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SAN FRANCISCO Uber is famous for its pugnacious approach to business and willingness to fight any and all competition. But in a handful of countries, the ride hailing company has ended up on a more conciliatory path. The latest example: On Thursday, Uber said it had formed a partnership with Yandex, the Russian search giant and operator of the ride hailing service Yandex.Taxi. The two companies will combine their ride hailing businesses in Russia and several other Eastern European countries under a new, yet to be named company. The deal, which must receive regulatory approval, will value the new company at 3.4 billion. It will be jointly operated by Yandex and Uber, with Tigran Khudaverdyan, the chief executive of Yandex.Taxi, as chief executive of the new venture. Uber will invest 225 million, while Yandex will invest 100 million of its own and retain a majority stake in the new company. "Together, we will continue to build a ride sharing service that offers a viable alternative to automobile ownership or public transportation," Mr. Khudaverdyan said in a blog post. The move is a rare detente for Uber, known for its aggressive approach to entering global markets, and it will end a costly battle between the two companies that has dragged out over the past three years since Uber arrived in Russia. It also comes during a trying time for the company, just weeks after Travis Kalanick, a co founder, resigned as chief executive. But the deal reflects the intense competition Uber has sometimes faced in its aggressive overseas expansion. Last year, Uber realized it was outmatched in China, where the company spent billions of dollars in rider subsidies to gain a foothold against Didi Chuxing, the incumbent ride hailing app there. After a protracted fight, Uber sold its Chinese subsidiary company to Didi Chuxing and formed a new, separate company operating in the region. Uber retains a 17.5 percent stake in that business. In Russia, the establishment of ride hailing apps transformed the taxi market, which had been dominated by irregular and unlicensed services. Individuals driving personal vehicles would offer themselves as taxis, and customers would flag them, negotiating prices to be paid in cash. Now, the sector is more formalized, though still not as fully regulated as in Western Europe. Passengers who use services like Uber, Yandex.Taxi and another rival Gett are aware of who their drivers will be and what cars they will be driving. They are also able to pay with credit cards and receive receipts. And because the market had been largely informal, there have been no major protests by incumbents against the ride hailing services, unlike in cities like London or Paris, where taxi companies and drivers are more heavily regulated. Still, Uber faced similar difficulties as it did in China against Yandex in Russia and the other countries in which Yandex.Taxi operates, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Yandex.Taxi's operations in Russia are about twice the size of Uber, according to data the Russian company released to shareholders. Yandex is an incumbent in a region where the government does not always welcome foreign business. Moreover, the company, often called the "Google of Russia," owns and operates a significant mapping database, an advantage over Uber. And Yandex, a well established internet brand in Eastern Europe, is able to heavily market its services to potential customers through its online properties a luxury Uber does not have. Players on both sides say that rather than spending money fighting for market share, a deal made the most sense. Users will benefit from shorter wait times, the companies said, as well as more reliable service. They will also be able to take advantage of global "roaming"; Yandex.Taxi customers may use the app in countries in which Uber operates to call cars, which will be fulfilled by Uber's drivers. Uber customers, similarly, will be able to do the same in areas in which Yandex.Taxi is the predominant ride hailing service. The deal has been in the works for months, with executives like Emil Michael, Uber's former senior vice president of business, and Cameron Poetzscher, the current vice president of corporate development, determining the details. "This deal is a testament to our exceptional growth in the region and helps Uber continue to build a sustainable global business," Pierre Dimitri Gore Coty, head of Uber in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said in a news release. As part of the deal, Uber will retain a 36.6 percent stake in the new company, which has the placeholder title "NewCo," while Yandex will hold a 59.3 percent stake; 4.1 percent will be held by employees of the venture. Combined, it will operate in 127 cities across six countries. Between the two operations, more than 35 million rides were completed in June, responsible for more than 130 million in gross bookings. Winding down expensive battles among competitors will also help assuage investor concerns about Uber's spending, which over the past few years has remained high as the company burns cash to expand its ridership. Uber lost nearly 1 billion over the fourth quarter of 2016, though it has started to shore up losses in some markets; it lost 708 million in the first three months of 2017. Reining in spending will probably sit well with investors, who are pushing for an initial public offering, which may soon become a reality. Uber is searching for a chief financial officer and new chief executive, and it is appointing other important executive positions in preparation for an eventual move to the public markets. Yandex and Uber expect their deal to close by the end of the year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
As a sellout crowd jostled its way into the first big show of the 34th annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering on a late January night in Elko, Nev., old friends backslapped each other and laughed about past gatherings. It was a rowdy, good natured opening of what has become the premier celebration of The Cowboy Way. The atmosphere was not surprising Elko, population about 18,000, sits in the northeastern corner of Nevada, an oasis in the Great Basin's high desert terrain and the center of the area's ranching lifestyle. And the gathering commemorates the end of the cattle drive festivities that defined the Old West, with camaraderie and all that the term encompasses: tall tales, poetry and songs, dancing, gambling, thick steaks and strong drinks . Beaded buckskin and swirling skirts dominated the dress of the women, string ties and cowboy hats the men. But when the cowboys took their seats, the hats came off: The Cowboy Way dictates respect for other audience members no one wanted to block views of Riders in the Sky and Wylie and the Wild West, the gathering's kickoff musical entertainers. Respect and courtesy, campfire storytelling and poetry, musical harmony and yodeling: all are part of The Cowboy Way. And all are part of the herding life in general. Excerpt from "Old Eagle Eyes" by Yvonne Hollenbeck: He's got eyes like an eagle for finding new calves that their mamas have hidden all snug; so why can't he see the mud on his boots that he's tracking all over my rug? Elko, as the event's name is short handed, yearly draws an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 revelers from across the American West and beyond. Past participants have included drovers from Australia and gauchos from South America. And there are Basques from their homeland in the Pyrenees Mountain areas of France and Spain, visiting relatives whose ancestors immigrated to the Great Basin. That diaspora began in the mid 1800s, many seeking gold, others to work as sheepherders. The 2019 gathering Jan. 28 to Feb. 2 will be the 35th. The theme is described in the official program as "about preserving tradition and about the quest to find truth and beauty in the creative voices of everyday people." Elko's Western Folklife Center is responsible for the get together, and its headquarters in the building built in the early 20th century to house the Pioneer Hotel is the main gathering place. The center's G Three Theater and adjoining bar are primary venues for performances, official in the former and unofficial in the latter. The antique bar all polished mahogany and cherry and mother of pearl inlays provides a suitable spot for laughing reminiscence, for catching up, for storytelling. A corner of the barroom, equipped with a fireplace and a vintage saloon style piano, is a popular site for impromptu singalongs. One afternoon of the 2018 gathering found a boisterous "Yellow Rose of Texas" competing with a "Red River Valley" songfest in the center's art gallery next door. Other attendees, more interested in topping the tale of the cowpoke on the next stool, were bellied up to the bar. The gathering began as a planned one off in 1985, the idea of the Nevada folklorist Hal Cannon; the buckaroo, cowboy poet and songster Waddie Mitchell and a handful of their cohorts. Mr. Cannon, who was doing fieldwork for the Smithsonian Institution at the time, was talking with "this grizzled up cowboy who looked at me and asked, 'You want to hear a poem?''' No folklorist, of course, could resist such an invitation. The 2018 gathering included outdoor Basque cooking lessons, with bread making in the hands of 79 year old Jess Lopatagai, a resident of the area who emigrated from Spain in the 1950s when he was 19 to work as a sheepherder. After a couple of back and forth trips between the old country and the new (including a close call at conscription into Franco's military) , he was granted permanent U.S. residency in 1965. His bread accompanied lamb dishes prepared by his friends Ramon Zugazaga, Zach Arbillaga and Choch Zaga. Basque meals are also available at several Elko restaurants year round, including at The Star, whose history as a cowboy boardinghouse is marked by the ringing of a bell announcing that it's time to sit down for the family style dinner. During the 2018 gathering, another Elko restaurant, the Ogi Basque Deli, extended its usual breakfast and dinner hours for unofficial evening dances, with participants providing the music. Pintxos (Basque tapas) were served along with sagardoa (dry Basque cider), patxaran (sweet liquor), craft beers and an assortment of Basque wines. Her background, she said, includes "being around livestock most of my life." Deciding she wanted to participate, in 2005 she produced a film about her experience making cowboy boots, and has since produced six more for the center's Deep West Video program. In 2017, she took over as executive director after nine years as director of TED Translators, supervising more than 30,000 volunteers . She said that her plans include more year round programs extending the center's mission of "connecting the American West and its herding culture with the rest of the world." But workshops and plans and missions are only part of what makes the gathering a must for attendees. There are the singalongs in the Three G Bar with the piano. Or impromptu harmonizing at the bar following a session in the theater. There are laughs at mini gatherings such as the one that materialized in a hallway around Ramblin' Jack Elliott and his friend Jim Bone, who describes himself as "sometime road manager, sometime bounty hunter," as they swap stories involving last minute headlong drives across the West. There are attendees who return to relive past visits. "We got married here in 2007," said Rose Mueller, enjoying drinks in the G Three with her husband, Matthew Warne. The pair has made the trip back from their home in Truckee, Calif., on their anniversary every year since. The Hollywood version of the Cowboy Way gets its due with the presence and proximity of several casino resorts. As any moviegoer knows, at the end of the cattle drive, the buckaroos celebrate at the saloons, gambling, drinking and being entertained with barrelhouse piano and dancing girls. A half block away from the Star are several legal brothels, including Inez's, which announces its presence (in neon) with "Dancing and Diddlying ." Perhaps the poet Zarzyski after 30 plus gatherings, after working to "make every line jump and kick" offered the best observation of the Elko experience: "It's like a family reunion of sorts, only here everybody likes each other. I always leave town feeling better about who I am, rewarded with new friendships and an infusion of hope." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The financier George Soros is part of a group of wealthy individuals calling for "a moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest one tenth of the richest 1 percent of Americans on us." Enthusiasm for a wealth tax on the country's thin sliver of multimillionaires and billionaires may be unsurprising after all, most Americans wouldn't have to pay it. But now the idea is attracting support from a handful of those who would. A letter published Monday on the website Medium.com calls for "a moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest one tenth of the richest 1 percent of Americans on us." The "us" includes self made billionaires like the financier George Soros and Chris Hughes, a Facebook co founder, as well as heirs to dynastic riches like the filmmaker Abigail Disney and Liesel Pritzker Simmons and Ian Simmons, co founders of the Blue Haven Initiative, an impact investment organization. "We thought it would be a good idea," Mr. Simmons explained by phone as he waited out a traffic jam in the Boston area. "Liesel and I decided to reach out to some other folks to see if they thought it was a good idea, too." The letter came together in the last two weeks. Eighteen individuals, spread among 11 families, added their names. All are active in progressive research and political organizations, some of which are pointedly focused on the swelling gap between the richest Americans and everyone else. A recent analysis of a Federal Reserve report found that over the last three decades, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their net worth grow by 21 trillion, while the wealth of the bottom 50 percent fell by 900 billion. The letter is addressed to all presidential contenders, and refers specifically to a plan offered by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Her proposal would create a wealth tax for households with 50 million or more in assets including stocks, bonds, yachts, cars and art. She estimates such a tax would affect 75,000 families, and raise 2.75 trillion over 10 years. A desire to curb the rising concentration of wealth has long been part of the Democrats' core message, but a Republican tax bill in 2017 that delivered the biggest benefits to Americans with the highest incomes reinvigorated the debate. She is part of the Pritzker family, the founders of one of the country's largest private companies, which included the Hyatt hotel chain. Another family member, Regan Pritzker, president of the San Francisco based Libra Foundation, also signed. Members of the billionaire club have previously argued that they should be taxed more. In 2011, Warren E. Buffett, the founder of Berkshire Hathaway, published an essay noting that his effective tax rate was "actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office." His comments prompted President Barack Obama and others to push for a "Buffett rule" mandating that millionaires pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. In 2014, Nick Hanauer, a Seattle based entrepreneur, published a memo to "My Fellow Zillionaires" noting that "people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country the 99.99 percent is lagging far behind." He added: "If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us." Mr. Hanauer signed the letter published on Monday, as did Molly Munger, a lawyer whose father is Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. She and her husband, Stephen English, were co founders of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization. He also signed the letter. Other names on the letter were Stephen M. Silberstein, co founder of the software company Innovative Interfaces; the philanthropist and arts patron Agnes Gund and her daughter Catherine Gund, the founder and director of Aubin Pictures; Arnold S. Hiatt, chairman of the Stride Rite Charitable Foundation; Justin Rosenstein, a co founder of Asana, which provides work management tools; Robert S. Bowditch Jr., the founder of MB Associates, a real estate development firm, and his wife, Louise; and Mr. Soros's son Alexander, deputy chair of the Open Society Foundations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Wayne Barrett, the muckraking Village Voice columnist who carved out a four decade career tilting at developers, landlords and politicians, among them Donald J. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71. His wife, Fran Barrett, said the cause was complications of interstitial lung disease. Mr. Barrett himself had called his condition ironic, noting that he had never been a drinker or a smoker. A self proclaimed country boy from Virginia and a lapsed seminarian, Mr. Barrett spent 37 years at The Voice, the alternative newsweekly started in Greenwich Village. There he exposed the misdeeds that ensnared appointees and supporters of Mayor Edward I. Koch a trail of serial corruption that he recapitulated in 1988 in "City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York," a much praised book written with his mentor and fellow Voice mainstay Jack Newfield. A 1992 book, "Trump: The Deals and the Downfall," was, as Mr. Barrett acknowledged, a flop at first. Thanks to his subject's improbable political ascent 25 years later, it was successfully republished and expanded in 2016 as "Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention." Mr. Barrett's voluminous background files from the Trump biography, and his professional courtesy, made his Brooklyn home a mecca for investigative reporters during the recent presidential campaign. "There may be no journalist in the nation who knows more about Trump than Barrett," Jennifer Gonnerman wrote in The New Yorker just after the election. Timothy O'Brien, who was research assistant on the Trump book and who then wrote "TrumpNation," called Mr. Barrett's work on Mr. Trump "foundational." "He took Trump seriously long before anyone else did," Mr. O'Brien, now the executive editor of Bloomberg View, said, "and most of the work that followed Wayne's was built upon his insights." Mr. Barrett wrote two books about Mr. Giuliani. The first, "Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani," written with the assistance of Adam Fifield, was published in 2000. It broke the provocative story that Mr. Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and a law and order mayor, was the son of a man who had been imprisoned for robbing a milkman at gunpoint during the Depression. Mr. Barrett's second book on the subject, written with Dan Collins, was "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11" (2006). Mr. Barrett started writing for The Voice in 1973 and, five years later, inherited the already battle scarred and politically irreverent Runnin' Scared column just as Mr. Koch became mayor. Mr. Barrett's career at The Voice ended in 2010, when, with the paper struggling financially, he was laid off. Tom Robbins, a longtime colleague and fellow investigative reporter, resigned in solidarity. (Another renowned former Voice colleague, Nat Hentoff, died on Jan. 7.) "I have written, by my own inexact calculation, more column inches than anyone in the history of The Voice," Mr. Barrett wrote in his final column. He added, "I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new. If I didn't see that, others did." On his and Mr. Robbins' departure from The Voice, an article in The New York Times, often the butt of the paper's barbs, inquired, "What becomes of New York's most formidable muckraking paper when two of its greatest muckrakers are gone?" In the same article, Donald H. Forst, a former Voice editor who died in 2014, lamented, "With the loss of Wayne and Tom, they lost Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle." Mr. Barrett was once asked to explain to students at his son's elementary school just what raking muck actually meant in terms of a day to day job. To appear in character, he put on a trench coat, pulled up the collar, withdrew a pad from his pocket and defined that special breed of investigative journalist this way: "We are detectives for the people." He added, "There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth." But as an argumentative muckraker in the spirit of Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, Mr. Barrett never pretended to be just a dispassionate, impartial journalist. He wielded the power of his pen to lobby for causes and candidates he pronounced deserving and to topple those he vilified. "We thought a deadline meant we have to kill somebody by closing time," he once wrote. Still, when he left The Voice, he was stunned to see that despite all the battering they had endured, Mr. Koch characterized his reporting as "superb" and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called to say his "voice will be missed." Not by everyone, of course. He was once choked by the leader of a South Bronx poverty program. Another time, after crashing one of Mr. Trump's birthday parties to see who had been invited, he was arrested by the Atlantic City police and charged with trespassing. "It depresses you," Mr. Barrett told Buzzfeed last year of his brief time in custody. "It's almost this instant, very down feeling, because somebody else controls your movement. And I think it really does teach you how important our freedoms are, because when you don't have it even for just a short period of time, it's very sobering." Mr. Barrett was born on July 11, 1945, in New Britain, Conn., the son of Lawrence Barrett, a nuclear physicist, and Helen Letitia Barrett, who became a librarian. He grew up in racially segregated Lynchburg, Va., where he founded the Teenage Republicans. For a time he aspired to become a Roman Catholic priest, but he dropped out of a seminary after just a few weeks, deciding he was unwilling to forgo a sexual life. He enrolled at the Jesuit run St. Joseph's College (now St. Joseph's University) in Philadelphia on a debate scholarship and received his bachelor's degree there. His politics as an undergraduate leaned to the right: He identified himself as a Goldwater Republican, and he belittled the University of California, Berkeley, a hotbed of radicalism, as "an ugly and sick haven for those with nothing to offer." But by the time he had graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1968, at the height of the antiwar movement, his politics had veered to the left. To avoid the draft, he became a public school teacher in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he moved with his wife, the former Frances Marie McGettigan, whom he married in 1969. In addition to her, he is survived by their son, Mac; three brothers, Lawrence, Christopher and Tim; and two sisters, Tia Barrett Bisignano and Loretta Barrett Evans. In Brooklyn, Mr. Barrett started a neighborhood newspaper that railed against irresponsible landlords and rampant drug dealing, which he maintained was being ignored by the police. As a teacher, he became embroiled in a racially charged debate in the largely black Ocean Hill Brownsville district over what should take precedence in the tumultuous transition to school decentralization: community control over hiring, or the seniority rights of unionized teachers. Mr. Barrett sided with nonunion teachers on the hiring issue, but he also documented malfeasance by the local school board and reported it to prosecutors and in The Voice, revelations that led to federal corruption charges. Among his Voice exposes, he wrote, with Andrew Cooper, an indictment titled "Ed Koch's War on the Poor," deconstructed the record of Andrew M. Cuomo, now the governor of New York, when he was secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration, and identified patronage jobs doled out to Liberal Party loyalists during the Giuliani administration. (Mr. Barrett's wife now works for Mr. Cuomo.) "Wayne was the conscience of New York," Mr. Cuomo said in a statement on Thursday. "Wayne was never afraid to speak truth to power, and those who listened were the better for it." Mr. Barrett was, by example, a tutor to a covey of ambitious interns and journalism students, despite a hair trigger temper. He was also a contrarian a Boston Red Sox fan in New York who shunned cellphones, cash machines and conventional social graces. His wife once described herself as "Wayne's liaison to the planet Earth." Mr. Barrett was not a dreamer, though. When he embraced liberalism, he said, he modeled himself on the student antiwar leader Tom Hayden rather than on the radical activist Abbie Hoffman. He wanted to work within the system rather than merely mock it, he said. While he viewed life largely in black and white terms, he would sometimes acknowledge tinges of gray. He said, for example, that his greatest professional regret was "that I didn't write more positive pieces about the things Koch did well," particularly the mayor's investment of billions of dollars to build and renovate housing. But some targets were to him beyond redemption. He took a dim view of the Rev. Al Sharpton, for one. ("I said he was a hustler then, he's a hustler now," Mr. Barrett said in 2011.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
This led to a Tarquinio Merula canzonetta for soprano and lute. In this short 1636 duo, the Virgin Mary (soprano Alice Teyssier) holds the baby Jesus in her arms, trying to get the restless infant to sleep, though she is overcome with premonitions of the suffering that awaits him. The lute (played by the fine Arash Noori) is curiously fixated on two notes, though these recurring pitches are often decorated with filigree. Next came the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya's radically unconventional Symphony No. 5, "Amen" (1989), lasting just 15 minutes and scored for a curious ensemble: violin, oboe, trumpet, tuba, big wooden box and a speaker (Gleb Kanasevich), who says the Lord's Prayer in Russian. The music is at once grave and grumpy, utterly serious and almost comic, swinging along in a foursquare meter like some slow march with a steady tread, each thematic note encrusted in a dour harmonic block. Then Mr. Noori returned to play Alessandro Piccinini's "Toccata Cromatica" for solo lute (1623), a work in which lyrical strands spin out into soft spoken swirling passagework. Ms. Teyssier was the compelling soloist, singing Maria Maddalena, in the Sciarrino piece, which over 30 taut minutes tries to evoke the scene of the mystic nun issuing her clipped bursts of words. The instrumentalists become her eight attentive novices, sitting for long stretches doing nothing, or just breathing in anticipation (the sounds of, say, a flutist playing a short tone then audibly inhaling), or sometimes muttering some jittery, quiet mini phrase. Then Ms. Teyssier's Maria would sing a frenzied burst of pent up notes, and the instruments would scurry, trying to scribble down her words. Jacob Ashworth, Cantata Profana's artistic director, conducted a suspenseful account of this radically episodic and spacey score. The audience in pews sat in almost complete darkness; the players were illuminated by theatrical lighting, so you had to give yourself over to this contemplative program, even when you could not read the translations of texts, even if you lost track of what piece was being played. A large and appreciative audience seemed ready to do so on a chilly Friday in a Chelsea sanctuary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Shortly after I posted a picture on Instagram from the sand dunes of Tottori on the west coast of Japan, a friend from Brooklyn commented, "Where is this?" The subtext: This could not possibly be Japan, right? With its steep hills of creamy golden sand and vast expanses ruffled into scalloped patterns by the wind, Tottori evokes a scene out of the Sahara. There are even camels to ride. Although these dunes are not the largest in Japan (those are in Aomori, in the north, and used for military exercises), the sand dunes of Tottori are the largest that are accessible to visitors. But even in Japan, the dunes are more famous for their literary connotations than as a travel destination. They were the setting for Kobo Abe's classic novel "The Woman in the Dunes," but among Japanese tourists, Tottori, the least populated region in Japan, ranks just 43rd among 47 prefectures in attracting visitors. That makes it a very relaxing place for a getaway. We live in Tokyo, a city of immense crowds and towering buildings. But when I took a walk with my daughter along the dunes, it was easy to leave behind any sign of other people. One reason for Tottori's absence of tourists is its relative isolation. While Japan's system of shinkansen, or bullet trains, makes travel around the country extremely convenient, no lines stop in Tottori. But it is just over an hour by plane from Tokyo Haneda Airport, and there is a convenient bus that connects the airport in Tottori to the center of the modest city. Most hotels and restaurants are in the center of town, and the dunes are reachable by city bus as well as taxis. As the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, I had come to report on the Sand Museum, where artists from around the world assemble every year to build massive sculptures from the distinctively moldable sand. The museum is open to the public from April through early January, and it is a delightful place to marvel at what sand can do in the hands of skillful artisans. The dunes are protected as a national park, and there is no charge to climb them. It's a great workout for the thighs in some places the sand reaches 165 feet. As in many places we go in Japan, I was impressed by the number of fit elderly people who could keep up with the rest of us. Although the dunes stretch for 10 miles along the coast, most visitors seem to stick to a fairly narrow area, climbing a steep hill next to a lagoon. Even the people watching was fun: We saw a man climbing in a business suit with a briefcase, as well as a group of millennials dressed in pink bodysuits kicking around a pink ball. And, well, why not? At the peak, my 10 year old son enjoyed hurtling himself off the top of the dunes, trying to see how airborne he could get. Those who want more of that flying feeling can get their feet off the ground at Tottori Sakyu Sand Board School (like snowboards, but for sand) or try paragliding with the Tottori Sand Dunes Paragliding School. For sand boarding, you get a board, a helmet and about two minutes of instruction in how to bend your knees, grab your thighs and slide down a steep slope that bottoms out at the ocean. My son and husband caught on quickly, though they both had some spectacular wipeouts that left their faces covered in sand. They also tried paragliding, carrying their parachutes on their backs on the walk from the boardwalk to the dunes. With a group of about a dozen others, they each took three or four flights during two hours on the dunes. We had an extra day and decided to venture away from the dunes, catching a bus to Uradome beach, which my 12 year old daughter had scoped out on Instagram. As we walked from the bus stop down to the coastline and glimpsed the sea between Japan and the Korean Peninsula, we spotted a coffee sign and stepped into the charming Nijinoki Cafe, where Brazilian jazz played on a turntable and architectural magazines were piled neatly on a bench. The coffee was delicious, too. The husband and wife who worked behind the counter told us of a "secret" beach, so we decided to skip Uradome and explore. It was about a 25 minute walk east, where we found a trail to Kumaihama Beach. And indeed, when we arrived in the cove of turquoise water and soft pale sand, we enjoyed that rare treat in Japan: We were the only people there. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Elisabeth Cunnick's house in Brooklyn Heights is next to a lot that will soon cease to be vacant. As a precaution, she hired a lawyer to help negotiate a construction agreement with the owner. Dan Kramer found out his new neighbor was planning extensive renovations last summer when he overheard an architect talking in the backyard next door. Within a few weeks, the reality of how this project was going to affect him literally hit home. "A brick had fallen down into a chimney stack, hit an obstruction, then burst through the plaster in my wall because it fell two flights," he said. "It came in right next to a laundry machine and almost hit my friend." Mr. Kramer, who lives in the West Village in a 19th century brownstone, is facing a problem increasingly common in the 21st, as homeowners renovate old buildings that share walls and foundational support namely, how to protect your property (and sanity) when a neighbor does major construction. People living next door to a house or apartment undergoing a serious makeover must deal with noise, dust, debris, and disruptions that can last for months, if not years, each one causing its share of headaches. But for owners of houses, the demolition process can also affect structural integrity, especially when developers dig deeper to gain space, because height restrictions prevent properties from growing taller. If not handled correctly, that process can cause adjacent homes to settle, so doors no longer shut properly and floors start to slope. According to Mr. Kramer, contractors had not received the proper permission before they started removing bricks from the party wall he and his neighbor share. His neighbor, Ara K. Hovnanian, a real estate developer, is removing a rear addition, lowering the cellar floor and adding a penthouse, work that Mr. Kramer says has already caused leaks in his ceiling, the close call with the brick, and other damage, prompting him to hire a lawyer. "Now we're in the process of entering into a very detailed agreement about responsibility for damages and anything else that goes wrong," he said. Robert Banner, a partner at Ingram Yuzek Gainen Carroll Bertolotti who specializes in construction law, is helping Mr. Kramer negotiate that agreement, which covers issues like hiring a structural engineer to assess the state of Mr. Kramer's building, and installing crack and vibration monitors. Chris McCabe, a lawyer representing Mr. Hovnanian, declined to comment on the situation. Mr. Banner recommends that adjacent homeowners ask to be added to the renovating neighbor's insurance policy, and also have their own architect or engineer review the construction plans. That is especially important if your neighbor plans to dig a lower level deeper than yours, as it may require shoring up your foundation. "When you go down deep," Mr. Banner said, "you're creating an avenue for whatever is under the adjacent person's building soil or gravel to flow a little bit. The adjacent owner's property could move. That's the biggest fear." Having worked for renovators and their neighbors, he has empathy for the parties on both sides of the construction fence. "There's the issue of vibration and how that may shake an adjacent building and loosen cornices or stone sills or even the foundation," he said. "There's also the opposite situation, where nothing is going wrong and just because of adversarial neighbors or hypersensitivity to the construction, the mind starts to imagine all these problems that might have already been there." Mr. Tortorella says that's why it is in the renovator's interest to do a preconstruction survey of adjacent buildings, and especially to document the conditions inside neighbors' homes. "Take as many pictures as possible," he advised. "Otherwise, you'll pay for every crack that's there." Of course, to do a preconstruction survey, one would need permission to enter the neighbor's property, which is one source of leverage for anyone living next to a potential construction site. "They may need to access your land; they may need to come in on your roof," said Elisabeth Cunnick, the owner of a nearly 200 year old wooden house in Brooklyn Heights that is about to have company in the empty lot next door. To lessen the impact of watching a 9,000 square foot building go up out the windows of her more modest home, Ms. Cunnick moved for a year to a studio in Manhattan. But the project was delayed and she has now moved back to Brooklyn just as construction is to begin. Since her lot is wider than her house, she is having a new survey made of the boundaries and has hired Mr. Banner to help negotiate an agreement with her neighbor. She also removed a chandelier, packed away most of her books to protect them from dust, and took artwork off the walls to avoid damage from vibrations from pile drilling next door. Even more important than minimizing the stress of living side by side with construction, she said, is preserving her historic home. "When you live in a house this old," she explained, "it's like living in a big piece of 19th century furniture. I would like to do everything I can to protect it. I don't know exactly what that is, but I'm trying to figure it out as I go." The lot next door to Ms. Cunnick is owned by SDS 155 Lincoln L.L.C. Louis Greco, the company's manager, said, "It's always very difficult to build next to an existing residence, but the laws are specific, and just being a good neighbor is paramount." Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (gvshp.org), recommends that people concerned about a renovation project first try to communicate with the neighbor who is doing the work, and then become involved in the permit approval process. "In cases where it's a landmark property," he said, "the application to do the work often has to go through a much more public process than if it were not a landmark property." The society's Web site lists applications submitted to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission for properties in Greenwich Village, the East Village and other nearby neighborhoods; it includes dates on which the local community board or the preservation commission will consider these applications. Interested neighbors can sign up to receive e mail notifications of updates to the status of an application for a particular address. Mr. Berman says showing up at community board meetings, at which renovation proposals are often publicly presented, is one way for a neighbor to voice any concerns. "The problem is, often times people don't hear about these applications until after it's gone through the community board process," he said, adding that community boards issue only recommendations, as opposed to having a decision making capacity. "But they may be willing to say, 'We don't approve this unless you take these precautions to protect your adjacent property owner.' " None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. The New York City Department of Buildings (nyc.gov/buildings) also offers resources for neighbors concerned about construction. On its Web site, you can enter an address and get information about jobs that have been filed for it, a record of any complaints or violations, and whether they have been resolved. But homeowners say the site can be difficult to navigate if you are in search of useful information like plans, and some of the terminology can be hard to decipher if you're not a builder or an architect. Anthony Sclafani, a department spokesman, says that plans are generally available at borough offices after a project has been approved, but that interested parties can find a rendering of the proposed changes by looking up the zoning document. (After entering the property's address at the building department Web site, click on "jobs/filings," select the most recent filing, choose the "virtual jobs folder," then select "zoning document ZD1.") The city has introduced a mobile app (available for iPhone and Android devices) that provides access to building data. Using these digital tools, neighbors can find out whether the city has issued an after hours variance permit for a construction project, allowing work outside the normal hours of 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday. Eva Talel, a partner in the law firm Stroock Stroock Lavan, says these agreements vary, but should include details like how long the construction will last, what hours it is to be allowed, how the work will be monitored, what dust containment measures will be taken, how much the security deposit will cost, and what the insurance requirements will be. One agreement she negotiated to be used by a building's managing agent for all renovation projects, so every shareholder is subject to the same rules is nearly 70 pages. "The list of horrible things that can happen in the course of alterations is endless," Ms. Talel said, citing a minor paint job that turned into a fire when a worker left a blowtorch too close to the paint. "Not only was that apartment gutted by the fire, but the neighbors suffered smoke and water damage after the fire department came." Even though most renovations cause neighbors only temporary distress, she said, having an agreement can prevent problems like the lack of proper soundproofing in a new floor, as well as provide a path to a resolution if something does go wrong. "It can end up in a lot of contentiousness," she said of the building process, "which is not what one wants in a multifamily living arrangement." Next door neighbors living in houses also have a delicate relationship to navigate. One woman who lives with her husband in an early 19th century house in TriBeCa says they now regret not having asked for a written agreement when their neighbor began extensive renovations. Although everyone started out with good intentions, and both sides tried to be accommodating when problems arose (like cracks in the walls and doors that would no longer open), she said good will eroded as the project dragged on for years. Speaking anonymously to avoid further discord, she suggested that anyone in a similar situation with a neighbor "get things in writing and find a structural engineer that you trust and believe is on your side." But there are inevitably risks when centuries old buildings are subject to the side effects of major construction, and not all damage can be repaired. "We know that our house changed, and it has changed forever," she said. "That's not something that can be quantified." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Riffing off the popularity of the Tin Pan Alley hit "The Sheik of Araby," Fats Waller and Porter Grainger celebrated a very different kind of exotic locale in their 1920s song "In Harlem's Araby." With lyrics by Jo Trent, the song tells of the Manhattan neighborhood where it was said that strait laced propriety didn't apply and rules could be flouted. The song ended up best known as a jazz instrumental, but the seldom heard lyrics hinted at the people you'd encounter in Harlem: "Oh, they've got women just like men, 'cause they act a just like brothers." The theme of gender fluidity was made even more explicit in a playful verse that Grainger sang on a 1924 recording he made with Waller: That verse does not appear in the published sheet music. But the words leapt off the stage during an exuberant recent performance that opened a New York Festival of Song program at Merkin Concert Hall, "Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do: Songs of Gay Harlem." Conceived by Steven Blier, the festival's artistic director, working with Elliott Hurwitt, a historian of early blues and jazz, the program offered music from the Harlem underground, including works by Billy Strayhorn and Grainger, as well as songs popularized by Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Gladys Bentley and Ma Rainey all of whom had, to different degrees, same sex inclinations and involvements, even if some were married during portions of their lives. Some of the songs were true obscurities, based on scraps of handwritten melodies and lyric sheets excavated by Mr. Hurwitt from storage rooms at the Library of Congress. The concert attempted to recreate the ambience of a Harlem club. The soprano Bryonha Marie, the mezzo soprano Lucia Bradford, the tenor Joshua Blue and the baritone Justin Austin, all impressive, were backed, nightclub style, by Mr. Blier and Joseph Li at two pianos, and by a small jazz combo. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The night veered from snarky to earnest, from climate change to ... eyebrows? Yep, it got weird. The 88 voting members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association have worked hard in recent years to overcome their batty reputation, but they can still be their own worst enemies. Citing concern for the environment, they served a Globes dinner on Sunday that was 100 percent plant based but decorated the ballroom with flowers that arrived by jet from Ecuador and Italy. So Ricky Gervais was only saying what many people in Hollywood were thinking when he poked fun at the association's members, some of whom seem stuck in another era and others of whom have a language barrier. "The Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English, and they've got no idea what Twitter is, so I got offered this gig by fax," said Gervais, who was on his fifth stint as host. He further roasted the group by saying, "The meal tonight was all vegetables, as are all of the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press." The association's president, Lorenzo Soria, appeared briefly onstage and playfully swatted back. "Ricky, you keep saying this is your last year hosting," Soria said. "For God's sake, please put it in writing." Kate McKinnon's introduction for Ellen DeGeneres, winner of the Carol Burnett Award for her contributions to television, was silly and substantive, and weirdly more memorable than DeGeneres's own speech. McKinnon framed hers as a list of things DeGeneres had given her, including "two pairs of Stan Smith sneakers" and "a sense of self." "If I hadn't seen her on TV, I would have thought, 'I could never be on TV. They don't let L.G.B.T. people on TV,'" McKinnon said. "And more than that, I would have gone on thinking that I was an alien, and that I maybe didn't even have a right to be here. So thank you, Ellen, for giving me a shot. A shot at a good life." McKinnon's voice cracked, DeGeneres herself looked stunned, and the audience burst into applause. It was a good reminder that today's brand of Nice Ellen whatever you may think of that brand is not the only role she has played in our culture. Margaret Lyons The most powerful red carpet fashion statement at the Globes occurred in 2018 when almost all the women showed up in black gowns and tuxedo suits in solidarity with Time's Up and MeToo. So the fact that this year's ceremony took place the night before the start of the trial of Harvey Weinstein, the man who arguably gave rise to the movement, added a certain scrutiny to what everyone wore. Would they continue what they had started, and make their clothes about more than just a pretty dress? Or would they return to the status quo, when fashion choices were more about marketing and best dressed lists? In the end, the most striking looks were gloriously, sometimes ridiculously, risky. (Sometimes they were also just ridiculous, but that was O.K.) They included Joey King doing her best impression of living sound waves; Cate Blanchett in gold pleats and crystal bra looking like a cross between an archangel and a pole dancing Valkyrie; and Charlize Theron in Jolly Green Giant goddess drapes over a peekaboo black corset. And then there was Gwyneth Paltrow in a sheer high necked ruffled mud brown tulle ... knit? It was hard to tell, but the Fendi gown revealed everything from her undies to her abs and may well get her on all sorts of worst dressed lists. It was a dry year at the Globes for films directed by or about women. But when the Hollywood Foreign Press singled out Awkwafina, the star of "The Farewell," it was in some ways making up for its oversight. She became the first Asian American lead actress to win a Globe (in her case it was best actress in a musical or comedy), and the movie itself was by a female filmmaker (Lulu Wang) about a Chinese American immigrant trying to shield her grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen) from a grim diagnosis. From the stage, Awkwafina told Wang, "You gave me this chance, the chance of a lifetime, and you taught me so much." Nancy Coleman After a month of withering criticism for the homogeneous choices for its Golden Globe nominees, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association started the night off right by honoring the Egyptian American Ramy Youssef for his starring role in the Hulu show "Ramy," which he also writes and produces. He plays a Muslim in New Jersey grappling with what his faith requires of him and how that conflicts with modern life in America. Youssef jumped backstage to speak to the news media, saying the award was "crazy" for a show that garnered strong reviews but not a huge audience. "I was just happy they pronounced my name right," he said. And while Youssef didn't address the homogeneity of the nominees, he did praise Hulu and A24 for taking a chance on his show about a Muslim family. "I wanted to lead with our problems," he said. "To make people feel a little less lonely." Before Youssef won, the host Ricky Gervais had jokingly told winners to "thank your agent and your God" and leave. Was Youssef also joking when he thanked his God in his acceptance speech? No, he said, he was being serious: "I don't always feel like I'm on the same page when it comes to jokes as Ricky. But the Epstein thing was really funny." Nicole Sperling Williams gave a rousing speech when she won an Emmy in the fall, advocating for pay equity and work environments free from sexism and abuse. For her Golden Globes win, Williams delivered a similarly potent and personal speech, this time about reproductive rights and abortion access. She said that she wanted a life "carved with my own hand," and that she "wouldn't have been able to do this without employing a woman's right to choose." The speech was elegant and powerful; even the presenters Tiffany Haddish and Salma Hayek had to take a beat to acknowledge it before moving on with the ceremony. Margaret Lyons | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"What would you do for love? The man I love was trying to topple a dictator. And then he went to jail for it. So I did what any loyal wife would do. I ran in his place. I have no interest in politics. My dream is just to be a good mother and a great wife. And now I'm leading a revolution against Europe's last dictator." MUSIC PLAYING "(CHANTING) Sveta! Sveta!" GUNFIRE "My name is And I'm from Belarus. We are run by a dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. He's oppressive tyrant who has been in power for 26 years." Europe's closest equivalent to North Korea. Accused of human rights abuses, stifling dissent, and running sham elections. "A lot of people who disagree with him just disappeared." The president had ordered his assassination. DW News has spoken with a man who says that he was a member of the death squads. "When COVID came, he asked, 'Do you see this COVID around? I don't see it. So it doesn't exist.'" Belarus has one of Europe's highest per capita infection rates. "Thousands of people died because of it." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "Our president doesn't respect his people at all. My husband went around the country just talking to usual people, asking how they were living." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "He was touched by ordinary people who didn't have good conditions for working." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "And it became so important for him." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "He was showing all these videos on his YouTube channel, 'A Country for Life.' His subscribers started to ask him to run for presidency because he knew all the problems from inside." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "I was sitting at home with my children. And I was worrying about him. Authorities knew that he will be a serious opponent for Mr. Lukashenko. And he was jailed. So I collected documents for myself and brought these documents to Election Commission. At that moment, I didn't think about country. Maybe it sounds wrong. But, at very that moment, I was thinking only about my husband, to support him. But I was sure that they know who I was. And they will never, never allow me to be registered. And it was great surprise when they did. I'm sure that they did this just to laugh at me. They were sure that people will never vote for a woman, for unknown person, for housewife. We went around Belarus. I've never talked to such amount of people. I was afraid that I will forget all the words. I understood how dangerous, in our country, to run for presidency because you're like a bug in front of tractor." Hundreds of opposition activists have reportedly been arrested, among them the president's main challengers. "I understood that I'm not ready to lead the country because I'm not economist. I'm not a politician. So I promised that I will be president no more than half a year, just to organize new elections, that's it." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "During all this election campaign, I had a lot of moments when I wanted to step away because I was frightened." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "I got telephone call from unknown person who told me that, if I continue to run this campaign, I will be jailed and my children will be put in orphanage. And the next city, it was Minsk. About 60,000 people came. And, at that very moment, I understood that I can't step away." "(CHANTING) Sveta! Sveta! Sveta! Sveta! Sveta!" SPEAKING RUSSIAN "So many people just came to show that they are with me. They are tired to live under pressure. They don't want this dictator anymore. We had a lot of observers at every polling station. And we saw that the majority voted with me. Till the end, there was a tiny hope that they will count honestly. But it was so tiny that it just disappeared." NARRATOR: SPEAKING RUSSIAN "Official result was 80% for Mr. Lukashenko and 10% for me. He stole all the people's voices. 100,000 of Belarusian people went out for peaceful demonstrations." GUNFIRE "Police just was going around and beating and beated and beated all of them. People were just beaten so hard. Thousands have been imprisoned, beaten, and tortured." NARRATOR: SPEAKING RUSSIAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN "This footage was recorded by a Belarusian journalist who was beaten on the streets and then became a patient in this hospital in Minsk. The ward is full of so many different people with the exact same injuries and very similar stories." SPEAKING RUSSIAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN "And some of these patients were not even protesters. One patient was just going to buy vinegar at his local shop. Even worse, some protesters said they were raped." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "This is what Lukashenko does to his own people." MUSIC PLAYING "After the elections, I had to leave Belarus." Belarusian opposition leader has been filmed speaking under duress. Tikhanovskaya was forced to flee the country. "At that moment, I had to think about family, about husband. I was ready to step away because it was difficult to accept this violence. So I really was ready to give up. Only, Belarusian people didn't give me chance to step away. I became like a symbol of freedom." "(CHANTING) Sveta! Sveta! Sveta!" "I started to meet with the leaders of different countries." "Honorable members of the European Parliament " "It is very important that people around the world are talking about us." "We wish you all strength and persistence in the struggle for democracy." "Authorities were sure that such violence will calm down people. But vice versa happened." ? CROWDS CHANTING ? CHANTING IN RUSSIAN "There were people of different professions, of different ages." SPEAKING RUSSIAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN "Old people, usually, is considered to be electorate of Mr. Lukashenko. But, at last, they understood. Even those people who were still apolitical workers who work in factories, they are usually apolitical they started strikes." PROTESTING IN RUSSIAN "It's unbelievable for Belarus. I always considered myself to be a weak woman. But when my fate laughed at me, when it put me in such obstacles that I had to look for the strength, maybe this strength already was inside of me. You know, the same as me, I'm sure every person has strength in himself or herself. They just didn't know they have this strength because we were so frightened by one person. But now they woke up. This revolution is not over. To the international community, we need new and fair elections. They can be run by the OSCE. And we need an investigation into the human rights abuses to my people who have been on the streets for weeks." SPEAKING RUSSIAN "Our revolution is not geopolitical. It's not a pro Russian revolution nor ? pro European Union ? revolution. It is a democratic revolution. And I want my husband back." MUSIC PLAYING | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
What is it? According to Volkswagen, the Golf SportWagen Concept previews a bigger, more spacious and more fuel efficient replacement for the Jetta SportWagen. Is it real? It's probably about as real as a concept can be while still retaining the concept name. By tagging it as a concept, VW can still do the grand introduction of the real thing at another auto show later in the year. The Golf SportWagen Concept appears to be a near twin of the ready for market European Golf wagon that the automaker showed in Geneva last month. That vehicle is called Golf Variant. "Variant" is German for "station wagon," but don't tell your German teacher we said that. What they said: "The SportWagen has long been a top choice for customers who want a car that's fun to drive and offers a large cargo area that is truly versatile. This new SportWagen is even more appealing, offering nearly 10 percent more cargo room with the rear seats folded than the outgoing model. Essentially, the Golf SportWagen provides a sportier alternative to compact S.U.V.s." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Highland Park in Los Angeles has long been a diverse and vibrant community. In the last few years, however, 20 and 30 somethings, lured by the neighborhood's affordable rents and proximity to downtown Los Angeles, have moved in and are giving local entrepreneurs a new incentive to open new restaurants, bars and boutiques. Many are on old Figueroa Street, now a vibrant thoroughfare full of pedestrians. A bar, restaurant and bowling alley all in one space: originally a popular bowling alley dating back to 1927, this sprawling space was a punk rock music venue until a local hospitality company, 1933 Group, took it over and restored it to its former glory with the original bowling lanes, candy machines and placards. There's also a Neapolitan pizza restaurant and four bars. Bowling is 50 per hour per lane; each lane accommodates six people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
For years, New York showed after Europe. If you showed anything that was innovative in New York, you got accused of being pretentious. That was really upsetting to me. I was never a designer who wanted to follow trends. The tide turned in 1990 when we started to show after Labor Day. It was a big deal. Donna Karan, who is my close friend, was furious with me. She said, "You've just now ruined our summer." (We had scheduled the shows for just after Labor Day.) I, on the other hand, felt it was more important that the press saw what American designers were doing before they saw the shows in Europe. At the time, if you were on the same wavelength as the Europeans, you were often accused of imitating what was happening in Europe. So I said, "Let's go first, and we can dispel this idea that was always in the air." In the late '80s, the French were always right, and if you followed the French, you were you were right on trend, and you would have a huge business at Bloomingdale's. For me, it was intensely unpleasant that you were expected to do a Lacroix collection after Lacroix showed it. The notion that we were copyists persisted. I remember the charm of working on this show about Eskimos. That collection was highly praised, but I hated it. At the time something crazy happened: Jean Paul Gaultier showed Eskimos. And that killed me. I thought: "Oh, my God, months of hard work, months of development. And now they're going to think I did it because Gaultier did it." Fashion consultant, former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America When I was hired at the C.F.D.A. in 1991, they took me to my office. It was a dump. There were old metal file cabinets packed all in one room in the back by the freight elevators. You had to get up from your desk and move to a counter to reach the single phone. I thought: "Really? This is the headquarters for the American fashion industry? This is going to have to change." In some of my earliest shows, safety was not vetted at all. How anybody lived through the stampedes of those crowds in those tiny spaces is beyond me. We showed at the Guggenheim downtown. We found you could rent it for the day. We erected the longest, skinniest runway ever, and we made it quite tall. The girls in their makeup, their hair, their clothes barely made it onto the stage. It was hair raising. Designers up to then had been showing in their showrooms. Those places were firetraps. There was never an exit. I remember Liz Tilberis, who was then the editor of Harper's Bazaar, being pulled out of the back of a freight elevator at 550 Seventh Avenue. One season, Isaac Mizrahi had a show on Lafayette Street and the power blew. Everybody sat there for half an hour until they got back the generators. It was a nightmare. I told myself, "I think my job description just changed." Our mission at that point became to organize fashion week to do something safe for the industry. We decided to have a venue where American designers could show, like Paris. I went for the first time to Paris to see some shows. I wanted to see how they felt, how they looked. Later, I saw my chance. I went to a party one evening at Diane von Furstenberg's home. I talked to Valentino about what it was like to have a large venue. He said to me: "You know, when you do that, you have to exaggerate the clothes. Otherwise no one will see them." I began raising money. I had looked at every empty parking lot in New York, at every empty pier, and at all the empty buildings in Times Square that had stopped being built during the recession. By then we had pretty much identified Bryant Park as a great location. But we had to figure out how to pay for staging the shows. I spoke to Anna Wintour and told her we were looking for funding. She asked, "How much do you need?" and I told her maybe half a million. She said, "Let me speak to Si Newhouse, the Conde Nast chairman , and I'll get back to you." She did, right away, and Si gave us our first 100,000. D. Claeys Bahrenburg, the publisher of Hearst, said Bazaar would give us 100,000, and then David Pecker of Hachette Filipacchi, the publisher of Elle, gave us 100,000. The search for spaces in New York was so frustrating. People weren't up to fighting to find them. In Europe, shows were much more organized. Editors would come back and say, "It's just too hodgepodge here." In the '70s, I was with Henri Bendel. I remember sitting around a table with Gerry Stutz. She said, "You have to show this collection." She said, "Let's show at Lou G. Siegel's the fabled kosher restaurant in the garment district ." So everybody showed up for bagels and lox with Henri Bendel and Stan Herman at Lou G. Siegel's on 38th Street. In the summer of 1992, things were starting to fall into place when the Democratic Convention arrived in New York. We decided to put on a fashion show in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park the only time we were ever allowed to do that, because the convention was so important to the city. We had thousands of people in a big white tent. Every designer participated: Calvin and Ralph, Donna and Oscar and Bill, Nicole Miller, Anna Sui and Todd Oldham. That show helped the designers envision what it might be like to show in a big tent in Bryant Park. Eventually the need to go global moved us to think of Bryant Park. I was very much involved with the politics of the city, and on the garment district board, and was on the board of Bryant Park. (I still am.) That's how we got Bryant Park. Entering into that period, I became president of the C.F.D.A. and hired Fern Mallis. Fern, in her wisdom, saw that the C.F.D.A. was the avenue by which we could organize ourselves, sit down with every designer and say, "Look, it's time for us to recognize that we are not somehow minor leaguers." The first season, Calvin, Donna and Ralph all showed in the tents, Gertrude and Josephine. Gertrude was named for Gertrude Stein, whose statue was prominently set backstage. Everybody would decorate that statue with scarves and hats. We began getting pushback eventually, when some of the designers wanted more space and time to do their shows. One season we got flak when Gianni Versace wanted to show in the tents. The designers complained: "Why are you letting him show here? We're Americans. This is for us." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
That Ms. Rachvelishvili was an outstanding Amneris was no shock. Her performances at the Met in recent years in "Carmen" (her 2011 debut), "Il Trovatore" and "Prince Igor" made her potential in this repertoire clear. But Ms. Netrebko, who started off as a lyric soprano, has been more of a surprise as she's moved into challenging bel canto repertory and weightier and more dramatic roles. This Aida proved yet again that she knows what she is doing. Ms. Netrebko seemed at once a young woman, in helpless love with the enemy, and a captive princess, indignant and agonized over what to do to help her people. All this came through in her great Act I aria, "Ritorna vincitor," when Aida, having lent her voice to the throngs of Egyptians wishing Radames success in battle, is left alone to confront the bitterness of her dilemma: To pray for his safety is to curse her countrymen. At this stage of her career, Ms. Netrebko's voice abounds in richness, depth and dusky colorings. Yet there are still elements of the bloom and sweetness from her days as a lyric. In climactic outbursts, when she summoned all her smoldering power, Ms. Netrebko sent phrases slicing through the brassy orchestra and into the house. Yet in plaintive passages, the melting warmth of her tone and the supple way she shaped long lines held you in thrall. Her voice also retains aspects of the slightly cool, focused tone characteristic of the Russian style she was raised in. This distinguishes her Verdi and Puccini singing from the typical throbbing Italianate approach. On Wednesday, in "O patria mia," Aida's wrenching Act III aria, Ms. Netrebko sang the music's plaintive, long spun phrases with a subdued yet penetrating beauty that recalled the great Leontyne Price, who once owned this role. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
This episode, which lacks any Versace (Gianni or Donatella), felt to me like the freshest so far in "The Assassination of Gianni Versace," the second season of "American Crime Story." We are introduced to several new characters, chiefly Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) and his wife, Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light). Their portrayal of a Chicago couple who have made the best of a 38 year marriage despite the lie at its center is both plausible and moving. Marilyn, a feisty former dancer, has become an entrepreneur who sells her fragrances and cosmetics on the Home Shopping Network. "Perfume is about our bodies talking to each other without words," she tells viewers. Lee is a commercial real estate developer, a Catholic who keeps a religious altar in his home where he prays for God's forgiveness for his sexual attraction to men, and says he has done his best to resist temptation. It's all slightly campy, but these two, whose relationship could easily have been portrayed in a mawkish or ridiculous way, came across to me as deeply sympathetic. God only knows how many marriages between ambitious women and closeted gay men were created (and endured, even now) during the decades long rights revolution in the United States that culminated with the full striking down of sodomy laws, in 2003, and the nationwide legalization of same sex marriage, in 2015. How did these couples manage these lies, while striving to lead lives of decency and integrity? Like the series over all, this week's episode is not told in chronological order. It is 1997. We follow Marilyn from a work trip in Toronto back to her home on Chicago's Gold Coast, where she quickly notices that things are not as they should be. Two passing friends dial the police. Marilyn sits in the kitchen, her polished nails dancing on the granite countertop, as a bloodcurdling scream is heard from the garage: Lee's mutilated body has been found. "I knew it," Marilyn says under her breath. Flash backward, a week earlier: Marilyn and Lee are at a fund raising luncheon for Gov. Jim Edgar, Republican of Illinois. She introduces her husband in terms so admiring as to be gushing: "So often we are told the American dream is dead. Except I say: Look at my husband, Lee. One of seven children. The son of an Illinois coal miner. He began his career selling premixed pancake batter out of the trunk of a beat up old car. And today Lee manages 32 million square feet of commercial property across the Midwest." Later, at home, Marilyn moisturizes her face and removes her cosmetic eyelashes. It would have been easy for the episode's writer (Tom Rob Smith) and director (Gwyneth Horder Payton) to have this moment be the one when the mask of a happy marriage is removed, its ugly face revealed. In some ways that happens: In a quiet moment before the mirror, Marilyn applies a drop of perfume down the front of her silk robe, her eyes hollowed out with longing. In another room, Lee takes a call from Andrew Cunanan, dialing from a pay phone, and when Marilyn asks who is calling, he lies and says it's a business call. But the marriage is not merely a sham. When Marilyn asks Lee what he plans to do while she is away on business, he sounds down. She asks him to accompany her. "I like it when you're there," she says, and she means it. It is their last meaningful encounter. With Marilyn away, Lee opens his door to the serial killer, who happens to be in town. Lee shows him his plans to build a 125 story, 1,952 foot Sky Needle, which would have been the world's tallest building. The conversation does not go well. Andrew thinks the main point of having a building taller than the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) is to surpass the latter structure's observation deck. Andrew also urges Lee to name the tower for himself, something the self effacing developer has no intention of doing. They kiss "It feels like I'm alive," Lee says and Andrew boasts: "Escorts don't normally kiss, do they? I am not like most escorts. I am not like most anybody. I could almost be a husband, a partner." I found this reference to marriage anachronistic, and puzzling, and not for the first time in this series. In earlier episodes, Gianni Versace's partner, Antonio D'Amico, tired of their hedonistic lifestyle, proposes, and Cunanan tells a friend falsely, we believe that Versace once proposed to him. I'm certainly not making light of commitment or the desire for it. But I'm puzzled by the use of words like "husband" and "proposed." They don't seem true to my own memories of the late 1990s, when gay men were more likely to speak of boyfriends, partners and companions, and they seem strangely ahistoric. My next quibble with this episode is more prosaic: the killing of Lee Miglin, in his garage, by Cunanan is so grisly and sadistic as to be difficult to watch. I'll spare the details, but the monologue Cunanan delivers before delivering the coup de grace bears note: I know that you're not wearing your hearing aid, so I am going to speak very loudly and very clearly so you can understand. I want you to know that when they find your body, you will be wearing ladies' panties. Surrounded by gay porn. I want the world to see that the great Lee Miglin is a sissy. Soon the whole world will know that the great Lee Miglin, who built Chicago, built it with a limp wrist. The cops will know, the press will know, your wife will know, your children will know, the neighbors will know. Tell me something, Lee: What terrifies you more, death or being disgraced? The monologue raises the question: Is Cunanan motivated by self hatred, a desire to expose hypocrisy, or both? His use of homophobic language suggests self hatred, but his focus on disgrace suggests some kind of crusade. It is not, of course, a crime to cross dress, or to look at porn. This mutual failure of recognition murderer and victim seem to agree on one thing, that to be gay is a disgrace is perhaps the saddest moment in this series so far. The rest of the episode is a tour de force by Judith Light, whose portrayal of a wife in denial is simply magnificent. She offers a brisk inventory of what's missing from the house a Lexus, 2,000 in cash, two leather coats, two suits, "some inconsequential pieces of jewelry," rare gold coins and a dozen pairs of socks as she reaches the conclusion that the killing must have been a random and opportunistic robbery. Told by the Chicago police superintendent about the gay porn found next to the body, Marilyn surmises that "they must have belonged to the killer," but goes on to say: "I'm not interested in his intentions. Find him, catch him, but don't talk to me about what or might not be going through his mind." She adds: "Dollars, jewelry, socks, suits that's all I'll allow that man to steal from me. He won't steal my good name. Our good name. We worked too hard making that name, and we made it together." For an ambitious woman born in the 1930s to have a husband who is fully supportive of her professional aspirations might indeed, as she suggests, have been "a fairy tale life." "How many husbands believe in their wives' dreams?" she asks her Home Shopping Network viewers and us later in the episode. "How many treat us as partners, as equals?" Left unsaid: Perhaps his being gay allowed him to be such a supportive partner. Compared with all this, Cunanan's murderous escapades seem mundane. He flees to New Jersey, and the police failure to capture him after a radio station reveals that investigators have been tracking his movements by car phone. In search of a new car to steal, he stops at a cemetery, where he marches one of the groundskeepers into a basement and makes him get down on his knees. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
What Can You Do for People in Crisis? Put on a Seder Show Like pretty much everybody in America blessed with good health these days, the actor Jason Alexander and his wife, the artist Daena Title, have been stuck at home, worried about their relatives, their friends and a nation whose future is uncertain. "We all want to try to do something, anything," Alexander said. But what? About a week ago, he found an answer, in an email from Benj Pasek, the lyricist who helped create the songs for the Broadway musical "Dear Evan Hansen," as well as the movies "The Greatest Showman" and "La La Land," which earned him a share in an Academy Award. The songwriter's pitch to Alexander was this: "Would you be interested in being a part of an all star online Seder fund raiser that will raise money for the C.D.C. Foundation?" On Tuesday, his wife arranged lighting in their dining room and held an iPhone as he rehearsed an original musical number, which they then recorded. He sang: "So you're stressed by all the stories that you've seen on cable news? Well, it's time to trade the cable for a tableful of Jews. While this night is always different from every other night, there is a smidgen of religion though we're keeping that part light. Tonight is stranger than a normal Pesach meal, 'cause we're locked in our apartment and the plagues are expletive real." "Nailed it!" said Erich Bergen, a star of "Madam Secretary" who, of late, has become a go to technical producer for logistically complicated endeavors, like the recent fund raising, one night return of "The Rosie O'Donnell Show." (He was in Alexander's dining room too, thanks to Zoom. But actually, he was sitting at a desk in front of his unmade bed in his apartment in Harlem.) "Let's do one more take," Title said. She later explained, with a little panic, that she hadn't actually hit the record button. Such are the dramas inherent in producing a show that relies on iPhones and dozens of performers including Ben Platt, Billy Porter, Judith Light, Tan France, Harvey Fierstein, Idina Menzel and Sarah Silverman who are all in different places. The result God willing, because as of this writing it's nowhere near done will be "Saturday Night Seder." It's an original telling of the Passover story meant to entertain and bring together a mainstream audience for a few laughs, a bit of joy and some unavoidable reflections on the human capacity for transcendence amid danger and chaos. It will be streamed on the "Saturday Night Seder" website and on YouTube at 8 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, April 11. (With some words beeped out, it's PG 13 family viewing.) "The Passover holiday is literally a story of going from confinement to freedom and from winter to spring," said Pasek, who a few years ago teamed with the Broadway performer Adam Kantor to reimagine the biblical story of exodus for more than 100 people in New York. This year, amid the health crisis of Covid 19, rising unemployment and near nationwide quarantine, Pasek and Kantor knew they needed to dip into their creative circles of colleagues, friends and friends of friends (of friends) to help share the story, with all its modern resonances, with a much larger audience. And to raise money while doing so. "At the Seder table, we ask ourselves, 'What can you do for people who are suffering because you once suffered?'" Pasek said. "We want to amplify that message because it is one of hope and also one that asks people to give of themselves however they can." Kantor, whose sister in law is a new mother and a nurse practitioner caring for Covid 19 patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York, helped write songs and wrangle actors, and he is overseeing the fund raising drive to benefit the C.D.C. Foundation. "We want to support the front lines," he said. The "Saturday Night Seder" team, including the writers Alex Edelman and Hannah Friedman; musical arrangers like Charlie Rosen and Ben Wexler; and the composer Shaina Taub, among many others, had about two weeks to put it together, using Slack, Dropbox, Zoom and a color coded Google Sheet full of Talmudic detail that producers like Talia Halperin used to manage the rehearsal and taping availability of rabbis, writers and Fran Dreschers. Everyone is doing every job. "At one point," Bergen said, "I found myself writing a letter to Oprah to see if she could participate, and then a minute later I was editing a video of a drag queen saying, 'Yas, Passover!' so it runs the gamut. If we pull it off and that's an if it will be a miracle." The first week of April, the creators met in a Zoom writers room for about 18 hours a day, piecing together a program that would have elements of awards shows, television variety specials and Broadway revues. This week, they worked directly with the talent, watching them rehearse and film the various elements while providing tech support to some people whose many gifts don't include knowing how to upload files to the cloud. Most every recording session brought one technical glitch or another. The actor and singer Josh Groban was relying on his iPad both to communicate with the producers on Zoom and to listen to the instrumental version of the track he was singing to. He needed to quit the Zoom app to make his recording. Before Groban left the Zoom room to sing and record himself, the producers gave him direction, including a request that when citing the Passover song "Chad Gadya," as his bit calls on him to do, that he pronounces "chad" with a throat clearing cccchhh. Groban went offline to do his thing, then returned to Zoom and shared his recording with the group. He sounded like a cantor, cccchhh and all. (Groban was not raised Jewish, but like many of the other men involved in "Saturday Night Seder," he played Tevye in a school production of "Fiddler on the Roof.") Rachel Brosnahan is also not a Jew, but she plays one on TV. Just as Mrs. Maisel might do, Brosnahan found the bright side of having to film her contribution from home. In the song she will sing for the show, she tells people not to worry if this year they lack the foods typically placed on a Seder plate. As Brosnahan practiced the lyrics "If you're out of greens and table salt, well, don't you fret my dears. Just use a stick of celery to wipe away your tears" she burst with an idea of her own. "I have a stick of celery!" she told the producers and bound into her kitchen to fetch it. On the next take, she brushed the stalk across her face as if to dry a tear, and punctuated the end of her line with a crunchy bite. When he was approached to take part in the production by Kantor, whom Winkler didn't know but with whom he had posed for a photo after seeing Kantor perform in "The Band's Visit" on Broadway, he agreed immediately and asked to be given a part that let him reflect on the meaning of Passover in this particular time in history. "As a citizen, even more than as a Jew," Winkler said, "I thought it was our responsibility to tell the story as it has been told for over 5,000 years, because it's a story about survival and renewal." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Lloyd S. Shapley, who shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for work on game theory that has been used to study subjects as diverse as matching couples and allocating costs, died on Saturday in Tucson. He was 92. He broke a hip several weeks ago, his son Peter said in confirming the death. Dr. Shapley, a mathematician and emeritus professor at U.C.L.A., was considered one of the fathers of game theory, which tries to explain the choices that competitors make in situations that require strategic thinking. The "Shapley value," named for him, is a concept through which the benefits of cooperation can be proportionally divided among participants based on their relative contribution. He was a close friend and mentor to John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematician and Nobel laureate who had schizophrenia. Sylvia Nasar, a former reporter for The New York Times, devoted a chapter in her 1998 biography of Mr. Nash, "A Beautiful Mind," to the men's friendship. (The book was adapted for a 2001 film.) Ms. Nasar said the book's title was suggested by a remark by Dr. Shapley. "He was obnoxious," Ms. Nasar quoted him as saying about Nash. "What redeemed him was a keen, beautiful, logical mind." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
If you're watching Snap's stock ticker, stop. The company that makes Snapchat, the popular photo messaging app, has been having a volatile few days after its rocket fueled initial public offering last week. But Snap's success or failure isn't going to be determined this week or even this year. This is a company that's betting on a long term trend: the rise and eventual global dominance of visual culture. Snap calls itself a camera company. That's a bit cute, considering that it only just released an actual camera, the Spectacles sunglasses, late last year. Snap will probably build other kinds of cameras, including potentially a drone. But it's best to take Snap's camera company claim seriously, not literally. Snap does not necessarily mean that its primary business will be selling a bunch of camera hardware. It's not going to turn into Nikon, Polaroid or GoPro. Instead it's hit on something deeper and more important. Through both its hardware and software, Snap wants to enable the cultural supremacy of the camera, to make it at least as important to our daily lives as the keyboard. Since even before the invention of the printing press, text has been the central way that humans communicate over long distances and across time. Computers only entrenched the primacy of text. The rise of desktop publishing in the 1980s turned all of us into composers of beautiful, printed documents. Then the internet turned us into distributors of digital words. Suddenly we were all bloggers, emailers, tweeters and authors of Mediums and status updates. We ditched phone calls for written messages. We called these messages what they were: texts, as if we were describing the histories of ancients. But then came the cellphone camera, and then, a decade ago, the smartphone. For the first time, it became possible for humans to instantly document their visual surroundings and to transmit what we saw with lifelike fidelity. At first this seemed like a small change: We'd have more pictures of our families. A host of companies, from Facebook to Flickr to Instagram, latched on to this idea. But Snapchat uncovered something deeper about the camera. Not only could we use pictures to document the world, but we could also use them to communicate. Snapchat, which was at first dismissed as a mere sexting app, showed that with the right design, a phone's camera could add an extra dimension to communication that you couldn't get with text alone. That may be only a start. The growing importance of cameras of images rather than just text is altering much about culture. It's transforming many people's personal relationships. It's changing the kind of art and entertainment we produce. You might even credit cameras or blame them for our more emotional, and less rational, politics. Perhaps most consequential, the rising dependence on cameras is changing our language. Other than in face to face communication, we used to talk primarily in words. Now, more and more, from GIFs to emoji, selfies to image macro memes and live video, we talk in pictures. How does this change culture? In a paper published last year, Oren Soffer, a professor of communications at the Open University of Israel, argued that Snapchat returns us to a time before the printing press, when information was disseminated orally instead of through writing. Snapchat has two defining features: pictures and ephemerality. When you talk to others on the service, you usually send them a photo, often of your face. The photo lasts for a few seconds before disappearing. Paradoxically, Professor Soffer said, these features make Snapchat much more like talking than writing. "What Snapchat is attempting is to apply technology to visual products to create a fading away effect just as spoken words fade away in the air after utterance," he wrote. Snapchat adds other features to deepen this effect. The lenses and filters ways to make your face look like a dog, for instance seem juvenile to people who aren't used to Snapchat. But the moment you pick it up you understand the effect; lenses don't just add whimsy to your speech, but can perform other functions that approximate face to face chatting, too. They can hide your face when you're not looking your best. They can provide emotional cues: rainbow vomit may mean you're feeling great, while a black and white filter may suggest melancholy. Yes, Snapchat lets you add text on top of these images, but the pictures are a kind of language by themselves. Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who is writing a book about how the internet is changing language, said Snapchat lenses and filters were a form of what linguists call "phatic communication," which is communication that is meant to ease social interactions instead of to convey information. (For example, saying "hello" and "you're welcome.") "That's the purpose of the face filters or the geofilters in Snapchat they provide a fun way to communicate these same kinds of phatic messages with pictures," Ms. McCulloch said. The other purpose the filters serve is to create a shared context for communication. When you talk to people in real life, you often do so while engaged in some other activity you go out to dinner, you take a walk, you play a board game. "In digital environments, what you talk about is Snapchat's filters, or sticker collections, or you talk about an interesting GIF," Ms. McCulloch said. "They're a shared object to talk about." None of this is to suggest writing is going to go away. On the internet, new forms of communication tend to be additive. We won't replace text with pictures; we add them together to create something new. What's more, text is still irreplaceable in lots of forms of communication. I could have tried to tell you this story in the form of an image based Snapchat story, but it would most likely have been unwieldy and not especially informative. If you want to convey a lot of information concisely and accurately, writing is still one of the best methods to use. "If you've ever looked at Ikea instructions, those don't have any words in them, and they're notorious for how frustrating they are to use," Ms. McCulloch said. "Ikea instructions would be a lot nicer if they came with words. So I don't think words are going anywhere." But even if words won't be replaced by pictures, the rising prominence of picture based communications systems could still alter society in big ways. Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg argued in a short essay last year that the raucous 2016 presidential election stemmed in part from what he called our "post literate" age. In the ancient era of oral communication, the messages that proved most memorable were short and emotionally resonant. Mr. Weisenthal argued that the clipped, image heavy syntax of social platforms bore a resemblance to that paradigm. "Complicated, nuanced thoughts that require context don't play very well on most social platforms, but a resonant hashtag can have extraordinary influence," he wrote. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In the Northern Hemisphere, spring can be defined as the moment the sun glides across the celestial equator in late March. As we tilt toward that wondrous starlight, its rays become more concentrated on our side of the earth, giving us our warmer half of the year. There is no bigger deal in astrology. It is a powerful season, one defined by cosmic regeneration, "the beginning of rebirth," as the astrologer Chani Nicholas reminded me by text the other day. It embodies more of a new year than the ending of the calendar year, a celestial orientation that manifests in many communities and cultures that observe solar and lunar calendars. The rituals of spring take on many earthly forms, each revolving around similar themes of liberation and renewal. Passover celebrates the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus from the dead after his crucifixion by the Romans. Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which translates to English as "new day," marks a time of spiritual prosperity, shedding the past and welcoming a fresh future. In Chinese communities, the festival of Qingming signifies a time for seasonal clearings, including flying kites, outdoor outings and visit to tombs to clean them and leave offerings for ancestors. The ancient Greeks rationalized the warmer seasons as the emotional outgrowth of Demeter, the goddess of fertility and harvest, overjoyed at the return of her daughter Persephone to Olympus from the Underworld. The Aztecs and Toltecs made sacrifices in honor of Xipe Totec, the patron god of seeds, their bloody appeal for a healthy crop for the coming year. The rites that correspond with this time of year are universal. They transcend era, religion and culture. Above all, the return of the sun means the return of life. It's more than the unsheathing of one season as a means to get to another. Spring is an alchemic time that animates and invigorates all those who honor it with a sense of vitality and growth. Behavioral scientists have observed the importance of rituals on our ability to help us function and experience positive emotions. Work by Nicholas Hobson and others suggests that even the word "ritual" has more cognitive significance than near synonyms like "habit" or "routine." Ceremony is integral to our well being; feeling a part of something bigger than ourselves can alleviate anxiety and help us retain a sense of control amid the chaos of the world. The familiarity is as palliative as the rituals, which echo the cyclical nature of the seasons, of life, of ups and downs. New Yorkers have a springtime ritual unto themselves. It's called stepping out, and it happens once the city shakes off its barrenness and thaws out. Most humans are heliotropic, or inclined toward the sun , but New Yorkers are especially adept at tracking its movements. The burdens of living in a city that cedes basic human needs like comfort to productivity and efficiency are made exponentially worse by frigid treks to the subway, deceptively deep icy puddles and the indignity of overheated apartments that dry out skin and sinuses. Spring is more than a ritual it's a necessary reminder that these hardships we endure are only temporary. And what better way to celebrate a time of year marked by life and vitality than elaborate rituals of beauty, bodily adornment and anointment? New York is a city of display and voyeurism, and the celebrations that coincide with Easter Sunday make for an ideal moment to observe this phenomenon in full bloom. As the photographers of The New York Times have long documented, our city has made this day into one of collective worship. The traditions remain the same: Those who are religious head to services and a meal. Those of us who aren't head to brunch, or maybe the park, sporting a freshly pressed suit, an elaborate hat, a big bow, a bright lip, a colorful jumpsuit or one of those delicate beaded Loeffler Randall bags that have suddenly and mysteriously become as ubiquitous as the cherry blossom trees in Brooklyn. Tina Campt, the author of "Listening to Images," theorizes that photographs are haptic artifacts, capable of transmitting frequencies that can be felt, or heard by the body. "The notion of intimacy is precisely what I'm trying to get at when I'm talking about the haptics of images," she said recently on the podcast "Imagine Otherwise." "Sometimes we feel an active response to an image, but more often there is a passive response of connection." The faces in these images speak of that connection. They breathe the audible sigh of relief and pride at surviving another New York City winter. They plan to celebrate by turning out in clothing that reminds them of their aliveness. They have survived and triumphed over another winter in the city, with a beautiful day as their hard earned trophy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
BLOWOUT Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth By Rachel Maddow For those who have watched Rachel Maddow's television show, the opening scene of her book will feel familiar in its eye for a compelling anecdote. She tells the 2003 story of a small new business in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood that is about to be inaugurated by a head of state, in fact, "one of the most powerful men on the planet." We're intrigued. It turns out the business is a gas station. What's going on? Four paragraphs later, we learn that the mystery man is Vladimir Putin, who is publicizing one of a string of American gas stations acquired by the Russian oil giant Lukoil. Having piqued your interest, Maddow now broadens her narrative and explains why this anecdote is an apt illustration of the book's larger point the centrality and influence of the oil and gas industry. "Blowout" is a rollickingly well written book, filled with fascinating, exciting and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today. While she is clearly animated by a concern about climate change, Maddow mostly describes the political consequences of an industry that has empowered some of the strangest people in the United States and the most unsavory ones abroad. It is "essentially a big casino," she writes, "that can produce both power and triumphant great gobs of cash, often with little regard for merit." But life at that time is good for Teodoro, who owns a 100 million house in Paris, a 30 million beach house in Malibu, a 7 million vacation home in South Africa, one of the world's largest yachts and dozens of racecars. When his drivers take one of Teodoro's many girlfriends shopping, they are given a shoe box filled with up to 80,000 in cash for a single outing. His bill for one spree at an auction house in 2010, Maddow notes, would have paid the entire annual wages of 3,300 of his countrymen, since three quarters of them live on 2 a day. (Teodoro does now face international investigations and pressure on various fronts.) While there are many colorful tales about villains, scoundrels and adventurers, the through line of this book is the story of the rise of Vladimir Putin. The most important geopolitical consequence of the oil and gas boom of the last 20 years has been Russia's development into a full blown petrostate, Putin's consolidation of power and his determination to use this capacity to protect himself and disrupt the West. 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. Maddow carefully takes us through the manner in which Putin asserted greater and greater control over Russia's vast oil and gas resources. The key move was the takeover of what was then Russia's largest oil company, Yukos, run by a brilliant entrepreneur, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. By 2003, Khodorkovsky had built Yukos into a 36 billion company, providing an estimated 5 percent of the total tax revenues of the Russian government, and was planning to acquire a competitor, Sibneft, which would make the conglomerate the world's fourth largest oil producer. This was not to be. By the end of 2003, Khodorkovsky had been jailed for tax evasion, fraud and embezzlement. The Russian government charged that Yukos owed 27.5 billion in taxes and penalties. In 2004, the company was sold in an auction that lasted six minutes. The winning bid at the firesale price of 9.3 billion was from an unknown company with an initial capitalization of 300. That company quickly sold Yukos to the state owned oil giant, Rosneft, at cost. Putin now controlled some of Russia's largest and most productive oil assets. As oil prices rose, so did Putin's ambitions, which reached a symbolic height with his decision to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, a Russian resort town with little snow and lousy facilities. No matter, that seemed part of the plan, because what ensued was an orgy of construction and corruption. In a detailed, thorough analysis of the project, the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov concluded that the Sochi Olympics had cost more than the previous 21 Winter Olympics combined, because Putin's favored builders had lined their pockets with 25 30 billion. A year later, Nemtsov was dead, assassinated just outside the Kremlin's walls. One of the book's themes is the degree to which Western capitalists bankers and oilmen abetted Putin's rise to power, cheered on his capture of resources and partnered with him no matter what he was doing to Russia's democratic and capitalist experiment. Chief among them was Exxon's C.E.O. Rex Tillerson (later the secretary of state), who was so cooperative that in 2013 Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship, one of the country's highest honors bestowed on a foreigner. And Tillerson was a fast friend indeed. Maddow quotes from a 2016 conversation in which Tillerson explained that after Putin's invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, he visited Russia and was surprised by his interactions with Putin and his aides. "The first question they asked me was ... 'Are you O.K.?' And I said, 'Well, yeah, I'm fine. Why do you ask?' They said, 'Well, we just wondered whether your government was coming after you because you've been doing business with us.'" Tillerson marveled that "they were more worried about me." What amazing concern and consideration! For him, Putin's aggression seemed far less noteworthy than his empathy. Ukraine features prominently in Maddow's account because it has become the central struggle between Putin and the West, and America in particular. She describes how Putin was outraged by American support for the ouster of the corrupt and pro Russian Ukrainian leader, Viktor Yanukovych, which happened in the midst of his triumphant Sochi Olympics. Putin was already deeply hostile toward the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton in particular, for having given verbal support to pro democracy protests in Moscow. For Putin, Western efforts at regime change could only be countered by his own attacks on Western democracies. Maddow's book is rich with other stories, from fracking in Oklahoma to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But while the tone throughout is one of shock, amazement and condemnation, the book is not as radical in its conclusions as readers might have anticipated. Maddow advocates more stringent rules on Western companies aiding foreign corruption. And she argues for an end to subsidies for the oil and gas industry, urging that it "pay for what it does." I assume that means a carbon tax. The caution is perhaps because Maddow knows that, whatever we might say about the oil and gas business, we are all eagerly consuming its products charging our phones, flying on planes and using plastics. Around 80 percent of the world's energy supply comes from fossil fuels, just about the same as 25 years ago. "I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person," Maddow writes, "and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night." In 2018, renewables made up just 11 percent of United States energy consumption. Without fossil fuels today, the lights would go out in much of the country. "Blowout" is a brilliant description of many of the problems caused by our reliance on fossil fuels. But it does not provide a path out of the darkness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The marathon fashion season that kicked off in New York in early February has finally come to a close in Paris, wrapping up with the last of the women's ready to wear shows. As the fashion throngs wing their way home, we look back at some of the best photo moments from the Parisian runways and behind the scenes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The last time the New York public radio station WNYC had a new boss, in 1995, Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor, and the station had an audience of about one million listeners a month and an operating budget of 8 million. Since then, WNYC's parent organization, New York Public Radio, has grown into a public media powerhouse, with a budget of 97 million, nationally syndicated radio programs and dozens of podcasts, including hits like "2 Dope Queens" and "Trump, Inc." The organization says that it attracts 24 million people across its various broadcast and online properties. And for the first time in nearly a quarter century, New York Public Radio has a new leader. The nonprofit group announced on Wednesday that its new chief executive would be Goli Sheikholeslami, who has led Chicago Public Media, which owns the radio station WBEZ, since 2014, and is a former executive at The Washington Post and Conde Nast. She will start her position in New York in October. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Where to Turn to When You're First in the Family to Go to College Dennis Di Lorenzo's parents never went to college. They were blue collar people who believed in hard work but not necessarily the hard work of higher education. "They didn't see the value in it," said Mr. Di Lorenzo, now dean of New York University's School of Professional Studies. Neither of his siblings finished high school, opting to work instead. Although Mr. Di Lorenzo was a high achieving student who scored well on standardized tests, his parents didn't consider college a necessary part of his future. "If not for my own motivation to go to college, I would not have been able to carve out a traditional experience for myself," he said. "I walked into Fordham University as a freshman and didn't even know what the word 'philosophy' meant. I didn't know what it meant to be college ready." He managed to finish school in four years. But he said it is supremely difficult for first generation college students to do what he did. "I know that the school system I came out of was better than the New York City public school system today," he said. "I had greater opportunities and pathways of affordability." First generation students mostly come from low to middle income families, are disproportionally Hispanic and African American and have little, if any, information about their higher education options. As a result, they often have misconceptions and anxiety about attending college. College counselors can help these students deal with the complexity of the college preparation and application process. Yet few public high schools serving significant numbers of low income and first generation students have anywhere near enough counselors. According to the 2015 State of College Admissions report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, counselors at public high schools are, on average, each responsible for 436 students, and those counselors spend only 22 percent of their time on pre college counseling. Enter Aspire, a program Mr. Di Lorenzo created two years ago. It was influenced by a study of 20 public schools in New York City's lower income neighborhoods that found graduation rates suffering and a huge variance in college readiness programs. Aspire aims to give students information about higher education, the application process and financial aid, and prepare them academically for the transition to college. The free, two year program serves 40 high school juniors, who attend a weeklong program each summer at N.Y.U. There are also classes and workshops throughout the school year that offer leadership training, advanced math instruction, assistance with college essay preparation, and discussions about careers, scholarships and college majors. In addition, students are connected to a group of college student mentors. Jesus Pena, a senior at Alfred E. Smith high school in the Bronx, was among the first cohort of students in Aspire. During his first weeklong summer program, Mr. Pena stayed on the 22nd floor of a new N.Y.U. dormitory. It was the first time he had seen a college dorm, had slept away from home or had a roommate. "The rooms were amazing, the view was amazing," he said. "But that first night, I couldn't sleep. It was such a new environment, and there was this stranger in my room. It was overwhelming." Mr. Pena still made it to class the next day. The program, he said, had a profound effect on him, and one instructor in particular was crucial. "He told us, 'You can't fly with the eagles if you're walking around with the turkeys,'" Mr. Pena said. "That stuck with me. After that, I started really paying attention." This fall Mr. Pena will attend Lehman College in the Bronx. About one third of undergraduates in colleges in the United States are first generation students, according the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and the United States Department of Education. Only 27 percent earn a college degree in four years, compared with 42 percent of students with parents who went to college, according to a report from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Without a college degree, children of low income parents are likely to be low income adults, and their earning potential will only get worse over time. An analysis by the Georgetown center predicted that by 2020, 65 percent of all jobs in the United States would require postsecondary education and training. Rutgers University offers one of the few programs for first generation, low income students that support them all the way through college. The Rutgers Future Scholars program also starts earlier than most: seventh grade. In May, 75 students from the program's first group of 180 selected in 2008 graduated from college. Of that group, 163 enrolled in college after high school, and 80 percent have either graduated or remain enrolled in some form of higher education. The Future Scholars program works with students from Newark, New Brunswick, Piscataway and Camden school districts in New Jersey who are considered "promising," said Aramis Gutierrez, the program's director. "We look for the 'if only' students, those who are on the cusp of doing remarkable things but need that additional support system in their life," he said. Students are chosen based on academic performance and, just as important, involvement in their community and their school. The students receive academic support and enrichment, and mentoring from Future Scholars participants who are now in college. They attend classes after school, on weekends and during the summer. No student is ever expelled from the program for poor grades or lagging attendance. "We wanted to be something different, especially for young people living in communities that don't give second chances," Mr. Gutierrez said. If a student doesn't show up to a Saturday class or an after school session, or their grades have dropped precipitously, the faculty tries to address the cause of the problem and get them back on track. Ninety seven percent of students in the Future Scholars program graduate from high school. More than half enroll at four year institutions, the majority attending Rutgers, which offers them free tuition. About a third enroll in other four year schools, and about 20 percent head to community college. A significant number of undocumented students are also in the scholars program; their college tuition is supported by private donors. First generation students who graduate from high school but haven't prepared for (or enrolled in) college can attend an N.Y.U. bridge program known as Access, which prepares them for college by providing academic remediation, tutoring and help with career development and job search skills. Students also earn 24 college credits that will transfer to a four year institution. The Access program began in the fall of 2016 with eight students; half will be attending college this fall. Unlike Aspire, Access is not free, Mr. Di Lorenzo said, but costs 15,000 for the year. (Aid and scholarships are available.) Aspire, Access and Rutgers Future Scholars are among a relatively small number of programs nationwide that target low income, first generation students. Some others are part of the federal government's TRIO programs, which consist of eight different programs (like Upward Bound and Educational Opportunity Centers) that are also open to disabled students. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
A Livestock Show and Rodeo Worth Seeing, but So Much More The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo has plenty to offer all comers even if the rodeo itself isn't up your alley. None If you love horses, barbecue, and live music, one of the world's largest livestock shows and rodeos, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, is happening from Feb. 27 to March 18 at NRG Park. The event, which began in 1932, welcomed more than 2.61 million visitors last year. According to Joel Cowley, the president and chief executive of the event, visiting the grounds is a fun experience for all, with plenty to offer to people who aren't traditionally interested in agriculture or rodeo events. "Anyone from little kids to great grandparents can have a good time because there is such a diverse lineup of activities," he said. Admission to the 300 acre event grounds is 15 per day for adults and 5 for children between the ages of 3 and 12. Admission to the daily rodeo and concert in NRG Stadium, one of the park's main venues, starts at 18 and includes entry into all other activities on the grounds. Admission is free for children 2 and under. For more information and to buy tickets, visit the show's website. Here's a sample of what visitors can look forward to. Mr. Cowley said that the daily rodeo performances in NRG Stadium, which seats more than 72,000, are the highlight of each day. Over 300 cowboys and cowgirls from around the world compete in a series of rodeo sports including bull riding, where competitors attempt to ride a bull for eight seconds and barrel racing, a speed event where women ride on a horse around a barrel pattern. The two hour rodeo performance is followed by a one hour concert from a notable band or musician. This year, country musicians Garth Brooks, Blake Shelton, Luke Bryan and the pop band OneRepublic are among the performers. Each day, all day, NRG Center, a 1.3 million square foot building adjacent to the stadium, will host a livestock show. Visitors can see about a dozen species of animals including cattle, pigs, llamas and sheep, and there's an area where they can watch chickens hatch and calves, lambs and baby pigs being born. The building also has a retail area where vendors from around the world sell Western themed goods such as clothes, boots, jewelry, furniture and art. NRG Arena will also host several horse shows a day. "These are fast paced events that are thrilling to watch," Mr. Cowley said. Onlookers can expect multiple events demonstrating each rider's prowess and the stamina and strength of the horses. One example is mounted shooting, where cowboys and cowgirls ride past balloons lined up on a stick and shoot into them with a blank rifle. The winner is the person who shoots the most number of balloons in the least time. The event also features a wine garden, which will be open daily. Visitors here will be able to buy small tastes, full glasses and bottles of around 50 wines from around the world and can imbibe while listening to live music performances from local bands. Always an attraction for children, the carnival, open all day, has more than 50 rides including an observation wheel, two Ferris wheels and several roller coasters. When you (or the kids) get hungry, hit the many food vendors selling fried foods on a stick such as smoked and fried turkey legs or fried cheesecake. Several properties in Houston offer packages themed to the livestock and rodeo, ideal for out of towners or locals looking to make a vacation out of the event. Hotel Derek, near the city's Uptown entertainment district and seven miles from the livestock show and rodeo, has an All Roped In Package inclusive of accommodations, a Southern inspired breakfast, valet parking and a welcome amenity of locally smoked beef jerky and a jar of honey roasted Texas pecans. Prices from 159 a night. Another option is the Rodeo Houstonian Style package at The Houstonian Hotel, Club Spa, situated in the heart of the city and about a 20 minute drive from the event; it includes accommodations, two Texas themed cocktails at the hotel's bar, a welcome amenity of a charcuterie board, a 50 Uber gift card, valet parking and a boot shine. Prices from 289 a night. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Kerby Jean Raymond, the founder of the independent, critically acclaimed fashion label Pyer Moss, planned to attend more than a dozen events at Art Basel Miami Beach this weekend, including an exhibition that showcases some of his label's shoes. Instead, he'll be flying to North Dakota. Mr. Jean Raymond is among a number of designers and brands that are responding to the basic needs of demonstrators fighting to prevent the Dakota Access pipeline from being built near the Standing Rock Reservation out of concern for the environment and Native American ancestral lands. Activists have requested nylon coveralls, heavy duty sleeping bags, gloves, wool clothes and blankets, along with monetary donations, on their own websites and on Amazon. After all, temperatures in Cannon Ball, N.D., the town near which protesters have gathered, range from highs in the low 30s to single digits. And it's not about to get any warmer. On Monday, Gov. Jack Dalrymple of North Dakota cited "anticipated harsh weather conditions" when issuing a mandatory evacuation order. Exacerbating the effects of the cold are the water cannons that the police have used against protesters, causing early signs of hypothermia in some. Over the last several days, Mr. Jean Raymond, 30, has worked to secure an assortment of warm clothes, using his personal funds and his connections. "I called Nike and I said, 'Instead of me keeping a couple of thousand dollars worth of sneakers that I'm not going to wear, let me send these back to you,'" Mr. Jean Raymond said. "'Let me get some thermals instead.'" In exchange for the free sneakers, he received credits that he then used to purchase thermal clothing. He has also personally purchased outerwear from Uniqlo. It's not the first time the designer, whose youthful but streamlined collections often engage with heavy topics, has taken a dive into activism. For his spring 2016 show, Mr. Jean Raymond prepared a short film about race relations in the United States. And two years ago, he designed a T shirt listing names of victims of police brutality, profits from which went to the American Civil Liberties Union. Designers with less visible profiles have also jumped in to help Standing Rock demonstrators. Bethany Yellowtail, a Los Angeles based designer who is a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and who grew up on the Crow reservation in Montana, created a line of "Protector Gear," including T shirts, hoodies, water bottles and hats, with profits to go directly to the Standing Rock Sioux, the tribe leading the protests. So far, the effort has raised over 10,000, Ms. Yellowtail said. Louie Gong, founder of the brand Eighth Generation, sent 60 blankets to the Standing Rock campsite, at a cost he estimated to be about 10,000. "It seems like a small and superficial sacrifice, however, when compared to our cousins sleeping in tents that are covered in snow," Mr. Gong, who grew up in the NookSack tribe, wrote in an email. Bliss and Mischief, a Los Angeles brand, is donating 15 percent of proceeds from every purchase until the end of 2016 to a cause of the customer's choice, with the Standing Rock Sioux offered as an option. And at least one major corporation is involved. Patagonia gave a 25,000 grant to the Indigenous Environmental Network, a nongovernmental organization, to support the indigenous community at Standing Rock. Ms. Yellowtail expressed enthusiasm about the outflow of support the tribes have received, but she cautioned non Native American volunteers, whether in the fashion industry or otherwise, against blindly appropriating the cause of the tribes at Standing Rock. "They're not asking allies to come out and speak for them, they're asking for people to stand in solidarity and be supportive," she said. "Ask yourself: Are you going for your own agenda or to listen and follow protocol?" For Mr. Jean Raymond, the purpose of his trip is simple. "I'm bringing as much supplies as I can out there," he said. "If I can do anything past that, I'll do it. If I feel like I'm unnecessary, I'll leave." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
From left, Stephanie Beatriz, Andre Braugher, Andy Samberg, Melissa Fumero and Joe Lo Truglio in a scene from "Brooklyn Nine Nine." The series co creator Dan Goor suggested that all office comedies are also family comedies. A writer asks the minds behind "Veep," "Brooklyn Nine Nine" and other office comedies to join her in pondering what makes the genre so great and so vital during a pandemic. To begin, a confession: My husband, an essential worker, goes to an office every weekday. He walks about a mile, navigating the sidewalks like a player in some virus inflected Frogger game, and rides a lonely elevator to an empty 10th floor suite. A staggered schedule guarantees that he works alone which means no pleasantries, no gossip, no box of doughnuts in the kitchenette just because. And even the thought of this office bereft, doughnut less makes me extremely jealous. Though my working life has included office jobs only sporadically, my mind has been cycling, wistfully, compulsively, through past workplaces the grimy kitchenette at the Village Voice, the beauty closet at Teen Vogue, the cubicle hedge maze of Columbia's English department. The other day, I noticed my 3 year old son playing a game on the tablet called Toca Life: Office. The game map includes a whiteboard and a unisex toilet. Characters can photocopy their own butts. I felt misty. If I'm honest with myself, my actual experience of office work was often tedious, the offices themselves dingy, relationships with colleagues clumsy and strained. Who likes a commute? Or a Tupperware lunch? Or an ergonomic chair that clearly isn't? But working and parenting require different skills, and trying to do them both, at the same time and in the same place, is insane making. I miss my office self: capable, better dressed, less inclined to yell at shorter colleagues. The idea of having an office to go to an office that doesn't double as a kitchen table and is only rarely smeared with peanut butter feels like obscene luxury. Dan Goor, who worked on the genius workplace sitcom "Parks and Recreation" and cocreated "Brooklyn Nine Nine," expressed similar nostalgia. "Sitting around in a room full of comedy writers laughing at all the funny things they say without having a mask on, that's probably what I miss most," Goor said when we spoke a few weeks ago. I talked to him and several other workplace comedy showrunners about what makes their genre so superb. They can't go to their offices either, so they were all around. And most of them, like me, had small children at home. "I've just been editing on Zoom every day while my child screams outside the door," said Tracey Wigfield, of the canceled too soon "Great News." But I can't tell anymore if I miss actual offices or if I have watched so many office comedies that I have deluded myself into believing that offices are fun. Ever since I was allowed to wield a remote, I have loved workplace sitcoms and hated family ones. In the '80 and '90s, office comedies and family comedies had the same multicamera setup and unvarying cast. But "Designing Women," "Night Court" and "Cheers" seemed expansive. Family comedies "Growing Pains," "Family Ties," "Full House" felt squirmier, claustrophobic. Now, at night, when I'm too debilitated from child care to write anything more coherent than a "K! Thx!" text, I have been watching workplace comedies again: new episodes of "Brooklyn Nine Nine," past seasons of "Parks and Recreation" and "The Good Place" (a stealth workplace comedy) and the latest season of "Younger," which is both a romantic comedy and an office comedy and therefore perfect. Onscreen at least, I can enjoy the company of co workers. Co workers with adult routines and adult problems and takeout coffee and pants that button. What unattainable bliss. Most of the showrunners I spoke with agreed that the secret to a great workplace comedy beyond having actual workplaces in which to write, film and edit it was the opportunity it provides to cram dissimilar characters into a relatively small space and force them to talk to each other. "A family show, they're literally family, and an ensemble friends shows, they're with each other because they just enjoy each other," said Justin Spitzer of "Superstore." "Workplace comedies bring together a group of very disparate people who don't necessarily want to be together." Difference generates conflict, and conflict creates comedy. Armando Iannucci, of "Veep" and "Avenue 5," argued that rather than mirroring families, offices provide microcosms of power politics. "There's a hierarchy in terms of who's boss and who wants to be boss," he said. (As "Veep" was set largely inside the White House, that cosm isn't always so micro.) His current show, "Avenue 5," about tourists and staff trapped aboard a spaceship, invites its own political comparisons. "We are very much aware we're writing a show about people trapped indoors fighting for survival under terrible leadership," he said. (The series was renewed in February for a second season; Iannucci doesn't know when shooting can begin.) The occasional Scranton based paper company aside, the choice of office matters, Wigfield told me. "Depending on what your workplace is, there are often built in stakes," she said. A newsroom or a spaceship or an experimental wing of the afterlife drive stories. Stories don't arrive as easily when you have to dream them on Zoom, showrunners told me. "Comedy is about blurting things out and being heard and timing," Goor said, "and those things all feel hard to do over Zoom." He spoke plaintively of the communal lunches and couches at his now shuttered office and a writing process that "puts you at great risk of inhaling somebody's aerosol droplets." Iannucci also had mixed Zoom related feelings. "It's not quite the same," Iannucci said. Wigfield, whose responsibilities right now include a toddler, a newborn and a "Saved by the Bell" reboot, found it lacking, too. "Or maybe it's just tricky to come up with jokes in the middle of a pandemic," she said. As a kid, I watched workplace comedies for clues about what adult life was and could be. The settings weren't especially glamorous. Neither were the characters (Julia Sugarbaker excepted), but they presaged a time in which I could choose my own work, my own skirt suits. I wonder what a pandemic episode would have looked like and what it would have taught me. "We could've done a great episode," Spitzer said of "Superstore." "And I could have shorted the market. But you can't live in retrospect." Of course, after weeks of school closure, home does increasingly resemble an office, with designated work spaces, something resembling a routine, the occasional video call that makes me put on a bra. Last month, an old printer broke, and I bought a new one with a scanner function. Now we can copy our butts right here. A dark lesson of late capitalism and Covid 19: Everywhere is an office, any hour a work hour. Is any of this funny? Another lesson: Maybe you don't actually need a workplace to make a workplace comedy. Late last month, I watched the "Parks and Recreation" reunion, a benefit for Feeding America. Though the 2015 series finale had sent most of the characters spiraling away from Pawnee, Ind., the reunion's premise had them reaching out, via the fictional Gryzzl platform, for mid pandemic check ins. In the show's final minutes, the characters all gathered, on our screens, in their individual windows, to sing an elegy for a miniature horse. Even without an office, they were working, together. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
PARIS No matter what anybody critic, stylist, editor, photographer, buyer thought or felt about the men's wear designs rolled out here over the last five days, there was finally a single determinant of success: social media metrics. This disturbing development became clear to lots of industry types when, in Milan, huge mobs unexpectedly turned out at Calvin Klein to see Cameron Dallas, a self created social media sensation whom front row regulars strained to place. Calvin Klein's corporate media wranglers know him, though, as do his 9.7 million Instagram followers. Suddenly, basketball stars and Hollywood celebrities seem so old culture. Who cares that you learned your craft and slept or clawed your way up the ladder of success? Fewer people are likely to recognize your name than that of a 21 year old from Chino Hills, Calif., who has done, effectively, nothing. The tension between dual positions defined virtually everything that followed both in Milan and then here in Paris. On one side were refined talents like Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, the Valentino designers, who season after season produce gorgeous if prohibitively expensive clothes rich in references to the contents of their own mature intelligences but equally to endangered crafts traditions. There were also designers like Lucas Ossendrijver at Lanvin, who last Sunday spoke with real feeling about the workers employed by that label (one rived by the recent firing of its women's wear designer, Alber Elbaz). On the other side of the equation was the Balmain show. An awful lot of front row chatter this week has concerned human relations, and not just the messy split between Mr. Elbaz and the ownership of Lanvin. Who is being considered to take the job of creative director at Dior vacated abruptly some months ago by Raf Simons? Which American design colossus is looking to reposition its brand by ditching its heralded but aging design team? What radical changes are due at another label with worldwide recognition, one whose new chief executive has a background in discount fast fashion? Olivier Rousteing's Balmain was in some ways the show of the week. Was it preposterous? It certainly was. Did it make those present feel that at any moment Ben Stiller might strut down the runway? It did. The more time elapses, the clearer it becomes that "Zoolander" is documentary. The satirical film's superficially wacko plot involving an assassination attempt on the progressive prime minister of Malaysia to allow the fashion industry to retain cheap child labor in that country now seems kind of prophetic. The cult of seemingly vacant male models it parodied is now an established reality. (See, please, Lucky Blue Smith.) While the "Zoolander" sequel doesn't come out for another few weeks, the Balmain show felt like its promotional trailer. (Too bad Owen Wilson, the film's co star who was spotted in a Left Bank sports bar watching the Patriots Broncos game with an entourage that included his brother, Luke wasn't there to witness it.) "I hope the quilted leather numbers also come in red," Klaus Stockhausen, fashion director of the German magazine ZEIT, quipped on the way out of the show, elbowing his way through a mob of Balmain fangirls. Mr. Stockhausen need not worry. A lot of collections over the last two weeks have been loosely thematic interpretations of military attire. Yohji Yamamoto, one of the authentic renegades in the business, showed a significantly restrained collection of fishtail parkas worn with blanket scarves and T shirts scrawled with unprintable epithets that could be the new look for Occupy Wall Street. Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garcons Homme Plus showed a resplendent grouping of swallowtail jackets whose sleeves were layered with reticulated brocade sections that extended a theme she had visited before: an "armor of peace." Martial themes were clearly in play, too, at Balmain, where the soldiers Mr. Rousteing conscripted for what he calls "the Balmain army" looked battle ready for the Siege of Las Vegas. The epaulets, dropped crotch jacquard biker pants, quilted cummerbunds, storm trooper boots, mink greatcoats, hauberks and assorted braid and regalia summoned up images of Scott Thorson, Liberace's tragic companion, or else a praetorian guard for Ming the Merciless, the despotic Flash Gordon villain. Those references would probably mean little to Mr. Rousteing, who is 30. Well before the Balmain show had ended, images from it had been liked and favorited all over the world. And that is one reason, as Stefano Tonchi, the editor in chief of W magazine said, that Mr. Rousteing's name has topped the lists of designers said to be in the running to replace Mr. Simons at Dior. With a personal Instagram following of 2.2 million and another 3.6 million faithfully keeping track of Balmain's official account, Mr. Rousteing whatever his design skills has captured the eyeballs of the world's most coveted consumer cohort. As if to dispel any doubt about his strategic intentions, the show was cast almost exclusively with models who themselves have large social media followings, guys like Jon Kortajarena ( kortajeranajon: 775,000), Sean O'Pry ( seanopry55: 509,000) and Francisco Lachowski ( chico lachowski: 1.1 million.) The men's wear cycle ended here with a beautiful and elegiac Thom Browne show that featured tattered tailcoats, ratted out patchwork furs that looked as though the moths had gotten to them and models with perforated bowlers worn like masks over their faces. It was a collection that seemed designed expressly for its own posterity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Scientists and science advocates are expected to fill the streets of more than 500 cities across the world on Saturday in support of scientific research, which they feel has increasingly come under attack, especially during the Trump administration. Since its inception in late January, the March for Science has transformed from a grass roots social media campaign into a bona fide force of scientific advocacy, attracting support from more than 220 official science organizations. But the marchers and the activists who organized them will soon have to address what follows the demonstrations. In addition to channeling the energy they've built, they will also need to contend with tensions that have emerged within the scientific community over this political turn. "We have no intention of letting this stop after April 22," said Dr. Caroline Weinberg, a public health researcher and co chairwoman of the march. "I will have considered it pretty much a failure if after April 22 all of this movement and all of this passion dissipates." Most eyes will be on Washington, where the main march will occur. But there will also be rallies in medical hubs like Boston, technology centers like San Francisco and even in the heart of oil and gas country, Oklahoma City. The strength of these satellite events could be important indicators of where the activism generated by the march will head in the future. For the past three months Dr. Weinberg and volunteers from across the country have been coordinating the protest, which will take place on Earth Day at the National Mall. The group partnered with the Earth Day Network because it had large scale event planning experience as well as a permit for the Mall on Earth Day. The day will begin with teach in sessions, followed by a four hour rally featuring Bill Nye the Science Guy, Dr. Mona Hanna Attisha, the pediatrician who helped expose lead poisoning in Flint, Mich., and Lydia Villa Komaroff, who helped produce insulin from bacteria, among others, before culminating with the march. For Dr. Weinberg, the idea to march began in late January when she heard that the Trump administration had ordered federal agencies to temporarily halt external communications that inform the public. She found a group of scientists on Twitter who shared her concerns. Their march, with the rallying cry of "Science, not Silence," was inspired by the Women's March on Washington. Kishore Hari, who does outreach for the University of California, San Francisco, has worked as a liaison between the national group and its satellite marches. As more events were organized around the United States, he said the conventional narrative about the marches changed. "The idea that scientists are leading the march started to evaporate when these small towns started to show up," he said. "I started to see teachers, farmers and factory workers; nonscientists are leading these marches and that's uplifting." Jocelyn Barton, a clinical psychologist and one of the organizers of the march in Oklahoma City, said that the rally was an opportunity to show that her city, which is a big oil town in a conservative region of the country, is as passionate about science as other cities. "I'm proud of people who are willing to say you can be a person of faith and a scientist, you can be politically conservative and advocate for science, and that's what's happening here," she said. After establishing their website and crafting their mission statements, the scientists quickly found themselves under the microscope. Across social media, people were picking apart every word of the organization's public message. In response, the organizers changed the document's language (the statement has been updated several times). But that upset other scientists who felt the organization was reproducing the status quo in science, in which women and minorities have been historically marginalized. "It set off alarm bells," said Zuleyka Zevallos an applied sociologist from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. "How can we trust them to look after inclusion and accessibility if they are going to buckle under pressure?" Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and the march's co director of partnerships and a member of its diversity team, said diversity and inclusion have been core parts of the march since its beginning, but the group has had several brutally honest conversations to make sure their messaging aligned with their values. The public conversations surrounding the march, she said, are an important step toward addressing discrimination problems within science. "It's shining a light on the scientific community, airing its dirty laundry in a way," said Dr. Johnson. "But I think that's a really valuable step in figuring out how we can do better as a community." The diversity concerns have also been joined with worries among some scientists especially those participating in science advocacy for the first time that they will lose credibility with the public by taking part in the march. As march organizers note, science has always been political, from the imprisonment of Galileo to the creation of the atomic bomb and beyond. But the polarization over some scientific issues in America became supercharged in the late 1980s and early 1990s as global environmental problems like the depleting ozone layer and climate change were increasingly being addressed by national policies. As the Soviet Union collapsed, conservative media began focusing more on environmental issues. "You start seeing headlines that say environmentalists are the new Marxists," said Aaron M. McCright, a sociologist at Michigan State University, who has studied the politicalization of science. That sentiment, he said, was built among conservatives during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, and exploded during the Obama presidency, with climate change denial becoming a kind of litmus test for conservatism. Dr. McCright said that the March for Science will most likely further the partisan divide over scientific issues, especially if there are no prominent conservative speakers, mostly because the media echo chambers that individuals follow will frame the event for them. Another researcher, John Kotcher of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, found no evidence that science related activism affected the science community's credibility with the public, at least when applied to climate change. Although his study does not definitively answer the question for all fields of science, Dr. Kotcher said "it does challenge the conventional wisdom that all forms of science advocacy will harm the credibility of scientists and their colleagues." What Comes Next Protests like the March for Science can lead to political changes, according to Stan A. Veuger, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. But he said that depends on "big turnouts and constant follow through." By observing the effects of the Tea Party's Tax Day protest in 2009, Dr. Veuger and his colleagues found that locations where demonstrations were well attended were more likely to see high voter turnout for Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections. But a key factor, he said, was the continued efforts by the Tea Party activists to volunteer in their neighborhoods for their cause. That may hold a lesson for the march's organizers, of which they're aware. "I see the Science March as a coming out party for scientists who have always been careful about getting involved in political advocacy and activism," said Lucky Tran, a molecular biologist who works as a science communicator at Columbia University, and a member of the march's steering committee. "I don't think we should see this as a one off event." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Museums often organize exhibitions celebrating the anniversary of the birth or death of major artists. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is taking a slightly different tack next spring. To mark the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago, the museum has organized "The Train: RFK's Last Journey," an unconventional blend of historical photographs and cutting edge projects. On March 17, 2018, the museum will put on view its recently acquired portfolio of 26 large color prints taken by a Magnum photographer, Paul Fusco, now 87. On June 8, 1968, working for Look magazine, Mr. Fusco rode the train carrying the body of Kennedy from New York City, where it had lain at St. Patrick's Cathedral, to Washington, D.C., where the former attorney general was interred at Arlington National Cemetery. The trip between the two cities, usually four hours, took eight because thousands of distraught men, women and children, many holding American flags and signs reading, "So long, Bobby," lined the tracks to pay their respects. Mr. Fusco took more than 1,000 photographs. A few years ago, when Rein Jelle Terpstra, a Dutch photographer, noticed that lots of people in Mr. Fusco's prints were holding cameras, he decided to track down some of them. After crowd sourcing on Facebook as well as contacting local churches and community centers, he found dozens of people who still had scrapbook photographs, snapshots in attic boxes and amateur movies of the funeral train as it passed by. Also inspired by Mr. Fusco's portfolio, the French conceptual artist Philippe Parreno went the re enactment route, renting a train and dressing people like the onlookers in Mr. Fusco's photographs. Mr. Parenno's 70 mm, high definition film is seven minutes long. Clement Cheroux, the senior curator of photography at the museum, told me, "This multidisciplinary exhibition mixing still and moving images, historical and contemporary works, vernacular material and high art is exactly the type of show I am interested in promoting at SFMoMA." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Grant Gustin, who plays the title hero on "The Flash," and Eric Wallace, the showrunner for the series, spoke out publicly on Monday after the firing of Hartley Sawyer, an actor on the show. Sawyer was dismissed for tweets he made before joining the series in 2017. The tweets, which were recently resurfaced, included jokes about racism and several remarks against women. Gustin wrote on Instagram: "I will say I was shocked, saddened and angry when I saw the tweets. Words matter." In a joint statement, the network and the show's producers, Warner Bros. TV and Berlanti Productions, announced that the actor would not return for the new season in the fall. It also stated: "We do not tolerate derogatory remarks that target any race, ethnicity, national origin, gender or sexual orientation. Such remarks are antithetical to our values and polices, which strive and evolve to promote a safe, inclusive and productive environment for our workforce." On May 30, Sawyer posted an apology on Instagram which read, in part: "I'm not here to make excuses regardless of the intention, my words matter and they carry profound consequences." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times At Google's New York offices, a tiny room with bright green walls and a maze of wires had been transformed into something resembling a science lab, by way of a Danny Kaye movie. But instead of microscopes and white coats, there were dancers and leotards. The dancers' bodies were wired to move, though not just for movement's sake: This was a laboratory for dance experiments. Google through Google Arts and Culture is on a mission to find new ways of braiding technology with culture. For two weeks in May it partnered with the Martha Graham Dance Company for a residency in which members of the Graham team worked with artists and Google technologists on several experiments. (Google has held several artist residencies in its lab in Paris, but this is the first time dance has been featured.) It's fitting: The company's founder, Martha Graham (1894 1991), was a revolutionary. Considered the mother of modern dance, she transformed her art form by stripping her movement, rooted in the pelvis, down to its purest essence. This isn't the first time the Graham organization and Google have teamed up. The first came in 2011 when they created the Google doodle in honor of Graham's 117th birthday. Next, beginning in 2015, was a partnership with Google Arts and Culture to create exhibitions for the Google site. The residency didn't just expand the Graham company's relationship with Google. It was also a continuation of what Janet Eilber, the group's artistic director, has been doing for years experimenting with Graham's core collection of works and technique. "We have discovered that the essential Graham canon the very best of Graham is so pure that it can be dressed up in a whole variety of ways and still speak clearly," Ms. Eilber said in an interview. "You can decorate it in many different ways or use it as a springboard for many different things." For Ms. Eilber, technology is a tool with which to do that. Would Graham approve? "She, if anyone, understood and desired new ways of getting to audiences," Ms. Eilber said. "Martha wanted those techniques." "Let's do the pelvis," the visual artist SoHyun Bae said in one of the sessions. Ms. Bae was referring to "Pelvic Terrain," from her "Jasper Lake" series of paintings that inspired a new work created with Tilt Brush a Google tool used to make 3D paintings. The result was a virtual reality environment for dance improvisation. As the Graham dancer Natasha Diamond Walker put on a virtual reality headset, Ms. Bae said, "Just think of yourself as water." Onlookers couldn't see what Ms. Diamond Walker was looking at through the headset the environment Ms. Bae had created but her sudden stillness registered that she was enthralled. "Oh, wow," she said softly. "I see a pelvis here. And a tailbone." Gradually, Ms. Diamond Walker began to move, stretching ribbonlike arms as she carved through the space. Ms. Eilber asked three other dancers, Laurel Dalley Smith, Xin Ying and Ms. Souder, to enter the performance area, one by one. "You decide when to come in," she said. "Build off the nymph that goes in before you." The three additional dancers, headset free and interacting with Ms. Diamond Walker, mirrored movement quality of one another, sequentially. It was a sensual, gossamer melding of bodies that grew increasingly layered. When it was over, Ms. Diamond Walker described the environment she had seen in the headset: "You could see the brush strokes there were no sharp endings. It was feathered out and curved like a ripple almost, like if you had dropped something into water." It's a sensorial shift for dancers to enter virtual reality, one that has changed their relationship with their bodies and with their dancing. "You become so absorbed in your world that it's almost freer," Ms. Dalley Smith said. "You're not so self conscious; you're not thinking or just feeling about what's coming next. You're fed by this world." Before the residency, Ms. Bae spent months making charcoal sketches of the Graham dancers at the company's studios simply because, as she put it, "I feel so alive watching them." She became proficient with Tilt Brush, which aided her in creating 3D performance landscapes, but she also painted while the dancers performed essentially tracing their shapes and moving with them as they did sections from Graham works or Graham inspired improvisations. She often finished those sessions as out of breath as they were. Of these experiments, Ms. Eilber said, "They didn't transcend, but they did tell us what the potential was going to be." Over the years, Ms. Eilber has invited contemporary choreographers to create "Lamentation Variations" as a way to expand on and explore the solo's breadth. For the Google residency, the company teamed up with Tyler Henry, who, with a Kinect camera, used optical flow, which tracks movement, to recast the solo. As Ms. Diamond Walker performed it with her body half obscured behind a scrim archival images from past performances flashed by, mirroring her positions as the Kinect camera pulled photographs from a database that Mr. Henry had created. "With our dancer dancing behind the scrim and then the rapid fire harrowing poses from other generations overlaid on top of her," Ms. Eilber said, "it transformed and transcended into being a real work of art." For Ms. Diamond Walker, the process was eerie. She could see the images of past dancers, including Graham, go by their poses revealing profound pain and grief as she moved through the choreography in slow motion. "It was kind of outer body or supernatural," she said. "I would hold a certain movement until Martha Graham's image through the data clicked in to view. Suddenly, we would be doing it together. It was almost like dancing with spirits or the ghosts of lamenters past. It was very emotional." "You're kind of seduced by the technology," Ms. Eilber said. "But pretty quickly I realized, wait a minute why us? Why dancers, and why Martha Graham dancers? That has to be part of the equation. Otherwise, you're just playing around like you're at a kid's birthday party." In the coming weeks, the company will discuss how the experiments that worked namely Mr. Henry's "Lamentation" can make their way into the real world. A couple of presenters, Ms. Eilber said, including Jacob's Pillow and Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are interested. "We're trying to put together something that is substantial enough to install somewhere, and we think we have a lot of the elements," she said. "It's just the time to think about next steps." And the question remains: Is it better than just dancing? "It's not that we're trying to make 'Lamentation' better, by any means," Ms. Eilber said. "We're trying to find new ways to consider Graham's art form." Collaborating with Google has allowed that to happen. "My main revelation was that Graham had to be about Graham being integrated with technology," she said, "not just playing around with technology. We don't feel like we reached the end of the journey, but we found potential." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WASHINGTON The House and Senate have reached agreement on a big package of measures to address the opioid epidemic. The legislation, backed by leaders of both parties, is a rare bipartisan achievement that lawmakers are eager to have in hand when they go home to campaign for the midterm elections. The 653 page bill contains a mix of law enforcement and public health measures, including one that aims to block deadly fentanyl from being imported through the mail and one that will allow more nurses to prescribe medication for opioid addiction. Another provision could make it easier for Medicaid recipients to get inpatient care for substance abuse over the next five years. "While there is more work to be done, this bipartisan legislation takes an important step forward and will save lives," a group of Republican and Democratic committee leaders said in a statement. But addiction experts say that while many of the measures will help incrementally, the investment remains meager and scattershot compared with what is needed, and with what the government spent to stem the tide of AIDS related deaths in the 1990s. With 72,000 overdose deaths in 2017, including nearly 50,000 involving opioids, members of Congress are eager to wield the bill as a substantive policy achievement amid the drama surrounding the fates of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, and Rod Rosenstein, his deputy attorney general. Both chambers still need to vote on the compromise bill. The House could vote as soon as Wednesday night, before its members adjourn to hit the campaign trail, and the Senate could take it up next week. The Congressional Budget Office has yet to score the new bill and estimate its cost, but an earlier Senate version would have cost an estimated 8 billion over five years. One of the most expensive provisions which had been a sticking point between the two chambers will repeal an obscure rule that blocks states from spending federal Medicaid dollars on residential addiction treatment at centers with more than 16 beds. The rule was originally intended to discourage warehousing of people with mental illnesses in psychiatric hospitals, which was far more common when it was written in 1965. More recently, the rule has limited the number of beds available for low income patients suffering from addiction, although there were several ways for states to circumvent it. Some addiction specialists worry that the bill's expansion of inpatient care will eclipse the importance of longer term outpatient programs that focus on medication assisted treatment, which researchers consider the gold standard for treating opioid addiction. Many residential programs for opioid addiction still don't offer such treatment as part of their protocol, and the bill does nothing to address that. "The evidence for residential stays is very thin in terms of science," said Dr. Ken Duckworth, medical director for behavioral health at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. "I'm not against the residential model, but the linchpin is that with it, you have to have exposure to medication assisted treatment." The opioids bill that the House passed in June limited the expansion of inpatient treatment only to patients with cocaine and opioid addiction; the Senate version left the old rule in place. The compromise bill lifts the rule for all substance use disorders for residential treatment lasting up to 30 days. The bill also permanently allows nurse practitioners and physician assistants to prescribe buprenorphine, an anti addiction medication that requires a special license and extra training. Only about 5 percent of the nation's doctors are licensed to prescribe it, and shortages are especially acute in rural regions. The bill further aims to increase access to the medication by allowing nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives and clinical nurse specialists to prescribe buprenorphine for the next five years. It will require the United States Postal Service to start collecting information on international mail shipments, just as private carriers like Fed Ex and DHL already have to do. By the end of this year, the Postal Service will need to provide the name and address of the sender and the contents of the package, as described by the sender, for at least 70 percent of all international packages, including all of those from China. It will have to provide the information on all such shipments by the end of 2020. The Postal Service could block or destroy shipments for which the information is not provided. The bill would provide funds for researching and developing new nonaddictive painkillers. It would also allow the Food and Drug Administration to require that certain opioids be dispensed in packaging that limits their abuse potential for example, in blister packs that provide only a few days' supply. What's not in the bill Missing from the final bill is a contentious provision that had nothing to do with opioids but that the pharmaceutical industry had pushed hard for. It would have softened a requirement that drug manufacturers start providing larger discounts next year to Medicare beneficiaries whose spending on prescription drugs falls in a coverage gap called the "doughnut hole." The measure, which would have cost the federal government 4 billion, met with fierce opposition from consumer advocates and some members of Congress. Also missing, according to many addiction treatment providers and researchers, is the vastly larger investment needed to truly stem the tide of overdose deaths and provide effective treatment on demand. As a model, they point to the Ryan White Care Act, a bipartisan bill that Congress passed in 1990, which has allowed for billions of dollars in treatment and other support for people with H.I.V. and AIDS, including antiretroviral drugs for anyone without insurance. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, both Democrats, have proposed legislation modeled on the Ryan White Act that would provide 100 billion over 10 years for addiction treatment and other supports. But the proposal has gone nowhere. "Compared to how we responded to AIDS, it's a failure," said Keith Humphreys, a Stanford professor who advised both the Senate and House on their earlier bills, of the new version. "The Republicans didn't want to spend, so they agreed on every second tier issue they could." Still, he added, "If you look at it in terms of the incredible dysfunction of Congress on everything, it's actually one of the few things they've been able to do together as parties." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Inexpensive gas has made fuel efficiency less important to buyers these days, but, the Environmental Protection Agency's regulations are forcing automakers to improve gas mileage. Many people are unaware that Hyundai offers the seventh generation Sonata with a second gen hybrid powertrain. Even better (SOUND UP) there's also a plug in model. (ON CAMERA) This car's only real competition is the Ford Fusion Energi. Now, if electric only range is really important to you know that Ford rates it at 19 miles, this one goes 27. Chevy Volt will go 50 miles on its battery pack but it's definitely a smaller car. The plug in version costs about 3,600 more than the standard Sonata hybrid once a 4,910 federal tax credit is applied. The two share a 2 liter gas engine, but the electric motor that's built into the transmission is more powerful in the plug in. (ON CAMERA) The 50kW drive motor takes the place of the torque converter and if you don't know what that is, know that it's creative engineering. Sonata's lithium polymer battery, which charges overnight on 120 current, takes a good chunk out of the trunk. More on that later. Sonata fans will notice the nose and tail are different from gas only models. (SOUND UP CAR TAKING OFF) The advantage of a plug in hybrid? I'm seeing 25 miles of pure electric range. (ON CAMERA) In all electric EV mode though it feels quite different than most electric cars because all of them that I can think of like the Tesla Model S here have single speed fixed gear ratios. Sonata here has a six speed transmission. (SOUND OF CAR TAKING OFF) After the battery is spent, there's no range anxiety, Sonata seamlessly defaults to a standard hybrid. Think of it as an electric car with training wheels. At speeds over 75 miles an hour the gas engine is forced on. (ON CAMERA) This is not a sporty car, it's meant to be comfortable, and the ride quality is very controlled. It's also very quiet, due in part to aerodynamics. Packed with tech it doesn't feel like driving a science experiment unless you call up screens that Bill Nye the Science Guy would appreciate. Remember, Sonata Plug In doesn't NEED to be charged up, but that would be missing the point huh? (ON CAMERA) Hybrids have a reputation for being underpowered (SOUND UP) 0 60 runs happen in about eight seconds, not too shabby. and the low end torque from the electric motor make it feel faster. (ON CAMERA) Fuel economy? Well, I find that it's easy to get forty miles per gallon in hybrid mode driving like a normal person. Concentrating on the unique gauges would improve that. When sipping gas, the plug in model is slightly less efficient that the standard Sonata Hybrid. (ON CAMERA) There are some fuel efficiency aids. At certain speeds when using the navi system, it will actually tell you when to coast, improving efficiency by about three percent. Sonata hardly looks like the Starship Enterprise. That continue inside, the conservative cabin appears much like the gas only version. This top end Limited model with adaptive cruise control, heated and vented leather chairs, plus a heated wheel retails for 39,435 before any government credits and incentives. The touchscreen interface is straightforward with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, there's a handy place for phones. Sadly, a sunroof is NOT available. (ON CAMERA) If you're worried the batter compromises the back seat, don't it's very roomy. Two adults have loads of space back here, and three will be fine so long as the 600 mile total range of the car isn't being tested. But, lets say you do. With all seats filled, it means somebody travels without a suitcase, or the group needs smaller luggage. I suspect this alone will steer people toward the standard Sonata hybrid with a larger trunk. Not only does Hyundai's 10 year 100,000 mile warranty apply, the battery pack is covered for the life of the car. Numbers and efficiency aren't exciting, but the conservatively handsome Sonata Plug In Hybrid is very refined and spacious, as long as a large trunk isn't needed. Because really, how long can this cheap gas thing go on? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
You know a film is a hit when a tourism office or a hotel marketing company starts suggesting a vacation inspired by it (e.g., "50 Shades of Grey" hotel packages and "Hunger Games" tours of Atlanta). But these can have a forced feel. There is a way to extend the feeling of seeing a movie by traveling to a place that calls to mind the themes it covers. This year, in time for the Oscars, we've put together a list of such destinations for each of the eight films nominated for best picture. This year's crop covers significant emotional ground. From the real Texas locations in "Boyhood" to the fictional European ones in "The Grand Budapest Hotel," the nominees traverse a good amount of physical territory as well. For our list, some places match directly with locations shown in the film, while others evoke the spirit of their movies' narratives. Film: The Theory of Everything At the beginning of James Marsh's film "The Theory of Everything," the audience sees Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) as they are unlikely to have seen him before, biking with a friend through the streets of Cambridge. The energy of that moment is reflected in the lush greenery and the stately buildings that line their path. They bike past King's College Chapel, among other landmarks. They attend a party where Stephen first meets Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones). These early scenes, from rowing on the river Cam to attending classes at Cambridge University, give a sense of the beauty of the town, one demarcated by centuries old architecture and varied activities. And they show the younger, more active days of a man whose physical capacities would by stunted by ALS. Viewers inspired by Dr. Hawking's youthful moments might be drawn to the sights Cambridge has to offer. One great way to do this is on a punting tour down the Cam to view the "backs" of the various Cambridge colleges. The town is great for biking and walking as well. The architecture of the churches is particularly notable, and a visit to King's College Chapel is essential, which includes the world's largest fan vault and panels of dramatic medieval stained glass. This year marks the 500th anniversary of the completion of its stonework. For art, visitors have their choice of a handful of museums, but the most robust collection is housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum. With its neo Classical architecture, that museum is host to a stunning permanent collection, from ancient world art up to present day paintings. Because of its degree of secrecy, the work of the SEALs often seems more elusive than other parts of the military. Some of its workings are revealed even celebrated at the National Navy UDT SEAL Museum, the only one devoted to presenting and remembering the work of this branch. Visitors can get a deeper understanding of the history of the special operations group and explore artifacts from past missions. One on view is the Maersk Alabama lifeboat where Capt. Richard Phillips was held hostage by Somali pirates until they were taken down by SEAL snipers. Another is the model of Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which was donated to the museum in 2012. The museum also includes models of ATVs used in Operation Desert Storm, and small submersibles used to send a groups of SEALs on covert maritime missions. A memorial is on the grounds, too, with a bronze sculpture of a combat swimmer as its centerpiece, to honor SEALs lost during battle. Place: "Sleep No More" at the McKittrick Hotel, New York City "Birdman," with its weaving camerawork, takes place mostly backstage in Broadway's St. James Theater. It follows its lead, the actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), through the bowels of that theater, up and down stairs, through corridors and into cluttered rooms. The camera moves with Riggan and the other players throughout, following them onstage for performances. The St. James does not currently offer backstage tours (and is gearing up for a new musical, "Something Rotten," to begin performances there in March), but there is a better way in New York to recreate the haunting, you are there experience of "Birdman": the production "Sleep No More." This mostly wordless show, at the McKittrick Hotel (which is a set of warehouses converted into a giant performance space) allows audience members to freely wander down corridors, up stairs, following its characters from one room to another. Sometimes that leads to a sequence where the cast gathers together in one large room. In the way that "Birdman" makes backstage part of the performance with unexpected turns, "Sleep No More" makes every one of its rooms theatrical, with a seemingly endless set of ways to experience it. The emotional scope of the film "Boyhood" is expansive, covering the life of the character Mason (Ellar Coltrane), from the ages of 6 to 18. Its setting is also expansive, taking place all around Texas, chronicling family relocations, road trips and milestones. The state helps to shape the characters in this drama, from the Austin based filmmaker Richard Linklater. Austin plays host to many scenes, while San Marcos and Houston also factor in. But one scene near the film's end, in which Mason takes a hiking trip with new college friends and reflects on life, takes place in Texas's largest state park, Big Bend Ranch. The writer and director Wes Anderson set his film "The Grand Budapest Hotel" in a fictional location, the Republic of Zubrowka, placing the hotel of the title remotely at the top of a mountain. He and his production designer, Adam Stockhausen, looked at archival images of European vacation spots to come up with its look. They also took cues from the architecture of the Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary. That hotel, with its neo Baroque architecture, reflects the classical feel of the hotel used in Mr. Anderson's film. Visitors have room options ranging from a single room (at a very reasonable rate) up to a presidential apartment, which includes a living room, dining room, bedroom and lush views of the town. The hotel also has a royal spa, with a steam bath, a salt cave and a relaxation pool. Patrons may also be interested in visiting the many hot springs around the town, like the Thermal Spring Colonnade, which sports a glass chimney. Grandhotel Pupp is no stranger to recent films. Shoots there have included "Last Holiday" and "Casino Royale," both released in 2006. Morten Tyldum's drama "The Imitation Game" looks at the life of the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Much of the film is set in Bletchley Park, the home base for the Government Code and Cypher School, where Mr. Turing and his team worked to crack the German Enigma codes during World War II. While the film was shot in other places that recreated portions of Bletchley Park, the filmmakers went to the real Bletchley Park, now a museum, for inspiration on the sets. They were given full access to the archives there to help them be as accurate as possible. Rather than a film that spans the life of the minister and activist the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Selma" zeroes in on one period, the organizing and executing of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. The period is short, but the film fully forms the spirit and character of Dr. King on screen during this time. Fans of the film, and of Dr. King, can explore much deeper at the historic site in Atlanta centered on his boyhood home. That two story home, at 501 Auburn Avenue, is open for guided tours each day. Other places worth exploring within the site include Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King was baptized. The church has undergone renovations to help restore some of its exteriors. The King Center includes the largest collection of archived source materials on the work of Dr. King. There, the crypt of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King sits on an island in the middle of a reflecting pool. One particularly beautiful part of the site is the "I Have a Dream" World Peace Rose Garden, which was initially planted in 1992. It's one of five such peace promoting gardens around the world and was designed in color blocks to represent different areas of Dr. King's life and work. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It seems obvious that there would be more injuries, and more serious ones, among high school and college athletes in football or soccer or lacrosse than, say, in running or tennis. But, how many more, and at what economic cost? Those figures turned out to be hard to come by, researchers at Yale discovered, but, using the best data available, they calculated that if contact sports could be made noncontact like flag football, for example there would be 49,600 fewer injuries among male college athletes per year and 601,900 fewer among male high school athletes. The savings which include estimates of medical costs and time lost could be as much as 1.5 billion per year for colleges and 19.2 billion per year for high schools. And that takes into account only the immediate consequences of an injury, a paper by the researchers says, not the long term effects of concussions or repeated jarring of the brain in collisions. Or the repercussions of ligament tears, which can lead to a greater than 50 percent risk of arthritis a decade later, said Dr. Mininder Kocher, a professor of orthopedics at Harvard Medical School. "The issue really is that contact is the driving force in all these major injuries," said Ray Fair, an economics professor at Yale and the senior author of the paper. "Any sport that does not have contact, the injuries are not that great." Fair and his colleagues focused on four types of serious injuries concussions and damage to the nervous system, bone injuries, torn tissue, and muscle and cartilage injuries. They are the sort that can sideline an athlete for months. And football players, who have the most injuries, can have one after the other, as happened to the son of Terry O'Neil, founder of Practice Like Pros, a group that focuses on making the sport safer for young players. O'Neil's son had six major injuries as a quarterback in high school two concussions, three fractures on his passing hand and a torn knee ligament. 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. What Will the Giants Do With Daniel Jones? The team must evaluate the quarterback ahead of a contract decision. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "He missed half the games in his high school career," O'Neil said. "You sit there with your heart in your mouth as a parent watching the games." Other athletes suffer for the rest of their lives from injuries in collegiate contact sports. Janet M. Currie, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, says her father, now 80, has had a bad knee ever since he played football in college. "That's 60 years with pain," she said. Many more people play sports in high school than in college, so for that reason alone there are more injuries in the younger group. But high school athletes are also more prone to injuries, experts said, because they are not as skilled, they have less experienced coaches and they may not be physically mature. More high school students play football than any other sport, in part because teams often have 30 to 40 players or even more. There are about a million football players in high school, said Dr. Robert Cantu, a founder of the Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center at Boston University and the medical director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That number dwindles to 100,000 in college, he said. "Even if the injury rate is similar, because 10 times as many kids are playing in high school, the total number of injuries is way higher and expensive," Cantu said. "And kids on the high school level don't have good coaching, and some of these kids should never be playing," he added. But what is important about the Yale analysis is the focus on the economic cost of these serious injuries, experts said. Already, the cost of football is weighing on some private high schools, Cantu said. Insurance for football players has become so expensive, he said, that "a number of schools have decided this is a sport they will not continue." Kocher, who is also the associate director of the sports medicine division at Boston Children's Hospital, hopes that a focus on the cost of collision sports might lead to some serious funding for injury prevention. "There is a lot of lip service about prevention, but not much money," he said. There also is not much money for reporting injuries, Cantu said, and what data exists can be hard to collect for studies. The states mandate concussion reporting, he noted, but do not provide funds for it. The sort of data that Fair, the Yale professor, gathered is "the best that's out there, but it is not complete." That, though, is all too typical for health data, Currie said. "One of the reasons why health research is so backward," she said, "is that it is very hard to get the data for most health projects." Fair said he and other faculty members at Yale would never allow their children or grandchildren to play contact sports. So, he added, "do we want our students to play?" But O'Neil said playing football had been such a wonderful experience for his son that he had no regrets, despite his son's injuries. And that point of view, said Roger Noll, a sports economist at Stanford, is what critics are up against. He said he admired Fair's paper and had sent it to Stanford's athletic director. But Noll is not optimistic that even a stark look at injury rates and costs will have much of an effect, especially in football, the most dangerous contact sport. When he goes to Stanford football games, he said, one of the things he notices is the television production people on the sideline walking around with parabolic microphones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Throughout its original run, my mother watched "Murder, She Wrote" every Sunday night. I was 6 years old in 1984 when it premiered, and by the time I was around 10, I'd developed a love of mysteries and shows like "Matlock" and "Quincy." Yet I had no interest in the detective Jessica "J.B." Fletcher and her adventures at the time. When my mom turned on "Murder, She Wrote," I'd leave the room. My only explanation for this serious lapse in judgment is that I had no idea who Angela Lansbury was. Andy Griffith and Jack Klugman were American figureheads in my eyes, thanks to old reruns of "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Odd Couple." I couldn't have picked Lansbury out of a lineup. But in 2014, I learned that the entire series was streaming on Netflix and decided to give it a try one day when I was bored. I expected I would probably watch half an episode and turn it off, but I was drawn in immediately. The two part pilot, titled "The Murder of Sherlock Holmes," felt like it could have been written by either of my favorite classic mystery authors, Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It introduces Jessica as a schoolteacher and widow who has just written a best selling debut novel and gets tangled up in a murder investigation at her publisher's estate. What really drew me to the show, however, was Jessica herself. Brilliantly embodied by Lansbury, she is a sassy, smart and funny older woman who despite not knowing how to drive is totally independent. As she travels the world, she seems as comfortable in Cairo as she does back home in Maine. While she has many admirers, she doesn't have any interest in moving on from her dead husband Frank. She has no children. This is not as sad as it sounds; she's genuinely happy with life. Her contentment without kids made me feel more secure about my own choice to not become a parent. When it comes up in conversation, I'm often told I will regret the decision, and some wonder who will take care of me when I am older. But Jessica, who seemed to have an abundance of friends and extended family, showed me that being a senior woman doesn't mean that you will be alone in the world. Setting aside the dead bodies and the half serious fan theories imagining her as the real killer in each case, she might be the healthiest, most stable character I have ever seen on television. Eventually, the show permeated my life. I became a bit obnoxious. That show you are talking about is great, but did it run for 12 seasons and four TV movies? My obsession became a bit of a joke among the people I know. One day, a colleague dubbed me Angela Fansbury, and this time, an idea was born: I started an Instagram fan account a few days later. Every day for almost two years , I posted screenshots of my favorite scenes from the show, until I ran out of content. These days I keep it going by reposting old content for fun. Eventually my enthusiasm began to rub off on my husband, who has never been a fan of crime shows but started watching "Murder, She Wrote" on his own. It was a chance for us to share a genre I loved we would often talk about the silly plotlines and the wild ways in which Jessica would catch the killers. (In one episode, she impersonates the sister of a murdered brothel owner and winds up running the brothel herself during the investigation.) We've even traveled to Washington just to see Lansbury in a play, and have begun watching her old movies, like the Disney feature "Bedknobs and Broomsticks." How did I miss out on her earlier work? Can I blame my parents for this? (My mom, who'd wanted me to watch "Murder, She Wrote" with her when I was younger, is amused by my 180 degree pivot. She doesn't remember any of the plotlines, but I still like to discuss episodes with her as I rewatch them.) One of my favorite episodes came late in the series, right before it was canceled. In the 12th season, "Murder, She Wrote" moved from Sunday nights to Thursdays where it aired against "Friends." The series, which had never ranked outside Nielsen's Top 20, dropped to 67th place. The writers had their fun, though the 16th episode of the season, "Murder Among Friends," featured Jessica solving a murder on the set of a television show called "Buds." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
SEATTLE Pacific Northwest Ballet opens in Manhattan on Wednesday with a program of new ballets at the Joyce Theater. Last weekend, however, here in its hometown, the company could be seen at full stretch in George Balanchine's three part "Jewels." I caught three performances at the Marion Oliver McCaw Hall from Friday to Sunday. The troupe's Balanchine style is milder in dynamics than New York City Ballet's, but the dancers fill the theater with light, radiant, musical dancing. Even in advance, this revival the company's first since 2009 featured several special points of interest. The ballet, staged by Elyse Borne, had been coached by five of its original 1967 lead dancers Violette Verdy and Mimi Paul ("Emeralds"), Edward Villella ("Rubies"), Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d'Amboise ("Diamonds"). The company's orchestra, surely the finest ballet band in America, is celebrating its 25th anniversary all season. And Carla Korbes, among the world's greatest ballerinas today, was giving her final performances of Balanchine repertory in her farewell season with Pacific Northwest. The troupe has long been eminent among America's Balanchine diaspora. This revival demonstrates a commitment unsurpassed in the Balanchine world today to ballet's generation to generation system of passing on insights about the repertory. (Remember that Ms. Verdy and Ms. Paul had also coached the company's 2009 revival of "Emeralds.") After giving the farewell performances of Kent Stowell's "Nutcracker" (with celebrated Maurice Sendak designs) this Christmastime, the company in 2015 dances "George Balanchine's 'The Nutcracker' " (the clumsy title insisted on by the Balanchine Trust), with new designs by Ian Falconer. This will intensify the company's Balanchine connection. One of Pacific Northwest Ballet's engaging traditions is that, after each performance in McCaw Hall's main theater, the artistic director, Peter Boal, has a public conversation downstairs in the lecture hall with company dancers. Mr. Boal is a wonderfully gentle, relaxed, funny interlocutor; he presents two dancers each time. I attended two of these talks; it was gratifying to hear dancers in their 20s speaking with enthusiastic fascination about how these first generation coaches, whose ages span 69 to 80, had not just adjusted details of text but had also provided insights on general features of Balanchine style (partnering with just the light touch of the fingertips for support, for example). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Slopes Are Green at Copenhagen's First Ski Hill. Really. In Copenhagen, the Danish capital that pledges to become the world's first carbon neutral city by 2025, a 410 foot tall smoke stack is a cause for celebration and the massive incinerator beneath it the latest tourist attraction. Especially if you bring skis. The Amager Bakke powerplant, designed by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, turns local trash by incineration into low carbon energy. The process, as designed, is so clean that the facility's roof has been created to be a recreational area. "CopenHill" opened October 4, with hiking trails, a fitness center, even an artificial ski slope on its slanted roof. "Amager Bakke is the embodiment of how we want to combine sustainable thinking and innovative architecture with recreational facilities when developing the city," said Frank Jensen, Copenhagen's mayor, in an email. The 12 floor facility, in the formerly industrial area of Amager Island, was built with a facade of glazed windows and stacked aluminum bricks (these double as planters). A large glass elevator offers a ride straight to the top and a glimpse of the plant and its silver gray machinery. Once on its roof, visitors enjoy a bird's eye view of the city, the Oresund bridge linking Denmark to Sweden and Sweden itself. They can also access the 1,480 foot artificial ski slope, but there's no snow. Instead, green synthetic bristles cover the hill, aiming to provide the same friction as a freshly groomed slope (it might be a little rougher on the skin). Three magic carpets, ideal for children and beginners, and one drag lift give access to the slope's levels of difficulty: green for beginners at the bottom, blue for intermediate and red for seasoned skiers at the top. "It takes typically three runs to adjust your mind to skiing on a green dry surface. It's very technical," said Kenneth Boggild, secretary general of Ski Federation Denmark. "Wear long sleeves, gloves, long pants and a helmet in case you fall." There's also a freestyle park, a slalom course, a fitness area, staircases on both sides for those elevator avoidant and plans for the world's highest artificial 280 foot climbing wall. Landscaped by SLA, a landscape architecture firm based in Copenhagen, the area looks like a mountain field, with 7,000 bushes, 300 pine and willow trees, various plants and real grass that grows through the artificial bristles. "It's so unique," said Martin Kroyer, a local mountain biker who recently raced up the hill. "We have no mountains in Denmark. Where else can you go and have, I mean, just this view?" At the top, a panoramic restaurant, once completely constructed, will serve Danish delicacies. At the bottom of the slope sits a ski rental shop, a ski school and apres ski bar. Admission to the landscaped park and top platform is free. CopenHill officials expect 300,000 visitors per year and recommend that skiers and snowboarders book their time slot online via Hourly rate for skiing is 150 krone or 22, without insurance, and extras like ski lessons and rental equipment (a full rental package, including a helmet costs 150 krone) can also be booked if needed. Inside, two thirds of the facility's floor space is used for trash incineration. The plant, which is run by the Amager Ressource Center, opened in the summer of 2017. In 2018, roughly 450,000 tons of garbage was fed into two furnaces and converted into electricity for 30,000 households and heating for 72,000 households. Showcasing that sustainability can also be used to increase our quality of life is the basis of much of the work done by CopenHill's architect, Bjarke Ingels, with his firm, BIG. Overall, the 590 million municipal power plant and its 14 million privately funded urban mountain took 10 years from conception to completion. The facility is a short bike ride from the world renowned restaurant Noma and the street food market Reffen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It was probably inevitable that becoming Joe Biden's running mate would result in controversy over Kamala Harris's heritage. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and whose father emigrated from Jamaica, is a woman of Tamil and African ancestry who identifies as Black. That's why, after Biden's announcement, she was described as the first Asian American and African American woman on a major party presidential ticket. Not everyone thought this was the right description for Harris. Several allies of President Trump, for example, were quick to dispute the idea that Harris was or could be Black. The radio host Mark Levin said Harris's Jamaican origins placed her outside the category of African American. "Kamala Harris is not an African American, she is Indian and Jamaican," Levin said. "Her ancestry does not go back to American slavery, to the best of my knowledge her ancestry does not go back to slavery at all." These objections are wrong. Jamaica, home to a brutal and violent plantation system, was at the center of the trans Atlantic slave trade, a major node in Britain's Atlantic empire, along with the Bahamas and its colonies on the North American coast. Many Jamaicans trace their origins directly to slavery and the mass importation of African captives. Based on a genealogical account by her father, there is a strong chance Kamala Harris is one of them. What's more, many descendants of enslaved people in the Americas have European ancestry on account of the pervasive sexual violence whites perpetuated wherever slavery took root. Having said all of that, this bid to contest Harris's identity which continued on Thursday with President Trump's clumsy attempt to stoke another "birther" controversy, this time about a woman born in Oakland in 1964 gives us an opportunity to think more deeply about the contours of racial identity in the United States, and Black American identity in particular. A note about terms: I've been using "Black" and "African American" somewhat interchangeably here. But there's a good case to be made that this is a mistake, that "Black" denotes a racial category and is inclusive of Americans throughout the African diaspora, while "African American" refers to national origins, specifically descendants of American slaves. But some Black Americans who are not descendants of slaves claim the term "African American," and some who are descendants do not. And "Black" also tends to be used in reference to the cultural heritage of Americans of African descent. This column is about "blackness" as a category and a culture, so I will stick with "Black" as my preferred terminology. My main point is this: Black American identity within the United States emerges from the interaction between structures of oppression slavery, the slave trade and race hierarchy and the needs and goals of those enmeshed within them. Slavery bound African captives together into a group; the desire to assert their personhood to build community, to find respite, to resist was cause to adopt a common identity. In turn, that common identity gave those individuals and their descendants a foundation from which to challenge the structures that bound them together in the first place. Race hierarchy and racism set in motion a process of group formation and social action, the aim of which was to transcend and overcome racial domination, and racial categorization itself. Here, precision is important. Black people did not create themselves as "a race." Race is an ideology, not a biological reality. It arose at a particular time in history, for particular reasons, in an effort to resolve the contradiction of a freedom loving society that held large parts of its population in bondage. The claim? That the enslaved were a different, lesser form of humanity. It was enslavers who deemed their African captives a "race," but it was those captives who made themselves into a people. Had things gone differently if the American Revolution had been emancipatory, for example, with a full commitment to total equality for all people in the new nation then Black Americans would have remained a people, but might no longer have been a "race." Race does not exist in the ether. It must be created and recreated, part of a hierarchical system of domination called racism, itself tied to the production and distribution of resources in our society. The violence and forced peonage of the post Reconstruction era; the segregation of Jim Crow; the white flight, deindustrialization and the ghettoization of inner cities all of these things created race. In other words, it is the reality of racism the ongoing production of race by institutions and structures of racial domination that fuels this process of group formation. In his 1940 book, "Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept," W. E. B. Du Bois captured this dynamic in a single sentence, the final point in an imagined dialogue with a white interlocutor. "The Black man," he wrote, "is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia." Bound together by segregation, discrimination and exploitation, Americans of African descent kept building community. And what is crucial to this question of the boundaries of blackness was the sheer rigidity of American race hierarchy. Your exact origins did not matter. Neither, for that matter, did your skin color. In his autobiography, "A Man Called White," a former head of the N.A.A.C.P., Walter Francis White, recounts a mob attack on his childhood home. White and his family his mother was said to be a descendant of President William Henry Harrison and Dilsia, an enslaved woman had light complexions, with few visible African features. "My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond," wrote White. They were, nonetheless, part of Atlanta's Black community, tied to it by heritage and history. It was those ties that made them a target, and it was that experience of racial violence that impressed on White his own identity: "In the flickering light the mob swayed, paused, and began to flow toward us. In that instant there opened up within me a great awareness; I knew then who I was. I was a Negro." The rigidity of race hierarchy in the United States is one important reason that African descended people from other parts of the world have identified with, and identified themselves as, Black Americans once in this country. They, too, were bound to the fate of the descendants of American slaves, thrown into this process of group formation. A quick look at some of the most prominent figures in Black American history will prove the point. Marcus Garvey, one of the most significant Black nationalists of the 20th century and the founder of one of the largest Black fraternal organizations in American history, was a native of Jamaica. Kwame Ture, born Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966 and 1967, was born in Trinidad. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black woman to compete for a major party presidential nomination, was the daughter of immigrants from Barbados and British Guiana. Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Colin Powell the list goes on. Let's return to Kamala Harris. Her family, as she explains in her 2019 memoir, grounded itself in the Black community of California's Bay Area. "From almost the moment she arrived from India," Harris writes of her mother, "she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the Black community. It was the foundation of her new American life." Harris, in turn, was raised to understand herself as a Black American. "My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women." Harris, for her part, claims her Black identity as much as her Indian heritage: "I was born Black. I will die Black. I'm not going to make excuses for anybody because they don't understand," she said in an interview in 2019. Because of heritage, upbringing and the realities of American racism, Harris calls herself Black and is also understood as Black by people within and outside the Black community. Her story illustrates the basic truth that "Black America" is a multitude. There has never been some essential element to blackness, no singular quality or attribute that makes someone a Black American. But there is always a context: the context of one's heritage, the context of one's community and the context of American racism. Perhaps, then, instead of asking "What makes someone Black?" it might be better to ask "Why do so many Americans of African descent claim blackness?" The answer, I think, is similar to what it was when most Black people still toiled in bondage. In the face of racism and racial oppression, Black identity links us to a history and to a culture, to tools to survive and resources to thrive. It provides refuge and spiritual sustenance. And it connects us to a vital tradition of struggle and perseverance, with many different visions for what it might mean to be free. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Here's the setup: The Phelans and the Lavecchias are longtime neighbors, and as the play begins, Theresa Phelan (Mr. Esper) and Roberta Lavecchia (Mr. Biehl) are sharing a plate of rainbow cookies and piles of family gossip. Theresa's son Tim (Mr. Esper again), the family golden boy, is back in town and newly engaged to a Korean American woman. Roberta's son, Robbie (also Mr. Biehl), lives at home and is smarting from a divorce. Her daughter, Daniela (Ms. Serralles, who also plays Daniela's father, Lon), is waiting for her boyfriend to propose. This is what the mothers believe, because these are roles and tropes they recognize. They are almost entirely wrong Arnulfo Maldonado's set is embellished with several sliding panels some wood grained, some wallpapered that slip across the stage noiselessly. The actors move between their roles almost as fluidly. Mr. Biehl, Mr. Esper, Ms. Serralles: Individually, these names brighten a cast list. To have them onstage together is a kindness and a gift. Under Ken Rus Schmoll's direction, typically cool and precise, they differentiate their roles but also twin them, showing how parents are echoed in their children. Does all that structural sophistication serve the play? The doubling, though often masterly (I'd swear Ms. Serralles's pants fit her differently as Daniela than as Lon), makes it harder to pin down any one character. In a drama especially one concerned with the mystery and haze of individual identity that's probably the point. But it makes some scenes harder to parse, which dulls the play's horror. And Ms. Chung's play is, in its tender way, a horror story: a dark parable about what happens if we try to swap roles or refuse to play along or reveal ourselves to our nearest without makeup or stage lights. Ms. Serralles's Daniela has witnessed a revelation like this. She describes it to her mother. "I go into that room," she says. "And in there, I can't stop screaming." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Labor Department has proposed a rule that would allow more federal contractors to base employment decisions on religion, a move that rights advocates said could be used to discriminate against workers for all manner of reasons. The proposal, announced on Wednesday, seeks "to provide the broadest protection of religious exercise recognized by the Constitution and other laws," the Labor Department said in a statement. It applies to a wide variety of organizations and companies that claim a religious goal as part of their mission. Naomi Goldberg, policy research director of the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank focused on equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, said the "proposed rule would permit taxpayer funded discrimination." "Examples of the type of discrimination this action condones include firing unmarried pregnant workers, workers who may not be coreligionists or who can't sign a statement of faith, unmarried cohabiting workers and L.G.B.T. workers," Ms. Goldberg said. In addition to this rule, the Trump administration is challenging other protections for gay and transgender workers. In three cases the Supreme Court will hear this fall, the administration is arguing that federal civil rights law does not prohibit employers from discriminating against such workers. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had previously ruled that such discrimination is illegal. Religious nonprofit organizations that receive federal contracts are currently exempt from rules covering other contractors that prevent religious discrimination. For example, a social services agency with a Jewish affiliation that receives a federal contract to feed disadvantaged children can insist on hiring a rabbi to oversee preparation of kosher food. The proposed rule appears to expand the scope of hiring and firing decisions in which contractors can invoke their religious tenets. While it was previously unclear if an agency that receives a federal contract could insist on hiring a Jewish janitor, the proposed rule appears to resolve that question in favor of the employer. The proposed rule would also extend the ability to discriminate in hiring and firing to all federal contractors, not just nonprofits, that identify their mission as including a religious purpose and practicing religion to advance that purpose. Under this definition, a privately held, for profit company like Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts chain whose owners have said they have sought to organize the company around their Christian beliefs, could refuse to hire a gay manager without risking the loss of a federal contract, which would normally preclude such discrimination. The public has 30 days to comment on the proposed rule, after which the department can issue a final version. Many advocates said they would expect a variety of legal challenges if it is enacted. 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. Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which advocates for the rights of people to express their religious faith, said the order was necessary to better align the religious exemption that exists for federal contractors with the broader exemption for religious organizations that exists under federal civil rights law. Under current law, a religious organization that is not a contractor could refuse to hire workers who do not share certain religious beliefs. Thousands of companies have federal contracts, for food and information technology services, the provision of furniture and military equipment, and much more. Holly Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a group that opposes government funded religion, said the rule would not override state laws intended to protect certain workers, which are not typically pre empted by federal rules. In explaining the purpose of the rule, the Labor Department said some religious organizations had indicated they were hesitant to apply for federal contracts because they were unsure if the existing religious exemption applied to them. "As people of faith with deeply held religious beliefs are making decisions on whether to participate in federal contracting, they deserve clear understanding of their obligations and protections under the law," Patrick Pizzella, the acting labor secretary, said in a statement. But Patricia A. Shiu, who ran the federal office that oversees compliance for federal contractors under President Barack Obama, said no contractors or prospective contractors had expressed such concerns during her more than seven years in the job. In 2014, Mr. Obama signed an executive order prohibiting contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, which was not forbidden by existing federal civil rights law. Ms. Shiu said she worried that the new rule could help employers evade that rule, but also that it would go much further in eroding civil rights protections. "My breath is taken away by the scope of this," she said. Jennifer C. Pizer, the law and policy director of Lambda Legal, an L.G.B.T. advocacy group, said the law had long held that the government could not deny public benefits to people who may have discriminatory views such as Christians who assert that their religious beliefs forbid homosexual relationships. But organizations have no similar entitlement to federal contracts. Historically, Ms. Pizer said, "if you want to work for the public, with public money, you have to be willing to employ the public." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Modified T cells in the freezer at the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility at the University of Pennsylvania. An experimental therapy has brought prolonged remissions to a high proportion of patients who were facing death from advanced leukemia after standard treatments had failed, researchers are reporting. The therapy involves genetically programming cells from the patient's own immune system to fight the disease. The research included 30 patients: five adults ages 26 to 60, and 25 children and young adults ages 5 to 22. All were severely ill, with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and had relapsed several times or had never responded to typical therapies. In more than half, the disease had come back even after a stem cell transplant, which usually gives patients the best hope of surviving. Their life expectancy was a few months, or in some cases just weeks. Six months after being treated, 23 of the 30 patients were still alive, and 19 of them have remained in complete remission. The study, by researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, is being published in The New England Journal of Medicine. "We have a number of patients who are a year or more out and are in remission and not requiring other therapies," said Dr. Stephan A. Grupp, who led the part of the study done at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He said those long remissions gave the researchers hope that the treatment would have lasting effects. Earlier reports by the same researchers involved only a handful of patients, some with chronic rather than acute leukemia. The scientists say the growing number of patients treated helps demonstrate that the findings are real. "With the initial patients, we didn't know if it was just lucky," said Dr. Carl H. June, the director of translational research at the university's cancer center. "It turns out it's reproducible." He and Dr. Grupp said that other hospitals around the country would soon test the experimental treatment in children with advanced acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Similar research, also with encouraging results, is being done at other centers, including the National Cancer Institute and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Each year in the United States, acute lymphoblastic leukemia affects about 2,400 people older than 20, and 3,600 younger. It has a cure rate in adults of only about 40 percent, compared with 80 percent to 90 percent in children. About 1,170 adults die from the disease each year, compared with 270 people under age 20. The experimental treatment uses patients' own T cells, a type of immune cell. Researchers extract the T cells and then genetically engineer them, using a disabled virus to slip new genetic material into the cells. The new genetic material reprograms the T cells to recognize and kill any cell that carries a particular protein on its surface. Then the cells are dripped back into the patient, like a transfusion. The cells are also programmed to multiply, so that each one can yield as many as 10,000 more cancer killing cells. The protein they search for, called CD19, is found on B cells, which are also part of the immune system. It was chosen as the target because these patients have a type of leukemia that affects B cells, so the goal is to train the patients' T cells to destroy B cells. Healthy B cells which make antibodies to fight infection are killed along with cancerous ones, but that side effect is treatable. The treatment clearly does not work for everyone. Seven of the 30 patients died, including a few who had complete remissions at first and then relapsed. In three, the leukemia came roaring back in B cells that lacked the target protein and therefore were not vulnerable to the treatment. Even so, Dr. June described the effectiveness of the treatment as "beyond my expectations." Of the 19 patients who stayed in remission, 15 did so without any additional treatment. One of them is Emma Whitehead, now 9, who was treated more than two years ago. Some researchers have thought that, to be on the safe side, any patient who went into remission after T cell treatment should have a stem cell transplant, because stem cells are considered the standard of care for this type of leukemia. But Dr. June and Dr. Grupp said the long remissions suggested that transplants might not be needed. They hope that eventually the T cell treatment will be used instead of stem cell transplants, which are risky and arduous. But the T cell treatment has its own side effects, in particular a phenomenon known as cytokine release syndrome. It occurs when the T cells churn out hormones called cytokines that can cause fever, aches, drops in blood pressure and breathing trouble. The more cancer there is to destroy, the worse the syndrome, Dr. June said. Dawn Carie, from Chesterfield, Mich., said her daughter, Lexie, then 16, had the T cell treatment a year ago, after multiple types of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant had failed. Within hours of receiving the T cells, Lexie's temperature shot up to 105 degrees, and she became disoriented and had frightening hallucinations. But when it was all over, she was in remission. For the first time since Lexie was 2, her mother said, tests found no signs whatsoever of leukemic cells. Because her disease had been so severe, Lexie had two more infusions of T cells a few months after the first one. She remains in remission. Lexie is now a senior in high school, busy applying to colleges, Ms. Carie said, adding, "You know, it's odd to feel normal, because we really never have." In July, the Food and Drug Administration designated the T cell treatment a "breakthrough therapy" for relapsed and treatment resistant acute lymphoblastic leukemia in adults and children. The designation recognizes experimental drugs "that may demonstrate substantial improvement over existing therapies" for life threatening conditions, and is meant to speed their development and review. Currently, the patients' T cells are processed at the University of Pennsylvania. But the drug company Novartis, which helped pay for the study, has invested heavily in the research, holds licenses to the technology and is expected to take over the cell processing. Dr. June, Dr. Grupp and some of the other study authors developed the technologies and may profit from them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The difference in their backgrounds a difference of religion, class and color gives their relationship a Romeo and Juliet quality. Maria's skin is darker than Peter's, she attends a Baptist church (he is Catholic), and her mother and brother don't approve. Maria is about to start college in New Orleans, and her eagerness to escape Natchitoches matches Peter's determination to stay in Cane River. As they flirt and banter their way toward love and grapple with family matters, Jenkins embeds their emotional and domestic struggles in a lyrical contemplation of landscape that is, in turn, nested within a historical argument. When Peter first meets Maria, she is reading "The Forgotten People," a scholarly work by Gary B. Mills on the history and sociology of "Cane River's Creoles of Color." The book is more than a prop; it's a reference point, to be cited and quarreled with as Peter and Maria try to figure out who they are to each other. Sometimes, Peter protests that the past shouldn't have any bearing on their lives. Yes, some of his ancestors owned slaves, but that was a long time ago. And, besides, other ancestors were themselves enslaved. It's complicated. He doesn't think of himself as not black, but he also doesn't like to think about race too much. He'd rather write his poems, and find other ways to impress the sometimes skeptical Maria. For his part, Jenkins is careful not to flatten his characters into representatives of a narrowly defined community or point of view. The dominant feeling in "Cane River" is affection. It's what the characters express toward one another (even at moments of high conflict) and what the director conveys, toward them and the landscape they inhabit, in every shot and musical cue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
If you can't make it to Spain this week, Joe's Pub will do. On Saturday, Noche Flamenca returned to that club, where you can experience the troupe's celebrated take on traditional flamenco up close and in a congenial atmosphere. A guitarist, a singer, a handful of dancers: that's all this stage can fit, and that's all this party needs. And when one of those dancers is Soledad Barrio, this company's burning star, the experience is pretty much guaranteed to be memorable. The program is titled "Cambio de Tercio," a Spanish idiom, derived from bullfighting, which can connote "a change of subject." But the only change here is in location. To anyone who has seen Noche Flamenca, the evening is one of familiar pleasures. On Saturday the troupe came closest to a surprise early on, with a staged dance battle between Juan Ogalla and the guest hip hop dancer David Thomas (who appeared in the company's "Antigona" in November). The incongruity of this pairing earned a laugh, but there was no real contest, no exchange, and before bewilderment could develop into anything else, it was over. The guitarist Eugenio Iglesias played a meditative, beautifully rippling solo, and we were firmly back in Noche Flamenca territory. That territory can be light and playful, as in a flirtatious exchange between the vocalist Emilio Florido and three of the company's female dancers. Mr. Ogalla attacked his solo "Farucca" with his customary verve, slapping his thighs and snapping around as if angry. His over the top peacocking verges on silly, yet there's something endearing about his ardor. Lately, it looks as though he has been borrowing steps from tap dancers. These earned another laugh: not quite convincing, but fun. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
This article is part of the developing coronavirus coverage, and was updated on March 26. Go here for the latest on the coronavirus. Pregnant women are often particularly susceptible to respiratory infections and, once infected, can become seriously ill, with long lasting consequences for both mother and baby. Is that true for the new coronavirus? The information available so far is thin, but it appears that pregnant women are no more likely than anyone else to have severe symptoms from the coronavirus. In an analysis of 147 women, only 8 percent had severe disease and 1 percent were in critical condition, according to a report published on Feb. 28 by the World Health Organization. It is too soon to know the consequences for these women's babies. But so far at least, infants born to women with an infection seemed free of the virus and appeared healthy at birth, according to a study of nine pregnant women and their babies published in February in The Lancet. "Fortunately, there was no evidence of vertical transmission from mother to child," said Dr. Wei Zhang, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University and one of the Lancet study's authors. A study published in March in JAMA offered more reassurance: Of 33 newborns born at the Wuhan Children's Hospital, only three had any signs of the virus, and even their symptoms were mild, the researchers reported. The researchers were uncertain of the source of the infection in the three newborns, however, and recommended that pregnant women be carefully monitored. Both studies are small. And they do not offer any clues to the infection's effect on women in earlier stages of pregnancy. Fevers in early pregnancy are associated with birth defects and with some developmental conditions. And some viruses can have devastating consequences for the fetus. Zika, for example, can lead to an unusually small head, and Ebola can be lethal. The 1918 and 1957 flu pandemics had death rates of between 30 and 50 percent among pregnant women. The trend in pregnant women infected with SARS, the closest relative of the new coronavirus, is no more reassuring: In one small study of 12 pregnant women in Hong Kong who developed SARS during the 2003 outbreak, three died, and four of the seven women who were in their first trimester had a spontaneous miscarriage. The WHO's statistics for the new coronavirus and Dr. Zhang's study both offer reason for optimism, but data from bigger numbers is crucial, experts said. "We do know that we're going to have lots of pregnant women with coronavirus, just given the number of cases," said Dr. Denise Jamieson, chair of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University. "It's going to be critical that surveillance systems collect information on pregnancy status." Dr. Jamieson is one of three experts who crafted the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' guidelines for treating pregnant women infected with the coronavirus. Among other best practices, the guidelines ask doctors' offices to screen pregnant women even before their appointment so that women with symptoms can wait in a separate area from other patients and to take a detailed travel history. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. For their part, pregnant women should take the same precautions as everyone else but let their doctors know immediately if they are experiencing any symptoms, Dr. Jamieson said. Dr. Jamieson was at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. About one in three pregnant women infected with that virus were hospitalized. The C.D.C. recommended then that pregnant women who gave birth be separated from their infants until they were no longer infectious. The women were also encouraged to continue to express their breast milk but then discard it until they were illness free, Dr. Jamieson said. Similar measures may be necessary with the coronavirus, she said: "Separating moms and babies is obviously a difficult issue." The infected mothers in Dr. Zhang's Lancet study were isolated from their infants. All nine women gave birth by cesarean section to minimize the newborns' exposure to the virus. Dr. Zhang's collaborators in Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic, tested cord blood, throat swabs from the infants, breast milk and amniotic fluid. "We did not see any evidence for the virus," Dr. Zhang said. In other reports of infected babies, including a study of 10 newborns with serious complications, the infants were either tested hours after they were born or may have had direct contact with the infected mothers because the women were not diagnosed before delivery, Dr. Zhang said. "If we have proper isolation and strict protocol, there should be good chance to have a healthy baby," he said. Dr. Zhang was careful to emphasize that his study offers "good news" only to women in late pregnancy. "We should be very careful not to mislead other group of pregnant women," he said. "We don't know the real effect of the virus on women in early pregnancy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Laurie Halse Anderson, the author of "Speak," a 1999 novel about a teenage girl traumatized by rape, did not initially see her book as a piece of activism. After it was published, Ms. Anderson visited schools to discuss the story and its main character, Melinda, a freshman who struggles to verbalize her pain after she is raped by an upperclassman at her first high school party. Early on, Ms. Anderson spoke about the book as a piece of literature rather than a lesson on rape culture. But then the students started asking questions, like, "Did this happen to you?" It had. She had been 13 when she was raped. She had not spoken about it for 25 years, until she wrote the book. She told them about it. "So many heads in the audience would nod," Ms. Anderson, now 56, said. "I realized that there are so many teens carrying burdens and scars." The book became a fixture in school libraries and English classrooms across the country, and it set something of a precedent for the industry. In the nearly 20 years since its debut, novels for young adults have explored issues of sexual violence like never before. As the country continues to respond to the MeToo movement, teachers and librarians are turning to fiction to help teenagers understand emotional trauma and make sense of this cultural reckoning. Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping the 2018 elections with our new politics newsletter. Kami Garcia, an author and former teacher from Annapolis, Md., wrote a novel called "Broken Beautiful Hearts," which tells a story about relationship violence that parallels her own experience as a teenager. Ms. Garcia, 46, said that when she was 17, she broke up with her boyfriend over his use of steroids and, in response, he pushed her through a screen door. For two years after that, he stalked her, she said. In Ms. Garcia's novel, released this year, the 17 year old protagonist, Peyton Rios, is pushed down the stairs by her ex boyfriend. But the difference is that the fictional character tells her mother about the abuse. Ms. Garcia said she didn't tell any adults. "I wanted to rewrite history and do all the things I wish I would have done," she said. On visits to schools to discuss the book, Ms. Garcia asked students to raise their hands if they knew someone who had experienced dating violence or had been sexually harassed or assaulted. At most schools, nearly every girl in the audience raised her hand, Ms. Garcia said. Novels can provide a safe place to explore ideas about consent and speaking out after abuse because young readers can inhabit the experience of a fictional character rather than face their own trauma head on, said Amy Reed, an author from Asheville, N.C. Ms. Reed's book, "The Nowhere Girls," tells a story of three teenagers avenging a classmate's gang rape. The teenage characters in the book, published last year, have a nuanced understanding of consent and its gray areas. "Silence does not mean 'yes,'" Ms. Reed, 38, writes. "'No' can be thought and felt but never said. It can be screamed silently on the inside." Ms. Reed said discussion about these subtleties were absent in her young adult years. "I wanted to write the conversations I wasn't having but so desperately needed." Ms. German, 34, said she considers it irresponsible for educators to ignore issues of sexual violence. "Teaching this stuff is scary for adults because I think that teachers think they have to have all the answers," Ms. German said. "That's not the case." "We're supposed to guide and facilitate the learning process," she said. "When teachers are vulnerable and honest with students, only good can come of it." Librarians across the country have also made it part of their mission to make sure young readers have access to books about sexual violence. At Oak Lawn Public Library in Illinois, Izabel Gronski, 31, a librarian for the young adult section, compiled an online list with a MeToo theme. She also tucked a display in a spot on the second floor where young readers could browse privately. She included information about the Rape, Abuse Incest National Network, or Rainn. A display at the Oak Lawn Public Library in Illinois featuring books for young adults that deal with rape and sexual assault. Emma Fernout, a librarian for Johnson County Library in northeastern Kansas, created a similar list, writing that the books were meant to provide young readers with "perspective and solidarity." Ms. Fernout, 22, said that she sees herself as an intermediary between the adult and adolescent worlds. Teenagers often have a particularly difficult time telling people they've been victimized, she said, because they assume adults won't believe them or their peers will ostracize them. "You're in this bubble of high school that you can't get out of," she said. "And if you say something, you're risking your entire world." Victor Malo Juvera, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, said that when he taught "Speak" to high schoolers in Miami, at least one student would open up to him each year about a personal experience with sexual violence. The first year he taught the novel, a teenage boy approached him with his story. In the years that followed, he brought a guidance counselor into class to make sure students had support if needed. Although "Speak" was written in the '90s, long before the phrase "rape culture" became well known, the text remains a staple of high school curriculums. In Princeton, Wis., a rural town of 1,200, Nicholas Sina, 28, teaches the novel to 10th graders. Many of his students have never talked openly about sexual violence before, he said, and the lessons can sometimes get uncomfortable. Mr. Sina said several parents in the conservative town have objected to the book, arguing that sexual content especially the violent kind is not appropriate. (This is not a new reaction: In 2010, a college professor in Missouri called the novel "soft pornography" that "glorifies drinking, cursing, and premarital sex.") Mr. Sina, who grew up in Princeton, said he explains to parents that it is vital that students discuss sexual violence before moving away to college, where they will be more likely to encounter it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A nasal spray that blocks the absorption of the SARS CoV 2 virus has completely protected ferrets it was tested on, according to a small study released on Thursday by an international team of scientists. The study, which was limited to animals and has not yet been peer reviewed, was assessed by several health experts at the request of The New York Times. If the spray, which the scientists described as nontoxic and stable, is proved to work in humans, it could provide a new way of fighting the pandemic. A daily spritz up the nose would act like a vaccine. "Having something new that works against the coronavirus is exciting," said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, the chairman of immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study. "I could imagine this being part of the arsenal." The work has been underway for months by scientists from Columbia University Medical Center in New York, Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Columbia University Medical Center. The team would require additional funding to pursue clinical trials in humans. Dr. Anne Moscona, a pediatrician and microbiologist at Columbia and co author of the study, said they had applied for a patent on the product, and she hoped Columbia University would approach the federal government's Operation Warp Speed or large pharmaceutical companies that are seeking new ways to combat the coronavirus. The spray attacks the virus directly. It contains a lipopeptide, a cholesterol particle linked to a chain of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. This particular lipopeptide exactly matches a stretch of amino acids in the spike protein of the virus, which the pathogen uses to attach to a human airway or lung cell. Before a virus can inject its RNA into a cell, the spike must effectively unzip, exposing two chains of amino acids, in order to fuse to the cell wall. As the spike zips back up to complete the process, the lipopeptide in the spray inserts itself, latching on to one of the spike's amino acid chains and preventing the virus from attaching. "It is like you are zipping a zipper but you put another zipper inside, so the two sides cannot meet," said Matteo Porotto, a microbiologist at Columbia University and one of the paper's authors. The work was described in a paper posted to the preprint server bioRxiv Thursday morning, and has been submitted to the journal Science for peer review. Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said the therapy looked "really promising." "What I'd like to know now is how easy it is to scale production," he said. In the study, the spray was given to six ferrets, which were then divided into pairs and placed in three cages. Into each cage also went two ferrets that had been given a placebo spray and one ferret that had been deliberately infected with SARS CoV 2 a day or two earlier. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Ferrets are used by scientists studying flu, SARS and other respiratory diseases because they can catch viruses through the nose much as humans do, although they also infect each other by contact with feces or by scratching and biting. After 24 hours together, none of the sprayed ferrets caught the disease; all the placebo group ferrets did. The protective spray attaches to cells in the nose and lungs and lasts about 24 hours, Dr. Moscona said. "If it works this well in humans, you could sleep in a bed with someone infected or be with your infected kids and still be safe," she said. The amino acids come from a stretch of the spike protein in coronaviruses that rarely mutates. The scientists tested it against four different variants of the virus, including both the well known "Wuhan" and "Italian" strains, and also against the coronaviruses that cause SARS and MERS. In cell cultures, it protected completely against all strains of the pandemic virus, fairly well against SARS and partially against MERS. The lipoprotein can be inexpensively produced as a freeze dried white powder that does not need refrigeration, Dr. Moscona said. A doctor or pharmacist could mix the powder with sugar and water to produce a nasal spray. Other labs have designed antibodies and "mini proteins" that also block the SARS CoV 2 virus from entering cells, but these are chemically more complex and may need to be stored in cold temperatures. Dr. Moscona and Dr. Porotto have been collaborating on similar "fusion inhibitor" peptides for 15 years, they said in a conference call. They have developed some against measles, Nipah, parainfluenza and other viruses. But those products aroused little commercial interest, Dr. Porotto said, because an effective measles vaccine already exists and because the deadly Nipah virus only turns up occasionally in faraway places like Bangladesh and Malaysia. Monoclonal antibodies to the new coronavirus have been shown to prevent infection as well as treat it, but they are expensive to make, require refrigeration and must be injected. Australian scientists have tested a nasal spray against Covid 19 in ferrets, but it works by enhancing the immune system, not by targeting the virus directly. Because lipopeptides can be shipped as a dry powder, they could be used even in rural areas in poor countries that lack refrigeration, Dr. Moscona said. Dr. Moscona, a pediatrician who usually works on parainfluenza and other viruses that infect children, said she was most interested in getting the product to poor countries that may never have access to the monoclonal antibodies and mRNA vaccines that Americans may soon have. But she has little experience in that arena, she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Whether you're taking on a roommate or moving into a new place with your significant other, combining different styles can be challenging especially when the people involved have strong opinions. But some of the most interesting spaces, designers say, integrate a variety of influences. Here are some suggestions for creating an environment that's cohesive, not clashing, and preserving your relationship along the way. "Taking everything out of a room, and then deciding together what goes back in, can give a couple a fresh start without starting from scratch," said James Tabb, an interior designer for the online decorating service Laurel Wolf. Then you can go shopping together to bridge any gaps. To get a better sense of each other's style, create a Pinterest board to share images of rooms and furniture you like. "I think a big mistake couples make when designing is that they feel everything needs to match or be in the same aesthetic," said Will Saks, a designer based in Brooklyn. He recommends going in the opposite direction: "Use furniture pieces from different design periods, layer in fabrics and textiles that are varied in pattern and color, hang artwork and pepper in accessories that are interesting and meaningful to you both. The ultimate goal in designing is to have a space that feels curated and personal." To achieve that effect, in the Brooklyn apartment of Carrie Carlson, 36, a publicist for lifestyle magazines who loves pinks and patterns, and Ben Blickle, 34, a Ph.D. candidate who prefers blues, greens and leather, Mr. Saks juxtaposed unexpected textures and colors, pairing a green leather armchair with a vintage pink velvet footstool and covering two antique wingback chairs in patterned upholstery. Photographs of family members, mementos from the couple's travels (including a menu from a restaurant they visited on their honeymoon) and colorful artwork hang together in the living room to create gallery walls. "To me, this design works because every element in the space has touches of both Carrie and Ben," Mr. Saks said. "Find something you both love like the color blue or the outdoors and incorporate that into the room in small details like a piece of art or a custom painted dresser," said Taylor Spellman, a Manhattan interior designer. She's also a host of the Bravo show "Yours, Mine or Ours" with Reza Farahan, a real estate agent, helping couples who live under separate roofs figure out how to share a space. For clients of Becky Shea, an interior designer with the online service Homepolish, the inspiration for their shared residence turned out to be an imaginary vacation home. "They were having a tough time finding a happy medium that wasn't overly masculine/feminine," said Ms. Shea, noting that the husband's "masculine monochromatic" tendencies clashed with his wife's love of animal prints and "Old Hollywood" glam. "The balance came once we started talking about travel. They both love the Hamptons, so we wanted to integrate that style into this home." The kitchen was redone with white Shaker cabinetry, a white Carrara marble backsplash and Thomas O'Brien pendant lights. "Once we started conceptualizing the kitchen, which would carry over into other areas," Ms. Shea said, "we found that a clean look would bring both of their worlds together, and the personal characteristics would be represented through accessories" blush chairs, brass finishes and a black and white stair runner in a design called Pony by Alexander McQueen. "The foundation is very much both of them: timeless, clean, updated traditional meets modern tradition," she said. That's what Jyothi Chandra, 32, a director at a communications agency, and Max Newlands, 34, a software engineer, did when they moved to a new condominium in Park Slope South, Brooklyn, last year. They found themselves struggling to blend Mr. Newland's affinity for clean lines and minimalism with Ms. Chandra's love of bright colors, loud patterns and eclectic art. "We had a hard time balancing some of our preferences and the years of hand me downs and Ikea furniture didn't help," Ms. Chandra said. "We needed a fresh look to go with our fresh place." Working with Megan Hopp, a designer with Homepolish, they started with white walls and contemporary furniture as a foundation for playing with color and accessories. In the master bedroom, abstract aquamarine wallpaper creates a colorful backdrop for a low profile bed, while a hand woven duvet adds texture. Black and white geometric wallpaper adds interest to the dining room, while a red wire hat rack in the shape of a moose is a pop of color in the entry. In the living room, a white credenza from CB2 is paired with a shaggy Native American wool rug; a midcentury style bookcase is packed with colorful books and knickknacks; and whimsical throw pillows sit on a modernist sofa. Ms. Hopp, at times, played the therapist. "I would do a lot of reassuring: 'I know this copper mirror might seem wild and crazy to you, Max, but we're on the right path; Jyothi, I promise this white console will not be boring, and when paired with the lamp, it won't feel sterile.'" "Letting him keep his framed sports jersey now will give you the ammunition you need later for the fight over the pink velvet sofa," said Mr. Tabb of Laurel Wolf. It's probably not worth taking a stand over that beat up old armchair you picked up at a garage sale, but maybe you don't want to let go of grandma's favorite teapot just yet. Think about what matters to you most and let go of the rest. When Ms. Chandra and Mr. Newlands butted heads over a piece of abstract plywood art that she had found in the street, Ms. Hopp of Homepolish stepped in with a solution. "She would have wanted to hang it in front of the dining table," said Ms. Hopp, who suggested placing it in the second bedroom instead, with a plant in front. That way, she noted, "Max doesn't have to look at it." "It is healthy in any relationship to preserve alone time and space," Mr. Tabb said. "Setting up a cozy reading nook for yourself, or understanding that someone's desk is completely their own domain, can be a small yet relationship saving strategy to retaining your sense of individuality while still living with someone else." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
One hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, by the side of a dusty road, two women in anti mosquito head nets peer at a queen bumblebee buzzing furiously in a plastic tube. "I think it's the biggest bumblebee I've caught in my life!" Kristal Watrous says. S. Hollis Woodard looks at the prize and says, "It's the biggest frigging bumblebee I've ever seen in my life!" Dr. Woodard, an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside; her lab manager, Ms. Watrous; and a small team of young academics have embarked on a bee hunting road trip from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay and back, almost 1,000 miles all told, more than 800 on the Dalton Highway. I joined the group the night before, and we are now tramping over tundra and through low willows near a maintenance site for the nearby Trans Alaska Pipeline. The site, called the Chandalar Shelf, lies in the shadow of mountain peaks as sharp as freshly made Stone Age axes the beginning of the Brooks Range. It is the group's third day in the field, and my first, and although the site is actually buzzing with bees, it seems that bee hunting is like fishing. No matter where you go and when you get there, someone always says, "You shoulda been here yesterday." Or the day before that. Another researcher, Jessica Purcell, an assistant professor in the entomology department at Riverside, said that at the Arctic Circle two days ago, "you couldn't shake a net at a flower without catching a bee." She and her husband, Alan Brelsford, both newbies to the bee business, caught 40 each. "We had to let some go," said Dr. Brelsford, who is starting at Riverside this fall as an assistant biology professor. Here, the bees aren't quite that numerous, and the hunters are every bit as intense as siblings on an Easter egg hunt. Two of them are actually siblings. Dr. Woodard's brother, Bren, an ex Marine and devoted participant in military history re enactments, carries a shotgun when there is a concern about grizzlies, but it doesn't seem to interfere with his bee hunting. He ranges far and wide, as does Jeff Diez, a plant ecologist and the grizzled veteran of the group. He has been at the university for three years. The bee stalkers run and pounce, swiping hand held nets like the ones butterfly collectors use, calling out, "Bee!" or "Got one!" when they are successful. They pop them into plastic tubes and bring them to Michelle Duennes, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Woodard's lab for identification. As she looks at the bees, species names roll off her tongue like ingredients in a Hogwarts potion. Sylvicola. Neoboreus. Balteatus. All bumblebees, all in the same resonant genus, Bombus. "They're the pandas of the insect world," Dr. Woodard says. "They're big and fuzzy. People can see them. They move a little slower." There are 250 species, a small fraction of the world's 20,000 bee species. Genetic studies suggest that they first appeared on the Tibetan plateau, where the greatest variety still exists. But they have spread around the Northern Hemisphere and into South America. They are social insects. While honeybees may congregate in insect cities of 100,000 bees or more, bumblebees live in the equivalent of small towns, with colonies of 50 to a few hundred. Almost all bumblebee colonies last for just one season. As cold weather approaches, female workers, the queen and male drones die. Only fertile females that have mated queens in waiting seek refuges under the tundra, sometimes in old mouse burrows, where they outlast the winter in a state of torpor. In the spring, they emerge to start the whole cycle over. Bumblebees are the only bees that live in the high Arctic. They have adapted to the darkness and cold of wintertime that dips to 60 below zero and then to the explosion of growth and pollination under summer's midnight sun. And that's why the bee hunter caravan is on the Dalton Highway. Some changes to the climate are already obvious. Willows are taking advantage of a milder climate to spread north to areas where only the low lying plants and lichens of the tundra had lived before. Moose follow the march of the willows. Other changes will come. For instance, new species of bees may arrive to compete with species that adapted to the old conditions. Some bumblebee populations in more temperate regions are already suffering, partly because of climate change. In September, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the once common rusty patched bumblebee as endangered. And there are gaps in the knowledge of Arctic bees that need to be filled. The group on this expedition wants to help build up information on current populations and behavior against which to measure change. That night, we camp at a gravel pit where pipes and other material for the pipeline are stored. Each captured bee is in a plastic tube, and Dr. Duennes first gases them with a can of compressed air from a grocery store. Compressed air, she explains, is not just air. This kind contains difluoroethane, which stuns the bees. . She removes the guts to study later for bacteria and viruses they may harboring, and places them in a solution that preserves them for genetic study. The bee bodies go into ethanol. As she works, she recounts some of the day's events, including one bee that she thought might be a polaris, but turned out not to be. She wanted to make sure she caught it, so she grabbed it through the net to make sure it didn't escape. She thought, "I don't care if it stings me. But then it did. And then I was like, 'Ow, ow, no, I do care." The next day, we arrive at an oasis of luxury, the Toolik Field Station, an Arctic research base run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The first Bombus polaris bee is a gift. A researcher who has been using fine mesh nets to capture birds has also caught a number of bees by accident. She gladly turns over two dozen or so. The bees have been in a cardboard box, and their hairs have become matted, making it impossible to see the color markings that identify them. Dr. Duennes and Ms. Watrous set up a bee fluffing salon in a back room of the station's recreation building. In another room, Dr. Woodard and the three other professors plot the grant application that will grow out of this trip, a pursuit of Bombus polaris they hope will take some of them to Greenland and to Ellesmere Island. But one restored bee has telltale dark color in a yellow patch on its side. Dr. Duennes and Ms. Watrous compared it to illustrations in a guidebook. They won't say what they think until they bring Dr. Woodard in to examine the bee. While waiting for Dr. Duennes to set up lines of bees for her impromptu Bombus test, I take advantage of the downtime to play foosball with Dr. Diez. He crushes me, and keeps bringing up this ignominy for the rest of the trip. Even though the long road to Prudhoe Bay is ahead, and a longer road back, when Dr. Woodard picks the right bee out of the lineup, Dr. Duennes is exultant. "I am almost certain that's polaris!" After scrupulously considering every possible objection to the identification, everyone in the group raises a glass to Dr. Duennes's toast: "Extreme bees, extreme people." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Well, this is it: the denouement of countless other awards shows, red carpet watches and weeks (make that months) of who will wear what designer speculation. Check out our slide show in which we open the envelope, if you will, for those answers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Scien tists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said they were "converging on the truth" in an experiment to understand hydrogen in its liquid metallic state. With gentle pulses from gigantic lasers, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California transformed hydrogen into droplets of shiny liquid metal. Their research, reported on Thursday in the journal Science, could improve understanding of giant gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn whose interiors are believed to be awash with liquid metallic hydrogen. The findings could also help settle some fractious debates over the physics of the lightest and most abundant element in the universe. At the temperatures and pressures found at the surface of Earth, hydrogen atoms pair up in molecules and bounce around as a colorless gas. At ultracold temperatures, below 423 degrees Fahrenheit, hydrogen condenses into a liquid. It also turns into a liquid at higher temperatures when squeezed under immense pressure. The molecules remain intact, and this state of liquid hydrogen is an insulator a poor conductor of electricity. Under even higher pressures, the molecules break apart into individual atoms, and the electrons in the atoms are then able to flow freely and readily conduct electricity the definition of a metal. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. An experiment at the Livermore lab in the 1990s was the first to convincingly create metallic hydrogen using a gas gun to send monstrous pressure waves through samples of hydrogen. But those tests did not reveal all of the details about how the transition occurred. In recent years, researchers have figured out additional ways to make liquid metallic hydrogen. Isaac F. Silvera, a professor of physics at Harvard, and his colleagues used two interlocking pieces of diamond to compress a smidgen of hydrogen and then heated it with laser pulses. At Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, intense bursts of magnetic fields were used to compress samples of deuterium, a heavier form of hydrogen. The Sandia scientists reported that the metallic transition occurred at about 44 million pounds per square inch, or about 3 million times the atmospheric pressure at ground level on Earth. That was considerably higher than many had expected. "There's been a kind of confusion of predictions," said Peter M. Celliers, a physicist at the Livermore lab who is the lead author of the new paper. Experiments on matter at ultrahigh pressure are difficult to perform, often with conflicting results, which " made for a picture that has looked to date fairly muddled," Dr. Celliers said. "We think it's starting to clear up with this new data set." The new research is a collaboration by American, French and British scientists with experiments performed at Livermore's National Ignition Facility. The mammoth apparatus, which made a cameo in the movie "Star Trek: Into Darkness," is housed in a building 10 stories high and three football fields long. With 192 gargantuan lasers aimed at a BB size target, it was built to generate bursts of fusion, although it has fallen short of its original objectives. The current experiment used 168 of the lasers at a lower setting to set off a series of reverberating shock waves through ultracool liquid deuterium. That compressed the deuterium to a pressure that was 6 million times greater than atmospheric pressure while keeping temperatures to what the physicists regarded as cool: below 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. (A more indiscriminate laser blast would heat the gas to hundreds of thousand of degrees.) They found that the metallic hydrogen transition occurred at less crushing pressures: only 2 million times atmospheric pressure. In addition, the scientists argued that turbulence in the larger Sandia samples masked this transition, and that the temperatures at which hydrogen becomes metal should be revised downward, where they would lie along the same curve as the new Livermore data. "Overall, we think there is a picture emerging that is converging on the truth," Dr. Celliers said. Liquid metallic hydrogen does not naturally occur on Earth except possibly at the core. But at Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet, most of the hydrogen could be flowing as a liquid metal and generating the planet's powerful magnetic fields. Understanding the properties of metallic hydrogen could help scientists decipher data from NASA's Juno mission, currently in orbit around Jupiter. The data could also sift out which theoretical models work in describing the properties of hydrogen under extreme conditions and which should be discarded. David M. Ceperley, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and his collaborators worked on herculean computer calculations, each data point the result of about 100 hours on a supercomputer with 10,000 computer cores, to model the transition of liquid hydrogen from insulator to metal. He said the Livermore results agree within about 10 percent of what their findings predicted in 2009, within the uncertainties of the experiment's measurements. "For us, they're great," Dr. Ceperley said. "They not only end up right on top of our calculations," but also help reconcile the disparate Harvard and Sandia findings. The Sandia scientists, however, remain confident in their data and did not agree with how the new paper reinterpreted their findings. "We have a different interpretation of what they're seeing," said Michael P. Desjarlais, a Sandia scientist who worked on that experiment. "Their temperatures are actually higher than they believe. Then their results would actually be quite consistent with ours." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
MIAMI BEACH As the global art world descends on South Florida for next week's Art Basel fair, which is celebrating its 17th anniversary, it's worth remembering how truly small the art world once was. As late as the 1980s, you could fit contemporary art's A list players all in one room. And the room in question often belonged to the prominent collectors Don and Mera Rubell inside their Manhattan townhouse, then the de facto after party venue for the Whitney Museum of American Art's career launching biennials. "We knew every collector in the world then," Don Rubell recalled with a chuckle. "Ninety percent of them were in New York or Germany." Richard Prince was a fresh arrival to the Rubells' after party in 1985, having made his biennial debut that year with his signature photo appropriations. He would later write of his nervous excitement at threading his way into their gathering, past the reigning enfant terrible Robert Mapplethorpe, and spying his own artwork there. "It was the first time I'd ever seen anything of mine hung on someone else's wall," an awed Mr. Prince remembered. "I was still an outsider but that evening I felt, if only for a moment, part of another family." That family of artists, museum directors, curators and collectors is now exponentially larger, with far more money, and far more rungs of status up for grabs. But the Rubells are just as keen on occupying its center stage as they were in 1993, when they purchased a 40,000 square foot warehouse for their growing art collection in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami. They later became instrumental in wooing the Swiss based Art Basel fair to begin a Miami edition. Now they have enlarged the showcase for their 7,200 artworks. Opening Dec. 4, the Rubell Family Collection, rechristened the Rubell Museum, fills a 100,000 square foot campus just west, in the new art neighborhood of Allapattah a gritty mix of warehouses, hospitals and modest homes. The Annabelle Selldorf designed complex includes a restaurant, bookstore, event space, outdoor garden, and not least, contemporary art holdings that overshadow that of any other South Florida institution. Allapattah's cheaper real estate beckoned: The Rubells bought their new museum's lot for 4 million, and purchased a similarly sized lot across the street for 8.6 million. Several heavy hitting developers have also moved into Allapattah, mirroring a pattern of gentrification that saw property values skyrocket in Wynwood (and forced artists to move out). While Mrs. Rubell insisted this move wasn't simply about flipping properties, she admitted "the appreciated value of the Wynwood space is why we can now do all this." Valued by Miami Dade County at 12 million, its planned sale is likely to fetch upward of twice that. The family still runs the same nonprofit organization to exhibit their collection, which remains open to the public five days a week. So why now call it a museum? Is it about bragging rights? "It's about what we want to step up to," Mrs. Rubell said. "I meet people who say to me 'I always wanted to come, but I didn't know how to get an invitation.' Here we are today, open to the public, doing all these exhibitions, and people still feel it's not accessible. But everybody knows what a museum is." The Rubell Museum's debut exhibition is "a hit parade of the last 50 years of contemporary art: Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, all the favorites," Mera Rubell explained. "If you've been scratching your head for the last 50 years saying 'What the hell is all this crap?' , well that stuff is now worth 100 million. But never mind the money. We're talking about the art that defined a generation." So rather than dismissively rolling your eyes, she continued, "you can say 'Wow, this is teaching me something about the world we live in'!" That teachable lesson , for better or for worse, will be on full display throughout Miami next week. Below is a guide to the highlights. So how do I attend the Art Basel Miami Beach fair? Staged annually inside Miami Beach's Convention Center, entrance is as easy as buying a ticket on site. (Although at 65 a ticket, it's pricey window shopping.) What exactly is the difference between Art Basel Miami Beach and Miami Art Week? The Art Basel Miami Beach fair features 269 exhibiting galleries. Nearly two dozen satellite fairs have also sprouted around Miami. Add in pop up shows, celebrity studded product rollouts, as well as Miami's own galleries and museums all putting on their best faces, and you have the circus that local boosters have taken to calling "Miami Art Week." What about Miami's own artists? A perennial sore point for local residents is the dearth of homegrown talent found within the Basel fair only 3 of its 269 exhibiting galleries are based in Miami. Still, those three are exhibiting some stellar natives: David Castillo will feature the winningly playful assemblages of Pepe Mar; Central Fine is showing paintings by Tomm El Saieh, whose hypnotic brushwork fuses Haitian folkloric traditions with classic Abstract Expressionism; while Fredric Snitzer's booth is devoted to paintings by Hernan Bas, whose beguiling, homoerotically charged portraits of dandies and waifs remain some of the strongest work to emerge from Miami over the past two decades. Where can I see more local galleries? Head to the Little Haiti neighborhood, the new ground zero for Miami's most consistently impressive galleries many of which were priced out of Wynwood as it morphed into an entertainment enclave. Start with Emerson Dorsch and their Color Field steeped paintings by Mette Tommerup but call ahead for performance times when Tommerup and her crew will be wrapping themselves inside her huge canvases and rollicking around the room . The Iris PhotoCollective ArtSpace is nearby, dedicated to socially engaged photography and run by Carl Juste, a Miami Herald photojournalist whose work never fails to dazzle. Nina Johnson is featuring new drawings by Terry Allen, and while his Lubbock, Texas, origins are anything but tropical, a rare opportunity to see his handiwork (and hopefully hear him perform some of his delectably barbed country songs) is too good to miss. What other neighborhoods should I visit for art? Southwest of Little Haiti, in Allapattah, is Spinello Projects' group show featuring Clara Varas, who begins her process with an abstract painting (often done on a bedsheet) and then adds all manner of found detritus from the city streets, amounting to sculptural Frankensteins that are fascinatingly more than the sum of their parts. Then head up to the Design District's Paradise Plaza for the latest jab at the art scene by the Brooklyn artist Eric Doeringer, who first grabbed attention in Miami by creating "bootleg" Art Basel V.I.P. cards (which let more than a few plebeians cross the velvet ropes). He's since graduated to "bootleg" paintings, and his latest show features handcrafted Christopher Wool knockoffs priced at 1,000 each, several zeros cheaper than the real ones. It's a stunt that works on both a conceptual level, wryly commenting on a blue chip artist whose paintings already seem factory made , and on a pleasurable one, offering Wool fans on a budget a chance to take home a tactile tribute: They may be fake Wools, but they're genuine Doeringers. Another year, another mogul making a splash with a new privately owned museum. This time it's Allapattah's El Espacio 23, exhibiting the contemporary collection of the real estate developer Jorge Perez, whose name already graces the side of the partially taxpayer funded Perez Art Museum Miami . After concerns that Mr. Perez would turn his attention to his new project leaving taxpayers to make up the difference he has publicly assured his namesake museum that it will not see any lessening of his financial support. Over on South Beach, two small institutions have consistently been punching above their weight: The Jewish Museum of Florida FIU, which is featuring provocative photographs by Zachary Balber that blend Yiddishkeit with thug life, and The Wolfsonian FIU, paying an 80th birthday tribute to its Willy Wonka esque founder, Mitchell Wolfson Jr., who has spent a lifetime traveling the world hunting down remarkable historical curios. There's a reason it's called Miami Beach. Just a few blocks east of the Basel hubbub, the gently rolling surf of the Atlantic Ocean beckons. Bring a towel, stake out a quiet spot on the white sand, and explore the fine art of doing nothing. Admission is absolutely free. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Smoke is often said to be the secret Mexican ingredient and everything here is cooked on a wood fire. The long, narrow space, all white and wood, with low, curving ceilings meant to evoke those of a hacienda, is split in two. The restaurant's 72 seats run parallel to the open kitchen, which is dominated by a 26 foot long grill a toasty chef's bar gets you close to the heat. Everything is diligently made in house, from the fruit liqueurs for their creative mezcal and tequila cocktails to the Oaxacan corn they import and grind themselves. The menu hops around Mexico and currently highlights Oaxaca, the Yucatan and Baja California. There are a handful of ceviches, including one with strips of heirloom carrots and radishes spiked with a spicy sal de gusano (dried and ground maguey worms). Rarer corn dishes like tlacoyos, tetelas and tlayudas are cooked on a clay comal griddle. These hand foods, like the oval tlacoyo, stuffed with requeson cheese and poblano pepper with a side of chanterelle mushrooms, reveal how bland our homogeneous corn tastes. The tortillas are some of the best in the city, though they are still improving. Green and toluqueno chorizo sausages are seared on the grill while deeply flavorful sweet potatoes and beets are roasted in the coals. From the section of larger, shared plates, we opted for the barbacoa. Lacking an earthen pit, here they wrap lamb neck in banana and avocado leaves and roast it in the wood fired oven for five hours. The cut, rich and fatty, evokes how one would normally eat the whole animal. We enjoyed pulling it apart with our fingers and making tacos with the array of salsas. Mr. Guajardo said, "The whole idea of Mexican food is getting together, sharing and having a good time. You got to grab it with your hands, get dirty a bit." For dessert, there was a chocolate mousse cake inspired by the tascalate drink the chefs had in Chiapas. Made with cacao, toasted tortilla, achiote and pine nuts, it was smooth and complex, and showed how Mexican ideas can translate and transform. "Mexico is very regional," Mr. Guajardo said. "That is what attracts us. We know so little still. It gives us so much longevity and learning." Quetzal, 419 College Street; quetzaltoronto.com. An average dinner for two, without drinks or tip, is 165 Canadian dollars, or about 126 at current exchange rates. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Building Trust at Financial Firms With CPR and First Aid When Silvercrest Asset Management Group launched its internal educational offering, Silvercrest Academy, the firm took pains in selecting the inaugural course. It had to set the right tone. The financial advisory, which manages 21.3 billion for clients who have an average wealth of 29 million, wanted to use the program to bring together people within the firm, which has about 120 employees. The hope was to find a way to break down barriers among departments and ultimately build the kind of trust among colleagues that would enable the firm to work better with clients. It had a long list of potential courses, including one explaining how its trading system worked and another that provided an overview of the firm's marketing. There was even one on task management and goal setting. "It breaks down divisions," he said of the CPR course. "You could have the C.E.O. next to the receptionist. You're on an equal plane." At their core, programs like these are meant to connect employees at different levels and help them get to know people in other departments. They are meant to alleviate the barriers that rise between people in different roles and also at different pay levels. They are meant to build workplace trust in the hope that it will extend to the work the company does. But since that first course Ms. Perez has taken 11 more courses. "Before, I wouldn't just call up the director of operations and ask her a question that seems silly, but I need help with," Ms. Perez said. "Now I have the confidence to call her and ask her directly and I know I'll get a helpful response." For a company's clients, classes like these can help build trusted working relationships that a company hopes will translate into more seamless service. "If we find something in common, we're more likely to connect and bond, no matter what it is we're doing," said Sue Langley, chief executive of the Langley Group, which works with companies and nonprofits globally to improve workplaces. She said those connections could ultimately lead to greater bonds of trust and comfort within a company, which is also good for customers. "If I see your name on the phone, I'm going to pick up in a welcoming manner," she said. "It's how can I help versus what do they want?" Dean Dewey, a vice president at Silvercrest, was one of the people charged with creating Silvercrest Academy in the summer of 2016. Mr. Dewey said Mr. Hough met with a group of seven people being groomed for leadership positions in the firm to brainstorm the idea. "He said he wanted to plant the seed and walk away and let us run it," Mr. Dewey said. "He wanted a curriculum that would educate the firm but also bring the firm together." The team came up with a program divided into corporate, personal and professional development. In addition to first aid and CPR, there have been courses on the firm's trading systems, the process of asset allocation, the role that marketing plays, how to set goals and manage your time and even an introduction to backgammon. Last year, Silvercrest Academy ran 27 classes, with between 10 and 35 people in each one. The group planning the courses decided to eliminate one thing that can induce people to attend an internal meeting: the food bribe. "It's not the right motivation, even though it works," Mr. Dewey said. "We've avoided it because we want people to learn and take the course with some sort of seriousness." The idea of using workplace courses to advance productivity and trust is rooted in the disruptive culture of Silicon Valley. Google and Amazon have long had speakers series meant to bring their employees together to learn something new and challenge their thinking. Ms. Langley said increasingly her clients included more established, old line companies that had realized a breakdown in trust and communication between their workers was hurting company productivity and ultimately what they did for clients. She said that one client, who was in charge of safety at a large manufacturing company, had learned to start meetings with a list of the things his team had done well and saved the near misses or accidents where someone was hurt until later. That is a reversal of what he used to do and has boosted the morale of his team, she said. It has created a more trusting environment where employees are working to improve processes, not worrying that they are going to make a mistake. Taking down that divide between employees was what Mr. Hough set out to do with Silvercrest Academy. He wanted a more integrated workplace but he also wanted his effort to help the bottom line. "The business has to have segregated functions to be effective," he said. "But the flip side is you have people in different jobs not understanding what people are doing and their value to the business. You want to break those barriers down so people can cooperate." He added, "In our business, and Wall Street in general, what is valued is often confused with money." Robert Savino, a retired Wall Street trader and Silvercrest client, said he felt the courses might benefit him as a client. He said he applied something similar but more ad hoc with the people supporting his trading desk. "I knew what the importance was of having a good relationship between me and the people doing the back office work," Mr. Savino said. "There's a lot of difference between us. What you have to maintain is a mutual respect. When people respect you they'll help you solve the problem. Things run smoothly when they're together." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Two years ago in a move that delighted some in women's sports and shocked others Olivia Moultrie announced that she had accepted a scholarship offer to play college soccer at the University of North Carolina. She was 11 years old. On Monday, Moultrie, the youngest girls' soccer player to publicly accept an academic scholarship offer, became the youngest girls' soccer player to then officially forgo her college athletic eligibility. Now 13, Moultrie announced that she had signed, in short order, a representation deal with the Wasserman Media Group, a sports agency, and a multiyear endorsement deal with Nike. In taking those two actions, Moultrie formally began her professional career. "It's just a shift in women's sports," Wadsworth said. "You see it more and more now where women's soccer is catching up to the men's side, and there's more opportunities for them." Moultrie has already drawn worldwide attention for her prodigious technical skills and her family's nontraditional approach to her nascent career. She has long played with older girls on the United States youth national team and with boys' clubs near her family's home in Canyon Country, Calif. Last year, Moultrie made multiple trips to Europe to meet and train with some of the continent's biggest clubs: Olympique Lyon and Paris St. Germain in France, and Bayern Munich in Germany. And with the help of her father, K.C., she has maintained an active presence on social media, often posting highlight clips to more than 87,000 followers on Instagram. "I feel for literally almost every kid in girls' soccer, you should go to college; there's not a million dollars at the end of the rainbow," K.C. Moultrie said in an interview with The New York Times last year. "I think if you're truly, truly elite, if your goal is to be a world class player and a pro and, in Olivia's case, to be the best player in the world, there's no way it's better to play college than it is to play full time." A far more likely prospect would involve Moultrie's latching on as a developmental player with a team in the top United States league, the N.W.S.L. But that path has its own obstacles; before she could ever sign a professional contract, the league would essentially have to create new allocation rules to deal with her unique situation. In addition, a player currently must be 18 to play in the N.W.S.L. Moultrie has been on her unconventional path for years. She began intense, soccer specific training when she was 7 years old, started home schooling as a fifth grader to free her schedule for more soccer, and eventually became the first girl to play for a boys' club team in the United States Development Academy system. She was 10 when she began attending college showcase camps, and at 11 she accepted a full scholarship offer from North Carolina. That she gave up the scholarship was not a huge surprise. For one thing, sneaker companies like Nike and Adidas had long had Moultrie in their sights. Last year, when she was still an amateur, Nike featured her in a local promotional campaign for one of the company's soccer cleats. On Sunday night, Moultrie appeared briefly near the end of a Nike commercial that aired during the Academy Awards. Nike, through a spokesman, declined to comment on its deal with Moultrie. Anson Dorrance, the longtime coach at North Carolina who had offered Moultrie a scholarship, said in an interview on Monday that he was pleased Moultrie had signed a deal for what he presumed was a significant amount of money, noting that the vast majority of women's soccer players still struggle to make a steady living as professionals. He said Moultrie's deal was a good development for the women's game. "We knew what was in the water, and we have no issue with this," Dorrance said about Moultrie's decision. "We lost a great player to the professional ranks, and we totally support that, if the financial incentives are good." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
WASHINGTON For President Trump and his economic advisers, the strong February jobs report was a cause for celebration and a first step toward delivering on the president's promise of faster economic growth. For the Federal Reserve, it was the final confirmation that the time had come to raise interest rates to prevent the United States economy from overheating. Mr. Trump and Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, appear to be headed toward a collision, albeit in slow motion. Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that he is determined to stimulate faster growth while the central bank, for its part, is indicating that it will seek to restrain any acceleration in economic activity. On Wednesday, the Fed plans to make a first move in the direction of restraint. The central bank has all but announced that it will raise its benchmark interest rate at the conclusion of a two day meeting of its policy making committee. The move itself is minor. The rate is expected to remain below 1 percent, and interest rates on consumer and business loans will still be remarkably low by historical standards. But the Fed is moving months earlier than markets had expected at the beginning of the year, precisely because the economy appears to be gaining steam. Both Fed officials and independent economists are quick to emphasize that the central bank is not trying to pre empt the new administration's policies. The Fed is raising rates because economic conditions are improving. Winter did not chill the United States economy this year. The stock market keeps fizzing upward; employment and wages are growing; companies and consumers are optimistic. "The thought that by tweaking the funds rate you could send some kind of political message is crazy, and they know that, and they're not going to do it," said Jon Faust, an economist at Johns Hopkins University and a former adviser to Ms. Yellen. "On the other hand, this is the first first quarter in about six years that isn't looking scary, so it's not surprising they would be considering a rate increase." The essential point, however, is that the Fed does not want faster growth. Fed officials estimate that the economy is already growing at something like the maximum sustainable pace. Fed officials predicted in December that the economy would expand 2.1 percent this year, slightly faster than the 1.8 percent pace they regard as sustainable. The Fed will publish new projections on Wednesday. Growth above the sustainable pace can lead to higher inflation. That, in turn, can force the Fed to raise rates more quickly, a course that often ends in a recession. Representative Steve Pearce, a New Mexico Republican, asked Ms. Yellen rather incredulously at a congressional hearing in February whether the Fed would really try to offset faster growth by raising rates more quickly. Ms. Yellen's response was carefully couched, but it amounted to "yes." She said the Fed was fine with faster growth so long as it reflected an improvement in economic fundamentals. On the other hand, she said, the Fed would try to offset faster growth "if we think that it is demand based and threatens our inflation objective" a technical description of what would happen if Congress cut taxes or increased spending. The White House and the Fed have very different economic outlooks. Mr. Trump has repeatedly painted economic conditions in some of the bleakest language ever used by an American president, and he has described his fiscal policy agenda as necessary to revive growth and restore the nation's prosperity. Gary Cohn, the head of the president's National Economic Council, told CNBC on Friday that he expected job growth to strengthen in the coming months. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "We're very excited about what's ahead of us," he said. Fed officials, by contrast, see the pace of job growth as unsustainable. The unemployment rate fell below 5 percent last May. Since then, employment has continued to expand at an average of 215,000 jobs a month more than twice the job growth necessary to keep pace with population growth. The faster growth is good news for the economy, indicating that adults who gave up on finding jobs are returning to work. The question is how long that can continue. There are already growing signs of a tighter labor market. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas recently reported that Texas employment in residential construction had nearly reached the level seen before the 2008 financial crisis and that skilled workers like framers, masons and bricklayers were in short supply. Average hourly earnings, adjusting for inflation, climbed 20.3 percent in the Texas construction sector from 2011 to 2016, compared with 5.9 percent for all Texans in private sector jobs, the Dallas Fed reported. The National Association of Homebuilders reported that 82 percent of builders regarded the cost and availability of labor as their primary concern. The Fed's slow march toward higher interest rates is gradually raising borrowing costs for businesses and consumers. The average rate on a 30 year mortgage loan was 4.21 percent last week, up about half a percentage point from the same time last year, according to Freddie Mac. Rates on credit cards and car loans have also ticked higher, although borrowing costs remain well below historical norms. As for interest on saving accounts, banks tend to raise those rates more slowly than they raise rates on loans. But as the Fed pushes up rates, savings rates will eventually increase, too. Ms. Yellen and other Fed officials have been careful to acknowledge the persistence of a range of economic problems. Labor force participation is low. Productivity growth remains weak. Middle income families have seen little income growth. But these problems, in the view of Fed officials, cannot be addressed by holding down the Fed's benchmark rate. "Monetary policy cannot, for instance, generate technological breakthroughs or affect demographic factors that would boost real G.D.P. growth over the longer run," Ms. Yellen said in a speech this month in Chicago. "And monetary policy cannot improve the productivity of American workers." She noted that the White House and Congress could adopt fiscal policies that would improve those fundamental factors, although doing so would take time. The Fed, an institution whose mission was famously described by a former chairman as taking away the punch bowl just as the party gets going, has a long history of angering politicians who would prefer to let the good times roll. But in this case there is no reason for the Fed to rush. The Fed has indicated what it will do. Now, it can afford to wait and see what fiscal policy makers do. President Trump has promised "massive tax relief for the middle class," and his Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said last month that he wanted to see a bill passed before Congress goes on summer vacation in August. That is an ambitious timetable, not least because health care legislation is first in line. But even if the deadline is met, more months will pass before the money accumulates in the pockets of businesses and consumers, and before the money is spent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
George Preti, an organic chemist who devoted his career to studying bodily odors and how they can be weaponized in detecting disease, died on March 3 in Hatboro, Pa. He was 75. The cause was bladder cancer, according to the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia based research institution funded by philanthropy, government grants and corporate sponsorships. Ever since he was a regular passenger on the New York City subways, Dr. Preti (pronounced PRET ee) had thrived on pungency, discovering how individual smells can distinguish human beings like fingerprints. "We're all little chemistry factories," he told The New York Times in 1995. "We have bacteria mingling with excretions from the body that form a variety of odors depending on what part of the body we're talking about." His studies of the chemistry and biology of human body odors examined in particular their potential for diagnosing disease. He collaborated with cancer specialists and animal behaviorists, for example, to train dogs to identify odor profiles of ovarian cancer from blood samples. By the time ovarian cancer is typically detected by a scan or by physical sensation, it has spread to other organs. Dr. Preti's goal, which he was working toward at his death, was to perfect what would amount to an electronic nose. Dr. Preti also delved into so called volatile emanations like earwax; anal sac odors from dogs; scent marks from marmoset monkeys; the reek of urine from guinea pigs and mice; food smells from fruit flies; and the stench of swine slurry a mixture of feces, urine, food and mud generated by mammoth hog farms. Each study served a purpose. Animal secretions, for example, could generate clues about sexual attraction and socialization. Analyzing the composition of swine slurry helped lead to an industrial strength deodorant. Dr. Preti held a number of patents, including on a means of identifying specific diseases through human body odor. Dr. Preti's introduction to scents and sensibilities was more august. His doctoral dissertation was titled "A Study of the Organic Compounds in the Lunar Crust and in Terrestrial Model Systems." When he was granted his doctorate and accepted a fellowship at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in 1971, he discovered that the same gas chromatography and mass spectrometry used to analyze Moon dust (he kept a vial on his desk to impress visitors) could identify odor causing chemicals, volatile organic compounds, molecules and isomers (molecules with the same chemical formula but different chemical structures). George Preti was born on Oct. 7, 1944, in Brooklyn to Mario Preti, who owned a coffee shop where he also cooked, and Sylvia (Sempepos) Preti, a homemaker. After graduating from Fort Hamilton High School, he received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry in 1966 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now the Tandon School of Engineering of New York University). He earned a doctorate in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is survived by his wife, Kathleen (Egan) Preti; his son, Gregory; his daughter, Stephanie Ruscin; his sister, Christine Crockett; and three grandchildren. Dr. Preti's favorite foul smell was the one attributed to sweat, the signature aroma of a locker room. The chemical cause of perspiration's smell had earlier been mistakenly linked by other researchers to schizophrenia, but Dr. Preti's team found that 3 methyl 2 hexenoic acid was what caused the smell that pharmaceutical and cosmetic firms make billions of dollars trying to mask. The scientists discovered the cause after six male volunteers who worked at the Monell center went without using soap or deodorants for a week before the study began. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WASHINGTON Jerome H. Powell was sworn in on Monday as the Federal Reserve's 16th chairman, stepping into his new role as a half decade of economic tranquillity is beginning to show some signs of strain. The Fed has gradually been increasing interest rates to maintain control of inflation, and markets are starting to notice. Stock prices fell more than 4 percent on Monday, following a selloff on Friday as investors contemplated higher rates with a tightening labor market. Mr. Powell, charged with keeping the economy in the safe space between overheating and recession, arrives on that high wire as a relative unknown. He is a lawyer by training and an investor by trade in a role reserved almost exclusively for economists in recent decades. It is harder to predict how he would respond to faster growth or to a financial crisis. But Mr. Powell, who turned 65 Sunday, arrives in the job with a deeper knowledge of financial markets than his recent predecessors, and what friends describe as strong political instincts. "I worry not at all," said Seth Carpenter, who worked with Mr. Powell at the Fed and is now the chief United States economist at UBS. He said that Mr. Powell, in his early days at the Fed, would pull staff members aside after meetings with long lists of questions. In time, the lists got shorter. "It got increasingly deep and increasingly technical and increasingly sophisticated to the point where I think that this idea that he's not a real economist is just bunk," Mr. Carpenter said. Louis Crandall, a longtime Fed watcher at Wrightson ICAP, said every Fed chief faced unexpected challenges. In 1987, the stock market crashed two months after the installation of Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman. Mr. Greenspan was one of the nation's most prominent economists, and his views were well known, but Mr. Crandall said no one had asked what he'd do about a market crash. Mr. Powell also has well established views on financial regulation, a crucial issue as the Trump administration seeks to loosen the strictures imposed on the industry after the 2008 crisis. In the fall of 1991, Mr. Powell, then an assistant Treasury secretary, was summoned before Congress to explain how the government had failed to prevent an elaborate scheme by a bond trader at Salomon Brothers to corner the market in some Treasury securities. Under sharp questioning, Mr. Powell resisted demands for a regulatory crackdown. He pressed for Salomon executives to lose their jobs, and he favored changes to prevent any recurrences. But he cautioned Congress against meddling with a market that mostly worked. In October, shortly before Mr. Powell was nominated as chairman of the Federal Reserve, he told an audience of bond traders that he remained proud that the government had shown restraint. "Regulation should always take into account the impact that it has on markets a balance that must be constantly weighed," he said. "More regulation is not the best answer to every problem." In his remarks, Mr. Powell also highlighted the importance of financial market participants holding each other to a high standard. That approach was reflected in Friday's announcement that the Fed was slapping sanctions on Wells Fargo for failures of corporate governance. The action was taken during the final hours of Janet L. Yellen's tenure as Fed chairwoman, but with Mr. Powell's full support. Mr. Powell has emphasized the importance of oversight by bank boards of directors, and the Wells action criticized the company's board for failing to do its job. The Fed also published harshly critical letters to the last two chairmen of the Wells board, holding them accountable for the problems. Mr. Powell is a lifelong Washingtonian. He went away to college at Princeton but came back to law school at Georgetown. He went away to work on Wall Street but came back in the early 1990s to take a job under Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, who had also been his boss at the white shoe investment bank Dillon Read. Mr. Powell has the calm and unassuming manner of a person confident in his abilities. Mr. Carpenter said the only time that he had seen Mr. Powell show irritation was when he persisted in addressing Mr. Powell as "Governor Powell" rather than "Jay." John Dugan, a longtime friend who worked for Mr. Powell at Treasury, said Mr. Powell's success owed much to playing well with others. "He has a tremendous sense of humor, but not an unkind one," said Mr. Dugan, a former comptroller of the currency. The Salomon scandal began with a routine phone call. At the time, Wall Street firms wrote bids on scraps of paper stuffed into a wooden box. The New York Fed policed the process by calling a small selection of buyers to verify bids. In the spring of 1991, a staff member reached a surprised supposed bidder. A quiet investigation found that Salomon was bidding in other peoples' names. No firm was allowed to buy more than 35 percent of a given debt issue; at one auction in May 1991, Salomon bought 94 percent, allowing the firm to resell at a premium. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." Mr. Powell oversaw the government's borrowing program, so he led the repairs, including the negotiations over a long weekend in August that resulted in the departure of Salomon's top management and the installation of Warren E. Buffett as chairman. The bond trader went to prison. Mr. Powell "was impressive to me because he thought clearly and he didn't jump to conclusions," said Deborah A. Perelmuter, then the head of the domestic trading desk at the New York Fed, who watched Mr. Powell hammer together a consensus on the necessary changes including the replacement of paper slips with electronic bidding. "He seemed to have his head on straight." His views about regulation remain substantially unchanged. He supports the stronger rules imposed on financial companies after the 2008 crisis, but he has said he sees room for streamlining and he favors measures that encourage the industry to take responsibility for its conduct, where possible. After leaving Treasury, Mr. Powell remained in Washington and made a fortune as a private equity investor at the Carlyle Group. By 2010, he was looking for a new challenge, and he joined the Bipartisan Policy Center for an eight week project simulating a state's insolvency. He was not paid. Searching for an encore, Mr. Powell recognized, earlier than most, that the Tea Party Republicans who arrived in Congress in January 2011 were genuinely opposed to raising the nation's borrowing limit, known as the debt ceiling. Since he had been in charge of government borrowing, he also understood, better than most, that default would cause a crisis. Working by hand, he modeled the government's cash flows, calculating when Treasury would run out of money. He called it the "X date," coining a term that remains in common use. He published his analysis online and, for several weeks, no one paid any attention. Then, quite suddenly, he found himself in the spotlight. Treasury had published its own calculations but the media and congressional Republicans wanted an independent source of information. All the better that Mr. Powell was himself a Republican. "Jay was somebody who they could trust, who could help get facts into the discussion." said Shai Akabas, the director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, who worked for Mr. Powell as an analyst at the time. "He likes to earn your respect by working hard. It's not about saying, 'I'm here to help.' It's showing them that you're really there constructively." Mr. Powell started briefing individual members of Congress about the need to raise the debt ceiling and in mid June briefed the entire House Republican caucus, explaining that failing to act would cause a lot of pain for a lot of people. When Republican leaders met with Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, to negotiate a deal, they mentioned that Mr. Powell's presentation was a crucial reason they would be able to rally the necessary votes to raise the ceiling. Mr. Geithner asked Mr. Powell if he would be interested in returning to public service. In December 2011, President Barack Obama nominated Mr. Powell for a seat on the Fed's board of governors. Mr. Powell, who lives in Chevy Chase, Md., with his wife, Elissa Leonard, a filmmaker, is now preparing for a new challenge. One looming test: He has often commuted to the Fed on his bike, an eight mile ride. He is trying to persuade his new security detail to let him stay in the saddle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The great American sculptor Robert Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973 at the age of 35, was as interested in the history of the Earth as he was in the history of art. He once considered becoming a geologist and said that as a reader, "the entire history of the West was swallowed up" for him "in a preoccupation with notions of prehistory and the great prehistoric epics starting with the age of rocks." So he would undoubtedly have been pleased with a vote by the Utah Senate and the Utah House of Representatives to designate as official state works of art both his masterpiece "Spiral Jetty," the huge curlicue of black basalt rock he built in 1970, jutting into the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah and the state's plentiful ancient rock art, petroglyphs and pictographs that have been widely celebrated and studied. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Hoda Kotb, the longtime co host of the fourth hour of the NBC morning franchise "Today," will replace Matt Lauer as co anchor of the program's opening hours, the network said on Tuesday. Savannah Guthrie, the show's other anchor, announced the news of Ms. Kotb's appointment during Tuesday's broadcast. "This has to be the most popular decision NBC News has ever made, and I am so thrilled," Ms. Guthrie said, after a round of applause from the crew on set. This is the first time that two women will be the main hosts of "Today," which first went on the air in 1952 and is the network's most profitable franchise. The show has an overwhelmingly female audience, and the feel good nature of much of its content and the convivial byplay between its personalities give the impression that the cast is an on air family. Mr. Lauer had been called "America's dad" by some before his dismissal. Ms. Kotb (pronounced COT bee) had replaced Mr. Lauer on an interim basis since he was fired in November over allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior with a subordinate. Mr. Lauer is among the highest profile names to have been ousted in a national reckoning over sexual harassment in the workplace, along with Harvey Weinstein, Roger E. Ailes and Bill O'Reilly. With the move, Ms. Kotb becomes one of the most vital figures at NBC News. In 2016, the first two hours of "Today" brought in more than 500 million of revenue, while the fourth hour had revenue of 68 million, according to Kantar Media. Ms. Kotb will remain co host of the 10 a.m. hour of "Today" with Kathie Lee Gifford, NBC announced on Tuesday. Megyn Kelly will be the sole host of the 9 a.m. hour. There was some concern among NBC executives in November that viewers could flee the morning program after the firing of Mr. Lauer, who had been with the show for 20 years. But Ms. Kotb, a longtime fan favorite for her freewheeling segments with Ms. Gifford, has provided more than a steadying hand, and may even have given the show a boost. NBC has defeated its ABC rival "Good Morning America" every week since Mr. Lauer was removed, something it had not done for four consecutive weeks in more than five years. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The "Today" lead has narrowed the program averaged around 4.4 million viewers the week before Christmas, about 54,000 viewers more than "G.M.A." and there is some uncertainty whether the lead is sustainable. Further, all three morning shows experienced rating drops last year. A surprise boon from an emergency host isn't new at NBC. When Brian Williams was suspended for six months in 2015 from his evening newscast after he was caught embellishing stories about a Middle East reporting assignment, Lester Holt replaced him and the show's viewership figures were strong. Mr. Holt became the permanent replacement later that year. Likewise, the departures of Charlie Rose from "CBS This Morning" and Mr. O'Reilly from Fox News after public allegations of sexual misconduct have done little to disrupt either network. Fox News is still No. 1 among cable news networks in prime time, and the ratings for "CBS This Morning" have held steady while Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell continue in Mr. Rose's absence. (CBS has not yet hired a replacement.) Ms. Kotb cut her teeth as a local reporter and anchor, including a six year stint for the CBS affiliate in New Orleans. She joined NBC in 1998 as a correspondent for "Dateline." "Over the past several weeks, Hoda has seamlessly stepped into the co anchor role alongside Savannah, and the two have quickly hit the ground running," said Andrew Lack, the chairman of NBC News, in an early morning memo to staff on Tuesday. "They have an undeniable connection with each other and, most importantly, with viewers, a hallmark of 'Today.' Hoda is, in a word, remarkable. She has the rare ability to share authentic and heartfelt moments in even the most difficult news circumstances." Though NBC wanted to alert its viewers first, the decision had been made for at least a week and one magazine interview had been arranged. Right at 7 a.m., as the on air announcement was being made, People magazine released its cover for next week, featuring a smiling Ms. Kotb and Ms. Guthrie under the somewhat incongruous headline "Our hearts were broken." (That referred to Mr. Lauer.) Both co anchors were quoted by the magazine, discussing their excitement about the new NBC morning hour. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
THE GIRL FROM KATHMANDU Twelve Dead Men and a Woman's Quest for Justice By Cam Simpson 387 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. 27.99. In November 2004, a terrorist group patrolling the highway from Amman to Baghdad managed to capture 12 laborers being ferried to work on an American military base in Iraq. The terrorists killed the young men on camera, beheading one with a hunting knife and forcing the rest to lie facedown in a ditch, shooting each in the back of the head, so that their blood soaked into the ground beneath their faces. These were not strapping American soldiers or beefy contractors from the suburbs. As proxies for American military power, these victims were something far more strange and pitiful: the sons of farmers from mountain villages in Nepal, passed from hand to hand by the "body shops" that had sprung up to provide cheap labor for American bases. Their families had scraped together wads of cash for traffickers who had promised their sons jobs at a luxury hotel in Amman. Instead, they had been forced to continue their journey to Iraq, crammed into gypsy cabs that were dispatched, unprotected, down a highway known to be so dangerous that American civilian workers were flown into the country, not driven. By the standards of 2004, this was enough of a story to linger for three or four news cycles until it was replaced by the next atrocity. But Cam Simpson, an investigative journalist at Bloomberg News, began a quest, fueled by outrage and disgust, to answer a question lurking behind the murders: How could the world's wealthiest, most powerful military treat its workers this way? That quest produced "The Girl From Kathmandu," Simpson's chronicle of a 13 year effort to hold Kellogg Brown Root, a subsidiary of the titanic American military contractor Halliburton, accountable for its role in the deaths of these impoverished workers. Simpson and his translator haunt the chain smoking Jordanian businessmen who demanded the Nepalis' passports and crammed them into squalid rooms. With the guile of a great reporter, he lulls them into boasting about their operation on the record, and lures them to a cafe where a photographer is waiting to capture their faces on film. His reporting became the seed of a lawsuit against KBR Halliburton, and the second half of the book gains momentum as a David and Goliath legal drama. Simpson's obsessive reporting is the book's great strength. There is no journalist working in South Asia or the Middle East who is not surrounded by shades of human trafficking from apparently benign examples, like the nannies and drivers who serve their own homes, to more obviously coercive arrangements, including the children sent to work as housemaids in South Delhi bungalows. The globalization of labor is the overarching story of Asia, hauling millions of families out of desperate poverty and trapping millions of workers in something close to slavery. It's so ubiquitous that it's easy to stop seeing it. Simpson insists that you see it. He has given us an anatomy of globalized labor at its most shameful, complete with the internal correspondence of American military and Kellogg Brown Root officials reporting coerced labor and human trafficking to their superiors. "These kinds of allegations really need to be put to bed in such a manner that we do not revisit them each time a 'social crusader' comes on the scene," one of the company's procurement managers wrote in response to the complaints. It is unfortunate, given this achievement, that Simpson felt it necessary to remove himself from the heart of the story. He builds the book's plot around , the 19 year old wife of one of the murdered workers. Kamala is a courageous woman: Rendered a nonperson by her widowhood, she leaves her husband's family to build an independent life for herself a breathtaking risk for a teenager with a new baby and eventually travels to the United States to testify in the case against Kellogg Brown Root. But Simpson attributes thoughts to Kamala too freely, stumbling into cliches. ("Deep anxiety and worry remained her constant companions, no matter how far from home she traveled," he writes at one point.) It feels incorrect, as well, to plant Kamala as a central actor in the legal case pursued by a Washington law firm on behalf of the men's families, though one can understand why Simpson chose to. Journalists, like class action lawsuits, need a hero. I just wish Simpson had acknowledged his own role as a prosecutor. As journalists we labor under the illusion that we are not players in the stories we write. We are taught that we are present to observe and document. But by scraping away at layers of corporate misdirection, by asking and asking again and not letting go, Simpson reached something naked and ugly and unimpeachably true. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
When the Guilford County Schools in North Carolina spent more than 27 million to buy 66,000 computers and tablets for students over the summer, the district ran into a problem: There was a shortage of cheap laptops, and the devices wouldn't arrive until late October or November. More than 4,000 students in the district had to start the school year without the computers they needed for remote learning. "It's heartbreaking," said Angie Henry, the district's chief operations officer. "Kids are excited about school. They want to learn." Millions of children are encountering all sorts of inconveniences that come with digital instruction during the coronavirus pandemic. But many students are facing a more basic challenge: They don't have computers and can't attend classes held online. A surge in worldwide demand by educators for low cost laptops and Chromebooks up to 41 percent higher than last year has created monthslong shipment delays and pitted desperate schools against one another. Districts with deep pockets often win out, leaving poorer ones to give out printed assignments and wait until winter for new computers to arrive. That has frustrated students around the country, especially in rural areas and communities of color, which also often lack high speed internet access and are most likely to be on the losing end of the digital divide. In 2018, 10 million students didn't have an adequate device at home, a study by education nonprofit Common Sense Media found. That gap, with much of the country still learning remotely, could now be crippling. "The learning loss that's taken place since March when they left, when schools closed, it'll take years to catch up," Ms. Henry said. "This could impact an entire generation of our students." Chromebooks, web based devices that run on software from Google and are made by an array of companies, are in particular demand because they cost less than regular laptops. That has put huge pressure on a supply chain that cobbles laptop parts from all over the world, usually assembling them in Asian factories, Mr. Boreham said. While that supply chain has slowly geared up, the spike in demand is "so far over and above what has historically been the case," said Stephen Baker, a consumer electronics analyst at the NPD Group. "The fact that we've been able to do that and there's still more demand out there, it's something you can't plan for." Adding to the problem, many manufacturers are putting a priority on producing expensive electronics that net greater profits, like gaming hardware and higher end computers for at home employees, said Erez Pikar, the chief executive of Trox, a company that sells devices to school districts. Before the year began, Trox predicted it would deliver 500,000 devices to school districts in the United States and Canada in 2020, Mr. Pikar said. Now, the total will be two million. But North American schools are still likely to end the year with a shortage of more than five million devices, he said. He added that he was not aware of any large scale efforts to get refurbished or donated laptops to school districts. Districts that placed orders early in the pandemic have come out ahead, industry analysts said, while schools that waited until summer often because they were struggling to make ends meet are at a disadvantage. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, spent 100 million on computers in March and said in September that it was unaffected by shortages. But Paterson Public Schools in New Jersey had to wait until it received federal coronavirus relief money in late May to order 14,000 Chromebooks, which were then delayed because of Commerce Department restrictions on a Chinese manufacturer, Hefei Bitland. In July, the Commerce Department added Hefei Bitland, which worked with the computer giant Lenovo, to a list of companies accused of using Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups in China for forced labor. That worsened laptop shortages just a month or two before schools were set to reopen. "It took a bad situation and made it worse," Mr. Pikar said. "It was quite dramatic there were hundreds and hundreds of school districts that got caught." A spokesman for the Commerce Department said Lenovo should have known that "they are supplying computers to American schoolchildren that could have been produced from forced labor." Lenovo did not respond to requests for comment. Paterson was able to secure more laptops just nine days before school started, but other districts have not been as lucky. Alabama schools are waiting for more than 160,000 devices, and Mississippi did not receive the first of the 320,000 computers the state had ordered until early October. Staples said it would receive 140,000 Chromebooks for schools in November and December, 40,000 of which are earmarked for California districts. If students stop turning in homework consistently, Mr. Santos asks them privately: Do you have access to a laptop? One boy said he and his brother were sharing one computer at home, making it difficult for both to attend class. Others were completing assignments on their cellphones. "It breaks my heart," said Mr. Santos, who hears the "demoralization" in students' voices. "They want to do their work." Nearly all of the almost 700 students at the school, Navarro Middle School, are Hispanic or Black, and most are eligible for free lunches. Mr. Santos said Navarro had been underfunded for years. It does not even have a functioning library, he said. The district said it had spent 51 million and obtained more than 100,000 devices since April. But a month into the school year, Houston teachers are still encountering children without laptops. Mr. Santos's students are intelligent, inquisitive and unaccustomed to struggling in school, he said. But since classes started in early September, about 10 of his 120 students have told him that they need a laptop. For the first time, some are falling behind, he said. Guilford County Schools, with 73,000 students, is encountering the same problem in North Carolina. The district ordered laptops in August with help from the March coronavirus relief bill, Ms. Henry said. In eastern Idaho, the Bonneville Joint School District is holding in person classes, but hundreds of students have had to quarantine after possible virus exposure and the district said it did not have enough Chromebooks for them all. It didn't place its 700,000 order for 4,000 devices until late September because of budget challenges, said Gordon Howard, Bonneville's technology director. While they wait for the order, students without computers are missing out on education. "Those that are behind continue to get further behind, and it's through no fault of the kids at all," said Scott Miller, the principal of the Bonneville district's Hillcrest High School in Ammon. Many students at the Sante Fe Indian School, operated by New Mexico's Pueblo tribes, live in tribal homes without Wi Fi access, said Kimball Sekaquaptewa, the school's technology director. The school ordered laptops with built in SIM cards that do not require Wi Fi to connect to the internet. But the delivery date for the July order was pushed to October, forcing students to start the school year without remote classes. Instead, they were asked to find public Wi Fi twice a week to download and upload assignments. "There's a lot of frustration," Ms. Sekaquaptewa said. "We really wanted to hit the ground running, and now we're in limbo." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT Engineering is largely carried over for the LS 460, though the sedan adapts the Lexus brand's new "spindle grille." Big flagship luxury sedans are relics. Artifacts left over from a time when social standing was reflected in the length of a car's wheelbase and how upright its grille stood. A time when Mercedes wasn't reaching down market and Hyundai wasn't aiming for the heights. Back when the sight of a new Cadillac put a company's employees on high alert that the boss was on site, and not just that some drone in Section G had leased a CTS. So here comes Lexus's redecorated 2013 LS 460 wafting out of the 20th century. The sedan is the direct successor to the 1990 LS 400 that established a reputation for quality, quiet and conservative design for the then new luxury division of Toyota. And like that first car 23 years ago, today's LS is as traditionally engineered as a Chippendale hutch. That means rear wheel drive (though all wheel drive is optional), an all independent suspension tuned to quietly suffocate every road and a V 8 engine as creamy as Vermont butter. Every detail has changed, and the price has gone way, way up over two decades, but the LS is still the most Lexus like of Lexuses. The LS's new face fronts largely carried over engineering. The steel unified body structure is virtually unchanged from the LS generation that entered production as a 2007 model. While the all independent suspension's tuning has been tweaked, the basic design is the same. The familiar 4.6 liter direct injection engine used in every LS except the Hybrid (which has a 5 liter version) is now rated at a modest 386 horsepower (six more than last year) and it still sends its power out through an 8 speed automatic transmission. An option on the LS 460, all wheel drive is standard on the Hybrid. And if the regular LS 460's 116.9 inch wheelbase feels cramped, the LS 460L, with 121.7 inches between the front and rear wheels, is likely to seem less so. As mechanically conservative as the updated LS is, its reconstructed nose is relatively radical. It's a version of the "spindle grille" used on other Lexus vehicles, the sides pinched in to form an hourglasslike hexagon. Lexus uses words like "bold," "dynamic" and "fresh" to describe the styling, but "alien," "bizarre" and "weird" also work. That noted, throw in a newly sculptured hood and headlights overstuffed with LED elements, and the result is a car that, at least at a glance, appears newer than it actually is. The value of rhinoplasty is, ultimately, in the nose of the beholder. It's inside where the redesign is most successful. A 12.3 inch high resolution display embedded in the dashboard is the command center for a suite of new technologies that include operation of cellphones, audio system, climate controls and the navigation unit. The screen is big enough that it can be split into separate elements for, say, navigation on one side and audio controls on the other. Lexus also offers an "Executive Class Seating Package" option that reconfigures the rear seating area into a mash up of a mobile office, an upscale spa and the American Airlines Admirals Club lounge at La Guardia. If you can afford a chauffeur, the 16,400 price ( 15,960 with all wheel drive) is a mere pittance for the power adjustable reclining rear seats, power door closers, multifunction Shiatsu massage system and much more. But the most impressive thing about the LS is how well Lexus builds it. Every switch, button and lever operates with precision, and when a door opens there's an audible whoosh as the seals around it separate and the cabin pressure equalizes with the open air. The leather is impeccably tailored and so well finished that it seems a shame to sit on it. And the straightforward instrumentation glows with almost symphonic elegance starting the engine makes it all blaze to life as if accompanied by a Strauss melody. Viennese moonlight should be so elegant. Like all cars in this class, the LS carries an array of electronic devices to keep the passengers entertained and the driver from doing anything truly foolish. There's even a precollision system that, if it detects an object ahead and the car is moving less than about 25 miles per hour, will apply the brakes to prevent a collision. But what's missing is the automatic parallel parking system that Lexus introduced with much fanfare when this generation of LS was introduced for 2007. (You can get similar systems now in much less expensive cars, including the Ford Focus.) I drove two rear drive LS models, a long wheelbase LS 460L and the shorter, slightly more aggressively equipped LS 460 F Sport. Initially both seemed distant in their driving experience. Numb not only in their steering response, but also in how every mechanical system seemed to be drowning in its own silent refinement. Around town, both were simply boring. On the open road however, each car revealed some character. With so many luxury cars running engines rated beyond 500 horsepower, the 386 horses in the rear drive LS seems modest. But with eight gears to keep the engine humping in the thickest part of the powerband, both cars rip out solid acceleration. Car and Driver tested an all wheel drive F Sport, in which the V 8 is rated at only 360 horsepower, and still achieved a solid 6 second trip from 0 to 60 m.p.h. But it's the F Sport that's more entertaining. With more aggressively bolstered seats, paddle shifting of the transmission (with rev matching downshifts), larger 19 inch diameter wheels, oversize six piston Brembo front disc brakes, variable ratio electric power steering and an adjustable air suspension system tuned to control body roll, the F Sport is significantly more responsive and entertaining on twisting back roads. It's still not quite a sport sedan in the BMW tradition, but it feels muscular and capable and rides as well as the regular LS. Prices for the shorter wheelbase LS start at 72,885 and escalate rapidly. The LS 460L with the thickest option package an 18,400 accumulation of electronics that includes a "climate concierge" to coordinate various heating and cooling elements in the cabin goes for 97,585. The F Sport package is a 15,230 option on short versions of the LS. My F Sport test car came in at 88,115. There's something almost noble in the LS's upright stance and forthright engineering. But it's impossible to shake the feeling that this is a car whose time has passed. Not only because Lexus itself offers S.U.V. alternatives that many buyers will prefer, but because so much of the competition is ahead in technology. The Audi A8 and Jaguar XJ sedans, for instance, are built around lighter all aluminum chassis structures, and the imminent next generation of the Mercedes Benz S Class will be as well. And turbocharging smaller engines has let the German brands produce similar performance with better fuel efficiency. As it is, the ratings of the rear drive LS 16 miles per gallon in the city and 24 on the highway are only so so. The LS is the flagship a car for the Horatio Lord Nelsons of the 21st century. But the ships in other fleets pack more technological firepower. Lexus may need to re arm if it hopes to rule the waves again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
WESTFIELD, N.J. When an eighth grade class at Roosevelt Intermediate School tackled Chapter 4 of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" one morning last week, the conversation focused on the loneliness of a minor white character known as Curley's wife. The next day at the same time, five miles away at the Cedarbrook K 8 Center in Plainfield, another eighth grade class opened to the same chapter of the same book but paid scant attention to Curley's wife, spending most of an hour on the sole black character, Crooks. Similar discussions of the classic 75 year old novel, about two migrant workers desperately seeking their own land, unfold in thousands of classrooms around the country. But these two sets of students are engaged in an unusual literary experiment, studying the book in a collaboration intended to provide lessons between the lines of Steinbeck's prose. In a state stratified to a large extent by race and wealth, the mostly white students in tony Westfield say that they live in a privileged "bubble," while the Cedarbrook students in Plainfield are nearly all black and Hispanic, and two thirds of them are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunches. On Tuesday, the day after Martin Luther King's Birthday, 130 of the eighth graders who have been reading Steinbeck side by side, trading questions via Wikispaces, Skype and visits to each others' schools, will gather for the final chapter in a project that sought to teach them as much about themselves as about Lennie and George. "If you become experts in Steinbeck, beautiful, but that's not my goal," Matthew Kalafat, a Westfield teacher, told his class of 13 students 11 white, 2 Asian holding well thumbed hardcover books in first period the other day. "This is just a tool to get us to understand our world." In a previous lesson, the students had discussed Crooks, the first black character in their readings this year, and many were less sympathetic to Curley's wife after she had threatened to lynch Crooks. Now, perched on a stool, Mr. Kalafat asked: Was Curley's wife being unfairly judged by the migrant workers? By the students? "That never happens in middle school, right?" said Mr. Kalafat, who has also taught in Plainfield and neighboring Scotch Plains. "Kids in Plainfield, Scotch Plains and Westfield are all guilty of being the men on the ranch. You get the metaphor?" Westfield and Plainfield are linked by a railroad line, but little else connects their residents. Westfield teenagers say they have passed through Plainfield and found it run down and unappealing on the way to the Dairy Queen or McDonald's. Plainfield students say they cannot afford to go to the restaurants and boutiques in Westfield's downtown. During a Nov. 21 session that kicked off the project, Plainfield students were asked to describe Westfield. They came up with "snotty," "rich," "clean" and "fantasy." But over Steinbeck and sandwiches at that first meeting, the students began to find connections. They love the same music (hip hop), though not necessarily the same clothes (Banana Republic in Westfield, Aeropostale in Plainfield). They strive to have friends and go to good colleges. "When I went to their school, I thought it was going to be really boring," said Kennedy Adams, 14, of Plainfield. "But then they started to actually talk to me, and I understood they were going through the same things I'm going through." Kennedy said he has since linked to 10 Westfield students on Facebook and chats online with his new friends every other day. "It basically all happened because of this book," he said. Students in Westfield, about 25 miles southwest of Manhattan, said the project had brought a different world right to their doorstep and taught more empathy. As part of the exchange, each student made a "dream board" of goals and aspirations to be shared with the group on Tuesday. Brett Robertshaw, a Westfield student, wrote on his board about going into medicine and making a lot of money. A Westfield classmate dreamed of becoming a fashion designer and living in a big house. In contrast, Brett noted, some Plainfield students wrote about finishing high school or landing college scholarships. "We were all shooting for the stars, and they just wanted to get out of town," he said. "You can't help being born into poverty. We were all born in a rich town. It really made me grateful for being born with all these privileges." The exchange was the idea of Derrick Nelson, the assistant principal at Roosevelt, who grew up in Plainfield and once taught in that district. When he took the job in Westfield, he said, some of his former colleagues thought he would be sitting in an office drinking tea all day. But he, too, found similarities: Westfield students struggled with peer pressure and academics just like those in Plainfield. Mr. Nelson, 36, teamed up with a longtime friend and Cedarbrook's former principal, Frank Asante, to develop the project, which cost less than 1,600 for busing, supplies, food and books for Cedarbrook (Roosevelt already had them). "Everyone has some vision of the American dream," Mr. Nelson said. "Why not use that to expand kids' thinking?" Eleanor Hemphill, a Cedarbrook teacher, said her students had benefited not just from exposure to alternate viewpoints but also from knowing they could do the same work as their counterparts in Westfield. "They're learning the same things, so they know that one school is no better or worse than the other," Ms. Hemphill said, noting that "the perception is you're not going to get a good education in Plainfield and the kids are different, and they're not." In Ms. Hemphill's first period class last Tuesday, she read from Chapter 4 before asking her 19 students 14 black, 5 Hispanic to explain how they felt about Crooks's being banished from the bunkhouse because of his skin color. One boy said Crooks was living like a slave in the stables. Others observed that he probably slept on a straw bed, amid horse droppings. But when she brought up Curley's wife, the discussion trickled off. "Is she nice?" Ms. Hemphill prodded. One girl finally offered that she was probably tired of being lonely and stuck at home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
In her opening, Calderon turns the camera on herself, recalling her interview with a Ku Klux Klan leader who threatened her: "We're going to burn you out." She writes: "There's no doubt: I, Ilia Calderon Chamat" she uses her full name here, highlighting the Syrian lineage she inherited from her mother's side of the family "am Black. Colombian, Latina, Hispanic, Afro Colombian, mixed and anything else people may want to call me or I choose to call myself, but I'm always Black." Race is a central theme of her story, underlining the significance of Calderon's professional ascendance in her native and adopted countries: She was the first Afro Latina to anchor leading national newscasts in Colombia and on a major Spanish language broadcast network in the United States. Hinojosa focuses her introduction on a girl from Guatemala whom she encounters at an airport in McAllen, Texas, one of nine immigrant children about to be escorted onto a flight to Houston and from there, who knows? Hinojosa and the girl stare at each other, a grown woman on her hands and knees looking for a plug to charge her phone and a "numb girl, the one with the gaze of nothingness, of just barely being human"; a child "anesthetized by some mysterious poison that kept you alive on the outside but dead on the inside." It's a jarring scene, punctuated by the bureaucratic coolness of the girl's chaperones, Hinojosa's tender reassurances in Spanish and the outrage she feels while witnessing "one of the greatest modern horrors of the U.S.A.," as she puts it, "the holding of innocent children; the transporting, trafficking, kidnapping of children by a government." Hinojosa's book is as much a manifesto as it is a memoir. The narrative is chiseled by points of convergence between her own story and the history of immigration in this country. In one vivid passage, she recalls a childhood memory of desperate families fleeing Vietnam in small fishing vessels after the fall of Saigon. She notes the term used by newspapers at the time "boat people" then asks: "Should we call those waiting on the sidewalks at the border in Mexico 'concrete people'? What's next? How else can we otherize people from different places?" There's an almost perverse similarity between Hinojosa's description of her arrival as a green card carrying child from Mexico in the 1960s and the arrival, in 2018, of a "mute and blind" asylum seeking boy from Guatemala whom she introduces in the final pages of her book. Hinojosa is a child of privilege: Her family moved to the United States because her father, a doctor and researcher, was offered a full time job at the University of Chicago. The boy she writes about has a different story: His family came to the United States to escape the mafia that had killed his grandfather and threatened to kill him and others in his family. Yet the overlap is telling. The government attempted to remove each of them from their mothers' arms as they arrived Hinojosa while at the airport, where a customs agent threatened to quarantine her after mistaking an allergic rash for German measles; and the boy while at an immigration detention center, just because. Her message is clear: Pedigrees don't matter much when you're brown. As a result, Hinojosa has made it her mission to shed light on the lives and stories that others refuse or aren't equipped to see. She has earned distinction after distinction in nearly 30 years as a journalist, working at public radio stations and for public, network and cable television news channels, often as the only Latina in the newsroom. Again and again, she recalls stories like one she worked on at NPR, about young boys who earned money by performing back flips and other tricks outside an El Salvador hotel that housed foreign reporters during that country's civil war: "It was a story that had been right in front of journalists' faces for years and yet for them and therefore for the rest of us, these kids were invisible. Their stories didn't matter." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The scientist at the center of a controversy over fossil fuel funding for climate research denounced his critics on Monday and said that he would be "happy to comply" with possible additional disclosure requirements from scientific journals publishing his papers. In his first detailed public statement since the controversy erupted more than a week ago, the scientist, Wei Hock Soon, a researcher at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, complained that he had been the subject of unfair attacks in the press. He ascribed them to "various radical environmental and politically motivated groups." Dr. Soon, who is known as Willie, added, "This effort should be seen for what it is: a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy" on global warming. Monday's statement was not released by Dr. Soon's employer, the Smithsonian Institution, which has responded to the controversy by starting an inquiry into his activities and a review of its disclosure and ethics policies for scientific research. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
PARIS You know when you go to a friend's house for dinner, and you wish you could buy their lifestyle: the furniture, the art, the clothes, everything? At Society Room, one of the most exclusive shopping destinations in Paris, that's the idea. "There's no question that e commerce is the future," said Yvan Benbanaste, the gregarious 46 year old founder and creative director of Society Room, "but ultimately I wanted to give my friends a good reason to get out of the house and shop." Located in a 19th century brick maisonette tucked in a courtyard near the Madeleine, the store, for want of a better word, initially appears to be just an enviably appointed Parisian home, with a 1980s Italian gold and glass console in the foyer, custom made alabaster light fixtures by Ruben Glustin in the stairwell and, in the living room, a black and white portrait of Naomi Campbell by the photographer Albert Watson. Except everything is for sale. And along with the flea market finds, the art dealer loaners and the Pierre Frey curtains, there are the tailored suits, little black dresses and cocktail jumpsuits designed by Mr. Benbanaste. And it all is refreshed about every six months. Opened quietly last October, this is not the kind of shop where you can just drop by on a whim and browse. As its name implies, Society Room is for friends and friends of friends by a degree or two of separation. You can't make a reservation the way you do at a restaurant, either. Shopping is by invitation only. That invitation often includes cocktails, maybe dinner, served on the oval table that seats 12 in a mallard blue dining room tucked between a tiny design studio and the kitchen The business plan (such as it is) is to "throw people together and see what happens," Mr. Benbanaste said. And at any gathering, you might meet professionals from the film industry, publishing, art, fashion, management, finance or law. Had Mr. Benbanaste lived in another era, he would have been the host of a literary salon. As it is, when he hit a professional crossroads a year ago, the self described textile geek decided to funnel his experience at the Italian luxury men's wear brands A. Testoni and Pal Zileri into what he called "real life dressing" for women and men, "at a reasonable price, in a place where people feel at home." The details didn't come into focus until Fabrice Pinchart Deny, his business partner, came up with the concept of an actual home. A friend of Mr. Benbanaste's from high school, Mr. Pinchart Deny had been an equity trader in London and then briefly worked in real estate in Paris before joining the business full time. (It was his wife's reaction to the clothes that convinced him of the project's commercial potential.) "As someone who loves Parisian style, I had to admit that I no longer recognized it in what I was seeing in shop windows, particularly abroad," Mr. Benbanaste said. What really got to him was what he called the "Las Vegas aspect" of fashion, as seen on social media. Yet Mr. Benbanaste enjoys the kind of lifestyle seemingly made for Instagram. His feed is filled with glamorous gatherings in Paris and exotic locales, be it a birthday weekend on Mykonos, a bash in London or a winter break in Tulum, Mexico, which may help explain his women's wear aesthetic: "Jane Birkin steals Serge Gainsbourg's wardrobe." That translates into a tightly edited collection of chic workhorse basics including crisp poplin shirts (starting at 140 euros, or 174) and silk blouses, jackets in stretch cotton micro jacquard, wool and mohair tuxedos (suits range from EUR500 to EUR2,500), and coats in chocolate suede and shearling. There are pajama style separates in Indian silk and cotton jumpsuits that offer a poolside alternative to the sarong. Delivery for tailored pieces, produced in Europe, takes three to four weeks. Jewelry by friends such as Marie Gas of Gas Bijoux and the Franco Mexican designer Sophie Simone Cortina, and flat sandals by Lorine Driot, the founder of the sandal brand Nupie, rounded out the shop's mix last month. Their wares will continue to be showcased, and Mr. Benbanaste will add other brands as he sees fit. On the men's side, Christmas gift certificates for EUR150 bespoke shirts proved a hit, he said, as did the wrinkle resistant travel jackets. They've also logged numerous orders for tuxedos for the Cannes Film Festival in May. "My friends look at fashion in a classical way, but with a touch of whimsy," Mr. Benbanaste said. They have a kind of uniform, and they're looking for something beautiful and sober that will let them stand out. And they're done with having to find the time, then standing in line to try clothes on or pay for them." Ad hoc as it sounds, he and Mr. Pinchart Deny are already fielding inquiries: A pop up space is to appear in September in Lisbon and trunk shows are being planned in London and New York. At home in France, Society Room has begun building out its concept: On Thursday, it will host an exhibition by the photographer Stephane Bisseuil at the restaurant Alcazar on the Left Bank. And a fabric discovery/wine tasting event is planned for April at the headquarters of the Chateau de Ladoucette wine group, in the 16th Arrondissement. So, how does a stranger join the party? For events, prospective guests will be able to register on the Society Room's website. As for the "home" shopping experience, after a moment's thought, Mr. Benbanaste suggested: "They could always email and ask to drop by for tea." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Bedsheet banners became a distinctive signature of the early Mets. The one above misspelled "vigor" to mimic the way President John F. Kennedy pronounced the word. The Mets were back in the Polo Grounds in 1963 and so were their many fans. Who knows why everyone showed up, or why so many of them brought banners, but some of the fervor was just sheer irreverence, the antiestablishment joy of rooting for a team that was so awful. And for sure, the Mets were terrible again, although this time they managed to win 51 games instead of 40. The nuttiest moment came when Jimmy Piersall ran around the bases backward after hitting the 100th home run of his career. The most exhilarating occurred when tens of thousands of Mets fans invaded Yankee Stadium for a charity exhibition game against baseball's defending champions, had their banners confiscated and then went berserk anyway when the Mets actually won. In 1965, the Mets were even worse, winning just 50 games while also losing Casey Stengel, who retired after breaking his hip. Without Stengel, the Mets were less entertaining and still stunk. They did move up from last place to ninth in 1966 but then fell right back into 10th a year later. Still, that season the Mets had the rookie of the year in pitcher Tom Seaver. In 1968, the left hander Jerry Koosman was just as impressive in his first season. The teammates of Seaver and Koosman now included other emerging players, like Jerry Grote and Bud Harrelson and Cleon Jones. And it showed in the Mets' 1968 record a 73 89 mark that still wasn't very good but suggested that maybe something was changing. And something was. So we celebrated the Mets in an appropriately early 1960s way ironic, self aware, rambunctious. Rock ish. The crowds with their made for TV bedsheet banners seemed charmingly self deprecating ("We don't want to set the world on fire, we just want to finish ninth") but they also foreshadowed darker times to come ("Pray"). The price of allowing, then encouraging, grandstand populism would eventually be their strident demands. But those two Polo Grounds years were fun. Energized media members were thrilled with their new job and the West Coast trips to visit the Dodgers and Giants that came with them. Writers replated the former Yankee manager Casey Stengel as a madcap guru even as he spoke the truth after yet another loss ("The attendance was robbed, we're still a fraud"), often with sarcasm ("Come out and see my amazin' Mets"). A teenager who would never fulfill his hype, Ed Kranepool, was held up as the face of the future. Most notorious of all, an inept first baseman, Marv Throneberry, was extolled as the symbol of the bumbling present. Years later, he told me how miserable he had been as a Met. He had entered the big leagues as a Yankee, Mickey Mantle's heir, no less, after a sensational minor league career. Being celebrated as Marvelous Marv, the Mets' fool, broke his spirit. Perhaps the most telling signal that celebrating the "lovable losers" as comforting symbols of "everyman" just like us! would be short lived was the creation of "neggies," precursors of the Moneyball analytics of today. We needed those negative statistics to prove that the Mets were not merely profoundly second rate but actually the worst of all time, so gloriously bad that we could claim them as champions, inverted champions to be sure, of games lost, chances bobbled, bases missed, hopes dashed. For the Mets, even mediocrity was a dream deferred. Pitcher Roger Craig with the No. 13 jersey he wore in August 1963 in a bid to break his 18 game losing streak. It worked, and he improved his record to 3 20. But the founding Mets writers and fans couldn't paint over the mid '60s slump in real American life. The glow of post World War II triumphalism had given way to the Bay of Pigs, the murderous resistance to civil rights activism, mounting Cold War anxiety, the assassination of J.F.K. There was too much dread. Mets fans began to clamor for some wins on their scoreboard. 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. There was a jolt of hope in 1964 when the Mets moved into their home for the next 44 years, Shea Stadium, paid for by the taxpaying fans, named for a wheeler dealer lawyer. The ballpark was riddled with imperfections. The team was even worse, lurching through five more losing seasons. The Mets couldn't even claw their way up to mediocrity. The so called New Breed fans (named and championed by the swaggering, righteous Daily News columnist Dick Young) grew restive. Beyond the ballpark, the riots and assassinations were taking their toll on the public psyche, and the Mets, our safety valve, our comic relief, were becoming just another black hole of despair. And then came Tom Seaver fresh, ebullient, hard working, immensely talented. Nothing mediocre here. He was the Mets' first homegrown superstar and many of us still think the only one. In 1967, he was National League rookie of the year, an All Star, and a 16 game winner for a last place club. The next year he again won 16 games, this time for a ninth place club. But Tom Terrific set the world on fire, not only the top gun of a strong young pitching staff Jerry Koosman, Nolan Ryan, Gary Gentry, Tug McGraw but the anti Marv. He was the New Breed's dream of the New Met, a California college boy with a playful cackle who would lead us to the promised pennant in 1969. Was it a miracle? Don't sports miracles happen suddenly, one hockey game, a shot heard 'round the world, a perfect punch? This miracle unspooled through seven years of suffering as preparation for 100 victories punctuated by Seaver's 25. Beating the highly favored Orioles was almost anticlimactic: It was truly about the journey from hopelessness to champions of the world without having to pass through mediocrity. Maybe that was the miracle ... and the devil's bargain. In fact, a case could be made here it comes that the 1969 World Series is still the high point of Mets history, that nothing in the next 50 years came close. The Mets lost the 1973 Series to Oakland and won in 1986 under morally nullifying circumstances; not only did they win because of a Red Sox error, but a member of that team in his final major league season, at a still serviceable 41, was Seaver. He should have still been a Met. In 1977, a contract dispute with the cartoonishly imperious Mets chairman, M. Donald Grant, was viciously spun by Dick Young into a Desperate Players Wives plot; Nancy Seaver, he claimed, wanted Tom to make more than Nolan Ryan. A man of dignity, Seaver opted out and began an exile's journey to the Reds, the White Sox, briefly back to the Mets, then the Red Sox and finally to his California winery. The Mets went on to lose the World Series in 2000 and 2015, each by four games to one. Failing against the Yankees in 2000 doomed the Mets to their current fate. Only winning the Subway Series would redeem a history of steady disappointment. Their owners have been lackluster; they have managed a record of 4,362 victories against 4,732 defeats, a .480 average, not to mention involvement with the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. The closest the Mets ever came to a Seaverish star was the talented, handsome, good hearted David Wright, unfortunately bedeviled by injuries. Following are excerpts from Times articles from 1964 to 1968. More of the Same as Mets Open Shea Shea Stadium, the newest major league baseball park, opened for business yesterday with appropriate festivities and colossal traffic jams. A crowd of 50,312, including 48,736 who paid, radiated enthusiasm under sunny skies as the New York Mets fought their way to a typical 4 3 defeat at the hands of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The lack of parking space at the stadium caused massive traffic snarls that started an hour and a half before game time. The congestion was not nearly so bad after the game despite the addition of normally heavy commuter traffic. Traffic Commissioner Henry A. Barnes was in a helicopter over the area trying to unscramble postgame jams. In every respect but traffic control and the outcome of the game, the occasion was declared a rousing success by most of those involved. "At first," said Casey Stengel, who has been singing the praises of the new stadium all over the country for months, "I couldn't find out where the writers were and where the broadcasters were, but then I found them and I was in trouble." LEONARD KOPPETT Baseball's transcontinental archrivals the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants battled through 10 hours and 23 minutes of a titanic doubleheader at Shea Stadium yesterday that included the longest game on a time basis ever played in the major leagues. Endurance records, attendance records and performance records fell through nine innings of the first game and 23 innings of the second before the largest crowd of the baseball season anywhere 57,037. The huge throng saw the Giants win, 5 3 and 8 6. And the 8,000 to 10,000 still on hand when the action ended at 11:25 p.m. saw 41 players struggle for 7 hours and 23 minutes, a record, in the second game. The two teams also played the longest doubleheader in history: 9 hours 52 minutes on the field. They also played the most innings ever played by big league teams in one day: 32. During and after the games, people lined up outside the stadium to use a telephone alongside the right field stands. Because of a union jurisdictional dispute, there are no telephones at the stadium. Some potential callers who saw the one phone booth tied up rushed hundreds of yards to the elevated train station. After paying a token, they raced to the phone booths there. Those who wished to leave during the game to make telephone calls were permitted to return. There was some grumbling, however, as the day went on. Jim Bunning of the Philadelphia Phillies pitched the first perfect game in the National League in 84 years yesterday when he retired all 27 New York Met batters. The Phils won the contest, the first game of a doubleheader at Shea Stadium by 6 0 before 32,904 fans, who were screaming for Bunning during the last two innings. The lanky right hander became the eighth man in the 88 year history of major league baseball to pitch a perfect game. He is the first man to pitch one in the majors since Don Larsen of the New York Yankees did not permit a Brooklyn Dodger to reach base in the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. In the second game, which the Phillies won, 8 2, the Mets were held to three hits, by a rookie, Rick Wise, and John Klippstein. GORDON S. WHITE Jr. As the World Series opens today on the other side of the continent, New Yorkers at least have the consolation of knowing that both their teams made baseball history in the season just past. Moreover, in his second game in the major leagues, Seaver outpitched Curt Simmons, who was pitching in his 540th game and who started pitching 21 seasons ago, when Seaver was a 2 year old tot in Fresno. JOSEPH DURSO The New York Mets, fresh from their opening day travesty in San Francisco, made a remarkable comeback when Jerry Koosman defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4 0, on a complete game four hitter. The 24 year old rookie left hander from Minnesota had never seen Dodger Stadium before. He had never won a game in the major leagues, either, and had pitched only 22 innings for the Mets, all of them last season. Koosman gave up two walks and no hits until Tom Haller singled to right in the fifth. Then Wes Parker doubled to left in the sixth, but still the Dodgers were scoreless. The Mets, meanwhile, reached Singer for two runs in the sixth, when Singer suffered from the effects of a bad cold, a pair of troublesome contact lenses and a leadoff triple by Ken Boswell. A pair of walks to Ron Swoboda and Ed Kranepool loaded the bases, then Art Shamsky pulled a two run single to right. JOSEPH DURSO NEXT UP: 1969: We Have Liftoff in Queens | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Cookbook writers had enticed me to explore cuisines in my own kitchen Paula Wolfert on Moroccan food, Diana Kennedy on Mexican, Julia Child on French. But Mr. Gold was the first food critic to open up a city to me, to push me, along with thousands of others, to go outside our usual understanding of a place and take some chances. Mr. Gold, who would take a top spot in any ranking of food critics, was also wildly prolific. There are more than 200 entries in "Counter Intelligence" a fraction of the reviews he would eventually generate, but enough to dizzy the mind. On that first post "Counter Intelligence" trip to Los Angeles, I had a few meals at restaurants he recommended: Korean hot pots in Koreatown, Persian sandwiches on Westwood, Oaxacan mole in Mid City. Exploring the food meant exploring the city, going to neighborhoods that, frankly, I had never even heard of. One Gold imprinted place I remember well: the Apple Pan in Rancho Park. It wasn't a Spam burger at Mago's, or a Bombay style "frankie" at All India Cafe, but the burger at Apple Pan was an L.A. classic one that, to my shame, I didn't know. It wasn't just the food that Mr. Gold made so appealing, it was the experience. "No matter how many waiting people may be crowded in behind you, no matter how hungrily they stare at your pie," he wrote about the Apple Pan, "the countermen will always draw you another cup of coffee from the gasfired urn and furnish you another dram of fresh, heavy cream." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Another week, another streaming record for rap music. Post Malone, the 22 year old rapper who can't stop making sing songy hits, has topped the Billboard album chart with his second LP, "Beerbongs Bentleys," earning both the largest sales week of the year so far and the most streams ever in a week (though the streaming era is, of course, only a few years old). His album, released by Republic Records, moved a total of 461,000 units by the industry's math, combining 153,000 in traditional sales and a gobsmacking 431 million plays on streaming services, according to Nielsen. That easily cleared the previous benchmark of 385 million streams, set by Drake's "More Life" last year, and dwarfed last week's blockbuster, "KOD" by J. Cole. (Post Malone might want to celebrate while he can; Drake will be back with the album "Scorpion" next month.) The digital dominance was so thorough that out of the 10 most streamed songs tallied by Nielsen for the week, eight came from Post Malone's album. The other two? Drake, whose Hot 100 topping "Nice for What" remained the most popular. Rounding out Post Malone's monster week, his debut album, "Stoney," from December 2016, jumped back into the Top 10 with 40 million streams of its own, good enough for No. 9. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
LONDON To some, he is a real life Willy Wonka. To others, he is a Bond style villain bent on taking over the world's supply of chocolate. In a stroke, a hedge fund manager here named Anthony Ward has all but cornered the market in cocoa. By one estimate, he has bought enough to make more than five billion chocolate bars. Chocolate lovers here are crying into their Cadbury wrappers and rival traders are crying foul, saying Mr. Ward is stockpiling cocoa in a bid to drive up already high prices so he can sell later at a big profit. His activities have helped drive cocoa prices on the London market to a 30 year high. Mr. Ward, 50, is not some rabid chocoholic, former employees say. He simply has a head for cocoa. And, through his private investment firm, Armajaro, he now controls a cache equal to 7 percent of annual cocoa production worldwide, a big enough chunk to sway prices. "Globally, he is unmatched in his knowledge of cocoa," said Tim Spencer, a former Armajaro executive. Armajaro maintains offices in West Africa, helping Mr. Ward keep tabs on major cocoa crops. "We even have our own weather stations our very own that no one else has in some parts of the world," Mr. Ward, soft spoken and tan, said in a video interview this year with a financial news service. Now, traders here are buzzing that Mr. Ward has placed an audacious 1 billion bet in the London market for cocoa futures. This month, he bought 241,100 metric tons of beans, they say. His play has some people up in arms. While some see it as a simple bet that cocoa prices will rise on falling supply, others say Mr. Ward has created a shortage of cocoa simply to drive up the price himself. The German Cocoa Trade Association and others wrote an angry letter to the London exchange on which cocoa is traded, demanding that it take action against what the association characterized as a "manipulation." The British news media has christened Mr. Ward "Chocolate Finger," a nod to the Bond villain Auric Goldfinger. And on Facebook, someone has created a "Choc Finger" page featuring Mr. Ward's face superimposed on a pig that is bellying up to the trough. The fear is that Mr. Ward will become the go to source until the annual cocoa harvest, which starts in October. With candy makers starting to stock up for the holiday season, they may be forced to pay him ever higher prices and cocoa has already jumped 150 percent since 2008. "The squeeze was really timed perfectly," said Eugen Weinberg, an analyst at Commerzbank in Frankfurt. Mr. Ward and his firm, which has not acknowledged buying the cocoa contracts, declined to comment for this article. Attempts to corner a particular market come and go in the rough and tumble world of commodities trading. During the 1970s, Nelson Hunt and his brother, William, tried but failed to corner the world market in silver. While Mr. Ward lords over the world of cocoa, he is a bit of a mystery outside of that universe. Former employees, acquaintances and peers say that, in person, he does not fit his villainous nickname, and characterize him as friendly and intelligent. Despite rattling the markets with large investments, Mr. Ward prefers to keep a low profile. After working as a motorcycle courier, Mr. Ward was introduced to commodities in 1979, when he became a trainee for the tea, rice, cocoa and rubber operations at the conglomerate Sime Darby. He first made his mark in cocoa with a big bet in the mid 1990s, when he was at Phibro, then the commodity trading arm of Salomon Smith Barney. Mr. Ward opened his own firm in 1998 with another founder, Richard Gower. Its name, Armajaro, is a mixture of their four children's names. Mr. Ward's appetite for risk extends beyond the cocoa market. He is also an avid rally racer who once drove a red 1947 Allard sports car thousands of miles in a race from London to Cape Town. He plans to race in a similar rally in January in a 1971 Ford Escort. His fellow driver will be Mark Solloway, who was badly injured in a crash involving Mr. Ward in 2002 in Poland. When Mr. Solloway ended up in a local hospital, a distraught Mr. Ward, who had been driving their car, arranged for a private jet to fly him to London for treatment. "He's the greatest and most generous person," Mr. Solloway said. Mr. Ward lives with his wife and two sons in a four story red brick town house in the upscale Mayfair district of London. A brisk, 15 minute walk away are Armajaro's offices, housed in a Georgian mansion with marble floors, soaring ceilings and a courtyard. At first, Armajaro focused solely on cocoa. Later, it started trading coffee and then other agricultural commodities. Today, Armajaro manages more than 1.5 billion in assets, mostly in hedge funds. But through another business, it remains one of the world's largest suppliers of cocoa. It has buying operations in the Ivory Coast, Indonesia and Ecuador. By most accounts, Mr. Ward profited handsomely by orchestrating a similar cocoa squeeze in 2002. That move, which earned him his chocolate themed nicknames, caught the attention of financial regulators here, but their findings were never made public. This time, seeing an even bigger investment, some cocoa organizations complained to the exchange, threatening to take their trades elsewhere. In a letter, the exchange said its investigations had turned up "no evidence of abusive behavior." A spokesman for the exchange declined to comment further. In any case, chocolate lovers should not worry too much, analysts said. Cocoa accounts for only about 10 percent of the price of most ordinary chocolate bars. The situation could change, however, if the next cocoa harvest falls short of expectations or if Mr. Ward keeps buying. "That really scares us. That he would double up the bet and buy more September contracts," said a London cocoa trader who asked that his name not be used because he might want to do business with Armajaro in the future. Still, the trader seemed in awe of Mr. Ward's play, adding: "If I had the guts and money, I would do that, too." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Cora Cahan, a longtime New York arts administrator, will join the Baryshnikov Arts Center as its new president and chief executive, the organization announced on Tuesday. Ms. Cahan will begin her tenure in mid October. Ms. Cahan, who had a career as a dancer before becoming the executive director of the Eliot Feld Ballet, has spent much of her career transforming neglected theaters into revitalized cultural spaces. After she and the choreographer Eliot Feld helped to transform a 1941 movie house into the Joyce Theater, she became the founding president of the New 42nd Street nonprofit organization where she spent 29 years reshaping a stretch of dilapidated Times Square theaters into a cultural hub. Under her tenure, the organization opened the family oriented New Victory theater, the black box theater the Duke and New 42nd Street Studios, which offers rehearsal and theater space for emerging artists. She stepped down as the organization's chief in June. Now Ms. Cahan will use her administrative expertise and her dance background to help Mikhail Baryshnikov, whom she's known for 45 years and calls Misha, bring his multidisciplinary arts center into its next chapter. "Of great interest to me is to go someplace created by somebody that I trust and admire beyond measure, which is Misha , and help him move it forward into not only the second half of the 21st century but beyond," Ms. Cahan said in a phone interview. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
BLINDED BY THE LIGHT (2019) 7 p.m. on HBO Signature. "It's like Bruce knows everything I've ever felt," Javed (Viveik Kalra) says of Bruce Springsteen. It's a somewhat unlikely match: For one thing, in this musical drama, Javed is living in the suburbs of London, a long way from New Jersey. For another, he's the 16 year old son of Pakistani immigrants. These differences between Javed and Springsteen are part of the point of "Blinded by the Light," a coming of age story that's both very 1980s and very timeless: Javed finds Springsteen, then himself. The film was adapted from a memoir by Sarfraz Manzoor and directed by Gurinder Chadha ("Bend It Like Beckham"), who infuses the story with Bollywood style musical sequences and Springsteen lyrics that at times physically spring to life onscreen. "I didn't want to make a jukebox musical," Chadha said in an interview with The Times last year. "The film is about writing and words." HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER 10 p.m. on ABC. After airing part of its sixth and final season late last year, this legal thriller series will return Thursday night for the first of its final episodes. Pieces of how the series will wrap up have been teased: Earlier episodes included flash forwards to a funeral for Annalise (Viola Davis), the law professor at the series's center. But they also made it unclear whether she actually dies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
This Tarantula Became a Scientific Celebrity. Was It Poached From the Wild? In February, the Journal of the British Tarantula Society published a paper describing a new species of tarantula, which was discovered in a national park in Sarawak, Malaysia. While the male of the species was an unremarkable brown, the female had eye catching, electric blue legs. New spiders are discovered all the time, and the paper likely would have gone largely unnoticed were it not for an article in Science magazine that appeared soon afterward. The article claimed that the tarantula researchers had received their specimens secondhand from private collectors in Poland and Britain, who had poached them in Malaysia. Neither Ray Gabriel nor Danniella Sherwood, the authors of the study, responded to email requests for comment. But Peter Kirk, chairman of the British Tarantula Society and editor of the society's journal, said the collectors had shown the scientists an import permit from Poland, and they "had no reason to think due process wasn't followed." "The paper absolutely will not be retracted, because it's a completely legitimate published paper," he said. The incident has reignited a decades old debate among scientists and hobbyists alike about research ethics, specimen collection and "biopiracy" the use of natural resources without obtaining permission from local communities or sharing any benefits with them. "The majority of responses I've seen are people saying, 'Yes, we need to stop this,' but there's also been a fair amount of people basically trying to justify the poaching and smuggling of these tarantulas," said Ernest Cooper, a conservation consultant in British Columbia. "It's this very strange, slightly colonial attitude of, 'We know better than developing countries, so their laws don't matter.'" Illegal wildlife trade is dominated by headlines about criminal cartels trafficking in ivory, rhino horn and pangolin scales. But scientists can also be complicit in illegal trade by poaching specimens themselves or by working with those who do. This type of wildlife crime occurs on a much smaller scale, but experts in a variety of fields believe it is a significant issue. "It's a problem globally, and it happens a lot," said Sergio Henriques, chairman of the spider and scorpion group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "I know for a fact that researchers linked to academia have purchased or collected specimens in a nonlegal way." For Mr. Henriques and others, this sort of collection raises deep ethical concerns. "We're the scientists, the ones who are supposed to know better and who should be leading by example," he said. "If we can't follow the rules, why are we demanding that others do?" The problem is likely to intensify, some conservationists believe. "Scientists do collect illegally, and normally this is not a huge problem, because scientists who study cacti, for example, are a small community," said Pablo Guerrero, a botanist at the University of Concepcion in Chile. "But every year we have more and more scientists working around the globe, and every year species are becoming more and more endangered." Other experts argue that scientific misconduct of this sort barely registers among the tremendous threats facing wildlife today. "The fact is that people make a big thing out of this tarantula or whatever else it is instead of making a case out of the need to protect where this animal lives, which no one does," said Heiko Bleher, an independent freshwater fish expert who has researched and collected specimens in 218 countries. No one knows how prevalent illegal collecting and use of poached specimens is among scientists, not only because of the covert nature of this trade, but also because it can be difficult to define who counts as a scientist and what counts as breaking the law. Expert level hobbyists often publish in the scientific literature, for example. But because they are not employed by a university or research institute, they are not subject to strict codes of conduct and may be more prone to cut corners, Mr. Cooper said. In their paper, Mr. Gabriel and Ms. Sherwood said they were affiliated with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. But Paul Smith, director of the museum, said that neither are employees: Mr. Gabriel is an honorary associate, and Ms. Sherwood was a volunteer. "The research was carried out independently and is not connected with the museum in any way," Dr. Smith said. The paper would have failed to pass the museum's ethics review, which requires authors to provide proof of legality of their specimens, he added. The ethics surrounding scientific acquisitions can be hazy. Still, some cases are clearly criminal. In 2005, for example, a curator of the Charles University Botanical Garden in Prague was convicted in South Africa of collecting over 3,000 protected plants, cuttings and seeds in the Western Cape, according to case records. In 1999 Earl Thomas Schultz, the former curator of herpetology at the San Diego Zoo, pleaded guilty to fraud and theft after being caught trafficking in imperiled reptiles. "Sometimes it seemed like I specialized in targeting scientists who felt they were above the wildlife conservation laws," said Ken McCloud, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service special agent who investigated the latter case. In other instances, though, "there are extensive gray areas, and it's as much a matter of ethics as it is of legality," said Peter Paul van Dijk, a conservation biologist at Global Wildlife Conservation, a nonprofit group in Austin, Tex. For example, many museum specimens especially ones collected decades ago have murky origins. "There's still an idea that the ends justify the means in terms of describing some of these specimens," said Lisa Buckley, a paleontologist at the Peace Region Paleontology Research Center in British Columbia. "That's an attitude that really needs to die a flaming death." Other scientists have no such compunction. "We all have different ethical standards, and mine are rock bottom," said David Martill, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in Britain. In 2015, Dr. Martill made headlines after stumbling across a 113 million year old Brazilian fossil in a German museum and realizing it constituted the world's first known four legged snake. Shortly after the news broke, Brazilian authorities began an investigation, citing laws enacted in 1942 forbidding the export of all fossils from the country. Dr. Martill stands by his decision to publish. "This is a really interesting, fascinating fossil, and I think the world should know about it," he said. But living animals are another matter altogether: "There are organisms that are so rare and threatened that sometimes radical protection measures are needed." Those protections differ from country to country, and scientists often get bogged down in confusing bureaucracy and lengthy waits. Some countries go so far as to forbid export entirely, especially of newly discovered species. "Brazil has imposed regulations that are simply insane," Mr. Bleher said. "They require you to deposit your materials wherever they tell you, so you have specimens that have been sitting for years in institutions in Brazil and no one is working on them." Researchers have long complained that Brazil's regulations originally set up to ensure the country receives adequate recognition and compensation for pharmaceutical discoveries impede science. While some researchers simply give up, others travel on tourist visas and undertake collections without a permit. "Most field working entomologists have some experience with this," said Petr Svacha, an entomologist at the Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. "Believe me, it is frustrating to do useful work while hiding like a criminal." In 2008, Dr. Svacha and a friend spent a month in prison in India after being accused of collecting insects without a permit in Singalila National Park. More than 1,200 scientists, including many from India, protested their arrest, arguing that it was a draconian application of the law. In the end, Dr. Svacha paid a fine and his friend, who was sentenced to three years in prison, fled the country before his appeal. Wildlife laws are generally designed with vertebrates in mind, but unlike tigers and elephants, most insects are composed of huge populations that will not be affected by even heavy collection, Dr. Svacha said. "When applied to insects, prohibitive conservation rules designed to protect individual animals become nonsensical and do not help anything," he said. "Under that circumstance, I will do everything possible to circumvent these rules, and I do not feel guilty." Dr. Svacha added that, like most entomologists he knows, he also readily works with specimens that he obtains from hobbyists and commercial sellers. Whether or not these specimens were collected legally is not something he asks about, he said, "because it is absolutely unimportant." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. This is the posture of researchers in other fields as well, who study fossils smuggled out of China or reptiles trafficked out of Indonesia. The ethics of working with such specimens can quickly become blurred. As Dr. van Dijk put it, "If all you need is a little blood sample and you go to a friendly hobbyist down the road and take a few drops of blood from a captive animal, would you really go through due diligence of making sure that animal was properly collected?" In the future, Mr. Kirk said, the Journal of the British Tarantula Society will require authors to provide a copy of their permits if their manuscript deals with specimens from another country, as many other publications do. The society will also prohibit the sale of the new blue tarantula at its annual exhibition, he said. (The species is already being advertised online in Europe and the United States for as much as 450 each.) Mr. Henriques would like to see the creation of a website managed by a trustworthy global organization, on which each country outlines its legislation and application process for specimen collection and export. The same site could serve as a repository for previously issued permits, he said, allowing researchers, museums, governments and journals to verify any given permit or specimen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them. Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday at a retirement home in Newport News, Va., calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong's history making moonwalk, let it return to Earth. A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961. The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson's 33 years in NASA's Flight Research Division the office from which the American space program sprang and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name. But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African American. In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women perhaps three dozen who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film "Hidden Figures," based on Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film's central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae as her real life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. In January 2017 "Hidden Figures" received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture. The film was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture. Though it won none, the 98 1/2 year old Mrs. Johnson received a sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage with the cast at the Academy Awards ceremony that February. Of the black women at the center of the film, Mrs. Johnson was the only one still living at the time of its release. By then, she had become the best known member of her formerly unknown cohort. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, proclaiming, "Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society's expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity's reach." In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. That year, The Washington Post described her as "the most high profile of the computers" "computers" being the term originally used to designate Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues, much as "typewriters" was used in the 19th century to denote professional typists. As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 was "a time when computers wore skirts." For some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as "computers" were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency's male mathematicians and engineers. But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering desktop calculating machines won them a level of acceptance that for the most part transcended race. "NASA was a very professional organization," Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. "They didn't have time to be concerned about what color I was." "I don't have a feeling of inferiority," Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. "Never had. I'm as good as anybody, but no better." To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson deflected praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home. "I was just doing my job," Ms. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book. But what a job it was done, no less, by a woman born at a time, Ms. Shetterly wrote, "when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school." Creola Katherine Coleman was born on Aug. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette (Lowe) Coleman. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a farmer. From her earliest childhood Katherine counted things: the number of dishes in the cupboard, the number of steps on the way to church and, as insurmountable a task as it might pose for one old enough to be daunted, the number of stars in the sky. "I couldn't wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry," Mrs. Johnson told The Associated Press in 1999. But for black children, the town's segregated educational system went as far as only sixth grade. Thus, every fall, Joshua Coleman moved his family 125 miles away to Institute, W.Va. In Institute, Katherine's older siblings, and then Katherine, attended the high school associated with the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a historically black institution that became West Virginia State College and is now West Virginia State University. Mr. Coleman remained in White Sulphur Springs to farm, and, when the Depression made farming untenable, to work as a bellman at the Greenbrier, a world renowned resort there. Katherine entered high school at 10 and graduated at 14. The next year she entered West Virginia State. By her junior year, she had taken all the math courses the college had to offer. Her mentor there, William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, only the third black person to earn a doctorate in mathematics from an American university, conceived special classes just for her. "You would make a good research mathematician," he told his 17 year old charge. "And I am going to prepare you for this career." "That," he replied, "will be your problem." After graduating summa cum laude in 1937 with a double major in mathematics and French, she found, unsurprisingly, that research opportunities for black female teenage mathematicians were negligible. She took a job as a schoolteacher in Marion, Va. In 1940, she was chosen by the president of West Virginia State to be one of three black graduate students to integrate West Virginia University, the all white institution in Morgantown. Two years earlier, ruling in the civil rights case Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the United States Supreme Court held that where comparable graduate programs did not exist at black universities in Missouri, the state was obliged to admit black graduate students to its white state universities. In the wake of that decision, West Virginia's governor, Homer Holt, chose to desegregate public graduate schools in his state. Now married to James Francis Goble, a chemistry teacher, she entered West Virginia University in the summer of 1940, studying advanced mathematics. "The greatest challenge she faced," Ms. Shetterly wrote, "was finding a course that didn't duplicate Dr. Claytor's meticulous tutelage." But after that summer session, on discovering she was pregnant with her first child, she withdrew from the university. She returned with her husband to Marion and was occupied with marriage, motherhood and teaching for more than a decade. Then, in 1952, Katherine Goble heard that Langley was hiring black women as mathematicians. The oldest of NASA's field centers, Langley had been established by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1917. In 1935, it began hiring white women with mathematics degrees to relieve its male engineers of the tedious work of crunching numbers by hand. Within a decade, several hundred white women had been employed as computers there. Most, unlike the male scientists at the agency, were classified as subprofessionals, paid less than their male counterparts. In June 1941, as the nation prepared for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, barring racial discrimination in the defense industry. In 1943, with the wartime need for human computers greater than ever, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, as the research facility was then known, began advertising for black women trained in mathematics. Among the first hired was Dorothy Vaughan, who began work that year. In 1951, Mrs. Vaughan became the first black section head at NACA, as the advisory committee was known, when she was officially placed in charge of Langley's West Area Computing Unit, the segregated office to which the black women were relegated. It was in this unit that Katherine Goble began work in June 1953, tabulating sheets of data for the agency's engineers. By the time she arrived, the company cafeteria had already undergone de facto desegregation: Its "Colored Computers" sign, designating a table in the back for the women, had been a salubrious casualty of the war years. But the separate bathrooms remained. Quite by accident, Katherine Goble broke that color line herself. While the agency's bathrooms for black employees were marked as such, many bathrooms for whites were unmarked. Without realizing it, she had been using a white women's restroom since her arrival. By the time she became aware of her error, she was set in her routine and disinclined to change. No one took her to task, and she used the white bathrooms from then on. Two weeks into her new job, she was borrowed by the Flight Research Division, which occupied an immense hangar on the Langley grounds. There, the only black member of the staff, she helped calculate the aerodynamic forces on airplanes. For that task, as she quickly demonstrated, she came armed with an invaluable asset. In 2016, Mrs. Johnson, self effacing as ever at 98, seemed somewhat indifferent to the fuss surrounding the feature film about her life. "I shudder," she told The New York Times that September, some three months before the film's release, having heard that the screenwriters might have made her character seem a tiny bit aggressive. "I was never aggressive." (As things transpired, Mrs. Johnson liked the finished film very much, Ms. Shetterly said in an interview for this obituary in 2017.) Mrs. Johnson may not have been aggressive, but she was assuredly esteemed. An index of just how esteemed she was came from Mr. Glenn, Mercury astronaut and future United States senator, who died in 2016. In early 1962, a few days before he prepared to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7, Mr. Glenn made a final check of his planned orbital trajectory. The trajectory had been generated by a computer not the flesh and blood kind, but the electronic sort, which were starting to supplant the agency's human calculators. Electronic computation was still something of a novelty at NASA, and Mr. Glenn was unsettled by the use of a soulless mass of metal to divine something on which his life depended. He asked that Mrs. Johnson double check the machine's figures by hand. "If she says the numbers are good," he declared, "I'm ready to go." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Federal Reserve has raised its benchmark interest rate again Wednesday's increase was the fourth this year and consumers can expect to feel it, one way or another. Whether you will cheer or chafe at the increase depends, broadly, on whether you're a saver or a spender. Savers and retirees seeking juicier yields will have an easier time finding savings accounts that pay more than 2 percent, a figure that looks attractive after they were starved of any interest for nearly a decade. But people trying to whittle down a pile of credit card debt, tap their home equity line of credit or purchase a car may find that it will cost a little more. All these changes are a result of the Fed's gradual increase in the federal funds rate, which is the interest rate banks and depository institutions charge one another for overnight loans. The rate influences how banks and other lenders price certain loans and savings vehicles and it can have broader impact on our financial lives. The Fed raised short term rates by a quarter of a percentage point to a range of 2.25 to 2.5 percent, which was the ninth increase since the end of 2015. That's still low from a historical standpoint, but it's the highest that rates have climbed since the financial crisis a decade ago. Indeed, the latest quarter point bump is no different than previous increases, but consumers may be beginning to feel the cumulative effect in a more pronounced way. Here's a refresher on what it all means for your wallet. When the Fed raises rates, some banks may pay more interest on savings accounts, particularly when they want to lure consumers to park their money. But the big banks haven't been too generous lately, and you shouldn't expect much to change with the latest increase. Today, the average savings and money market deposit accounts pay a paltry 0.22 percent, according to BankRate.com. That's up from 0.10 percent in 2015, when the Fed starting raising rates. You also shouldn't rush to tie up your money in certificates of deposit, which tend to move in step with similarly dated Treasury securities. Two year C.D.s are paying just more than 1 percent on average, but you can find some paying 3 percent if you take the time to comparison shop, according to BankRate.com. You'll probably do better with an online savings account; many are already paying more than 2 percent and are likely to rise further. "For the first time in more than a decade, you can earn more than the rate of inflation on your savings account, but only if you shop around," said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at BankRate.com. The inflation rate, which measures how much prices have risen from a year ago, is now roughly 2 percent. If your money isn't earning at least that much, you're losing purchasing power. CIT Bank and Citizens Access are offering 2.25 percent, according to BankRate.com, and at least two other online banks are paying 2.4 percent. Bond investors often get nervous when interest rates rise because bond prices tend to fall in response. Why? When rates increase, the price of existing (and lower yielding) bonds drop because investors can buy new bonds that offer higher interest rates. But higher rates also mean that bonds will generate more interest income, which is good for investors over the long run. The average person who invests in bonds does so through some kind of mutual fund. To get a sense of how your bond fund may react to rising rates, take a look at its duration, a number that you can look up on your fund provider's website. It's a complex calculation that combines interest payments and the bond's maturity date to measure the investment's sensitivity to rate changes. The longer the duration, the more sensitive the bond. A good way to estimate the effect of an interest rate change: A rate increase of 1 percent will reduce an investment's value by a percentage equal to the duration. For example, a fund like the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund, which has an average duration of 6.3 years, would decline by about 6.3 percent if interest rates rose a full percentage point. But fear not, that's not the full picture: A fund like that also pays investors interest, and will soon be adding new bonds paying a higher rate. That offsets some of the decline in value. But some home loans are more directly connected to the Fed's action, including home equity lines of credit and adjustable rate mortgages, or A.R.M.s. A typical home equity borrower has already seen rates rise to about 6.5 percent, according to BankRate.com, from roughly 4.5 percent three years ago. And now rates will probably move a quarter point higher. The Fed's latest rate increase won't be "too damaging," said Keith Gumbinger of HSH.com, which tracks the mortgage market. But the combination of the recent increases and changes in the tax code that restricted the interest deduction "is a bit of a double pinch for some." The good news related to adjustable rate mortgages which typically have a fixed rate for a certain number of years, and then adjust each year thereafter is that few people have them, Mr. Gumbinger said. But borrowers who are already out of their fixed rate period and are set for an annual reset in December can expect to pay more. They will most likely see a rise to about 5.36 percent for 2019, up from a rate of 4.3 percent over the past year. For the sake of comparison, rates on 30 year fixed mortgages are now about 4.75 percent. That's still favorable from a historical standpoint, and those loans are usually the most practical for most buyers. Credit card holders with variable rates averaging around 17.6 percent, up from about 15.7 percent at the end of 2015, according to BankRate.com can expect their rates to rise another quarter point within one or two monthly cycles. While the rate hikes' cumulative effect is beginning to squeeze car buyers, the latest increase probably won't change your decision to finance a car. It would only your raise monthly payments by a few dollars a month on a 25,000 loan that will be repaid in five years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1961, Ms. Chin has lived in Berlin since 1988. She is known for unconventional, boundary pushing work (she studied with Gyorgy Ligeti). H er best known piece may be her opera "Alice in Wonderland," which was given its premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007, when it opened the Munich Opera Festival. The Philharmonic wasted no time in awarding the prize. The fruits of the last Kravis Prize were harvested just last week, when the orchestra played the world premiere of the Dutch modernist Louis Andriessen's new tone poem "Agamemnon," which was commissioned when he won the prize in 2016. The prize's previous winners were Henri Dutilleux and Per Norgard. The awarding of the prize to Ms. Chin suggested a note of continuity at the Philharmonic. Her work was championed by the orchestra's last music director, Alan Gilbert; his successor, Jaap van Zweden, said that he looked forward to "sharing the musical worlds" Ms. Chin creates. "It is important that leading orchestras like the New York Philharmonic shine a light on the music of our time, and I am grateful to the Kravises for making it possible for us to do so through this significant prize," he said in a statement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Ten years ago, the director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin gave us a deliciously scored origin myth to one of the defining online institutions of this generation and the man (portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg as a fast talking, sandal wearing incel) behind it. Seen now, "The Social Network," about the founding of Facebook and the lawsuits that followed, feels grimly prescient and perhaps representative of how the past few years since the movie premiered and the past few months of the pandemic have changed our relationship to social media and each other. In 2010, "The Social Network," with its egomaniacal antihero, seemed overdramatic, too pessimistic in the way it examined the birth of one of the biggest social media sites. Facebook was still in its infancy, far removed from what it would eventually become. I was in college then and had my own Facebook account, which I made grudgingly I was tired of missing party invites and notifications from friends. But then I was on constantly, tracking friends' posts, looking for guys I liked. I had known Myspace in high school, and, despite my initial resistance, Facebook felt novel and cool (a quality that Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with in the film); my peers spoke about it as the "new Myspace, but for college kids." It ate up my free time. In the movie (available on Netflix), there is a big celebration when Facebook reaches a million users. Now Facebook users number in the billions. And yet, for me and many friends who still use the site, it seems to highlight our isolation more than connection, and we've lost our trust in it. Fincher's film unknowingly pointed to how the site would manipulate personal data Mark uses code to transcribe students' information from one platform to his new one, without their consent and how solitary it could actually make users feel. The social domain of the film, after all, is remarkably small; each character seems as isolated as Mark is. The Winklevoss twins, peers of Zuckerberg who sue him claiming that he stole their idea, are eerily depicted as though they're one person, which is underscored by casting Armie Hammer in both roles. At one point, Tyler Winklevoss declares, "I'm 6 5, 220, and there's two of me," as though his twin were only a clone and not an independent being. The rich, coked up Facebook investor Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) seems to show up, as though summoned, wherever there's a party, but he's also too paranoid to trust anyone. And finally there's Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Facebook's chief financial officer and the sympathetic foil to Mark. Near the end of the movie, he sits across from Mark, flanked by lawyers in a boardroom, and tells him, "I was your only friend. You had one friend." And consider, too, the language of social media, which uses terms of intimacy and familiarity to create the illusion of human connection despite the artifice of the medium. You "friend" someone and "like" them. You express your enthusiasm for a post by clicking a tiny red heart. But the dialect of connection is manipulated into a kind of capital: How many "likes" did you get? How many "friends" do you have? Though many do use social media for connections, to talk to faraway friends or family members, to keep in touch with acquaintances, in the past decade Facebook has proved that it's not simply the innocent model of social connection that the real Zuckerberg has made it out to be. "The Social Network" accurately emphasized the platform as an enterprise something to buy into, and in real life it has become a medium known for invasions of privacy and the dissemination of false information, hate speech and propaganda. When the coronavirus hit, we were all forced to our separate rooms like children in time out, and the world seemed to pause. Time dragged as people had to separate themselves from their loved ones. Social media, of course, carried on as ever. In those first weeks, on Facebook, on which I've only posted sporadically for the last several years, I fell into rabbit holes looking up old friends. Each time I was left dissatisfied. Somehow, when our real social structures ceased to continue, our artificial ones Facebook, Twitter, Instagram weren't able to become a suitable substitute. But it continues to feel like a necessary evil. By the time "The Social Network" hit theaters, I had deleted my account a handful of times before ultimately resigning myself to keeping it. It was too late for me to fight it; I felt that I needed Facebook to maintain my social and professional lives. And yet, now every time I log on, I see the veil: I step into an artificial space with its own language, intangible and empty. At the end of the movie, Mark sits alone in the boardroom after a long day of lawyers and questions. He finds his ex's profile and tries to friend her, refreshing the page over and over again. He built a whole social media empire from his bitterness after their breakup, thinking that he was owed this relationship, this affection. But the very site he created for people to connect leaves him feeling even more disconnected from her, from his friends and from everyone else. In 2020, as the world shut down, we've learned all the ways we can define distance, and social media as one cynical film predicted is one of them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
THE BUYER Mario R. Garcia moved into his new place with some of his favorite things. Nearly two years ago, Mario R. Garcia was invited to lecture and teach at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was living in Tampa, Fla., at the time. Friends helped him find a furnished rental, and he landed at a high rise condominium in the far East 70s, spending 3,600 a month. He liked his new life so much he decided to move permanently to New York. His four children were grown and gone. He has been widowed since 2008. His media consulting business, Garcia Media, could be run from anywhere. Dr. Garcia, 68, had immigrated to Miami at age 14 as part of Operation Pedro Pan, during which 14,000 unaccompanied minors were flown to the United States from Cuba. At Columbia, he teaches multiplatform design and storytelling, preparing his students for "the media quintet," which includes journalism delivered via smartwatch along with the existing quartet of phone, tablet, computer and print. He started the hunt last summer at open houses. There was always "that essential element that kept you from continuing," he said. Usually it was size. He was coming from a 5,400 square foot five bedroom house, and every one bedroom he saw seemed small. Places with sufficient space were going for well over 1 million. In one case, he intended to bid, but was told "there are already three offers beyond the asking price," he said. "This does not happen in Florida." The mother of an employee at Garcia Media was a friend of Lisa Greenblatt, a saleswoman at Douglas Elliman, who helped him with his search. He was interested in a sponsor owned one bedroom in a condominium on West 95th Street. With a foyer and a hallway, it was larger than many he had seen. The asking price was 689,000; monthly charges were around 1,400. He made a low offer that was not accepted. The apartment later sold for 701,000. In a nearby co op building, a one bedroom was available for 599,000, with monthly maintenance of around 1,300. The agent warned Dr. Garcia that the owner would be on hand for the showing because a ferocious cat was in residence. He arrived to find the place redolent of the animal. The layout was "like a train car," Dr. Garcia said. "Too many negatives," he concluded. With little suitable inventory near Central Park West, Ms. Greenblatt urged Dr. Garcia to cross the park. That way, he would have both more choice and better access to the city's airports, she said, noting that "he travels quite a bit." "Lisa kept trying to lure me to the Upper East Side, and I was sort of reluctant," he said. "I was stubborn but she was determined." They saw several one bedrooms in a large 1965 co op building on Third Avenue near 68th Street. One was 559,000, with a monthly maintenance fee of 1,500. The small balcony was a nice feature, but the apartment was cluttered. And he was unimpressed by the building in general. He considered a one bedroom in a postwar co op building on East 71st Street. But then he came to a handsome 1929 co op with a doorman on East 79th Street near Second Avenue. Two units were available in the same line, each with more than 800 square feet that included a foyer and an eat in kitchen. One needed work, but the other, with built in shelves in the living room, was in excellent condition. It even had a cedar closet. The price was 650,000 with monthly maintenance of almost 1,400. Within minutes, he knew he was home. He offered the asking price and began the arduous preparation of paperwork for the board. It ended up at 513 pages. "I found assets I never knew I had," he said. "I found an I.R.A. account I would have died without knowing about. It was an X ray of my life." Dr. Garcia sold his Tampa house for 550,000. He arrived in the winter, having had the foyer painted black and the rest of the apartment white. He furnished it with favorite things from his Florida house. "I am perfectly happy with what I have here, and every item has a meaning for me," said Dr. Garcia, who wrote an essay about editing his life in preparation for his move. Even the location on a busy cross street is an advantage. His twice weekly trip to Columbia involves the crosstown bus and the subway. On the return trip, the bus delivers him to his doorstep. He runs either in Central Park it's more distant than he had hoped or along the East River. Though he is not keen on the subway construction a few doors down, he knows it is temporary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
One Friday afternoon, we drove away from Chicago to look for rivers. The first one we came across was slender and manicured, like a path for floating golf carts. It followed the highway for a mile or two before turning away. Then came the real thing, the DuPage River, flowing fast and high with spring rain. We followed that for a while, heading toward our main destination: the Mississippi. It was a simple idea for a family vacation. With our 6 year old twins and 3 year old in tow, my wife and I would drive to the Mississippi River and head south. After a few days, we would turn back. We'd follow the Great River Road, a patchwork of state highways and county roads that form a national scenic byway along the Mississippi River, 3,000 miles from Minnesota to Louisiana. This would be our first trip on the Mississippi as a family, although my wife and I had taken the road once before. There's a story to that. Back in the summer of 2001, Nancy and I got married in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala. We talked about going on an epic honeymoon but we were moving to Haiti and that seemed epic enough. So we decided to embark on a leisurely, romantic drive up the Mississippi River, ending in Chicago, then fly to Haiti. We had borrowed my dad's car, and it was filled with suitcases containing our new life together. "Just Married!" signs covered the trunk. From Birmingham, it took a day and a half to get onto the actual Great River Road. I remember pointing to a sign look we're on the road! That is why it felt especially cathartic to drive along the Mississippi's wide, lazy expanse the next morning and pass the green pilot wheel sign in the Quad Cities indicating the Great River Road. Had it just been the two of us, Nancy and I might have mused over what it all meant the arc of our marriage seen through the prism of the river. But our youngest, Sylvie, was annoyed at being in her car seat, so we rushed to our first stop, Arsenal Island, the largest island on the Mississippi. Our guide during the entire trip was a surprisingly useful and free foldout map of the Great River Road, published by the Mississippi River Parkway Commission. It identified interpretive centers connected to the byway in each state along the river. These were a mix of museums, historic sites, nature centers and other attractions. Iowa was an overachiever with 16. We chose to stop at the places that interested us the most, and we were never disappointed. On this first stop, though, the map probably should have indicated that the blandly named Mississippi River Visitor Center Lock and Dam 15 was within a heavily guarded military base. Arsenal Island is headquarters of the First Army and a weapons manufacturing facility that dates back to the Spanish American War. To gain access, we had to talk to an armed security guard standing behind bulletproof glass, get our picture taken, and undergo an instant background check. It was worth it. At the visitor center, we watched the lock at work, lowering boats from one portion of the river to the next. We learned that the first bridge to span the Mississippi was built on the island. Completed in April 1856, it was destroyed soon after, rammed by the steamboat Effie Afton. Abraham Lincoln defended the bridge company in a legal case that followed, a trial that elevated him to national prominence. From the visitor center, we walked past the sole remaining stone pillar from that first bridge, and then stopped to throw rocks and sticks into the water. Our children sat on the generous, bowing limb of a shoreline oak tree and reveled in their climbing abilities. We were totally alone. It felt like something out of Mark Twain's childhood. Arsenal Island, like other subsequent stops along the Great River Road, lacked tourists but held many layers of history. Originally the site of a wooden fort that extended American control into the upper Mississippi, it also contained a Confederate cemetery, a National Cemetery, a U.S. Army museum, and 19th century stone buildings that give the base the feel of a college campus. We could have stayed there for a while, but the Quad Cities were only 160 miles west of Chicago, and we had a lot more of the Mississippi River to see. Over the next two days, we wandered down through Iowa and Missouri and the southern tip of Illinois, where the river's unmolested banks were marked by transport and industry. Sometimes the Great River Road ran within a stone's throw of the Mississippi. However, when the road swerved away, I could always find the river again by searching for the cooling towers of factories that lined the banks. Some of the factories looked abandoned, others were grimy with work. They processed corn, phosphate, meat, stone and sand, the base materials of our world. The wild Mississippi was nonetheless easy to find. Hawks flew everywhere, over fields just beginning to blossom, over forests and water. My son asked if they were playing tag. We stopped at little river towns and threw more rocks into the river. As we drove further south, the budding trees looked fuzzy and newly born. Sometimes traveling is filled with annoyances missing the turn off a highway or negotiating between three children and only two pretzel sticks. But other moments are so unexpectedly profound that they make the entire trip worthwhile. We had one of those in Southern Illinois. Our Great River Road map led us to Fort de Chartres, a mostly reconstructed French fort that dates back to the 18th century, when the French claimed sovereignty over large portions of the Mississippi River basin. As we neared the site, I realized that the markings on the road had disappeared. It was nothing more than a ribbon of asphalt. Insects rose thickly from the fields and we opened the windows to let in the afternoon sun. Everything in this little corner of the world seemed happy. The parking lot at Fort de Chartres was nearly empty. Acres of luminescent grass surrounded us, dotted by tall cottonwood trees. An ancient playground set, rust streaked but still functional, tantalized our children. I climbed the levee that stands between the fort and the Mississippi's floodplains. On the other side, an abandoned mailbox and driveway lay under several feet of water. Walking back, I approached three people dressed in French colonial attire. One of them was a middle aged woman so perfectly outfitted that I was momentarily surprised that she spoke English. They were members of "Les Amis du Fort de Chartres," a volunteer organization dedicated to the upkeep of the fort. She showed me around the small but excellent museum, and an intact powder magazine, the oldest structure in Illinois. Afterward, my 6 year old daughter spent a half hour trying to pet suspicious cats. As I watched her, my mind flashed back to a memory so old it seemed more like a dream. I was the child searching for cats, and my father was watching me, grinning happily, just like I was grinning at my daughter. The levee road ended at the Mississippi River, next to a man fishing and a faded sign indicating that the area used to be the landing point of a ferry. Our car and phone GPS gave us conflicting instructions, but it didn't matter. We were in no rush for the moment to pass. With the windows still open, we drove into the setting sun. We kept heading south, through the boot of Missouri on the way to Memphis. By design, we stayed on the western side of the river, far away from Dyersburg and the site of our honeymoon crash. In Memphis, the midway point of our trip, we stayed at the Peabody Hotel, where our children spent nearly two days splashing in the pool and watching the hotel's famous duck residents. Finally, we set off for the town of Helena, Ark., to visit the Delta Cultural Center. It turned out to be another excellent museum that highlighted the music of the delta as a response to slavery. There were a few exhibits for children, but mainly they loved listening to recordings of gospel and blues musicians. Leaving town, we visited Helena River Park and walked along a wooden pier that soared through trees and stopped at the river's edge. The muddy water ran fast. Everything from twigs to branches the size of trees floated by. Dozens of birds sat in the treetops and chattered loudly to each other. It was around here that the Mississippi started to expand into the land around it. The Great River Road tiptoed around countless oxbow lakes, formed when the river meanders elsewhere and leaves behind trapped water. But Poverty Point recently gained international renown. In 2014, it was named a Unesco World Heritage site, because it is "a singular achievement in earthen construction in North America: it was not surpassed for at least 2,000 years." When King Tutankhamen ruled over ancient Egypt, Poverty Point was the largest city in North America. We took a tram ride around the complex: five huge mounds, including the Bird Mound, which is shaped like a bird in flight and is over 700 feet long. The mounds were discovered first, followed by six concentric C shaped rings where up to 5,000 people may have lived. Despite its name, archaeologists believe that Poverty Point had ample natural resources to sustain this large population. The only materials they lacked were stone and metal, and these they procured in trade with people as far away as the Great Lakes. By late morning, Poverty Point had become hot and humid, an early taste of summer in the delta. We walked along the border between forest and field, and I stared nervously at the ground. The evening before, in Mississippi, a mouse ran into the lobby of our hotel. Minutes later, this unexpected event gained new meaning when a hotel guest discovered a poisonous snake several feet long waiting at a side entrance. For the rest of the trip, I approached every clump of tall grass with suspicion. When we left Poverty Point, the sky seemed enormous, a kaleidoscope of turbulent storm clouds at high altitude. We put on a CD of blues musicians we had bought at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena. A vulture picking at road kill stared as we drove by, and little red winged blackbirds flushed from the fields. The next morning, just before we started back north, I drove a little further down the Great River Road, this time by myself. Before setting off on our trip, I had come across the early 19th century travel diary of Francois Perrin du Lac, a French colonial administrator. Several miles below Natchez, he described a U.S. fort. "Here the head quarters of their small army are established," he wrote. "There are also some armed vessels for the defence of the place. All the vessels that descend this river are obliged to stop here, and declare to what nation they belong, and the nature of their cargoes." During the turbulent period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this area of southern Mississippi was an international border between Spain and the newly independent United States. The fort, later named Fort Adams after the second president, was the first port of entry to the United States. However, the fort's strategic importance quickly diminished when the Mississippi River turned away from it, isolating it in the floodplains just like an oxbow lake. Later when Spain withdrew from the area, Fort Adams became a backwater in every sense of the word. This is still the case. The fort itself is gone, and present day references to the area are nearly impossible to find. Its Wikipedia entry ends with this mysterious sentence: "As of 1993, Fort Adams was a small community and the site of businesses that provided supplies to hunting and fishing camps in the region." Over the course of our road trip, I became slightly obsessed with finding out what was actually in Fort Adams and I had only that morning to find out. Driving south from Natchez, I turned onto state road 24 at the town of Woodville. On the map, Fort Adams lay at the terminus of the road, which soon left the town behind and entered thick forest. Once in a while, I saw distant wooden houses on stilts. The road continued on, twisting and turning toward the Mississippi. I ducked under the barbed wire and began climbing through dense shrubs and trees. On the summit of the mound stood a grove of enormous bald cypress trees. One of them had a burl five feet long protruding from its trunk. Among the trees lay the 19th century graves of the Lessley family. Since bald cypress trees can live over 600 years, these trees may have been around during the time of the Native Americans and the Lessleys. Somewhere below me, as the morning sun filtered through the grove, the rancher yelled at his cows. I returned to my car to keep looking for Fort Adams. Minutes later, a dirt road appeared and impulsively I turned onto it because it was headed toward the Mississippi. Soon, though, the dirt road turned muddy. Water lay everywhere, gathering in ruts and turning the forest into swamp. It's as if the Mississippi had come to me. I got out, well aware that a minivan is a bad vehicle to bring off roading. Bugs raced sure footedly across the surface of the water. One of them disappeared with a gulp as a fish broke the surface. It sounded like Times Square for birds. Thousands sang in unison from the trees. The area was nothing special. It wasn't a national park or wildlife reserve. And yet it felt primeval. I had no trouble imagining the lives of those Poverty Point residents from 3,000 years ago. Back on the state road, I eventually approached a sign that said Fort Adams. The asphalt ended and a network of dirt trails began. I parked next to Bubba's One Stop, a low slung bait shop decorated with bleached antlers. Nearby stood the Fort Adams Baptist Church and several wooden houses perched on brick stilts. I saw no one. The forest receded in this area, replaced by a vast sweep of floodplains decorated with carpets of tiny yellow flowers and solitary oak trees. After taking a few pictures and walking around, I started back. Along the Great River Road, we found a little bit of everything. Heavy industry, civilizations thousands of years old, the horrors of slavery, wilderness, hawks, and turtles. And our own personal history as glimpsed through two trips 16 years apart. The Mississippi River is a movable feast, an ancient waterway filled with the ambitions, sorrows and joys of countless lives. I imagine myself decades in the future, an old man, crossing over the river yet again and swimming in the memory of my children yelling out the river's name. The river is deep enough and long enough to hold it all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Small rocks from the beaches of eastern Massachusetts began appearing at Lexington High School last fall. They were painted in pastels and inscribed with pithy advice: Be happy.... Mistakes are O.K.... Don't worry, it will be over soon. They had appeared almost by magic, boosting spirits and spreading calm at a public high school known for its sleep deprived student body. Crying jags over test scores are common here. Students say getting B's can be deeply dispiriting, dashing college dreams and profoundly disappointing parents. The rocks, it turns out, were the work of a small group of students worried about rising anxiety and depression among their peers. They had transformed a storage area into a relaxation center with comfy chairs, an orange/peach lava lamp and a coffee table brimming with donated art supplies and lots and lots of rocks to be painted and given to favorite teachers and friends. They called it the Rock Room. "At first it was just us," said Gili Grunfeld, a senior who helped with the effort. "Then everyone was coming in." "We want to be a model," said Jessie Steigerwald, a longtime school board member. But it has not been easy. Claire Sheth, a mother of four who had invited Ms. Abeles to town, describes Lexington students as "tired to the core." Students say depression is so prevalent that it affects friendships, turning teenagers into crisis counselors. "A lot of kids are trying to manage adult anxiety," said the principal, Laura Lasa. The problem is not anecdotal. In a 2015 national health survey, 95 percent of Lexington High School students reported being heavily stressed over their classes and 15 percent said they had considered killing themselves in the last year. Thinking about it most often were Asian and Asian American students 17 percent of them, as is the case nationally. The town's growing Asian community has not been timid acknowledging the problem. Through college forums and chat rooms, a group of parents and leaders of the local Chinese American and Indian American associations have been working to lower the competitive bar and realign parental thinking. Others are pushing back. They don't want the workload reduced they moved here for the high rigor schools. At association meetings, where the tension is most pronounced, discussions about academic competition in the district have brought some to tears. Indeed, reversing the culture is complicated in a town that prides itself on sending dozens of students to the Ivy Leagues: 10 went to Harvard last year and seven to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Young people are lauded at school board meetings and online for having published academic papers or performed at Lincoln Center. Last year, the varsity team placed second in the 2016 History Bowl nationals and fourth in the National Science Bowl. The robotics team has qualified for the FIRST Championship, an international technology and engineering competition, for five of the last six years. After school recently at the public library, which was packed with students poring over textbooks, calculus work sheets, lab reports and term papers, a sophomore looked up from her world history textbook and said, "You see all these people? They want the same thing that's really overwhelming." What they want: Entry into a top colleges when acceptance rates are at an all time low. In evidence as well are signs of the burgeoning biotech industry, and the changing face of America's elite. Since 2000, the Asian population has ballooned from 11 percent to an estimated 22 percent of Lexington's 32,000 or so residents, surpassing Newton (at about 13 percent) and Cambridge (15 percent). Today, more than a third of Lexington's students are Asian or Asian American. The demographic mirrors the migration of Asian families to suburbs across the country. In the Crafty Yankee or the Asian bakery across the street, you are likely to bump into electrical engineers from Seoul, physicists from Beijing and biochemists from Boston. They teach at Harvard (10 miles away) and run labs at M.I.T. (11 miles). They hold top positions in the pharmaceutical companies that dot the Boston area tech corridor. More than half of the adults in Lexington have graduate degrees. And many want their children to achieve the same. In many ways, students in Lexington are the byproduct of the self segregation that Enrico Moretti writes about in his book "The New Geography of Jobs," which addresses the way well educated, tech minded adults cluster in brain hubs. For their children, that means ending up in schools in which everyone is super bright and hypercompetitive. It's hard to feel special. Best selling authors and child psychologists have long urged parents to divest themselves from their child's every accomplishment, thereby sending the message that mental health matters more than awards. In Lexington, the attack is more comprehensive, involving schools, neighborhoods, churches and synagogues. It is riffing off research that shows that resilience and happiness, reinforced by the entire community, can be just as contagious as stress and depression. "You need to bring along everybody," said Ms. Abeles, whose campaign has taken her to towns with similar communitywide efforts, including Elkins Park, Penn., San Ramon and Burbank, Calif., and New Rochelle, N.Y. Peter Levine, associate dean for research at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts, says that communities that bond to promote pro social behavior can be powerful inoculators for young people. "Family problems are often community problems," he said. "They need community solutions." No one is more aware of this than Ms. Lasa, who grew up here, earned degrees from nearby Springfield College and Lesley University, and then returned to the district watching all the while as the population morphed from relatively laid back to Type A. She often wakes to emotional emails from parents delivered to her inbox after midnight. Most, she says, are about their children's academic standing, and the tone is often disappointment. Last fall, as 557 bright eyed freshmen gathered in cushioned folding chairs in the auditorium for orientation, she gave a speech that over the last few years has come to focus more and more on stress reduction. She begged the students to make mistakes. "Do not believe that you must acquire straight A's to be a successful student," she said. "If you and/or your parents are caught up in society's picture of success, let us help you change the focus." Students are now required to meet with counselors when choosing courses to talk about their academic loads. The practice is largely seen as a way of keeping students from overscheduling to beef up their college transcripts. Lexington, Mass., a tight knit hamlet where the first shot of the Revolution was fired. Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times "We are trying to change a culture that is deeply rooted here," Ms. Lasa told me in a sunny Boston accent as she barreled through the school. She was showing off the 45 minute free period she instituted this year, allowing or in some cases, forcing students to take time to unwind. Some were playing basketball in the gym. Others were talking with teachers. A few hung out in classrooms, chatting with friends. An awful lot, though, were getting a head start on homework. Ms. Lasa says she is trying to "balance all the messages" they are getting about success and happiness. The one she wants to most impart is: "Slow down." The paradox of Lexington High School is that while indicators of anxiety abound, so too does an obsession with happiness. A large banner from the town's newly formed suicide prevention group, a chapter of the national organization Sources of Strength, greets students as they enter the sprawling red brick building, proclaiming: "Be a Part of Happiness." There are close to 50 students in the group. Below the banner are remnants of their project to spread positivity. Students were asked to write down their sources of strength, which were then posted beneath the banner and on Facebook. Some named their pets or friends. One wrote: "My mom." Another: "Trip to Israel!" A girl with green hair: "Chicken curry." One morning in February, students in "Positive Psychology: The Pursuit of Happiness," a popular elective, were following up on a discussion about the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's "broaden and build" theory, which posits that negative emotions like anxiety and fear prompt survival oriented behaviors, while positive emotions expand awareness, spurring new ideas, creativity and eventually building skills. "Today, we are going to look at pretty simple ways to make it more likely that you experience positive emotions on a day to day basis," Matthew Gardner told his "Happiness" students as they pulled out notebooks and pencil cases. The class discussed the benefits of exercise and eating foods that release feel good hormones. The students also learned that smiling and being smiled at releases dopamine, which has an uplifting impact. Mr. Gardner offered an alternative to smiling: "Our brains are not so perfect that, sometimes, if you hold a pen or pencil like this" he held a pencil between his teeth "you activate some of the same face muscles. You might get a little bit of a dopamine effect, too." Several students held pencils between their teeth to test the theory. At one point, the class practiced laughter yoga, raising their arms slowly as they breathed in, then lowering them as they breathed out, and bursting into peals of laughter. Afterward, the students recorded changes in their pulse rate to demonstrate research from the HeartMath Institute that shows heart rates slow down and smooth out after bouts of good feeling. "It's not just that your heart rate goes down and you become very calm," Mr. Gardner explained. "It's that the shape of your heart rate is smooth and more controlled. Frustration is more jagged." Their homework assignment: Do laughter yoga or "smile at five people you wouldn't normally smile at." The effects of smiling are also taught in the A.P. Psychology class that Gili Grunfeld is taking, and it has informed her thoughts on stress. On a winter afternoon, she and several classmates were uncoiling in the Rock Room, making friendship bracelets and sketching in fat coloring books. A Post it that read "Unplug" was taped to the wall clock. The students were bemoaning how so many of their peers develop "tunnel vision," in Gili's words, about schoolwork and extracurricular activities, sacrificing sleep and time with friends. "They isolate for academics," she said glumly. Soon the students had changed topics, and were discussing the ice that had caked the school parking lot that morning and how to balance on it. The subtext, once again, was well being: How much can friends support each other if both feel overwhelmed? "Are we more likely to fall or are we more steady if we hold onto each other?" asked Jocelyn Geller, a junior. "I feel like if you have a friend with you, you feel safer," said Millie Landis, a sophomore, pulling Jocelyn up and wobbling on the floor with her to demonstrate. "But you could pull each other down." The district has increased the number of counselors and social workers, including those working in the district's elementary schools, and expanded the training they receive in identifying and supporting at risk students. Cynthia Tang, whose parents emigrated from Taiwan, has been a counselor at Lexington High for 12 years. Warm and well liked, she organizes workshops addressing the pressure on Asian students to succeed, borrowing insights from the childhood discord she experienced with her own parents as well as research on biculturalism. Studies show that the less assimilated parents are to American culture, the more stressed the children. Adding to the pressure, she says, are cultural differences in how parents, raised abroad, and their offspring, raised in the United States, are expected to process setbacks and strife: American educators routinely encourage students to share their feelings; not so in Asia. "I really see a lot of this being bicultural conflict," Ms. Tang said. "When you have one side of the family holding one set of values and the other embracing a new set of values, that inherently creates a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of tension." Ms. Tang says that the disconnect is compounded by a lack of knowledge about the various routes to success available in the United States. Last year, she was brought in by the vice president of the local Chinese American Association, Hua Wang, to help plan the college forum, a three hour event on Father's Day. Dr. Wang, an engineering professor at Boston University, wanted to shift the focus away from a guide on applying to top colleges. Despite resistance from the organizers, he and Ms. Tang prevailed. At the forum, she presented a slide show celebrating the academic trajectories of respected Chinese Americans: the fashion designer Vera Wang went to Sarah Lawrence College; Andrew Cherng, the founder of the fast food chain Panda Express, went to Baker University in Kansas; the best selling author Amy Tan, San Jose State University. Parents were surprised. But, Ms. Tang said, "I think a lot of parents felt like: 'What do I do with that information?'" This year, organizers will delve deeper into the differences between the Chinese and American systems, and are planning to add another new element: a panel discussion on combating stress. Dr. Wang said they want to showcase families who have adopted a more "holistic view" of education. Selected parents of graduating seniors will be asked to talk about how they encouraged their children to get enough sleep, comforted them when they came home with B's and discouraged them from skipping ahead in math to be eligible for higher level classes earlier. This would not be the only time that Dr. Wang has engaged in this kind of dialogue. Using the Mandarin words "danding," which means to keep calm and steady, and "ruizhi," which means wise and farsighted, he has initiated conversations on WeChat, an online chat room popular among Chinese parents. Recently, he told them: "Calmness and wisdom from the parents are the Asian child's greatest blessings." But the message was not well received by everyone. Among the posted responses: "If your child gets a C, how do you get to a point of calm? You think we should be satisfied because at least he didn't get a D?" And: "But my heart still whispers: Am I not just letting my child lose at the starting line?" One parent, Melanie Lin, found herself, too, in a heated conversation on WeChat after early admissions decisions arrived last school year. She urged the other parents to stop bragging on the site about acceptance letters to top tier schools: "If it's only those students who are attending the big name schools that are being congratulated, then the idea being passed on is that only those students are successful, and attending a big name school is the only way to become the pride of your parents." Dr. Lin, who works at a pharmaceutical company, emigrated in the 1990s from Beijing to get a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Arizona State University. She says her rebuttal annoyed even close friends, whose online responses accused her of trying to deny parents and their children their moments in the spotlight. Recounting the conversation with me brought Dr. Lin to tears. "There is just so much pressure," she said. For her, the struggles are not theoretical. On the home front, she too can be just as obsessed as her peers, she says. Her daughter, Emily, would agree. During junior year, she dreaded car rides and family dinners any time, really, that she was alone with her parents because conversations routinely veered back to college. Now a senior, Emily has eight A.P. and 13 honors classes under her belt. She is also a violinist, choral singer, competitive swimmer and class vice president. But as a member of a youth board for a teen counseling center in town, she realized that her study habits were unhealthy. To get support for herself and others, she helped launch the town's Sources of Strength chapter. She has assisted in planning student outreach events and spoke up at a town meeting about "the dog eat dog" competition that still persists at the high school. Homework remains heavy, students say, particularly in high level classes. Class rankings may be gone but students have a pretty good sense of where they stand. And while there has been talk of a later start time to the day so students can get more sleep, the idea is on hold. In December, when early decisions came in, Emily found out she was deferred to the regular admissions pool by Yale, her top choice. Parents on WeChat were more sensitive this time around, but accepted seniors still bragged on Facebook. Since then, Emily has been admitted to nine universities; rejected by three, including Yale; and waitlisted by Harvard and the University of Chicago. She is deciding between Columbia and Duke. Through it all, she has wondered if it's worth it. "I lost out on a lot of high school," she had told me as she waited for college decisions. What she hopes is that students who come after her find some balance before their time at Lexington is up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Whitney Richardson, an events manager for The Times in London, discussed the tech she's using. Q. What tech do you use to put together events? A. Over the past year, I have really expanded my use of the entire Google suite and I use its tools for basically everything, especially the Google Drive app on my phone. From my phone, I can share files with multiple clients with Google folders and I can manage my budget in Google sheets. I've used Google forms to quickly collect feedback from attendees of events I produced. For presentations, I use Google slides (and begin brainstorming while on the commute to work). I can video chat with a group of people in different countries using Google video chat and sync all appointments and meetings to my calendar. What do you like about the tools, and what could be better? I appreciate being able to store all of my documents in one place and being able to walk into meetings with just my phone and still have my files at my fingertips without logging in to multiple accounts. I've gone to high level meetings with just my phone, and people seem genuinely surprised that I am able to quickly refer to key data points or notes without having a laptop or a notebook in front of me. I look forward to the day when we have an American version of the popular Chinese app WeChat, where I can really sync all of my day to day apps in one place. With all of the recent data security breaches we have had in the past few years (Equifax, Facebook), I also want the assurance of having online services that are impenetrable to hackers. You were previously a photo editor at The Times. Plenty of photographers are experimenting with new ways to take pictures using drones and virtual reality. What do you think will stick around? We are in a renaissance period of photography, when technology is ultimately changing the way humans relate to imagery. Photos are no longer used just as a way to capture a moment. They are an actual form of communication. A while ago, I read an interview with Kevin Systrom, co founder of Instagram, who said he realized early on that people were willing to forgo quality in an image for the ability to quickly share it with their networks. In my opinion, the tools that will stick around are the ones that make capturing and sharing visual information as seamless as possible. I absolutely love what our photojournalists have been doing with drone video and photography. A few months ago, I worked with my colleague Josh Haner on a story about plans to make the Hoover Dam into a giant battery. Josh was able to capture stunning drone footage over the Hoover Dam, which really allowed viewers to see the massive scale of the structure in a way that made the story come to life. I am also excited to see where augmented reality and holographic video is headed in the news business. Our recent story on Ashley Graham, which we published during Fashion Week, took my breath away, but it took 100 cameras to record her runway walk in 3 D. This then goes back to the issue of scalability and making these tools readily available for journalists to use for alternative story forms. How can we create tools that make stories like this not a one off, that more journalists can access to really lift The Times's report over all? What do you wish would go away? I want portable 360 degree video cameras to take a break until we can figure out how to scale them without completely compromising image resolution. I don't think they have found that sweet spot just yet. Outside of work, what tech product are you currently obsessed with? In my daily life, I cannot live without my Bose wireless noise canceling headphones. I hesitated getting them for a while, but my husband got them for me as a gift and I will never go back to normal earphones. (No more cords!) I also have several portable mirror sets with LED bulbs, which I pack when I am traveling to help with makeup application and general skin care. And when my husband and I travel, we love using Airbnb. We have actually gone on a vacation planned around an Airbnb location because we were interested in the living space and wanted to experience it. Like most new businesses in the gig economy, it is shaking up the hotel industry in a good way, I think, and allowing people alternative ways to experience new cities in unexpected ways. You're new to London. How do the British use tech differently from Americans (or not)? The one striking difference I have noticed between living in London and New York is not exactly tech it's the efficiency of the bus and train system in London. The Times has done a ton of coverage of New York's crumbling trains, and there are no clear signs of improvement. The subway and bus system in London runs on time, and there are all sorts of updated indicators on platforms and by certain bus stops for when your transport will arrive (and they are accurate). It has made commuting on public transportation much more enjoyable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
On July 16, 1969, a towering Saturn 5 rocket sat on Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At 9:32 a.m., the five enormous F 1 engines of its first stage ignited, expelling orange flame, dark smoke and 7.5 million pounds of thrust to lift the three astronauts of Apollo 11 into space. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon four days later. Today, at that same launchpad, technicians working for SpaceX, Elon Musk's upstart rocket company, are preparing for the maiden flight of what is by most measures the world's most powerful rocket since the Saturn 5. The Falcon Heavy will be able to carry more than 140,000 pounds to low Earth orbit, or more than twice as much as current competing rockets. Aboard the demonstration flight, which may take off in the weeks ahead (sign up for The Times Space Calendar to be notified of the date), will be a whimsical, cross promotional payload for Mr. Musk a cherry red Roadster built by his other business, the electric carmaker Tesla. The car would travel around the sun in endless ellipses that extended as far out as Mars' orbit. If successful, "it continues SpaceX's very impressive run of achieving launch milestones that have been viewed as very difficult," said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm that follows the space industry. But first, the Falcon Heavy has to get off the ground. That has been a long time coming, much longer than Mr. Musk originally promised. Turned out it was rocket science SpaceX successfully launched 18 of its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets last year, a remarkable recovery from a launchpad mishap in September 2016 that destroyed a rocket and the 200 million satellite on top. After years of falling short of optimistic predictions, SpaceX seemed to fall into a consistent, accident free flow of sending payloads to orbit. For 14 of the launches, SpaceX landed the boosters, to be reused for future flights. The Heavy described by SpaceX as far back as 2005 is essentially a Falcon 9 with two additional Falcon 9 boosters attached to the sides. That triples the horsepower of the rocket at liftoff. That approach allowed SpaceX to design a heavy lift rocket largely by rearranging the same pieces. "Because of the commonality between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy we're able to spread the overhead across both vehicles," Mr. Musk said at a news conference in 2011. "It's able to use the same tooling, be made in the same line, and I think therefore significantly improves the probability of being able to hold to our cost numbers on Falcon Heavy." The modular design also cut the development costs of the rocket. "It is essentially the first time the nation has gotten a super heavy lift vehicle at essentially zero cost to the taxpayer," said Phil Larson, an assistant dean at the University of Colorado's engineering school who previously worked as a senior manager of communications and corporate projects at SpaceX. "We were pretty naive about that," Mr. Musk said in July at a conference in Washington, D.C. "At first, it sounds really easy. Just stick two first stages on as strap on boosters. How hard can that be? But then everything changes. All the loads change. Aerodynamics totally change. You've tripled the vibration and acoustics." The central core was redesigned and reinforced to handle the stresses, one of the key reasons that the Heavy is more than four years behind schedule. While the two side boosters are reused from earlier Falcon 9 launches, the core is all new, as is the second stage. Another tricky aspect is the large number of rocket engines. A Falcon 9 booster has nine of SpaceX's Merlin engines, each putting out 190,000 pounds of thrust. The Heavy triples that to 27 engines and a total of more than 5 million pounds of thrust. All of the parts of the Heavy finally arrived in Florida late last year. Since then, SpaceX has been modifying the launchpad to handle the larger rocket. In the coming days, the company is expected to conduct a critical test that would light all 27 engines at once with the rocket anchored to the pad. Going big in an era of rockets on a diet Some wonder how much business exists for a rocket as big as the Heavy. "I've always scratched my head, why would you do this?" said Jim Cantrell, who was part of the founding team of SpaceX in 2002 but left soon afterward. He is now chief executive of Vector, which is building rockets much smaller than SpaceX'. With advances in electronics and miniaturization, satellites have been getting smaller, and the trend among rocket start ups has been toward smaller and smaller rockets. (Jeffrey P. Bezos' Blue Origin is a notable exception.) For 1.5 million, Vector will launch a 140 pound payload, with flights beginning this year. Other new companies aiming at small payloads include Rocket Lab, which over the weekend had its first successful orbital test flight, and Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit. "There's pretty good financial and technical reasons for going smaller," Mr. Cantrell said. Some suggest that NASA could take advantage of the Falcon Heavy as a cheaper alternative to the Space Launch System it is developing to launch robotic probes and astronauts out into the solar system. Although the NASA rocket would be larger and more powerful than the Heavy in fact it would rival the Saturn 5 it is also much more expensive and would fly only once every few years at a cost likely to exceed 1 billion a launch. The Trump administration has declared that sending astronauts back to the moon is a priority and has advocated a greater role in the space program for private companies. Its budget proposal for 2019, which will be released next month, should include more details of what it plans to do. Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served in the Trump administration's transition team, thinks the agency should consider turning to cheaper, commercial alternatives like the Falcon Heavy. He spearheaded a NASA financed study in 2015 that laid out a plan that could accomplish that in five to seven years. Because the Heavy is smaller than the Space Launch System rocket, the proposed mission would be more complicated, but it would still be faster and cheaper, Mr. Miller said. So far, support for the Space Launch System has remained strong in Congress, and Jim Bridenstine, an Oklahoma Congressman who has been nominated to be NASA's next administrator, has stated he favors the program. But the first launch of the much delayed NASA rocket, without any astronauts aboard, likely will not occur until 2019, and the first crewed flight would follow several years later. Beyond the uncertain commercial prospects, Mr. Musk may be driven more by his long term dreams of colonizing the solar system. He has already described plans of an even larger rocket that could be used for sending people to Mars. This year will be a busy one for SpaceX, which is aiming for more than 30 flights. It has already started in a cloud of mystery, with the launch of a highly classified payload code named "Zuma," which was built by the defense contractor Northrop Grumman. Soon after the launch, rumors swirled that Zuma was a failure and had already fallen out of orbit. SpaceX strongly stated that the rocket that took Zuma to space had performed without issue. SpaceX has also scheduled test flights of the Crew Dragon, the capsule it is building to carry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, although that date may slip again into 2019. For the first flight of the Heavy, Mr. Musk has tamped down expectations. There is "a real good chance that that vehicle does not make it to orbit," Mr. Musk said in his July remarks. "I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win, to be honest." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Are you a fan of Peter Frampton, the British rocker behind such late 20th century hits as "Baby I Love Your Way" (1975)? If so, you might fare reasonably well during "Hummingbird in a Box," one of three New York premieres that Cincinnati Ballet is presenting at the Joyce Theater. If not, there is unfortunately little to recommend this bafflingly vapid work, choreographed last year by Adam Hougland, the company's resident artist, to a commissioned score by Mr. Frampton. Fandom is key to keeping the viewer afloat. It was an uninspiring reintroduction to the company, which last visited New York 35 years ago and is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The other pieces on the program, Val Caniparoli's "Caprice" (2013) and Trey McIntyre's "Chasing Squirrel" (2004), were nothing groundbreaking either, but at least they demonstrated some measure of curiosity: about how people relate to one another, about how dancers relate to music. With help from his creative partner Gordon Kennedy, Mr. Frampton, who used to live in a suburb of Cincinnati, wrote seven songs for "Hummingbird," his first foray into composing for dance. In his preshow banter (he attended opening night on Tuesday), he joked about feeling like "a slight misfit" in the concert dance world. The incongruity between his music and Mr. Hougland's choreography turned out to be more than slight. Or maybe congruity was the problem: movement slotted too directly into the leaden rhythms and riffs of songs like "Heart to My Chest" and "Shadow of My Mind." Either way, the pairing didn't work, with uncomplicated, strike a pose steps falling flat amid hackneyed lyrics ("I'm not holding back anymore" or "When it feels right, it feels right"). The costumes black sequined bras and low waisted black tutus for the four women, white jeans for the four shirtless men only reinforced the uncomfortable sense of being thrust back into the 1990s. "Hummingbird" revolves around a boy meets girl (or rather boy feels lost, boy needs girl, girl lands in boy's arms) story, with Janessa Touchet and Patric Palkens as the central couple. Ms. Touchet, though a solid, competent technician, was emotionally lifeless in her solo to the title track. She presses her palms against the air as if, well, stuck in a box. Could she be that hummingbird? Mr. Palkens had more verve as he leapt and lashed around under pulsating magenta lights. When's the last time a dancer really reminded you of Patrick Swayze in "Dirty Dancing"? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Some myths are too powerful too necessary to ever be fully undone, no matter the facts gathered to address them. Such is the case with the still officially unsolved deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac and Biggie, gunned down six months apart two decades ago, a cruel extermination of hip hop's elite. They became martyrs, and also as the years passed and their killers were never brought to justice symbols of a kind of institutional neglect, failed originally by the genre they loved and, in death, by the police. So the most conspicuous aspect of "Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G.," a lightly fictionalized 10 part limited series on USA that has its premiere on Tuesday, is its certainty. Here is a show that offers answers, a ticktock of the various investigations into the killings that have resulted in no arrests but not, if "Unsolved" is to be believed, in no answers. The series is inspired by "Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations," a book by Greg Kading, who led a task force investigating the shootings in the late 2000s. (There is an accompanying documentary as well.) In that book, Mr. Kading lays out his theories about who pulled the triggers, and why. Yet somehow, seeing those theories brought to dramatized life seven episodes were provided for review gives them more power. "Unsolved" is equal parts appealingly pulpy and workmanlike, sometimes paced like a procedural and sometimes like a prestige drama. It weaves together three story lines the friendship between Tupac (Marcc Rose) and Biggie (Wavyy Jonez), which soured and ultimately collapsed; the original L.A.P.D. investigation into Biggie's murder, steered maniacally by the detective Russell Poole (Jimmi Simpson); and the task force convened a decade after the killings, helmed by Mr. Kading (Josh Duhamel). The love story here isn't between Biggie and Tupac, though ample screentime is given over to their early friendship. It's between the two detectives who never meet: Poole and Kading, who both begin to unravel in the face of a complex investigation, institutional pressure and family problems. In this telling, Poole is the true detective, wholly and distractingly absorbed by the case. Mr. Simpson plays him as an impatient savant, forever sternly exhaling and chafing against his superiors. (It should be noted, though, that in the "Murder Rap" documentary, Mr. Kading makes short work of Mr. Poole's theories about the murders.) By contrast, Mr. Duhamel's Kading is blank. Better is his extended team, which includes Daryn Dupree (a grounded Bokeem Woodbine) and Lee Tucker (Wendell Pierce, testy as ever). Mr. Jonez captures the gentle grandeur of Biggie (born Christopher Wallace), and Mr. Rose has Tupac's familiar seductive glint in his eye. But this show about murdered rappers is really a cop show. What's more, "Unsolved" did not secure licensing rights for either rapper's music though some lyrics are sprinkled into conversation making them feel even more distant as subjects. In capturing the two investigations, though, "Unsolved" is effective in an unglamorous, no frills way. And yet, as the episodes toggle between the ostentation of the hip hop world and the grayness of police headquarters, it's hard to overlook that a story of this historical significance is rendered in such proletarian fashion. Add to that the fact that Mr. Kading's book and documentary were self released, and that "Unsolved" isn't on a vanity platform like HBO or Netflix, or delivered with the luxe production values of the "American Crime Story" series, but rather on USA, a basic cable staple. You would think that a show that advertises a convincing theory about these killings would be lavished with funding, be loudly publicized not just as art, but also as news. But instead, "Unsolved" remains in the shadows. Myth has a way of enduring. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
THE RENTERS Adam and Alison Sadel in their new one bedroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They lived in Williamsburg before moving to Toronto nearly four years ago. Alison and Adam Sadel met in 2011 at the Equinox health club in Grand Central Terminal, where she worked and he was a member. They later moved in together, living with two roommates in a rental building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nearly four years ago, Equinox transferred Ms. Sadel, then Alison Hornstein, to Toronto, as the company was expanding in Canada. She rented a one bedroom in a new condominium tower downtown, with a den, balcony, washer dryer and two bathrooms. Mr. Sadel soon followed, finding a job in property management there. Last winter, however, they decided it was time to return to New York. Mr. Sadel, now 32, took a job in Manhattan as a broker for Park River Properties, which specializes in condo conversions. The couple knew that Ms. Sadel, an account executive at Equinox, would be able to transfer back to New York, though it was unclear exactly where she would be based. So Mr. Sadel lived with his parents in northern New Jersey while he looked for a one bedroom and she wrapped up things in Canada. "It had been my job in Toronto to pick an apartment," said Ms. Sadel, 29. "Adam moved in sight unseen. Now it was my turn to trust him." Besides, she had other things to think about: At the time, they were engaged and she was busy planning their wedding at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The Sadels wanted to live in a relatively new building close to their jobs in Manhattan, and hoped to spend about 3,500 a month for a one bedroom. Mr. Sadel's priority was a large closet; Ms. Sadel's was an open kitchen. Two bathrooms, they thought, would be nice, too. "Once you have two bathrooms, it's hard to go back to one," Mr. Sadel said, though he assumed it was inevitable. "We were looking for something similar to what we had in Toronto without sacrificing too much." Mr. Sadel began looking in Brooklyn Heights, where they had friends. But apartments seemed small for the price, and many of the buildings were old. He knew they would find more space in Williamsburg, as well as plenty of buildings built in the last decade or so, as the neighborhood had changed substantially in the few years they had been gone. Another building, 101 Bedford, which opened in 2012 near McCarren Park, also had an available apartment with surround sound speakers. It had a balcony as well, which was something they felt they could easily do without, and it was on a low floor overlooking a busy courtyard, with a fishbowl feel, he said, "where everyone could just watch you." Then one day last spring, as Mr. Sadel was walking along Kent Avenue, he saw a 40 story tower rising in what looked like a great spot on the waterfront. The building, Level, was not offering showings yet, but he visited the rental office and saw floor plans that showed the desired open kitchen and ample closet space, as well as a washer dryer. She happily gave him the go ahead. "I wanted it taken care of," she said. "I trusted him because he has better taste than I do." They signed a two year lease that included two free months, and Mr. Sadel arrived in the middle of July, with Ms. Sadel joining him in August. (About a quarter of the building's 554 units have been rented so far.) "I felt instantly home," Ms. Sadel said. "I was so happy to be back in the city." The first few weeks they were there, the hallways were covered with plastic floor protection film, Mr. Sadel said, and "you could hear people walking on it near your door" a crunch that sometimes awakened him. It has since been replaced by carpeting, but the construction continues. Because they are at work during the day, though, they are able to escape the brunt of it, and it is scheduled to be finished in the spring. To his delight, Mr. Sadel realized he could ride the ferry to work, with a quick trip between the North Williamsburg landing and Murray Hill, though it runs less often than the subway. Ms. Sadel heads to two gyms in the East 50s in Manhattan. She reluctantly gave up her 12 minute walk to work in Toronto, and now uses the crowded Bedford Avenue station, where she takes the L train and transfers uptown. The only other real sacrifice, they said, was the second bathroom but then, they expected that. "Our bathroom is a big bathroom," Ms. Sadel said. "So it's not a problem." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
LONDON Does Prince Harry have the voice to be in the cast of "Hamilton?" Theatergoers found out Wednesday night, when the Duke of Sussex as he is officially known showed up at the Victoria Palace Theater in London with his wife, the former Meghan Markle, in the company of Lin Manuel Miranda, the creative force behind the hit musical. This show was meant to raise money for Harry's charity, Sentebale, specifically its work in Lesotho and Botswana for young people with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. At one point, Harry got onstage to thank the cast and crew and briefly sang a line from the show. "You say ...," he crooned the opening words of "You'll Be Back," sung by King George III. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A Bamoun statue from Cameroon, left, and a 2018 painting, "Redresseurs," from a Cuban art collective The Merger, at the new Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar. It retraces cultural contributions of Africa up to present time. DAKAR, Senegal The 19th century sword rests in a glass case alongside a frail Quran in a spacious gallery where scrolls hang from the wall and soft religious chanting is piped in. The saber's etched copper handle is shaped like a swan's beak, with a ring at the end. Its leather sheath rests nearby. The sword belonged to Omar Saidou Tall, a prominent Muslim spiritual leader in the 1800s in what is now modern day Senegal. His quest to conquer nearby territories put him in armed conflict with France, which had its own takeover ambitions. The French colonialists eventually won and seized not just large swaths of West Africa but also the region's treasures, including the sword. Like most artifacts from France's African colonies, it wound up in a French museum. But the sword is now back in Senegal and the Senegalese would like to keep it here. It is one of the most important pieces on display at Senegal's new Museum of Black Civilizations, which has opened its doors amid a heated discussion about Africa reclaiming art that was looted during the colonial era. The scale of artifacts in question is staggering. Up to 95 percent of Africa's cultural heritage is held outside Africa by major museums. France alone holds 90,000 sub Saharan African objects in its museums. "However many works there are in the Senegalese collections in France or anywhere else, we want everything back in Senegal, because these artworks are ours and should be back where they belong," he said. A set of treasures from Senegal was included on the list of objects that the restitution report said should be returned immediately. The sword of Omar Saidou Tall, also known as El Hadj Omar, topped the list. The report also demanded the return of objects currently in the natural history museum in Le Havre, as well as jewelry and medallions held in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. About 10 objects, including a drum and a Quran are on loan to the Dakar Museum from Le Havre. Some arts administrators in France have feared an emptying of entire halls in the Quai Branly, which has 70,000 sub Saharan African artifacts. "We cannot go to France and take them by force as they did in the days when they took them from our people," Mr. Coulibaly said. "France, on the other hand, should help us identify artworks that originated in Senegal. We will then work together in bringing all of them back here." In November, Mr. Macron announced that he was giving back 26 African treasures plundered by French colonial forces in the late 19th century. The thrones, statues, palace gates and regalia belonged to what was then the Kingdom of Dahomey, a territory that is now part of Benin. In building exhibits for the new museum, Mr. Bocoum , who is also an archaeology professor at Dakar's main university, wants to set aside the ethnographic approach, reinventing displays, discourse and design to create a new kind of space for self representation. Exhibits include "The Cradle of Humankind" and "Africa Now." Another called "The Caravan and Caravel" tracks how new African communities abroad grew out of the slave trade. The first of its rotating displays focuses on Haiti and Cuba, work "that enables us to have the back story of African history." If the timeline of African humanity were just one day, he said, colonization and slavery "were just one minute." That theme is evident from the moment visitors step inside the new museum to be greeted by a towering, 22 ton rusting baobab tree. The displays of ancient skulls and bones of some of the earliest human relations, from Ethiopia and elsewhere, as well as tools and ceramics on early craftsmanship, pay homage to the origins of humankind. The 18 meter tree, called "The Saga of the Baobab," is by the Haitian artist Edouard Duval Carrie and an example of how Mr. Bocoum wants the museum to reflect the contributions of the diaspora. About 500 pieces from outside the continent include works from Philippe Dodard from Haiti and Elio Rodriguez from Cuba. The museum, the grandest and most modern in the region, aims to celebrate black civilizations' contributions across the world. Its creation was the vision of the poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal's first post colonial president. In the 1960s, Mr. Senghor helped foster the Negritude library movement that championed the idea of a shared identity among Africans across the world. It is a peculiar twist that the museum finally came to fruition with the contribution of a 34 million gift from China, which is making new inroads into West Africa with donations and loans to governments eager for new infrastructure. A reminder that China foots much of the bill is noticeable in firefighting equipment spaced throughout the exhibit halls and labeled in Chinese characters. estimated that the number of artifacts Senegal would demand might total "a few dozen objects." He said Senegal was not about to demand the return of all works of Senegalese origin at Quai Branly, which that museum has estimated at 2,249. Not that the Dakar museum couldn't house all of it. The museum's 14,000 square meters of space (roughly 150,000 square feet) rebut the old position that Africa doesn't have room to hold its artifacts that are now on display thousands of miles away. "We can say now this museum can receive anything and everything taken away from Senegal," said Ousmane Sene, director of the West African Research Center and a member of the museum board. Taken together, its exhibits can seem like a bit of a mishmash. A photo display of paintings on rocks from Chad and Algeria dating back thousands of years. A display on Pope John Paul II's visits to the continent. Ivorian textiles hanging on walls and Malian bogolan mud cloth spread inside cases. A display of African masks alongside those from Mexico and China an attempt to show the continent's masks in a global context. One hall includes a curved blue wall where skin lightening products are spilled at its base; it's a 2017 piece by Juan Andres Milanes Benito, a Cuban artist living in Norway. It nods to a debate over the sometimes unhealthy practice of skin bleaching that in Rwanda has led to raids on pharmacies to confiscate dangerous cosmetics. Also on display are the modern works of regional artists, including the wiry, iron sculptures from Ndary Lo, born in Senegal. The museum has a design workshop and a 150 seat theater for lectures. On a recent morning, Yaya Ngom, a 53 year old artist from Dakar who specializes in interior design, was perusing the new exhibits. He said most Africans know about their history and heritage only through books and documentaries and most of those are rarely produced by Africans. The museum, he said, "is a significant turning point for us as a continent to be able to know about ourselves through our very own teachings and rewrite our own history through these objects." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Yayo was poring over a pair of hands, one of the three to five she tends to any given day at Vanity Projects in Manhattan. With a small pair of scissors she cut and placed a thin foil on each nail , creating boundaries for the polish. Then, with the pad of her index finger and thumb, she held the tiniest of brushes and painted white polish within the lines. The final touch was a fine gold powder that she sprinkled over a clear base and buffed to a shine. The artist herself wears elaborate eight inch long nails covered in crystals and handmade 3 D appliques. Yayo calls them her "superlong bling bling nails." Think Edward Scissorhands, but with diamond encrusted talons instead of shears. While she works, the clicking of her nails is often the only sound that can be heard. Those who see Jenny Bui, known as the "Queen of Bling," in the Bronx tend toward the multidimensional. "Cheap nails aren't good, and good nails aren't cheap," said Ms. Bui, the nail technician who keeps Cardi B rich in acrylic nails. Ms. Bui works out of her Fordham Road salon, Jenny's Spa, where she creates her signature stiletto nails layered with Swarovski crystals. People travel from as far away as Australia for private sessions with her. "My personal nail style is reminiscent of my work as a designer," said Jules Kim, a jewelry designer who is one of Yayo's clients. "I like to combine the visual simplicity with ingenuity, in either shape or application of a jewel." She stressed the importance of nails "that never take away from the jewelry pieces I present on my hand." Nearby, at Akiko Nails, Christina F. Richardson watched as Tahsiyn Harley created a design that reflected a traditional Japanese nail art experience. Using the Time's Up movement, black history and the Santeria religion as inspiration, Ms. Harley drew portraits of women on Ms. Richardson's accent nails, and painted the others yellow, which represents the Santeria goddess Oshun. In most cases, the nail design process is a collaboration that merges customer recommendations and artists' tastes. Naomi Yasuda, an independent nail artist whose Rolodex includes Madonna, Lady Gaga and Kesha, invites her customers to come to appointments with ideas in mind, which she then brings to life. Suzanne E. Shapiro, the author of "Nails: The Story of the Modern Manicure," said that the mainstreaming of hip hop and urban fashion, in tandem with Japanese nail technology, has contributed to contemporary nail art aesthetics. "Our obsession with mobile devices has also been hugely influential, allowing us to capture the minute detail of nail art and broadcast it to the whole world," Ms. Shapiro said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Julia Sweeney's Pat, left, was popular enough on "S.N.L." to inspire a movie. But the character also has an ugly underside that its creator never intended. In her current one woman show, Julia Sweeney shares the story of how she acquainted her teenage daughter with her most famous "Saturday Night Live" character, an adenoidal social misfit of uncertain gender named Pat. As Sweeney tells the tale, they sat together reviewing one of her old performances and she watched as a withering look of despair crossed her daughter's face. "I don't know, Mom," her daughter told her. "It really feels like that character is just about making fun of someone where you can't tell if it's a man or a woman." It has been nearly 30 years since Sweeney introduced television audiences to Pat, a graceless but good natured geek whose ambiguity confused bystanders who were curious to know Pat's gender, but felt too uncomfortable to ask directly. Sweeney played the role in more than a dozen sketches that placed Pat in everyday settings a gym, a drugstore, a barbershop and in parodies of films like "Basic Instinct" and "The Crying Game." Pat became one of the most popular "S.N.L." characters of the 1990s, with help from an opening jingle whose lyrics asked viewers to "accept him or her" for "whatever it might be it's time for androgyny, here comes Pat." But the character also has an ugly underside that its creator never intended. Over the years, Pat has become a cultural cudgel used to mock those with unfamiliar gender expressions an all purpose insult hurled at people who do not fit conventional definitions of masculinity or femininity. Abby McEnany , the co creator and star of the Showtime comedy series "Work in Progress," said she has been called Pat because she is a lesbian who happens to resemble the character. "That sucked, because it was never a compliment," McEnany said. "It was aggressive. It was bigotry." Even in the bathroom of a lesbian bar, McEnany said another woman confronted her and said, "Ugh, who are you? Pat?" "It's like, wow, I can't even find a safe space in what's supposed to be a safe space?" she said. Jill Soloway, the creator of the Amazon series "Transparent," said that Pat typified a dehumanized depiction of real people. The Pat sketches, Soloway said, were a reflection of how people are expected to adhere to gender stereotypes and "everybody who doesn't do that is subject to a wide array of bullying and hatred." Sweeney is well aware of Pat's complicated legacy and the pain that the character represents to many people. As she asks herself in her one woman show, "My God, what did I do? Was I the Al Jolson of androgyny?" More sincerely, Sweeney said in a recent interview that she took this criticism seriously and empathized with anyone who was insulted in this way. "As a person, of course I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings," she said. But, she added, "As an artist, I don't want to never hurt anyone's feelings." The problem of Pat represents an increasingly persistent debate in comedy: What happens when a joke, character or routine is re examined outside of the era in which it was made and is deemed insensitive by contemporary standards? Should its creator still be held accountable for that material, and what if anything is owed to audiences who may have been offended or hurt by it? Comedies are continually revisited with fresh eyes and subjected to new scrutiny, whether the 1980s era teen movies of John Hughes, which have been reproached for male chauvinism, or TV shows like "The Simpsons," where the character of Apu has been criticized for perpetuating racist stereotypes. While audiences and performers can be reluctant to have these debates, Sweeney is open to further consideration of her work and she plays herself in a story line on "Work in Progress," which premieres on Dec. 8, that reckons with the consequences of Pat. But she does not disown the role. As Sweeney explained it, "I didn't do that character to make anyone feel bad," she said. "On the other hand, I created a character and then people happened to look like that character. I'm not responsible if they take it negatively, either. So that's a complicated situation." Sweeney created Pat while she was still a member of the Groundlings, the Los Angeles comedy troupe, in the late 1980s. She said that she based much of the character's behavior on a socially awkward officemate she worked with as an accountant at Columbia Pictures, who drooled and stood too close to people when he talked. But Sweeney felt she could not pull off the character if she played Pat as a man. So she made Pat androgynous in appearance and oblivious to other people's uncertainty about Pat's gender. "Pat doesn't know that Pat comes off in an androgynous way," Sweeney said. "Pat is actually very sexual heterosexual. We just don't know if Pat's a man or a woman because of how Pat presents Patself." When she played Pat this way at the Groundlings, Sweeney said, "That was the biggest laugh. The androgynous jokes were easy. As soon as another character has an agenda, the jokes come quickly." Pat was one of several characters that Sweeney performed in her "Saturday Night Live" audition and one that she did not expect to catch on after she was hired there in 1990. "I thought I was going to do it once and be done," she said. "I didn't know it was going to become this thing that people identified with." But as Pat grew increasingly popular on "S.N.L.", Sweeney said the ways in which the character was being used to demean other people what she called " the icky part" of the role became clear er to her. Sweeney did not ask to stop playing Pat on "S.N.L." But after a 1994 movie based on the character, "It's Pat," was a resounding commercial and critical flop, she said, "To me, that was it it had a natural end." She left "S.N.L." that same year. But the impact of the character has lasted well beyond Sweeney's time on the show. Soloway said that Pat was emblematic of an era in "S.N.L." history when the program was tilted toward its male cast members, who often performed in drag, and when it "used gender as a way to say, A, we don't really need women around to make women, and, B, we're going to make fun of how ugly we are when we're dressed as them." Soloway said that Pat had taught a generation of viewers to see gender nonconforming people as outsiders, rather than people who have the right to participate in art, media and comedy. "We're looking to be the person who decides what's funny," Soloway said. "The dream is to be able to walk into a room, being the subject and not the object to not be afraid that we're going to be pointed at for not fitting in." Soloway expressed admiration for Sweeney, describing her as "important to the history of comedy and the history of women in comedy." While Soloway said they wished that Sweeney would offer "a huge blanket apology to all nonbinary people for making fun of their essence," the fact that she did not, Soloway said, "doesn't make her a bad person. But times have changed so quickly that even things that seemed right three years ago are no longer right." But she cautioned that even the most innocuous cultural offerings can boomerang in unexpected ways. For example, Sweeney said that her husband, whom she described as a "tall, thin, supernerdy scientist," was bullied as a child because he looked like the character Poindexter from "Felix the Cat." "The person who created Poindexter, should they feel bad?" she asked. Citing "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer," another popular recurring character from her era of "S.N.L.", she said, "If there were Neanderthals now, working as lawyers, they would be like, 'People call me 'Caveman Lawyer' and I was traumatized by it.'" While Sweeney considered it a worthwhile endeavor to look back at past efforts and consider how cultural standards have evolved, she said we should be careful not to reflexively dismiss performers or works that are deemed out of step. In another 30 years, she said, "It could be that people will watch movies from now, that are the most politically correct, and you know what they might say? 'I couldn't listen to what the characters are saying because they were eating a hamburger.'" She added, "Don't dismiss everything, because norms and expectations that we once accepted are going to keep changing." As she has reflected on those experiences, McEnany said, "Julia Sweeney didn't ruin my life; what ruined my life is people's bigotry and their reaction to this character." But while McEnany was preparing the pilot episode of "Work in Progress," she and her collaborators decided to include a fictionalized incarnation of Julia Sweeney as a recurring character on the show one who would be portrayed by the actress, and whom McEnany (who is also playing a heightened version of herself) would confront and later befriend. McEnany did not previously know Sweeney before approaching her about the role, but she said that their real life relationship has come to follow a similar trajectory. "She and I do not see totally eye to eye on Pat, and that's O.K., because I love her," McEnany said. She added that, at a time when "there's so much vitriol, you can be friends and love people that don't think the same things about everything you think about." Sweeney said that she was saddened to learn about McEnany's difficult history with Pat. "Of course I felt terrible," she said. "I could see how that would be a very traumatizing thing, and I didn't want her to have had that." There was no need to expunge her past Pat sketches from the historical record, she said, but no need to bring Pat into the present day, either, describing the character as a remnant of "a whole other world." Today, Sweeney said, "You would not make fun of somebody for being that way," adding that the fundamental premise of the sketch would fall apart in a matter of moments. "You'd be able to say, 'What are your pronouns?'" she explained. "And Pat would say, 'I'm so offended, they're obviously ' And then the joke would be over." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
This article is part of David Leonhardt's newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday. This year's National Football League draft will begin tonight. As one of the first normal sports events in months, it's likely to get huge television ratings. I realize that many readers of this newsletter may not be sports fans, but I want to talk about the draft because it's a fascinating window into human irrationality, with lessons even for people who don't like football. Here's the brief version: Many people including experts, with great resources at their disposal are shockingly overconfident about their ability to forecast the future. About 15 years ago, two economists, Richard Thaler (who has since won a Nobel Prize) and Cade Massey, set out to study the history of the draft. They analyzed where in the draft order different players were chosen and then compared the order to the players' later performance. Thaler and Massey discovered that, despite the time and money that football teams devoted to studying players, the teams weren't very good at predicting who would be the best. Those chosen early often had less impressive careers than those chosen later. The chance that a player at a given position turns out to be better than the next player drafted at that same position is only 52 percent, not much better than a coin flip. Predicting the career paths of 22 year olds in any field is hard. Consider that neither of the past two Super Bowl winning quarterbacks (Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady) were chosen at the very top, while several recent 1 picks (like Baker Mayfield and Jameis Winston) have struggled. And yet N.F.L. teams continue to treat the very top picks as far more valuable than picks slightly further down. They're often willing to trade multiple picks later in a draft for a single pick near the top. It's irrational, and predictably so, but the N.F.L. teams can't help themselves. Executives remember the exceptions the top picks who turned out to be as good as advertised and convince themselves that they can pull off another one. "Even the smartest guys in the world, the guys who spend hours with game film, can't predict this with much success," Massey has told me. "There's no crime in that. The crime is thinking you can predict it." The savviest teams have realized they can exploit this irrationality by trading one of their high picks for multiple picks lower down. They effectively swap the ability to choose the one player they want for the ability to take chances on multiple players. They embrace humility. The Dallas Cowboys built a championship team in the 1990s with this approach, and the New England Patriots have done so over the past two decades. Tonight, the teams with the most glaring opportunities to trade down are the Detroit Lions (who pick third) and the New York Giants (fourth). The Lions and Giants have also been two of the worst run franchises in recent years. So allow me to suggest some last minute reading for their executives and for anyone who enjoys an unusually well written academic research paper. The official title is: "The Loser's Curse: Decision Making and Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft." None The Massey Thaler paper is part of a long line of research on human overconfidence. One famous experiment found that psychologists became more confident but no more accurate in their diagnoses as they received more information. We tend to be underconfident on easy problems and overconfident on difficult ones. In other words, we underestimate our ability to do well when all signs point to success, and we overestimate it when the signs become much less favorable, failing to adjust enough for the change in external circumstances. Second, it increases with familiarity. If I'm doing something for the first time, I will likely be cautious. But if I do it many times over, I am increasingly likely to trust in my ability and become complacent, even if the landscape should change (overconfident drivers, anyone?). None I spoke to Thaler yesterday, and he offered a prediction for tonight: If any high profile trades happen, the team that moves up in the draft will select a quarterback and will pay the traditional market price in draft picks for doing so. (N.F.L. teams use a chart that describes the supposed value of each draft pick; the chart substantially exaggerates the value of top picks.) None The social psychologist Philip Tetlock has done extensive research into forecasting failures, including his book with Dan Gardner, "Superforecasting." None "For more than a month, American culture has existed on a split screen. On one hand, movies and theater and travel and every other sport ground to a halt," The Ringer's Bryan Curtis writes. On the other hand, the N.F.L. keeps going in part because it's in its offseason. Curtis describes tonight's draft as "the Quarantine Super Bowl." If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter ( DLeonhardt) and Facebook. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Are Kendall and Kylie Jenner the Olsen sisters of the midprice market? Celebrity siblings bringing a new kind of style to the people? A party Monday evening (in the prelude to New York Fashion Week, which begins on Thursday) to celebrate their new line titled (surprise!) Kendall Kylie suggests they would like the answer to be yes. The line, their third clothing venture, after a juniors line with PacSun and capsules with Topshop, will debut this season at stores such as Neiman Marcus, Saks and Shopbop, and it is a full collection of ready to wear and shoes, with items from 68 to 498. Of course, the sisters didn't exactly hold their event during fashion week, a canny move that suggests a little less bombast than that attached to, for example, the fashion ambitions of their in law Kanye West (who shows on Thursday), and that they know they may need to develop things a bit further. If so, they are correct. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
There are many reasons for the sorry state of commercial aviation in America. When it comes to your routinely terrible flight not to mention the sort of exceptional horror that took place aboard United Airlines Flight 3411 last weekend regulatory failures as well as consolidation, which the authorities have allowed to occur unabated for decades, can be blamed. But I come to you as a technology columnist to tell you that technology, too, has failed you. People in Silicon Valley pride themselves on their capacity to upend entrenched industries. Uber defeated taxi cartels. Airbnb made getting a room cheaper and more accessible. Streaming services are undoing the cable business. Yet the airline industry has not just stubbornly resisted innovation to improve customer service in many ways, technology has only fueled the industry's race to the bottom. Everything about United Flight 3411 overselling, underpaying for seats when they are oversold, a cultish refusal to offer immediate contrition, an overall attitude that brutish capitalism is the best that nonelite customers can expect from this fallen world is baked into the airline industry's business model. And that business model has been accelerated by tech. "The airline industry has been on a steady downward trajectory when it comes to customer service for nearly 40 years," said Henry H. Harteveldt, the president of the Atmosphere Research Group, a travel industry research firm. He noted that American carriers were improving on some metrics on time service is up, baggage loss is down and prices keep getting better. What keeps deteriorating are comfort and quality of service for low end passengers (i.e., most people). Legroom keeps shrinking. Airlines keep tacking on separate fees for amenities we used to consider part of the flight. And customers keep going along with it. "Consumers have shown that they're willing to put up with an awful lot, including lack of legroom, lack of amenities, mediocre or worse customer service, dirty airplanes and more to save money," Mr. Harteveldt said. "And the airline industry has evolved to meet that desire" for cheap fares. Part of the problem is how we buy tickets today. The whole system is mercilessly transactional. When you search online, you look for price and travel times, and perhaps you consider some airline loyalty program. Customer service that is, how the airline treats you isn't often part of the transaction. As a result, airlines have little incentive to reform themselves. "Airline executives will tell you they don't view themselves as being service companies," Mr. Harteveldt said. "They want Wall Street to view them as industrial companies, and they want consumers to view them as transportation providers. Customer service is just not what the airlines are about." You can see this in United's initial response to what happened on Flight 3411. "I apologize for having to reaccommodate these customers," Oscar Munoz, United's chief executive, said in a statement dripping with all the warmth of a ransom note. In a letter to employees, he repeatedly suggested that the customer, not the airline, was at fault. After all, the passenger was offered a bountiful 1,000 in United vouchers for his trouble. It was an offer he couldn't refuse. As a United spokesman told The Times, the passenger was "asked several times, politely," for his seat before anyone beat him up. It took two days and a plunge in United's stock price for the airline to offer a real apology. "I want you to know that we take full responsibility and we will work to make it right," Mr. Munoz said in a statement on Tuesday. Can technology improve how airlines work? Some people have ideas for how that may happen. One of them is obvious and sensible: customer reviews. Last year TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site that has become indispensable for hotel bookings, began rating airlines. Its new rankings, released this week, show that over all, airlines get an average rating of 3.7 out of 5 from customers. Emirates and Singapore Airlines are rated the best in the world; two American airlines, JetBlue and Alaska, made TripAdvisor's Top 10 list. But Delta was the only major American airline to receive TripAdvisor's seal of approval. United and American Airlines did not meet the site's minimum threshold, though Bryan Saltzburg, senior vice president for TripAdvisor's global flight business, said that the two had been improving. One can imagine how such reviews could prompt improvements in airlines. If instead of just price, travel search engines included prominent warnings from reviewers "This airline might give you a bloody lip while kicking you from your seat, 1 star!" that could alter travelers' calculations in booking. "That would be a good idea a filter on travel search that says, 'Click this filter and it might cost you a few dollars more, but we'll bias you towards airlines that treat their customers well,' " said Paul English, the co founder of the travel search company Kayak who now runs another travel start up, Lola. That is small potatoes, though. A bigger disruption would come from altering how we pay for airfares. In the same way that Netflix changed the DVD business by charging a monthly fee, some consultants argue that a membership fee could radically improve flying. "We've prototyped a subscription airline in the past, and it basically gets the airline out of the business of reducing service for offering the lowest fares," said Devin Liddell, the principal brand strategist for Teague, a design firm that works with Boeing and other transportation companies. Some start ups have tried a monthly subscription model, and none have taken off. But airline start ups face high capital costs; a new business model might work, Mr. Liddell said, if an established airline tries it as a way to break free from the accepted way of doing things. You might wonder why an airline would dare try such a thing. After all, airlines are doing well; profits are up across the globe, despite your annoyance about flying. But Mr. Liddell warned of long term competition from other kinds of transportation. If self driving cars make driving easier and more comfortable, midrange flights would face competition. Counting the time it takes to clear airport security and get to and from the airport, it takes just as long to drive between some places Los Angeles to San Francisco, say as to fly. If self driving technology makes driving much more comfortable, too, lots of people might abandon planes for cars, Mr. Liddell said. An even longer term idea is the Hyperloop, Elon Musk's vision for superfast tunnel travel. It's a pretty speculative idea, but if it works, airlines would need to radically alter how they work. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The pianist and composer "Blue" Gene Tyranny in performance at the La MaMa arts center in Manhattan in 2004. Robert Sheff, a composer and pianist who worked under the name "Blue" Gene Tyranny as a solo performer and a collaborator with artists including Iggy Pop, the composer Robert Ashley and the jazz composer and arranger Carla Bley, died on Dec. 12 in hospice care in Long Island City, Queens. He was 75. The cause was complications of diabetes, Tommy McCutchon, the founder of the record label Unseen Worlds, which released several albums by Mr. Tyranny, said in an email. His memorable pseudonym, coined during his brief stint with Iggy and the Stooges, was derived partly from Jean, his adoptive mother's middle name. It also referred to what he called "the tyranny of the genes" a predisposition to being "strongly overcome by emotion," he said in "Just for the Record: Conversations With and About 'Blue' Gene Tyranny," a documentary film directed by David Bernabo released in September. Music, Mr. Tyranny explained in the film, was a source of solace, but also a means "of deeply informing myself that there's another world. Music is my way of being in the world." A master at the keyboard and an eclectic composer who deftly balanced conceptual rigor with breezy pop sounds, Mr. Tyranny was active in modern music as early as his teenage years. From curating contemporary music concerts in high school, he went on to participate in the groundbreaking and influential Once Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, Mich., during the 1960s. He taught classes and worked as a recording studio technician at Mills College, an experimental music hotbed in Oakland, Calif., from 1971 to 1982. Arriving in New York City in 1983, Mr. Tyranny worked with Mr. Ashley, Laurie Anderson and Peter Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra, while also composing his own works. Mr. Tyranny, who had been living in Long Island City since 2002, is survived by a brother, Richard Sheff, and three half siblings, William Gantic Jr., Vickie Murray and Justa Calvin. He was born Joseph Gantic to William and Eleanor Gantic on Jan. 1, 1945, in San Antonio. When Mr. Gantic, an Army paratrooper, was reported missing in action in Southeast Asia during World War II, Mr. Tyranny related in "Just for the Record," his wife gave up their infant child for adoption. He was adopted 11 months later by Meyer and Dorothy Jean Sheff, who ran a clothing shop in downtown San Antonio, and renamed Robert Nathan Sheff. He began piano studies early in his childhood and took his first composition lessons at 11. By high school, he was performing avant garde works by composers like Charles Ives and John Cage in an experimental music series he jointly curated with the composer Philip Krumm at the McNay Art Institute in San Antonio. Invited by the Juilliard School to audition as a performance major, he demurred, insisting even then on being viewed as a composer. Instead he went to Ann Arbor, where he lived and worked from 1962 to 1971 and participated in the Once Festival. Mr. Tyranny's works from this period, like "Ballad" (1960) and "Diotima" (1963), were abstract and fidgety, chiefly concerned with timbral contrast. In 1965, Mr. Tyranny helped found the Prime Movers Blues Band, whose drummer, James Osterberg Jr., would achieve fame as the proto punk singer songwriter Iggy Pop. Another founder, Michael Erlewine, later created AllMusic, which became a popular reference website to which Mr. Tyranny contributed, occasionally writing about his own work. In the late 1960s, Mr. Osterberg transformed himself into Iggy Pop and formed the Stooges. After releasing the album "Raw Power" in 1973, he invited his former bandmate to join him on tour. Mr. Tyranny accepted, performing with red LED lights woven into his hair. He also played in the bands of jazz composers like Bill Dixon and Ms. Bley, and in 1976 explored the intersections of contemporary classical music and rock with Mr. Gordon in a groundbreaking concert series in Berkeley, Calif., documented on a 2019 Unseen Worlds release, "Trust in Rock." An association with Mr. Ashley, whom Mr. Tyranny had met in Ann Arbor and then followed to Mills College, flourished into a close, enduring collaboration. Mr. Tyranny's best known work likely was the role he created in "Perfect Lives (Private Parts)" (1976 83), Mr. Ashley's landmark opera, conceived and eventually presented as a television series: Buddy, the World's Greatest Piano Player. Their relationship was deeply collaborative. Presented by Mr. Ashley with a blueprint indicating keys and metric structures, Mr. Tyranny filled in harmonies and supplied playfully ornate piano writing. "Blue and Bob had this symbiotic relationship from back in Ann Arbor," Mr. Gordon, who also participated in the creation of "Perfect Lives," said in a phone interview. "The character Buddy is like the avatar for the music of 'Blue' Gene." "What we commonly recognize as music in 'Perfect Lives' was 'Blue' Gene's," Mr. Gordon explained, "but the overall composition was Bob's." Mr. Tyranny would contribute in different ways to later Ashley operas, including "Dust" (1998) and "Celestial Excursions" (2003). In his own music, much of which he recorded for the Lovely Music label, Mr. Tyranny moved from early efforts with graphic notation and magnetic tape to compositions that drew from popular styles. Some selections on his debut solo album, "Out of the Blue" (1978), like "Leading a Double Life," were essentially pop songs. "A Letter From Home," which closed that album, mixed found sounds and dreamy keyboards with an epistolary text, spoken and sung, ranging from the mundane to the philosophical. He worked extensively with electronics and labored throughout the 1990s on "The Driver's Son," which he termed an "audio storyboard." A realization of that piece, a questing monodrama set to lush timbres and bubbly rhythms, will be included in "Degrees of Freedom Found," a six CD boxed set of unreleased Tyranny recordings due on Unseen Worlds in the spring. Mr. Tyranny, who lost his eyesight in 2009 and gave up performing after 2016, helped to compile the set, hoping to give his disparate canon a coherent shape. Mr. Tyranny's compositions divided critical response. "To this taste, Mr. Tyranny's work too often skirts the trivial," John Rockwell wrote in a 1987 New York Times review. But Ben Ratliff, in a 2012 Times review of the last new recording issued during Mr. Tyranny's life, "Detours," offered a different view: "Mr. Sheff represents a lot of different American energies." He added, "He does not stint on beautiful things major arpeggios, soul chord progressions, lines that flow and breathe and his keyboard touch is rounded and gorgeous, a feeling you remember." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Millions of young people grew up knowing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act as a birthright. They now demand its guarantees and even more. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. To get to her job as the communications director of a legal office in Philadelphia, Imani Barbarin gets in her car when the coronavirus pandemic doesn't require working from home and drives to a train station 20 minutes away. There's a station closer to her house, just a two minute drive. But Ms. Barbarin, who has cerebral palsy, walks with crutches; the nearby station doesn't have an elevator, and the steep steps are too hard to climb. Ms. Barbarin was born four months before the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act became law in July 1990. She belongs to the A.D.A. generation at least 20 million people with disabilities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau that grew up knowing the transformative civil rights law as a birthright. They expect the law to guarantee, not just promise, that they will get access to transportation, jobs, schools and other public places and to the same opportunities as anyone else. Ms. Barbarin, 30, finds daily reminders of how the A.D.A. makes her world easier: the fully accessible office buildings and restaurants, or simply the expectation that a woman with a disability will have the same chances to take part in everyday life. There are also the markers that mock those raised expectations. The A.D.A. doesn't require every old structure, like that train station, to be retrofitted for accessibility. And then there was her job search. After graduate school, Ms. Barbarin sent out hundreds of applications and disclosed that she has a disability. She didn't get one interview. She sent out more, without mentioning her disability, and did. It's "disheartening," Ms. Barbarin said, for people of her generation, "who feel like the A.D.A. is the floor of what our rights should be. But we should be so much further along." Ariella Barker, who was born with spinal muscular atrophy, says people often assume that disability civil rights laws provide an advantage they do not. One of Ms. Barker's classmates at the Kennedy School at Harvard told her that as a woman in a wheelchair she held the "golden ticket" to a good job. But high unemployment persists for people with disabilities, even after the A.D.A. banned discrimination in the workplace. Only 31 percent of working age people with disabilities people held jobs last year, compared with 75 percent of those without disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. When she graduated with a master's degree in public administration this May, Ms. Barker, who already had a law degree, didn't find the jobs she wanted and instead returned to an old one. Since long before the A.D.A., there have been accepted roles for people with disabilities. They could be the objects of pity or of inspiration. They wanted neither. Doron Dorfman, an associate professor of law at Syracuse University, argues that a new generation has grown up with an added unwelcome role as objects of suspicion. The public knows little about the A.D.A. or the frequent discrimination faced by people with disabilities, Mr. Dorfman says, and one result is what he calls "the fear of the disability con." People with disabilities constantly pay "a tax or price," he said, "this idea of the disability con and always needing to prove they are actually disabled" and therefore worthy of protection. Ms. Barker, who lost the ability to walk at 11, understands. When she was in law school, one day she was in the checkout line of an Atlanta clothing store, clutching a dress, a pair of pants and some tops. Another customer approached, explaining that she was curious about the young woman in the wheelchair: "How do you have the money to buy all of that?" the woman asked. "Did you get injured and sue somebody?" The A.D.A. generation grew up expecting its rights but also found resentment instead propelling a need to keep pushing back. "There's more of us who've grown up disabled and proud," said Stephanie Woodward, 32, of Rochester, N.Y. Ms. Woodward, who was born with spina bifida, was 7 or 8 when she first heard of the A.D.A. She had just started using a wheelchair at school, and a teacher complained that it was a safety hazard. The next day, her father went to demand an apology. Told that the principal was unavailable, her father an electrician and a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy" raised the issue of his daughter's rights and announced he was going to "find an A.D.A. lawyer." That threat got results. Ms. Woodward recalls thinking: "What's the A.D.A.? Like I really needed to know because it got such a reaction." Today, Ms. Woodward is a disability rights lawyer and activist. A widely circulated photograph showed her getting arrested in a U.S. Senate office in June 2017, her hands zip tied behind the back of her pink wheelchair. She was arrested with members of the disability group Adapt, protesting a Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. She argues that disability and racial justice issues encompass Covid 19, too. Black and Latino people have died from the coronavirus in disproportionate numbers, in part because of unequal access to health care and other causes of their greater prevalence of pre existing conditions including disabilities like diabetes and chronic lung illness. There are more young people with disabilities now than in the past, or, at least, more who are willing to accept the label. Today, almost one in four college students report having had a diagnosis of depression, according to the American College Health Association. That's up from one in 10 college students in 2000. "It's a perfect storm," said Mary T. Hoban, the association's chief researcher. Students face an exceptionally stressful world, she says: the pressures of social media, fears of school shootings and, now, the pandemic's many disruptions. Far more seek mental health services than used to be the case, she says. One reason: The A.D.A. erased some of the stigma of mental health care issues by requiring schools to make accommodations like private rooms for tests or liberalized permission to take a leave of absence. Also true to their age group, members of the A.D.A. generation use social media to meet and organize. Ari Ne'eman was 18 when he started the Autistic Self Advocacy Network online in 2006 to challenge the prevailing narrative about autism, one that was driven by parents' groups and researchers. It largely saw autism as a tragedy and the answer as a cure. That freedom to think big is what most marks the A.D.A. generation. After Micah Fialka Feldman helped move his sister into her college dorm, he decided he wanted the experience of dorm living, too. At the time, he was taking a two hour bus ride to get to his nondegree program at a college outside Detroit for students with intellectual disabilities and Down syndrome. When the university said he couldn't live on campus, he used the A.D.A. to sue and won in 2009. Today, he works as a teaching assistant at Syracuse University's school of education. He helps grade papers, reads students' journals and talks to future educators about what it's like to have an intellectual disability. "I sometimes wonder if I'd been born at a different time, how much different my life would be," said Mr. Fialka Feldman, now 35. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
An office party from days past (1966). "This is not the year for telling your boss off," said David Adler, the founder of BizBash, which tracks trends in the event planning industry. "You aren't going to see people letting their hair down." Remember the scene in the movie "Office Christmas Party" when the head of human resources grabbed the D.J.'s microphone and told employees to have sex in the parking lot instead of in their cubicles? Wait, you didn't see it? Well, anyway: Those days are over, even in jest. Holiday gatherings have become toned down affairs as executives respond to demands to cut costs, improve company morale and, this year, address sexual harassment in the workplace. More companies are focusing their efforts on holiday parties that promote teams and foster cooperation. A growing favorite are parties at bowling alleys and escape rooms, events with a manageable size and guest list. At Vox Media, the company whose editorial director was recently fired for sexual harassment, guests will be limited to two drink tickets at its holiday party, putting a chill on alcohol consumption (and potentially scandalous behavior). Other companies are taking a more stringent approach, cutting out booze altogether. Challenger, Gray Christmas Inc., a human resources and outplacement firm, surveyed 150 human resources' representatives and found that the number of parties is expected to hold steady this year. Of those, though, 47.8 percent of employers will offer cocktails, wine or beer, down from 62 percent in 2016. Bob Colacello, a Vanity Fair special correspondent who attends a fair share of holiday parties, believes the current political and cultural environment is, in itself, a deterrent to unseemly high jinks. "The only thing people like to talk about anymore is Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein," he said. "And, with that as the dominant subject of conversation, it does tend to inhibit everything from predatory sexual behavior to innocent flirting." David Adler, the founder of BizBash, which tracks trends in the event planning industry, said exuberant merriment or worse has always been a risk at corporate holiday events. But this year, with bosses, underlings and co workers under increased scrutiny, everyone will be on their best behavior. Still, some companies are reminding employees that an office party is governed by the decorum at work. "This is not the year for telling your boss off," Mr. Adler said. "You aren't going to see people letting their hair down." In Los Angeles, where morale has been worsened by a spate of sexual harassment charges against big name actors and executives, the holiday vibe is markedly low key. Paramount Pictures' former chairman Brad Grey, who died in May, used to hold an A list holiday shindig to celebrate the studio's filmmakers. One year he invited Harrison Ford, Lorne Michaels and Jack Nicholson, who gathered for cocktails and canapes in the columned loggia on his Bel Air estate, overlooking an azure pool set in an acre of rolling lawn. Regulars included Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Few Paramount executives were invited. Neighbors and nonfamous friends didn't come either. Jim Gianopulos, the former Twentieth Century Fox veteran hired to replace Mr. Grey, is taking a more inclusive approach this year. He too is holding a holiday party at his home for Paramount's filmmakers and creative colleagues. But he also invited studio executives, as well as some reporters and personal friends. "It's a casual, low key event," said Chris Petrikin, a Paramount studio executive who worked with Mr. Gianopulos at Fox. This is not to be confused, of course, with the annual Christmas party on the Paramount lot. There, a tree is lit and fake snow drifts across the lot. Mr. Grey spared no extravagance when he ran the studio. One year, the party featured a carnival theme and an indoor Ferris wheel. This year, Mr. Petrikin said, it did not. Time Inc., once known for Christmas hoopla where convivial young editors supped on buckets of oysters and glasses brimming with champagne, has moved its party to dreary January for the second year in a row. Mr. Adler, of BizBash, said corporations are hard pressed to cancel holiday parties outright. "It sends the wrong message about the company," he said. "It says the company does not care about its people." But there are ways to edit that message. For more than a decade, HBO rented a grand ballroom at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square for a lavish holiday luncheon for its 2,500 employees. Waiters passed trays of sushi. Platters of pasta and roast chicken were laid out, alongside bountiful glasses of wine and beer. More recently, though, HBO found the event as poorly received as the first season of "Hello Ladies." About half of its employees stayed home. Many of those who showed up didn't stick around. Executives surmised (perhaps wisely) the party's meager attendance wasn't enough to justify the 300,000 price tag. So, two years ago, HBO offered its employees an afternoon off with their co workers to volunteer at a charity instead. Last December, staffers in New York packed 101,316 children's meals, while others visited an art center or a pediatric hospital in Hackensack, N.J. Millennials, in particular, clamored for more. This holiday season, 95 percent of HBO employees participated in the volunteering drive. "We read the news," said Dennis Williams, an HBO executive who oversees the program. "People are extremely eager to be involved in social causes." Millennials, he said, seek to connect through experiences, whether it be in a socially conscious context, like volunteering, or a collaborative activity. "They expect the company to provide them with those kinds of experiences," Mr. Williams said. A less philanthropic but still debauchery free experience can be had at Escape the Room, an interactive game site where as many as 10 people are shut in a room and have one hour to solve a puzzle. Holiday bookings are up this year, said Wyndham Manning, the manager of the company's location in Midtown Manhattan. And many are new corporate clients, albeit smaller groups, given the size and intensity of the games. "People view this as an alternative to traditional parties," said Mr. Manning. Investment professionals from both KKR Co. and JPMorgan Chase recently booked all five rooms for a single hourlong session, he said. Citibank, too, booked two sessions of three games for an evening. Such intimate gatherings give companies what they lack otherwise during the holiday party season: control in a particularly fraught year. "We've always had a zero tolerance policy" for sexual harassment, said Elizabeth Maddick, the human resources manager at PicsArt, a San Francisco company that makes an app for image editing and drawing. "We wouldn't do anything different, except to remind people that office policy is the same for an office party." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
were married Aug. 18 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. Meghan Desai, a friend of the couple who was ordained a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated. Mrs. Wagner, 31, works in business development at AirSwap, a digital asset trading platform, and at its parent company, Fluidity, based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She is also a founder of Mochi Magazine, an online publication for Asian American women. She graduated from Harvard, from which she also received an M.B.A. She is the daughter of Cheuwan K. Hwang and Dr. Derbiau Frank Hsu of Manhattan. The bride's mother, now retired, was an executive vice president at Allianz Taiwan Life Insurance in Taiwan. Her father is a professor of computer and information science at Fordham and a founder of the International Conference on Cyber Security. Mr. Wagner, 33, is a software engineer at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. He graduated from the University of Michigan and received master's degrees in public policy and administration from the London School of Economics and in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Will 2019 Be Your Year of Better Sleep, at Least On the Road? None Forget fitness, 2019 may be the year you finally sleep well on the road. Hotels, cruise lines, airports and even airlines are devoting more attention in the coming year to helping travelers get better rest when away from the comfort of their own bed. Six Senses, with 14 properties globally, is rolling out a jet lag recovery program during the first few months of 2019 that it developed in consultation Dr. Steven W. Lockley, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who is an expert on circadian rhythms. The program is free, but guests must enroll in it before their arrival. Dr. Lockley helped create a jet lag recovery app called Timeshifter, which tells users what to do to overcome their jet lag based on where they are in the world. For example, the app indicates when to nap, sleep for the night and drink caffeine . In 2019, Westin Hotels Resorts, with more than 250 properties worldwide, will redesign guest rooms with sleep in mind. New rooms will include special lighting with soothing illuminated patterns of light and shadow on the walls, like reflections on water, instead of the usual lamps and overhead lights. Similarly, Four Seasons Hotels Resorts offers free sleep oriented amenities at all of its hotels. Guests can choose among mattress toppers and pillows, each with different firmness levels. Other amenities include lavender bath salts, pillow mists and eye masks. Airlines are also investing in cabin amenities that can help fliers sleep more soundly on long flights, or stay awake when it's daytime. Air Canada's new fleet of Boeing 737s have cabins with mood lighting systems meant to help travelers gently fall sleep and wake up. On long haul routes, the planes simulate a sunset after the first meal service and a sunrise before the second one. (Qantas and British Airways have new Boeing 787s with similar cabin lighting that also adjusts to the time in the flight's destination.) The Airbus A350, a favorite with some airlines, is also built with passenger sleep in mind. Delta Air Lines' new A350s feature LED ambient lighting, and Singapore Airlines' new LED lighting systems offer the cabin crew 16 million color combinations and the ability to simulate sunrises, sunsets and other times of the day. If you're stuck at an airport, now you can catch some shut eye in comfort. Many airports are opening nap pods with beds that rent by the hour. Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport, for one, opened a new Minute Suites in Concourse T last September. Situated post security, the five suites have daybeds and sofas and can be rented starting at 42 an hour. The co founder of Minute Suites, Daniel Solomon, said that although the company opened its first location around nine years ago, also at the Atlanta airport, the bulk of its six locations have opened in the last 18 months. And six more Minute Suites will open at airports in 2019 including in Charlotte and Baltimore. In January 2019, Washington Dulles International Airport will debut a 16 room micro hotel, Sleepbox, in Concourse A. The rooms are eight feet tall and 30 to 45 square feet in size, have work spaces, are soundproof and have beds with memory foam mattresses. Rental rates start at 25 an hour. A second Sleepbox is scheduled to open in the second half of 2019 at Boston's Logan International Airport. When it comes to sleeping on the ocean, several cruise lines including Norwegian Cruise Line and Crystal Cruises offer "pillow menus" so guests can pick the most comfortable pillow for the way they sleep. The menu on Norwegian is only available to those who book in The Haven, the line's luxury suites, and includes the choice of an overfilled pillow for cruisers seeking extra neck and head support. Crystal's menu is available to all guests, and includes the choice of a goose down pillow or a therapeutic foam pillow. Some ships have onboard spa treatments to help guests sleep, too. The spa on Celebrity Cruises' new ship, the Celebrity Edge, has a sleep inducing treatment called the Ocean Spa Wave Massage. It's performed on a table similar to a waterbed and includes a seaweed wrap, reflexology and body massage. Guests also wear headphones so that they can listen to relaxing sounds such as wind chimes and crashing waves while they're getting the treatment. No one will blame you if you fall asleep right there on the table. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Keanu Reeves is set to reprise his role as Neo, a rebel leader battling machines, in a fourth installment of "The Matrix" franchise, Warner Bros. said this week. He will be joined by Carrie Anne Moss as Trinity, a fellow warrior and Neo's love interest, in the latest sequel for a franchise whose first film was hailed as a revolution in filmmaking when it debuted in 1999. The movie will be written, directed and produced by Lana Wachowski, a creator of "The Matrix" franchise with her sister, Lilly. Lilly will not be involved in the latest movie, according to news reports, because she is at work on her latest television project, "Work in Progress." Toby Emmerich, the chairman of Warner Bros. Picture Group, made the announcement in a news release on Tuesday. "We could not be more excited to be re entering 'The Matrix' with Lana," he said. The news was first reported by Variety. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Magazines offer a world of ideas, but they come with a small domestic problem: When too many pile up or are strewn about, they can be an eyesore. A magazine rack can help manage the chaos by providing a place for those yet to be read. But they aren't the only solution other large containers will do the job just as well. "I use dough bowls, oversized baskets, brass containers and primitive troughs," said Lauren Liess, an interior designer in Great Falls, Va., who is at work on the new HGTV television series called Best House on the Block. The ideal choice depends partially on how you want to live, she said. Some magazine racks put the covers on display, so the magazines need to be neatly arranged, while others allow them to be casually dumped inside. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
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