It was so hard for me to articulate at first. THARP It's the difference between something that's truly sexy and something that's manufactured sex, as in Madonna sex. It's not Madonna sex this is the real deal. RUDNER Has doing this dance infected your own dancing? COPELAND Absolutely. The human connection that we often overlook no matter what style of dance we're doing is something that I've taken from this process. It can enrich an entire piece to acknowledge and relate to people and see them. BOYLSTON Also, it feels very adult to me. THARP Oh, this is getting good. Adult porn. No more kiddie porn. BOYLSTON to Ms. Copeland I love that you're in heels for your "Woman" dance. I love that dance and Misty in it she's just so in her own world. It's so cool. A woman in control of her body. What has been the most difficult quality to get back? RUDNER I would say the underlying strength and ease, knowing where your weight is, having a strong leg but also the upper body actually is working polyrhythmically. The head is going one way, and the arms are going another. COPELAND I've been working with a new teacher and trying to retrain myself, which is crazy. Twyla has been saying the same words to me for years, but now I can hear them: It doesn't matter what type of movement I'm doing, the same rules apply. I think my natural instinct when I'm not doing classical dance is to be hunched over and not open, and so it's been fascinating to be given the same exact corrections from Twyla in the movement in "Deuce Coupe." BOYLSTON The way Twyla throws herself onto the ground. She's not afraid of going down. THARP The Graham technique has a lot of different approaches to falls, and I studied with Martha for a year and I studied in the studio for three years, so I knew a lot about falling. And also the clowns. I'm a clown. I have always been a clown, and I will always be a clown. Clowns are very close to God. They know how to get down. BOYLSTON Oh my God. Is that why you picked me to do your part? THARP Partially, yes! I knew you had it in you. But I'm still waiting. I'm still waiting for the Buster Keaton to get out, but I know that you can do it. Do you think this ballet has changed you? COPELAND Firmly Yes. It couldn't be more perfect timing in my career and my life to be able to absorb this information, or just have an understanding or acceptance of myself about what I want to be and what I'm capable of. THARP It's always about creating artists, right? About creating the possibility for somebody to become an artist. Not simply a dancer. There's nothing the matter with dancers. They're great, and some of them are phenomenal athletes, but an artist is a person who thinks for themselves, uses what they have that they recognize and is willing to take their own chances. That's the person that we want to see develop in the studio. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Rangers selected left wing Alexis Lafreniere, the consensus top prospect, with the No. 1 pick on Tuesday night in an N.H.L. draft conducted virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Lafreniere, who will turn 19 next week, scored 35 goals and had 112 points in 52 games last season for Rimouski Oceanic of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. He joins a youthful Rangers roster, with forward Kaapo Kakko, 19, the second overall pick in 2019; forward Filip Chytil, 21; defenseman Adam Fox, 22; and goaltender Igor Shesterkin, 24, at its core. "Obviously we are really excited to bring a player to New York who has a lot of special qualities," Rangers General Manager Jeff Gorton said. "It's a special night for our organization as we move forward. Our entire organization is excited and I'm sure our fan base is too." The Rangers last won a playoff series in 2017 and committed to a rebuild the following season. After trading up from No. 22 to No. 19 on Tuesday night to select defenseman Braden Schneider, the Rangers have now used eight first round picks in the past four drafts, including three picks in 2018. "It was an unreal feeling,'' Lafreniere, wearing a blue Rangers sweater and hat, said in a Zoom news conference shortly after he was selected. "Obviously, the New York Rangers is a great organization. For me, I am really honored to join them." Lafreniere also is a notably rare wing who can be more of a playmaker than a pure goal scorer, similar to Chicago's Patrick Kane, Tampa Bay's Nikita Kucherov or Artemi Panarin, who led the Rangers in assists (63) and points (95) last season. "Everybody talks about his ability to produce off the wing," said Kevin Weekes, the lead analyst with the N.H.L. Network and a former Rangers goaltender. "Wingers who can generate that much offense make plays and create off the wall are rare and hard to come by." Quinton Byfield, a 6 foot 4 center selected second over all by the Los Angeles Kings, had a succinct assessment of Lafreniere, his teammate on Canada's 2020 World Junior Championship team. "His play speaks for itself,'' said Byfield, who became the highest selected Black player in league history, surpassing Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman Seth Jones. "He can do everything." Lafreniere said he had never been to New York and was looking forward to making his first visit soon. He was also looking forward to playing at Madison Square Garden, which last hosted a game in March, before the season was suspended because of the pandemic. "I heard a lot of good things about the fans and about the building,'' Lafreniere said. "I am really excited to arrive in New York in the next maybe couple of months. I hope we're going to have a good season." The Rangers' other first round pick, Schneider, who is 6 foot 2 and 209 pounds, played the past three plus seasons for the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League. He had 42 points in 60 games last season. "I take a lot of pride in my own end and being a guy who is hard to play against and in your face,'' Schneider, 19, said of his style of play during a Zoom news conference. "And if the opportunity comes to make a good pass or jump up in the play or get a shot on net, I'm more than willing to take it." The draft was originally scheduled for the last weekend in June in Montreal, but like everything else on hockey's calendar since the league suspended play in March, it was delayed because of the pandemic. An expanded 24 team playoff tournament began in Toronto and Edmonton, Alberta, on Aug. 1, and the Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup, defeating the Dallas Stars in six games. Commissioner Gary Bettman said during Tuesday's broadcast that the league was targeting Jan. 1, 2021, to start the next season. "The world out there is a dangerous place for everyone in North America and we're trying to find a way to get back to normal but we can't do it until there are solutions to the world's problems," Rangers President John Davidson said. "We're busy, busy, busy but it's not normal." The initial draft lottery held in June included the seven teams that did not qualify for the summer playoffs plus a placeholder pick for each of eight clubs that would lose in the qualification round. One of the placeholder teams won the June lottery, leading to another drawing in August among the eight losing squads, with each having a 12.5 percent chance to snare the first overall pick. After the Rangers were swept, 3 0, by the Carolina Hurricanes, they won that second lottery, guaranteeing the Original Six franchise its first No. 1 pick since the universal draft format was adopted in 1969. In 1965, when the N.H.L. had only six teams, the Rangers chose forward Andre Veilleux with the top selection in an amateur draft that had only 11 picks. Veilleux never played in the N.H.L. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
ADVISERS put a considerable amount of effort into talking to clients about accumulating a life savings. But advisers and their clients tend to devote less thought to how to spend that money when it's time. Some sort of conversation generally happens when clients approach retirement, but it may need to start happening earlier and become much more sophisticated. "If I have 1 million in my retirement account, how I'm going to distribute it is ninth out of 10 steps," said David A. Littell, director of the retirement income certified professional program at the American College of Financial Services. Mr. Littell has actually drawn up a list of 18 risks that people have to consider. These include some you can control spending too much and some you can't, like living longer than expected, needing expensive health care and not being able to work as long before or in retirement as planned. Additionally, there is a wave of young and wealthy people like the beneficiaries of social media companies now selling for millions who face a similar question. Will the several million dollars they made for being at the right company at the right time last? "The biggest problem I see is people have a hard time connecting a pool of money that they can't understand to a time period they can't quantify," said Peter J. Rekstad, chief executive of BGM TruNorth Wealth Partners. "People have a hard time balancing their checkbook and yet we expect them to come up with a rational decision on their spending." That risk is always there but it can be more daunting for someone who has come into money earlier. There are two basic ways to calculate what people can spend, though both are less helpful in practice than in theory. There is the linear calculation, based on a set percentage of the principal taken each year. This is commonly expressed as the 4 percent rule, though recent research has reduced that number to 3.5 or 3 percent. It is simple but fraught with risks. On the investment return side, it requires people to be lucky and stop working just before their investments are set to rise. If they stop working and their investments fall, they are subject to what is called sequence of returns risk. It means their annual draw is going to be lower if their account value falls. "The systematic withdrawal strategy can be inefficient in some environments and dangerous in others," said Aaron Thiel, senior wealth planner at PNC Wealth Management. On the spending side, that strategy fails to account for how people spend when they stop working: Freed of the need to go to an office every day, most splurge in the early years of retirement and cut back later. "I describe the stages of retirement as go go, slow go and no go," Mr. Rekstad said. That can be a problem for someone who cashes out young. "The 50 year old has a much longer go go period than someone who retires at 68," he said. A more advanced method is probability analysis. Advisers often present this strategy to clients by talking about Monte Carlo simulations that test thousands of probable outcomes to come up with the likelihood that a strategy will succeed. It is effective but can be difficult for people to understand. Of the many other ways to help people manage their spending when income is not coming in, two in particular try to nudge people into the right behavior: the time segmented approach and the use of funded ratios. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' The first works by getting people to think of money lasting for certain time periods: the first 10 years, the next 10 and so on. Mr. Thiel says he advises clients to set up a series of accounts that will be liquidated over that period and replaced by the next account. "A structure like this creates a long term focus," he said. "It matches assets with current and future liabilities." Yet it still requires people to stay on a budget for those years and not spend beyond what the account has in it, which can seem like a diet. A newer and more dynamic approach is to borrow the concept of funded ratios from the pension fund world. This number is a measurement of the assets in a pension fund versus the payments it will eventually have to make. The closer to 100 percent it is for a pension, the better. Timothy Noonan, managing director of capital markets insights at Russell Investments, said using funded ratios with individuals would help take the focus off returns and account balances and put it on how long a person expects to live with the money he has. The funded ratio is calculated by doing a present value calculation of the amount of money someone has saved or will receive say, from Social Security or a pension and comparing it with basic and desired expenses and life expectancy. Since it gets represented as a percentage, it gives advisers and clients a way to check how they're doing. "When you consider, what percentage of my portfolio is it safe to distribute, most people believe mistakenly that it must be related to the amount of my wealth," Mr. Noonan said. "But in fact it's related to the length of my life." In his book, "Someday Rich: Planning for Sustainable Tomorrows Today" (Wiley Finance, 2012), Mr. Noonan gives the example of a couple trying to calculate their annual spending, having saved 775,000 by their early 60s and counting on 38,000 a year from Social Security. They're debating between needing 60,000 a year and 72,000 a year (including Social Security) for their expected life expectancies. With the former, they're 152 percent funded; with the latter, that number drops to 98 percent. In his own situation, Mr. Noonan, 50, said he was 95 percent funded if he retired today. In two years, with his earnings and savings continuing, that number rises to 114 percent. Two more years and it hits 125 percent. Ideally, he said, people should aim to get to 135 percent funded, which would insulate them from most shocks. But it is still an art, not a science, since people don't know how long they're going to live. To compensate for living longer than expected, Mr. Noonan said people needed to continually assess their funded ratio. If it goes too low, and it looks as if they're going to run out of money, the funded ratio would dip below 100 percent. At that point, people have a choice: reduce spending to get the ratio back up or buy an income annuity to cover basic expenses. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Stephen Fry, the actor and comedian who has hosted the Bafta film awards ceremony 12 times, is stepping down this year, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts announced Friday. In a statement, Mr. Fry expressed his affection for the Bafta show and his colleagues there: "Over the last two decades I have especially loved watching the emergence of new young film talent behind and in front of the camera. But after so long a time I felt it only right to stand down and let others take the Baftas on to new heights and greater glories." Mr. Fry served as host from 2001 to 2006, andfrom 2012 to 2017. The comedian and television presenter Jonathan Ross hosted in the intervening years. "What fun it will be to watch Bafta 2018 without my heart hammering, mouth drying and knees trembling," Mr. Fry said, in reference to the pressure awards show hosts must endure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In the City, but Not of It THE grand houses of Fieldston about 260, all single family are mostly generations old, devoid of the uniformity in other parts of the city and in suburban subdivisions. Nearly a century after it was conceived, this flowing suburban community in the northwest corner of the Bronx retains its dash of country, as well as its easy access to city life, having kept faith with its developers' original vision. Most of the original homes remain intact. Transportation to Manhattan is simple, and many nearby destinations parks, restaurants and the subway are within walking distance. "It's the best of all worlds," said Howie Ravikoff, who arrived in August from the Upper East Side, paying about 1.3 million for a 1928 Tudor with three bedrooms. "It's suburban, but an urban version of suburbia. It's very much a walking community. You need a car, but you can do things without." And historic designation, granted in 2006, represents an even more formal guarantee against significant change anytime soon. Bert Trebach, the owner of Trebach Realty, whose home and office are just outside the neighborhood, said he expected the designation to increase Fieldston's appeal in coming years, although it had not yet had a significant impact. "It preserves a jewel," Mr. Trebach said. "Over time, people would have made McMansions and monstrosities." Mr. Ravikoff, 39, whose family owns a real estate company that manages properties in Westchester, said he had harbored some concerns about the designation when he moved in, especially about whether making changes to the home would be too cumbersome. But those worries have largely been alleviated. When he and his wife, Randi Maidman, wanted to build a fence, Ms. Maidman downloaded the two page application from the landmarks commission and filled it out herself. Within two weeks they had approval. "The experience may vary," Mr. Ravikoff said, "but our experience was very smooth." Fieldston is considered a section of Riverdale, along with North Riverdale, Central Riverdale, South Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil. But there is an important distinction: it is privately owned. In practice, that means an entity called the Fieldston Property Owners' Association, rather than the city, maintains streets and sewers. Also, in addition to the city's 50th Precinct, the area is policed by a private security patrol; it issues passes for parking on the street. These services cost homeowners an annual fee of a few thousand dollars over and above city property taxes (the specific amount is pegged to lot size). On the edges of the area are three elite private schools: Horace Mann, Ethical Culture Fieldston and Riverdale Country. Manhattan College is also on the border. It is the schools more than anything, Mr. Trebach and other real estate agents say, that draw prospective buyers. And once they move in, many do not leave for decades. Barbara Muhlfelder moved to Fieldston in 1979, when she and her husband, Tom, paid about 130,000 for a Gothic Revival style home with three bedrooms and three baths. She estimated that her house was worth about 1 million now. The area is "as beautiful now as it was 30 years ago," she said, "and people take pride in it." It feels as if you were a bit off the grid here, and there is a reason for that. The developers, using a layout finalized in 1914, made a point of avoiding straight streets and square blocks. No two angles look the same, because the streets maneuver around hills, large trees and outcroppings. Over all, Fieldston covers 140 acres, or about a fifth of a square mile. According to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the area is circumscribed by Henry Hudson Parkway to the west, Manhattan College Parkway to the south, Tibbett Avenue to the east and 250th Street to the north. The homes come in an appealing mix of styles, including Colonial Revivals, Tudors and even formal modernist houses. They are generally large, but lot sizes vary: half an acre is considered large. The vast majority of residents are white, according to census data. But there are some Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans. Orthodox Jews are represented. When talking about a house, its residents will often cite its architect. Owning one designed by Dwight James Baum, who built dozens of homes in Fieldston in multiple styles, is a point of pride as well as a selling point. Dara Caponigro, the editor of Veranda magazine, was one buyer attracted by the Baum name. When Ms. Caponigro and her husband, David Steinberger, bought their house in early 2010 (for a price she declined to disclose), the inside was a wreck, she recalled. But since Baum was a "master of proportion," she said, particularly with the dimensions of rooms and windows, it helped make the renovation worthwhile. After living in Manhattan for 30 years, she thought the move to the quiet and spacious Fieldston might be tough. Not so, she said. "It's been a shockingly easy adjustment for both of us." Prices have not escaped the general downturn in real estate. Ellen Feld, an agent for Sotheby's International Realty, said prices had generally fallen 10 to 20 percent since their peak a few years ago. Still, buying does not come cheap. Most houses sell for at least 1 million, and some reach or exceed 3 million. According to Ms. Feld, one of the main factors driving prices is the cost to update the house, since many require renovations. Susan Baldwin, an agent with Robert E. Hill in Riverdale, said that more houses were on the market now than before the downturn, in part because they are staying there longer. It is difficult to know exactly how many listings there are, because owners often list exclusively with a single broker and not on a listing service. Also, few sellers have qualms about taking a house out of the running. "There's not a panic in Riverdale for sellers," Ms. Baldwin said. "If the market is not bringing them the attention they want, they are often even willing to take it off the market." Although the vast majority of homes are owner occupied, there are some available for rent. Mr. Trebach said rental prices usually ranged from 7,000 to 14,000 a month. Fieldston is purely residential, but shops and restaurants are a short walk away, along Riverdale and Johnson Avenues, just to the south. Van Cortlandt Park, to the east, has more than 1,100 acres with athletic fields, trails and even a public golf course. To the west is Wave Hill, a 28 acre public garden with views of the Hudson River and the Palisades, on a site once leased by Mark Twain. With the private schools a big factor in home purchases, it's no surprise that many parents in Fieldston send their children to one of them. Even so, the local public schools beat citywide averages. Public School 81, which enrolls over 600 and runs through fifth grade, recently had fourth grade competency standards of 68 percent in reading and 65 percent in math, versus 51 and 62 citywide. Middle School/High School 141, also known as the David A. Stein Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy, has over 1,300 students in Grades 6 through 12. On recent state tests, 41 percent of its eighth graders met standards in reading, 62 percent in math, versus 35 and 53 citywide. SAT averages in 2010 were 475 in reading, 479 in math and 470 in writing, versus 437, 460 and 432 citywide. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Sometimes, foreign policy consists of trying to make lemonade out of lemons. In the case of the recently signed U.S. Taliban agreement on Afghanistan, President Trump provided the lemons, and the lead U.S. negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, and his team did the squeezing. Mr. Trump made clear that he intended to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan with or without a "deal." Then NATO partners pressured the United States not to reward the Taliban by conceding their long held objective of forcing an American withdrawal for free. So, the president reportedly gave his negotiators a finite window to explore whether some deal was achievable. Lacking the backing of a resolute American commander in chief, Mr. Khalilzad got what he could a deeply flawed agreement that has the potential to lead to peace but is very unlikely to achieve it. In short, the United States gave away a lot and got relatively little in return. To start, the United States dropped its longstanding, principled opposition to negotiating directly with the Taliban (including the terrorist Haqqani network, which has killed countless American service members) without our key partner, the Afghan government, at the table. Next, following a seven day, roughly 80 percent "reduction in violence," the United States acceded to the Taliban's primary demand that America fully withdraw all of its own and NATO forces as well as intelligence personnel from Afghanistan. Mr. Trump agreed to draw down from our current force level of approximately 12,000 U.S. troops to 8,600 (the level he inherited from President Barack Obama) within four and a half months. Within 14 months, he will drop American and NATO troops to zero leaving only an embassy based diplomatic presence. Senior U.S. officials insist that the American withdrawal is "conditions based," but no political or military requirements have been specified. Additionally, the United States announced it intended to lift all American and United Nations sanctions against the Taliban by the end of August. In exchange, the Taliban pledged not to cooperate with, and to prevent the use of its territory by, terrorists who threaten or target the United States and our allies. The Taliban also agreed to enter intra Afghan talks, including with government representatives, by March 10, to discuss a cease fire and future political settlement. The start of talks seems contingent on the Afghan government releasing up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners, and the Taliban responding by freeing up to 1,000 government prisoners. However, Afghanistan's president, Ashraf Ghani, has already balked, because he knows that releasing Taliban prisoners before negotiations would amount to relinquishing his minimal leverage in talks with the Taliban. In assessing the U.S. Taliban agreement, it is important to first acknowledge the positive results. Any end to the war in Afghanistan can come only through a settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. To the extent that the present document, barely four pages long, could become a first step that culminates in talks to discuss such a settlement, it is better than nothing. Moreover, if the reduction in violence by 80 percent is sustained and the Taliban curtail attacks not only against American and coalition forces, but also against Afghan government forces, it would lessen the bloodshed and help create conditions more conducive for negotiations. Unfortunately, there are troubling early signs that the Taliban are already resuming attacks against civilians and Afghan forces. And in the long run, the fundamental weaknesses of the U.S. Taliban agreement will most likely endanger America's national security and doom prospects for a just and lasting peace in Afghanistan. Why is that? First, under President Trump, the United States is widely seen to be committed to withdrawing from Afghanistan under almost any circumstances. There are no indications of what "conditions" might slow or halt an American drawdown of troops short of a major attack by Al Qaeda launched with clear Taliban support. Not sustained violence against Afghan forces, nor smaller scale terrorist attacks, nor continued Islamic State operations seem likely to prompt the United States to reverse course. The Taliban know this and so does the Afghan government, reducing nearly to nil America's influence over events in Afghanistan. For those reasons, intra Afghan negotiations, if they begin, will strongly favor the Taliban. By cutting a deal with the Taliban that excluded (and even failed to mention) the Afghan government, the United States legitimated the Taliban and further weakened the Afghan government. In committing to the Taliban to end the American military presence and drop sanctions, the United States also sacrificed its remaining leverage to help the government in intra Afghan negotiations achieve critical shared objectives, like protecting democratic gains and preserving the rights of women. Given that intra Afghan talks will take many months, if not years, to yield any progress, the United States is likely to withdraw before any deal is done, abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban wolves. Worse, after 14 months, the United States will be left without any military or counterterrorism capacity in Afghanistan, effectively subcontracting America's security to the Taliban. During the Obama administration, we considered and rejected the idea of reverting to a civilian U.S. Embassy only presence, because we understood that such a posture would leave American diplomats highly vulnerable to attack and increase the prospect of a Vietnam style withdrawal of Americans under fire. Finally, in lauding his capitulation to the Taliban as a diplomatic triumph denied to his predecessors, Mr. Trump reiterated his intention to meet with Taliban leaders, potentially even at Camp David. Meanwhile, he bragged about his "very good" relationship with the Taliban leader after calling its senior leader on Tuesday. More shockingly, Mr. Trump also revealed his own true feelings about Afghanistan, stating: "We should never have gotten in in the first place." Now we know America is led in wartime by a commander in chief who not only cheapens the sacrifice of the 3,500 American and NATO service members who perished in Afghanistan. More dangerously, Mr. Trump told the world he believes that the terrorists who murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11 never deserved to be fought. Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser from 2013 to 2017 and a former United States ambassador to the United Nations, is a contributing Opinion writer. She is the author of the memoir "Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For." AmbassadorRice 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 |
One of the most widely praised releases of 2018 was "Whack World" by the singer and rapper Tierra Whack: 15 sly, smart songs, all accompanied by video clips, that each lasted only a minute. They went breezing by, lightheartedly addressing large ideas while alluding to decades of R B and hip hop. Her music was often skeletal a handful of looped instruments but most of the songs sounded complete, not truncated. It was a miniature tour de force, and enough to get Whack noticed by the Grammys (which, with typical befuddlement, nominated an earlier, more conventional track, "Mumbo Jumbo," for best music video). In its deceptively casual ambition and ruthless brevity, "Whack World" had a brilliant strategy for combat in the attention economy: keep things short and visual. Because, really, who has time for music? Listeners have work, or school, or both, and work in the internet era has grown infinitely expandable past 9 to 5. Because so much music now arrives via streaming, controlled on a screen, music also has to share attention with everything else on that screen: texts, social media, videos, alerts, news feeds, games, searches, maps, maybe one more check on that work email. Perhaps some single minded listeners can set all those distractions aside, but they're a minority. Along came the unintended consequences. Without the routine expectation of, say, a 12 song album every two or three years, the internet looms as a giant, insatiable maw, constantly demanding more content with less payback. YouTube and streaming have made each song a click rather than a purchase and not even a click with autoplay, prefab playlists and algorithmic "discovery" (which actually pushes toward more of the same niche) guiding the way. In that endless stream, the idea that a song is a thought out, carefully distilled utterance was bound to erode. Add another factor: social media. The initial promise was increased connectivity, a way to reach and respond to fans quickly and candidly: no gatekeepers, no filters. But for most pop aspirants, the result has been the end of creative seclusion. There's pressure to keep offering new material, musical and nonmusical, making the promotional cycle as endless as the internet workday. Maybe it's a song snippet or a glimpse of a video shoot. Or maybe it's a Twitter feud, a media ready screed on Facebook or a fashion experiment on Instagram. As marketing, it's relatively low budget and democratizing but the potential for distraction is boundless. Billie Eilish, a 17 year old songwriter who has been releasing ominously compelling songs about desire and intimate betrayal since 2016, tabulates 24 million listeners monthly on Spotify and tours internationally as a headliner. But she will be just getting around to releasing her debut album in 2019. In the meantime, she gathers about two million likes each time she posts a pouty photo on Instagram. Musicians aren't exempt from the gamified, instant gratification metrics that keep users on social media, and the narcissism that often goes with being a performer might make them even more susceptible. Technology and distribution mechanisms the guitar, the microphone, the LP, radio have always shaped music. Now, social media and streaming are rewarding a rapidly changing skill set. It's a different kind of career that makes music just one part of a pool of cultural content: aural, visual, textual, entrepreneurial. That model grew out of hip hop. But in the social media age, the career path is different. Cardi B was a stripper turned sassy social media figure who made her public pivot into hip hop on a reality TV series. She has been rapidly and diligently improving her singing, rapping and writing, but at the same time, she has kept her snappy social media presence in full force. Together they multiply her cultural leverage; the impact is more important than the means. Pop celebrity has always demanded a certain amount of spectacle, from magazine photo sessions to video clips. But now, social media is pushing that spectacle to become continuous, intimate and hyperactive on multiple fronts. Performers gather shards of attention into a multimedia mosaic that's presented like a soap opera coupled with a surveillance log: evidence of authenticity that can turn forensic. Daniel Hernandez, the rapper known as 6ix9ine, flaunted a gun toting tough guy image in raps and on social media he has nearly 16 million Instagram followers but has ended up charged with real world gang activities, with prosecutors citing his social media postings. For the 21st century pop figure, songs are part of the mix, but so are romances and breakups, professional rivalries and reconciliations and countless rumors and memes that might be generated by the stars themselves, their fans or their trolls. Which in turn feed back into the next round of songs. Ariana Grande's 2018 album, "Sweetener," exulted in a blissful, erotic romance, including a track, "Pete Davidson," named after her boyfriend. Soon after they broke up came a self healing single, "Thank U, Next," that listed exes' names and promised that she was now in love with herself. Its video clip, with more than 200 million YouTube views, mocked social media misinformation. It's a full fledged, old school pop song, complete with song and dance video extravaganza, but it's also the latest episode in her continuing personal saga. Perhaps, in a culture that's constantly staring at a small screen, music was bound to be pushed aside. Songs that become massive streaming hits often sound unfinished, a looped riff and a vocal with a few tweaks. They fit into playlists that go by unobtrusively as background music; they are the ticktock of a soundtrack to everyday life. But songs can also have a higher profile. They can astound us with timbres never heard before and rhythms that kick and shake; they can tell us things we weren't sure we knew. And there is an audience for them. As the perceived value of recorded music has dropped nearly to zero, people have been willing to pay more and more each year for live concerts where the music is the main thing in the room, where distractions are minimized. According to figures from the concert promotion magazine Pollstar, for the top 100 tours of 2018 alone, gross revenues worldwide were 5.6 billion and average ticket prices rose from 84.63 in 2017 to 93.65 this year. In North America, the leap was even greater, from 78.91 to 92.50. Music can still be a central, overwhelming experience. We just have to put away the phones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Credit...Jessica Lehrman for The New York Times LOS ANGELES Bethany Cosentino can be eerily good at predicting the future. She wrote the song "Boyfriend" before the guy in question took on that role. She released a track with the lyric "What a year this day has been" in 2012, well before our 24/7 news hellscape took hold. She spoke out about sexual misconduct in the music industry in 2016, a year before MeToo took off. And she wrote a new song called "Everything Has Changed" about quitting drinking and finding happiness 14 months before she took action. "Deep down inside, it was a life that I wanted it was just not one that I thought I would be able to live," said Cosentino, the 33 year old singer, guitarist and songwriter for the indie rock duo Best Coast. She added that in an early version of a mission statement about the group's fourth studio album, "Always Tomorrow," due Feb. 21, she explained her seemingly divine powers in the lingo of the feminist internet: "As it turns out, I am indeed a very powerful witch." With that said, she paused to dip a thin brush into a small ceramic palette. Cosentino was spending a December afternoon decorating an oversized mug at Color Me Mine, a pottery painting shop with an outpost minutes from her childhood home, steps from the since closed record store where she'd first discovered the Blink 182 albums that inspired her to take up the guitar. On the topic of botched prognostications, Cosentino also didn't foresee that the very qualities that made her such an appealing rock star over the past decade her openness about her life in lyrics, her availability on social media, her seemingly cavalier attitude about her vices were simultaneously causing her to unravel. "Always Tomorrow," a powerhouse rock record with a sharp perspective and loads of hooks, is a document of an artist stitched whole again. It's also the sound of an invigorated band rejecting the idea that the greatest music comes from tortured roots. When Best Coast Cosentino and the guitarist and bassist Bobb Bruno, 46, a friend from the Los Angeles scene released its first album, "Crazy for You," in 2010, it arrived with a sonic fingerprint: chiming guitars, gobs of reverb, girl group grooves, vocals delivered with a casual affect. With the producer Jon Brion, the duo wiped away a layer of haze on its follow up, the 2012 LP "The Only Place," and spread its sound out further on "California Nights" in 2015. Cosentino is what the "Always Tomorrow" producer Carlos de la Garza calls "one of the greatest singers I've ever recorded." He described her "rich tone" in a phone interview as "a classic type of voice, almost like a Patsy Cline" in an indie rock slipcover. But an outspoken mob always seemed to be challenging the band in its early days. Best Coast's songs weren't all lyrical love letters to California or weed, or Cosentino's beloved ginger cat, Snacks but the idea that the group was beholden to a guiding aesthetic and a thematic shtick stuck to them like sap. Female musicians don't just get asked a lot of questions about being women in bands; they face an outsized amount of verbal abuse. Best Coast's rise coincided with the growth of social media as a marketing tool and omnipresent force. Cosentino was very online, and very sensitive to the digital daggers piercing her music, her personal life and her looks. "I was so good at acting like I don't care what you think of me, but deep down, I read every review, I read every comment, I cared so much," she said. "And I believed those things. Like if somebody said, 'This girl's music is mediocre,' I was like, oh, I'm a mediocre human. I should lock myself in my room for five days." Bruno cited the snarky and now defunct blog Hipster Runoff as emblematic of the era's freewheeling fire hose of negativity. "There was a lot of misogynistic and really wrong, hateful stuff that site would put out there, and yet it was popular," he said in a phone interview. "It still upsets me." The story Cosentino wanted to tell on "California Nights" five years ago was of maturity and evolution, of demons conquered and ladyboss status achieved. That wasn't exactly accurate. While contemplating the lettering on her mug, she quoted the lovably loose moraled "Seinfeld" character George Costanza to explain her personal relationship to the truth at that time: "It's not a lie if you believe it." She added: "And literally the entirety of my 20s, that was my M.O." Cosentino's very public relationship with Williams, whom she said she has "nothing but respect for," made her a tabloid figure for the Stereogum set. (They shared a Spin cover in 2012.) She said it was hard to navigate a "relationship that was at times very unhealthy" while "feeling like my identity was so tied into it." Outside of it, she remained a public figure in indie rock, rallying behind women who accused the music publicist Heathcliff Berru of sexual misconduct in 2016 (he apologized for "inappropriate" behavior), and appearing on "The Daily Show" to discuss sexism in the music industry: "I literally was sitting there being like, how did I get here and how did I become the spokesperson for this?" (She took Xanax before the show taped, "which wasn't smart," she realizes now.) She later wrote an op ed about misconduct, revealing that a family member assaulted her when she was a child. When she wasn't on tour, destructive patterns awaited. "My self care at the time was like, oh I just get really expletive up and watch Bravo," she said. (She still watches Bravo, sober, for the record.) She was blacking out often, "mixing a lot of things that shouldn't have been mixed," she said, "to the point where I'm like, really lucky that I'm still alive." On the advice of her best friend since childhood, Cosentino returned to therapy, but kept some things secret. She was abusing her prescriptions. She was burying feelings. "I knew if I said certain things out loud, I would have to address them," she said. And for the first time, the prolific songwriter was creatively paralyzed: "I would sit and try to write and nothing would come out." She ultimately broke down and asked Bruno if he would send over tracks for her to write to, something she'd never requested before. The first one became "Graceless Kids," a song anchored by a chugging riff with glimmers of '80s pop metal. Lyrically, it's a message to Cosentino's fans, who need "a hero not a wreck," and it includes a spoken word section that both thrilled her and thoroughly freaked her out. "My fear was that it was going to sound like when Taylor Swift does it," she said. "When I recorded it in the studio, I made everyone leave." The music was inching along while Cosentino's Instagram was filling with images of wine glasses and Coronaritas, but she started to crave change. "I had friends that had quit drinking, and I would look at them and be like, how did you do that?" One of them, Jennifer Clavin from the band Bleached, had likewise manifested her sobriety in song before it happened, and became instrumental in Cosentino's journey. "It's almost like we subconsciously know the lifestyle we're living is really unhealthy and self harming and we want to get out, but we aren't ready to fully accept that that's what we need to do," Clavin said in a phone interview, noting how easily the music industry facilitates and glorifies drinking and drug use. "Beth is such a huge inspiration to me," she added. "She knows what she wants and is willing to go for it." Playing older songs on the Paramore tour, Cosentino gained an awareness of the pain in her own music. "I remember listening to my lyrics and thinking to myself like, why are you still doing this if you're so miserable?" Not long after she returned, she woke up after a friend's birthday party, hung over and bawling, and says she hasn't had a drink or taken a drug since. Bruno recalled that their conversation about it was brief. "She was just like, I'm not going to do any of that stuff anymore," he said. "I was like, O.K., cool. And that was it." Writing sober didn't hold Cosentino back; it helped her break out of a creative lull: "Being awake to everything in such a clear way is so expletive crazy." The producer Justin Meldal Johnsen (Paramore, M83), an early "Always Tomorrow" collaborator, described the duo's unique working relationship as an "easy coexistence." "It's almost like Bethany and Bobb are two halves of one person" in the studio, he said in a phone interview. He explained that the pair's goals for the new album were to avoid rehashing the past, and to "honor their influences without it ever seeming pastiche or too on the nose." Part of Cosentino's enduring charm is her willingness to reveal her inspirations and gab about pop culture. Her current obsession? The anthemic band White Reaper. Lana Del Rey, who invited Cosentino to share the stage last year? "Literally the nicest person I've ever met." You can hear dashes of everything Cosentino absorbs on "Always Tomorrow," an album about looking to the future while stealing enough glances at the past to stay on track. There's crisp pop punk ("Different Light"), spacey fuzz rock ("Used to Be"), a song about Snacks ("Rollercoaster"). And yes, Fleetwood Mac is still a touchstone. While the lyrics lean toward the earnest, Cosentino did allow herself a wink on "Everything Has Changed," rhyming "lazy crazy baby" as a nod to the doubters who have dismissed her writing as repetitive. Being anything but brutally honest wasn't an option. "I realized if I didn't tell this story, I'd be lying to people," she said. "I would just be doing exactly what I was doing in the past, which was putting on an act and pretending like I didn't give a expletive ." Success looks different to Cosentino now, too. When she bought her new house, she downsized to something "super teeny." She traded in her Mercedes for a Subaru. Nearly four hours after her mug odyssey began, she carefully applied a series of dots (her signature), then thrust out her hands. "My tattoos are a perfect example of where I used to be and where I am now," she said. One finger displays "trust no one." On her other hand, there's "let it go" and "surrender." "So it's fully like old me, new me," she said. "But they still both exist." And she doesn't plan to remove any of them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Ask Jean Poole, a medical billing advocate, about her work helping people navigate the bewildering world of medical bills and insurance claims, and the stories pour out. There's the client who was billed almost 11,000 for an 11 minute hand surgery. The cancer patient who was charged 9,550.40 for a round of chemotherapy he never received. And then, there's the tale of the woman who came to Ms. Poole with a large rolling suitcase stuffed with bills for her 68 year old husband, who had gone to the emergency room after he fell getting out of bed. The hospital's doctors discovered a series of problems kidney failure, blood and urinary tract infections, and a blood clot. Ultimately, he ended up staying in the hospital for two months and being transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation. Though the couple had two insurance policies one through Medicare and a secondary policy at Blue Cross Blue Shield they still received more than 25,000 in medical bills and another 65,000 from the nursing home. And some of them threatened collections if they weren't paid within days. "Most people have a false sense of security if they have two insurances like this," said Ms. Poole, who is based in Virginia. "Many of the bills were confusing and she was very concerned there were errors and overcharges." Like most patients and their families, the ailing man's wife who didn't want to be identified because of concern her husband's care could be compromised simply wanted to figure out how much she really owed. That simple question has no simple answer, as an increasing number of consumers are finding out now that they are shouldering a greater share of their health care costs whether they have a high deductible plan, coinsurance or because they're underinsured (or not insured at all). How did the hospital or doctor arrive at these charges? Are the charges reasonable? And are the charges for services actually rendered? Hospital care tends to be the most confounding, and experts say the charges you see on your bill are usually completely unrelated to the cost of providing the services (at hospitals, these list prices are called the "charge master file"). "The charges have no rhyme or reason at all," Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "Why is 30 minutes in the operating room 2,000 and not 1,500? There is absolutely no basis for setting that charge. It is not based upon the cost, and it's not based upon the market forces, other than the whim of the C.F.O. of the hospital." And those charges don't really have any connection to what a hospital or medical provider will accept for payment, either. "If you line up five patients in their beds and they all have gall bladders removed and they get the same exact medication and services, if they have insurance or if they don't have insurance, the hospital will get five different reimbursements, and none of it is based on cost," said Holly Wallack, a medical billing advocate in Miami Beach. "The insurers negotiate a different rate, and if you are uninsured, underinsured or out of network, you are asked to pay full fare." With the exception of Medicare and Medicaid, experts say, the amount paid for services or the price your insurers pay is based on the market power of the insurance company on the one side and the hospitals and providers on the other, and the reimbursement agreements they ultimately reach. So large insurers that command a lot of market power may be able to negotiate lower rates than smaller companies with less influence. Or, insurers can place hospitals or providers on a preferred list, which may help bolster their business, in exchange for a lower reimbursement rate. On the other hand, well regarded hospitals may command higher prices from insurers. So let's say you have coverage through a high deductible plan, where you're responsible for, say, the first 5,000 or 10,000. It's possible that you may have to pay more out of pocket for your medical services than your friend, also in a high deductible plan, but one with an insurer that has greater negotiating power. "The ones that are affiliated with the larger insurers do best," Mr. Anderson said, adding that the uninsured have virtually no bargaining power, which is why they are expected to pay much more. With so little pricing information available, expecting people to shop around for quality care at the lowest cost something that's not always possible in emergency situations is also asking a lot of consumers. "I have always found a bit cruel the much mouthed suggestion that patients should have 'more skin in the game' and 'shop around for cost effective health care' in the health care market," said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health policy expert and professor at Princeton University, "when patients have so little information easily available on prices and quality to those things." President Obama's Affordable Care Act, the health care overhaul law passed in 2010, tries to make some improvements (though the Supreme Court is expected to rule whether all or some of the law is constitutional this month). But while the law's changes help you shop around for insurance policies specifically through its new HealthCare.gov Web site, a one stop shop that lists all of your insurance options in one place it's still unclear how effective the law will be for anyone comparing medical services. Still, there are a handful of provisions that will help consumers on these issues. Starting in September, health insurers and group health plans must provide consumers a comprehensive summary of their plan's benefits and coverage in plain language. It also provides grants to help states start or improve services, known as Consumer Assistance Programs, aimed at assisting people who have questions or problems about their health coverage. These programs, like Connecticut's Office of the Healthcare Advocate, help people understand their plans, find coverage as well as assist with billing issues. Additionally, the new law gives patients the right to appeal their insurers' decisions after they are denied payment, for "plan or policy years" starting after July 1, 2011. But one of the overarching ideas behind the law, according to Mike Hash, acting director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, is to eventually encourage insurance plans to provide detailed information on, say, the quality of care and how much your share of the costs will be if you choose to have your knee surgery, for instance, at one provider versus another. He also expects more clarity on out of pocket costs, which will be capped at reduced amounts for people who buy insurance through the state run insurance exchanges and meet certain income requirements. But other out of pocket limits will apply to other people who buy plans inside and many plans outside the exchanges, experts said. For now, there are some other helpful resources that exist, many of which can provide you with a rough idea of what some services might cost in a specific area, while some insurers offer tools to its customers as well. (I've listed some of them in the blog post attached to the online version of this column.) As for the 68 year old patient, Ms. Poole's detective work ultimately reduced his out of pocket costs by more than 22,000, which left him responsible for about 3,915. Since the couple didn't have long term care insurance, he was also responsible for the nursing home's charges of 65,000, which Ms. Poole said Medicare covered for only a short period of time. (Ms. Poole, a former emergency room nurse, who later received an M.B.A., generally charges about 25 percent of the savings found.) She uncovered the savings in various places there were charges for brand medications when the patient ordered generic, services that were double billed, as well as charges for a private room that the patient did not request; he was only there because no other rooms were available. In another instance, a surgeon belatedly submitted his 4,400 bill to the insurance company, so the claim was denied. That wasn't the patient's fault, but he was billed anyway. She lobbied the billing department to drop the charges, and they did. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
A man comes to Sao Paulo to find his brother. What he discovers, however, is a city more alluring than he could have imagined. "Shine Your Eyes," from the Brazilian filmmaker Matias Mariani, finds a distinctive way to tell a familiar narrative of immigrants in megacities, of how dreams can pummel you and of the complexity of fraternal bonds. Streaming on Netflix, the film follows Amadi (OC Ukeje), a Lagosian musician, as he traverses through Brazil's most populous city looking for his missing brother, Ikenna (Chukwudi Iwuji). Amadi's journey, which is fueled by familial duty, quickly morphs into a propulsive detective story. Amadi soon realizes that the life his brother purported to live from his position as a university professor to his purchasing of a house is a lie. Before disappearing, Ikenna became obsessed with cracking the secret code to the universe, which he thinks is a hologram. The search for Ikenna brings Amadi to different parts of Sao Paulo and he quickly becomes enamored with the sounds and sights of the city (which Mariani, and the cinematographer Leonardo Bittencourt, masterfully capture). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Back in the 1970s, Steven DiFlora had an unrequited crush on Doriane Lucia, a high school classmate in New Jersey. Decades later, after each had married and divorced, they reconnected, fell in love and last year began searching for a house. "We were starting our life together," Mr. DiFlora said, "and the first step was to purchase a home." Moving from separate houses in New Jersey, the couple, both in their 50s, knew what they wanted natural beauty along with a sense of community and they found it in Pound Ridge, N.Y., a town in northeastern Westchester, about 50 miles from Manhattan. In September 2015, they bought a three bedroom, two bath Cape Cod on two and a half acres surrounded by woods for 596,000. The house, with a pool and a deck, was built in 1930 and expanded in 1974. Since then, Mr. DiFlora, a partner in an engineering consulting company in Manhattan, and Ms. Lucia, a billing specialist at a Manhattan law firm, have sampled the offerings in Scotts Corners, Pound Ridge's half mile long business district, and hiked with their dog in Eastwoods Preserve, one of 17 that are managed by the Pound Ridge Land Conservancy. They appreciate the town's bucolic roads, which meander past wooded slopes, streams and lakes and 19th century stone walls. "You realize you are truly off the beaten path," Mr. DiFlora said. Of Pound Ridge's 30 square miles, nearly a third is open space, including more than 3,000 acres of Ward Pound Ridge Reservation. In this quiet, relatively undeveloped town, there are no traffic lights. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for November. The four part series "Wrong Kind of Black" is based on the experiences of Boori Monty Pryor as a young adult, in the years before he became renowned for using spoken word performances and children's books to explain Australian Aboriginal culture to kids. In the 1960s and '70s, Pryor worked to make his name as a DJ, spinning R B and disco to audiences who loved the music of Black Americans, but who nevertheless discriminated against Black Australians. Clarence Ryan plays Pryor and Aaron McGrath his brother Paul in this lighthearted but pointed social dramedy, set partly in the rowdy urban club scene of 50 years ago. Many movie and TV buffs first got to know the actors James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams, Joshua Jackson and Katie Holmes during the six seasons they spent on "Dawson's Creek" between 1998 and 2003, playing four friends managing the growing pains of high school and college. Created by Kevin Williamson a writer unusually attuned to the uncomfortably adult feelings and problems of teenagers the show balanced the usual young adult romantic melodrama with rich character development, making each of these kids' dreams and disappointments feel vividly real. When two precocious and nerdy New York teenagers are left at home by their families over Christmas break, they become acquainted at a distance by hiding notes, leaving clues and challenging each other to a series of dares and games around the city. That's the premise of "Dash Lily," a TV series based on a young adult novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. The episodes alternate between the two lead characters, showing that the cynical Dash (Austin Abrams) and the sunnier Lily (Midori Francis) may have similar tastes in literature and music, but remain far apart when it comes to the wonders of the holiday season. On their popular YouTube channel and podcast, and live shows, and multiple web series the Australian comedy troupe Aunty Donna have put their own twist on Monty Python style absurdism. A typical sketch has the teams's core performing trio (Mark Samual Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane) sharing an ordinary encounter like a meal or a bit of casual chit chat, which quickly warps into something dark and strange or sometimes just gleefully silly. The group will be working on a somewhat larger scale for their six part Netflix series "Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of Fun," so it'll be exciting to see what they come up with when they have more money to spend. One of the more high profile holiday offerings from Netflix this year, the fantastical musical "Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey" features songs by John Legend, who's also one of the project's producers. Written and directed by David E. Talbert, the movie stars Forest Whitaker and Keegan Michael Key as rival toymakers: one a genius who struggles to make ends meet, and the other rich and unscrupulous. It's a traditional underdog story, but filled with magical Christmas gadgetry and some warm Yuletide tunes. Two long awaited major characters enter Queen Elizabeth II's orbit for the fourth season of the historical drama "The Crown": Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) and Lady Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin). This time the show will dramatize the late '70s and early '80s, a time when Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) dealt with another round of family scandals just as her country suffered from an economic downturn and widespread social unrest. The creator Peter Morgan has been telling these stories in two season arcs, so these will be the last episodes with Colman as the queen. (May God save her.) Here's another big new Netflix Christmas musical with a pop powerhouse in the credits. Dolly Parton wrote the songs for "Christmas on the Square" and also plays an angel who tries to persuade a sourpuss landlord (played by the delightful Christine Baranski) not to drive the residents of a quaint, snowy small town out of their homes. Treat Williams and Jenifer Lewis play two of the villain's oldest friends who also try to get her into the holiday spirit, amidst many colorful song and dance numbers. The author and activist J.D. Vance survived a tough childhood in a working class Ohio town, where he was surrounded by poverty and addiction. He later wrote about the experience in the best selling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," which has now been adapted into a movie by the Oscar winning director Ron Howard and the screenwriter Vanessa Taylor. Gabriel Basso plays Vance, Glenn Close plays the hard nosed grandmother who taught him the value of work, and Amy Adams plays the mother who was a destabilizing presence in his life. Also arriving: "Felix Lobrecht: Hype" (November 3), "Love Anarchy" (November 4), "Carmel: Who Killed Maria Marta?" (November 5), "Paranormal" Season 1 (November 5), "The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run" (November 5), "Justice League Dark: Apokolips War" (November 6), "Wrong Kind of Black" Season 1 (November 6), "Satellite Boy" (November 7), "Sweet Country" (November 7), "Toomelah" (November 7), "Goldstone" (November 8), "Undercover" Season 2 (November 9), "What We Wanted" (November 11), "The Life Ahead" (November 13), "The Minions of Midas" (November 13), "We Are the Champions" (November 17), "The Gulf" Season 1 (November 18), "The Princess Switch: Switched Again" (November 19), "If Anything Happens I Love You" (November 20), "Shawn Mendes: I Wonder" (November 23), "The Christmas Chronicles: Part 2" (November 25), "Great Pretender" Season 2 (November 25), "How I Met Your Mother" Seasons 1 10 (November 25), "Mosul" (November 26), "The Call" (November 27), "A Go! Go! Cory Carson Christmas" (November 27), "Sugar Rush Christmas" Season 2 (November 27), "Virgin River" Season 2 (November 27). Organized crime these days is an international operation that involves the cooperation of crooks, mercenaries and politicians from all over the world. So despite its name, the mob drama "Gangs of London" doesn't just stay put in England. This sprawling and stylish series cocreated by Matt Flannery and "The Raid" director Gareth Evans is ostensibly about the internal power struggle that ensues when an old school syndicate boss gets assassinated. But there's trouble outside the family too, as gunmen and schemers from across Europe, Asia and Africa jostle for position, in a story with a complex plot interspersed with dynamic and explosively violent action sequences. Science fiction inspired comedies have had a bit of a bad run in 2020, with the disappointing "Avenue 5" and the inert "Space Force" letting down fans of their talented creators and casts. But there's still reason to hope for the best from "Moonbase 8," a bone dry sitcom about NASA washouts who've agreed to isolate in a desert training facility to prove they're fit for space travel. The would be astronauts are played by Fred Armisen, Tim Heidecker and John C. Reilly, who also co wrote the series with Jonathan Krisel (a fellow master of sublimely odd humor). Ronald Reagan has had a lasting impact on the U.S.A., where politicians still ape his folksy charisma and his nostalgic appeals to the ideals of American individualism. Yet the realities of the Reagan administration both good and bad sometimes get lost in the rush to turn him into a symbol. The director Matt Tyrnauer's four part docu series "The Reagans" is intended as a corrective. With the help of insider interviews, Tyrnauer aims to explore the behind the scenes debates and personality clashes behind some of the President's best and worst policy decisions. A lot of nostalgic TV revivals try to replicate not just the premise but also the look and the feel of the originals. The new version of the '90s teen sitcom "Saved By the Bell" brings back a lot of the original cast, now playing the parents to the latest batch of students at California's Bayside High. But judging by the early trailers, it has a very different visual style. (Plus, the characters now make self referential jokes, more in line with a show overseen by "30 Rock" and "Great News" writer Tracey Wigfield.) The series' goals don't seem that far off model though. This "Saved By the Bell" will still use light comedy and soapy drama to tell stories with social relevance. One of the more underrated American TV dramas of the 2010s, the low key "Rectify," is about Daniel Holden (Aden Young), a man released from prison after spending nearly 20 years behind bars for a rape and murder he was accused of committing as a teenager. Upon returning to his tiny hometown in the state of Georgia, Daniel tries to win back his neighbors' trust, while proving that he's not the villain they presume. Created by the great character actor Ray McKinnon, "Rectify" is a sensitively rendered character sketch about a man struggling to be his best self, in a world he barely recognizes. Part travelogue, part reality competition and part adorable animal show, "The Pack" features a dozen dogs and their humans, who team up to complete various physical and mental challenges around the world. The U.S. Olympic ski champion Lindsey Vonn hosts and sets the tone with her intro, which emphasizes both the thrill of a grand outdoor adventure and the deep bond between pets and their masters. What results is something a little like "The Amazing Race," but with cute pooches in tow. The filmmaker Steve McQueen (best known for the Oscar winning "12 Years a Slave") grew up in London at a time when immigrants with West Indian roots were at the center of a raging national debate over England's growing multiculturalism. McQueen's anthology series "Small Axe" (co written with Alastair Siddons and Courttia Newland) tells five different stories, set between the late 1960s and the early '80s. Each covers aspects of life in the city's West Indian communities, documenting everything from the vibrant house parties to the persistent clashes with the local constabulary. Each chapter stands alone, but collectively they paint a bigger picture about a moment in time when a country had to reckon with its rapid demographic changes. Also arriving: "Ferro" (November 6), "James May: Oh Cook!" (November 13). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Like so much else in Brooklyn these days, the art scene there seems to be in flux. Galleries that were familiar presences have closed; others have changed names and moved to Manhattan. Neighborhoods that previously served as linchpins now have fewer dedicated art spaces; rents are high, and other parts of the city promise greater foot traffic. Yet in a way, transition has always been central to a geographically scattered scene that's uneven in its offerings and anchored by a handful of larger nonprofits alongside a rotating cast of small spaces run as labors of love. Even commercial operations seem to work differently here: Jenkins Johnson Gallery's outpost aims to build a relationship with the surrounding community (and its coming show "Free to Be," featuring Rico Gatson and Baseera Khan, should be worth a visit). Part of the thrill of seeing art in Brooklyn is that you don't quite know what you're going to get. This list is just a sample of what Brooklyn has to offer. It will take you from Bushwick down to Park Slope and focuses on exhibitions that are, quite loosely, about identity. These artists are exploring how cultural, national, social and other factors shape us, even as they take very different approaches. It's a fitting theme for a borough that, despite becoming a brand, is still a haven for those looking to make a creative life in New York City. Industrial art spaces aren't as au courant as they used to be, but Brooklyn and Queens still have their fair share. The Chimney rightly embraces the roughness of its home by commissioning artists to create work for its brick walls and concrete floor. Sara Mejia Kriendler has even extended her solo show onto the ceiling, covering it with mounds of gold tinted foil. Down below, broken terra cotta hands are piled in a huge circle on the ground, like the remnants of an ancient society or mysterious ritual. Inspired by her Colombian roots, Ms. Kriendler uses simplicity and scale to turn the gallery into a space that feels simultaneously sacred and profane. Through May 5 at 200 Morgan Avenue, Bushwick; thechimneynyc.com. The seven galleries in this building have had consistently strong programs. Tiger Strikes Asteroid is one of the smaller spaces but regularly swings for the fences, focusing on solo presentations for underrepresented artists and group exhibitions with unusual themes, like the current "baseball show." Organized by Andrew Prayzner, the show brings together an array of astute work, including Elias Necol Melad's clever paintings of baseball cards without their figures (and thus their value) and Christopher Gideon's incriminating scans that show dipping tobacco tins in players' pockets. The nine artists treat the sport not simply as a beloved pastime but as a cultural phenomenon worth examining. Through May 5 at 1329 Willoughby Avenue, No. 2A, Bushwick; 347 746 8041, tigerstrikesasteroid.com. 3. Recess, 'Lex Brown: The Inside Room' and 'American Artist: blue are the feelings that live inside me' The nonprofit Recess does something different than most other art spaces: It gives artists the gallery and roughly two months to realize their projects on site. So the work happens before the public's eyes, and it's best to visit multiple times to follow the progress. Right now, Lex Brown is building a studio for the production of an experimental TV show that will disregard the typical conventions of the medium scenes and story lines will be improvised, multiple people will play a single character to focus on human interaction. Hanging in the front room are disquieting photographs by American Artist of books from the Blue Lives Matter movement an extension of their recent, powerful show at Brooklyn gallery Koenig Clinton. Through June 8 and May 11 at 46 Washington Avenue, Clinton Hill; 646 863 3765, recessart.org. Located in a renovated carriage house near the Prospect Expressway, Open Source is something of an outlier in a neighborhood without many art galleries. That hasn't stopped it from mounting ambitious exhibitions. Ronny Quevedo's current solo show continues his investigation of games and their relationship to the migration of people. On the floor, he's placed gold and silver tiles that turn the space into a kind of board. Some of them hold concrete sculptures of misshapen sports balls, while prints on the walls turn the shapes associated with various games into evocative abstractions. With the whole gallery as a "Field of play," as the exhibition is titled, it falls to the viewer to invent the rules for navigating it. Through May 11 at 306 17th Street, Park Slope; open source gallery.org. Once upon a time, 56 Bogart was the place to see art in Bushwick; today it's no longer the neighborhood's artistic nerve center. The galleries that remain are a mix of newcomers and longtime holdouts, of which Theodore:Art, at almost a decade old, is one. Peter Krashes's current exhibition is a poignant reflection of the changes being felt throughout Brooklyn. The artist is a longtime community organizer, and in his gouache on paper paintings he captures street festivals, encounters with the New York Police Department and celebrity sightings near Barclays Center. Krashes paints with smooth, confident strokes but leaves blank specks throughout, suggesting the gaps of memory that make even the best representations of reality imperfect. Through May 18 at 56 Bogart Street, Bushwick; 212 966 4324, theodoreart.com. 6. Art in General, 'Chim Pom: Threat of Peace (Hiroshima!!!!!!)' and 'Don't Follow the Wind: Non Visitor Center' This storied nonprofit is best known for presenting conceptual shows that contain an ambitious site specific element. The current centerpiece is the Japanese artist collective Chim Pom's affecting, tunnel like installation made of paper cranes that people from around the world have sent to Hiroshima as a gesture of peace. The city keeps the cranes millions of them in a special warehouse, where the collective also filmed a new video. On view concurrently is a "non visitor center" for "Don't Follow the Wind," an exhibition created inside the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone by Chim Pom, other artists and the curator Jason Waite (who organized both shows at Art in General). Visitors can glimpse the restricted area via a 360 degree video and contemplate the sobering past and present of our nuclear reality. Through July 13 at 145 Plymouth Street, Dumbo; artingeneral.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
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