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Wendy Rhoades really cares about her husband. In spite of his grasping ambition and her position in the crossfire during his now ended war with her boss, and in spite of how Chuck outed them both as sadomasochists, she wants him to be happy. She hates that he has been made to suffer. But Wendy is suffering, too, which is one reason she wants to sell their home. When Chuck responded by divulging a story of emotional abuse from his childhood in which the lesson from his mercurial father was that all women crave domination Wendy was horrified, of course. She isn't out to compound Chuck's anguish by destabilizing his home. She is selling the house not to punish him, but to move beyond her own painful memories. And she's probably doing it for his sake, as well. But Wendy's thoughtfulness does not extend to everyone. Indeed, her mind can be a pretty dark place. One person she isn't fooling is Mafee (a never better Dan Soder), Bobby's ex employee who is now the lieutenant of his nemesis, Taylor Mason. He sees fully now that what was behind her smile wasn't the benevolence of "some serene and wise teacher." He screamed as much in full view of Bobby and everyone else at Axe Cap. "It hid a sick, vicious phony," he shouts. "Now I know what you really are: a expletive monster." As security hauls the furious man away, in part to keep him and Dollar Bill from coming to blows, he closes out his tirade: "You're a garbage person, Wendy! That's what you are! That's what you all are!" It was very, very difficult to come away from Sunday night's ruthlessly cruel episode without drawing the same conclusion. For once, the plot of "Billions" was actually pretty simple to summarize: By faking a chance encounter with Mafee and renewing her therapeutically friendly relationship with Taylor, Wendy figured out in last week's episode that the Mason family dynamic was its weak link. Turn Taylor against Doug, she surmised, and the whole edifice would collapse. So Bobby and Chuck this week formed a sort of bucket brigade of back stabbing, bribery and blackmail. Aided by a series of very funny cameos the sight gag in which the towering Clancy Brown and the tiny Danny Strong stand at adjacent urinals is one for the ages they induce the Bureau of Industry and Security Secretary (Chelcie Ross), a man known as Hard Bob, to shut down Doug's aerospace project on national security grounds. And all it took to persuade the secretary an adult film enthusiast, of course (see: Hard Bob) was the help of a few real life porn stars: Lisa Ann, Cory Chase (Audrey Joyce Leon), and Rayveness (Gina Raye Carter), adding three more cameos to the list. The choice left to Taylor was stark and simple: Mason Cap could stay committed to Doug's project, mounting a quixotic challenge to the bureaucracy while hemorrhaging other clients who wanted no part of the battle; or it could pull the plug on the project, and on Doug, sending him packing with a check while selling his life's work to the government. Taylor chose Plan B. Doug retreated in rage, furious that his dreams meant nothing to a child who had grown cold. Taylor was furious, too, taking his reaction as proof that he got back in touch only in hopes that his mega rich and mega smart kid could further his own ambitions. The firm is intact, but everyone involved is broken. It was pure disgust that moved the usually laid back bro Mafee to storm into his old office and go berserk at the woman who helped manipulate the entire affair. Bobby being Bobby, he sees Mafee's meltdown as a sign of success; the dinner party he throws after buying out his old pizzeria boss, Bruno, takes place later that night. That's one way to process being a garbage person. But not everyone is so inured to her own garbage ness. When the assembled merrymakers (including Axe's estranged friend Freddie Aquafino, played by Noah Emmerich) bite into their slices, Wendy isn't there. She has put her home on the market for real this time, complete with a freshly baked pie to, you guessed it, manipulate potential buyers. Chuck, who spends the episode embroiled in a cover up over that gun permit he secured for a bigwig earlier in the season, is told by the real estate broker he can't eat the pie. But he sure gets a mouthful of the symbolism. What does Wendy do instead of party? She runs through the night, compulsively, until Mafee's words and her own guilt and pain catch up to her and she clutches a railing to cry. It's awful to see this preternaturally composed and brilliant person break down. It's also a tremendous payoff for the work Maggie Siff has done in creating Wendy's aura: She may not have been invulnerable, but she always did come across as invincible. Not anymore. Directed by Laurie Collyer from a script by the series creators and showrunners Brian Koppelman and David Levien, Sunday's episode showed the "Billions" crew at its worst. Often, we feel compelled to measure these characters by their best behavior, even when we know we shouldn't a testament to how well drawn and well acted these characters are. But this week challenged that good faith. Perhaps we shouldn't be giving them so much benefit of the doubt after all. Right before Taylor finally saw through Wendy's ruse and told her where to stick it, Wendy said that working for the "toxic, corrosive" Bobby was like working for "Shiva the Destroyer." This was almost certainly an unconscious self indictment. Like her boss and his minions, like her husband and his father, Wendy smiled, and smiled, and was a villain. She can't outrun that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, 'Shut It Down 2020' When "Shut It Down" appeared on "Colorado," the 2019 album Neil Young made with Crazy Horse, it was a stomp and drone reproach to climate change. A few months later, with economies worldwide partly shut down, Young's words about "People trying to save this earth from an ugly death" register differently, especially tied to a video showing deserted landmarks worldwide and the efforts of medical workers, as well as Young and Crazy Horse in the studio (long before social distancing). The music is a slight remix of the album track, while events have shifted everything. JON PARELES Laura Marling's quietly magnificent new album, "Song for Our Daughter," contemplates the many ways a relationship can crumble: "Note by note, bruise by bruise/Sometimes the hardest thing to learn is what you get from what you lose," she reflects in "Blow by Blow." The album's music could have come out of Laurel Canyon in 1972: rooted in folk, with instruments and vocals in close up, but more than adept at graceful studio illusion. In "Blow by Blow," discreet piano chords are joined by strings and distant voices, and nothing obscures the emotion. PARELES Sometime in self quarantine, Tyler Joseph wrote his first song on the guitar, a delicious bit of '80s pop funk that revels in its simplicity a less common choice for Joseph, the duo's songwriting engine and a studio maximalist. Anxiety has always been a core part of the Twenty One Pilots proposition, so its first lines, "Panic on the brain, world has gone insane/Things are starting to get heavy," are familiar terrain. The solution here is a personal connection a quarantine partner, someone to calm his itchy mind. The video shows Joseph and the drummer Josh Dun at home with their families and passing back and forth a memory stick (Postal Service style, sort of), ending with a calming promise: "We'll be OK. We're gonna be OK." CARYN GANZ Charli XCX battles her own affectionate sentiments in "Forever," a song at odds with itself; two electronics loving producers, A.G. Cook and BJ Burton, share the credits. From the start, her neat, poppy melody is besieged by distortion. Although the noise recedes for a chorus that insists, "I'll love you forever" before an impending separation, it returns, scraping and hissing and whooshing and revving up, as if to insist that there's no way things will go smoothly. PARELES Into the grand global slowdown seeps Frank Ocean, his voice powerful and a little reluctant. These new songs he debuted versions of them at his PrEP parties last fall show Ocean reducing his sound to a kind of ambient folk music, overlaid with soul plaint. The result is like new age music that doesn't soothe: The pace is molasses, the anguish will make you wince. These are marked as acoustic versions, though they feel like a post technological kind of acoustic, slightly dirty and uncertain. ("Cayendo," which includes Ocean singing in Spanish and echoes of Sade's "Love Is Stronger Than Pride," is the more jolting of the two.) On the vinyl releases of these songs, though which were put on sale last fall but have not yet been released the B sides are both dance remixes: Justice on "Dear April," Sango on "Cayendo." JON CARAMANICA How are you ending your conversations these days? "Stay safe"? "Stay healthy"? It's getting repetitive, right? Not to mention a little dispiriting. How about "Stay beautiful"? This newly released single from Damon Locks, a sound and visual artist based in Chicago, was left off last year's "Where Future Unfolds," the debut album from his Black Monument Ensemble. Locks begins the track with a poem about lying in bed sick and finding a bouquet of flowers at his bedside. It's accompanied by a note that ends with the words, "Stay beautiful." In the five minutes of music that follow, those are the only lyrics sung by a half dozen voices in a cascade of swelling harmonies while the percussionists Dana Hall and Arif Smith stutter through a lethargic dub beat, and Angel Bat Dawid adds quiet puffs of bass clarinet. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO The Korean American songwriter, singer and producer Yaeji has made an aesthetic out of feigned tentativeness. "Ahem, 1, 2" is how she begins "When I Grow Up" from her mixtape "What We Drew." She builds electronic beats and bass lines from half muffled sounds; she sings and raps, in Korean and English, in a voice that only moves between a whisper and the mildest coo. But her beats are insidiously kinetic, and her enigmatic lyrics are far from dance floor throwaways: "Feeling like I, I've been exposed/To the ones I shouldn't know." PARELES The one man studio band Ernest Greene has been releasing woozy electro pop since 2011 under the name Washed Out. "Too Late" marks his return to Sub Pop, the label that released "Within and Without" and "Paracosm," both outstanding examples of what was once called "chillwave." His new track picks up where he left off there: lush vocals, quavering synth bass, throwback electronic drums and an intense sense of longing. GANZ A tender, not fully formed singer songwriter with a fervent online fan base, Alec Benjamin has been inching his way toward ubiquity for the past few years with songs that often sound so fragile they might shatter. "Six Feet Apart," his entry into the quarantine pop sweepstakes, plays to his strengths a warbly voice, a Sheeran esque sense of simplicity. "I miss you most at six feet apart/when you're right outside my window/but can't ride inside my car," he sings. Benjamin still sounds fragile here, but it's all held together with a heavy dollop of the thickest, most viscous sap. CARAMANICA Samantha Crain, 'Holding to the Edge of Night' An industrious pianist, bandleader and organizer, Arturo O'Farrill comes by his vocation by way of family tradition: His father, Chico O'Farrill, led an influential Latin jazz big band in the mid to late 20th century, and Arturo has passed along the trade to two musician sons. In his own music, O'Farrill has never stopped rolling forward while also keeping faith with the fundamentals of Afro Caribbean folkloric music. On its surface, "Baby Jack" is a sharply contemporary piece, but at moments the rhythmic tumble of rumba creeps in from below; elsewhere, the harmonies of the horns make a subtle nod to the romantic tradition of Cuban danzon. RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
PORTLAND, Ore. In the months since Equifax allowed the Social Security numbers of 145 million Americans to fall into the hands of thieves, the company has apologized, consumers have expressed rage and politicians have lashed the company at public hearings in Washington. The banks and other financial institutions that buy our personal data from Equifax and its two competitors, Experian and TransUnion, however, have not had much to say on the matter. That all changed here on Friday as Umpqua Bank, with about 300 branches in five western states, gleefully conducted what it called Freeze Day for its 4,200 employees. It encouraged them to press the pause button for 30 minutes during the workday and use the time to close off their credit files at the three credit bureaus. Umpqua, which bills itself as the world's greatest bank and does so with only the slightest smirk, assembled and trained a team to help workers initiate what's known as a credit freeze. The bank has started encouraging customers to freeze their credit files, too. As part of the freeze day festivities, Umpqua served brown sugar strawberry ice cream sandwiches to the staff for breakfast, staged a mock snowball fight to start the workday and gave all employees a 10 reimbursement for any fees involved with freezing their credit. Freezes keep any new creditors from seeing your credit file, which makes it nearly impossible for hackers to open new accounts in your name. The fact that a big bank is pushing the concept cannot come as good news to some executives in the credit reporting industry, who fought state laws that brought freezes into existence and have spent years beating back other regulatory efforts. In the wake of a different breach in 2015, one top Experian executive resisted the call from consumer groups for it to offer freezes gratis to the victims. "The precedent set for offering free freezes would haunt all beaches going forward," he wrote in an email that either was missing a crucial letter "r" or trying to equate his industry's counterattacks with the storming of Normandy. "Doing as they request on either count will not satiate their hatred for Experian." There were no picket signs or guillotines carved from ice here on freeze day, for Umpqua's relationship with Equifax is multifaceted. It buys lots of credit data from the company and its competitors, so it can determine which customers deserve loans and at what interest rate. Those loan executives did not mind, given that the process for lifting a freeze temporarily is fairly straightforward as long as the credit bureaus' systems are working and borrowers have the PINs they need to thaw their credit files. "If it takes an extra step, so be it," said Cort O'Haver, the bank's chief executive. "Everyone embraced it, and it would be tough not to agree with it because it's the right thing to do to protect customers." So what does Mr. O'Haver think of Experian's view of freezes? I did a semi dramatic reading of that email, which accidentally fell into the inbox of a consumer advocate, and I focused in particular on a section where the executive asserted that most people do not need freezes. Mr. O'Haver's eyes widened a bit. "Uh really? Oh man," he said. "Wow. That is not right." An Experian spokesman said that the email did not reflect the company's position on the matter. Before Mr. O'Haver and his colleagues could property educate customers about freezes, they had to get up to speed on the process of freezing a file themselves. Two employees, Katie Scott and Nicole Stein, dreamed up the concept of freeze day and served on the crew that assembled at headquarters on Friday to answer questions from other employees. Ms. Stein put a stopwatch to her own efforts and found that it took just 24 minutes to freeze her credit files at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Another colleague, Jeremy Lang, created a themed playlist as a soundtrack for the day. Bruce Springsteen's "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out'' was playing when I walked in to meet the team. Questions from co workers included whether you really have to freeze your files at all three credit bureaus. (Yes, you do, lest thieves find an opening with a company that checks credit at a bureau where you have not frozen your file.) Also, do both spouses have to freeze? (Yes, again.) And should people shopping for a mortgage wait before freezing their files? (Yup, as Ms. Scott had recently done herself.) He comes to Umpqua each Friday to balance his checkbook and nibble on the treats the bank serves. "If things balance, I get an extra cookie," he said. Others seemed glad that the store displayed signs announcing Freeze Day, which reminded them of the Equifax breach months earlier. "When something terrible hasn't happened yet, you forget all about it," said Gordon Caron, a retired physician, who had made a midday stop with his wife. He eventually conferred with employees there, all of whom were dressed in gaudy holiday themed sweaters. Nationwide, other consumers have barely caught on. Only about 4.5 million people with Equifax credit files have cut off outsiders' access to them, according to the company, though that is up from a million or so before the breach. Equifax told me it has no beef with Umpqua's Freeze Day and said it planned to introduce an app on Jan. 31 that will make cutting off and turning on access to a credit file easier. "We're pleased to see an employer, especially one with a stake in the financial sector, taking steps to try to educate and empower their employees," said Paul Zurawski, senior vice president of external relations for Equifax. "A credit freeze is what's currently available and easiest for consumers to understand based on what's been promoted in the media. If you too want to initiate a freeze, see the comprehensive guide I wrote this fall to protecting yourself after the Equifax breach. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
After getting a job as a curator in Buffalo at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center with a recommendation from Ms. Sherman (one of its founders), Ms. Gould became close friends with Kiki Smith who was part of an exhibition about the artists collective Colab. Multiple works by Ms. Smith populate the director's office wall, including a self portrait of Ms. Smith with her cat and birds. Ms. Gould returned to Artists Space in the 1990s as director. She purchased prints commissioned for fund raising benefits by artists she exhibited there, including Jim Hodges and Nan Goldin. An Ann Hamilton print was Ms. Gould's goodbye gift when she left to take the helm of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She continued the practice of buying benefit prints commissioned from artists such as Maira Kalman, Karen Kilimnik, Barry Le Va and Lisa Yuskavage (Ms. Gould gave Ms. Yuskavage her first solo museum show in 2000). When she moved to the Jewish Museum six years ago, Ms. Gould was keen to display art in the lobby. During a lunch she had with Mel Bochner, whose word paintings were going to be shown at the museum, he wrote on a slip of lined paper "KVETCH KVETCH KVETCH KVETCH" multiple times across his sketch of the front desk a drawing now framed on Ms. Gould's wall. Ultimately, he used "BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH" for the lobby wall, Ms. Gould explained, "because people were going to think everyone complains here." These are edited excerpts from our conversation. Do you have any particular favorites on your wall? I love that Lisa Yuskavage painting, especially the woman's striped tights. I always wear patterned tights. Lisa gave me that for one of my big birthdays. Also the Sheila Hicks, who had this incredible show at the ICA. It was a change maker for Sheila, who went from the craft world to the art world. When I first took the job at the Jewish Museum, she dropped by and dumped all this yarn on my couch and said, 'What colors do you like?' I just figured she wanted my ideas. A year later she showed up with this small weaving . I think that's the most surprising gift I ever got. Have you had other unexpected gifts? The photographer Seton Smith, Kiki's sister, one summer stayed in my apartment while I was traveling. When I left that apartment on 11th Street to buy an apartment on 12th Street, she gave me a suite of photographs she had taken from my window on 11th Street. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
WASHINGTON Just days after President Trump spoke of a "running war'' with the media, his chief White House strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, ratcheted up the attacks, arguing that news organizations had been "humiliated" by the election outcome and repeatedly describing the media as "the opposition party" of the current administration. "The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while," Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday. "I want you to quote this," Mr. Bannon added. "The media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States." The scathing assessment delivered by one of Mr. Trump's most trusted and influential advisers, in the first days of his presidency comes at a moment of high tension between the news media and the administration, with skirmishes over the size of Mr. Trump's inaugural crowd and the president's false claims that millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants swayed the popular vote against him. Mr. Bannon, who rarely grants interviews to journalists outside of Breitbart News, the provocative right wing website he ran until August, was echoing comments by Mr. Trump last weekend, when the president said he was in "a running war" with the media and called journalists "among the most dishonest people on earth." Mr. Bannon's remarks added to the growing acrimony between the press and a president who made attacks on the media a rallying point of his election campaign. Among Mr. Trump's advisers in the White House, Mr. Bannon is responsible for putting into action the nationalist vision that Mr. Trump channeled during the later months of the campaign, one that stemmed from Mr. Bannon himself. And in many ways Mr. Trump has acted on that vision during his first week in office from the description of "American carnage" he laid out in his inauguration speech to a series of executive actions outlining policies on trade agreements, immigration and the building of a border wall. Mr. Bannon is one of the strongest forces in an administration with competing power centers. A savvy manipulator of the press, and a proud provocateur, he was among the few advisers in Mr. Trump's circle who were said to have urged Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, to give a confrontational, emotional statement to a shocked West Wing briefing room on Saturday, when the White House disputed news reports about the size of the inauguration crowd. He shares Mr. Trump's view that the news media misunderstood the movement that the president rode into office. Speaking by telephone on Wednesday, Mr. Bannon delivered a broad indictment of the news media as being biased against Mr. Trump and out of touch with the American public. That is an argument familiar to readers of Breitbart and followers of personalities friendly to Mr. Trump, like Sean Hannity of Fox News. "The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong," Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it "a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there." "The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign," Mr. Bannon said. "Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: They were outright activists of the Clinton campaign." (He did not name specific reporters or editors.) Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "That's why you have no power," he added. "You were humiliated." Mr. Bannon spoke in blunt but calm tones, peppered with profanity, and humorously referred to himself as "Darth Vader." He said, with ironic relish, that Mr. Trump was elected by a surge of support from "the working class hobbits and deplorables." The conversation was initiated by Mr. Bannon to offer praise for Mr. Spicer, who has been criticized this week for making false claims at the White House podium about attendance at Mr. Trump's inaugural, for calling reporters dishonest and lecturing them about what stories to write, and for failing to disavow Mr. Trump's lie about widespread voter fraud in the election. Asked if he was concerned that Mr. Spicer had lost credibility with the news media, Mr. Bannon chortled. "Are you kidding me?" he said. "We think that's a badge of honor. 'Questioning his integrity' are you kidding me? The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work." "You're the opposition party," he said. "Not the Democratic Party. You're the opposition party. The media's the opposition party." Journalists reacted with alarm and defiance to Mr. Bannon's comments. "What country are we living in?" Christiane Amanpour, the CNN correspondent, wrote on Twitter. "We are not the opposition,'' Stephen Engelberg, editor in chief of the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, wrote in an email. "We are part of an essential function in any democracy." He added that ProPublica had no intention of "shutting up in response to this or any other president's demand." "We are here to tell the truth and we intend to continue doing so, regardless of how badly some might want us to parrot 'alternative facts,'" Mr. Engelberg said. Mr. Bannon mostly referred to the "elite" or "mainstream" media, but he cited The New York Times and The Washington Post by name. "The paper of record for our beloved republic, The New York Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated," Mr. Bannon said. "They got it 100 percent wrong." He added that he has been a reader of The Times for most of his adult life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SEATTLE Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said on Monday that its quarterly profit fell 23 percent after it sharply increased spending, in a rare financial stumble by the tech giant. Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to 40.5 billion for the third quarter, but that profit dropped to 7.07 billion. Profit, which missed Wall Street forecasts, was hurt by rising costs for research and development and marketing, the company said. The performance demonstrated the challenges of trying to maintain growth at the company and showed how Google must invest to keep that up. While advertising, rooted in the dominance of Google's internet search engine, has sustained Alphabet's bottom line in recent years, that business isn't growing as fast as it once did. Google is also facing new competition for marketing dollars from Amazon and others. Alphabet faces other challenges. Google is squarely in the sights of regulators and politicians who want to take down a monopoly. Its employees have been unhappy with management, political conservatives accuse the company of bias and YouTube has been under attack for spreading misinformation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
For years, development plans came and went at 5 Beekman Street like City Hall workers filing in and out of their nearby offices in Lower Manhattan. Expectations for the property were high. The nine story brick and terra cotta building at Nassau Street was one of New York's first skyscrapers when completed in the late 1800s, even if others quickly eclipsed it. For fans of antique architecture, 5 Beekman has also been a source of fascination because few have seen its distinctive interior feature a tall atrium topped by a large pyramid shaped skylight that was sealed up for much of the 20th century. Soon, though, admirers may be able to share the view. A developer is converting the office building to a 287 room hotel with restaurants and bars, and adding a condo tower next door. The timing for this 350 million project seems apt, after all these decades. The financial district is undergoing a spurt of hotel construction along with surging tourism. "Not only is there a market down here for this, there's not a person who hasn't walked into this building without their tongues hanging out," said Allen Gross, the president of GFI Capital Resources Group, a real estate company in New York whose development arm is undertaking the project. GFI Capital previously developed the trendy Ace and NoMad hotels. The Beekman Hotel, as it will be called, will mostly be contained in the existing brick building, which is actually two joined structures: one, with nine stories, from 1883, and an annex with 10 stories from 1890. In recent years, it served as an office building but essentially has been empty for more than a decade. Not much original detail has survived from the 19th century; indeed, three cage style elevators were removed because they were unsafe, Mr. Gross said. Modern facsimiles will take their place. In the Victorian era, the building contained as many as 212 offices, mostly for lawyers, who flocked there to be near both the mayor and the court system, according to historical accounts. For most of its life, it was called Temple Court, after the Temple legal district in London. Entered through arched doorways, many of those law offices were clustered around the atrium, under the skylight, which is also where hotel rooms will be tucked. Two duplex rooms will be in two cupolas whose pointed slate roofs were recently refurbished. An additional 75 rooms will be in the lower floors of that condo tower next door, a 600 foot building at 115 Nassau Street. The tower will also contain 68 condo units on its upper floors, which will be called the Beekman Residences, as well as amenity spaces for residents. When sales start this summer, prices at the units, with 16 foot ceilings, are expected to be more than 2,000 a square foot, though the sales plan has not been approved. Since the hotel has been declared a landmark and few alterations could be made to the older structure, adding a wing with hotel rooms was one of the few ways to make the project economically sound, Mr. Gross said. The previous owners of 5 Beekman, the Chetrit Group and Bonjour Capital, bought the building in 2008 also aiming to make it a hotel, but plans fell through. Those years did, however, renew interest in the property, and its reopened atrium, as photo shoots and fashion shows were held there. In 2012, GFI Capital bought it for 64 million; the parcel next door, which was empty, cost 22 million. Scheduled to open in summer 2015, the hotel will be operated by Thompson Hotels, a brand under the umbrella of Commune Hotels Resorts, whose New York properties include a pair nearby: Gild Hall, on Gold Street, and Smyth TriBeCa, on West Broadway. The condo will open a few months later. The area has been becoming steadily residential for years. What's relatively new, though, neighborhood officials say, is that tourists are streaming downtown, mostly to visit the nearby World Trade Center site. Allen Gross, foreground, of GFI Capital Resources Group, with Bruce Blum of GB Lodging. All told, 12.4 million tourists visited Lower Manhattan in 2012, up from four million in 2002, according to the Downtown Alliance, an advocacy group. Though the numbers dipped in 2013, owing in part to lingering damage from Hurricane Sandy, the group says, 2014 is expected to be strong. Next month a museum is set to open at the World Trade Center site, joining its three year old memorial, which had 5.3 million visitors in 2013, up from five million in 2012, a spokesman said. In fact, some statistics indicate that the World Trade Center memorial is a bigger draw than the Statue of Liberty, the Bronx Zoo or the Empire State Building. Next year, One World Trade Center is due to cut the ribbon on an observatory that promises 360 degree panoramas. If they are coming downtown to see the sights, many tourists have been decamping to Midtown at night. The financial district has been comparatively limited, with 18 hotels south of City Hall, the Downtown Alliance said. But 18 new ones, with more than 3,000 rooms, are planned, and 13 are scheduled to open in the next 12 months, the group says. They include a 490 room Holiday Inn at Rector and Washington Streets to open this year; a 185 room Four Seasons at Church and Barclay Streets, as part of a condo hotel; and 170 Broadway, a 243 room Marriott converted from an office building. While land prices in the last few years may have been a bit softer in the financial district, spurring hotel development, hotel developers say they have been equally attracted by the changed vibe. The area is more of a round the clock neighborhood that does not empty after the markets close. "It used to be crickets down here on the weekends," said Evan Weiss, a principal at LW Hospitality Advisors, a consulting firm. And with new retail offerings expected, such as at the World Trade Center complex and along Broadway, "there will be more to do, and more reason to be downtown," he said. And for travelers, rates may still be a bargain downtown: Last year, rooms south of 42nd Street averaged about 240 a night, versus about 350 in Midtown, LW Hospitality statistics show. Still, the developers of 5 Beekman are just as interested in creating places to hang out, according to Bruce Blum, the president of GB Lodging, the GFI Capital affiliate responsible for the hotel. It will offer two ground level restaurants, a lower level lounge and four distinct event spaces, as well as rentable terraces on the roof, he said. Indeed, like the Ace before it, 5 Beekman aims to create community, where neighbors can gather as well as visitors, Mr. Blum said, adding, "right now, you come downtown, you want to get a cocktail, and there's nowhere to go." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
For Amelia Sandell, the Hudson Valley was appealing because it was nothing like the Hamptons. Although now, she admits, that argument is getting harder to make. "It feels like the amount of people from Brooklyn who are buying second homes here is growing exponentially by the day," said Ms. Sandell, 43, who lives in a brownstone in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with her husband, Rob Schlederer, 47. She is a founder of Red Lantern Strategy, a market research company based in Dumbo, and her husband is a broker at Compass. The couple recently bought a small cottage with a wraparound porch, on property with a creek, in Stone Ridge, N.Y. "We were up at our house recently at the grocery store, and we ran into people we know from the dog park in Brooklyn," Ms. Sandell said. "Often it feels like we are even more social up there with our friends than we are at home." For generations, New Yorkers have flocked to the Hudson Valley to escape the pace of city life, often choosing it over the Hamptons for its affordability, as well as its relative lack of traffic, pretense and SoulCycle studios. But as more city residents buy homes upstate, that distinction is becoming less obvious. Even in places like the Catskills, once known as the borscht belt. Recently, some have given it a new name: The Camptons. And the once sleepy hamlet of Kerhonkson, N.Y., where a number of ultramodern million dollar homes have been built in recent years, has been dubbed Kerhampton. A sliver of land between the Shawangunk Ridge and the Catskill Mountains, the Rondout Valley is made up of hamlets like Kerhonkson, High Falls, Stone Ridge and Accord (pronounced AK ord). Helping drive the area's popularity are the many activities on offer, from hiking at the nearby Mohonk Preserve to drinking micro brews at Arrowood Farms and shopping for pricey antiques at Field and Barn. While some may find the spreading Hampton ification of the Hudson Valley irksome, it has helped buoy the real estate market. In Ulster County, for example, home prices have been rising steadily in the last five years, although like those in many other regions, they were relatively soft in 2018 compared with the year before. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the median home value in Ulster County was 221,500, compared with 192,000 in the fourth quarter of 2013, an increase of more than 15 percent, according to data from the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. And last year, sales of homes valued at 900,000 or more nearly doubled, to 39, from just 21 the year before, according to data from the Hudson Valley Catskill Region multiple listing service. "Home buyers have discovered that their dollars go much further here than in other areas that are a similar distance from New York City," said Jeff Serouya, an associate real estate broker at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Hudson Valley Properties. "The Rondout Valley has become a destination for a lot of creatives, because there are all these charming towns, but no throngs of day trippers, and there is a very young, organic agricultural movement that has taken hold." Real estate developers have taken notice, and several new projects are in the works. "Over the past few years, we have seen a large uptick in the number of applicants coming to the planning board for approvals for subdivisions or development," said Timothy Sweeney, a broker at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Nutshell Realty, who is on the town board of Marbletown, which includes the hamlets of Stone Ridge and High Falls. Among the projects under consideration there are one 18 home parcel and another 14 home parcel, he said. The area's many attractions are partly what drove Jeff Park and his wife, Leslie Kim, to consider the Rondout Valley. The couple, both 32, live in a one bedroom in Hell's Kitchen, and were considering upgrading to a larger apartment. "We went to open houses for two bedrooms, and it just felt like nothing was enough space," said Ms. Kim, who works in education. Instead, the couple began researching real estate upstate, specifically Hudson Woods, an Instagram friendly development in Kerhonkson with 26 stylish homes featuring Scandinavian design and materials like local bluestone and white oak. The development, which opened in 2014 and is sold out, recently had its first resale. That home, a three bedroom cabin on six acres with an in ground pool, sold for 695,000 when it was brand new in 2014. It was listed at 1.2 million late last year and closed in December for 975,000. In the end, Mr. Park and Ms. Kim chose not to buy at Hudson Woods, in part because of the proximity of the homes and their similarities in design. The couple chose Waterfall Properties, a nearby development that was begun in 2012 and has five homes set off a private road, surrounded by woods. "The house has all these interesting plays on facades and an open layout, with full floor to ceiling windows that cantilever out," said Mr. Park, a financial analyst. "If it wasn't for this house, we may not have pulled the trigger, but we loved the design, and it was within that two hour radius from New York." The listing price was 1.2 million, and Mr. Park and Ms. Kim closed on the home late last year for 1.05 million. Buying Creek House also made sense from a financial perspective. "One of our other thoughts was that the tax code change meant a lot of deductions were going away, but not for maintenance against rental income," Mr. Park said. "So at some level, it raised the possibility of what an investment could look like, if we ever made this a rental property." In fact, Creek House was a rental property before Mr. Park and Ms. Kim bought it. The original owners moved to California and had listed it on Airbnb, which gave Mr. Park and Ms. Kim the opportunity to stay there for a weekend. "We actually slept in it before we bought it," Ms. Kim said. "We just wanted to experience it before we committed." The couple paid 275,000 for their 700 square foot cottage, which sits on five acres and includes a seven acre plot nearby. They won out over three competing bids, made within 36 hours of the home going on the market. The area's popularity may be growing, but Ms. Sandell insisted that the spirit of the place and its affordability remain intact: "It is so relaxed, and the focus is on nature and calm." As far as she is concerned, she added, "the Hudson Valley is still the anti Hamptons." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Ralf Rangnick made an unlikely heretic. His rimless eyeglasses and charcoal sport coat gave him the air of a serious, but benevolent, schoolmaster. Standing in front of a live studio audience, he looked just a little uneasy. He seemed to take comfort in the familiarity of his only prop: a tactics board dotted with pale magnets. It was, by some distance, the biggest platform Rangnick then 40 had ever had. He was the coach of modest Ulm, in Germany's second division. His host, the leonine Michael Steinbrecher, had a far greater profile, and his program, "Das Aktuelle Sportstudio," was a national institution. Rangnick's appearance lasted five minutes or so, but the ideas he elucidated were explosive. Coolly, surgically, he railed against many of the abiding tenets of German soccer. It was not exactly well received. "There was a big reaction," Rangnick said. Hindsight has been far kinder. That interview took place in the winter of 1998. Looking back, Rangnick appears less a maverick and more an oracle. The approach he laid out on that flimsy tactics board zonal marking, a back four, fierce and organized pressing of the opposition has become the bedrock of soccer in the touch screen age. There is a reason Rangnick ranks as, quite possibly, the most intriguing free agent on soccer's coaching market. There are plenty out there who are younger, or who have lifted more trophies, or who could command a higher salary, or who see their names linked to the world's most prestigious clubs with confidence inflating regularity. There are very few, though, who can justifiably claim to have had a greater impact on the game than the man widely regarded as the high priest of pressing. The tendrils of Rangnick's influence spread far beyond the parvenu clubs Hoffenheim, Red Bull Salzburg, RB Leipzig that he has turned into mainstays of either the Bundesliga or the Champions League. His proteges the likes of Marco Rose, Adi Hutter, Sebastian Hoeness and Julian Nagelsmann have embedded his school of thought at teams across the Bundesliga. The dominant style of German soccer now the one exported beyond the Bundesliga's borders by the likes of Thomas Tuchel and Ralph Hasenhuttl is the style Rangnick advocated two decades ago. Many of the methods he pioneered have traveled even further. Rangnick, for example, was one of the first coaches to abide by the "eight second rule," the idea that most goals are scored within a few seconds of winning the ball back. The idea is now part of most coaches' baseline thinking. "Five or 10 years ago, you were not afraid of what the other team was doing while you had the ball," he said. "Now most teams in most leagues have some sort of plan for how they can hurt you when they do not have possession." The greatest proof of the triumph of his ideas, though, is in the nature of Liverpool and Bayern Munich, the reigning English, German and European champions. A host of players at both clubs encountered Rangnick at some stage of their development. Bayern's assistant coach, Danny Rohl, is a Rangnick student. Jurgen Klopp, the Liverpool coach, co opted much of his thinking at an early stage of his career. Rangnick considers Klopp to be "the best coach in the world," one who has taken the beliefs they share onto another plane of excellence. A straight line can be drawn from the ideas Rangnick espoused 22 years ago to the pressing game that has become not only the hallmark of Liverpool and Bayern, but also soccer's best practice, its dominant orthodoxy. What Rangnick explained to that live studio audience was the game's future. It just did not know it yet. Though Germany's relationship with Hoffenheim and RB Leipzig, the teams with which Rangnick is most intimately associated, remains uneasy, nobody holds his lack of playing career against him anymore. "If you look at the Bundesliga, the vast majority of coaches did not play at the very highest level," he said. Despite his vindication, though, he has no great wish to reverse engineer a sense of destiny onto his story. The way he tells it, his rise is pockmarked with coincidences. There was the day, as a player, he won man of the match in a game in which all he did was mark the opposition's star. "I asked myself," he said, "what did you actually do today, other than spoil it for him?" There was the time the amateur team he was coaching was summoned to play a friendly against Valery Lobanovsky's Dynamo Kyiv. "I was sure I'd made a mistake, that I'd named one player fewer," Rangnick said. "Because it seemed to me they definitely had more people on the pitch." And there was Germany's decision in the late 1990s to invest heavily in its youth system, combined with its failure on the international stage at the European Championships in 2000, which created the conditions in which his brand of soccer and coaches without an illustrious background could thrive. That interpretation of his own story is significant when it comes to considering the future of the game he has helped to shape. It is possible to read soccer's history as a battle of ideas, where each strategy that rises to prominence is, sooner or later, first neutralized and then countermanded by a new one. Or it is also possible to see it as Rangnick does less as a tale of conflict between systems and more one of communion between them. As far as he was concerned, he was simply building on the work of the likes of Arrigo Sacchi, the great A.C. Milan manager, as well as Lobanovsky. What comes next, in his mind, will not overturn the orthodoxy he helped establish, but build on it. He is particularly intrigued by how teams use set pieces. A third of goals come from corners, free kicks and throw ins, he said. And yet a third of training time is not dedicated to their practice. He does not believe the pressing era is the end of history. It is just another start. Rangnick watched the triumphs of Liverpool and Bayern over the last two years with a sense of satisfaction. Not simply out of affection for those players and coaches at both clubs whom he counts as friends, but because they demonstrated how far his ideas could go. "Lionel Messi is the best player in the world," he said. "But even he is not resistant to the press. Look at what happened against Liverpool and against Bayern: If you play in unison, as a team, then even he had no solutions." The collective, working correctly, trumps the individual. To present Rangnick or Klopp or Bayern Munich's Hansi Flick, for that matter as nothing but a preacher of pressing, though, is to misunderstand the nature of the revolution. "It is a very important part of the game as people like me and Jurgen see it," he said. "But it is only a part of it." A friend of Rangnick's provides the analogy: The pressing is the fruit, the visible product, but the work goes on in the roots. Not just in coaching the players to teach squads "to find the right decisions in congested situations, and under pressure" but in every element of the club. Rangnick transformed the way his teams played either as a coach or as a technical director because he transformed the structure behind them. He left Red Bull in the summer, but a much anticipated move to A.C. Milan never materialized. Wherever he lands next ideally, he has said, in England or Germany he will expect to do the same. At Leipzig, players were expected to arrive at the training facility 90 minutes before a session started so they could undergo saliva and blood tests; within 30 minutes, Rangnick and his staff would know how much the players would train that day, and how hard. They tested for allergies gluten and lactose and tailored their players' diets. They brought in an expert to help teach them how to maximize their sleep. This data, he said, will be the next frontier, as much as anything on the field. Success and failure in soccer will depend on the quality of information teams have, and the quality of the experts they have appointed to provide it and to decipher it. Throughout his career, he has not only leaned on analysts, but educated them in what sort of analysis they need to provide. Scouts were trained to know what to look for, to have a clear idea of the sorts of traits in players that worked well in his teams, or the sorts of coaches who might suit them. "We had a clear profile of the types of coaches we needed, a concrete profile of the type of player we wanted for every position on the pitch," he said. "If you know exactly what you need, it becomes quite simple." There are a handful of clubs he sees, around Europe, that currently meet those criteria for success. One is RB Leipzig. That, perhaps, should be no surprise, given that it is built in Rangnick's image. He wonders if Paris St. Germain warrants inclusion. Bayern Munich and Liverpool most definitely do. It should be no surprise that all of them have German coaches, ones who bear just a little of Rangnick's imprimatur, ones who see soccer as he does. This, to his mind, is what the future of soccer looks like. He has seen it once. He believes he can see it again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Read all of our classical music coverage here. Hi there! The Metropolitan Opera announced its 2019 20 season on Wednesday, and our writers have chosen some highlights. And Corinna da Fonseca Wollheim took the measure of Daniel Harding and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. In sadder news, the composer Dominick Argento, who spent much of his life in Minnesota, died at 91. A Facebook friend told me Argento was close with Mary Ann Feldman, the Minnesota Orchestra's longtime program annotator, who died this week, too. "A sad week for the classical music community in the Twin Cities," my correspondent wrote. Argento's song cycle "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf," written for Janet Baker, is one of his finest achievements. Enjoy it. ZACHARY WOOLFE The director Mary Birnbaum, in her intriguingly updated production of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" at the Juilliard School, gives us an ambiguous ending. The staging posits that Dido doesn't die of heartbreak, but by self immolation, after the public humiliation of being abandoned by her lover, Aeneas. (After all, what kind of queen falls hopelessly for an enemy?) But Ms. Birnbaum further complicates things: Her Dido storms off at the end and seems not to die at all. It's a difficult concept, but the cast, dressed in modish, stylized costumes, embraced it and brought lots of youthful, ardent singing to the music, backed by the sensitive period instrument Juilliard415 ensemble, with Avi Stein conducting. (It runs through Sunday.) The mezzo soprano Shaked Bar was a dark toned, calculating Dido, a role she performed in 2017 in a semi staged performance with the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra. The baritone Dominik Belavy, in a sleek three piece suit covered with embroidered flowers, was an impassioned Aeneas. I must mention Chance Jonas O'Toole, a sweet voiced tenor whose small role as a sailor was fortified with a couple of inserted, thematically appropriate Purcell songs. ANTHONY TOMMASINI The Hebrew word "mar'eh," which means "face" or "sign," is the revealing title the composer Matthias Pintscher gave his 2011 work for violin and orchestra, which he led with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday. In this 23 minute score, the violin has long passages that seem to be suggesting the myriad auras, or faces, of sounds. It begins with the violin playing almost gauzy, hushed high tones and scratchy effects. In time, the sounds coalesce into wandering, elusive lyrical lines. Slowly, the violin becomes a questing, sometimes challenging protagonist in a dialogue with the orchestra. Violin utterances draw fidgety, softly rumbling and skittish reactions. Only passing episodes of assertive, gnarly music disrupt the mostly hushed, urgent conversation that dominates this sonic tone poem. Renaud Capucon was a spellbinding soloist, as in this excerpt from a 2015 performance with the Berlin Philharmonic, with the composer conducting. To open the program in New York, which runs through Saturday, Mr. Pintscher led a sumptuous, wildly animated yet cagey performance of Ravel's "Alborada del gracioso." He ended with a riveting account of Stravinsky's "Firebird," a fresh, startling account that conveyed both the plaintive beauties and slashing rawness of this 1910 score. ANTHONY TOMMASINI On Thursday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, members of Yarn/Wire and the International Contemporary Ensemble gathered for a Composer Portraits concert devoted to works by Wang Lu. The program began with the title work from her recent album, "Urban Inventory." That suite incorporates some prerecorded street scenes, captured by the composer while visiting Xi'an, the city in China where she was born. The playing at Miller was sharp, particularly in the 2008 chamber work "Siren Song," which includes passages of acidic squall, as well as pools of melodic reverie. Yet in other works, the players' acute emphasis on more striated textures occasionally seemed to lose sight of a fine balance between rupture and reflection that can be heard in this composer's music as in the final movement of "Urban Inventory," during which traces of a recording by the pop singer Yang Yuying can be heard. SETH COLTER WALLS On Wednesday, a different sort of pop classical meeting came during Andy Warhol's 1966 film "Hedy," which screened as part of a triple feature at the Whitney Museum of American Art, currently showing a Warhol retrospective. Though the film progressed with the same long take style of other Warhol moving image works from the period, "Hedy" also employed interstitial music during its scene transitions. The wildly pulsing drone music that could be heard offstage as Warhol's camera zoomed in and out was immediately recognizable as the Velvet Underground. The film has no traditional credits, but the Warhol Museum cites work by Underground members Lou Reed and John Cale as part of "Hedy." In his book "Andy Warhol's Ridiculous Screenplays," Warhol collaborator Ronald Tavel remembers the entire group as being present at the Factory during the shoot though Warhol "amazingly, unforgivably" never managed to capture footage of their playing in the film. Mr. Tavel cites the composer La Monte Young as a likely influence on the group's playing in this performance, though the forceful music for the film also brought to mind some experiments conducted outside of Mr. Young's Theater of Eternal Music including Mr. Cale's 1965 guitar solo "Summer Heat," as well as a later collaboration with Tony Conrad, "Dream Interpretation." SETH COLTER WALLS | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
On a recent Friday night, all the boys wore knit caps and the girls swooned in chunky sweaters. A young Norwegian documentarian chatted up a tall Dutch massage therapist, the salted rims of their margaritas inching ever closer. A man in plaid with stubble followed a woman with a topknot and a chambray shirt into the bathroom. Mr. Mendez is a musician, an avid record collector and a D.J. His friends, including Michael Simonetti and Justin Van Der Volgen, frequently spin in unannounced shows. But when no D.J. is present, the music tends toward Barry White, Hot Chocolate and Teddy Pendergrass. This bar requires reservations. There are two phone numbers: One is public and first come first served; the other, which guarantees entrance, is a closely guarded secret. "It's my cellphone," said Emir Dupeyron, a manager. When they are not downing shots and dancing, the bartenders pour five types of margaritas: regular, mezcal, Jamaica, guava and tamarind. (Prices vary depending on the mezcal but remain under 7.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WHAT IS IT? A quirky sports car with four doors, four seats and the last rotary engine we're likely to see in the foreseeable future. HOW MUCH? 33,055 as tested with no options. WHAT MAKES IT RUN? 1.3 liter Renesis rotary engine (232 horsepower, 159 pound feet of torque), 6 speed manual transmission, rear wheel drive. IS IT THIRSTY? Unfortunately, the RX 8 needed, and has received, an intervention. Its E.P.A. rating of 16/22 m.p.g. compares unfavorably with heavier and more powerful machines. (The 505 horsepower Chevrolet Corvette Z06 is rated 15/24.) ON a crisp fall day in 2003, I drove one of the first Mazda RX 8s one of the first 10 made, my notes say away from Pocono Raceway and onto the back roads of eastern Pennsylvania, bound for upstate New York. I remember a few things about that trip, including the acrid aroma of fried brakes auto writers had flogged the car on the racetrack all day as well as a synthesized female voice ordering me, every half minute or so, to make a U turn. The navigation system had frozen, forever fixated on some unforgettable destination, and would not be silenced until I pulled over and pried out its fuse. The other thing I remember was falling in love with that ragged early production car. With its quick steering, impeccable balance and free winding engine, it glued itself to the mountain roads. Inside the low set cabin once wrong way Wanda had shut up I enjoyed the fine driving position, well placed controls and supportive seats. But I moved on, driving an RX 8 only once or twice since then. For me, as for many Americans on the hunt for a sporty car, the Mazda with the cartoonish fenders and curious rear half doors was largely forgotten. The market shifted, and the compact but gas swilling rotary engine no longer seemed a wonder. Only 759 RX 8s were sold in 2011. So Mazda discontinued the car, capping the seven year run with a Spirit R tribute edition available only in Japan. But for old times' sake, before the last RX 8 left the press fleet, I took a last spin in the only production car powered by a triangular rotor that whirls within the combustion chamber the "spinning Dorito," in owners' parlance. The Velocity Red 2011 test car was in considerably better condition than its talkative ancestor, but the driving experience was as invigorating as I remembered. The chassis was solid, the brakes were emphatic, the steering was quick and precise. The engine revved like crazy calling to mind another beloved but defunct sports car, the Honda S2000 on its way to a 9,000 r.p.m. redline. The crisp manual transmission was close to perfection. If the rotary is a delight when it's revving madly at 5,500 r.p.m., where it makes peak torque, sending the car squirting from stoplights and rocketing out of turns, it can be a dullard when it loafs. Merging onto a freeway may require a couple of downshifts. After experiencing the RX 8's eagerness on suburban streets, it can be disconcerting to discover, as you're passing a truck on the Interstate, tepid response to a floored accelerator. Noise is a constant companion, especially a road drone exceeding what you'd experience in most of today's cheap subcompacts. The ride is busy and a bit rough, with road imperfections sent through the chassis and into your spine. But in general, it's surprising how up to date the car still feels. Seats, steering wheel, gauges in this car as in less aspirational models like the Mazda 3, this company has a knack for the details. The RX 8 was always an oddity. Unlike its two door RX predecessors, it didn't fit neatly in the sports car category. Still, the RX 8 began with a smart concept: a reasonably practical sports car for a young couple or a grown up boy and his dog. In the end, though, the gas gobbling rotary was out of sync with the times. Mazda, which built its brand around the innovative technology, turned its limited engineering resources to developing an efficient powertrain technology called Skyactiv. A Mazda spokesman, Jeremy Barnes, acknowledged that development of the next generation rotary had slowed, but added, "We fully expect the rotary will be a key part of Mazda's future." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The long running Off Broadway musical "The Fantasticks" will close in June, the producers announced on Tuesday, ending a chapter for a show that has been on New York stages for much of the last half century. The original production of the musical, a wistful story about young love, opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village in 1960 and had a record breaking 17,162 performances during its 42 year run. The current Off Broadway revival opened in 2006. In 2015, producers announced that the show was set to close, but within weeks two anonymous donors swooped in and contributed enough money to keep it running. In addition to the New York run, the musical has had thousands of productions in more than 60 countries outside the United States, including Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Wednesday night at Radio City Music Hall, Billie Eilish was cavorting in a universe of her own design. On the screens behind her were crawling insects, a baby doll engulfed in flames, gloomy silhouettes of barren trees . Her hair was dyed a deep black, with tones of green and purple peeking through. For much of the show, the lighting was broodingly dark and pierced by intense strobes, and she commanded the room alone but for two musicians dressed unobtrusively in all white . The night before at Madison Square Garden, Ariana Grande delivered a fantasia, too. Tautly controlled dance sequences. Small acts of kiss off theater. With her hair clutched high into her signature ponytail, and wearing shimmering outfits with shoulders that pointed skyward to the cheap seats, she was part 1950s and part 2050s . From a distance, Grande and Eilish represent two divergent approaches to pop superstardom. Grande is chromed and polished, a laser precise, big voiced, old fashioned maximalist; Eilish is offbeat and earthy, with an almost shrugging approach to fame and a voice that sometimes remains at the level of a conspiratorial whisper. But these two concerts Grande's was the third of four arena shows in the area last week, and Eilish's was the second of two large but not yet arena sized performances demonstrated how they're both reckoning with the same questions. The chasm between their answers reflects the ways in which the accelerant of the internet is rejiggering pop stardom in what feels like something much faster than real time. The most striking difference was in their relationship to hip hop, and the degree to which it belongs to pop. Grande has recently been making her connections more overt borrowing a flow from 2 Chainz on "7 Rings," then collaborating with him on "Rule the World"; using a sample made famous by Wu Tang Clan on "Fake Smile"; and occasionally tabling her huge voice in favor of bouncy rapping. Though this is the "Sweetener" tour, named for her hit packed but slightly airless 2018 album, the attitude had more in common with its admirably flexible follow up, "Thank U, Next," which was released in February and is one of this year's most ambitious and forward looking pop albums. It's a logical endpoint for the relationship between the two genres any post Taylor, post Katy pop star was almost certainly raised on hip hop and these songs made for some of the most effective moments in her show. Grande's gift for attitude is almost as vast as her voice, and in these moments, she felt the most present. But she's essentially solved this Rubik's Cube just in time for an entirely new paradigm to emerge. Eilish is, more or less, the first SoundCloud rap pop star, without the rapping. That scene's sometimes harsh, quasi industrial production is an important part of her arsenal, as is its overall blend of mayhem and dismay. (Her opening act was the rambunctious Florida rapper Denzel Curry, a sort of uncle to the scene.) "If you hate yourself, this song is for you," she said before "Idontwannabeyouanymore." "You Should See Me in a Crown" had the beauty of a bulldozer. And yet Eilish, like Grande, is deeply tuneful. Her haute Hot Topic outfits and enthusiasm for the gross and gory belie the fact that her music relies on classic structures. Her debut studio album, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?," which was released in March, is full of suspiciously formal melodies cosplaying as goth. In places, her songs are almost cabaret: Imagine Elaine Stritch winking her way through the lyrics to "Xanny" at the Carlyle: "I don't need a Xannnnnnnny to feel better." And the intensity of the singalongs at this show her fan base is young and outlandishly devoted, right down to emulating her hairdo and outfits sometimes masked the fact that Eilish has a lovely, rich, uncomplicated voice. It's well complemented by the production of her brother, Finneas O'Connell, who prefers cleanly structured music far less outre than Eilish herself. At the show, he played keyboards, guitar and bass, and toward the end, the two sat together in a bed that slowly floated up to the rafters and performed "I Love You," mirroring how they first wrote it, Eilish said. This gestural intimacy was part of Eilish's gift for making very grand moments feel extremely personal. An unpretentious performer , she chatted loosely with the crowd. She wasn't a polished dancer like Grande, but more of an enthusiastic mover, jumping wildly and bounding across the stage like she was hearing her songs for the first time, and loving them . It was a contrast to Grande's extravaganza, which felt casually grand but rote, making the big room seem even bigger. Grande is a powerhouse singer, one of the best pure vocalists currently working in pop, but Grande the belter is more developed than Grande the stage personality. Though this show had jolts of energy, it was meted out in controlled bursts. Her performance was a tug of war between a diva showcase, one that flaunted her singing, and a dance pop extravaganza, which is typically the stock in trade of less polished vocalists. Which is to say that, for all the expressiveness of her voice, there is still something distant about Grande, something slightly reluctant. Over the past six years, she's built a presence that's crisp, authoritative and especially online often fun. But this concert showed the limitations of that approach: It offers little hint of what might lurk beneath when the ponytail comes undone . And as Eilish made clear, now more than ever, what's happening in the shadows is crawling up into the light. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
None Update: Here's what to know about getting a flu shot in 2021. Public health officials, fearing that the confluence of Covid 19 and influenza cases could result in a "twindemic" that will further overburden hospitals and testing locations, are urging flu shots for nearly everyone, and the sooner the better. "We don't have many arrows in our quiver in terms of combating Covid," said Dr. Kevin Ban, the chief medical officer for Walgreens, which began administering the vaccine across its stores on Aug. 17. That's why medical professionals are focusing instead on minimizing flu cases, so "resources go where they need to," he added. Here is everything doctors want you to know about the influenza vaccine this year. Who should get vaccinated? "Everyone above the age of 6 months should be getting the flu vaccine," said Dr. Uchenna Ikediobi, an assistant professor of general internal medicine and infectious diseases at Yale University. Growing concern over the combined impact of the two viruses has even led some to mandate the vaccine. The University of California system announced this month that it would require all its employees and students to get a flu shot by Nov. 1. And Massachusetts is requiring all students between 6 months and 30 years old to get the flu shot by the end of the year. When should I get my flu shot? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone get the flu shot in September or October, before the start of the flu season. Experts suggest that adults over 65 and those with compromised immune systems wait until at least mid September, so that the vaccine's protection lasts the entire season. But if you are young and healthy, "if the flu shot is available in your area, I would suggest to get it" now, said Dr. Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Dr. William Schaffner, the medical director for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said it was better to go early than not at all. And if you miss the recommended time frame, you should still go, since influenza cases typically reach their peak in February. Not every vaccine is a perfect match, and sometimes people still get sick even if they get a shot. But it will make your illness less severe, and make it less likely you'll end up in the hospital, Dr. Schaffner said. Absolutely. Despite unfounded fears, there is no evidence of adverse effects in most people. Some people do experience mild symptoms like a sore arm, itchy eyes or fatigue after getting the flu shot, but these usually go away on their own within a few days. Even if you are pregnant, you can and should get vaccinated. Pregnant women are one of the groups the C.D.C. says are at high risk for influenza complications. Vaccines undergo several clinical trials, the results of which are reviewed and approved by the Food and Drug Administration before the medicine is released to the public. The vaccines continue to be monitored for safety and effectiveness, and every year the C.D.C. releases new flu vaccination guidelines. What if I am allergic to eggs? Some vaccines are grown using chicken eggs, so some people with egg allergies have avoided getting the shot. Those with mild or moderate egg allergies should still get the shot, Dr. Marcelin said. If you have a severe allergy, however, you should consult your doctor, who should supervise the vaccination. There is also an egg free vaccine available. If you are pregnant and allergic to eggs you should consult your doctor about the best vaccine for you. What if I don't like needles? There's a nasal version of the flu vaccine. While past studies have found that method to be most effective for children, that guidance has changed in recent years. The nasal vaccine is now approved for people ages 2 to 49, unless they are pregnant or have certain medical conditions. And you should not get this type of treatment with a runny or congested nose, Dr. Marcelin said, because that can interfere with the delivery of the vaccine. The nasal spray is not as widely available Walgreens, for instance, does not carry it but you can request it from your doctor. Where should I get the vaccine? Rite Aid, CVS and Walgreens (and its Duane Reade stores in New York) all have the vaccine in stock, as do other pharmacies. To find a location near you, try the Healthmap Vaccine Finder tool. In an effort to expand access, the U.S. Department of Health is also allowing pharmacists to administer the vaccine to young children. Walgreens reduced its age requirement to 4 years old from 7 years old in eligible states, while CVS pharmacists are administering the shot to kids as young as 3. You may also contact your doctor. How is the vaccine different this year? As always, this year's shot was updated to include the influenza variants that are predicted to circulate in the United States. But there is a special vaccine for adults 65 years old and older with a higher dosage that has been updated to protect against four strains of influenza, rather than three as in previous years. A version of that high dosage shot containing adjuvant, which boosts immune response, was also licensed. How much does it cost? For those with private insurance, Medicare or Medicaid, the shot is typically free or comes with a low co payment. Contact your insurer for more information. If you don't have coverage, it may be worth shopping around. At Walgreens, the uninsured cost is 40.99 for the quadrivalent shot, which is the most common variety, and 72.99 for the shot geared toward those 65 and older. At CVS and Rite Aid, it is a little cheaper: 39.99 for the seasonal vaccine, and 69.99 for the high dose vaccine. Could we see a repeat of past shortages? It's too early to know for sure, but that's highly unlikely, Dr. Ikediobi said. This year, manufacturers project that they will deliver as many as 198 million flu shots, which is at least 15 percent more than the record number produced last year. Still, it's best not to procrastinate. "What I'm telling my patients every opportunity that I get is that we do not know what this season is going to look like," Dr. Ikediobi said. "Find out now where you can get it without hesitation so that when the season starts in the next few weeks, you are in line and you've gotten yours." The C.D.C. has released safety guidelines for all health care providers. So as long as your provider is following these guidelines, it is safe to get your shot there. For example, Dr. Ban said, Walgreens has implemented rigorous cleaning protocols and is checking patients for symptoms of Covid 19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Pharmacists who administer the shots wear both a face mask and a face shield, and patients are required to wear a mask. How serious is the threat of a 'twindemic'? Medical experts don't know. Some hope that the measures taken against the coronavirus could also slow the spread of influenza. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Commander Mitchell moving across the moon in February 1971. Lunar dust can be seen clinging to the boots and legs of his suit. Edgar D. Mitchell, who became the sixth man to walk on the moon as a member of NASA's first lunar mission devoted exclusively to scientific research, died on Thursday at a hospice in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 85. NASA announced his death, which came one day before the 45th anniversary of his moon landing. The Apollo 14 flight, launched on Jan. 31, 1971, took Commander Mitchell and his fellow Navy officer, Capt. Alan B. Shepard Jr., to the moon's Fra Mauro highlands. Captain Shepard had been America's first man in space 10 years earlier. Maj. Stuart A. Roosa of the Air Force remained in orbit snapping photographs of potential sites for future missions while awaiting his colleagues' return in the lunar module. The first two flights to the moon the epic Apollo 11 of July 1969 with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 12 four months later were largely devoted to testing whether men could survive there, albeit for a brief period. Apollo 13's scheduled moon landing had been aborted by a near disastrous oxygen tank explosion. For the 14th mission, scientists were counting on Commander Mitchell and Captain Shepard to be the first astronauts to return with a large collection of rocks from high elevations, where some might be old enough to provide clues to the moon's origin and its evolution. (Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 had landed in fairly level areas.) Spending just over nine hours on two moonwalks, the astronauts collected more than 94 pounds of rock samples, piling them in a two wheeled cart they were hauling. But they missed out on completing one important task. NASA had hoped that they could climb to the rim of the nearly 400 foot high Cone crater and collect especially significant rock samples there. But in lugging the cart the astronauts found the climb to be difficult and experienced rapid heartbeats. Mission control, concerned about exhaustion and wary of time constraints, ordered them to turn back. Unbeknown to the men at the time, they were only about 20 yards from their goal. Commander Mitchell, who had a doctorate in flight sciences, had long maintained a parallel interest in the study of consciousness, a fascination that was heightened during his return from the moon. "It was a sense of the Earth being in critical condition, a recognition of the massive insanity which had led man into deeper and deeper crises on the planet," he told the writer Francine du Plessix Gray in The New York Times Magazine in August 1974. "Above all, I felt the need for a radical change in our culture. I knew we were replete with untapped intuitive and psychic forces which we must utilize if we were to survive, forces that Western society had programmed us to disregard." Heading home, Commander Mitchell secretly conducted an experiment in extrasensory perception thought transference while his fellow astronauts were asleep. He concentrated on symbols in a set of cards he had brought with him in the hope that four people he had selected back on Earth could read his thoughts and determine what those drawings were. In discussing the experiment at a news conference five months later, he said it produced "results far exceeding anything expected." Of the 200 guesses by his contacts back on Earth, he said, 51 correctly identified his thoughts. Another Apollo 14 moment having nothing to do with rocks was provided by Captain Shepard, who took three golf balls with him to the moon. Wielding a makeshift 6 iron, he hit a shot, televised back to Earth, that traveled "miles and miles and miles," as he put it, in lunar gravity only one sixth that of the Earth. (The shot was presumed to have gone more than 800 yards, more than six times his normal range with a 6 iron back on Earth.) Edgar Dean Mitchell was born on Sept. 17, 1930, in Hereford, Tex., and grew up in Artesia, N.M. He became fascinated by flight when he watched crop duster pilots flying biplanes from an airfield near his home. He received a bachelor of science degree in industrial management from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh in 1952 and joined the Navy the next year. After flying fighter planes, he obtained another bachelor's degree, in aeronautics, from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1961. He earned his doctorate, in aeronautics and astronautics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. He graduated from test pilot school, then joined the astronaut corps in April 1966. Apollo 14 was Commander Mitchell's only spaceflight. He retired from NASA and the Navy in 1972 and at his death lived in Lake Worth, Fla., south of West Palm Beach. Mr. Mitchell's two marriages ended in divorce. Survivors include four daughters, Karlyn, Elizabeth, Mary and Kimberly, and a son, Paul, according to the South Florida website TCPalm.com. Kimberly Mitchell is a former city commissioner of West Palm Beach. Mr. Mitchell owned a business consulting firm in South Florida but retained his interest in studying the mind. In 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a California based nonprofit that supports research in the field. Its name is derived from the Greek word variously defined as intellect or inner wisdom. Mr. Mitchell created a stir in 2008 when he told a British radio station that his contacts in military and intelligence circles had told him that "we've been visited on this planet, and the U.F.O. phenomena is real," but that governments had "covered up" the matter for at least 60 years. (His boyhood home was 40 miles south of Roswell, N.M., site of the celebrated claim of an unidentified flying object crash and government cover up in 1947.) NASA, Mr. Mitchell's former employer, was quick to respond. "NASA does not track U.F.O.s," a spokesman for the agency said. "NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere else in the universe." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Isabella Kwai, a correspondent in Australia, on assignment in Melbourne. She dislikes taking notes by hand, which once led a source to ask "how I was able to type and look her in the eye." How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Isabella Kwai, a correspondent in Sydney, Australia, discussed the tech she's using. What are the most important tech tools for doing your job, and how do you use them? At this point, my iPhone 6S is basically another limb. We don't have desk phones in our bureau and everyone bounces around, so it pays to be as mobile as possible. I have Slack, Google Hangouts and the Google Docs app downloaded on my phone. I'll also take pictures and videos to remind me of scenes when I'm reporting a feature. I'll use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to both share our bureau's stories and find potential ones. It looks like Apple doesn't even sell the iPhone 6S anymore. They want us to upgrade. But it's been only a few years, so I refuse. I still keep a notebook on hand that I'll occasionally use. But to be honest, I have atrocious handwriting, and deciphering it is arduous. Instead, I use the Notes app. I find it easier to write up thoughts and notes that way though once, it did freak out a source, who asked me how I was able to type and look her in the eye. (Disturbingly agile millennial thumbs is how.) For reporting in the field, I had a Sony ICD PX470 voice recorder with a built in USB that was the slimmest, most unobtrusive device until I dropped it on a recent assignment. I'm using the Voice Memos app for now until I can pick up a new one. The TapeACall app works for recording phone interviews. And after a few too many inventive attempts at finding power outlets, I always carry a Cygnett power bank. My beloved battered laptop is a MacBook Air that does everything it needs to do. While trying to keep organized, I've been loving Google Keep lately as a to do list, because it's not too fussy. Wunderlist is another app I'd recommend for that. My favorite Chrome extensions and Mac apps are Momentum for a dose of nature on my dashboard, OneTab for my crazy tab collection and Self Control, which bars access to Twitter, Facebook and any other time wasters for a set period. Sometimes you need technology to keep you from your basest instincts. Also, I'd like to formally thank Lane 8's deep house sets on SoundCloud for hauling me through long hours of writing. Please never stop making music. Australia has a reputation for trying to limit transparency. And are there tech tools you've found that help to improve transparency? The lack of transparency is more of a general suspicion from officials and people in the corporate sector about journalists. Questions for government officials or corporate executives are heavily filtered through publicists and communications people. It's harder to get someone in a powerful position on the phone. Certain applications, statistics or reports are surprisingly difficult to find. It just means having more conversations with different sources to try to get information. One handy trick I did learn is that you can click on the arrow next to a search engine result. It pulls up the previously published versions of the site, even if the current version of a website is down. As long as it's available here, we love many of the same apps and gadgets Americans do. One thing that doesn't exist here is Venmo, the peer to peer payments app, which I used to miss. But to make up for it, the apps for the major banks here are amazing super easy to use, with built in budgeting systems and pretty aesthetics. People use them to transfer money almost immediately from bank to bank. Another thing I've noticed, though it might not be isolated to Australia: For most people I've encountered in their 20s who use social media to document their lives, Facebook is pretty much dead. Every new person I meet asks to add me on Instagram now. Amazon only recently arrived in Australia. Are Australians embracing it? When I lived in the United States, Amazon Prime was practically a way of life. But it hasn't quite taken off here in the same way. For me, it's because the selection of products was limited until November, and shipping here has been slow and unreliable, so it hasn't quite distinguished itself from Australian retailers. I'll still order the occasional clothing and electronics item online but for everything else, I'll go in person to browse the stores. That used to include books until I got a Kindle for my birthday last year. I really hate to say it, but I love reading on it! If there's one area Amazon is raking in my cash, it's e books. Outside of work, what tech are you obsessed with, and why? For personal budgeting, I'd really recommend the You Need a Budget app, which has a mysterious way of making saving money seem like a game. Headspace, a meditation and mindfulness app, helps me wind down. We even had a nice lunchtime meditation at the office together with it once before a call from a publicist interrupted proceedings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Credit...Bryan Derballa for The New York Times Though Colin Jost has worked at "Saturday Night Live" for nearly 15 years, it wasn't until this past spring that he was able to watch his show the same way its audience does: from home on a Saturday night with a sense of anticipation and uncertainty. The circumstances were not ideal. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, with its staff members sheltering in place, "S.N.L." finished its 45th season with three remotely produced episodes assembled from footage that cast members recorded on phones and other devices. Until now, Jost said he had avoided rewatching "S.N.L." from home, as a coping mechanism to survive the emotional ups and downs of making the show. But with this ad hoc production process, Jost, a longtime "S.N.L." head writer and an anchor of its Weekend Update desk, said he was genuinely surprised by his colleagues' creations. Speaking by phone from Montauk, N.Y., where he has been these past four months, Jost told me, "It was really heartening to see people make things, to have no idea what they would be and then have them really make you laugh." At "S.N.L." in particular, he said, "you don't get to step out of your own work and have that experience often." Jost, 38, has been in a retrospective mode for a while now, having been working on a memoir of his life and trajectory at "S.N.L.," where he has spent nearly his entire career. Not that his time there has been especially tumultuous or scandalous. But Jost knows many viewers believe he has coasted on his annoyingly clean cut looks that, despite his underlying earnestness, can give him an air of insincerity. In pre pandemic times, Jost's memoir, which Crown will publish on July 14, might have come across as a victory lap for an author contemplating new horizons. But now the book reads like his appreciation for a comedy institution that he hopes will come back in its traditional, chaotic form as soon as possible. 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. As exhilarating and as frustrating as it was to make "S.N.L." from home, Jost told me, "You finish watching and then you're just sitting on your couch. It's a lot less fun than getting to celebrate or commiserate with your friends." In early March, when such things were still permissible, I met with Jost in his office at NBC's Rockefeller Plaza headquarters. With no particular sense of urgency, we talked about "A Very Punchable Face," a book that is partly an account of his awkward coming of age in Staten Island and partly a recap of his relatively smooth career path from the Harvard Lampoon to "S.N.L." to Weekend Update, which he anchors with Michael Che. When I asked him why he had written a memoir a step rarely taken by "S.N.L." alums, let alone by someone still working at the show Jost told me he felt he had reached "the end of what felt like a defined chapter in my life." Referring to his relationship with the actress Scarlett Johansson, Jost said, "I'm about to get married. I now almost have a stepdaughter who I love and is a big part of my life now. I'm starting to do more and more outside of the show. It felt like the right time to look back." Within days, "S.N.L." announced that it was suspending the rest of its live season and seemed unlikely to return. Gradually, however, its producers began strategizing to write and perform the show from home, a plan that at one point would have leaned more heavily on contributions from the Weekend Update desk. While his castmates were assembling their sketches from whatever they had on hand or could order online, Jost discovered he was grossly underprepared for his own weekly segment. "I had four shirts," he said. "I had to really, consciously think: Did I wear this shirt last Weekend Update?" He also had to be provided with a new iPhone to record his contributions because, as he explained, "I have such an old phone, I don't know that it would have shot video at a resolution that was acceptable for human consumption." He helped write scores of Weekend Update jokes and a sketch where Brad Pitt played Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert. But Jost probably gained the most attention from these episodes for a stray acoustic guitar that was prominently placed onscreen in his first at home appearance. "Scarlett had that guitar forever and it was in the quarantine," Jost said sheepishly. "She was like, 'Maybe I should learn to how to play,' and just left it on the couch. It was so perfectly framed there and then everyone pointed it out and I was like, how can I be so dumb? I had no awareness of it at all." If Jost followed one of the most reliable industry routes to arrive at "S.N.L.," his colleagues said he was never content to coast on his pedigree and earned his keep there every week. "He seemed like he was a child," said Andy Samberg, who joined the "S.N.L." cast in 2005, the same year that Jost started there as a writer. "But," Samberg added, "it didn't seem like, professionally speaking, he was out of his depths in the slightest. He was someone who was game to write with anybody and he was also a guy who would lock himself in his office and write something hilarious by himself." Che, who became Jost's co anchor in 2014, said that they found it challenging at the start of their partnership to put a personal stamp on Weekend Update and escape the influence of numerous celebrated predecessors. "The first season or two, the only thing you're thinking about is how to do the segment the way other people have done the segment," Che said, adding that he and Jost were seeking a way to do it "just for us there was no template for it." What has succeeded for them, Che said, are recurring bits like the one where they read jokes sight unseen that they have written for each other (and which Che often writes to make Jost sound racist). "I guess if you look at Colin and you don't know him, if someone told you that he was a racist, you'd be like, yeah, maybe," Che said. "He couldn't be further from it, which is why it's so funny. I literally try to come up with the worst possible things for him to say, because there's nothing really bad to say about him." Jost gets a bit more introspective in "A Very Punchable Face," looking back on a childhood in which he did not begin speaking in full sentences until he was nearly four and an adolescence in which he struggled with his weight. As he told me, "My confidence throughout my life was always about being creative, feeling like I was funny or smart. I never feel confident about my physical appearance. There's still that chubby kid inside of me." Jost hastened to add that, in the book and in life, "I'm not really ever looking for sympathy from anybody. If people hate me, I understand it. I also hate myself sometimes." He is, of course, reverent in his treatment of "S.N.L." but suggests that it was a mistake to have President Trump host the show in 2015 while he was still a polarizing candidate seeking the Republican presidential nomination. Trump's much derided appearance, Jost writes, "was a wake up call for our show. It became clear that he wasn't like any other political guest. He was a uniquely divisive and dangerous candidate. And that episode of 'S.N.L.' has not aged well, politically or comedically." Jost himself has been criticized for his approach to Weekend Update that sometimes tends toward bland centrism say, a series of jokes mocking the backlash that Amazon faced from New Yorkers in 2018 when the company announced plans to build a new corporate campus in Long Island City, Queens. (Amazon canceled those plans a few months later.) In the coronavirus era, Jost said it was difficult to make future plans with any sense of foresight or optimism. "It hits you in waves, of having hope or feeling normal for a second, and then lurching the other way," he said. But when he thought back on his first mass Zoom conversation with his "S.N.L." colleagues, as they planned for their first at home episodes, Jost sounded like he was looking forward to many more such interactions at the show. "We'd all been in these weird bubbles," Jost said. "You start thinking, how can you ever do comedy in times like this? And then you're around funny people and you have no choice. Everyone just has it in their bones." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
General Motors is recalling about 17,500 Cadillac SRX crossovers from the 2010 15 model years in Canada for a rear suspension problem, according to a notice posted on the website of Transport Canada, the Canadian counterpart of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It was unclear whether a similar recall was planned in the United States. The Canadian report says the toe link jam nuts on the rear suspension may not have been properly tightened, possibly allowing the rear wheel "to turn inboard or outboard." This could cause "sudden changes in vehicle handling" that could result in a crash. General Motors does not have "anything to share on this issue since we have not publicly announced a recall in the United States," Alan Adler, a spokesman for G.M., wrote in an email Tuesday night. N.H.T.S.A. has received at least two complaints one in 2012 and another this past June from owners of 2010 SRX crossovers about rear suspension failures nearly causing accidents. The safety agency did not immediately respond to an email asking whether General Motors had indicated whether it would issue a recall in the United States. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
This week, Beyonce introduced an athleisure clothing line called Ivy Park. The brand's name derives from a beloved childhood park she ran in, and from her 4 year old daughter, Blue Ivy, a regular on her Instagram account and in her videos who also appears in the commercial, on her mother's back and both wearing Ivy Park logo headbands. The response from the public was rapturous. People.com hailed the commercial as "empowering." One fan in a YouTube response video said: "Some people just create a clothing line just to get money. And I think, you know, she's actually doing it from a place where it's, like, coming from her heart, especially when you name something after your child." They have a point. I am sure that Beyonce would not include her daughter in her empire unless she felt it benefited her character. And there is a great deal to admire about the way she empowers others, particularly girls and women. ("My goal with Ivy Park is to push the boundaries of athletic wear and to support and inspire women who understand that beauty is more than your physical appearance," she said in a statement.) That said, there is still something disconcerting about seeing celebrities enlist their children in service of their brands, even if there is some ancillary political value. If I had a friend who told me he was starting a business named after his young child, I might find it cute, perhaps even touching. If he were using his son's or daughter's likeness as the logo (a la the Wendy's franchise), I could understand how that might be fine, though I'd wonder how his offspring might react later to seeing his cartoon image plastered ubiquitously. But if he also cast his child in commercials, and that was on top of a web campaign in which the little boy or girl was otherwise a prominent fixture, and if my friend already inhaled the rarefied air of the ultrarich and I suspected the deployment of the adorable tyke was a strategic showcase for his own relatability as a normal parent and a measure to downplay the crass commercialism of the enterprise well, then I might be concerned. And yet many parents on social media are doing much the same thing, albeit in less conspicuous fashion, and usually with a goal of praise, not profits. Celebrities are brilliantly monetizing a new technological practice that a mere decade or two ago would have been regarded as gauche and narcissistic. Obviously, not every instance of posting information about children on the Internet is calculated. Relaying joyful photos or anecdotes for family and close friends is often more convenient over social media. In addition, these networks can provide support and advice to parents who are confounded, upset or isolated. But they can also be about serving the ego, as demonstrated by a popular, epithet enhanced blog that routinely calls out parents for self absorbed conduct on social media. Earnestly asking for guidance on how to get through a flight with an infant sounds quite different from a faux self deprecating remark complaining that your baby cried nonstop on the way to your Hawaiian vacation, which seems designed to alert others to both one's glamorous lifestyle and parental stamina. Then there are those progenitors who appear to detach themselves from the act of parenting, shruggingly referring to their children online as "the kid" (or "the boy" or "the girl") when reporting their cute acts. Using the definite article rather than "my," even sardonically, also might be seen as elevating one's child from the pack and effacing the rest, as if theirs is "the" sole child in existence. "It's hard enough to get through puberty," Amy Webb wrote, in a widely read 2013 essay on Slate, about a friend's unfettered Facebook pictures of her 5 year old daughter. "Why make hundreds of embarrassing, searchable photos freely available to her prospective homecoming dates?" The 5 year old clearly cannot approve with full understanding the uploading of these images, just as the only way Blue Ivy can refuse to endorse her mother's marketing campaign is by throwing a temper tantrum. We have strict child labor laws, and I am certain that any applicable ones were upheld during Blue Ivy's cameo. (I also imagine that she had fun.) Social media sites typically attempt to ban users under 13, and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule is designed to safeguard children when they use the Internet. But there are no specific restrictions concerning what parents share about their own children, though the national police in France a country we have historically thought of as more laissez faire than us regarding just about everything recently posted a message on Facebook warning parents that sharing photos of their children is unsafe. Mark Zuckerberg clearly disagrees. For someone whose corporate mantra is "openness," the photos on his public account do not reveal all that much about his personal life. There is a smattering of his wife and an album with friends called "The Great Goat Roast of 2009." The majority, though, are of business meetings and conferences that could come out of a slick P.R. brochure. Yet after the birth of his daughter in November, Mr. Zuckerberg went on paternity leave and suddenly began posting pictures of her and of his home life. I do not doubt that he is smitten with his daughter. Furthermore, parading one's child in front of the cameras may be an inevitable consequence of mega celebrity (see under West, North), either because of the futility of keeping the paparazzi and fans at bay or because one is so accustomed to life in the spotlight that it doesn't seem tacky. Nevertheless, it is striking that both famous billionaires, aware of how staunchly they must defend their own privacy (Beyonce, for instance, rarely gives interviews), seemingly have few qualms about sacrificing their children's. Only Mr. Zuckerberg knows whether one of his aims was to make himself and Facebook more likable to his customers and critics by presenting himself as a regular dad who is happy to change diapers. His letter to his newborn, shared on the site, mixed in idealistic values and objectives around technocratic proclamations such as "Building Facebook has created resources to improve the world for the next generation." Detractors quickly noted that the altruism outlined in Mr. Zuckerberg's letter, which pledged to donate 99 percent of his and his wife's Facebook shares to their philanthropic limited liability company, may have major tax benefits as well. But no matter; the missive, accompanied by a beatific photo of the couple and their daughter, has been "liked" over 1.6 million times. For those of us not peddling 185 bodysuits or big data, perhaps we feel guilty for ignoring our children in favor of our devices so frequently that we compensate by highlighting them in our social media feeds. Or, to take a less skeptical tack, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Knowles simply want to express their love for their daughters and are using social media to do so because they are powerful figures in that space. While love for and from a child is absolutely something to be cherished and celebrated, it may also explain why children are such perfect props for online self promotion. If someone were to post daily pictures of and stories about his spouse, he would soon find himself without any virtual friends. Yet children get a pass, not only because they are, as ever, symbols of purity, but also because they are still unspoiled by digital technology, unable to use it themselves with much proficiency. As Rousseauian innocents of the Internet age, they aren't susceptible to the vapidity, solipsism and toxicity the rest of us have been sullied by. To integrate a child into a Twitter post or Instagram picture, then, is to acknowledge a deeply intimate connection we have to a world untouched by these corrupting media platforms, to signal to others that when we put down the phone or close the computer, there exists a human being whose life is wholly dependent on us, who wants to hear a bedtime story rather than another hot take on the latest scandal, who loves us not for how many followers we boast but for the tender, sacrificial care we give them. And yet we use a cold piece of machinery to affirm that warm human sentiment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
If you're one of the more than 1,069,000 people who have watched the YouTube video "Baby Modern Dance," or one of the more than 50,700 who have viewed the similar "Milkdreams Rehearsal With Ivo," then you may have a sense of what goes on in Alexandra Beller's "milkdreams." In those videos, a few adult dancers allow a delighted toddler Ms. Beller's son Ivo Hart to lead their rehearsal, following along with his resilient moves to cello music. Whether swatting the air or catching his own fall, Ivo turns out to be a resourceful improviser. For grown ups wanting to move freely, as dancers often do, the physical intelligence of babies and young children is enviable. There are entire schools of movement devoted to reaching our earliest, deepest layers of kinesthetic awareness, including Body Mind Centering and Feldenkrais. So it's not surprising that Ms. Beller, a former member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, would find inspiration in her children. For the 45 minute "milkdreams," which had its premiere on Thursday at La MaMa (the final production in the 10th La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival), she reconstructed the impromptu dances of Ivo (14 months) and her other son, Lucas (5). She and her performers also worked with developmental movement experts to shed "the habits, inhibitions, and presentations of the trained dancer, and to recover a physicality motivated entirely by sensation, desire, joy, curiosity and, ultimately, love," according to an artist's statement. That approach may be more engaging as research, or as the "spiritual practice" detailed in a program note, than as performance. Danced by Lea Fulton, Carly Berrett Plagianakos, Edward Rice and Simon Thomas Train, the movement, gooey and tottering, looks as if it feels good to do. But choreographically, "Milkdreams" wanes, circling back on itself without evolving much. Squatting, collapsing, flat footed running: While carefully woven into group phrases and a final solo for Mr. Thomas Train, all backed by Robert Poss's meditative score (played live), the material makes a first impression these are adults moving like babies and stays there. And while the dancers may abandon certain habits, new ones arise, like the doe eyed gaze and bemused smile worn by most of them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The received scientific wisdom of the day drew from the same pool of "self evident truths" as did Chief Justice Taney. The Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz offered the same rationale for slavery. Agassiz had come to believe that people of different races had not descended from a single Adam, but rather from different Adams, who lived in different parts of the world. Therefore, he said, it would be a mistake "to assume that races have the same abilities, enjoy the same powers, and show the same natural dispositions, and that in consequence of this equality they are entitled to the same position in human society." Douglass knew that all else in the quest for the abolition of slavery, and equal status and protection under the laws depended on the refutation of the scandalous allegation that the genetic origins and social and cultural evolution of black people constituted prima facie justification for their second class status. He had to devote much of his oratory simply to "proving" the humanity of black people. Speaking at Western Reserve College in 1854, in one of the first commencement addresses ever delivered by an African American, Douglass deconstructed word by word a recent editorial in the notoriously racist Richmond Examiner that argued that "the negro" did not have the same right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the white man. The reason: "BECAUSE HE IS NOT A MAN." Douglass, in his remarks, made his own declaration: "Tried by all the usual, and all the unusual tests, whether mental, moral, physical, or psychological, the negro is a MAN considering him as possessing knowledge, or needing knowledge, his elevation or his degradation, his virtues, or his vices whichever road you take, you reach the same conclusion: The negro is a MAN." Sixteen years later, when the 15th Amendment was ratified, Douglass knew that while one battle may have been won, the forces of white supremacy and pro slavery stubbornly persisted, as he warned in his speech "Our Composite Nationality" in 1869. Unfortunately, he was right: The promises of Reconstruction gave way to the destructive emergence of Jim Crow. In the continued need for African Americans to account for their own humanity, we see permutations of Douglass's struggle: from the British antislavery catchphrase popularized in the 1780s, "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?," to the Memphis sanitation workers' signs proclaiming "I Am a Man" on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and in the very phrase "Black Lives Matter." Much has been made lately of the metaphor that anti black racism is part of the DNA of American culture. Some have taken offense, presuming incorrectly that the genetic allusion suggests that America is unalterably racist. Rather, the metaphor means to say that anti black racism has been passed down through the generations as an elemental aspect of American history and American culture. Genetics is not determinism. The 20,000 or so genes that compose the human genome can each be silenced or amplified. Think of our genomes as akin to a piano keyboard: The melodies it yields depend upon how it's played. Racism, like anti Semitism, is a chord that we can choose to play or not. Or think of racism as a cultural mutation. The introduction of that tainted mutation into our country's founding and the weight it continues to place on black people to prove themselves worthy of inclusion over and over again is what is meant by racism being part of our DNA. Mutations cannot be silenced by pretending they are not there; they cannot be silenced by being censored or shouted down. Mutations do not magically go away. But they can be combated, as the 15th Amendment sought to combat the long history of denying the manhood of black American men. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Rachel Tess, a Portland, Ore., choreographer now based in Sweden, is obsessed with relationships between forms: architecture and choreography, silence and sound, light and dark. Ms. Tess, a Juilliard graduate whose scenes resemble dioramas, may have discovered the performance site of her dreams at Governors Island, where, as part of the River to River festival, she presented "Souvenir Undone" on Friday at the Fort Jay magazine, a medley of arched brick rooms once used to store gunpowder. Commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Baryshnikov Arts Center, "Souvenir Undone," featuring moody lighting by Michael Mazzola, is a sensory immersion that fluctuates between the fresh and the banal. Before entering, people in the small audience were given a ground rule: When a dancer picks up a lantern and moves into another room, follow. In the opening scene, Luis Rodriguez sat before a long plastic curtain hanging from the ceiling and tossed a sequined jacket against it repeatedly. More than the action, it was the effect of the jacket's rise and fall a shimmering cascade that mesmerized. Ms. Tess then led the audience into another room, smaller and damper, where she extinguished the light; the focus was on sound as she slapped and swiped her hand against a bench and squished against the floor's wet center in sneakers. Eventually she picked up the pace, rising on her toes and scooting backward on her heels. The rhythm of the movement invariably became the score (there was no music), and here, Ms. Tess was at her most convincing. She stood in front of each audience member and fanned her hands in front of each face so viewers could experience, as she had, the moving air. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Here is what I suggest campaigns do if they want to scale this up across the country: None Understand the severe limitations of conventional campaigning categories of "persuasion targets" (white, suburban, female) versus "turnout targets" (African American), shorthand that ultimately shortchanges voters. If we had run a typical campaign, a large majority of resources would have been spent on the relatively small number of "persuadable" white suburbanites, those likely to vote but not clearly affiliated with either party. But actual election results proved them to be largely Republican voters year after year. Instead, our core strategic imperative was persuading and mobilizing an enormous pool of new, infrequent or nonvoters of color and white liberals whom we saw as both "turnout" and "persuasion" targets. None Invest in quantitative and qualitative research about what messages and strategies motivate and dissuade unlikely black voters. And Democratic operatives must cease thinking of black voters as a monolithic voting bloc. We need to spend real money exploring the top issues, desires and needs of black voters and dive into all the cross tabs with the same level of curiosity and focus as campaigns do with white voters rural, suburban, urban; college, noncollege; men, women; young, old, middle aged; regular voter, nonvoter, etc. We also need to explore whether voting against Donald Trump is enough of a motivation to vote . (Hint: It's not.) None Explore what people know about the different ways to vote (by mail? early in person? on Election Day?) even more important in this pandemic so that we can tailor our voter education campaigns to address voters' questions. None Embrace identity politics as an electoral necessity and moral imperative. Identity politics within a campaign means acknowledging that issues and policies affect communities differently, and different communities have different needs. This truth should be reflected in campaign policy plans, but more important, candidates have to talk about these differences directly. None Build diverse teams at every level. This is a core strategic imperative for winning. Any winning coalition across age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, economic status, region, education level, family status, ability and so on requires a team that can connect with and understand the extraordinary diversity of our electorate. In a state as big and diverse as Georgia, where people of color are on the cusp of making up a majority of the population, there is no single way to be culturally competent. This is true in many battleground states, and especially across the South. None Reject the cynical notion that mobilizing voters of color will lose white voters. This was a big fear we heard all the time with Stacey's candidacy. Could a black candidate center a campaign on increasing participation by all voters of color as the main ingredient to victory, and also earn the support of white voters? Or would she scare all the white people away? Ultimately, Stacey won a larger share of the white vote than any Democrat in a generation. So I say yes, you can do all of these things. In fact, we must; it's a requirement to building the broad and deep multiracial, multiethnic coalition that Democrats need to win. Let's take two issues we talked often about in our campaign: criminal justice reform and guns. Throughout the campaign, Stacey discussed both issues with all audiences, very much against convention. On criminal justice, sure, in the cross tabs of our research, black men had ranked the issue higher than Latinos and women of all races. But white voters would talk to Stacey about criminal justice reform at events, and later it showed up unexpectedly in research about them. For example, in a focus group late in the campaign, two "persuadable" white women brought up, in a group of their peers and unprompted by the moderator, the need for criminal justice reform. One woman said she didn't want her son in college getting jailed for minor marijuana possession, adding that there are too many people in jail and it was a waste of resources. Gun safety is an issue we were cautioned to avoid. Stacey spoke about the issue from the start, both about her personal experiences with guns (her grandmother taught her how to hunt) and her belief that we need policies to reduce gun violence. And she did this everywhere, including in Augusta at a labor union's gun raffle where the audience was mostly white men. (This is true. I was there.) When she talked about these topics, she was authentic and direct, which allowed her to connect with all types of people, even when they didn't agree with everything she said. A great candidate with an authentic message and a plan isn't enough to move the needle on turnout in communities Democrats have long neglected. That's why we spent millions of dollars on layered voter education directed at registered voters of color, even if they didn't have a history of voting or were fairly regular voters. We took no one for granted and made few assumptions about the "nonvoters." After all, they were there on the voter file and had bothered to register. But no one had ever tried to talk to them. We put millions of dollars toward a volunteer organizing program and a large scale paid canvass from the big cities to the small African American majority towns on the Florida border. To provide information on how to cast a ballot early, by mail or in person, we went big on digital ads, on TV from the popular evening news stations to BET; in small local print outlets; on radio and more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The Public Theater, a leading Off Broadway nonprofit, is giving small grants to several hundred freelance artists as many grapple with the impact of joblessness and expiring unemployment benefits. The theater said it has given 1,000 "financial relief payments" to 368 people including technicians and crew members like carpenters, truck drivers, engineers and programmers; teaching artists, who facilitate classes, workshops and talkbacks; and members of working groups, which support artists as they develop. "Freelance theater workers are in total economic distress, almost universally," said Oskar Eustis, the Public's artistic director. "It feels pathetic this isn't enough money but it's just what we can do right now." The Public, like other nonprofits, has seen its ticket revenue disappear with the closing of theaters; the organization says it faces a shortfall of over 10 million this year. Last month, the theater furloughed 105 of its 232 full time employees it is continuing to pay their health insurance through the end of the year and it has cut the pay of all remaining staff members who make over 100,000 a year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Why Is There a Coffee Shop in So Many Stores? None Jeenah Moon for The New York Times The joke used to be that there's a Starbucks on every corner in New York City. Now there's coffee in the corner of almost every store. At Lichen, a boutique in Williamsburg that sells home goods and furniture, you can pick up Danish glass cups for 7, an Italiana Luce lamp for 85 or a marble chair for 12,000. But like more and more stores of all types plant shops, bike shops, barber shops there's also a coffee bar tucked into the side. "If you walk in somewhere and there's expensive furniture, and there's no music playing, it turns into a gallery," said Jared Blake, who owns Lichen with Edward Be. "But if it's people drinking coffee and there's music playing, you're like: 'Oh, I can lean into this a little bit, feel it and want to buy it.'" He estimates that coffee accounts for between 15 and 20 percent of the store's sales. At Regular Visitors, a coffee counter takes center stage between the shelved walls of fragrance oils, magazines and candles, but don't call it a coffee shop. Daniel Sorg, a founder of the Boerum Hill store which self designates as a local meeting place said they had initially pictured it as a modernized newsstand, both a community hub and a sundry stop. "We originally set out to do retail specifically I wanted to curate products and beautiful things, essential stuff," Mr. Sorg said. "Then the newsstand became a bigger idea and it was like, 'We have to have coffee, we're on the corner, we're above a subway, we're in New York.'" For some stores, it's a simple way to add foot traffic. "How can you have as many points of entry as possible?" Mr. Sorg said. "If you're relying on any one thing, any one revenue stream, any one idea, eventually it's probably going to change or dry up. We wanted to give a bunch of different people different reasons to come in every day." And so, coffee. The owners of Lichen and Regular Visitors all entered the coffee world with minimal knowledge, and turned to local roasters for their education. Mr. Sorg learned proper brewing techniques from Nobletree's Brooklyn roasting facility; Lichen's owners worked at first with one particular roaster that is, until David You, a singer songwriter and DJ, walked in one day, tasted their product and quickly educated the pair on how to improve their blends, using his own connections to roasting companies. He's stuck around as a regular and informal advisor ever since. In addition to coffee, Maglia Rosa's Industry City location offers a bicycle self service station and bike parts vending machine. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Other spots, like Maglia Rosa, have paired with larger name roasters. While its Carroll Gardens store is a bike shop only designed for professional cyclists with a penchant for Italian imported rides the Industry City location emphasizes coffee and food. Aside from bicycle influenced decor, books and apparel, the store features a bicycle self service station and bike parts vending machine. Owner Manuel Mainardi, a racer himself, was offered the opportunity to open a store in Industry City a particularly convenient spot, considering the current construction of a 4th Avenue bicycle lane that will stretch from Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill to Bay Ridge. He joked that his first thought, a combination booze and bicycle shop, would not have been the best in practice; his second thought was to bring coffee on board. Mr. Mainardi lived most of his life in Italy, and wanted to recreate the coffee he drank there, so he worked with La Colombe Coffee Roasters to achieve that flavor. La Colombe works not just on blend with its clients initial tastings may include up to 30 varieties but also functional coffee bar design, according to Nicolas O'Connell, La Colombe's senior vice president of sales and wholesales. Mr. O'Connell added that "hybrid concepts are becoming more and more popular," and credited Saturdays NYC a surf shop cum coffee bar with spearheading the trend. When Saturdays NYC opened their Soho location, they paired with La Colombe and developed a signature roast that is only sold at their New York locations, according to Morgan Collett, a founder. David You, a regular and informal advisor, makes coffee at Lichen, a homeware store in Brooklyn. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Jared Blake and Edward Be, the owners of Lichen. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times However, the coffee store combination isn't limited to small businesses. Ralph Lauren has cafes in their Upper East Side and Rockefeller Plaza locations, and Brooks Brothers has one in their Red Fleece branded Flatiron store. "In a building that is four floors of shopping, a cafe provides a nice change of pace," said Mohit Gulrajani, senior vice president of omnichannel strategy and operations at Brooks Brothers. As for cafe only visitors, "even if they're only buying coffee, they're looking at the products that we have laid out on the path in and out of the store." Maybe you see a coat when all you wanted was a cappuccino; maybe you go to your local coffee spot, and one day, you need a new desk. To Mr. Blake and Mr. Be at Lichen, coffee was key, and a Nespresso wouldn't cut it it was important to learn brewing from scratch, even the minutiae of scales and timing. "It reflects the furniture. The furniture is a lot of work. Marble is a lot of work," said Mr. Blake. To then serve subpar coffee would mean "something's off." "As our furniture elevates, everything else has to elevate with it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The dancers at American Ballet Theater often describe the company as a family. Sometimes I wonder: Is that good? Is it true? How is it reflected in the art? Families experience angst and tension, but this season at the David H. Koch Theater, the sitcom version of family has emerged in some ballets. "The New Romantics," a program on Wednesday night, featured two new works with little urgency. Instead, there it was: that artificial sitcom feeling. That program, a fairly regressive look at love, explored conventional aspects of romance by Gemma Bond, Jessica Lang and James Whiteside. The return of Ms. Lang's "Garden Blue" couldn't diminish the dismal memory of her "Let Me Sing Forevermore," a duet performed for the first time in New York last week. Set to Tony Bennett, it is a flimsy redaction of Twyla Tharp's choreography to Frank Sinatra and a figure skating routine rolled into one. "Garden Blue" is derivative in a midcentury modern dance way, but it has a loveliness mainly because of Sarah Crowner's sets, Noguchi like winged panels sometimes activated by the dancers, and vibrant unitards that give the stage a three dimensionality. Mr. Whiteside's "New American Romance," originally performed over the summer at Vail Dance Festival, also had a secondhand veneer. In it, he merges the idea of romantic ballet dancers wear blue violet costumes, long tulle skirts for the women and poet shirts for the men with contemporary, sassy injections of turned in footwork or classical hands that suddenly start to swirl midair. Set to Debussy, "New American Romance" begins with a pas de deux for Catherine Hurlin and Aran Bell; here they are again, as in "Forevermore," performing a figure skating routine off the ice, complete with throws and flips. A trio for three women, a sisterhood of sorts, turns powerful poses into coquettish ones in 2019, it's a frustrating sight and later a duet morphs into a menage a trois. Throuples happen. But here the final scene features a threesome in which they pile on top of one another, each raising an arm in the air before the three arms are intertwined. It was surprising, coming from Mr. Whiteside who is a drag artist as well as a Ballet Theater principal that his ballet was so, well, straight. But he does know how to move bodies: His dance glides along with a certain ease. Ms. Bond's "A Time There Was," though, is frantic and overpacked: The spins, kicks and embellished details of the arms rarely slow down. This foray into romance takes inspiration from Benjamin Britten and, it seems, the dynamic qualities of her cast. As the sections unfold and couples dash in and out Zimmi Coker, sunny and sweet, and Gabe Stone Shayer infuse a folk infused section with sprightly jumps hints of a narrative emerge, but only hazily. The couples appear to be part of the same community. So why do they seem to come from disparate worlds? It's not until the end that Ms. Bond lets in more air with a pas de deux for Isabella Boylston and Mr. Whiteside; there's a wistfulness, a quest for harmony as they dart toward and away from each other until he latches an arm around her waist and spins her right into a blackout. At least the dancers moved with spirit and vivacity. This season particularly in George Balanchine's "Theme and Variations" some of the dancing has been more studious than free, as if it were taking place underwater. A consistent delight, though, has been Calvin Royal III, who is suddenly the most elegant male dancer in the company. Twyla Tharp's "Deuce Coupe" shows off his jazzy daring, and he made a remarkable debut in the daunting title role of Balanchine's "Apollo." Splendidly expansive, he makes you realize how important expressive hands and fingers can be: In "Apollo," they radiated with a wholeness that made you sense their interior force. Joo Won Ahn, also making his debut in the title role, didn't have the same polish or was it will? He looked uncomfortable, unsure of himself. The decision to revive Clark Tippet's "Some Assembly Required" is a perplexing one. This 1989 work, created for the real life couple of Amanda McKerrow and John Gardner, tracks a relationship that flickers between moments of tenderness and thorny partnering. For all their beauty and imagination, Sarah Lane, in a short, flirty dress, and Cory Stearns, in jeans and a white T shirt, looked as if they were part of an artier outtake from "Dirty Dancing," the 1987 film. Both the ballet and the movie are clearly of their moment. Ms. Tharp's "Deuce Coupe," from 1973, does capture a specific time, yet it remains timeless. This season, the majority of performances that stood out were of dancers gracing Tharp ballets. In her latest, "A Gathering of Ghosts," the star is Herman Cornejo. But it's the others swirling around him that give this ballet its air of mystery and eccentricity. It's striking to realize that Ms. Tharp's first ballet and her most recent one 46 years apart are part of the same season; it's even more striking to realize that rather than making the same dance over and over again, she is continuing to probe her imagination. Her presence at Ballet Theater over the past two seasons is important; it has instilled momentum, a never settle for less force into the dancers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In 1999, the year of the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, Heath E. Morrison was a middle school principal in Maryland, shocked by what he and his colleagues saw as a terrible but unique episode. "There was this intense desire not to overreact," said Mr. Morrison, who is now superintendent of the Charlotte Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina. Since then, Mr. Morrison has come to view schools as much more dangerous places. In the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings last week, he finds himself contemplating heightened measures to protect students, including increasing the number of security officers in schools who carry their own guns. "We are a country that has too much violence and too many ways to have people hurt or killed and not enough access to mental health services," Mr. Morrison said. "So if there was an ability to put an armed security officer in every school, I would have to seriously consider it." Charlotte Mecklenburg already stations armed security guards at the district's 28 high schools, though not at its 88 elementary schools. Across the country, some 23,200 schools about one third of all public schools had armed security staff in the 2009 10 school year, the most recent year for which data are available. Now, in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, school officials across the nation are reviewing security protocols, including lockdown drills and building entry procedures, but also whether to hire more armed guards. These questions arise amid a broader political and societal debate about gun control. While some people view the prospect of bringing additional guns into schools as fueling a culture of violence, others say children need the protection. On Sunday, a former education secretary, William J. Bennett, indicated on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he would support such measures. "I'm not so sure I wouldn't want one person in a school armed, ready for this kind of thing," said Mr. Bennett, who served under President Ronald Reagan. With national sentiment starting to move in favor of stricter gun laws, Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan vetoed a bill on Tuesday that state lawmakers had passed just a day before the shootings in Newtown, allowing registered gun owners to carry concealed weapons in schools. But also on Tuesday, a legislator in South Carolina introduced a similar bill that would allow school employees to carry guns in schools. The question of whether to place trained security guards with guns in schools is left up to local districts. These officers are charged with protecting students not just from intruders but also from each other. They often conduct classes in preventing gang violence or bullying, as well as handle more prosaic tasks like issuing traffic tickets. According to the Council of the Great City Schools, cities including Albuquerque, Baltimore, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and St. Louis have armed officers in schools, either contracting with local police forces or recruiting their own dedicated security staff. Other cities, including Boston and New York, place unarmed security officers in schools. Sandy Hook Elementary did not have a security guard on campus. In Texas, the tiny, one school Harrold Independent School District, about 150 miles northwest of Dallas, enacted a policy five years ago to allow teachers and administrators who have gun licenses and agree to additional training to carry concealed weapons in school. After the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and in an Amish community in Pennsylvania in 2006, David Thweatt, the Harrold superintendent, decided that since the school was too small to afford a security guard, its employees needed to be able to protect students on their own. "I looked around for solutions, and the only solutions are to have some kind of defense," Mr. Thweatt said. He added that having several staff members with concealed weapons was more effective than one security guard. While supporters of gun control oppose allowing teachers or school administrators to carry guns, some are sympathetic to schools that want trained, armed security officers, given the recurrence of mass shootings. "Until we get a handle on that," said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, "I certainly understand school districts" wanting armed officers. "If they're not armed, they're no different than a janitor with a broom or a teacher with a piece of chalk," said Leon Lott, sheriff of Richland County. "A bad guy is going to need to be confronted with someone who is on equal footing." Mr. Lott added that the presence of these officers, whose salaries are shared by the sheriff's office and the school districts, was a deterrent to would be violent offenders. "If someone drives by and sees a sheriff's car on campus, they are going to keep going because they'll think, 'I'm not going to be able to do what I want to do. There's going to be a cop there to stop me,' " he said. Sharla Benson Brown, an education consultant and mother of three children, one of whom attends a public middle school in Richland County, said she felt comfortable with an armed officer being at the school but was not sure he could prevent an episode like the tragedy at Sandy Hook. "With a school being so big, there's only so many places he can be at one time," she said. Constrained school budgets are likely to prevent any mass hiring or arming of security officers. But even if districts could afford to hire more armed guards, education and safety experts say that might not be desirable, especially if it made schools feel more threatening to students. Larry Johnson, executive director of school security for the Grand Rapids, Mich., district and president elect of the National Association of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officials, said violence prevention should start with counseling and social work, not weapons. His office has the authority to arm school security officers but has decided against it. "We think we should concentrate more on the heart than the hardware," Mr. Johnson said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
More listings for the new season: Art Pop Classical Theater Film Television All dates are subject to change. NEW YORK LIVE ARTS This Chelsea institution, under the new director of programs, Thomas O. Kriegsmann, continues moving in a multigenre direction, offering more music and theater than in past years. But rest assured: There's plenty of dance, including premieres by Miguel Gutierrez (Sept. 16 through Sept. 26), Pavel Zustiak (Dec. 2 5) and Jen Rosenblit (April 20 28). The ravishing Okwui Okpokwasili revives her one woman, multicharacter "Bronx Gothic" (Oct. 21 24); Ann Liv Young interrogates Sophocles in her brazen adaptation of "Elektra" (Jan. 20 30); and the estimable Valda Setterfield plays King Lear in her take on the tragedy, joining forces with the Irish choreographer John Scott (Feb. 17 20). newyorklivearts.org. THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY THEATER This space in Long Island City, Queens, has been going strong while staying small (in square footage, at least) for 10 years. An enticing season has begun with Jeanine Durning's "To Being" (through Sept. 19), a new companion piece to her heady "inging," which she reprises Sept. 23 26. Also in store: a solo by Silas Riener (Oct. 14 28), Juliana F. May's text and body based "Adult Documentary" (March 1 12) and Beth Gill's season closing installation in May (dates to be announced). chocolatefactorytheater.org. CROSSING THE LINE A silent walk through Red Hook and deconstructed Bavarian folk dance are among the offerings in this category shirking festival, presented by the French Institute Alliance Francaise. This year's roster includes artists from Austria, Brazil, Iran, Italy and New York, at sites throughout the city. The New Museum hosts a two week run of "Chambre," a riotous revision of Jean Genet's "The Maids" by the choreographer Jack Ferver and the visual artist Marc Swanson, with Mr. Swanson's sculptural set on view during museum hours. Through Oct. 4, fiaf.org. TIME BASED ART FESTIVAL The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Oregon presents this forward thinking celebration of "art in real time," as the tagline goes. The 13th edition includes Michelle Ellsworth's winning hybrid of comedy, dance and science experiment, "Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome," and Dana Michel's stereotype dismantling "Yellow Towel," among dozens of other genre blurring events. Through Sept. 20. pica.org. 'TREE OF CODES' Inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer's novel of the same name, this hyperkinetic collaboration fuses choreography by Wayne McGregor with a score by Jamie xx and Olafur Eliasson's visual design. The time and space bending venture takes shape in the Park Avenue Armory's 55,000 square foot Drill Hall. Sept. 14 through Sept. 21, armoryonpark.org. 'THE AGE AND BEAUTY SERIES' In this poignant, funny and existentially anxious trilogy, the unruly Miguel Gutierrez plunges into issues surrounding his identity as a gay, male, middle age choreographer, drawing upon queer theory and life experience. As part of the Crossing the Line Festival, he reprises the first two parts and unveils the third, which features a stellar cast ranging in age from 8 to 64. Sept. 16 through Sept. 26, New York Live Arts, newyorklivearts.org. JOANNA KOTZE Baryshnikov Arts Center kicks off its 10th season with "Find Yourself Here," in which the Bessie Award winning Ms. Kotze examines intersections between visual art and dance. The visual artists Jonathan Allen, Zachary Fabri and Asuka Goto contribute a multilayered installation, but they don't disappear behind the scenes; they'll share the stage with Ms. Kotze and her excellent dancers Netta Yerushalmy and Stuart Singer. Sept. 17 through Sept. 19, bacnyc.org. TRADITIONAL DANCE FROM OKINAWA This Japan Society program offers a rare look at court and folk dances from the southernmost reaches of Japan, dating as far back as the 15th century. A history of the Okinawa Islands is threaded through the presentation of dance and live music, which features alumni and faculty from the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts. Sept. 18 and Sept. 19, japansociety.org. NEW YORK CITY BALLET The company unveils seven new ballets during its fall (Sept. 22 Oct. 18), winter (Jan. 19 Feb. 28) and spring (April 19 May 29) seasons. The fall gala (Sept. 30) includes four of those, by the resident artist Justin Peck, the corps de ballet member Troy Schumacher and, in their City Ballet debuts, Robert Binet of the National Ballet of Canada and Myles Thatcher of San Francisco Ballet. The remaining premieres come from the Danish born choreographer Kim Brandstrup, with his inaugural work for an American company (Oct. 8); the sought after Mr. Peck, with his first narrative ballet (Feb. 2); and the Tony Award winning Christopher Wheeldon (May 4). "George Balanchine's the Nutcracker" returns from Nov. 27 to Jan. 3, and the company honors its new music director, Andrew Litton, on Jan. 19. David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, nycballet.com. LINCOLN CENTER AT THE MOVIES Dance comes to the big screen about 600 big screens around the country in this new suite of recorded live performances. (Why not broadcast actual live performances?) The inaugural lineup is on the conservative side: San Francisco Ballet's "Romeo and Juliet" (Sept. 24), a quadruple bill from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Oct. 22), Ballet Hispanico's "Carmen.maquia" (Nov. 12) and New York City Ballet in "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" (Dec. 5 and 10). fathomevents.com. DANSPACE PROJECT The Japanese born choreographer Yasuko Yokoshi opens the Danspace season with the premiere of "ZERO ONE" (Sept. 24 26). Part dance, part film, it features identical twin sisters with contrasting backgrounds in traditional Japanese and contemporary dance. Ms. Yokoshi, always interested in duality, entwines those lineages. Other fall highlights include a double bill from the Butoh influenced artist Mina Nishimura (Oct. 29 31) and a duet by the Irish dancer Jean Butler and the cellist Neil Martin (Nov. 17 21), which travels to the Kennedy Center in May. Sept. 24 Dec. 19. St. Mark's Church, danspaceproject.org. WALKER ART CENTER This progressive hub in Minneapolis has a longstanding relationship with the choreographer Sarah Michelson, having commissioned her 2005 "Daylight (for Minneapolis)," "Devotion" (2011) and most recently "tournamento," which has its world premiere Sept. 24 27. A formidable force in contemporary dance, Ms. Michelson keeps the details of any new work under wraps, letting her sensuous formalism speak for itself. The Walker also presents Dean Moss's "johnbrown," a roiling meditation on the 19th century abolitionist who raided Harpers Ferry, Oct. 15 17, walkerart.org. FALL FOR DANCE A tasting menu of dance, this City Center shindig showcases 20 companies over 12 days, four on each program. The international medley ranges from British ballet and Brazilian hip hop to malambo, an Argentine folk form, and Odissi, a style of classical Indian dance. Look for the whimsical tap choreographer Michelle Dorrance, one of this year's commissioned artists, and the New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck, who teams up with the clown and comedian Bill Irwin in a new duet. Sept. 30 Oct. 11, nycitycenter.org. ABRONS ARTS CENTER At this Lower East Side haunt, you can catch ghostly puppetry by the dance world darling Basil Twist ("Sisters' Follies: Between Two Worlds," Oct. 1 31) or sample the latest in Eastern European contemporary dance ("Skin Me," by Viktoria Danyi, Csaba Molnar and Zsofia Tamara Vadas, April 8 9). The guest curator Laurie Uprichard continues her illuminating Travelogues series with the Irish dance theater collective Ponydance (Oct. 7 10) and the Los Angeles choreographer Lionel Popkin, who offers a playful critique of the modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis (Oct. 29 Nov. 1). abronsartscenter.org. 'LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK: BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE 1933 1957' This exhibition at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art considers the fertile ground and short life span of Black Mountain College, where artists like John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg exchanged ideas. Integral to the show is a sprung dance floor, where students from Boston Conservatory and Harvard University perform early Cunningham works, restaged by the former Cunningham dancer Silas Riener. The choreographer Pauline Motley reconstructs "Glyph," by Katherine Litz, who taught modern dance at the college in the 1950s. Oct. 10 to Jan. 24, icaboston.org. JACK This scrappy space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, greets visitors with tinfoil lined walls and convention breaking performance. The fall calendar includes a weekend of Afro futurist reflections organized by the scholar Thomas DeFrantz and the choreographer niv Acosta (Oct. 16 18); an evening with the noted experimentalists Neil Greenberg, Yvonne Meier and Jennifer Monson (Nov. 5 7); and a Martha Graham standard re envisioned in "Appalachian Spring Break," by Brendan Connelly and Scotty Heron (Dec. 10 12). Oct. 1 Dec. 12, jackny.org. SUNDAYS ON BROADWAY The choreographer and video artist Cathy Weis hosts this free, impromptu series a grab bag of screenings, performances and conversations at her inviting SoHo loft. This month brings appearances by two luminaries of postmodern dance, Carolyn Brown and Sara Rudner (Oct. 18), and the ever inventive Douglas Dunn and Dancers (Oct. 25). cathyweis.org. APARNA RAMASWAMY A founder and star member of the Minneapolis troupe Ragamala Dance, which specializes in the classical Indian form Bharatanatyam, Ms. Ramaswamy goes solo for her Joyce Theater debut. Her ritualistic "They Rose at Dawn" features live music in tandem with her bracingly musical dancing. Oct. 6 8. Joyce Theater, joyce.org. JOSE LIMON INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL The Mexican American choreographer and modern dance trailblazer Jose Limon founded his company in 1946. While that troupe has endured, his work has also been staged by companies around the world. A handful of those, including the Royal Danish Ballet and the Venezuelan troupe Coreoarte, convene at the Joyce Theater to honor the Limon Dance Company's 70th anniversary. Students from some of the country's top dance conservatories will also perform. Oct. 13 25. Joyce Theater. BREAKIN' CONVENTION This global array of hip hop dance theater first came to Harlem in 2013. (It's been produced since 2004 by the London performing arts center Sadler's Wells.) Its return to the Apollo Theater brings artists from Argentina, England, France, the Netherlands, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York. The centerpiece is a new sci fi collaboration between Rennie Harris Puremovement and Brooklyn's Next Level Squad. Oct. 16 18, apollotheater.org. 'TRISHA BROWN: IN THE NEW BODY' This nine month series in Philadelphia, presented by Bryn Mawr College, chronicles Ms. Brown's groundbreaking career, from her redefinition of dance in the 1960s to her 21st century inventions. The performance element (there are also classes and lectures) begins with a selection of early, non proscenium works (Oct. 18) and continues with pieces for the stage "Set and Reset," "If You Couldn't See Me" and "PRESENT TENSE" (Oct. 23 24) all performed by the Trisha Brown Dance Company. In June, Pennsylvania Ballet stages her celestial "O zlozony/O composite" (2004) as part of its Balanchine and Beyond program. Through June 12. Various sites, trishabrown.brynmawr.edu. AMERICAN BALLET THEATER A host of premieres and revivals brings the company's 75th anniversary to a close, Oct. 21 Nov. 1 at the David H. Koch Theater. The most alluring of those a new ballet by Mark Morris, the company premiere of Frederick Ashton's "Monotones I and II" and the revival of Twyla Tharp's "Brahms Haydn Variations" make up the gala evening on Oct. 21. Other developments include the company premiere of Balanchine's "Valse Fantaisie" and the return of Kurt Jooss's antiwar opus "The Green Table." In holiday news, Alexei Ratmansky's marvelous "Nutcracker" migrates to its new home, the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, Calif., Dec. 10 20. It's a win for the West Coast. abt.org. WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL This Lincoln Center festival draws connections between art and spirituality, broadly defined. The dance component, robust this year, includes the British soloist Aakash Odedra, known for synthesizing classical Indian and contemporary dance (Oct. 22 24); the American premiere of "Partita 2" by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (Oct. 29 30); and a triad of responses to the music of Thomas Ades, by Wayne McGregor, Karole Armitage and Alexander Whitley (Nov. 20 22). Various sites, whitelightfestival.org. TRAJAL HARRELL Through a two year residency at the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Harrell has been exploring the work of the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, who developed the post World War II performance art Butoh. From a labyrinth of research emerges "The Return of La Argentina," a kind of homage within a homage based loosely on a solo that Hijikata dedicated to the flamenco dancer Antonia Merce. Mr. Harrell also brings back "The Practice," opening his rehearsals to museumgoers. Oct. 23 25. Museum of Modern Art, moma.org. PERFORMA 15 It has been 10 years since RoseLee Goldberg founded this citywide biennial of visual art performance, a category encompassing the hard to categorize. The sixth edition (Nov. 1 22) includes "Ballet (New York)," an experiment for trained and untrained dancers by the French choreographer Jerome Bel (Nov. 6 7 at Marian Goodman Gallery), and the Brazilian performer Volmir Cordeiro in a gender bending solo at Danspace Project (Nov. 6 7). performa arts.org. WORKS PROCESS AT THE GUGGENHEIM Presented in the spacious basement theater of the Guggenheim Museum, these programs toggle between performance and conversation to shed light on choreographic processes. While some afford glimpses of coming premieres, like a preview of Juilliard's "New Dances" (Nov. 15), others focus on more obscure collaborations, like the one between the dance artist Emily Coates and the particle physicist Sarah Demers, both professors at Yale University. On Nov. 30, they discuss their recent work together. Sept. 20 Dec. 13, guggenheim.org. NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL Dance, opera and puppetry meet in "Hagoromo" (Nov. 5 8), one of the most exciting prospects in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's fall festival. The former New York City Ballet principals Jock Soto and Wendy Whelan play the roles of a poor fisherman and a fallen angel in a reimagined classic of Japanese Noh theater. David Michalek (Ms. Whelan's husband) directs, and David Neumann choreographs. Other Next Wave attractions include Souleymane Badolo's "Yimbegre" (Dec. 2 5) and Urban Bush Women's "Walking With 'Trane" (Dec. 9 12). Sept. 16 Dec. 20. Brooklyn Academy of Music, bam.org. RALPH LEMON Mr. Lemon's intoxicating "Scaffold Room," which he calls a "lecture performance musical," has its New York premiere at the Kitchen, Nov. 3 7. On and around a set that calls up a flood of associations bedroom, cabaret stage, recording studio, jail cell Okwui Okpokwasili and April Matthis embody a sprawling, tangled cast of characters in a charged rumination on black female archetypes in American culture. Nov. 3 7 and 9 10. thekitchen.org. SYLVIE GUILLEM The ballet superstar is about to retire, but not without bidding her fans a dazzling farewell. Her "Life in Progress" tour, featuring works by Mats Ek, Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, makes its only American stop at City Center, Nov. 12 14. TWYLA THARP To salute the 50th year of her career, a choreographer might survey what she's already done. Not Twyla Tharp. Known for her work ethic as much as for the staggering complexity and musicality of her ballets not to mention her sweeping influence on 20th century dance Ms. Tharp has created two new pieces for a nationwide tour. The tour begins in Dallas on Sept. 18 and ends in New York at the David H. Koch Theater (a Joyce Theater presentation), Nov. 17 22. 'THE DANCE HISTORIAN IS IN' On the last Wednesday of every month, the 91 year old writer, archivist and fount of wisdom David Vaughan holds court at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, screening films and leading discussions (free). This month (Nov. 25), he focuses on the dances of Yvonne Rainer. The season's other subjects include Denishawn, David Gordon and Balanchine rarities. Sept. 30 Jan. 27. Lincoln Center, nypl.org. ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER Robert Battle has made big changes in his few years as this troupe's director, but he hasn't created a new work for the company until now. In "Awakening," he takes inspiration from John Mackey's original score to tell a story of collective grief and healing. The company's City Center run (Dec. 2 Jan. 3) also includes premieres by Kyle Abraham, whose "Untitled America: First Movement" confronts the American prison system, and Ronald K. Brown, who always makes these dancers glow. Paul Taylor's steamy "Piazzolla Caldera" joins the repertory, as do three new productions of Ailey classics: "Blues Suite," "Love Songs" and "Cry." As always, "Revelations" will be in the house. TERE O'CONNOR Few choreographers commit to the stuff of movement as deeply as Mr. O'Connor, with as much faith in the medium. His new works are not to be missed. In "The Goodbye Studies," which has its premiere at the Kitchen Dec. 2 12, he formulates a crowd in constant motion with 12 dancers and his longtime composer James Baker. 'MAKING SPACE' It's a bustling season at Gibney Dance's downtown branch, which hosts this platform for adventurous new work. The series wraps up this month with "Church, an epilogue for OTRO TEATRO" (presented with the Chocolate Factory Theater), a kind of extended communal rite by the Uruguayan choreographer luciana achugar (Dec. 10 19). Other featured artists include Jaamil Olawale Kosoko (Sept. 23 26), Patricia Hoffbauer (Sept. 30 Oct. 3) and Jon Kinzel (Oct. 21 31). Gibney Performing Arts Center, gibneydance.org. LIZ GERRING After the spare spaciousness of "glacier," her handsomely structured work from 2013, Ms. Gerring experiments with filling up a stage. "Horizon," presented by Peak Performances at Montclair State University, deepens her collaborations with the composer Michael Schumacher and the lighting designer Robert Wierzel, as she tests the threshold between order and chaos. Dec. 10 13. Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair, N.J., peakperfs.org. BIG DANCE THEATER These multimedia wizards have repeatedly tackled big texts ("Orestes," "Antigone") through their signature blending of theater, video, song and dance. In "Short Form," Jan. 6 16 at the Kitchen, they veer to the opposite end of the literary spectrum, embracing documents as abridged as the text message in an evening of ultra succinct performance. AMERICAN REALNESS This feast of contemporary performance returns to Abrons Arts Center for a seventh year, Jan. 7 17. Confirmed events include two solos: Heather Kravas's "dead, disappears," inspired by Richard Serra's "Verb List"; and "Sara (the smuggler)," starring the Bay Area renegade Sara Shelton Mann in collaboration with the choreographer Keith Hennessy and the composer Norman Rutherford. LIVE IDEAS New York Live Arts expands this festival formerly one week devoted to a single artist into a two month exploration of cultural change in the Middle East and North Africa (Feb. 9 April 8). The schedule of performances, screenings and discussions includes the Belgian company les ballets C de la B in "Badke," a collaboration with young Palestinian dancers and the Brussels theater KVS, Feb. 11 13. PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY This troupe returns to Lincoln Center under the heading Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance, which it adopted last year along with a revamped mission. For the first time, Mr. Taylor solicits new works by choreographers other than himself Larry Keigwin and Doug Elkins to be performed by his own dancers. (Catch a sneak peek at the Guggenheim, Nov. 21 22.) Another non Taylor work, Donald McKayle's 1959 "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder," will be danced by guests from Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. March 16 April 3. David H. Koch Theater. SAN FRANCISCO BALLET If you happen to follow the choreographer Justin Peck on Instagram (recommended), you've seen a few tantalizing seconds of his new work for this company at least in rehearsal. The real thing opens on April 7, sharing a bill with Balanchine's "Theme and Variations" and Mark Morris's "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes." The full season, Jan. 24 May 8, also brings a new ballet by the young British choreographer Liam Scarlett and the North American premiere of William Forsythe's "Pas/Parts." War Memorial Opera House, sfballet.org. MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY For its 90th birthday, this troupe upgrades to a bigger theater (City Center) and continues bringing in new works to supplement the Graham archive. Premieres by Marie Chouinard, Mats Ek and Pontus Lidberg bump up against Graham classics like "Chronicle" and "Appalachian Spring." April 14 16 and 18. NORA CHIPAUMIRE In "Portrait of Myself as My Father," the Zimbabwe born Ms. Chipaumire, an arresting performer, explores African masculinity and audience proximity, transforming the stage into a boxing ring where ideas and bodies spar. Her opponent (and ally) is the Senegalese dancer Kaolack, who joins her in wrestling with questions about the black male body, as spectators move freely around the space. The world premiere is presented by Peak Performances, April 14 17. DANCING THE GODS Whether you're well versed in classical Indian dance, this World Music Institute program promises rich discoveries, spotlighting two artists rarely seen in New York. The Bharatanatyam dancer Mythili Prakash reflects on fire in "JWALA The Flame" (April 23), and Sanjukta Wagh, a performer steeped in Kathak and Hindustani music, offers a dance theater work on April 24, both at Symphony Space. ALEXEI RATMANSKY In his seven years as American Ballet Theater's resident artist, Mr. Ratmansky has never been featured as prominently as he will be this spring, during the company's Metropolitan Opera House season (May 9 July 2). In addition to his 2013 "Shostakovich Trilogy," balletgoers can look forward to the American premiere of his comedic "The Golden Cockerel," created for the Royal Danish Ballet in 2012, and a new work for seven male dancers. His celebrated "Sleeping Beauty" returns, one of the season's seven full length ballets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
MARIETTA, Ga. Housing prices continue to fall nationwide, despite a few modest signs of improvement. But not all markets are equal. Places like Miami and Phoenix symbols of boom time excesses and later the sites of fierce crashes were not the weakest performers last year. That distinction goes to Atlanta. A sprawling Southern metropolis, Atlanta has become one of the biggest laggards in the economic recovery. In November, prices of single family homes were down close to 12 percent compared with a year earlier, the largest decline among major metropolitan areas, according to data released on Tuesday in the Standard Poor's/Case Shiller Home Price Index. Home prices regionally are now below their levels of 2000, making Atlanta one of only four metro areas to have experienced such a slide. The price of entry level housing in the area the lowest tier of the market, valued at just under 96,600 fell by close to a third last year. Even though the national economy shows signs of strengthening, the beleaguered housing market remains a significant drag on the recovery. Across a group of 20 metropolitan areas measured by S. P./Case Shiller, prices of single family homes were 3.7 percent lower in November compared with a year earlier, with average prices at their 2003 levels. Economists say prices are unlikely to hit a nadir until at least late spring. Tom Porcelli, chief United States economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York, projects that average prices could slip by as much as 5 percent nationally this year because of the large amount of distressed properties for sale and a shortage of buyers. Although Mr. Porcelli describes a "generally better outlook on housing" than he has over the last few years, he added, "we still have a long way to go." Here in Marietta, a suburb north of downtown Atlanta, the decline has attracted bargain hunters like Andy Heller. One damp afternoon last month, Mr. Heller, a part time investor, examined a four bedroom, faded yellow house that had sold seven years ago for 208,000. Last fall, after a foreclosure by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the house was put up for sale. The asking price was slashed by more than a third last month to 99,900. Mr. Heller, eyeing kitchen cupboards with missing doors and signs of leaks in the upstairs bathroom, figured he could lop 30,000 more off the price. "I am concerned as a citizen," he said. "And on the other side as an investor, I see the opportunity of a lifetime." Where the region once attracted thousands of prospective home buyers drawn by plentiful jobs and more affordable living, that influx has dwindled. Local unemployment, at 9.2 percent, is slightly higher than the national rate, in part because one in every four jobs lost was connected to real estate, a much higher rate than in the rest of the country. Those jobs have yet to return, while even people with work are having trouble qualifying for loans. The region, plagued by mortgage fraud and developers who dotted the exurban landscape with large luxury homes that never sold, is inundated with foreclosed properties. In fact, Atlanta has the most government owned foreclosed properties for sale of any large city, according to the Federal Reserve. Nationwide, sales of existing homes have recently picked up, prompting some economists to suggest that the housing market is finally starting to repair itself. But the number of new homes sold fell to a record low in December, and many homeowners are stuck in houses that are worth far less than they owe on their mortgages. Last week, the Federal Reserve described the housing sector as "depressed," and in his State of the Union address President Obama unveiled a refinancing program for homeowners waiting "for the housing market to hit bottom." Atlanta has suffered greatly from a contracting pool of home buyers. The number of people moving from within the United States to Atlanta peaked at 100,000 in 2006 and plunged to just 17,000 by 2009, the latest census figures available. "Most of the housing activity that we experienced in the past 10 years was people moving to Atlanta from other markets," said Domonic Purviance, real estate market analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. "If you lose 80,000 people a year coming to your market," Mr. Purviance added, "that's the whole issue." The collapse of the housing market also put many prospective homeowners out of work. From February 2008 to August 2011, Atlanta lost 60,000 jobs in construction and real estate, about 25 percent of job losses in the broader metropolitan area during that period. Across the nation, construction and real estate jobs were only 15 percent of total positions lost, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by IHS Global Insight. Many homeowners forced into foreclosures or distressed sales are people whose livelihoods had depended on a robust housing market. That's what happened to the owners of a three bedroom house in Dacula, about 45 minutes northeast of downtown Atlanta. The husband, a home remodeler, had not had steady work in three years and the family was struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments. The couple, who asked not to be named because they were embarrassed to tell their extended family, were on the verge of foreclosure last month. Then Matt Hermes, an agent with Keller Williams who drives a bright red Ford F 150 pickup bearing the license plate "BUYAHOM," persuaded them to try to sell it and negotiate with their lender to take a loss. She and her husband bought a four bedroom home on a manmade lake in 1999 for 374,000. They spent 100,000 installing a pool, a hot tub, a basement bar and home theater. When her husband lost his job as a sales executive at a consumer products company in 2007, the couple moved into a house that Ms. West had inherited from her mother in St. Augustine, Fla. They put the Dacula house on the market for 599,900. They rejected several offers that they considered lowballs. "Everybody kept saying 'Oh, it's a great house, it will sell,' " Ms. West recalled. A contract for 447,000 fell through when the buyer could not secure a loan. Last month, the couple signed a contract for 360,000, effectively erasing previous gains and their large investment in improvements. Other owners have simply been forced to give up their homes. In the third quarter of last year, the most recent period for which figures are available, foreclosed homes represented 24 percent of all sales in Atlanta, compared with a national rate of 12 percent, according to RealtyTrac, a data provider. Georgia is one of 30 states where a lender can foreclose on a home without appearing before a judge, which suggests that many more homes may be at risk of foreclosure in states where proceedings require court approval. On a recent tour of several homes, James H. Sinnott, a corporate lawyer who is trying to raise an investment fund for distressed properties in Atlanta, was struck by the sheer volume for sale at astonishingly low prices. In a well kept subdivision in Jonesboro, south of downtown Atlanta, teenagers and elderly couples strolled the wide streets. Mr. Sinnott inspected a three bedroom brick home that had floor to ceiling mirrors in several rooms, garish chandeliers and a number of stripped out basement walls that made him suspect it had been used as a brothel. The asking price was 69,900. In Norcross, a northern suburb, he looked at a sun filled three bedroom home up a steep driveway that had sold for 131,300 in 2003. Now, the lender was asking just 39,900. The glut is likely to grow. According to RealtyTrac, Atlanta has a nearly 12 month supply of foreclosed homes, about 70 percent of which are sitting on the books of servicers and lenders, waiting to go on sale. The release of just a chunk of properties can push down prices. "You can't get a bottom until you clear the backlog," Mr. Sinnott said. Mr. Sinnott, who is new to the investment market, is having trouble raising capital. But even an expert like Mr. Heller, who has bought more than 100 houses with a partner over the last 20 years and says he has never missed a mortgage payment, is frustrated by his difficulty securing loans. Typically, he buys in middle income neighborhoods and then signs tenants to rent to own contracts. If he had financing, he said, he would buy as many as 100 homes this year. "If I had a lot of cash I would be going ballistic right now," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
ELECTION season is approaching, and aspiring student body presidents are drafting platforms, posting fliers and plotting ways to capture votes. For last February's election, with the 1,000 cap on campaign spending lifted at the University of South Carolina, Kenny Tracy unleashed "Kenny for Carolina" T shirts, sunglasses, koozies and "mood cups" that turn his campaign color, blue, when liquid is added. Mr. Tracy won after spending about 2,200. That kind of investment may pay off. A survey by the American Student Government Association found that 71 percent of student leaders are compensated. But pay, perks and budgets vary wildly, as does the position's power and visibility. Below, student body presidents share some of what they get for their labors (they work 30 to 40 hours a week) and give back. Student president: Kenny Tracy, who represents 30,000 students, with a budget of 413,000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
If spontaneous, self taught genius in step with the times exists, surely Thornton Dial's unrelenting art is proof. Dial (1928 2016) came from a region of Alabama where African Americans, including an uncle of his, frequently made sculpture, screens and fences from metal junk welded together. By 1981, when he could make art full time, he had flattened his assemblages into thick, painting like rectangles, adding softer materials, especially hooked rugs and clothing, as well as paint. The result is fiercely formal in ways that connect to Jackson Pollock's allover fields of dripped paint and the object paintings of Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel. Dial was an untrained Neo Expressionist, drawing emotional energy from his life and times, which spanned Jim Crow and the struggle for civil rights. With three works from the 1990s and five from the first decade of the 21st century, this exhibition samples the amazing range of Dial's work in his final decades, when he became more cognizant of mainstream art styles without losing touch with either his roots or the historical events that often fueled his art. In "Setting the Table" (2003), the colors become so bright and the surfaces so thick with toys and logos that a refreshed Pop Art emerges. "Art and Nature" (2011) is relatively pared down: Dried twigs and flowers in one half of a bifurcated ceramic vase rest on two tables improvised from scraps of wood and metal. They alternate with big gushes of pink, blue or white, pouring from squashed paint cans (a favorite Dial device), forming the "art" of the work's title, but also suggesting figures, ghosts or drapes. It's a haunted Matisse. One of the 14 female nudes in Danielle Orchard's impressive solo debut, "A Little Louder, Love," is called "Girl Removing Her Shirt." With a confidently slick shorthand of early 20th century figurative abbreviations wielded with a casual 21st century elan, Ms. Orchard paints a woman sitting on the floor, with her back against a pale blue bathtub. Arms over head, wrists crossed as if pinioned, face reduced to a sketchy profile beneath the sheer fabric of the half removed shirt, and naked except for a red tulip held between her thighs, she seems to be acting out the traditionally subject position of an artist's model. But if she's acting, it's not subjection, after all: It's subversion. The same discreetly topsy turvy radicalism comes through in the way she's constructed. Though the image as a whole is graphic, colorful and easy to read, its parts are as distinctly separate as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. One thigh is composed of an orange fin, a blush colored bar and a brown rectangle; a section of dark wall fits neatly around a box of bath salts, more like a lid than a background. It all suggests a world in permanent flux, in which anything that seems permanent gender, personality, identity is an illusion. The stated mission of this new TriBeCa project space, founded by a former partner at David Zwirner, is to exhibit artists who've had significant foreign impact but little exposure in the United States. Its inaugural show certainly qualifies: This is the first American solo outing for Michel Parmentier (1938 2000), one of the most undeviating abstract painters of postwar France, whose radically simple paintings fused minimalism, performance and institutional critique. Mr. Parmentier is best known as one quarter of the swashbuckling but short lived group known as B.M.P.T. (The letters stand for the last names of the artists Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Mr. Parmentier and Niele Toroni.) I n 1967, its members voiced their intolerance for gestural abstraction by painting ultra minimal canvases at a Paris salon in Mr. Parmentier's case, horizontal stripes exactly 38 centimeters wide, done with spray paint and then quickly withdrawing them from view. Four paintings here feature his trademark stripes, in blue or silver or red or black, spanning the unstretched canvas and bulging out from the wall; you can see the creases where he folded the canvas and the punctures where staples held it to his studio wall. Mr. Parmentier broke from B.M.P.T. just a year after the group's debut; he gave up painting from 1968 to 1983. His second phase also comprises horizontal stripes on unstretched supports, but now he has used delicate paper rather than thick canvas, and composed the stripes with dense freehand marks in pastel, paintstick or pencil. These fragile later works are as dispassionate and skeptical of gesture as his early striped canvases, though instead of the extreme authorial abnegation of spray paint, here the handmade marks marry restraint and repetition with subtle individuality. French abstract painting of the 1960s, dismissed at the time by chauvinistic American critics, is having quite a moment in New York: Elsewhere in town now are exhibitions by Martin Barre and Francois Morellet. But there is a particular satisfaction, in today's snapping and yapping New York art world, in rediscovering this most stringent painter of all. The project notes for Madeline Hollander's "New Max" are probably the best way to describe her current installation at the Artist's Institute at Hunter College. "Performance begins at 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and dancers continuously hit a new maximum temperature each round." Lower on the page are directions for the four dancers to pause ("dancers rest") before performing another of the 16 cycles in the work as the temperature in the room, controlled by four air conditioning units, four heat sensors and four light panels, rises from a low of 65 degrees to a high of 85. If "New Max," which clearly descended from 1960s systems based artwork, sounds dry, it is not. The four young dancers, clad in stylish silver boxing shorts, specially designed black chemises and Keds sneakers, perform a series of movements choreographed by Ms. Hollander that fall somewhere between an Yvonne Rainer sequence and stuff you'd do in an exercise class. (Many dancers make their living teaching various types of Pilates Yoga Gyrotonics, which inevitably surface in their choreography.) The overall impression is of a 21st century version of the graces in Botticelli's "Primavera" (1477 1482), but here dancing is a form of mechanized labor rather than a lyric pleasure. The performance installation gains further heft from a smart essay by A. E. Benenson, printed for visitors on thermal paper, as if it were a long drugstore receipt. The essay touches on the history of air conditioners, climate change and the alt surrealist Georges Bataille's musings on energy and consumption. "Heat is the universe's choreography," the essay states, concluding that "we have built a kind of planetary scale air conditioner. It's just stuck facing wrong side out," with greenhouse gas trapped with us inside. Meanwhile, Ms. Hollander's graces dance silently before you in the slowly rising heat of the room. Aperture Foundation often produces exhibitions to complement issues of its photography quarterly, Aperture magazine. Such is the case with "Prison Nation," a stirring show about mass incarceration in the United States, with the historian Nicole R. Fleetwood doing double duty as curator and issue editor. Between what's on the wall and what's in print there's a lot of history. In the magazine, the lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., and author of the 2014 memoir "Just Mercy," traces the disproportionate degree of African American incarceration back to 18th century slavery, when American citizenship was restricted to property owning white men. And in photographs in the show from the 1960s and '70s by the folklorist Bruce Jackson, we see 20th century East Texas prison farms that were, in effect, cotton plantations that used racially segregated forced labor. Far from being coolly documentary, though, many of the images in the show are personal. The artist Jamel Shabazz, renowned for his images of contemporary black street fashion, and his fellow New York photographer Lorenzo Steele Jr., both worked as correction officers on Rikers Island in the 1980s. Their on the job pictures of colleagues offer a counterweight to the usually negative view of prison staff. And, in general, the show gives a warmer image of prison life than we're accustomed to seeing: in Jack Lueders Booth's beautiful 1970s color portraits of inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution Framingham, one of the oldest women's prisons in the country; in Lucas Foglia's images of prisoners tending to Rikers Island flower gardens; in the artwork created from soap bars and newsprint photographs by a former inmate, Jesse Krimes; and in Deborah Luster's extraordinary, monumental 2013 portraits of prisoners dressed for roles in an Easter passion play in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The humanizing perspective of "Prison Nation" is deeply moving and long overdue. It's crucial to remember, though, the unforgiving realities of incarceration. A majority of the prisoners at Angola, which is built on the site of several former slave plantations, are serving life sentences, either by judicial decision or by default. According to a text accompanying Ms. Luster's photographs, some 90 percent of inmates who enter Angola, at whatever age, for whatever crime, are expected to die there. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A group of Texas optometrists is lobbying the State Legislature for more power to negotiate contracts with health insurance companies, and the measure they are supporting could hit consumers' wallets, some business advocates say. "The problem is that optometrists are just getting eaten up by insurance companies," said Dr. Thomas A. Lucas Jr., an optometrist and legislative chairman for the Texas Optometric Association. "It's very rare that the small business optometrist has any say in what's actually in the contract." Senate Bill 632, by Senator John Carona, Republican of Dallas, would prohibit a common practice among insurers: contractually obligating optometrists to offer discounts on services and products that are not covered by the health plan, like a spare pair of glasses or cosmetic contact lenses that change eye color. The Senate approved the bill this month, and Representative J. M. Lozano, Republican of Kingsville, has agreed to sponsor the bill in the House. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Like good books, travel themed board games take your eyes off your screen and your mind far away. They're about more than winning. They're departure points, capturing a bit of the beauty, history and spirit of the places in which they're set, provoking questions and talk of future trips. With the games below one for each day of the week you can immerse yourself in Renaissance Florence, visit hot springs in Edo period Japan, help design the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, wind your way through a bazaar in Istanbul and trek across national parks like Acadia and Canyonlands. This, of course, is not an exhaustive list. There are all sorts of travel games inspired by landmarks, train rides and hotels. To discover more, check out BoardGameGeek, a searchable database with descriptions, reviews, user ratings and photos. You may also want to Google games that have won Spiel des Jahres awards, created in the 1970s by game critics from German speaking countries. Additionally, each year members of Mensa play and rate the latest board games and award their top five choices with "Mensa Select" seals. In this outdoorsy version of Monopoly, houses and hotels are camp sites and ranger stations. Instead of classic tokens like a car and a top hat, there's a bison and a ranger hat. And "properties" include parks such as Denali, Acadia and Zion (with game board spaces that have photographs and dates the parks were established), a volcano, a geyser and activities like nature hiking, rock climbing, bicycling and river rafting. Corresponding title deed cards have descriptions of each park. For instance, the Mount Rainier card points out that it's an active volcano that last erupted more than a century ago, and that the park has more than two dozen named glaciers. Traditional Monopoly rules apply (you can still end up in jail), though there are additional features, such as historic sites cards with instructions like "Independence National Historical Park is closed for renovations. Go back three spaces." (Though how you'll feel buying majestic places like the Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains in a "quest to own some of America's greatest treasures" as the game is billed, is another matter.) Cost: About 40. This refined game is all about the pleasures and wonders of the journey. It's also a delightful way to learn a few Japanese words and traditions. It takes place "in days of old" on Tokaido, the storied road connecting Kyoto and Edo (modern day Tokyo). Along the way, travelers visit hot springs (onsen); make donations at temples; buy souvenirs such as wooden sandals (geta), musical instruments (like the shamisen) and Ukiyo e prints; soak up countryside vistas; meet new people (Shinto priests, samurai, Kuge nobles); and sample local cuisine, earning points for different experiences. As in life, the player who ends up having the richest experience wins. Lately the game has been hard to find online in the United States, but a recent search turned up copies on eBay and some specialty game retailers. Cost: From about 40. With a board the sunny colors of Tuscan farmhouses and terra cotta roofs, each player in this game is the head of a noble family in Renaissance Florence. To win, members of your family must go into the city and thrive by gathering resources, conquering territories, gaining military strength and engaging in activities such as repairing the Cathedral and promoting sacred art, accruing points along the way. The player with the most points wins. Because this is a complex game, the makers suggest initially playing using the basic rules. When playing the full game with the advanced rules, you'll also be using "leader cards" featuring artists and other historical figures worthy of further study long after the game is over: Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, da Vinci, Lucrezia Borgia and Lorenzo de' Medici among them. Cost: From about 50. Make stops around a bazaar in Istanbul using a merchant and assistants to acquire and sell goods such as fruit, spices and fabric. To win, be the first to amass a certain number of rubies (based on the number of players). Even better, let the places you visit in this imaginary bazaar (created using game tiles arranged in a grid) spark your interest in the real life bazaars, mosques, palaces and teahouses of the Turkish city. Cost: From about 50. Set in Meiji era Japan, players are merchants in the fishing village of Yokohama. The goal is to prove you're the most capable one by traveling the city to places such as the silk mill, copper mine, fishing ground and tea plantation; fulfilling orders; learning foreign technology; and building shops and trading houses. While this game may serve as a prompt to explore a compelling time in history when the small village of Yokohama began developing into the major city and port that it is today it's worth keeping in mind that setting up the many pieces takes time, as does learning the rules. Cost: About 60. Not everyone staying home these days is doing so with others, which is why it's especially great that this game can also be played solo. So why not fancy yourself an artisan in Barcelona, creating a stained glass window in Antoni Gaudi's basilica, Sagrada Familia? Your goal is to make the prettiest window, arranging colorful dice (your "stained glass") while adhering to certain color and shade restrictions. Cost: About 40. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It was a windy spring afternoon, though that's not why Malcolm Gladwell's hair was standing straight up as he hurried into a recording studio in Downtown Brooklyn. Mr. Gladwell, known aesthetically for his finger in the light socket hair and otherwise as a longtime writer for The New Yorker and a best selling author many times over, was recording his popular podcast, "Revisionist History." The podcast, which examines historical events he deems "overlooked and misunderstood," and things he has personally obsessed with, like a forgotten Elvis Costello song, now take up half of Mr. Gladwell's year. He spent that entire sunny day in a beige room with fabric walls and no outdoor views doing "pickups" (re recording problematic portions) in preparation for the June 15 premiere of the second season. "There's a great economist, Albert O. Hirschman, who always talked about how all accomplishments are based on illusion," Mr. Gladwell said, in that if a person knew how difficult something would be, he would most likely have never started the project. "Well, that just about sums me up in this case." Mr. Gladwell's show is part of the Slate Group's podcast division, and its chairman, Jacob Weisberg, stopped by that afternoon to see Mr. Gladwell, his friend of several decades. The men, sitting in orange chairs in the soundproof recording room around a table topped with green felt and several microphones, chatted and laughed as two podcast producers and one editor prepared for the session in the adjoining control room, visible behind a picture window. "Tracking" or radio narration "is a skill and not something you just know how to do," said Mia Lobel, a longtime radio producer who admitted being worried initially about Mr. Gladwell's ability to adapt to the new medium. But, she said, "He has this way of emoting when he personifies his characters." After Mr. Weisberg said his goodbyes, Mr. Gladwell waved his arms above his head like an air traffic controller to signal he was ready to record. Mr. Gladwell writes the approximately 45 minute scripts, and they had recorded nine of this season's 10 episodes, which dwell on topics as varied as the economics of private golf courses in Los Angeles, the family behind Brown v. Board of Education, and how friendships influence political power. Mr. Gladwell defers to his podcast team to tell him what needs to be re recorded. "I serve at their pleasure," he said. "They tell me what to do; I do it." Wearing a dark gray wool jacket open over a striped crew neck T shirt, he sat at the head of the recording table. A stack of scripts and a two plastic water bottles were scattered before him. His iPhone, within reach, remained untouched. The band of the large professional grade headphones was hidden behind his hair. On Ms. Lobel's signal, Mr. Gladwell read one of the civil rights episodes, in a tone slightly slower and deeper than his usual speaking voice. "In January of 2004," Mr. Gladwell said. He paused and repeated the phrase, before adding, "On one of those cold Michigan days." Mr. Gladwell sometimes looked down and simply read, a black Sharpie in his left hand ready to edit or strike through words. Other times he sat slumped, as he intoned each word into the microphone. When he got excited, which happened when he offered a reveal or surprising fact (like how physicist Frederick Lindemann wrote Winston Churchill 2,000 memos), he gestured broadly as if conducting an orchestra, punching the air with a closed fist. Some lines had to be re recorded because of minor hiccups, like a throat clearing or a popped "p" in the word policy. Others masked regional pronunciations, like Mr. Gladwell's saying resume as "res ew me" a holdover from his rural Ontario roots. For much of the afternoon, he plodded along, recording most changes without question, pushing back when he thought it harmed the flow or muddled a point. Many of the pickups involved snippets, and their juxtaposition was sometimes comical. "You sound like Hitler!" Mr. Gladwell said one moment, followed by, "Make me some fries the old way!" Around 4 p.m., the production team suggested a break. Once peppy and animated, Mr. Gladwell seemed drained. He won't, he said, record more than two full episodes in one sitting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A difficult decision became more daunting on Wednesday as American tennis officials intent on staging the United States Open continued to run into stiff resistance from international players. "We have less than a week to go, so we need to finally finalize what we will do," said Patrick Galbraith, the president of the United States Tennis Association, as he presented the case for holding this year's Open to more than 400 players and coaches on a videoconference call with the ATP, the men's tour. The tennis tours have been shut down since mid March because of the coronavirus pandemic, and two Grand Slam events have been affected. Wimbledon was canceled for the first time since 1945 amid World War II, and the French Open was postponed from a late May start until late September. The U.S. Open, with main draw play scheduled from Aug. 31 to Sept. 13 in New York, would be the next Grand Slam on the schedule. Its leadership has proposed staging the event without spectators and with players, support personnel and officials confined to a so called bubble world to reduce the risk of infection. Exceptional measures would include restricting players to a tournament hotel outside Manhattan, imposing a limit of one support team member per player, eliminating singles qualifying and reducing the doubles draws to 24 teams from the usual 64. "I know this isn't ideal," Eric Butorac, a former tour player who is the U.S.T.A.'s director of player relations, said on Wednesday's call. "The 2019 Open was amazing. I wish we could run it back the same way. However, this is the world we are living in. We believe this is a good plan and believe it is good for the sport. It's good for the tennis economy, creates jobs for you, for coaches, for commentators, for so many people. And most importantly, this plan keeps you safe." Nonetheless, some of the game's leading men's and women's players, including Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Simona Halep, have expressed doubts about committing to playing the U.S. Open under those conditions. The five time U.S. Open champion Roger Federer won't be available for other reasons: On Wednesday, he announced he would miss whatever remains of the 2020 season after having a second surgery this year on his right knee. Djokovic, the world's top ranked men's player, called the proposed measures "extreme" in recent interviews with news media in his native Serbia and criticized the limit on the size of personal teams as "impossible." He said he favored restarting the season in September at European clay court events, most likely in Madrid or Rome, before the rescheduled French Open. Halep, ranked No. 2 in women's singles and already training on clay in Romania, her home country, took a similar tack in an email interview on Wednesday. "I definitely have strong concerns about going there with those conditions," she said. "Not only because we're in the middle of a global pandemic but also because of the risk of travel, potential quarantine and then the changes around the tournament. "We are used to things operating very differently and it would not be an easy transition at all, particularly on our bodies. I know that financially the tournament and sponsors would like it to run and also that many players are out of jobs right now, but I think it's a very personal decision we have to make. It's important to understand that everyone has individual needs and circumstances and we should do what's best for our personal health and also think long term about our career." Butorac said players should not be concerned about having to self quarantine upon arrival in the United States. "By the time we get to our event, we're hearing our country will be opened up," he said. But Wednesday's conference call made it clear that some lower ranked international players do share some of the stars' concerns about health and travel. There are also concerns about fairness, with the qualifying tournament very likely eliminated and full singles ranking points still expected to be on offer if the U.S. Open goes ahead, even without some of the game's biggest stars. Some on Wednesday's call, including Kei Nishikori of Japan, proposed removing ranking points from the U.S. Open this year: a concept the U.S.T.A. is rejecting because it would transform the Open into a high priced exhibition and potentially affect lucrative agreements with broadcasters like ESPN. The U.S.T.A. has also proposed moving the Western Southern Open, a men's and women's event usually held outside Cincinnati, to New York for this year only and staging it without spectators at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. The move would provide a warm up tournament for the Open without making international players travel within the United States. With players not having competed since March, this doubleheader would allow them a chance to play meaningful matches before the U.S. Open, where the men's singles matches are best of five sets. Combined prize money for the men for the two tournaments would be 30 million, according to Stacey Allaster, chief executive of the U.S.T.A.'s professional tennis division and the new U.S. Open tournament director. Allaster said 2 million of the U.S. Open total would be set aside as compensation for players who would be affected by the reduced doubles draw and lack of qualifying tournament. She said the U.S.T.A. would give discretion to Andrea Gaudenzi, the chairman of the ATP Tour, and his team on deploying those funds, suggesting they could be used to organize tournaments in Europe or compensate players directly. Because the U.S.T.A. does not own the Western Southern women's event, combined prize money was not yet clear. But the U.S.T.A., cognizant of player concerns also has proposed a Plan B: canceling the Western Southern Open and instead holding the U.S. Open with qualifying events and a full 64 team doubles draw. Galbraith said the U.S.T.A. could not put on full versions of both tournaments, adding that if the Western Southern Open was dropped, men's compensation for the U.S. Open alone would be "roughly 26 million" (the women would receive the same). That is approximately 95 percent of the 2019 total. When Marin Cilic of Croatia, the 2014 U.S. Open men's singles champion, suggested that players should receive more prize money given the proposed conditions, Galbraith disagreed. "We actually are taking out more debt to get this event going," Galbraith said. "Our revenues are absolutely shattered this year. We just had a cut on Monday of our staff. We laid off 130 people, so we can't go any higher. We literally can't. This is it." The U.S.T.A. has rejected the option of trying to move the tournament outside of New York, although the U.S.T.A. has a campus with 100 courts in Orlando, Fla., the area that is preparing to host the N.B.A. and Major League Soccer this summer. "We have a third scenario, and that is we pack it up and just cancel for 2020, which we really don't want to do," Galbraith said. If the U.S.T.A. does pursue the New York option, the plan will need approval from local and state authorities. Olivia Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, said a team of experts from the parks department and the office of citywide events was working with the U.S.T.A. and evaluating its plans. "Our top priority is ensuring the health and safety of New Yorkers," she said. In addition, Steven Cohen and Bill Mulrow, two advisers to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, are overseeing the process, creating the potential for the tournament to become another point of conflict in the long running rivalry between Cuomo and de Blasio. Galbraith said a decision needed to be made by next week. The U.S.T.A. does not require approval from the men's and women's tours to go ahead with the U.S. Open, but Wednesday's meeting made it clear that they are highly unlikely to get a full strength field. That does not sit well with some players, including Danielle Collins, an American ranked 51st on the WTA Tour who was an Australian Open semifinalist in 2019. She was particularly critical of Djokovic, the president of the ATP Player Council. "He is one of the most influential players of our time, and his reluctance to play could determine whether or not the U.S. Open goes ahead," she said in an email. "His incredible accomplishments and being the greatest player in the world has given him privileges like having a full staff to support him. The majority of players do not have this luxury." Collins said that many players wanted to play and that if strict health and safety protocols were enforced, she would feel "pretty confident" about participating. "I think it's important for top players to take a step back and realize that in the grand scheme of things we have it pretty good," she said. "Everyone else is also making sacrifices, losing their jobs, having to find child care for their children who can't go to school, etc. If the biggest sacrifice I will have to make in order to get tennis back up and going is only bringing one guest to the site, then I will consider myself very fortunate." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
We don't talk about it much, what with all the cultural space we've devoted to Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar, but Disney loves making movies about sled dogs. From "Iron Will" to "Snow Dogs" to "Eight Below," the studio's executives clearly have a soft spot for rugged frontier tales of tough Arctic men and their canine companions. The latest entry in their unofficial Sled Dog Cinematic Universe, "Togo" (streaming on Disney Plus beginning Dec. 20), adds two new perks: its basis in fact and the presence of its star, Willem Dafoe. Tom Flynn's screenplay draws its inspiration from the 1925 serum run, in which antitoxins were transported more than 600 miles, in the midst of a deadly winter storm, to stay a diphtheria outbreak in Nome, Alaska. The dog that completed the run, Balto, got the fame and the glory (and his own, earlier big screen vehicle) but Togo was reportedly the real hero, running 264 miles of the route under the guidance of his trainer and musher Leonhard Seppala (Dafoe). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
To support the construction of the new home of the Studio Museum in Harlem, artists including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mark Bradford and Glenn Ligon are donating work to sell at a Sotheby's auction in May, the auction house announced Sunday. "They all represent different aspects of the museum's life," said Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the museum, "the way in which artists actualize our mission through their work." The museum is seeking to raise 175 million for the new building at its current site on 125th Street designed by Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson as well as for a reserve and endowment. The city has contributed 53.8 million, with another 9 million commitment anticipated over the next two years. Among the other artists donating their work are Sam Gilliam, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Lorna Simpson and Lynette Yiadom Boakye all of whom have longstanding relationships with the Studio Museum. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
PARIS A large beauty emporium was scheduled to open here on Wednesday in the former foundry where Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" was cast. It is the second Parisian outpost for L'Officine Universelle Buly a three year old luxury cosmetics company founded by the kinetic French entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami. The 2,000 square foot space in the Marais district will include a 19th century style boutique selling the brand's aromatic potions, powders, soaps and perfumes. It will also house a Japanese florist specializing in delicate dried arrangements and Cafe Tortoni, a revival of the famed Belle Epoque coffeehouse on the Boulevard des Italiens, offering house blended hot chocolate, homemade ice cream and, in homage to Marcel Proust, madeleines. But it will not be simply a retail space. If all goes according to plan, it will be the cornerstone of a new sort of European luxury group one that, like those anchored by Hermes, Cartier and Louis Vuitton, is rooted in the French Empire but reaches far beyond the traditional product segments of apparel, leather goods, watches and jewelry. "For me, luxury is not only leather handbags and clothes," Mr. Touhami said while having an espresso at a cafe counter. He was wearing a khaki jacket, T shirt, white baggy pants, vibrant orange socks, Birkenstocks and taqiyah skullcap. Luxury, he said, is "calligraphy, fine food, beautiful decor, authentic details and working with artisans." It has "one foot in the past," he added, "and one foot in the future." The group, named Honmono (for the Shinto philosophy, meaning "the real product") is off to a lightning start. The five star Hotel de Crillon, also scheduled to reopen on Wednesday after a four year renovation, will have an extensive range of Buly amenities in each bedroom a major coup for the brand. Mr. Touhami is planning to roll out Cafe Tortoni branches in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan and to open 30 more Buly boutiques worldwide in the next year. He also said he was in negotiations with a major luxury group that wants to invest in the enterprise. "The world wants Paris," Mr. Touhami said. "And we sell Paris: a fantasy of Paris." That Mr. Touhami is the force behind this luxury paradigm is perhaps the most startling development of all. A former skateboard kid, he has had his hands in nearly every sort of business in the last 25 years, from reality television to Cire Trudon, the French manufacturer of wax once beloved by royalty. He said his ambition had been driven primarily by three basic requisites: "inciting revolution," "having fun" and "meeting beautiful girls." Even now at a relatively more settled 42 and married to the French aristocrat Victoire de Taillac Touhami, who runs Buly with him Mr. Touhami is not your typical luxury brand executive. He speaks so quickly that he can leave his listeners downright dizzy, and he infuses all that he does with this same manic energy. His biography reads like a piece of wild fiction, though he swears it's all true. He is the grandson of a Moroccan hero and son of an apple picker in the Tarn et Garonne region of France ("I grew up in apple orchards," he said), and he dropped out of technical school at 17. He had introduced a T shirt brand called Teuchiland riffing on the Timberland logo with a reference to cannabis that was a youth sensation, and building that business seemed much more interesting than studying. Yet it all ended abruptly, he said, when a gang in Toulouse "kidnapped me, tortured me and stole all my money." Mr. Touhami fled to Paris, where he spent a year without a home. "I slept in public toilets, in the Metro," he said matter of factly. "And I still hate dogs." In an altercation with another vagrant, he said, he was stabbed and has a 10 inch scar down his shin to prove it. "I almost bled out," he said. "When you almost die, you embrace life." He "left homelessness," as he puts it somewhat cryptically, when he fell for a cute girl. Not long after, he started skateboarding, and founded King Size, a skatewear and skateboard company, in partnership with a local manufacturer. He sold it in 1997, and cooked up a variety of other projects, including in 1998 co hosting a French reality television program called "Strip Tease," which chronicled the intersection of hip hop and middle class life, and he opened L'Epicerie, a concept store with his friend the designer Jeremy Scott, who was based in Paris at the time. But it did not last long. "We lost an enormous amount of money, which wasn't ours, so we didn't care," Mr. Touhami said. "We had a lot of fun and we met a lot of girls." Mr. Touhami spent time in Japan, where he rebooted the fashion retail brand And A, returned to Europe to work as the men's wear director for Liberty in London, and, later, in Paris, created Resistance, a streetwear line that paid homage to the Black Panther Party. "I went to see other mysterious movements, like the Zapatistas and Hezbollah. I met all the crazy men of the world," he said, proudly. "We were anarchists! We thought it was fun!" In 1999 he met Ms. de Taillac, a French public relations executive and one of four sisters (another is the jeweler Marie Helene de Taillac). The couple married a decade later in a multiday party at the Taillacs' Gascony chateau, Luxeube, not 20 miles from where Mr. Touhami grew up. Today, the Touhamis have three children. Over the years, they have lived in Jaipur, India; New York; Tangier, Morocco (where Mr. Touhami owned a cafe and had a donkey polo club); and, most recently, Tokyo. This summer, they are returning to Paris and their Left Bank contemporary duplex perched atop a historic building where, he noted with glee, the legendary French finance minister Colbert once lived. The idea for Buly came to him after he read Honore de Balzac's 1837 novel "Cesar Birotteau," about a celebrity Parisian perfumer who loses his fortune in real estate speculation. Mr. Touhami was so seduced by the tale that he researched it and discovered that the title character was based on a French fragrance tycoon named Jean Pierre Bully, who sold skin tonic called Vinaigre de Bully. Mr. Touhami acquired the name and, after tweaking the spelling, dreamed up a new iteration of the brand similar in spirit to the old school operations Penhaligons in London and Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Italy. He found an all white art gallery on the Rue Bonaparte that, with the help of artisans, he transformed into a fin de siecle dream of handmade oak cabinetry, antique glass vitrines, Benou marble counters, terra cotta floors and a swan beak faucet and sink that "we pulled out of a St. Petersburg palace," he said. There, as well as in his other one of a kind shops in Taipei and Seoul and shops within shops at Dover Street Market in London and Bergdorf Goodman in New York, Mr. Touhami offers more than 700 products, including botanical based masks and scrubs, and toothpastes, all without parabens, phenoxyethanol or silicone. He says his sales staff, elegant young women and men in neat navy suits, have been trained by a protege of the head of protocol for the emperor of Japan. "The best service in the world is in Japan," Mr. Touhami said. "That is what we master and offer." Items are personalized for clients on the spot, including monogrammed soaps and made to order potpourri. "We want to disrupt the beauty business the same way the food business was disrupted 20 years ago," he said. "We aren't some big corporation raking in profits. We don't care about money. We want to change the philosophy of the industry." Still, Buly is by all accounts a highly profitable business, though it does not release sales figures. He and Ms. de Taillac Touhami have also produced "An Atlas of Natural Beauty," a thick, richly illustrated encyclopedia detailing their doctrine, which will be published by Ebury Press in Britain in September. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A scene from Bill Viola's "Ascension" (2000) in the exhibition "I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like: The Art of Bill Viola," at the Barnes Foundation. PHILADELPHIA When rereading a classic novel many years after college, one finds that greater maturity often deepens the experience, bringing more insight into the author's objective. Recently, I had a similar reaction in viewing 10 videos of varying length, several for the second time, by the artist Bill Viola during a daylong marathon among three museums here. Engrossed in the humanistic spiritualism that permeates Mr. Viola's work, blended with his idiosyncratic imagination about the activities of daily life, I emerged with a fresh understanding of how his representation of a singular instance stands for a timeless worldview of both people and nature. Mr. Viola, 68, a New Yorker by birth and Californian since 1980, now lives in Long Beach with his wife and collaborator, Kira Perov. Coming from what he calls a TV childhood, he discovered video in 1969 when someone staged a video camera in his high school classroom. When he arrived at Syracuse University, he immediately signed up for the video workshop and has been experimenting and developing new techniques ever since in what was then a nascent art. Read about exhibitions in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. In paving the way for video innovation, he has produced challenging art works based on medical imaging technologies of the human body and animal behavior as well as scripted moving scenarios filmed with performers. As proof that video is now mainstream in the art world, all four of the finalists on view for the 2018 Turner Prize, sponsored by Tate Britain, were practitioners of video art with digitally driven, hyper political themes. Often museums may show a few Viola videos at onetime, but here the Barnes Foundation takes the lead in an exhibition of eight videos, titled "I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like," curated with a catalog by John G. Hanhardt and other writers. Both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Fabric Workshop and Museum around the corner joined in with one video each from their permanent collections. Together the works span the years 1976 to 2009. When I walked into the gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy to see "Ocean Without a Shore," I was immediately taken back to that hot day in 2007 at the Venice Biennale when I stood in line in the campo outside the 15th century Church of San Gallo to see it for the first time. Inside, screens were recessed above three ornate altars, and the videos were synchronized at different stages. In each, a person seen in grainy black and white would come from a distance and break through a sheet of transparent water emerging in full color expressing fear, anguish or joy . (His innovative use of new technologies includes a water wall, a laser cut, razor precise edge that creates a sheet of water that looked like glass.) I have learned since that Mr. Viola was assigned this space and created the video of the dead coming back temporarily to our world. He deemed the altars as a cross between tombs and places to pray. Unfortunately, in that crowded space no one could stay for long. How fortunate then to enter its present space arranged in the same configuration, with the suggestion of the altars. Here I saw the entire sequence representing people of many ethnic and cultural backgrounds exploring, in the artist's words, "the fragility of the border between life and death." The sequence had a rhythm to it broken by the different personalities and expressions, until a young girl, seen as a shadow, puts her hand through the water and then turns back, the only one not to break through. This powerful moment, which I missed the first time, immediately reminded me of Emily in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," who returns painfully to a day in her life. Mr. Viola is influenced by mystic religions; the title comes from the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi: "The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no beginning or end, in this world and the next." "The Veiling," at the Fabric Workshop, where Mr. Viola was artist in residence in the early 1990s, was also first shown at a Venice Biennale (1995), one of five video and sound installations that he created to occupy the five rooms of the United States Pavilion. Nine parallel scrims of sheer Italian curtain cloth serve as continuous screens for a slow motion episode of a man and woman meeting and separating in a nocturnal woodland scene, with projections coming from both ends. Its ethereal quality captures the viewer's own imagination almost as a participant. Still it was sometimes difficult to focus on images between the slightly waving sheets. Among t he artist's myriad technological feats, slow motion is one feature that draws attention to dramatic details that would be missed if shown in real time. Moving to the Barnes, this was most evident in "The Greeting" inspired by the Mannerist painting "The Visitation" (circa 1528 29) by Jacopo da Pontormo that serves as the altarpiece for a church in Carmignano, Italy. After seeing it on loan last year at the Morgan Library Museum, I was captured here not only by the elegance of Mr. Viola's scene, with its expressions of anticipation and fulfillment, but by the setting of similar Italianate buildings with mysterious characters in the background and, above all, the draping and flow of fabrics that conveyed the original without losing the modernity of, say, shoulder bags on the present performers. In a simple room based on a nun's cell, the performer, Weba Garretson, goes about her daily routine yoga in the morning, sewing at midday, writing with frustration in the afternoon, a ritualistic lighting of candles at night, and finally preparing for bed. But the singular window in each panel enlarges the story with a view of a tree passing through the seasons. Here on first take, it seemed to me a whole life lived ending in death, and I succumbed to what I call the dollhouse theory of seeing myself in the interior and living the experience. It was sobering to feel life fleeting by. Finally, there is Mr. Viola's fascination with water. He has often spoken of his discovery of a magical underwater world in a near drowning accident at age 6. In the film, "I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like," the enigmatic title drawn from the Rig Veda, the opening sequence conveys this sensation. Completed in 1986, after three years of recording and editing, it is both a surreal and specific rendering of the fragility and intermingling of animal and human life, from extreme close ups of birds in zoos and of underground caves to a fire walking ceremony in a Hindu community in Fiji. As he zeros in on the eye of an owl, suddenly I could see the artist reflected in its black pupil. By the end of the marathon, I had had an illuminating encounter with life, death and consciousness through Bill Viola's own experimental and farseeing eye. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like: The Art of Bill Viola Through Sept. 15 at the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia; 215 278 7000; barnesfoundation.org. (Screenings for "I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like": Wednesdays, through Sept. 11 at 1 p.m.; Sunday, Sept. 1 at noon; Friday, Sept. 6, 6 p.m.) Through Dec. 31 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 128 North Broad Street, Philadelphia; 215 972 7600, pafa.org. Through Oct. 6 at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia; 215 561 8888, fabricworkshopandmuseum.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
At One Manhattan Square, an 823 foot high condominium that will nearly abut the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, the Extell Development Company hopes that sensational views will help overcome a so so location. The panorama from the Z shape tower, rising at 252 South Street near the Manhattan Bridge, will sweep across Lower Manhattan and the East River and take advantage of primarily low lying downtown blocks, based on sales videos. But closer to earth, the 815 unit building is in a part of the Lower East Side dominated by affordable housing like the public complex Rutgers Houses, chain restaurants and aged delis, in contrast to the developer's more upscale building locations. (Extell's luxury towers include One57, on Billionaires' Row in Midtown.) "I think New Yorkers may be skeptical of the location," said Natalia Padilla, an agent at Citi Habitats and longtime resident of Cherry Street, which runs along an edge of the development site. But, she added, foreigners eager for a toehold in the city, and young people unsaddled with any preconceived ideas about the area, will likely flock. "It will probably be appealing for anybody who has no idea of what once was," said Ms. Padilla, who is not associated with the new condo. If the neighborhood is rough around some edges, it's far better off than it was in the 1960s, said Gary Barnett, Extell's founder and president, who grew up in a two bedroom rental a few blocks away, on Pike Street. "When I was growing up, I wouldn't come down here, it's true," Mr. Barnett said during a tour of the condo's sales office, in an elegantly reinvented self storage building near the development site. Through a window behind him, boats were seen bobbing in the East River. "But today, the neighborhood is totally different," he said, noting its low crime rate. In 2015, there was just a single homicide in the First Precinct, which includes the area, according to police statistics. One Manhattan Square will feature 100,000 square feet of outdoor and indoor amenities. They will include offerings like a lantern hung teahouse nestled in gardens, a treehouse like structure perched on stilts and a full size indoor basketball court with bridge views. There will also be three ground floor retail spaces. Mr. Barnett said he would like them to include a supermarket, in part to replace a popular Pathmark grocery store that was razed for the project. Upstairs, according to Extell, 386 units will be one bedrooms, which start at around 700 square feet; 322 two bedrooms and 105 three bedrooms make up most of the rest of the mix. There will also be two penthouses, one with four bedrooms and the other with five. Finishes, available in dark or light palette options, include quartz kitchen counters, marble bathroom floors and five inch wide stained oak floors. Against signs of a weakening luxury market, One Manhattan Square is emphasizing its less than stratospheric prices. Apartments start at around 1,600 a square foot, according to Extell, which is thousands of dollars less per square foot than what Extell has charged at other condos. The company began marketing the 1.5 billion development late last year in China, after the offering plan was approved by the state attorney general's office, Mr. Barnett said. Sales began in New York last month, with prices for one bedrooms starting at 1.2 million and three bedrooms at 3.5 million. So far, 80 units have been sold, according to Extell, though the developer declined to provide a breakdown of sales. One Manhattan Square, which is expected to open in spring 2018, will also offer affordable housing, in exchange for receiving property tax breaks. Those 205 income restricted rental units will be on the same property as the market rate condo, but they will be in a separate 13 story building that will also have its own address, 229 Cherry Street. The building will have its own amenities, including a gym, a bike room and a landscaped terrace. Mr. Barnett said that the two building layout at One Manhattan Square, which was approved by the city, is respectful of those who reside in affordable units, because it does not make them use a secondary entrance. Extell had been criticized for creating a separate "poor door" for lower income residents at 50 Riverside Boulevard, a condo rental project with affordable units on the Far West Side. The city ultimately banned these separate entrances in 2015. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
LONDON Roger Scruton, a prominent British philosopher and public intellectual whose espousal of conservative causes and contentious views elicited both plaudits and opprobrium, which he likened to "falling to the bottom in my own country," died on Sunday. He was 75. His family announced the death on his website without providing other details. Mr. Scruton, who lived for many years on a farm in Wiltshire, in southwest England, was said to have been treated for lung cancer in recent months. In the course of a long academic career, which included spells in the United States, Mr. Scruton wrote more than 50 books, ranging over topics like art, aesthetics, architecture, music, philosophy and sexual behavior. On the defining issue of the new century in Britain, he said, he voted in favor of leaving the European Union, the so called Brexit that propelled the Conservative Party's landslide victory in elections in December. He also wrote four novels in addition to newspaper and magazine columns, in which he mused on wine, politics and horseback hunting, which he pursued enthusiastically until his final birthday. As a musician, he composed operas. He qualified as a barrister, too, but did not practice law. In the Cold War years of the late 1970s and '80s, he transcended the frontiers of formal Western academia by traveling beyond the Iron Curtain to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia to deliver clandestine lectures and smuggle samizdat works disguised as blank CDs to Soviet bloc students. In later years he was awarded medals in recognition of that role. He was knighted in Britain in 2016. After his death, Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted, "We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully." Toward the end of his life, Mr. Scruton concluded that he had been treated unfairly in his own land, subjected to what he termed a "hate storm" inspired by critics who had accused him of Islamophobia, anti Semitism and disparagement of Chinese people allegations that Mr. Scruton called "fantastic and fabricated." The immediate cause of the furor was an article about him in April in the left wing magazine New Statesman. Based on an interview with him, the article, which a New Statesman editor said on social media contained "a series of outrageous remarks," prompted an uproar. Mr. Scruton was said to have belittled the term Islamophobia, spoken stereotypically of Chinese people and evoked a "Soros empire in Hungary," referring to the financier George Soros, who is Jewish. Within hours of its publication Mr. Scruton was sacked from an unsalaried position he had held as the head of a government appointed body that advised on modern architecture, the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. But he was reappointed after the magazine acknowledged that his views "were not accurately represented in the tweets" that had been published along with the article. The magazine apologized. The episode recalled Mr. Scruton's longstanding reputation as an iconoclast. Peter Stothard, who had been his editor at The Times of London in the 1980s, when Mr. Scruton wrote a column for the paper on art and politics, was quoted as saying that "there was no one I ever commissioned to write whose articles provoked more rage" than Mr. Scruton's. Critics also assailed his views on homosexuality and gender issues. In his interview with New Statesman, he said that homosexuality was "different" but denied that he was homophobic. He described the 21st century debate on gender and identity as "a kind of theatrical obsession which is being imposed on children whether or not they understand it." Mr. Scruton dated his conversion to the conservative cause to the Paris student riots of 1968, when, at 24, he observed young people, including his friends, clashing with the police in the Latin Quarter. "What I saw was an unruly mob of self indulgent middle class hooligans," he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2000. "When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledygook," he continued. "I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defense of western civilization against these things. That's when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down." Roger Vernon Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, a village in Lincolnshire, in eastern England, on Feb. 7, 1944, the son of John and Beryl (Claris) Scruton. His father was a teacher, his mother a homemaker. The couple also had two daughters. Roger was educated at a grammar school in High Wycombe, West London, and won a scholarship to Jesus College at Cambridge University, where he studied philosophy. He met his future first wife, Danielle Laffitte, a teacher, while traveling in France. They married in 1973, the same year he was awarded his doctorate. They divorced in 1979. From 1971 to 1992 he taught at Birkbeck College in London, where, he said, he was the only conservative on the teaching staff. In later years he was sometimes depicted as providing the intellectual spine to Thatcherism in Britain, although he said he did not share Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's devotion to the free market. In 1982, Mr. Scruton helped found a conservative journal, The Salisbury Review, which stirred controversy in 1984 by publishing an article by a headmaster in the north of England who raised questions about the value of multicultural education. Mr. Scruton published a torrent of books on a range of subjects, including "The Aesthetics of Architecture" (1979). Mr. Scruton published a torrent of books, including "Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of the Mind" (1974), "The Aesthetics of Architecture" (1979) and "Sexual Desire" (1986). His novels included "Notes From Underground" (2014), based on his experiences behind the Iron Curtain. In 1992 he became a professor of philosophy at Boston University; he returned to Britain in 1995. In 1996 he married Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian, with whom he had two children, Sam and Lucy. They all survive him. The episode revolving around the New Statesman article, in the last year of his life, left Mr. Scruton feeling bruised. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
ZOLFO SPRINGS, Fla. A pernicious disease is eating away at Roy Petteway's orange trees. The bacterial infection, transmitted by a tiny winged insect from China, has evaded all efforts to contain it, decimating Florida's citrus industry and forcing scores of growers out of business. In a last ditch attempt to slow the infection, Mr. Petteway revved up his industrial sprayer one recent afternoon and doused the trees with a novel pesticide: antibiotics used to treat syphilis, tuberculosis, urinary tract infections and a number of other illnesses in humans. "These bactericides give us hope," said Mr. Petteway's son, R. Roy, 33, as he watched his father treat the family's trees, some of them 50 years old. "Because right now, it's like we're doing the doggy paddle without a life preserver and swallowing water." Since 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency has allowed Florida citrus farmers to use the drugs, streptomycin and oxytetracycline, on an emergency basis, but the agency is now significantly expanding their permitted use across 764,000 acres in California, Texas and other citrus producing states. The agency approved the expanded use despite strenuous objections from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which warn that the heavy use of antimicrobial drugs in agriculture could spur germs to mutate so they become resistant to the drugs, threatening the lives of millions of people. But for Florida's struggling orange and grapefruit growers, the approvals could not come soon enough. The desperation is palpable across the state's sandy midsection, a flat expanse once lushly blanketed with citrus trees, most of them the juice oranges that underpin a 7.2 billion industry employing 50,000 people, about 40,000 fewer than it did two decades ago. These days, the landscape is flecked with abandoned groves and scraggly trees whose elongated yellow leaves are a telltale sign of the disease. Mr. Petteway says the antibiotics have helped bring many of his trees back to life. "They used to have pneumonia, but now it's like they have a cold," he said, tugging on the waxy, bright green leaf of a tree thick with embryonic, gumball size fruit. A temporary approval of the drugs was issued under President Barack Obama, but in December, under President Trump, the E.P.A. gave final approval for a much broader use of oxytetracycline. The agency has also proposed the expanded use of streptomycin under similar terms. The decision paves the way for the largest use of medically important antibiotics in cash crops, and it runs counter to other efforts by the federal government to reduce the use of lifesaving antimicrobial drugs. Since 2017, the F.D.A. has banned the use of antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals, a shift that has led to a 33 percent drop in sales of antibiotics for livestock. The use of antibiotics on citrus adds a wrinkle to an intensifying debate about whether the heavy use of antimicrobials in agriculture endangers human health by neutering the drugs' germ slaying abilities. Much of that debate has focused on livestock farmers, who use 80 percent of antibiotics sold in the United States. Although the research on antibiotic use in crops is not as extensive, scientists say the same dynamic is already playing out with the fungicides that are liberally sprayed on vegetables and flowers across the world. Researchers believe the surge in a drug resistant lung infection called aspergillosis is associated with agricultural fungicides, and many suspect the drugs are behind the rise of Candida auris, a deadly fungal infection. Drug resistant infections kill 23,000 Americans each year and sicken two million, according to the C.D.C. As more germs mutate, the threat is growing. With few new medicines in the pipeline, the United Nations says resistant infections could claim 10 million lives globally by 2050, exceeding deaths from cancer. Antibiotics sprayed on crops can affect farm workers or people who directly consume contaminated fruit, but scientists are especially worried that the drugs will cause pathogenic bacteria in the soil to become resistant to the compounds and then find their way to people through groundwater or contaminated food. The other fear is that these bacteria will share their drug resistant mechanisms with other germs, making them, too, impervious to other kinds of antibiotics. In its evaluation for the expanded use of streptomycin, the E.P.A., which largely relied on data from pesticide makers, said the drug quickly dissipated in the environment. Still, the agency noted that there was a "medium" risk from extending the use of such drugs to citrus crops, and it acknowledged the lack of research on whether a massive increase in spraying would affect the bacteria that infect humans. "The science of resistance is evolving and there is a high level of uncertainty in how and when resistance occurs," the agency wrote. Since its arrival in Florida was first confirmed in 2005, citrus greening has infected more than 90 percent of the state's grapefruit and orange trees. The pathogen is spread by a tiny insect, the Asian citrus psyllid, that infects trees as it feeds on young leaves and stems, but the evidence of disease can take months to emerge. Infected trees prematurely drop their fruit, most of it too bitter for commercial use. Officials say it is too early to know how many farmers will embrace the spraying of antibiotics. Interviews with a dozen growers and industry officials suggest many farmers are waiting to see whether the regimen is effective. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Many scientists disagree with such assessments, noting the mounting resistance to both drugs in humans. They also cite studies suggesting that low concentrations of antibiotics that slowly seep into the environment over an extended period of time can significantly accelerate resistance. Scientists at the C.D.C. were especially concerned about streptomycin, which can remain in the soil for weeks and is allowed to be sprayed several times a season. As part of its consultation with the F.D.A., the C.D.C. conducted experiments with the two drugs and found widespread resistance to them. Although the Trump administration has been pressing the E.P.A. to loosen regulations, Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the agency's pesticides office had a long track record of favoring the interests of chemical and pesticide companies. "What's in the industry's best interest will win out over public safety nine times out of 10," he said. A spokesman for the E.P.A. said the agency had sought to address the C.D.C.'s and F.D.A.'s concerns about antibiotic resistance by ordering additional monitoring and by limiting its approvals to seven years. Still, it remains unclear whether the drugs even work on crops. Graciela Lorca, a molecular biologist at the University of Florida and an expert on citrus greening, said she is not convinced. In the absence of peer reviewed studies, she and other researchers have largely relied on anecdotal evidence from growers who have reported some improvement after applying the drugs. "Right now it's a desperate measure for sure," she said. One recent afternoon, Kenny Sanders drove through his groves of Valencia and Hamin oranges and pointed out ailing trees adorned with the strips of pink tape that mark them for destruction. He said he tried using antibiotics for one season, but gave up after seeing little improvement. Cost, he added, was the main reason he didn't continue spraying. In the meantime, he and many other growers have embraced a range of remedies: tearing out trees at the first sign of disease and planting new stock bred to better withstand the bacteria. He also regularly feeds his trees a precision blend of micronutrients, a coddling he says helps them withstand the disease. Roy Petteway does all of the above, too, but he believes that the spraying is worth the expense. Soft spoken and contemplative, he considers himself a environmentalist and though he worries about antibiotic resistance, he puts his faith in the E.P.A. and its determination that the risks of spraying are minimal. He sees it as a stopgap measure that can help his trees survive until researchers develop disease resistant stock or more effective treatments. As a fourth generation grower, Mr. Petteway has more pressing concerns than the relatively abstract threat of antibiotic resistance. "These trees are our livelihood and our future," he said. "And I've got to make sure all of this is here for my children and grandchildren." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Tania Leon is one of 19 female composers the New York Philharmonic has commissioned to honor the centenary of women's suffrage. Tania Leon worked for the New York Philharmonic in the 1990s. But the full orchestra is only now performing her work. She was supposed to end up in Paris. When the composer Tania Leon was 9, her piano teacher, traveling in France, sent a postcard back to Cuba with a picture of the Eiffel Tower. "I don't know what happened to me when I saw the card," Ms. Leon, now 76, said recently. "I went to my family, and I said, 'This is where I'm going to live.' And I became obsessed." A few years earlier, her intrepid grandmother had marched her to the local music conservatory in Havana and demanded that she be enrolled. They didn't usually take students so young, but Ms. Leon already showed promise: Even at 4, she would press against the radio at home, dancing to salsa and singing along, with perfect pitch, to the classical station. Following rigorous, European style conservatory training, and inspired by her teacher's postcard, the young pianist set her sights on France, intent on becoming a touring virtuoso and helping lift her family out of poverty. After years of waiting, she landed a free flight to the United States through a resettlement program. In 1967, at 24, Ms. Leon left for Miami, intending to travel on to Europe. But right before boarding the plane she learned that she would not be permitted to return to Cuba, and upon entering the United States, she discovered that she would have to stay at least five years before she could apply for citizenship. She was trapped, a citizen of nowhere. But she soon reached New York, where she began carving out an unusually varied artistic path and resisting, even at a time of increasing focus on multiculturalism, the identity based labels "black composer," "female conductor" that others sought to attach to her. She eventually served as the New York Philharmonic's new music adviser in the mid 1990s. Although she curated the Philharmonic's American Eccentrics series and conducted educational concerts, the orchestra, which had a weak record with composers of color at that time, stymied some of her projects and never actually played her music. But this week she finally arrives at the Philharmonic, with the premiere of her work "Stride," to be performed on Feb. 13, 15 and 18, under Jaap van Zweden. The premiere is part of Project 19, a multiseason initiative in honor of the centenary of the 19th Amendment, that has commissioned works by 19 female composers. Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic's executive director in the '90s, returned as president and chief executive in 2017, and was eager to finally program Ms. Leon's music. "Here we are," Ms. Borda said in an interview, "coming back to an important artist and enfranchising her, over 20 years later." Ms. Leon's trajectory in America, from displaced pianist in training to compositional force, began with upheaval. Not long after she arrived, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; Ms. Leon barely spoke English, but found herself shouting slogans at antiwar protests. She was overwhelmed with stress, and her hair began to fall out. But propelled by talent, tenacity and a bit of luck, she began to reverse her fortunes. She played her way into a scholarship at the New York College of Music. Substituting for a friend as an accompanist to dance classes, she was spotted by the famed New York City Ballet dancer Arthur Mitchell. He was starting a new venture, the Dance Theater of Harlem, and recruited Ms. Leon as music director. Soon, Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine were teaching Ms. Leon their repertoire. "What freaked me out the most," she recalled with a laugh in an interview in the Philharmonic's archives, poring over old program booklets and photographs, was "when I found out that Stravinsky was alive, and that Stravinsky had written three or four ballets for Arthur Mitchell." At Mitchell's behest, she began conducting, improvising and, increasingly, composing. Her tendency was to say yes to every opportunity, and not fret too much about what it might entail. "People that I respect a lot, they tell me something seriously and I think about it, but I don't become negative," she said. "He told me, 'Write a piece.' And I said, 'Wow.' So I wrote the piece." She honed her voice in large scale, percussive dance works that dabbled in the serial techniques in vogue in the 1970s. The Dance Theater became an international sensation, and its tours even took her, finally, to Paris. At last she was able to return home, through a Cuban government family reunification program. Visiting Havana in 1979, she went first to the cemetery to see her formidable grandmother, who had died while she was abroad. She played recordings of her new compositions for her father, who remained skeptical. "He told me, 'Where are you in your music?'" she recalled. "He knew something about me that I was not addressing in my sound." "When you come from one land into another, one culture into another, you want to be assimilated," she added. "You want to learn the traditions, you want to learn the gestures." To remind her of her roots, her father took her to a Santeria ceremony, where she heard the polyrhythmic music that she had absorbed growing up, but which had remained absent from her early professional work. She returned to the United States, and soon after, her father suffered a stroke and died. Visa issues kept Ms. Leon from attending his funeral. She began having nightmares in which she heard pounding drums. She was working on a piece for solo cello, and started to sketch out a movement based on her father's rhythmic gait, in the style of a syncopated montuno. The grand mixture that is Cuban music its intricate grooves, melodic inflections, arrays of drums began flowing into her compositions. "I was searching myself, trying to address something," she recalled of those years, describing it as a period of "trying to understand my own culture." The music's central impulse is a forceful, bustling modernism, with angular and pointillistic gestures undergirded by kinetic, perpetual motion. She also became an outspoken advocate for cultural diversity. Alongside her pathbreaking career as a conductor, Ms. Leon spearheaded a pioneering outreach program at the Brooklyn Philharmonic and led community concerts across that borough. She oversaw major festivals of Latin American music with the American Composers Orchestra, served as music director of the Broadway production of "The Wiz," and testified at city hearings about the integration of pit orchestras. Today, she directs the wide ranging festival Composers Now, which is going on across New York through February. But as her career unfolded, Ms. Leon bristled at attempts to define her. Her background is mixed she has family roots in Spain, France, Africa and China and the seemingly binary categories of race and gender circumscribed her individuality. "I am tired of all our labels," she said in 1986. "I am nothing that the people want to call me. They do not know who I am. The fact that I am using this physical costume does not describe my energy, does not describe my entity. My chosen purpose in life is to be a musician, a composer, a conductor. This is the way I am making my contribution to mankind." She saw herself as a global citizen, a cosmopolitan figure boxed in by categories that had confined people of color for hundreds of years. The scholar Alejandro Madrid, who is writing a biography of Ms. Leon, observed recently that this ethos was grounded in her arrival in the United States in the late '60s, toward the end of the civil rights movement. "Identity politics are very strong," he said of that period, "and she never felt very comfortable with it." He added, "The ambivalences she has about blackness come out of the specific experience of her being in New York at this time, and being always labeled something that she didn't believe she really was." Ms. Leon's position is largely the same today: She praised the Philharmonic's Project 19 as a "reparations gesture" but also argued that "any label limits the person." "I honor all my ancestors in my skin, and in my character, and my presence," she said. "But I don't go around saying I'm Cuban Italian, or I'm Cuban French, or I'm Cuban this and Cuban that." Nearly two decades ago she moved to Nyack, a village on the Hudson River north of Manhattan, seeking more space. "I always lived in places where, every time I looked out the window, I was looking at someone else," she said. Today, Ms. Leon remains a bit astonished by the trajectory of her life and career. "I consider what happened to me to be a miracle," she said. She attributes some of her success to mystical forces, adding: "I still talk to the spirits of my ancestors." Her music is still infused with a vigorous pluralism, although it is a bit more relaxed less harsh, less busy than her earlier efforts. (Little of her recent work has been commercially recorded.) The Philharmonic will present a Nightcap concert on Feb. 15 that explores her myriad influences, with guests including the jazz harpist Edmar Castaneda. "Stride," her new work for the orchestra, is inspired by two women: the suffragist Susan B. Anthony and the grandmother who was a major presence in Ms. Leon's life a progressive who embraced socialism as soon as it reached Cuba. "Stride," unfolding in a series of fitful episodes thickets of glassy strings, declamatory brass and contrapuntal juxtapositions that evoke Charles Ives is both solemn and celebratory. It is also aware of the racialized limits on the enfranchisement that women won a century ago. Its final moment offers a note of prophetic dissent: As two percussionists symbolically ring 19 tubular bells, a third plays a rhythmic pattern based on a clave from West Africa. "That is the symbol of the people of color," Ms. Leon said. "It's like, this is next." "It's the 100th anniversary," she added. "A lot of things have changed, a lot of things need to change, and that is my very personal comment. That we're celebrating something that was handicapped, and something that is still handicapped." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The first overview of Darrel Ellis's photo based art in New York in over 20 years is suffused with a sense of tragedy and loss. This is not only because Mr. Ellis's promising trajectory was cut short in 1992 when he died of AIDS at 33 , or that his work incorporates family photographs taken by his father, a professional photographer, whose life ended violently in police custody in 1958, just before Mr. Ellis was born. This information makes the show sadder, but the mournful quality comes from the idiosyncratic ways the artist manipulated his father's otherwise happy images of family gatherings. Mr. Ellis, who was black, distorted his images by projecting their negatives onto little stepped reliefs of clay or plaster and then rephotographing the disturbed image. The results are washed out and ghostly, with unexpected fissures of white and stuttering repetitions. Sometimes mirrors are added to the arrangement, introducing blank circles or fragmented reflections of the artist. These images convey a mysterious world, full of emotion and almost impossible to make whole. It is rived with fault lines, foremost among them the many ways American society itself threatens the wholeness of all families, especially black ones. ROBERTA SMITH The problem with this exhibition begins with its title, "Picasso's Women." The possessive is uncomfortable in its implication of ownership. The news release tries to temper the effect by noting that Picasso's many wives and mistresses were "not merely mute muses." Mute, however, is what they seem in the gallery. The exhibition, dedicated to the art historian John Richardson, who died in March, contains a rare and impressive collection of paintings and sculptures that largely haven't been seen before in New York. But it also seems lacking in deeper context or curatorial logic, especially in light of recent shows devoted to two of the women, Dora Maar and Olga Khokhlova. The most successful groupings are those that demonstrate an artistic progression the rounds of Fernande Olivier's face turning to angles with the development of Cubism or showcase variations on a theme, as with the sensual, colorful paintings of Marie Therese Walter in states of repose, including "Le Repos" and "Le Reve," both from 1932. Still, I couldn't escape a feeling of wearying sameness a sense of how Picasso, who abused his lovers, made them into formal experiments by using their bodies, but rarely captured what made them unique. The exceptions are few but worth savoring, like "Portrait de Femme Profil Gauche Sur Fond Vert et Brun" (1939), which has a tenderness one rarely sees in Picasso's work, and "Femme au Petit Chapeau Rond, Assise" (1942), from which Dora Maar looks out with a self possession so striking it almost reads as a rebuke. JILLIAN STEINHAUER The painter David Novros has long been devoted to geometric abstraction but not so much its primary format: the rectilinear canvas. This show traces his wide ranging pursuit of the genre on multiple or shaped canvases, copper and iron as well as in ceramic, fresco and architecture . Relating painting to architecture has been an interest of Mr. Novros's since the early 1970s, when he exhibited at the storied Bykert Gallery, a haven for risky art. Combining a signature L shape with blocks of color, his compositions often evoke doors, windows or portals, and have always animated blank areas of either canvas or wall. See "Phoenix," "DB" (both from 2000) and the monumental "Boathouse" (2016), which spreads seven panels across 20 feet. The show also includes a 2000 model for a painted atrium house. Also on view are three wonderfully bulky, even goofy works painted on copper, creviced or curved by carefully controlled explosions of dynamite before paint was applied. But the core of Mr. Novros's work remains a kind of spirituality, which achieves an architectural resonance in two imposing, moderately shaped paintings from 2019. "SW" is deep red, "NW" is deep blue. Their arched forms and side panels conjure Renaissance chapels, as if revisited by a devout modernist whose hero is Mark Rothko. ROBERTA SMITH Rough little tiles 306 of them fill a wooden frame in an untitled piece by Maddy Parrasch. Most are glazed ceramic, teetering between indigo and black. But a scattered few enough to break up the pattern of the others without quite forming a pattern of their own are gypsum printed with found photographs. A lightning bolt, a pair of fighter jets, a detail of a painting by Giotto. It's a very contemporary way of treating photographic imagery as unimportant background noise, mainly good for decorative accents. Emma Soucek treats photos the same way, stapling snippets cut out of magazines, along with the occasional drawing, sticker and even a laminated piece of Ms. Parrasch's ceramic, into her striking, otherwise abstract compositions of paper pulp on canvas. (The two artists were friends, as well as classmates at the Rhode Island School of Design, before Ms. Parrasch died last year in a car crash.) Though they're hyperactive with bright, textile influenced patterns, these pieces by Ms. Soucek also share Ms. Parrasch's version of a Japanese wabi sabi aesthetic. Every pinched bit of pulp is a clear record of Ms. Soucek's fingers, which puts process on a par with product, and gives equal time to accident, to intention and to the materials. WILL HEINRICH Post truth and alternative facts are among the buzzwords of our era, and they are central to Peggy Ahwesh's smart, unsettling exhibition "Cleave" at Microscope. Four video installations here focus on recent topics and news stories, examining how these have been presented in images. "Verily! The Blackest Sea, the Falling Sky" (2017) features appropriated snippets from a Taiwanese news organization that uses animation to report the news, while "Re: The Operation" (2019) offers two different versions of the hunt for and execution of Osama bin Laden: the American government's story versus that of independent reporters. In both of these installations, banal images of people in extreme situations often verging on cartoon cute sanitize the violence and traumatic nature of the stories. "Kansas Atlas" (2019) and "Border Control" (2019) use footage shot by Ms. Ahwesh to explore the American heartland and the country's borders . Filters and special effects transform the landscape into a psychedelic Rorschach maelstrom, and "Border Control" shows a migrant from Ghana scaling a United States border wall near Tijuana, Mexico. According to the gallery, Ms. Ahwesh spoke with the man about his long journey a bizarre tale that is also oddly characteristic of our chaotic moment. MARTHA SCHWENDENER | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit...Ike Edeani for The New York Times It's not a shock that the choreographer Bill T. Jones would be thinking about AIDS right about now. "'This is my second plague,'" he said he told his company recently. "I know it's kind of a coarse thing to say. They're different, but they have things in common." Yes, the circumstances of the coronavirus are different, but there's a sense that the dance world, which suffered tremendous losses during the AIDS crisis, has been through this all before. "Do we really want to change the way we live?" he said. "Are we willing to give up anything? Do I really need the convenience of going to a movie or a restaurant when I want to? Am I willing to have to think more about things?" Like everyone, he has questions. But Mr. Jones, 68, a choreographer whose visceral dances have used bodies and a diverse assortment of them to explore and confront pain, whether physical, cultural or emotional, is looking exactly like an artist with the experience and wisdom to help others navigate the present moment. Each Monday he meets with his company for a virtual check in. "I try to talk them through what it was like to be living through the AIDS crisis and how many of us felt cheated," he said. "You will be able to survive, but life will change," he said he told them, adding: "We lost a lot of people at a time when those people should have been doing what they wanted to do, which was build a future. But life went on." In the meantime, we have these photographs of rehearsals in February, which show the breadth of his vision. In interviews before and after the shutdown, Mr. Jones, who is now at his home in Cottage Valley, N.Y., with his husband, the artist Bjorn Amelan, discussed the creative process behind the work and commented on the photos. "They captured something about it, which helped me," Mr. Jones said as he and I looked at them together. "But of course it landed like a knife in the heart after the cancellation." Before working on "Deep Blue Sea," Mr. Jones had spent been six years making "Analogy Trilogy," a series of evening length, collage type works that explored trauma and memory in language and movement. After that, he said, he felt done at least for awhile. But the invitation from the Armory lured him back. "The Armory is the way we used to feel about going to BAM back in the '80s," Mr. Jones said, referring to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "I thought, maybe it should be a swan song. Maybe I should make one more work and, look, it can only be done in one place. Like give everything to it." It was fitting, too; a space as expansive as the Armory required that level of intensity. For "Deep Blue Sea," Mr. Jones was inspired in part by Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" namely the lonely character of Pip, the African American boy who at one point is stranded at sea along with writings by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The ambitious and personal production, a collaboration with the architect Elizabeth Diller and the projection designer Peter Nigrini, features a sonic backdrop by Nick Hallett, the music producer Hprizm and the vocalist and composer Holland Andrews. The production progresses from one dancer to 100, beginning with Mr. Jones. His solo would have been his first time performing in more than 15 years. The solitary figure of Mr. Jones is then joined by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. He calls this part "The Raft," which is also how he refers to the company; it has helped get him through impossible moments in his life, like Mr. Zane's death. The final scene introduces 89 guest performers. "What does it mean to take this lonely, wounded apostate from the avant garde?" he said. "What does it mean to put that person in the world? What does it look like?" He is left, now, with more questions: "What is my art learning from Covid 19?" he said. "I don't know if I'm ready for the new normal. How does my art find the new normal?" For him, the expanse of the Armory was a way to show the fragility of a figure in a sea of space. "We can talk about loneliness," he said, "but how do you show it?" "I feel that we're constantly trying to convince the world that there's beauty in movement," he said. "That space is an eloquent medium. That text is not always necessary." But now, without physical proximity, what's left? "That's what I've got to find out," Mr. Jones said. After Mr. Zane died, Mr. Jones created two large scale works: "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land" (1990), a sprawling three hour spectacle that explored race and sexuality; and "Still/Here" (1994), a two act production that was developed in workshops with people with life threatening illnesses. For Mr. Jones, "Still/Here" wasn't about AIDS; it was about survival. But in 1989, he did choreograph a dance that was more specifically tied to the AIDS epidemic: "D Man in the Waters," which he made to celebrate the resilient spirit of Demian Acquavella, a company member who died of AIDS in 1990. A documentary about the history and the enduring quality of "D Man" is in the works by Rosalynde LeBlanc, another former Jones/Zane dancer, and Tom Hurwitz. As the world changes, it is turning into a film about making art in a time of plague that mirrors our own. "Deep Blue Sea," like "D Man," is highly physical. Contact is integral. "If you'd think about a large work, like what you saw us rehearsing in the Armory is that going to make some people gasp,' oh my God, how can they touch each other?'" he said. "How can so many strangers be touching?" He considered the photograph in which he is held aloft by other dancers: Curled on his side with his hands wrapped around his head, he's vulnerable, delicate, defenseless. "When we were in our prime and doing contact," Mr. Jones said, referring to contact improvisation, "we were like the kamikazes we would run in and with no mat, full on jump and roll. Boom! My lower back has still probably not forgiven me for it, but you know when you're young and indestructible." Mr. Jones is no longer young. He is not indestructible. Yet in "Deep Blue Sea" he re enters the stream of dancing bodies. "That picture says so much about what is needed for me to be there," he said. "Yes, I'm saying something about loneliness and abandonment and the water, but I've got to really give myself to them. I've got to be completely in their hands. And that's kind of beautiful." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"The Titanic is going down," said Bob Wells, the founder of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, alluding to the general state of the economy and environment. "This is a lifeboat. This is a hope, a promise of a better, more meaningful life."Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York Times "The Titanic is going down," said Bob Wells, the founder of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, alluding to the general state of the economy and environment. "This is a lifeboat. This is a hope, a promise of a better, more meaningful life." QUARTZSITE, Ariz. "Road Virus" is a 32 foot long matte black "skoolie" that is the rolling home and bookstore of Emily Black, 35, a former librarian and an alumna of a Bay Area tech start up, and Sade Black, 27, a musician and writer. From it, the couple sells horror, science fiction, erotica and other so called fringe lit, along with oddities like raven skulls, preserved scorpions and postcards sent by Charles Manson. For the last month, they have been parked here in front of Reader's Oasis Books, an idiosyncratically stocked emporium presided over by Paul Winer, a sinewy former rock 'n' roller otherwise known as the naked bookseller because he wears only a sock over his private parts. Skoolies are school buses that have been turned into houses on wheels, and the Blacks, who bought theirs through Craigslist for 7,500 and have been on the road for a year, are new members of a sprawling and disparate tribe of vehicular nomads that flock to this dusty desert town each winter. They come for the boondocking nomad vernacular for free or low cost camping on the thousands of acres of federal land that are adjacent to the place, and for the community, particularly that found at a two week long rally called the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. Melody Tilton, a 31 year old massage therapist, said she had been inspired by Mr. Wells's YouTube videos to take to the road last fall with her husband, Kyle, also 31, who had worked in information technology, in a white '97 Roadtrek, though she hankered for a skoolie. (Roadtreks are easier to park.) They sold their house in Minnesota, and are running on the proceeds. "I had been looking for ways to be a full time hobo," Ms. Tilton said. "I thought you had to be retired." Committed nomads come to share tips on solar power, stealth overnights in parking spots on city streets, van conversion, mail, hygiene, finances and low cost dental care, which can be found over the border in the Mexican town of Los Algodones, an hour and a half away. Aspirational nomads come to test the waters, in rented mini Winnies and camper vans. And they come to meet Mr. Wells, a celebrity here. With his abundant gray hair, lustrous beard and mellifluous voice, he is an amiable philosopher elder of the road: Bruce Chatwin in a GMC cargo van. Twenty three years ago, Mr. Wells went through a bitter divorce that upended his finances. He couldn't afford to rent an apartment on his own; with his last 1,500 in savings, he bought a box van and moved into it, stealth parking on the streets of Anchorage, where he worked at a Safeway and where his ex wife and two sons lived. The first nights, he cried himself to sleep. "I came into the van life kicking and screaming, but I fell in love with it," he said. Radical simplicity is his credo. From his YouTube channel, Cheaprvliving, which has over 120,000 subscribers, and his website of the same name, he dispenses practical advice such as how to live on 500 a month (Mr. Wells has a pension from his years at Safeway), or tips for camping with pets, along with musings on the psychological and environmental benefits of road life. Some tutorials are winning combinations of the pragmatic and the esoteric. "Pooping in a Car, Van or RV" is one of his most popular videos, with more than 230,000 views. As for the method, suffice it to say that Mr. Wells is extremely fastidious and has perfected a bucket system that is a concert of Howard Hughes like moves involving two garbage bags, antibacterial wipes, gel alcohol and water. "We're out here to be comfortable and happy," he says in the video, "not to prove how tough we are." The road from Quartzsite to the site of this year's RTR was pocked with muffler scraping craters. ("End Arizona Dept. of Transportation Maintenance," read a helpful sign.) Most nomads left the rutted tarmac for the dusty shoulder, bucketing along until they hit a dirt track. It wasn't easy to discern the shape and scope of the rally, or figure out where it actually began. Converted delivery trucks, Roadtreks, vintage RVs, skoolies and even a few cars (Mr. Wells likes to say that those who are living in Priuses are the saints of the community) were camped along the washes at decorous intervals from each other, in distinct contrast to the more conventional RV campgrounds that also surround Quartzsite, where gleaming Winnebagos park nose to tail and side by side. One afternoon, he and Giuseppe Spadafora, 34, a former video editor who has been on the road for over a decade serving tea at no charge and a manifesto of anticonsumerism that is a continuing social experiment he calls Free Tea Party, held a book swap and social. Mr. Spadafora has been traversing the country in a white 1989 Econoline he has outfitted like a bohemian wooden boat, with snug banquettes covered in satiny damask pillows. Mr. Grey is helping him put together a manual about "eco friendly mobile living systems," using his vegetable oil fueled tea bus as an example. The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous agora was a centrally located patch of chalky ground ringed by creosote bushes and giant saguaro. There were seminars on creating YouTube videos; a tin can Q. and A., and show and tells of favorite gadgets. Two tarps were neatly arrayed with books, clothing, housewares and personal care products. Attendees could leave unwanted goods from decluttering their rigs or pick up needed items for free. A bulletin board was festooned with notices for, variously, the Fabulous RVing Women (FRVW on Facebook); a lost cat; entreaties for help installing solar power; a self defense class for women; invitations to caravan to Los Algodones or Slab City, the outsider community on an abandoned Navy base in California's Badlands that is a de rigueur stop for this set; and a beading class at the RTR "art camp," which was two trestle tables strewn with art supplies set out by Sue Soaring Sun, a 62 year old artist. One sign printed on green construction paper read: "Wanted: RTR Kindness Generosity Stories." One afternoon, the faint smell of charcoal briquettes wafted over the crowd, sunburned men and women planted in camp chairs and trying to keep snuffling dogs not used to leashes to heel. As Mr. Wells was extolling the virtues of camping above 7,000 feet, a late visitor wondered why. "He doesn't like to get hot," one woman whispered. A man raised his hand. "I'm an introvert," he said softly. "You're an introvert. So what are we doing here?" Mr. Wells nodded and asked all the introverts in the crowd to raise their hands. Mostly everyone did. "Good question," Mr. Wells said. "Why have we driven thousands of miles to be together? It's because we need each other so much. Even the most introverted of us knows that. We're looking for like minded people who will let us be our authentic selves. Together, at a distance. Humans are funny things. Don't worry. The RTR is going to end, and you'll be alone again soon." These days, Mr. Wells does break his solitude occasionally to camp with Carolyn Higgins, 50, a two year road veteran who left her marketing business in San Francisco and is now, like Mr. Wells and others, a YouTube star. They met last summer, and their bond much remarked upon has made them the mother and father of the movement. "Are you dating?" a woman in the crowd asked. They are not, though they like to tease their audience. YouTube is the glue and engine for the road bound. Stars like Nomadic Fanatic (a full time RVer who travels with his cat, Jax, and has 130,000 subscribers) provide inspiration and technical advice, along with a forum for a tribe that can feel isolated from each other and society. It is also a revenue model, albeit a modest one. This is a community that has no relation to the social media phenomenon known collectively as vanlife, for the Instagrammable adventures of attractive young white couples in their atmospheric vintage VW vans, doing yoga, surfing and accruing sponsorship from the makers of hipster products. (Though the odd festival fan will show up at the RTR, having seemingly confused Quartzsite with Coachella, only to be confounded by the lack of swag and services, like the guy who came two years ago and complained on an online forum that there was no sound stage or bathhouse.) The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous is a different kind of van dweller mecca, said Jessica Bruder, whose 2017 book, "Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty First Century," followed a small posse of retirement age women forced into the van life through economic hardship, part of a new and growing labor force of older Americans working seasonally as campground hosts and Amazon stockers. While van culture may be growing because more and more people are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of flat wages and rising home prices, Ms. Bruder added, "I also think people are frustrated by consumer culture and what they are supposed to want. People who are constrained by economics are also saying, 'I can opt out.' I think that can be tremendously liberating." For her research, Ms. Bruder bought a white GMC Vandura, named it Halen, for the 1980s hair band, and learned to correct for its sideways drift on the highways. Despite aching shoulders from keeping it on course, she loved being out in her van, she said. "There was one day when we were driving in a caravan, like horses galloping across the desert. I was following a 70 year old woman named Swankie, and we were on our way to see an ancient earthwork in a petrified forest. My heart was in my throat. That sense of constant motion on the road, when everything feels new. The mythos of the desert landscape. It got me." Ms. Higgins, who cashed in her 401(k) to buy a balky RV named Matilda after a month hiking on the John Muir Trail erased any lingering attachment she had to the apartment she was renting for 1,600, now has over 50,000 YouTube subscribers: "Patrons" who pay from 7 a month get extra content. "I think a lot of women my age have a feeling they'd like to take control," Ms. Higgins said, noting that her videos seem to have struck a chord. "Maybe they are recognizing that mainstream society doesn't feel safe anymore. For many of us, we've been fed the lie that we have to have the heels, the makeup. That we aren't complete without a man. We've been fed the lie we have to get married and take care of everyone. I think women are saying, 'What about me?'" Perhaps more of an introvert than Mr. Wells, Ms. Higgins has struggled with her YouTube fans, who crowd her at campsites "Imagine it being Halloween for two weeks straight," she said clamor for her autograph and send her marriage proposals. At the RTR, she was parked so far away from the action that this reporter nearly got lost among the washes trying to make her way out. But Ms. Higgins gamely led a caravan of nine rigs with her to the Women's March anniversary rally in Las Vegas, and to a meet and greet with Mr. Wells at the RTR. "This event has changed my life," she said then, tearing up. "I'm very proud that I found my voice, and that it matters." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Three black teenagers in Bedford Stuyvesant are shot by police officers in a case of mistaken identity. One of them, Kareem Jenkins, survives and learns a secret: Only black people have superpowers. How does the world react as the truth is exposed? This is Black, a new comic book series about black characters by black creators. The comic, developed by the writer Kwanza Osajyefo and the designer Tim Smith 3 after a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, was designed to tell a story that reflected their lives and helped fill a void, they said. While there has been media attention on superheroes who break traditional molds in recent comic series, Chalice is transgender, Faith is full figured, the Hulk is Korean American the same sense of inclusion has not always been apparent behind the scenes. Black, published by Black Mask Studios, is distinctive for the diversity of its creative staff as well as the power of its covers, which were illustrated by Khary Randolph and strikingly rendered in a palette of black, white and red. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Terry Crews has an enviable resume: former professional football player; actor on "Brooklyn Nine Nine"; star in the "Expendables" movie franchise; and, according to People magazine, one of the sexiest men alive. But there's a new job title that he finds especially thrilling: furniture designer. "There's nothing more satisfying," Mr. Crews said, discussing his first collection of furniture for Bernhardt Design, which will be presented during the ICFF furniture fair in New York later this month. "I want something beautiful. I want something special. I want to see something that I did with my own hands that touches the world." The brawny Mr. Crews has long had a creative side. He studied graphic design at Western Michigan University on an art scholarship. As a player in the National Football League, he painted portraits of teammates for about 5,000 each to make ends meet when he was cut from teams. After retiring from football, he tried to get a job as an animator. That didn't work out, but he began acting and that did. Mr. Crews studied graphic design in college on an art scholarship. In recent years, he has also developed an irrepressible passion for design. Mr. Crews speaks about his April 2016 trip to the Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan the way other people may talk about attending Vanity Fair's Oscar party. Unlike experienced professionals, "They don't know all the things that they're not supposed to do," Mr. Helling said. "It's a clean slate. It comes from their heart, rather than being an academic exercise." Why would highly accomplished individuals from other creative fields bother with designing furniture and fabrics? "It's just so exciting to see an idea come to life," said Ms. Merritt, who collects vintage ribbon and has used some to make her own guitar straps. When he finally did, she used her ribbon collection as inspiration for a line of six striped fabrics with names like Verse, Reverb and Swing. Such cross disciplinary design collaborations are increasingly common, said Joel Towers, executive dean of Parsons School of Design. "There's a real breakdown in boundaries," he said, where creative people are no longer expected to stick to their specialties. "Some of these people are performers who really understand their audience and the sense of what people desire. These are all key components of design." He also pointed to social media, where celebrities often share pictures of their homes and personal style choices. The idea that people can then get involved in designing those style choices "feels very much of our time," he said. "It's about design being more democratized." Indeed, when Mr. Kravitz, who founded Kravitz Design in 2003, speaks about design, he frequently does so in a very personal way. "The products I design I do use," he said. "It's very rare that Kravitz Design does something and I don't have a piece in one of my homes. It's very important to me." That intimate approach has led to products like Mr. Kravitz's Trousdale collection for Rocky Mountain Hardware, which includes rectangular door levers and pulls with a deeply pitted surface inspired by one of his belt buckles. "It's a different, edgy, modern look more so than other things we've done," said Christian Nickum, the chief executive of Rocky Mountain Hardware. "It's enlightened our customers to some of the different designs that we can create." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
For anyone with ovaries, menopause is a fact of life seemingly mundane, perhaps, in its inevitability. In fact, menopause is a biological rarity, one scientists haven't managed to fully explain. Only three species outlive their fertility: humans, killer whales and short finned pilot whales. Figuring out what commonalities exist among these species might help scientists understand why menopause happens. A new study on killer whales, published on Thursday in Current Biology, suggests reproductive conflict between mothers and daughters may have played an important role in the evolution of menopause. Analyzing four decades of data on killer whales in the Pacific Northwest, the authors found that when mothers and daughters breed around the same time, the calves of the older females had higher mortality rates than those of the younger females. Female killer whales typically start reproducing at age 15, and stop in their 30s and 40s. Yet they can live to be more than 90, meaning they might spend up to two thirds of their lives not birthing any offspring. In the framework of evolution this seems to make little sense: One might expect that female killer whales that continue reproducing throughout their lives would pass on more of their genes. But the unique demography of killer whale social groups may motivate younger females to invest more competitive effort into reproduction, tipping the costs and benefits of reproduction for older females, said Darren Croft, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Exeter in England and an author of the new paper. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
He did "Nassim" on a Wednesday evening, showing up after an "All My Sons" rehearsal looking slightly disheveled and appearing bemused as he awaited instructions hidden in a box on a table on the stage at New York City Center. (The show continues there, with various performers, through April 20.) Edited excerpts from a conversation follow. What were you expecting? Nothing. I've done a lot of improv; I've worked with TJ and Dave; and I guess I had an expectation that I would be taken care of. I couldn't imagine anybody was going to throw me on stage to humiliate me or let me flail, because that wouldn't make for a very good show. Did you get any instructions? Stage management sent me a little note a few days before the show that told me what stage door to arrive at, and said when you read a question, feel free to answer it, and if a word is written in all caps, stress it. They did not tell me what to wear. They did tell me to take my cellphone with me, but to put it on airplane mode. What were you thinking as the show unfolded? I'm a weeper, and I did think to myself, somewhat early in the proceedings, that I might have to steel myself, because I don't want to start crying. They told me later some performers do. What about it made you think you could cry? In the time we're living in right now, most people I know walk around trying not to cry most of the time. And the show touches on a lot of things storytelling, language, transcending borders, connection and connection with anybody is moving. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Unable to complete a race on Sunday because of injuries to both knees, a tearful Lindsey Vonn announced she was considering an immediate retirement from ski racing. But on Wednesday, Vonn said she hoped she could overcome her injuries and continue racing. "I am taking things day by day, and we will see what happens," Vonn wrote on her Instagram account. "I know that I might not get the ending to my career that I had hoped for, but if there is a chance, I will take it." Last weekend in Italy, in her first races since injuring her left knee in a November training session, Vonn, who has already had several surgeries on her right knee, struggled to find her form. She finished 15th and ninth in consecutive downhills, and in Sunday's super G, she skied off the course without finishing the race after a mishap halfway down. With heavy braces on both knees, Vonn conceded it might be time to end her career. "I've had four surgeries on my right knee; I've got no L.C.L. on my left knee, " Vonn said, referring to her lateral collateral ligament. "There's only so much I can handle, and I might have reached my maximum." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The moment Chauncey Kearney broke out in a rash upon hearing the cost of flowers for his May 24 wedding was a moment of reckoning for his fiancee, Chanet Tisdel. "I was like, I have to better my communication skills," Ms. Tisdel said. Despite her desire for a riot of expensive, fat hydrangeas, "I realized that, at the end of the day, I'm going to see this man every day for the rest of my life. I wasn't going to walk into it angry." Mr. Kearney, she acknowledged, is not cheap, just more interested in investing in the house they bought in 2015 in Lynbrook, N.Y., than in giving a party for the ages. Fortunately, theirs is a relationship built on hashing out differences. Ms. Tisdel met Mr. Kearney in 2013, when she was living in Queens and working as an executive assistant to the president of Ralph Lauren and he was living in Brooklyn and putting his training at Institute of Culinary Education to use at Riverpark. The conversation flowed, but the end of the date took a turn for the weird. "After dinner I asked him to a movie, but he said he had to go home and do his laundry," she said. "Then he walked me to the train station and shook my hand, like it was a formal interview." Later, she asked Mr. McKay if Mr. Kearney was aware he had been set up on a date. He said he was. When Mr. Kearney called Ms. Tisdel for a second date not long after, she accepted out of curiosity: Was his formality just first date nerves? Would he loosen up on date No. 2? The answer, she discovered after a stroll through a Manhattan car show with Mr. Kearney, was no. This time when he said good night, he hugged her. "But it was a weird grandma hug, like he patted my back," she said. Three more dates with businesslike endings would pass before frustration set in. "I was like, I don't know what I'm doing with this person. I might as well be his cousin." Then, a breakthrough. On date No. 6, he made her dinner at her apartment. It came with a proposal. "I had figured out that he was reserved, and that he really wanted to do things step by step, the right way. And I loved that," she said. They sealed the deal on date six, and on their new relationship status, with a real kiss. As a couple, they cleared relationship milestones quickly. Within weeks, Ms. Tisdel had introduced Mr. Kearney to her mother, Pier Moore of Brooklyn, and father, Robert Tisdel of Queens. Six months in, they traveled to Virginia Beach to meet Mr. Kearney's family. Ms. Tisdel won over her future in laws instantly: "She's a phenomenal charmer, and it was clear how much she cared about my son," said Tanya Kearney, Mr. Kearney's mother. In spring 2015, they moved into a Queens apartment together. That fall, they bought the house in Lynbrook, but not without first making sure their financial views were in sync. "I'm the first one in my family to own a home, and Chauncey is the first one in his family," Ms. Tisdel said. "We knew we had a lot to learn, and we decided we would go slow." Ms. Tisdel learned to reel in her instinct to call a professional the minute a window needed repairing or a room needed painting, something she was trained to do in her job as an executive assistant, she said. And Mr. Kearney learned that the internet can be a newbie do it yourselfer's best friend. They both learned that housing bills pile up even when homeowners decide to get handy. Which is why Ms. Tisdel was surprised when Mr. Kearney proposed that Christmas. "We had just closed on the house in September, so we made a deal that we were only going to give each other three gifts to save money," she said. On Christmas morning, she spotted an extra present behind the tree. She was annoyed. "I thought, did I accidentally buy him an extra gift, and now I only get three?" She hadn't. Mr. Kearney had wrapped a Tacori rose gold diamond ring with a halo of pave diamonds into nesting boxes. When she finally found the ring box, he took off his bathrobe to reveal a tuxedo. And that wasn't the only surprise. After he proposed on one knee and Ms. Tisdel replied with a tearful yes, she looked out the living room window and saw her grandmother and mother looking in. Mr. Kearney had tipped them off, knowing they would want to be there. The family spent the day celebrating, with Mr. Kearney showing off his skills in the kitchen. Ms. Tisdel showed off her ring, which was everything she had dreamed of, and only sort of a surprise. During a hypothetical if we ever get married talk months before, Ms. Tisdel had laid out her ideal ring scenario. "He knows I love rose gold, and he had asked me if it was important that I have a diamond or if it could have a gem stone," Ms. Tisdel said. "I was like, Please. Let's not be creative with this decision, sir." On Dec. 26, 2015, her first day as a bride to be, Ms. Tisdel created a name for the category of wedding she envisioned: affordable luxury. "I came up with that for Chauncey," she said. "Because at first, everything I wanted he was like, no, I really don't want that. He would have been happy with City Hall. But that's just not me." Once she convinced him that her idea of luxuriousness was attainable through clever planning, he perked up. Ms. Tisdel followed a script when sitting down with vendors. "Whenever I met with one, I would say, I love what you bring to the table, but this is the dollar amount I can work with," she said. That resulted in her florist choosing flowers with a life span long enough to last through the rehearsal dinner and wedding, and the top dollar stationer Engaging Invites designing a handful of thank you cards rather than invitations. On the afternoon of May 24, around 75 friends and family kicked off Memorial Day weekend at de Seversky Mansion. Ms. Tisdel, shoeless and in a mermaid gown with bustle and crystal and lace detail down the sides, walked down a grassy aisle on the mansion's manicured lawn with her nephew, D'Andre Reed, as a string quartet played. Five attendants on each side, including a man of honor, Leslie Hill, in a custom electric blue cape with black tassels, watched as Ms. Tisdel and Mr. Kearney, in a quilted white Chanel style jacket, met under an altar canopied with greenery and white roses. Bernadette Saunders, founder of the Kairos Moment, a New York wedding planning company, helped coordinate the wedding and officiated; she is a minister at Refuge Apostolic Church of Christ, in Freeport, N.Y. After a short ceremony in which both promised to forever be no one other than themselves, Ms. Tisdel and Mr. Kearney jumped a broom into their new life debt free. "We saved for this wedding," Mr. Kearney said. "When we get home, we'll have only a couple of bills to pay. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a relief." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Forces fighting for the future of New York City's fashion industry came to a head on Monday evening in the less than chic but nevertheless most fitting of places: the auditorium at the High School of Fashion Industries in Manhattan. On one side were those battling on behalf of the garment district, a neighborhood that takes up about a dozen blocks in Midtown Manhattan and is home to more than 400 clothing manufacturing businesses. Since 1987, the area has been split into two sectors that are protected by special zoning regulations that discourage landlords from converting space used for industrial purposes to residences, offices or hotels. Facing off against them were proponents of a plan sponsored by the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio that seeks to strip the zoning protections and gradually shift the heart of the industry to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a move supported by 51 million worth of investments in technology, jobs training, business development and costs associated with moving. The plan is backed by the Garment District Alliance and the Council of Fashion Designers of America. "Today is about beginning a long discussion, first about urban manufacturing in general, then about garment manufacturing in particular," Ms. Brewer said. The crux of the argument is whether the zoning changes will force out industrial tenants, who already feel squeezed by rents. The debate is a continuation of one from 2009, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's administration considered removing the regulations, an effort that was eventually thwarted by a grass roots movement. On one hand, the government argues that the zoning regulations have had no effect on talent retainment in the garment district. That side points to data provided by the Census Bureau, which says the number of jobs in the district has been declining for decades. Most recent data show a drop from 13,607 in 2000 to 5,123 in 2015. "From the 1950s, we have had a steady decrease in apparel jobs in New York," said Barbara A. Blair, the president of the Garment District Alliance. "When the special overlay was put into place in 1987, it did not even put a blip into job retention." But union leaders, designers, manufacturers and business owners say the drop has partly been caused by a lack of government oversight, which has led to more than five million square feet of noncompliant office uses in the district. "One of the reasons the job decline is continuing its slide is that the zoning is not properly enforced," said Samanta Cortes, the founder of Save the Garment Center, a grass roots organization that published a public letter last weekend proposing a plan to develop the garment center with the addition of a commercial arcade, a designer co working space, a center for skills development and more. Also contributing to the migration of business out of the garment center and to the other boroughs, and to New Jersey, have been rising rents and short leases. "My landlord will not give me a lease, so I'm basically month to month," said George Kalajian, the president of Tom's Sons International Pleating, which has worked with designers like Dennis Basso, Elie Saab and Zuhair Murad. "My future is dwindling in another man's hands." Since 2010, office space in the area that includes the garment district has gone from an average of 36.10 a square foot to 57.34, according to Colliers International, a real estate company in New York. Within Midtown South, which Colliers considers to cover everything between Canal and 40th Streets, the area has the lowest average asking rates. There is still plenty of room for prices to rise. The proposal from the city's Economic Development Corporation and the Planning Commission is a response to these rising costs. Within the next three years, the government plans to offer five to 10 year leases on 700,000 square feet of space in Sunset Park at 16 to 25 a square foot. The development agency estimates that there is an additional 2.4 million square feet of space available from private firms in the area. "The city is committing millions to build great space where garment manufacturers can enjoy the kinds of affordable, long term leases they've said they need and can't get," said Stephanie Baez, a spokeswoman for the development corporation. "This is about safeguarding a job intensive sector for future generations by taking action today." Those invested in maintaining the Manhattan location praise the accessibility and wealth of options that the garment center offers. Many also have a special regard and nostalgia for the garment center as a place that was a thriving hub for New York's fashion industry at a time when hundreds of thousands of people worked in the city's apparel manufacturing industry. This emotional investment was apparent during the symposium, when some of the participants spoke over each other or snapped in anger, and audience members shouted passionately from their seats. "If Bette Midler rips the train of her dress because the understudy chorus boy steps on it, the wardrobe supervisor can head to the garment center, buy the fabric, get it back to the theater, get that train recut and stitched before the show even begins," said Steven Epstein, a costume designer. They are concerned that trying to move the cluster to another place nearly an hour away by subway and stripping the garment center of special zoning regulations will destroy an ecosystem that has been built up over decades. "The reason we have a cluster is because we have protection," said Yeohlee Teng, a designer who has been fighting to keep the zoning laws in place since at least 2009. Joe Ferrara, the president of the New York Garment Center Supplier Association, called the move "a deportation to Brooklyn." He and other opponents of the plan say that it will force out workers for whom the commute is not viable. In response, the development agency points to census data showing that more than half of the city's garment manufacturing workers live in Brooklyn and Queens. Lilly Lampe and her husband, the founders of Blluemade, a clothing company, recently moved their operation to New York from Atlanta. "Everything was easier," she said. "Getting tags, buttons, zippers. Our manufacturing has gotten cheaper. The entry barrier isn't high. People are open and ready for the work." Ms. Lampe said that before moving, she and her husband tried to create a network of support similar to the one in New York in Atlanta but found it impossible. "It's easier to sustain something than to create it from scratch," she said. For now, the plan is stalled, but the development corporation is hoping to begin the seven month approval process for the plan in May. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The nature of creativity is an elastic theme: stretched to the length of Fellini's "8 1/2," or as succinct as Sondheim's lyric "Look, I made a hat where there never was a hat." Like a demon to be exorcised, it seems to appear in every artist's output, from Plato to the novels of Ben Lerner often autobiographical, and almost always philosophical. To this genre we can add Hannah Lash's chamber opera "Desire," a dreamy and enigmatic allegory about the creative process that premiered Wednesday night at the Miller Theater at Columbia University. With a poetic libretto and mercurial score, its ideas shift in and out of focus, slippery and only suggested: the ephemerality of inspiration; the stifling frustration of doubt; the ecstasy of cultivating beauty. In program notes, Ms. Lash cites her admiration for Bartok and Debussy, whose influences course through "Desire," from the concision it shares with "Bluebeard's Castle" to the elusive ambiguity of "Pelleas et Melisande." But her opera is truly her own (she even wrote the libretto), with a feminist spirit and idiosyncratic harmonic language, performed by a septet of voices and strings in a dangerous and rare turn without a conductor. The risk pays off in its intimacy, but not always in its cohesion. Opening nights are difficult for any opera, and on Wednesday there were jarring moments of misalignment: singers entering too late, or searching for cues with expressions of nervous uncertainty. But it's a wonder that the opera, with rhythmic pitfalls and a score whose melodies drift as if suspended in fluid, held together as much as it did a testament to the committed excellence of its performers, especially the JACK Quartet, which plays virtually nonstop during the 65 minute running time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"The Friend" also resonated with critics and judges this year perhaps because of its subtle exploration of sexual harassment: The writer's deceased friend was a prominent writer who leveraged his fame to have inappropriate relationships with his young students. In their citation, the judges called "The Friend" an "exquisitely written and deeply humane exploration of grief, literature and memory." This year's fiction finalists included an eclectic mix of experimental works from independent publishing houses like Soho Press and Graywolf, and writing by established novelists like Lauren Groff and Rebecca Makkai. Some of the biggest surprises in the fiction category this year involved not the five writers who made the shortlist, but the critical and commercial darlings who were overlooked. Two of this year's most popular and acclaimed novels, "There There" by Tommy Orange and "An American Marriage" by Tayari Jones, were longlisted but failed to make the finalist cut. Nunez, author of the novels "Salvation City," "The Last of Her Kind," "A Feather on the Breath of God" and "For Rouenna," among others, spoke in her acceptance speech about how writers are able to find meaning in pain and emotional hardship because suffering and loss can generate great literature. The award for works in translation was added this year, marking the first time in decades that the foundation has recognized literature beyond the borders of the United States. The foundation's board unanimously voted to add the prize, which is given jointly to authors and translators, and recognizes fiction and nonfiction works by living authors who are published in the United States. (International authors who write in English are not eligible.) "This is an opportunity for us to influence how visible books in translation are," Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, told The Times when the prize was announced. "The less we know about the rest of the world, the worse off we are." The addition of the translation prize marks a departure from the National Book Awards' original mission of celebrating "The Best of American Literature," but many in the literary world have cheered the broadening of the awards as a necessary corrective to the often parochial attitude of American readers and publishers toward works in translation. It also restores a prize that was eliminated in 1986, when the foundation had a slew of categories that it felt diluted the significance of the awards, among them were prizes for books about science, philosophy and religion, history and biography, arts and letters, contemporary thought, autobiography, first novel. By also recognizing translators as co creators, the awards are highlighting an often overlooked art form. This year's five finalists included writers and translators from several continents, among them Olga Tokarczuk, "Flights" translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft; Negar Djavadi, "Disoriental", translated from French by Tina Kover, and Hanne Orstavik, "Love", translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken. One of the nominated translators was a well known and celebrated novelist in her own right: the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri, who translated the Italian writer Domenico Starnone's novel "Trick." Elizabeth Acevedo's "The Poet X", a novel written in verse, about a 15 year old girl from an observant Dominican family in Harlem who is navigating the perils of adolescence and finding solace in her poetry notebook, won the award for Young People's Literature. In an emotional acceptance speech, Acevedo thanked her agent and her editor, "who let me use the language that was authentic to what I needed to say." She noted that as a Latina author, she often feels an additional burden to prove herself. "I walk through the world with a chip in my shoulder," she said. "I go into so many spaces where I feel like I have to prove that I'm allowed to be in that place." She reserved her most heartfelt thanks for her readers, children who approach her and say they'd never seen characters whose lives reflect their own in a book before. In recognizing "The Poet X," which blends poetry and prose, the judges highlighted how innovative children's literature has become. Some of the most groundbreaking authors at work today write for children and young adults, and the scope and depth of contemporary children's literature was on display in the work of the five finalists. In "The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge," M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin adopt a novel story telling device the tale unfolds from two different perspectives of a goblin and an elf, one in prose, and one in illustrations that resemble medieval woodcuts. A critic for The Times called the book "both moving and hilarious." The graphic novelist Jarrett J. Krosoczka was nominated for "Hey, Kiddo," a poignant and honest graphic memoir about growing up as the son of a heroin addict. The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende accepted the foundation's lifetime achievement award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, becoming the first Spanish language author to ever receive the prize, which has gone to such influential writers as Stephen King, John Updike, Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe. Allende became a global literary star when her first novel, "The House of Spirits," was published in 1982. She has gone on to write more than 20 works that have collectively sold more than 70 million copies. The novelist Luis Alberto Urrea introduced Ms. Allende, citing her profound influence on him and praising her for writing fearlessly in the face of dictatorships and political oppression. "In despotic times she speaks of human hope," he said. "If dictators like Chile's Pinochet could not silence these kinds of voices, could not stop the words, then what Isabel does is a calling to us to be bolder." "You can't build a wall to keep them out. You can't lock them up," he said. "She has taught us that words have wings." In her speech, Allende said she was accepting the award on "behalf of millions of people like myself who have come to this country in search of a new life." She denounced the rise of "nationalism and racism" in our current political discourse, and spoke about the power of literature to forge understanding across cultures and nationalities. "The values and principles that sustain our civilization are under siege," she said. "If we listen to another person's story, if we tell our own story, we start to heal from division and hatred." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In the underground theater of the Abrons Arts Center on Wednesday, all the right ingredients seemed to have been assembled for an evening of fun and maybe of magic. There was a fog machine, a wind machine, a rack of outre clothing. There were two microphones, two laptops stocked with music. Most important, there were two performers experienced in the risk taking of improvisation. They were Jeremy Wade and Mark Tompkins, American dancers who have long lived in Europe. They were in town for the Queer New York International Arts Festival and the United States premiere of "Stardust," a project that involves the two men hunting for costumes before the show (most of Wednesday's trove came from the children's section of a Kmart), stocking the theater, and then seeing what might happen. The evening began promisingly enough, as the men entered in dresses and wigs, spreading tinsel from bowls and singing about being in one place while longing to be in another. Mr. Tompkins, taller and older, turned testy. Mr. Wade followed him with puppyish Jack Lemmon faces. These were hints of a good comedy team trying to find a rhythm. But not a minute had passed before Mr. Tompkins said, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," a blunder from which the men never quite recovered. Instead the main humor and wit came from self conscious acknowledgments of how poorly the show was going. Mr. Wade sneaked in a jab at Mr. Tompkins's tired "Wizard of Oz" quote. He beseeched an idol in the form of a sequined puppy doll to forgive them for their lame beginning. He played the Patti Smith Group's song "Ghost Dance" ("We shall live again") and quipped about the possibility of rebirth, "even if you have jet lag." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
What follows is a series of creative murders, all entertainingly annotated by the killer. The most elaborate involves the poisoning of a doddering clergyman; the most outlandish has Mazzini using a well aimed projectile to burst the hot air balloon carrying the militant suffragist Lady Agatha: "I shot an arrow into the air. It fell to earth in Berkeley Square." That the victims, including Lady Agatha, are universally Guinness removes the sting however Mazzini does away with them, his look alike relatives keep popping up. The actor's multiple appearances turn the movie into a stunt. "The sly and adroit Mr. Guinness plays eight Edwardian fuddy duds with such devastating wit and variety that he naturally dominates the film," Crowther wrote. Perhaps this performance diverted Crowther's attention from Mazzini's other sketchy escapades, outrageous for the time, which include courting one victim's widow (Valerie Hobson) while carrying on an affair with a friend's sultry wife (Joan Greenwood). In his way, this British villain is as coldblooded as Richard III or Macbeth. Among Ealing's most accomplished directors, Hamer was not primarily a maker of comedies. He made his reputation with the creepy "haunted mirror" sequence in the classic 1945 horror anthology "Dead of Night." He also directed the atmospheric crime thriller "It Always Rains on Sunday," a 1947 movie that, in its treatment of London's working class East End, predates the gritty "kitchen sink" naturalism of films like "Room at the Top" (1959) and "Look Back in Anger" (1959) by a dozen years. With "Kind Hearts," Hamer had first planned to make a comedy about the French serial killer Henri Landru, but Charlie Chaplin beat him to it, with "Monsieur Verdoux." He then adapted Roy Horniman's 1907 novel, "Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal," a snobbish, anti Semitic satire in which a Jewish interloper gets away with murder and winds up a duke. In the aftermath of World War II, it was surely prudent to change the killer's ethnicity. Such sensitivity did not extend, however, to a racial slur used twice in a children's nursery rhyme and overdubbed for release in the United States. The American version also added a final shot to ensure no one gets away with murder. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Zac Posen is a designer known for dressing celebrities like Reese Witherspoon and Claire Danes in fantastical Cinderella extravaganzas. But his latest project has very little to do with the red carpet though it does involve a runway of sorts, and it will be revealed at a catwalk show Tuesday in Atlanta. That, after all, is where Delta Air Lines is based. And Mr. Posen's latest collection all four dozen or so looks comprises the new uniforms for approximately 60,000 Delta employees working as ticket and gate agents, at the Sky Club and in flight. Employees are allocated a set of points so they can mix and match their outfits by choosing from different pieces, including dresses, skirts and blazers, coats, shirts and pants. Mr. Posen signed on in spring of last year. Though he acknowledged it was a leap from the collection that bears his name (and even his work for Brooks Brothers, where he is the creative director for women's, and David's Bridal, where he sells a line of wedding dresses), he said he wanted to do it for a variety of reasons, from his own love of travel to his belief in the power of a good uniform. And the fact that in designing for the friendly skies, he will be joining a line of fashion names that includes Cristobal Balenciaga (who designed uniforms for Air France); Pierre Cardin (Olympic Airlines); Emilio Pucci (Braniff Airways); Pierre Balmain (Singapore Airlines); and Julien MacDonald (British Airways). "I do everything in a suit and a tie, from going to the office to walking my dog," Mr. Posen said. "How you dress helps heighten your performance." Though not every performance has the same requirements. "This is not models on the runway at all," he said, noting that he shadowed Delta employees, including flight attendants and ticket agents, to get a sense of their dressing needs. "These are people who have multiple tasks to do in their jobs. It takes great mental and physical concentration to do those tasks, and to be poised at the same time." After the uniforms are revealed Tuesday afternoon, a select group of about 1,000 flight attendants, airport service agents and ground support personnel will test them in action. The final rollout is expected in 2018. As part of the design process, Mr. Posen worked with a committee of 24 Delta staff members and assessed feedback from 20,000 employees. Elaine Casanova, who has been a flight attendant for 43 years and says she has worn at least six different uniform iterations during that time, was on the committee. "My biggest concern was that there would be a stain resistant factor and that the uniforms be fairly wrinkle free," she said. "Also that the uniform would be able to go from a cold climate to a warm climate in one trip." So what was the end result? A finished prototype of a blazer and skirt that Mr. Posen presented at his showroom last week was made of an ottoman fabric that's stain resistant and stretchy. Inside the skirt is a rubber grip to help keep the shirt tucked in, and the blazer has a slot at the top for the walkie talkies that flight attendants use to communicate. Anti bacterial materials are woven into the lining of the jacket. The colors of the uniform plum, thistle and cardinal as opposed to the standard blue may surprise frequent fliers. But the company and its employees wanted a change. When wearing the current shade, Mr. Posen said, "they felt ordinary." Another complaint that came up was that the old uniforms were too frumpy, according to Mr. Posen. Inspired by the form of airplanes and by the ergonomic lines of a vessel moving through space and air, Mr. Posen tried to rectify that grievance. On a plum blazer for women, the back panel flares out, for example, emphasizing or exaggerating the wearer's curves. With the same purpose clearly in mind, a dress has two curved, scarlet lines that almost converge on the front. "Making all bodies look beautiful is really key," he said. On a man's jacket, part of the lapel is sewn into the fabric for a smoother effect. Decorative scarves have patterns that change in scale to make the fabric appear more dimensional. Aside from the color, these changes may be too subtle for most casual fliers to register. The uniforms follow a classic formula of being fitted yet modest and don't scream designer (cool school principal is more like it). But Ms. Casanova, for one, was pleased. "It's professional looking, but it's going to bring back glamour, which we had in the '70s," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Cadillac has signed a lease for 34,000 square feet on the top two floors of 330 Hudson Street, the building's owner said in a statement Thursday. The 16 story building is in Manhattan's Hudson Square neighborhood, and will serve as the luxury automotive brand's new global headquarters starting next year. "The addition of a headquarters office in New York is a key step in Cadillac's ongoing global expansion," Johan de Nysschen, president of Cadillac, said in the statement. "There is no better atmosphere in which to better immerse ourselves into luxury consumer and brand expertise. We look forward to being a good neighbor there, starting in spring of 2015." Three partnering real estate companies Beacon Capital Partners, Ivanhoe Cambridge and Callahan Capital Properties handled the deal, Ivanhoe Cambridge said in a statement on its website. The space in the the 467,000 square foot office building converted from a former warehouse, features 14 foot ceilings and 10 foot windows. The glass paneled top of the building is a relatively new addition to its renovated brick and stone base, which was built in 1910. Cadillac has received some criticism for leaving Detroit, where its parent, General Motors, is based. But David Caldwell, a spokesman for Cadillac, said in a telephone interview that the move to New York was part of taking the brand "to the next level." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve will begin later this month to publish the predictions of its senior officials about their own decisions, hoping to increase its influence over economic activity by guiding investor expectations. The change was approved at the most recent meeting of the Fed's policy making committee, in December, but was kept secret until Tuesday afternoon, when the Fed released an account of the meeting after a standard three week delay. The inaugural forecast, set for Jan. 25, will show the range of predictions made by Fed officials about the level of short term interest rates in the fourth quarter of 2012, 2013 and 2014, although it will not list individual predictions. It also will summarize when they expect to start raising short term rates, which they have held near zero since late 2008. And it will describe their plans for the Fed's investment portfolio. The forecast could reduce borrowing costs for businesses and consumers by convincing investors that the Fed intends to keep rates near zero for longer than expected. But the benefits most likely would be modest, as rates already are very low and already are widely expected to remain near zero into 2014. A more significant possibility, is that the changes will set the stage for the Fed to announce an expansion of its existing economic aid campaign, for example, by once again increasing its purchases of Treasuries and mortgage backed securities. According to the meeting minutes, "a number of members" of the 10 person committee "indicated that current and prospective economic conditions could well warrant additional policy accommodation, but they believed that any additional actions would be more effective if accompanied by enhanced communication." This, however, is unlikely to have any broad impact on the economy, because the Fed lacks the power to address the most important issues weighing on growth, including a lack of demand from gloomy consumers, high levels of debt throughout the economy and the depressed condition of the housing market. Stock traders took the Fed's announcement in stride as indexes continued their rise in the first day of trading in 2012. Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which will release its inaugural forecast on Jan. 25. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index closed up 1.6 percent. The Fed's staff, which prepares an economic forecast noted for its unusual accuracy in an uncertain business, reduced its medium term outlook for growth, citing the impact of events in Europe, according to the minutes. "The Fed's core problem right now is that the parts of the economy through which those interest rate effects would normally get traction are blocked," said Vincent Reinhart, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley and a former senior Fed staff official. "It is not clear how effective any of these policies will be." The change in communications policy is part of a broader effort by the Fed's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, to improve public understanding of the central bank's goals and methodology. It formalizes a series of experiments with forecasting that the Fed has made in recent years, beginning with its statement in December 2008 that rates would remain near zero "for some time." Talking about future policy was a longstanding taboo among central bankers, who worried that investors would treat the predictions as promises and react badly when some predictions inevitably were off base. But the Fed now is casting its lot with the growing camp that regards shaping expectations as a primary tool for monetary policy, and is eager to seize any opportunity. The forecast will summarize the predictions of the Fed's five governors two seats on the board are vacant and the 12 presidents of its regional banks, only five of whom hold votes on the committee at a given time. It will be included in an existing forecast of economic conditions the rates of growth, inflation and unemployment that the Fed publishes four times a year. In presenting those forecasts, the Fed excludes the three highest and the three lowest estimates submitted by the officials. It then reports the highest and lowest predictions among the remaining 11 forecasts, showing a range that it describes as the "central tendency." For example, the forecast published in November, showed the committee expected growth of 2.5 percent to 2.9 percent in 2012. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In 1921, the town council of Chamonix, then a quiet French community of 3,000 people, decided to change the municipality's name to Chamonix Mont Blanc, thus forging an official link to the mountain, the highest in Western Europe, with a summit that soars 12,000 feet above the town center. The council's goal was to prevent their Swiss neighbors from claiming the mountain's glory, but there was really no need: It's impossible when you're in Chamonix to ignore the gargantuan, icy beauty that looms overhead. And, as in any good mountain resort town, the adrenaline rush promised by the surrounding slopes fuels a sense of revelry and indulgence in the valley below. Perhaps nowhere else is this dynamic so evident as in Chamonix, where you can wander through a landscape that feels as wild and harsh as the moon, then, half an hour later, soak in a Jacuzzi under the stars. Chamonix is a glorious place for visitors, especially in winter, when the town and its mountains are cloaked in snow. Professional climbers, weekend skiers, gourmands, night life lovers, devoted adrenaline seekers Chamonix welcomes them all with the classic French double kiss. To understand Chamonix, you must get a sense of the immense scale of the landscape. So start your visit by catching a ride on the fire engine red Montenvers Train, which has been carting visitors 3,000 feet up into the Alpine wilds since the track was completed in 1909 (EUR32.50, or about 37, round trip). Emerge from the train and take in the expansive views over France's longest and largest glacier, the Mer de Glace, an immense, frozen river that winds its way through the mountains at a pace of less than half an inch per hour. Explore the science and history of glaciers in the Glaciorium, a small, but excellent, museum that offers an alarming perspective on the planet's warming climate (entry is included with your train ticket). Visitors can enter the belly of the glacier itself by touring the Mer de Glace ice cave, which is re sculpted every year. After catching the train back to Chamonix, spend an hour or two meandering through the busy town, which, after sunset, is decked out in twinkling lights for at least as long as the snow sticks around. Stop by the Maison de la Presse, a cozy bookstore near the town center, to stock up on route maps, ski guides and mountaineering literature in both French and English. Then do your last minute shopping for ski gear at Snell Sports, or wander through the collection of chic Alpine meets Nordic furniture at the popular Cocktail Skandinave. At Poco Loco, a favorite with the young, adrenaline seeking crowd, place your order at the bar (in English, if you like; there's a good chance your waiter hails from Britain) then head to the small seating area upstairs to find a spot among the kitschy diner posters, Christmas lights and empty soda cans that adorn the walls. Pair a blonde beer (EUR5.50) from the Brasserie du Mont Blanc brewed with water from local glaciers with the restaurant's eponymous burger: a generously portioned beef patty inside a freshly baked roll and topped with bacon, Emmental cheese, a special spicy sauce and French fries (yes, the fries are inside the bun). Cost: EUR9 for the normal size, EUR12 for the "big" version. Join the hungry crowds at Aux Petits Gourmands, a popular, central bakery, to enjoy a cappuccino (EUR3.90) and a bite to eat before you head for the slopes. Indulge in the local specialty, the Croix de Savoie (EUR3.10, or EUR2.10 to take away), a cross shaped brioche bun smothered in cream and topped with a generous sprinkling of vanilla flavored sugar. Or linger over the classic French petit dejeuner (EUR13) an array of breads and pastries served with chocolate spread and homemade jams. 5) 9 a.m. Saturday on the slopes The Grands Montets may be Chamonix's most famous skiing area, but if you have just a single day to spend on the pistes, then Brevent may be your best bet (EUR53 for an adult day pass; EUR45.10 for children under 15 and adults over 64). Here, on the south facing slope that sits across the valley from Mont Blanc, you can enjoy the sunshine and a dazzling vista of snow covered summits as you whiz down the hill. Brevent is excellent for intermediate skiers, but its steeper slopes have plenty to offer the more advanced. Thrillseekers can practice their jumps in the snow park, which is equipped with a massive "airbag" to soften landings. Take a break from skiing at the Panoramic Restaurant, which sits at the top of the Brevent lift at an altitude of more than 8,000 feet. The restaurant doesn't take reservations on its busiest days, so you might have to wait for a table but the views from the small and sunny terrasse are worth the wait. Order the tartiflette, which, like most traditional food in this part of France, is a hearty and warming combination of potatoes, melted cheese and bacon then strap your skis on for an afternoon back on the slopes. Lunch, about EUR25. You'll be sweaty and aching after a full day in ski gear, so make your next stop the Bachal Spa at Chamonix's Hameau Albert Premier, a luxury hotel and restaurant complex that's a short walk from the center of town. Sign up for a 75 minute hot stone massage (EUR140) or a 45 minute foot treatment (EUR55). Feel free to linger after your session is finished: Your appointment affords you two hour access to the spa, which includes steam rooms, a fire lit lounge area, and a small indoor rock climbing space. Swap your white robe for some evening wear, then wander across the Albert Premier's manicured grounds to the hotel's restaurant for an evening of alpine haute cuisine (mains from EUR54 to EUR90). The Albert Premier Restaurant, which has earned two Michelin stars for its creative interpretations of regional classics, recently came under the direction of the young chef Damien Leveau, who continues the restaurant's tradition of celebrating the best local produce in time with the seasons. Indulge in the six course Petite Fete Gourmande du Marche (EUR102, or EUR197 with wine), which often features vegetables and herbs from the garden outside , as well as fish from nearby mountain lakes. Sitting on the edge of a small green space near the middle of town, La Maison des Artistes serves as both a stylish venue for live music and a nursery of sorts for up and coming musicians. Founded by the songwriter and television personality Andre Manoukian who used to be a judge on the French equivalent of "American Idol" the Maison des Artistes offers weeklong residencies to promising musicians in genres ranging from bluegrass to jazz to Brazilian psycho pop. The musicians take advantage of the on site recording studio during the week before performing to a live audience in the Maison's intimate performance space on Friday and Saturday evenings (free entry, cocktails EUR10 to EUR12). 10) 9 a.m. View from above If you're visiting in the new year, start your final day in Chamonix by taking the stomach dropping cable car ride up to the top of the Aiguille du Midi, an icy, steep peak that hosts a cluster of buildings and walkways for visitors to explore (EUR61.50 round trip; closed for repairs until later this month). The cable car whisks you straight from the busy streets of Chamonix into one of the continent's harshest and most beautiful landscapes. From the top of the lift, hardened mountaineers set off on expeditions to the summit of Mont Blanc and beyond. But no ice axes are required to tour the Aiguille du Midi complex where you can browse exhibits on the history of mountaineering and the geology of the Mont Blanc massif. Those feeling brave can walk through a glass floored exhibit that dangles over a 3,000 foot drop. Wander back through Chamonix's bustling, pedestrian only zone to Pie, an intimate spot that's perfect for a quick, fresh lunch before you head out of town. Owned by the Paris trained pastry chef Charles Guillaume and his wife Stephanie, the restaurant features a rotating selection of tarts, both sweet and savory. Order the quiche of the day (EUR9.80), which comes with a lightly dressed salad, then enjoy a decadent hot chocolate embellished with chestnut cream (EUR5.90) for dessert. Many hotels in Chamonix impose a three or four night minimum on stays during ski season, so be sure to call ahead. The Park Hotel Suisse and Spa, with its rooftop spa and cozy, chalet inspired rooms, is one exception (double rooms starting from EUR309). Ask for a room with a view of Mont Blanc. Apartment rentals are easy to find in Chamonix's lively and walkable city center, where nightly rates for a one bedroom range from EUR79 to about EUR160 on Airbnb. For a quieter retreat, consider the Montenvers Refuge, accessible only by train in winter, where a bed in a 10 person dormitory starts at EUR85 per night, including dinner and breakfast. Private rooms are also available, starting from EUR250 per night for a double room, including dinner and breakfast for two. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Thursday's news cycle was, as Trevor Noah put it, "more chaotic than free cocaine day at Dave and Busters." Vice President Mike Pence announced he'd gotten Turkey to agree to a brief cease fire in Syria, which President Trump whose troop withdrawal led to the invasion praised by saying, "The Kurds are very happy, Turkey is very happy, the United States is very happy and, you know what? Civilization is very happy." "Yes, civilization is very happy. Centuries from now, historians will look back at the greatest achievements of all time: the development of democracy, the invention of electricity and the time Trump negotiated a really short cease fire in a war he basically started." TREVOR NOAH "Because the deal is that they have five days to leave the land and then Turkey gets the land. That's the deal. Yeah. Doesn't sound like a deal. Sounds like the deal I had with my high school bully: I would give him my lunch money and he would give me a black eye. Win win." TREVOR NOAH "Trump took a victory lap and said the deal never would never have been made without him. And he's right the deal would never have been made without him, because before he pulled the troops, there was no fire to cease." JIMMY KIMMEL "But meanwhile, this U.S. exit from Syria was so sudden and hasty, we actually had to bomb one of our own bases to destroy the ammunition that was left behind. Thanks to our genius commander in chief, the U.S. military is now bombing itself. And it was a success, too. We totally caught ourselves by surprise." JIMMY KIMMEL Also Thursday, the acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney undercut Trump at a televised briefing, saying (and later denying) that the president had indeed held back aid to Ukraine to get it to carry out investigations that would help him politically. "Get over it," Mulvaney said. "There's going to be political influence in foreign policy." "And then Sarah Huckabee Sanders burst through the wall like Kool Aid and took the podium back." JIMMY KIMMEL "O.K., hold up, hold up. Trump has said on multiple occasions: No quid pro quo of any kind. Now middle aged Harry Potter is coming out saying that there was a certain type of quid pro quo, but everyone must get over it? That's it, just get over it? Everybody does it? So this is, what, locker room corruption? Is that what this is?" TREVOR NOAH "So all the bad stuff they've been saying the president didn't do, now they're saying he did it and he does it all the time? The defense has gone from 'If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit' to 'Give me back my glove!'" JIMMY KIMMEL "Trump's attorneys were said to be 'baffled' by Mulvaney's statement. One of his lawyers put out a statement. He wrote: 'The legal team was not involved in the acting chief of staff's press briefing.' Of course not. They already have one idiot shooting his mouth off. They certainly didn't authorize two." JIMMY KIMMEL "And then, with all this talk of the Bidens inappropriately profiting from public office, the White House today announced that the United States will host the next G 7 summit at the Trump Doral golf resort in Miami. For real. The president is generously renting his golf club out to all the leaders of the world. Because of course he is. He doesn't care anymore. He's just like, 'Yeah, you know what, we're hosting it at my golf resort. And guess what? A round of golf's a million bucks that doesn't include cart, and we're tripling the room rates! So leave a duffel bag full of Krugerrands by the front door.'" JIMMY KIMMEL "It really seems like there's nothing Trump wouldn't do to profit off the presidency. Like, I bet you he's going to be outside his own impeachment trial just scalping tickets." TREVOR NOAH "Although the G 7 summit happens in June there's a good chance he might not be president anymore by then. Wouldn't that be interrupted by applause By the way, wouldn't that be this would be the greatest scenario: Trump has to watch President Pence chatting it up with the world leaders while he guzzles Diet Cokes in the clubhouse." JIMMY KIMMEL "This might be the true genius of Donald Trump. Because you realize, with one scandal, you get kicked out of office. But with seven in one day? Ain't nobody got time for that." TREVOR NOAH "The Daily Show" spliced together some of President Trump's contradictions on the subject of the Kurds. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
On a remote island in Disko Bay, Greenland, a scientist in 1990 was collecting specimens of narwhals, the whales with unicorn like tusks. He noticed an unusual skull on a hunter's roof. The teeth were bizarre: The top ones pointed forward. A couple spiraled out. They looked like a mix of narwhal and beluga, but with too many for a narwhal, too few for a beluga. The hunter told the scientist that the skull had belonged to a strange animal he'd killed in the late 1980s. He had also killed two other similarly strange whales the same day. All had beluga like flippers, narwhal like tails and solid gray skin, he said. Mads Peter Heide Jorgensen, the narwhal scientist, convinced the hunter to donate it to the Natural History Museum of Denmark for analysis. But at the time, he could only conclude it was a possible hybrid or deformed beluga. Thirty years later, he and others have finally cracked this cold case. A genomic analysis of DNA extracted from the John Doe skull revealed that it belonged to an adult, first generation son of a narwhal mother and beluga father. The study, published Thursday in Scientific Reports, shows how a little DNA can go a long way, that hybridization isn't that unusual and that as long as museums keep storing mysterious stuff, the right technology might one day set their stories free. "There are certainly things lying around that can tell us about the natural world around us and how it shifts and changes," said Eline Lorenzen, the museum collection curator who first decided to pull the skull off its shelf. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Her lab extracted DNA from the dust of its teeth and bones, and compared it to genomes derived from tissue samples of belugas and narwhals from the same area. The analysis, conducted by Mikkel Skovrind, a graduate student, revealed it was a male and a 50/50 narwhal and beluga mix. A first generation hybrid perhaps a narluga? And analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which only comes from the mother, indicated surprise she was a narwhal. Generally only male narwhals have tusks, which may play a role in advertising social dominance and attracting females, kind of like deer antlers. But this female narwhal didn't seem to mind a tuskless beluga. The hybrid whale's combined features are completely weird, Dr. Lorenzen said. "It's like if you took 50 percent beluga and 50 percent narwhal and shoved their teeth in a blender, that's what would come out." That probably complicated slurping prey like a toothless narwhal or chewing it like a beluga. Despite that, the large skull indicated he had survived well into adulthood. Remnants of carbon and nitrogen in his bones suggested that he had fed on the seafloor, more like a walrus or bearded seal than a typical monodontidae. Reproduction may also have challenged the creature. Many hybrids in nature think mules, the offspring of a horse and donkey are sterile. Others like him probably have existed, but wouldn't occur frequently, said Randall Reeves, a marine mammal biologist who has studied the skull, but was not involved in the recent genomics research. There is no evidence in the beluga or narwhal genomes of interbreeding in at least a million years. The skull came from one of the few places on Earth where narwhals and belugas are found together during mating season. And despite constant monitoring of these and other whale populations by experienced hunters, government agencies and biologists, there are no reports of other oddballs, not even rumors, Dr. Heide Jorgensen says. Still, the chances that this occurred only once in a million years and they just happened upon the skull are slim, said Dr. Lorenzen. Blue whales have recently hybridized with fin whales. And belugas have interacted with and even adopted narwhals. Humans and Neanderthals, horses and donkeys, polar bears and brown bears, at least 16 different whales: Genetics are revealing that hybridization, though rare, may be more common than we think. For now, it's only possible to speculate about the circumstances that led to the conception of the baby beluga narwhal, perhaps the cutest sounding animal that ever existed. But perhaps it's just a matter of time before someone unlocks the secrets of other weird whale skulls that are waiting to be found. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"On the Royal Road: The Burgher King," a new play about President Trump written by the Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, will have its first presentation next week in the United States. Excerpts from the play which is scheduled to have its premiere this fall at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, Germany will be read on Monday at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ms. Jelinek, an Austrian who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2004, is best known among American audiences as the author of the 1983 novel "The Piano Teacher," which inspired the 2001 Michael Haneke film of the same title. "She's a very ferocious writer for the theater," Frank Hentschker, the theater center's executive director, said, and added that her recent plays had reckoned with current events: "Die Schutzbefohlenen" (2013), about the migrant crisis; "Wut" (2016), about the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris; and now this new work inspired by Mr. Trump. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The National Hockey League announced the recipients of four of its annual awards Thursday, two months after the regular season was abruptly halted, then canceled. Though there was little suspense since all four awards honor regular season statistical leaders in various categories, the awards were a psychological marker that reified a bizarre timeline that has seen play suspended, players largely unable to train on ice and, most recently, steps taken toward a complex, expanded 24 team playoff that would be played over the summer. "I think it's one of those moments where we realize that the regular season is over and it's on to playoff mode," Florida Panthers defenseman Keith Yandle said. Yandle acknowledged that some of the award races could have changed shape in the canceled portion of the season, but he emphasized that every player was dealing with the same unusual circumstances. The league had completed about 85 percent of the regular season when play was suspended on March 12. "It's not like one or two teams got to play 10 games more. Pretty much everyone played the same amount of games and those guys were recognized for having amazing years," Yandle said. Washington Capitals left wing Alex Ovechkin won his record ninth scoring title as he and Boston Bruins right wing David Pastrnak shared the Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy, awarded to the league's top goal scorer. Both players scored 48 goals. Ovechkin was two goals shy of his ninth 50 goal season, which would have tied a record shared by Wayne Gretzky and Mike Bossy, with 13 games left on the Capitals' schedule when the season was halted. Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews finished the truncated campaign one goal behind Ovechkin and Pastrnak. In addition to a potential tie break, Matthews could have potentially fired his way to the trophy had the season been completed. Washington had played 69 games while Boston and Toronto had each played 70 when play was suspended. "I wouldn't mind having a game against Boston or Toronto just so those three guys can decide," Capitals center Evgeny Kuznetsov said. "Or, if they want to be creative, they could create a challenge for those three guys and have a competition between them to show their skills." Edmonton Oilers forward Leon Draisaitl won the Art Ross Trophy as the league's top point producer in the most comfortable fashion of any of Thursday's winners. He finished 13 points ahead of his teammate Connor McDavid. Draisaitl, the first German player to win a scoring title in a major North American league, will undoubtedly receive consideration for the Hart Trophy, awarded to the N.H.L.'s most valuable player. A fan of his country's soccer league, the Bundesliga, Draisaitl said he hoped the N.H.L. would glean lessons from that league's restart earlier this month. "They've done a very professional job of making it as close as possible to a normal game day and a normal format," he said. In a much closer race, the Bruins' goalie tandem of Tuukka Rask and Jaroslav Halak won the William M. Jennings Trophy, awarded each season to the goalies for the team that allowed the fewest goals. They edged out the Dallas Stars' Ben Bishop and Anton Khudobin by just seven goals allowed, and had played one more game than Dallas. The Bruins also earned the Presidents' Trophy, awarded to the team with the highest point total. They had a game in hand and a 6 point advantage on the runner up St. Louis Blues, their Stanley Cup finals adversary last year. Unlike the N.B.A., which in some circumstances uses league honors to dictate the earning potential of its players, bonuses in the N.H.L. for league awards are limited. The vast majority of players do not have financial incentives in their contracts by way of guarantees in the collective bargaining agreement, as those only apply to entry level players and over 35 veterans on one year contracts. Only one player who was an award winner or runner up Thursday, Khudobin, is headed toward potential free agency. None are on entry level contracts and none face potential salary arbitration for next season. The player agents Allan Walsh and Eustace King agreed that any potential bonuses regarding trophies or their factoring into salary arbitration were matters that the N.H.L. and its players' union would adjudicate in the near future because of the uncommon nature of this season and next. It was one of many issues to be resolved between the two sides in the near future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In an effort to begin addressing persistent gender bias in laboratory research, the National Institutes of Health announced Tuesday that it will distribute 10.1 million in grants to more than 80 scientists studying a diverse array of subjects, including drug addiction, fetal development, migraines and stroke. The researchers will use the additional funds to include more human participants generally women in clinical trials and to ensure that their laboratory animals, even cell lines, are representative of both genders. The money also will be used to analyze gender differences in the resulting data, officials said. "It's an early first step we're taking to encourage people to see the value of studying sex as a biological variable," said Dr. Janine Austin Clayton, associate director for women's health research at N.I.H. "What we are after is to transform how people think about science and therefore transform how science is done." Women are not adequately represented in many clinical trials of new drugs and medical devices. The gender bias starts at an early stage of the scientific process: Traditionally many investigators have worked only with male lab animals, concerned that the hormonal cycles of female animals would add variability and skew study results. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Books and movies depict the future as a bleak dystopian world. BMW's view is considerable more optimistic with hybrids that look like spacecraft and move like, well, BMWs. The i8 starts at 137,495. Not cheap. As tested at 150K, it's still a giveaway considering it is transportation, an amusement park thrill ride, and investment grade art backed by a staggering engineering budget. Doc Brown may ditch the DeLorean for one after figuring out how to integrate a Mr. Fusion. Consider this stuck in creeping highway traffic with a Porsche Panamera 4S on my bumper, the i8 had the visual power to render the German completely invisible. Never have so many drivers broken the no phone rule so gleefully. Here's how BMW builds the future of fun; The passenger cell is made from extremely light and strong carbon fiber reinforced plastic fused to an aluminum structure. There's an electric motor up front and an over achieving turbocharged 1.5 liter 3 cylinder aft of the passengers. The motor drives the front wheels through a two speed gearbox, the engine turns the back rubber with a 6 speed. Total horsepower is 357 horsepower with 420 lb ft of torque, certainly enough to move 3455 pounds. i8 is a plug in hybrid. Charge the lithium ion battery running down the center spine for a claimed all electric range of 22 miles at up to 75 miles an hour. Charging isn't necessary, just more efficient. A full fill takes 1.5 hours with 220V. 0 60 isn't quite the jump to hyperspace but few cars do it in 4 seconds. It'll dust your neighbor's Prius on its way to vanquishing that Panamera. A center of gravity just 18 inches off the road keeps cornering tenacious. Only Katniss Everdeen has a keener aim. More road feel would be appreciated but performance junkies can feel great about saving gas. The E.P.A. rates the combined gas electric fuel economy at 76 MPGe, gasoline only efficiency is 28 mpg. Remember, 0 60 in 4 seconds. How could you forget? i8's power flow is similar to any hybrid with a powertrain that's remarkable seamless. It's like driving any regular car, one that's very fast. A satisfying growl comes from the 3 cylinder's direction, some of it is synthetic sound piped in for more bravado. The best way past the scissor doors and high sill is to drop into the cabin. Laced with indigo light piping, Tron must be revered in Bavaria. Apparently global warming isn't an issue with no vented seat option. Nein on the AM radio too, BMW says the electric drivetrain interferes with reception. i8 is a 2 2, don't plan on stuffing adults you like in back. Cup holders are an optimistic touch. The back hatch cover is made of two thin sheets of high strength smartphone glass with an acoustic layer between. The space below it is either a very small trunk or very large glove box. You want space with your think tank BMW? Buy the breadbox like i3. That's i8's biggest offence; it's not practical. But BMW has done a remarkable job infusing efficiency with sculpture and performance. Best of all, it's not made by the Soylent Corporation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Michael Dezer, a multimillionaire real estate investor, is selling his James Bond car collection, which includes dozens of cars, boats and even a tank, for more than 33 million. Mr. Dezer will only sell his collection as a single lot, but the buyer gets everything including the tank from "Goldeneye," the speedboat from "Live and Let Die," the Lotus Esprit Turbo from "For Your Eyes Only" and the Tuk Tuk from "Octopussy." (The Express) In a nod to horse drawn carriage days, some early luxury cars the type called town cars featured an open cockpit and a closed in passenger compartment. In the exhibition "Town Cars: Arriving in Style," the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles is displaying top end examples of the vehicles. The collection includes Fred Astaire's 1927 Rolls Royce Phantom I Town Car and the Brooks Stevens designed 1959 Scimitar town car phaeton. (Hemmings Daily) From Feb. 7 to 10, Chrysler dealers took advantage of the first time the diesel power Ram 1500 pickups were available and placed orders for more than 8,000 of them. More than 400 of the orders were for already completed sales, and initial orders by dealers were two to three times higher than Chrysler had expected. (Automotive News, subscription required) Cadillac may be ready to begin selling its ELR plug in hybrid, but many of its dealers are not. Out of 940 Cadillac dealers in the United States, 410 mostly in areas of the country where sales projections for plug in hybrids are low told Edmunds that they do not plan to sell the ELR. (Edmunds) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Donald Trump has some ideas about fighting the coronavirus. "We hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light," the president says, to the bafflement of nearby aides. "Supposing, I said, you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or ... in some other way," continues the president, gesturing toward her Her? I should explain. The words are 100 percent Donald J. Trump's. The actions belong to the comedian Sarah Cooper, whose homemade lip syncs of the president's rambling pandemic related statements have become the most effective impression of Mr. Trump yet. She captures her Trump entirely through pantomime. She crosses her arms and bounces on her heels, like a C.E.O. filibustering through a meeting while the staff suffers. Plenty of wags seized on Mr. Trump's bleach prescription for easy jokes, but her performance gets at something deeper: the peacocky entitlement of the longtime boss who is used to having his every whim indulged, his every thought doodle praised as a Michelangelo. Ms. Cooper has been on a tear since, her karaoke Trump holding forth on the math of disease testing and wrestling with what it means to test "positively" for a virus. Channeling the president's announcement that he was taking the drug hydroxychloroquine (against prevailing medical advice) as a Covid preventive, she's a manic Willy Wonka, handing out a blister pack of pills to herself as a girl in pigtails. Long before he was elected, Donald Trump posed the challenge of being easy to imitate, and thus nearly impossible to satirize. Everyone has a Trump, and when everyone has a Trump, no one does. A big problem comes when a writer tries to take the president's belligerent spoken jazz ("I know words. I have the best words") and force it into comedic 4/4 time. Even the most lacerating satire has to impose coherence on Mr. Trump, which like news reports that try to find a narrative in his ramblings ends up polishing the reality, losing the chaos essential to the genuine article. Which maybe destined Donald Trump to be the TikTok president. The service was built around the concept of lip sync videos, and to spoof this president, the perfect script is no script. Before Ms. Cooper's "How to Medical," other TikTok users riffed on a Trump ramble about the power of "germs." Kylie Scott posted "Drunk in the Club After Covid," lip syncing Mr. Trump's words as a rambling inebriate, finding 80 proof logic in the teetotaler president's musings. "The germ has gotten so brilliant," she mouths cradling a drink, squinting her eyes and spiraling a finger toward her temple "that the antibiotic can't keep up with it." (A TikTok search on " drunktrump" yields a growing crop of examples.) In 2008 Tina Fey hit on a version of this with her "Saturday Night Live" impression of Sarah Palin, some of whose best lines were verbatim or near verbatim quotes. But even Ms. Fey put some English on Ms. Palin's English, as with the line "I can see Russia from my house," which some people later mistook for a real quote. With Ms. Cooper, there's the added frisson of having Mr. Trump who boasted of sexual assault, ran on xenophobia and referred crudely to African and Caribbean countries played by a black woman born in Jamaica. (Compare the "S.N.L." sketch that used as a punchline the idea that Leslie Jones wanted to take over the role of the president.) It's more than just irony. There's something liberating about Ms. Cooper taking on a subject she couldn't be expected to mirror, much as Melissa McCarthy was freed to imagine a hyper aggro version of the former press secretary Sean Spicer. Instead, Ms. Cooper's Trumpian drag is partly a caricature of performative masculinity. (Mr. Trump's lifelong public persona has also been a caricature of performative masculinity.) There's something provocative in a woman trying on a male politician's unexamined confidence, his viewing of the other people in the room as temporarily useful props. It's part an impression of Mr. Trump, part an attempt to ask whether a woman could get away with what Mr. Trump does and what that might look like. (Ms. Cooper wrote a 2018 humor advice book titled, "How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings.") Other Cooper videos are more minimal, like a 12 second clip of the president touting his economic record: "We are bringing our country back and a big focus is exactly that, with the, uh, minorities, specifically, if you look at, uh, the Asians." There's no outfit or staging. Ms. Cooper does all the work with her eyes, which dart around frantically on each "uh," before landing somewhere offscreen and pointing on "Asians." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A few months ago, I pulled off I 10 and stopped at a gas station in LaPlace, La. As I gazed at the vodka and meat pies for sale inside, I realized that I was home. Or at least some crucial nugget of what I call "me" was home. Although I haven't lived in south Louisiana for going on seven years, the time I put in there, soaking up the land and seascape and sky, and, most of all, the spiritual yearning that exists cheek by jowl with drive through daiquiri shops, poverty and Mardi Gras, changed my perceptions profoundly. Louisiana south Louisiana, in particular may as well be its own separate country, a place where the residents just happen to speak American English, except when they're speaking Cajun French or Yat or some other regional dialect. All of which adds up to a place that produces writers the way France produces cheese prodigiously, and with world class excellence a place that calls on its writers' talent and inspiration and, in turn, is reflected back into the world through their words. And though the list of Louisiana writers both homegrown and those drawn to the place as if by seismic forces seems endless, I wanted to smell and hear and see the places that had left a mark on at least a handful of them. Tennessee Williams, who called New Orleans one of "the last frontiers of Bohemia." I figured I'd start at literary ground zero, in this case, the oldest part of the Big Easy, and from there work my way out and around and down the bayou and along the river and over the swamps the non New Orleans part of the state that the comic novelist John Kennedy Toole called "the heart of darkness, the true wasteland." Which, of course, is just one point of view. Another would be from the mystery writer James Lee Burke, who wrote: "In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end ... " In any case, the mainly 18th century French Quarter, or Vieux Carre, has been so suffused with literary associations that you can practically hear the echoes of clattering typewriters. When the quarter was hovering just on the genteel side of being a slum its heyday, actually, in terms of number of writers per square foot Tennessee Williams, who spent his early childhood in Mississippi before moving to St. Louis and eventually New Orleans, said that it was one of the "the last frontiers of Bohemia." Today it's all pricey beignets and knickknacks shops, but back then, just before the Second World War and into the midcentury, the Quarter was filled with immigrants, streetwalkers, sailors, bars, brawling and rooming houses, like the one at 722 Toulouse Street, where Tennessee Williams's attic digs became the inspiration, if perhaps not the exact setting, for Stella and Stanley's dreary flat in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Today 722 Toulouse is spruced up and operated by the Historic New Orleans Collection, which uses it for its offices. But bricks and mortar aside, so potent was the vision that created "Streetcar" that every March, below the gallery of what's known as the Upper Pontalba building on Jackson Square, a crowd gathers for the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival to yell "Stella!" and "Stanley!" in the hopes of winning the Stanley and Stella shouting contest. The four story red brick Pontalba buildings (there are two of them, flanking Jackson Square) have long since gone from their original aristocratic glory to seediness and back again. This time around they possess the kind of coveted hipness that characterizes the dwellings of tastemakers in other quarters of urban America, though as with everything in New Orleans, the Pontalbas come with their own distinctive flourish, including elaborate iron scrollwork. Truman Capote, who was born in New Orleans, described the buildings in his short story "Hidden Gardens" as "the oldest, in some ways most somberly elegant, apartment houses in America," even though they weren't originally apartment houses in the modern sense at all, but rowhouses. If it's grit or at least non flash that you're after, veer off the tourist track toward North Rampart Street, to the house at 1014 Dumaine Street that Williams owned from 1962 until his death in 1983. There's not much to see: a 19th century yellow house, with a path behind a locked residents' gate leading back to separate units. The place doesn't give anything up, but the walk itself is worth it for its quiet non glamour, and for the glimpses of peeling paint and cracked sidewalks and things that at least hint at the seediness that characterized much of the quarter during its literary heyday. New Orleans is much more than its oldest parts, though, and later writers tended to go upriver, to the Johnny come lately neighborhoods of the Garden District, the Irish Channel and Carrollton, where even a casual drive through is guaranteed to elicit an acute attack of real estate envy, especially if you happen to swoon for, say, large, raised center hall Creole cottages with columns, gabled roofs and gardens spilling over with flowering vines. Anne Rice, who was born here, called New Orleans a "strange, decadent city full of antebellum houses," and whether or not you're into vampires (I'm not), you might want to do a drive by to see the author's most famous residence, an 1857 Greek Revival Italianate mash up in the Garden District at 1239 First Street, or to 2524 St. Charles Avenue to see the Marigny, a center hall Greek Revival home also built in 1857, where the author briefly lived when she was a teenager and which served as the setting for "Violin," about a ghostly violinist and musical passion. Kate Chopin, though born in St. Louis, also lived in the hood (and in Cloutierville near Natchitoches), first at 443 Magazine Street, described in the 1899 novel "The Awakening" as " ... a large, double cottage, with a broad front veranda, whose round, fluted columns supported the sloping roof." I couldn't find that particular double cottage, but saw others like it in the vicinity. You can also take in the Chopins' residence eventually, Kate Chopin and her husband, Oscar, had six children at 1413 Louisiana Street, a graceful house, shaded by enormous live oaks. On the afternoon I was there, I gazed up, imagining the author writing on the side balcony. Yat is captured over and over again by the New Orleans native John Kennedy Toole's uncanny ear for mimicry and rhythm in his masterpiece and winner of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for fiction, "A Confederacy of Dunces," which revolves around the adventures of the corpulent and sometimes slightly delusional Ignatius J. Reilly: "Santa says he likes the communiss because he's lonely ... If he was to ax me to marry him ... I wouldn't haveta think twice about it." The author himself lived in a simple, one story house at 7632 Hampson Street, in Uptown Carrollton, originally built in the late 19th century and undergoing restoration on the October afternoon I strolled by. (Hard core fans might want to visit the statue of Ignatius J. Reilly in front of the Hyatt on Canal Street, chow down on Lucky Dogs, or take in a movie at the Prytania Theater.) Just a few blocks from Hampson Street, on a quiet block of unassuming houses, is 1820 Milan Street, where Walker Percy who was instrumental in getting "A Confederacy of Dunces" published after its author's suicide began writing the 1961 National Book Award winning "The Moviegoer." The novel follows its narrator's spiritual journey in the days leading up to his 30th birthday, as he daydreams, meanders and goes to the movies, all in a quest to simply be comfortable as a member of the human race. Walker Percy in his Covington, La., yard in 1977. Percy who was born in Alabama but lived either in or near New Orleans most of his adult life felt the city as a kind of fever dream, an atmosphere so redolent, so potent, so dripping in charm and dazzle that it made it difficult for the artist to see past its seductive appearance and get to the messiness of life, which is, after all, the fodder of great literature. In an Esquire essay called "Why I Live Where I Live," Percy said: "The occupational hazard of the writer in New Orleans is a variety of the French flu, which might also be called the Vieux Carre syndrome. One is apt to ... write feuilletons or vignettes or catty romans a clef ..." Binx Bolling, the complex, searching, often lonely protagonist of "The Moviegoer," says that he "can't stand the old world atmosphere of the French Quarter or the genteel charm of the Garden District" and hence moves to Gentilly, "a middle class suburb of New Orleans. Except for the banana plants on the patios and the curlicues of iron on the Walgreen drugstore, one would never guess it was a part of New Orleans." Perhaps to escape the lure of the literary equivalent of kitsch, Percy also left New Orleans, in his case for Covington, some 40 miles away on the North Shore of Lake Ponchartrain, another "non place," in the author's estimation. Today Covington is a destination charm spot filled with coffee emporiums and boutiques. But in Percy's time it was quiet and not at all chic, a place where he lunched at his favorite waffle house and walked his Welsh corgi, Sweet Thing. Here, the author, a Catholic convert, was free to pursue his, and his characters', search for God in the everyday, whether in Louisiana, as in "Lancelot," or elsewhere North Carolina, for example, in "The Second Coming." In Covington's leafy historic district, I found myself on Lee Lane, where 19th century, tin roofed cottages are now being used mainly as antiques shops. I tried, but failed, to get a sense of the author at the French Mix, an upscale furnishings emporium, where, when it was his daughter's bookshop, the Kumquat, he had an upstairs office. Nor could I find him at St. Joseph Abbey on River Road, where he was an oblate, occasionally attended Mass, and maintained friendships with at least three of the monks and where he is buried. I did however find excellent, if pricey, iced coffee at Coffee Rani, and realized, once again, that there's no better place to find Walker Percy than inside the pages of his many dazzling novels, which I'd fallen in love with years ago. But where is Tula Springs, anyhow, other than in the imagination of the author, who was born on Thomas Street in nearby Hammond and educated at Yale? He went on to begin his writing career in New York City, and, a couple of decades later, returned home, to head up the creative writing department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, which is where I got to know him. Later I learned that Tula Springs where Wilcox's novels "North Gladiola," "Miss Undine's Living Room," "Sort of Rich," "Heavenly Days" and "Hunk City" are also set is based in part on Independence, La., a 40 minute drive from Covington, where in fact the railroad tracks run parallel to the main thoroughfare, the business district is about a block long, and there's a red brick Baptist church, a water tower and signs advertising mudbugs (crawfish), barbecue and wings. Like so much in Louisiana, if you're looking at Independence with eyes hoping to see grandeur, glamour or charm European capitals, New England villages you're not going to get it. And that's because, past the seductive beauty of the Big Easy, Louisiana is all about nuance, possibility within the boundaries imposed by climate, landscape and, in many places, poverty. Over all, it is flat, hot and wet. But it is there in the interstices between the limited real and the spiritual perhaps that the masterpieces of Louisiana literature unfold. I love these places: small towns, weedy railroad tracks, bridges over bayous leading to wetlands that give way to the oil rig dotted Gulf of Mexico. There are no signposts, no big photo opportunities. Just a unique and, for me, magical way of being in the world. Before moving to California to live with his mother and stepfather, Gaines was raised on River Lake plantation, where his parents were sharecroppers, and as an adult built his home, on what had once been its land, moving the tin roofed plantation school to the back of his property. You can still see the River Lake plantation house, which is privately owned, from the road, and, if you're like me, drive down the dirt road abutting it to see the cane being brought in. You can also visit the pretty town of New Roads, where St. Augustine Catholic Church, still serving primarily African American worshipers, once ran a school that Gaines attended, and where I got a bite to eat at Ma Mama's Kitchen. The waitress called me "honey" and the menu featured crawfish, crab cakes, etouffee and chops. Now, over the swamps, to the small town of New Iberia, home base of James Lee Burke's Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux: crime in and around da bayou. (The author himself, born in Texas and raised on the Texas Louisiana Gulf coast, now spends most of his time in Montana.) I have to confess that I've long had a special affection for small, pretty New Iberia, with its plantation homes and first rate Bayou Teche Museum next to the Art Deco Evangeline Theater. On Main Street you can follow Detective Robicheaux and his buddies to Victor's Cafeteria, and get fried frogs' legs, gumbo, soft rolls and all kinds of vegetables, or meander over the Teche on Bridge Street, where Dave's fictional bait shop was located. Not just the town, but all of Iberia Parish is dotted with places from the author's many novels, but remember to bring soft eyes so you don't miss the misty blue greens, the march of live oaks and the wooden houses, some with a quality of wistfulness from having withstood decades, and even centuries, of hurricanes and humidity. My final stop was also my starting place: Baton Rouge where Huey Long built the nation's tallest state capitol building, a 34 story Deco Moderne skyscraper. Three years later when he was a United States senator, he'd be assassinated outside his offices. Or, as Robert Penn Warren put it in "All the King's Men": "We came into the great lobby, under the dome, where there was a blaze of light over the statues which stood in statesmanlike dignity on pedestals to mark the quarters of the place. ... I saw the two little spurts of pale orange flame from the muzzle of the weapon." On the Capitol's observation deck, I looked west over the Mississippi toward the swamps and bayous, north toward great smoking petrochemical plants, east toward the Big Easy and its dreamy charms, and finally, between where I stood on the 27th floor and the Louisiana State University Tiger football stadium, toward the old wooden house where my husband and I raised our children, with its two looming oaks out back and decades of stories. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Cade Metz, The New York Times's emerging technologies reporter, answered reader questions on Facebook Live, about two newly discovered security flaws that are almost universal. What You Need to Do Because of Flaws in Computer Chips On Wednesday, a group of security experts revealed two security flaws that affect nearly all microprocessors, the digital brains of the world's computers. These flaws, called Meltdown and Spectre, could allow hackers to lift passwords, photos, documents and other data from smartphones, PCs and the cloud computing services that many businesses rely on. Some of the world's largest tech companies have been working on fixes for these problems. But the researchers who discovered the flaws said one of them, Spectre, is not completely fixable. "It is a fundamental flaw in the way processors have been built over the last decades," said Paul Kocher, one of the researchers who discovered these flaws. Here is a guide to what you need to know and what you should do. Where exactly are these flaws? Both are issues with the way computer chips are designed. Meltdown affects most processors made by Intel, the company that supplies the chips for a majority of PCs and more than 90 percent of computer servers. Spectre is far more difficult for hackers to exploit. But it is even more pervasive, affecting Intel chips, microprocessors from the longtime Intel rival AMD and the many chips that use designs from the British company ARM. Your smartphone most likely contains an ARM chip. Why are they such a problem? Both flaws provide hackers with a way of stealing data, including passwords and other sensitive information. If hackers manage to get software running on one of these chips, they can grab data from other software running on the same machine. This is a particular issue on cloud computing services. Why are cloud computing services so important? Operated by companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, these are services where any business or individual can rent access to computing power over the internet. On a cloud service, each server is typically shared by many different customers. By exploiting the Meltdown flaw, a hacker can just load some software onto a cloud service and then grab data from anyone else who has loaded software onto the same server. What about phones and PCs? Phones and PCs are more difficult targets. Before they can exploit the chip flaws, hackers must find a way of getting their software onto your device. They could fool you into downloading an app from a smartphone app store. Or they could trick you into visiting a website that moves code onto your machine. But companies are fixing these flaws? They are trying. Meltdown can be fixed by installing a software "patch" on the machine. Microsoft has released a patch for PCs that use its Windows operating system. Apple said it had released software patches for iOS, Macs and the Apple TV that help mitigate the issue. Intel is also working on updates to help fix the problem. The onus is now on consumers and businesses to install the fix on their machines. What should I do as a consumer? Keep your software up to date. That includes your operating system and apps like your web browser and antivirus software. Microsoft, Mozilla and Google have already released patches for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome to help address the problem. Installing an ad blocker on your web browser is also a safeguard, according to security experts. Even the largest websites do not have tight control over the ads that appear on their sites sometimes malicious code can appear inside their ad networks. A popular ad blocker among security researchers is uBlock Origin. "The real problem is ads are dangerous," said Jeremiah Grossman, the head of security strategy for SentinelOne, a computer security company. "They're fully functioning programs, and they carry malware." How do I update my software? Your operating system and apps typically have a button you can click to check for software updates. For example, in Google's Chrome browser on a computer, you can click on the three dots in the upper right corner and click Update Google Chrome. To update Windows, click the Start button and click through these buttons: Settings, Update security, Windows Update and Check for updates. To update the Mac system, open the App Store app and check the Updates tab for the latest software. Don't procrastinate. Last year, a piece of malware called WannaCry infected hundreds of thousands of Windows machines worldwide. Microsoft had released an update before the attack, but many machines were behind on downloading the latest security updates. What about the cloud services? Amazon, Google and Microsoft said that they had already patched most of the of servers that underpin their cloud computing services, and that largely addresses the problem. But Amazon and Google also said customers might need to make additional changes. To share computing power with customers, cloud services offer "virtual machines." These are computers that exist only in digital form. Customers use these virtual machines to run their own software. After Amazon, Google and Microsoft update their machines, customers may have to update the operating systems running on their own virtual machines to guard against some exploits. If everybody updates his or her software, all is good? No. The researchers who discovered Meltdown said that patching systems would slow them down by as much as 30 percent in certain situations. That could be a problem for big cloud systems. Independent software developers also ran tests on a patched version of Linux, the open source operating system that now drives more than 30 percent of the world's servers, and saw similar slowdowns. "There are many cases where the performance impact is zero," said Andres Frome, a software developer who has tested the new code. "But if you are running something like a payment system, where a lot of small changes are made to data, it looks like there will be a significant performance impact." Consumers are less likely to be affected, and Mr. Kocher said slowdowns could dissipate over time as companies refined their patches. What about the Spectre flaw? According to the researchers who discovered these flaws, including security experts at Google, the memory chip maker Rambus and various academic institutions, Spectre can't be completely fixed. But patches can solve the problems in some situations. Intel and Microsoft and others said the same. No, according to the researchers. But Spectre is much more difficult than Meltdown for hackers to exploit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Q. What makes the corpse flower that just bloomed at the New York Botanical Garden smell so bad? A. The main chemical that makes the giant bloom of Amorphophallus titanum, also called the titan arum, so odoriferous when it first emerges has been identified by Japanese researchers as a sulfur compound called dimethyl trisulfide. Their study was published in 2010 in the journal Bioscience, Biotechnology and Biochemistry. Dimethyl trisulfide is implicated in the notorious odor of boiled cabbage, emerging when all the more pleasant odors have been cooked away. It is also associated with cancerous lesions. In the corpse flower, the volatile odor is dispersed by the heat the flower generates as the phallus like bloom emerges, attracting carrion beetles and similar connoisseurs. There are other culprits as the bloom continues, including dimethyl disulfide, which strikes a garlic note; isovaleric acid, which contributes to the smell of sour sweat; and methyl thiolacetate, with an odor that blends garlic and cheese. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
When the speakers on the rooftop of the Strand Hotel in Midtown began to blare a disco version of "America" from "West Side Story," Chita Rivera, the original Anita in the 1957 Broadway production, cut loose, splaying her crimson tipped fingers and breaking into a giddy trot. An appreciative roar went up from the crowd that turned out the other night at this "gypsy tea dance" to celebrate Ms. Rivera's half century career, all but engulfing her as they cheered. Her entrance was a killer. But it didn't rival the moment when, as Claire Zachanassian, she first strides on stage in Kander and Ebb's musical adaptation of "The Visit," and delivers the kind of fire and ice performance that may well earn her Broadway's ultimate accolade when the Tony Awards are presented on June 7. Just a sidelong glance from the kohl eyed Claire, and the opening night audience was on its feet, its applause so boisterous and sustained that Ms. Rivera had to wave it down with a magisterial sweep of her hand. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Glance at any TV, computer, tablet or phone screen let's face it, it's impossible to escape them and you've probably seen ads for Acura's new TSX with the tagline "It's That Kind of Thrill". The car itself appears at a party thrown by Ludacris (apparently he doesn't attend his own soirees) and careening through the midnight streets and parking structures of Gotham (clearly the helmeted driver knows the cops are on a donut break). Acura is of course Honda's premium mark. TLX replaces two sedans in its line up, TSX and TL. In spirit, it's the TL without the creased Transformer like sheetmetal. The designers, seemingly wary of thrills, steered clear of controversy this time around. Only the signature Acura beak attempts to polarize. TLX can be had with a 206 horsepower four cylinder. The car I'm driving in the video is Acura's 290 horse 3.5 liter V 6. All front drive TLXs get all wheel steering. The six cylinder comes with a nine speed dual clutch automatic, four cylinders get an eight speed dual clutch with a torque converter. Super Handling All Wheel Drive can only be had with the V6. Honda knows how to bake sportiness into its chassis and TSX drives like a really nice Honda. This SH AWD version zooms from 0 60 in just under six seconds. It has become quieter at highway velocities too. Word on the street is four cylinder models have a crisper overall driving feel. Sending more torque to the outside rear tire during corning, it's hard to know how much Super Handling All Wheel Drive affects performance since it can't been switched off. Perhaps due to the Lane Keeping Assist system, TLX has an on center feel that is absolutely locked down. Stuff like standard Jewel Eye LED headlights and optional ELS audio system impress. To run with Audi, BMW, Cadillac, and the newly aggressive Lexus, Acura might try putting the passion of the ads into the car. The pleasure of a stylish cut and sewn dash, self parking system or panoramic glass roof is not available on TLX. The interface will be very familiar to Honda owners. I would be thrilled if it were more elegant to use and had Audi or BMW grade graphics. At least iPhone owners can use Siri Eyes Free. Starting at 31,900 and loaded at 45,600, the reasonable price could withstand a slight jump to pay for those goodies. It's as if Acura product planners believe buyers don't need them. And perhaps we don't. But we want them, don't we? Promising thrills, Acura delivers understatement and logic. VIDEO SCRIPT It's hard to escape genetics. A car company can spin its image with millions of dollars of marketing but a vehicle's DNA speaks louder than any ad. I'm Tom Voelk with Driven for The New York Times. The TLX sport sedan has been launched with Acura's largest promotional campaign ever. The tag line? "It's That Kind of Thrill". That's a lot to live up to. (ON CAMERA) I have never been a fan of Acura's seemingly random alphabet soup nomenclature but the TLX actually makes sense since it effectively replaces two cars in their lineup, the TL and TSX. The only remnant of TLs angry robot design is the bionic beak. Acura drew this one up conservatively. Functionally, standard LED headlights are brilliant. Pun intended. TLX can be had with a 206 horsepower four cylinder. I'm driving the 290 horse 3.5 liter V 6. (SOUND UP) front drive versions get all wheel steering. (SOUND UP) the six comes with a nine speed dual clutch automatic, four cylinders get an eight speed. Super Handling All Wheel Drive can only be had with the V6. SUPER V 6 SH AWD 0 60 is approximately 5.9 seconds Velocity is not an issue (SOUND UP) word on the street is four cylinder models have a crisper overall driving feel. Sending more torque to the outside rear tire during corning, it's hard to know how much Super Handling All Wheel Drive affects performance since it can't been switched off. A graphic shows what's happening. Throttle, steering, and transmission mapping can be tailored (ON CAMERA) The shocks are not adjustable for firmness, it is a little softer than I would expect SUPER EPA V6 AWD fuel economy is 21 city / 31 hwy on specified premium fuel As for thrills, TLX is secure but not surgical in the way 3 Series and ATS corner. On center feel is positively locked down. Good for long distances, it's much quieter than the outgoing TL. (ON CAMERA) Acura's fuel saving start stop system is different than most. Use a light pedal effort while stopped and the engine will not shut off. You'll get a prompt to push harder. There you go. It automatically restarts (SOUND UP) Wish the response was a hair quicker. TLX begins at 31,900. This one's loaded at 45,600 with impressive safety tech including lane keep assist. It reads road stripes to keep the car centered, even on this slightly curving stretch of road. Pretty cool. There's radar assist cruise control too. Acura takes a sensible approach to luxury. Materials are quite good, but emotional touches such as a cut and sewn dash and needle sweeping dramatics at startup are missing. Panoramic roof glass, self parking feature, and a rear sunshade are not available. The interface, not always intuitive, is controlled by a knob or the lower haptic touch screen. It will look and feel familiar to Honda owners, upgraded graphics would be nice. Voice commands are tedious. (ON CAMERA) Space is okay here, two average sized adult shouldn't complain. I'll give you a second to look at knee room and foot room. The middle position? That's a different story. It's raised up so... put the small passenger here No power port or storage in the doors? Seats cushions don't get heat either. It comfortable but folks back here don't get the VIP treatment. (ON CAMERA) With the proximity key in your pocket there are cars that will pop the trunk automatically if you simply stand near it or wave your foot under the bumper. Yes, the cargo hold will handle long stuff so long as it isn't too wide. The average score in the T.P. Trunk Test for this class is six bundles. TLX matches that. There's a lot of Honda DNA here. More flair, emotion, and maybe rear wheel drive are needed to set the Acura division apart. The nimble TLX is understated and logical. It's that kind of thrill. There is an awful lot of tech in TLX that is either difficult to shoot or too time consuming to explain. I'm sure your friendly Acura salesperson would be happy to school you. There's blind spot warning and collision mitigation. (ON CAMERA) ELS SU (SOUND UP) The lane keep assist can really be felt, but like all tech it's not one that you should rely on (SOUND UP) See what I mean? Finally, I would love to see some common sense applied to Acura's names. Let's start with X should be reserved for all wheel drive. Or maybe they could just go back to Legend and Integra. How about that? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
For the first time, one of the top prizes in mathematics has been given to a woman. On Tuesday, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced it has awarded this year's Abel Prize an award modeled on the Nobel Prizes to Karen Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The award cites "the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." One of Dr. Uhlenbeck's advances in essence described the complex shapes of soap films not in a bubble bath but in abstract, high dimensional curved spaces. In later work, she helped put a rigorous mathematical underpinning to techniques widely used by physicists in quantum field theory to describe fundamental interactions between particles and forces. In the process, she helped pioneer a field known as geometric analysis, and she developed techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians. "She did things nobody thought about doing," said Sun Yung Alice Chang, a mathematician at Princeton University who served on the five member prize committee, "and after she did, she laid the foundations of a branch of mathematics." Dr. Uhlenbeck, who lives in Princeton, N.J., learned that she won the prize on Sunday morning. "When I came out of church, I noticed that I had a text message from Alice Chang that said, Would I please accept a call from Norway?" Dr. Uhlenbeck said. "When I got home, I called Norway back and they told me." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Dr. Uhlenbeck, 76, a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said she had not decided what to do with the 700,000 that accompanies the honor. There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and for decades, the most prestigious awards in math were the Fields Medals, awarded in small batches every four years to the most accomplished mathematicians who are 40 or younger. Maryam Mirzakhani, in 2014, is the only woman to receive a Fields Medal. The Abel, named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, is set up more like the Nobels. Since 2003, it has been given out annually to highlight important advances in mathematics. The previous 19 laureates in three years, the prize was split between two mathematicians were men, including Andrew J. Wiles, who proved Fermat's last theorem and is now at the University of Oxford; Peter D. Lax of New York University; and John F. Nash Jr., whose life was portrayed in the movie "A Beautiful Mind." 'She did things nobody thought about doing.' In her early work, Dr. Uhlenbeck essentially figured out the shape of soap films in higher dimensional curved spaces. This is an example of what mathematicians call optimization problems, which are often very difficult and can have zero solutions, one solution or many solutions. "You can ask a question of when you have a soap bubble in this n dimensional space," she said. "You don't know ahead of time what the shapes of those minimal soap bubbles are going to be." The universe is often lazy, looking for solutions that take the least amount of energy. In a flat plane, an example of an optimization problem can be stated trivially: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Even on a curved surface, like Earth, the question has an easy answer an arc known as a great circle. With soap films and bubbles two dimensional surfaces in a three dimensional space the problem starts to get more complicated. To minimize the forces of surface tension, a bubble forms in the shape with the least amount of area to wrap around a given volume a sphere. When two or more bubbles touch each other or when a soap film forms inside of a twisted metal loop, the shapes become more complicated but still contort to take up the smallest amount of area. In yet higher dimensions, "The theory becomes dramatically harder, and standard techniques just don't work," said Dan Knopf, who worked with Dr. Uhlenbeck at the University of Texas. Dr. Uhlenbeck showed that the problem was not unsolvable everywhere, although at a finite number of points, the calculations would not converge. Thus, one could get a handle on the answer by handling those troublesome points separately. "Karen developed some revolutionary techniques," Dr. Knopf said. "And roughly speaking, she found solutions of an approximate problem and then tried to take limits of these approximate solutions to get actual solutions." Dr. Uhlenbeck later worked on what are called gauge theories, used by physicists in quantum field theory to describe interactions of subatomic particles. A gauge theory basically says that how the particles behave should not change depending on how you look at it. That is, the laws of physics should not change if the experiment is moved to the left or rotated. But the answers sometimes seemed to blow up to infinity. She was able to recast the problem in a way that removed the infinities. Dr. Uhlenbeck began publishing her major papers in her late 30s. In principle, that would have been early enough that she could have been recognized with a Fields Medal, but her ideas took time to spread. In 1983, at 41, she received broader recognition with a MacArthur Fellowship, which comes with a bundle of money 204,000 in Dr. Uhlenbeck's case. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
There is one thing analysts can agree on about the year that is coming to a close: 2016 confounded predictions and expectations. From how stocks would perform to who would win the presidency, this was a bad year for people who tell us what tomorrow will bring. So as people take stock of what has passed and wonder about what's to come, is there anything to latch on to for guidance? Or is rolling dice just as likely to yield a useful forecast? As my colleagues have written this month, most year end predictions are useless, particularly those that portend to pick a sector that is set to soar or dictate how the stock market will perform. But this seemingly clear futility, of course, does not mean that analysts will stop making predictions or that people will cease to seek meaning in various indicators, even if they have proved mostly wrong or right only by random chance. You will not get any predictions here. Instead you'll get a look at three reasonable approaches call them the 3 C's that investors can take to prepare themselves for next year or any year. The Company Approach: This approach isn't about guessing where a stock price might finish the year; it's about looking at how companies are performing and assessing their fundamentals. The argument here is that a company's fundamental sales and earnings potential can be analyzed. And while individual investors have been cautious about investing money in the stock market over the last several years, company earnings have continued to be strong. "With so much negativity out there, you still have to put your money somewhere," said Thorne Perkin, president of Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management. "We've had a theme of U.S. pre eminence, which we've had for years. U.S. equity is the place to be." Some of the company approach has its basis in how stock markets typically perform. About three quarters of the time, they go up. And consumers keep buying things. Of course, if there is some external shock say, a trade war or a foreign policy crisis then it could affect how, when and where companies sell things. And this uncertainty is where the company approach can have pitfalls: What is known now is not everything. "Consumer confidence improved further in December, due solely to increasing expectations, which hit a 13 year high," Lynn Franco, director of economic indicators at the Conference Board, which tracks consumer confidence, said in a statement. But there was a caveat: "The postelection surge in optimism for the economy, jobs and income prospects, as well as for stock prices, which reached a 13 year high, was most pronounced among older consumers." Stew Leonard Jr., president and chief executive of the Stew Leonard's grocery store chain, which operates in affluent areas of Connecticut and New York, has his own way of measuring the economic sentiment of his customers: He calls it the mashed potato index. Mashed potatoes that are prepared in the store cost about 4 a pound, compared with 1 a pound for potatoes. But with plain old potatoes, you have to peel, cook and mash them yourself. Yet the price disparity between the two is so great some 400 percent that when Mr. Leonard sees customers buying more prepared mashed potatoes, he stocks the shelves with more high end food. Customers are feeling flush with cash. "There isn't even a close parallel as far as cost goes," he said. "It's timesaving." This holiday season, he said, mashed potato sales were up 31 percent from last year. Catering, he said, was also up 15 percent, and sales of bottles of wine above 20 have also increased since the election. "We've got these things in the store that I rely on a little bit," Mr. Leonard said. "I don't bet the ranch on them, but I keep an eye on them. I really do think they're a precursor of what's to come." Yet by the time Donald J. Trump begins his presidency, Mr. Leonard said, his leading indicators will be less reliable. "I can't really read January or February that well," he said. "Everyone is on diets." The Control Approach: For many affluent investors, crunching corporate numbers or assessing prepared food sales and having time to do both often enough so that the results are meaningful isn't realistic. There is one option, however particularly after such an unpredictable year that all investors can embrace. It's an approach that allows them to manage the only thing that any investor can control: having a saving, spending and investing plan and adhering to it just as surely when stock prices fall in value as when they rise quickly. As we all know, advice to create a financial plan is akin to recommending a diet after a holiday season of gluttony. Most of us know it's what we need, but sticking to our resolve beyond the first weeks of the year can prove difficult. (After all, Mr. Leonard knows his consumer indicators revert to the mean after the dieting months of January and February are over.) Thorne Perkin, president of Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management. "With so much negativity out there," he said, "you still have to put your money somewhere." But several advisers have suggestions on how to keep people sticking to their plans. One of them is thinking negatively about the year. "If I had had a crystal ball, and it said the U.K. would vote to leave the E.U. and that Trump would win the election, it would have never occurred to any of us that the response would have been a really ebullient stock market," said Seth Masters, chief investment officer of Bernstein, which manages portfolios for AllianceBernstein's private client group. "So what you need to do is have some thoughtful risk management and predict all the ways you think you can be wrong." Sounds like a depressing way to begin a new year, but Mr. Masters explains that concentrating on potential risks is one way to get investors to stick to the long term plans they created. He said the plans that the firm set up for clients before the 2008 crisis had accounted for the risk of a recession like the one the United States went through. The plans did not place a high probability on such a collapse, but they did chart a course through it. "We spent a lot of time speaking to clients that there could be a lot of bumps in the road, and that the only way a plan could work is if you stuck to it even when things were terrible," Mr. Masters said. Of course, during the crisis many investors panicked just as assets were at their lowest. "The industry may have been putting plans together, but the evidence is pretty damning," Mr. Masters said. "At every dip, there have been huge outflows into bonds from equities at the exact wrong time, and then money back into stocks at the wrong time." What's the solution? Instead of panicking, investors should rebalance their portfolios meaning that they should adhere to the allocations set out in their plan. This goes for good times, too, when people are more likely to let positive returns knock their portfolios out of balance. "I've seen so many people come in, and they create a plan and then they take it home and never touch it again," said Darrell L. Cronk, president of the Wells Fargo Investment Institute. "Keeping it alive, changing it, adjusting it as the return structure changes we plot a line to make sure people are staying on that plan." "There are no epiphanies," he added. "Discipline, discipline, discipline is going to get you a lot farther down the path when emotions ride high and you most want to make those decisions" that deviate from the plan. While this sounds a lot more boring than telling people to buy a certain stock or bet the farm on a commodity, focusing energy on a plan is going to get people a lot closer to their goals in 2017 and beyond. Besides, as Mr. Masters said, "No one will have the right list of surprises for you, and if they did, you'd think they were nuts." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Webster Breitwisch's old childhood pal is running for office, and Web is unimpressed. "Jimmy Feucht for State Assembly," he says. "You're the guy who almost burned down Scott Pritchard's house by lighting farts in the basement." "People grow up and people change," Feucht (pronounced Foyt) replies, but on the other hand maybe he hasn't changed all that much. Rumblings beneath the surface figure heavily in Jeremy J. Kamps's political tragicomedy "Breitwisch Farm," a smart, complex but overloaded riff on Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard." It takes place on an organic family farm facing foreclosure in contemporary Wisconsin and as Feucht points out, approvingly, frackers drilling nearby would pay loads of money for that property. "I'd rather give my kidney to Dick Cheney," Web (Joe Tapper) says. Not that the place belongs to him and his sister, Leena (Katie Hartke), yet. As their mother, Connie, lies ailing offstage, Breitwisch Farm keeps running. That's largely thanks to Dolores (an excellent Maria Peyramaure), a Mexican immigrant whose teenage son has grown up on the farm, and Zai (Danaya Esperanza), a doctor's daughter from Connecticut who loves the romance of working the land. Directed by Ryan Quinn for Esperance Theater Company, the play lays out dueling visions of the American dream, circa 2010 most significantly between Dolores's son, Oscar (Alejandro Rodriguez), a high school football hero and academic star whose future is held hostage by his undocumented status, and the fervently Republican Feucht (Charlie Murphy), Oscar's principal and an avid suitor of his mom. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
William Gilbert Clayman and Joshua Keith Handell were married Aug. 18 at the Yale Club of New York City. Kyle Roche, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated. Judge Diane S. Sykes, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, led the couple in an exchange of vows. The couple met through a mutual friend while attending law school at Yale, from which each received a law degree. Mr. Clayman (left), 28, and Mr. Handell, 29 both work for the Justice Department in Washington. Mr. Clayman is a trial lawyer also in the criminal division and is detailed to the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Mr. Handell is an appellate lawyer in the criminal division. Mr. Clayman graduated from the University of Florida. He is a son of Katherine P. Clayman of Miami and Landon King Clayman of Mount Vernon, Ohio. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York Times CULVER CITY, Calif. A speeding Ford Fiesta passed the Sony Pictures gate and swerved into a parking lot across the street. It was 1:07 p.m. Was this finally him? Frannie and Irwin don't like to wait. A young man in a tight sweater tumbled out of the car. Clutching a black binder overflowing with scripts, he started to walk run toward the Culver City Senior Center. "Ta da!" he said as he approached the entrance, adding a little ankle turn for effect. He hugged me we had never met before and apologized profusely for his harried schedule: "Girl, it has been a morning." Matthew Hoffman's basic story is as old as Hollywood itself. After studying theater at the Boston Conservatory, part of Berklee College of Music, he packed a suitcase and moved to Los Angeles in 2006, determined to become a star. He got a roommate and a restaurant job and started to audition. But then life took an unexpected turn. Mr. Hoffman, now in his late 30s (and fussy about it because of ageism in Hollywood), has become a celebrity, if not quite the kind he had envisioned. A few years ago he started to volunteer at the senior center as a type of acting coach. He helps people in their 70s, 80s and 90s perform scenes from films like "Casablanca," "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Wizard of Oz," even providing wigs and costumes for special videotaped performances, which they toast with champagne flutes filled with vanilla Ensure. "This town can be very, very, very lonely, and when things have not been going well in my life, these people have always been there for me," he said. "They also live authentic lives. They don't care what anyone thinks. Do. Not. Care. That gives me the courage to be my high haired, theater loving self." (Which has not always been easy!) But now Mr. Hoffman has a conundrum: At long last, his Hollywood career has started to take off. Acting was his first calling. As a teenager growing up in Lynbrook on Long Island, where his father was a hospital administrator and his mother worked in a brokerage firm, Mr. Hoffman landed the role of Young Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol" at Madison Square Garden. (Jesse Eisenberg was his understudy.) Somewhere along the way, he decided to abandon his craft and turn toward "hosting" talk shows, game shows, celebrity news shows. Think Ryan Seacrest on the E! red carpet, except with jazz hands. Tuesdays With Matthew sessions, which now take place on Wednesdays, typically involve routine line readings. More elaborate scenes with props and silly costumes (Bernice playing a pesky iceberg in "Titanic," Millie as a swaying ear of corn in "The Color Purple") require a lot more prep time. Because he is a volunteer at the center, Mr. Hoffman only does those a few times a year, and less so lately. On a recent afternoon, about 20 seniors gathered in a room next to the cafeteria. The scent of turkey chow mein lingered in the air, but nobody seemed to mind. They were excited to see Mr. Hoffman and find out what scenes he would pluck from his binder for them to tackle. First up: Ms. Friday and Mr. Turek. Mr. Hoffman called on them to perform a scene from "A League of Their Own," the 1992 comedic sports drama starring Geena Davis and Tom Hanks. Mr. Turek, in a plaid yellow shirt and tan trousers, and Ms. Friday, decked out in a bright blue sweater, chunky jewelry and striped pants, ambled to the front of the room. Mr. Hoffman handed them their lines. "One, two, three action!" he shouted, standing on tiptoe and spreading his arms like he was about to take flight. Ms. Friday started to feign sobbing. She rubbed her eyes and sniffled. Everyone clapped heartily when they were finished; one person banged approvingly on a walker. "That was some of the best crying we have ever had," Mr. Hoffman said, running over to Ms. Friday. "I have goose bumps! Look at them!" He pulled up the sleeve of his sweater and extended his arm. "I love you, Matthew," she said, giving him a hug. "I feel about 35 after your classes." Mr. Hoffman returned to his binder and flipped madly through the pages. "Aha! Here were go," he said. "Who here loves Meryl Streep?" "Nobody? Not a single person? I thought everybody loved Meryl," Mr. Hoffman said, pretending to be traumatized. He flipped some more. "How about old trusty? 'Steel Magnolias.'" Mr. Turek sighed loudly. "Matthew, how about something by Clint Eastwood," he said. "You always want to do that scene," Mr. Turek said Ms. Friday decided to chime in. "I would like to do more Mae West," she said. "I love men's legs, comedy and sunny weather the sunnier the better, because that means the legs are out for me to see." She giggled. "Louder!" shouted someone with hearing aids in the back. Mr. Hoffman regained command of the room by zeroing in on a quiet woman in her early 80s named Irene. She had been coming to class for months but had never participated. "You want to come up?" Mr. Hoffman asked her. It took some coaxing. But before long she was doing a monologue from "Sunset Boulevard." "Did you have fun?" Mr. Hoffman asked, giving her a high five. "I was scared," she said. "You don't even know how good you are!" "If he ever left, I'd have a disaster on my hands," Jill S. Thomsen, the recreation and community services coordinator at the center, told me one afternoon in November. I don't think she was exaggerating. Mr. Hoffman has long been more than a volunteer acting coach to the seniors who cycle through Ms. Thomsen's hallways. He doubles as a friend and confidant and a surrogate son, perhaps helping them cope with the daily indignities of growing older. He listens to their stories and treats them like contemporaries. "I was sick recently and missed a few weeks, and Matthew called me to check on me," Mr. Turek said. "It made me feel like I was important enough for someone to worry about." Funerals, alas, are part of this gig. One center mainstay, Dee Burress, a plain spoken woman who liked to perform, died last year at the age of 76. Mr. Hoffman brought flowers to class and placed them on her preferred seat. He keeps her photo on the cover of his script binder. "It sounds lofty and weird, but Tuesdays has transformed me as a human being," he said. "I discovered who I am." The meandering path that brought Mr. Hoffman to the Culver City Senior Center started, strangely enough, with the avatar of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Center (and the high priestess of Conde Nast): Anna Wintour. After Mr. Hoffman started posting videos of special performances on YouTube as a way to raise money for Meals on Wheels, the directors of senior centers in other cities contacted him: Would he come do one of his costumes and props sessions there? Last year, he agreed, traveling within California to a center in Bakersfield and one near Fresno. He found a sponsor for the Fresno trip, raising 5,166 for Meals on Wheels. But his work schedule has put the brakes on his fund raising. This year, he has only raised about 35 percent of his goal. "Love Island," for instance, required all of Mr. Hoffman's attention over the summer. Even before that, he was stressed out by trying to balance his career with his volunteer work. After a class in the spring, he sat on a bench outside the center and broke down about it. "I'm at a big crossroads personally and professionally," he said, wiping away a tear. "These people have been my family out here." He drove away. The center seemed to turn from Technicolor to black and white. My phone rang. It was a steadier Mr. Hoffman. "I don't care how busy I get," he said. "I will somehow make it work. I am not leaving them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A report to be released on Tuesday by a group seeking to raise college graduation rates shows that despite decades of steadily climbing enrollment rates, the percentage of students making it to the finish line is barely budging. The group, Complete College America, is a nonprofit founded two years ago with financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation and others. Its report, which had the cooperation of 33 governors, showed how many of the students in states completed their degrees, broken down into different categories , including whether enrollment is full or part time, or at a two or four year institution. The numbers are stark: In Texas, for example, of every 100 students who enrolled in a public college, 79 started at a community college, and only 2 of them earned a two year degree on time; even after four years, only 7 of them graduated. Of the 21 of those 100 who enrolled at a four year college, 5 graduated on time; after eight years, only 13 had earned a degree. Similarly, in Utah, for 100 students who enrolled in a public college, 71 chose a community college, 45 enrolling full time and 26 part time; after four years, only 14 of the full time students and one of the part time students graduated. Of the 29 who started at a four year college, only 13 got their degree within eight years. Because of gaps in federal statistics, students who enroll part time, or transfer have been nearly invisible, said Stan Jones, the president of Complete College America. "We know they enroll, but we don't know what happens to them," he said. "We shouldn't make policy based on the image of students going straight from high school to college, living on campus, and graduating four years later, when the majority of college students don't do that." Currently, federal education statistics generally focus on first time full time students. But according to the report, about 4 of every 10 public college students attend part time and no more than a quarter of part time students ever graduate. "It's really, really hard to get your hands on completion rates for nontraditional students," said Judith Scott Clayton, of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College. "If somebody pops in and takes a community college class and they don't finish, you don't know whether they were ever planning to get a degree." Among older students, as well as those who are awarded Pell grants, and black and Hispanic students, the report said, fewer than one in five of those attending college part time will earn a degree in six years. "Time is the enemy of college completion," the report said. "The longer it takes, the more life gets in the way of success." One factor, Mr. Jones said, is the increasing practice of amassing more credits than are required for a degree. Another factor is the large number of students mired in noncredit remedial classes that the report calls the "Bermuda Triangle" of higher education. Half of all students studying for an associate degree, and one in five of those seeking a bachelor's degree including many who graduated from high school with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher, previous research has shown are required to take remedial, or "developmental" courses, and many of them never move on to credit bearing courses, much less graduation. The report recommends that states adopt financing incentives to push colleges to pay more attention to completion rates. And it highlights strategies that have helped to increase graduation rates. Among those strategies are embedding remedial instruction in the curriculum, rather than requiring separate courses, and offering programs that students attend in a block, with a predictable schedule and a cohort of other students seeking the same credential. The report praises Tennessee's 27 Technology Centers, where the degree completion rate is 75 percent. Tech students, with an average age of 32, sign up for a program, not individual courses, and they come for seven hours a day, Monday through Friday, with classes ending by 3 p.m., allowing them to hold an evening job or care for their children after school. Instead of separate remedial courses, the centers have a required foundation course, in which each student learns skills needed for a program. "A student might come in not knowing why they need to learn trigonometry, but when they're studying machine technology or drafting technology, they'll see why, and I think that helps," said Carol Puryear, director of the Tennessee Technology Center at Murfreesboro. "Our mission is really work force development," she said, "and about 85 percent of them get a job when they graduate." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Station wagons are probably not going to become more popular than sport utility vehicles, but this Volvo can do everything an S.U.V. does, in a sleeker package. Welcome, friend. Surely you've glanced at the photo of the Volvo V90 Cross Country and understood that it's a station wagon. And yet you read on. Possibly you're an original thinker and open minded about wagons. Or perhaps you're just odd. Lately, it seems, you have to be to own a wagon. In 2016, 40 percent of the vehicles sold in the United States were crossovers and sport utility vehicles, according to IHS Automotive. Wagons? About 1 percent. For some reason, automotive writers love station wagons. When we don our smoking jackets in our secret lair, we lament the dearth of wagons (but celebrate that few of us actually smoke). It can be argued that S.U.V.s are simply raised wagons in camping clothes. I have owned five station wagons, one with fake wood paneling on the side. And full disclosure, the other four have been Volvos, two of them Cross Country models. Let's cherish the V90 and its outdoorsy sibling, the V90 Cross Country. The two, along with the Mercedes Benz E400 4Matic, are the last full size wagons sold in the United States. The Cross Country starts with the handsome V90, adds rugged body cladding and exterior trim, and lifts the ride height by some 2.5 inches. Think Ranger Rick dressing for success. A standard panoramic glass roof makes it easy to spot Woodsy Owl in the wild. The dark ebony wood in the cabin and the special seat stitching reflect Volvo's Scandinavian sensibility. Based on the same architecture as the XC90 S.U.V., the 2017 Cross Country has one powertrain, designated T6. Its two liter four cylinder engine is turbocharged and supercharged, turning out a healthy 316 horsepower and 295 pound feet of torque. The gearbox has eight speeds. All wheel drive is standard. Drive modes noticeably change the vehicle's dynamics, and the Cross Country's suspension gets extra range of motion for smoothing out forest service roads. This 4,220 pound machine moves from a standstill to 60 miles an hour in a robust six seconds. For hikers in less of a hurry, the 2018 models will be available with a less expensive T5 engine (basically the T6 without the supercharger). For highway trekking, the quiet, comfortable and composed Cross Country lives up to its name. A wagon typically has a lower center of gravity than an S.U.V., giving the Cross Country confidence in corners even with a suspension properly tuned for comfort. The Cross Country is higher than a standard V90. But it's more aerodynamic than the XC90 so the wagon's fuel economy is five miles per gallon better on the highway (the government rates it at 22 miles per gallon in the city, 30 highway). Fully describing the standard safety equipment would exceed this article's allotted length. It includes automatic emergency braking for cars, bicyclists, pedestrians and large animals. Pilot Assist, also standard, is Volvo's semiautonomous driving technology, which can handle steering, braking and acceleration, in many cases. After about 10 seconds of hands free driving, though, it wants your hands back on the steering wheel (which is heated). Pilot Assist works at speeds up to 80 miles an hour but is best at reducing the stress of tedious stop and go commuting. Unlike urbanites dressing in expensive technical outdoor clothing, the Cross County is no poser. I've confidently driven this Volvo on unimproved access roads at speeds that would scare most passengers (purely for research, mind you). The Cross Country glides over tree roots and dirt heaves on the way to remote trailheads. Hill descent control automatically applies the throttle and braking on extremely steep grades drivers only have to steer. Will it challenge a Jeep Wrangler's abilities? Nope. But few owners will challenge the Cross Country's capabilities. Modern Volvo interiors have a warm, rich Scandinavian ambience that sets them apart from Audi, BMW, Lexus and Mercedes. Hefty interior door releases are shaped so fingers slide inside them in a soul satisfying manner. Poke fun at me now, but you'll understand when you try them. Volvo seats are often held up as the best in the business and these don't disappoint. A 4,500 package that was not on my tester adds seemingly infinite adjustments and a massage feature to the front seats. User interfaces are important in modern cars, and the LCD screen Volvo uses is as large and responsive as an iPad. Swipe left and right to get to different pages. Easy? Yes, but the graphics can be small and tough to read or accurately hit on bumpy roads. A few more dedicated hard buttons would be nice. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto help. Back seat room is generous and the outboard seating positions (with an integrated child booster seat option) are as comfortable as the front seats. Middle passengers must deal with a drive shaft tunnel and a seat back that's a little lumpy. The package that adds massaging seats upfront includes a climate zone, heated cushions and full sunshade treatment for the rear. Everyone's happy. Volvo eliminated the rear facing third row years ago. So if your children like to wave at the cars following behind (my kids called it "sweet and sour," depending on the engagement of the driver), the Mercedes E Class wagon is the way to go. The Volvo's cargo space has all sorts of elastic bands that keep things from rolling around. Obviously, the space doesn't have the depth of the XC90 S.U.V.'s space, but it will easily swallow the luggage of five poorly packed people. Drop the split rear seats and two mountain bikes should easily slide in. I advise a tarp to keep things clean speaking from experience. Volvo has been turning out attractive designs lately. The svelte V90 may be the best looking of the bunch. (But hey, the automotive journalist brain sees things that way.) Chances are, station wagons aren't going to become wildly popular again. But the stylish V90 Cross Country does nearly everything an S.U.V. does, only in a sleeker package. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The offers pop into my inbox: Come stay in my villa in Tuscany. Bordeaux is beautiful in the spring, and our country house has a pool. Wouldn't you like to come to Rio and use my place at the beach? Each one ignites its own little fantasy: drinking coffee in the garden of a French chateau from a big, chipped cup, so chic it doesn't have to be perfect. Waving to George and Amal in their speedboat on Lake Como. Coming home at night to cocktails on the terrace of my cutting edge London apartment. And I can actually slip into at least some of them for a couple of weeks, at the small cost of lending my own home. Over the last three years, my husband and I have traded our Manhattan brownstone for a light filled canal house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam; an apartment just steps from La Concha in San Sebastian, Spain; a rather generic ski condo in Utah; and, this past summer, an apartment in the Sodermalm neighborhood of Stockholm and a houseboat in Copenhagen's equivalent of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We've saved money. Every night we spend in someone else's home is a night of not paying for a hotel room, and that can add up to thousands of dollars over the course of a vacation. But more important has been the chance to experience a place like a local, learning which bakery has the great bread and which one is better for pain au chocolat, keeping an afternoon appointment with the gelato stand one block over, navigating by local landmarks (turn right at the Cut the Crap hair salon) to get back to "our house." Home swapping is a first cousin to using sharing economy disrupters like Uber and Airbnb, though in a straight up exchange no money is changing hands. It remains a tiny part of the traveling world, according to Douglas Quinby, vice president for research at PhoCusWright, a travel research firm, in part because of the structural obstacles to swapping homes. "You've got to find a home that's available where you want to go, you've got to match and marry dates, you've got to match for an equitable home," he said. And "you have to be somewhere that other people want to go." Before the web, home exchangers looked at thumbnail photographs in printed catalogs, Ed Kushins, who founded HomeExchange.com, the service we use, in 1992, told me. Back then, if you wanted to swap, you would "have to write an actual letter and stick it in the mail and then wait for a reply," he said. The company now has 55,000 members who each pay 9.95 a month to list their homes and who complete an estimated 120,000 exchanges a year, he said. Other companies put their own twists on the exchange process: One called 3rd Home focuses on luxury second homes (it vets your house to make sure it's up to snuff); Love Home Swap has a point system that members use to swap and also offers rentals; Home Link International says it's the oldest exchange group, with the most members outside the United States. People always ask, don't you feel odd having strangers in your house? And the truth is, no. The exchange relationship is at once intimate and distant. You sleep in each other's beds, use each other's towels, borrow the lingonberry jam and, maybe, that fancy conditioner in the shower, but you don't often meet. I frequently find myself scouring our hosts' houses for clues as to who they are, reading the titles on the bookshelves, staring at the photos on the walls and pondering their design choices. It didn't surprise me to learn that our Dutch host was a product designer with a piece in MoMA's gift shop, based on the spare, white beauty of her living room. The two little girls in our Swedish hosts' photographs must be teenagers by now, judging by the copies of "Insurgent" and "Divergent" on their shelves. And surely it meant something that at both of our exchanges this past summer, volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard's creative class best seller, "My Struggle," were on the shelves my husband was racing through it, too. So far we haven't traveled to cities with long lists of tourist requirements dutifully to be checked off. Our experiences trend less toward forced march and more toward leisurely stroll. On our first full day in Stockholm, for instance, we left the city for Artipelag, an arts center on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, created by the founder of the Baby Bjorn baby carrier company. There, in a show devoted to art from the archipelago, we discovered the work of Prins Eugen, a member of the Swedish royal family who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was at the center of the artistic foment there. The next day, back in Stockholm, we visited his house on Djurgarden, a lovely and quite modest place, where our stroll through his flower garden was punctuated by screams from the Fritt Fall ride at the nearby Tivoli Grona Lund amusement park. Later, my husband and I took a boat to Drottningholm, the Swedish Royal palace, an enormous pile of a place with acres of formal gardens surrounding it. It was hard to imagine the modest watercolorist Prins Eugen in its gilded halls. It was mid August and everywhere we turned, someone was sitting in a slice of sun, soaking it up. We got into the habit of joining them. From afternoon into the lingering evening, the sidewalk cafes and outdoor beer halls were filled. I couldn't help but notice, though, that every place was stocked with fleece blankets, an omen perhaps of the cold, dark days to come. After a week in Stockholm we moved on to Copenhagen. Working out our back to back exchanges had taken an algebraic equation of home swapping, in which the Danish family stayed in our house in New York in February, while we were in the Utah ski condo, which belongs to a man who currently lives in Qatar. The Swedish family took over our place while we stayed in theirs (then they stayed the second week while we moved on to Denmark). The Danish family had another house they could stay in while we were on the boat. We still owe the owner of the Utah place a week at our house. Home, this time, was a houseboat moored off Refshaleoen Island, once home to the Burmeister Wain shipyard. Its giant industrial buildings are being repurposed as restaurants, clubs, concert spaces and even a paintball arena. We stopped in the last to see if my son could get in on a battle, but the manager told us they were completely booked with people celebrating their weddings. I don't know what I expected of the Danes, but it wasn't that. Our location meant that there were no stores close by, no corner cafe to pop into in the morning. We compensated by loading up our rental bikes on the way home, ferrying exquisite pastries from Lagkagehuset bakery home in our backpacks. The ride itself was a treat, a long slide down Prinsessegade, past Christiana, the renegade squatter settlement, where the air was sweet with the smell of marijuana, followed by some swooping turns past old military buildings. Two red barns marked where we turned for the last quiet pedal to the boat. There the resident cat, Bulle, waited. By the time we'd arrived in Copenhagen, it was the third week of August, and the Scandinavian summer was clearly coming to an end. The days were chilly, the nights chillier. One afternoon when the temperature hit the mid 60s, I told my son we had to go to Islands Brygge Harbour Bath, a floating pool in Copenhagen harbor that I had been longing to try. After changing on the deck, we headed to the high dive, where he immediately launched himself from the top of the 5 meter platform. I followed from the lowest level. The water was heart stoppingly cold and surprisingly salty. All the Danes swimming, I later noticed, had on wet suits. If Stockholm had been beautiful but a little sedate, Copenhagen is clearly the Brooklyn of Scandinavia. My husband debated the merits of cold brew coffee at a stand in the Torvehallerne food hall (the barista said he didn't think cold brew brought out the acidity enough and gave him a pour over), and we ate lunch one afternoon at Copenhagen Street Food, where stands and trailers offered artisanal hot dogs, specialty tacos and small batch ice creams. We spent an afternoon in the meatpacking district, which is starting to shade over into something else a home to galleries, small manufacturers like Butchers Bicycles (makers of a highly engineered cargo bike) and hip restaurants like Kodbyens Fiskebar, a white tiled temple to fresh fish. After dinner there one night, we rode the very cool, very orange Cykelslangen bicycle skyway back toward home. But part of the joy of home exchange is that it takes the edge off that travelers' pressure to go out and do something. A 400 square foot hotel room with a mini fridge and a coffee maker starts to close in on me after a few days, and I start feeling desperate to escape. Staying in a house or an apartment or even on a boat gives you permission to relax. Rather than dining out every night, you can stay in and eat leftovers and watch "Breaking Bad" on TV with the cat at your feet. If that sounds like home, well, that's the point. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Museum of Modern Art in New York, known as MoMA and founded in 1929, owns about 200,000 works of modern and contemporary art, and is regarded as one of the world's leading cultural institutions. MoMaCha, a cafe and exhibition space in New York, opened this year, displays modern and contemporary works of art, and appears to have become known mainly for being sued by MoMA. A dispute between the two began late last year, according to the museum, when a company related to the cafe submitted a "MOMACHA" trademark application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, then followed up with an application for "MOMA." Then, in April, the MoMaCha cafe opened on the Bowery, serving matcha tea and exhibiting artworks. The cafe's logo, in its font and graphic presentation, was similar to the one used by the museum, at least as far as MoMA officials were concerned. They sent a letter to the cafe demanding changes, to no avail. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
There's a story that the married duo behind the catchy numbers from the movie musical "Frozen" tell about being disparaged. It goes like this: The songwriters , Kristen Anderson Lopez and Robert Lopez, were in a Disney store in Los Angeles. It was relatively soon after the unleashing of "Let It Go" the be yourself anthem that took over kindergarten classrooms and karaoke bars alike and during a period when the "Frozen" songs had reached peak omnipresence. The two were standing in front of a cashier, trying to get a discount. The "Frozen" soundtrack chirped along in the background. "We said, 'We don't work for the company, we're songwriters,'" Lopez recalled recently. "'And by the way, we're the writers of these "Frozen" songs.' And she just looked at us and said, 'Why?'" "Being the writers of 'Frozen' has led to some wonderful, wonderful gifts," Anderson Lopez explained. "And it has also led to moments of humility." Call it a price of success: You don't create a defining earworm for a generation of children and parents without anybody crying "overplayed!" The original "Frozen," about the queen of a fantasyland (Elsa, voiced by Idina Menzel ) absconding and her sister ( Anna, voiced by Kristen Bell ) journeying to find her, made over a billion dollars at the global box office after its 2013 release. The plot prioritized female self reliance over romance; it was credited as a leap forward for Disney princess stories. The movie bagged two Oscars (one for original song) and two Grammys . So when the directors of the first movie, Jennifer Lee (who was also the screenwriter) and Chris Buck, came to Lopez and Anderson Lopez in 2015 and asked whether they would collaborate on a "Frozen" sequel, the songwriters weren't sure that they wanted to jump back in. "No one wants to just try to replicate their success," Lopez said. "That would be a recipe for disaster." But the pair connected with a new theme Lee and Buck had in mind. "They pitched us sort of a thematic ballpark that they wanted to begin with, which was the idea of change and the difficulty of keeping things together as the world changes around you," Lopez said. "That struck a chord with us immediately." (In an early song, "Some Things Never Change," a character sings the line "Like an old stone wall that'll never fall, some things are always true." Onscreen, part of an old stone wall crumbles.) "We have girls growing older," Anderson Lopez added, referring to the duo' s two daughters. " So this is about maturity it is about finding your path and your purpose and how you can stay attached to your family while also finding your own path." The catchiest sequence of notes in "Frozen 2" may be the one based on a Latin hymn about Judgment Day. "Into the Unknown" is built around a duet between Menzel's Elsa and a "secret siren." The siren's call, a distinctive sequence of four notes, is based on the Dies Irae, a Latin hymn best known for being used in the Catholic Mass for the dead. In the past, the hymn has been incorporated into a Brahms piano composition, "The Shining," "Sweeney Todd" and a laundry list of other works, usually to stoke foreboding. Now it's likely to be joyfully belted from the back of minivans: It has been turned into a musical motif in "Frozen 2," delivered in high pitched, mysterious fashion in "Into the Unknown" by the Norwegian singer Aurora. "The type of singing is inspired by kulning, which is a shepherdess's call from Scandinavia," Lopez said. "The most important thing with 'Lost in the Woods,'" Anderson Lopez said, "is 'you feel what you feel and your feelings are real.'" She was referring to a line near the beginning of the song, an '80s infused, cheesy serious ballad of love and longing sung by Jonathan Groff's character, an introverted ice peddler named Kristoff. "We both have strong references to when we were in our own high school trials and tribulations," Anderson Lopez said of herself and Lopez. "Your 13 year old boyfriend breaks up with you, you're listening to Bryan Adams singing like, 'Baby, you're all that I want.'" The duo's goal with the song, Anderson Lopez said, was "to show this buttoned up mountain man really, truly feeling big, huge emotions." Why an '80s ballad? "So that we could have fun but also land a certain sincerity," she said. While singalong friendly tunes like "Into the Unknown" and "Lost in the Woods" have gotten the most attention, "The Next Right Thing" is probably the most surprising song in the movie it's a dark and pensive meditation on grief. (Sample lyrics: "You are lost, hope is gone/But you must go on." ) The song, sung by Bell's Anna, was born of tragedy. "During the press junkets for 'Frozen' one, Chris Buck lost his son," Anderson Lopez said. "We were there as he just took a step and another step and showed up for work and showed up for the awards and made it through, one breath at a time, the unimaginable." She said that another colleague, Andrew Page, a central figure in music production for both the original "Frozen" and "Frozen 2," also lost a daughter. "So two of our key collaborators at the Disney Company had both experienced the worst nightmare you can imagine," Anderson Lopez said. When she sat down to write the lyrics for "The Next Right Thing," she explained, "I really just thought about them, and wrote it for them." The inevitable question whether "Frozen 2" would try to follow up "Let It Go" directly dangled over the lead up to the movie's release. Thematically, this song may share the most D.N.A. with that anthem: "Show Yourself" also sends an unmistakable message of self acceptance (it's in the title). Anderson Lopez said that, at an early screening, the couple's 14 year old daughter was sobbing after the song. "'It feels like you're telling me I can follow my gut and find my own path,'" Anderson Lopez remembered her saying. "That's the success of this movie for me , " Anderson Lopez added. "If she can't hear it from her mom in daily life, she can hear it from her mom through a Disney movie she wrote." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
MIDLAND, Texas I cried the day I moved to Midland, the capital of our nation's oil and gas industry. Back then, almost 10 years ago, my husband's new job designing control systems for natural gas processing plants wasn't the sort of work I wanted him to take. It didn't mesh well with my increasingly progressive principles. And so on some level, I understand the response from people when I tell them where I live: an odd mix of curiosity, pity and disgust. Curiosity because, along with our neighbor city Odessa, we're seen as the land of "Friday Night Lights," oil barons and women with hair still bigger than Texas. Pity because all they picture is flat, thirsty land peppered with thorny mesquite and bobbing pump jacks. Never mind that the sunsets will leave you speechless. Yet ever since a drop in demand caused by this Covid 19 pandemic caused oil prices to plummet, it's the last response disgust that seems to be everywhere. Disgust stemming from "oil town" stereotypes. And it troubles me. Because I can't reconcile the disgust turned to glee I see on social media (the "they deserve it anyway" attitude) with the Midland I've come to know. My husband and I are native Texans. When we returned from four years in Beijing with a dog and a newborn daughter, the city quickly made us feel at home again. Over the past several weeks, as we joined the rest of the country in doing what we can to stop community spread of the coronavirus, we've been dreading another crisis in the making. One that few outside of the oil rich Permian Basin in West Texas noticed brewing. On April 20, it happened. Late in the afternoon, after helping my first and third grade daughters finish their Google Classroom assignments, I heard the price for a barrel of oil had reached 15 cents an unfathomable number. I walked into my husband's makeshift work from home office to ask whether he had seen it. He had the current trading information pulled up on his screen when I walked into the room, and I felt a little relieved when I glanced at it and noticed it was at 33. "Oh!" I laughed sheepishly. "A second ago I thought I saw something about it being 15 cents." He raised an eyebrow and pointed at the tiny negative sign I had missed. It kept falling and closed at negative 37.63 for a barrel of oil. I'm no oil expert, but I know plenty of them. And I've yet to meet a local who isn't astounded that prices fell into negative territory, that traders were paying people 37.63 a barrel to take it off their books. (Now we'd trade that light, sweet Texas crude for toilet paper if we could.) It's not "big oil" I'm worried about the multinational conglomerates and the national corporations. It's my brother who just got laid off. It's a friend telling me how devastated her son was after he had to lay off a single mother. It's our Chin refugee community displaced from Myanmar being suddenly destabilized again as the low skill, high wage jobs that helped them buy houses and plant roots in their new country evaporated overnight. Their mortgages haven't. With oil's crash, some economists say our community in Midland could be the epicenter of the coming recession for months or years. Unlike parts of the country where people are out of work until coronavirus restrictions can be lifted, jobs here went over the cliff with the price of oil. As a five hours from anywhere single industry town, there aren't other jobs just down the road. Deaths of despair, strokes and heart attacks could go up. Will those get counted the way we tick off deaths from Covid 19? Does anyone on the coastal edges of our country even care? "Big oil" in West Texas is actually a hive of small businesses, many of which are run by my friends. And one of those businesses puts a roof over my head and dinner on my table. It's what knits our community together. It's made up of all the people I love generous and kind. The sort of people who invest their oil profits in the community here as well as those abroad. It seems that every day, a new For Sale signs pop up and more people I care about lose their businesses. My girls will lose classmates and teachers; I'll lose friends. My husband might lose his job in the coming weeks. I called my best friend to share my excitement about writing this article and heard her voice crack as she described the agony of trying to save their small business in this gutted market. It's as if everything is somehow tied to the destruction. Sometimes it surprises me when people don't seem to realize life is a whole lot more gray than black and white. Once I boarded an airplane with a woman wearing a "Down With Oil" shirt. I wondered if she caught the irony of her wearing it on a plane, in clothes that couldn't have been made without oil. I hear too many online, and even on the news, acting like that woman now rejoicing in the downfall of an industry that, like it or not, we'll all depend upon for the foreseeable future. Here in Midland, we are rooting for communities in our nation facing the full brunt of this health crisis. We've sewn masks, shuttered small businesses, canceled school and stayed six feet apart though granted it is a bit easier out here in the wide open. But I wish I heard or saw a little bit more reciprocal solidarity. We don't expect anyone to "fix it" for us. But we would like to be able to speak our concerns about the economic situation we're facing without feeling as if by valuing our community's jobs we're disregarding science or not valuing human life. I wish I could help you understand what it feels like to hear what sounds like some parts of this country rejoicing when we're afraid and grieving and watching our community crumble. I want us to pursue paths to cleaner and renewable energy. But not like this. Not via the collapse of an entire region's economy in the course of a few weeks. This has multigenerational repercussions for us. But indifference to this oil crisis won't hurt us alone. It will hurt our entire nation and drive us further into our respective corners in this Divided States of America. Carrie McKean ( MckeanCarrie) works and raises her family in Midland, Texas. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
In February, a group of several hundred military enthusiasts gathered to play fight in Clovis, Calif., at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. They had come for an event called the Road to Kharkiv, a simulation of a fictional NATO mission into Eastern Ukraine, hosted by a company called MilSim West. Roughly half of the participants played NATO troops; the other half, Russian forces. Visually, they were almost indistinguishable from a real life military unit. In MilSim a portmanteau for "military simulation" first person shooter games meet outdoor endurance events. Participants wear authentic military apparel and wield realistic airsoft guns to simulate 40 hours of frontline combat. In the early 2000s, as companies began producing high quality airsoft guns that mimicked the weight and internal mechanics of real weapons, the target demographic became people who sought to emulate American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan or, as Jet Del Castillo, a 36 year old Navy veteran and MilSim enthusiast, put it, teenagers who wanted to "play Call of Duty in real life." Mr. Del Castillo said that the simulations also appeal to some veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom were eager to leave service behind but still sought military camaraderie or the "thrill" of combat scenarios. Civilian players, in turn, were excited to hear firsthand about the war they'd seen depicted on TV and in video games. Now, around 20 large scale MilSim events (meaning those with more than 100 players) take place in the United States most years. Several others are hosted internationally. Though many were canceled this year because of the pandemic, some companies now have events scheduled for September and October. MilSim West is widely considered to produce the most immersive scenarios: The uniform and gear requirements are extensive in order to be highly realistic, and the three day events operate at a grueling pace that leaves no room for breaks. The company uses pyrotechnics and radios to mimic the sounds, smells and chaos of combat. The Road to Kharkiv event drew 217 players, according to the company. Only 165 of them finished. According to The Washington Post's database of fatal police shootings, 129 Americans were killed by law enforcement from 2015 to 2017 for holding fake firearms, most of them airsoft guns. The Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12 year old Tamir Rice in 2014 said he mistook the airsoft pistol tucked into the child's waistband for a real one. Still, in 2017, 3.4 million Americans played with airsoft guns; the following year, a report from Grand View Research, a consulting firm, estimated the airsoft industry which includes gun sales, equipment and revenue from airsoft fields to be worth 600 million. MilSim enthusiasts don't hew to any one ideology or political party. In the parking lot of the MilSim West event in February, a car with a Pete Buttigieg campaign sticker sat next to a truck with an National Rifle Association membership sticker. Ryan Pendergrast, a 26 year old Californian who manages a pet store and who was there for the weekend, described himself as a "staunch leftist." "You seem to come across people from all across the political spectrum at an event like this," Mr. Pendergrast said, "which could be surprising for someone on the outside looking in." Still, there's an understandable fear from outsiders that the combination of predominately young men and simulated combat means MilSim serves as an attractive recruitment source or training opportunity for far right militias. And while MilSim West's owner and founder, Josh Warren, said that he deliberately avoids politicizing his events (in part, by creating an in game world based on an impossible scenario), a few other MilSim organizations appear to have embraced the American militia movement, hosting events based on fictional battles between U.S. troops and civilian militias. "If you think you're here training for whatever coup your brand of politics is going to have in the streets, you're going to be frustrated because people aren't going to take it seriously," Mr. Warren said in a phone interview in September. He added that "if I saw someone was recruiting people to carry weapons in the street, which is itself a form of violence, I would certainly tell the police." Ellie Chang, a 29 year old historian who's been an active MilSim West player for eight years, observed that the players are often impressionable young men. "These are the kids you can recruit into the military," she said. "It's the same person that could, key word here, could be recruited to the far right. It's not MilSim that makes them go one way or the other." Mr. Warren pointed out that MilSim events cost as much as training opportunities offered by almost every gun range in America, which use real firearms instead of fake ones. As far as hobbies go, MilSim can be expensive. Hyper realistic airsoft guns can run upward of 800. Then there's body armor, fatigues and helmets, not to mention the PVS 14 night vision monocles issued to U.S. troops, which many players buy, that go for about 3,000 on Amazon. Doug Woolbert, 46, who attended February's event with his son, Benji, said he spent more than 2,000 on MilSim weapons and gear for the two of them. The 200 tickets were Benji's 15th birthday present but for Mr. Woolbert, the bonding opportunity was priceless. "For his birthday, we wanted to share time together and do something physical. I didn't take the opportunity to serve when I had the chance and now I have another son who's serving," Mr. Woolbert said. (Mr. Woolbert's other son is a U.S. Marine, stationed in Camp Pendleton, Calif.) "So many kids are playing video games, and I'm just proud my boys are doing this and getting me out here. I'm 46 and I'm not on the couch," he said. Most players justify the expense of the hobby as one of entry to a close knit community. "I'm terrible at airsoft," said Harrison Irvine, 24 and from Halifax, Nova Scotia. "I come here to be with my friends, I come here to have a physical challenge, to get away from my desk job that I work back at home." The immersive quality is also a big draw. "You have these moments of suspended disbelief when things are going off around you, but then it calms down and you think, 'Oh, I have to be back at work on Monday,'" said Devin Moore, a 28 year old warehouse manager from Lake Forest, Calif. Despite being pitted against one another for almost 40 hours, when the weekend's final battle ended (the Russian side overwhelming the NATO team), the dirt covered players broke into laughter and immediately began swapping stories and fawning over each other's gear. Most of the players had slept for fewer than six hours in the past three days. All were grinning widely. Later that day, at a nearby In N Out, Benji and his father recalled the battles. Mr. Woolbert said the event made him feel closer to his older son, the Marine. Benji agreed. Between bites of a double double animal style burger, he said, "I've seen that it's a lot harder than I thought." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'BE MORE CHILL' at the Lyceum Theater (previews start on Feb. 13; opens on March 10). A favorite of some blissfully uncool young fans, this Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz musical about a teenager who swallows a potentially malevolent supercomputer is booting up on Broadway. Reviewing the Off Broadway production, Ben Brantley called it a "high energy, high anxiety musical." Stephen Brackett directs. bemorechillmusical.com 'BONNIE'S LAST FLIGHT' at Next Door at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on Feb. 8; opens on Feb. 13). Keep yourself in a locked and upright position during the playwright Eliza Bent's new show. A flight attendant prepares to work the friendly skies for the final time while the rest of the cabin crew is in turmoil. Under Annie Tippe's direction, Bent appears as Mark Twain. 212 460 5475, nytw.org 'THE CAKE' at City Center Stage I (previews start on Feb 12; opens on March 5). The playwright and television writer Bekah Brunstetter ("American Gods," "This Is Us") whisks up a play loosely inspired by bakers' refusals to create cakes for gay weddings. For Manhattan Theater Club, Debra Jo Rupp portrays a woman with confectionary conflicts. Lynne Meadow directs. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org 'DADDY' at Pershing Square Signature Center (previews start on Feb. 12; opens on March 5). A co production from the New Group and Vineyard Theater, Jeremy O. Harris's poolside play cannonballs into the Signature Center. Under Danya Taymor's direction, Ronald Peet stars as a young black artist, with Charlayne Woodard as his mother and Alan Cumming as his lover and father figure. There's a gospel choir, too. 212 279 4200, thenewgroup.org 'FIDDLER ON THE ROOF' at Stage 42 (previews start on Feb. 11; opens on Feb. 21). Sunrise, sunset, swiftly moves the show. After a rave Off Broadway engagement, this National Yiddish Theater version of "Fiddler," directed by Joel Grey, translates the text into Yiddish. (There are supertitles.) A tear struck Jesse Green wrote that the prior production had "a kind of authenticity no other American 'Fiddler' ever has." 212 239 6200, nytf.org 'FREESTYLE LOVE SUPREME' at Greenwich House Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 12). It's one thing to say, "Yes and ..." But can you say it to a beat? And make it rhyme? This improvised hip hop show, an early creation of Lin Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail, returns for a month or two of ad libbed rap. Joining the regular crew are occasional guest stars, including Miranda, Daveed Diggs and Christopher Jackson. freestylelovesupreme.com 'KISS ME, KATE' at Studio 54 (previews start on Feb. 14; opens on March 14). Brush up on your Shakespeare and your Cole Porter, too, because the Roundabout is reviving this 1948 musical, a metatheatrical riff on "The Taming of the Shrew." Under Scott Ellis's direction, Kelli O'Hara stars alongside Will Chase, Corbin Bleu and Stephanie Styles. Has the show aged poorly or will it be just wunderbar? 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'MARYS SEACOLE' at the Claire Tow Theater (previews start on Feb. 9; opens on Feb. 25). Jackie Sibblies Drury, one of the theater's most thrilling, form flexing playwrights, returns with a new play set in the 19th century, now and points in between. Quincy Tyler Bernstine stars as a Jamaican woman with a lifetime of adventures and then some. Lileana Blain Cruz directs. 212 239 6200, lct.org 'MIES JULIE' AND 'THE DANCE OF DEATH' at Classic Stage Company (in previews; opens on Feb. 10). Sex and spiritual violence inform these adapted August Strindberg plays, running in repertory at Classic Stage. Shariffa Ali directs Yael Farber's forceful adaptation of "Mies Julie," which resets the action in post apartheid South Africa. Conor McPherson's take on "The Dance of Death," about a marriage that will have couples counselors cowering in terror, is directed by Victoria Clark. 866 811 4111, classicstage.org 'THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG' at New World Stages (previews start on Feb. 11; opens on Feb. 20). After going right on Broadway for a year and a half, this spoof of very amateur dramatics arrives Off Broadway as intact as a show that destroys its own set can be. Though Ben Brantley occasionally found the comic chaos exhausting, he wrote that there's "a wild, redeeming poetry in such anarchy." 212 239 6200, broadwaygoeswrong.com 'SEA WALL'/'A LIFE' at the Public Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 14). In these twinned monologues by Simon Stephens and Nick Payne, men contemplate life, death and fatherhood. Tom Sturridge, who starred in Stephens's "Punk Rock," plays a photographer covering a family story in "Sea Wall." Jake Gyllenhaal, who has performed in two Payne pieces, delivers a monologue originally drawn from Payne's personal experiences in "A Life." Carrie Cracknell directs. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN' at the Irish Repertory Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 12). Sean O'Casey, a great playwright of the Anglo Irish renaissance, is reborn, courtesy of the Irish Rep. It will present all three of his major plays, beginning with this 1923 tragicomedy, directed by Ciaran O'Reilly. Set in the Dublin slums, it centers on a poet who perilously resembles an I.R.A. soldier. 866 811 4111, irishrep.org 'BEHIND THE SHEET' at Ensemble Studio Theater (closes on Feb. 17). Charly Evon Simpson's moving drama about a controversial gynecologist has only a few appointments remaining. Colette Robert directs a drama inspired by J. Marion Sims, a physician who made his breakthroughs by experimenting on unanesthetized slave women. Ben Brantley wrote: "'Behind the Sheet' may be a quiet play. But its echoes are thunderous." ensemblestudiotheatre.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
new video loaded: Underwater Video Offers New Look at Titanic Wreck | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
El Museo del Barrio has appointed Rodrigo Moura, formerly the adjunct curator of Brazilian art at the Sao Paulo Museum of Art, as its chief curator. Patrick Charpenel, the executive director of the museum, said Mr. Moura's community driven, socially oriented vision "totally aligns" with El Museo's values and mission. An institution like El Museo "obviously is very sensitive about diversity, very sensitive about immigration, very sensitive about marginality," Mr. Charpenel said. He added that those issues are at the heart of Mr. Moura's work. Check out our Culture Calendar here. Before his time at the Sao Paulo Museum of Art, Mr. Moura spent 12 years at the Inhotim Institute, an outdoor contemporary art museum in central Brazil, where he served as curator and artistic director. He joins El Museo as it works to restructure and expand its curatorial staff after facing several setbacks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Our critic spent 30 minutes looking or trying to look at "Starry Night." It wasn't easy. The Museum of Modern Art owns only three paintings by Vincent van Gogh, but they include its biggest crowd pleaser: "The Starry Night," which the Dutchman completed in 1889, shortly after having checked into a psychiatric hospital. It has hung in the first gallery on the fifth floor since 2004, when MoMA opened its expansion by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi. More than anything by Matisse or Picasso, more even than Monet's late "Water Lilies," "Starry Night" draws the largest throngs in the permanent collection, scrutinizing and photographing the picture's flamelike tree and agitated Provencal night sky. (On the museum's audio guide, Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture, notes with a chuckle, "Chances are you aren't standing in front of this painting alone ...") I usually skip past "Starry Night" when I'm at MoMA: too crowded, too familiar. But even art critics need the odd refresher course so as an adieu to MoMA's Taniguchi era, I committed to spending half an hour with the museum's most popular painting. I went at the worst possible time: late Friday afternoon, when the museum offers free admission. It was mobbed. 5:30 p.m. Hear the crowd before I see it. Doors to the fifth floor collection slide open, and the gallery sounds like Penn Station. With the fourth and sixth floors closed, the crowds in here are bigger than I've ever seen and "Starry Night" has a semicircle of 50, 60 people in front of it. 5:31 p.m. Station myself in the back of the throng. Back here "Starry Night" (which measures about three feet by two and a half) appears a bit larger than postcard scale. Neighbors murmur in French and Turkish. I'm tall enough to see over most heads; the raised smartphones, however, are a killer. 5:33 p.m. Push forward: excuse me, excuse me! Now I can see the brush work properly; the blues of the night sky stutter like Morse code, and the black outline of the church steeple pierces the distant hills. Try to let the picture, so overloaded with cliches of madness and vision, dissolve into pure form. Shoved by woman with GoPro. 5:35 p.m. Affable security guard, stationed to the painting's left, makes the first of several requests for spectators to stand back. Unlike other bucket list paintings at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa is sequestered behind a wooden banister; at the Uffizi in Florence, Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" sits in a recessed niche "Starry Night" hangs right on the wall, with no special protection except some nonreflective glass. 5:39 p.m. As I zero in on the crescent moon ringed by an intense halo; it looks, I realize, more like a Parisian gas light than an astronomical body a guy with seriously nice arms thrusts his phone in front of my face. He takes a photo, inspects, deletes, takes another, inspects, deletes. I'm looking at him for journalistic purposes only. 5:40 p.m. All right, Jason, look at the painting! Scrutinize the stammering brush strokes in the sky. We call them "churning" or "roiling," but they aren't that messy after all; they glide, they ripple, as orderly as the floorboards of "The Night Cafe" or the stalks of "Wheatfield With Crows." 5:42 p.m. I'm in the front now. Try to concentrate on the cypress tree at lower left: the part of the painting literally overshadowed by the starry sky. I'd never really appreciated the brown squiggles that streak through the vegetation a lovely bit of nonlocal color in this dusky scene though I wish I could get closer to see every detail. Elbowed by woman taking photograph of her mother. 5:46 p.m. It's a little calmer now. Smart teenager to my left tells her friend: "This was my favorite painting when I was, like, 13." Friend responds with a weary postmodern admission that would make Jean Baudrillard proud: "I know this is the real painting, but it's like I can't see it." 5:49 p.m. Look longingly past "Starry Night" to "The Olive Trees," an equally compelling van Gogh in the same room, with just one person in front of it. Told myself I'd stay put! 5:51 p.m. I have spent as much time looking at visitors' screens as I have at the van Gogh. It's not hard to photograph a flat surface in even white light yet many photos people take here are terrible. The angles are severe, the focus is fuzzy, a third of the canvas is out of frame. These camera phone shots, I think I understand, don't aim to be faithful reproductions; they aim to say, "Yes, I was here." Even with the photographer out of frame, it's still a selfie. 5:55 p.m. Move to the extreme right side. Only from this angle can I see van Gogh's impasto; never had I seen the thick, canary yellow lines in the hollow of the crescent moon. 5:57 p.m. Step to the rear of the crowd. The painting, I have to admit, has not opened up to me after half an hour. But from the rear of the gallery I can see five in progress photos on smartphone screens, five little "Starry Night"s hovering in front of the real thing. And this unbridgeable space between the painting itself and images of it affords a satisfaction of its own. Looking matters, looking is primordial but looking is not enough to make sense of a masterpiece. What was van Gogh's project, after all, if not an exploration of the gap between the things in front of your face and the tools you use to represent them? 6:00 p.m. Timer on my phone vibrates. Pull it out for the first time, and take a selfie. Works from the Museum of Modern Art's Permanent Collection Through June 15 (June 16 for members) at 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212 708 9400, moma.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The most prestigious performer in New York's Flamenco Festival 2014 has been Eva Yerbabuena, who presented two programs, "!Ay!" and "Lluvia," at City Center this weekend. (The festival continues, but at other New York locations, through March 24.) At the end of "Lluvia," as she danced her long, rich and complex "Llanto" solea, she proved herself one of the world's great dancers. Not a moment too soon: All of her first program ("!Ay!," on Saturday evening) had been horrid and the first sections of "Lluvia" (on Sunday night) had been worse. Though it was always apparent that Ms. Yerbabuena was a mistress of the flamenco genre, she spent most of the time exaggerating, perverting or parodying it. Mainly she used it for a prizewinning display of anguish: If suffering were a category in the Olympics, she would take top honors. But it's ludicrous for an important dancer to spend large parts of her recitals with her face and torso slumped on a table, as Ms. Yerbabuena did on both evenings. At no point in "!Ay!" or the first half of "Lluvia" could we feel dance as music making. Instead the emphasis was all Expressionistic, all labored and all tiresome. It's remarkable that, when Ms. Yerbabuena dropped Expressionism and became musically complex in "Llanto," she also became a far more seriously expressive artist. The long train of her black dress became part of the force of gravity against which she worked. Just to see her gently lean this way or that, as if rooted to the spot but still moving, became exciting, and the opening of her arms, the circling of her hands were all glorious. Then, lifting her skirts and letting her feet thunder and drill (the fullness and force of her heel action is exceptional), she showed all the uncrushable defiance of flamenco. These, however, were only a few features of "Llanto." In a spectacular sequence, Jose Valencia, much the finest of the three singers in both programs, held out a crimson shawl for her like a red cape to a bull? She slowly advanced toward it, as if magnetized; then, unexpectedly, she turned, letting him place it protectively around her shoulders. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Credit...Nina Westervelt for The New York Times In the beginning, there were inflatable waterfowl. Then came the doughnuts, the Pegasus floats and the novelty coffins. Children have drifted out to sea and across lakes on them. They have terrorized highways, carried by the wind. And last year, on Fish Lake in Chisago County, Minn., a group of four women stranded on a rainbow unicorn were rescued by local deputies. With each passing summer, more and more bodies of water are invaded by the species known as the polyvinyl chloride inflatable pool float. Search poolfloat on Instagram and there's a near endless scroll of babies, dogs and fully grown adults reclining on inflatables of all shapes and sizes. Celebrities do it. Influencers do it. Even ferrets and tiny inanimate dolls are doing it. The act of lounging on a novelty pool float, or, more specifically, the photographic evidence of one lounging on a novelty pool float, has become visual shorthand for a carefree, idyllic lifestyle. The phenomenon shows no signs of deflating; there has been a spike in searches for "pool float" on Google every summer for the past three years, according to Google Trends. (Popular related search topics include "unicorn," "swans" and "pineapple.") Pool parties and mass gatherings like Coachella are the floatie's natural habitat. In New Jersey, Floats Boats is a popular festival at Tices Shoal that, as the name implies, celebrates both floats and boats . In a Facebook post, the organization behind the event, now in its fourth year, encouraged attendees to bring only "really cool" floats, adding that "round tubes and noodles are not allowed unless they are doughnuts or seamonsters of sorts." (The event, formerly known as Floatchella, underwent a name change after receiving a cease and desist letter from Coachella last year.) The festival is the brainchild of Nicole Cesario, 26, and Marissa Laudati, 27, childhood friends who grew up on the Jersey Shore. They first got the idea to throw one after seeing how much attention their personal pizza floats drew from beachgoers in 2015. "Everyone looks cute on a float," Ms. Laudati said. "It's not just, 'Hey, I'm standing on this body of water.' It can go along with your outfit it just adds to your outfit appeal or aesthetic, your brand, in a way." Ms. Cesario said that each year brings new styles of floats with references to pop culture, like ones inspired by "Stranger Things" and by the Kardashians. "You keep seeing new ones you want to buy even if you already have one," she said. "It's like a lifestyle. It makes for a really cool Instagram opportunity that celebrities are able to do. Now you post and it's like you're one of them." Though Ms. Cesario and Ms. Laudati consider pineapples "basic float bait" that is, not very original they said fruit themed floats and oversize inflatables continue to be big trends in the float o sphere. They have even spotted an inflatable bull riding float that rocks with the waves. "It's like a statement," Ms. Cesario said. "The float that you bring defines you." While he declined to identify Sunnylife's current best selling float or reveal many details about the brand's design process, citing wariness about competitors, Mr. Glick did concede that he believed the trend of animal themed inflatables was fading. "Animals are less hot than they once were," he said. "Animals are done." Mr. Barrett of Funboy, the company that saw a boom in sales from Taylor Swift's Instagram, expressed a similar sentiment. The industry was originally fueled by sales of unicorns and swans, he said, but the brand's newer floats, like a rainbow chaise longue, have shifted away from novelty shapes and are closer to "three dimensional art." Celeste Barrett, a Funboy founder and its creative director, said the company's designs, which include inflatable angel wings and a "retro pancake," are inspired by flea market finds, runway fashion, museums, and art and architecture. (Ms. Barrett is the wife of Blake Barrett's brother, who is also a company founder.) "We're definitely teetering into the fashion space," she said. "I think our floats are really an extension of people's wardrobes, as well as their homes." Up next, Ms. Barrett said, Funboy is expanding its focus to include "winter stuff." This winter, you can experience that very photo friendly pool life outside of the pool. The company introduced its first inflatable sled last year , and plans to introduce more inflatables geared for the snow in coming months. For inspiration, "we looked at vintage sweaters, different old snowmobiles," Ms. Barrett said. "It's very 1970s ski team." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. He arrived in New York City from Williamsburg, Va., where the complexities of American history are on full display. Give yourself more than eight hours to walk the length of Manhattan. I learned this on a recent crisp Sunday when my partner, Maggie, and I set off on a hike from Battery Park on Manhattan's southern tip, with the goal of reaching Fort Tryon Park, about 12 miles away, by sunset. I'd write about the walk, I thought, and take some photos along the way that showed all the different New Yorks that exist within just one of the city's five boroughs. A little stunty? Sure. But the inclusion of New York City, a place where I've lived for five years, on the 52 Places to Go list posed a number of challenges. For starters, there was the timing. New York was my last stop in the United States for a while, before I headed off to the Middle East and beyond, and unfortunately I would have to miss some of the events that put New York City on the list namely, World Pride, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. But I knew the biggest struggle would be balancing recovery I've been averaging five hours of sleep a night on this trip with reconnaissance. A hike across Manhattan felt like one way to neatly package a narrative (even if "Broad City" did it first) while doing something I've always thought of doing, but never made time for. Having grown up on the move, feeling like a visitor is, for me, status quo, even in my current home. Still, approaching the city you live in as a tourist allows you to see the place in a new light and I don't mean finally making it to the American Museum of Natural History or Katz's Deli. I mean the little things: How, when the sun is high, the shadow that consumes Trinity Church is the perfect respite for eyes strained by the glare of the Financial District's office towers right behind it. Or how the food cart proprietors, fishing for hungry customers, often tie a single pretzel from their yellow and blue Sabrett signs. After two solid months of traveling, in which I was constantly soaking in every detail around me, I found myself hyperaware of changes in New York. Why, for instance, had the arcade machine at my favorite bar, the divey Sophie's in Alphabet City, been swapped out? How dare they make such a momentous decision in my absence? Nowhere was change more shocking than at Hudson Yards, the long planned 25 billion development on Manhattan's West Side that was seemingly conjured out of the ground in the months I'd been gone. I arrived in time for the opening of the Shops, the development's ritzy indoor mall. The event was bizarre, and not just because I had come straight from Colonial Williamsburg. Servers passed out flutes of Champagne to the overdressed crowd while taiko drummers in branded happi coats put on a show in front of Uniqlo. Break dancers took over one elevated hallway and lines formed to enter Snark Park, the immersive art space that was promoting a collaboration with a "cereal infused ice cream" brand, as one of the employees told me. I didn't inquire further. I needed another chance to see Hudson Yards for it to make sense. So I returned during my walk through Manhattan. The High Line, the elevated park that winds past the midsections of Chelsea's luxury apartment buildings , was even more packed than usual, given its new role as a conduit into Hudson Yards. A small courtyard separates the mall from the development's centerpiece, a sculpture for now known as "Vessel," a 200 million gleaming stairway to nowhere that you need a free, but timed, ticket to climb. Entering the mall felt like a respite, if only for a second, from the selfie stick waving hordes in front of the installation. "I'm from New Jersey so I know shopping malls," Maggie said, as we tried to keep track of each other in a crowd pressed onward, like automatons, by the blaring techno music. "I'd say this is definitely one of the clubbier ones I've been to." My parents live in Dubai and the only way I've learned to like that superlative obsessed, chrome and glass city is by gravitating toward the polyglot migrant communities that built the city, and the scant traces of the pearl diving beginnings that haven't been swallowed up by the drive to build, build, build . To me, Hudson Yards is New York City trying to be the Dubai I've always avoided. It's a vision of the future seven years ago, when ground was broken, that already felt outdated on opening day. If there's a silver lining, it's that Hudson Yards made me feel more like a tourist in my own city. Getting back on the Hudson River Greenway was a relief, and entering Central Park made me ecstatic. By the time the sun started setting, we had only reached Harlem, conveniently where our apartment is. Strolling through Hamilton Heights, where dusk looks like light streaming through a million coffee filters, I took comfort in the familiarity of it all. We called it a day over subtly spiced stews at Tsion Cafe, a neighborhood favorite. What I packed, what I left behind None I can already hear the seasoned travelers scoffing at how late to the game I am, but Holy Merino wool! On the first leg of my trip, I had brought a couple of shirts and socks made out of the miracle wool to try it out on the road. But I took the opportunity of being back to stock up on the stuff at REI. Merino wool really does keeps you warm when it's cold out and cools you down when it's hot . Best of all, the wool has anti bacterial properties that keep your clothes smelling fresh. None Knowing the ice caves of Ontario were on my itinerary I had packed serious performance gear, including snow boots that took up a third of my suitcase. Those were left behind this time, not just because I won't be dealing with such harsh weather, but because I've realized it's not worth bringing anything that I'm only going to use once or twice. None When traveling alone, your cellphone can become a lifeline. There's no such thing as too many portable power banks. I'm now traveling with three. I may not have been organized enough to keep two fully charged, but I think I'll have better luck with three semi charged. The impressions that stayed with me as I packed up to leave again weren't about Hudson Yards or anything new. I was just happy that some of my favorite meals the anesthetizing bowls of Sichuan spiced meats and vegetables at Mala Project; the bang for your buck pan Indian fare at the West Village's Mint Masala; the perfect whole fish at one of Harlem's West African outposts, La Savane were still good. I was relieved that my cat climbed into my lap, for the second time ever, soon after I sat down on the evening I arrived. And then did so a third, fourth, fifth and sixth time over the next two weeks. I found myself looking for reasons to stay in my apartment, or at least in my neighborhood. I had to rest up, organize my files, catch up with expenses, call my mom. With the exception of a quick trip to the Bronx for lunch, I didn't leave the island of Manhattan a travesty for a tourist, as any New Yorker would assert . It had been less than two months since I had left New York for the 52 Places adventure. In the past I've repeatedly found myself away from the city, as a reporter or as a touring musician it often felt like I was just pretending to live here. This time felt different . All of a sudden, this megacity, one that can be so elusive to so many even me felt a whole lot like home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Nets Are Looking Really Good, Even From London Dinwiddie, 25, was a second round pick of the Detroit Pistons in 2015, but after failing to catch on in stints with the Pistons and the Chicago Bulls and after several stints in the N.B.A.'s development league he signed with the Nets as a free agent in December 2016. His first season in Brooklyn was fairly uneventful, with an average of 7.3 points a game in a bench role, but last season was thrust into a starting role as a result of injuries to D'Angelo Russell and Jeremy Lin, and he thrived with career high averages of 12.6 points and 6.6 assists. He came into this season still unsure of his future, talking openly about feeling a lack of security with his place on the team, but he blossomed as the team's first man off the bench, essentially alternating big games with Russell and serving as his team's closer in tight games. Ten times this season he has scored 25 or more points off the bench, with his high mark coming on Dec. 12 when he poured in 39 in a win over the Philadelphia 76ers. Dinwiddie's play has generated some buzz around a potential All Star appearance. More important, it inspired the team to sign him to a three year, 34 million contract extension in December. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
UFA, Russia Oblivious to the freezing cold, a small boy, seated at the edge of a hill overlooking the wide Belaya River, held a wooden train high above his head. He angled it so that it appeared poised on a bridge spanning the gray water, taking people and goods perhaps to the far off metropolises of Moscow or Leningrad. "You are dreaming," Ralph Fiennes said in Russian to Maksimilian Grigoriyev, playing the 8 year old Rudolf Nureyev. "Dreaming of places far away." It was November 2017, and Mr. Fiennes, the director of the newly released "The White Crow," was shooting some of the final scenes for the story of the early life of the man who would become one of the world's most influential dancers. Nureyev was fiercely charismatic, immensely talented and obsessed by dance. By the time he was in his mid 20s, he would be as famous as a pop star. The film isn't exactly a biopic, although we see elements of Nureyev's impoverished childhood in this city some 800 miles east of Moscow, and his formative years at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in Leningrad, where he was schooled by the famed teacher Alexander Pushkin (played by Fiennes). Written by David Hare, "The White Crow" is a portrait of the artist as a young man, an attempt to show the complex array of factors biographical, psychological, social, political that led to the moment when the 23 year old dancer made a decision that would change the history of ballet: Nureyev became Nureyev by defecting from Russia to the West at Le Bourget airport in France in June 1961. As the film shows, there was little about his family or upbringing to suggest he would become one of the greatest male dancers of the 20th century, and probably the most important influence on male ballet style and technique since Vaslav Nijinsky. Throughout "The White Crow," Fiennes and Hare suggest the extraordinary will and curiosity that drove Nureyev to dance, and to seek out art and culture wherever he could. Hare wanted to show "the sheer dedication needed to work at the level Nureyev worked at," he said in a telephone interview. "He worked longer and harder and more obsessively than anyone else. I wanted people to understand that genius doesn't come fully formed." Nureyev was born in 1938 on a train as his mother traveled from Ufa with his three sisters to join her husband, serving in the Red Army. He was raised in poverty, often went hungry and was a loner from an early age. But his life changed one day when his mother smuggled the family into Ufa's opera house to see a ballet. "I knew," he wrote in his autobiography. "That's it, that's my life." He started folk dance classes, then ballet lessons, and by 17 had managed to secure a scholarship to the Vaganova academy, a feeder school for the Kirov Ballet (now known as the Mariinsky), which he joined three years later. By the time the Kirov was due to move on to London, officialdom had had quite enough. At the airport he was told he would be flying to Moscow. Knowing that this meant disgrace and probable exile, he took "six steps exactly," as he wrote in his autobiography, toward two French airport policemen. (They had been alerted to a potential problem by Clara Saint, one of Nureyev's new friends in Paris. She had rushed to the airport after receiving a call explaining the situation.) "I would like to stay in your country," he said. That scene (with Nureyev played by the 26 year old Oleg Ivenko, a principal dancer with the Tatar State Ballet in Kazan, Russia) provides a tense climax to the film. "I felt it was almost like a thriller," Fiennes said. "That heightened moment of self realization, the context of the Cold War, the way chance determined almost everything. I think it was happenstance, he was caught by surprise, and events that unfolded second by second." Nureyev's defection made headlines around the world. While it brought opprobrium upon his friends and family in Russia, it also gave an extra fillip to the sensation caused by his dancing, his long hair, fierce expression and sexual allure "like a predator let loose in a drawing room," one British critic wrote of his performance. The choreographer Frederick Ashton described him as a mixture of faun and lost urchin. Nureyev went on to form a legendary partnership with the British ballerina Margot Fonteyn and joined the Royal Ballet in London, performed and staged ballets all over the world, and became director of the Paris Opera Ballet in the 1980s, developing a new generation of choreographers and star dancers. Nureyev's glamour and celebrity he was a regular at Studio 54, where he hobnobbed with the likes of Liza Minnelli and Truman Capote gave ballet a new allure, which wasn't hampered by his reputation for perfectionism, arrogance and tantrums. (In 1973, the ballerina Natalia Makarova accused him of deliberately dropping her onstage, and there are innumerable stories of abusive behavior toward fellow dancers.) His influence is still felt today in male ballet technique and style. Even in his Kirov years, Nureyev brought an unusual feminine grace to his dancing, rising higher on the ball of the foot than was standard, and constantly working on what is known in ballet as "line": the elongation of the limbs into a harmonious, full bodied alignment. At the same time, the masculine power and unapologetic sensuality of his pantherine, explosive performances charged male dancing with new drama and intensity. These innovations have changed expectations for subsequent generations. Ivenko, who was born two years before Nureyev's death from AIDS in 1993, at 54, said that he and his classmates grew up watching videos of the dancer. "He has this amazing, wonderful energy and authentic emotion when he danced that we all wanted to take from him," Ivenko said. Fiennes said he had always been clear that he wanted to tell Nureyev's story until the defection. (A new documentary, "Nureyev," just released in the United States, does tell the full story of his life.) "I wasn't interested in what happened afterwards, with Fonteyn, the fame, the jet setting," he said. "For me, the story was about self realization, the discovery this is what I want to do. I found it very moving, this poor boy who hasn't had a formal education, hasn't been introduced to the history of art or music, and then dance is the springboard." Fiennes added that he wanted to show that Nureyev's "armor of attitude" was more than narcissism or outrageousness. "There is a parable like aspect: a boy with a destiny, and a knife edge personality, who won't tolerate anything but perfection," he said. "Something in me finds that ruthless commitment exciting. In a weird way, he is a kind of superhero." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Some Hollywood actors, including Charlize Theron, James McAvoy and Ewan McGregor, will perform onstage Nov. 13 at Carnegie Hall in the American premiere of "The Children's Monologues," a fund raiser for concert hall and the arts charity Dramatic Need. The Academy Award winning director Danny Boyle has organized the production, which he has staged twice before in London, in 2010 and 2015. This staging, a collaboration between Dramatic Need and Carnegie Hall, will feature a largely new cast and roster of playwrights who have adapted real monologues from children in rural South Africa. In addition to Ms. Theron, Mr. McAvoy and Mr. McGregor, other film stars include Susan Sarandon and Daniel Kaluuya. Others include the "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah, of South Africa, and Lena Dunham. Also appearing are the six time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, and two "Hamilton" performers, the Tony winner Daveed Diggs and Javier Munoz. The monologues come from children growing up in Rammulotsi, a rural township in the Free State province of South Africa, who were asked to recall a day they would never forget. Through storytelling, Dramatic Need's founder, Amber Sainsbury, said in a statement, "they learn to express themselves, cope with difficult experiences, and empathize with others." She added that in some cases, "they can find comfort, strength, and even solutions to the challenging circumstances that they face." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
But the ballet's potency gradually tapers off. Mr. Wheeldon resorts to ornamental and repetitive choreography steps are done again, yet rarely build to create a satisfying visual rhythm, except in the spirited second act dance for the corps de ballet. His forced arm positions and use of a flexed foot which, depending on the scene, gives characters a touch of anguish or jauntiness feel forced, while lifts are more acrobatic than soaring; you see the dancers fighting for the right grip, a semblance of control. Mr. Wheeldon has reunited with the composer Joby Talbot, who contributes a mildly evocative score that is more cinematic than balletic, and with the designer Bob Crowley, whose tree in the second act is divine. (The three also collaborated on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.") But just as with Mr. Wheeldon's "Cinderella," it is Basil Twist's silk effects that steal the show. In the play, there is a well known stage direction for Antigonus, an adviser to Leontes, who is commanded by his king to abandon the baby Perdita: "Exit, pursued by a bear." When Mr. Twist's ravenous bear lashes out in the form of waves of fabric dancing through the air, "The Winter's Tale" is never more chilling or alive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
For decades the curved, somewhat comma like shape of Windsor Terrace, in central Brooklyn, seemed almost to symbolize its role: a kind of geographic pause between larger flanking neighborhoods. Squeezed between Park Slope and the various parts of the Flatbush area, and linking them in the process, Windsor Terrace never really achieved the stature of its bigger name peers. But after years of sprucing up its parks and adding stylish restaurants, while aggressively protecting its porch fronted rowhouses from out of scale development, the area has become a top choice destination. Period. Brick rowhouses are the most sought after, along with wood frame townhouses, and in the heart of the neighborhood a lack of through streets keeps things quiet. "Fortunately we bought when we did, otherwise we would never be able to afford this place now," said Geraldine Cassone, 53, who has spent nearly her entire life in Windsor Terrace. In 1992, Ms. Cassone, a retired special education administrator, paid 172,000 for a Queen Anne that has multiple porches and a backyard view of Prospect Park. Though as a "handyman special" it needed a great deal of work new windows, a roof and a kitchen, among other things it could sell today for nearly 2 million, Ms. Cassone said, basing her estimate on recent area sales. She shares the home with her husband, Paul, and their two children. Beyond being a successful investment, Windsor Terrace is appealing for its neighborliness; residents look out for one another at all hours of the day. Offering an example of this interconnectedness, Ms. Cassone described recently logging on, for the first time, to a blog dedicated to local goings on, only to learn that her dog, Princess, whom she had seen in the yard moments earlier and who is distinctive in having lost one of her legs was on the loose. "I thought my husband was playing a joke on me," she said. And on the Facebook page dedicated to Dari Litchman's building not long ago, "My neighbor was like: 'Who has dried cranberries I can borrow? I will return them tomorrow.' " Ms. Litchman lives in a two bedroom prewar co op for which her husband, Jonathan Dahan, paid around 100,000 in 2001. The place could sell for about five times that today, said Ms. Litchman, who works as a real estate agent. A grassroots group of which Ms. Litchman is the lead organizer, Friends of Greenwood Playground, has worked for nearly a decade to improve a triangular public space adjacent to the Prospect Expressway, turning it into a social hub for parents and children in the process. And this month the group is turning its sights outward, asking residents to donate toys, child car seats and strollers for infants living in poverty in Brooklyn, she said. When Ms. Litchman moved here a decade ago from Canarsie, people would scratch their heads when she gave the neighborhood's name. Now, "everybody knows somebody who lives here," she concluded. "It's definitely gained respect." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
A senior editor for BBC News accused the network in an open letter on Sunday of operating a "secretive and illegal" salary system that pays men more than women in similar positions. The editor, Carrie Gracie, who joined the network 30 years ago, said she quit her position as China editor last week to protest pay inequality within the company. In the letter posted on her website, she said that she and other women had long suspected that their male counterparts drew larger salaries and that BBC management had refused to acknowledge the problem. She said she decided to make her story public, risking discipline or dismissal, because she wanted viewers to know the BBC had been "resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure." "I simply want the BBC to abide by the law and value men and women equally," Ms. Gracie wrote, citing the Equality Act 2010, which states that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay. "On pay, the BBC is not living up to its stated values of trust, honesty and accountability." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
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