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When I accepted the assignment to review Charlie Kaufman's new movie, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," I vowed that I would avoid the recursive, self conscious, Kaufmanesque flourishes that afflict so much writing about this screenwriter and filmmaker. What follows is the record of my abject failure to live up to that promise. In my defense: He made me do it. Exercising professional due diligence in other words, seizing an opportunity to procrastinate on deadline I acquired a copy of "Antkind," Kaufman's recently published novel, only to discover that I'm a minor character in it. A few hundred pages after faintly praising me as "a nice enough fellow and I'm sure a very smart guy for a hack," the book's narrator (a quondam critic with nothing nice to say about Charlie Kaufman) challenges me to a barroom argument about cinema. I barely get a word in edgewise, and in the wake of his "vanquishment of A.O. Scott," my fictional nemesis makes a bold prediction: "Never will he write again. Of that I am certain." I would like to think I am right this minute proving him wrong, but I'm not so sure. What is certain is that Kaufman (whom I've met a couple of times at film festivals) is living in my head, as I seem to be living in his. And so, whether I like it or not and to be honest, I don't really mind I find myself ensnared in a low key version of one of his favorite predicaments. Often notably in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," in "Anomalisa" and now in "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" that question arises in, and threatens to spoil, a heterosexual romance. Men, in particular, have a habit of confusing the objects of their fantasies with the real women in front of them. This can be funny, creepy, sad, toxic or sweet, sometimes all at once. In "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," the effects arrive before our understanding of their causes. We know what we're feeling, but we don't know why. As far as we can guess, we are in the head of a woman named Lucy (Jessie Buckley), who is taking a car trip with her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons). "You can't fake a thought," Lucy muses to herself, and one of her thoughts is summed up in the movie's title. She and Jake haven't been dating that long, and she doesn't see much of a future for them. Does Jake somehow know what she's thinking? He startles her from time to time by seeming to read her mind, which seems to keep changing. It's not the only thing that does. As the couple makes their way through a snowstorm toward the farm where Jake's parents live, little inconsistencies pop up, mostly about Lucy's interests and background. One minute, she says she has no interest in poetry and the next she is reciting a heart rending lyric she claims to have written herself. She is variously said to be studying physics, or painting, or gerontology. Her peacoat is pink, until it is blue. Her name might not even be Lucy. Once she and Jake are out of the car, the weirdness accelerates. Jake's mother and father (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) grow older and younger each time they leave the room. Their awkward, high strung table talk is interrupted from time to time by scenes of an old, lonely school custodian making his rounds, a character whose connection to Jake and his family is implied but not spelled out. Until the end, that is, but even then maybe not quite. "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" is based on a novel by the Canadian writer Iain Reid, a spare and elusive story that provides Kaufman with a stable enough trellis for his own florid preoccupations. The film is suspenseful because it generates uncertainty about its own premises, and because the movements of the camera, the strangeness of Molly Hughes's production design and the tremors of Jay Wadley's musical score guide the viewer toward dread. Lucy is often puzzled, sometimes curious, but maybe not as afraid as she should be. Unless, that is, her perspective isn't one we should trust. Maybe she is faking her thoughts. Or at least borrowing them. Kaufman's dialogue is larded with passages that sound like quotations, only a few of them attributed. Jake helpfully or pompously informs Lucy when he's quoting Oscar Wilde or David Foster Wallace. But at other moments, you may find yourself tempted to pause the movie (which is streaming on Netflix) so you can Google what you just heard, thus discovering (for example) that Lucy's lengthy, wised up critique of John Cassavetes's "A Woman Under the Influence" is lifted verbatim from Pauline Kael's review of that movie. A visual clue of sorts has been provided by the appearance in an earlier scene of a copy of Kael's collection "For Keeps." The weird thing is that the "Woman Under the Influence" review doesn't appear in the book. An annotated version of "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" might be nice to have, though it might also undermine the sense of knowingness that is both one of the film's minor pleasures and one of its major provocations. Jake, who is defensive about David Foster Wallace and oblivious to the rapeyness of the song "Baby It's Cold Outside," is a guy with a clear need to know, explain and control things. He's proud of how smart he is, though also a little ashamed that he won a medal in school for "diligence" rather than "acumen." (His mother couldn't be prouder.) When Lucy makes an offhand reference to Mussolini making the trains run on time, Jake is quick to point out that improvements in Italian rail service actually predated the fascist dictatorship. His behavior toward her his moodiness, his evasive answers to her questions, his passive aggressive efforts to shut her down is increasingly alarming, even as it is also the most consistently realistic aspect of the film. Much of the second half takes place against the backdrop of a howling nighttime blizzard, an almost too perfect metaphor. "Anomalisa" partly camouflaged its melancholy cynicism in the absurdist whimsy of R rated stop motion animation. "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" has some of its own flights of inventiveness and fantasy a ballet sequence, a satirical poke at Robert Zemeckis, a couple of songs from "Oklahoma," a curious homage to "A Beautiful Mind" but they always land in the same dark and lonely place. That place is at once vividly cinematic this is Kaufman's most assured and daring work so far as a director and deeply suspicious of the power of movies to infect our minds with meretricious and misleading ideas. Both Jake and Lucy at times share this suspicion, and both of them can be seen as victims of the art form that has summoned them into being. Plemons and especially Buckley play this somewhat abstract conundrum for real existential stakes, either tricking you into caring about them or sincerely expressing the need to be cared about. I was sometimes puzzled and sometimes annoyed by their story, and by the other possible stories in which they are embedded, but I was also moved. More evidence that I'm a hack, for sure, but who am I to argue? I'm Thinking of Ending Things Rated R. Baby, you'll freeze out there. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Watch on Netflix. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Michael Kelly let go of another employee last month. As chief executive of a small Michigan military contractor, Nanocerox, he had already cut his work force by one third. But it was not enough. And if the government spending cuts mandated by Congress continue, he said, more people will go in the coming months. The squeeze Mr. Kelly is facing is one reason markets are jittery about what the Labor Department's latest report on unemployment and job creation will reveal about the economy on Friday. After a strong start to the year, several economic indicators beginning in March have pointed to much slower growth, largely because of the fiscal headwinds from Washington, economists say. Job cuts like the kind at Nanocerox remain the exception, rather than the rule. On Thursday, the government said weekly unemployment claims were at a five year low. The problem is that companies have not been hiring. This week, a survey of private sector hiring in April came in well below expectations, while indications for everything from retail sales to manufacturing have also been soft recently. Whatever the data ultimately show for April, economists like Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial in Chicago, say the economy would be showing much more momentum if it were not for the combination of higher payroll taxes that went into effect in January, as well as the process of automatic spending cuts known as sequestration that began to bite last month. "What's the biggest drag on the economy? The government," Ms. Swonk said. "If the government simply did no harm, we could be at escape velocity." Without the impact of federal cuts and higher taxes, Ms. Swonk estimates, annual economic growth would be close to 4 percent, above the 2.5 percent pace she is expecting in 2013. Like most economists, Ms. Swonk says she does not think the economy will fall back into recession or experience a pronounced rise in unemployment. Instead, economists on Wall Street are looking for the economy to have created 140,000 jobs in April, below average compared with the monthly rate of 168,000 jobs added in the first quarter but better than the 88,000 jobs created in March. The unemployment rate is expected to remain at 7.6 percent. That's down considerably from the 10 percent peak in unemployment recorded in October 2009, but still well above where levels for joblessness should be this far into a recovery. Nearly 12 million Americans are unemployed and looking for work, according to the Labor Department, and almost 40 percent of them have been jobless for more than six months. 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. As long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent, the Federal Reserve has vowed to keep buying tens of billions of dollars worth of bonds each month to help stimulate growth. That has buoyed Wall Street, and helped the stock market reach record highs, but it has yet to translate into the kind of job gains the Fed wants to see. Other central banks have been getting into the act, too. The European Central Bank cut rates on Thursday in a bid to restore growth, and the Bank of Japan recently started an aggressive stimulus effort. In particular, economists will be watching Friday's report to see if the manufacturing sector shed more jobs in April. The government is generally furloughing employees rather than laying them off, but private contractors that supply the Pentagon have been trimming their work forces outright. Julia Coronado, chief North American economist at BNP Paribas, predicted the impact of the sequester would increase in the months ahead. "We've seen orders for defense related goods really slow down," she said. "There are definitely signs of a cooling." "We're not in a free fall," she added, "but it highlights the difficult nature of this recovery." Although sequestration did not officially go into effect until March, the Pentagon and some other agencies began cutting back last year. At Mr. Kelly's company, Nanocerox, that has meant a sharp slowdown in orders for powder derived from rare earth minerals that is used in a wide range of high technology products, like advanced lasers and air to air missiles. With just 2.5 million in revenue, the company, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., had to react quickly as demand from the Pentagon and big contractors like Raytheon evaporated. "It's a tough, tough environment," Mr. Kelly said. "We're trying to sell the company. It's sad because our technology is the next generation for the military." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In the midst of a debate over scientific misconduct, one of the world's leading scientific journals on Thursday posted the most comprehensive guidelines for the publication of studies in basic science to date, calling for the adoption of clearly defined rules on the sharing of data and methods. The guidelines, published in Science, come weeks after the journal retracted a study of the effect of political canvassing on voters' perceptions of same sex marriage, by Michael LaCour of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald Green, of Columbia, because of concerns over Mr. LaCour's data. That study was the latest in a series of highly public retractions in recent years, in fields as diverse as social psychology, anesthesiology and stem cell research, and involving many different journals. Dr. Marcia McNutt, the editor in chief of Science and an author of the guidelines with more than 30 other scientists, said in an interview that the timing of the paper had nothing to do with any particular case. She and others had been working on them since early 2014, well before the retracted study appeared in December. "This was a bullet train that already left the station," she said. She said that the new guidelines, even if fully implemented and enforced, would probably not have exposed Mr. LaCour, who is suspected of fabricating data. But they would at least make it easier for researchers to attempt a study with the aim of confirming the results of the original work. Problems emerged with Mr. LaCour's data when two University of California, Berkeley, students tried to mount a similar study. The world of scientific publication includes more than 10,000 journals in scores of specialties, some of which already have rules governing transparency in reporting study results. But the new guidelines called TOP, for Transparency and Openness Promotion represent the first attempt to lay out a system that can be applied by journals across diverse fields. "Right now, virtually the only standards journals have are where to set the margins, where to put the figures copy editing stuff," said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the lead author of the new paper. "But journals now understand that they have a strong role not only in the publication of science, but in determining what is said and how it's said." Dr. Nosek is the executive director of the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit that promotes data sharing and was centrally involved in creating the guidelines. More than 100 journals and 31 scientific organizations are signatories to the new guidelines, including the Association for Psychological Science and the American Geophysical Union. Outside experts said that the new rules were a good first step, but nothing more. "Look, any steps in this direction that even recognize this problem are good ones," said Dr. Ivan Oransky, an editor of the blog Retraction Watch and editorial director of MedPage Today. "But the proof will be in the pudding, in whether journals actually hold scientists' feet to the fire." The guidelines include eight categories of disclosure, each with three levels of ascending stringency. For example, under the category "data transparency," Level 1 has the journal require that articles state whether data is available, and if so, where. Level 2 requires that the data be posted to a trusted databank. Level 3 requires not only that data be posted, but also that the analysis be redone by an independent group before publication. The "data" in question varies depending on the field and the methods. So called raw data from social science studies survey answers, for instance, stripped of any personal information are easily cached and understood. Not so raw readouts from genetic analysis or magnetic resonance imaging recordings, which take up enormous digital capacity. That is one reason the guidelines also include a category called "analytic methods transparency." In Level 1, scientists are called on to declare whether the code they used to analyze all those bites of raw data is available, and if so where; Level 3 would require the code be posted in a databank and the reported analysis reproduced before publication. The guidelines also call for, among other things, "preregistration" of studies: that is, that an outline of study methods, design and hypotheses be posted before the work is carried out. This kind of requirement makes little sense in some fields like geosciences in which investigators rush to study the effects of Hurricane Sandy, for instance. But it should serve as a check against the so called file drawer problem that has plagued social sciences and others, in which authors report only versions of a study that produce strong results, not ones with weak or null findings, Dr. Nosek said. Preregistration is the law for most clinical drug trials, and it is already done by many social scientists. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. Berenice Sadie Brown lights a cigarette, and a world is newly illuminated. An African American housekeeper in a small Southern town in the mid 1940s, Berenice is played by a wondrous Roslyn Ruff in the Williamstown Theater Festival production of Carson McCullers's "The Member of the Wedding," which runs here through Aug. 19. We have arrived at the second act of what has so far been a solid but less than thrilling production, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch and also starring Tavi Gevinson, and we hadn't even known that Berenice smokes. But certain conversations in those days required the sacramental blessing conferred by smoldering nicotine. And Berenice is about to describe the ineradicable imprint of a great love, and how it haunts you for life. Leaning against the kitchen sink to an audience of a 12 year old girl and a 7 year old boy Berenice solemnly describes the death of her first husband, the person who had made her happier than "any human woman," and how forever after she kept seeing "little pieces" of him in other men, some of whom she was foolish enough to marry. As Ms. Ruff's Berenice relates this, in a thrumming voice that turns everyday eroticism into something celestial, the theater is silent with the raptness that descends when we are afforded a blessed, 360 degree view of an opaque person's inner life. And the center of a classic play has definitively shifted. In the scenes that followed, I realized with new vividness just how eloquent a portrait "Member" is of the deprivations of being black in the segregated South. And how such a society could endow one woman's loneliness with tragic dimensions. Up to that point, "The Member of the Wedding" had been, a bit tediously, "The Frankie Addams Show," which is probably how you remember it if you saw the 1952 film of McCullers's play, which she adapted from her 1946 novel. That movie used the stars from the original 1950 Broadway production, including the monumental Ethel Waters as Berenice. But since I saw that film for the first time when I was a young teenager, it was 12 year old Frankie who has the misfortune to "fall in love with a wedding" who tattooed herself on my mind. Played by a 26 year old Julie Harris, Frankie was the stinging embodiment of the horrors of early adolescence, full of grand poses and pain, and mortally afraid she was a freak who would never, ever fit in. As Harris played Frankie, she was a radioactive mirror of everything I hated about myself at her age. At the same time, she endowed the character with such tremulous lyricism, that it was an honor as well as a nightmare to identify with her. In Ms. Upchurch's production handsomely designed by Laura Jellinek (the fittingly oppressive set), Clint Ramos (costumes) and Isabella Byrd (the summer saturated lighting) Ms. Gevinson is Frankie. She gives a clear and credible performance. It is also an interpretation that seems propelled by an unfaltering inner confidence. This is a trait you might associate with the polymathic Ms. Gevinson, who at only 22 has already been a successful journalist, fashion blogger and actress ("The Crucible" and "This Is Our Youth" on Broadway). But such sureness means we never worry too much about this Frankie as she heads toward what looks like a potentially suicidal nervous breakdown. The action takes place during one hot weekend in the small town where her brother, Jarvis (Tom Pecinka) is coming home to marry his fiancee, Janice (Louisa Jacobson). Seeing this couple together for the first time makes Frankie, a lifelong loner, believe that "the bride and my brother are the 'we' of me." Never mind that Berenice who raised the girl, after Frankie's mother died in childbirth tries to that tell her in marriage, three is definitely a crowd. In the opening scene, when Frankie sees Janice and Jarvis together for the first time, the cropped haired Ms. Gevinson, clad in boyish shorts and T shirt, is indeed truly alarming in her infatuation with the pair, stroking their shoes and pants legs as if they were religious icons. But as the play proceeds, Ms. Gevinson, who plies a Southern accent with conscientious deliberation, seems less dangerously unhinged than typically teenaged. She is at her best when Frankie is in dictatorial mode, bossing around her fey cousin, John Henry (an appealingly unforced Logan Schuyler Smith), and chasing other kids out of her yard while wearing a basin on her head like a helmet. But as she carefully presents Frankie's absurd affectations, she doesn't convincingly reveal the genuine, roiling hurt that they disguise. "Oh," you think, "she'll grow out of this." You also suspect that on some level she knows this. Berenice possesses a sadder self awareness. She knows her life will never be better. Ms. Ruff (recently seen in the Off Broadway hit "Fairview") defines the contours of that life with a completeness that feels both in the moment and heartbreakingly prophetic. Her Berenice inhabits the well worn kitchen of the Addams house with the sureness of long acquaintance. It is her sanctuary, where she presides with a glowing affection over the provisional family of misfits made up of herself, Frankie and little John Henry (a character said to be partly inspired by Truman Capote), who wonders if he could turn into a girl by kissing his elbow. But there are emissaries from the harsher world outside, like Berenice's current beau, T.T. Williams (Leon Addison Brown), and her foster brother, Honey Camden Brown (Will Cobbs). These characters embody different ways of being black men in a white world polite servility in T.T.'s case and combustible in Honey's. That anger flares searingly when Honey fails to address Frankie's father (James Waterston) as "sir," and he speaks of Honey as one of the "biggity, worthless" black men (the noun he uses is unprintable) who have gotten above their station during the war. Berenice hears this insult to her relative without visible consternation, and it is Honey whom she later rebukes for bringing it on himself. She has had to become a master of absorbing gross indignities. But so thorough is Ms. Ruff's investment in her character that we can read something like the thoughts that McCullers gave Berenice in the novel, which come to hover like an epigraph over this production. If only, Berenice thinks wearily, there were a world in which "there would be no colored people and no white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry through all their lives." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
PARIS The world may be in the middle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, at least according to the financial and political powers of The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which ended on Saturday. But in Paris, as of Sunday, fashion was still championing the preindustrial art of couture: garments made entirely by the human hand, to order, for one client at a time. Does this mean they are out of touch? It was hard not to think that in the wake of a conversation about global technological disruption, the clothes on show (and indeed, the whole couture enterprise itself) could end up looking alarmingly disconnected. One day you have the economist Nouriel Roubini discussing what he has labeled "the new abnormal" state of world markets; a few days later, Giorgio Armani is unveiling a subset of his main Armani ready to wear collection entitled "The New Normal." It's a little disconcerting. Yet designers are not nearly as oblivious to this situation, and the need to make couture relevant, as you might assume. If not all their solutions are convincing, at least, as the run of shows began, they were wrestling with the problem. For Donatella Versace, for example, the answer lay in the realm not of Silicon Valley, but silicon gel, as well as a variety of other symbols and fabrications that had to do with sports, and the power and energy encased in the human form, as opposed to a motherboard. Her argument posited the body as the ultimate smart machine. So she christened the Atelier Versace collection "athletic couture," set it to a specially commissioned soundtrack by Violet with the refrain "we march to the beat of our own drum," and put it on a plain gray runway. The result was a relatively stripped down (for Versace) show built on a blinding white base, shot through with chartreuse, orange and sky blue. Sharp smoking jackets cinched asymmetrically by luggage straps were paired with stretchy stirrup pants; sheer crystal mesh bodysuits and T shirts were layered under cowl backed minidresses; and the usual bounty of cleavage baring necklines were transformed into racer tanks and draped and dropped to show a flash of hip here, a slash of side there. Webs of "water jet cut" velvet backed by leather formed bomber jackets and stiff skirts, and it was all held together, mostly, by crystal bungee cords. The only prints came in the form of ergonomic lines racing over the body. As was the high/low smorgasbord prepared by Bertrand Guyon at Schiaparelli, who served up a soupcon of politics with his embroidery via a play on the concept of taste: the kind that comes from your gut as much as your head. "Today enjoying a great meal with friends may strangely become an act of resilience" went the show notes, in an oblique reference to the Paris attacks of last November, and out came a series of easy little skirt suits, the jackets embroidered with ornate teakettles or Wedgwood porcelain; bias cut evening gowns in silk crepe printed with cherries and root vegetables, the shoulder straps twisted in the classical mode; and a navy blue jacquard covered in silver spoons (and assorted other cutlery). It sounds clowny, but in fact the sartorial jokes and surreal references were less heavy handed then they have been in the past, especially when it came to neat jackets in a patchwork geometry of 19th century dish towels over Op Art awning striped taffeta gowns, which elevated the ordinary to the interesting. Even at Christian Dior, currently in limbo between designers, an attempt was made to "free" volumes and explore a "new realism." That it did not succeed is perhaps a natural consequence of the fact that the creative team is working without an official guiding point of view. Rather, it is being led by Lucie Meier and Serge Ruffieux, the heads of studio under the former artistic director Raf Simons, who are filling his shoes on an interim basis. It is their job to advance the vision he left behind without being too wildly assertive about their own ideas, so as to allow the next artistic director, whoever he or she may be (and the rumors are rife), to take the brand in a new direction. In practice this meant new versions of the Bar jacket, the Dior classic that Mr. Simons revived, but oversize and mannish (and a bit clunky) or shrunken, with a frilled peplum and fluted sleeves (much better). It meant curving Bar coats and dresses cut away from the body with one shoulder tacked down as if it had slipped off, layered over thin jeweled tulle T shirts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
By the time heroin addiction catches them in its jaws, Emily is in her mid 20s, teaching college writing and helping the narrator, who is halfheartedly taking classes on the G.I. Bill, grow marijuana in a tent in their living room. After the plants flower and dry, they flip them for dope money. Emily orders salad at McDonald's. She says "man" a lot. Her male friends want to sleep with her. Our narrator loves the way she "cussed with great beauty" and "always gave you everything and she wasn't ever fake about it." That she's less a woman than a collage at first doesn't seem much of an issue the novel is told in the first person, after all, limited to the narrator's perspective, and what lover can ever truly see his or her beloved? But what's glossed over ultimately mitigates the intensity of their romance. We never learn why Emily wanted to transfer to a school in Montreal, for instance; though we're told she's smart (it's a point of pride with the narrator), we're rarely given access to conversations in which she says what she wants or doesn't want, or shares what she thinks. This shortsightedness doesn't stop at Emily. Women, when they appear, are categorized by their sexual availability and desirability. Often they're given no name, and simply assigned to a male character his woman, his girl. What's meant by this construct is unclear. Of course, some men really talk this way, but accuracy as justification seems at odds with how the narrator intends to be perceived. He's a self professed "scumbag," sure, but he also underscores his vegetarianism and claims, "I take all the beautiful things to heart ... till I about die from it." He's sensitive, not to mention extremely damaged by his time at war. But his flashes of gooey adoration for Emily and moments of sympathy for other women feel less genuine than put on, as if they've been carefully planted to distract us from the casual sexism inherent in his voice. I got the impression I was meant to like him. It's a miracle I credit to the urgency of every aspect of this novel outside of the love story that I often did. "Cherry" is a singular portrait of the opioid epidemic and the United States' failure to provide adequate support to veterans. It's full of slapstick comedy, despite gut clenching depictions of dope sickness, the futility of war and PTSD. The sections on Army life in and out of Iraq offer a searing glimpse into the wretchedness of that American disaster. ("Fort Hood was bleak, a new kind of desert, engineered to induce fatalism in the young. It worked like a charm.") As a stylist, Walker is un self conscious and rangy. He has a gift for the strategically deployed profanity, and writes dialogue so musical and realistic you'll hear it in the air around you. He can pull off judicious caps lock. And yet, it's a struggle to root for a novel that relies on a woman for narrative structure even as it constantly undermines her humanity. Emily feels even more spectral in contrast to the all too concrete Soren, the primary love interest in Lisa Locascio's debut novel, "Open Me." Due to an administrative mix up, the 18 year old narrator, Roxana Olsen, who is supposed to be studying abroad in Paris with her best friend, has instead been sent to Denmark. At the airport, bleary with jet lag, she's scooped up by Soren, a 28 year old representative from International Abroad Experiences, the program responsible for the mismanagement of her eight week trip. From their first meeting, Roxana's perception narrows; despite the newness of her surroundings, all she can see is Soren: "His eyes the blue of a frozen morning under brows like smudges of ash. ... He took my hand as if to shake it but didn't close the grip. My fingers swam in his, little fish." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"But what would a stroke feel like?" my patient asked. I didn't quite know how to answer. I again explained that we could give him a blood thinner, which would lower his risk of having a stroke to 3 percent, but increase his risk of bleeding to 5 percent. I again told him that his abnormal heart rhythm, atrial fibrillation, made it more likely a blood clot could shoot off toward his brain, which in turn could lead to difficulty speaking or moving parts of his... He interrupted me. "You already said that. Would I recover? Be the same person? And where exactly would I bleed from?" Despite tremendous advances in health care, most medicine still occurs in a gray zone: There aren't right or wrong answers, but rather a continuum of risks and benefits. Circumstances exist in which diagnosis and treatment are clear a ruptured appendix, for example, or a life threatening heart attack. But for most conditions there are several reasonable options, important trade offs among them, and uncertainty about how well each might work. It's our job to help patients choose, but doing so can be surprisingly difficult. This is partly because while many doctors tend to think in stats, most people think in stories. Salient or visceral experiences, like "my neighbor had a stroke" or vomiting blood into a toilet, are immediately accessible. Abstract risks, like the ones I presented to my patient, can be difficult to grasp. We also tend to prioritize immediate consequences over long term possibilities, and are strongly influenced by framing. A 95 percent chance of living, for example, sounds a lot better than a 5 percent chance of dying. To my patient, then, the choice between risking a stroke or a major bleed might seem like comparing apples to oranges or rather, three hundredths of an apple to five hundredths of an orange. How is he supposed to choose? How am I? Yet patients and doctors must make these kinds of choices every day. Should you choose six months of life with chemotherapy and intractable nausea, or three months at home chemo free? Should I prescribe insulin, or something less effective and less dangerous, to treat a patient's diabetes? Should we operate on an elderly woman with a broken hip knowing there's a small chance she won't live through surgery, but a near certainty she'll never walk without it? Shared decision making by which patients and doctors discuss treatments in the context of a patient's goals and values is supposed to help us solve this problem, or at least better navigate the options. It emerged in the 1970s alongside greater emphasis on patient autonomy and patient centeredness, as opposed to the paternalism that had historically dominated medicine. But research suggests shared decision making isn't used widely or effectively enough, and that our communication with patients suffers. Fewer than half of patients believe their clinicians understand their goals and concerns, and many people who are seriously ill say their medical care is not aligned with their preferences. Nearly half of the time when doctors say they discussed prognosis and likely outcomes with patients, their patients say there was no such conversation. Research also finds that it's common for doctors to review the benefits of screening and treatment, but discussion of risks like overtreatment, overdiagnosis and complications is lacking. One study found that less than 10 percent of patients were told about the potential harms of cancer screening. And more generally, patients tend to vastly overestimate the benefits and underestimate the harms of treatment. Almost 90 percent of patients have fundamentally mistaken beliefs about how cardiac stents might help them; nearly the same proportion overestimate the benefits of breast cancer and colon cancer screening. For many interventions, the minimum benefit patients say they're willing to accept is greater than the benefit research tells us they're likely to receive. More shared decision making would be a good start. Shared decision making initiatives have traditionally used decision aids like educational booklets and DVDs, but new technologies like online interactive tools are increasingly being deployed with promising results. A recent Cochrane review of over 100 studies and 34,000 patients found that decision aids can improve patients' knowledge of their options, help them understand what's important to them, and lead to more accurate expectations about treatments. The Mayo Clinic and other institutions have developed online decision aids, available to all, to help doctors and patients more easily conceptualize the pros and cons of a given treatment. Mayo's Statin Choice Decision Aid, for example, allows patients to enter personal health characteristics and, through visually engaging charts and graphics, assess their risk of a heart attack. It then prompts them to select various options to see how likely they are to have that heart attack with treatment or without treatment. It also presents information on how the risks and benefits vary by statin dose, how many people need to be treated for one person to benefit, and what the costs are to both your bank account and your daily routine. Similar decision aids are now available for other common conditions like diabetes, osteoporosis, depression and cancer. Our medical era is one of complex technologies, seemingly endless information, and imperfect data. It can be difficult for doctors to explain medications and procedures, let alone adjudicate their relative value for each patient. But we must do a better job of guiding patients through the subtle, sometimes counterintuitive, trade offs inherent in the tests and treatments we propose. Decision aids may not solve the problem, but they can help. If effectively and creatively deployed, they can translate what we know and feel our goals, preferences and values into what we do and experience. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
LOS ANGELES Nancy Tellem, a longtime entertainment executive recently caught in the crosscurrents of a leadership change at Microsoft, is joining senior management at Interlude, a start up focused on interactive music videos. Interlude, founded in 2010 by the Israeli rock star Yoni Bloch, said on Wednesday that Ms. Tellem would become chief media officer and executive chairwoman. The move continues a focus on new media for Ms. Tellem, who spent roughly two decades at CBS and Warner Brothers before joining Microsoft, which hired her in 2012 to create an Xbox centered movie and television business. Last year, just as Ms. Tellem's operation was starting to gain traction, Microsoft got a new chief executive. Steven A. Ballmer was replaced by Satya Nadella, who set new priorities. Competing with the likes of Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and Sony in digital content was not one of them. Mr. Nadella pulled the plug on Xbox Entertainment Studios. (One series that Ms. Tellem left behind, "Humans," a drama about robotic household servants, will be shown on AMC starting in June.) Ms. Tellem's role at Interlude will involve her Rolodex. "I look forward to extending Interlude's reach to the entertainment industry by bringing film and television creators on board," she said in a statement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Richard Termine for The New York Times Read all of our classical music coverage here. Hope you had a bustling week and are looking forward to some adventurous listening this weekend. In memory of Michael Gielen, the searching conductor who died last Friday at 91 read David Allen's superb obituary hear one of the selections David chose: Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis," rendered with cleareyed power. It was clear from the start that the Samson, Aleksandrs Antonenko, was struggling; after intermission, the Met announced that he was ill with a cold, and would be replaced by Gregory Kunde. It's not easy to jump into the middle of a performance, but Mr. Kunde did it with stylish ease. Now 65(!), he's moved on from specializing in bel canto earlier in his career to the heroic roles of Verdi and Puccini. But he's hardly ever sung at the Met. Hopefully that changes now. His success brought me back to an already classic recording of Rossini's "Armida" made from 1993 performances in Italy. Here's Mr. Kunde combining memorably with Renee Fleming: And Christine Goerke spoke with Michael Cooper about taking on Brunnhilde at the Met, where she was once in the young artists program. "I think if you talk to anyone who's ever been a young artist in any house, it's always hard to come back and feel like a grown up," she said. "I'm going to be 50, and I still feel like I'm 24." The night after Beatrice Rana's New York debut, on the same stage (Zankel Hall), the fun was doubled in a fascinating program of exciting works for two pianos, performed by the formidable Kirill Gerstein, who can play anything, and Thomas Ades, an eminent composer who is also accomplished pianist. Recently they were with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the premiere of Mr. Ades's Piano Concerto, written for Mr. Gerstein. (They bring that work to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday.) At Zankel, they began with Debussy's "En Blanc et Noir," a late work, from 1915, which in this starkly beautiful and steely performance seemed not far removed from the shock and awe radicalism of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (1913). Turning to Stravinsky, they played Shostakovich's rarely heard arrangement of the "Symphony of Psalms." With the chorus part (a setting of psalm texts) divided between the pianos and without the distraction, so to speak, of the score's dark, percussive orchestral sonorities the modernist daring of Stravinsky's harmonic language came through stunningly. The program also included Mr. Ades's stream of consciousness Concert Paraphrase from his opera "Powder Her Face," and ended with an account of Ravel's "La Valse" that had this showpiece sounding dangerous. Don't believe me? Here they are playing it in Paris in 2016. ANTHONY TOMMASINI | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
As an emergency physician in an area being hit hard by Covid 19, I believe that Farhad Manjoo's flawed logic will cause people to die. Mr. Manjoo thinks the risks of traveling and dining with extended family on Thanksgiving are "worth it." But these risks extend far beyond his family. Each time someone interacts with people outside his or her personal bubble, the probability of getting the virus and initiating a cluster of cases increases. Just a few cases can set off an irreversible chain of events that culminates in hospitals filling up, without enough staff or resources to care for all the sick people. In my hospital, we're frantically calling other facilities to see if they can take patients. E.M.S. workers drive hours trying to get patients to a hospital. Data suggests that behavior like Mr. Manjoo's will cause these heroic frontline workers significant risk by spending more hours in vehicles transporting Covid patients. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The Disney animated musical "Frozen 2" again dominated domestic theaters this weekend, leading the box office for the third weekend in a row. "Frozen 2" sold an estimated 34.7 million in tickets Friday through Sunday, bringing its total domestic sales to about 337.6 million nearly double what that original "Frozen" had made by the end of its third wide release weekend in 2013, adjusting for inflation. "Frozen 2" brought in an additional 90.2 million internationally this weekend, according to the studio, for cumulative global sales of about 919.7 million. It's hard to imagine a scenario where "Frozen 2" wouldn't be making a lot of money, but the fact that there is little fresh competition can't be hurting. "Playmobil: The Movie," an animated family film based on the German toy line and distributed by STX Films, opened this weekend to an estimated (and paltry) 668,000. The movie failed to break into the top 10, despite playing in over 2,300 locations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Don't blink or you'll miss one of more than a dozen superheroes featured in the new trailer for "Avengers: Infinity War." Marvel's all star adventure brings together not only Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) from the Avengers, but also the Guardians of the Galaxy (Chris Pratt's Star Lord, Zoe Saldana's Gamora, Bradley Cooper's Rocket and Vin Diesel's Groot) and oh yeah Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), whose stand alone movie has grossed more than half a billion dollars in the United States alone. Apparently it will take these combined superpowers and more to overcome the threat of Thanos (Josh Brolin, who'll play a different character in Marvel's forthcoming "Deadpool" sequel). The villain is on a quest to collect the six Infinity Stones, which will allow him to wipe out half the population of the universe. Directed by the brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, who also oversaw the 2016 smash "Captain America: Civil War," the latest Avengers installment looks to incorporate some of the cheeky humor that has set Marvel titles like "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Deadpool" apart from the more serious films of its rival, DC Comics. After Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) introduces himself to Peter Parker (Tom Holland), the web slinger quips, "Oh, we're using our made up names? Then I am Spider Man." (For the record, the doctor's real name is Stephen Vincent Strange.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In folklore, the trickster figure is a cunning rulebreaker, positioned disruptively outside conventional mores. With her new book's title, Anne Waldman, whose writing, performing, teaching and activist career defies political and poetic convention, appears to promise feminist mischief and playfulness. And there are such moments: when, for instance, the names of woman poets are embedded as homonyms ("Mean alloy" for Mina Loy, "Burn a debt" for Bernadette Mayer, presumably). But these operate more as a homage to fun than as fun itself. The pervading mood in "Trickster Feminism" is of a piece with our national mood: gloom filled, sorrowing, yet occasionally threaded with hope. "And the day would be proud of itself going on as if it hadn't already collapsed, had not been destroyed, riven, all the people mad and metabolically downcast," begins the prose sequence "denouement," which responds to Donald Trump's election. "People were coming out to the street. In the way they wanted to see where the big guy lived and boasted so as to mock the event. ... How ugly would it go?" Later, Waldman tells of a woman "mumbling mantras ... as she circles the tower. ... Om Man Be Gone ... Om Con Con Be Gone," and laments "a lack of power to move ethical clocks forward." Waldman is associated with 20th century experimental writers who have energetically defined themselves against what she calls "the official verse literati culture academic mainstream." A longtime left wing political activist, she has written dozens of works of poetry and given hundreds of performances. She co founded, with Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. A devotee of Tibetan Buddhism, she seems to have centered her life and work on the idea that poetry and language are a "tribal responsibility," summoning a powerful kind of political magic. See the Book Review's selection of 100 Notable Books and 10 Best Books of 2018. Over the decades, Waldman has written many long poems. Her urge is epic. In sequences of prose and verse, she gives voice to vatic, rhythmic, litany shaped utterances, with an intensity that can mute her playfulness (though in performance her ability to play gets more play). Waldman combines political, mythical, literary, artistic and historic references in poems that tend to blend and blur rather than yield imagistic clarity. The shortest poems in "Trickster Feminism" are one or two pages long; most are much longer. The metaphor that comes to mind is of a river, its great volume washing by. My undergraduate students would love to talk about Waldman's "flow." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In late May, as protests against police brutality began to seize American cities, videos of a Black man on horseback wearing a bulletproof vest spread widely on social media. In many of the posts, users suggested that he had stolen a policeman's horse. But Adam Hollingsworth, a 33 year old Chicagoan, is no thief. The horse in the video, Prince, is one of four he owns and rides around the city, where he is known as the Dreadhead Cowboy. You have to have "some kind of experience to get on a horse to ride it," he said in a phone interview last week. And, he added, "if you steal a police horse, it's like kidnapping a police officer. You can't just get up and steal a police horse." "It's not just about me," he said. "Everything I'm doing is for the future." Mr. Hollingsworth was born and raised in Woodlawn, a majority Black neighborhood (nearly 83 percent, according to a 2019 analysis by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning) on the South Side of Chicago. The area has recently appeared in the news as the proposed site of the Obama Presidential Center. Horseback riding didn't come into Mr. Hollingsworth's life until adulthood, after a wrongful conviction for gun possession. "I don't play with guns," Mr. Hollingsworth said. "I'm not that kind of guy." But when his car was pulled over in 2006, someone riding with him did have a gun, which the police found when they searched the car. The officers asked for the ages of the men in the vehicle. "I was 19, and they said, 'You're the oldest, it's your gun.'" The bail for his release was set at 5,000. Unable to pay, Mr. Hollingsworth sat in jail awaiting a court date. His public defender advised him to fight the charge, believing there was insufficient evidence to convict him. However, after a month in a cell, Mr. Hollingsworth said he just wanted to go home and requested his public defender arrange for a plea deal. He spent a month in Cook County Jail, pleaded guilty and received a sentence of probation. Mr. Hollingsworth focused on staying out of trouble and finding a job. But with a criminal record, this became a herculean task. He began working as an exotic dancer in 2010 and bought his first horse, Wi Fi, nine years later for 800 during a period of severe depression. "My horse was my therapy," he said. Over time, one horse became four. He keeps them in a barn at his uncle's house in Crete, a suburb of Chicago, and brings them out to the city almost every day, as long as the weather cooperates. "When this pandemic came about and everyone was depressed and miserable, I thought maybe they can help them too," he said. During lockdown, Mr. Hollingsworth began riding around Chicago's Black and Latino communities to bring joy to residents, especially young children. "I didn't have my father in my life," he said. "To have a kid say I'm their hero, it melts my heart." His son, Akil, 12, has begun referring to himself as the Dreadhead Cowboy Jr. Some adults have told him it is their first time seeing a horse in real life. "You've never seen a horse in the hood," he said. He said it was not unusual for onlookers to question his ownership of the horses. "When people see me on a horse, they always ask if I'm a police officer. They ask if I got money. If I steal it. How I get it," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
People with acne are at substantially higher risk for depression in the first years after the condition appears, a new study reports. Researchers used a British database of 134,427 men and women with acne and 1,731,608 without and followed them for 15 years. Most were under 19 at the start of the study, though they ranged in age from 7 to 50. The study is in the British Journal of Dermatology. Over the 15 year study period, the probability of developing major depression was 18.5 percent among patients with acne and 12 percent in those without. People with acne were more likely to be female, younger, nonsmokers and of higher socioeconomic status. They were also less likely to use alcohol or be obese. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
"Event to Change the Image of Snow," from 1970, a documentary photograph of performance art from the Japanese collective GUN. The colored landscape, created with sprayed pigments, were soon buried by snowfall. When the going gets rough when the students start throwing paving stones and the mounted police swing their truncheons sometimes what you need is some time in the country . In the years around 1968, American artists aghast at the Vietnam War raised their voices in New York and Los Angeles, but also set up back to the land communes or constructed awesome earthworks in the Nevada desert or Utah's Great Salt Lake. In Britain, Richard Long started making art out of walks in the fields of Wiltshire; in West Germany, Sigmar Polke slipped away to a farm outside Dusseldorf, making lots of films and ingesting lots of hallucinogens. Japan's big cities, too, were in full upheaval at the decade's end. In 1968 and 1969, students barricaded the lecture halls at the elite Tokyo University, and at Tama Art University, the students locked themselves in their classrooms and studios and demanded mass leadership resignations. Some young artists found their places in the daily demonstrations and the antiwar and antinuclear movements. For others, the best way forward was to get out. "Radicalism in the Wilderness," a precise and sturdy exhibition on view at Japan Society, looks deeply into three bold positions rooted far from the lights of late 1960s Tokyo, and explores how putting one's distance from the capital and its art institutions could be its own productive ferment . The artist Yutaka Matsuzawa, in the forests of Nagano Prefecture, aimed to create a conceptual art that broke from rationalist thought. The collective GUN, formed in Niigata Prefecture, then an agrarian region, produced breathtaking environmental projects, as well as artsy political action and small works sent through the postal service. And the Play, an Osaka group, took its happenings out of the city and into the mountains and rivers of Kansai, where they sought a new kind of collective art making. "Radicalism in the Wilderness" has been curated by Reiko Tomii, an independent art historian who also published an award winning book of the same title in 2016. She's organized the exhibition into three condensed presentations, each standing on its own, but together mapping a vanguard defined by its distance from Tokyo. And a few projects by Western artists working in similar conceptual or land oriented strains provides the ballast for Ms. Tomii's principal argument: that the full global story of art in the 1960s features both active collaborations and accidental resonances between the East and the West, and between the big city and the countryside. Of this show's three figures, Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922 2006) had the most direct links to the structures of the art world, both in Tokyo and in the West. In the 1950s, he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship, made abstractions by pouring corrosive chemicals onto iron sheets , and grew fixated on a WOR radio show on paranormal activity. Back in Japan, he made collages and drawings that, so he said, captured clairvoyant visions beyond the realm of the senses. Then, on June 1, 1964, he experienced some kind of otherworldly instruction to "vanish matter" and in his village Shimo Suwa , he started to create an art out of language alone. Matsuzawa wrote recondite texts on extrasensory perception, arguing for an art "seen" wholly with the mind's eye, and laid them out in Buddhist inspired grids that he printed on posters and sent through the mail. (Ms. Tomii has translated the texts here.) He began proposing "empty" exhibitions, in one case taking out an ad in an art magazine and instructing readers to send imaginary artworks into the wilderness telepathically. A poster here, entitled "Ju (Blessings): Talisman of Vanishing" (1966), sets forth his vision of progress as total nothingness: "Governments will vanish. Sex will vanish. Factories will vanish. Production will vanish. Capital will vanish ..." To some back in Tokyo, it sounded like a cult. Yet Matsuzawa was inventing a Japanese conceptualism with Buddhist characteristics, and when he later found Western counterparts to his own immaterial practice , he happily joined in. At Matsuzawa's invitation, American artists working with nonvisual, instruction based techniques, like Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry, contributed to a 1970 show in Kyoto he called "Nirvana." Eventually even the British Italian art duo Gilbert and George came to hang out in Shimo Suwa ; Matsuzawa filmed them clambering up to his treehouse studio, looking rather out of place in their tweed suits against the Japanese foliage. The young artists of the collective GUN (or Group Ultra Niigata), led by Tadashi Maeyama and Michio Horikawa, worked even farther from the metropolis than Matsuzawa, in a city on the far side of Honshu's central mountain range. In 1970, after some unsuccessful efforts to win attention in Tokyo, they decided to work with the landscape before them which has the heaviest snowfall in the country by staging the first of their "Events to Change the Image of Snow." Filling up pesticide sprayers with red, blue and yellow pigments, the members of GUN blasted snow covered expanses with spectacular colored clouds and tramlines, transforming the fields of this "provincial" region into thrilling, joyous abstractions. GUN would eventually grow more explicitly political, creating postal art and photo collages that questioned Japan's self defense force and imperial family. Compared to Matsuzawa and GUN, the collective known as the Play (founded in 1967 and still active) will be the best known to Western viewers of this exhibition; they appeared in the 20 17 Venice Biennale among a constellation of international collectives devoted to humor, improvisation and volunteer participation. While students in Tokyo protested their nation's alliance with Washington, the Play took a lighter view of Japanese American connections in their early "Voyage: Happening in an Egg" (1968) an absurd but earnest effort to release a giant fiberglass egg on the waves of the Pacific Ocean and to steer it to the American west coast . The artists enlisted the aid of oceanographers and local fishermen, but the egg went missing before long. The adventure was meant to be a free activity outside of contemporary political and social boundaries, which the Play would double down on in "Current of Contemporary Art," a summer escapade first undertaken in 1969, for which the artists built an arrow shaped raft and rowed nonchalantly across the Kansai region. In 1972, they built a floating house of Styrofoam and plywood, where they lived together for a week as they drifted downriver from Kyoto to Osaka. For "Thunder," an annual project, the group invited participants to build a wooden pyramid and wait for lightning to strike. Year after year, the lightning rarely came but unlike with Walter De Maria's nearly contemporaneous "Lightning Field," the real point of "Thunder" was the collective work and collective waiting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Learning technologies offer great potential to improve education, but whether that potential will be realized depends on three key factors, which have less to do with technology itself and more to do with the people using it. First, we need to ensure that we don't lose sight of the "learning" in learning technologies. As we develop and adopt learning technologies we need to keep in mind what we know about how students learn. We know, for example, that they learn at different rates, that it is critical to master a topic before moving to the next when learning is sequential, that students who are engaged are likely to learn more and learn more deeply, and that active learning is more likely to engage students than passive learning. It follows that technologies that help teachers personalize learning even more than they already do and that tailor learning to the pace and interests of students are likely to have bigger payoffs than those that do not. Second, we need to recognize that we are really facing an adaptive challenge, not a technical one. At the moment, the digital tools most likely to be adopted are the ones that are least disruptive to the status quo and fit readily into existing school models. They offer a quick, technical fix but, according to research by SRI International, have little impact on student learning. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Billy Joe Shaver in Chicago in 1980. His songs were an expression of outlaw country's nonconformist spirit. Billy Joe Shaver, the Texas singer songwriter whose trenchant, vivid compositions helped launch country music's outlaw movement in the 1970s, died on Wednesday in Waco, Texas. He was 81. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his friend Connie Nelson, who said he had recently had a stroke. Mr. Shaver wrote songs for many of the major outlaw figures, including Willie Nelson, Bobbie Bare and Kris Kristofferson. Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash recorded his material, and Bob Dylan, in "I Feel a Change Comin' On," a song written with the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, sang admiringly of listening to Mr. Shaver's music. ("I'm hearing Billy Joe Shaver/And I'm reading James Joyce.") Mr. Shaver's early reputation rested on his plain spoken yet poetic contributions to Waylon Jennings's landmark 1973 album "Honky Tonk Heroes," regarded as a quintessential expression of outlaw country's nonconformist spirit. "I've spent a lifetime making up my mind to be/More than the measure of what I thought others could see," Mr. Jennings sang on his version of Mr. Shaver's "Old Five and Dimers Like Me." Mr. Shaver wrote or co wrote all but one of the 10 songs on "Honky Tonk Heroes," including the title track and "Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me" a tribute, its unusual spelling of his first name notwithstanding, to Mr. Nelson, his friend and fellow outlaw. "Black Rose," a monument to self recrimination and regret, featured one of Mr. Shaver's typically hard hit but also self aware narrators. "The devil made me do it the first time/The second time I done it on my own," Mr. Jennings sang ruefully over a lean but steadily chugging rhythm section. Three of Mr. Shaver's songs from "Honky Tonk Heroes" also appeared on "Old Five and Dimers Like Me," his musically unvarnished, autobiographical first solo album, produced by Mr. Kristofferson for the independent Monument label in 1973. "Hell, I just thought I'd mention, my grandma's old age pension/Is the reason why I'm standing here today," Mr. Shaver sang in a raspy drawl on "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train." Propelled by a headlong neo rockabilly beat, the song revisited his hardscrabble childhood with dignity and pride: "I got all my country learning, milking and a churning/Picking cotton, raising hell and baling hay." Songs like "Georgia on a Fast Train" feel almost larger than life, and yet both that song and "You Ask Me To," another 1973 single, barely broke into the Top 100 of the country chart. Mr. Jennings's version of "You Ask Me To," by contrast, became a Top 10 country hit. Reflecting on this disparity in a 2014 interview with the NPR program "Morning Edition," Mr. Shaver admitted that he always believed he would never be as popular an artist as the stars who made his songs famous. "The songs were so big, they were too big for me," he said of the material he wrote during the heady early days of the outlaw movement. "I couldn't possibly get them across the way Waylon could." Billy Joe Shaver was born on Aug. 16, 1939, in Corsicana, Texas, and grew up in Waco. His father, Virgil, abandoned his mother, Victory (Watson) Shaver, before their son was born. Mr. Shaver's grandmother, Birdie Lee Watson, helped raise him; when he reached adolescence he and his older sister, Patricia, moved in with their mother and her new husband. Mr. Shaver dropped out of school to work in his uncles' cotton fields before completing eighth grade. He sometimes accompanied his mother to the nightclub where she tended bar, sparking an early interest in writing and playing music. At around this time Mr. Shaver took a job in a sawmill, where he lost the index and middle fingers of his right hand in a work accident and had to relearn how to play the guitar. In 1968, after several more years of scuffling, including periodic visits to Nashville to pursue his fortunes as a songwriter, Mr. Shaver persuaded Mr. Bare to give him a songwriting job at his publishing company. Success eluded him until five years later, when "Honky Tonk Heroes" elevated him to the ranks of unfettered, imagistic country tunesmiths like Mr. Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury and Guy Clark. His biggest success as a songwriter in the post outlaw era came when the neo traditionalist singer John Anderson had a Top 10 country hit in 1981 with "I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal (but I'm Gonna Be a Diamond Someday)." Mr. Shaver recorded steadily, but with little commercial success, from the 1970s on. He eventually developed a following among fans of alternative country music with albums like "Tramp on Your Street" (1993) and "Unshaven: Live at Smith's Olde Bar" (1995). Billed simply under the name Shaver, both albums reflected Eddy Shaver's increasingly prominent role in his father's band, with which he had been playing since he was a teenager. In 1997 Mr. Shaver had a small part in "The Apostle," a feature film written by, directed by and starring Robert Duvall. Mr. Shaver's wife and mother both died of cancer in 1999. His son died of a heroin overdose a little more than a year later. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Forte dei Marmi is a tale of three seaside resort towns. You have Miami Beach, home to this pale, airy and nicely tailored restaurant that opened in late 2016. Then there is its name, which comes from a popular Tuscan beach town. Finally, there is Nerano, down on the Amalfi Coast, where the chef, Antonio Mellino, has had a restaurant since 1983. It all adds up to food kissed by a sea breeze, always a good idea in a sun drenched location. At the Miami Beach spot, an indoor outdoor affair, the Italian accent dresses local, and often organic, ingredients like stone crabs by tossing the sweet crustaceans with Sicilian tomatoes and chile oil over a bundle of homemade tagliolini. "I was all set to import most of my ingredients," Mr. Mellino said. "But I'm finding most of what I need right here. There's great seafood people in Miami love sea things and there are farms that are growing just for us." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
POLYCHROME Shoppers on Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill, whose residential populations include immigrants from South America and South Asia and whose housing in spots is pure 19th century American. RICHMOND HILL, in southeastern Queens, is the ultimate study in New York diversity. It is a place to eat Caribbean cuisine, shop for Bollywood movies, worship at a Sikh temple and stroll through streets lined with Victorian era houses, a slice of pure Americana. Extending down the south slope of Forest Park, the neighborhood evolves from the quiet streets just off the park, where the old wood framed homes are found, to vibrant "Little Guyana" along Liberty Avenue, its southern border with South Ozone Park. "There are churches next to mosques next to mandirs," said Richard S. David, the executive director of the Indo Caribbean Alliance, a social service agency that works in the neighborhood. (A mandir is a Hindu temple.) Ivan Mrakovcic, the president of the Richmond Hill Historical Society and a vice chairman of Community Board 9, says he also sees religious diversity near his home in the Victorian section, where an Orthodox synagogue sits near Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches. Mr. Mrakovcic moved to Richmond Hill in 1994, finding it more affordable than Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he had originally looked in order to be close to family. The way he describes it, the area offers both urban and suburban living. "You can have a vegetable garden and mow the lawn, but the J train is three blocks away and it's a short walk to the park," he said, also noting that the Rockaway beaches are a 20 minute drive. According to 2010 census figures compiled by the city Planning Department, Richmond Hill covers about three square miles and has nearly 63,000 residents, including Asians (27.4 percent), Hispanics (36 percent), whites (11.2 percent), and blacks/African Americans (11.1 percent). Among those populations are the neighborhood's Indo Caribbean residents: Guyanese immigrants of South Asian ancestry who began settling in the area in the 1960s, Mr. David said. Now, the community includes second and third generation Americans. "A lot of people are renting basements or housing family members," said Seema Agnani, the executive director of Chhaya Community Development Corporation, a housing agency that works with South Asians in New York City. "All floors of those homes are occupied." For immigrants especially, housing space has been particularly limited by the foreclosure crisis, which hit hard in parts of Richmond Hill. "People fell prey to predatory loan practices and many refinanced during the height of the high interest rates," Ms. Agnani said. Financial troubles were compounded when homeowners who held service jobs or who worked in construction saw their incomes drop. "It was really a loss of income together with the bad loans that pushed a lot of homeowners over the edge," Ms. Agnani said, adding that the housing market is slowly improving. It is south of Atlantic Avenue, in an area also known as South Richmond Hill, that Guyanese Americans have settled in large numbers. There, homes are smaller and more closely spaced. Liberty Avenue serves the Indo Caribbean population with its many small businesses: sari stores, Guyanese bakeries and restaurants, and fish and vegetable markets. Colorful wares and clothing are displayed on sidewalks, which bustle with shoppers. According to Mr. David, Sikhs took root here during the height of the real estate market in the early 2000s, when some Guyanese Americans in the area moved to Florida, Pennsylvania and other states and often sold their homes to Sikhs. The city's largest Sikh temple, the Sikh Cultural Center, is at 117th Street and 97th Avenue. The area is low rise, made up of single and multifamily homes with a smattering of apartment buildings. The northern part has larger houses, many of them fine examples of Queen Anne Victorian architecture, adorned with gables and inviting verandas. The historical society has unsuccessfully petitioned the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate a historic district in the northern part. Mr. Mrakovcic said a new petition would seek to cover a smaller area between Forest Park and Myrtle Avenue. Homeownership turnover in this microneighborhood of Richmond Hill is low, especially since the downturn of 2007 and 2008, said Mitra Hakimi, a real estate agent who works in Richmond Hill and other Queens neighborhoods. She said some owners were testing the market now, putting their houses up for sale to see how much buyers would be willing to pay. Inventory is more plentiful below Atlantic Avenue. Some homes share narrow driveways that lead to free standing garages that abut backyards of neighboring properties. This part of the neighborhood is lined with block after block of neatly kept homes, most with aluminum siding in white and light colors and well tended front gardens. Home values suffered during the mortgage crash. "Before the 2008 financial crisis," Ms. Hakimi said, "you couldn't find a property under 250,000; It didn't exist. Now you can easily find one." According to a search of properties in Richmond Hill on the Multiple Listing Service last month, 159 properties predominantly single and multifamily with some mixed used buildings were for sale. Prices are still depressed compared with levels before the crisis. According to Ms. Hakimi, a house that sold for 470,000 in 2004 would very likely sell for 100,000 less now. Rooplall Phagu, an agent with Family Choice Realty in Richmond Hill, said he saw a similar trend. A large two family home listed for 480,000 to 550,000 would have sold for as much as 650,000 before 2007, he said. Ms. Hakimi added: "It is a price driven market. Nobody is going to overpay. They want to buy, but at the right price." Richmond Hill is well served by the subway system, which has elevated lines running along two avenues. The rides to Manhattan are direct, if long. The northern part of Richmond Hill has J trains along Jamaica Avenue. A trip to Grand Central Terminal from the 104th Street station takes about an hour and requires a transfer to the 6 train at Canal Street. The A train has a branch that runs along Liberty Avenue ending at the intersection with Lefferts Boulevard, the center of Little Guyana. The journey from the Lefferts Avenue stop to Times Square takes about an hour. Residents also can take a bus to the nearest Long Island Rail Road stop in Kew Gardens; the trip to Penn Station in Manhattan takes 17 minutes. Residents of northern Richmond Hill have easy access to Forest Park, which has a golf course, a horseback riding school and equestrian path, a historic carousel, playgrounds, ball fields and trails for hiking and running. Shopping and eating on Liberty Avenue are also popular. Mr. David says Guyanese Americans who live in the Bronx and Brooklyn come to Liberty Avenue to do their grocery shopping. Ms. Agnani added: "On the weekend, it's very thriving on the streets with music and food. The diversity of our city it comes out very clearly there." The commercial area in northern Richmond Hill along Jamaica Avenue has experienced the loss of longtime businesses like Jahn's ice cream parlor, which closed a few years ago. A shopping center being built along Hillside Avenue at Lefferts Boulevard promises the arrival of a Dunkin' Donuts, a rare fast food presence in the neighborhood. Richmond Hill High School, with about 2,500 students, got a C on its most recent city progress report. Its combined SAT average last year was 1156, versus 1325 citywide. The neighborhood has a number of elementary schools, among them Public School 90 Horace Mann School, which has 860 students and got an A on its most recent progress report. No. 66 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has 500 students and also received an A. For middle school there is No. 137 America's School of Heroes, which has nearly 2,000 students and got a C. A mural depicting the neighborhood's beginnings in the late 19th century can be found inside the Queens Library at Richmond Hill on Hillside Avenue. The American artist Philip Evergood painted it in the 1930s with funding from the Works Progress Administration. Covering a wall above the fiction section, the work shows three scenes: a crowded and squalid immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan; a group of prosperous real estate barons surveying plans for a new garden community near a railroad stop; and a bucolic scene of trees, homes and happy mothers and children in the newly created Richmond Hill. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
A key base of support for the Democratic Party, black America, is lagging in its recovery from the recession and demanding more attention to economic issues than white voters. That divide could complicate presidential contenders' attempts to woo African American votes in 2020. A decade after the financial crisis, with national unemployment below 4 percent and wage gains slowly accelerating for typical workers, white Democrats largely see economic issues as a lower priority, according to polling conducted for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey. The opposite is true for African Americans, who are struggling even as the economy is growing relatively fast, and who want candidates to focus on job creation above all else. Black Democrats are more likely than white Democrats to say they benefit "less than most others" from the current economy. They are significantly more likely than whites to call jobs and the economy the most important issue facing the nation. White Democrats are significantly more likely to cite health care as the top issue, followed by the environment, with jobs a distant third. "There has been an economic boom for some people but not enough people, and certainly not enough people who look like me," said Joyce Wilson Harley , a survey respondent and former Democratic elected official in South Orange, N.J. Ms. Harley, who is black, said she was doing fine financially. But she said she didn't have to look far to see people who were struggling. And she said mainstream Democrats, including many presidential candidates, had focused too little on jobs, wages and other core economic issues. If Democrats were listening to black voters, she said, "you'd be hearing more about economic opportunities." "It's almost like they don't get it," Ms. Harley, 68, said. "The black women who carry the party, we were ignored and really highly disrespected, and our issues weren't as important to the Democrats as they should be given that we're the base of the Democratic Party." Seeking to highlight the concerns of black voters, the Democratic National Committee convened an African American Leadership Summit on Thursday in Atlanta, an event that drew several of the presidential candidates. Black voters overwhelmingly say they trust Democrats over Republicans on economic issues. And leading Democratic campaigns say that they recognize the struggles that black Democrats face and that they are devising policies to address them, including specific attempts to narrow the wage and wealth gaps between blacks and whites. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, for example, has pushed policies to reduce racial discrimination in housing and higher education. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has proposed an education plan that includes efforts to reduce segregation in schools. "We're not surprised to hear this, because for African Americans, we never recover in this country," said Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who is a co chairwoman of Mr. Sanders's presidential campaign. Mr. Sanders "does understand the disparities," she added. "He talks about them all the time." Mr. Sanders's pollster, Ben Tulchin, said the campaign's focus groups had revealed widespread economic anxieties among working class Democrats, even in an improving economy. "We're seeing that across the spectrum, whether you're African American, Latino or white working class," Mr. Tulchin said. Even in prosperous states like California, he said, voters are seeing extravagant new construction, yet feel that "I'm falling behind, or my wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living, so I'm feeling a lot of economic pressure." "When we're talking about working Americans, rebuilding the backbone of the country, we're talking about black folks, brown folks, women, Asia Pacific islanders," said Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. "We want to make clear that when we say the middle class is hurting, voters understand that's a middle class that represents everyone." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. But Alicia Garza, a prominent black activist, said that even when candidates talked about economic issues, they tended not to acknowledge the particular challenges facing African Americans and other groups. Criminal justice reform, for example, is an economic issue for both incarcerated people and their families, she said, but it is rarely framed that way. The cost of college hits black families harder because they earn less on average and have less accumulated wealth. "The disconnect between black voters and candidates who are talking about economic issues is that they often talk abut them in a race neutral way," Ms. Garza said. "Black communities differ when we talk about economic issues because there are these added barriers." Ms. Garza's organization, the Black Futures Lab, recently ran a survey of more than 31,000 black people across the country. Eight five percent of the respondents cited "low wages that are not enough to sustain a family" as a major problem, and 76 percent said the same about a lack of affordable housing. And while most respondents identified as Democrats, many were dissatisfied with the party: One in five people in the survey expressed an unfavorable view of the party . "We're waiting throughout the entire campaign season for some candidate to just hit the right note, and it's so rare that they do," Ms. Garza said. President Trump has often claimed that his economic policies are benefiting African Americans, and he proclaimed on Twitter and at campaign rallies last year that the black unemployment rate had hit its lowest level on record. The rate has risen since then, however, to 6.7 percent in April from a low of 5.9 percent in May last year. The unemployment rate for black Americans is more than double the white unemployment rate, which was 3.1 percent in April down from 3.5 percent in April 2018. Since the recession, wages have risen more slowly for black workers than for workers of other races. Federal Reserve officials reported last month that "gaps in economic well being by race and ethnicity have persisted even as overall well being has improved since 2013" with African Americans and Hispanics continuing to lag. In the Fed's "Report on the Economic Well Being of U.S. Households in 2018," nearly four in five whites said they were "at least doing O.K. financially." Only two in three black respondents said they were at least doing O.K. Compounding the challenge for candidates is that the Democratic divide in economic optimism, along racial lines, runs the other way: Blacks are more hopeful than whites. Black Democrats are more than twice as likely as whites to say they expect to be better off financially a year from now than they are today. When Geoffrey Cooper , who is black, graduated from college in 2009, few jobs were available for young people of any race. Today, things are better. The economy in Atlanta, where he lives, is strong, and Mr. Cooper and his wife are thinking about buying a house. But Mr. Cooper, 32, said the financial crisis and its aftermath had left him and many of his peers aware of how fragile even a seemingly sturdy economy could be. And he said the economy was working better for people like him who have college degrees than for the majority of workers who did not. "I would love to see candidates come to here and talk about jobs and talk about why is it that we still expect 7.25, the minimum wage, to be an effective wage," he said. "That's real life stuff that people care about, and Democrats have got to talk to those issues." Democrats, he said, have too often campaigned for black votes without listening to black voters. "Democrats who want the endorsements of the N.A.A.C.P. or the endorsement of Al Sharpton, they go up to Harlem and go to Red Rooster or Sylvia's," he said, referring to restaurants that are frequent locations for campaign photo opportunities. "They're not talking to people who are affected by these everyday problems." Many candidates for the Democratic nomination, including Mr. Sanders, Ms. Warren and Mr. Biden, argue that their policy proposals such as free college and "Medicare for all" would help everyday voters, including many African Americans. But Mr. Cooper, who works in marketing for an electronics manufacturer, said he did not like the leftward turn of the party. "Come to the middle, where the majority of America is, and talk about a sensible solution," he said. About the survey: The data in this article came from an online survey of 2,574 adults conducted by the polling firm SurveyMonkey from May 6 to May 12. 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 three percentage points, so differences of less than that amount are statistically insignificant. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
If on the scale of child friendliness, the bacchanalian Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is a 1 and the Kids Corner Music Festival in Philadelphia scores a 10, what is a 5? Where can parents hear the bands they love without exposing their children to, say, the desert sun and people on amphetamines? One answer is the new Eaux Claires Music Arts Festival in Eau Claire, Wis., on July 17 and 18. The Bon Iver frontman, Justin Vernon, is organizing the inaugural event with Aaron Dessner of the National, bringing acts like Boys Noize and Sufjan Stevens to his hometown. In February, Mr. Vernon told The Times that he wanted to create the kind of festival he'd like to attend, one that favored intimate performances and quiet places for attendees over "4,000 things happening at once." Michael Brown, the creative director of the festival, said he hopes that atmosphere appeals to a variety of music fans, from revelers to families. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Terry Cannon, who created a waggish alternative to the Baseball Hall of Fame with oddball artifacts like a cigar partly smoked by Babe Ruth and unconventional inductees like Dock Ellis, who claimed to have pitched a no hitter on LSD, died on Aug. 1 at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 66. His wife, Mary Cannon, said the cause was bile duct cancer. In the mid 1990s, Mr. Cannon turned his love of baseball into the Baseball Reliquary, a nonprofit organization that presents a disarming collection of unusual objects and a Shrine of the Eternals a roster of individuals who are elected to it more for their unique personalities and achievements than for their statistics. "Terry guided the reliquary into existence by reaching out to fans who looked beyond big names and ballooning salaries and saw the game as a rich cultural stew," John Schulian, a screenwriter and former sports columnist, wrote in a tribute to Mr. Cannon on The Stacks Reader, a journalism website. A puckish historian, Mr. Cannon opened every annual shrine induction ceremony by leading the audience in a Pasadena library in the banging of cowbells. That was a tribute to Hilda Chester, the leather lunged Brooklyn Dodger fan known for pounding a cowbell at Ebbets Field. The Hilda Award is given to distinguished fans. "That just gets better every year," he said in 2017, as the ringing subsided. The shrine signaled its type of inductee with its first election, in 1999. Those honored included Curt Flood, who helped pave the way for free agency by challenging baseball's reserve clause, which had tied a player to his team year after year unless an owner traded or released him; Bill Veeck, the maverick owner of several teams; and Ellis, a thoughtful, idiosyncratic Black pitcher, mostly for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who spoke out on racial issues. Ellis attended his induction ceremony and wept, saying that Major League Baseball had never honored him. He recalled receiving a letter from Jackie Robinson (a 2005 shrine inductee) urging him to continue to push for change in baseball. "He was crying his eyes out," Ms. Cannon, who is also the reliquary's artistic director, said in an interview. "I had to reach over and pat his hand to bring him back." Other inductees elected by the reliquary's almost 300 members, who pay 25 in annual dues include Jim Bouton, the pitcher who scandalized baseball with his book "Ball Four"; Emmett Ashford, the first Black umpire in Major League Baseball; Pam Postema, a minor league umpire thwarted in her quest to reach the big leagues; and Marvin Miller, the transformational leader of the players' union. Mr. Miller had been rejected by Cooperstown several times before being voted in posthumously this year. (He died in 2012.) The shrine welcomed him in 2003. That honor "puzzled me at first," Mr. Miller once told The New York Times. About Mr. Cannon, he said, "Despite the fact that he likes to have fun, he's a serious individual and an intelligent one, and he deserves to be taken seriously." Still, the artifacts Mr. Cannon collected invariably prompted a smile as did his use, at his wife's suggestion, of the word "reliquary," which means a container for holy relics. There is the jockstrap worn by the 3 foot 7 Eddie Gaedel, who appeared as a pinch hitter for the St. Louis Browns in 1951 in a stunt conceived by Veeck. And there is the sacristy box, which a priest used in 1948 to give the last rites to Babe Ruth (who died nearly a month later). Then there are the curlers that Ellis wore on the field during batting practice at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh after Ebony magazine wrote about his hairstyle. "I was interested in things that other museums weren't interested in collecting," Mr. Cannon told Pasadena Weekly in 2017. "Like, if they wanted bats and gloves, I wanted things to keep famous stories alive. It was more interesting to find a desiccated hot dog that Babe Ruth partially digested than a signed baseball or bat." Mr. Cannon had no museum in which to display the artifacts. He kept them at home (a life size cardboard cutout of the former Detroit Tigers manager Sparky Anderson still stands by his bed) and in a storage unit. He showed his wares in exhibitions at libraries. This year, however, Whittier College in California agreed to become the collection's new home. In 2015, Whittier became the home of the Institute for Baseball Studies, a research center whose books, artwork, periodicals and papers about the game were donated by Mr. Cannon and many other sources. Mr. Cannon was a director of the institute. Terry Alan Cannon was born on Aug. 31, 1953, in Dearborn, Mich. His father, William, was an engineer at Ford, McDonnell Douglas and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a consultant to NASA. His mother, Charlotte (Haas) Cannon, was a homemaker. A passionate baseball card collector, Terry was 12 when he met Juan Marichal, the star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, at an exhibition game and got him to sign the game program, upon which Marichal promptly perspired. For days afterward, Mr. Cannon recalled, he ran around his neighborhood crying, "Look, I've got Juan Marichal's sweat!" He graduated from San Francisco State University in 1974 and then worked for his father, who had retired, at Skinned Knuckles, a monthly publication for vintage and antique automotive restorers. (His father collected prewar Studebakers.) He stayed there for nearly 30 years. He also founded Pasadena Filmforum (now Los Angeles Filmforum), which shows experimental films. After stepping down in 1983, he published Spiral, a journal about experimental film, and an underground arts newspaper, Gosh! By the time he started the reliquary in 1996, his baseball collecting had shifted from the baseball trading cards of his youth to more sophisticated artifacts and ephemera. The Shrine of the Eternals began in 1999. He worked at the vintage car magazine until 2005, when he sold it for 1. He then moved to a new day job as a high school library technician and later as a library assistant at the Allendale branch of the Pasadena Public Library. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sisters, Barbara and Nancy, and his brother, Philip. When Mr. Cannon was close to death, his wife said, she wanted to send him off by invoking the names of two men who represented his passions, for baseball and also for jazz. One was Jim Bouton, who once called the reliquary the "people's hall of fame." (He died last year.) The other was Sun Ra, the avant garde pianist and bandleader who died in 1993. "In an excited voice, as if I were seeing them," Ms. Cannon recalled, "I said: 'Terry wow! Sun Ra and Jim Bouton are right over there and they're waiting for you.' And out of his near death state, he raised his eyebrows up and down twice, curled his lip and squeezed my hand. Three breaths later he was gone." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Conor McGregor has retired and un retired before, so it is possible he will return to the Ultimate Fighting Championship. But if McGregor, who loves to talk as much as he loves to fight and loves to win, has indeed left the sport for good after months of career and legal troubles, U.F.C. will be without its most popular and recognizable fighter just as it is trying to expand its footprint in a crowded sports landscape. "In the short run, they'll miss the attention that Conor gives them, no doubt," said Marshall Zelaznik, who spent 10 years as a U.F.C. executive before leaving in 2016. "For the longevity of a promotion, you need these kinds of stars." Read: McGregor is under investigation in Ireland after an accusation of sexual assault. U.F.C. has churned out other athletes with crossover appeal. Jon Jones, the first mixed martial artist with a Nike signature shoe, recently returned from a 15 month doping suspension. Ronda Rousey, who has become a professional wrestler, regularly drew huge pay per view audiences as recently as 2016. Now the sport is confronting a fallow period, with unfortunate timing. ESPN, the new U.F.C. broadcast partner, has taken over the sport's pay per view distribution and will air the main events exclusively on its streaming network, ESPN . "It's at a crossroads," David Carter, the director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California, said of U.F.C. The company's alignment with ESPN ushers a once renegade sport deeper into the mainstream. On top of a reported five year, 1.5 billion deal struck last May that wrested the complete media rights package from Fox, ESPN paid an undisclosed fee to extend that deal through 2025 and become the only purveyor of pay per view fights in the United States. They will be shown exclusively on ESPN , which costs 4.99 monthly. Main cards will cost an extra 59.99. ESPN has not released any viewership data from ESPN beyond acknowledging in its quarterly earnings call in February that two million subscribers had signed up and that it attracted 568,000 new subscribers in January, when the initial deal with U.F.C. kicked in. It is unknown, for instance, whether people signed up for ESPN and then left and if so, how many. "Our metrics show that our fan base has significantly scaled," said Mark Shapiro, the president of Endeavor, "and that M.M.A. viewers are buying the fights as much for the slate of fights as they are any one individual fighter." None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. According to Nielsen data, through five live telecasts on ESPN's main channels, U.F.C. is averaging 1,462,000 viewers, or more than twice as many as its fights averaged (707,000) on FS1 last year. Still, U.F.C. appears to have reached a critical juncture in the same manner as other leagues, like the N.B.A., that struggled with sustainable star power during transition seasons. The challenge for U.F.C., Carter said, is to develop the new fighters to supplant the old guard when, to some extent, fans will have to pay for an ESPN subscription to get to know them. And lately casual sports fans have been hearing about U.F.C. largely in connection with fight cancellations or suspensions. Or in McGregor's case, a suspension for his role in a brawl after he lost a fight in Las Vegas and criminal charges after he was caught on video last spring outside Barclays Center throwing a metal dolly into the window of a bus carrying U.F.C. athletes and employees. He pleaded guilty in a Brooklyn court to one count of disorderly conduct. "That's not limited to U.F.C. at all," Carter said. "But at some point, I think at some point casual fans get fatigued by the circus element of it." By selling the rights to ESPN, U.F.C. no longer has to worry about some of the uncontrollable elements that affect pay per view purchases injuries, suspensions, retirements. The venture is somewhat risky for ESPN as it tries to determine whether a substantial audience will quickly adapt to a new network and subscribe to ESPN , but the deal represents a long term investment. ESPN did not make anyone available for comment, but a partnership with the network improves U.F.C.'s chances of becoming a topic of conversation on ESPN programs like SportsCenter and First Take. "I do think they need to do a better job of building stars, making people stand out," Chuck Liddell, one of the early U.F.C. stars, said in a telephone interview. "There's so many fights now. Back in the day, there used to be six U.F.C. events. Now there's what, 40?" Under ESPN's deal, there will be 42 nights of live events, including 12 on pay per view, which will increase the need for appealing fights. Zelaznik joined U.F.C. in 2006, in the middle of Liddell's career. He said he could not recall feeling anxious about unearthing new talent, or there being a lull. "The biggest difference right now is that when I came on, U.F.C. was the only game in town it was the entire cola category," said Zelaznik, who oversaw U.F.C.'s pay per view and digital business and is now the chief executive officer at Glory Sports International. "Now U.F.C. is clearly the Coke and Pepsi, and then there's a lot of RC Cola and Shasta. The uniqueness has sort of worn off. The novelty isn't what it was. People are familiar with it, so how do you make people care?" That question is central to the growth of U.F.C., which wants to protect itself for the future while providing a return on ESPN's investment. Michael Berman, executive vice president of programming and general counsel for In Demand, which until recently distributed U.F.C. fights to cable systems, said that interest had declined over the past few years, except for a few megaevents. Across its 25 cards in 2017 and 2018, U.F.C. attracted 400,000 pay per view purchases a threshold for what Berman considers substantial only four times. U.F.C. events topped a million once, when Khabib Nurmagomedov defeated McGregor in October, according to MMAPayout.com, a website that tracks the business of mixed martial arts. In its 26 cards from 2015 to 2016, when Rousey and McGregor were fighting regularly, 13 pay per view bouts surpassed 400,000 purchases, and seven exceeded a million. "There's so much content available that it becomes very difficult to differentiate between a lower level pay per view and a fight that had been appearing on Fox or FS1," Berman said. "If you've got three weeks of U.F.C. programming and two are available for free and one is 65, the one that's 65 really has to stand out to pay that money. Without the big stars, it's difficult to convince people to spend." That's especially true, Berman added, now that people are spending on other streaming services like Hulu, Netflix or DAZN and will have to determine whether they want to pay for another. "ESPN has that brand name and can build off that, but they're not the only game in town," Carter said. The best way, Zelaznik said, to distinguish U.F.C. to make people care is to identify fighters as personalities. Liddell knocked out people. Georges St Pierre kept fans interested by defending his title nine consecutive times. Michael Bisping won a season of the reality television series "The Ultimate Fighter" then won the middleweight title. If you don't have a great fighter, Zelaznik said, you can't make him a star. "That's when you need the Conors of the world the Brock Lesnars, even the Jon Joneses," Zelaznik said. "Otherwise you're just fishing in the same pond, repurposing all of your fans. You've got to grow in this space or you die." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Judah Guber, who is sometimes mistaken for celebrities. including Anderson Cooper and Peter Scanavino, near his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times Judah Guber, who is sometimes mistaken for celebrities. including Anderson Cooper and Peter Scanavino, near his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Julianne Kassidy had one ex she definitely didn't want to run into. (Don't we all?) In late October, it had almost been a year since Ms. Kassidy, 20, a college student in Los Angeles, had last seen this former boyfriend until she walked into a grocery store, and there he was. Her heart raced, she felt sweaty and she started panicking. Would he follow her to the car? Would she have to talk to him? Then it dawned on her: He didn't recognize her because, per local and national guidelines, she was wearing a face covering. "He looked at me dead in the face and walked right past me," Ms. Kassidy said. "I was like, 'Oh, thank God.'" The main role of a mask is obviously to protect you and the people around you from the coronavirus. But some people are finding another positive benefit to wearing them: anonymity. The ability to walk down the street and not be recognized is a gift many are cherishing. For some it means the end of unwanted small talk when they are trying to run errands. For others, it allows them to be exactly how they want to be in public there is no need to put on a fake smile or hold back tears regardless of who is around. Mr. Franklin, who is 35 and works for a pharmacy software company, used to dread bumping into people he knows. It gave him anxiety to be peppered with questions or have to think of what to say. He has even had a few panic attacks. Sure, wearing a mask limits those encounters. But it also makes it easier for him to chat with people when a run in still occurs. "I suppose it's a vulnerability thing, or it could just be a breathing regulation thing or a 'we are in this together' unity thing," he said. "I really don't have a good answer, I just know I feel a lot less anxious when I am wearing it in public. It makes it a little bit easier to talk to people." He said even when the pandemic ends and masks are no longer medically necessary, he will keep one in his pocket. Mr. Franklin also has someone in his life he doesn't ever want to see again. "It's a fellow, and I would rather not share why I dislike him," he said. "There is no great way to explain it, but we all have these people we would rather see first than vice versa, right?" Mr. Franklin was in a gas station, and the man in question walked up to the counter in front of him. He immediately thought he could use his mask as a shield. "I looked away from him, and I made sure it was far up and covered my face," he said. "I saw him looking at me twice. I counted it. Then he left. He didn't seem to recognize me. Just that extra seed of doubt that someone may not be who you think, it was enough to keep him away." Mr. Chileski, 20, likes premeditated social gatherings. "If I know someone I know is going to be at a certain place, and I talk to them, I don't care. I'll mentally prepare to have that conversation," he said. "I like having friends." But spontaneous encounters, not so much. "Sometimes when people spring up on me and pester me with a whole bunch of questions, it is rough for me," he said. "I will immediately turn around and leave the dining room if I see people I know." This year has gone much smoother than the last because of one handy prop: his mask, which allows him to see and be seen only when he wants. The day after Mr. Chileski moved in, a friend of a friend waved to him in the parking lot, but he didn't recognize her because of her mask. It was the perfect excuse to avoid saying hi (although he later figured out who it was and apologized because he felt bad ignoring her). Some of his classes still meet in person, and he can sit anywhere in the room without being pinpointed. He no longer gets approached in the cafeteria line or while running errands. "The masks are kind of a good thing because they just let me be," he said. "For outgoing people that must stink, but for me, it's phenomenal." Bhushan Sethi, 47, lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and runs around Central Park, either the loop or the reservoir, daily. He is a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and this ritual is his "me" time. "It's my way of processing some stuff and preparing for the day," he said. As the park has grown more crowded during the pandemic, Mr. Sethi guesses he is running past clients, colleagues and friends he knows. But his mask helps him stay in the zone without worrying too much about who is around him. "You don't look for people now," he said. "There just aren't as many casual collisions." Not that Mr. Sethi is some kind of misanthrope. "I am very proud of watching all these people wearing masks," he said. Some people, however, dislike being overlooked, and so they are wearing "signature" masks, in bold prints like leopard or gingham or, more radically, changing their hair color. Kendra Vanderwerf, 34, runs a hair salon in her home in Ontario, Canada. With her striking red hair and five foot height, clients come up to her regularly, even when she's wearing her mask. "People recognize me as the tiny thing wandering around with bright hair," she said. Her husband, David Vanderwerf, 40, a teacher, offers another distinguishing characteristic: He walks with a cane. But she doesn't have the same clues to identify others. "I am waiting in the conversation for them to drop a hint to who they are," she said. "I don't want to be mean and say, 'I can't recognize you with your mask on,' even though I can't." She has occasionally had to ask leading questions about work and their families to gather more information. "My food is expensive because I'm gluten free," said Ms. Vance, who is 24 and works in customer service in Kingsport, Tenn. "It was a little embarrassing." Mr. Franklin of the gas station near miss works at a medical marijuana dispensary in his free time. The other day he was chatting with a client for a few minutes, before he started considering it may be someone he already knows. "She had a lot of similarities to a good friend of mine," he said. "I had to look at her medical marijuana card to be sure. I was going to feel really, really awful if I didn't recognize her because of a small piece of cloth over her face." Judah Guber, 37, who works in digital strategy and, like Mr. Sethi, lives on the Upper East Side, has one of those faces that people think they recognize. "The guy I get most these days is Peter Scanavino from 'Law and Order: SVU' and sometimes Simon Baker," he said. "I also get Anderson Cooper all the time." "Strangers stare at me, and I'm always like, 'Do I have something on my face?'" he added, laughing. Wearing a mask has only compounded Mr. Guber's problem. With half his face covered, people really have no idea if he is a celebrity or not. "I passed by Stumble Inn, this bar, the other day and someone said, 'I think that is Mark Zuckerberg.'" he said. "I turned around, and I heard him say to his friends, 'Is it really him?'" Mr. Guber was not flattered. "I wish I was more anonymous when wearing a mask," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
France, Not Waiting for European Union, to Tax U.S. Tech Firms as '19 Starts PARIS With the so called Yellow Vest movement forcing concessions that have widened the country's budget shortfall, the French government is accelerating a plan to place hefty taxes on American technology giants that have long maneuvered to keep their bills low while reaping huge sums of money. France has been working with other countries on a European Union wide digital tax on companies including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, but some members of the bloc have balked at the proposal. Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister, said last week that France would move ahead on its own if the union did not approve such a tax by March. On Monday, he moved up that date. "The tax will be introduced no matter what on Jan. 1, and it will be for the whole of 2019," Mr. Le Maire said. A week ago, he urged the public to "fight with me" on the issue in an interview on French radio, during which he said, "It's time for these companies to pay the taxes that they owe." Mr. Le Maire estimated the total tax bill for the companies affected at around 500 million euros, or 568 million. It will help pay for EUR10 billion in emergency spending announced last week by President Emmanuel Macron after waves of angry citizens took to the streets of Paris and other cities to protest growing inequality. The tax, Mr. Le Maire said, would most likely cover not only the companies' direct sales in France, but also revenue from online marketplaces and the resale of private data. He declined to discuss other details, including the means for introducing the tax or the rate of taxation. The proposal being considered by the European Commission would tax digital media companies based on where in the 28 member European Union they generate revenue, rather than in the often low tax countries, like Ireland and Luxembourg, where they have regional headquarters. The push, which has been led by France and Germany, has been resisted by the low tax countries and has also raised concerns that it will exacerbate Europe's simmering trade tensions with the United States. France's decision to go its own way for now did not appear to derail the European Commission's proposal. A commission spokesman noted in a statement that "about a dozen E.U. countries already have or are considering a form of taxation of digital activities." Those countries include Britain, where officials recently unveiled a proposal to impose a 2 percent tax on revenue that social media platforms, search engines and online marketplaces earn there. Spain is introducing its own 3 percent tax on online advertising services, brokering services and the resale of personal data. But, the commission spokesman noted, "the announcement by France does make it even more urgent for the E.U. to agree on a common digital services tax." Mr. Le Maire said he still hoped that a union wide agreement could be reached by March. Amazon, Apple and Twitter declined to comment. Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment, although the director general of Google France told reporters this month, "Google will pay if a tax on revenue is put in place" in France or in the European Union. Large technology companies have long avoided paying taxes comparable to other businesses in the European countries where they operate. Facebook, for instance, paid corporate taxes of EUR1.9 million in 2017 in France on stated revenue of EUR55.9 million. The company has more than 34 million users in the country, and much of its revenue was logged in Ireland. Apple paid around EUR19 million in 2017 taxes in France. Amazon, too, does business across the union, but has benefited by having its regional headquarters in the low tax haven of Luxembourg. The European Commission estimates that the online retailer and other companies pay an average effective tax rate of just 9.5 percent, compared with the roughly 23 percent paid by traditional businesses. The big companies are not alone in opposing the commission's digital tax proposal. European start ups have said it would handicap an expanding tech sector in the region that has struggled to match the scale of markets in the United States and China. France and Germany responded to such concerns by narrowing the proposal to include only larger technology companies, particularly advertising focused companies like Facebook and Google. Those changes have not mollified everyone. France's imposition of a digital tax is one front in a wider campaign in Europe to target American technology companies amid growing concerns about their power and influence in society as well as their business practices. Germany has enacted a law requiring Facebook and Twitter to remove flagged hate speech within 24 hours or face fines. France has passed rules allowing judges to order the removal of misinformation around elections. Regulators at the European Commission have also targeted Google, Apple and Amazon for antitrust violations, imposing billions of euros in fines and orders to return unpaid taxes. The French government sued Google this year for EUR1.12 billion in taxes it claims the company avoided paying on advertising revenue earned. A Paris court ruled that the government could not collect because Google had declared that the revenue belonged to an Irish subsidiary. The government is appealing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Despite my decades of gardening practice, I feel frantic every April and never more so than in the chaotic spring of 2020, when the normally simple parts of the equation, like acquiring supplies or hiring a helper, present their own challenges on top of the anticipated eruption of perennial weeds like garlic mustard. But I'm sticking to what I say each year at this time: We are not powerless over April, although in most places, it's a contender for the busiest month of the garden year. First, a note on timing that lets anyone worried about being late off the hook, and even offers a pat on the back for procrastinating: To support beneficial insects, it's best not to start your spring cleanup until after you've had a steady stream of 50 degree days. Douglas W. Tallamy, a professor in the department of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware and the author of "Nature's Best Hope" and "Bringing Nature Home," recently reminded me of the importance of waiting until the weather settles. A warm stretch triggers some overwintering insects, notably bees and certain butterflies and moths, plus spiders (which are not insects, but major consumers of unwanted insect pests), to get moving. Once they do, often after resting all winter in leaf litter or under tree bark, they are no longer as vulnerable to spring cleaning actions that might kill them or move them away from their host plants. Shall we proceed, then, one chore at a time, as the weather allows? Every year, I follow this set of eight steps that any gardener can do no experience required. Again, first things first: In the edible garden, why prep the tomato, eggplant or pepper rows transplants that won't be set out until all danger of frost is past if you haven't planted lettuce or other cold hardy things yet? Spot clean targeted areas for the earliest crops, then double back. Similarly, begin by gently removing matted leaves to uncover spring ornamentals, like flower bulbs and other early bloomers, even if you can't stop to clean the whole bed. The performance of tulips or trillium is far more enjoyable when they are not still up to their necks in debris. If you scored seeds early, before they became as elusive as toilet paper, dry beans and pasta, make a calendar of what to sow when, indoors or out, and organize the packets week by week, in an accordion file or recipe card box. (Don't know when to sow what? My calculator tool for vegetables, herbs and annual flowers will help.) I want to have just enough of each edible over a long harvest, not a momentary glut then nothing more. Move any packet that's best sown a little at a time ahead two weeks in the filing system after you use it, to plan for a staggered supply of salad greens, carrots, beets, radishes and even cilantro (which bolts fast, so you need succession sowings or you'll have flowers and then coriander seeds instead of tasty leaves). When it's time to sow bush beans, I likewise do so two or three times, a couple of weeks apart. Make Space in the Compost Heap for Incoming Debris Because you'll be generating it fast. Extract (and preferably screen) finished material from the bottom to top dress beds as you clean them. No compost heap? Dedicate a spot that's out of the way but neither dank and too shady nor in the baking sun. Segregating raked up leaves in a separate pile can yield homemade fodder for the next task: mulching. Skip all those plastic bags, if possible, and ideally choose a locally produced material. (The most local of all are your raked up and aged leaves, which are great on vegetable beds and more once they get crumbly.) In some areas this spring, mulch deliveries are allowed; elsewhere, they aren't. But even in states where garden centers are closed to foot traffic, no contact curbside pickup of prepaid orders including bagged products may be happening. Check your garden center's website and call to find out about availability. Also, maybe add more birdhouses a great project for homebound handy types, and a good way to upcycle scrap wood. I usually clean mine in March, but better late than not at all, assuming nobody has claimed them yet. The Sialis website (Sialia sialis is the Latin name of the Eastern bluebird) offers guidance on how to be a good bluebird landlord, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's NestWatch site has detailed birdhouse plans that suit the needs of every species of cavity nester. And While You're Doing All of That Don't forget: Never walk, or work, in mucky soil. I stay off soft beds and lawns, too, delaying some chores. Those tasks can be done in another week, but you can't easily fix soil turned to concrete. For Encouragement, Treat Yourself to a Little Color I like big bowls of pansies or violas to cheer me on in April and May as I prep my Northeastern garden, because the list of chores can feel daunting, especially in years when winter keeps performing mini encores or, as this year, when help is not accessible. The local garden center is my first call to inquire if, and how, I can get plants, and which ones they will put out by the curb for me to reward myself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Emma Tennant, who blended fantasy, science fiction and social satire in dozens of novels that explored the borderland between daylight and dreams, anatomized contemporary Britain and updated the works of Jane Austen and other classic writers in sequels that often had a feminist twist, died on Jan. 21 in London. She was 79. The cause was posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer's disease, her daughter Rose Dempsey said. An unusually prolific writer, Ms. Tennant produced dystopian fantasies like "The Time of the Crack" (1973), about a seismic fault under the Thames that destroys half of London, and comic novels of manners like "The Adventures of Robina, by Herself: Being the Memoirs of a Debutante at the Court of Queen Elizabeth II" (1986). In "Alice Fell" (1980), one of many novels in which she looked deeply into the psychology of modern women, she recast the myth of Persephone and Demeter as a mother's search for her errant daughter in the urban underworld of Soho. Perhaps most provocatively, she wrote audacious sequels to famous English novels. In "Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde" (1989), she transformed Robert Louis Stevenson's dark tale into a contemporary feminist parable. In two Jane Austen sequels, "Pemberley: Or, Pride and Prejudice Continued" (1993) and "An Unequal Marriage: Or, Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later" (1994), she risked the wrath of Janeites by imagining Elizabeth Bennet's anxieties as the wife of Mr. Darcy and detailing the couple's squabbles and estrangements. Writing in The Village Voice in 1990, the critic Gary Indiana called her work "a startling procession of novels unlike anything else being written in England: wildly imaginative, risk taking books inspired by dreams, fairy tales, fables, science fiction and detective stories, informed by a wicked Swiftian vision of the U.K. in decline." Emma Christina Tennant was born on Oct. 20, 1937, in London. Her father, Christopher Grey Tennant, was the second Baron Glenconner, with a family fortune derived from a large chemical business. Her mother was the former Elizabeth Powell. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the family moved to the Glen, a mammoth Gothic folly implanted in a deep valley near Peebles, in the Scottish Borders. It was in the woods outside Emma Tennant's childhood bedroom window that the 19th century Scottish writer James Hogg had set his fairy tales, which enchanted Emma and led her to his novel "The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner." That book became a decisive influence on one of her most celebrated works, "The Bad Sister" (1978). When she was 9, the family returned to London, where she attended St. Paul's Girls' School. She left at 15. After attending a small finishing school in Oxford, studying languages and art history, she spent a year studying art at the Louvre. Ms. Tennant was presented at court in 1956, and a year later she married Sebastian Yorke, the son of the novelist Henry Green. The marriage ended in divorce, as did her marriages to Christopher Booker, a founder of the satirical weekly Private Eye, and the journalist Alexander Cockburn. In addition to her daughter Rose, she is survived by her husband, Tim Owens; a son, the writer Matthew Yorke; another daughter, Daisy Cockburn; a sister, Catherine Tennant; a brother, Toby; and three grandchildren. Under the pen name Catherine Aydy, Ms. Tennant published "The Color of Rain," a dark satire about the British upper classes, in 1963. Her publishers submitted it for the Prix Formentor, awarded yearly in Majorca, Spain. The chairman of the judging panel, the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, denounced it as a prime specimen of the decadence of the British novel. Ms. Tennant found her footing in the early 1970s after discovering writers whose anti realist qualities dovetailed with her own love of myth, magic and dream. In 1980 she told the reference work World Authors: "It became gradually clear to me, after meeting British science fiction writers J. G. Ballard amongst them that a way to the center for me lay in the fantastic; and despite the very deep loathing of the British literary establishment for any writing that could be so described, I set out to read as many Latin American and Central European writers as possible, finding confirmation in such works as Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita' and the writing of Bruno Schulz that there was nothing inherently 'silly,' as the English would have it, in showing the world through lenses both fantastic and real: that the English were indeed limited by a creative feebleness and love of irony which left them out of the most interesting writing, all going on in other parts of the world." This new orientation was reflected in "The Time of the Crack" and the two novels that followed, "The Last of the Country House Murders" (1974) and "Hotel de Dream" (1976). In 1975 she founded the influential literary journal Bananas, which published new work by Mr. Ballard, Beryl Bainbridge, Angela Carter and the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. She served as editor for three years. Her many novels also included "Queen of Stones" (1982), a feminist retelling of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies"; "Faustine" (1991), about a woman in her late 40s who makes a pact with the Devil to return to her 20s; and "The Beautiful Child" (2010), a ghost story revolving around an unfinished manuscript by Henry James. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Noah Centineo, the "internet's newest boyfriend," found time to chill out in New York this month. Noah Centineo Is Hot. If Only He Could Cool Off. Noah Centineo was just two steps from By Chloe, a fast casual vegan restaurant on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, when he was recognized. "You went to Boca High, right?" said a brunette woman in her 20s, wearing a tank top and skirt. "Yeah," Mr. Centineo said cautiously, looking up. "So did I," the woman said, pulling out her earbuds. Turns out they had an acquaintance in common from their high school days in Florida. "You're kidding me," he said, using more colorful language. Mr. Centineo is used to being recognized these days, though not just for going to Boca High. As the 22 year old star of the Netflix teen comedy "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," he sent the internet into a collective swoon last month, playing Peter Kavinsky, the jock with a heart of gold. Mr. Centineo swears it hasn't gone to his head. "It's on a two dimensional screen. It's not like it's really happening in real life," he said, drinking a kale and spinach cold pressed juice. "You start noticing your numbers and people start reaching out to you." "That's really been the surreal part of it," he continued, "random people who I haven't spoken with in years or people that I'm close with who are like, 'Oh my God, you're on my Instagram feed, you're on my Twitter, you're all over Tumblr.'" Mr. Centineo was in town from Los Angeles, where he lives, to promote his latest project for Netflix: "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser," a gender swapped, digital age retelling of "Cyrano de Bergerac" set in a high school. He had back to back interviews, and to get out some of his abundant boyish energy, he suggested a stroll around NoLIta, a neighborhood that he tries to check out whenever he is in New York. But he may not have been prepared for the triple digit temperatures and sweat inducing humidity. It wasn't even noon and already his tangle of dreamy curls was starting to droop. Faint pools of sweat appeared on his striped T shirt and button down, which he wore with chunky sneakers by Valentino. "They're so sick," Mr. Centineo said. Sadly, they were just on loan from his stylist. What was supposed to be a leisurely stroll soon became a game of staying cool, something difficult for someone who describes himself as easily distracted. Up the block from By Chloe, he spotted a shaded fire station driveway and bounded across the street into oncoming traffic. "I just like climbing things and exploring," he said, as sweat formed above his matinee idol brows. While Mr. Centineo isn't new to the small screen (his TV credits include a 53 episode run on the progressive family drama "The Fosters"), "To All The Boys I've Loved Before" has been a career breakthrough. What is it like becoming a verified celebrity overnight? "It's all of the above: It's humbling, it's inspiring, and it's really motivating," he said, as he popped into Carre d'artistes, an affordable art gallery on Prince Street, for some robust air conditioning. "I've been working for this for 14 plus years." Mr. Centineo grew up near Palm Beach, Fla., where he got his start in community theater. Local modeling gigs and commercials landed him an agent and bigger roles in Los Angeles. At a certain point, his agent said he had to move west if he wanted to continue. "That's when I looked at my parents and was like, 'Yo, I'm about it. If you move me there I'll be successful. This is what I want to dedicate my life to,'" he said. While Los Angeles was great for Mr. Centineo's career, it also offered temptations. "A year and a half ago I decided to cut the negative habits, things and people out, and dedicated myself to loving myself and my career," he said. Instead of drinking and smoking weed, he began working out and eating better. "This feels like the fruits of the harvest coming to fruition," he said. "What I found was, when I took care of my body, my mind and my emotions and my heart were way happier. When I wasn't drinking, when I wasn't smoking weed and partying, I was responsible for my actions and I could choose my actions from a more mindful place. And my life changed drastically." Outside the gallery, Mr. Centineo noticed the corner traffic light and took its very presence as a dare. "Should I climb it?" he said, with a mischievous grin. Before receiving an answer, his 6 foot 2 frame was already clambering on top of a trash can. Mr. Centineo hasn't let fame dampen his wild, youthful charms. "It's crazy when you get rocked in the face for the first time," he said. "I'll be sparring, and someone will come down and nail me with a right hook and I'll start smiling. That's when the adrenaline hits." After his little stunt, he stumbled into the Elizabeth Street Garden, hoping to find shade. The collection of odd statues caught his interest, and he wound his way through overgrown pots of plants and circled a gazebo before spotting cover near a gardening shed. Shelter at last! Not once during two hours with a reporter did Mr. Centineo pull out his smartphone to check his Instagram or Snapchat, which is surprising for an actor who so convincingly plays a teenager living in a social media saturated world. He's no Luddite but is consciously trying to manage his tech intake. "The other day I went up to some dunes in Malibu and just turned off my phone for, like, eight hours," he said. "I leave my phone in the car when I go hiking or when I'm at the gym." Still, he recognizes that his celebrity owes a debt to Instagram. "When you're someone who is in the attention of the masses, you can't help but become a sort of reality personality." The shade turned out to provide little relief from the heat. It was getting close to 2 p.m. and he had more interviews in store. And he needed to freshen up again, as sweat was dripping down the side of his face. "I've got to embrace it," Mr. Centineo said with a defeated laugh. "It's just about being in the moment." It was time to head back to his air conditioned chariot, an Escalade, and head off to People magazine's offices, which were presumably icebox cold. As he headed out of the garden, a timid young woman with dyed blond hair stopped him and asked for a photo. Another Boca High alum? No, she had seen him on TV. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB at Brooklyn Steel (Feb. 2, 9 p.m.). Named for the leather clad toughs from the 1953 film "The Wild One," this California band started making heavy, heady rock around the turn of the millennium its 2001 debut, "B.R.M.C.," is a minor classic of that time and never stopped. The eighth Black Rebel Motorcycle Club album, "Wrong Creatures," arrived in January. The group's sound may no longer reflect the latest fashions, but it's somehow comforting to find it unchanged after all these years. bowerypresents.com/brooklyn steel BROCKHAMPTON at Irving Plaza (Feb. 2 4, 9 p.m.). This freewheeling crew of rappers and producers, which traces its origins to a popular online forum for fans of Kanye West, has energy and charisma to spare. Brockhampton released its first, second and third full length studio albums in 2017 "Saturation II," from August, is the one to try if you're short on time, although they're all solid listens and has a fourth on the way. The group sold out three nights at Irving Plaza capacity 1,000 this week, and while that fact suggests there will be opportunities to see Brockhampton at bigger venues soon enough, the resale market is there for those who can't wait that long. 212 777 6817, irvingplaza.com JOOLS HOLLAND at Blue Note (through Feb. 4, 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.). If you've ever hummed along to "Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)" or another of the new wave classics Squeeze released between 1978 and 1980, you've likely enjoyed Jools Holland's genial piano and keyboard work. Mr. Holland, who left that band in 1981, is better known today as the host of a long running BBC2 show, but he continues to record music that falls somewhere between supper club jazz and smooth R B. These twice nightly engagements in the West Village are his first performances in the United States in well over a decade. 212 475 8592, bluenotejazz.com/newyork NADINE at Baby's All Right (Feb. 8, 8 p.m.). Nadine's recent single "Ultra Pink" is the kind of song that makes one wonder why its creators aren't more famous yet: light as a feather, cryptic and cool in just the right proportions to inspire repeat listening. There's more where that came from on this indie pop trio's just released debut LP, "Oh My." Lexie, a side project of the singer songwriter Greta Kline (of Frankie Cosmos), will be among the opening acts on Thursday night. 877 987 6487, babysallright.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
WITH savvy marketing to value driven consumers, Kia and Hyundai have been reporting big sales gains in a sluggish market. Simultaneously, the Korean automakers have been honing their own signature styles a point reinforced by new models introduced at the New York auto show this month and are becoming visually desirable rivals to Japanese, American and even German brands. On the day before Kia was set to unveil its 2011 Optima at the show, Tom Kearns, the head of Kia's California design studio, was discussing the redesigned sedan with a reporter when he pulled off the cloth hiding the still secret car. On the lonely lower level of the Javits Center, the temporary exposure seemed safe enough. But spectators began to stop and stare. Almost panic stricken and fearful that a full scale crowd would gather, Kia's public relations people implored Mr. Kearns to replace the veil quickly. Not long ago, few would have given any Kia a second look. But the Optima was "undoubtedly the star of the show," Eric Gallina wrote on the Web site of Car Design News, the London based professional journal that he edits. The Optima and another redesigned Kia that made its debut in New York, the 2011 Sportage crossover, expand on a look already on the streets in the form of the small Forte sedan, the sporty Forte Koup and the jaunty Soul. After years of turning out generic knockoffs of Japanese best sellers, Kia began its design awakening in 2006 when it hired Peter Schreyer, a German who had been Audi's head designer, as its design director. Mr. Kearns, a soft spoken American, joined Kia after helping to design the CTS sport sedan for Cadillac. One of Mr. Schreyer's first moves was to establish a distinct Kia face. The "tabbed" grille first appeared on the Kee concept car in 2007. The feature was called the Tiger grille, but Mr. Schreyer has backed away from the nickname not because of any association with the golfer, but because "tiger" suggests outdated notions about Asian economies. Mr. Kearns calls it the "Kia signature grille." Kia's design theme, Mr. Kearns says, is "simplicity, but with precision." He added, "Peter emphasizes simplicity, the single line drawn without picking up the pen." For the Optima, that single line is the roofline. He said the designers wanted the car's silhouette "to be recognizable from a long distance." Mr. Schreyer said he wanted the car to appear low, with a coupelike profile; the rearmost roof pillar is particularly low, making the entire car seem lower and wider. An arch of chrome sweeps over the roof, Mr. Kearns noted, and attaches to the rear glass in a totally new way. Another character line runs from the headlamps to the rear deck. "It is a more sophisticated design," Mr. Kearns said. By sophistication, he explained, he was referring to subtle surfaces that keep the viewer's attention. The complex interplay of lines and curves, highlights and shadows around the Optima's roof helps to hold a viewer's interest beyond a simple glance. There is a lot of flexibility in the Kia design language. The midsize Optima is aimed at a very different market than the Soul, a small youth oriented "urban utility," but both share the tiger face. "The Soul says youthful, bold, simple," Mr. Kearns said. Its design is another variation on simplicity. The new Sportage's "spearing shoulder line," grille and headlights show its family ties to the Optima. The state of Hyundai design was represented at the show by two versions of its midsize Sonata, a hybrid and the turbo 2.0T, and by the high end Equus. The Sonata and the Tucson crossover share with the Genesis sedan and coupe elements of a design language that Hyundai calls "fluid sculpture." Hyundai's executive vice president for design, Suk Geun Oh, has promised that the company's designs will be not simple, but provocative and aggressive. The Hyundai look is expressive, too. Like the Genesis Coupe, the Sonata is characterized by twisting forms that represent torque and sharp creases that imply straight line acceleration. The Equus, a new top of the line 50,000 alternative to the Lexus LS sedan, has the most sedate shape of the line. Hyundai's future designs are likely to be even more expressive, based on the i flow concept car revealed at the Geneva auto show in March. "Hyundai is more flowing and emotional than we are," Mr. Kearns of Kia said. Neither Kia nor Hyundai is aiming to create a design that is particularly Korean. Like Samsung or LG in electronics, the companies project themselves as global companies whose home turf is technology, not geography. "We don't have a lot of history," Mr. Kearns said. He conceded that few Korean designers work in the company's studios, which like Hyundai's are situated in Irvine, Calif.; South Korea; and Germany. So successful were the Hyundai designs from Irvine that Mercedes hired away Hyundai's chief designer, Joel Piaskowksi; he was replaced by Phil Zak, formerly of General Motors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The name Steve Madden is practically synonymous with high heel shoes and thigh high boots. He has more than 250 namesake stores all over the world, and his shoes for women are carried in major department stores. Now he is moving in on the men's market. Mr. Madden, perhaps the most famous fashion entrepreneur to be convicted and jailed, served two and a half years in a Florida prison for securities fraud and stock manipulation in the early 2000s after having illegally traded shares from the initial public offering of Stratton Oakmont, the investment firm run by Jordan Belfort. The case was fodder for the 2013 Martin Scorsese film "The Wolf of Wall Street," with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Mr. Belfort and Jake Hoffman playing Mr. Madden. Since his release from prison, Mr. Madden has devoted himself to the business he loves. He opened a big new store in Times Square on Aug. 1, with nearly a third of its 2,000 square foot floor space dedicated to his new focus: men's shoes. "I felt that men were getting shortchanged," he said. "We were putting all the excitement into women's." While salesclerks in "I'm With Steve" T shirts helped tourists navigate the rows of pumps, loafers and boots, Mr. Madden tried us on for size. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The plan was simple: Take the train to the ski slopes. Why? Trains are romantic. Trains are relatively climate friendly. And I had recently spent an hour and a half on a perfect powder day sitting in traffic, trying to drive up Little Cottonwood Canyon to Snowbird, near Salt Lake City. So I decided to swear off car travel for a weekend of skiing and snowboarding via the rails. Two developments in Denver made the scheme possible: In 2016 the city opened the A line train, which runs from Denver International Airport to Union Station, an exquisitely restored Beaux Arts terminal and the city's main transit hub, in 37 minutes. The following year, Amtrak launched its service on the Winter Park Express, a snow season train that leaves Union Station each weekend and delivers passengers to the base of the Winter Park Resort, a burly, 3,000 acre ski mountain about 70 miles outside Denver. Getting to the mountain, and the other resorts west of Denver by car is increasingly an issue. On a snowy weekend, traffic on I 70, the main route to the mountains, can turn an hour and a half drive to Winter Park into a four hour ordeal. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the Winter Park Express's trips sell out, with 400 passengers choosing to ride the rails each trip. One city, three trains to the airport It was admittedly a harebrained exercise. I had to fly to Denver and back, and spend a night in a hotel there at either end of the ski weekend, making for an expensive two days on the slopes. But I decided to consider it as research for a possible longer trip. The journey began on a Friday afternoon in New York City, which lacks what travel planners call a "one seat ride" to the airport. I slalomed down the subways stairs with my skis and gear as commuters streamed up, then rode a urine perfumed elevator to the platform to meet my friend Julie at Penn Station. A standing room only Long Island Rail Road train took us to Jamaica station, the terminus of the AirTrain, where we once again had to schlep our gear to a new platform to get to the terminal for our four hour and 47 minute flight (which sat on the tarmac for an hour and a half after our scheduled departure). The original Colorado ski train was created by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad in 1940 to carry members of the Eskimo Ski Club to the mountain. The tradition continued until 2009, when the DRGW, which had changed hands several times by then, was sold again, and the new owners shut it down, selling off the cars to a Canadian outfit, as if to put a spike in the idea that it might return. But train enthusiasts do not give up easily. In the fall of 2014, a member of Colorail called for the ski train's revival in the group's newsletter. Brad Swartzwelter, an Amtrak conductor who, as a boy, had gone fishing and hiking in the woods not far from the train tracks in Granby, Colo., put together a business plan, which Colorail pitched to Amtrak. Test runs began in March 2015 and by January 2017, after some improvements to the platform at the ski resort, the Winter Park Express was in business. Its eight cars double decker Superliners are usually used on overnight trains in the West, like the California Zephyr or the Southwest Chief, but in the winter, when rider numbers on the big trains decline, the cars can be lent to the ski train. Mr. Swartzwelter is the conductor, checking tickets and offering a running commentary over the train's public address system. After leaving Denver at 7 a.m. sharp, the Express rolled through the suburb of Arvada and across a wide grassland plain, where it climbed a series of 10 curves toward the mountains of the Front Range. As the terrain got steeper, the train wound through massive slabs of rock that seemed almost close enough to touch. In the lounge car, the bartender, Darrell Bennett , was playing Tracy Chapman and doing a brisk business in Bloody Marys. After a section along South Boulder Creek, the train reached the 6.2 mile Moffat Tunnel. For the day trippers, that was the signal to put their ski boots on; in 10 minutes we were at the base of the mountain. Nine a.m., right on time. We cheated on our anti car resolve and rode a hotel shuttle bus to the front desk of the Zephyr Mountain Lodge, where we stowed our bags, since our room in a nearby condominium wouldn't open up until the afternoon. Within half an hour we were in line for the gondola. The mountain seemed to fit into the theme of the trip, with runs named Trestle (an Expert bump run with one seriously steep section), Brakeman and Derailer. Winter Park has never had the cachet of mountains like Vail and Aspen, and its devotees seemed to have a bit of a chip on their shoulders: "Vail Sucks" stickers were plastered on many available surfaces in the lift lines. Julie and I split up for a while. Did I notice, she asked when we got back together, that everyone here seemed to be talking about smoking weed? That night we cheated again and took a shuttle bus into the nearby town of Winter Park for fish tacos at a bustling joint called Pepe Osaka's, where we sat at the bar and watched motor sports on TV. As we waited in the falling snow for a shuttle home, the people next to us casually lit up a joint. The next day was a skier's dream. It had snowed all night and just kept going. My skis floated through inches of powder as we danced down the bowls and tree lined slopes off the Panoramic Express lift. The day was punctuated by cries of "yee hah" from our fellow skiers and maybe from me as well. Around 3:30 p.m., I called it a day and went back to the condo to pick up our gear. Another quick shuttle ride took us back to the platform and the waiting train. Every seat was taken. There were numerous family groups Emily Rice and her husband, from Chesapeake, Va., were visiting her parents, and her father, who had never been to Winter Park, had arranged the outing for them all. They hadn't even skied. "I love taking the train," she said. Another group was celebrating a birthday they had a cooler of beer for the ride back. John Blood was on the train with his family, including his two young children, and another couple and their children. Why had they taken the train? "I 70," he said. Well, part of the appeal was "little kids who like trains," he added, though at 200 for a family, t he ride was not a viable alternative to the highway, he said. As we rode out of the mountains, Mr. Swartzwelter talked about the train how it got 400 passenger miles per gallon of diesel fuel, what he does while the train is at Winter Park "fix things" and rest, since he gets up at 4 a.m. to get the train rolling in the morning. Then he pulled out his smartphone, tapped on Google Maps and traced his finger along the path of I 70 where traffic was backed up for miles. "See all the red?" he asked. I did. And I was happy to be on the train. If You Go This ski season, the Winter Park Express ran every Saturday and Sunday, leaving Union Station at 7 a.m. on the way out, and returning from Winter Park at 4:30 p.m. The train also ran on the first two Fridays of each month, letting skiers spend a long weekend on the mountain. Tickets range from 29 to 59 per person each way, depending on how far in advance they are purchased. Children 2 through 12 are half fare with an adult. The Winter Park Express runs this year through March 31. The Hotel Indigo Denver Downtown is just across the street from Union Station at 1801 Wewatta Street. A room with two queen beds was 153.95, including taxes, using the Booking.com app. At Winter Park, a studio in the Founders Pointe condominium at the base area with one queen bed and a pull out couch was 280.12, including taxes. The Crawford Hotel occupies what used to be office space within Union Station itself. You check in at a nook off the main waiting room. A double queen room recently cost about 278 a night booked through the hotel, 351.95 with taxes and fees. The hotel does not have its own bar or restaurants, but has access to those in the station, including the Cooper Lounge on the mezzanine, which offers a view over the waiting room along with craft cocktails. Amy Virshup is the editor of the Travel section. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE We have a new 52 Places traveler! Follow Sebastian Modak on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SAN FRANCISCO Pinterest has avoided many of the woes of other newly public tech companies. But on Thursday, it stumbled. In its first earnings report since going public last month, the digital pinboard company posted a narrower loss than a year earlier and a 54 percent increase in revenue. But its earnings per share failed to meet Wall Street expectations, sending its stock tumbling more than 15 percent in after hours trading. The results followed the bumpy stock market debuts of several tech companies in recent months. Last week, the stock of the ride hailing giant Uber dropped on its first day of trading, and has struggled ever since. Shares of Uber's rival Lyft, which were listed in March, have also fallen below their offering price. Those performances have raised questions about investor appetite for fast growing but unprofitable tech firms. Some smaller tech companies that are losing less money have seen their share prices soar after their recent I.P.O.s. They include Zoom, a video conferencing software company; PagerDuty, a cloud computing company; and Beyond Meat, a meat alternative company. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A request by the pop singer Britney Spears to substantially change the setup of the court approved conservatorship she has lived under for 12 years will not be decided on until February, a California judge said this week amid a flurry of filings by Spears and her family. Spears, 38, remains one of the most beloved and best selling stars of the modern era, but has had her life and finances carefully controlled by a complex and largely private legal arrangement one typically used for the old, infirm or disabled since 2008, following her much publicized struggles with mental heath issues and substance abuse. For more than a decade, Spears's father, James P. Spears, known as Jamie, has overseen much of the singer's career and personal life as conservator of her person and estate, though he stepped down last year, citing health problems. Spears, through her court appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, said this week that she was "strongly opposed" to having her father return to his role as her conservator, indicating that she was willing to fight him in court. Ingham said that Spears preferred to keep her temporary conservator, Jodi Montgomery, in the role overseeing her mental health care and more, and requested that a bank be in charge of her estate. To justify the changes, the lawyer pointed to Spears's desire to no longer perform for the time being, and left open the possibility that she would "seek termination of this conservatorship in the future." At the same time, Jamie Spears, through his own lawyers, sought to bring back his former co conservator of Spears's estate, Andrew M. Wallet, who voluntarily resigned from his role in March 2019, after more than a decade in the job. Following a hearing on Wednesday, Judge Brenda Penny of the Los Angeles County Superior Court in California extended the current version of the conservatorship until Feb. 1. She called for Ingham to file his petition on behalf of Spears by Sept. 18, with any objections filed by Oct. 2. A hearing was scheduled in the case for Oct. 14. The recent filings, and especially Spears's call for changes to the conservatorship, have only served to inflame the grass roots, fan led protests known as the FreeBritney movement, whose followers believe that the pop star is being held against her will or stolen from. (Court documents put Spears's total assets at 57.4 million as of December 2019, including about 2.7 million in cash.) Though the court proceedings are typically closed to the public and most records sealed, FreeBritney supporters gathered outside the hearing in Los Angeles on Wednesday, and were heartened when Ingham told the judge that he found the blanket seal and closed courtroom to be occasionally unwarranted, calling for perhaps more transparency in the future. Jamie Spears has dismissed the FreeBritney advocates as conspiracy theorists, and in additional filings this week, sought to seal future pleadings, citing the privacy of his daughter and her two children. "Such information would undoubtedly fuel widespread publicity and the ability to obtain access to her or her children, as evidenced by the publicity surrounding this conservatorship since its inception and numerous instances of harassment," his lawyer said. "That publicity would be highly injurious to the Conservatee's health and well being, as well as the health and well being of her minor children." The ACLU indicated this week that it would back the performer if she requested help. "People with disabilities have a right to lead self directed lives and retain their civil rights," the organization said in a tweet. "If Britney Spears wants to regain her civil liberties and get out of her conservatorship, we are here to help her." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The mystery novelist was watching TV in May 2013 when his agent called and asked him, "How would you like to be Robert B. Parker?" "It took me about a nanosecond to say yes," Coleman wrote on his website. "We all dream about unexpected magical moments chance encounters, phone calls, emails that will transform us, but do we ever believe they will happen?" These days, when a popular author dies, financially savvy heirs often commission someone to keep writing his or her books. (There's even a term for this: "continuation literature.") Sophie Hannah writes Agatha Christie novels; David Lagercrantz channels Stieg Larsson; Anthony Horowitz has taken on Ian Fleming. That's what Robert B. Parker's family decided to do when the crime novelist died in 2010. "Spenser was a cash cow," Parker's wife, Joan, told The Boston Globe in 2012, referring to her husband's most beloved character, a Boston private eye. "And we felt that Bob would want to see Spenser live on." In 2011, they hired Ace Atkins to write more Spenser novels, and in 2013 they asked Coleman to take on a different series, the one starring the Massachusetts cop Jesse Stone. For Coleman, saying yes was the easy part. "It's one thing to be offered to step into a great man's shoes. It is quite another to stare at the blank screen and figure out what to do," he says ruefully. So he called Atkins. "He gave me some tips on how my life was about to change," Coleman says. "He suggested that I never go to the fan sites. Of course, that was the first thing I did." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
NASCAR said on Wednesday that it would ban the Confederate battle flag from its events and properties, becoming the latest organization to reconsider the emblem's place amid a national reckoning over racism and white supremacy after the death of George Floyd. "The presence of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry," NASCAR said in a statement. "Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of the Confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties." NASCAR made the announcement two days after Darrell Wallace Jr., the first black driver in 50 years to win one of its top three national touring series, called on NASCAR to ban the flags outright. "No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race," Mr. Wallace, who is known as Bubba, told Don Lemon of CNN. "So it starts with Confederate flags. Get them out of here. They have no place for them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Philip Glass, far right, with his ensemble during a rehearsal in 1974. His "Music in Eight Parts" resurfaced at an auction in 2017 and has now been recorded. In the early 1970s, Philip Glass was already writing masterpieces and performing them with his ensemble in lofts, galleries and museums. But he wasn't quite making a living as a composer yet. He made ends meet by working as a mover, plumber and taxi driver. And by selling autograph scores including, it is believed, the one for his 1970 work "Music in Eight Parts," which was performed just a handful of times and was later thought lost. For decades, it seemed, to Mr. Glass's circle, to exist only as fragments in his archive. Then the final manuscript for "Music in Eight Parts" resurfaced near the end of 2017, when it came up for auction at Christie's. Sold for 43,750, and now in the hands of Mr. Glass's publisher, it has been realized anew for his ensemble and, 50 years after its premiere, released on a recording by Orange Mountain Music this week. "If you're a Picasso fan and you walk into a room full of early Cubism, and there's a painting there that you've never seen before, it's like that," said Lisa Bielawa, a composer and a vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble. "It's right at the center of the authentic early period, right in the middle of it." Mr. Glass's sketches for "Music in Eight Parts" date to late 1969, and it premiered in January 1970, placing it between "Music in Fifths" and "Music With Changing Parts," which paved the way for the monumental "Music in 12 Parts." The title refers not to the number of sections, but to its contrapuntal voices; with a running time of about 20 minutes, "Music in Eight Parts" achieves its drama through rhythmic shifts and intricacy. Alex Gray, an assistant with Dunvagen Music Publishers, who began to reconstruct the "Music in Eight Parts" score as an intern there a year and a half ago, said that it fit neatly into Mr. Glass's experiments of the time, while working through a distinct idea. "Everything he's writing up to this point is about additive rhythm," Mr. Gray said. "This is the first time he tried to take what's typically horizontal and apply it vertically. You see it a little bit in 'Music in Similar Motion' adding a new voice and adding a new voice, every couple of minutes. In this one, you literally see it expanding note by note." When the piece came up for auction and caught the attention of Mr. Glass's staff Mr. Gray found himself transfixed by the manuscript, which was written in shorthand, and asked the composer why it had been shelved. "I just started writing '12 Parts,' and I had a better piece to play," he recalled Mr. Glass saying, with characteristic nonchalance. But Mr. Glass was supportive of his ensemble returning to "Music in Eight Parts" now. And Mr. Gray, who finished his master's degree at New York University this week, advised by the Bang on a Can composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, made a thesis out of the project of turning the manuscript into a conventional score and synthesizer demo, then analyzing it and cataloging its history. The work's original instrumentation was based on that of the Philip Glass Ensemble at the time. But the newly engraved score is based on the group's current members; it loses viola and cello parts, for example, and adds a solfege vocal line for Ms. Bielawa. Such an arrangement is not without precedent: Mr. Riesman and Ms. Bielawa worked on a similar one for a version of "Music With Changing Parts" that played Carnegie Hall in 2018. "The experience of updating 'Music With Changing Parts' is what gave me the idea of a freer hand with this," Mr. Riesman said. "Philip said: 'Let's make something new out of it. Not changing the original idea, but let's flesh it out.'" Revisiting "Music in Eight Parts" has also been the subject of a course at the New School, home of the nascent Philip Glass Institute, where Ms. Bielawa is its chief curator and inaugural composer in residence. (You can guess what the ensemble in residence is.) Students, in addition to learning the piece, sat in as the Glass players worked toward re premiering and touring it this spring, with a recording to follow. Plans changed, however, when the coronavirus pandemic closed the school and canceled virtually all concerts indefinitely. But the ensemble decided that, rather than wait to record it, they would put their rehearsals to use and lay down the track. (Ms. Bielawa, Mr. Riesman and Richard Guerin produced the album.) The project came together quickly. For the cover image, they turned to the estate of Sol LeWitt, a friend and collaborator of Mr. Glass's who had designed the covers for the "Music in 12 Parts" LPs in the 1970s. (Mr. Glass has also told stories about how LeWitt would, unprompted, send him thousand dollar checks during those years.) Another curveball came about a week before the recording took place. Seeing an announcement of the album on Facebook, someone commented, claiming to have archival audio from 1970. It was very different from what the 21st century ensemble had been rehearsing not only in the timbre of its voices but also in its much slower tempo. It was informative, though the players stuck to their current interpretation. Recording in quarantine was difficult everyone alone at home, working from a baseline track but not impossible, especially for this ensemble. "When we're onstage, we're not hearing each other acoustically anyway," Ms. Bielawa said. "You can't. So the actual sonic experience, for me, was not that different." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Errol Spence Jr., left, landed a punch against Danny Garcia on Saturday night in a world welterweight fight in Arlington, Texas, for Spence's W.B.C. and I.B.F. titles. Errol Spence Jr.'s Win Sets Up a Dream Pairing. That's All It May Be. After turning his high stakes bout with Danny Garcia into a 12 round boxing clinic, Errol Spence Jr., the undefeated welterweight, held a news conference that included reporters gathered at AT T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and others tuning in via Zoom. Spence, who lives in the Dallas area and entered the bout as the W.B.C. and I.B.F. welterweight champion, had just won a unanimous decision over Garcia, a former world champion. Spence had depended heavily on his right jab, a basic but effective weapon against the counterpunching Garcia. And when asked why he employed that game plan, Spence replied in his deadpan drawl that common sense had dictated the strategy. "I was the taller person, he had the shorter arms," said Spence, who is 27 0 with 21 knockouts. "I always had a great jab, so that's what we was working on." Common sense also suggests that Spence and Terence Crawford, who holds the W.B.O. title, would face each other next. Their schedules align: Crawford last fought on Nov. 14, steamrollering Kell Brook of England in four rounds to retain his title, and, like Spence, he has nothing lined up for early 2021. Their resumes line up as well. Both are undefeated titleholders at welterweight in search of a career defining win. And they are the class of a talent rich 147 pound division, versatile boxers and punchers who are equally comfortable in a chess match or in a brawl. But Spence, managed by Al Haymon, fights under the Premier Boxing Champions banner, while Crawford, who watched Spence's win from ringside, is under contract to Top Rank, a rival outfit run by Bob Arum. Pairing the fighters means bridging a stubborn divide. It's not impossible witness February's heavyweight fight between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury but it's also not guaranteed. When asked about a Crawford fight, Spence told reporters that Haymon made those decisions. "I'm not worried about Terence Crawford," Spence told reporters. "I'm going to enjoy my time with my kids and just chill out and reflect on this last year and a half." Spence's win over Garcia (36 3, 21 knockouts), and the ambiguity surrounding his next move, is unfolding in the shadow of an exhibition bout between the retired 50 something fighters Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr., an event on Nov. 28 that attracted mainstream press attention and heavy social media engagement and that generated 1.2 million pay per view buys. But less than a week after Tyson Jones, the rapper Snoop Dogg, who performed and did commentary during that broadcast, announced he intended to start a televised boxing series in 2021. That kind of move suggests the market for serious bouts is not dying, and that it might even be underserved. If Tyson Jones was the spectacle fight that sports fans did not realize they wanted until it happened, Spence Crawford could be the fight avid boxing fans want but fear they may never see. This type of uncertainty is unique to boxing imagine delaying or skipping the Super Bowl because the A.F.C. and N.F.C.'s champions could not agree on a venue or a revenue split. But for boxing aficionados, it's a familiar frustration. Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao never fought until 2015, six years after their pairing was first discussed. In the 1990s, Riddick Bowe tossed his title belt in the trash rather than commit to a title unification bout with Lennox Lewis. Crawford and Spence have squared off and talked trash in person, but on Saturday, Crawford's social media feeds indicated he wasn't impressed with Spence as a potential foe. "Danny tired," read the only Crawford tweet commenting on the action. Later, he posted a string of upside down smiley face emojis, implying Spence's performance underwhelmed him. Spence dominated Garcia on Saturday night in his first bout since a fiery car crash in October 2019. Video from a security camera showed Spence's Ferrari flipping several times after hitting a median at high speed. The impact ejected Spence from his car, and he suffered facial injuries. He resumed light training in March and began heavier workouts this summer. On Saturday, he entered the ring facing questions about his strength and durability after the crash, and he answered emphatically. He spent most of the fight stalking Garcia behind a stiff right jab, and pounding him with lefts and rights to the body. According to CompuBox, the scoring system, both fighters landed 103 power punches. But Spence landed 84 jabs, compared with 14 for Garcia. "The jab is the easiest punch to throw and the fastest punch to throw, and the hardest punch to block," said Derrick James, Spence's trainer. "You saw that tonight." Spence and Garcia headlined one of the few major fight cards to take place in front of a paid audience since the coronavirus pandemic shut down most sports in March. The previous such card, headlined by the lightweights Gervonta Davis and Leo Santa Cruz on Oct. 31, also was in Texas, in San Antonio. "It's crazy times right now in the world, and crazy times in sport," Garcia said during a post fight news conference. He added, "It's a blessing to the fighters and the fans." Saturday's event sold out all 16,102 available seats at AT T Stadium, which can seat 80,000 and accommodate more through standing room. Spectators were required to wear masks, and most actually did so. The seating was also arranged to enhance social distancing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
At the "mouse hospital" in the Immune Disease Institute of Beth Israel, scientists use highly specialized methods to study cancer in mice. BOSTON Here at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a black mouse lies on a miniature exam table, his tail dangling off the end. A plastic tube carries anesthetic to his nose and mouth. He is asleep. Before he was born, the mouse was injected with two mutated genes often found in human prostate cancer. As he lies on the table, a technician is measuring his two millimeter prostate tumor with a petite ultrasound machine the very exam a man would undergo, only on a dollhouse scale. "There's the tumor," says the technician, Bhavik Padmani, sliding a probe over the mouse as a bright white amoebalike shape comes into view. The animal is in what is called a "mouse hospital," a new way of using mice to study cancer. Although mice have been studied in regular labs for years, the results often have been disappointing. Usually, the cancers were implanted under their skin, not in the organs where they originated. And drugs that seemed to work in mice often proved useless in humans. The mouse hospital at Beth Israel Deaconess and a few similar ones elsewhere are at the forefront of a new approach to studying human cancers. The mice are given genes that make them develop tumors in the same organs as humans, which means the researchers need scanners to watch the tumors' growth inside the animals' bodies. So the mouse hospitals have tiny ultrasound machines, CT and PET scanners, and magnetic resonance imaging machines with little stretchers to slide the mice into the machines. They also have mouse pharmacies to formulate medicines in mouse size doses and mouse clinical laboratories specially designed to do analyses on minute drops of mouse blood and vanishingly small quantities of mouse urine. That lets them follow cancers' growth and responses to treatments. What's more, with genetic advances in studies of human tumors, the researchers do not have to implant human cancer cells in all their complexity into mice to study the cancers; instead, they can give the mice just a few mutated genes that seem to drive a tumor. They genetically alter the mice before they are born and then, with scanners, watch what happens as a cancer develops in the expected organ the prostate, in this case. Then they can try out drugs designed to attack those gene mutations and the cancers they cause. The result, so far, has been astonishing. The mice with just a few cancer genes developed prostate cancer when they grew up. The cancer responded to the standard treatment castration or, in the case of patients, chemical castration with a drug that shuts off testosterone production in the testes. Then, as often happens in men with advanced prostate cancer, the tumors in the mice started growing again, resistant to the castration treatment. But because so few genes were involved in the mouse prostate cancer, the investigators, including Andrea Lunardi of Beth Israel Deaconess, could pinpoint the genetic roots of the treatment resistance. Researchers had studied prostate tumors before, asking how and why they grew resistant to treatment, but were stymied by the hundreds of mutations in cancer cells and unable to figure out which ones were important to the treatment resistance. In retrospect, the solution seems obvious, said Dr. Pier Paolo Pandolfi, scientific director at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. By making mice with only one or a few suspect mutations at a time, scientists cut through the chaotic genetic noise. "The data were in front of our eyes, but we did not see them because the patients had many other things going on," Dr. Pandolfi said. Understanding the roots of the treatment resistance in mice, the investigators could try out rational ways to circumvent it in the animals, based on their genetic insights. It turned out to require more than one drug, which was not surprising. The work is reported in Nature Genetics. Many cancer researchers have suggested that the best way to treat cancer will be with more than one drug, blocking the cancer's paths of escape. But the trouble was choosing which drug combinations to try. "If we start randomly throwing every combination together, there are not enough patients on earth to test them," said Dr. Lewis C. Cantley, director of the cancer center at Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork Presbyterian Hospital who worked with Dr. Pandolfi on the prostate cancer study. "We need a scientific rationale for picking a particular combination of drugs." The investigators just started one clinical trial to see if the mouse studies predict what will happen in patients, and are about to start another. And, they say, they could never have gotten this far without the mice with human cancer genes and the mouse hospital to study them. That, of course, is the goal of the two clinical trials. Each participant will be matched with collections of mouse proxies, with each group of mice engineered to carry different combinations of a few major human prostate cancer genes. The mice will develop tumors, just as the men did, and will receive the same treatments as the men. But since each mouse will have only one or a few of the critical cancer mutations, researchers will be able to see if a treatment is doing what it should and analyze the reason for resistance, if it develops. These trials will be the first to test treatments in mice and men simultaneously, Dr. Pandolfi said. The patients will be men whose advanced cancer grew resistant to the standard treatment with chemical castration. To escape the drug, the cancers turn on genes that let them make their own testosterone. Some even make a more powerful version of the hormone, dihydrotestosterone. "Surprisingly, over time, the prostate cancer cells become almost like mini endocrine organs," said Dr. Glenn J. Bubley, director of genitourinary medical oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess. Cancer cells also have a way to survive even if their hormone supply is cut off. They inactivate genes that normally would make them commit suicide when deprived of the testosterone or its stronger cousin. In the study that has just gotten started, men with advanced prostate cancer will get Zytiga, made by Janssen Biotech, which stops the tumors from making testosterone, along with an experimental drug made by Novartis that prevents the cancer cells from inactivating their suicide program at least in the mice with the human prostate cancer genes. The other study, beginning soon, will use a combination of drugs Avodart, made by GlaxoSmithKline, to block dihydrotestosterone production, and another drug, embelin, a natural compound, to prevent cells from inactivating suicide genes. Don De Grandis is patient No. 1 in the first study. He found out in October that he has prostate cancer when what he thought was a muscle pull in his back turned out to be bone pain from a cancer that had already spread to his bone marrow. Mr. De Grandis, 58, a former warehouse worker from North Easton, Mass., was soon in excruciating pain, even with heavy doses of narcotics. The cancer was too advanced to cure, and the standard testosterone blocking drug had stopped working. He joined the study in March. Just a couple of weeks later, his wife, Kathleen, knew something was happening. "He made me dinner," she said. "It was very good pasta with mushrooms, ground turkey and cheese. With a beautiful salad." Until then, she said, he had been in too much pain and too tired to move much from his bed. His physician, Dr. Bubley, noticed that Mr. De Grandis's PSA levels, a measure of prostate cancer growth, had begun to fall. Mr. De Grandis started using a cane instead of a walker and cut his narcotic dose in half. But, Dr. Bubley cautioned, this is an early stage clinical trial, looking primarily for drug dosages and safety. There are many unknowns and no guarantees. So far, some of the mouse proxies getting the same drugs as Mr. De Grandis are responding too, Dr. Bubley and the other researchers say. The cancer and its response to treatment progresses much faster in mice, so the animals may give a foretaste of what is to come in the men to whom they are matched. Now the researchers will follow Mr. De Grandis and the mice that are responding to see how long the good effect lasts, and they will do a similar analysis of other men who are joining the study to see how well the mice mirror the men and whether the drug combination works for others as well. Meanwhile, Mr. De Grandis said he was hoping for one more good year of life. "I just want to spend more time with my family," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
She has justified her spot. After beating Liudmila Samsonova, 6 2, 6 3, in the first round, she beat 10th seeded Garbine Muguruza, a two time Grand Slam champion, in the second round, and 18th seeded Donna Vekic in the third. In the fourth round, she appeared fatigued after squandering a match point in the second set, but hung on for a 6 4, 6 7 (5), 6 3 win over Alize Cornet. "I'm glad I keep winning," she said. "I cannot hide it: I'm really proud of what I'm doing." Pironkova had planned to return to tennis in late March, but was delayed by the pandemic. She has benefited from WTA rules that expanded the number of tournaments a returning mother could play with a protected ranking to 12, up from eight, including two Grand Slam tournaments. The window for a return was also expanded to three years, up from two. The rules were introduced at the end of the 2018 season, after Williams's high profile return from maternity leave. "At that time I really didn't care about that information because I was in a new place in my life," Pironkova said of the rule changes. "But that was one of the motivations to come back; if I had to start from scratch, I'm not sure I would take that challenge, really. But when you know that you have your old place, it makes all the difference." Azarenka, who returned to tour in 2017, six months after giving birth to a boy, Leo, also advanced to her first Grand Slam quarterfinal since becoming a mother, having struggled to refind her game and focus amid a custody battle. She said that she would not have done anything different in her return, but that she was happy about the rule changes. "We are more protected and feel more comfortable because it's such a life changing experience that you have," Azarenka said of motherhood. "To find that balance to be able to go out there ready to play, physically be ready, mentally be ready, I think it's just a better opportunity for players to take that break if they want to, if that's their choice." The success is slightly double edged, however. By winning, Pironkova has been away from her son for more than two weeks. "It's very hard because up until now it's the longest I've been away from him," Pironkova said. "I'm used to sleeping with him, to cuddling with him, to waking up with him, to receiving a kiss in the morning. Now all this stuff, I really miss it. But I know it's for good." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Berwick Kaler, right, in "The Grand Old Dame of York" in 2018. Performing since 1977, he is Britain's longest serving panto dame. LONDON Every year, for the past 42 years, Berwick Kaler has spent all of December and half of January onstage, wearing an elaborately hideous, multicolored hooped dress, workman's boots and a bright orange wig. He is Britain's longest serving pantomime dame, which makes him, in a way, a Christmas institution. Pantomimes the merry, family friendly musical comedy shows which take top billing at theaters throughout December here traditionally feature an actor in drag. For the people of York, in the north of England, where Kaler has played the dame in productions since 1977, he is as much a part of the holidays as turkey, gifts and family disputes. At the beginning of last year, Kaler retired from playing the dame, but he had planned to return to the stage at the age of 74 in "Dick Turpin Rides Again," at York's Grand Opera House this month. In September, however, his plans for a reprise were shelved because of the coronavirus pandemic. "Dick Turpin Rides Again" is one of more than 180 British pantomimes that have been canceled or postponed until next December, a development which has plunged the country's theater industry, already beleaguered by months of national shutdowns, into dire financial straits. The pantomime remains a peculiarly British tradition. It is nominally a children's Christmas show based on a fairy tale such as "Sleeping Beauty," "Cinderella" or "Jack and the Beanstalk" to which music hall elements are added, making it a show for the whole family. These include the dame (who usually has a penchant for sexual innuendo), song and dance routines with topical lyrics, slapstick, in jokes, call and response ("Oh no it isn't!" "Oh yes it is!") and familiar celebrity guest stars, including ex soap opera actors, former boy band members and children's TV presenters. Pantomimes represent many British children's first experience of live performance, and many adults's only theater trip in a year. In pre Covid times, when multigenerational outings were not considered a health risk, three generations would often attend shows together. Featuring large casts, dancers, musicians, elaborate costumes and special effects, "pantos," as they are known, usually provide work for thousands of people each year. As such, they are crucial to the British theatrical ecosystem. In the 2018 19 season, according to figures compiled by the industry advocacy group U.K. Theatre, there were 2.9 million tickets to pantomimes sold, with takings of 63 million pounds ( 83 million) at the box office. For many theaters, the festive show provides the financial means to stage the rest of the year's program, typically bringing in around 30 percent of their annual box office in just four weeks. Most theaters in Britain have been shut since March, when the country went into its first coronavirus lockdown. The British theater industry is projected to lose PS3 billion ( 3.9 billion), or 61 percent of its expected revenue, in 2020, according to a report published in June by Oxford Economics, a forecasting group. In the same month, as many as 200,000 theater jobs were thought to be at risk, if the government didn't intervene. When, in July 2020, the British government announced a PS1.57 billion rescue package for arts organizations at risk of closure because of the pandemic, pantomimes were given special mention by the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. He even named the project to bring back live performance "Operation Sleeping Beauty." But planning for the pantomime season usually begins more than a year before the season begins. In August, with no clarity on whether live events would be permitted around Christmas, the production company Qdos whittled its planned 35 panto productions down to nine shows at 10 venues, according to Michael Harrison, a joint owner of the company. Pantomime is built to survive even the harshest of conditions, said Harrison in a telephone interview. "It's the most adaptable of art forms," he continued. "It's all about what you create for the here and now. So when somebody says, 'Everybody onstage has to be two meters apart at all times,' that's fine." This year, the Qdos shows that are still expected to take place are socially distanced onstage and backstage, with fewer dancers in the chorus line and more understudies in case of cast illness. All props, from fairy wands to magic lamps, are sanitized before every touch and each show has a "Covid monitor" to ensure adherence to the rules. In the auditorium, the masked audience members are seated in "bubbles" with family or household members and will be discouraged from shouting out as is traditional to limit any potential spread of the coronavirus. The shows are 75 minutes without an intermission, rather than the usual two and a half hours, to avoid audience mingling, and the theaters will have to do without their usual profits from selling drinks and candy. After a monthlong national lockdown, the government introduced a tier system of restrictions; in third tier areas, where the coronavirus risk is considered to be very high, theaters were ordered to remain closed until at least Wednesday, with tier reviews scheduled every two weeks. On Monday, the government announced that all London theaters would close on Wednesday, when the city enters the highest tier of restrictions. At the time of writing, all 10 of Qdos's planned openings had been further postponed to later in December, with three scheduled to open in early 2021. "Christmas is about 28 percent of our annual box office," said Dan Bates, the chief executive of Sheffield Theatres, a group of three venues in the north of England that fell under the fiercest tier restrictions at the beginning of the month. For around 80 percent of their Christmas audience, a pantomime is the only time they'll visit the theater all year, he added. The largest of the three theaters, the Lyceum, has been closed since the first national shutdown in March. "Sleeping Beauty," the pantomime that should have opened there this month, was canceled in July. Instead, the plan was to stage a trimmed, 70 minute version of a pantomime in the smaller Crucible Theatre. "We've got to plan to be ready" for whatever happens with the local pandemic restrictions, Bates said. In the event the theater remains closed through the holiday season, the show will be filmed and put online. "It's like waiting for an exam result, seeing which tier you're going to be in," Bates said. Each time the theaters "announce a plan, it's fairly guaranteed that it's going to change," he added. Theater makers have attempted to innovate their way out of the crisis with live streamed, open air and even drive in pantomimes. The BBC will screen its own "virtual" pantomime "Cinderella" on Christmas Eve, starring Olivia Colman, Helena Bonham Carter and Anya Taylor Joy. Peter Duncan, 66, has performed in pantomimes since childhood. Over the summer, he filmed a "Jack and the Beanstalk" panto in his backyard, with a giant sycamore tree acting as the beanstalk. He ended up employing some 35 theater creatives, and in September, the film was bought by two U.K. cinema chains, to be shown at 55 screens this month. "It was a way of being proactive," Duncan said. "Panto reaches parts of the public that no other theater does." Among the genre's fans is Joshua Williams, 23, a teaching assistant from Colwyn Bay in north Wales, who spends around PS500 ( 650) a year traveling around the country to watch his favorite celebrities play Cinderella, Dick Whittington and Mother Goose. At a panto, "you just forget where you are for a few hours and you turn back into a child," he said in a telephone interview. Last year, in his two week Christmas vacation from school, he watched 11 pantomimes, visiting London, Birmingham and nearby Llandudno. This year he only has three booked. Some theater makers have had to diversify their income sources to survive this most unusual year. Lily Arnold, 35, has won awards for her pantomime set and costume designs. Normally, she would spend around "half the year" working on a panto, she said. In 2020, she hasn't worked in a theater since March. "I've still got nothing fixed in the diary for next year. It's all very tentative," Arnold said. Instead of making dresses for dames, she has been busy making and selling mugs on Etsy. She keenly misses the collaborative push and pull that comes with staging a panto. "When you're designing a panto, you get stressed in the way that you would with a normal show," she said, the difference is the "incredible buzz when you see 800 children who are absolutely transfixed. It's pure delight." The long serving dame Berwick Kaler had already written the script for "Dick Turpin Rides Again" when the show was canceled in September. His Christmas will be rather different this year. "It will be very quiet," he said. "I might start writing next year's pantomime." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Read all of our classical music coverage here. Hojotoho, and happy Friday! This week, the soprano Christine Georke brought her much hyped Brunnhilde to the Metropolitan Opera for the opening of Wagner's "Die Walkure," my favorite installment of the "Ring." Her arrival is remarkable if only because vocal troubles nearly pushed her to quit opera; you can read all about it in Michael Cooper's profile of her: But enough about Wagner (for now). Elsewhere this week, I attended the latest edition of the New York Philharmonic's Nightcap series. These little concerts are meant to provide an intimate introduction to living composers John Adams, in this case. The program Mr. Adams curated, however, was generous and illuminating, featuring only two of his works ("I Still Play" and "First Quartet") to make room for ones by his younger colleagues. So Mr. Adams presented music by people like Timo Andres he also played the evening's solo piano pieces and Nico Muhly, as well as Gabriella Smith, who I hope will be heard at the Philharmonic again soon. Enjoy an excerpt from her "Carrot Revolution," a sonically intrepid piece that has the impression of an image coming in and out of focus, joyously performed at Nightcap by the Attacca Quartet. She was mesmerizing in a performance last month with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where she struck a Martha Argerich like balance of commanding precision and wildness. The scales tipped slightly at David Geffen Hall this week as she opened the concerto with a fiery run of chords. Which is not to say she gave a feral performance: She never appeared out of control as she navigated the piece's changing moods and fickle attachment to Romantic and Classical styles. For an encore, she leaned into Romanticism with one of her standbys, Liszt's stirring transcription of the Schubert song "Gretchen am Spinnrade." For those following Ms. Wang's many appearances in New York this season, she'll next play at Carnegie Hall on April 10, where her Perspectives series continues with a recital featuring the cellist Gautier Capucon. On the program is Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata in G minor, a chamber work whose dreamy sound world I'm always happy to revisit. See you there. JOSHUA BARONE If the opera world had awards like the Oscars, then in 1998 the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey would surely have won for best actor in a leading role, for his wrenching performance as the hulking, slow witted Lennie in Carlisle Floyd's "Of Mice and Men" at New York City Opera. (Here he is in the video above, in a 2011 production at Opera Australia.) Mr. Griffey might even have picked up the award again in 2008, for the title role of Britten's "Peter Grimes" at the Metropolitan Opera. His Grimes came across like a dangerously intemperate and painfully isolated man boy. Now a professor of voice at the Eastman School of Music, Mr. Griffey returned to New York for a recital last Sunday at the Morgan Library Museum. He shared the program with the gifted, radiant voiced young coloratura soprano Amy Owens (presented in collaboration with the George London Foundation). The Warren Jones was the elegant, superb piano accompanist. Mr. Griffey brought robust sound, tenderness and his trademark crisp diction to songs by Frank Bridge, John Jacob Niles, Charles Ives and others. He paid tribute to Mr. Floyd, now 92, singing Sam's Aria from "Susannah," which he once performed at the Met with Renee Fleming in the title role. Mr. Griffey also expressed gratitude to Andre Previn, who died last month, for giving him career changing opportunities, including casting him as Mitch in the premiere of the opera "A Streetcar Named Desire" (which also starred Ms. Fleming). Mr. Griffey then sang a wistful performance of Mitch's revealing aria. ANTHONY TOMMASINI | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The pulse of the train on the tracks sets a rhythm as its passenger cars seem to skim over Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. These six miles of nothing but sky above and water below are the gateway into the city by rail. Next come the cemeteries at the edge of New Orleans, and all of a sudden, a day and a half of travel ends at the Amtrak terminal in the business district. I had just completed the first leg of my cross country journeyby sleeper train, starting in New York, and was beginning the second: a foray into the cultural ties between the Crescent City and California. This trip had been inspired partly by the travel writer and blogger Greg Gross, who grew up in New Orleans and California. "I had a great uncle who ran away at 15 to become a Pullman porter," he said. These black men served a predominately white customer base as sleeping car porters, often simply called "George" by their customers. Their union became a powerful force during the civil rights movement. Mr. Gross's great uncle Ellis Pearson worked on the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles. He was something like an usher for Mr. Gross's family, which is full of cross country transplants, including his parents and a deceased uncle who played jazz trumpet. When black New Orleans families like his moved to California, "They brought their food with them, their music," he said. "They brought an energy, an attitude with them. 'We survived there; we can make it here.' They brought it to their churches and their neighbors." It's a refrain I hear many times as I speak to members of this diaspora. The Grosses weren't the only ones. The migration of black and Creole families moving to California from Louisiana began as a trickle in 1927, in the wake of that year's great flood, and grew to a mass migration from the 1930s to 1960, years that encompassed the Depression, World War II and the growth of employment opportunities for blacks, and Jim Crow. While many families went from the South to the North, the train lines led many in New Orleans to the West instead. The better part of a century after its start, some migrants resettled in California after Hurricane Katrina. I wanted to follow the path that others had, to trace a thread of our cultural lineage, however faint. I wanted to see both cities through a black Bayou and Creole lens, to see if they'd drifted apart or were overlapping, remixing culture in the same way that Creoles originally had. I would start my trip in New Orleans, among some of the families who made the westward migration. Kalaamu ya Salaam, an activist and writer, whose aunt moved to Los Angeles from the Lower Ninth Ward when he was young, took me to the artfully decorated Cafe Rose Nicaud on hip Frenchmen Street, filled with daytime revelers. "Parts of this area remind me of SoHo," he said. "You could be in Manhattan. That is what New Orleans has become." In the post Katrina, post recession era, a new New Orleans is experiencing a construction and real estate investment boom that has left out many locals, though it has plenty of charm. The night before my meeting with Mr. Salaam, I'd gone to the Frenchmen Art Market just down the street an open air bazaar strung with lights and filled with artisan wares, with music wafting through the warm air from street performers and nearby clubs. But like many thriving places, it seems geared more to new residents than to longtime locals. The segregation that was a vestige of slavery caused many to leave. But why Los Angeles? "There ain't nothing worth stopping for between New Orleans and Los Angeles," Mr. Salaam said, half joking. I kept it in mind as I undertook the journey, as part of the Amtrak Residency for Writers. I would have a sleeper cabin or roomette of my own on the 48 hour trip. The journey was a scenic one: The greens and browns of the bayou were gradually supplanted by the ocher of the Southwest. The Sunset Limited, unhampered by Eastern train tunnels, was a double decker with a glass walled viewing coach, perfect for watching the miles go by and meeting a mix of families, solo adventurers and train enthusiasts on the journey. One night, I pulled into San Antonio late and stopped by the landmark restaurant Mi Tierra; then, on a whim, I paid my knowledgeable cabdriver to give me a tour of his city. He took me through the historic neighborhoods, with their grand Victorian and Italianate homes, and he taught me about the evolution of the city. What those homes could not reveal was that San Antonio, and other cities in Texas, had the same racial caste system many in New Orleans were fleeing. They kept their eyes fixed on Los Angeles, and black Texans joined the surge heading West. Once in Los Angeles, I headed to the venerable Creole restaurant Harold and Belle's on Jefferson Boulevard to meet up with Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor, writer and producer, and the actor and musician Mark Broyard. The dining room scheduled to reopen next month after a renovation was filled with locals wearing fleur de lis T shirts or other symbols of their fealty to Louisiana. Mr. Broyard and Mr. Smith have known each other since childhood, and collaborated on a play called "Inside the Creole Mafia," staged several times over the course of two decades. I got a taste of their razor sharp banter over my gumbo. Mr. Broyard explained how his family left Louisiana during the Jim Crow years because, "as my mother said many times," he said, "she was not going to fight the civil rights movement with her children. We, the Creole kids, the light skinned kids, we had been integrating schools for a lot longer because we weren't dark. So we had been in and out of all these white institutions for years, with a tacit understanding that these people were colored, but it was O.K. that they were here because maybe they had half of one drop or something." Mr. Broyard and Mr. Smith come from families who settled in Los Angeles during the 1950s, and soon found that aspects of Jim Crow had followed them. "L.A., although it's the West, has been one of the most segregated cities in America," Mr. Smith said. "There were restrictive covenants, and our parents integrated previously all white neighborhoods." There were an estimated 212,000 black Angelenos in 1950, with 18 percent from Louisiana, according to Prof. Faustina DuCros of San Jose State University, who conducted oral histories with Creole families. "These people came and brought their culture completely intact," Mr. Broyard said at the restaurant. "They had Big Loaf Bakery; they had the Louisiana Seafood Market. There was Pete's Hot Sausage on the corner, here, and Aubrey's barber shop. There was Ashton Shatto" (pronounced chateau). "That's how they spelled it. Everyone had their wedding receptions there, their after funeral receptions there. My dad was a contractor. Everybody went to Roger's mother, who was a dentist and shared an office with my uncle, who was a physician." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Boy meets girl. Boy proposes to girl. But then ... girl runs off! "Freddie Falls in Love," a play told through dance, is one frothy production, but it doesn't take its rule book from "The Bachelor." Created by Al Blackstone, "Freddie" is about surviving a breakup. In the end, a surprise twist reveals which character is Freddie until then, none of the other performers have names and love prevails. But was it worth the wait? Not so much. "Freddie" is more cloying than sweet and more clueless than charming. Mr. Blackstone, a choreographer best known for his work on "So You Think You Can Dance," has resurrected "Freddie," originally presented at a fund raiser for Dancers Responding to AIDS in 2016, for a run at the Joyce Theater. It features Matt Doyle (notably from "The Book of Mormon") as the boy and Melanie Moore (the Season 8 winner of "So You Think") as the girl. One gentleman leaving the Joyce Theater on Wednesday night observed, "It's sure not the Bolshoi." All too true. "Freddie" is "So You Think You Can Dance" meets "Electric Company" with a dash of "Glee." (A good audience for this show might be musical theater obsessed teens.) Even in its bawdier moments as when Mr. Doyle tries out new lovers or when he takes a trip to Paris and has a sexual awakening at a nightclub the show has the feeling of kids pretending to be adults. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
AN ALMOST PERFECT CHRISTMAS By Nina Stibbe Illustrated. 176 pp. Little, Brown Company. 25. The year I was 9, my mother decided I should defrost the freezer of our small refrigerator by ironing the ice off with our old G.E. I bring this up because "An Almost Perfect Christmas," Nina Stibbe's guide to making it through the holidays without committing suicide, offers a similar scene. As Nina described her mother dragging her out of bed and forcing her to sit "cross legged on the toilet floor pointing a Philips hairdryer on an extension lead into the chest cavity for half an hour to finish off the defrosting," I experienced a frisson of recognition. This feeling was particularly memorable because it was one of the rare relatable moments in a book that really should be translated from the English. The entire volume is a reminder that they speak a very different language on the other side of the ocean. After struggling through the first few pages, I was overjoyed to discover the little glossary tucked into the back of the book. Ah good, I thought, when I came upon someone called Alan Titchmarsh, I'll just look him up. This, however, was not much help. "Very Christmassy and bears an uncanny resemblance to the Angel Gabriel," was what I found. Wikipedia was more forthcoming, informing me that Mr. Titchmarsh, MBE, DL, HonFSE, is "an English gardener, presenter, poet and novelist." The glossary was equally opaque on the subject of Quality Street. "The only really Christmassy chocolates (except Terry's Chocolate Orange), more Christmassy than say, Heroes." Stibbe's holidays are filled with a vast array of people and objects that are complete mysteries to me. I'd be willing to bet that you're in the same boat. Are you familiar with Acker Bilk, Flubes, Orla Kiely napkins, Cluedo, the Archers, Fanny Cradock, Barbara Windsor, Marguerite Patten, Gogos, Viennetta, Blue Band, French sticks or Loom Bandz Kits? Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Even our shopping habits, it turns out, have little in common. In a chapter called "Christmas Shopping," young Nina, still a small child, goes to the off license hatch at the pub (whatever that is) to buy her mother a bottle of Bell's for Christmas. I do know what Bell's is, but I also know that no American child could stroll into a bar and casually order a bottle of whiskey. While I'm sure many American parents would be thrilled to have their children follow this advice, it won't be possible any time soon. Then there's the music. Nina insists that Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody" is the best Christmas song ever written. Have you ever heard of it? It turns out that this huge English hit (apparently everyone over there knows it by heart) never really made it in America. But just as I was about to give up on Nina she delivers a great Christmas party playlist. I'll certainly use it the next time I serve Glue Vine (look it up) and sugar dusted mince pies. I was beginning to feel better about the book when I came upon the sad potted Christmas tree Nina rescues from a mean florist who insists it's "not up to the job." Feeling sorry for the little fellow, Nina takes it home and stands it next to an oak "to give it big ideas," and close to an ugly bamboo "to boost its esteem." She nurtures it for years, and I kind of love her for it. Then I read the bittersweet tale of Timothy the organic turkey and found myself laughing guiltily while I worried about the poor bird's fate. As for "Swim to Santa Claus," this little chapter would be hilarious in any language. If you're an American looking for advice on surviving the holiday season, "An Almost Perfect Christmas" will do you no good. On the other hand, if all you want is a good time, Nina Stibbe is your girl: She has the knack of being funny without being mean. And once you've succumbed, Nina quickly feels like a friend. I want to call her up and have a heart to heart about brussels sprouts. "Ignore Nigel Slater," she opines, "just boil, do not roast or fry or add anything. You have enough to do." This is, of course, remarkably bad advice. On the other hand, I'm sure she'll be happy to hear that we're in complete agreement on the subject of thank you notes. I also want to let Nina know that she's dead wrong about the concept of "bulking up." She thinks it foolish to add a few small presents (refrigerator magnets and the like) to make your main gift appear more substantial. I say what's the harm? But the real problem is that, in an orgy of self deprecation, she adds, "It has just occurred to me that the book you're now reading might well be a bulker upper." That's selling it far too short. "An Almost Perfect Christmas" is an introduction to Nina's England, a place filled with people named Bunny Wedgwood and sisters called Vic. It's an England where everyone loves dogs and is slightly, delightfully batty. It's an England that makes you long to spend your next Christmas there. After all, you're now very well prepared. You know how to defrost an English turkey. And you've got the perfect playlist. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
PARIS French labor unions and business leaders struck a deal on Friday to overhaul swaths of France's notoriously rigid labor market, moving to tame some of the most confounding rules in the 3,200 page labor code as the country tries to increase its competitiveness and curb unemployment. The changes would include giving employers more flexibility to reduce working hours in times of economic distress without incurring union strikes. High levels of compensation that courts can award to laid off workers would be trimmed. The five year period that former employees now have to contest layoffs would be reduced, a shift that Medef, France's employers' union, said would "reduce the fear of hiring" by businesses. President Francois Hollande has said the changes are needed to burnish France's international allure as a place to do business, and the accord capped weeks of sparring among the five top labor unions and Medef. The labor measures would help address what Louis Gallois, Mr. Hollande's investment commissioner, has called a "two speed" labor market in France. Under that system, employees on long term contracts enjoy extensive, costly job protections and benefits, while temporary workers, whose ranks have surged to a third of the French labor force, have minimal job security and relatively few benefits. In November, the government introduced a tax credit for companies, potentially worth a total of 20 billion euros ( 26 billion), aimed at easing high employment costs. In exchange, business negotiators agreed on Friday, as a concession to unions, to pay higher taxes for short term work contracts. Two hard line unions, the Confederation generale du travail and the Force Ouvriere, rejected the offer as insufficient and refused to sign the deal, which was nonetheless binding because France's three other main labor unions backed it. A formal agreement will be signed next week. The tax would help expand government coffers meant to support the unemployed while also nudging employers toward favoring long term contracts. Employers would also pay somewhat higher contributions for private health insurance. The deal "will change life for businesses in France," Laurence Parisot, the president of Medef, said in a statement. "This marks the advent of a culture of compromise after decades of a philosophy of social antagonism." The negotiations were clouded recently by a series of public episodes, including a government threat to nationalize an ArcelorMittal plant in France to preserve jobs. There was also the decision in the last week by the French actor Gerard Depardieu to take Russian citizenship to escape a proposed 75 percent marginal tax rate on incomes of more than 1 million euros ( 1.3 million). Whether any of the changes will come fast enough to fix France's problems is an open question. Some economists say that France could become the next sick nation of Europe if it does not improve the environment for investment and hiring. "Given the gap we still have between the level of labor market regulation in France and in countries like the United States, Britain and Ireland, it is very clear that when observers look at the outcome, they will say it's a step in the right direction, but not enough," said Dominique Barbet, the European economist for BNP Paribas in Paris. 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 we also need to keep in mind that in France, if you want to make reforms, you have to go through small steps first," he said. "You can't try to change the system overnight. That usually results in mass protests in the streets." Mr. Hollande's government is expected to sign off on the deal. He has said it will help him keep a promise of reducing unemployment, now at a 13 year high of 10.7 percent, by the end of the year. Youth unemployment is about 25 percent. By contrast, unemployment in Germany, which last decade made deeper cuts to labor costs and regulations than France is doing, is at 6.9 percent and joblessness among the young is around 8 percent. Mr. Hollande sought the accord after Mr. Gallois issued a stark assessment of the French economy in November, saying the country needed a "competitiveness shock" that would require politicians to curb the "cult of regulation" that Mr. Gallois said was choking business. Under current labor rules, many entrepreneurs in France hesitate to hire large numbers of workers. Some employers even resort to operating several companies with no more than 49 employees each instead of running larger ones that employ hundreds. That is because after the 50th employee is hired, a stack of new regulations come into play, including long firing procedures even for underperforming employees and requirements for numerous union representatives. Temporary contracts fall on the other end of the scale: they are often lower paid and offer far fewer protections, something that has alarmed French labor unions. More than 80 percent of new contracts issued in France are short term, a trend that has grown steadily as employers turn to them to escape the costly rules protecting permanent workers. Mr. Gallois's report said that unless France relaxed its labor rules, the country would continue on an industrial decline that destroyed more than 750,000 jobs in a decade and helped shrink France's share of exports to the European Union to 9.3 percent from 12.7 percent. The report also called for cuts to business taxes used to pay for government and France's costly social safety net. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The Downtown Brooklyn skyline has been redefined by the cluster of high rises that has sprouted in recent years. And while 11 Hoyt, a new condominium being built on the site of a Macy's parking garage, will certainly be tall at 57 stories, its development team hopes its design will help it stand out from the crowd. The building, on the corner of Hoyt and Livingston Streets, will have 481 residences, priced between 600,000 for studios to about 3.4 million for four bedroom units. Already several stories high, it is expected to be finished in 2020. Sales, conducted by Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, began this month . Designed by Jeanne Gang, the founding principal of Chicago based Studio Gang Architects, 11 Hoyt has a scalloped exterior made of cast concrete that, from a distance, resembles small waves lapping in the sky. But the waved exterior isn't just decorative, Ms. Gang said. The undulating facade also pulls the interior borders outward, providing a little extra space for residents in many units. Ms. Gang, an architect and a MacArthur Fellow, said she got the idea for the interior nooks after noticing all the protruding bay windows in brownstone Brooklyn. The extra space can be used to house plants, books, ornaments, or be turned into window seats. The complex geometry of these contemporary oriel windows and the resulting lack of right angles create about 190 different floor plans in the building. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. What do you think of it? What else are you interested in? Let us know: thearts nytimes.com. Media outlets still haven't fully processed the news that President Trump called Haiti and certain African countries "shitholes" during a meeting last week. On late night TV on Monday, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon weren't about to let it go, either. "Trump said it on Thursday, and not only did the White House not immediately deny it, Trump reportedly was calling friends to brag about it. He's like a toddler calling his mom to the potty. 'Come look at the load I dropped in the national discourse!' " STEPHEN COLBERT "Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci defended Trump, saying, 'At the end of the day, he's not a racist.' Then he said, 'During the day, it's a different story.' " JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
By moving to a remote broadcast, the 2020 N.F.L. draft will be short two of its hallmarks Commissioner Roger Goodell being booed by the studio audience and bear hugged by drafted players. It is a ubiquitous sight at the N.F.L. draft in a normal year. One by one, after their names are called, the newly drafted players bound onto a stage and envelop N.F.L. commissioner Roger Goodell in a bear hug. Not this year. Not only will Goodell abide by federal guidelines and remain at least six feet from players at next week's draft, but he will be hundreds or thousands of miles away. In fact, Goodell will announce the picks from his home in the New York area, the N.F.L. said on Monday. Specifically, from his basement, according to NBC Sports. Goodell showed off his remote conferencing skills last week on a FaceTime call with the tech influencer Ankur Jain, and even proposed a solution for the missing hugs. That is just one of a host of changes made to the draft because of the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, just about the only thing that hasn't changed is the dates, April 23 25. This year's draft was supposed to take place in Las Vegas, the latest city chosen to host since the N.F.L. left Radio City Music Hall in 2015 and turned the draft into a pop up spring football extravaganza. Vegas is no longer a verboten word in league headquarters now that the Supreme Court has struck down a federal prohibition on sports betting and the Raiders have found a soft landing there after fleeing Oakland. The 2020 N.F.L. draft was going to be a party attended by hundreds of thousands, put on in the understated style Las Vegas is known for. Instead, the draft picks' reactions will be filmed in their homes, sectional sofas and all. The league has invited 58 prospects to be part of a "virtual green room" and is reportedly outfitting each with a camera to join the remote broadcast. Players have been advised to maintain quarantine guidelines and not invite anyone into their homes who has not already been in contact with the people there. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Tristan Wirfs, an offensive tackle from Iowa expected to be drafted in the top 10, said he would probably spend the day at his mom's house in his hometown, Mount Vernon, Iowa. "If this whole virus thing wasn't going on and I were to stay in Mount Vernon," he said, "I'd say damn near the whole town might be there." Instead, he said his aunts, uncle, grandmother, girlfriend, sister and two cousins would be over. "That might be it." Derrick Brown, another potential first round pick, said being drafted would still be special because he can be with his family. But the Auburn defensive tackle was clear about one regret missing out on the Bellagio fountain boats. "Not going to lie," he said. "I thought that was going to be pretty sweet." The draft telecast will originate from Bristol, Conn., the home of ESPN, with a limited number of commentators physically in the studio. Trey Wingo, who has helmed ESPN's draft coverage since Chris Berman stepped down in 2017, will host from the studio, but draft regulars like Mel Kiper Jr. and Chris Mortensen will appear remotely from their homes. ESPN reporters will be "embedded" with teams, but instead of doing the usual stand up shots outside team facilities, they will be standing in their spare bedrooms. The NFL Network will simulcast ESPN's production instead of televising a separate draft show. Rich Eisen and other NFL Network analysts will appear on this hybrid telecast. And for the second year in a row ABC will have its own draft telecast, aimed at more casual football fans "ABC will focus on storytelling and the journey draft prospects and their families have taken to get to the N.F.L." in the words of the news release. The show will be hosted by Rece Davis. Since shortly after the N.F.L. draft combine in February, teams have been conducting draft preparations remotely, with some pro days canceled and in person interviews banned. Some teams, like the Giants, have been interviewing prospects over FaceTime or Skype. "We're losing the personal touch points," said Dave Gettleman, the Giants general manager. "We have the visual touch point, but we're really missing out on the personal touch point, when you can smell or feel a guy." As a self described "old man," Gettleman, 69, said it was exciting working with the "young guys" on his staff who were thoughtful about using technology. Kevin Abrams, the Giants assistant general manager, said meetings conducted over the internet haven't been "perfectly smooth, but it's been smoother than anyone could have expected." He will be less excited if things go wrong on draft day and as a result the Giants, who select fourth over all, can't nab the player they want or complete an advantageous trade. Over 11 million viewers watched the opening round of the draft last year. With nearly the entire country living under stay at home orders and sports fans starved for something, anything, new and consequential, most are predicting the draft will draw record viewership. Those tuning in will see an N.F.L. draft like no other, a draft shot on low quality cameras in homes, full of static camera shots and more likely to encounter technical glitches. But perhaps this will also be an N.F.L. draft that feels more organic than the over the top, slickly produced extravaganza it has become. And an unexpected upside to an N.F.L. draft conducted remotely? One notable N.F.L. draft tradition vociferous booing the first time Goodell walks onto the stage will be absent. Unless his wife, children or pets are feeling particularly vicious. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Q. Is it possible to read Nook books on a Kindle? Is there an e reader that handles books from multiple e bookstores? A. The Barnes Noble Nook e books and Amazon's Kindle e books use different formats, but dedicated users have shown it is possible to convert and read Nook books on an Amazon device. How you do it depends on the hardware you have and can take some technical fiddling to copy over Nook books to a Kindle e reader or Fire tablet. Slinging e books between two brands of e readers is generally unsupported by all companies. It can also involve breaking the built in copyright protections so read all the fine print to fully understand what is allowed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority at H.H.S. is distributing billions of dollars to companies to develop vaccines, including the latest funding to AstraZeneca. The authority, known as Barda, has already agreed to provide up to 483 million to the biotech company Moderna and 500 million to Johnson Johnson for their separate vaccine efforts. It has also agreed to provide 30 million to a coronavirus vaccine effort by the French company Sanofi, building on a larger contract announced last December for making flu inoculations. Scores of vaccine efforts are underway around the world, and several potential vaccines are now in at least small scale clinical trials. But the Oxford vaccine candidate, now licensed by AstraZeneca, has moved quickly into the kind of large scale testing necessary to prove safety and effectiveness. Building on efforts to develop a vaccine against a similar disease, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, the Oxford scientists last month began a Phase I trial of their potential vaccine against Covid 19 in Britain involving 1,100 participants. A combined Phase II and Phase III trial involving 5,000 participants is set to begin in Britain by the end of this month. The researchers have said that if the vaccine is proven effective, they hope to have an approval for emergency use, worldwide, by September. But a steep decline in the rate of new infections in Britain may make it difficult to prove effectiveness. Ethics rules generally preclude deliberately infecting test participants. That means unless enough test participants who are given a placebo become infected with the virus in the community, the researchers cannot show that the potential vaccine does its job. The large scale tests in the United States this summer may provide another opportunity. On Monday, Moderna announced partial data of its first phase trial, saying its vaccine candidate had proven safe and that it had provoked an immune response in 45 people, including eight who had extensive tests that found they had produced antibodies that could prevent the virus from infecting cells. It is also working on an accelerated timetable with partners at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Swiss company Lonza. Moderna received approval to move to a second phase involving 600 people and said it would also begin a third stage in July with thousands of healthy people. The Trump administration's efforts to stanch the pandemic have been troubled by a series of agency fumbles, starting with defective C.D.C. tests that stalled detection of the virus's spread for weeks and limited diagnoses for patients at hospitals and clinics. Recently, President Trump reorganized vaccine and treatment efforts after he dismissed last month the head of Barda, Rick Bright, who then filed a whistle blower complaint contending he had been pressured to seek approval for certain treatments for Covid 19. Just last week, Mr. Trump named Moncef Slaoui, a venture capitalist who was a longtime vaccine executive at GlaxoSmithKline and most recently a board member for Moderna, to help oversee "Operation Warp Speed," the federal drive to accelerate ways to combat the virus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
There is a major force uniting America's fiercely partisan politicians: big technology companies. Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels are coming together to scrutinize the power of the Silicon Valley giants and, potentially, to rein them in. Letitia James, the Democratic attorney general of New York, announced on Friday that attorneys general in eight states four Democrats and four Republicans and the District of Columbia had begun an antitrust investigation of Facebook. Next up for state regulators is Google. A similarly bipartisan group led by eight attorneys general is set to announce on Monday a separate but comparable investigation. The search giant is expected to be the focus of the inquiry, according to two people familiar with the plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity before the official announcement. Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, a Republican, is taking a leading role in the Google investigation, the people said. The state inquiries coincide with bipartisan scrutiny of the tech giants in Washington, by House and Senate committees, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. Federal officials are examining the practices of Amazon and Apple as well as those of Facebook and Google. The companies have caught the attention of Republicans and Democrats for somewhat different reasons. President Trump and political conservatives complain that the social media giants discriminate against them. Liberals say online platforms are barely policed conduits for right wing conspiracy theories and racism. As a result, the various investigations reach beyond the companies' size, wealth and market power the usual concerns of antitrust regulators. The companies' handling of consumer data, their ad targeting practices and their role as gatekeepers of communication are all under a microscope. "The dominance of these giant technology companies warrants a closer look," said Representative David Cicilline, the Rhode Island Democrat leading the House antitrust subcommittee that is investigating the big tech corporations. "I'm glad that members of both parties understand that." Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who began an investigation of Google in 2017, when he was his state's attorney general, also cheered on the state officials. The federal and state inquiries of today's big tech companies are just getting started. Major investigations of industry titans like AT T, IBM and Microsoft in the past were marathon endeavors, spanning years, and sometimes decades. But Harry First, an antitrust expert at the New York University School of Law, said that rising public concern about the biggest tech companies was fueling the new spate of inquiries. "It remains to be seen if we're seeing the beginning of the hard work of serious enforcement or this is mainly political theater," said Mr. First, a former official in the New York attorney general's office. "But this matters, because nothing is going to happen without political support." Joining New York and the District of Columbia in the investigation of Facebook are the attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee. Ms. James of New York said all companies including Facebook, the world's largest social media platform must follow the law and respect consumers. "We will use every investigative tool at our disposal to determine whether Facebook's actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers' choices or increased the price of advertising," Ms. James said. In a statement, Will Castleberry, Facebook's vice president of state and local policy, said the company "will work constructively with state attorneys general, and we welcome a conversation with policymakers about the competitive environment in which we operate." A Google spokesman had a similar response. "We look forward to working with the attorneys general to answer questions about our business and the dynamic technology sector," he said. That state officials would investigate Facebook and other big tech companies over antitrust and other issues had been expected, although the timing was unclear. The states' move follows similar steps by the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department to examine how the companies have accumulated market power and whether they have acted to reduce competition. On Friday, Google disclosed to financial regulators that the Justice Department had requested documents related to past antitrust investigations into the company. Congress is exploring the same questions. In July, executives from Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple the four companies that are the focus of the Justice Department's review appeared at an antitrust hearing in Washington. Another hearing is planned for next week. State regulators, typically acting in tandem with federal officials, can play an important role in major antitrust investigations. That was the case in the landmark antitrust case against Microsoft, when 20 states joined the Justice Department in suing the software giant in 1998. Unlike that case, the current antitrust issues extend well beyond a single company. The Justice Department, for example, is focused on companies that operate in, and have come to dominate, somewhat different markets, including internet search, online advertising, e commerce and social networks. For Facebook, the states' antitrust investigation puts the social media giant in regulators' cross hairs yet again. In July, the Federal Trade Commission voted to fine the company about 5 billion for mishandling users' personal information, the agency's largest fine ever against a tech company. Also in July, Facebook officials faced two days of grilling in Congress over a new cryptocurrency initiative called Libra. The state antitrust investigation into Facebook could move in many different directions. It might, for instance, align with the trade commission's inquiry, which is focused on whether the company used what Chris Hughes, a Facebook founder, and the prominent antitrust academics Scott Hemphill and Tim Wu have called a "program of serial defensive acquisitions" to maintain its dominance in the social networking industry. In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, the photo sharing network, for 1 billion. Two years later, it spent 19 billion for WhatsApp, a global messaging application used by more than a billion people. Critics like Mr. Hughes, Mr. Hemphill and Mr. Wu believe that long before either acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook and its chief executive, kept a close eye on start ups that could pose a threat to his company. Facebook has acquired more than 70 companies over roughly 15 years. As for Google, it escaped unscathed from a 21 month trade commission investigation that ended in 2013. The agency decided that the company did not violate antitrust laws in how it presented search results, despite often steering users to its own services, like shopping. Google has received tougher treatment in Europe. In several antitrust investigations into its market behavior, Google has agreed to pay the European Union more than 8 billion in fines. In the United States, Google agreed this week to pay a 170 million fine and make changes to protect children's privacy on its YouTube video service. The settlement was reached with the trade commission and the office of Ms. James, New York's attorney general. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Much is yet to be determined about the future of Fox News, especially with the contracts of the star anchors Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly soon to run out. But a new prime time lineup for the 24 hour news network, which is in rebuilding mode after the departure of its longtime chief, Roger Ailes, is starting to take shape. Tucker Carlson, a former co host of CNN's "Crossfire" and a prominent conservative writer, is set to take over the Fox anchor chair at 7 p.m., filling the slot formerly held by Greta van Susteren, who left the network in September. As Fox faces competition from scrappier rivals like Breitbart News, Mr. Carlson, 47, is in some ways a throwback to a more genteel era of conservatism. Preppy and jovial, Mr. Carlson founded The Daily Caller, a provocative, if relatively moderate, right leaning website, and he has often evinced a mischievous streak; in 2006, he agreed to be a contestant on "Dancing With the Stars," although he was eliminated in the first round. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The Greatest: You know who had a pretty good 2016? , that's who. After winning four gold medals and a bronze in the Rio Olympics last summer, Biles who already had 14 world championship medals to her name and who won't turn 20 until March was hailed as the greatest American gymnast of all time. "Who doesn't want to fly in the air?" she asked Ebony magazine. "It's kind of cool." The Associated Press chose Biles as its female athlete of the year; Ebony included her on its Power 100 list; and her memoir, "Courage to Soar," written with Michelle Burford, hit No. 1 on the young adult hardcover best seller list. (After seven weeks, it's currently No. 4.) Not that she has let the success go to her head. "To me, I'm just normal," she told The Financial Times last month, in a profile that started this way: ", arguably the greatest female gymnast of all time, is doing her best to convince me that she is an ordinary mortal, just like the rest of us. And it is nearly working. Sort of." In her memoir, Biles again passes herself off as normal, maintaining her good natured humility and emphasizing the challenges she faced: early years in foster care (she was eventually adopted by her grandparents), struggles on the uneven bars and the realization that she would just miss the age cutoff for the 2012 Olympics. She quotes a diary she kept when she was 11, after she did the math: "I will have to wait a long time. . . . I don't know if I will make it," she wrote. She tells us that she then turned out the light to sleep, but turned it back on to add one more thought: "I want to go the farthest I can." Looking back now, Biles writes, "that was the most important sentence I've ever written." Posthumorous: "The Princess Diarist," Carrie Fisher's book about working on the original Star Wars movie, didn't make much noise when it was released in late November: It appeared for a single week on the combined nonfiction list, then faded. That all changes with Fisher's death on Dec. 27 this week, the book (based in large part on journals she kept at the time, when she was 19) catapults to No. 1 in its debut on the hardcover nonfiction list. Even as a teenager, Fisher was in possession of the ingenuous wit and raw honesty she later displayed in books like "Postcards From the Edge" and "Wishful Drinking." The neuroses, too. "I would like to not be able to hear myself think," she writes in one entry. "I constantly hear my mind chattering and jabbering away up there all by itself. . . . If anyone reads this when I have passed to the big bad beyond, I shall be posthumorously embarrassed. I shall spend my entire afterlife blushing." Networking: The title of Megyn Kelly's memoir, "Settle for More," comes from her personal motto. But it takes on added resonance with the recent announcement that Kelly will leave Fox News for a prominent gig at NBC. The book is No. 8 in its seventh week on the hardcover nonfiction list. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Farmers and plant breeders are in a race against time. The world population is growing rapidly, requiring ever more food, but the amount of cultivable land is limited. Warmer temperatures have extended growth seasons in some areas and brought drought and pests to others. "We face a grand challenge in terms of feeding the world," said Lee Hickey, a plant geneticist at the University of Queensland in Australia. "If you look at the stats, we're going to have about 10 billion on the planet by 2050 and we're going to need 60 to 80 percent more food to feed everybody. It's an even greater challenge in the face of climate change and diseases that affect our crops that are also rapidly evolving." But plant breeding is a slow process. Developing new kinds of crops higher yield, more nutritious, drought and disease resistant can take a decade or more using traditional breeding techniques. So plant breeders are working on quickening the pace. Dr. Hickey's team has been working on "speed breeding," tightly controlling light and temperature to send plant growth into overdrive. This enables researchers to harvest seeds and start growing the next generation of crops sooner. Their technique was inspired by NASA research into how to grow food on space stations. They trick the crops into flowering early by blasting blue and red LED lights for 22 hours a day and keeping temperatures between 62 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Last November, in a paper in Nature, they showed that they can grow up to six generations of wheat, barley, chickpeas and canola in a year, whereas traditional methods would only yield one or two. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. On Monday in Nature Biotechnology, Dr. Hickey and his team highlight the potential of speed breeding, as well as other techniques that may help improve food security. Combining speed breeding with other state of the art technologies, such as gene editing, is the best way to create a pipeline of new crops, according to the researchers. "What we're really talking about here is creating plant factories on a massive scale," Dr. Hickey said. A new era in plant research has arrived, says Charlie Brummer, director of the Plant Breeding Center at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the work. Breeders and breeding companies have always tried to minimize the time it takes to develop a new variety of crops, but with new technologies like speed breeding, "we can do it better now than we could in the past," he said. Botanists first started growing plants under artificial light carbon arc lamps 150 years ago. Since then, advances in LED technology have vastly improved the precision with which scientists can adjust and customize light settings to individual crop species. Researchers have also adopted new genetic techniques to optimize flowering times and make plants more resistant to the rigors of a warming planet. Unlike older crossbreeding and crop modification techniques, newer tools like Crispr allow scientists to snip out portions of the plant's own DNA that may make it vulnerable to disease. Dr. Hickey and his team are working on adding Crispr machinery directly into barley and sorghum saplings, in order to modify the plants' genes while simultaneously speed breeding them. This is easier said than done for some crops. Potatoes and some other crops, such as alfalfa, are tetraploids, carrying four copies of each chromosome. (Humans and most animals are diploid, with two chromosomes, one from each parent). A breeder might want to delete one gene that decreases crop yield, but there may be three more copies of the gene on the plant's other chromosomes. This unique inheritance pattern means that potatoes are typically sterile, and must be propagated by harvesting them and replanting tubers. Speed breeding and genetic editing can only fast track propagation to a certain extent, said Benjamin Stich, a plant geneticist at the Heinrich Heine University of Dusseldorf, Germany. Dr. Stich and his team are developing a technique called genomic prediction to fast track the identification of tubers with desirable traits. First, the researchers take what they know about how various genes influence growth and yield. Then, they input that data into computer models and extract predictions about which plants will have the best combination of genes and yield in the field. "We can now predict many traits simultaneously, with high reliability," Dr. Stich said. His team has used the technique to successfully predict tubers' susceptibility to potato blight, as well as their starch content, yield and time to maturity. With cheaper, more powerful technology, opportunities are opening up to improve crops around the world. Dr. Hickey's team plans to train plant breeders in India, Zimbabwe and Mali over the next couple years through a collaboration with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics and grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Ms. Cerami, 54, is the chief executive of Cerami Associates, a company based in New York that provides acoustical, audiovisual and technology design work for commercial and residential properties. Its recent projects include work at the Hudson Yards development, One World Trade Center and the Barclays Center. Cerami Associates was started in 1965 by Ms. Cerami's father, Vito Cerami. A. We're really busy, and we're really busy because there's a lot of repositioning for companies. A. What's happening now is that there are three generations in the work force, and people work very differently. The millennials are coming in with a different work mentality they're more likely to work out there in a collaborative way as opposed to an enclosed space. So more collaborative space, more bring your own device sit down let's work and let's do as opposed to these 30 person big, strapping meetings in conference rooms. They like that cacophony of sound. My generation is much happier in a quiet environment. Q. So appropriate acoustics would be important for all workers. A. When you have good acoustics in place and design, it makes for a better work experience. Q. How many projects are you working these days? A. It's quite a number I'll say around 300. Q. Is much of it in the New York area? A. I'd say 70 percent of our work is in the Northeast corridor: New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington. And it's New York centric: A lot of the major developers are here, and there are tentacles to many other places in the country. Q. One of your biggest projects is Hudson Yards. A. We're doing most of the office and residential buildings and some of the interior space. We're working also with Brookfield on Manhattan West they did the transformation of the World Financial Center and with Silverstein; all of the buildings at the Trade Center are projects of ours as well. A. Yes. All the acoustics. We're not doing the Conde Nast space. We did the core and shells, all of the air conditioning, all of the slabs. We did the base building. Q. Do you do much residential work? A. We're doing a lot of residential property. With former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's quality of life edict for the city, it has fallen into acoustics. Buildings, for instance, on the West Side Highway have a requirement for the facade of the building to meet acoustical requirements for a sound barrier. Q. Noise is typically the No. 1 complaint of apartment dwellers in New York City. Any advice? A. It's usually with a tenant above. Maybe they have wood floors and they're hearing the clickety clack. You put carpet down. A tenant that plays a lot of music the bass of it is what you feel. There's no simple answer for that. That's called structure borne noise. We designed for a very famous actor and he wanted to play his piano any time of day or night, so we designed his apartment to be able to do that. Basically what you do is float a room within a room and isolate it from the entire building. But unless you have an awful lot of cash, the simple things are all you can do from a practical perspective. Q. You do sound masking, too. A. That's white noise. Remember in the day there was Muzak. Sound masking with white noise is a blanket of sound. The New York Times Building is one of the first to do this; we did the acoustics for The New York Times Building. We actually input sound into your space and create this blanket. If we turned off the sound masking, it would be dramatically different. We create an environment that you can't see, can't touch, but the outcome is one that creates a good collaborative work space or a great residential property. Q. You came to the helm of Cerami Associates in 1987, just a couple of years after joining the firm. A. I graduated college, worked for General Electric in the management program and then came to work for my dad. My dad had a partner, Fred Shen, and Fred left to start his own business in 1986, and then my dad died the following year. Q. It must have been a scary time for you. A. My Plan B was to be a patent attorney. But I realized I had an opportunity, and I'm a fighter. I bought the company from my mom. There are a lot of people in this industry that really mentored me and that are clients today, like Hines, an international developer. People knew my dad this goes back a lot of years and then my dad's legacy has evolved to be my legacy. Q. Where would you like to see the company in the next five to 10 years? A. Developing more skill set isn't on my docket right now. I'd like to do a few things really, really well. I think it's taking that brand and seeing how we can create a larger representation across the country, and to be a national firm. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention making the rounds this month on the internet are clarifying what we know about the transmission of the coronavirus. The virus spreads mainly from person to person, rather than via contaminated surfaces, according to the C.D.C. For those who were worried about wiping down grocery bags or disinfecting mailed packages, the news headlines highlighting this guidance in recent days might have brought some relief. But this information is not new: The C.D.C. has been using similar language for months. If anything, the headlines have pulled into sharper focus what we already know about the virus. The coronavirus is thought to spread mainly from one person to another, typically through droplets when an infected person sneezes, coughs or talks at close range even if that person is not showing symptoms. The website also says that people can become infected by "touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes." But those are "not thought to be the main way the virus spreads." According to cached versions of the website that are available online, this language has remained largely unchanged since at least late March. The format of the C.D.C. website was slightly altered at least twice this month, but the language about surfaces remained largely the same. On May 11, it appears to have been placed under a new subheading "The virus does not spread easily in other ways" and more information about the difficulty of catching the virus from animals was added. That change appeared to spur the series of news headlines, and on May 22, the C.D.C. said in a statement that "after media reports appeared that suggested a change in C.D.C.'s view on transmissibility, it became clear that these edits were confusing." So the agency made another edit. Now, the language about surfaces is under a new subheading: "The virus may be spread in other ways." Experts at the C.D.C. and elsewhere are still learning about the new coronavirus. There are questions about how the density of virus particles could affect transmission rates. Researchers don't yet know whether all speech, cough and sneeze droplets carrying the particles are equally infectious, or if a specific amount of virus needs to be transmitted for a person to get sick by breathing it in. A study last week found that talking alone can launch thousands of droplets into the air, and that they can remain suspended for eight to 14 minutes. It seems that the virus spreads most easily when people are in close contact with one another in a conversation, for example or gathered in poorly ventilated spaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech. She said that in order for a person to catch the virus from a surface, it would seem that a few things would have to happen. First, the virus would have to be transmitted to the surface in large enough amounts. Then, it would have to survive on that surface until it was touched by someone else. And even if it was eventually transferred to, say, a person's finger, it would then have to survive on the skin until that person happened to touch an eye or mouth. "There's just a lot more conditions that have to be met for transmission to happen via touching these objects," Dr. Marr said. A lot of what we know about how long the virus lives on surfaces comes from a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in March. The study found that the virus can survive, under ideal conditions, up to three days on hard metal surfaces and plastic and up to 24 hours on cardboard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Researchers in London who are studying how people respond to art used the artist Patrick Tresset's robotic installation, "5 Robots Named Paul," to measure how people respond to drawings created by machines. Do You Like 'Dogs Playing Poker'? Science Would Like to Know Why If you've ever wondered whether the title on a work of abstract art say "Blue No. 2" influences how you feel about it, you'll be intrigued by a new study from the University of Pittsburgh. Researchers there found that people prefer works with straightforward titles like "Curved Lines" or "Dots of Color" to those with figurative titles like "Ice Dancing" or "Sabotage." Another study released last month by psychologists at Boston College found that a big reason people favor an artist's work over an identical copy is their belief that some essence of the artist is left behind in the original. "Philosophers have grappled with questions about the arts for centuries, and lay people have puzzled about them too," Ellen Winner, a Boston College professor who led the study there, said. "Now, psychologists have begun to explore these same questions and have made many fascinating discoveries." Nearly two dozen research labs across the United States are studying aesthetics examining not just the visual arts but domains like music, literature and performance and pumping out scientific papers in disciplines that include anthropology, neuroscience and biology. But, at its core, much of the research in this growing field of "experimental aesthetics" boils down to efforts to solve two age old enigmas: What is art and why do we like what we like? "It's an exciting field because we have started to figure out how to use the best tools of science to measure things we did not think were measurable," said Thalia Goldstein, editor of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, a quarterly journal of the American Psychological Association. "We want to build a research base science can draw on." For years, the journal has been filled with peer reviewed articles with arcane titles like "An Empirical Study on the Healing Nature of Mandalas," or "The Effects of Cognitive Load on Judgments of Titled Visual Art," or "A Qualitative Case Study of the Impact of Environmental and Personal Factors on Prominent Turkish Writers." In June, researchers at the University of London tackled the riddle of machine made art in a paper, "Putting the Art in Artificial: Aesthetic Responses to Computer Generated Art." They found that while people tend to disdain paintings they know are generated artificially, they have a soft spot for those works when they see them being made by a robot with an arm. The researchers concluded that including a humanlike robot in the art making process "may indeed represent the final frontier for the true acceptance" of works created by artificial intelligence. While some studies are born of scholarly curiosity, others are aimed at discovering medical and educational applications based on how art affects the body and the brain. The National Endowment for the Arts is helping fund research into the potential therapeutic benefits of art "in treating a disease or disorder, or in improving symptoms for a chronic disease, disorder or health condition." One specific question: "How does a dosage frequency, duration, or intensity of creative arts therapy relate to individual or program level outcomes?" The N.E.A. is also working with the Defense Department on a study to determine whether having service members decorate blank plaster masks can help with diagnosing and treating post traumatic stress disorder. Preliminary findings suggest the masks offer clues to the psychological states of service members and veterans otherwise reluctant to report symptoms because of social stigma. "We all want to raise the quality of evidence in this space," Sunil Iyengar, director of the N.E.A.'s Office of Research Analysis, said. Another study by Drexel University in Philadelphia offers hope that art therapy can have physiological benefits. Researchers determined that 45 minutes spent on art projects "resulted in a statistically significant lowering of cortisol levels," a hormonal marker of stress, measured in before and after saliva samples from participants. The organization whose members initiated much of this research, the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, is a unit of the American Psychological Association that was established in 1945. Its membership has grown consistently over the years and stands at about 500. A second organization that promotes similar research, the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, includes not only psychologists but philosophers, sociologists and neuroscientists. Each group publishes a research journal and both will hold conventions in August. Ms. Winner's team at Boston College published its study, "Essentialist Beliefs in Aesthetic Judgments of Duplicate Artworks," in the society's journal in June. The research was designed to explore why people come to devalue pieces they had once revered after finding out that the works were not actually created by the artist. The subjects were told both works had the same market value to eliminate concerns that money might affect the aesthetic judgments. They were told both images were sanctioned by the artist, to alleviate any ethical worries. In one part of the experiment, the subjects were told that the image on the left had been made by the artist, but the image on the right by the artist's assistant. The viewers strongly favored the image said to have been made by the artist, even though its twin was in all respects identical. Their conclusion: "While we may dislike forgeries due to their immorality and worthlessness on the market, we also prefer originals for another reason: We like to look at original works that we know were made by the artist and this is because it makes us feel like we are communing with the artist's mind, soul, heart and essence." Naturally, this idea of stuffing art into a test tube has its skeptics. In a 2017 article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Alexis D. J. Makin, a psychologist at of the University of Liverpool, England, cast doubt on the efficacy of studying responses to art in a clinical setting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Maria Sibylla Merian, like many European women of the 17th century, stayed busy managing a household and rearing children. But on top of that, Merian, a German born woman who lived in the Netherlands, also managed a successful career as an artist, botanist, naturalist and entomologist. "She was a scientist on the level with a lot of people we spend a lot of time talking about," said Kay Etheridge, a biologist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania who has been studying the scientific history of Merian's work. "She didn't do as much to change biology as Darwin, but she was significant." At a time when natural history was a valuable tool for discovery, Merian discovered facts about plants and insects that were not previously known. Her observations helped dispel the popular belief that insects spontaneously emerged from mud. The knowledge she collected over decades didn't just satisfy those curious about nature, but also provided valuable insights into medicine and science. She was the first to bring together insects and their habitats, including food they ate, into a single ecological composition. After years of pleasing a captivated audience across Europe with books of detailed descriptions and life size paintings of familiar insects, in 1699 she sailed with her daughter nearly 5,000 miles from the Netherlands to South America to study insects in the jungles of what is now known as Suriname. She was 52. The result was her magnum opus, "Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium." In her work, she revealed a side of nature so exotic, dramatic and valuable to Europeans of the time that she received much acclaim. But a century later, her findings came under scientific criticism. Shoddy reproductions of her work along with setbacks to women's roles in 18th and 19th century Europe resulted in her efforts being largely forgotten. "It was kind of stunning when she sort of dropped off into oblivion," said Dr. Etheridge. "Victorians started putting women in a box, and they're still trying to crawl out of it." Today, the pioneering woman of the sciences has re emerged. In recent years, feminists, historians and artists have all praised Merian's tenacity, talent and inspirational artistic compositions. And now biologists like Dr. Etheridge are digging into the scientific texts that accompanied her art. Three hundred years after her death, Merian will be celebrated at an international symposium in Amsterdam this June. And last month, "Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium" was republished. It contains 60 plates and original descriptions, along with stories about Merian's life and updated scientific descriptions. These are a few of them. Before writing "Metamorphosis," Merian spent decades documenting European plants and insects that she published in a series of books. She began in her 20s, making textless, decorative paintings of flowers with insects. "Then she got really serious," Dr. Etheridge said. Merian started raising insects at home, mostly butterflies and caterpillars. "She would sit up all night until they came out of the pupa so she could draw them," she said. The results of her decades worth of careful observations were detailed paintings and descriptions of European insects, followed by unconventional visuals and stories of insects, amphibians and reptiles from a land that most at the time could only imagine. It's possible Merian used a magnifying glass to capture the detail of the split tongues of sphinx moths depicted in this painting. She wrote that the two tongues combine to form one tube for drinking nectar. Some criticized this detail later, saying there was just one tongue, but Merian wasn't wrong. She may have observed the adult moth just as it emerged from its pupa. For a brief moment during that stage of its life cycle, the tongue consists of two half tubules before merging into one. It may not have been ladylike to depict a giant spider devouring a hummingbird, but when Merian did it at the turn of the 18th century, surprisingly, nobody objected. Dr. Etheridge called it revolutionary. The image, which also contained novel descriptions of ants, captivated a European audience that was more concerned with the exotic story unfolding before them than the gender of the person who painted it. "All of these things shook up their nice, neat little view," Dr. Etheridge said. But later, people of the Victorian era thought differently. Her work had been reproduced, sometimes incorrectly. A few observations were deemed impossible. "She'd been called a silly woman for saying that a spider could eat a bird," Dr. Etheridge said. But Henry Walter Bates, a friend of Charles Darwin, observed it and put it in a book in 1863, vindicating Merian. In this same plate, Merian depicted and described leaf cutter ants for the first time. "In America there are large ants which can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night," she wrote in the description. Merian noted how the ants took the leaves below ground to their young. And she wouldn't have known this at the time, but the ants use the leaves to farm fungi underground to feed their developing larvae. Merian was correct about the bird eating tarantula, ants building bridges with their bodies and other details. But in the same drawing, she incorrectly lumped together army and leaf cutter ants. And instead of showing just the typical pair of eggs in a hummingbird nest, she painted four. She made other mistakes in "Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium" as well: not every caterpillar and butterfly matched. Perhaps one explanation for her mistakes is that she cut short her Suriname trip after getting sick, and completed the book at home in Amsterdam. And errors are common among some of history's most celebrated scientific minds, too. "These errors no more invalidate Ms. Merian's work than do well known misconceptions published by Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton," Dr. Etheridge wrote in a paper that argued that too many have wrongly focused on the mistakes of her work. The Help She Had It wouldn't be fair to give Merian all the credit. She received assistance naming plants, making engravings and referencing the work of others. Her daughters helped her color her drawings. Merian also made note of the help she received from the natives of Suriname, as well as slaves or servants that assisted her (she was not a slave owner). In some instances she wrote moving passages that included her helpers in descriptions. As she wrote in her description of the peacock flower: The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves. Londa Schiebinger, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University, called this passage rather astounding in a short paper in the journal The Lancet. Merian reported this detail that directly acknowledged the injustices of slavery and colonialism, and suggested that a medicine could be a tool to allow women to control their own reproductive destinies. It's particularly striking centuries later when these issues are still prominent in public discussions about social justice and women's rights. "She was ahead of her time," Dr. Etheridge said. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. 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Bats are the main cause of human rabies in the United States and have been for several years, responsible for infecting seven of every 10 people who develop the disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Wednesday. Even though the actual number of rabies cases is very small, the C.D.C. made its announcement to raise awareness that bats carry rabies, said Dr. Emily Pieracci, a veterinarian with the agency. The United States has one to three reported human cases of rabies a year. There were two deaths in 2018, and none so far in 2019. Worldwide, rabies kills about 59,000 people yearly, almost all of those from dog bites. Rabies is 100 percent preventable if a series of shots is received before symptoms start. The United States has been free of the canine rabies virus since 2004 because of extensive vaccination of dogs, but other variants are present in wildlife, particularly bats, foxes, skunks and raccoons. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Late stage coronavirus vaccine trials run by AstraZeneca and Johnson Johnson have resumed in the United States after the companies said on Friday that serious illnesses in a few volunteers appeared not to be related to the vaccines. Federal health regulators gave AstraZeneca the green light after a six week pause, concluding there was no evidence that the experimental vaccine had directly caused the neurological side effects reported in two participants. The AstraZeneca news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Johnson Johnson said that its trial, which had been on pause for 11 days, would restart after learning that a "serious medical event" in one study volunteer had "no clear cause." In an interview, the company's chief scientific officer, Dr. Paul Stoffels, said that no one at the company knew if the volunteer had received the placebo or the vaccine, in order to preserve the integrity of the trial. The Johnson Johnson news was first reported by The Washington Post. An F.D.A. spokesperson declined to comment on the trial restarts. Dr. Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, welcomed the announcements, citing the urgent need for multiple vaccines to remain in the race for a product that could protect the global population from the coronavirus, which has already killed more than a million people worldwide. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Credit...Peter Prato for The New York Times Two years ago, Merrill Garbus decided to learn how to D.J. The Oakland, Calif. based indie pop musician, known for her pan global rhythmic loops and frank lyrics in Tune Yards, had little experience behind turntables but she dived in headfirst, booking a Tuesday night residency at a bar near the studio where she records. "I hadn't been in charge of an evening like that before," said Ms. Garbus, 38. "What does the audience want to dance to? How do you know what they want before they say so? It taught me a lot." You can hear the lessons of the dance floor in the music she and her bandmate, Nate Brenner, made for Tune Yards' fourth album, "I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life," due Jan. 19. A sleek, radical evolution from the clattering collages that first earned Tune Yards an audience (notably on the 2011 album "Whokill," which won that year's Village Voice critics' poll), the new LP is full of insistent beats, catchy hooks and pointed questions about modern society. "I ask myself, what should I do?/But all I know is white centrality," Ms. Garbus sings on the bubbly single "ABC 123." Amid preparations for a tour that begins in Sacramento on Feb. 15, she spoke with The New York Times from her home. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. You participated in a six month workshop on race at the East Bay Meditation Center while you were working on this album. What was the most surprising thing you learned there? The whole thing was surprising. We met twice a month, looking at Buddhist principles and our roles as white folks in the community, with readings and videos. A lot of it learning about a concept like white fragility, for instance was like, "Oh my God. There's a word for this?" Instead of walking through the world with this huge amount of defensiveness, thinking , "I will not be racist," to say, "Merrill, you are racist, simply by being brought up white in this society. So how does that feel? And let's move from there." You've said that you felt "a wall of shame bubble up" when you recorded the line "I use my white woman's voice to tell stories of travels with African men," from your new song "Colonizer." How has it felt to sing those words in concert? The first time, my heart jumped out of my chest. A lot of my feeling about growing up white in this country is about not knowing how to talk about whiteness. I think that's part of how white supremacy works: There isn't language for it. I'm finding the same thing with singing. What expression do I use when I'm singing those lines? Am I looking straight ahead? Am I looking down? These very subtle performance choices contextualize completely differently. In a time when artists from Kendrick Lamar to Solange are making vital music about why black lives matter, what does a white musician have to add to the conversation about race? That's the question, isn't it? I constantly question, "Do I deserve to be here?" Why am I talking to you, for instance? This is a privileged place to be. I wish I could say, "I've sat and meditated for so many hours on my whiteness that I have something to say." But I have no idea! And I think it's O.K. not to know that. That being said, there is plenty that white people can do. A lot of the answers that I got doing that workshop were answers I didn't particularly want to hear. Like: "Talk to other white people." My first response was, "No! Why would I want to talk to Trump supporters, or my family that I don't agree with?" But I will. I don't want to alienate my fans who voted for Trump, because I want to talk to them. I want to talk about it all. What if some people just want to dance? Is it O.K. with you if the political messages on the album fly over their heads? There's only so much you can ask as a musician. If people are listening at all, I'm grateful. If I read this interview, I'd be like, "Damn, that sounds way too heavy for me." But if people listen to the music, I hope it's pretty instantaneously danceable. Fans of club culture often talk about the utopian potential of dance music. Do you believe, on some level, that dance music can save the world? What I appreciate about dance music is that it brings people together in something that surpasses our more cerebral moments. I think that's something very ancient and very deep in our cells as human beings. Do I think it will save us? Only when paired with the right things. Where else did you find musical inspiration for this album? I have a radio show called C.L.A.W., Collaborative Legions of Artful Womxn, that pairs female identified producers with lyricists. So I was listening to a lot of Holly Herndon and Suzi Analogue and KEISHH. It's endless, the amount of wild creativity that I found when I asked the question, "What are women producers doing out there in the world?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
'What Are the Symptoms?' 'What Should I Do if I Feel Sick?' and Other Coronavirus Questions More than six months on and the coronavirus continues to spread across the globe. In the United States, where the economy is slowly reopening, infection rates in certain states are surging to pre lockdown levels. We're learning new information about the virus at a pace as rapid as ever, but don't let that volume send you into a panic about your health and that of your loved ones. "The mantra is, 'Keep calm and carry on,'" said Dr. Marguerite Neill, an infectious disease expert at Brown University. Here's a list of answers to some frequently asked questions about the coronavirus outbreak and its symptoms. What symptoms should I look for? Common symptoms of Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, include fever, a dry cough, fatigue, chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache, a loss of the sense of taste or smell and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The illness can cause lung lesions and pneumonia. Some of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses and stuffy sinuses are less common. Patients may also exhibit gastrointestinal problems or diarrhea; we are continuing to learn about different symptoms over time. Most people fall ill five to seven days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days. In some cases, people who had appeared stable rapidly deteriorated in the second week; anyone infected needs careful monitoring. The C.D.C. says the following symptoms if you are otherwise healthy should prompt you to seek emergency treatment. None Persistent pain or pressure in the chest None Any other symptom that is severe or concerning Frequently asked questions and advice about life under the coronavirus What should I do if I feel sick? The first step you can take to help safeguard your loved ones and your community is to stay home, except to get medical care. In general, the C.D.C. recommends you call a medical professional if you notice symptoms or think you've been in contact with someone who might have been exposed. Don't rush to the emergency room unless you have severe symptoms. Though hospitals in states hardest hit early in the pandemic are no longer facing a crush of patients, other states are seeing hospitalization rates surge, so it's best to call your doctor before going in. When you call your doctor, he or she will advise whether you should come in. If you do, calling ahead of time will help the doctor prepare for your visit and prevent the spread of the virus to other people in the office. Be sure to wear a mask when you go to the doctor's office and when you're around other people. If you cannot find a mask, you can sew one or create a makeshift one from a scarf or a T shirt. The C.D.C. also suggests that you avoid public transportation, ride sharing services and taxis, and that you separate yourself from other people and animals in your home as soon as possible. That means not letting anyone enter your room and, ideally, not sharing bathrooms. Others should stay at least three feet away from you and avoid any surface you might have coughed on or touched, including doorknobs, plates, cups and towels. Disinfect the environment as much as possible. The landscape for testing looks far better than it did in the early days of the outbreak, and hundreds of thousands of tests a day are being conducted in the United States. In some areas, it is so widely available that public health officials have complained they do not have enough takers. What if someone in my family gets sick? Follow the same steps listed above if you think someone in your household may be infected. The coronavirus has largely spared children, and most confirmed to be infected have had only mild symptoms. But in May, doctors in Europe and the United States reported a troubling phenomenon: Some children are becoming seriously ill with symptoms that can involve inflammation in the skin, eyes, blood vessels and heart. Parents of children who have these symptoms, or others related to Covid 19, are advised to take them to pediatricians rather than dismissing a rash or fever or abdominal pain as a sign of a typical childhood illness. How does this compare with the flu? The coronavirus seems to be more deadly than seasonal flu and quite contagious. Early estimates of the coronavirus death rate from Wuhan, China, where the outbreak originated, have been about 2 percent, while the seasonal flu, on average, kills about 0.1 percent of people who become infected. But children appear to be more affected by the flu. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. By contrast, the 1918 flu had an unusually high fatality rate greater than 2 percent. Because it was so contagious, that flu killed tens of millions of people. How does the virus spread? The coronavirus is thought to spread mainly from one person to another, typically through droplets when an infected person sneezes, coughs or talks at close range even if that person is not showing symptoms, according to the C.D.C. It can also spread through contaminated surfaces, though the C.D.C. has said that this is not thought to be its primary mode of transmission. Still, if an infected person coughs and a droplet lands on a surface, a person who then touches that surface can become ill. Whether a surface looks dirty or clean is irrelevant. A study of other coronaviruses found that they remained on metal, glass and plastic for two hours to nine days. But there is good news: The virus that causes Covid 19 is relatively easy to destroy using any simple disinfectant or bleach. Droplets can sit on the surfaces of latex gloves. Some experts suggest wearing cloth or leather gloves that absorb droplets and are bulky enough to discourage you from touching your face. If so many people are asymptomatic, how can I find out if I had the virus? There are two types of coronavirus tests: a viral test, which diagnoses whether you have Covid 19, and an antibody test, which will tell you whether your body has developed antibodies. The existence of antibodies the protective proteins made in response to an infection to Covid 19 signifies a previous infection. Many health care providers nationwide offer antibody tests, so check with your doctor. Keep in mind that antibodies take time to develop, so a lack of antibodies may just mean your body hasn't had enough time to develop them post infection. Will these antibodies protect me against reinfection? It's complicated. We don't yet know conclusively whether antibodies offer protection against reinfection, or for how long. A new study suggests that antibodies may last only two to three months, especially in people who never showed symptoms while they were infected. The conclusion does not necessarily mean that these people can be infected a second time, several experts cautioned. Even low levels of powerful neutralizing antibodies may still be protective, as are the immune system's T cells and B cells. Is there a cure? What about a vaccine? There is currently no cure or vaccine for Covid 19. In May, the drug remdesivir, first antiviral drug to show effectiveness against the coronavirus in human trials, was given Emergency Use Authorization by the United States Food and Drug Administration, allowing physicians to use the drug on patients with confirmed diagnoses of Covid 19. Because the drug is given intravenously, it is restricted to hospital settings, but the American biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences will soon start trials of an inhalable version to get around the hospital limitation. Still, the drug's designation does not constitute formal drug approval, and remdesivir's safety and efficacy are still being investigated in several clinical trials. As for a vaccine, researchers around the world are developing more than 140 versions. Vaccines typically require years of research and testing before reaching the clinic, but Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said in late June he was "cautiously optimistic" a vaccine would be ready by early 2021. I have many more questions. We understand. The coronavirus has drastically shifted so much about our lives this year. Take a look at The Times's special section on frequently asked questions and advice. We have answers to common questions on health, money, daily life, politics, science and travel. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
If this Oscar season were a movie, it would surely win the Golden Globe for best drama. In the headline making months that led up to Sunday night's show, it often seemed like we were asking more questions about the very nature of the Oscars than about who would actually win them. Could the ceremony soldier on without a host? Would all 24 categories still be broadcast live? And did a variety of hasty, scuttled decisions among them, the desperate notion of introducing a popular film trophy for big blockbusters suggest the Oscars were mired in an identity crisis they could not overcome? I suspect we'll still be asking some of these questions next year, though Sunday's show was encouraging. After an awkward opening montage featuring critically derided duds like "Tag" and "Destination Wedding" the sort of thing that plays like a politician trying to woo undecided voters at the expense of his base the Oscars managed to settle into an appealing groove. The best and worst moments from the Oscars. Our film critics on "Green Book's" win. A best picture backlash. Fleet without seeming hurried, the show still knew when to slow down and linger. Overjoyed acceptance speeches from the likes of Spike Lee and Olivia Colman were allowed to play out in full, and the performance of "Shallow" from Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga was the sort of intimate high point that would have been lost if it had not been allowed to crescendo over several minutes. Could a host have brought more coherence to the comic material? Yes, but the one two punch of Queen's performance and Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph as the opening presenters offered comparable momentum to a killer monologue. At the Governors Ball after the show, I saw the academy president, John Bailey, clinking champagne glasses with his fellow governors: After months of controversy, they'd still managed to land the plane. The director Kimberly Peirce, who sits on the academy's board of governors, told me she was happy with where the show ended up. "Everybody saw some of our decision making play out in the press, and you know what? I think that's par for the course. It's like when you make a movie: You have a screening and you get new information and things can change." Peirce was particularly pleased that the academy had broadcast every category live, after the original plan to award four Oscars during the commercial breaks was met with an industrywide backlash. "I fought for that, I supported that, and I'm thrilled because everybody deserves their share," she told me. Indeed, everybody got their share on Sunday, since the eight movies nominated for best picture all picked up at least one Oscar. The biggest of them went to "Green Book," Peter Farrelly's racial issues comedy, which won Oscars for supporting actor Mahershala Ali as well as original screenplay and best picture. The movie's awards strategist, Tony Angelotti, was all smiles when I found him at the Governors Ball. "You're always shocked when your movie's named best picture, and I've had the luxury of working on a few," he said, citing "The English Patient," among other films. "That was supposed to win, and when they said the name, I was still shocked, because I've seen it go sideways so many times." Most pundits, myself included, predicted the Netflix film "Roma" might take the top prize, and while it did collect trophies for director, cinematography and foreign language film, many in the industry including Steven Spielberg, who helped champion "Green Book" resisted the notion of awarding best picture to a streaming service. As I spoke to Angelotti, one nearby well wisher shouted, "Theatrical distribution lives!" But the win for "Green Book" was not without its own controversies: The makers of the film have spent most of this season on the defense. The star Viggo Mortensen issued a statement after he used a racial epithet at a Q. and A., while Nick Vallelonga, a screenwriter, deleted his Twitter account after an old tweet surfaced that disparaged Muslims. Family members of the pianist Don Shirley, played by Ali in the film, have also criticized "Green Book" for misrepresenting the man's life. "There's been a lot of slings and arrows," one of the film's executive producers, John Sloss, admitted at the Governors Ball. "And yet the intention of making this film was very straightforward, from a group of decent people. As a very smart man once said to me, 'The only people who like "Green Book" are the audience.'" "Was it Spielberg who said that?" I asked him. Though some will be vexed that the same academy that rewarded "Moonlight" two years ago has now given its top prize to the far more conventional "Green Book," that, too, is the nature of the Oscars. This is a show through which we can examine not just the state of Hollywood but also figure out where we're at as a culture, and what we glean from the mirror it holds up can be frustrating and illuminating all at once. Just look at Hannah Beachler, who won the production design Oscar for "Black Panther," and Ruth E. Carter, who earned the Oscar for the film's costumes. It was a highlight to see these women of color take the stage, and sobering to realize that they are two of only three black women who have ever won an Oscar in a category other than acting. Through their victories, many more can be inspired. "It was great to see them be honored and have a platform like that," the "Black Panther" director Ryan Coogler said at the Governors Ball. "Sometimes people deserve certain things and they don't necessarily get them." But on Sunday night, at least some of those people did, and to watch women like Beachler and Carter receive a standing ovation is to be reminded that at their best, there's still nothing like the Oscars. "I feel thankful I could be here to see it, bro," Coogler said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
INDIANAPOLIS First it was Kyler Murray's height. Then it was Kyler Murray's weight. And then, after Kyler Murray's weight, it was Kyler Murray's hand size. By Friday, when Murray appeared before the news media, the chatter at the weeklong N.F.L. combine an annual predraft meat market that makes little pretense of being anything subtler had been dominated by discussions of his physical qualifications (or lack thereof). Does he, the Heisman Trophy winning quarterback for Oklahoma who is preparing for April's draft, really have what is needed to succeed as a pro? Gil Brandt, the former Dallas Cowboys personnel chief, could not remember more buzz around a draft prospect. "This is the most in history," Brandt said, "and I've been doing this since 1977." A number of factors have contributed to the Kyler craze. Three months ago, he and Scott Boras, the most powerful of baseball agents, told anyone who asked that Murray planned to finish his sole season as the Sooners' starting quarterback and then report to spring training with the Oakland Athletics, who picked him ninth over all in last year's Major League Baseball draft and agreed to pay him a 4.66 million signing bonus. Instead, after acquitting himself admirably in a national playoff semifinal loss to Alabama, Murray announced that his focus would remain on football after all. He effectively spurned the A's and their money in favor of pursuing his gridiron dreams, even though as quarterbacks go, he is, charitably speaking, not tall. Murray did not know what N.F.L. teams thought of him until he completed his productive 2018 season, he told several dozen journalists on Friday as they gathered in a corner of the mammoth Indianapolis Convention Center. "The N.F.L. kind of heated up," he said, "and here we are." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Recently, there have been a couple of successful quarterbacks who stand south of six feet tall. But just how short (or tall) is Murray? Clearly the neutral arbiter that is the N.F.L. combine would figure this out. That is what happens here. And his hands: Are they big enough? Is his palm of requisite heft to support a regulation football, his fingers sufficiently long to curl around the ball's pebbled leather? (As is often the case when the topic is men and sports, there is subtext, and size matters.) Murray was measured Thursday, and the white smoke from the sacred space soon emitted good news: He is small, but not too small. Height: 5 feet 10 1/8 inches. (As they always say, football is a game of eighths of an inch.) Weight: 207 pounds. He was closer to 195 while playing for Oklahoma last season, he said. Hand size: nine and one half inches, from the pinkie's tip to the thumb's. Which is, apparently, ordinary for a quarterback. "I showed up, they told me to put my hand down, told me to stand here, step on the scale, and that's what I did," Murray said Friday. "And everybody made a big deal about it." In fairness, this is a big deal as big in its way, you might say, as the 10.88 inch hands of Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. In proving his physical adequacy, Murray held out the chance of becoming that most valuable of sports commodities, a franchise quarterback. And yet the prototypical quarterback is bigger than Murray, the better to see and throw over his hulking offensive linemen and the equally hulking linemen on the other team. At combines past, for example, Tom Brady was measured at 6 4, Cam Newton at 6 5, Patrick Mahomes at over 6 2. Drew Brees and Russell Wilson are two current franchise quarterbacks closer to Murray's stature. Murray has talked with Wilson, another standout baseball player, a couple of times. "Good to have him in my corner," Murray said. "Obviously, I look up to him." (Literally. During his combine, Wilson was measured at 5 10 5/8 .) Also close to Murray and Wilson is Baker Mayfield, who was measured at 6 1 during last year's combine. Murray backed up Mayfield at Oklahoma for the 2017 season, when Mayfield won the Heisman, after which the Cleveland Browns drafted him first over all. There is a tantalizing subplot to the question of whether Murray will follow Mayfield as the top pick. The Arizona Cardinals hold the No. 1 slot, but they selected a quarterback, Josh Rosen, early in the first round last year. However, they have since changed head coaches, and the new top man, Kliff Kingsbury, both played quarterback and coached in the Air Raid system the offensive scheme in which Murray thrived at Oklahoma, and that Mahomes, a former Kingsbury protege, proved transferable to the N.F.L. during his outstanding 2018 season with the Kansas City Chiefs. Has Murray met with the Cardinals? Yes, he said Friday, he has. Murray clarified a few other things as well, patiently addressing the scrum of reporters, his average size hands at his sides. Yes, football is his final answer. "I was born a football player," he said. "I love this game. There is no turning back." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Every night in the summer, more than 15 million bats emerge from a hot, cavernous sinkhole just outside San Antonio. They spiral up and out of the cave's gaping mouth like a tornado and slowly gain elevation. If you're sitting nearby, you can feel the wind from their wings. Once the bats reach the treetops, they form columns that flow out and over the hills like plumes of smoke that appear to never end. It's dinner time in Texas, and in the corn and cotton fields, the hairy, winged mammals will feast on moths throughout the night. This bat emergence at Bracken Cave, home to the world's largest bat colony, requires an appointment, but it's just one of many nightly shows you can catch in Central Texas in July, August and September. You can also see them at Old Tunnel State Park, just south of Fredericksburg, or for a more urban experience, you can have a picnic or cocktail and watch 1.5 million bats drop down from under the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin and take off across the river like a school of fish. They do this every night, but the best time to catch them is when it's hot and dry and they're hungry, because that's when they'll head out early. "The hotter and more uncomfortable you are, the better the bat flight," said Mylea Bayless, an ecologist for Bat Conservation International. As the saying goes, everything's bigger in Texas, and the caves and bridges that these Mexican free tailed bats call their summer home are no exception. The dome ceilings of large caverns natural or constructed trap heat, making them the perfect temperature for females to roost and to raise their young. Warm, stable roosts like Bracken Cave are essential because baby bats are born hairless and have only a few months to develop before migrating to Mexico and Central and South America in the fall. These bat pups spend their energy on growth, not thermoregulation. The millions of bats you see take off at once in Texas are all females and babies. The males are around, but they're scattered about in smaller caves or parking garages. If it's not the big Texan caverns, it's the migrating corn earworm moths that bring the bats here every summer. A mother bat will consume about two thirds of her body weight in insects at night to meet her energy demands. Economists estimate that bats save Texas more than 1 billion on pesticides annually. The feeding frenzy can last for hours, but as day breaks, the bats return to their roosts. If you're up for a 5 a.m. bat shower, you should head back out. "They come shooting down out of the sky like rain," Ms. Bayless said, and they "do this crazy Olympic gymnastics type of thing" to get back into the crevices at the bridge. Using superlong toe hairs like whiskers, they find their way in the dark. The bats return to the cave in a reverse tornado and slow down by opening their wings like a rudder or sail. Ms. Bayless says it sounds like millions of people blowing on blades of grass, or a swarm of bees. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Q. I get several phone calls each day on my cellphone from different phone numbers that I do not recognize. If I don't answer, no message is left. If I answer, there is no response, just a hang up. If I call the number back, there may be a voice message that "this number does not accept incoming calls" or that "all lines are busy," or no response at all. What are these calls, and how should I respond? I have decided not to answer calls from unrecognized numbers, thinking that if it is important, the caller will leave a message. Problem with that is, I may miss an important call from someone not in my contacts list. A. If you are getting multiple calls each day and the caller is not leaving a message (or hanging up after a couple of seconds), your number is most likely being dialed by scammers trying to confirm that a human exists on the other end of the line. Once your number has been verified, it can be added to a database and passed along to the highest bidder. With your number in a database, telemarketers or robocalling software will keep calling, trying to get you on the line. A recent tactic used by phone spammers is to call you from numbers (spoofed or otherwise) that resemble your area code and telephone exchange, with the hope that you might mistake the number displayed on your screen as being from a neighbor or member of your family and answer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
When long awaited drawings of the new plan to rebuild David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic's home at Lincoln Center, were released earlier this month, James Kennerley's eyes were immediately drawn to the blank wall above the stage. He was looking for pipes. "I was surprised to see there was no pipe organ case," said Mr. Kennerley, the dean of the New York City chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Organists, and those who love the natural, visceral sound of mighty pipe organs, have long lamented that both of New York's premier concert halls, Carnegie Hall and Geffen, got rid of their old pipe organs decades ago and went electric. They see the coming renovation of Geffen as a chance to right a historical wrong, especially at a time when many of the world's most glamorous new halls including Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Philharmonie in Paris and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg have installed mammoth new pipe organs. But the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center must weigh the desires of organ aficionados against other competing needs. For money, of course, but also for an even more precious New York commodity: space. How much square footage can or should be devoted to an organ, which plays a key role in a beloved but limited slice of the core orchestral repertoire? And the hall's planners face a classic renovators' conundrum: Do you go with built in, or something more flexible? There are pros and cons to a new pipe organ, as well as to one of the latest digital models, which boast ever more realistic samples and better sound technology. No decision has yet been made, said Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive officer of the Philharmonic. "The Philharmonic is advocating for an organ solution," she said, adding that she expects a decision by the time the design development phase wraps up this spring. (Construction in the hall is expected to begin in 2022, aiming for a 2024 opening.) The organ question has emerged as an early flash point in the renovation, with some questioning why a symphony orchestra which relies on the finest unamplified instruments it can get in nearly every other case would make an exception when it comes to the venerable organ, which is sometimes called "the king of instruments." "What serious pianist would prefer an electronic keyboard to a refined Steinway or a piano by any other excellent builder?" said Paul Jacobs, the chairman of the Juilliard School's organ department. Of course, pipe organs are many orders of magnitude bigger than pianos. The Philharmonic used to have one. A floor shaking, 45,000 pound Aeolian Skinner organ with 5,498 pipes the largest was 32 feet long was built for it when it moved to Lincoln Center in 1962. The composer Paul Hindemith wrote his Concerto for Organ and Orchestra for the new instrument that season. But the organ was removed during a renovation of the hall in 1976, in part to free up space backstage, and to spare the expense of reducing its size and relocating it within the hall. The instrument found a new home in a California megachurch, the televangelist Robert H. Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, where it was combined with another organ to form one of the largest in the world. Now it is getting a new life: After the Crystal Cathedral was bought in 2012 by the Catholic Diocese of Orange and renamed Christ Cathedral, the massive organ was transported to Padua, Italy, to be restored. The refurbished instrument will be rededicated this May, by Mr. Jacobs and others. Perhaps more unexpected was the fate of the Philharmonic's old console, the command center of keyboards, pedals and stops where the organist sits and plays. It apparently made its way to a farm in Hooper, Utah to a pipe organ housed in a barn that came to be known as "the Hoopernacle." Hal Stoddard, 84, a rancher and amateur organist, built the Hoopernacle and installed what several organists said appeared to be the Philharmonic's old console, which he salvaged from a collection of organ parts when he was not busy raising cattle and growing alfalfa. "I told my wife once that I sure don't look very much like an organist," Mr. Stoddard said in a telephone interview. So she made him a sign: "It is better to look like a cowboy and play like an organist than to look like an organist and play like a cowboy." The removal of the Philharmonic's organ came at a moment when pipe organs were falling out of favor in concert halls. Carnegie got rid of its pipe organ which had taken 12 freight cars to transport from St. Louis, where it was built in the early 1960s after it had fallen into disrepair, and turned down the gift of a new one amid concerns that its installation would harm the hall's acoustics. The Cleveland Orchestra installed a new acoustical stage shell in Severance Hall in 1958 that so muffled its old pipe organ that the instrument needed amplification; it eventually fell silent in 1976. The pipe organ revival is tenuous, though. One of the world's biggest organ stars, Cameron Carpenter, concertizes on an impressive digital instrument called the International Touring Organ. This year the University of Oklahoma decided to close its respected organ technology and repair program, dismaying some in the field. The design team for the new Geffen Hall is weighing its options which are limited, given that they are working to rebuild the auditorium while staying within its existing footprint. Gary McCluskie, who is leading the team from Diamond Schmitt Architects designing the hall, said that the space that once housed the organ extended through three stories backstage and had been transformed into dressing rooms and other spaces used by musicians and artists cramped areas that many in the hall would like to see improved. Calls for a new pipe organ for the Philharmonic date to the days when Kurt Masur was its music director in the 1990s and Ms. Borda was serving her first stint there, as executive director. She said that one oft repeated tale, that a benefactor had donated nearly a million dollars for a new pipe organ, was "urban mythology," and that the money had gone to the orchestra's general endowment as a "turn the lights on, pay the musicians gift." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
This week the major networks unveil their offerings for the coming season to advertising buyers in Manhattan. Money, prestige, and cultural import are at stake. Three New York Times media reporters John Koblin, Michael M. Grynbaum, and Sapna Maheshwari assess what they saw at Monday's NBCUniversal presentation, which kicked off the television upfronts. JOHN We're just back from Radio City Music Hall and a preview of what's in store for the NBC and a litany of cable networks, including Bravo and E! Let's start with the big news: Megyn Kelly, NBC's new 9 a.m. anchor and host of a new Sunday evening newsmagazine made her first public appearance with the network. Michael, how'd she do? MICHAEL Basic cable, meet broadcast. It was hard not to scrutinize the body language between Ms. Kelly and her new colleagues in the notoriously cutthroat NBC News division. (Not for nothing did Seth Meyers joke that Billy Bush was exiled to North Korea.) Matt Lauer introduced Ms. Kelly as someone "who shares our values" weighted words as the former Fox News star braves the left leaning enclave of 30 Rock. Ms. Kelly pronounced herself "psyched" and "so honored" to be joining the team. Then she shoehorned in a plug for her recent memoir. "We're a family at NBC News," Mr. Lauer said, before adding in an apparent ad lib: "Sometimes, it feels a little dysfunctional." Indeed. JOHN Remember it was just two years ago that we were still in the throes of the Brian Williams scandal and the news division went entirely unmentioned at the presentation. Today? BriWi wound up in a sizzle reel. Also, lots of shout outs to MSNBC (the first time I can recall that happening in the three NBC presentations I've been to) and to Rachel Maddow, whose rating have soared. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Dancers of street and club styles, including vogueing, house, break, flex and electro, are part of the cast of Rameau's "Les Indes Galantes" at the Paris Opera. PARIS The choreographer Bintou Dembele was at the Paris Opera one recent afternoon, rehearsing a new production of Rameau's rarely performed Baroque spectacle "Les Indes Galantes." Four vogue dancers had formed a semicircle onstage, each elevated on a gray slab. They had contracted their torsos, rounding their backs while looking away from the audience. Their poses seemed passive rather than confrontational, and Ms. Dembele, 44, a pioneer of French hip hop dance, suddenly spoke up. "They cannot be in that position while the word 'slavery' is being sung," she said. "Les Indes Galantes," which opens on Sept. 26, is among the premier examples of 18th century "opera ballet," a melding of loosely plotted sung narrative and extravagant dance sequences. At its 1735 premiere, the work was designed to represent the triumph of French Enlightenment order over the "other," depicting a series of stories of love and virtue set in exotic realms. ("Indes" was, at the time, a term used to describe all non European locales.) Its score is among Rameau's most voluptuously colorful and vibrant. To audiences today, however, its cast of Turkish, Peruvian, Persian and Native American characters can seem hopelessly hackneyed. And its French gallantry conquers all plot can come across as propaganda for colonialism. (One of the acts is called "The Savages.") The scene Ms. Dembele was rehearsing revolves around two Persian men; each falls in love with the other's female slave. "Love is necessary in slavery," says one of the masters. "It sweetens the hardship." The libretto is full of offensive moments like this. Ms. Dembele's choreography suggested that such moments have to be subtly subverted. But can "Les Indes Galantes" subvert the ideology it was written to uphold? Ms. Dembele and Clement Cogitore, the artist and filmmaker making his stage debut as the production's director, are betting that it can. "I hope to reveal what the text refuses to name, to show its misunderstandings," Mr. Cogitore said in an interview. "A stereotype is a character who suffers because we haven't listened to his story." The production originated with a video short Mr. Cogitore created in 2017 under the auspices of the Paris Opera's Third Stage program, which is designed to connect opera and ballet with new audiences. Set to "The Dance of the Peace Pipe," from the fourth act of "Les Indes Galantes," the film was a collaboration with Ms. Dembele and a group of dancers specializing in the vigorous street style called krump. Featuring a dance battle like circle on the stage of the Opera Bastille here, the film's energy escalates as those on the outskirts join the dancers in the center with short staccato arm jabs and chest pops, mounting to a brio that appears both ecstatic and angry. "I was deeply moved when I saw Clement Cogitore's film," Stephane Lissner, the company's director, said in an interview. "He took the subject of 'Les Indes Galantes,' its condescension toward the 'other,' and turned it on its head." Given the problematic libretto, Mr. Cogitore and Ms. Dembele knew that the dance sequences would have to be central in a staging of the full work. "I didn't want the dancers to be ornamental accessories to the protagonists," said Mr. Cogitore. "They needed to participate in the action, to have real roles, even if they remained silent." So the dancers, some from Ms. Dembele's Compagnie Rualite, have been enlisted to move the story along and shape the stage environment throughout. In the third act, for example, after the master slave love quadrangle, a break dancer performs rapid head and hand glides center stage. This sequence is usually a happy celebration for the couples, but these whirlwind turns feel like they reject that narrative. The entire chorus then walks onstage. When a diverse group of children steps out of the crowd and starts moving in hip hop shuffles and steps, the dance seems to transform the scene into one of community and belonging. Some choreographed, stylized gestures accompany the singing, as is the tradition in opera ballet. But Ms. Dembele has given the dancers broad liberty in their solos: "We're waiting for the part where we can bust out into our own thing, with total freedom," Cal Hunt, a flex dancer in the cast, said in a telephone interview. Dancers of street and club styles, including vogueing, house, break, flex and electro have joined some of the original krumpers from Mr. Cogitore's film. Ms. Dembele said that these forms, unlike the decorative divertissements of Rameau's time, "resonate with what's going on in the street. They developed as a means of survival." "In the movement of the body, we can give expression to what we have lived," she added. "I have to confront my own frustration, and the frustration of new generations who have not found their place. Gathering people through dance transforms that anger so we can tell these forgotten stories." It is believed that Ms. Dembele, whose parents are from Senegal, is the first black female and first black French choreographer to be engaged by the Paris Opera in its 350 year history. But this has gone unmentioned in the company's publicity materials, as well as in the mainstream French press. France's model of universalism largely ignores the particularities of racial identity; the word "race" was struck from the constitution last year. Yet this model of assimilation has been widely perceived as failing immigrant communities, overlooking the historical use of race as a category in the country's former colonies. Some have looked toward dance as an art form capable of acknowledging this tension. "In French institutions, dance avoids the pitfalls of the dialogue, working instead through nuance and suggestion," Felicia McCarren, a historian of French hip hop at Tulane University, said in a telephone interview. While in the United States, hip hop dance has become increasingly commercialized, the French government has been financing hip hop as both an artistic and pedagogical practice for three decades, making the form central to debates about anti racism. Hip hop dancers in France have the employment status of artists ("intermittents du spectacle") and the right to state issued income between projects. But street styles have rarely made it onto the Paris Opera's stage, still seen by many as the heart of the French choreographic patrimony. "This production is the sign that there is a new visibility of minority choreographers and dancers," Isabelle Launay, a dance historian, said in an interview. And Ms. Dembele has opened the door for others. "We knew we could embark on this project with her," said the voguer Giselle Palmer, part of the "Indes Galantes" cast and possibly the first openly transgender woman to perform at the Paris Opera. "I always thought of the Opera as closed off, reserved for ballet," said Nadia Gabrieli Kalati, a krump and house dancer whose family is from Cameroon. "This inclusion of other styles is not only great for dance. It shows that difference can be a force, that difference can unite us all." Sept. 26 through Oct. 15 at the Opera Bastille, Paris; operadeparis.fr. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
We escaped to Margaritaville and made way for Glenda Jackson, got mad as hell all over again and learned to love a Malfoy. The year in theater had many riches and no shortage of surprise. Now that our chief critics have weighed in, it's time for other New York Times writers and editors who spend lots of time in the dark to illuminate the moments that brought us joy and laughter, shock and awe. And the beat. Any star gets entrance applause these days. Entrance yowls of terror? That's trickier. But when the titular two ton ape of "King Kong" a marvel of puppetry, animatronics and some not exactly subtle sound, projection and lighting blasted onto the Broadway stage, looking like he meant to eat the front mezzanine, it was a first impression for the ages. ALEXIS SOLOSKI Rarely has a strut so completely embodied a character as Taylor Louderman's in "Mean Girls." Playing queen bee Regina George, Ms. Louderman swings her hips with bold confidence and aligns each foot exactly ahead of the other, as if she were walking on a tightrope. It's like watching the second coming of Ann Margret, and it's exhilarating. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI An "Oklahoma!" with same sex lovers might seem to have "gimmick" written all over it. But in Bill Rauch's transformative and important production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, any such worries melted away the instant that Curly (Tatiana Wechsler) made her exuberant entrance, as much fun to root for in romance as Ado Andy (Jonathan Luke Stevens) would turn out to be. LAURA COLLINS HUGHES Ewww! That's the word Idina Menzel, making her first appearance in a straight play in years, might have uttered if she actually needed words to express her inner thoughts in Joshua Harmon's comedy "Skintight." After all, she was sitting down on the couch where her 70 year old father's 20 year old boyfriend, clad only in a jockstrap, had just been perched. Remembering the sight of his bare butt, she blanched and leapt back up. It turns out there's more than one way to hit those high notes. MICHAEL PAULSON A devil with an angel's face, the British actor and musician Johnny Flynn brought his floppy hair and pouty lips to Martin McDonagh's midnight black comedy "Hangmen." A creature of fast talk and loose walk, his Peter Mooney was a menace, a creep and a maelstrom of pure charisma. A.S. "We Got the Beat" opened the show with the requisite bang, and "Vacation" had its spot, too, but the real surprise in the underrated Go Go's jukebox musical "Head Over Heels" were two deep cuts: "Vision of Nowness" and, especially, "Automatic Rainy Day" the latter powerbombed into my cranium in a duet by Bonnie Milligan and Taylor Iman Jones. SCOTT HELLER In "Pass Over," Antoinette Nwandu's powerful contemporary reimagining of "Waiting for Godot," a picnic basket contains a bottomless (and ridiculous) array of delicacies, from string beans to apple pie, goji berries to turkey legs, collard greens to dim sum. There is meaning, here, about the haves and have nots, but there is also spectacle watching a menacingly mild Gabriel Ebert extract the impossible bounty from a dainty basket was unexpected stagecraft that had to be seen to be believed. M.P. "The Ferryman" pulls many rabbits out of its sleeve, including literally. But the most magical moment might be when Aunt Maggie Far Away wakes from a near vegetative state and holds the four young Carney daughters rapt with tales of lost love and predictions of their own futures. It's a sweetly mystical glance both forwards and backward, whose dark oracular power only becomes clear in the play's final seconds. JENNIFER SCHUESSLER The talk dirty to me monologue in Kate Tarker's bizarro comedy "Thunderbodies," at Soho Rep, was flamboyantly gross out filthy, and the great Deirdre O'Connell wallowed magnificently in it, delivering a screamingly funny, revoltingly blue aria to a lover's prowess with his nose. L.C.H. Maybe I'm too open to suggestion. But I would swear that the Lyric Theater actually got cooler when the dementors cloaked creatures that feed on human happiness arrived in "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child." Is the production actually lowering the temperature in the auditorium, or am I just feeling chills because I know dementors exude cold? I've never asked the question, because, to be honest, I'd rather treasure the thrill. M.P. What can't Katrina Lenk do? At MCC Theater's annual Miscast gala, which features gender swapped performances, the sultry star of "The Band's Visit" found a way to own "If I Were a Rich Man," accompanying herself on the fiddle, slyly giving the lyrics a feminist spin, and delivering a deadpan eye roll that signaled some 2018 skepticism about the wisdom of the wealthy. M.P. Two young Afghan refugees crossed Europe in search of safety in the Scottish company Vox Motus's "Flight," an affecting show that, sans live actors, was a triumph of visual and aural design the story of the journey told through a series of exquisitely detailed miniature dioramas that gave spectators the heart racing sensation of being immersed in the boys' peril. L.C.H. When do tickets go on sale (1)? For years I've read theater fans wondering out loud why "Mack and Mabel," Jerry Herman's silent movie era musical from 1974, has never been revived on Broadway. Great score, bad book; that seems to be the story. But watching Alexandra Socha effervesce her way through the madcap "Look What Happened to Mabel" number in the Encores! revue "Hey, Look Me Over!" put me firmly in the when's it gonna happen camp. And why not pair her once again with Douglas Sills? S.H. When do tickets go on sale (2)? When Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal premiered songs from their upcoming musical based on "Norma Rae" in the American Songbook series, the excitement was palpable: Finally, a film inspired show that targets adults, and with a pro union message to boot. Let's hope the pair's efforts find a theatrical stage soon. E.V. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In the weeks after the killing of George Floyd, tens of millions of dollars have flowed into small nonprofit organizations in Minnesota. Now many donors would like to know how those funds will be distributed. The Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund that earlier this month only had one full time employee, has raised more than 30 million alone since Mr. Floyd's death on May 25. Its name became ubiquitous on social media as activists and celebrities posted screenshots of their donations to the fund and implored their followers to match them. (Bail funds raise money to release those who have been jailed, so that they can await trial freely.) On Monday, the fund announced that it had contributed "well over" 200,000 to bail payments in the weeks since the protests began. That revelation followed an open letter addressed to two other organizations that had seen a surge in donations, Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block, asking that the nonprofits be more transparent about fund raising and the allocation of funds. After the Minnesota Freedom Fund shared the 200,000 figure, several commenters on Twitter expressed disappointment that such a small portion of the donations had been distributed. Some also noted that the fund's board, as it had been depicted on its website, appeared to be composed entirely of white people. (The web page that lists the organization's staff has been removed at least twice this month as the board's membership has shifted; there are currently seven members.) Any organization as small as the Minnesota Freedom Fund might have struggled under the weight of such a sudden influx of funding. "Not sure how any small organization would spend 35 million in a matter of 2 weeks when they've never dealt with such a large amount of money in their lives," tweeted Noname, a rapper who helped signal boost the fund in late May. But the organization was in a particularly difficult position when it found itself in the spotlight. It had already been grappling with questions about the leadership of its only full time employee, Tonja Honsey. In April, a page called "Tonja Honsey Native Rachel Dolezal" appeared on Facebook. Its administrators alleged that Ms. Honsey, the fund's executive director, was lying about her identity as an Indigenous woman, comparing her to Ms. Dolezal, the former Spokane, Wash., N.A.A.C.P. president who posed as a black woman for years. The page's administrators called for Ms. Honsey to step down from all her organizing roles. The administrators said they would not identify themselves to The New York Times because of concerns about their own safety, but said they were two native women local to Minneapolis. Ms. Honsey said in an email that she was "not able to talk to media at this point," but that the Facebook page was "untrue." She pointed to posts on the page made by her mother, who wrote that her daughter was Indigenous "on her grandfather's side." The Facebook page also carried a message that Ms. Honsey had been ousted from the organization for issues related to those raised by the page. Ms. Honsey said she could neither confirm nor deny whether she was still involved with the fund. "Because we are in active arbitration, I am unable to comment about that," said the Minnesota Freedom Fund's current board president, Octavia Smith. Ms. Smith and her predecessor, Greg Lewin, who was the board's president until early June, said that turmoil within the organization had detracted from its overall mission. "Our capacity is taxed for sure," Ms. Smith said. "Our capacity is definitely taxed." She added that before the nationwide protests, "our staff was only a staff of one." Mr. Lewin said that the internal issues which he said he was unable to comment on in detail did not inhibit the organization's ability to get people out of jail, but that it did "hamper our ability to move and collaborate in the community." Mr. Lewin said that the organization typically identifies those in need of bail money with the help of local public defenders, and that its process depended on lawyers' involvement. That prevented the disruption related to Ms. Honsey from directly affecting the organization's work, he said, but it also made for a more limited process than many online might have expected. "Being at the reins of an organization getting this level of attention and resources is a different ballgame," he said. "That includes public scrutiny. People should be mad, stay mad, stay impatient for change. I'm not sure we're the perfect vehicle for that impatience but we get it." Mr. Lewin added that the criticism could be frustrating. "The left is exceedingly good at eating its own," he said. "People think because we got money we are now part of the system," he continued. "It's like, 'No.'" The Minnesota Freedom Fund was founded in 2016 by Simon Cecil, then a master's student at the University of Minnesota. Ms. Smith, a friend of Mr. Cecil's, was the fund's first employee, and became its board president in 2018. In 2019, Ms. Smith stepped away from her regular work with the fund but remained listed on its website as "emeritus board president." On May 31, though, she briefly cut ties with the organization altogether. "I had some disagreements around leadership," she said. "That is probably all I'm able to say." Ms. Smith, who is black, was asked to come back to the board "in order to steward a just transition of resources and power," she said. On June 11, she was reinstated as the board's president. "Our board has historically been predominantly white, and we recognize that that's a problem," she said. The fund said on Twitter that it had paid "all protest related bail that has come our way." Mr. Lewin said that it had bailed out 40 people in June. Ms. Smith said that most other people who were detained in Minnesota had been cited and released, and were not eligible for bail. "We would love to use that 30 million and get people out tomorrow," she said. "But the reality is that the systems that are put in place to prevent that, to prevent black and brown people from having freedom, to prevent people who are poor from having freedom, still exist. So we're still navigating a toxic system. While also trying to abolish it." Ms. Smith said she understood why people were upset. "We're scaling up to meet the needs of the community while also trying to scale our resources to meet the needs of those who are directly impacted by the harms of mass incarceration," she said. "That requires deep care and intention. We're moving. That is all I can say, that we're moving." For the time being, the fund is encouraging donations to other organizations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Credit...Associated Press The season began with a loss to the brand new Montreal Expos, the Mets' eighth straight opening day defeat. And the situation grew only worse. At the end of April, the Mets were 9 11. On May 27, they were 18 23, in fourth place in the National League East. Off in the distance were the first place Chicago Cubs. But the next day, the Mets beat San Diego, 1 0, in a game in which Jerry Koosman struck out 15 batters. That began an 11 game winning streak that left the Mets yeah, the Mets with a record of 29 23. The revolution was on. In early July, the Mets had their first showdown with the Cubs, and Tom Seaver came within two outs of a perfect game. A week later, the Mets took two out of three at Wrigley Field. The Mets were now in second place, just four games out of first. Hodges was sending a message, but the Mets kept struggling. By mid August, they were 10 games out. And then, with Woodstock being staged in the background, the Mets took off. They swept the Padres at Shea in two weekend doubleheaders and began a run in which they would win 38 of their last 49 games of the season, sometimes in stupefying fashion. There was, for instance, the delirious Aug. 30 game in San Francisco in which the Mets threw out runners at home in the eighth and ninth innings along with another runner at third and then won in the 10th on a home run. A week later, Manager Leo Durocher and his swooning Cubs arrived at Shea, and the Mets beat them twice, with fans sarcastically serenading Durocher and with a black cat running in front of the Chicago dugout. The next day, the Mets moved into first. Two days later, they won a 1 0, 1 0 doubleheader in Pittsburgh. The starting pitchers drove in both runs. Three days later, the Mets struck out a record 19 times against Steve Carlton in St. Louis. But so what? They won, anyway, with Ron Swoboda hitting two two run homers. Following are excerpts from New York Times articles in 1969. Scaling new heights again, the New York Mets climbed past the break even point and into second place in the National League East by beating the Los Angeles Dodgers, 5 2, at Shea Stadium tonight. Two home runs by Ed Kranepool, a well placed misplay by the Dodgers, Tom Seaver's eighth pitching victory and Tug McGraw's second save marked the historic occasion, which also stretched the current winning streak to six games. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. No Met team had ever been above .500 beyond the fourth game of a season. In 1966, and again this year, the Mets won two of their first three games; but in 1966, they lost the next five and this year they lost the next four. Never again did they have more victories than defeats until now, when their record stands at 24 23. LEONARD KOPPETT It has taken them 7 1/2 years, 439 victories and 771 defeats, but today the Mets finally begin an important series. At 2:05 p.m. at Shea Stadium, they start a three game series with the Chicago Cubs, the only team ahead of them in the National League's Eastern Division. The Mets were loose and confident going into the game because their best pitcher was going to work. The 24 year old, right handed Seaver, a fine athlete, had won 13 games and lost 3. But two hours later, the Mets and their fans wanted much more than victory No. 14. They wanted perfection and the first no hitter by a Met, and they cheered madly for every Cub out. The first batter in the ninth was Randy Hundley, the experienced catcher. He tried to bunt a high pitch, but the ball rolled to Seaver's right and Seaver threw Hundley out at first. The fans, ever sensitive, booed Hundley for having tried to bunt Seaver out of a perfect game. The 22 year old Qualls, a switch hitter batting left handed in his 18th major league game, was the next batter. Seaver wanted to keep the ball outside to him, but the pitch strayed a little too close to the plate and Qualls stroked it solidly to left center, nowhere near Cleon Jones or Tommie Agee. GEORGE VECSEY Moon or the Mets? In Bars, It's the Latter The moon didn't figure in the conversation mostly in Spanish at the Full Moon Bar and Grill at 161st and Broadway. The bar was recently renamed La Luna Llena. It's owner, Richard Hauseman, was asked why the customers weren't following the moon shot on television. "What's there?" he retorted. "Walter Cronkite talking that's all." The television sets were on at most other bars, but not for Walter Cronkite or the astronauts. In Chicago, the Mets were ahead of the Cubs, suggesting a miracle that even Jules Verne did not foresee. A bartender was asked whether his customers were more interested in the Mets or the astronauts. 12 Wins in 13 Games as Mets Close on Cubs Jerry Koosman pitched the New York Mets to within two games of first place tonight as he overpowered the San Diego Padres, 4 1, with a two hitter for the Mets' sixth straight victory. He allowed the two hits in the first inning but no more the rest of the game and he faced only 31 batters four more than the minimum. The Mets continued past another milestone on their remarkable road several hours after the first place Chicago Cubs had lost again to the Cincinnati Reds. And by the time the Mets had finished their work tonight, they were all even with Chicago in games lost, and the Cubs' lead in the Eastern Division rested solely on the fact that they had played and won four more times. The victory was Koosman's third in a row, and the Mets' 12th in their last 13 decisions, while the Cubs were dropping eight of 10. It also was No. 74 for the Mets this season, one more than the record total they achieved all of last season, and it was their 11th in a row over San Diego. The situation at the top of the Eastern Division was growing so sticky that Ernie Banks even telephoned long distance to San Diego tonight. JOSEPH DURSO The New York Mets survived three hours of thrills and sometimes terror and defeated the San Francisco Giants, 3 2, on a 10th inning home run by Donn Clendenon. The victory ended the Giants' winning streak at nine games and kept the Mets 3 1/2 games behind the first place Chicago Cubs, who beat the Atlanta Braves, 5 4. Clendenon put the finishing touches to the Mets' afternoon by hitting a 2 1 pitch from Gaylord Perry over the right field fence with two outs. But he did it only after the Mets lived through two wild innings in the eighth and ninth, during which the Giants put five runners on base and the Mets threw two of them out at home plate and one at third base. JOSEPH DURSO The New York Mets the urchins of baseball for the last seven years shook down the thunder from the sky tonight when they overpowered the Chicago Cubs, 7 1, before 58,436 persons in Shea Stadium. It was the fourth straight victory for the Mets and the sixth straight defeat for the Cubs, and the urchins moved to within a half game of first place in the National League East with three weeks to go. The Mets, who have never finished higher than ninth, made the tumultuous scene last night on the five hit pitching of their prodigy, Tom Seaver. The 25 year old Californian allowed four singles, one double and one walk, and achieved his 21st victory in the gaudiest season of pitching in Mets history. They also added half a game to their lead over the Chicago Cubs in the National League's Eastern Division. The Cubs ended an eight game losing streak tonight when they beat the St. Louis Cardinals, and they now trail the Mets by 2 1/2 games with less than three weeks to go. Three pitchers limited the Pirates to eight hits and no runs in the doubleheader. In the opener, Jerry Koosman pitched a three hitter and, in the second game, Don Cardwell allowed four hits for eight innings and Tug McGraw gave up one in the ninth. In both games, the starting pitchers also batted themselves to victory Koosman with a single off Bob Moose in the fifth inning, and Cardwell with a single off Dock Ellis in the second inning. As a result, the Mets added these features to their high flying caps with only 18 games left: They won their 24th and 25th games of 31 played since Aug. 13, when they trailed the Chicago Cubs by 10 games; they won their 21st and 22nd shutouts of the season, and their third in a row, and they extended their recent string of shutout innings to 34. JOSEPH DURSO Steve Carlton of the St. Louis Cardinals set a major league record tonight by striking out 19 New York Mets. But the Mets still won the game, 4 3, on a pair of two run home runs by Ron Swoboda and extended their lead to 4 1/2 games with 15 to play. Carlton, a 24 year old left hander, struck out the side in four of the nine innings as he surpassed the record of 18 strikeouts set by Sandy Koufax, Bob Feller and Don Wilson. He even fanned Swoboda twice, on his first and third times at bat. But on his second and fourth trips to the plate, the Maryland muscleman drove home runs into the left field seats, both times with a man on base, both times with the Mets trailing by one run. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Social media companies have been under tremendous pressure since the 2016 presidential election to do something anything about the proliferation of misinformation on their platforms. Companies like Facebook and YouTube have responded by applying anti fake news strategies that seem as if they would be effective. As a public relations move, this is smart: The companies demonstrate that they are willing to take action, and the policies sound reasonable to the public. But just because a strategy sounds reasonable doesn't mean it works. Although the platforms are making some progress in their fight against misinformation, recent research by us and other scholars suggests that many of their tactics may be ineffective and can even make matters worse, leading to confusion, not clarity, about the truth. Social media companies need to empirically investigate whether the concerns raised in these experiments are relevant to how their users are processing information on their platforms. One strategy that platforms have used is to provide more information about the news' source. YouTube has "information panels" that tell users when content was produced by government funded organizations, and Facebook has a "context" option that provides background information for the sources of articles in its News Feed. This sort of tactic makes intuitive sense because well established mainstream news sources, though far from perfect, have higher editing and reporting standards than, say, obscure websites that produce fabricated content with no author attribution. But recent research of ours raises questions about the effectiveness of this approach. We conducted a series of experiments with nearly 7,000 Americans and found that emphasizing sources had virtually no impact on whether people believed news headlines or considered sharing them. People in these experiments were shown a series of headlines that had circulated widely on social media some of which came from mainstream outlets such as NPR and some from disreputable fringe outlets like the now defunct newsbreakshere.com. Some participants were provided no information about the publishers, others were shown the domain of the publisher's website, and still others were shown a large banner with the publisher's logo. Perhaps surprisingly, providing the additional information did not make people much less likely to believe misinformation. Subsequent experiments showed why. Most viral headlines from distrusted publishers were obviously false (for example, "WikiLeaks confirms Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS") even without knowing the source. Adding publisher information typically added little beyond what you could determine from the headline itself. Consider another anti misinformation tactic used by social media platforms: enlisting professional fact checkers to identify false content. An early Facebook strategy for combating fake news, for example, was to flag false headlines with a "disputed by third party fact checkers" warning, and a recently leaked memo suggests that Twitter is considering a similar approach. Unfortunately, this is also an example of an intuitive approach that research suggests may not work as expected. We and our colleagues conducted experiments that found that though people were less likely to believe and share headlines that had been labeled false common sense was right about that people also sometimes mistook the absence of a warning label to mean that the false headlines may have been verified by fact checkers. This is a problem because only a small percentage of false headlines ever get checked and marked: Fact checking is a painstaking, time consuming process, whereas troll farms and internet bots can create and distribute misinformation with alarming speed. In other words, a system of sparsely supplied warnings could be less helpful than a system of no warnings, since the former can seem to imply that anything without a warning is true. Another seemingly promising strategy is to provide general warnings about the existence of fake news and to offer tips about spotting misinformation. In 2017, Facebook began a public relations campaign along those lines that included billboards and subway signage informing people that "Fake news is not your friend." Here, too, research suggests that such tactics can be counterproductive, since they often reduce confidence in all news, regardless of veracity (which, as it happens, is the goal of many disinformation campaigns). Of course, sometimes ideas that make intuitive sense do work. Getting people to slow down and engage in more critical thinking, for example, has been shown to reduce belief in fake news and to reduce the sharing of it. Likewise, sometimes ideas that seem terrible turn out to be effective. In 2018, Facebook proposed surveying its users about how much they trusted various news sources and then using that information to selectively promote content from sources rated as trustworthy. That proposal was greeted with widespread condemnation and ridicule, but empirical tests that we conducted indicated that this crowdsourcing approach was highly effective at identifying sources of misinformation. The obvious conclusion to draw from all this evidence is that social media platforms should rigorously test their ideas for combating fake news and not just rely on common sense or intuition about what will work. We realize that a more scientific and evidence based approach takes time. But if these companies show that they are seriously committed to that research being transparent about any evaluations that they conduct internally and collaborating more with outside independent researchers who will publish publicly accessible reports the public, for its part, should be prepared to be patient and not demand instant results. Proper oversight of these companies requires not just a timely response but also an effective one. Gordon Pennycook is an assistant professor at the Hill and Levene Schools of Business at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan. David Rand is a professor at the Sloan School of Management and in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T. 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 |
If you think you've seen more Aperol spritzes this year, you're not wrong. And if you've been drinking more of those sparkling red orange drinks in pretty stemmed glasses, you're doing exactly what the makers of Aperol at Campari hoped for. "We saw there was a growing interest in Aperol in the U.S., especially at summer events and destinations," said Melanie Batchelor, the vice president of marketing at Campari America. "We invested behind that." The citrusy bitter liqueur has been popular in Italy since the 1950s, but it took a coordinated push to bring "sunshine in a glass," as Ms. Batchelor described it, to the United States. The marketing plan was a savvy one: It started in New York with a flurry of Aperol spritz booths that were installed at popular summertime events, including the Jazz Age Lawn Party and Governors Ball. In the Hamptons last summer, Campari turned a little scooter car into a bar and drove it around offering free spritzes. The company also wrapped a Hampton Jitney a bus that transports weekenders from Manhattan to the Hamptons in full Aperol orange, with a spritz recipe and the message, "So it's orange y and bubbly at the same time. Plus it's super popular in Italy, so you know it's good." That the drink is an attention grabbing orange certainly helps. At Aperol adjacent events, it's not unusual to see friends posing for photos, clinking their spritzes in the sun. And they might even be wearing Aperol accessories. Campari merch Aperol spritz themed wine glasses, straws, umbrellas, sunglasses and orange fans has infiltrated social feeds. The strategy seems to be working. According to Nielsen, Aperol sales rose 48 percent since last summer. "It's not just in New York. We're seeing strong growth with Aperol across the country," Ms. Batchelor said. Over the last five years, Aperol has become a staple liqueur for many bartenders and can be found on menus all over the city, several New York restaurateurs said. But it wasn't until this year, they all agreed, that we could declare it the drink of the summer. (Some maintain the Campari spritz is next.) At Caffe Dante in the Greenwich Village, the classic Aperol spritz is so popular that it is kept on tap, like beer. The drink is poured from a 10 gallon keg, and garnished with an orange slice and an olive. "We have a special aerator for it," said Will Oxenham, the beverage director there. "It speeds up the process, and keeps the flavor consistent and violently refreshing." He noted that as recently as 2016, "people were still drinking oceans of rose" and few people were ordering Aperol spritzes, but this year and last, the bar has consistently gone through six to nine cases of Aperol a week. The bar also serves an Aperol ice pop. For Estelle Bossy, the bar director at La Sirena, putting a spin on the classic spritz was a bit of a mission. With more than a decade's experience in the beverage industry, she knew that the classic Aperol spritz would be popular this summer, so she decided to up her game by creating a frozen Aperol spritz in the style of frose (a rose wine slushie). Ms. Bossy's concoction is made with Aperol, prosecco, grapefruit juice, lemon, orange flower water and vodka, served in a chilled goblet with a small stem, and garnished with a huskberry. "I wanted you to look at it and think of ice cream soda or a gorgeous parfait," she said. "I wanted people to see it and just go, 'O.K., I've got to have that.'" The frozen Aperol drink has been, without competition, the restaurant's most popular summer beverage, Ms. Bossy said. On the day of the Pride parade, the restaurant made about 600 of them. In Harlem, the French restaurant Barawine has become a popular spot to grab a spritz. Filip Maksimovic, the head bartender there, said he has made more Aperol spritzes this year than in the previous two years combined. "Last year, I went through a bottle, maybe two, of Aperol per month, but this year we're going through a case of six," Mr. Maksimovic said. "And for a bar where most people come for the French wine, that's a lot." The spike in Aperol consumption is in line with a rising demand in the United States for herbal bitter liqueurs, or amaro, more generally. Traditionally these bitters, including Cynar, Campari and Fernet Branca, have been produced in Europe. But now, American made versions are beginning to hit the market. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
When Nicole Thibault had her first child, she imagined traveling everywhere with him. But by age 2, he would become upset by simply passing a restaurant that smelled of garlic. Waiting in line elicited tantrums and crowded places overwhelmed him. Autism was diagnosed within the year. "I thought maybe our family dream of travel wouldn't happen," said Ms. Thibault , 46, of Fairport, N.Y., who now has three children. But she spent the next three years learning to prepare her son for travel by watching videos of future destinations and attractions so that he would know what to expect. The preparation helped enable him, now 14 and well traveled, to enjoy adventures as challenging as exploring caves in Mexico. It also encouraged Ms. Thibault to launch a business, Magical Storybook Travels, planning travel for families with special needs. Now the travel industry is catching up to the family. A growing number of theme parks, special attractions and hotels are introducing autism training and sensory guides that highlight triggers, providing resources in times of need and assuring families they won't be judged. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 59 children falls on the autism spectrum disorder, up from one in 150 in 2002. Autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, is a developmental disability that can cause challenges in social interaction, communication and behavior. Some may have sensory sensitivities and many have trouble adapting to changes in routine, which is the essence of travel. The growing frequency of autism diagnoses and the gap in travel services for those dealing with autism created an overlooked market. "There's still a lot of stigma for families with children on the spectrum," said Meredith Tekin, the president of the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards, which certifies organizations from schools to hospitals in cognitive disorders. In the past two to three years, the organization has worked with more than 100 travel providers on autism programs. "We went from zero in travel to getting requests from dozens and dozens of places," she said. Some families skip travel altogether an I.B.C.C.E.S. study found 87 percent of families whose children have autism don't take family vacations but others insist it feeds minds and teaches coping skills. "We're bringing up kids in a world that's constantly changing and the more we can do to make them a little bit more comfortable with change, the better," said Alan Day, a travel agent who founded Autism Double Checked, a consultancy that trains travel companies in autism readiness, after he was told his own son was on the spectrum. I.B.C.C.E.S. certification requires 80 percent of staff members who interact with guests to undergo up to 21 hours of training in sensory awareness, communication and social skills; to pass an exam demonstrating their understanding; and be recertified every two years. The organization also conducts an on site review to suggest changes that would better serve travelers on the spectrum. Among the newly certified destinations are SeaWorld Orlando, the Aquatica Orlando and Discovery Cove, where visitors can swim with dolphins and snorkel with tropical fish. All three were certified in April. Additionally, the International Board created sensory guides for the parks, available online, that rate attractions on a scale of one to 10 in five senses touch, taste, sound, smell and sight. There are also corresponding signs in the parks with sensory ratings. "We're not asking SeaWorld not to be SeaWorld, but to provide families with options," Ms. Tekin said, stressing the importance of having materials available before a visit, which allows families to discuss what to expect and anticipate any pitfalls. "Most individuals on the spectrum or their families are planners." Each park also created a quiet room with neutral decor, minimal noise, lighting on dimmer switches and interactive toys where families can take a time out. "Our programs accommodating guests with physical disabilities have been robust, including identifying what rides are best suited based on individual abilities," said David Heaton, a vice president at Aquatica Orlando. "We saw an opportunity to improve assistance with developmental disabilities." The website Autism Travel (autismtravel.com) lists I.B.C.C.E.S. certified destinations including Beaches Resorts, the three family friendly all inclusives in Jamaica and the Turks Caicos, that qualified in 2017. In April, the resorts received advanced certification, introducing new one on one childcare, a private room for check in and a culinary program that allows for a greater range of special requests. Beaches also extended autism training to its dive instructors. In March, the Mall of America near Minneapolis also became autism certified, offering sensory guides to its indoor amusement rides. The most ambitious among autism spectrum efforts is i n Mesa, Ariz., the Phoenix neighbor that draws significant family traffic with Major League Baseball spring training and water sports on the Salt River. The city aims to be the first autism certified travel destination in the country, requiring 60 members of its travel bureau, Visit Mesa, including hotels and attractions, to undergo autism training and implement programs to make travelers with autism welcome. City officials say they are more than halfway to their goal and expect to reach it by the end of summer. For Marc Garcia, the chief executive of Visit Mesa, the program was borne of personal experience; he has a 5 year old with autism among three children. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
With VW No Longer an Option, Diesel Buyers Have Few Choices Owners of Volkswagen diesel cars have been among the technology's most loyal evangelists, spreading the word on how fun, frugal and oops, clean, a diesel powered car can be. Now, nearly 500,000 American owners sit in recall limbo over Volkswagen's admission that it equipped its TDI diesels with emissions cheating software to evade detection of rampant diesel pollution. So put upon VW owners are facing an ultimate test of their loyalty: Do they keep faith in Volkswagen to fix the cars that have served them well? Or do they look to other brands for high mileage vehicles that are as clean as advertised? For now, VW diesel fans have few comparable options. Alexandra Llamas considered her 2009 VW Jetta TDI the perfect car for her. It was affordable and had great fuel economy for long commutes in Texas, where she lived before moving to California. It also had a seal of approval as the 2009 Green Car of the Year, rated by a panel of environmental and auto experts who included Jay Leno. "It was my first ever full, adult purchase," said Ms. Llamas, now the marketing director for the San Francisco Symphony. "I loved it. It was good for the environment, and I filled it once a week versus two or three times for my Acura." Now, like many TDI owners, Ms. Llamas is feeling duped. She is waiting to see what steps Volkswagen will take to fix the problem, but after all that has happened, she says she would still buy another VW. "Definitely. Accountability is the key," Ms. Llamas said. Her steadfast support is common among VW owners. Since the beginning of 2015, Edmunds.com data shows that more than one in three VW TDI owners bought another VW diesel. And while 38 percent of VW owners remained with the brand, TDI drivers were even more loyal, with more than half trading for another VW. For VW, the scandal "is unfortunate, because people are so loyal and passionate about the brand and the diesel technology," said Jessica Caldwell, director of industry analysis for Edmunds.com. But now that VW has frozen the sales of new and used TDI models, car shoppers may struggle to identify comparable alternatives, she said. "There's a bit of a hole in the marketplace," Ms. Caldwell said. "Other vehicles certainly could be substituted, but there aren't a lot of affordable fun to drive diesels out there." Other fuel efficient and earth friendly options are also significantly more expensive. VW's diesel technology has been the market's most affordable, adding as little as 700 to the price of a conventional gasoline model. In hindsight, VW's decision to save money by forgoing a costly liquid urea treatment system used by Mercedes and other makers to scrub diesel tailpipe pollution may cost the company billions of dollars in fines, recall costs, legal damages or lost business. While some pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles offer diesels, only one passenger car in America competes directly with the TDI for affordability: The 26,500 Chevrolet Cruze diesel compact sedan, which gets up to 46 miles per gallon and can be driven 700 miles on the highway on a single tank. Others are expensive European luxury models, including ones from VW's Audi division. The BMW 328d sedan starts around 42,000, well beyond the budgets of many current VW owners. The Mercedes E250 Bluetec sedan costs 53,000. Jaguar and Land Rover will bring their first American diesels to showrooms next year, but those will also be dearly priced. Linda Wheat bought a 2013 VW Jetta SportWagen after owning Peugeot diesels in the 1980s. The VW, with its modern turbocharged diesel, was different. "It was amazing," Ms. Wheat said. "No smell, no sound, no stinky exhaust. I thought, 'They figured it out.' But they actually figured it out on the sly." "Being environmentally conscious is barely on the radar here, but within my limited means I was determined to do what I could," Ms. Wheat said. "I was so pleased to find a green car with great mileage and terrific pep." Despite their professed love of fuel economy, only 2.8 percent of VW owners traded for a hybrid. Diesel drivers in general tend to scoff at hybrids for their often dawdling performance or mushy feeling regenerative brakes. The 2016 Chevrolet Volt might seem a natural alternative for disgruntled VW fans. The plug in hybrid has been smartly redesigned, with sleeker styling, improved performance and efficiency that even current diesels can't touch: The new Volt travels 53 miles or more on a plug in charge, up from 38, while getting the energy equivalent of 106 m.p.g., or "m.p.g.e." It then switches to gas electric hybrid power and returns an official 42 m.p.g., versus 36 m.p.g. for the Jetta TDI. And its price has fallen nearly 1,200, to 26,495, after owners take an available 7,500 federal tax credit. Tim Mahoney, Chevrolet's global chief marketing officer, is a defector himself, having previously served as the marketing chief for Volkswagen of America. Mr. Mahoney said it was too early to gauge if the VW scandal would translate to a sales increase for the Volt. "There has definitely been a mind set of a division between hybrid and diesel fans," he said. Ms. Llamas said she was not taken by the original Volt's styling. But the new model is more attractive, though the issue of where to charge a plug in can be tricky for city and apartment dwellers. "I'd consider another diesel, even from Audi or BMW, or a hybrid," she said. "The Volt could be a great alternative, and the price point is good as well." Ms. Wheat said she had considered a Toyota Prius before buying her VW, but preferred the Jetta, which has ample space to ferry around her grandchildren. Nearing retirement, Ms. Wheat hoped her Jetta might be her last new car. Now she is just hoping that VW can restore her Jetta's green credentials, along with its resale value. Frustrated, Ms. Wheat said she might just leave her next choice in a car up to chance. "I bought a lottery ticket," she said. "And if I win, I'm buying a Tesla." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Nearly every case of the rare cancer that has been linked to breast implants anaplastic large cell lymphoma involves those with a textured surface, not a smooth one, and most implants in the United States are smooth. The Food and Drug Administration says women with implants who are not experiencing any problems with them should stick to routine care, and do not need to have the implants removed. But symptoms like breast pain, swelling, fluid buildup or lumps should not be ignored. Not all doctors know how to treat problems from breast implants, according to Dr. Steven Teitelbaum, a plastic surgeon in Santa Monica, Calif. "If the doctor doesn't show a real fluency in this, see somebody else," he said. "You don't want someone who acts like it's nothing or seems confused." To check for lymphoma, doctors use ultrasound (not a mammogram) to look for fluid, and then they drain the fluid and test it for a substance called CD30, which is a sign of the disease. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The twin designers Shimon and Ariel Ovadia, the Brooklyn bred men behind the label Ovadia Sons, played before an enthusiastic hometown crowd on Tuesday, the second night of New York Fashion Week: Men's. Before the models stepped into a ring made of hundreds of orange hued Edison bulbs and black wires, a gaggle of photographers surrounded the New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz, whose off field game includes modeling the Ovadia Sons 2017 resort collection. Though Mr. Cruz is a regular in the front row, he is not attending just any show this week. "I have a personal relationship with the brothers," he said. "We go out to dinner, we hang out, we talk on the phone. It just so happens that they're luxurious fashion designers at the same time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A prehistoric scene, enhanced with digital tracings, top, is etched into rock in the Saudi desert showing what may be the earliest depictions of human dog companionship. The engravings are 8,000 to 9,000 years old.Credit...Huw Groucutt A prehistoric scene, enhanced with digital tracings, top, is etched into rock in the Saudi desert showing what may be the earliest depictions of human dog companionship. The engravings are 8,000 to 9,000 years old. Our bond with dogs is etched in stone. For thousands of years man's best friend has been by our sides, helping us hunt, herd and heal from emotional stress. Now, in a study published Thursday, archaeologists exploring rock engravings in the Saudi desert have found what they say may be the earliest depictions of human canine companionship. The ancient carvings date back about 8,000 to 9,000 years and depict hunters using dogs to overwhelm prey such as gazelles and ibex before they fired killing blows with bows and arrows. "You can almost hear the dogs barking and the humans yelling," said Melinda Zeder, a curator of Old World archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study. "You can almost smell the fear in the animals." "This is the first imagery of a dog with a leash," said Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Germany, and an author of the study, which appeared in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology and was first reported by Science. He said that because of where the lines were on the dog and human's anatomy, they most likely represented actual leashes and were not mere symbolic lines. Dr. Petraglia added that the rock art most likely dated to the early Holocene period, which began around when the Paleolithic ice age closed. But he acknowledged that the team was unable to date it directly because the etchings left little indication for when they were carved. Instead the team correlated the rock art with nearby archaeological sites that they had dated. The team also found that the dog images were carved beneath images of cattle, which they said indicated that the dog images came earlier. They said earlier evidence had suggested these particular ancient humans had domesticated dogs before they began keeping cattle. They added that the transition from being hunter gatherers to herding most likely occurred between 6,800 B.C. and 6,200 B.C., which they used to hypothesize that the rock art featuring dogs appeared before humans began herding. "We can now say about 9,000 years ago people already controlled their dogs and had them on leashes and used them for really complex hunting strategies," said Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and lead author. She worked in partnership with the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage. Dr. Guagnin analyzed more than 1,400 panels of rock art that contained more than 6,600 animals across two sites. The images showed dogs helping humans hunt equids, or African asses, as well as fearsome lions and leopards. Some artwork depicted the dogs taking down medium size prey, and in others they were used to corner larger prey. "It's a little bit heart wrenching, the equids are usually mothers with their young being attacked," said Dr. Guagnin. One such image featured 21 dogs, two with leashes, surrounding an equid and its children. "It's quite interesting to see these scenes with the dying animals and there are dogs hanging off them." Dr. Guagnin was not sure why the dogs would have been leashed, but she speculated it might indicate the dog was young and learning to hunt or it was important and the hunters wanted to keep it away from danger. Dr. Zeder questioned the dating, saying that the team needed stronger evidence to support their claim that the images were as old as they believed. But she called the images striking and said they showed a collaboration between humans and dogs where humans were in control, which is a rare find among archaeological remains. "This is giving us an actual window into the visceral thrill of the hunt," she said. "With the rock art you're putting flesh on the bones." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A common genetic mutation is linked to an increase in life span of about 10 years among men, researchers reported on Friday. The mutation, described in the journal Science Advances, did not seem to have any effect on women. Still, it joins a short list of gene variants shown to influence human longevity. By studying these genes, scientists may be able to design drugs to mimic their effects and slow aging. But the search for them has been slow and hard. When it comes to how long we live, nurture holds powerful sway over nature. In 1875, for example, life expectancy in Germany was less than 39 years; today it is over 80. Germans didn't gain those extra decades because of evolving, life extending changes in their genes. Instead, they gained access to clean water, modern medicine and other life protecting measures. Nevertheless, heredity clearly plays a modest role in how long people live. For example, a number of studies have shown that identical twins, who share the same genes, tend to have more similar life spans than fraternal twins. In a 2001 study of Amish farmers in Pennsylvania, researchers found that close relatives were more likely to live to similar ages than distant ones. The impact of heredity on life span has turned out to be about as big as its influence on developing high blood pressure. But large scale surveys of people's DNA have revealed few genes with a clear influence on longevity. "It's been a real disappointment," said Nir Barzilai, a geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Researchers are having better luck following clues from basic biology. In many species, for example, there is a relationship between an animal's size and its life span. "If you look at dogs, flies, mice, whatever it is, smaller lives longer," said Gil Atzmon, a geneticist at the University of Haifa in Israel who collaborates with Dr. Barzilai. Results like these have led researchers to look closely at the molecules that cause our bodies to grow. One of the most important is growth hormone, which is produced in the brain and courses through the body. The hormone latches on to cells, binding to a surface molecule called a growth hormone receptor. This signal can trigger cells to grow faster. The cells may also release signaling molecules of their own, known as growth factors. About a quarter of people have a mutation in the gene for growth hormone receptors a chunk of DNA is missing. People with this mutation can make working receptors, but their shape is slightly different. Studies in the mid 2000s suggested that this mutation might make children short. The link between height and longevity led Dr. Atzmon and his colleagues to wonder if it might also influence how long people lived. The researchers sequenced the gene for growth hormone receptors in 567 Ashkenazi Jews over 60 and their children, whom Dr. Barzilai had been studying for years. The mutation, they found, was present in 12 percent of the men over age 100. That rate was about three times higher than in 70 year old men. In women, however, the mutation was present in roughly the same fraction in both age groups. Dr. Atzmon and his colleagues followed up by examining the gene in a group of long lived people in the United States, another in France and a third in the Amish community, raising the total number of subjects to 814. In all three groups, the researchers observed the same effect. Among men, the mutation in the gene for growth hormone receptors was linked to substantially longer lives. "The results look convincing to me," said Ali Torkamani, the director of genome informatics at the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Dr. Torkamani, who was not involved in the new study, said it was the first to establish a link between growth hormone receptors and longevity. "I definitely think there's some fire there," said P. Eline Slagboom, a geneticist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. But she had some reservations about the results, given that only men showed an effect and that the study was relatively small. "It's calling out for larger studies," she said. In 2008, Dr. Barzilai and his colleagues discovered that a mutation in another growth related gene could extend life this time, only in women. Combined with the new study, this research suggests that men and women take different genetic paths toward living long lives. But the researchers don't know what those paths might be. "This whole issue has shocked us," Dr. Barzilai said. The new study also shows that the link between life span and height is more complex than the scientists had anticipated. They had expected that long lived men with the mutation would be short. However, just the opposite turned out to be true: The mutation seemed to raise men's height by about an inch. Dr. Barzilai and his colleagues suspect that the mutation triggers a cascade of changes in the growth spurring signals in men's bodies, leaving cells less sensitive to low levels of growth hormone. When growth hormone levels surge, however, these cells divide faster than those in men without the mutation. Somehow, the receptor amplifies the signal's growth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Islanders' Matt Martin, left, has scored five goals in the postseason, matching his regular season total. The Last Islanders Team to Advance This Far Sees a Little of Itself TORONTO No one should be surprised that the Islanders advanced to the conference finals for the first time in 27 seasons. After all, their success derives from a familiar playbook: their own. Like the 1992 93 club, and to a certain extent the 1980s dynasty that won four consecutive Stanley Cups, the main connective tissue has been leadership: General Manager Bill Torrey and Coach Al Arbour then, and Lou Lamoriello and Barry Trotz now. All were of the same mold. They emphasized important principles of accountability and earned the trust of the players. Torrey was hired by the expansion Florida Panthers as their president in April 1993, but his fingerprints were all over that Islanders team. "There's no variance with Lou," said Ray Ferraro, a TV analyst for TSN who was a key member of the 1993 team. "And Barry has a great connective way with his players. They trust what he says and he can get his message to his players." These Islanders, of course, are trying to advance further than Ferraro's, who lost the conference finals in five games to the eventual champions, the Montreal Canadiens. But they are down, 2 1, to the Tampa Bay Lightning in their series in Edmonton, Alberta. They lost Game 2 after Nikita Kucherov broke a 1 1 with less than 10 seconds left, but won the next game, 5 3, on a go ahead goal in the final five minutes. Like the 2020 version, the 1993 Islanders were a collection of hard working players who excelled by playing solid defense and outworking their more skilled opponents. They also played with a lot of emotion, epitomized by the hard hitting rookie defenseman Darius Kasparaitis, who helped neutralize the Penguins star Mario Lemieux as the Islanders beat Pittsburgh in seven games in the division finals. Scotty Bowman, who coached Pittsburgh to a repeat championship in 1992, sees similarities between Arbour and Trotz in how they learned how to develop a competitive roster in the early, lean years in their careers, with Trotz coaching expansion Nashville for its first 15 seasons. "Al started with the Islanders when they were only in the second year," Bowman said. "Trotz started with Nashville. They didn't have the players, so they had to figure out a way to stay competitive. I coached against Trotz when Nashville came in, and they were a tough team to play against." The best scorer on the 1993 Islanders was Pierre Turgeon, who was coming off a career best 58 goals in the regular season. But a blindside hit in Game 6 of the first round resulted in a separated shoulder, causing him to miss the ensuing series against the Penguins. From the top line players to the role players, the Islanders pulled together to compensate for the loss of Turgeon. "What a great team," said Glenn Healy, the Islanders' starting goaltender in 1993. "Not in the sense we were all going to the Hall of Fame because I don't think any of us are in the Hall. But we certainly were a Hall of Fame team in that we cared about each other." It helped that Healy and Ferraro got hot at the right time. "Heals had the six weeks of his career, I would say, and I had the six weeks of my career," Ferraro said. Ferraro, who missed three months of the 1992 93 season with a broken leg and dislocated ankle, caught lightning in a bottle. He scored eight goals in the first round against Washington, including four in one game, scored two overtime winners, and led the team with 13 goals in 18 postseason games. "Every player who plays a long time has a time when everything is going their way," Ferraro said. "It's described as being in the zone." One player who was in the zone was forward David Volek, who had such a miserable season that the ownership wanted to get him off the roster. He scored the overtime winner, his second of the game, on a two on one with Ferraro in Game 7 against Pittsburgh. Another unlikely hero was forward Tom Fitzgerald. "We were down in Game 4, and he scored two short handed goals on the same penalty," Healy recalled, still incredulous. "Same penalty. Otherwise we don't get to Game 7." They have adopted a defense focused system in which all five players collapse toward their own net to support the goaltender and block as many shots as they can. But they are quick enough to race up ice on the forecheck to put pressure on the other team's defense. John Tonelli, who played with the teams of the 1980s dynasty, said that "as a player who played for Al, you could see a lot of things we used to do, they are doing." He continued, "A good, solid team game, good support in front of their goaltender. You know, the Islanders." Those 1980s teams were more skilled and complete than either the 1993 team or the current club. They had a strong two way center in Bryan Trottier, a rugged power forward in Clark Gillies, an elite scorer in Mike Bossy, a tough offensive defenseman in Denis Potvin and a combative puck stopper in Billy Smith. All five are in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Trotz's Capitals were criticized as chronic underachievers because, although they won the Presidents' Trophy for finishing the regular season with the most points both in 2015 16 and 2016 17, they lost each time in the second round to the Penguins, who won the Stanley Cup both years. Finally, the Capitals broke through and knocked off the Penguins in 2018, and that momentum carried the Capitals to their first championship. Trotz joined the Islanders for the next season and has taken the Islanders to the postseason twice. "I think Barry has a really good grip on what they are going through," said Gillies, one of 16 Islanders who played on all four Cup winning Islanders teams. "He went through two very tumultuous years in Washington before he won the Cup. He learned a lot of lessons. There are things we learned back in 1978 and 1979." Potvin also sees a parallel between Torrey's trade acquisition of Butch Goring in 1980 and the trade this year by Lamoriello to bring in Jean Gabriel Pageau. Goring was seen as the final piece of the puzzle for the Islanders, scoring 19 points in 21 postseason games to help the Islanders win the first of their four consecutive Stanley Cups, and being named the most valuable player of the playoffs the next season. Pageau, in turn, has been a sparkplug for the Islanders. He is among the Islanders' leading goal scorers while providing forward depth as the third line center. Off the ice, the Islanders then and now made tight bonds. They live near each other on Long Island during the season, making for close friendships between them, their wives and families. "The 1980 Islanders had terrific esprit de corps," said Stan Fischler, a hockey historian. "Ditto for this club." The year end team party in 1993 was a testament to how tight the club was, Healy said. Normally, some players are bitter that they didn't get enough ice time, or didn't get on the power play. "Our entire group was out, and it was like it never ended for us," Healy said. "A bunch of us even went to Ireland on vacation together." Healy, who won a Stanley Cup with the Rangers in 1994, when they broke a 54 year Cup drought, sees this Islanders team as having some of the ingredients needed for a championship run, although the Lightning with 92 points in the regular season and having outscored the Isles, 10 3 in the first two games are more talented. "The Islanders have got a good coach, they've got good structure, they understand what their roles are, and they care about one another," Healy said. "That goes a long way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
He is no longer "Uncle Joe." Joseph R. Biden Jr., now officially the Democratic Party's nominee for president, has dabbled in various imagery over the years, including working class champion and regular guy. But the one that has always stuck, and that followed him onto the campaign trail earlier this year, was that endearing and charming but awkward relative, slightly removed; the aviator wearing cool old dude who you are happy to have around, but with the occasional wince. Enshrined by The Onion, the satirical magazine, during the Obama administration, and embraced by the Trump campaign, which has exaggerated the caricature into doddering territory, the image may have been put to rest on Thursday night. In a convention finale speech that ranged from the quietly intimate to the soaring, from stories of his lost wife and children to quotes from the poet Seamus Heaney ("when hope and history rhyme"), exhortations and promises to rise to the moment, Mr. Biden saw off the Uncle Joe persona and made a pretty convincing case for another familial role. Hello, father of the nation. It was an idea that has been slowly, carefully seeded over the four days of the Democratic National Convention, with its emphasis on family, empathy, the big, all embracing party tent. And it has been done with words and supporting imagery. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defended a recommendation that sexually active women refrain from drinking alcohol if they are not using birth control after it spurred a strong backlash, with many women saying they considered the suggestion insulting, severe and impractical. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the C.D.C., said in an interview Friday, "We weren't as clear as we had hoped to be." The C.D.C. report released on Tuesday focused on the possibility that children may develop fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, estimating that 3.3 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 who drink alcohol while not using birth control risked exposing their infants to the disorders. The report suggested that women who intend to get pregnant or could get pregnant should not drink alcohol, as about half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned and most women do not know they are pregnant until four to six weeks into the pregnancy. But the idea that fertile women who are not using contraception should indefinitely not drink alcohol was not well received by many women. Dr. Schuchat, however, said the C.D.C.'s intention was to explain the risk of drinking before a woman knows she is pregnant and to show that the harmful effects of alcohol on a developing baby were "completely preventable" not to prescribe a lifestyle or suggest women "plan their entire lives around a hypothetical baby." "We're really all about empowering women to make good choices and to give them the best information we can so they can decide what they want to do themselves," Dr. Schuchat said. "Alcohol in that period can be particularly risky, so we wanted to make sure people are aware of that. What they do with that information is, of course, up to them." Much of the response to the recommendation, however, was negative. Jezebel, a website devoted to women's issues, called it an "unrealistic warning." The Washington Post said it was "incredibly condescending." And Slate called it "swath yourself in bubble wrap thinking." "Its underlying message was unmistakable: Women should consider themselves first a vessel for human life and make decisions about their health and behavior based on that possibility," Rebecca Ruiz wrote at Mashable. Some organizations, however, like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, applauded the recommendation. Drinking during pregnancy has long been linked to the disorders, which can stunt children's growth and cause lifelong disabilities. In October, a report by the American Academy of Pediatrics said that "no amount of alcohol should be considered safe to drink during any trimester of pregnancy." The C.D.C. report said that, although 90 percent of women stop drinking alcohol once they know they are pregnant, three in four women who intend to get pregnant do not stop drinking when they stop using birth control. That would suggest people think less about the effects of alcohol in the early parts of the first trimester when they may be unaware of the pregnancy a time during which developing children are already at risk, according to the C.D.C. "I absolutely respect women, and want them to be empowered to make the choices that are important to them," Dr. Schuchat said. "Some of the coverage that portrayed the C.D.C. as only thinking about women as incubating babies was a big misunderstanding of our attitude." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Bound up the steps to the front door of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, open your bag for inspection, pay your 25 or 25 cents for a ticket, and walk straight forward. You'll be in the dim Medieval Sculpture Hall, with its giant iron choir screen but something unusual, something brilliant, is peeking out beyond it. The usually empty doorway to the Lehman Collection, at the back of the museum, is overwhelmed with dumbstruck apostles, swaddled in silks of rose and lilac; there are prophets with long white beards, backlit by dazzling sun. In the center of it all, beckoning tour groups to his fellowship, is the white clad, mustachioed son of God, his body halfway between flesh and light. What you're seeing through the door is the top half of a stupefying 28 foot tall altarpiece by Cristobal de Villalpando, the most important painter of 17th century Mexico or New Spain, as the viceroyalty was called when it stretched from Central America to Florida and Louisiana. The altarpiece, completed in 1683, has never before traveled from its home in the colonial cathedral of Puebla, Mexico. From now until October, this masterpiece of the Mexican Baroque a lighter, less rigid style than its European counterpart, making use of bright color and free ornamentation stands alone in the Lehman Wing courtyard, and its churning collision of saints and mortals should encourage all sorts of veneration. Not since 2001, when the interior of the Guggenheim was painted black to offset a masterpiece of the Brazilian Baroque, has a Latin American altarpiece of such scale and importance come to New York. "Cristobal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque" includes 10 smaller works by the artist, upstairs in the Lehman Wing. You'll see them eventually, but walk down to the basement level when you arrive to view the altarpiece from up close. The transfiguration of Jesus that you saw at a distance occupies only the top of the painting, while below is an Old Testament vision of darker character. It depicts a passage from the Book of Numbers, in which the Israelites are being ravaged by snakes for doubting the word of God. Women weep or gaze in horror; a serpent winds itself around a muscular body on the ground. Moses, whose head radiates with hornlike beams of light, directs the Israelites to gaze upon a brass sculpture of a serpent, wound around a cross like pole at the lower center, just beneath Jesus in the upper half. The sculpture, commanded by God, will heal them. In your first minutes with Villalpando's altarpiece, you'll probably still be working out the cast of characters, whose demonstrative poses and resplendent robes double down on Baroque theatricality, and figuring out how the halves work together. For it's a bizarre double world that Villalpando depicts, not cleanly divided, but bleeding across its Equator, from Old Testament to New and back. Moses appears among the terrified Israelites and again in the clouds of the vibrant upper half, beside Jesus in his cocoon of light. The landscape, steeply raked like a theatrical stage, is mostly contiguous from bottom to top. The desert through which the Jews wander extends upward to become Calvary, where the cross is cast into shadow and bedecked with a crown of thorns, a whip, a lance, and other instruments of the Passion. Just what are these two scenes, biblically unrelated, doing together? The literal answer is given by a saucy faced angel holding a panel, which explains in Latin that "as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up." In other words, the bronze serpent is a prefiguration of Christ's Crucifixion and the world's salvation. But contradicting the famous ban on graven images in the Second Commandment, in this painting God explicitly demands the creation of a work of art. Not an idol, the brass serpent nevertheless saves lives. The sculpture is a stand in for Christ but also a work of art in itself, and you can therefore see the altarpiece as a vindication of Villalpando's own painting, meant to inspire reverence and reveal the workings of grace. There is little biographical information about Villalpando, whose most important works are in churches and rarely travel. Born in Mexico City, he was only in his early 30s when he completed the Puebla altarpiece. He would have learned the rudiments of Baroque figure painting from older artists in Mexico City and from Flemish prints, especially those after Peter Paul Rubens. After all, Rubens, as much as Villalpando, was a subject of Hapsburg Spain present day Belgium remained under Spanish rule until the start of the 18th century and colonial Mexico City was plugged into a trans Atlantic flow of images and ideas that linked the Spanish empire. The 10 religious paintings upstairs testify to the complex exchange of European and Mexican influences in Villalpando's art. All but one is on loan from Mexican collections, and while it's a pleasure to discover them, not all are of equal sophistication. His early, Italianate "Agony in the Garden," from the 1670s, sees him faltering with drapery and struggling with scale, and a small picture of Adam and Eve in Eden would be hard to distinguish from those of thousands of Flemish journeymen. But in paintings like "The Holy Name of Mary," a glorious, asymmetric composition from around 1695 in which the Virgin contemplates her own name written in the clouds, Villalpando infused the drama of the European Baroque with the bright light of the New World. Exhibitions of colonial Latin American art are so rare in the United States that it would be churlish to wish this one were larger. (A major exhibition of 18th century Mexican painting opens this fall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, part of the huge festival Pacific Standard Time.) You'll still have to go to Mexico City to discover Villalpando's full achievement, but the outstanding altarpiece from Puebla should be a pilgrimage site of its own this summer. Down in the bottom right corner of the altarpiece, in a flash of gold against the darkness, is a notable signature: "Villalpando inventor." That proud and deserved designation testifies that an artist in New Spain had no reason to think of himself as a mere European imitator. He was an inventor of his own, and his gaze extended as far as paradise. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Like many an only child, Nicolaia Rips grew up largely in the company of adults. While other Manhattan youngsters were being herded into Mommy and Me classes and the soccer leagues at Pier 40, Ms. Rips, who grew up in the Chelsea Hotel, was spending her afternoons with the unruly oddballs on West 23rd Street. There was Robert Lambert, a painter, and his irritable half paralyzed screenwriting friend, nicknamed Mr. Crafty, who traded insults and nicknamed Ms. Rips "Lttle Crafty," awarding her entry into their tiny, profane club of two. There was the Angel, a young man whose uniform was a pair of enormous white wings and a sort of diaper. There was the Capitan, a man of mysterious, and probably inflated, martial origins who had a black Newfoundland that Ms. Rips would ride through the halls. Arthur Weinstein, the night life impresario, was the father of her babysitter Dahlia; he didn't say much, but every now and then would toss Ms. Rips a chocolate bar. Now 17, Ms. Rips has written a memoir about her time there. The jacket copy for "Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel" calls her a "bohemian Eloise for our times," billing that brings to mind a self consciously precocious imp. To be sure, Ms. Rips, the child of an author and an artist, imagined herself as imbued with the spirit of her hero, Groucho Marx (he died on her birthday), and was once celebrated by her father in a preschool interview for her ability to deliver an after dinner toast (she got in). The cover of Ms. Rips's book, "Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel." But the young woman who spent her formative years in the boisterous landscape of fabulists that was the Chelsea Hotel did so more as an amused observer preternaturally wise and self deprecating than an egocentric performer. Memoirs of that fractious, febrile ecosystem erupt every year or so (Patti Smith's "Just Kids" being a notable example). Last October, Linda Troeller, a photographer who lived there from 1994 to 2013, published her own impressionistic photo memoir. Ms. Rips's contribution to the canon is one of the better entries. Halloween was the hotel's special holiday, the one night, as Ms. Rips writes, "its residents would be praised for what had typically isolated them." Tellingly, the first book Ms. Rips was able to read on her own wasn't "Charlotte's Web" but Jerry Seinfeld's "Halloween." Ms. Rips's parents came late to family life. Her father, Michael Rips, 62, is a lawyer turned author who had dedicated himself to hotel living (before the Chelsea, Mr. Rips roomed at the Regency) and hanging about in coffee shops (when drawing up a list of likely preschools for his daughter, Mr. Rips chose those closest to his favorites). Her mother, Sheila Berger, 56, is a former model, artist and committed vagabond; when she discovered she was pregnant, she took off for a three month tour of the Silk Road. Ms. Rips has been traveling with her mother ever since, and corrected the proofs for her book in Ladakh, India. Her father read her whatever he was reading at the time, mostly Thomas Carlyle, which had the peculiar effect of delaying her reading skills until the end of third grade while at the same time imprinting her speech with the rhythms of that Scottish philosopher and essayist. None of this training did anything to help Ms. Rips fit in with her peers, a situation that had become horribly acute by middle school. After one particularly hideous day in school, Ms. Rips slumped home to the lobby, her misery clearly written on her face. Ms. DeLarverie called her over in a gruff New Orleans drawl and showed Ms. Rips the pink revolver strapped to her ankle. "That, baby doll, is my best friend," Ms. DeLarverie told her, promising to take it to Ms. Rips's school should anyone there give her more trouble. With a mythological creature like Ms. DeLarverie watching her back, Ms. Rips writes, "who really needs to be afraid of couple of prepubescent girls?" One recent afternoon, Ms. Rips and her parents had picked their way past the construction debris of the Chelsea's halls, now sheathed in Sheetrock and fire retardant fabric, to the door of Apartment 602. Its white fabric seal had red zippers and a sign, framed in duct tape, that proclaimed: "Tenant Occupied." The hotel has been a blown out landscape since 2011, when its owners at the time began to renovate the place and exhume its colorful tenants. Many lawsuits and two owners later, the place is somewhat stabilized, though only a handful of its original denizens remain. Some, like Mr. Lambert, fled the chaos early on. "It was just too much strife," he said recently. Though pruned of much of its furniture, which moved uptown with the family, the apartment is filled with Ms. Berger's artwork: glinting steel and glass sculptures and mobiles and her delicate and lovely encaustic paintings. Plaster casts of hands fill a wall of shelves, a ghostly audience. In Ms. Rips's tiny room, a fairy is tucked into a chandelier, and the walls are still emblazoned with the mottos (from Coco Chanel and others) she painted there in middle school: "You live but once, might as well be amusing" and "Things turn out for the best for people who make that the best." Ms. Rips wore a billowy coral colored dress that fell to her ankles. "I would come home and tell my parents all these fantastic tales," she said. "Well, not fantastic. These humiliating experiences. And my dad was always of the mind set that I should write things down, so I started doing that. By the time I got to eighth grade and I needed a project, I, who had inherited my father's tendency to not like hard work, thought: 'Ah, I already have a project. I can just smoosh them together.'" As much he loves the hotel, Mr. Rips said he did worry about its effect on his only child. "What does a child expect from themselves in that environment?" he said. "A lot of these people were old, and a lot of them were ill, mentally or physically, and that kind of extremely creative but decaying circumstance was a concern. And it was so out of the ordinary in terms of the other kids Nicolaia was meeting in school." In her book, Ms. Rips writes of one memorable (her only) children's party there, when the Capitan showed up in his underwear and Mr. Crafty shouted an expletive, the nicest thing he ever said, she writes. "Of course," Mr. Rips continued, "that adjustment is the crux of the book. I'm proud she was able to navigate that." Stanley Bard, the hotel's fretful, anxious manager and impresario, who was booted out in 2007, was another of Ms. Rips's protectors and mentors, albeit a distracted one. "You are like a daughter to me," he tells her. "A beloved resident of the Chelsea. Your father, on the other hand ..." While on the topic of Mr. Bard, Mr. Rips shared this anecdote. Many years ago, he and Ms. Berger were hosting a bris for a nephew. The mohel was late, and Mr. Rips found him in the lobby with Mr. Bard, who announced to whomever was milling about down there: "Today is a historic moment. This is the first circumcision in the history of the Chelsea Hotel." Mr. Rips recalled that Mr. Bard paused a moment before continuing, "Though not the first mutilation." The thing about middle school is that it eventually comes to an end. The mean girls, having peaked early, stumble from their lofty perches; and the misfits, having grown sturdy and resilient from years of battering and loneliness (and the enduring solace of literature), go on to conquer in arenas that value brains more than brawn. Well, sometimes. Ms. Rips finds her liberation at La Guardia, the music, art and performing arts high school memorialized in the movie "Fame." "I think it's a mistake they are allowing me to graduate," said Ms. Rips with typical self deprecation, citing lax punctuality (because of her parents' daily entreaties to stay and have another cup of coffee) and wildly underestimating her accomplishments (acceptance to Brown University). It was two years into high school when "the Chelsea diaspora," as Ms. Rips said, emptied the hotel. But Ms. Rips had internalized the gifts from her fairy godmothers. Having finally found her own tribe and her own talents, she no longer needed the support of mythological creatures. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Facebook and Instagram flagged posts from the Fox News show "Tucker Carlson Tonight" as false information on Wednesday, saying that they repeated information about Covid 19 "that multiple independent fact checkers say is false." The show posted a video on the social media platforms on Tuesday night with the caption "Chinese whistle blower to Tucker: This virus was made in a lab I can prove it." The posts feature a segment in which Mr. Carlson interviewed Li Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist who claims that the virus "is not from nature." Intelligence agencies have been skeptical that the pathogen can be conclusively linked to a lab. Scientists who have studied the genetics of the virus agree that it began as a bat virus and likely evolved to jump to humans. Many have dismissed theories that the virus infected researchers in a lab accident. On Tuesday night, Facebook and Instagram placed screens of varying levels of opacity over images of the "Tucker Carlson Tonight" video along with a "false information" warning while also allowing users an option to watch it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
From left: James McNew, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo. The band's new album title was inspired by a 1971 LP by Sly and the Family Stone. At first glance, "There's a Riot Going On" is a pointlessly provocative album title. The indie rock band Yo La Tengo got it from the strange, brilliant 1971 album by Sly and the Family Stone, "There's a Riot Goin' On." It was Sly Stone's last great album, which included the hit "Family Affair," and its viscous, gnarled, inward looking funk has been scoured for ideas by songwriters like D'Angelo and Kanye West. What's a not particularly funky indie rock band from New Jersey doing by invoking that album's mantle? Apparently, thinking about its mood and its historical moment. The songs on "There's a Riot Goin' On" were about turning away from the post 1960s turbulence of the Nixon presidency and withdrawing into music as a hazy refuge. "Feel so good inside myself, don't want to move," declared its opener, "Luv N' Haight." For Mr. Stone, the haze of 1971 also reflected a serious and increasing drug problem. For Yo La Tengo, it may just be a retreat from chaotic current events, into the relatively manageable realm of tinkering in the studio. The music drones and burbles, tinkles and undulates, taking its time and lingering over instrumental stretches as if people are still willing to experience a whole album from start to finish. "Forever" sways in slow motion, with a reassuring soul bass line, imperturbable organ chords and nostalgic "shoo wop shoo wop" backup vocals. But the lyrics that Ira Kaplan croons aren't exactly comfortable: "Laugh away the bad times/Lie about what's to come." The album's mission statement may be in "Above the Sound": "For all our heads may spin/See if we can look within," Mr. Kaplan sings barely above a whisper. Or maybe it's in "What Chance Have I Got," sung by Georgia Hubley: "Stand your ground/What chance have I got." Yo La Tengo was formed in 1984 by Mr. Kaplan (vocals and guitar) and Ms. Hubley (drums and vocals), who are married, and since 1992 its third member has been James McNew on bass. The band long ago became a quiet model for sustainable indie rock. Yo La Tengo has found a loyal audience, a steadfast label and considerable respect among fellow musicians. It has recorded an extensive catalog "There's a Riot Going On" is its 15th studio album and it continues to play what it wants, from thoughtful 1960s flavored pop rock to extended feedback freakouts. The band's general canon, defined through its own songs and countless cover versions, is clear and broad: the 1960s of the Velvet Underground, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, the British Invasion and psychedelia; the 1970s of Los Angeles folk pop, krautrock and punk; the 1980s of new wave, post punk and indie rock, not to mention select Top 10 pop from every era. That's roomy enough for ample variety. But any stable, long running band has to battle staleness, and for this album, Yo La Tengo transformed its recording methods. "There's a Riot Going On" is the band's first digitally recorded album, allowing it to use an unlimited number of tracks. It was made in the band's rehearsal studio with no outside producer, allowing each song to be built in leisurely layers. John McEntire, of Tortoise, eventually mixed the results. The album often dissolves the guitar bass drums core of typical Yo La Tengo songs. It's awash in loops and effects, in sustained shimmering tones and percussion overdubs; in the opening track, "You Are Here," a long drone acclimates a listener to its sense of suspended time. There are echoes of late 1960s studio extravaganzas like the Rolling Stones's "Their Satanic Majesties Request," Tim Buckley's "Goodbye and Hello" and the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds." (The album's closest approaches to lilting pop tunes, "Shades of Blue" and "Let's Do It Wrong," are overt homages to the mid 1960s Beach Boys.) But the album's tone is far more subdued than its psychedelic forebears, and Mr. Kaplan and Ms. Hubley, who have always been diffident singers, are even more self effacing than usual, almost as if they wanted to hide among the instruments. They deliver their apprehensions as gently as they can, turning reckonings into reveries. In "She May She Might," Mr. Kaplan sings about a woman who wishes she could "get outside her mind" or simply run away, in a tangle of unresolved modal harmonies. In "Dream Dream Away," it takes nearly three minutes of contemplative, slowly strummed guitar and abstract reverberation before Mr. McNew muses, in choirlike vocal harmonies, "Why cry? Why try? It's all the same." The album ends with "Here You Are," a cozy, floating, gradually gathering vamp that enfolds a grim summation: "We're out of time/Believe the worst." Yo La Tengo knows all too well how fragile its musical refuge is, and how temporary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
LOS ANGELES The Los Angeles Times said on Monday that it had named Lewis D'Vorkin, previously a senior executive at Forbes, its top editor. The announcement followed a sweeping management overhaul at The Times in August that resulted in the ouster of several senior leaders, including Davan Maharaj, who had served as both editor and publisher. At the time, Tronc, the parent company of The Times, installed Ross Levinsohn, a longtime media executive, as publisher. Mr. D'Vorkin, 65, was most recently the chief product officer at Forbes, where he oversaw the company's product, technology and editorial teams. While at Forbes, he broadened the company's native advertising offerings, including a product called BrandVoice that allows advertisers to contribute material alongside Forbes articles. He has also worked at The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and The New York Times. "Lewis is one of the most transformational editors and digital innovators in the media industry and is exceptionally qualified to lead the evolution of the Los Angeles Times newsroom," Mr. Levinsohn said in a statement. "He knows how to build a competitive, sustainable media business with global clout while preserving the highest standards of journalistic integrity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Haley is familiar with using music as a salve in trauma, having directed the lovely drama "Hearts Beat Loud," where a widower and his daughter bond by writing songs together. Amber's ambition to study music at Carnegie Mellon University, her father's alma mater, is complicated by her sense of obligation to her mother. When Cravalho sings in the movie, her star presence is hard to ignore. She performs as if her full of hope heart might burst, cementing her magnetism as a performer. The movie's familiar suggestion of music as a light in the darkness works primarily because its star shines so brightly. All Together Now Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
There will be no courses at the Relay Graduate School of Education, the first standalone college of teacher preparation to open in New York State for nearly 100 years. Instead, there will be some 60 modules, each focused on a different teaching technique. There will be no campus, because it is old think to believe a building makes a school. Instead, the graduate students will be mentored primarily at the schools where they teach. And there will be no lectures. Direct instruction, as such experiences will be called, should not take place for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. After that, students should discuss ideas with one another or reflect on their own. If it all sounds revolutionary, it's supposed to. In its promotional materials, Relay uses fiery terms to describe its mission, promising to train schoolteachers in a way that "explodes the traditional, course based paradigm that has been adopted by traditional schools of education over the past century." Norman Atkins, the founder of a network of charter schools and the president of Relay, talks about his program as being beyond ideology, a word he believes has a negative connotation. "The messiah is not going to come in the blink of an eye," Mr. Atkins said recently. But he hopes, he said, to help bring about a future in which teachers and schools use instructional techniques that are known to work and are held accountable for student performance, two core tenets of Relay. Mr. Atkins's goal of upending teacher training stems from a broader diagnosis shared by many who work in public education: that it is failing millions of American children, leaving them without the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century. Vastly improving teacher education, they believe, is critical in fixing that picture. There are wide concerns that too many teachers are unprepared for the classroom, though they may have more educational credentials than ever before. Master's degrees are required for permanent certification in only a few states, including New York and Kentucky. But data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics show that 52 percent of kindergarten through eighth grade teachers have a master's degree or higher which often qualifies them for a pay bump. And so graduate school in education is big business. In the 2008 9 school year, the 178,564 master's degrees in education that were awarded across the country accounted for 27 percent of all the master's degrees awarded. Over the years, some of the toughest critics of education schools have been educators themselves. In 1986, the Holmes Group, a collection of deans from education schools, warned that too many schools were indifferent to the importance of hands on teacher preparation. Their curriculums were outmoded, and their standards for admission and graduation were lax. Major research universities accorded them a low priority. Twenty years later, Arthur Levine, the former dean of Teachers College at Columbia University, argued in a scathing report called "Educating School Teachers" that most of those problems still held true. "While there are some wonderful teaching schools," he told me recently, "there are some that place students at failing schools with failing teachers to learn how to teach. There are some in which the professors are really far behind the times. There is enough bad practice to justify getting rid of the bottom of the field." But even those calling for reform face a problem, Dr. Levine said: There is little research into what kind of training is most likely to produce a successful teacher, a fact that social scientists are now working to remedy through long term study. In the meantime, states, which set the rules for certifying educators, are taking an everything but the kitchen sink approach to reform, raising the standards for existing schools while opening the door to new kinds of organizations, from online schools to charter school networks to museums, to train their teachers. For example, New York invited nonacademic institutions to apply for 12.5 million in grants to develop and offer "clinically rich" master's degree programs in teacher preparation. Among the 11 winning proposals, which were announced earlier this month, are the American Museum of Natural History, which already has a doctoral program in biology, along with Fordham University, Mercy College and two campuses of the City University of New York. These changes come as large numbers of teachers already bypass traditional education degrees, entering classrooms with temporary licenses after as little as several weeks or months of pre service training. Today, about 500,000 of the nation's 3.6 million teachers have entered the field through these alternative routes, such as Teach for America, mostly to work in public schools in high poverty areas. Even Arne Duncan, President Obama's secretary of education, has joined in questioning traditional teacher education, advising districts in a speech last year to rethink the practice of rewarding teachers with a raise for a master's degree, because "there is little evidence teachers with master's degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers." Education schools, particularly those that offer top notch training, might be excused for feeling they are under attack. "The rhetoric is enormously heated," Dr. Levine said, speaking from his office at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where as president he helps universities restructure their teaching programs. "We have a group of education schools that are perplexed at why they are being so criticized," he said. "We have states saying they are going to create alternate routes to becoming a teacher, and they are going to increase standards for the existing education schools. "We are simultaneously trying to reform and replace the enterprise." It was a Saturday in May, and a full day session of Teacher U was convening in a windowless high school classroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Class started at 9 a.m., and at 9:45 a.m., the master's students were still trickling in. They were mostly young the average age is 25 and dressed in weekend attire: sneakers, jeans or khakis, T shirts and baseball caps. They nursed iced coffees and nibbled chocolate croissants and yogurt parfaits. Full time teachers, almost all at charter schools, they work grueling hours, and they were tired. There were no books out, though one young man consulted "The 10 Day M.B.A." during breaks. Instead, the students followed along on what the school calls "interactive handouts," worksheets that provide exercises to accompany their teacher's PowerPoint presentation. The morning's subject was "Right Is Right," a technique in which teachers learn to hold out until their students give them answers that are 100 percent accurate. It is the second of 49 strategies cataloged in "Teach Like a Champion," a 2010 book by Doug Lemov, a teacher and principal who founded the Uncommon Schools charter school with Mr. Atkins. Mr. Lemov's work is such a backbone of instruction at Teacher U, students say, that he has near guru status there, as does Dave Levin, a founder of the KIPP charter schools, and Julie Jackson, former principal of North Star Academy in Newark. "I am a believer," said Zach Mack, 31, a Teacher U student whom I watched one day in June deliver a dynamic social studies lesson to his fourth grade class at Public School 139 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He schedules each day down to the minute, and posts daily goals on the board so students can see them. "As Doug would say," he added, "if you don't have a plan for them, they have a plan for you." Teacher U opened three years ago as a program within Hunter College School of Education, part of the City University of New York. Its monthly daylong lessons take place at Hunter College High School, the college's laboratory public school. The program has already gained attention with its nearly single minded focus on practical teaching techniques. And this summer, when it transforms into the Relay School of Education, independent of Hunter, it will move even further away from a traditional education school model of classroom instruction and theory, sometimes above practice. Some education theory will be integrated at Relay, Mr. Atkins insisted, but not "37 1/2 hours' worth" the length of the traditional three credit course that the new school eschews. Forty percent of its coursework will be online. When students do gather, it will be mostly in small groups, mostly for discussion expanding on a core practice at Teacher U. It is one of a few examples around the country of charter organizations developing degree programs to train their own and other teachers. High Tech High in San Diego has a master's program with training in project based learning techniques. Such models, in turn, are part of a national movement emphasizing practical instruction for teachers already in the classroom full time. "To make a crude analogy, if I am learning to become a blacksmith, I also don't learn how to be a pipefitter," Mr. Maddin said of Teacher U's focus on pedagogical technique. "I also don't read a ton of books about how to shoe a horse. What I do is I show up and shoe horses." On that Saturday, the teacher, Mayme Hostetter, a former teacher at a KIPP charter school, started off by playing part of a Nelly Furtado pop song called "Say It Right," to hook students into the lesson. Her co teacher, Romina Piersanti, then showed a series of video examples from real classrooms explaining dos and don'ts of Doug Lemov's "Right Is Right" strategy. One clip showed an expert teacher making an error. Stephanie Ely, at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, asked a classroom full of uniformed sixth graders for the perimeter of a rectangle that is 4 by 8 feet. She cold called a girl in a yellow headband named Takira, who responded, "24 units." Ms. Ely corrected her: she should have said feet, not units. Takira grimaced. "Let's just do a quick share out," Ms. Piersanti said, replaying that part of the scene. Takira looked crestfallen. She seemed mad at herself and disappointed. Ms. Ely should have encouraged Takira to get to the right answer herself, instead of correcting her, the graduate students agreed. "You can praise what she did to get to that 80 percent answer, so that there is more clarity about going to the 100 percent," Ms. Piersanti said, offering the kind of tip that is Teacher U's specialty. "This goes back to the bigger picture idea that everything a teacher does or doesn't do, says or doesn't say, sends some message to the student and has an impact." Later that morning, the graduate students experimented with teaching technique No. 46 "J Factor," as in joy. While many of the Lemov techniques are geared toward setting a disciplined classroom tone of high expectations, some are about fun. The students split up into three relay teams and sprinted down the hallway toward a pile of numbered cards, racing to be the first team to collect all the ones that match a certain criterion, such as even numbers or multiples of 10. After sharing out how to use the exercise with their students, Ms. Ely herself led them through a discussion about different ways to help middle school students solve an algebra problem. There was no mention of John Dewey, Howard Gardner or Paulo Freire, the canon of intellectuals that tend to take up an outsize portion of the theory taught at traditional education graduate schools. But that seemed fine with the students, who chatted avidly about their own experiences. After class, they told me about the improvements they saw in how they managed their classes. "I can study Vygotsky later," said Tayo Adeeko, a 24 year old third grade teacher at Empower Charter School in Crown Heights. She was referring to another education school staple Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet theorist of cognitive development who died in 1934. "Right now," she added, "my kids need to learn how to read." The progress of Ms. Adeeko's students is not optional. Another core component of Teacher U/Relay is that, before they can earn their master's degrees, they must submit a portfolio showing that their own students made at least one year of academic progress in a subject. To that end, each of the 280 Teacher U students has a Flip video camera to document their lessons, and they must track their students' test scores and other work. It's a technique that Hunter College also uses with its traditional education students. (The camera can be a useful teacher's aide; Mr. Mack, for example, said he found his students behave better when they know they are on a video that could be shown to their parents.) As practice focused as Teacher U is, its founders still felt constrained by the three credit course structure mandated by Hunter. So last year, they applied to create the standalone graduate school. Relay will start with 200 part time students, and hopes to expand to 800 in five years. The goal, Mr. Atkins said, is to reach beyond the charter school world, and for half of its students to be traditional public school teachers. "The techniques and strategies that you are learning here are applicable to all settings and to all types of kids," he said. "However," he allowed, "if you believe that children shouldn't have homework, or you believe that testing is evil, this probably isn't the best program for you." A 30 million initial investment from the Robin Hood Foundation to start Teacher U will help finance Relay, and it is estimated that other revenue sources (such as AmeriCorp stipends for Teach for America teachers) will reduce the cost of the two year program for most students from 35,000 to as low as 4,250. That is well below the roughly 40,000 fee at Teachers College, its most storied private competitor. Relay has not had an easy go of it, though. Eight of the 13 graduate schools around New York City objected to the idea. A key concern was that the school would add extra competition to an already crowded field during an era of budget cuts and potential teacher layoffs. Another was that its tight focus on pedagogical technique would mean less intellectual rigor. The office of CUNY's chancellor, for example, wrote in a formal objection to the state that Relay "is essentially a similar educational model as the existing Teacher U/Hunter College partnership program, except that it would lack the depth of educational and other resources that a university brings to the partnership." Even the state appointed team of university educators that reviewed Relay's charter expressed concerns, though it ultimately recommended approval. "The institution must recognize the importance of scholarly activity in a graduate school," it warned. "It must specify how it plans to support ongoing (rather than episodic) scholarly work by full time faculty." Relay has since agreed to hire a director to oversee faculty research into effective teaching practices. The debate mirrors a larger concern nationally, which is that by treating teaching as a trade instead of an art, and permitting new teachers to run their own classrooms from the first day, alternative education programs will, in the long term, reduce the quality of America's teaching force. A great teacher, critics of the new approach argue, should also be trained in advanced work in his or her field, as well as be versed in child psychology, cognitive theory and educational philosophy, so he or she can work in any setting. Lin Goodwin, the associate dean at Teachers College, describes Relay thusly: "What they are doing is teacher training, to follow a protocol, to be able to perform in a particular context, to know how to work in this way. And I think that what that does is it dumbs down teaching, and takes us back a few steps, in terms of our struggle in the profession for teachers to be seen as professionals." At Teachers College, she added, graduate students commonly spend three and a half days a week in student teaching, in addition to a full evening course load in theory, pedagogy and advanced subject area content. Jerrold Ross, the dean of St. John's School of Education in Queens, said he had expressed his concerns about Relay to David M. Steiner, the state education commissioner. "The thrust to improve practice is one to which we subscribe, but any path which further separates content from practice in my view is not the best way to go," he said. "The answer lies in better monitoring and supervision of existing graduate schools, more than it is 'Let's just toss to the side and create something different.' " Yet Relay and programs like it are already having a broader impact. Dr. Steiner, who had recused himself from the Regents vote on Relay, helped start Teacher U when he was the dean of the Hunter College School of Education. As commissioner, he led the rewriting of state policy on teacher education as part of New York's successful Race to the Top federal grant application, and those regulations share some similarities with Teacher U policies. By 2013, New York will begin holding all graduate students in education accountable for student learning in their classrooms before they can get their degrees, as at Teacher U and Relay. It is one of 22 states to experiment with accountability standards through a pilot being conducted out of Stanford University. And New York and eight other states are piloting a program supported by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education to reorganize teacher education around clinical practice rather than academic study. One rising model is residencies, in which students will teach full time but get intensive mentoring and coursework. Programs are already under way in Boston and Denver. "We don't think that all the wisdom is lodged in the education schools," Dr. Steiner told me. "The fundamental point is that we need people to think outside of the box, to shake things up a little bit." Experts hope that out of this sea of experimentation comes a consensus on what teacher training should look like. In some programs, it takes a semester to train a teacher, in others five years. Some require a year of mentored student teaching, others almost no teaching at all. But as new approaches are tried, there are also potential dangers, said Linda Darling Hammond, an expert on teacher education at Stanford University. "As with anything else, we should have a high standard for it to be done responsibly," she said. Just as doctors must have extensive training before they can work independently, so should teachers, she said. "Otherwise, we risk learning on other people's kids." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
So little is predictable these days an achingly close election, a pandemic with an ever more obscure endpoint that I have developed an intense appreciation for reliably wonderful things, like Mallomars and beech trees and Jesmyn Ward books. Add to this list Kathryn Hahn's face. You've seen this face in everything from silly comedies like "Bad Moms" and "We're the Millers" to sexy Peak TV like "I Love Dick." It's an expressive, open face that slips easily into quirky characters like the randy sister in law in "Step Brothers." But Hahn also excels in dramatic supporting roles, telegraphing the inner turmoil of the women she inhabits. Take this scene from the Season 1 finale of "Transparent" (cue 12:04). Hahn plays Raquel, a gentle rabbi who is in love with Josh (Jay Duplass), the brother of Gaby Hoffmann's Ali. The two women are covering mirrors at a shiva, per tradition. "I could not be happier," Raquel beams, her brows upturned and earnest. But Ali is concerned, then pitying. "I mean, I'm not saying he's a sex addict or a love addict," Ali says of Josh. "I don't know, maybe he's a love addict." Stumbling upon this new twist of words love addict is so satisfying to Ali, she doesn't look up to consider its implications for Raquel. But the camera switches to Hahn to tell us. Her face has a fragility now, her searching eyes cast inward. Hahn gets all of 90 seconds to convey Raquel's devastation to us, and she has to do this while also trying to conceal it from Ali. She pulls off this task quickly with that face of hers, registering subtle gradations of confusion, shame and hurt that only we, the viewers, seem to see. This ability to flash her private thoughts to us places Hahn in company with some of my favorite actors, who displayed their skills most thrillingly in early supporting roles, making efficient use of their little screen time. I'm thinking of John Cazale in "The Godfather," Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Boogie Nights," Viola Davis in "Far From Heaven" and Brian Tyree Henry in "Atlanta." Each of those performances felt like a secret revealed. So as we ride out the uncertainty, here are three roles two minor, one lead in which Hahn puts her remarkable face to effective, dependable use. I first noticed Hahn in Season 1 of "Girls," during a four episode arc that left me asking, who is that? She is introduced as a harried yet vivacious working mother, who hired the young, beautiful Jessa (Jemima Kirke) as a babysitter. Hahn is a successful documentarian someone Jessa might hope to become if she didn't see aging as inherently sad. But in a later scene, Hahn's careful smile shows she understands the insecurity that lies beneath Jessa's cockiness; she had it once, too. And this one look gives you her character's whole back story. In a movie that tediously spells out subtext with a Sharpie "We had another child to prove the first one wasn't a mistake," April later says to Frank it is a blessing that Hahn and Harbour, playing ordinary suburbanites, are given few self conscious lines and are left to, well, act their parts. After the Wheelers announce they're leaving Connecticut for Paris one evening, Shep and Milly are alone in their bedroom, dressing in elegant, seemingly iron pressed pajamas. Shep is obviously infatuated with April, so his agitation here is logical. But why does Milly quickly break into tears? Is she in love with Frank or April or the idea of them? "It's nothing," Milly says as Shep ineptly consoles her. Hahn plays the scene ambiguously, but one thing is clear: Milly wants to keep her anguish hidden from her husband. Again, it feels as if Hahn is whispering this secret to only us. The two play a middle aged, artistic couple Rachel, a writer; Richard, a former theater director who are trying to have a baby by any means necessary. The film swiftly, and rather funnily, cycles through the indignities of both adoption and assisted reproduction. Scenes with judgmental social workers are spliced with shots of Richard watching pornography in a fertility clinic. "Private Life" is a comically apt title: Rachel and Richard are doing the most intimate thing creating a new life in front of a bunch of strangers. Richard learns his sperm count is zero in a recovery room full of other I.V.F. patients. After a doctor suggests using an egg from a donor instead of from Rachel, she storms out, distraught, only to argue with Richard on a busy New York City street. "I'm not putting someone else's body parts into my uterus," she yells as she makes way for a woman pushing a stroller. It's moving to watch Hahn make no effort to contain her feelings this time, even as Rachel's rage spirals into a raw, snotty grief neither for the benefit of passers by nor for Richard. The vulnerability Hahn shares with us throughout the movie is exactly what Rachel shares with him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
First, the city of Washington took down a tribute to George Preston Marshall, the founder of its N.F.L. team, that was in front of the team's old home, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. Then the team removed references to Marshall, who named his team the "Redskins," from inside its stadium and at its training facility. On Monday, under pressure from corporate sponsors, the team announced its most dramatic step, that it would drop its logo and "Redskins" from its name, an all but forced turnaround by team owner Daniel Snyder, who for decades said he would never change the name that had long been considered a racial slur. "Today, we are announcing we will be retiring the Redskins name and logo upon completion of this review,'' the team said in a statement. But only in the past few weeks has there been movement to address his legacy by removing the monument and his name from team facilities. Monday's decision came just 10 days after the franchise said it would review the 87 year old team name under significant pressure from major corporate partners including FedEx, which had threatened to end its naming rights sponsorship of the team's stadium. Snyder's shift from total resistance to grudging acceptance in just a few weeks has been remarkably swift in a league that often moves forward deliberately, if at all. But after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in late May, much of the country has moved rapidly to confront historical representations of racist symbols. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. The team did not announce a new name on Monday as it continues to evaluate possibilities. Snyder said the new name, when chosen, would "take into account not only the proud tradition and history of the franchise but also input from our alumni, the organization, sponsors, the National Football League and the local community it is proud to represent on and off the field." His about face comes after hundreds of universities and schools have in recent years abandoned team names and mascots with Native American imagery. "This day of the retirement of the r word slur and stereotypical logo belongs to all those Native families," said Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native American activist. She said that the change was a victory for all those who "bore the brunt of and carry the scars from the epithets, beatings, death threats and other emotional and physical brutalities resulting from all the 'Native' sports names and images that cause harm and injury to actual Native people." That Washington, among the N.F.L.'s most valuable franchises, was compelled to change its name likely adds pressure on the remaining professional teams with Native American mascots and logos to re evaluate their names and monikers. The Kansas City Chiefs of the N.F.L., the Chicago Blackhawks of the N.H.L. and the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball have long resisted changing their names and logos, though the Indians dropped the mascot Chief Wahoo last year and recently said they would review the team name. The Washington team's most immediate task is changing its official branding, but it is unclear how the team will address fans who continue to wear headdresses, war paint, and other stereotypical imagery to games, and if it will replace its fight song, "Hail to the Redskins," which contains references to "braves on the warpath" and is played after touchdowns at home games. The team may get to delay making those decisions if fans are not allowed to attend games this season because of the coronavirus. The boycott came after decades of pressure on the team to change the name, which many people (and some dictionaries) consider to be offensive. In 1992, Native American activists began a campaign to compel the United States Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the team's "redskin" trademark, a legal battle that the Supreme Court ended in 2017, finding that even potentially disparaging trademarks are protected by the First Amendment. In 2014, 50 U.S. senators sent a letter to the N.F.L. urging the league to step in. And across the country, waves of universities and schools abandoned mascots and sports team names with Native American symbols. But more than 2,200 high schools still use Native American imagery in their names or mascots, according to a database of mascot names. All the while, Snyder, who purchased the Washington team in 1999, remained steadfast. "We will never change the name of the team," he said in 2013, a stance he maintained even in the face of pushback from activists, politicians and some fans. What finally changed was, seemingly, wider American society around the team. After the death of Floyd, there has been a widespread reconsideration of statues, flags, symbols and mascots considered to be racist or celebrating racist history. Snyder's move to drop his team's name could pave the way for his effort to build a stadium inside the city, a potential relocation from its current site in a Washington, D.C. suburb. Lawmakers in the city had said they would not support his goal of building within the District unless he renamed the team. Now that the team has let go of its current name, it will have to find a replacement, a process that requires navigating trademarks and the league's many licensing deals with partners and which can often take years. Teams use their name, logos and colors to forge a new identity, a process that can include speaking with sponsors, fans and other constituents. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
THE CHESSBOARD AND THE WEB Strategies of Connection in a Networked World By 296 pp. Yale University Press. 26. At the start of the 2015 Henry L. Stimson Lectures at Yale, on which this book is based, , a distinguished political scientist, authority on international law and now president of the New America think tank, explained that the topic came to her while she was serving as director of policy planning at the State Department in effect while she was practicing what she had preached in her academic career. The time honored exercise of international politics as a "great game," an endless competition for strategic advantage among sovereign and equal powers, was in urgent need of a radical update for a world in which networks spawned by the internet and social media, both benign and malignant, were shaping a far different global order. "The Chessboard and the Web" is meant as a guide for foreign policy in this new world. Whether in human interrelations or terrorism, efficient businesses or nefarious crime syndicates, government services or governments meddling in each other's politics, Slaughter declares, we are at the dawn of a "Networked Age" when "all humanity is connected beneath the surface like the giant colonies of aspen trees in Colorado that are actually all one organism." Yet foreign policy makers, she argues, still play on the two dimensional chessboard fashioned by the 17th century Peace of Westphalia, partly because they lack the strategies for the web. The grand strategy she proposes is an international order based on three pillars: open society, open government and an open international system. Open versus closed, she declares, is the fault line of the digital age, the way capitalism versus Communism was in the last century. In the new order, in which competing states have been replaced by networks, openness means participation, transparency, autonomy and resistance to controls or limits on information. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LONDON The schoolteacher's choice of color is a promise and a warning. Portrayed with a vitality that sears and illuminates by a truly incandescent Lia Williams, the title character of the Donmar Warehouse production of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is first seen amid a world of subdued grays in an alarmingly red dress. That isn't the only reason that Miss Brodie's students or the audience for David Harrower's new adaptation of Muriel Spark's immortal 1961 novel can't take their eyes off her. There's her flame colored hair, as well, and those too wide open eyes that seem to be both devouring and dismissing everything around her. You may come to regard her as dangerous, ridiculous or simply pathetic. But there's no denying Miss Brodie's incendiary presence, in a play that implicitly poses the haunting question of what happens to such intensity when it's deprived of an outlet. Or, as is asked about another woman, who is effortlessly dominating the much bigger stage of the Aldwych Theater in the same neighborhood, "How do you hold fire?" The subject in that instance is Anna Mae Bullock, who goes by the professional name of Tina Turner. Miss Brodie the Scottish schoolteacher and Ms. Turner the great American singer who is played to the long legged hilt by Adrienne Warren in the hit bio musical "Tina" would seem to have little in common. But seeing these two knockout performances back to back, as I did, gets you thinking about the penalties exacted from women for possessing uncommon potential in a man's world. To make a theatergoer's triptych of the topic, I also met the more wanly luminous figure whose light is being extinguished nightly at the Almeida Theater across town, in Islington. There, a character called Young Woman is introduced to us in a crowded subway car, where she wouldn't stand out except for the orange gloves she has on. Those brightly sheathed hands become fatal instruments of destruction, the pride and ruin of the reluctant wife played by Emily Berrington in an unsettling revival of "Machinal." That's Sophie Treadwell's pioneer work of expressionism from 1928, an anatomy of a murder committed by a woman smothered by marriage and motherhood. Young Woman's feverish rallying cry, spoken only to herself: "I've submitted to enough I won't submit to any more." The F word feminism, whose fourth wave manifestation remains a subject of much discussion on opinion pages here is never spoken. But it whispers between the lines of "Machinal," "Tina" and "Jean Brodie." Seen in those terms, "Tina" which has a book by the American playwright Katori Hall, with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins is an act of canonization for its sorely tried but ultimately transcendent star. "Machinal" is a grim, modernist medieval chronicle of an everywoman's martyrdom. "Jean Brodie" based on a work by a writer for whom mysticism always glimmered from the shadows locates something almost divine, and equally diabolical, in its thwarted protagonist's frustrations. It is by far the most subtle and psychologically engaging of the three. Ms. Findlay's production also provides the occasion for Ms. Williams, a star of the London stage, to scale new heights with a definitive rendering of an oft interpreted character. (Ms. Williams may be best known to international audiences for playing Wallis Simpson in the Netflix series "The Crown.") And no, I am not forgetting Maggie Smith's Oscar winning turn in the 1969 film version. Ms. Smith injected the role with the winning, withering archness that was fast becoming her stylized signature. (See: "Downton Abbey," nearly 50 years later.) Ms. Williams matches Ms. Smith in amusing affectations. But she also lets us see, with increasing clarity, the uneasily provincial behind the sophisticated artifice. Our growing awareness of Miss Brodie's unsatisfied hunger to live larger than she does parallels the gradual disenchantment of her once enraptured coterie of pet pupils. It's not just that she becomes older; more startling, it's as if we like her former students grow out of the infatuation with which we first perceived her. Miss Brodie is as dangerous a force as ever in the lives of the girls she calls "the creme de la creme." After all, she unforgivably tries to engineer a love affair between the prettiest of her disciples and a roue artist, and unwittingly sends an attention starved pupil to her death in the Spanish Civil War. But for once, this character evokes something like the pity and terror of classical tragedy. There's a painful new awareness of Jean's avidly trying to live through others. Watch her ravenous eyes as she reads a map that traces someone else's travels, or her shifting profile as she mirrors the girl posing for the painter. At the end, a now cancer riddled Miss Brodie accuses the canniest of her former girls (Rona Morrison, excellent) of killing her. It's an absurd and melodramatic declaration, but you know what she means. What fed and sustained Miss Brodie was the sunlight of the adoring gaze. Deprived of it, she shrinks and withers. There's no shrinking and definitely no withering by the title character of "Tina." The book by the gifted Ms. Hall (an Olivier award winner for "The Mountaintop") for this handsomely produced musical is disappointingly formulaic, the usual inspirational showcase for a series of chart topping hits. Poverty, a sexist and racist recording industry and a terrifyingly abusive relationship with her husband and mentor Ike Turner (Kobna Holdbrook Smith, a perceptive study in anger) only make the show's titanic heroine bigger and stronger. What hoists the show several niches above the standard jukebox biography is Ms. Warren's performance, which finds the gritty sand in Ms. Turner's pearlescent presence. A Tony nominee for "Shuffle Along," the smashing Ms. Warren replicates the signature physical and vocal inflections. More important, she suggests that what we hear when Tina sings is shaped by a confluence of circumstance and character; every note vibrates as a wrestling match between a woman and her demons. In the first act, after Ike proposes marriage to Tina, she (anachronistically) sings "Better Be Good to Me" her hit single from the mid 1980s as an internal monologue. Ms. Warren's delivery is rooted in a defiant sense of self worth that would make us feel in our guts, even if we didn't already know the story, that Ike doesn't stand in a chance in the battle of wills ahead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The team of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (producers) and Garth Ennis (comics writer) has given us AMC's "Preacher," the most inventive, audacious and purely entertaining comics based series of the past few years. With "Preacher" on the way out its final season begins Aug. 4 the three are getting right back in the game, with a new show based on an Ennis comic, "The Boys," coming to Amazon Prime Video on Friday. "The Boys" is not pitched at the feverish level of "Preacher," in terms of either mayhem or dark comic style its showrunner, Eric Kripke , is the maker of network series like "Supernatural" and "Timeless," and the eight episode "Boys" is like a high end, more thoughtfully assembled, slightly bloodier and sexier version of one of those conventional shows. ("Preacher" is overseen by Sam Catlin , whose previous writing and producing experience include s "Breaking Bad.") "The Boys" is also a little more of a known quantity because it's a superhero show. That it's an anti superhero show in which the costumed crime fighters are the bad guys, arrogant and corporatized and heedless of collateral damage to innocent humans, and the Boys of the title are a motley, disreputable bunch who take them on doesn't change the basic equation. The visual takeaway is still people in tights who can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes, the wrinkle being that we're rooting for the guy fighting back with his wits and a crowbar. All of that said, the series is quite enjoyable, particularly in a fast and clever first episode (written by Kripke and directed by Dan Trachtenberg ) that introduces us to the show's world marginally exaggerated from our own and gives the show's real hero, the distinctly non superpowered electronics salesman Hughie (Jack Quaid ), a reason to hate the supes. In a judiciously horrifying scene, we witness the accidental obliteration of Hughie's fiancee by an out of control Flash like character, A Train ( Jessie T. Usher ), who's a member of the Seven, America's premier superhero team. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Paulus Berensohn, a dancer, potter and teacher whose slower, quieter, more mindful approach to pottery influenced a generation of artists, died on June 15 in Asheville, N.C. He was 84. His death, at a hospice, was confirmed by his sister in law, Alison Jarvis, who said the cause was a stroke. Mr. Berensohn was perhaps best known for the book "Finding One's Way With Clay" (1972), a guide to making pinch pots that blended instructions for making these simple clay bowls with reflections on art, the environment and spirituality, and that advanced the idea that creativity was universal. He spent nearly 40 years affiliated with the Penland School of Crafts in Bakersville, N.C., about an hour northeast of Asheville, holding pottery and journal making workshops. A charismatic and striking figure, his lean dancer's body topped by a snow white ponytail, Mr. Berensohn was also a magnetic speaker who, with a resonant voice, often recited poetry on the fly and spoke passionately to students about art and environmental issues. Paul Bernsohn was born on May 14, 1933, in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn, to Adolph Bernsohn, a women's clothing designer, and the former Edyth Kalison. His brother, Lorin, was a cellist with the New York Philharmonic. (He later added the "e" to his last name to give it more panache, he said and the "us" to his first name.) Mr. Berensohn, who was dyslexic and often spoke about his condition, attended a number of institutions of higher education, including the Juilliard School in New York and later Bennington College in Vermont. He studied dance at both schools. After leaving Bennington without a degree, he moved back to New York City, where, he said, he took classes with Merce Cunningham and was used as a demonstrator by Martha Graham when she taught classes. In the early '50s, Mr. Berensohn made a short but life changing trip to the Land commune, a community of artists near the Hudson River town of Stony Point, N.Y., made up of graduates and faculty from the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. At the Land, he saw Karen Karnes, a ceramist, at work at a kick wheel, and her artistry and movement inspired him to take up the craft. "I thought, that's a dance to learn," Mr. Berenson told the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in an oral history interview in 2009. At the Land, Mr. Berensohn also met M. C. Richards, an influential potter and poet, and followed her to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Me., where he enrolled in her pottery workshop. The two developed a lifelong companionship, and during his time at Haystack Mr. Berensohn began to develop his philosophy of ceramics as a noncommercial enterprise that can foster human development and unlock human potential. In the early 1960s, Mr. Berensohn taught crafts and pottery at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat in Wallingford, Pa., and at Swarthmore College, before buying a farm near Scranton, Pa., in 1965. The farm, which later became known as the Endless Mountains Farm, operated as an artists' colony that was cooperatively owned by writers and artists like Ms. Richards, Remy Charlip and Burt Supree. Mr. Berensohn began teaching workshops at the Penland School of Crafts in the late 1960s. His experiences there would form the basis for "Finding One's Way With Clay." By the late '70s, Mr. Berenson had turned to tapestries as a form of therapy after a cancer scare (it turned out to be an intestinal illness) left him too exhausted to make pottery. In 1979, at Greenwich House Pottery in Greenwich Village, he exhibited his fiber work, which a review in The New York Times called a "splendid blend of line and color, sparkling with glints of metallic yarn and undulating with sudden energetic curves." In addition to his sister in law, Mr. Berensohn is survived by a niece. Mr. Berensohn was an early proponent of deep ecology, an environmental movement that values all living beings equally, and he became more vocal about environmental issues as he grew older. For decades, he said, he did not fire his pinch pots but rather placed them in the forest to melt back into the earth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Maybe it was out of frustration with a 13 year old who was constantly talking about how bored he was. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. But I like to think that it was a mother's intuition that led my mom to suggest that I watch the Tony Awards broadcast one Sunday in June of 1992. It was the day of my younger sister's dance recital. I had just sat for two hours watching girls do dramatic lyrical dances to Richard Marx ballads, which left me thinking, "Hey, why can't that be me?" That's precisely when my mom, Charlotte, invited me to watch the Tonys with her. I had shown an interest in acting, I liked movie musicals ("Grease 2" was my favorite) but I didn't know much about Broadway. I sat with my mom on our couch, in the middle of Omaha, and was completely mesmerized by the medley from this show called "Falsettos." I had never heard or seen a story told that way before. It seemed so contemporary. I didn't know musicals could be like that. I was also drawn to a particular number in that medley, "The Baseball Game," because there was a boy about my age in the show. I wanted to be him. I didn't feel jealous; I felt driven. I wanted to be one of those people on the Tonys. From that year on, I recorded the Tonys every season on our trusty VHS player so I could see the musical numbers again and again. Damned was the person in my family who ever tried to record over the Tonys with a football game or an episode of "Thirtysomething." Those tapes were precious to me. The next year, the show and dream roles changed: "The Who's Tommy," "Blood Brothers," "Kiss of the Spider Woman," "The Goodbye Girl." (I could be either Martin Short or Bernadette Peters in that one it didn't matter to me.) This was pre internet, kids, so access to Broadway via the Tony Awards was a once a year Brigadoon of an event. That only added to the magic. Years later, 13 to be exact, I found myself on Broadway in "Hairspray." The show had been running for three years, and I was very proud to be its third Link Larkin. There was a posting up at the theater for tickets to the awards show. It never occurred to me that one could just buy tickets to the Tonys. I figured you had to be invited. The tickets were in the upper, upper, upper balcony of Radio City Music Hall, but I was thrilled at the chance to go. I went with some fellow "Hairspray" cast members, and before the awards started, I suggested we get a drink. I noticed a lot of people filing into a venue in Rockefeller Center. Everyone was dressed elegantly, women in fancy gowns, men in tuxedos. It had to be a Tony party. I convinced my companions that we should crash it. I mean, we were also dressed up, we were working on Broadway, we were technically a part of the community that had to be worth a couple of drinks. We waltzed in with brazen confidence, and it paid off because we were immediately handed glasses of Champagne. My first official Tony party, I thought. Just as I imagined. And then a young woman in a very large, very elaborate wedding gown entered the room. It was not a Tony party at all. With my dream slightly bruised, we quickly exited and made our way to our seats inside Radio City, which were practically on the roof. It was still an exciting night. But being in the audience was not the same as being onstage. Close, but not close enough. It was a version of the dream I had dreamed (thank you, Fantine) but not quite what I had pictured. I wasn't onstage, but at least I was in the room. I was getting closer. In 2011, I earned a Tony nomination for my role in "The Book of Mormon." Not only would I be attending the awards, I would be performing my second act solo, "I Believe." I stood backstage that night waiting to be introduced. It was a song I had sung countless times, but on that night, it all felt different. I was about to make my Tony Awards debut. I was about to represent our cast, our crew, on the very telecast that had given me purpose. There I was one of those people on the Tonys. One of those people who would be seen on TV sets all over the world. Surely there would be at least one kid, maybe in Omaha, maybe somewhere else, maybe even farther away, who would see me and think, "Hey, I want to be like that guy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Hear tracks from Fountains of Wayne, "Crazy Ex Girlfriend" and more plus a tune written about the power pop dynamo, who died of the coronavirus at 52. The shelf life of a power pop band is short. The Knack had an album and a half. Big Star had three. The Raspberries catalog could make for a fantastic first half of a CD. Fountains of Wayne, fronted by the songwriting and producing team of Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, seemed to have silos full of hooks. Like Lennon and McCartney, they shared joint credit, even if only one of them wrote a song. In five studio albums and one compilation, they sang almost exclusively about 18 to 28 year olds living on the East Coast. They had one huge hit, "Stacy's Mom," but wrote dozens of funny or sympathetic songs about Gen X misfits, like an earthbound Beach Boys serenading the suburbs rather than the sea. In addition to his main band, Schlesinger, who died on Wednesday of the coronavirus, formed several side groups and wrote for the TV show "Crazy Ex Girlfriend" as well as the stage. Here are 30 of his essential songs. (You can listen to the playlist on Spotify here.) Nothing important ever happens in a Fountains of Wayne song. That's kind of the point: The band wrote about the big dreams and tiny victories of people who never get anywhere. "Sick Day" describes a "hell of a girl" who's stuck in a crummy office job, and while Schlesinger and Collingwood treat her with tenderness, the best they can foresee is that she might take a sick day (pause) soon. (The timing of that pause shows a keen comic sense.) It's a gorgeous acoustic ballad, with a winking reference to "I Want to Hold Your Hand" after the third chorus, and it sketches out some ideas that came to perfection later in "Troubled Times." Tom Hanks wrote, directed and appeared in "That Thing You Do!," a 1996 movie about a mythical Erie, Pa. band who have one big hit in the mid 60s before it all falls apart on them. Crucially, the film needed a great retro song that a) sounded credibly like a British Invasion styled song from, specifically, the summer of 1964; b) was great enough to have been a hit; and c) could stand up to being heard over and over in the movie. About 300 writers submitted songs for consideration, and Schlesinger's song won. It was nominated for best original song at the Academy Awards and at the Golden Globes. A nice guy can only stand so much rejection from the fairer sex before he gets drunk, buys some Bactine and a .38 Special CD, takes the train to Coney Island and signs up for a fierce looking tattoo. The singer does it only to court a girl, who, you can be sure, will not be moved by the gesture. "Red dragon tattoo is just about on me/I got it for you, so now do you want me?" the dim bulb pleads. The band's first absolute power pop masterpiece. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
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