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Bury St. Edmunds, England Making a statement right at the heart of the English cathedral town of Bury St. Edmunds, Northgate House has more than one story to tell. Once home to the British novelist Norah Lofts, the eight bedroom red brick house in the county of Suffolk is now on the market for 2.5 million pounds, or 3.1 million, with the real estate agency Jackson Stops and Staff. With a wealth of architectural features, including ornate detailing inside and out, the property has a long street front facade with a recessed, colonnaded entrance, and 9,372 square feet of living space. It largely dates to 1713, during the Queen Anne period, but evidence can still be seen of Tudor timberwork in the roof, and the cellars are believed to be medieval. Ms. Lofts, who was a prolific writer of historical fiction, won a National Book Award in the United States for "I Met a Gypsy,'' voted by members of the American Booksellers Association in 1936. She lived at Northgate House from 1955 until she died in 1983, and is named on a historical marker mounted on an external wall. Her son, Clive Lofts, still lives next door in Northgate House's former coach house, which has been converted and is today a separate property not forming part of the sale. He said it was difficult to date the main building as a whole. "There has been a house on this site, however, for a long, long time," he said. There is an opinion that it perhaps used to be two houses that were later joined together." Many of Ms. Lofts's novels, including her Suffolk Trilogy, follow the history of specific houses and their residents over several generations. "My mother always loved old houses, and she fell in love with this one," he said. "It did require a lot of modernization when she bought it back in 1955. It had no central heating at that time, so she had to have a large system and lots of radiators installed throughout this huge house." Northgate House still embodies much of its period grandeur, with many rooms fully paneled, and with features such as marble fireplaces, Georgian door casings and architraves. The 494 square foot drawing room has a notable molded ceiling and floor to ceiling sash windows. The 408 square foot reception hall has a fireplace and French windows opening on to the garden, while the 456 square foot dining room can comfortably accommodate a 12 seat table. The first floor also includes an entrance hall, kitchen breakfast room, study and music room. A 285 square foot sitting room and a laundry room form the lower level of what could be a separate, two story home within the larger house. Here, one of two service staircases rises up to a shower room, kitchenette and a 285 square foot bedroom. This accommodation could be self contained. The Georgian main staircase sweeps up from the center of the house to a large, second floor landing, leading to seven well proportioned bedrooms, together with three large bathrooms. Norah Lofts in the drawing room. She lived at Northgate House from 1955 until she died in 1983. One of these bedrooms, which is approximately 320 square feet, was Ms. Lofts's study. "This was very much the hub of the house," Mr. Lofts said. "It was where my mother did all her writing. When the sun comes around on a summer's evening, it is lovely in here. She had a magnolia bush planted out in the garden so she could see from her office as she wrote." On the third floor of Northgate House are hobby rooms, which may well have been servants' quarters. The cellar is also extensive and could possibly have had an entrance to a tunnel leading down to an abbey that once stood on the site close to where the cathedral is today. Northgate House sits on approximately half an acre, including landscaped gardens and a summer house dating to the 1920s. There is also a kitchen garden and off street parking. Ollie Peacock, of Jackson Stops and Staff, described the property as "arguably the finest house in Bury St. Edmunds." "As this is a niche market, we are looking for a particular buyer," he said, "perhaps someone who wants a large family home but does not want acres of land to look after and will enjoy all the convenience that town center living offers." Ms. Lofts, who also wrote under the pen names of Peter Curtis and Juliet Astley, had dozens of books published, as well as short stories and nonfiction, while she lived at the property. In one piece of writing, which she titled "Home with a History,'' her son explained, she discussed Northgate House. "Architecturally hybrid, historically obscure, it just suits me," she wrote. "And although the verb 'to love' is one which I, a born East Anglian, find difficult to conjugate, I can truthfully say to Northgate House, 'I love you!' Then all its component parts combine and speak with one voice, saying, 'You are not the first!' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Playing the character of Giselle, a great ballerina can put herself through astonishing changes: A village girl falls in love with a count (named Albrecht) who is pretending to be a peasant, and when she learns he is betrothed to someone else, she goes mad, dies of shock and returns as an ethereal spirit. But a great ballerina often has to play Giselle again and again; and over time, a radiant performance can settle into habit. Fortunately, that wasn't the case on Monday when American Ballet Theater's production of "Giselle" returned to the Metropolitan Opera House with Diana Vishneva in the title role. If anything, Ms. Vishneva, a Mariinsky trained ballerina who was already a world class Giselle when she first performed the part with Ballet Theater in 2005, was better than ever. Her performance was both vividly dramatic and dramatically coherent: Her character, while undergoing radical transformation, remained of a piece. From her first simple steps and jumps, she was breathtakingly buoyant, the most beautiful girl in the village with the softest phrase endings. Innocent, she showed caution in love, but as she fell more deeply, her dancing grew more reckless, thrilling Albrecht and the audience with spontaneous seeming elaborations. Her Giselle was excitable, a girl prone to fantasy. And when she learned of Albrecht's deception, it was heartbreaking to watch her walk right past him, seeing not him but her image of him, and then flail in the same steps she had previously danced so effortlessly. In Act II, she was no longer flesh but a gorgeous spirit adrift, and yet in that floating and the impossibly slow extensions and the flares of febrile speed, she was recognizably the same girl who loved to dance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
LOS ANGELES "All I did was get fired," said during a public discussion at the Women in the World conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. With that blunt declaration, Ms. Pascal put to rest behind the scenes speculation among those who work closely with her as to how much was push and how much was pull in the weeks leading to the announcement of her exit from Sony Pictures Entertainment last week. Ms. Pascal now acknowledges there was plenty of push. Her remarks, made on stage during a talk with the writer and media entrepreneur Tina Brown, were framed as a tribute to women honored at the annual meeting, which in the past featured Hillary Rodham Clinton and the International Monetary Fund's managing director, Christine Lagarde. "All the women here are doing incredible things in this world," said Ms. Pascal, in the immediate run up to her remark about being shoved out of Sony. Long before Sony was hit by a damaging hacking attack that spread Ms. Pascal's embarrassing emails around the planet, she had been in deep discussions about a contract renewal, and those obviously had not gone well. In the late summer, it looked as if she might be gone the victim of a weakening track record and of changing studio economics. By the fall, however, people close to her signaled that the renewal was settled, though always speaking on condition of anonymity. In November came the hacking, which crippled the company's computer systems and made available reams of data on the company, including personal emails. For a time, it appeared that the attack had perversely changed the internal equation in Ms. Pascal's favor. People briefed on Sony's internal workings repeatedly said her career would not be a victim of the attack. Sony executives, and Ms. Pascal, just as repeatedly declined to discuss her renewal. With last week's announcement of her resignation, Ms. Pascal was described by some people as having tired of the job, and of the contract renewal process. They said she found the prospect of a fresh career producing movies more alluring than a taxing executive job. The studio's official statement about her departure was artfully ambiguous: It said Ms. Pascal would "transition" to a new production venture at the studio, without getting into the particulars of her departure. Ms. Pascal's new production deal could pay her as much as 40 million over four years, and involves her with some of Sony's most valued projects, including the "Spider Man" and "Da Vinci Code" series. As details of the deal came out, word began to circulate among studio associates, including producers who would now be competing with her, that she had in fact been fired. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Sony, where Ms. Pascal remains co chairwoman until May, declined to comment. But, as reported by the Recode.net Web news service, Ms. Pascal was mincing no words on Wednesday. "You should always say exactly what you think directly to people all the time," she said. "In the moment, the first time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Last week, Vanity Fair Italy's cover star was not a supermodel lounging on a yacht in an Etro caftan, or a movie star in Gucci, but rather a lung specialist in a starched white lab coat. In Britain, front line workers from the National Health Service graced four special edition covers of Grazia magazine. The April issue of Russian Glamour featured a pop star in pigtails, a yellow puffer jacket and a white respirator mask. Vogue Portugal opted for a monochrome image of two models kissing through face masks under the words "Freedom on Hold." Fashion magazines are vehicles for luxury fantasies. They sell readers on consumerist dreams, sandwiching glossy images of supermodels and stars between advertisements for 50,000 watches and 250 moisturizers. The new coronavirus pandemic and lockdown orders have derailed those dreams. As a result, fashion magazines have been derailed both in production and purpose. It's not just that 2020 is set to be the worst year in the history of the modern luxury business, with supply chains in free fall and media advertising budgets slashed. It's not just that shoppers have stopped shopping, or that fewer people in the fashion industry, from seamstresses to salespeople, are able to go to work. It's that magazines were already a fraught business. It's that many people have been re evaluating their moral relationship with consumption. It's that resentment and even rage has risen toward celebrities and other elites a pampered pool of cultural figureheads who fill the pages of contemporary fashion publications. And now there's a pandemic to address. While some editors were able to insert last minute references to the pandemic in their May issues, print magazine readers shouldn't expect to see coronavirus content in earnest until June. Which means that, unless the editors pull from older unused material, there will be no jet set photo shoots, in person interviews or coverage of Champagne soaked red carpet events the fabric of most fashion magazines this summer. "The next wave of print stories that come out have been made with the coronavirus crisis in mind," Will Welch, the editor of GQ, said, referring to the magazine's June July issue. "I wouldn't want to look back at the GQ that we're making during this time and have it feel like business as usual." Via a Zoom call from her living room in New York last week, as sirens blared in the background, Ms. Brown described the task of being a fashion editor right now as "a constant balancing act." In between stories about eye creams and tips on styling a denim jacket, her team (who are all working from home) had just produced a one off digital cover featuring Dr. Jana Broadhurst, an infectious disease diagnostics specialist. "As an effective editor, you need to read the room constantly," she said. "Now we need to read it not just every day, but every hour and minute, registering appetites and anxieties that are constantly changing." "Offering some escapism and glamour is still important, but I'm less paranoid now about getting this celebrity for that cover, or a product exclusive," said Ms. Brown, who is known for her close relationships with the Hollywood glitterati. (The InStyle May issue, published this week, featured Lady Gaga on the front cover.) "Readers are saying they want to see the everyday women currently doing extraordinary things being celebrated. We need to show that we are listening to them." How to run a magazine nimbly on an ever receding budget has become an essential skill for editors. Some titles, W magazine among them, have already been forced to furlough staff and switch to survival mode given the new status quo. That traditional business model had been sputtering for years. Douglas McCabe, the chief executive of the media research firm Enders Analysis, estimated that, on average, magazines are now looking at further advertising declines "in the major double digits." Similarly, magazine editors haven't been able to shoot their own editorial content at their normal speed and volume. Photoshoots require people traveling and working together in close quarters: the photographer and the models, but also assistants and stylists of many stripes. "It would be irresponsible to put people together to do anything at all right now," Mr. Welch said. "We're thinking about how we can get new visuals of people from quarantine." In upcoming issues of GQ, some subjects are photographing themselves at home with their own devices instant cameras and iPhones in consultation with photographers; others will be represented without photography. In some cases, illustrations will replace traditional portraits. Italian Vogue was ahead of this curve in January, when it eliminated photography as an exercise in sustainability not necessity. "We've been exploring different ideas that we might never have thought about or talked about before," said Aya Kanai, the editor of Marie Claire. For its September issue, the magazine has considered sending a camera to the husband of the cover star and asking him to photograph her. This kind of improvisation extends to digital content, too. For a video series of celebrities giving beauty tips while wearing face masks, subjects will be provided with questions and technical specs to film themselves at home. Conveniently, some of the participating actresses already have semiprofessional setups that they use to record audition tapes. 'Ripped Everything Up and Started Again' From a creative standpoint, editors and publishers said they are taking advantage of the chaos. It's an excuse to try new things; to shake up familiar visuals and stale formats; to introduce more originality at a time when the line between editorial content and advertising is blurrier than ever. "There is a sort of liberation about it," said Kate Lewis, the chief content officer at Hearst Magazines, the publisher of Elle, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. On Tuesday, Italian Vogue said it "started from scratch" for its April issue, shelving earlier cover plans in favor of a blank white cover: a symbol of respect, rebirth, silence, purity, the color of lab coats and "the title page of a new story that is about to begin." For the front liners issue of Grazia UK, the editor Hattie Brett said her team also "pretty much ripped everything up and started again" an easier move for a weekly than a monthly publication, but one that helped the magazine to be thoughtful about balancing sensitivity with light relief. "Being unable to shoot a lot of content, especially fashion stories, has presented real challenges," Ms. Brett said. "But as the world adjusts to a new reality, we are choosing to view uncertainty as an opportunity to exercise even greater creativity in how we operate." What Happens to This Business Now? Some fear that fashion advertisers could pivot further toward influencers, digital marketing specialists and their own social media channels as preferred communication mediums with their audiences trends underway before Covid 19 began. But the industry isn't willing to declare disaster yet. Also some new print sales patterns have emerged. While airport newsstand sales are down (no one is flying), "we're seeing a real uptick in supermarkets," Ms. Lewis, of Hearst, said. They suspect that shoppers stocking pantries may be tossing more magazines into their carts at checkout. As of now, those issues have no coronavirus content whatsoever. "It's nice to get that feeling that during a time like this, we're a comfort to people," she said. "Readers want the kind of things we've always provided. Even when the world is topsy turvy, that feels reassuring." Conde Nast, the publisher of titles including Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ, said subscriptions for American magazines were up 85 percent for March 2020 versus March 2019. (Recently the company has offered free digital access for people in France, Britain, Italy and Spain.) What proportion of those subscriptions were print versus digital was not made available by the company, nor was data from previous years. Conde Nast also said they received a 35 percent boost in weekly average digital readership in markets that included the United States and India. Hearst Magazines said their sites attracted 33 percent more readers, compared with last year. Increases in readership don't offset advertising downturns. "More eyeballs are only valuable if you are able to monetize them," said Mr. McCabe, the analyst. Anna Wintour, the industry's most powerful figurehead, has been rallying the fashion industry behind initiatives like the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund for Covid 19, which will provide financial support for designers and manufacturers affected by the pandemic. "This is an extraordinarily challenging time for so many," she said. As the editor of American Vogue and the artistic director of Conde Nast, Ms. Wintour said she has "been engaged in near constant discussions about how to think creatively and conscientiously about our content at a time of crisis." And Wolfgang Blau, the global chief operating officer of Conde Nast, acknowledged that navigating the economic climate as a magazine publisher has been daunting. But, he added, there was cause for optimism. "I don't think a lot of our creative output around fashion is pure escapism," Mr. Blau said. "Like music or art, fashion that also acknowledges its outside context can also produce a sense of connectedness and belonging something that becomes increasingly important as people start thinking about identity while cooped up in their homes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The film's writer and director, Amber Sealey, hews close to Lexi, but the camera rarely takes up Lexi's perspective, preferring to observe her behavior rather than trying to see through her eyes. A result of this visual flatness is that some sequences drag with cliches, as the camera dithers on hackneyed images like Lexi flushing her wedding ring down the motel sink. But in the scenes that break with banality, there is a zing not only of originality, but of daring. The film's most memorable sequence is a sex scene in which Lexi acts out a prostitution fantasy, inviting a man to her room only to be shocked when her conquest brings a friend without asking for her permission. As Lexi maneuvers the two men, seeking ways to regain the control that was taken from her, Ms. Sealey navigates power through nudity, physically and psychologically exposing her male subjects while allowing her female protagonist to remain an enigma. In a film of mostly mixed merits, such mysterious highs sustain the mundane lows.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A lot of people had one question for Constance Weldon, she once recalled, when they saw her lugging a 40 pound bass tuba down the street: "Why didn't you take up the piccolo?" The truth was that she had already tried her hand at the flute and the trumpet, the trombone and other instruments but had fallen in love with the tuba after her father had brought one home from a pawnshop. "I played it and said, 'This is for me,'" Ms. Weldon told The Miami Herald in 1981. "On no other instrument I played had the sound come so naturally." Ms. Weldon, who is believed to be the first woman tubist to earn a position in a major American symphony orchestra, died on Aug. 7 at an assisted living facility in Southport, N.C. She was 88. Her death was confirmed by her longtime friend and caretaker, Linda Broadwell. Constance Janet Weldon was born on Jan. 25, 1932, in Winter Haven, Fla., to George and Edythe (Roebke) Weldon. The family soon moved to Miami, where her father took a job as a groundskeeper at Vizcaya, an estate built by the agricultural machinery magnate James Deering. (It later became the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.) Her mother worked as a teacher.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The Federal Reserve appeared surprisingly hesitant to raise interest rates, experts said on Thursday, following months of anticipation on Wall Street, in Washington and in corporate boardrooms around the country that a move was imminent. A majority of economists on Wall Street and market indicators of investor sentiment had predicted the Fed would hold off on any move to tighten monetary policy at the two day meeting that concluded Thursday afternoon. But several analysts said the language in the rate setting committee's statement suggested that officials were even more cautious than they had thought. "It felt like a dovish result with a dovish statement," said Carl R. Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust in Chicago. "Before this meeting, there was a supposition that they'd set the table for a future move. I didn't see any silverware in this announcement, and I think October is off the table." "I don't think they are in much of a hurry," he added. "The international situation must have generated a real re evaluation." Still, other experts argued that the central bank is prepared to move as soon as global conditions improve, illustrating the uncertainty that will persist until at least the next Fed meeting in late October or more likely until the last gathering of the year for policy makers in mid December. "The global deterioration has caught their attention and, clearly, that was the main factor," said Michael Hanson, senior United States economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "I don't think this will keep them on hold for an extended period of time. Both the meetings in October and December remain live." Indeed, traders on Wall Street could not make up their minds Thursday on how to greet the Fed decision not to enact its first rate increase since 2006. After initially dropping after the 2 p.m. announcement, stocks quickly rallied by more than 1 percent, only to fall in the final hour of trading. Major market indexes finished the day down by about 0.25 percent. Several analysts said they were struck by the second paragraph in the Fed's statement, in particular the conclusion that global volatility and economic events "are likely to put further downward pressure on inflation in the near term." Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said those conclusions constituted the major news in Thursday's announcement. "I'm not surprised they didn't move, but I am slightly surprised that they were so explicit with their reasoning," he said. "The new stuff is the recent financial global developments, and for now they are kind of paralyzed." Mr. Shepherdson said he expected the United States economy to continue to strengthen in the months ahead while volatility lessens in China and other markets, prompting the central bank to finally start tightening in December. What is important to understand, said Michael Gapen, chief United States economist at Barclays, is that the Fed has concluded inflation will remain depressed, even if the other economic fallout from problems abroad is minimal. "That's significant," said Mr. Gapen, who is an outlier on Wall Street in predicting that the Fed will wait until March 2016 to move. "Whether or not the risk materializes, they think it will suppress inflation, and that means they can let labor markets go a little longer without an increase." With wage gains still scarce for most workers, and many having trouble finding full time positions despite a 5.1 percent unemployment rate that would normally signal employers to raise pay, labor unions and liberal economists hailed the Fed's move as a sign policy makers see continuing slack in the labor market as much more of a threat than inflation. "We are pleased that the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates unchanged," said Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L. C.I.O. "We know the economic recovery still has not reached working families, and even a small increase can have devastating effects on our economic stability." Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, said he believes that Janet Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, is focused on how uneven the recovery in the labor market has been. "This doesn't feel like an economy that needs a brake tap," he said, adding that Ms. Yellen "has been consistently, and thankfully, mindful of the absence of full employment despite the 5.1 percent unemployment rate." With the dollar strengthening by more than 15 percent over the last 12 months against other currencies, making imports into the United States cheaper, economic forces are quietly combating inflation through another channel, Mr. Bernstein noted. "The appreciation of the dollar has been doing the Fed's work many times over," he said. Many observers expect the dollar to continue to rise against other currencies, because of economic weakness in Asia and the relative strength of the American economy. On the other end of the political spectrum, conservative economists and Republicans on Capitol Hill expressed worry that the longer the Fed waits to make its inevitable move to raise interest rates, the greater the threat that investors will get cold feet. Thursday's decision "has less to do with the underlying weakness of the economy than the timidity of the Fed to take the first necessary step to normalize monetary policy," said Representative Kevin Brady, the top House Republican on the Joint Economic Committee. "As long as the Fed remains fearful to act lest it be blamed for any economic hiccup, market uncertainty will continue."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Credit...Robert Leon for The New York Times A light rain was falling in Victoria, but it wasn't keeping anyone inside on a Saturday afternoon. The horse drawn carriages and pedicabs were out in force, a ska band was tuning up by the harbor, and all along Wharf Street, people strolled, most of them without umbrellas. This was British Columbia, after all, and no one was going to let a little rain get in the way. Fresh off the ferry, a friend and I joined the other sodden tourists heading to the Inner Harbour where some of the city's most splendid buildings are gathered: the British Columbia Parliament complex, with its arched doorways, domes and oceanic lawn; and the Fairmont Empress, a grande dame of a hotel, with its own set of weathered domes and turn of the last century details; a place where afternoon tea, with all the attendant rigmarole, is a ritual kept alive and well by those seeking to immerse themselves in a city that Emily Carr once called "the most English tasting bit of all Canada." And who, you might ask, is Emily Carr? She is the unexpected element in this scene: an aging woman from another era, with a monkey on her shoulder, a dog at her feet and a pad of paper on her lap. She sits or rather a bronze sculpture of her sits in the center of everything: on the grounds of the Empress, a place where she had experienced both intense joy (in the former conservatory) and acute boredom (in the tearoom). Until I stumbled across her paintings a year or so ago at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I was among those Americans who Canadians must secretly roll their eyes at for knowing so little about their northern neighbor's culture. Besides the statue and all the things named after her, including a university in Vancouver, she has been the subject of biographies, films and a novel (by an American, no less the late Susan Vreeland). Her paintings have appeared on postage stamps, her former home is a National Historic Site of Canada, and she is the author of several books, one of which, "Klee Wyck," won the prestigious Governor General's Award in 1941. (And yes, there is a calendar of her artwork.) Currently, two exhibitions in Vancouver and Victoria focus on what is arguably her most glorious subject matter: the landscapes of British Columbia. They are rich and intensely colorful works, some light filled seascapes, others brooding forest interiors and portraits there is no other word for them of trees, whether of a towering red cedar or a fledgling pine. The best of her paintings are animated with an almost palpable energy "the singing movement of the whole," as she called it. They all resonate in a time when environmental threats from logging to oil pipelines are of great concern. On a recent visit, I relied on some of these paintings as guideposts to southern Vancouver Island (her oeuvre depicting First Nations artifacts could be the focus of an entirely different trip), along with her journal and memoirs, an excellent West Shore Arts Council map and a biography by Maria Tippett. This wouldn't be the strictest of Emily Carr tours I was intent on driving the Pacific Marine Circle Route, which didn't always follow her path. Ultimately, my aim was to get a sense of the land through her eyes. The next morning dawned gray, but dry, so we paid a visit to James Bay, a pretty neighborhood of old houses and tidy gardens. In 1863, Emily's father, Richard Carr, arrived here with his wife and two oldest daughters. He purchased a sizable plot of land, erected an Italianate style house and turned his land into English gardens, cow pastures and fields. It was a magical place for Emily. In a memoir of her childhood, she writes about the flowers ("our wild Canadian lilies ... white with bent necks and brown eyes looking back into the earth"), her older sisters, her gentle, unwell mother and her visits to her father's import business on Wharf Street; from there she could observe with great interest the Songhees First Nations reserve across the harbor. Carr would eventually travel to places like San Francisco and Europe, where she studied art; to eastern Canada, where she was featured in exhibitions, and was befriended by the landscape artist Lawren Harris; to Vancouver, where she taught art; and to New York, where she met Georgia O'Keeffe. She also took arduous journeys to remote areas of British Columbia and Alaska to sketch indigenous artifacts. But most of her life was spent in James Bay, where she lived, worked and, in a priory that is now an inn, died, in 1945. But she also took pleasure in solitude, writing stories deep into the night, and sketching during the day. Though her work received praise, she trusted none of it. Success for her was a complex, spiritual matter; the business of melding art and godliness was an unending quest. And, of course, she had her animals for company: a Javanese monkey who got into all sorts of trouble, multiple dogs and a white rat. And then there was the forest. "I sought my companionship out in the woods and trees rather than persons," she wrote. "It was as if they had hit and hurt me ... so that I went howling back like a smacked child to Mother Nature." And so, with the aid of the Elephant, she began producing some of her best work as she entered her 60s. "Nothing ever, ever stands still," she wrote, "and we never, never catch up." It doesn't take long to find wilderness on Vancouver Island. On yet another overcast afternoon, we pulled into a parking lot about 10 miles outside Victoria, and walked down a wide trail. This was Goldstream Provincial Park, more than 900 acres of Douglas fir, cedar, hemlock and other trees; through it all runs a river where salmon spawn each fall. Emily Carr loved to anthropomorphize; after reading about brown eyed lilies and screaming trees, it was easy to imagine that the giant fern fronds on the trail weren't just brushing against our legs, but reaching out beseechingly, or at least curiously, trying to get as much a visceral sense of us as we were of them. In 1933, Emily had the Elephant towed to the Goldstream River flats, and there she settled down for a lengthy visit. It wasn't her first. A few years earlier she had been there, producing sketches in which, say, a cedar branch was not a static thing, but a moving wave of foliage. (One of her most famous works, "Red Cedar," illustrates this effort.) No doubt she expected to experience the same productivity two years later, but a parade of parkgoers wasn't helping. "They started early this morning the Public," she wrote. "The air is riled up with motor snorts, dog parks and children's screechings." Add to that the antics of Woo, her monkey who consumed her green paint and had to be treated with Epsom salts and the rain and the darkness. "I am not afraid, but it's creepy," she wrote, before leaving. A volunteer with a lined, sunny face expressed enthusiasm for our driving trip to the island's western side a trip I was nervous about after reading online warnings about the dangers of washed out roads, aggressive logging truck drivers and frequent rain. She brushed it all aside. "Nothing but ocean till you get to Japan!" she said of the views from the wild western coast, then gave us directions to a nearby waterfall, advising us to ignore the high safer path, and to walk instead along the dry riverbed. It was a precarious walk on slippery stones, and rain was beginning to fall, but finally, the waterfall appeared. I saw my friend far ahead of me, her jacket a tiny red smudge below the trees and the falls. Everything here was big. We drove on, toward Albert Head Lagoon, located in a populated area where the prospects of transformative beauty weren't promising. As it turns out, Albert Head, its beach edged with trees and strewn with driftwood, is an understated arc of paradise on this developed shore. Here and nearby, Carr found fodder for luminous sky and sea paintings such as "Strait of Juan de Fuca" and "Lagoon at Albert Head," in which she unleashed an incredible range of colors. Our goal was to reach the artsy resort town of Sooke before night fell, but we decided to backtrack in hopes of finding Esquimalt Lagoon. On the way, we stumbled upon the Royal Roads Forest, a hauntingly beautiful woodland where some of the largest Douglas firs on the island are found. We wandered in the cool, dark forest, forgetting about our schedule. The lagoon itself is a fragile place, a bird sanctuary protected by a wisp of land. Carr, seduced by the "wide sweeps of sea and sky," arrived here on a beautiful spring day in 1934. Her caravan was deposited on a field of daisies. "Woo rolls among the daisies with her four hands in the air," she wrote happily. But that night, an epic storm rolled in: "Everything inside blew out and outside things blew in till in and out were all mixed up." Soon enough, the caravan was hauled to higher ground on a farmer's field. A few years later she would return to this area off the coast, and find inspiration in something that was basically ugly: gravel pits. Paintings called "Above the Gravel Pit," show scenes of denuded land and tree stumps, all beneath a brilliant, rippled sky. There would be more paintings of bare landscapes, some with spindly second or third growth trees struggling upward beneath a blue sky. In this period, Maria Tippett writes in her biography, Carr approached the sketching or painting process ritualistically: Sitting on her camp stool, she might light a cigarette, sing a hymn, then "raise her gaze slightly above and just beyond her subject, so that it was out of focus. Then, with her sketching board on her lap and brush or charcoal in her hand, she would strike out with her arm and wrist and with curved or slashing motions make great sweeping strokes...." "There's a torn and splintered ridge across the stumps I call the 'screamers,' Carr wrote. "These are the unsawn last bits, the cry of the tree's heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sway and the dreadful groan of falling, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with their saws and axes resting and watch." Later on our trip, those words would resonate. We arrived in Sooke an hour before sunset, too late to explore Sooke Hills, which Emily had visited. We stayed at a rambling hotel on the wedding circuit with wide porches overlooking the water. On a Monday, it was nearly empty. By the water four harbor seals bobbed and rolled between moored boats. The clouds had dispersed, revealing a Prussian blue sky and the glimmer of stars. Here, in an area where the weather is notoriously moody, the clear skies that had evaded us in the supposedly milder Victoria area, would, with luck, greet us in the morning. "You will lose coverage," our waitress told us later that night in the hotel's restaurant when we described our plans. She was referring to cellphone service on the farther reaches of the Pacific Marine Circle route. "But you will see animals, guaranteed. I saw elk and eagles and bears last time." She told us that she had been born on the island, moved to Toronto, and not relishing the pace, returned. "I live over there," she said, pointing at the dark hills across the water. "Sometimes I kayak to work." I thought of Carr, who had generally been eager to return home from her travels. In her journal, she recounts an exchange with a Vancouver art promoter: "'It's a shame to think of you stuck out here in this corner of the world unnoticed and unknown,' says he. 'It's exactly where I want to be,' says I." We stopped for breakfast the next morning at the Sooke Harbour House, a beautiful inn with handcrafted details, a lauded restaurant and an Emily Carr guest room. Below it, Whiffen Spit, knitted with beach grass, juts out between the calm Sooke Basin and the wide open Strait of Juan de Fuca. Our map indicated that Carr may have been here. Later we passed a road that led to a place called Malahat Farm, where, the Carr map said, the artist had signed the register in 1920. The farther west we went, the more nebulous the recordings of her presence became, yet the more we felt immersed in what we saw in paintings like her "Wood Interior" series, and in journal entries where she wrote about "the awful solemnity of age old trees," or the forests' "helter skelter magnificence." We found both magnificence and solemnity on trails along the way, places where the trees closed around us, and the forest floor was laced with ferns. Some led to desolate beaches like Sombrio Beach, strewn with driftwood and coffee colored ribbons of kelp, as shiny as glass in the sun. Farther west, in Port Renfrew, was Botanical Beach, where tide pools were filled with limpets, mussels and sea anemones. No doubt, Carr would have loved Avatar Grove, situated off a steep and deeply potholed road. Here the nonprofit Ancient Forest Alliance, has recently completed a boardwalk and stairs that lead to ancient Douglas firs and red cedars. Solemnity, magnificence: Carr's words certainly applied here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The cats in "Cats" are a diverse group. Victoria, the most elegant of the Jellicle tribe, wears white from head to paw, symbolizing purity and innocence. For Georgina Pazcoguin, the New York City Ballet soloist who plays Victoria in the current Broadway revival of that Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, the role fulfills a childhood dream. She grew up obsessed with a videotape of the Broadway production. "Catholic school ended at 2 p.m., and my dance classes started at 4:30 or 5 p.m.," she said. In between, she watched "Cats." Now 31, Ms. Pazcoguin had some musical theater experience before "Cats." Along with playing Miss Turnstiles in the recent Broadway production of "On the Town," she is admired for her portrayal of Anita in "West Side Story Suite" at City Ballet. But with Victoria, she is performing against her usual type: strong and spirited. Ms. Pazcoguin, on leave from City Ballet, recently spoke about opening night, Sunday, at the Neil Simon Theater (the nerves!), the differences between ballet and Broadway, and what it is like to become Victoria. What follows are excerpts from that interview. How did your first opening night on Broadway measure up? I kept telling myself: "Gina, you've done a lot of things. Take it down a notch. Pull yourself together." So I'm not going to lie. I was really nervous. It was also a weird buildup. On gala days at City Ballet, you get to expend some energy we run the ballet the day of. On Sunday, we had the whole day off before the "Cats" opening night . There are these traditions that happen like the Gypsy Robe ceremony an hour before we go onstage. For a quote unquote mildly O.C.D. ballerina, my schedule for getting ready for the show is all messed up. I am so new to all of this. The Gypsy Robe ceremony is something that happens before an opening. It's for a chorus member. They get this robe, and everyone screams, and the winner has to run three times around the stage, and everyone has to touch the robe, and then the person wearing the robe has to visit every dressing room. Then the show is blessed and ready to open. It's, like, a thing. It's a big, big thing. The "winner" is the chorus member who has the most Broadway credits, in this case, Jeremy Davis, who plays Skimbleshanks. It seemed that you relaxed after you performed your solo, which happens early on. Is that right? Yes. It is so slow, and I'm on a rake. It's the first time I'm really vertical and connecting to my body, and it's kind of the gauge of am I going to be on my leg or not? Laughs That's when I really feel the rake. I was just thinking in my head: Whatever happens. It's gone worse. It's gone better. I didn't fall, thank God. I'm literally the only person that I think has fallen, and I'm supposed to be the ballerina. There's a viral video of me carrying a prop in rehearsal, and I manage to fall. How did you get this part? I got a call from my agent that they were casting and were interested to know if I was interested in auditioning for "Cats." I honestly did not know that Victoria would be a part for me. My sister said: "You really were innocent. And knowing you, you're just not that." If I can fool my sister, we're fine. And you instantly wanted to do this? A part of me that was like, duh, yes. But it was a really scary decision. I've known one home, at City Ballet, and this puts me in a new zone. I'm going to be asked to do things that aren't my forte, like hip hop dancing and singing. I feel like I am finally getting some momentum at City Ballet, and for me to stop that momentum to take a leave of absence? So I didn't take it lightly, but in the end, the right choice was made, and I knew it when I burst into tears the very first night of previews. When the City Ballet principal Megan Fairchild was in "On the Town," she told me how nurturing and supportive the Broadway world was. Do you agree? Being a ballerina is very self involved, and our family at City Ballet is one of the best there is. We are so supportive of each other, but there's always a competitive nature. There's competition on Broadway, too, but no matter how old you are at City Ballet, if you're not a principal dancer no matter what age you are you're kind of considered a child. In the Broadway world, no matter what you are, you are an adult. You've worn your share of awkward costumes over the years, but how does having a tail rate? The tail is only annoying during the coccyx balance at the end of the solo. For the longest time, we didn't have tails, and I was practicing and saying, "I've got this," and then we put the tails on, and I was like, "Oh, my God, this really hurts." I much prefer the tail to doing fouettes in cape with a bow and arrow and a huge cornucopia hat. You're not used to breaking the fourth wall at City Ballet, but in this show the cats approach the audience. Have you had any bad interactions? No. Because I'm awkward, I kind of make my time in the audience as brief as I can. I've heard some of my castmates say that they've had people go, "Here, kitty, kitty." I would suggest audience members don't do that. Gross, right? Laughs Don't do that. No, I have a dog! A black lab and Boykin spaniel mix. She's a loon.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Perez Hilton, the early gossip blogger turned media personality, has been permanently banned from TikTok for violating community guidelines, effective Dec. 12. Since joining TikTok in August 2019, he had become an influential figure on the app, amassing more than 1.6 million followers and earning an average 10 million views per week. On TikTok, Mr. Hilton reached a new generation of media consumers who are more likely to get breaking news from social media than from push notifications. The app also helped him stay busy and upbeat in a difficult year. "I've been very depressed this year, and TikTok gave me something to really look forward to every day. It created joy for me and an escape and allowed me to share that with people," Mr. Hilton said in an interview on Sunday. But he also found new critics on the platform, many of them fans of the influencers he tended to criticize. "Anyone else think it's inappropriate for a 15 year old to dance to this?" Mr. Hilton commented on a video posted by Charli D'Amelio in March, in which she danced in a bikini to a remix of the song "Sugar," by Brockhampton. "i'm sorry i'm just trying to have fun! :)" she replied. The interaction set off an internet feud which resulted in hundreds of thousands of fans of Ms. D'Amelio, the most followed person on the app, petitioning to have Mr. Hilton removed. Separately, fans of Bryce Hall, another influencer popular on TikTok, took issue with the fact that Mr. Hilton referred to him as "Addison Rae's boyfriend," rather than by name. Mr. Hilton, born Mario Lavandeira, previously had faced backlash for his celebrity commentary. In 2016, he alleged that Angelina Jolie's lawyers had threatened to sue him for reporting on her divorce from Brad Pitt. He was also criticized for outing gay male celebrities in the aughts. (In 2012, a New York Times reporter noted that Mr. Hilton had "toned down his malicious rhetoric considerably, in keeping with a new culture of nice online that has accompanied the rise of social media.") Influencers are a new class of celebrity, though. They wield powerful fan armies who can shape public narratives through advocacy. Influencer fans would mass report all of Mr. Hilton's videos, he said, which resulted in many being removed. "Not only do they ban together and mass report your account, they mass report your comments so you're banned from commenting for several days or a week," Mr. Hilton said of his TikTok adversaries. "I was getting death threats daily." Mr. Hilton believes it was pressure from TikTok's biggest stars that led to his ban, though the company disputed this. "We are deeply committed to maintaining a welcoming and supportive community environment. Our Community Guidelines apply to everyone and everything shared on TikTok, and we remove accounts that repeatedly violate our policies," a TikTok spokesperson wrote in an email statement. Still, the ban set off alarm bells because influencer fans had been pushing for it and young creators celebrated it. "I don't know, Perez, maybe it's time for you to just go to Facebook or something," said Tatayanna Mitchell, a TikToker with 4.5 million followers, in a TikTok video she posted on Sunday. "I think it was a good decision for him to be banned," said Grace Honeycutt, 17, a TikToker with nearly 20,000 followers. "He used his platform to just throw around drama which was not a good thing to use his platform for." "Frankly, this is pretty disturbing to me," Ben Goggin, a digital culture editor at Insider, tweeted on Saturday. "Perez was and is a controversial media figure, but this feels like a dangerous step towards media censorship in favor of prioritizing the feelings of popular creators." Mr. Hilton's TikTok posts fall into a loose category on the app known as "TeaTok" or "MessyTok," in that they often consist of gossip, analysis of celebrity drama and opinionated commentary. Similar accounts, including Drama Alert and TikTok Room, have become monetized media businesses with staff or contributors. (Mr. Hilton was also making around 3,000 a month through TikTok's Creator Fund program.) "I think the reason I have been permanently banned without any warning is because I've been talking about a lot of creators on TikTok," Mr. Hilton said in a video posted to YouTube and Twitter. "But I haven't done any harassing or bullying and TikTok is claiming that I am." Mr. Hilton posted several tearful videos to YouTube and Twitter, refuting the idea that he had ever violated guidelines and begging Ms. D'Amelio and her family to help reverse the ban. In emails between Mr. Hilton and Anthony Fernandez, a content partnerships manager at TikTok, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Hilton also pleaded with the company to reinstate his account, claiming that the content he shared, including that which related to Black Lives Matter and so called "Karens," had news value. "I'm sharing those for newsworthy value. And they never get taken down from any other platform," he wrote. "There is nothing more I can do at this point," Mr. Fernandez replied. "Our Community Guidelines apply to everyone, and to everything shared on TikTok. You've violated multiple Community Guidelines, some of which even have a zero tolerance rule. Thank you for understanding and respecting our commitment to keep the TikTok community safe." In a previous email to Mr. Hilton, Mr. Fernandez claimed Mr. Hilton had violated multiple Community Guidelines, "including posting content that contains slurs and hate speech, sexual behaviors and nudity, and bullying." Mr. Hilton disputed that and noted that he cross posted many of his TikTok videos to YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, and that none of those sites had ever removed his videos. "No matter what happens, I'm still Perez Hilton," he said over the phone on Sunday. "I'm bigger than any one app or any one thing. People will still seek me out and employ me and have me do things. I'm excited for the future."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
PHILADELPHIA In the early 2000s, the pianist Farid Barron read that his idol John Coltrane had once received a papyrus from Sun Ra that was said to stop time. "That's why I came over here, to look for the manuscript," Mr. Barron, 49, said on a recent Saturday afternoon, standing on the steps outside the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra, where he now lives. An unassuming stone rowhouse in this city's Germantown neighborhood, it is where Ra a pianist, composer, poet and mystic whose influence on culture has only seemed to grow since his death in 1993 held court for the last quarter century of his life. Members of his ensemble, the Sun Ra Arkestra, continue to live and rehearse there, surrounded by his artifacts and aura. So did Mr. Barron ever find the papyrus? Not exactly, he said, but "in a roundabout way, I found an answer to stopping time." It happened on his first gig with the Arkestra, in 2006. With the band careening into a hailstorm of free improvisation, he felt lost. "I thought it was cacophony," he said. So he decided to attempt some of the difficult piano runs he'd been struggling with. "In that moment, all the stuff I had been working on by Art Tatum that I couldn't execute, now I could," Mr. Barron said. "In that sort of environment, where there's no strict time and the energy is just flowing that's when I started to understand." As a robed, serene faced Sun Ra says of his band in the 1974 film "Space Is the Place," "We work on the other side of time." That perspective slanting, potential opening energy is best experienced live, of course, and without the pandemic, this weekend would probably have offered an ideal opportunity: The Arkestra, whose members always perform in shimmering regalia, has a long history of Halloween concerts. The next best option is picking up "Swirling," the group's first album of new recordings in 20 years, due on Friday. This far ranging double LP serves as a fabulous introduction for newcomers to the Arkestra's sonic universe, and an affirmation for old fans of how vital the band remains under the direction of the saxophonist Marshall Allen, who at 96 has devoted two thirds of his life to playing Ra's music. On "Swirling," named for the album's one Allen composition, the Arkestra wraps its arms around a huge range of musical history: swing, early rock 'n' roll, Chicago blues, avant garde improvisation, abstract electronics. An undercurrent of darkness and portentous mystery courses throughout evoked by low stirring reeds, a crisscross of percussionists and drummers, or the band members' baritones uniting in a chanted chorus. This deep, unsettling hue ties into what Ra describes in "Space Is the Place," explaining his understanding of the cosmos. "Space is not only high," he says. "It's low. It's a bottomless pit. There is no end to it." Ra's aphorisms and poetry which he called "equations" were as much a part of his art as the music, and he came to rely on the stately vocalist June Tyson to carry his messages. Tara Middleton, a vocalist and violinist, joined the band in 2012 and picked up where Tyson left off. She too happens to be a poet with cosmic inclinations; she has been writing her own extensions on Ra's poetry, and on "Swirling" they blend seamlessly. "The music is overwhelming, because there's so much depth to it," Ms. Middleton said in a phone interview. "But his poetry speaks from such a clear point of view, so poignantly. When you think about the world today and you think about what he was talking about all those years ago, it's relevant." In an essay this summer for The New York Review of Books, the critic and scholar Namwali Serpell ponders the contemporary resonance of "Space Is the Place," in which Ra seeks to assemble a space program to help Black people escape from Earth. Dr. Serpell takes a particular interest in a scene where Ra describes himself as "everythin' and nothin'." In his insistence on darkness and disappearance, she sees not self annihilation, but a will toward utter rebirth. "Sun Ra's art in all forms offers this challenge to Black people: If we're nothing, if we're just myths, why not make that literal, why not make it material?" she writes. "Why not create, why not become, glittering black matter?" But his mind ran from mathematics to music to grander questions, about whether a more humane species than this one might exist somewhere. Sun Ra later spoke of having been visited by extraterrestrials in his teens, and sometimes said he himself hailed from Saturn. If space was a possible future, the guiding truths of the past came mostly from Africa. Studying ancient texts and world histories as well as astronomy books, he came to see himself as an emissary of Nubian culture, and the pilot of an even more ambitious endeavor than Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line: a project to transcend the earthly realm. After moving to Chicago in the 1940s, he doubled as a musician and a street preacher, delivering sermons and pamphlets alongside Black Muslim converts and Christian evangelists. And he assembled a devoted band, playing jazz with an eerie magnetism that only sometimes sounded like it belonged in a dance hall. Together with the South Side impresario Alton Abraham, Ra began a series of business ventures, many of which didn't last. One that did was El Saturn, a record label they started in the mid 50s; Ra's first releases on it ranged between doo wop, pop and space age jazz. Marshall Allen remembers hearing more proselytizing than music at his first rehearsal in 1957; he didn't play his horn at all. "He was gathering up recruits," Mr. Allen said, seated on a folding chair outside the Germantown house alongside fellow Arkestra saxophonist Knoel Scott. "I'd just listen, while he's talking about all this other stuff: ancient Egypt and the Bible," he said. "I couldn't fit in yet no way, because I didn't know the philosophy." But once he grew into the band, Mr. Allen found that Ra listened back closely to his contributions. The bandleader's method was to ensure that he "tailor made" each individual part for the musician he was writing for, Mr. Allen said. "That way, you get the talent out of everybody." He then heard how the group handled the music, and allowed it to evolve. "It changed every day, that's why you had to be there every day," Mr. Allen said. "Tomorrow, if you don't come to rehearsal, you don't have a part anymore. So then you come back the third day and you get a new part." Mr. Allen has kept up a similar method in his time as band director. "Sun Ra was such a grand figure, nobody really listened to the band," Mr. Scott said. After Ra's death, "Marshall had to establish that we have the music, and this band is an excellent band." Especially since the centennial of his birth in 2014, the Arkestra has worked constantly, touring almost as if Ra were still on this planet. The coronavirus, of course, halted that, but the band has still been holding rehearsals carefully, with close attention to social distancing usually with only a few members present. Even at 96, well into his sixth decade playing Ra's music, Mr. Allen continues to make discoveries. Sun Ra recorded virtually every rehearsal, leaving behind thousands of tapes. He has been listening back to them for years, and every so often he finds something remarkable. One tune on "Swirling," a wobbly waltz titled "Darkness," was the product of that archival work. It had never been officially recorded or performed by the Arkestra until Mr. Allen transcribed it from the tape and taught it to the current band. Asked what else he has been listening to recently, besides that bottomless trove of unheard Ra recordings, Mr. Allen paused. "What else is there?" he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
"Never oil, never lemon," Pere Vehi said. "I mean, do you put lemon on caviar?" I had joined the opinionated owner of Bar Boia, a 70 year old institution in Cadaques, a whitewashed fishing village on the Costa Brava, for a midmorning nosh of sea urchin. Mr. Vehi opened each urchin Cadaques style, with a large, curved knife, bringing its blade to bear on the sea urchin as he rotated it in the palm of his free hand. He tore off a piece of bread and used it to scoop out the tangerine hued roe. "Use your hands, never a knife," he said. I had come to Spain's northeast coast to feast on sea urchin. I was learning that there are right ways, and wrong ways, to do it. Like many American sea urchin lovers, I had my first taste at a Japanese restaurant. I'd eaten it in Japan too. From the first mouthful a wild seesaw from saline sharpness to fatty roundness I was entranced. But more recently, thanks to Alex Gares, a Catalan chef I met in Thailand, I'd been dreaming of eating sea urchin in Spain. Mr. Gares spoke of childhood holidays on the Costa Brava spent feasting on fresh from the sea erico de mar (literally, sea hedgehog; Catalans also call them garotes). Intrigued, I made a mental note, and in January, when an opportunity to travel to Spain arose, I mapped a sea urchin quest. On the Costa Brava, sea urchin season lasts from Nov. 1 to April 1. By luck, my husband and I would be traveling during La Garoinada, an annual sea urchin event staged by Palafrugell, a municipality in Girona province. (The festival's name is taken from garoines, the word for sea urchin in Palafrugell dialect.) During the festival, which runs for about two months starting in late January, restaurants serve raw sea urchins a la carte and as part of set menus that include typical local dishes. Though commonly referred to as roe, the edible part of the sea urchin is actually its reproductive organs, or gonads. Each year Catalonia licenses up to 25 mariscadors, or professional gatherers, to collect and sell purple sea urchin, with a maximum catch of 330 pounds per day. It had been a foggy drive from Barcelona, but by the time we reached Palafrugell's small medieval center, the sun was out and we were hungry. We ate our first garoines at La Xicra. Occupying a thick walled village house, the restaurant is known for its changing menu of updated Catalan dishes made with local and seasonal ingredients, many from Palafrugell's daily market. At 2 p.m. on the early side for lunch by Catalan standards all but one of the eight tables in its three cozy dining rooms were claimed; at least one order of sea urchins graced most. La Xicra serves garoines with traditional accompaniments: bread, blood sausage called botifarra negra and, if diners will have it, red wine. "Tourists often ask for white wine, but we prefer vinho negra. It answers the strong flavor of the urchin," said Montse Soler Xargay, the owner, as she poured a garnacha shiraz blend. A dozen urchins were arranged on a plate, the upper quarter of each spiky exoskeleton sheared off to reveal five symmetrical stripes of roe ranging in color from yellow gold to brick red. Lightly cupping an urchin in her palm, Ms. Xargay demonstrated how to scoop out the roe with a spoon or, better yet, a piece of bread. "Metal changes the taste," she said. Less fatty than the urchins I'd enjoyed as sushi, these carried an initial smack of brine followed by a lingering finish at the back of the tongue that varied from mildly sweet to downright honeyed. And they were light, leaving me with an appetite even after I downed a dozen. The next day we drove an hour north to Roses, a sprawling resort city near El Bulli, the celebrated and now defunct restaurant. The snack bar La Sirena (The Mermaid), opened in 1962, was bought 11 years ago by Jordi Blanch and Vicente Fernandez, chefs who worked in kitchens in Barcelona and elsewhere before returning to their native Roses. They retained its original decor, including a handsome timber bar, and unpretentious feel. Blackboard menus list dishes featuring seasonal produce of the Emporda region and seafood caught off the Cap de Creus. In fine weather the best seats in the house are at tables outside. Costa Bravans swear that sea urchins are best eaten raw, but they shone in a humble dish of favetes (tiny young fava beans) with quartered slices of blood sausage, olive oil and finely snipped chives and parsley. Barely touched by the heat of the other ingredients, the urchin maintained its brilliant color, along with enough brine and sweetness to balance both the sausage's fat and the bitter bite of the favas. Before we had arrived in Spain Mr. Gares had put me in touch with Paco Perez, the chef and co owner, with his wife, Montse Serra, of Miramar, a Michelin starred restaurant in Llanca, a fishing village hiking distance from the Pyrenees foothills near the French border. Mr. Perez offered to show us how to collect sea urchins the traditional way and prepare them in a few dishes. The next morning we hiked with Mr. Perez and his son, Guillem, over headlands and then down to a stretch of rocks jutting out to sea. Wielding a shuttlecock shaped basket attached to a long rattan pole, Mr. Perez pointed to the sea urchins nestled in clumps near the rocks. He cantilevered out over the water, using the basket end of the tool, called a garroter, to pull out sea urchins. It was slow work; after 30 minutes he had collected fewer than 25 urchins. (Collectors simply don wet suits to snorkel for the urchins and pluck them from the rocks with gloved hands.) Back at his house, Mr. Perez cut the urchins open with scissors and used a spoon to scrape out the dark brown bits of intestine that lie around the roe. The revealed lobes were the most impressive we'd seen yet, plump stripes of coral, apricot and Sedona red. "For me the sea urchin is number one," Mr. Perez said later in his kitchen, as he prepared small bites. "The aroma, the taste there is nothing closer to the sea." A thin slice of Catalan pa amb tomaquet (bread rubbed with tomato), drizzled with olive oil and topped with a few pieces of sea urchin, followed a dish of urchin and butter soft raw white tuna. Then Mr. Perez placed sea urchin at the bottom of a small glass, shaved over it Spanish black truffle and added a lightly cooked egg. Stirring the ingredients released an intoxicatingly earthy fragrance; the combination tasted as luxurious as it smelled. For a main course, Mr. Perez cooked a comforting suquet de peix, fish stew with garlic, tomato, potato and pieces of urchin. Remarkably the delicate urchins retained their flavor, delivering little hits of briny freshness. By now we'd enjoyed sea urchin raw and cooked. But we had yet to experience it in quintessential Catalan fashion: on a beach, with bread, sausage and wine. We came close the next day, on a 90 year old timber fishing boat, when we joined a dozen Spanish tourists for a cruise off Llafranc, a well tended village wrapped around a picturesque cove near Palafrugell. Joan Santolaria began offering sea urchin and vinho fueled cruises eight years ago. We gathered with our fellow passengers around the roof of the cabin, which held a 22 pound bag of sea urchins and a mini guillotine. While Mr. Santolaria opened the garoines, the crew sliced bread and sausage and prepared red wine in a porro, a spouted drinking vessel that, I found, is as likely to deliver wine to one's neck or shoulder as to one's mouth. We skirted the coast south of Llafanc, passing Cap Roig and circling the Illes Formigues, a group of small rocky islands that was the site of a 13th century battle between Catalan Sicilian, French and Genoese fleets. By the time we returned to port, the makeshift table was littered with breadcrumbs, urchin spines and splashes of wine. Fortunately Mr. Perez had connected me with Mr. Vehi, a Cadaques native and Dali aficionado. We met on the water facing deck at Boia Bar, which has been in Mr. Vehi's family for four generations. It was unusually hot, the bay glassy. Sea urchins, a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine and a large curved knife sat on a table. Mr. Vehi was a bundle of nervous energy, juggling appointments, phone calls and his staff. Once he began opening sea urchins, he relaxed. Dali, he said, "used to come to the bar four or five times a year. It was easy for people here in Cadques to be in touch with him." Every Jan. 20, Mr. Vehi told me, residents gather in front of Sant Sebastia Hermitage, built 300 years ago on a mountain overlooking the harbor, to celebrate Mass, dance and feast on a meal that includes sea urchin. On Ash Wednesday, they mark the end of Carnaval and the beginning of Lent with an urchin feast on the beach. I was too late for the former, and too early for the latter. But sitting in the sun, eating sea urchin with bread and red wine steps from the beach was close enough. Tela Marinera (telamarinera.es) offers excursions on its restored fishing boat. A two hour trip from Llafranc that includes sea urchins and wine costs EUR30 per person. Where to Eat and Drink La Xicra (Calle Sant Antoni, 17, Palafrugell; restaurantlaxicra.com) serves updated Catalan dishes featuring local fish, meats and produce, much of it from Palafrugell's morning market. A three course daily set menu for one, which includes a glass of wine, is EUR30. La Sirena (Placa de Sant Pere, 7, Roses; restaurantlasirena.cat) features seasonal produce and local seafood in tapas and grills, with a Catalonia producer heavy wine list. Lunch for two with a half bottle of wine comes to about EUR65. Paco Perez's molecular gastronomy rooted in tradition and local ingredients has earned Miramar (Passeig Maritim, Llanca; restaurantmiramar.com) two Michelin stars. A set menu is EUR160. In Palafrugell's medieval old town, tinyVa de I (Calle Raval Inferior, 17, Palafrugell) serves charcuterie, cheeses and tapas and a small, considered selection of Emporda wines. Charcuterie plate and wines by the glass for two, about EUR30.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
THE LAST BLACK UNICORN By Read by the author 6 Hours, 29 Minutes. Simon Schuster Audio. EVERY DAY I'M HUSTLING By Vivica A. Fox Read by the author 8 Hours. Audible Studios. is hilarious. But you knew that already. What you probably don't know is that she has an indomitable spirit that helped her to survive a difficult, often harrowing past. In the audiobook of "The Last Black Unicorn," Haddish narrates her journey from growing up poor in South Central Los Angeles, to touring on the comedy circuit, to becoming the breakout star of last year's "Girls Trip." There's some tough stuff here. When Haddish is only 8, her mother suffers a severe brain injury in a car crash. Afterward she is never the same, becoming emotionally abusive and physically violent in one particularly gut wrenching scene, she beats her daughter in a Walmart parking lot. Haddish spends time in the foster care system, where an older man abuses her. Then, as an adult, she suffers domestic abuse at the hands of her now ex husband. Haddish does not sugarcoat these experiences, and the audiobook is sometimes painful to listen to not only for what she says, but for the way she says it. At times, you can hear the hurt thrumming in her voice as she recounts missing the mother she had before the car accident or explaining why she stayed so long with an abusive husband. "Maybe it was just that I didn't know any other way to be loved," she says, with a rawness as devastating as it is affecting. 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. Haddish's life is not only heartache. There is joy and hilarity here too, narrated in a raucous style reminiscent of her stand up routines. She spends some of her teenage years as an "energy producer" at bar mitzvahs. When she is first offered the job, she hesitates, assuming the words "bar mitzvah" mean she will have to climb atop a bar, strip and show her "mitzvah." It's only after she talks to her grandmother that she realizes a bar mitzvah is a party, and an energy producer's job is to make sure all the partygoers are letting loose and having a great time. Because of her chaotic home life, Haddish often acts up at school. When she is 15, a social worker tells her that her behavior must be addressed, then offers her the choice between Laugh Factory Comedy Camp or psychiatric therapy. She chooses comedy camp, which, as she says, is "the first time I felt safe." At the Laugh Factory she meets a host of comedians, most memorably Richard Pryor, who interrupts her midset to critique her performance. "People don't come to comedy shows because they want to hear about your problems," he tells her. "When you're onstage you need to be having fun. If you're having fun, they're having fun." She takes the advice to heart: "I try to take that philosophy and apply it to everything I do in life. That's why I think my life has turned out as good as it has." Some of the funniest and most entertaining parts of the book come when Haddish talks about her ups and downs on the comedy circuit. Here her excellent comedic timing and delivery come into play; the narration really shines. There's the show where she prays into the microphone for the power to beat up a woman who's been heckling all the comedians. Then there's the one where she bombs in front of 4,000 black students at Howard University because she is nervous, and another where only 30 people show up (most of them her in laws) and she falls down onstage. The road to comedy success is not without bumps. Thanks to the MeToo movement, we are all aware of the sexism and harassment that women in entertainment face. These injustices are even more pronounced for black women, who must work against a narrower set of stereotypes grounded not just in sexism but in racism. It's a testament to Haddish's spunk and tenacity that she has managed to not only survive but thrive in the comedy world. "The Last Black Unicorn" is an inspiring story that manages to be painful, honest, shocking, bawdy and hilarious. With chapter titles like "Don't Let Anyone Work Harder Than You," "You Can't Aim if You Don't Have a Target" and "Turn Your Haters Into Congratulators," Vivica A. Fox's "Every Day I'm Hustling" is part memoir, part self help. The actress alternates between recounting her road to success and offering listeners advice on achieving their dreams. Her narration is folksy and intimate, drawing listeners in as if they were sitting and chatting over a glass of wine. What's refreshing about Fox's book is her willingness to be open about her mistakes. She wasted time waiting to be discovered, chased after empty material success and pretended to be someone she didn't even want to be. In that way, "Every Day" gives its readers permission to be gentle with themselves to forgive their mistakes while at the same time offering practical tips on how to stay focused in a world full of distractions and haters. Two standout anecdotes in "Every Day" clearly helped shape her philosophy. The first happens on the set of Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Vol. 1." Following days of frustration, Fox boils over after an angry lecture from Tarantino and lashes out at him in front of the whole cast and crew. It takes a quiet conversation with Uma Thurman to make her realize that she's approached the issue in the wrong way. "What you need to do is learn how to manipulate the situation better. ... Learn to attack intelligently," Thurman tells her. On set, Fox watches as Thurman gives a "master class," successfully lobbying Tarantino for changes. Fox's subsequent fight scene takes four days to film and leaves her with 30 bruises. She says "Kill Bill" is the work she's proudest of, and she credits Thurman with helping her to stay focused and for teaching her about the power of sharing power. The next memorable story occurs on the set of "Independence Day," where Fox's trainer who happens to be Will Smith gently reprimands her for lounging by the Jacuzzi on her day off, margarita in hand, treating her once in a lifetime opportunity as if it were just another job. This sounds like obvious advice. Opportunities in the entertainment industry do not appear with any kind of regularity, and when they do, success is never guaranteed. The trick, Smith tells Fox, is to think about where you were before the opportunity, and where you might land afterward. This is the essence of hustling: staying hungry even when you've scored a big meal. On the surface, the books share an impassioned struggle for success a story that has been covered in quite a few memoirs. But what makes both "The Last Black Unicorn" and "Every Day I'm Hustling" stand out is their authors' emphatic belief that if you're true to yourself, you will open up more opportunities. The biggest obstacle to wisdom and your own success, in other words, might just be you. So get out of your own way.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
THE ASSAULT ON INTELLIGENCE American National Security In An Age Of Lies By 257 pp. Penguin Press. 28. Michael Hayden the retired Air Force general who has directed both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, now a principal in a Washington consulting group went on a fact finding mission in August 2017. The subject of his inquiry, however, was not a foreign espionage service. What Hayden was after were clues to why America had elected Donald Trump. He began by talking to several dozen of his brother's friends, all Trump supporters, over beers in a Pittsburgh bar. "I knew many of the participants, indeed had grown up with several," Hayden writes. "But we could have been from different planets." While Hayden was curious about and civil to the men and women who voted for Trump, he is less kind to the president himself. Trump's statements during the campaign drove Hayden to become more involved and outspoken than he anticipated in the months before the election. Indeed, it is something of an irony that this military and intelligence veteran whose 2016 book, "Playing to the Edge," defended controversial policies of surveillance, interrogation and targeted killing is among Trump's most prominent and incisive critics. Hayden, a self described "internationalist," opposes Trump's trade, immigration and foreign policies. He also blasts Trump's record of exaggeration, falsehood, misstatement and conspiratorial thinking. "All candidates shape their message," he writes, "but Trump just seemed to say whatever came into his head." Having led one agency where some operatives wore T shirts saying "Deny everything, admit nothing," Hayden is nonetheless impassioned about the importance of empirical data to decision making. Hayden is an institutionalist. What concerns him is the degree to which policymakers operate according to established roles and norms. He sees the virtues of bureaucratic procedure. The "idea of this book," he writes, "is not that civil war or societal collapse is necessarily imminent or inevitable here in America" thank goodness "but that the structures, processes, and attitudes we rely on to prevent those kinds of occurrences are under stress, and that many of the premises on which we have based our governance, policy and security are now challenged, eroded or simply gone." Whatever disagreements Hayden may have had with George W. Bush and Barack Obama and he argues that several of Obama's policies were ill conceived Trump's predecessors, he says, largely respected the independence and judgments of the bureaucracy. Trump does not. He not only accuses the F.B.I., Justice Department and other agencies of forming a "deep state," but also seeks to challenge, disrupt and exert control over them. Trump does not think in institutional terms, but in personal ones. These lines of criticism intersect over Russia. Hayden acknowledges that intelligence agencies were slow to pick up on the Russian challenge to United States elections: "Committed to a path of cyber dominance for ourselves, we seemed to lack the doctrinal vision to fully understand what the Russians were up to with their more full spectrum information dominance." That lack of vision was compounded by the reluctance of both the Obama and Trump administrations to counterattack. "Russia has been actively seeking to damage the fabric of American democracy," Hayden writes, "and the Trump administration's glandular aversion to even looking at this squarely, much less mounting a concerted response to it, is an appalling national security lapse." For a longtime spook, Hayden is a breezy and direct writer. He reduces complex issues of cyber and information warfare to essentials, and his polemic is leavened with humor and sympathy. He is at his best, though, when he shifts to a purely analytical tone. He coolly forecasts the direction of America under Trump, explains the intelligence that foreign governments are likely to collect from the president's Twitter feed and describes the benefits Russia drew from the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Kremlin connected Russian attorneys and senior Trump campaign officials. Reading this book, I could not help being struck by the divide separating officials like Hayden from followers of Trump. Hayden's narrative is filled with accolades for media institutions and figures distrusted by large numbers of Americans. He makes frequent mention of various panels and conferences he has taken part in and celebrities he has met. But his laudable case for the intelligence community does not dwell on the things the community has gotten wrong, from the fall of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Nor does he reckon with the questionable practices of officials who leak secrets, misrepresent themselves to Congress and respond in kind to Trump's outlandish rhetoric. Hayden's "Assault on Intelligence," then, is more than an indictment of Trump. It is evidence of the social and cultural divide between everyday Americans and the highest levels of their government. What we learn from Hayden is that the upper echelons of the intelligence community are filled with patriots who can tell you what is happening in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan but are at a loss for words when the scene shifts to a Pennsylvania bar.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
I started a walking program at the beginning of the lockdown, gradually building up to two one hour walks a day. I've lost 20 pounds, but weight loss was not my primary goal. I walk because I'm fortunate enough to live in a beautiful and fairly rural section of New England, and the "small wonders" mentioned in the column are countless. I encounter few other human beings (though many squirrels), so my risk for Covid 19 infection is minimal. And although I'm certainly not a misanthrope, I find that these natural glories are best appreciated solo. You notice more, and have more time for introspection, when conversation is left out of the equation. (And to eliminate distractions, I carry a bare bones flip phone, not a smartphone.) I'm not as obsessive a walking enthusiast as Henry David Thoreau, who routinely took four hour daily walks, but I certainly now understand why the ritual meant so much to him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Though it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and shocked audiences who saw it at two Off Broadway theaters over the course of a year, Jackie Sibblies Drury's "Fairview" was hard to talk about. Any discussion of its aims and effects had to be blanketed in spoiler alerts. As the play closes in New York the last performance is on Aug. 11 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn and gets set to play in London at the Young Vic theater and most likely beyond, a conversation about its exploration of black life and the white gaze can take place in earnest. "Fairview" concerns a "regular" middle class black family seen in increasingly surreal ways. First they seem to be part of a sitcom, then the object of commentary by unseen white voices. Finally Ms. Drury has the teenage daughter of the family, Keisha, step out of the story to ask white audience members to switch places with the black cast onstage. "Could I tell them that those seats are not theirs, even though they paid for them?" Keisha wonders aloud. "That no one can own a seat forever? That no one should?" So: Spoiler spoiled. But it turns out that the play still poses a problem or an opportunity. In a cultural medium whose producers, audiences and critics are still predominantly white, "Fairview" challenges playgoers to think about how the different backgrounds and assumptions they bring to the theater may produce vastly different results once inside. With so many black playwrights writing so passionately about these questions right now, the "Fairview" challenge was too important to pass up. Salamishah Tillet, a professor of African American studies and creative writing at Rutgers University Newark and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and Jesse Green, the co chief theater critic for The Times, sat down for a conversation. JESSE GREEN Let's start with our experiences at the end of "Fairview": mine as a self identified white man SALAMISHAH TILLET And mine as a self proclaimed black woman. I guess we have to talk about the ending. GREEN How did it go down for you in the audience? TILLET Once Keisha invited the white audience members to come onstage, I was shocked and I wondered "Why are they going up there?" I assume that the play thought it was creating a safe space for the people of color who remained in the audience. TILLET That's so interesting. I didn't feel like I actually stayed with watching the white people onstage for that long. Of course, their procession to the stage was quite a spectacle. But I thought the gaze quickly turned back on me as a black person, and the white audience was suddenly listening to this one sided conversation between a black actress and the people of color in the audience. I actually felt like I was a "prop" who suddenly had to perform racial solidarity in that moment and was under more scrutiny in the end that I was in the beginning. GREEN It sounds like you had the experience of still being the subject of white gaze, whereas I and maybe the other white folks onstage had the experience of being completely left out of the proceedings. Was there something on your side of the proscenium that you could have gotten from the play without that device? TILLET I thought the second act when the black actors were onstage while the white actors were offstage doing voice overs and played the game, "If you could choose to be any race, what race would you be?" was really illuminating. I've never played that game, but noticed a lot of the people around me stopped laughing, got really quiet, and saw themselves in that conversation. But, I was really moved by then the scene right before the ending and when the fourth wall was finally broken. It was a stunning representation of the violent schizophrenia of American racism. If the play ended with that lack of closure, it would have been jarring but it offered no absolution, no purging of white guilt. GREEN What's the word you used? Absolution? To the white audience by giving them a little chore to do? GREEN I didn't feel absolved of anything and I can't speak for others but I definitely felt that I ought to do what this black playwright wanted me to do. Because, God knows, white people have been telling black people what to do for so long, especially in the theater. And what's the harm to me, really? It pushed me outside of my comfort zone but I trusted that she had something she wanted to show me, as a white person, that was worth seeing. But that's where the hard question comes in. Who is the play really for? Would "Fairview" even work if 90 percent of the audience were of color? GREEN I'm really interested in your question about absolution because although I doubt black playwrights at the vanguard of this wave of great new plays are very interested in granting absolution to anybody, there's a big difference between what they write and what audiences do with what they write. I'm sure some white people can see "Fairview" and feel no shame or guilt. Not me. Racism has been part of theater, part of entertainment history for a shockingly long time. I mean we still had blackface Othellos quite recently. Was I personally involved in those decisions? No. But I think if you're a sensitive person you feel guilt by association. Or at least the need to acknowledge that bad things have been done in ways you may have profited from. I feel that way about lots of issues, not just racism. But racism especially. Of course, hearing myself say all that, I worry about the desire to "virtue signal," to say "Oh look, I've done something good because I went to this play and was momentarily uncomfortable." Or, as a critic, to say I've done something good because I've written a positive review. Perhaps that's unavoidable, but if I respond so strongly to "Fairview" or, to name another, "Slave Play," I think it's because my taste and my self image come together when confronted by a powerful playwright who wants to push me around. I feel that way about Shakespeare, too. Or Suzan Lori Parks. So absolution, yes, I can't get around it; these plays may soothe liberal guilt, even while engaging it. But is that so different from what all theater does when it engages and gives expression to emotions and leaves you lighter from that encounter? TILLET Yes, that's Aristotle's "catharsis" thesis in "Poetics." But, I also think we should remember the earlier black plays that marked whiteness but to different ends. Set in a New York City subway in 1964, Amiri Baraka's "The Dutchman" is all about the Manichaean struggle between the black male character, Clay, and the white female character Lula. The moment Clay asserts his agency and tries to exit their racial melodrama, Lula delivers a fatal blow, only to restart her homicidal cycle with another unsuspecting black man. James Baldwin once had separate entrances for black and white audiences for his 1964 play inspired by Emmett Till's murder, "Blues for Mister Charlie." And Douglas Turner Ward's "Day of Absence" from 1965 is about the day when all the black people suddenly disappear from their Jim Crow Southern town. The white people do not know how to function, take care of their children, govern each other or simply exist. It's a play about whiteness cast with all black actors. Since "Fairview" actually had white actors play white people who were pretending to be black, I found it noteworthy that new plays, like "A Strange Loop" by Michael R. Jackson and "Toni Stone" by Lydia R. Diamond do that too: critique the white gaze but cast only black actors. GREEN What I felt was going on in those two plays you mention is that the playwrights, using the techniques of the theater, were giving power back to black people that racism had stolen. They could own the experience and then drop it; they were in charge. I found that powerful. GREEN One thing these plays are teaching me is that our experiences, even if they are relatable, are not symmetrical. The black gaze on white people means something different than the white gaze on black people. And I suppose what I feel in moments like the one you describe is that I don't really need more information from white playwrights about what they imagine black life to be. But I am happy to see what black playwrights think white life is. TILLET I'm most compelled by plays that have both a interracial and intraracial critique or others that do not care about the white gaze but rather how black people see each other. Plays like "A Strange Loop," "Toni Stone," Tarell Alvin McCraney's "Choir Boy" and even the recent revival of Lynn Nottage's "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark" all show black people's inner lives to varying degrees. When I saw Donja Love's "Sugar in Our Wounds" last year, I was amazed. I had never seen a coming of age story set in slavery about black queer men before. GREEN In that play Mr. Love wrote as if everybody either knew what the black characters were talking about, or if they didn't know they were on their own. White plays have done that forever. TILLET It is also a way decentering the white gaze without reifying the white audience . That's just a different strategy. GREEN It's fine to say: That was not written for me. It wasn't written against me either. That's a quality I like in a play, whatever it's about. I want it to be more interested in itself than it is in me. Another good example is Aziza Barnes's "BLKS," about three black women roommates in their twenties in Brooklyn who go out for a night on the town. There's racism implied in it, but it's mostly offstage, and these women have other things (often sex) on their minds. And why shouldn't they? It's as if the playwright is saying, if you're not interested in these women's lives as they experience them, then I have nothing for you. It is indifferent to the white gaze. Honestly, it's a relief. TILLET If you decenter the white gaze, what different dynamic stories will we see? Toni Morrison has said, "I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books." I thought of that with "Toni Stone," about the first woman to play in professional baseball, in the Negro Leagues. It was trying to deal with the white gaze in theater and 1950s baseball. But, it was also about sexism she was dealing with at home and on her team; racism was not the only oppressive force in her life. TILLET Yes, of course you can write about and review these plays sensitively. But, the bigger question is why there are so few black theater critics in mainstream publications that have the power to make or break a show's run or black playwright's career? GREEN I have my theories, if no evidence. But here's another example of why it's important. The most scathing review of Suzan Lori Parks's "White Noise," which was about a contemporary black man who agrees to become his white best friend's slave, came from a prominent black critic, Hilton Als of The New Yorker. He wrote that the play "hadn't been written from within blackness." Even if I agreed, I could never say such a thing nor, I submit, ever know it. It speaks to the necessity of having other voices. But I'm really asking a different question since I'm not actually going to quit my job. What I'm really asking is: Can a white critic even "see" these plays properly? TILLET Why would you not be able to see it? You're pulling from your different experiences and different histories. But you also might miss a lot of things, too, which could affect your read and, of course, your review. Like in "A Strange Loop," Jackson satirizes sacrosanct cultural icons like Zora Neale Hurston and Whitney Houston, black cast Broadway hits like "The Lion King" and "The Color Purple," and Tyler Perry's urban theater. All of these, especially Perry's "circuit" plays have provoked contentious debates among black people about access, representation, caricature, which are all big parts of the metalanguage of Mr. Jackson's play. But my main concern is that the critical voices of white writers are considered more important than those of people of color. That simply does not make sense. In this groundbreaking moment in black art and culture, it is cultural malpractice to have so few critics of color weighing in with their interpretations and insights. GREEN What I'm really learning most from our conversation is the way in which thinking a lot about the white gaze can also be a distorting element within the plays. Which raises a more fundamental question: In making a play whose subject is the white gaze, are you turning the power of the play back to the very people you're trying to get it away from? TILLET I know white people who went to "Fairview" and felt like they were being held accountable but also did not realize how much they remained at its center of attention. It is true, however, that I didn't feel disempowered when I left "Fairview." A group of us black people found our way to each other and stayed afterward to talk about what we experienced. The only other group near us was the mainly black cast members. So, in the end, who actually felt comfortable? Who felt like they owned that space? In that sense Ms. Drury achieved her goal. I actually felt comfortable talking about what I just saw while a lot of the white audience members seemed to be rushing home to process what just happened in the privacy of their homes and not under the hot stage lights.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
IT'S an immutable law of the car business: the more focused a company's lineup, the greater the outrage when that company decides to expand its product range. When Porsche introduced the Cayenne S.U.V. as a 2004 model, purist fans reacted as if the company had announced it was branching into unicycles and Justin Bieber merchandise. "That's not a Porsche!" cried many people who have never bought, nor will ever buy, a Porsche. Ditto Lotus's recent announcement that it might one day build cars that weigh more than a Honda Ruckus scooter. Heresy! Silvio Berlusconi probably wishes Ferrari would announce a new pickup truck, just to provide a distraction. Just as the aforementioned companies have long histories of building sports cars, the name Mini evokes sprightly front wheel drive two door hatchbacks. So the new Mini Cooper S Countryman All4 an all wheel drive four door is a pretty significant departure. And yet I'm not sensing much righteous frothy indignation among the faithful. Unlike, say, the old Saab 9 7 (a k a, the Chevrolet TrailBlazer), the Mini Countryman is a logical extension of its brand. There are surely would be Mini owners who wish for more room, or more traction, than you get in the Mini hardtop or Mini Clubman. Unto that breach rolls the chunky, blunt prowed Countryman, looking like the old Audi Allroad's punk nephew. Prices start at 22,350 for a base front drive Countryman. That sounds reasonable, but Minis hew to their BMW origins in that options can inflate the sticker by more than 50 percent. In this car, as with other Minis, you're paying for design. The Countryman interior, in particular, looks like something that other companies may cook up for a concept car but then abandon on the way to the showroom. In cars with a navigation system, the screen resides in the middle of the gigantic round speedometer centered in the dashboard. The parking brake handle resembles an aircraft throttle, and a center rail that bisects the interior allows for clip in attachments like cup holders, armrests and a litter bag. Mini opted to configure the Countryman as a strict four seater, and the rear buckets offer a surprisingly generous amount of room. The seats adjust 5.1 inches forward or backward, so you can choose between increased cargo capacity or rather extravagant legroom the back seats are within an inch of the BMW 3 Series sedan in that department. Over all, the Countryman is 15.7 inches longer than a Mini hardtop, and that stretch lends a new dimension of meaningful practicality. So the extra doors are a potential temptation for the Mini faithful. As for the all wheel drive option, I'm not so sure. The other is the "it'll get you up the snowy hill, but it's still mostly a front wheel drive system." (See: Ford Taurus, most crossovers.) The Countryman's all wheel drive system is the latter variety, with 100 percent of the power going to the front wheels most of the time. When the system detects slip, up to half of the torque can go to the rear wheels. But this is the sort of design that's intended to help you claw into your arctic urban parking space, not lower your lap times. If the Countryman had 250 horsepower under the hood, I'd say it needed all wheel drive to help deploy the power. As it is, the Countryman All4 uses the same 181 horsepower 1.6 liter 4 cylinder engine as the other Cooper S models. Meanwhile, it gains some 600 pounds over a two door Cooper S. To put that in perspective, adding 600 pounds to a Mini Cooper S is akin to a 150 pound person ballooning up to 180 you're going to notice a change like that. The Countryman All4 isn't exactly lethargic, but the extra weight noticeably dulls the playful exuberance of its lighter brethren. In testing by Edmunds Inside Line, the Countryman S All4's quarter mile time was exactly the same as that of the Toyota Sienna SE minivan: 15.7 seconds. I don't expect a Mini to excel at drag racing, but it would be nice if it could outrun a Cheerios encrusted day care on wheels. Fortunately, there is an easy way to put the porkiest Mini on a diet: forgo the all wheel drive. Even the company seems a little confused about why it's there. (The Mini Web site suggests that maybe you'll deploy the Countryman All4 for some light off roading, which seems as likely as using it as a pushback tractor at LaGuardia.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Turturro at home in Brooklyn. He got the Coen brothers' blessing to return to his "Big Lebowski" character. When last we encountered Jesus Quintana, the bumptious Latino bowler was going door to door in his new neighborhood, meekly sharing that he was a registered sex offender. That was in 1998, the year that the Jesus (John Turturro, at his most inspired) cameo ed in Joel and Ethan Coen's feverishly adored stoner noir "The Big Lebowski." Turturro reprises the role in the farce "The Jesus Rolls," opening Feb. 28, Turturro's 63rd birthday. The film which he wrote and directed with the Coens' blessing is loosely based on Bertrand Blier's 1974 movie "Going Places" in which two French knuckleheads steal cars, grope women and boink themselves into existentially richer moments of being. I spoke with Turturro about resurrecting the Jesus, zealous disciples and more. Here are excerpts from the conversation. I never dwelled much on that aspect of The Jesus. I was more embarrassed by the codpiece Joel and Ethan made me wear when I went door to door. In the new movie, how do you turn a cartoonish child molester into a cartoonish non child molester? Pedophilia is a real thing, a horrifying thing. But "The Jesus Rolls" is a comedy, so I said let's address the crime and move on. A flashback in the opening scene reveals it was all a big misunderstanding involving the Jesus' penis. Big enough to get him arrested. Another distinguishing feature of the Jesus is his voice, which is gentle and disarmingly high. I first used the voice in Reinaldo Povod's play "Nijinsky Choked His Chicken" at the Public in 1987. Rei's father had just been released from prison, and that's how he spoke. Part of what made the Jesus so endearing were his extravagant gestures. He taunted opponents by shimmying and strutting and backpedaling like a cocky prizefighter. A lot of those moves were modeled on Muhammad Ali's, especially his psych out job on Sonny Liston. Ethan says you got more mail and, alarmingly, more marriage proposals from the role than any other and also, understandably, more room on the subway. I got all kinds of women letters, men letters. Weird ones, racy ones. "I love your body." "I love your outfit." "I'd love to take your outfit off." I made "Lebowski" after returning to the States from Europe, where I filmed "The Truce." I played the writer Primo Levi returning home to Italy from Auschwitz after World War II, and I'd lost a lot of weight for the part so much that a couple of New York gossip columnists speculated that I was dying. A Fleet Street hack even called my mother in Queens and asked, "Is it true your son has brain cancer?" A friend suggested that I hold a press conference with my head bandaged and thank God for my miraculous recovery. "The Jesus Rolls" nods toward "Lebowski," but it's not a sequel. Basically, you've inserted a "Lebowski" character into "Going Places" and updated that story to the present day. How did you decide to hitch a ride on a 46 year old road movie about aimless joy riders whose entire objective is to keep driving until the tank is empty? "Going Places" made a tremendous impression on me. I was 19 and in college when I saw the movie at a second run theater in upstate New York. It wasn't long after the student riots in Paris, a time of hippies and revolutionaries, and the film was a celebration of freedom in a world of bourgeoise hypocrisy. I was shocked, not just by what I was seeing onscreen, but by my laughter at the shocking things I was seeing. I remember thinking, "Holy mackerel!" The original title of "Going Places" was "Les Valseuses," French slang for testicles. The brutish leads Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere treated females like walking vaginas who existed solely to service mankind. Roger Ebert condemned the film for what he called its "palpable and embarrassing" hatred of women. And yet Pauline Kael was a big champion of "Going Places." She saw the Depardieu and Dewaere characters as guileless raw innocents for whom almost everything backfires. To me, they were like cave men crude, misogynistic and at times a little rough but they became generous cave men. They seemed to genuinely care for Miou Miou, their lover and companion. They also cared about the little band of outsiders they formed with a weathered convict played by Jeanne Moreau, and Isabelle Huppert, a teenage runaway. The generosity of the powerless appeals to some rebellious part of me. In "Jesus Rolls," you stand in for Depardieu, the mindless mastermind, and Bobby Cannavale is your partner in crime. Audrey Tautou takes the place of Miou Miou and Susan Sarandon replaces Moreau. How closely did you hew to the "Going Places" screenplay? I intentionally left the screenplay way behind. As a writer and actor it's important to remember you're not those characters, that's not your language, you're not that age. After rewatching "Going Places," I transposed the narrative and read Blier's novel, which is filthy, broader in its concerns and the basis of the film. Then I asked him for permission to repurpose the book and make the two drifters a few decades older, so that I could play one of them. My pitch was simple: those guys are now middle aged and they're still idiots. And Blier said, "O.K., as long as they're stupid." The Coen brothers are forever retelling the story of Job. The question isn't whether God exists, but what He's up to. Do we have a friend in the Jesus? I really like religious movies, especially if they're about nuns. I was thinking of calling this picture "Jesus, Mary and Peter" because the three principals do good deeds. They solve problems. They don't hurt anybody. Even when they steal a car, they bring it back. Maybe in 20 more years I'll make another movie about the Jesus. As we all know, he already came back once.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The veteran hard rock band Slipknot bested the veteran rapper Rick Ross on the Billboard album chart this week, in a battle of sales vs. streaming. "We Are Not Your Kind," Slipknot's sixth album and its third to hit No. 1, benefited from the now common tactic of pairing a built in album redemption offer with concert tickets, leading to sales of 102,000 in the album's first week, according to Nielsen. Even when combined with only 19 million song streams, Slipknot's total album activity reached 118,000 units, giving it a comfortable margin atop the Billboard 200. Behind Slipknot are two rap albums that found their audiences primarily on streaming services. "Port of Miami 2," Rick Ross's sequel to his 2006 debut album, had 68 million streams in its debut week, reaching 80,000 units in total, including 25,000 in sales. "!" by the SoundCloud graduate Trippie Redd lands at No. 3 with 62 million streams and 7,000 in sales, or 51,000 units by the industry's math. No other new album reached the Top 25. Rounding out the Top 5 are the chart fixtures Billie Eilish whose "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" is hanging around at No. 4 in its 20th week out and Ed Sheeran, whose "No.6 Collaborations Project" is No. 5 in its fifth week. Both the Eilish and Sheeran albums were streamed about 45 million times.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Stress may increase the risk for heart disease, especially in younger people. Researchers writing in BMJ used Swedish data on 136,637 people diagnosed with stress related disorders, including post traumatic stress disorder, acute stress reaction and others. They compared them with 171,314 unaffected siblings, and with 1,366,370 people in the general population without a stress disorder diagnosis. They tracked their health for up to 27 years. After controlling for physical and mental health history, age, sex, income and other factors, they found that a person with a stress disorder was 29 percent more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than a sibling without a stress disorder, and 37 percent more likely than those in the general population. The risk was even greater in the first year after the diagnosis 64 percent higher than a sibling, and 71 percent higher than the general population. The association between stress and cardiovascular disease was especially strong for people under 50. "Our study included only people with a diagnosed stress disorder," said the lead author, Huan Song, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Iceland. "But people with depression and anxiety are also at higher risk for cardiovascular disease. In fact, anyone with stress is at higher risk, but here we focused on people with acute stresses and severe psychiatric reactions to them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Mandy Patinkin is returning to Broadway. The Tony winning actor will assume the lead male role in "Natasha, Pierre The Great Comet of 1812" for three weeks, from Aug. 15 through Sept. 3. He'll take over from the "Hamilton" alumnus Okieriete Onaodowan in a show that picked up 12 Tony nominations and continues to perform strongly at the box office. "The Great Comet," Dave Malloy's musical adaptation of a portion of Tolstoy's "War and Peace," was highly celebrated when it arrived at the Imperial Theater last fall. "It is both the most innovative and the best new musical to open on Broadway since 'Hamilton,'" Charles Isherwood wrote in a review in The New York Times. The show's accolades included Tony nominations for Denee Benton and Josh Groban, the actors in the lead roles, and Tony Awards for scenic design and lighting design, in June. Mr. Patinkin, 64, will inherit Mr. Groban's role of Pierre, a hard drinking, bitter aristocrat who plays piano and accordion onstage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Ron Kincaid remembers what it was like to worry that his job would be sent overseas. Globalization had ravaged American manufacturing, and now, in the first years of the new century, economists were warning that offshoring the relocating of work to other countries was coming for white collar jobs like his as well. For Mr. Kincaid, the evidence seemed close at hand; he overheard conversations through his boss's open office door about which foreign contractors should take over which jobs at the automobile finance company where he worked. He remembers the meeting where an executive mused that perhaps the whole department could be shipped to India. He wondered how much notice he would get, and what his severance would be, and how he would tell his wife. Mr. Kincaid didn't need to have that conversation. He kept his job. While he later left the company, he has remained steadily employed a decade and a half later. And the broader jobs apocalypse never materialized. Companies did move millions of office jobs to India, the Philippines and other places where they could pay workers less. But those job losses were more than balanced by growth elsewhere in the economy. A widely covered 2007 study by Alan S. Blinder , a Princeton economist and former Clinton administration official, estimated that a quarter or more of jobs were vulnerable within the next decade. But many companies discovered that labor savings were offset by other factors: time differences, language barriers, legal hurdles and the simple challenge of coordinating work half a world away. In some cases, companies decided they were better off moving jobs to less expensive parts of the United States rather than out of the country. "Where in retrospect I missed the boat is in thinking that the gigantic gap in labor costs between here and India would push it to India rather than to South Dakota," Mr. Blinder said in a recent interview. "There were other aspects of the costs to moving the activities that we weren't thinking about very much back then when people were worrying about offshoring." In his 2007 paper, Mr. Blinder scored occupations on a 1 to 100 scale based on how easily they could be sent offshore. Bus drivers and electricians scored near the bottom. There is pretty much no way to do that work from afar. On the other end of the spectrum were computer programmers and telemarketers jobs that in many cases were already being sent overseas. In a follow up paper released Friday, another economist, Adam Ozimek , revisited Mr. Blinder's analysis to see what had happened over the past decade. Some job categories that Mr. Blinder identified as vulnerable, like data entry workers, have seen a decline in United States employment. But the ranks of others, like actuaries, have continued to grow. But Mr. Blinder didn't miss the mark entirely, said Mr. Ozimek, who is chief economist at Upwork, an online platform for hiring freelancers. The new study found that in the jobs that Mr. Blinder identified as easily offshored, a growing share of workers were now working from home. Mr. Ozimek said he suspected that many more were working in satellite offices or for outside contractors, rather than at a company's main location. In other words, technology like cloud computing and videoconferencing has enabled these jobs to be done remotely, just not quite as remotely as Mr. Blinder and many others assumed. One telling example is call centers. Telemarketing jobs have declined sharply in the United States since 2007, as much of the work was sent overseas. But the number of customer service representatives has continued to grow. The two occupations may seem similar. But the different employment trend may reflect both cultural and logistical differences. Telemarketers are essentially selling products and often working from a script. Customer service and other call center work like tech support often require a more nuanced understanding of the customer experience. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Deb Thorpe , senior vice president for operations for Kelly Services, a staffing company, said that rather than move customer service jobs abroad, many companies were trying to find cost efficiencies by putting offices in less expensive parts of the country or letting workers take calls from home. "The call center business in the U.S. is still pretty healthy," Ms. Thorpe said. Mr. Kincaid, now 59 and living in Columbus, Ohio, has seen all those patterns up close. Shortly after his own near miss with offshoring, he was hired by another American company to manage a team of programmers in India. It didn't go smoothly: The Indian workers were skilled, but the time difference and the distance made it hard to collaborate. He eventually told the company that it would be better to bring the work home. "I can share my screen with them, but I can't, in real time, sit with them while they're making the mistakes and show them where they're making the mistakes," he said. Mr. Kincaid's current employer, Nexient, develops software for companies on a contract basis work that is a prime candidate for outsourcing. But all of Nexient's employees are in the United States, which the company uses as a selling point with its clients . Mark Orttung , Nexient's chief executive, said that offshoring worked fine for certain types of work, such as short term projects, but less well on projects where requirements change over time and collaboration is more important. American workers can also have an edge on projects that require them to understand the specifics of the business: how the American health care system works, for example, or what customers expect from a particular brand. "When we work with a large retailer, most of our employees probably shop at that retailer," Mr. Orttung said. Nexient is based in the San Francisco Bay Area , but most of its employees are in Columbus or in Ann Arbor, Mich. Both are college towns, with plenty of young graduates with technical skills. They are in or near metropolitan areas with big companies that are sources of more experienced workers. And they are much cheaper places to live than Silicon Valley. A growing number of companies are shifting operations to cities like Columbus, said Susan Lund, who has studied the future of work for the McKinsey Global Institute, the consulting firm's think tank. No American location can compete directly with India on labor costs, she said, but shifting jobs elsewhere in the country can narrow the gap. "The companies that started the offshoring trend were largely based in Manhattan or the West Coast, in the very high cost places, and they realized that, hey, there are a lot of other places in the U.S.," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
First the Play. Then the Soul Searching. But What Comes Next? You're in a Zoom gathering when a young black man named Keishon pops onto your screen. "Ay yo, what's good everybody?" he says. People in adjoining boxes wave. However ingratiating he may be, Keishon actually the actor Marlon Burnley has a harrowing story to tell. After both his parents died, he spent age 7 to 18 in foster care, abused by both adults and children but mostly by the system itself. The agency in charge of his placements stole his survivor benefits, he says, leaving him broke when it spit him out at the end: "Apparently, the state's budget is so thin that they're using low income kids' tragedies to fill their general reserves." People don't usually talk public policy like that in the theater, but maybe they should. At any rate, that's the idea behind Equitable Dinners, a series of monthly events, produced by Out of Hand Theater in Atlanta, that sees plays not as aesthetic objects but as prompts for reflection on aspects of racial inequity in America. It still involves the same five elements: a welcome, a short play commissioned for the occasion, a talk from an expert on the evening's subject, small group discussions led by facilitators and, finally, a call to action. But the play is now a livestream, and those discussions, which formerly took place over potluck at individual tables, are held in Zoom breakout rooms with five to 10 participants each. As a vehicle for what we traditionally think of as theatrical engagement, the new medium is a mixed blessing. Though the 250 people who attended Sunday's dinner were not in the same actual space as Burnley, and could not make themselves known to him or he to them the way actors and audiences can in a theater, that distancing was a powerful reflection of reality. Keishon's story, alive beside us, was the kind that too often remains difficult to touch as I'd learn later in the evening. In this case, it was, at least to me: Hatcher's book "The Poverty Industry" explores the many ways in which grants to social service agencies create a perverse disincentive to providing actual service. On Sunday, matching the theme of Sharpe's play, for which he served as an adviser, Hatcher focused his 20 minutes on foster care, a system in which black children are heavily overrepresented. But the same funding schemes also underlie programs that turn the life span of what Hatcher calls "vulnerable citizens" whether in schools, prisons or nursing homes into government income streams. Important information, certainly, but hardly as dramatic as Keishon's monologue. The language of explanation is different from the language of empathy. It was the facilitator of my breakout group, the epidemiologist Camara Jones, who pointed out that phrases like "vulnerable citizens," and the discussions of poverty and capitalism that had started our conversation, avoid the obvious point, which is racism. She asked each of us to reflect on why that word, which lies at the root of the other problems, can be so difficult to face. And that's when the evening's real drama began, as nine people diverse by age, race, gender and geography, seated in kitchens and living rooms around Atlanta and around the country, singly or in pairs, tried to clear a way through shyness and uncertainty to approach some fundamentals. Among the ideas proposed: Racism is a system, not an individual moral failing. Police violence is an expression, not an aberration, of that system. Indeed, it was not lost on anyone attending the Equitable Dinner on Sunday that these conversations were occurring in the midst of two existential threats to people of color. One was the virus, but the other was man made. Not 48 hours earlier, as protests over the killing of George Floyd continued, another black man, Rayshard Brooks, was shot to death by a white policeman in a Wendy's parking lot in South Atlanta, five miles from Out of Hand's office. No surprise that the mood in my breakout group was often heavy and hopeless. Theater has likewise been facing two threats, one preventing plays from being staged, one making too many of them seem trivial. Out of Hand's project produced with social justice organizations including The King Center and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and sponsored by locally headquartered philanthropies including the Coca Cola Foundation points to a possible solution to both problems. For one thing, its repurposing of meeting software as a dramatic tool, too often a mere expedience in streamed theatrical presentations, is utterly convincing here, in part because it acknowledges the fact that we are really in a meeting. And the subject matter, which over the next three months will examine education, housing and voting rights, could not possibly be more pressing. To spend two hours engaged in a public discussion of what many of us are thinking about all day anyway is to create a momentary equilibrium between ourselves and our world. If there is a limitation in the Equitable Dinner model it is the limitation of theater itself: It can substitute symbolic action for the real thing. To see a dramatization of racism, even with a discussion and action items to follow, is not to fight against it. Being willing to listen to a story like Keishon's in a dramatic monologue is not the same as being willing to listen to it in real life, Camara Jones pointed out. "Does it really take a play to care?" she asked. The justification for theater in a tragic world is that by representing tragedy safely it trains us in sympathy that can result in change. But if we're honest we know that theater, like all art, can also glut us, rendering us useless in the world it hopes to repair. The Covid pause and Black Lives Matter are making that clear. When the drama is all on the street, behind masks, why bother imagining it onstage? And yet consolation is also a valuable role of theater. Out of Hand seemed to recognize that on Sunday, consigning the call to action that usually ends its programs to a webpage and email. Instead, Jericho Brown, who won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, popped up on the screen to read three poems and end the evening. "I'd like us to rethink/What it is to be a nation," was a key line in one, and in that moment you could hear, from several of Zoom's discrete black rimmed boxes, the unmistakable sound of crying.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The study, published online last week in The Lancet, was done by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, which studies sexuality and reproductive health. Globally, abortions fell from 35 per 1,000 women in 1995 to 29 per 1,000 by 2003. After that, the rate essentially leveled off. The study blamed a decline in access to birth control. "When contraception rates are high, abortion rates are low," Gilda Sedgh, a senior research associate at the institute and the lead author of the new study, said in an interview.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
BACHELOR NATION Inside the World of America's Favorite Guilty Pleasure By Amy Kaufman 310 pp. Dutton. 25. Since its debut season in 2002, "The Bachelor" and its many offspring shows have made for a durable and reliable fantasy factory, a hiding in plain sight reminder of the endless American appetite for love stories, and also for schadenfreude. Over 35 seasons of "The Bachelor" and its sister program, "The Bachelorette," the show has perfected zero sum romance for one person to secure love, others must suffer. Both are pleasures to watch. Rendering the contradictory with ease is a "Bachelor" specialty, Suzannah Showler notes in "Most Dramatic Ever: The Bachelor," her vivid and enthused collection of extended essays on the show, which she says "dramatizes the pursuit of individual happiness, only to claim in the end that it was manifesting destiny all along." Its ideal of love is pristine, alluringly commodifiable and, despite obvious skepticism, renewable year after year. The books are apt companion pieces: one on the mechanics of how the show is made and one on the poetics of how it is consumed. Both are rooted in passion for the subject. Kaufman covers the show as an entertainment reporter for The Los Angeles Times or at least she did until ABC stopped allowing her access to program events in 2014. Showler, a Canadian poet and essayist, has written about the show for BuzzFeed and The Los Angeles Review of Books. I, too, am among the faithful: I have watched 28 seasons in full, along with pretty much every spinoff. (I am not, however, enough of a masochist to have watched the season starring Charlie O'Connell, oily brother of Jerry.) It is soothing the characters change, but the rhythm does not. It also rewards various levels of engagement: uncritical hope, nuanced skepticism, outright loathing. There is no right way to consume it; it's as easily dismantled as it is worshiped. "There's no allegiance to what happened in reality," one show editor tells Kaufman, explaining how the finished product can bear little resemblance to the source material. The journalist details various strains of production trickery, from the contestant interviews through to the proposal on the finale (though much of this has been spoiled by the vicious Lifetime drama series "UnREAL," about a "Bachelor" esque reality show, cocreated by a former "Bachelor" producer). 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. What's most striking is the participants' collective willingness to play along with producer shaped story lines, either in the hope of airtime or out of a sort of Stockholm syndrome. The Milanese born cosmetics entrepreneur Lorenzo Borghese agrees to an Italian prince themed season filmed in Rome, even though he was mostly raised in New Jersey and spoke barely any Italian. Justin Rego, a onetime professional wrestler who was a "Bachelorette" contestant in 2010, was quickly scorned by the other men, who doubted his sincerity. "I realized, 'Oh, I'm that guy this season,'" he tells Kaufman. "So it was like, 'If this is how the story line is going to be, I'm going to make this a damn good story line. Let's do it.'" In addition to conversations with key onscreen participants and behind the scenes personnel, Kaufman gets access to some revealing primary source documents. She details a production staff binder containing contestant descriptions from an early season, complete with the expected cruel distillations: "CRYING IN INTERVIEW regarding her brain surgery," "UCSB sorority chick ish!" And she quotes from journals kept by Sharleen Joynt, a notable "Bachelor" dissenter, one of the rare cast members to leave the show of her own accord rather than be eliminated. Joynt's reflections are like the Comey memos of "Bachelor" captivity: contemporaneous documentation designed to privately establish state of mind so as to contradict any public attempts to smear her character or distort her intentions. "Bachelor" hopefuls are cut off from the outside world during filming: no phones, no television, not even any gym equipment, Kaufman reports. "You're constantly prompted to talk about him, what you two share, how it makes you feel, how seeing him with the other girls makes you feel," Joynt writes in one entry. "There's no escape." Kaufman spends less fruitful time exploring the post "Bachelor" ecosystem of offshoot series, Instagram ads and alumni charity events. By that point in the arc, everyone is complicit, playing the character he or she has been handed. But where "Bachelor Nation" shines brightest is in laying bare what it takes to get everyone in character in the first place. Many, though, had been practicing their parts long before ABC came calling. "With its burlesque of real life, 'The Bachelor' suggests something about the role performance plays in the production of all romance," Showler writes. She is a keen and perceptive viewer (if more interested in the show's middle and later years than its inception), keyed in to its lingo and rhythms, its tricks and elisions. She finds meaning in the inevitable antagonist in each season: "The villain is a reference a relief. ... We hate the villain for being fake so we can love 'The Bachelor' for making love real." This book is full of such offhand sparklers. One contestant's voice sounds "the way bad posture looks." The show's curious soft focus visual homogeneity establishes "less a set of features and more an effect: a pixilated, approximate sexiness the sense that everything is in the right place." Showler is particularly astute about the ways in which race is a persistent stumbling block for "The Bachelor," even after last year's casting of the first black Bachelorette. She points out how scenes that have been designed as avatars of tolerance instead rely on and reinforce stereotypes, allowing the show an air of progressivism while never challenging cliche. Especially in recent years, "The Bachelor" has morphed into a romantic daisy chain in which the dominant measure of the lead's attractiveness is the intensity of his or her plight as a pursuer in a prior season. But neither book directly answers what is, for me, the most pressing question: Particularly given the heavy handed techniques deployed by producers, why would people subject themselves, and others, to this process multiple times?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Turn Down For Aout: Vegas Golden Knights fan and rapper Lil Jon hyped up the crowd behind celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay during last year's playoffs as part of the notoriously boisterous atmosphere at T Mobile Arena. EDMONTON In any other year, they would be waging battle in the Fortress, the nickname for T Mobile Arena, where the Vegas Golden Knights notoriously defend home ice to the tune of a 75 33 11 record over three seasons, fifth best in the N.H.L. The Fortress has become one of the loudest arenas in the league, with a boisterous fan base and a raucously loud soundtrack played by staff members on game days. This postseason, the team is replicating past success, having won the Western Conference's top seed in the round robin tournament and run out to a 2 0 series lead in the best of seven first round matchup against the Chicago Blackhawks. But the neutral ice of Rogers Place in Edmonton, the West's postseason hub, lacks the din that has helped propel the Golden Knights in the past. Players' cheers and chirps stand out more than usual, echoing around the spectator less arena. "We've got a lot of vocal guys," Vegas forward Alex Tuch said last Saturday. He noted that forward Jonathan Marchessault and wing Ryan Reaves had been the team's most chattery members in a round robin game against the Colorado Avalanche, "whether it's toward our bench, trying to pump us up, or getting under the other teams' skin." The warm up music was pumping at close to full volume as the Golden Knights opened their first round series against the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday. The Vegas bench got loud during the national anthems, echoing a fan tradition by shouting "Knights" during the singing of "The Star Spangled Banner," ("gave proof through the ...") before easily defeating the Blackhawks, 4 1. The Golden Knights' team identity has been shaped by its brashness. Initially, opponents were thought to have succumbed to the "Vegas Flu," having had a little too much fun on their visits to Sin City. But it quickly became clear that the Fortress itself was an intimidating place to visit. The N.H.L.'s game presentation department is handling the production duties in both hub cities, Edmonton and Toronto, though teams have supplied personalized content for use during games. In addition to satisfying sponsor requirements with venue specific rink board advertising, the goal has been to give each game a distinct feel, both in the arena and for fans watching on TV at home. "Even though we're doing these games in front of no fans, I really wanted the fans of a particular team to be watching the broadcast, and hear a sound effect we play or a particular power play song that the team uses," said John Bochiaro, the N.H.L.'s senior director for game presentation. "Obviously, their goal songs and goal horns. To me, that was super important, to make sure we have those elements." Early on, that meant seeing the country music star Tim McGraw sing his song "I Like It, I Love It" while waving a catfish on the Jumbotron whenever the now eliminated Nashville Predators scored a goal during the preliminary round. Organist Jeremy Boyer ends each period of the St. Louis Blues home games with a video rendition of his signature "When the Blues Go Marching In." "We notice the little details but there's definitely no comparison," Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews said last Wednesday when asked about playing in bubble instead of back home in Chicago. "I'd say last change is definitely a good thing to have, but other than that, I think it's a pretty even playing field for both teams." "I don't know what really home ice advantage is, here," Blues coach Craig Berube said after his team was 0 2 1 in their round robin games and slipped from first to fourth seed in the West. "Sure, it's a line change, you get last change. But it really doesn't feel like home ice advantage for anybody." The Blues' run to the Stanley Cup in 2019 was fueled by tremendous support from fans and community. "Fans are a big part of everything we do," Blues winger Robert Thomas said. "They really pushed us and gave us a great atmosphere last year. It's nice, every once in a while you see a couple of familiar faces on the screen that make you just feel a little bit at home." The actor and Blues fan Jon Hamm hasn't made an appearance yet on the video screens. But the game presentation team promises it has more surprises in store as the tournament moves into later rounds. To help create more high energy moments on the TV broadcasts, the songs teams use to celebrate goal and begin power plays are used in every game. Artificial crowd noise, originally intended to be heard only by television viewers, is now being pumped in as well. But the virtual fans don't favor one team over the other. There is no booing, and the noise levels ratchet up for big plays and scoring chances at both ends of the ice. With eight teams already eliminated during qualifying round play, the league's schedule for the first round is down to a somewhat manageable average of two games a day in each hub city, with the potential of overtime lurking for every contest. "I equate this to, and I've done quite a few of them in my career, a Grand Slam tennis tournament," said the N.H.L.'s chief content officer, Steve Mayer, who has overseen the hub city project and produced all four Grand Slams in his 20 years working at IMG Productions. "On the first week, oh my goodness, you've got 10 courts going. You've got matches on every court all day long, all night long. Then, one by one, players get eliminated. Then it gets really easy, by comparison. "This is going to be the same. I mean, we're intense right now. We know that we're going to get very little sleep, but we know that eventually, it's going to get a lot easier."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Aphids are a familiar sight in the garden, sucking the juices out of your rose bushes. Luckily, so are ladybugs, which prey on aphids and keep them in check. But the relationship between predator and prey is more complex than you might think. Aphids may be important to the survival of some ladybug species we have come to know and love by warding off another predator that has been moving in and feasting on them. The arrival about 30 years ago in the United States of the multicolored Asian lady beetle, or Harmonia axyridis, which gleefully devours other ladybugs' larvae, led to a drop in numbers of the seven spotted lady beetle. Although the seven spotted beetle is also an invasive species, it has been around longer than the Asian lady beetle, and exists alongside native ladybug species, which also take a beating. However, some aphids contain a substance that's much more toxic to this aggressive invader than to the other ladybugs. As a result, researchers show in a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, these aphids may provide refuge to the other ladybug species by killing off their common enemy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Michael Golden, the vice chairman of The New York Times Company, will retire from his executive management role at the end of the year, the company announced on Monday. He will continue to serve on the board. "Words are inadequate to convey my deep appreciation to Michael for all he has done over his many years in management at The New York Times Company," Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of The Times and Mr. Golden's cousin, said in a statement. "He's been a true partner to me in leading this institution through multiple periods of monumental change." Mr. Golden, 67, a member of the fourth generation of the Ochs/Sulzberger family that has controlled The Times since 1896, has been at the company for 32 years and has been its vice chairman since 1997. Among other leadership positions, he has served as president and chief operating officer of The Times's Regional Media Group, which the company sold in early 2012 for 143 million, and was publisher of The International Herald Tribune from 2003 to 2008. Most recently, Mr. Golden played an important role in succession planning at the company, serving on a selection committee established to assess the candidates for deputy publisher and ensure an even playing field.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
LONDON It took the San Francisco 49ers seven years to turn their interest in owning a piece of an English soccer team into reality. Now, two years after buying a 10 percent stake in Leeds United, the 49ers' owners are looking to increase their investment, and their involvement, in the storied club that two weeks ago won promotion to the Premier League. Executives representing the 49ers and Leeds United's majority owner, Andrea Radrizzani, are in talks about increasing the N.F.L. team's share, according to Paraag Marathe, the 49ers executive who has sat on the soccer team's board since San Francisco's initial investment in 2018. "It's something that we are absolutely hoping to do," Marathe said in a telephone interview. Any new investment, though, would only further entrench American football team owners in the board rooms of England's Premier League, the world's most popular and lucrative domestic soccer competition. The Glazer family, which owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has controlled Manchester United since 2005; Arsenal is backed by the Los Angeles Rams owner E. Stanley Kroenke; and Fulham, which is one win away from clinching a return to the Premier League, is owned by Shahid Khan, who also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars. Under Radrizzani, an Italian sports media tycoon, Leeds United has long searched for new investment. Radrizzani has been in talks with Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, which already owns the French superclub Paris St. Germain, but those discussions despite reaching an advanced stage last year have so far failed to produce a sale. While the 49ers only hold a minority share, they have hardly been passive investors in Leeds. Top executives, including Marathe and Jed York, the 49ers' chief executive, had been regular visitors to Leeds' Elland Road stadium until the coronavirus pandemic shut down global travel. Marathe said he and York had traveled to Leeds, a city in northern England, once every five to six weeks. "It obviously had fallen on hard times under multiple ownership groups," Marathe said of Leeds, a storied club that has been troubled by financial problems and on field struggles since tumbling out of the Premier League in 2004. "But the brand equity is still there, the fans, and the amount of people that care about that club," he said. "We just knew that not only do they belong in the Premier League, but if they got to the Premier League, that the sky's the limit." "The journey isn't concluded," he said of the team's return to England's top tier. "It's just beginning." The 49ers first took an interest in Leeds United in 2011 when Marathe, the president of 49ers Enterprises, the team's venture capital division, was scouring the world for sports brands in which the team could invest. In Leeds, he found a team with a long history a three time English champion with a passionate fan base in a large city that had no other professional club and started talks about a relationship. The 49ers did not invest then, but did sign a strategic partnership agreement that largely failed to yield any positive results, according to Marathe. But the team's interest in a more direct stake in Leeds remained. By 2015, Marathe had developed a friendship with Radrizzani, who two years later bought Leeds himself. "I said, 'Wow,'" Marathe recalled saying to Radrizzani shortly after the Italian's purchase was complete. "'It's such a coincidence because I actually love this club and I spent some time around this club.'" Marathe and Radrizzani speak at least twice a week. And in addition to the regular trips to Leeds, the 49ers regularly share information about their business and processes; when Leeds was beginning the search for its current coach, the 49ers passed on a guide the team used to recruit its current general manager and head coach. Leeds eventually picked Marcelo Bielsa, the charismatic and quirky Argentine who led Leeds back to the Premier League. The gap in quality and resources between the Premier League and the second tier Championship that Leeds United just won can be significant. Last season's Championship winner, Norwich City, will return there next season after finishing last in the Premier League this year. Some teams spend heavily to try to become competitive immediately. Others, like Sheffield United, which finished in the top half of the table in its first season back in the top flight, have prospered by relying on the fundamentals that took them there. Marathe pointed to Sheffield United's debut season as an example of an approach Leeds might be looking to follow. "You don't want to just rush and go high 'Every player out now; we're a Premier League club' and buy this and this and this player," Marathe said. "Sometimes you want to build it organically and thoughtfully." Marathe said that, for now, the 49ers remained focused on being patient with their investment which became far more valuable on July 17, the day Leeds United's top flight return was confirmed rather than on cashing in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
There will never be one billion Americans. Matthew Yglesias, the author of "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger," thinks it would be great if America were that populous. He also admits that there's no real political constituency for such a policy. Conservatives think the country is already full, he notes, while liberals tend to think the same thing about their own towns and cities. The question is moot, anyway. Even if everybody wanted America to grow to one billion people, it would never happen. Yglesias himself concedes that the concept is "impossible and absurd." The arithmetic is pretty simple: There are about 330 million Americans right now, which means that getting to one billion would mean adding 670 million net new humans. For comparison, the aggregate population of Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras and the rest of Central America is not much more than 205 million. To put it another way: China did manage to grow from 330 million people to more than one billion people, but it did so against a backdrop of 180 years of global population growth. With the world's population expected to start shrinking in about 45 years, there's no way that the United States is going to repeat that feat. The tell is simple enough: At no point does Yglesias try to quantify the effect of any of his preferred policies on the size of the U.S. population, nor does he look at the effect such policies have had in countries where they have been implemented. He devotes a whole chapter to "the dismal economics of child rearing," for instance, wherein he proposes policies that are common in Western Europe, such as greater subsidies for child care and tertiary education. Those might well be noble policies to adopt, but a glance at the European fertility rate, which is, on average, significantly lower than the rate in this country, should call into question the idea that such moves would spur another baby boom. Much the same can be said for Yglesias' other ideas, from introducing congestion pricing and "S trains," which traverse cities efficiently, to promoting the immigration of skilled workers. They've generally been tried elsewhere, often with positive social results, but almost nowhere have they been associated with significant overall population growth. It's impossible to imagine that such policies could move the population needle in a country as huge as this one. This book, then, often feels as though it's making the weakest possible argument for otherwise good ideas. However desirable they are, none of the prescribed policies are good because they will cause population growth and most of them wouldn't even do that. Particularly odd, given the impossibility of his goal, are the lengths to which Yglesias goes to be "pragmatic" about achieving it. On immigration, for instance, he's happy to assuage xenophobes by being open to fairly unrestricted immigration from "Canada, Australia, the Anglophone Caribbean, America's NATO allies or some other subset of countries that seems popular." Would it be unfair for these immigrants to pay taxes without being able to vote? Not to Yglesias, who's willing to propose that they be forced to pay higher payroll taxes than citizens do. Setting himself an impossible task also does weird things to Yglesias' sense of perspective. "Our rate of population growth is pretty easy to alter," he writes, adding that attracting skilled immigrants to places like Toledo is "not hard" and that the problem of population loss in Rust Belt cities "can be easily fixed." There's also, he insists, "nothing particularly difficult" about providing financial support for Americans with children. Similarly, revamping commuter rail lines so that they don't terminate in city centers "isn't hard at all." Indeed, when measured against the impossible goal of one billion Americans, even climate change seems like a relatively tractable problem. The strongest case against massive population growth is that 670 million new Americans, each emitting 16 tons of carbon per year, would together emit some 10 billion tons of carbon annually. That's more than China, which is currently the largest emitter in the world. But Yglesias blithely asserts that "if people were able to magically relocate themselves, climate change wouldn't be nearly as big a problem" and declares that climate change is a technological problem, with technological solutions. One billion Americans, he suggests, would more rapidly discover technologies to "make prosperous lifestyles sustainable," which in turn would render "irrelevant" the sheer number of prosperous Americans. Needless to say, he cites no climate experts in support of this thesis. Many economics books devote themselves to cataloging the world's ills, and then end with a curiously short "solutions" chapter that doesn't really solve most of the problems in the book. "One Billion Americans" is a novel twist on this model. It starts with one curiously short and unconvincing chapter on the problem of having less than one billion Americans, and then dives into a long catalog of solutions. Most of them are very good ideas. But none of them solve the problem.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The Las Vegas Aces battled and bruised other teams en route to the top seed this W.N.B.A. season. A'ja Wilson dominated the block on both sides of the court, and Angel McCoughtry sliced through defenders with ease. Driving to the basket, getting to the foul line and pushing the pace were what made the Aces championship contenders. Yet two games into the finals, the fire the Aces played with all season has waned under the efficient play of the Seattle Storm. "If we're in attack mode, I think that's a great thing," said Wilson, this season's most valuable player. "That means we're not shy, we're not backing down. We'll continue to do us, get to the free throw line as much as we can." Now facing elimination in the best of five W.N.B.A. finals, the Aces will have to return to the physical game that got them there to keep their championship hopes alive. Game 3 is Tuesday night in the league's so called bubble in Bradenton, Fla. The Storm lead the series, 2 0. During the regular season, Las Vegas's physical play manifested in a league leading 23.4 free throw attempts per game. The Aces averaged 88.7 points per game and 19 of those points were from the free throw line. In their 104 91 loss to Seattle on Sunday, the Aces shot only five free throws to Seattle's 15. "We attack the basket and get fouled, and get to the free throw line," Aces Coach Bill Laimbeer said Sunday. "Today we attacked the basket, got fouled and there were no calls. So, it is what it is." The lack of attempts from the line was a sore point for Laimbeer, but it didn't tell the full story. The Aces reached the line 20 times in Game 1 and still lost by 13 points. Las Vegas tallied 15 turnovers on Sunday. The main point of emphasis for the Aces going into Game 3 will be fixing that. "I think the biggest thing we need to adjust is taking care of the basketball," Wilson said. "I think if we cut back on our turnovers, we'll be right there." When the Aces faced elimination in Game 4 of the semifinals against the Connecticut Sun, McCoughtry scored 19 of her 29 points in the second half to help force a decisive Game 5. Now, as Wilson draws multiple defenders against the Storm, players like McCoughtry need to be ready on the perimeter to shoot or make the extra pass and get Seattle's top three ranked defense moving. McCoughtry set the record for most points in a finals game (38) in 2011 but knows all too well that is not enough to win a championship. In her fourth W.N.B.A finals appearance her first with Las Vegas McCoughtry is still without a ring. It will take more than Wilson and McCoughtry to avoid a three game sweep. Enter Cannon. In September, she signed with the Aces, who had entered the season without centers Liz Cambage and Ji Su Park and needed depth. Cannon has played critical minutes for Las Vegas, now missing Dearica Hamby, who was named sixth woman of the year for the second consecutive season but injured her knee during the semifinals. At 6 foot 2, Cannon offers some size when Laimbeer subs her in for the 6 foot 6 starting center Carolyn Swords. With Swords in foul trouble on Sunday, Cannon made the most of her extended minutes. "We knew that in the first two days we had her she's not afraid to go out there and do her thing," Laimbeer said of Cannon. "That's what she did. She stays with herself, a physical player, and we saw some good post moves which are really needed." However, Laimbeer said he is not expecting Cannon to drop another 17 points on Tuesday. So where will the offense come from? Las Vegas averaged a league low of 11.5 3 point attempts in the regular season. They have shooters like McCoughtry, Sugar Rodgers, and Kayla McBride who can get hot from the perimeter. Las Vegas may want to try to get shots from them from distance early in Game 3. "I mean that's who I am," McBride said. "I know it doesn't seem like that all the time, but that's who I want to be on the court for this team: Be aggressive, take my shots, and just be myself." McBride shot 42.9 percent from 3 in the 2019 playoffs and has shot at a 36.7 percent clip for her career. If McBride can get some of her shots to fall early, the Storm's defenders will have to decide if they'd rather keep attention on Wilson in the post or stop the hot hand from the perimeter. Whether or not the Aces get better outside shooting in Game 3, they will need to return to their usual fearless and physical style to avoid elimination. Wilson described the team's finals performance as "so so." For the Aces to extend the series and their season, they must leave no doubt as to what type of team they are. For McBride, that has to come with more aggressiveness and communication on defense. "This league is too good, the players are too good, for us to have mistakes on the defensive end on assignments," McBride said, adding, "Making it a team effort, you know, and always finishing with a rebound and not giving second opportunities has been a big thing for us." The Aces are most like themselves when they get out in transition, but through two games the Storm have stopped that. McBride believes the Aces will need to play with more grit if they hope to dictate the pace of the game on Tuesday. "That's been our M.O. all season long and we've gotten away from it," she said. "Credit Seattle for making shots, being very efficient. But still, you know, we still got to be that tough minded group on the defensive end. That's who we were all season long. That's what got us the No. 1 seed."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly," the television newsmagazine program that debuted on NBC over the weekend, has met with mixed reviews thus far in part because, in her much vaunted interview with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, Ms. Kelly didn't seem to be able to rile him into saying anything more than his usual party line. However, the show did inadvertently uncover one real piece of uncomfortable truth: the sexism that still exists around the female image in the news. Here's what happened: On Thursday, to drum up excitement around the show, Ms. Kelly and NBC tweeted pictures of her with Mr. Putin and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, before a dinner party the night before the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia, where Ms. Kelly was also a moderator, and where she was scheduled to interview Mr. Putin for her TV program. Both men were wearing their usual dark suits, but Ms. Kelly was wearing a sea blue crushed velvet off the shoulder cocktail dress with black spaghetti straps and a high slit, by the designer Yigal Azrouel. "What Are We to Make of Megyn Kelly's Interview Attire?" asked the headline on New York Magazine. "Megyn Kelly Turns on the Sex Appeal for Putin," declared MomZette. There were also some less polite versions, but you get the idea. The general point being: How entirely inappropriate. It made almost as much news as the fact that Ms. Kelly had managed to snag Mr. Putin for an interview in the first place. Except that it wasn't true. Ms. Kelly did not wear the cocktail dress for her interview with Mr. Putin: She wore the round neck black T shirt with fluted white sleeves, a white belt and white trousers that she wore onstage at the economic forum. She was, in other words, all covered up and understated. Indeed, more so, and in a more relaxed way, than she had ever been on Fox News. The vibe was leaning toward the Katharine Hepburn model, rather than the Lana Turner one, which was interesting in itself, and probably says more about how Ms. Kelly is trying to position herself now than the cocktail frock would have revealed. The velvet dress had just been for a dinner event, and in that context, it was not particularly shocking. The contrast between men's dinner party wear and women's dinner party wear has always been pretty extreme, when you think about it. You may not approve of it, but it wasn't an outlandish clothing choice. We all have our power outfits. So why the wide misinterpretation? In part, Ms. Kelly's own history as a Fox News host, where she often made waves because of her clothing choices, most notably when she wore a spaghetti strap Ralph Lauren dress to the Republican National Convention. Her appearance had also been the subject of controversy thanks to a GQ Magazine shoot that resurfaced during the presidential campaign, and was then used to, as she told The New York Times, "slut shame" her. She resolutely refused to apologize or distance herself from either wardrobe decision, instead using them as fodder for the argument that it was about time women be allowed to embrace their femininity, and dress like women however they choose to define that term in a professional setting. Which made it easy to assume that she was wearing the shoulder revealing blue dress during her first Big Get interview to mark her territory and move the boundaries ever more in that direction. Also contributing to the confusion was our own discomfort with the idea of clothing that seems to exploit sexual politics, especially in a post Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly world, where the reality of sexual harassment on TV is much in the conversation. And we are increasingly confused about what constitutes "appropriate" clothing when it comes to women and the workplace; now that the suit is not the only option, and everything from turtlenecks to sheath dresses can be seen on TV, where is the line drawn? And who decides? Maybe someday Ms. Kelly will opt for a velvet party dress when she interviews a world leader. If she does, it will probably be a conscious decision made for a strategic reason. Given how much Mr. Putin likes to use clothing or lose clothing (at least his shirt) to emphasize his stereotypical masculinity, it would have made some sense for Ms. Kelly to have weaponized her appeal to speak with him, but presumably she knew what the reaction would be. She is one of few female power players even willing to discuss the subject of clothing, the role it plays in the workplace, and how it can be used. This apparently comes with its own risks, as her new program made clear. Instead of immediately assuming the worst, however, perhaps it's time we applauded her for taking them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
For many L.G.B.T.Q. people, June signals rainbows and glitter, but also reflection. With the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising and the WorldPride festival colliding in New York this Pride Month, it's an especially momentous time to look to the past to consider what Pride means today, and c inema long an integral part of queer artistic expression can be an important tool. Many of the city's repertory movie theaters have assembled special programs for the occasion, from revivals of "Paris Is Burning" (Film Forum) and "The Queen" (IFC Center) to a series looking at queer cinema before and after Stonewall (Museum of the Moving Image). As ideas about queerness have expanded , so has our engagement with media that reflect those experiences. Nick McCarthy, the director of programming and operations at NewFest, stressed the value of regular programming and its potential to create community. "It's equally important that the contemporary stories told through queer cinema continue to mirror not just the progress but the evolution of our community," he said by email. While NewFest is best known for its annual film festival, it produces year round programming, which McCarthy said is "essential to serving the community in order to see themselves reflected on screen." The New York Times wants to capture the ever evolving ways in which we describe ourselves. Tell us who you are. One of the challenges in creating this programming is the looming threat of streaming services, where a seemingly endless amount of content is always available. The Metrograph is countering that with Films of Pride and Protest, a program of shorts not easily found on digital services. And Adam Baran, who programs the Queer/Art/Film series with the movie director Ira Sachs, said that he suggests alternative titles if a proposed selection is either too present on streaming, or screens in New York too often. Niche streaming services like Dekkoo offer a home for gay movies, but, as Michael Koresky, the editorial director at Film at Lincoln Center, noted, the quality of their output is inconsistent. "There's a lot of product out there, made cheaply, and, not unlike porn, it's churned out to appeal to a hungry demographic," he said by email. The major streaming services create an illusion of access and community sans shared physical space; the L.G.B.T. movie sections on Netflix and Hulu might have a handful of gems, but their selection is limited, even as they debut original programming. The alternative streaming platforms for gay cinema have yet to break out, and Baran remarked in a phone interview on the challenges of the market. "It's very hard to know what a gay audience wants, especially a gay audience willing to spend money," he said. So how important is it for gay audiences to be able to gather together in person to view these films? Will gay audiences spend money on these specialty repertory programs, like the German focused Queer Kino at the Quad or the tongue in cheek presentation of "The Babadook," whose horror villain was memed into a gay icon across social media in 2017, at IFC Center? Will they be drawn to Koresky's salon like panel "Queer Now Then" to catalyze them to consider past, present and futures of queerness and cinema? "It needs to be encouraged in our community to actively have these dialogues in person to strengthen the fabric, identity, and impact of our community's ethos," McCarthy noted. In addition to providing tangible community, programmers with goals both political and artistic hope to give audiences new ways to look at queer subjects. D'Angelo Madsen Minax, who works with Joey Carducci on a series at Anthology Film Archives called The Cinema of Gender Transgression: Trans Film, said by email of their mission, "The programming doesn't only show films by trans filmmakers, or only films about trans subjects or the experiences of trans characters, but tries to imagine what a trans lens can bring to films that more loosely explore trans adjacent themes." Carducci added, "I think it's crucially important to make space for this kind of work, now and always." Stonewall 50 and WorldPride provide great reasons to honor queer legacies, but they're hardly the end point for keeping queer stories alive, according to Baran, whose series continues this month with a screening of "Death Becomes Her" presented by the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly. In thinking about queer cultural history, he said, "We're all on a continuum and we need to understand it, and the only way we can understand it is to seek it out." And Thomas Beard, a programmer at large for Film at Lincoln Center who organized its 2016 series Queer Cinema Before Stonewall, cautioned against an emphasis on commemorating milestone moments: "There are obviously many crucial episodes in the history of gay and trans liberation that predate Stonewall," he said via email. "Our relationship to the historical past is never as neat as anniversary celebrations like these might suggest." He continued, "the horizon of true liberation still feels quite distant, though we still are struggling toward it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Caregiving is something that people go into most likely because they have a family member that needed caregiving. But most likely caregiving happens because they have compassion for the person that went through that particular incident to require caregiving. It's also something that you do out of love. In 2017, Hawaii passed the Kupuna Care Act. Kupuna means elder in Hawaiian, and the program will pay 70 a day to family caregivers. This payment helps offset caregiving expenses and supports hiring part time caregiving help. The program is meant to help seniors who need some assistance but wish to keep living at home. The Kupuna program is very important for caregivers because you're working and you have to still take care of your elderly or your family member while working full time or part time. It's very costly to caregive. The medication, pamper supplies, the bed lining, the hygiene, it adds on. If you have extra help just to give the financial support to hire someone else, so you can go to work the next day and not be miserable. That's a big help.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Karsten Moran for The New York Times Hello from Paris, where so far this week I have been to a sleepy concert by Paavo Jarvi and the Orchestre de Paris (missing its soloist Radu Lupu, who was replaced at the last minute by Nelson Goerner in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto) and the premiere of a new production of Scarlatti's "Il Primo Omicidio" at the Paris Opera. This Baroque oratorio, staged inside the Baroque inspired Palais Garnier, was directed by Romeo Castellucci more on that next week and conducted by Rene Jacobs, who recorded the piece with the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin in the late 1990s. (On that album, he also sang the countertenor role of God.) Here, he led the Belgian ensemble B'Rock, with a beefed up orchestration to more easily fill the Garnier. Normally I would be skeptical of expanding an orchestra simply for volume; it risks sacrificing the score's details and texture. But, under Mr. Jacobs's baton, B'Rock still sounded like a small chamber orchestra: nimble, clear, precise. And restrained, reserving its most powerful sound for dramatic effect, which added a sense of theater to a piece whose plot often verges on inertia. JOSHUA BARONE Thursday would have been the 100th birthday of the composer, pianist and conductor Leon Kirchner, who died at 90 in 2009. One of the most comprehensive musicians of his day, he was a valued teacher during a long career at Harvard. As a composer, Mr. Kirchner demonstrated that one could write works of rigorous complexity employing modernist techniques but in an instinctive, richly expressive, viscerally dramatic way. Though steeped in the dodecaphonic music of his beloved teacher Schoenberg, Kirchner never used the 12 tone system strictly. Just hints of the aesthetic run through this mysterious slow movement from Kirchner's Second String Quartet (1958), beautifully performed here by the Orion Quartet. Bartok and Stravinsky where also major influences, as the punchy opening movement of Kirchner's First Piano Concerto (1953) make clear in this 1956 performance featuring the composer at the piano, with Mitropoulos conducting the New York Philharmonic. Some musical highlights of my years living in Boston were the concerts Mr. Kirchner conducted with the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. He was not the tidiest technician. But he led scores by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and contemporary giants like a fellow composer who completely understood how the piece at hand worked. ANTHONY TOMMASINI Any ensemble making its American debut is likely to feel some jitters, especially when the program includes a masterpiece as dense and thorny as Beethoven's Op. 130. But on Sunday, members of the Maxwell String Quartet had an additional reason for feeling a little, well, vulnerable. Flashes of thigh, and wit, are not the only reason to take note of the Maxwell Quartet, which hails from Scotland and advertises that fact both in its dress and in its repertory, which includes striking arrangements of folk music. (As the sole Englishman in the lineup, the violist Elliott Perks wore tartan trousers.) As Sunday's eloquent performance demonstrated, the players bring the same charisma and sense of adventure to their selections. The slightly tart, resiny sound of traditional fiddle playing carried over beautifully into fresh readings of Haydn and into the Beethoven. But perhaps the most arresting moment was James MacMillan's "Memento" from 1994, in which wisps of a melody floated on hazy harmonies and coalesced into heaving sighs before dissolving again into ghostly strains, rendered with a kind of fierce tenderness. CORINNA da FONSECA WOLLHEIM	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
'1917' Hits No. 1 at the Box Office and Takes Aim at the Oscars None LOS ANGELES Since the Academy Awards began more than nine decades ago, films have had to thread two needles to win the best picture statuette: art and commerce. Netflix's business model is changing that dynamic: "The Irishman" officially has ticket sales of zero, since the streaming service does not release movies in a traditional way. But over the weekend, with the war epic "1917," came an old fashioned example of a film delivering both artistic wows and big ticket sales. "1917," a front runner for multiple Oscars, nominations for which will be announced on Monday, collected roughly 37 million at 3,434 theaters in North America, an astounding result for an R rated period film with no marquee stars. Directed by Sam Mendes and telling the story (in under two hours) of a spindly World War I soldier (George MacKay) in a race against time, "1917" cost roughly 90 million to make, not including marketing expenses. Universal Pictures released "1917," which was produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners. The film's wide rollout (a limited release to build buzz started on Christmas Day) was timed to follow the Golden Globes, where voters honored Mendes as best director and the film as best drama. David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, said on Sunday that "1917" was on track to generate 350 million or more in worldwide ticket sales. For the weekend, "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" (Disney) fell to second place, taking in about 15 million, for a four week domestic total of 478 million and 990 million worldwide. "Jumanji: The Next Level" (Sony) was third, collecting an estimated 14 million, for a five week total of 257 million ( 671 million worldwide). The two blockbusters have contributed to a strong start to 2020, with ticket sales running 7 percent ahead of last year. Then came a pair of new releases, both of which attracted decent attention. Jamie Foxx in "Just Mercy." Oscar attention for the drama could help the film connect with a wider audience in the coming weeks. Determined not to stumble out of the gate with another drama, Warner Bros. used theater buyouts from celebrities like John Legend, companies like Microsoft and churches like New Light in Houston to push "Just Mercy" to an estimated 10 million in ticket sales. "Just Mercy," starring Michael B. Jordan as the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as a wrongly condemned death row prisoner, cost about 21 million to make. It received an A plus grade from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls. "Like a Boss" (Paramount), a poorly reviewed raunchy comedy starring Tiffany Haddish, Rose Byrne and Salma Hayek, also collected about 10 million, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. It cost around 29 million to make. The weekend marked another Kristen Stewart misfire, however. The modestly marketed aquatic horror movie "Underwater" (20th Century Fox, a division of Disney) was just that in a financial sense, costing TSG Entertainment an estimated 50 million to make and taking in 7 million. "Underwater," essentially "Alien" except at the bottom of the ocean, took in another 7 million overseas. After a well regarded run in art films like "Clouds of Sils Maria," Stewart has made a turn back toward mass appeal movies lately. She last appeared in "Charlie's Angels," which was similarly rejected by ticket buyers. In other box office news, the National Association of Theater Owners and Comscore said on Friday that final ticket sales for 2019 in North America, as expected, totaled 11.4 billion, a 4 percent decline from the year earlier. But overseas ticket sales helped the global box office pass 42 billion, the best ever. "Unaffected by streaming," the trade association said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Five dollars from the sale of each pair of TOMS x Every Mother Counts mommy ( 59) and me ( 36 to 42) espadrilles with an orange rose, the universal symbol of maternal health, will benefit the Christy Turlington Burns nonprofit dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safer in the developing world. At 264 Elizabeth Street. And at Brookfield Place, the fashion illustrator Blair Breitenstein will create a custom Mother's Day card free of charge daily through Saturday, from noon to 3 p.m., with proof of any purchase. At 230 Vesey Street, Level 1. At Project:OM, the aim is to create the world's largest yoga event in support of the Susan G. Komen Foundation fight against breast cancer, with 700 donation based events scheduled this weekend, including one at 6 p.m. on Thursday in Bryant Park. People can register for the yoga session at projectOM.com On Friday, the Artists Fleas mini chain will unveil a SoHo market with 40 vendors offering New York vintage and artisan products like a '70s paisley print dress ( 628) and Soap for Sinners coffee body scrub ( 16). At 568 Broadway.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In June 2013, in a Target parking lot in Wilsonville, Ore., an estimated 50,000 bumblebees dropped dead. Shoppers reported bees falling from branches and crawling on the ground. Piles of carcasses scattered beneath dozens of linden trees marked the largest mass bee kill ever recorded. The Oregon Department of Agriculture later determined that a pesticide used against aphids had poisoned the bees. They banned its use on lindens. But still more reports surfaced of mass bumblebee deaths around Oregon. Explaining them wasn't as simple. "It's not your classic story of, oh, the pesticides kill the bees," said Sujaya Rao, an entomologist who studied the bee deaths while at Oregon State University. "Not every dead bee could be because of a pesticide," she added. "There are strange phenomena in nature that lead to things like this." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. For centuries, people have noticed similar mysterious incidents around the United States, Europe and Britain. In a study published last month in PLOS ONE, Dr. Rao and other researchers proposed an explanation: If it's too cold, and the bees are too weak, and the trees are enticing but don't produce enough nectar all that may tip bumblebees over the edge. "Not all bee death is related to humans," said Claire Lande, a co author of the study who also runs an apiary in Minnesota. "Sometimes it just happens." To examine the other alleged death by linden cases in Oregon, Dr. Rao, now at the University of Minnesota, assembled a team of bee detectives who followed leads to various sites for observation and collection of actively foraging and dying bumblebees, and then drew connections between the cases. After many dead ends, a pattern emerged: Deaths seemed to occur on cooler mornings, late in the blooming season, when trees start running out of nectar. So what did it mean? Bumblebees are warm blooded. To fly and forage, their thoraxes where their wings and flight muscles are must reach a temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit. To generate that, they shiver. But the cooler it is outside, the more energy the bee needs to do it. In crawling bees near death, the team found compounds related to energy processing that were different from those in active and foraging bees, suggesting the dying bees didn't have enough energy. As the floral blooming season progresses, the linden tree runs out of nectar. Why, then, would the bees keep returning if they are able to detect nectar levels? Alkaloids, like caffeine, can boost how rewarding bees find linden nectar. The team found an alkaloid called trigonelline that they think may attract bees. They haven't tested the idea, but they speculate that trigonelline could boost bees' loyalty to linden even as nectar runs out. But when they visit on cool mornings without enough energy to heat up for a return flight to their nests, they fall to the ground, crawl around and die. "It's like you have a favorite Starbucks, and you keep going there," said Dr. Rao. "And one time they're out of coffee, and then you don't have enough gas to go to the next Starbucks. And so you're stranded."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Facing a significant decline in the number of students playing high school football, the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association on Wednesday adopted new guidelines to sharply reduce the amount of contact allowed in practices and, in doing so, address concerns about player safety. The new rules, which the association said were the most restrictive in the country, limits the time that teams can engage in full contact drills in practice to 15 minutes a week, down from the 90 allowed under the old rules. Preseason full contact drills, previously unlimited, will be reduced to six total hours, including scrimmages. The existing ban on full contact in spring and summer practices in New Jersey remains in effect. New Jersey officials said that other states are considering similar restrictions as concerns about head injuries continue to grow. "I think this is a positive thing based on what we know now about player safety and the more education that we are all getting all the time about how to keep players healthy," said Kevin Carty Jr., the coach at Hillsborough High School in central New Jersey. The New Jersey association said it implemented the rules on the recommendation of the New Jersey Football Coaches Association and Practice Like Pros, an organization that advocates the exact limits on practices that have now been adopted by New Jersey. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Full contact is considered tackling that brings a player to the ground. Jesse Mez, an associate professor of neurology at Boston University and member of the school's Alzheimer's Center and CTE Center, applauded the new regulations. He said that there is "good evidence" to show a relationship between the dangers of repetitive impacts in football and not just those involving concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative disease linked to repeated blows to the head. He said the exact nature of that relationship has not been fully measured. "I think there are better ways of playing team sports and getting exercise than repeatedly hitting your head," Mez said. "But given the country's interest in football and how much everybody loves it, if we are not going to stop playing, then we should reduce the amount of contact as much as we can." Despite its risks, tackle football is still among the most popular sports for male youths from ages 14 to 17. But participation is falling, and particularly in New Jersey, a state long known for being rich in high school football talent. In 2017, 1,700 fewer players were reported playing high school football in New Jersey than the year before, a 6.8 percent decrease. Only three states Colorado, Montana and Oklahoma lost players at a higher rate over the same period. Most attributed the decline to increased concerns about player safety. Carty, a past president of the executive board of the New Jersey coaches association, said that while the purpose of the new rules was to increase safety, they also could help slow the decline in participation. He said he and a number of other coaches in New Jersey had been following the guidelines announced Wednesday for the past few seasons. Now, they will apply to everyone. "We're not doing this as a recruiting ploy," he said. "It's just we want to keep our kids safe and we want people to know this is happening. By making it a mandate statewide, it can ease the fears of a lot of parents that they won't have to investigate that their coach is doing it the right way." Other states moved to put new limits on out of game contact before New Jersey did. At least seven allow only 60 minutes of full contact practice each week, and Texas has also worked to reduce head injuries by offering junior high school and high school coaches seminars on rugby tackling, where the focus is on leading with the shoulder instead of the head. The N.C.A.A. does not mandate limits for its college football teams, offering only recommendations. The various conferences set their own limits, ranging from the Pacific 12, which allows 90 minutes a week, to the Ivy League, which does not allow any full contact training. The N.F.L. allows 14 padded practices during its 18 week regular season, and one practice per day for each day of preseason. Terry O'Neil, the founder of Practice Like Pros, said that his organization, which includes former N.F.L. players and coaches, neurosurgeons and orthopedists, is not concerned with participation levels. The goal is to promote the safety of those playing the game now. The approval of the New Jersey rules, he said, "is going to be very helpful for us in opening the conversation with other states around the country."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
It was the week before the inauguration, and Marlo Thomas, the actress, author and second wave feminist activist, was wrestling with whether or not to join her old friend and collaborator, Gloria Steinem, at the Women's March on Washington. The timing was complicated: Ms. Thomas was about to unveil a clothing line for the Home Shopping Network called "That Woman," which meant a trip to Tampa, Fla., for an on air selling marathon, along with a couple of mall appearances, in the days leading up to the march. "That Woman," of course, had been named to evoke "That Girl," Ms. Thomas's television show from the late 1960s that was a feminist touchstone. Airing from 1966 to 1971, "That Girl" was Ann Marie: a young, single working woman, living alone in New York City, and a proxy for Ms. Thomas. As part of her pitch to ABC, whose executives warned that the concept just wouldn't sell, Ms. Thomas gave the head of programming a copy of Betty Friedan's book "The Feminine Mystique." When those same network executives pushed for the series to conclude with Ann and her boyfriend, Donald, a magazine writer played by Ted Bessell, getting married, Ms. Thomas pushed back. Their engagement during the fifth and final season was the compromise, though the last episode found them stuck on an elevator, arguing about who had the most power in the relationship. Ms. Thomas used her considerable comedic chops to defang the cultural threat posed by Ann's implicit power as an unmarried woman. (As she learned from her father, comedy can be a Trojan Horse for all sorts of subversions.) And she used fashion to distinguish herself from her television forebears. She shed the housewife gear, the demure shifts, Peter Pan collars and aprons sported by Lucille Ball, Donna Reed and even Elizabeth Montgomery, for the uniform of the '60s youthquake graphic, eye popping designs from Andre Courreges and Mary Quant to be followed by the more bohemian accouterments of the early '70s, like the styles of Halston, Giorgio di Sant' Angelo and Yves St. Laurent. "That Woman" a collection of 15 pieces and a tote is not going to make fashion history. But it is the first commercial product that Ms. Thomas, now 79, has put her name on in decades, and she is proud of it, even though it might surprise those who know her as a founder in 1973 of the Ms. Foundation, with Ms. Steinem, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Patricia Carbine, to fund social justice efforts; or as the mistress mind behind "Free to Be ... You and Me," an album, best selling book and TV show upending gender stereotypes. "David Geffen once told me that the problem with having too many options is that if you don't play one, you might as well not have any," Ms. Thomas said of her more recent project. "So I decided to play an option. But my way, so I'm in control of everything." That's the spandex, she said. "People make decisions about how they should look at a given age," Ms. Thomas continued. "But I think you should keep in mind how you move and how you sit. I like things that show a little skin somewhere, something that makes you feel, as you're standing in a room full of men, that you're not just one of the guys." Ms. Thomas sat astride paisley floor pillows in the glassy living room of the Fifth Avenue penthouse she shares with her husband, Phil Donahue, long America's favorite male feminist and talk show host. You could see Central Park stretched out in its entirety beyond the terrace walls. The two fell in love, on the air, in 1977, when she was a guest on "The Phil Donahue Show." Ms. Thomas has the video that proves it. (You can find the clip on YouTube; their fumbling, instant rapport is deeply adorable.) "We flirted for the whole hour, to an embarrassing degree," she said. "He asked me if I would ever get married, and I said, 'Never.' I talked about feminism and why marriage was not a good institution for women, how marriages were only good for one and a half people." Ms. Thomas's traditionally married parents were an example she was not eager to emulate. Her Italian mother, Rose Marie, was a singer with a radio program when she met the comedian Danny Thomas, whose Lebanese background was as patriarchal as her own, so there was no question whose career would come first. Still, Ms. Thomas and Mr. Donahue started dating the day after the show. At the time, he was living with four sons from his first marriage, to Margaret Cooney (their daughter was living with her mother), frat house style, as Ms. Thomas recalled. Not only was Ms. Thomas, then in her early 40s, used to living alone, but, she said, "I wasn't used to that many towels and jock straps; I had never been with a man before who had 'Dad' written on his underwear." In 1966, when "That Girl" went on the air, the birth control pill was still illegal in many states. It wasn't until 1972 that the Supreme Court ruled that contraception in any form could be distributed to single people. As these cases churned through the judicial system, "That Girl" remained so chaste that Donald's bare ankles were a plot device. Musing on how culture evolves in fits and starts, Ms. Thomas said, "When I played Jennifer Aniston's mother on 'Friends,' and they talked about the wet spot on the bed, I thought, 'Oh my God, wouldn't Donald turn over?'" How women are depicted on television reached a high point, Ms. Thomas said, with "Roseanne" Roseanne Barr's irascible character on the ABC sitcom that ran for nearly a decade starting in 1988. "She was the first woman who dared to be unlikable," Ms. Thomas said. "Me and Mary were good girls. But Roseanne was a woman who hated her children, who ever says that? She was the Jackie Gleason" of female role models. Like Lena Dunham, Ms. Thomas said, Ms. Barr showed that you can be a role model without being perfect. Ms. Thomas and Ms. Steinem were introduced by a (male) agent, who proposed a film project in which Ms. Thomas would portray Ms. Steinem when she went undercover as a Playboy bunny. "Boy, I don't know which one of you I'd like to sleep with first," he told them in his office, she recalled in her 2010 memoir, "Growing Up Laughing" except he used a different verb. "Boy, did he pick the wrong two women to say that to," Ms. Thomas wrote. Ms. Steinem said later, "Two friends have different memories, but I probably still owe her a script." Nonetheless, she added: "We recognized in each other two women who were trying to forge a life that was different from what we'd been brought up to do. I can't express how terrible the 1950s were. You really were brought up to believe your life would be shaped by your husband's needs and your children's needs. This made marriage seem a lot like death." When Ms. Thomas and Mr. Donahue married in 1980, Ms. Thomas said she felt as though she was abandoning Ms. Steinem. "I wrote her a letter," she recalled, "saying that this may be the challenge of sisterhood, that we can take different paths." Ms. Steinem, whose speech at the Women's March this month noted the upside of a long life "You remember," she said, "when things were much worse" recalled how for a long time Ms. Thomas, being an actor, had fudged her age. "But when she turned 60, someone reported it. So Marlo said, 'You can imagine how hard it is to be 60 when you've never been 40 or 50.'" In 2014, Ms. Thomas was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom the same year Meryl Streep received hers, as it happens for her social justice advocacy and her work with the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the free pediatric cancer research and treatment center in Memphis founded by her father. "I got a flash of my grandparents who were immigrants from Lebanon and came here with their belongings in sacks," she said. "What would they think of my standing here at the White House? I choked up. I am a second generation Italian and Lebanese person. Both sets of grandparents were in arranged marriages. I've often thought, 'What would they think of me who took my own sweet time to get married to the man I chose?' They didn't have that freedom." Though Ms. Thomas had campaigned heavily for Hillary Clinton, she declined to talk politics. (And she had to sit out the Women's March, it turned out, because of a bug she caught in Florida. "I hated to miss it," she said. "I marched all over the country for the E.R.A. I've marched for pro choice. Phil and I march together in the Gay Pride Parade. It was hard not being there.") "Let me turn this into a comedic bit," Ms. Thomas said of the election. "I love that people are discovering there's fake news. If you're a public person, you've been living with fake news your entire life, only you've been clawing the walls, asking yourself, 'Why are they saying that?'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Twenty year old Janan Moein vaped his first pen a year ago. By late fall, he was blowing through several THC laced cartridges a week more, he said, than most people can handle. Then in early December, he found himself in the emergency room of Sharp Grossmont Hospital in San Diego with a collapsed lung and a diagnosis of vaping related lung illness. His hospital stay plunged him into a medically induced coma, forced him onto a breathing machine and stripped nearly 50 pounds off his 6 foot 1 inch frame in just two weeks. At one point, Mr. Moein said, his doctors gave him a 5 percent chance of survival. He resolved that the wax pen he had vaped before his hospitalization would be his last. When he contracted a mild case of Covid 19 during a family barbecue three months ago, he knew he had quit not a moment too soon. "If I had caught Covid 19 within the week before I got really ill, I probably would have died," he said. Since the start of the pandemic, experts have warned that the coronavirus a respiratory pathogen most likely capitalizes on the scarred lungs of smokers and vapers. Doctors and researchers are now starting to pinpoint the ways in which smoking and vaping seem to enhance the virus's ability to spread from person to person, infiltrate the lungs and spark some of Covid 19's worst symptoms. "I have no doubt in saying that smoking and vaping could put people at increased risk of poor outcomes from Covid 19," said Dr. Stephanie Lovinsky Desir, a pediatric pulmonologist at Columbia University. "It is quite clear that smoking and vaping are bad for the lungs, and the predominant symptoms of Covid are respiratory. Those two things are going to be bad in combination." Last year's vaping crisis, during which thousands of people like Mr. Moein were sickened and hospitalized with severe lung and respiratory illnesses, underscored the hazards of many e cigarette and vaping products, especially illicitly sold marijuana based vapes. Much of what underlies the relationship between smoking, vaping and the coronavirus remains unclear. Doctors aren't sure why vaping makes some people seriously sick, but seems to spare others. And Mr. Moein's unexpectedly mild encounter with the coronavirus remains mysterious as well. These and other lingering questions have made the risks of smoking and vaping during the pandemic tough to communicate. James Ippolito, a 26 year old Army veteran who lives in Hingham, Mass., has been hooked on vaping nicotine for about six years. "I vape every day, all day long," Mr. Ippolito said. The looming threat of the virus doesn't intimidate him. "I hate to say it, but if I got the virus, I would still be vaping I wouldn't even think it was related," he said. Such stubbornness troubles experts, who pointed out that Covid is hardly the first disease to hit smokers and vapers harder. "Lungs aren't designed to regularly breathe in smoke and vape," said Dr. Drew Harris, a pulmonologist at UVA Health in Virginia. These products, he added, "do just about everything bad you can think of." About 34 million adults smoke cigarettes in the United States, many of them from communities of color and low socioeconomic status groups already known to be more vulnerable to the virus. And more than 5 million middle and high school students recently reported using vapes. The active contents of cigarettes and vapes vary immensely, ranging from nicotine to THC, the high inducing ingredient in marijuana. But many experts are more concerned about the other ingredients that tend to accompany them: additives like heavy metals and vitamin E acetate, which bathe the lung in toxins and ultrafine particles that can poison or pulverize delicate tissues. Decades of research have unmasked smoking's ability to put the immune system on the fritz. The punch of harmful chemicals packed into each puff is thought to discombobulate the system of checks and balances needed to direct disease fighting cells and molecules toward harmful invaders like germs, while waylaying any misguided attacks on healthy tissues. A body hamstrung by a smoking habit can struggle to rouse a sufficient defense against viruses but has little trouble turning its arsenal of weapons inward. Eventually, deteriorating lungs can become chronically inflamed and awash with mucus, narrowing the airways and stymieing the flow of oxygen into the blood. Certain patients may end up with lungs pockmarked by scar tissue, further impeding the movement of air. Dr. Lovinsky Desir describes the internal architecture of these tissues as bunches of gas filled grapes, enmeshed in a network of blood vessels. "Chronic smoking destroys those grapes," she said. "They become saggy and floppy." Smoke can also compromise little hairlike structures known as cilia that boot toxins and microbes out of the airways, making it easier for pathogens to set up shop in the lungs. Less is known about vaping, a relative newcomer. But similar trends have been noted for e cigarettes and vape pens. Several studies have shown that vaping makes mice more vulnerable to bacteria and viruses, and sends surges of inflammation throughout the body, beyond the boundaries of the lungs. Mr. Moein was one of thousands who last year fell prey to a disease called e cigarette or vaping associated lung injury, or Evali. Many Evali patients had vaped products containing a sticky substance called vitamin E acetate, which has been found in the branded Dr. Zodiak cartridges Mr. Moein preferred. Mr. Moein still recalls his hospital stay in vivid detail. "My lips were blue," he said. "They had to tape my eyes shut. I was hallucinating the entire time that the nurses were trying to kill me, that the walls were made of human skin. It was a really bad situation." Nearly a year later, Mr. Moein, a towering athlete who played competitive sports in high school, said he was now once again "very healthy." But Dr. Laura Crotty Alexander, a pulmonologist and vaping expert at University of California San Diego and one of Mr. Moein's doctors, said experts were still teasing apart the potential long term effects of vaping, even brushes briefer than his. "Just because he feels 100 percent recovered doesn't mean his lung function returned to 100 percent," she said. After peaking last September, emergency department visits linked to Evali plummeted. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not updated their counts since February, leaving experts worried that concerns over vaping have fallen to the wayside. "This has not gone away from patients," said Michelle Eakin, a pulmonary disease expert at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Crotty Alexander noted that she and other researchers have struggled to follow up on many of last year's Evali cases, paradoxically thanks to a pandemic that might hit some of these patients especially hard. Early evidence hints that the virus may have an easier time breaking into the bodies of smokers and vapers. Smoking appears to alter the surfaces of certain cells, prompting them to coat themselves with more of a molecule called ACE 2 the protein the coronavirus uses to break into its targets. "If you have higher expression, you're going to have more virus entering cells," Dr. Crotty Alexander said. "I'm now seeing the same sort of data come out on the vaping side." That pattern, layered on top of the ways in which vaping weakens the lungs, may help explain why a recent survey of more than 4,000 people ages 13 to 24 found that vaping was strongly linked to catching the coronavirus. But Bonnie Halpern Felsher, a pediatrics researcher at Stanford University and an author on the study, said that there was probably more than biology at play. People who vape often do it socially, sharing spaces and equipment. And vaping, like smoking, involves a lot of hand to mouth movement, providing germs an easy path into the airway, Dr. Eakin said. "And if you're smoking or vaping," she said, "you're not wearing a mask." "Some of these patients will have permanent issues," said Dr. Anne Melzer, a pulmonologist at the University of Minnesota. Arlie Frahmann, a longtime smoker who picked up her first cigarette at the age of 9, hesitated to give up cigarettes when the coronavirus first infiltrated her community in Damariscotta, Maine, this spring. "The last thing I wanted was to be stressed out during quarantine," she said. As of this week, though, Ms. Frahmann is eager to quit. She started a new job at a bakery, where she will have to interact with strangers. "It was one thing to explain it away to myself when I wasn't going into public at all," she said of her smoking. "But now I can't justify it." A few early reports suggest that some people may be shelving their cigarettes or vapes. As schools reopen for in person learning, though, it might become easy to relapse. And Dr. Lovinsky Desir worries that the stressors brought on by the pandemic may be pushing some people to smoke or vape even more. Mr. Moein recalls brushing off warnings from his father, who used to send him articles about the dangers of vaping.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
At 36, the soprano Lisette Oropesa is in the midst of what should be a star making season at the Metropolitan Opera. This fall she won rave reviews and ardent ovations in the title role of Massenet's "Manon." And on Wednesday, she sang her first performance with the company as Violetta in Verdi's "La Traviata." It can be hard for a soprano to stand out among the enormous horde of singers who have taken on this touchstone role. And Ms. Oropesa is following Aleksandra Kurzak's riveting account at the Met last month, when Michael Mayer's 2018 production returned. But combining exquisite singing, youthful allure, affecting vulnerability and, by the end, bleak intensity, Ms. Oropesa emerged on Wednesday as a major Violetta. In Act I, when Violetta, a charming courtesan, is throwing a lavish party, a soprano must summon flights of coloratura brilliance and coquettish sparkle. Ms. Oropesa breezily dispatched runs and embellishments as she mingled with her guests and met Alfredo, the smitten young man from a bourgeois family who has been pining for her from afar.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Richard Liu, the Chinese technology executive arrested in the United States on suspicion of sexual misconduct, has returned to China where he is the No. 1 topic of conversation. Chinese news outlets and social media users were consumed on Monday by details of Mr. Liu's arrest. His mug shot, taken by law enforcement officials in Minnesota, was everywhere online. Chinese netizens speculated about how his wife a celebrity in her own right, known as Sister Milk Tea might respond, and parsed unfamiliar legal terms. The intense reactions to Mr. Liu's legal troubles reflect the public's fascination with China's self made tech tycoons, who have become symbols of the country's rise as a global power and its upward social mobility. Their books are best sellers. Their private lives are tabloid fodder. Their speeches on success and entrepreneurship are perpetually running on TV screens at airports. In effect, they are the rock stars of China's Gilded Age, and Mr. Liu is one of the brightest. His company, JD.com, courts the country's growing middle class with quality brand products instead of the shoddy copycats that are common on the Chinese internet. Today, its shares trade on the Nasdaq at a market value of about 50 billion. On Friday, Mr. Liu whose Chinese name is Liu Qiangdong but who goes by Richard in the English speaking world was arrested over allegations of sexual misconduct. Police officials in Minneapolis said they were treating the case as an active investigation. In Minnesota, the term "criminal sexual conduct" covers a range of nonconsensual sexual contact. JD.com has maintained that Mr. Liu was falsely accused, and on Monday said he had been released without being charged and without having to post bail. The executive has hired lawyers but has returned to work in China, the company said, without saying when he arrived in the country. John Elder, a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department, said Monday that the investigation was "really in its infancy." "We are trying to ensure his rights while respecting the rights of the person who made the complaint," he said of Mr. Liu. Mr. Elder said the police had no legal authority to keep Mr. Liu from leaving the country as the investigation continued, but he expressed a "very strong belief we will be able to connect with him later." Chinese internet users have obsessed over the minutiae of the case, many of them getting a crash course in the American legal system in the process. "This photo of Liu Qiangdong is called a mug shot," a blogger and journalist who goes by the name Michael Anti wrote on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese messaging and social media platform. He went on to explain that mug shots were considered public information in the United States, and can be released to the media. Descriptions of "probable cause" and "released pending complaint" were also widespread. There were even photographs and audio recordings of Mr. Elder. Others speculated over Mr. Liu's marriage to Zhang Zetian, who rose to fame as a student when a photo of her holding a cup of milk tea was widely shared on social media. Nicknamed "Sister Milk Tea," Ms. Zhang met Mr. Liu while she was studying in the United States, and they married in 2015. The couple have been both praised and criticized in China for cataloging online the intimate details of their lives, including their wedding and Ms. Zhang's pregnancy. Mr. Liu's arrest also prompted derision. In a previous video interview, he had insisted he had not married Ms. Zhang for her looks. "I am face blind," he said. "I can't tell who is pretty and who is not." Referring to those remarks, one online user joked, "Maybe he mistook the other woman as Sister Milk Tea. He is face blind, after all." Beyond online comments, the case also put a spotlight on JD.com's fierce rivalry with the Chinese e commerce giant Alibaba, and in particular the clash of personalities between the companies' founders. If the most intense reality show in the United States is national politics, business feuds take top billing in China. The workings of the government are carried out in a black box, off limits to media scrutiny and public discussion, but antagonism in the business world is carried out in the open. Among the business tycoons, the heads of China's internet companies are the hottest stars, the leaders of JD.com and Alibaba chief among them. Where Mr. Liu is like an aggressive boxer a straight talker and a formidable disciplinarian Alibaba's executive chairman, Jack Ma, is more of a tai chi master, skillful at gentle maneuvering. Even before his arrest in Minnesota, Mr. Liu was in the news a lot with a colorful private life and blunt speaking style. In July, a judge in Australia rejected his request to prevent the release of his name in connection with a case in which a sexual assault was said to have taken place after a 2015 party at his Sydney penthouse. That case has not generated as much online attention as the recent arrest, largely because Mr. Liu was not charged with a crime or accused of any wrongdoing. Still, at the time, JD.com reposted a lawyer's statement on Chinese social media platforms that aimed to quell any rumors tied to the Sydney case. Born in a poor part of the eastern province of Jiangsu, Mr. Liu has made much of his Everyman credentials. Able to afford meat only once or twice a year, his family typically ate sweet potatoes and corn as dinner staples. Until recently, he would put on a helmet and JD.com's red uniform to make deliveries on a three wheeled electric bike. He calls the 100,000 odd deliverymen who work for JD.com his "brothers," and often trumpets how much better they are paid than those employed by competitors. As it has grown, JD.com has become a serious competitor to Alibaba and, increasingly in recent years, the two are going head to head, vying for the attentions of growing numbers of affluent online shoppers in China. Both companies have tried to lure popular brands to open virtual stores on their sales platform, a battle playing out most aggressively in fashion, traditionally Alibaba's stronghold. Mr. Ma's company scored a major victory in 2015 when Uniqlo, the Japanese casual wear company, quit JD.com to sell its wares on Alibaba's platform. Last year, a group of apparel merchants also made the jump, a move that JD.com's chief financial officer said on a recent earnings call that the company was still recovering from. (Alibaba has denied it pressured any brands into exclusive arrangements.) There is no love lost between the two men, either. Mr. Ma famously once said that JD.com would eventually end as a "tragedy," because its business model was excessively labor and capital intensive. Mr. Liu, for his part, has accused Alibaba of not doing enough to fight fakes on its platform, a charge Mr. Ma has denied. It is little wonder, then, that many Chinese internet users responded to the news of Mr. Liu's arrest by posting photographs of Mr. Ma laughing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
There is no indication that China meddled in the American election, but the Communist government's use of Facebook is ironic given its apparent fear of the platform. It also hasn't been reluctant to use it as a soapbox where China's relationship with the United States is concerned. China has been a major priority for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's founder, has spent years courting it. Facebook executives even set up a page to show CCTV, one of Beijing's chief propaganda outlets, how to use the platform during President Xi Jinping's 2015 trip to the United States. While China's propaganda channels on Facebook are not nearly as subtle as Russian groups when it comes to influencing opinion, their techniques are nonetheless instructive. Rather than divisive advertisements, many of the Chinese Facebook posts replicate the sort of news propaganda delivered at home: articles stressing China's stability and prosperity mixed with posts highlighting chaos and violence in the rest of the world. A similar blend of stories pandas and idyllic Chinese landscapes next to heavy coverage of the mass shooting in Texas has proliferated across China's official Facebook channels in the lead up to Mr. Trump's visit to Beijing, which began on Wednesday. While much of it is unlikely to sway the average American's mind, such posts reach people across the world, many of whom are newer to the internet and may have a less sophisticated understanding of media. China's state media has Facebook channels dedicated to Africa and other regions of the world, and it seems evident that it is offering itself as an alternative to the Western media for a more global audience.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Bleeps happen. Especially during live awards shows. But they usually result from expletives that have slipped from the mouths of winners out of excitement, passion, even anger. Not during Sunday night's Golden Globes, when the host Ricky Gervais, never one to bite his tongue, was bleeped twice by NBC during his prepared monologue. First came a comment about Judi Dench's defense of the panned film "Cats," which she stars in. (Even Gervais hesitated at first, saying "I can't do this next joke.") "It was the role she was born to play," Gervais said, "because she loves nothing better than plunking herself down on the carpet, lifting her leg and licking her own ." "If you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech; you're in no position to lecture the public about anything, you know nothing of the real world," he said. "If you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and ," he continued, gesturing offstage. Tom Hanks did not seem amused. Sunday night was the fifth time Gervais, a British comedian known for his unfiltered style of cringey comedy and brazen digs, has hosted the Golden Globes. "You'll be pleased to know this is the last time I'm hosting the Golden Globe Awards," he said Sunday. "I don't care anymore. I never did." In past ceremonies, he has made targets out of Mel Gibson, Tim Allen and Madonna, to name just a few. On Sunday, he called the Hollywood Foreign Press "very, very racist" for the lack of diversity among nominees and jabbed at the popularity of remakes (awful and lazy, he called them) and superhero films. "Their job isn't acting anymore," he said of the actors who make superhero movies. "It's going to the gym twice a day and taking steroids." To the bevy of producers in the crowd, Gervais said, "They're all terrified of Ronan Farrow; he's coming for you." Farrow, an investigative reporter, has worked to uncover allegations of sexual misconduct among Hollywood heavy hitters. Gervais also made pointed jabs at Felicity Huffman, for her college admissions scandal; Leonardo DiCaprio for dating much younger women; and, in possibly his most tame joke, at Joe Pesci, comparing him to Baby Yoda. For the most part, the audience laughed, though there were plenty of audible groans and cringing faces. Not that Gervais cares either way. Pleasing a celebrity audience is not his goal, he recently told The Hollywood Reporter. He'd much rather entertain a global audience. "I try and play the outsider," he said. "I've got to be the bloke sitting at home who shouldn't have been invited."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Amity Shlaes made her name as a conservative historian by narrating the Great Depression as a tragedy of the best intentions: The Roosevelt administration tried to lift Americans from misery, but succeeded only in making things worse. In her latest book, "Great Society: A New History," Shlaes shifts her focus forward by about a quarter century, offering an account of the 1960s centered on President Johnson's campaign to eliminate poverty by expanding the social safety net. Despite the change in scenery, Shlaes's conclusions remain unchanged. She writes that Johnson's effort to build what he called a Great Society came "close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy." That failure, she says, should serve as a warning to the new generation of bleeding hearts who are again advocating for more government spending: "May this book serve as a cautionary tale of lovable people who, despite themselves, hurt those they loved." Shlaes's book is part of a broader shift in the focus of popular historical narratives. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves increasingly begin in the 1960s and, for the perpetual debate about the role of government in society, the shift from the Depression to more recent facts and anecdotes is a welcome development. "Great Society," however, is a deeply flawed contribution to that discourse. Shlaes relies on her talents as a narrator to make the case that, as she puts it, "the government lost the war on poverty." The book is well written; it goes down easy. But Shlaes's evidence is highly selective: Medicare and Medicaid, the largest antipoverty programs created by the Johnson administration, are barely mentioned. Other major Great Society initiatives, including the Head Start preschool program, food stamps for hungry families and increased federal funding for public schools in low income communities, also largely escape Shlaes's notice. Instead she chooses to treat the first of the major Great Society bills, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, as representative of the broader legislative program. This choice serves her purposes as a polemicist, because the government failed for the most part in its efforts to promote job creation. But it is indefensible as a matter of scholarship to completely omit the success of other Great Society programs. 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. Shlaes also devotes a chapter to public housing projects, which expanded under Johnson. She tells a compelling if familiar story of the infuriating arrogance of government planners, who repeatedly destroyed poor communities in the belief that they could build better places. Shlaes, who has a good eye for quotes, picks a beauty from a court decision allowing the destruction of a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. "If those who govern the District of Columbia decide that the nation's capital shall be beautiful as well as sanitary, there is nothing in the Fifth Amendment that stands in the way," the court wrote. Public housing in the United States, sadly, has rarely been beautiful or sanitary. Shlaes catalogs some of the low points: the efforts of government social workers to ensure that fathers did not visit their children; the decision to increase rents with income, eliminating any incentive to work; the insistence that even the owners of modest homes would be better off in government apartments. "To be housed, it turned out, was not what people wanted," she writes. "They wanted to house themselves." Curiously, Shlaes also narrates at some length the story of a welfare program that never happened: a Nixon administration proposal, designed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to guarantee a basic income to working adults. Congress rejected the idea, underscoring the limited success of proponents of a stronger safety net. Shlaes's conclusion that the expansion of welfare programs failed to improve public welfare is a staple of conservative rhetoric. In 2014, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin marked the 50th anniversary of President Johnson's speech declaring war on poverty by declaring the war had "failed." The usual evidence for this claim is that the share of Americans living in poverty, as measured by the official federal standard, has remained relatively constant in recent decades. The reality is more complicated. The Great Society programs have not eliminated poverty, and the problem is not merely a failure of implementation or funding. Most Western democracies maintain welfare states far more generous than anything proposed by Johnson, and there are still poor people in Europe. But the Great Society programs have produced broad and lasting benefits. The official measure of poverty is widely regarded as deeply flawed because, like Shlaes, it ignores some of the successes of the War on Poverty. For example, the government does not count food stamps as income. A 2014 analysis concluded the remaining Great Society programs "have played an important and growing role in reducing poverty." Other experts on poverty have reached similar conclusions. One of the strengths of Shlaes's book is her narration of the broader context in which the Great Society programs were created. She captures the nuanced relationship between the war on poverty and the war on Vietnam, which sometimes constrained social spending and sometimes created an imperative for bread and circuses. She also offers an account, through the lens of classical economics, of the broader forces that made it possible to expand social spending during the 1960s, and then began to constrain that spending during the 1970s. But the narrative is warped by Shlaes's determination to establish that the expansion of federal spending amounted to an embrace of socialism, which leads to long digressions about peripheral figures like Tom Hayden, a student activist whose interest in socialism left no apparent fingerprints on public policy. Shlaes also elides the useful distinction between the belief that government should control the means of production the classic definition of socialism and the belief that government should redistribute output, which is more accurately described as support for a welfare state. For Shlaes, as for many conservatives, socialism has come to describe the redistribution of wealth by any means whatsoever. This is what the industrialist Sherman Fairchild had in mind when he decried employees' demands for stock options as "creeping socialism." The purpose of this capacious definition of socialism, of course, is to tar the welfare state with the deservedly compromised reputation of central planning regimes. To call the Great Society a socialist enterprise is to foreshadow its inevitable failure. And Shlaes goes further, arguing that the government's effort to end poverty drove federal spending to unsustainable heights. "America," she writes, "morphed into a country that could afford nothing." It is more accurate to describe the United States, which collected a significantly smaller share of income in taxes than most developed democracies, as a nation unwilling to pay for Johnson's dreams. The result was the stagflation of the 1970s. Shlaes ends her narrative with the first stirrings of a counterrevolution: the rise of a California politician named Ronald Reagan and the demolition of the notorious Pruitt Igoe public housing project in St. Louis. What was the alternative to public housing? Shlaes offers a standard list: respect for property rights, devolution of power and resources to local authorities and a dollop of self reliance for good measure. "How might neighborhoods like this one have turned out," she writes, "if local companies, local authorities and local individuals had led in the 1950s and 1960s, building their own Great Society?" Half a century later, in the midst of a revival of interest in ideas like Moynihan's basic income proposal, readers may find themselves wondering whether the nation's problem is really too much government or, perhaps, not enough.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Michelle Goldberg is right about President Barack Obama's being dangerously dismissive of economic failures under George W. Bush. An even greater omission was President Obama's failure to investigate as crimes the incidents of torture under the Bush Cheney regime. Apparently, Mr. Obama thought that the airing of charges by the press was enough to provide a deterrent in the future. Obviously, it wasn't. Donald Trump while campaigning said he would use waterboarding, or something "tougher." Garry Wills Evanston, Ill. The writer is professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author of "What the Qur'an Meant." While wealthy New Yorkers agonize over having to trade their posh apartments on Fifth Avenue for luxurious second homes outside New York City, tens of thousands of low income families are bracing for likely eviction in the coming months if Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature fail to act. These renters, who make up the vast majority of New York City and who lack the resources to move on a dime to the Hamptons, have received little help from Albany. With the statewide eviction moratorium set to expire on Oct. 1, they could very well end up on the street just in time for cold weather. Albany must focus on addressing the plight of these New Yorkers: families that largely inhabit the 1.6 million apartment units of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. The stories written about the rich Manhattanites' exodus distort the reality that the vast majority of New Yorkers live in. Judith Goldiner New York The writer is attorney in charge of the Civil Law Reform Unit at the Legal Aid Society. "The Jersey Shore of My Imagination," by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Op Ed, Aug. 20), revived treasured childhood memories, albeit longer ago and further north: summers in Belmar, N.J., to be exact. Those priceless joys of 1950s summers both enrich and calm me, especially nowadays. Lying in the sun, refreshingly exhausted from swimming in the cold Atlantic and warmed by the hot sand beneath our family blanket, listening to the hypnotic sound of breaking waves punctuated by the squeal of carefree children playing and hungry, screeching sea gulls gracefully hovering, then arrogantly foraging: Hey, this was their beach, too. A lunch of soggy but eagerly devoured tuna or P.B. J. sandwiches, topped off by a quickly melting Fudgsicle from Sam's "everything" store across Ocean Avenue, was followed by the intellectual stimulation of the latest Superman or Archie comic, because every mom seemed to know that you couldn't go back into the water for an hour after eating or you'd get "cramps" and drown. Belmar evenings offered other pleasures: miniature golf, the penny arcade (where "games of skill" really cost only pennies), gumball and popcorn machines outside the souvenir booths on the boardwalk, and the Rialto Theater, where the movies changed every three days. But most astonishing of all, in hindsight, was Trudy, the blond lady in an evening gown, who played old standards on an organ onstage at "the pavilion" on the beach at 10th Avenue. You just walked in, got a booklet with all the lyrics, and sat down and sang for an hour, no charge, all welcome. Where else would I have learned the words to "My Blue Heaven"? Come Labor Day, the idyll was over. My dad's home movie shows us writing "Belmar 1956" in the wet sand, before a wave washed it away. From the beach, but not from my mind's eye. Thank you, Ms. Boylan. Yes, the Jersey Shore is a very good idea.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
For as long as Donald J. Trump has been a brand name representing playboy bling and New York business savvy in the 1990s up through his freestyle approach to presidential politics today he has flirted with hip hop. Sometimes, famous rappers reciprocate. Yet even for a man who once palled around Manhattan nightclubs with Puff Daddy and Russell Simmons, and later hosted Kanye West in the Oval Office, President Trump can still surprise with his Black celebrity alliances, judging by the reaction on Thursday night to a photo op with Lil Wayne. "Just had a great meeting with realdonaldtrump," the multiplatinum rapper posted to his nearly 35 million followers on Twitter after the two posed together in Florida, earning a retweet from the president. "He listened to what we had to say today and assured he will and can get it done." The photo immediately went viral on social media, but the backlash was swift as well, making Lil Wayne the latest in a recent line of rappers to align themselves, however briefly, with the president's re election campaign, only to face criticism from fans and fellow artists. Lil Wayne, like Ice Cube before him, had cited the president's Platinum Plan, a two page document rolled out in September that promised to "increase access to capital in Black communities by almost 500 billion" over the next four years. The radio host Charlamagne Tha God, of The Breakfast Club on Power 105.1 FM in New York, responded in a segment on Friday morning, calling Lil Wayne's apparent endorsement a distraction. While he noted that Black voters are not monolithic, Charlamagne added, "Trust me when I tell you, Black people are not on the Trump administration's agenda, nor will we ever be. All of our civil liberties are at risk." Representatives for Lil Wayne did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. Previously, ahead of the 2016 election, Lil Wayne had distanced himself from politics and the Black Lives Matter movement, saying he preferred to focus on music. Asked about Mr. Trump specifically, the rapper responded with a laugh: "Who's that?" Earlier this month, the New York rapper 50 Cent also seemed to endorse President Trump in a post on Instagram, claiming that Joseph R. Biden Jr. would raise taxes. "I don't care Trump doesn't like black people," 50 Cent wrote. "62% are you out of ya expletive mind." (Instagram marked the post as "missing context" and in need of a fact check.) But the rapper soon walked back his support for Mr. Trump, and on Thursday, he reacted negatively to Lil Wayne's political post. "Oh no," 50 Cent wrote on Thursday evening. "I WOULD HAVE NEVER TOOK THIS PICTURE." Ice Cube, a founding member of N.W.A, who released a song called "Arrest the President" as recently as 2018, faced similar scrutiny after it was announced this month that he had consulted with the Trump administration on the Platinum Plan. He said later that he hoped to work with both sides, and was not endorsing Mr. Trump, adding, "I don't trust none of them." "Black progress is a bipartisan issue," Ice Cube said. "I will advise anybody on the planet who has the power to help Black Americans close the enormous wealth gap." Trump has called himself the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln, despite a questionable record on race, including his pronouncement that there were "very fine people on both sides" after white supremacists rioted in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. His campaign has said that it hoped to slightly improve on its performance with Black voters in 2016, when Mr. Trump earned about 8 percent of the Black vote. Of course, plenty of rappers have endorsed Mr. Biden, including Cardi B, Offset and Snoop Dogg, while others, like Waka Flocka Flame and Lil Pump, who is of Mexican and Cuban descent, have signaled an openness to supporting the president. In an interview, the writer, filmmaker and activist Dream Hampton called it "the hubris of the celebrity" for rappers to "kind of saunter in during the fourth quarter, talking about making demands." She noted that while Black men will still overwhelmingly vote for Democrats Mr. Biden leads 78 11 among Black men, according to a recent Times/Siena poll a macho affinity for President Trump and the allure of economic success could explain his inroads with a certain segment of the hip hop community. "It's the same reason they were referencing him in the '90s it's about the lie of the American dream," she said. "It's about the lie of Black entrepreneurship somehow being a panacea to these larger social problems. Hip hop became a stand in for that, lifting up individual Black accomplishment." "There are real reasons to criticize Joe Biden, even in this 11th hour," Ms. Hampton added. "But we" Black activists and organizers "were already doing that."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Still in Love With Comic Books, and Now With Her, Too It started as many relationships do: Someone thought they were in one. In this case it was Ayanna Ross, who was 11 when she met Shawn Martinbrough, also 11, in the 1980s at Summer Pines Day Camp in New Rochelle, N.Y. "It was very clear Ayanna liked me," said Mr. Martinbrough, 45, a native of the Bronx and an illustrator for DC Comics, Image Comics and Marvel Entertainment. "But I didn't get the memo we were dating. She was very pushy. We would hang out, but there was never a commitment." This was news to Ms. Ross, who insisted the two were a thing. "I was drawn to him instantly; I remember loving the way his skin smelled," said Ms. Ross, 44, who grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and is a lawyer in Washington, where the couple live. "I knew he liked me because he followed me everywhere. When we did out of camp excursions, he always wanted to be on my team. I don't see where he could have thought he wasn't my boyfriend." "Shawn was interested, whether he wants to admit it or not," Mr. Estrada, 44, said. "He told me he thought she was pretty. As kids, we'd have sleepovers and prank call Ayanna. We didn't have texting or Snapchat, and back then that's how silly boys showed their interest and tried to get a girl's attention." A shorter, and more traumatic, exchange played out when the two, unbeknown to each other, ended up attending Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in Manhattan; she for dance, he for art. "During my first month, I saw him with a group of friends standing on the sidewalk," Ms. Ross said. "He was taller, and I thought, 'Oh my God, that's my boyfriend.' It was like no time had passed. We hadn't kept in touch, but I still thought we were dating, so I went up to him, said hi and asked if I could wear his jacket. He said, 'O.K.' I'd seen 'Grease,' so I thought: 'Cool. I'm his girlfriend.'" With jacket in tow, she rejoined her pals. Shortly after, Mr. Martinbrough sent one of his buddies to retrieve it. The relationship ended there. Ms. Ross threw the jacket at his friend. A week later, she was dating a senior. "I felt really dejected," she said. "He should have come over and gotten it himself. The jacket incident shaped my interactions with potential dates to come. I developed a very thick skin, and after that I never called any boy. If someone was interested, they would have to be the initiator." "I couldn't be bothered," he said. "I was a late bloomer. I was into Japanese animation and comic books." They went to different colleges, and Mr. Martinbrough met his first wife at his. The couple divorced in 2001, after eight years of marriage. By then, he was living in Washington and drawing for DC Comics. Ms. Ross had also moved on. She was living on the Upper East Side, working as an assistant district attorney and dating someone she had met in law school. Chance brought them together in 2008, when Mr. Martinbrough spotted Ms. Ross at a book party at the restaurant Barna, now closed, on Park Avenue South. He had returned to New York to visit his family and was supposed to attend the event with his sister, who unexpectedly had to work late and couldn't go. Mr. Martinbrough had been working relentlessly on an illustration project. This was his first social outing in months, so he decided to go alone. "I was getting my coat from coat check, and I see this cute woman," he said. "I thought it was Ayanna but wasn't sure. When I turned around, she was standing in front of me. It was her, but she didn't recognize me. I tried to explain how I knew her, and she didn't believe me until I mentioned the jacket and camp." It was true. She had no idea who he was. "I saw this tall, muscular guy by coat check," she said. "'Sex on a Platter' started playing in my head as I saw myself and my life and everything, like a movie. When I got close enough to him, he said, 'I think I know you.' He pronounced my name correctly a wanna , which no one does." She then believed he really must have known her. This time, Mr. Martinbrough wasn't turned off but rather fond of her forwardness, which he now found refreshing. "She beat me to the punch," he said. "It's one of the things I love about her. I didn't view her as pushy anymore because we were grown up. I thought she was charming." They met for dinner. The next day it was lunch. Then again that same evening. Ms. Ross had to leave the next morning for Las Vegas. Mr. Martinbrough watched her pack. They talked all night. Neither went to sleep. Then he drove her to the airport. He extended his stay in New York by a week and was waiting at the arrivals hall for her when she returned. And although things between them moved fast, Ms. Ross didn't mind. She liked the man he had become. Over the next six years, they became inseparable and took turns visiting each other over the weekends. Finally, sick of the commute, Ms. Ross moved in with Mr. Martinbrough. On one of the unluckiest days of the year, Friday, Dec. 13, 2013, he proposed. Ms. Ross immediately said yes. Not everyone was alerted to the early love story. "I had no idea she had a crush on him; we were just kids," said Douglas Coleman, 44, who was also a camper at Summer Pines that year. "When they started dating and Shawn reintroduced me to her, he said, 'Do you realize who this is?' I couldn't believe it. To know they found each other, and that they're getting married, is fate. You have to give that some credibility." Mr. Estrada added: "Ayanna's very good for Shawn. She's smart, and she challenges him. He really feels like his life has come together." Ms. Ross, touched by his words, agreed. "There will be a silver lining," she said. "Instead of a sunset, something cool will happen during the ceremony." The couple was married at 7:08 six minutes later than scheduled on Friday, March 31. The Rev. Sheldon Williams of the Co Op City Baptist Church officiated in front of 75 guests. "He was my grandmother's pastor," Mr. Martinbrough said. "She passed away last year, so having him do our service is like having her with us." And though the new Mrs. Ross Martinbrough didn't get her sunset, she did get her silver lining: She married the love of her life. "It's O.K. that we didn't have the sunset," she said. "Shawn is my sunlight. He lights up my heart." Mr. Williams pronounced them husband and wife, and as they began to kiss, a large boat made a surprise appearance, seemingly from nowhere. She found her inspiration. "It's a sign that we're supposed to go on and sail off," she said, "and that we'll be doing big things together."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
It also makes for rapid fire sales. The amount of time that listings spent on the market fell 20 percent to a record low of 73 days in the third quarter, according to the Douglas Elliman report. "You have to be very competitive and you have to be quick," especially at the lower end of the market, Ms. Herman said. "I tell people, 'You really have to have your ducks in order financially and know the market yourself.' " Overall, the number of closed sales was up for the quarter, driven by robust closings in new development. While prices remained high across all market segments, the average sales price for the luxury market, defined as the top 10 percent of closed sales, dropped 12 percent in the third quarter, to 6.73 million, compared with 7.68 million during the same period last year, as fewer luxury properties closed, according to the Corcoran report. The highest third quarter sale was in new development: a 37.9 million penthouse at the Charles condominium at 1355 First Avenue on the Upper East Side. In the resale market, there were only two recorded sales of more than 20 million: a 30 million co op at 1040 Fifth Avenue, also on the Upper East Side, and a 22 million apartment at 15 Central Park West, on the Upper West Side. Buyers may be reaching a breaking point when it comes to outsize prices for luxury real estate. "At the upper end of the market, I believe there is a little bit of a pushback from the buyers," said Diane M. Ramirez, chief executive of Halstead Property, which found that the average sales price of co ops with at least three bedrooms declined 26 percent to approximately 3.1 million in the third quarter of the year, from 4.2 million during the same period last year. Hall F. Willkie, president of Brown Harris Stevens Residential Sales, said that though demand remained strong, "more sellers are asking prices that are just not justified." Especially at the high end, he said, "there's a glut of inventory that's overpriced."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
But while many of the tweets were aimed at rejecting the idea that women should be restricted to some narrow sartorial category, the "dress like a woman" phrase, co opted as a hashtag, didn't come directly from Mr. Trump. In his newsletter, Mr. Allen attributed the phrase this way: Trump likes the women who work for him "to dress like women," says a source who worked on Trump's campaign. "Even if you're in jeans, you need to look neat and orderly." We hear that women who worked in Trump's campaign field offices folks who spend more time knocking on doors than attending glitzy events felt pressure to wear dresses to impress Trump. In an email on Friday afternoon, Mr. Allen declined to offer any further details. It's clear that appearances matter to the president. Mr. Trump, the former owner of the Miss Universe Organization, has come under harsh criticism for rating women's appearances on a scale of one to 10 and for hurling insults at female critics.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Many Americans might not know the more polemical side of race writing in our history. The canon of African American literature is well established. Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin are familiar figures. Far less so is Samuel Morton (champion of the obsolete theory of polygenesis) or Thomas Dixon (author of novels romanticizing Klan violence). It is tempting to think that the influence of those dusty polemics ebbed as the dust accumulated. But their legacy persists, freshly shaping much of our racial discourse. On the occasion of Black History Month, I've selected the most influential books on race and the black experience published in the United States for each decade of the nation's existence a history of race through ideas, arranged chronologically on the shelf. (In many cases, I've added a complementary work, noted with an asterisk.) Each of these books was either published first in the United States or widely read by Americans. They inspired and sometimes ended the fiercest debates of their times: debates over slavery, segregation, mass incarceration. They offered racist explanations for inequities, and antiracist correctives. Some the poems of Phillis Wheatley, the memoir of Frederick Douglass stand literature's test of time. Others have been roundly debunked by science, by data, by human experience. No list can ever be comprehensive, and "most influential" by no means signifies "best." But I would argue that together, these works tell the history of anti black racism in the United States as painfully, as eloquently, as disturbingly as words can. In many ways, they also tell its present. "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," by Phillis Wheatley (1773) No book during the Revolutionary era stirred more debates over slavery than this first ever book by an African American woman. Assimilationists and abolitionists exhibited Wheatley and her poetry as proof that an "uncultivated barbarian from Africa" could be civilized, that enslaved Africans "may be refin'd, and join th' angelic train" of European civilization and human freedom. Enslavers disagreed, and lashed out at Wheatley's "Poems." "An Address to the Inhabitants of British Settlements, on the Slavery of the Negroes in America," by Benjamin Rush (1773) "Notes on the State of Virginia," by Thomas Jefferson (1785) The author of American freedom in 1776 wrote of American slavery as a necessary evil in this book, widely regarded as the most important political portrait of the nascent United States. Jefferson indicted the "tyranny" of slavery while also supplying fellow slaveholders with a batch of prejudices to justify slavery's rapid expansion. Blacks "are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind," he wrote. And Wheatley is not "a poet." "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Or, Gustavus Vassa, the African" (1789) "Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemers," by Benjamin Banneker (1792 97) After helping to survey the District of Columbia, Banneker compiled his first almanac, replacing Wheatley's "Poems" as abolitionists' finest showpiece of black capability. He enclosed the almanac in a letter to Jefferson, writing, "I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions." Jefferson did not jump off the train, but other Americans did while reading this remarkable book. "An Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species," by Samuel Stanhope Smith (second edition, 1810) The Princeton president tried to stop the polygenesis theory that the races are created unequal, stoutly defending biblical monogenesis and the notion that first humans were white. He called for physical assimilation: In a colder climate blackened skins would revert to their original white beauty; "the woolly substance" on black heads would become "fine, straight hair" again. His racist idea of the lighter and straighter the better still demeans after all these years. "Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks," by Robert Finley (1816) Blacks should be freed, trained "for self government" and returned to Africa, according to the antislavery clergyman and former student of Samuel Stanhope Smith. Finley wrote the manifesto for colonization, a cause supported by several American leaders until Lincoln's failed schemes doomed the movement during the Civil War. 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. "An Appeal From the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America," by Robert Walsh (1819) "An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," by David Walker (1829) This Boston abolitionist viciously assailed colonization and "Mr. Jefferson's arguments" in the first book length attack on the "inhuman system of slavery" by an African American. Black seamen smuggled the appeal into chained Southern hands; community readers sounded the appeal to violently throw off the violent yoke. Walker's ultimatum for slaveholders: Give us freedom and rights, or you will "curse the day that you ever were born!" This book revived the theory of polygenesis that dominated intellectual racial discourse until the Civil War. What reviewers hailed as an "immense body of facts" were Morton's measurements of the "mean internal capacity" of the human skulls in his renowned collection in Philadelphia, from which he concluded that whites had the "highest intellectual endowments." "Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832," by Thomas Roderick Dew (1832), and "Thoughts on African Colonization," by William Lloyd Garrison (1832) "The Narrative of the Life," of Frederick Douglass (1845) The gripping best seller earned Douglass international prestige and forced readers around the world to come to terms with slavery's brutality and blacks' freedom dreams. No other piece of antislavery literature so devastated Morton's defense of polygenesis, or John C. Calhoun's recently popularized theory that slavery was a "positive good." Inflamed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Stowe offered a fugitive slave story that made millions sympathize with slaves. Her novel and its dramatic adaptations turned the "hard and dominant Anglo Saxon race" toward Christian salvation with a simple lesson: to stop enslaving quintessential Christians in all their "lowly docility of heart." From accommodating Uncle Toms to superior mulattoes to soulful Africans, the book also popularized any number of lasting racist tropes. "On the Origin of Species," by Charles Darwin (1859) In "Principles," Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest," becoming the ultimate amplifier of Social Darwinism in the United States. Americans fell in love with his comprehensive theory of evolution, claiming that Reconstruction policies would allow inferior blacks to evolve (or assimilate) into white civilization or lose the struggle for existence. The net effect of Spencer's Social Darwinism: the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. This prominent New York journalist blanketed the nation with fairy tales of corrupt, incompetent, lazy Black Republican politicians. Reconstruction's enfranchising policies were a "tragedy," Pike wrote, nothing but "the slave rioting in the halls of his master." His "objective" reporting caused many once sympathetic Northerners to demand a national reunion based on white rule. "Our Brother in Black: His Freedom and His Future," by Atticus Haygood (1881) In the 1880s, Southern segregationists marketed their region as the New South, among them this Methodist bishop and Emory College president. In his popular book, Haygood eased consciences that the end of Reconstruction meant the end of black rights. The New South will be as good for black folk as the old, Haygood declared, as new white Southerners would continue to civilize inferior black folk in their nicely segregated free labor society. "Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro," by Frederick Hoffman (1896) Better covered than the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that year, "Race Traits" catapulted this statistician into scientific celebrity. At the time of emancipation, blacks were "healthy in body and cheerful in mind," Hoffman wrote. Thirty years later, the 1890 census forecasts their "gradual extinction," due to natural immoralities and a propensity for diseases. He blazed the trail of racist ideas in American criminology when he concluded that higher black arrest rates indicated blacks committed more crimes. "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," by Ida B. Wells (1892) "The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan," by Thomas Dixon (1905) Convinced that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had misrepresented the South, Dixon emerged as Jim Crow's novelist laureate. "The Clansman" was the most influential of his works, particularly after it was adapted into a popular play and D.W. Griffith's 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation." In Dixon's telling, the virtuous Ku Klux Klan saved Southern whites from their "awful suffering" during Reconstruction. "Tarzan of the Apes," by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912) With his racist colonial plot, Burroughs glued animals, savages and Africa together in the American mind, and redeemed white masculinity after the first black heavyweight champion knocked it out in 1908. Forget boxing and Jack Johnson white men embraced Tarzan, the inspiration for comic strips, 25 sequels and dozens of motion pictures. "The Passing of the Great Race," by Madison Grant (1916) Van Vechten was the Harlem Renaissance's ubiquitous white patron, a man as curiously passionate about showing off black people as zookeepers are about showing off their rare species. Through this best selling novel, he gave white Americans a racist tour of the safari of Harlem, casting assimilated blacks in the guise of tropical exotic lands being spoiled by white developers. "Gone with the Wind," by Margaret Mitchell (1936) The Pulitzer Prize winning jewel of the plantation fiction genre, this was Americans' second all time favorite book behind the Bible, according to a 2014 Harris Poll. Mitchell portrays white enslavers as noble, slaves as shiftless, docile and loyal. Mitchell did for slavery what Dixon did for Reconstruction and Burroughs for Africa. "Their Eyes Were Watching God," by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) and "Native Son," by Richard Wright (1940) "An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy," by Gunnar Myrdal (1944) As Americans fought against Nazism overseas, this Swedish economist served up an encyclopedic revelation of racial discrimination in their backyards. If there was a scholarly trigger for the civil rights movement, this was it. Myrdal concluded that "a great majority" of whites would "give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts." Segregationists seethed, and racial reformers were galvanized to show the truth of Jim Crow. This instant classic about a white lawyer defending a black man wrongly accused of rape was the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the civil rights movement. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy," a neighbor tells the lawyer's daughter, Scout. She's talking about their reclusive white neighbor, Boo Radley, but the African Americans of 1930s Alabama come across as singing spectators, thankful for the moral heroism of Atticus Finch. The white savior remains the most popular racist character in American letters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
But Mr. Levine was fired in 2018 after the company said it had found evidence that he had "engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct towards vulnerable artists." In court papers, the Met accused Mr. Levine of inappropriately touching one of the young artists, and of trying to set up a tryst in his dressing room "to engage in sexual activity." Mr. Levine's lawyers denied the accusations. The dueling lawsuits between Mr. Levine and the Met were quietly settled this summer. Mr. Nezet Seguin said that while he did not want to comment specifically on "any individual cases," he was consciously working on "a re evaluation of what it is to be in power, and what is the correct way to foster a culture where everybody feels that they are respected and that they can develop." And he gave a hint of some of what he would be looking to foster in young singers including individuality. "I've done a lot of auditions, and obviously had a lot of casting discussions with my colleagues at the Met, and sometimes we're finding that maybe young singers, it seems that they want to fit a mold that's all already prepared," he said. "And it seems sometimes that maybe at some point in their development, they've shut down their own personality." "Actually, it's quite the contrary that I want for the operatic culture," he added. "I think what the audience wants to hear is true personalities, people who actually have something very individualized to say, and have recognizable voices and don't necessarily fit in a mold."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
N.B.A. teams began arriving at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Disney World on Tuesday. The rest of the 22 team field will arrive Wednesday and Thursday. As the first N.B.A. teams arrived at Walt Disney World for the resumption of their season, Commissioner Adam Silver reiterated his conviction that the restricted environment in Florida will be safer for the league's personnel during the coronavirus pandemic than being anywhere "off this campus." The ultimate test of that belief had begun just a few hours before Silver's comments, when the Orlando Magic courtesy of a 30 minute bus ride from their home arena were the first of the 22 teams to arrive Tuesday morning at Walt Disney World to begin life in the N.B.A.'s restricted access village. Denver, Phoenix, Utah, Washington and the Nets were also scheduled to arrive Tuesday, with eight teams to follow on Wednesday and eight more on Thursday. After weeks of planning and the creation of a 113 page guidebook of health and safety regulations to govern the N.B.A.'s return to play on July 30 after a more than four month hiatus, Tuesday's check ins were the beginning of a critical process: assimilating teams into the campus while trying to keep the coronavirus out. "It's a very protected environment, but, again, this virus has humbled many," Silver said on Tuesday on Fortune's Brainstorm Health virtual panel. "So I'm not going to express any higher level of confidence than: We are following the protocols and we hope it works as we designed it." Jeff Weltman, Orlando's president of basketball operations, spoke with reporters via Zoom as members of the Magic's traveling party settled into their quarantine at the Grand Floridian, regarded as the second tier choice of the three Disney hotel properties to which teams were assigned based on playoff seeding. "This has never been done before," Weltman said. "All you can do is prepare yourself as best as possible given the very restricted modes of operation that have been placed upon us. Our guys have done that and now it's time to come together." Those who arrived Tuesday were almost immediately taken to a testing room. While on campus, they will be tested for the coronavirus daily, and masks will be mandatory in public when teams are away from basketball activities. After arrival, players and staff must quarantine for up to two days and register two negative tests before they can move freely around the premises. A significant fear is that players or staff members who initially register negative tests are actually carrying the coronavirus, which medical experts say can incubate for up to two weeks. To help mitigate that threat, players also received two optional devices in their rooms: A beeping sensor to remind campus residents to maintain at least six feet of distance between themselves whenever possible, and an Oura ring, which may help provide early warnings of Covid 19 symptoms. "I have been very optimistic for quite a while now, only because I know the lengths to which and the extent that the N.B.A. has relied upon experts and tried to leave no stone unturned," Weltman said. Yet even as the first teams arrived, two more high profile players were ruled out for the rest of the season on Tuesday: Washington's Bradley Beal and the Nets' Spencer Dinwiddie. Beal's decision was not a surprise, as he had voiced numerous concerns about safety and the restrictions on players once inside the N.B.A. bubble. He was officially ruled out because of the lingering effects of a shoulder injury, leaving Washington without its three best players: Beal, the injured former All Star John Wall and Davis Bertans, Washington's sharpshooting forward who recently announced that he would not play to guard against injury as he enters a potentially lucrative off season as a free agent. Dinwiddie, who tested positive for the coronavirus last week and again Monday, has experienced headaches and dizziness. He announced on Twitter that he and the Nets made a joint decision to end his breakout season while he remains symptomatic. Averaging 20.6 points and 6.8 assists per game, Dinwiddie is one of at least five Nets veterans who will be unavailable for the restart, joining Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, DeAndre Jordan and Wilson Chandler. The Nets were in talks Tuesday to sign the veteran center Amir Johnson to replace Jordan, according to two people who were not authorized to discuss the team's plans publicly. Jordan also tested positive for the coronavirus last week and immediately ruled himself out of the restart. Chandler cited family reasons for not playing; Durant (Achilles' tendon) and Irving (shoulder) are recovering from injuries. The uncomfortable reality for the league, at the start of such a pivotal week, is that an increasing number of players have voiced apprehension about the restart, raising concerns that go beyond the coronavirus and injury risk though the fact that at least seven of the 22 Disney bound teams over the past two weeks closed their practice facilities at some point because of positive tests surely stoked concerns. The Nets' Garrett Temple, a vice president for the National Basketball Players Association, acknowledged in an interview Sunday that there's considerable player anxiety about the challenges of living and playing on the Disney campus for at least six weeks, and potentially up to three months for the teams that reach the finals. "I would imagine more than half of the league, of the players that are going, have had second thoughts," Temple said Sunday, describing his own state as a "nervous anxiousness."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Of the fever dreams that punctuate the oeuvre of Tennessee Williams, the most powerfully weird, for me, has got to be the scene in "Suddenly Last Summer" when Sebastian Venable is eaten alive by cannibal children. Narrated in the play by Sebastian's cousin, Catharine Holly, and surreally staged in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film adaptation, the scene depicts a gang of "frightfully thin and dark naked children that looked like a pack of plucked birds" pursuing the effete Sebastian through the Spanish beach town of Cabeza de Lobo. Bashing together tin cans flattened out into cymbals, the children overtake and descend upon Sebastian, whom they proceed to devour, tearing or cutting "parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with" and stuffing them "into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs" until all that remains is a heap of flesh that Catharine compares to "a big white paper wrapped bunch of red roses." Like so much of Williams's work, the episode occupies that liminal zone in which, in the 1950s, what could not be spoken could be implied: in this case, that Sebastian Venable, like so many gay men of his time, regularly paid poor youths for sex, a form of sexual consumerism for which their literal consumption of him serves as a sort of inverse analogy. As far as I have been able to determine, Sebastian Venable's death has no basis in Williams's life other than the one that Christopher Castellani has invented for it in "Leading Men," his audacious new novel about Williams and his relationship with Frank Merlo, the Italian American lover to whom he dedicated "The Rose Tattoo." A work of "alternative history fiction" (to quote Publishers Weekly), "Leading Men" takes, as its starting point, a vacancy: As Castellani explains in an afterword, Williams's diaries contain no entries for the period between July 28 or 29 and Aug. 7, 1953, a lacuna that coincides both with a famous party Truman Capote threw in Portofino (Williams, then living in Rome, was invited but told a friend he wasn't going since Capote wouldn't let him bring his bulldog) and with the mysterious death of the American novelist John Horne Burns, author of "The Gallery," in the Livornese village of Cecina. The concurrence of these events, combined with an enticingly brief reference, in a letter Capote wrote to David O. Selznick from Portofino, to a "Swedish mother and daughter who share a fisherman between them," provides Castellani with the germ of his novel, in which not just Williams and Merlo but Burns and his Italian boyfriend, Sandro Nencini, decide at the last minute to go to Capote's party, where they meet one another and also the aforementioned Swedish mother and daughter, Bitte and Anja Blomgren. It is on the day after the party that these six characters make the expedition to the fictitious Testa del Lupo (the Italian translation of Cabeza de Lobo, or "Wolf's Head"), a creepy cliffside sculpture garden where they are attacked and the women almost raped by a mob of nearly naked boys with "bony little bodies" making a "racket" of "weird drumming" and chanting "a nightmarish cacophony of nonsense." Unlike Cabeza de Lobo, the only person to die at Testa di Lupo is one of the attacking boys; all the principals are rescued in the nick of time. The episode forms the spine of "Leading Men" and provides Castellani, in his alternative history, with a ready made, if entirely made up, biographical point of origin for the scene of Sebastian Venable's murder. Yet the events of the summer of 1953, recounted in close third person from Frank Merlo's point of view, are only half the story. The rest takes place six decades later. Anja Blomgren now Anja Bloom, a famously imperious Swedish actress who bears more than a passing resemblance to Liv Ullmann is living in splendidly Bergmanesque isolation in an unnamed Northeastern city when she receives a visit from Sandrino Nencini, the son and namesake of John Horne Burns's lover. An intimacy ensues, at the culmination of which Anja shares with Sandrino and his boyfriend, Trevor, a heretofore unknown Williams play, "Call It Joy," of which she has the only copy and which is included in its entirety in the novel. At their urging, she agrees to stage the play in the Provincetown bar where Williams and Merlo met. In its construction, "Leading Men" is as intricately designed as a Lego kit. The pieces from which the novel is built snap together into a whole so redoubtably sound that by the time I finished reading it I almost believed John Horne Burns really had met Tennessee Williams in Portofino, that Anja Bloom really existed and that "Call It Joy" really was written by Williams rather than cannibalized from a "flawed short story" left over from Castellani's days as an M.F.A. student. Engineering may be the aspect of novel writing that deserves the most praise and gets the least, and Castellani is a first rate engineer. At its best, his novel not only exults in the historical synchronicities and proximities he has discovered but catches the reader up in its rapture.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
LONDON Seesaw markets, growing concerns about the stability of Europe's banks and a faltering economic recovery are dimming prospects that Britain will enact stricter banking regulation anytime soon. On Monday, a government appointed banking commission is expected to present its final recommendations on how to protect taxpayers from bearing the costs of any future bank collapses. The plan aims to separate a bank's deposit taking business from the riskier trading and investment banking operations, which would be allowed to fail should they run into trouble. But at a time of heightened economic uncertainty, the government of Prime Minister David Cameron has grown nervous about the proposed changes, said two government officials who declined to be identified because no final decision has been made. Mr. Cameron is concerned that the changes will drive up banks' financing costs and in turn limit their ability to lend to British businesses, which would threaten an already weak economy, the officials said. So even if the Independent Commission on Banking proposes far reaching changes, London is likely to delay their implementation until after the next election, planned for 2015, the officials said. "This is a political and not a financial thing now," said Simon Gleeson, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance. "What everybody hoped was that by the time we got to reforming banking regulation we'd have a more stable economy. But we don't and that's the biggest challenge." The British economy grew just 0.2 percent in the second quarter, and the Bank of England has cut its growth forecast for this year to 1.5 percent from 1.9 percent. The British proposal would make it considerably more expensive to raise capital for investment banking and would be much more painful for Britain's banks than the so called Volcker Rule in the United States. Under the United States approach, originally advocated in a stronger form by Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who served as an adviser to President Obama, banks' freedom to trade with their own capital and manage hedge funds would be limited. But they would still be able to borrow money economically because their balance sheets would remain unified. British banking executives, nervous that the new rules would increase their financing costs and threaten their credit ratings, have stepped up lobbying efforts in recent weeks. Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland would be the most affected by the new rules because they have large investment banking businesses and could see profit drop by a third, according to a research note by JPMorgan Chase. The chief executive of Barclays, Robert E. Diamond Jr., and his counterpart at R.B.S., Stephen Hester, have held lengthy discussions with the government, arguing in favor of the universal banking model, that is, leaving consumer and investment banking linked. They claimed this had helped their banks to withstand risks, according to a Treasury official who declined to be identified because the talks were private. In a preliminary report in April, the Independent Commission on Banking suggested limiting the use of consumer deposits to finance the investment banking operation by setting up a so called ring fence around the consumer operations. On Monday, the commission is expected to give more detail on exactly which businesses should be "ring fenced" and how strict the separation should be. As an example, banks could be restricted to using deposits only for personal loans and the purchase of government bonds. Angela Knight, the head of the British Bankers Association, an industry group, said the commission's proposals would weaken rather than strengthen the financial sector. "Ring fencing becomes unattractive to investors of all types as it reduces the benefits of diversification, gives borrowers a worse deal, and is inefficient from a capital, funding and operational perspective," she said. Among the biggest fears for banking executives is that the new rules would increase the financing costs of investment banking by implying the business would be allowed to fail. Interbank lenders, the executives argue, would demand higher rates in return for the higher risk. The banks' total financing costs could rise by about PS2 billion a year, according to a report by Citigroup analysts. Credit rating agencies are watching the moves closely. Moody's Investors Service said last month that the ratings of the biggest British banks were on review for a downgrade pending the commission's proposals. Markets, too, have taken notice. British banking stocks have lagged behind European rivals this year because of uncertainty about regulatory issues. Leigh Goodwin, an analyst at Citigroup, estimated that much of the PS20 billion to PS25 billion, or about 32 billion to 40 billion, in lost market value of the three largest banks over the past year was due to "perceived regulatory risk." The British financial services industry accounts for about 10 percent of Britain's economic activity and 4 percent of total employment, according to Ernst Young. The relative importance of the sector adds a pointed political dimension to the debate over banking regulation. The issue has already caused tensions within Britain's coalition government, pitting Mr. Cameron, who is willing to postpone or water down any new rules, against his business secretary, Vince Cable, who favors immediate changes. A member of the Liberal Democrats, the junior coalition partner, Mr. Cable last month accused banks of being "disingenuous in the extreme to use the current context to argue against reform." "Banks are in a way trying to create a panic around something which they know has got to happen," he added. But Mr. Cameron appears concerned that introducing stricter regulation now would only further threaten jobs and recovery, according to the officials. These concerns are backed by an Ernst Young report that estimated that tougher bank regulation could indirectly reduce economic growth by 0.3 percent, as higher financing costs for banks could limit their desire to lend.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
In recent weeks, Tucker Carlson, the conservative Fox News host, has challenged the Black Lives Matter movement, dismissed demonstrators as "criminal mobs," accused a Texas police chief of "sounding more like a therapist than a cop" and mocked a CNN children's special about racism that featured Elmo, the "Sesame Street" puppet. His comments have generated a harsh backlash. Critics have called Mr. Carlson's on air monologues incendiary and accused him of making racist remarks. Major advertisers, including the Walt Disney Company and Sandals, the vacation resorts, have fled, requesting that Fox News remove their ads from Mr. Carlson's 8 p.m. hour. Viewers, however, are tuning in. "Tucker Carlson Tonight" was seen by 4.2 million people on Monday, making it the most watched television program in the country that night, ahead of entertainment fare on the major networks. His show was the highest rated on Fox News last week, and he has pulled ahead of Sean Hannity, the network's usual ratings leader, in total viewers for June. Fox News's stars, including Mr. Carlson, are no stranger to advertising boycotts and denunciations from the left. But at a moment of deep national turmoil, prompted by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month, the response to Mr. Carlson offers another sign of the nation's deep political divide. Major American brands have recoiled from his program and celebrities like Padma Lakshmi have accused him of spreading "race baiting filth" even as many viewers remain enthusiastic. Mr. Carlson, a conservative pundit who previously hosted shows on CNN and MSNBC, has seized on the high Nielsen numbers as a sign that his message which warns about censorship from the left, and depicts the country's unrest as ominous and violent is resonating. "You are not alone," Mr. Carlson told viewers on Tuesday, noting that his Monday program had ranked first among "cable and broadcast news, entertainment and sports." "You may feel like you are," he continued. "Suddenly, your opinions qualify as crimes. Dare to say what you think at work and you will be fired in the middle of a recession. Write what you think online and you will be silenced by the big tech companies." But his remarks have not sat easily with Mr. Carlson's advertisers, including companies like Papa John's, Poshmark, Angie's List and the office furniture brand Vari, all of which have distanced themselves from "Tucker Carlson Tonight." T Mobile announced its defection in a memorable Twitter post from Mike Sievert, the company's chief executive, who wrote: "Bye bye, Tucker Carlson!" On Thursday, the fitness equipment company NordicTrack also said it would no longer advertise on Mr. Carlson's program. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "The show has almost no big name advertisers left right now," Kara Alaimo, a public relations expert who teaches at Hofstra University, said in an interview. "This is just not an issue you want to be on the wrong side of, if you're a mainstream brand." Fox News has said brands removed from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" typically have their ads run on other programs, and the network retains the revenue. Fox News also earns a significant portion of its income from subscription fees paid by cable providers, rather than spending by individual advertisers. Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who control Fox News, are usually reluctant to make changes at the network because of outside pressure. Last week, Mr. Carlson acknowledged his superiors' support: "We work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they're not intimidated. We're grateful for that." Since demonstrations began, Mr. Carlson has adopted a hard edge approach, encouraging President Trump to be more harsh, not less, in cracking down on protesters. The ad boycott intensified after Mr. Carlson, on June 8, said the unrest "is definitely not about black lives, and remember that when they come for you." (Fox News said the pronoun "they" referred to liberal leaders, not protesters.) This week, Mr. Carlson criticized police officials in Fort Worth for dropping charges for rioting. The police responded by saying that more serious criminal charges had not been dropped, but Mr. Carlson repeated his criticism, calling the department's actions "shameful." Though he enjoys Fox News's backing, Mr. Carlson, a longtime Washington resident, may be on the cusp of leaving his liberal leaning hometown. He recently put his Washington home up for sale, and has spent much of the quarantine at his houses in Florida and Maine. Through a spokeswoman, the host declined to comment about his plans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When the coronavirus kills, it attacks the lungs, filling them with fluid and robbing the body of oxygen. In chest X rays, clear lungs turn white, a sign of how dangerously sick patients are. But earlier this month, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, a federal health agency, abruptly notified companies and researchers that it was halting funding for treatments for this severe form of Covid 19, the disease caused by the virus. The new policy highlights how staunchly the Trump administration has placed its bet on vaccines as the way to return American society and the economy to normal in a presidential election year. BARDA has pledged more than 2.2 billion in deals with five vaccine manufacturers for the coronavirus, compared with about 359 million toward potential Covid 19 treatments. But the shift in strategy also shows that the administration is backing away from the relatively modest funding it has provided so far for treatments that address the severe lung ailments, while continuing support for antiviral therapies that could treat people earlier in the course of the disease. The decision to suspend investment in lung treatments blindsided academic researchers and executives at small biotech companies, who said they spent months pitching their proposals to BARDA, which is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Some clinicians and bioethicists contend that BARDA should continue supporting research into treatments for lung conditions, while other experts contend the policy is a sensible way to spend limited federal dollars. Vaccines are universally considered the world's best hope for stopping the virus, but scientists and doctors treating patients hospitalized with Covid 19 caution that there is no guarantee a vaccine will be ready by the end of the year, as President Trump has promised. And no treatment or therapy has been proved to prevent the disease. Most of the patients admitted to the intensive care unit for Covid 19 at Northwell Health in New York, a system of 23 hospitals at the epicenter of the region's epidemic this spring, have developed severe respiratory distress, said Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, the regional director of critical care medicine at Northwell. "You're going to need other forms of treatments for a lot of those people, and I feel like that's where there's going to be a gaping hole," she said. Even if a vaccine is approved, she and others noted, people will still get sick from the virus because not everyone will get vaccinated, or the effectiveness of a vaccine may wane in months, or it may not work in older people or those with compromised immune systems. Thousands of people die from the flu in the United States each year even though there is a vaccine and treatments for that virus. "Everybody deserves some piece of the pie," said Dr. Arthur L. Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Medical Center. "It's public money, so you do have to pay attention to the needs of all." But other experts said that BARDA's shift away from lung treatments made sense, given that vaccines or broad based antiviral drugs would do the most to stop the global spread of the virus, and experimental treatments like stem cell therapies are far from proved. "It's not unreasonable, what they are doing," said Dr. Luciana Borio, who oversaw public health preparedness for the National Security Council in Mr. Trump's White House and had been the acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration under former President Barack Obama. "It's important to bring discipline to the process because the resources are finite, both financial and human." In interviews, six company executives and academic researchers who had begun the application process with BARDA said they had not heard back from the agency, or had been told their research area was not a priority. An executive for one biotech company, who did not want to be named because he did not want to jeopardize future federal contracts, said the company had been in the final stages of negotiating a deal with the agency when it suspended applications. That partnership is now on hold. In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, Elleen Kane, said, "To make the most of potential partners' time and efforts and to communicate clearly about investment areas, we are only leaving open areas of interest that are of highest priority for H.H.S. right now." She said the agency was setting up a clinical trial network to test multiple treatments, a better approach than "supporting expensive clinical trials for each product separately." However, BARDA has not yet announced any such trials, and Ms. Kane said, "How such a clinical trial would be run is in early planning stages." Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. The government funding is prized by companies because it helps them get through the so called valley of death the phase when a product has shown promise, but can fail because of a lack of investment in late stage clinical trials and manufacturing. Many vaccines and treatments for infectious diseases like Ebola and the coronavirus don't have a viable commercial market, so companies rely instead on federal funding. In the case of the coronavirus, Congress has allocated more than 6.5 billion to BARDA to develop vaccines, treatments and other products to address the pandemic. The goal is to speed them through development by financing clinical trials and ramping up manufacturing at the same time, a financial risk that companies normally don't take because they don't know if their products will work. Many of the companies hoping for support from BARDA were developing treatments that seek to dampen the immune system, calming the "cytokine storm" that can wreak havoc on patients with severe Covid 19. "It seems that BARDA is shutting the door on that whole area of medicine," said Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, a stem cell researcher at Duke University. She had asked the agency in early April to support a small clinical trial on the use of stem cells in patients with Covid 19 who had acute respiratory distress syndrome and said she had received only an acknowledgment that her proposal had been received. Representatives for academic researchers and smaller biotech companies contend that BARDA should disperse money to a wider variety of projects. Clinical trials for treatments, rather than vaccines, can move more quickly because the course of Covid 19 is relatively short, compared with testing a vaccine on thousands of healthy volunteers, and waiting for them to get infected. Like a vaccine, an effective drug that renders the virus less deadly could allow society to return to normal more quickly. They also noted that many of the biggest pharmaceutical breakthroughs like the polio vaccine or immunotherapy for cancer originated in academic medical centers or biotech start ups, not from large drug companies. H.H.S. said in its statement that it was working with companies of all sizes. "We think failing to focus on lung repair is not wise," said Janet Marchibroda, the president of the Alliance for Cell Therapy Now, a coalition of academic institutions, biotech companies and health systems that favor more research into cell therapies. "The majority of patients who are in hospitals are dying because of lung injury." The coronavirus outbreak has killed more than 118,000 people in the United States, and those who die often succumb to respiratory failure after the lungs become unable to provide the body with enough oxygen. In some cases, people's immune systems go into overdrive and cause critical damage. On Tuesday, scientists at the University of Oxford reported that a cheap, commonly used steroid, dexamethasone, reduced deaths of patients on ventilators by a third, a hopeful discovery. An experimental drug, remdesivir, has been shown to have moderate success in speeding patients' recovery in early trials. But others say additional treatments will be needed, because no one drug will work in all patients. BARDA has already announced deals with some companies that are testing existing drugs in patients with severe Covid 19, including 25.1 million to Genentech for its rheumatoid arthritis drug Actemra, and 16.4 million to Regeneron for its drug, Kevzara, another remedy for rheumatoid arthritis. Researchers and companies are also testing stem cell therapies, which are also believed to dampen the immune system. One company, Mesoblast, is testing its stem cell product in patients with severe Covid 19 as part of a clinical trial supported by an arm of the National Institutes of Health. Another company, Athersys, has also begun testing stem cells in infected patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome, a condition that can be caused by other viruses or illnesses. A previous small trial of patients with A.R.D.S. that tested Athersys's stem cells produced positive results, and the company said in March that BARDA had designated its product to be a "highly relevant" treatment for Covid 19. A spokesman for Athersys declined to comment on the status of the application. The chief executive of another company, CytoSorbents Corporation, said its BARDA application to finance a randomized clinical trial was now in limbo. The company makes a device, the CytoSorb, which aims to filter out the excess cytokines that are secreted by the immune system when it becomes overactive. Although the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for the device to be used in Covid 19 patients, the company's chief executive, Dr. Phillip Chan, said the CytoSorb should undergo testing in a rigorous clinical trial. "We are at war with Covid 19, with no cure, and a critical need to continue funding and support of the most promising therapeutic options," he said in an email. "Among the highest priorities," Dr. Collins said, are immune modulators and anticoagulants, used to prevent troublesome blood clots that are sometimes associated with Covid 19. The goal, he said, is to find treatments "as soon as possible for the people who are really sick." He said officials were in the "very advanced stages" of planning studies that would get underway in the coming weeks. But some researchers said that while N.I.H trials were welcome, BARDA's assistance was critical because it provided money to scale up manufacturing and help smaller companies and researchers bring their products to market. "There's not other government funding that really fills that gap," said Dr. Kurtzberg, of Duke University.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Last week, two high profile San Francisco health start ups began marketing at home coronavirus kits that let people collect their own saliva samples or oral throat swabs and then send the specimens to commercial labs to be tested for the virus. The start ups, Carbon Health and Nurx, each said they were preparing to offer thousands of the kits in the coming weeks. By Friday afternoon, the Nurx site said its kits had "reached capacity for today" and promised more would be available for sale this week. But on Friday evening, the Food and Drug Administration issued an alert warning consumers that it had "not authorized any test" for the coronavirus that people could buy and administer at home. Carbon Health and Nurx subsequently suspended sales of their kits. As the coronavirus pandemic intensified across the country, the two companies and other start ups rushed to market collect your own specimen kits without rigorous published studies proving the effectiveness of at home swabbing for coronavirus testing. The dash to sell at home kits coincided with a push by the White House to promote rapid innovation in coronavirus testing by relaxing federal health regulations. Last Wednesday, President Trump announced that his administration was studying the possibility of introducing self swabbing on a mass scale an effort that could free up health providers to focus more on treating seriously ill patients and less on collecting specimens. Then on Monday, the White House appeared to overrule the F.D.A., saying that "self swabbing options" should be available to Americans this week. Tech giants and some of their top executives are also racing to help track the spread of the virus and rapidly increase testing. The Bill Melinda Gates Foundation is sponsoring research at major medical centers on at home kits. The studies are examining whether swabbing inside your nostrils with a short Q tip like wand at home could work as well for coronavirus testing as the medical grade specimens that health professionals collect an often uncomfortable process that involves pushing a long swab up through the nose to collect samples from the back of a patient's throat. "There are significant differences between these collection methods," Dr. Dan Wattendorf, director of innovative technology solutions at the Gates Foundation, said in recent comments on the foundation's site. "So it's essential for the F.D.A. to evaluate their relative performance through rigorous, well designed studies." The start ups were not marketing a novel method of testing for infectious diseases. At home kits have proved effective for other infections, such as gonorrhea. Founded in 2015, Nurx markets self swabbing kits and online consultations for sexually transmitted diseases. The start up, whose investors include the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Union Square Ventures, said it had worked with Molecular Testing Labs, its longstanding diagnostic testing provider, to develop its coronavirus kits and was confident the tests were accurate. Executives at Carbon Health, which offers telemedicine consultations as well as in person medical care at its own clinics, said it had decided to offer self administered sampling kits after doctors there treated some of the first coronavirus patients in California and ran into obstacles getting them tested. It worked with Curative, a three month old start up, to develop a saliva test for the virus. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. "Having a saliva sample that can be mailed back and that is just as accurate, or nearly as accurate, as the nasal or the throat swab was very attractive to us," said Dr. Caesar Djavaherian, the medical director of Carbon Health. Another San Francisco start up, Forward, which runs health care clinics using a health club like membership model, announced last week that it was offering self swabbing kits on a limited basis to members it determined to be at high risk for the virus. Forward's investors include Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump's adviser and son in law. But public health and laboratory medicine experts cautioned that tests based on self swabbing might not be accurate, noting that many of the at home kits did not adhere to current medical standards of care. The Nurx kit uses oral swabs of the throat, the Forward kit uses inner cheek swabs, and the Carbon Health kit uses saliva. "That sounds to me like a really terrible idea," Dr. Sheldon Campbell, associate director of the Yale School of Medicine's Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, said of collecting saliva samples at home. "There is concern, in this outbreak emergency setting, that good labs will cut corners and that bad labs will spring up to exploit the opportunity to make a quick buck." Last month, the F.D.A. issued guidance for the pandemic allowing accredited commercial labs to develop and perform tests for the coronavirus as long as they applied for an emergency use authorization from the agency within 15 days of initiating testing. Carbon Health, Forward, Nurx and Everlywell, another start up that promoted at home kits, each said last week that they were working with accredited labs that had received the F.D.A. emergency authorization. They also said the labs met federal standards for demonstrating the accuracy of their coronavirus tests. But on Friday, the F.D.A. clarified that the coronavirus testing guidelines for accredited labs did not apply "to at home testing, including self collection of samples to be sent to a clinical laboratory." Nurx and Forward said on Monday that they had suspended sales of their kits. In a statement, Carbon Health said it was discontinuing the at home kits and contacting the 50 people who had used them to schedule testing in its clinics. Everlywell said it was moving to provide its kits, which use the long swabs for nasopharyngeal testing, to health care providers and hospitals. Researchers working on the Gates sponsored nasal self swabbing study said they hoped to have results soon showing the efficacy of at home coronavirus kits. Among other things, the researchers are studying whether self administered nostril swabs pick up sufficient cells to produce accurate results. "One of the things we are trying to figure out is, how accurate is this nasal test going to be?" said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of pediatrics, health research and policy at Stanford University School of Medicine who specializes in infectious diseases. "If you are negative, how likely are you to be still infected?" On Monday, the F.D.A. said it believed that, for those people who are exhibiting coronavirus symptoms, nostrils swabs "that access just the front of the nose rather than the depth of the nasal cavity" could be used for testing. That would allow people to collect their own samples for testing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
SHAQ LIFE 9 p.m. on TNT. "Look, I'm not one to be narrating TV shows," Samuel L. Jackson says while narrating this TV show. "But when Shaq calls, I answer." See Shaquille O'Neal sniff a scented candle, toss pizza dough, buy shoes, D.J. and more in this new reality series, which gives Shaq's admirers a window into his remarkably busy life as a retired professional basketball player and an opportunity to live vicariously through him. Sprinkled throughout are pieces of insight from Shaq, who in the first episode gives a young man advice on attending an eighth grade dance. "Listen," he says. "If the dance starts at 8, show up at 8:15." ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP (2019) 7:20 p.m. on Starz. Rotten flesh and nostalgia fly across the screen in "Zombieland: Double Tap," the latecomer sequel to 2009's "Zombieland." Like the first movie, this violent comedy sees Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Abigail Breslin and Emma Stone butchering the undead in creative ways this time with the help of Rosario Dawson, Luke Wilson, Zoey Deutch and other newcomers. "The whole movie is very 2009," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, "which is amusing and puzzling and possibly kind of a relief, given what 'very 2019' might look like."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
IN her senior year at New York University, Rachel Bishop left dorm living behind. Since then, she has always paid under 1,000 a month sometimes well under for rent. Ms. Bishop, 25, started out as one of five roommates in a two bedroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two roommates doubled up in each of the bedrooms, and the fifth had "a little closet under the stairs sort of room," she said. But the space was uncomfortably tight, leading to "a variety of conflicts," she said. Her next place was a tiny two bedroom shared with a friend. The backyard overlooked an art gallery. During outdoor shows, "we would hang out and watch, and they would hand us beers on the fire escape," Ms. Bishop said. "I thought it was great because it was O.K. for us to have parties and play our music." The downstairs neighbors were in a band. So she and her friend moved to a small railroad apartment with no bathroom sink. The problem there: The downstairs neighbors "were really crazy about noise," Ms. Bishop said. Last year, she and her friend moved again, this time to a two bedroom in a three unit building on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. They paid 900 and 700 respectively. Ms. Bishop had a quick bicycle commute to her job in Gowanus at the League of Young Voters, a small nonprofit where she has worked since she interned there as a student. Ms. Bishop and her friends like to play guitar and sing, though they try to refrain from doing so late at night. "It seems no matter how hard we try not to be incredibly noisy, we end up making more noise than our neighbors like," she said. In Red Hook, "even a small social gathering over for dinner was a problem. That was really frustrating." This summer, her friend announced plans to move to California. And her brother, Scott Groffman, a student at N.Y.U., decided to leave the dorms. So the siblings, who are from Dutchess County, N.Y., and were given different last names by their parents, teamed up to hunt for a place together. "We specifically tried to find a place that was in a big building with thicker walls," Ms. Bishop said. "When there's a lot of people in a building, people are a little more accepting when a party happens. My friends have parties without their neighbors getting mad." Ideally, she joked, she would live above a bar. Ms. Bishop focused on Prospect Heights and Crown Heights, where plenty of friends were moving. Those neighborhoods are "becoming a natural extension of Bushwick for people in their early 20s who are moving for cheap rent and a good community," she said. She pinpointed a few blocks near Eastern Parkway between Washington and Franklin Avenues that "are both really developed streets with a bunch of different bars and restaurants." Mr. Groffman, 20, was glad to follow his sister's lead. "She had gotten apartments in New York many times before, and I sort of trusted her judgment," he said. A two bedroom with an appealingly low rent of 1,700 was on Franklin Avenue above Dutch Boy Burger. "It was a really perfect location, on the same block as bars and next to a big coffee shop," Ms. Bishop said. "Living on a noisy street is a bonus for us," she added, with residents there presumably used to a fair amount of racket. Mr. Groffman approved of the location. "I immediately wanted to go to every restaurant we saw on that street," he said. But the apartment was smaller than they preferred. "We would be willing to be fairly crowded," Mr. Groffman said, but they had their limits: any friends staying over would have to sleep in the kitchen. Nearby was another place, also for 1,700. "We couldn't figure out why it was so cheap at all," Ms. Bishop said. "It was really nice. It had a separate eat in kitchen." She asked the agent, Daniel Craig of D'Andrea Craig Realty in Carroll Gardens, about the low price. It was the layout, he said. The apartment had a long hall with three bedrooms at one end, one of which could be used as a living room. "Those rooms are pretty small," Mr. Craig said. "They are probably 8 by 10. The management company thought they would have a hard time renting it." The two didn't mind a few extra steps to reach the kitchen and bathroom. "A layout never even occurred to us as something that could be weird about an apartment," Mr. Groffman said. Happy and relieved, the siblings signed on for a year. "To each his own," Mr. Craig said. "They loved it and thought it was a great setup, but nine out of 10 people wouldn't have liked it." They arrived in midsummer, paying a one month broker fee. Ms. Bishop's room has no closet, but there are two large hall closets and an enormous kitchen pantry. Mr. Groffman's windows face an alley, but lamps easily took care of the lack of light. Mr. Groffman considered moving in his drum set so he could practice at home, but his sister nixed that idea. A friend, however, found a drum on the street. They hauled it inside to use as a table, though "we bang on it sometimes if we are playing guitar," Ms. Bishop said. On occasion, they have been subjected to music in the wee hours. Closing the windows or running the air conditioners solved that problem. "We consider it a trade off," she said. "If our neighbors make noise, that means we get to make noise." They have only one problem so far, with their front door. It slams shut and the sound "sort of resonates in the hallway, which has tiles," said Mr. Groffman, who learned to close it quietly. He recently left for a semester abroad in Prague. Friends are staying in his room in the meantime. No complaints about parties have been received.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
"Hey! Lucas, right?" I heard a voice as I walked around the Gifford Park Neighborhood Market, a compact but lively farmers' market that was a quick walk from the room I was renting on Cass Street in Omaha. The voice belonged to Alex O'Hanlon, whom I'd met just a couple of days earlier at a donation based fermentation workshop she had led at City Sprouts, a local organization with a large community garden that promotes health and seeks to improve food quality in the community. Alex and I chatted, and I shared some tamales I'd bought from a market vendor. Remembering my name and saying hello was maybe a small gesture for Alex, but as an out of towner, I was impressed. But I wasn't really surprised that the locals were friendly in Omaha, the biggest city in Nebraska, located about halfway between Sioux Falls, S.D., and Kansas City, Mo. What surprised me during a recent four day trip was how big the city seemed. I'm not talking about surface area: Omaha, in addition to its famous zoo, has a progressive sensibility that places its good restaurants, live music scene and diverse entertainment options on par with cities many times its size. And it's worth a visit for any curious traveler who, like me, is keen on saving money. My Airbnb host, Orenda, was accommodating when a flight cancellation led me to arrive a day later than expected (my private room with bath was 41 a night). She and her partner, both musicians, gave me some recommendations for activities in the area, and let me use their driveway for the car I'd rented through Turo. This was the first time I had used Turo, a service that operates something like Airbnb and lets private citizens list and rent out their own cars online. The high rates from the national agencies made me get past my trepidation of renting from a total stranger, and I picked a Hyundai Accent from a woman named Stephanie for 33 a day. Luckily, Stephanie was an old hand and she made the pickup and drop off of the car seamless. One difference with Turo is that there are frequently limits on the number of miles you can drive your rental (300 in my case) be careful not to exceed your maximum, or you'll pay an extra fee. I also made good use of the public bus system, which I found to be a reliable way of making short trips. I bought a book of 10 rides ( 12.50) at a local supermarket, and set out to see the city. My first stop was at Artifact, a store that specializes in handmade aprons and tote bags. The Omaha based brand, which got its start on Etsy, makes its products locally. I was even encouraged to peek into a large area behind the showroom to watch some items being sewn and assembled. They're not exactly for shoppers on a budget, however: Some run well over 100, so I picked up a locally made bar of eucalyptus and rosemary soap from Benson Soap Mill ( 6). The nearby Joslyn Art Museum, just south of Creighton University, was a logical next stop: The only thing better than a world class art collection is a free world class art collection. The Joslyn's collection includes exceptional examples of work from the ancient world, Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, modern and contemporary art, and pieces inspired by the American West. The museum also made very effective use of multimedia in one of the first exhibits I saw. Using a small touch screen, visitors can watch an examination of a Madonna and Child triptych, painted by an unknown artist, that carefully explores the work, section by section, explaining its style, composition and symbolism. It explains how the museum came to deduce that the painting was likely done in the early 16th century by a follower of the Flemish artist Jan Gossaert. All in all, a fascinating and educational whodunit for a painting I might otherwise have overlooked. Head upstairs for the American Indian art collection, with artifacts like ration ticket bags and medicine pouches from the Ute and Sioux tribes, as well as work like the pictograph based "Horse Sense (for advice and council)" by the New Mexican artist Jaune Quick To See Smith. El Museo Latino ( 5 admission) features Hispanic and Latino art and history and also serves as a cultural center. A larger than life textile exhibit from the Mexican artist Marcela Diaz was particularly enjoyable, and included a comically large hammock woven from coconut fibers. Some exceptionally beautiful prints were also on display, like Gabriel Macotela's "Ruinas de la Independencia" and Manolo Roldan's "Fragile." I won't spend too much time singing the praises of the Omaha Zoo, which has been one of Omaha's major tourist draws for decades, but I can't leave it out because it is too good to miss, especially if you have children. The minute you enter the gate ( 21.95 for adults, 15.95 for children) and see the awe inspiring geodesic Desert Dome, you know you're in for a treat. Don't miss the primates, particularly the Western Lowland gorillas and Diana monkeys, as well as the lemur enclosure: Red Ruffed lemurs are running free, sidling up close enough to touch (but don't). To experience nature in a slightly different way, head farther south to the Fontenelle Forest Nature Center, on the Nebraska Iowa border. The serene forest ( 11 admission), along the Missouri River, has miles of trails of varying degrees of difficulty for those looking for a healthy hike. Don't miss the Raptor Woodland Refuge, where the center rehabilitates injured birds of prey. On my visit, Rusty, a red tailed hawk suffering from a gunshot wound, and Minerva, a great horned owl that suffered two broken wings after a car hit her, both seemed to be recovering admirably. Omaha's Old Market area, a charming concentration of repurposed buildings over a century old, is worth a quick visit. Once the home wholesale and retail grocers in the city, there are now art galleries, shops and restaurants lining the brick streets. I parked my car in a 1 an hour lot and stopped for an iced tea at Urban Abbey, which might best be described as a coffeehouse of worship, as it combines both a church and a coffeehouse. There are modern church services in the shop's warm, open space ("The World According to Mister Rogers" is the name of one sermon series) and part of my purchase ( 2.50 for a mango peach iced tea) went to benefit Nebraska Appleseed, an organization that supports immigrant rights. I wondered if activism with a decidedly progressive bent struggled to thrive in a state as red as Nebraska, and I asked Eithne Leahy, an Omaha native who was working behind the counter. "It sort of works," she said. "There's lots of great work being done on a grass roots level with nonprofits and churches. But with the government ..." She paused. "Not so much." There's as much to do in Omaha at night as there is during the day. A hip hop variety night at the Reverb Lounge, hosted by D.J. Houston Alexander, was a great place to kick back with an Old Style beer ( 3.50) and enjoy music by local artists. Brothers Lounge, with carpeting and a fireplace, had a pleasingly dingy atmosphere that went well with the 1 bag of Gardetto's and 4 Pyramid apricot ale I purchased. I snacked and listened to a couple of bands ( 5 cover) that were playing that evening: The dreamy, synth heavy Rogue Moon, and Media Jeweler, a four piece outfit that I can best describe as Weezer meets Frank Zappa. While I only caught the tail end of their show, I thoroughly enjoyed Dent May, a Los Angeles based band playing at the Slowdown ( 12). Their song "Born Too Late" was both pop y and wistful; I liked it so much, I bought a band T shirt. But little could compare to Hard Candy Omaha ( 20), a drag show hosted by the Max, a gay club on Jackson Street downtown. In a sauna like room jam packed with people, the evening's M.C. introduced a series of impeccably dressed performers who lip synced, vogued and cartwheeled down a short runway to different popular songs (and the dollar bills of appreciative audience members). Finally, the M.C. gave the crowd what it had eagerly been awaiting. "Are you ready for something thin, white and salty?" he asked. The crowd roared with enthusiasm as the evening's headliner, Miz Cracker, a popular drag performer who was on the reality series RuPaul's Drag Race, came onstage to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and blew the roof off. Nourishment is needed after any good night out, and Omaha proved more than up to the challenge. Steak is synonymous with the city, but good steak isn't cheap. Fortunately, there are a number of good steakhouses with reasonably priced lunchtime options. The Drover is one, a dimly lit, cavernous restaurant with a very tasty seven ounce, whisky marinated sirloin ( 15.95). Johnny's Cafe, opened in 1922, greets diners with a vaguely intimidating, elaborately wrought set of metal front doors. Two long, pointed steer horns that act as handles foreshadow the meal to come. Johnny's is a relic from a bygone era: red leather booths, martinis and plenty of taxidermy adorning the walls. The lunch special, a 9.96 prime rib sandwich (so priced for the 96th anniversary of the restaurant) with fries and coleslaw, is tough to beat. Check out Farine and Four if you're after coffee the bright, spacious cafe with an open kitchen also served a mean 8 herring toast when I visited. Nearby Spielbound is a good option, too. A board game cafe with more than 2,000 games ( 5 for a day pass), it also serves coffee, beer and food. I stopped in for a good 3.75 hibiscus iced tea. On the slightly more upscale side of the dining spectrum, Yoshitomo in the Benson neighborhood made for a great sushi stop one afternoon during their weekday happy hour (4 to 6 p.m.). The yaki gindara, torched sablefish with yuzu miso ( 7.50), was particularly good. And then there's the Alpine Inn. It's tough to explain my immediate love for this magnificent, slightly off kilter establishment. Is it the outstanding fried chicken, hot and juicy on the inside with skin that shatters like the shell on a creme brulee? Or is it the outdoor platform where raccoons and cats gnaw on the discarded chicken bones and potato wedges?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Whether or not the coronavirus turns into a global pandemic, the outbreak is already infecting economies and financial markets around the world. While governments try to navigate the fine line between being prepared and setting off panic, the economic costs are growing as countries and communities try to control the spread of the disease. The hopeful narrative about 2020 heralding a modest rebound in global growth now lies in ruins. Europe stagnated and Japan's economy shrank in the last quarter of 2019, even as China and India were losing momentum. So this year was already off to a rocky start. Now, the coronavirus has put the world economy in survival mode. The spread of the virus is hurting travel, trade and supply chains worldwide. The Baltic Dry Index, a forward looking indicator of global trade, has fallen by half and oil prices are down by about a quarter so far this year. U.S. stock markets, after initially taking the epidemic's fallout in stride, are now experiencing a major sell off. Why were stock markets sanguine for weeks after the outbreak began, and why are they now in full blown panic mode? Financial markets are prone to large, sentiment driven swings that sometimes seem out of line with economic fundamentals. But the news of the last few days suggests that, rather than coming under control and being confined to China, the outbreak is spreading and could get far worse. Stock markets in the United States and elsewhere are reflecting this reassessment of the epidemic's future trajectory and the risks it poses. The notion of this outbreak being a short lived negative shock to global demand now looks unrealistic. It is not just spending on restaurants and travel that is suffering, but also investment by businesses while they wait for the uncertainty to be resolved. This will have long term effects on growth even if the outbreak proves short lived.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
"On the one hand, the supermarket is the most banal, mundane place," said Benjamin Lorr, the author of the new book, "The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket," standing in the produce aisle of a Trader Joe's in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, a short stroll from his apartment. "But sometimes," he continued, "I walk in and I feel like I'm tripping. I'm in this surreal experience of abundance and choice. It's like 'Alice in the Wonderland' for adults." You'll have to excuse Mr. Lorr, 41, if he feels an equal sense of awe and dread about the American supermarket. He just spent five years exploring the glorious veneer and dark underbelly of an American institution that, in its way, is as much a symbol of 20th century capitalism as Henry Ford's assembly line. His book, published this month, combines the muckraking approach of Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" with the wry travelogue approach of a Michael Moore movie. It is a first person journey through every conceivable link on the grocery supply chain. Along the way, he came to see upscale supermarkets like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods as temples of conscious consumerism, serving not just as a clubhouse for hyper informed foodies, but also a theater in which they can act out their putatively superior taste, education and virtue. As he expounded on how the supermarket is "an expression of how you value your body, and your relationship to mother earth," Mr. Lorr pushed his red grocery cart through aisles brimming with organic produce, fair trade coffee and quirky packaged items like kale gnocchi and fig butter. The Wonder Bread emporiums of the 1950s, he said, have morphed into the organic Edens of the present, and grocery shopping has become an exercise in self branding, an "escape hatch for those of us who had some bohemian leanings and natural fears of materialism." "You could consume the right food as an exemplar of your materialism, and exemplar of your moral virtue, as opposed to having the ostentatious Rolex," he added. As he weaved through the produce aisle amid shaggy young professionals wearing design forward masks, Mr. Lorr recalled seeing fellow yoga students "descend on Trader Joe's with maniacal glee" when he was reporting his 2012 book "Hell Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga," which peeled back the curtain on the sweaty, and at times abusive, Bikram yoga scene. "To me, it seemed like a stand in for the entire cult of food." He credited Joe Coulombe, who founded Trader Joe's in the 1960s, for shattering the idea that supermarkets could only thrive on mass market branded staples. Passing the egg cooler in the store, Mr. Lorr recounted how Mr. Coulombe would buy extra jumbo eggs that were actually better and cheaper, but most stores wouldn't touch because they were seasonal and sporadically available, and most grocery managers prized predictability above all. "It set off the idea of discontinuous products," Mr. Lorr said. "To some extent, Trader Joe's defined the grocery industry by its choices to march against the grain." One pitfall of being an educated consumer are the never ending ethical dilemmas: which is more damaging to the environment, farmed or fresh salmon? In his book, however, Mr. Lorr shows that ethical dilemmas exist at every level. Those days are gone. Because of deregulation and the drive to lower costs, Mr. Lorr said, truckers are now regarded by many companies as just another replaceable part. Some can barely eke out a living. "Trucking is a vampiric industry," Mr. Lorr said. "It preys off people's hope and converts that hope into debt." Some in store workers do not have it much better, he said. Supermarkets, like many other retailers, often strive for maximum efficiency by frequently adjusting employees' schedules. "Employees are kept around when they're needed, and then told to go home when they're not needed," he said. "And it results in tremendous uncertainty. You never know when you will be called in, so you can't get a second job, to supplement what ultimately was designed as a part time job. It ends up preventing things like child care, or just living a normal life." Things get tougher, and sometimes more cruel, with every step down the supply chain, Mr. Lorr found. As he paused in front of a seafood freezer, with its festively labeled bags of frozen shrimp, Mr. Lorr discussed the many ethical quandaries involving seafood, which Mr. Lorr saw firsthand, reporting from docks in Thailand. Mr. Lorr interviewed immigrants from Burma, some of them former prisoners forced to toil unpaid on fishing boats. One worker, identified in the book as Tun Lin, recalled watching his best friend beaten and tossed overboard when he became delirious from exhaustion. Others were whipped with stingray tails. But there is not much that Americans can do as consumers to improve working conditions abroad, Mr. Lorr said. "A boycott sounds compelling, but because of the volume and complexity of the supply chain, it's overly simplistic," he said. "There are so many good actors caught up with bad actors. Also, you boycott Thailand, or any country, and market pressures lead to the same problems cropping up somewhere else." He felt overwhelmed, but also awed, when he sneaked into a windowless, warehouse sized industrial egg farm in California, and saw thousands of chickens stacked in cages. "I walked away thinking, 'This is exactly the misery I expected," he said. "But it also wasn't a hellscape." More than anything, it seemed like an apt metaphor for the agricultural industrial complex that keeps our supermarket aisles stocked with an endless array of grocery options at the lowest possible prices. "I thought, 'This is what it looks like to feed seven billion people,'" Mr. Lorr said. "The human project has reached an absurd level, and our food supply reflects that absurdity." He added: " I had eggs the next morning."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Emerson Collective, the organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in The Atlantic magazine, with full ownership possible in the coming years. After that, Emerson Collective may purchase Mr. Bradley's remaining interest. "While I will stay at the helm some years, the most consequential decision of my career now is behind me: Who next will take stewardship of this 160 year old national treasure?" Mr. Bradley, 64, wrote in a note to employees. "To me, the answer, in the form of Laurene, feels incomparably right." The leadership of The Atlantic, including Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief; Bob Cohn, the president; and Hayley Romer, the publisher, will remain unchanged and will continue to run the publication's daily operations.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The face is everything. From the very first shot, tight and merciless, Charlotte Rampling's pale, stricken countenance sets the tone of "Hannah" and dominates virtually every moment thereafter. By the end, we feel so wrung out it takes a second or two to realize that very little has happened. This is partly because the movie, with implacable sterility, gradually nudges its title character toward a threatened tipping point. Details are sparse and dialogue scant as Hannah, an older resident of an unidentified Belgian city, sees her husband off to prison for an unspecified (but, eventually, horribly clear) crime. Later, she will feed her dog, water her plant and attend an acting class as, one by one, social and familial connections are cruelly severed. Her husband's actions have built a wall around them both.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A species of highly venomous sea snake that made rare appearances on two California beaches in recent months has also been washing up thousands of miles away in Australia. Beachgoers reported seeing several of the yellow bellied sea snakes, or Pelamis platura, which lead entirely aquatic lives usually in tropical waters, about 200 miles south of Sydney after a spell of stormy weather. Ross Sadlier, a reptile researcher at the Australian Museum, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the snakes were most likely weakened by the rough seas. The sightings in California, where the appearance of the snake is far more unusual, have also been linked to weather patterns.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
New York's Armory Show, opening on Thursday, starts the spring culture season. But for those who can't (or won't) trek to Piers 92 and 94 on the Hudson River, where winds are still wintry, may we suggest picking up one of the season's coffee table books about design, art and artfulness through the decades? For starters, "John Richardson: At Home" (Rizzoli, 65, 224 pp.), looks at the eight sumptuous spaces that the knighted Picasso biographer and art historian has occupied over his 95 years. Writers have been granted peeks into Sir John's cluttered interiors before, but this volume culls decades of his flocked wallpaper, chintz, and conversation worthy antiques and artworks (not just by Picasso). The abodes photographed by Francois Halard include a colonnaded chateau in the south of France and a downtown Fifth Avenue loft with 14 south facing windows, bought on the cheap in the 1990s. "Vitamin T: Threads Textiles in Contemporary Art" (Phaidon, 75, 304 pp.) explores a different corner of the art world: fiber art, a medium the editors Louisa Elderton and Rebecca Morrill say has historically been undervalued because it is relegated to the realm of "craft." It receives its due here, in a catalog of more than 100 artists working in textiles today. Be it Faith Ringgold's narrative quilts, Mona Hatoum's visceral "Hair Necklace" and "Stream" (hair stitched into toilet paper), or Grayson Perry's provocative and often political tapestries, there is much tactile work to discover. This year, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus a school that was committed to flattening any distinction between art and craft is celebrated in events from Chicago to Berlin. Tribute is also being paid in a facsimile edition of the Bauhaus Journal, Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy Nagy's periodical that was originally published from 1926 to 1931 (Lars Muller Publishers, 80, 412 pp.). The reissue packages all 14 issues into slipcased form, with 128 pages of additional commentary and a full English translation. Like the Bauhaus journal, Gio Ponti's Domus magazine charted the rise of modernism but with an Italian sensibility. The architect, designer and editor is the subject of a retrospective running through May 5 at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, and the catalog is a handsome chronological tribute ("Gio Ponti: Archi Designer," Silvana Editoriale, distributed by D.A.P., 75, 312 pp.). Designed from 1921 to 1978, Mr. Ponti's work ranged across practical objects like a cobalt fronted magazine rack and matching desk created for the Italian Cultural Institute and curiosities like the eighth floor auditorium pavilion peeking out from the top of New York's Time Life building. Though his most recognizable achievements Milan's slender Pirelli Tower, for instance (1958), or his sinuous Superleggera chair for Cassina (1957) are purely of their time, Mr. Ponti could be considered "the legitimate heir of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance," writes Olivier Gabet, the museum's director, who even describes him as "the Leonardo or Michelangelo in his field." And then, there was that particular brand of modernism that sought to project our home life as it might be lived in the future. "Home Futures: Living in Yesterday's Tomorrow" (Design Museum, distributed by D.A.P., 49.95, 308 pp.), the companion to an exhibition running through March 24 at London's Design Museum, explores how designers throughout the 20th century imagined the future and whether our 21st century domestic trappings matched their visions. "Are we fulfilling future predictions or, rather, are we just stuck in the past?" Eszter Steierhoffer, the museum's senior curator, asks in the introduction. Six scholarly essays grapple with this theme, but the real fun comes in illustrated pages of prototypes, models and fully realized gadgets. Included are RCA Whirlpool's 1959 Miracle Kitchen, with its radio controlled vacuum cleaner and perambulating dishwasher; Joe Colombo's 1972 "Total Furnishing Unit," which ingeniously compacted a bed, refrigerator, TV and more into one piece of furniture; and Enzo Mari's 1974 "Autoprogettazione" manual offering 19 do it yourself furniture plans that could be assembled with just wood and nails.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Three decades ago, when Mick Fowler climbed the north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, he used crampons and ice axes to haul himself up sheer walls of snow and ice. Nowadays, during a hot summer, "you'll find virtually no snow and ice on its face none," he said. "It's a huge change over the last 20 to 30 years." Like Mr. Fowler, mountaineers around the world find themselves forced to adjust to a warming world. Routes that were icy or glaciated in the middle part of the past century, when the world's highest peaks were being conquered for the first time, are turning into unstable and unappetizing rock. "Almost every area and route in every range have been affected," said Jeff Jackson, editor of Rock and Ice , a climbing magazine. The main issue, scientists and climbers say, is that as permafrost, ice and glaciers melt, they leave areas of teetering rock. Some rock formations high in the mountains have essentially been held together by ice, which "acts as a glue," said Christian Schluchter, a professor at the University of Bern's Institute of Geological Sciences . When the glue disappears something he has seen happening over the past 15 years in the Alps the formations can collapse, especially if they are initially weak. Retreating glaciers are a problem because they leave rocks and other sediments that are poorly compacted and of different sizes, which can make footing treacherous and lead to rockfalls, said John H. Shaw, chairman of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at Harvard University. Mr. Shaw said that as meltwater runs to the foot of a shrinking glacier, it "can make fissures and crevices more common" and indeed some climbers have noticed more dangerous crevasses. Glaciers are retreating in many high ranges, including the Himalayas and the Alps (though the Alps are having an unusually snowy year so far), and scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say they expect the trend to accelerate this century. Recent reports from the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, which is based in Katmandu, Nepal, indicate that glaciers in the country have shrunk considerably in recent decades and are also fragmenting. The speed of the changes has amazed and dismayed many climbers. Mostly, routes are becoming harder, according to Michael Kennedy, the editor in chief of Alpinist magazine. Among regions that he said climbers were especially worried about are the Alps, the Canadian Rockies and the Peruvian mountains, as well as many Himalayan areas. Some professional climbers are also concerned that amateurs may attempt routes that have become unacceptably dangerous because they are not up to date on the changes. David Breashears, who has climbed Mount Everest five times since 1983 and heads GlacierWorks , a nonprofit climate change awareness group, said significant changes had occurred on the icefall just above the Everest base camp. Sherpas and other guides have reported that it is "getting much harder to maintain the ladders and the ice screws and the fixed ropes in the icefall," Mr. Breashears said. The ice screws, which help anchor things in place, now melt out earlier in May, he said. Some mountaineers say that a changing climate affects not only the climbs themselves, but also climbers' ability to reach remote sites in the first place. Mr. Fowler, who is president of the Alpine Club in London , said that during a trip to the Himalayas, his party had been delayed for three days because of rock slides that the locals said were unprecedented. Because the horses could not carry their burdens over the slides, the men had to unload them, carry the supplies across themselves and then reload the horses. The slides were set off by an extreme monsoon season this summer, Mr. Fowler said, and since the group had only 30 days in Nepal, further delays could have prevented them from reaching the mountain they had come to climb. "If the landslide problems had continued all the way to base camp, we would never have made it," Mr. Fowler said. Climate change is sparing the highest altitudes to some extent, some climbers say. "In my experience, the higher you go, the less evidence you see of climate change simply because it gets much colder," said Steve House , a top American climber. "The transition zones, where the ice is newly melting, is where the most danger exists." Whereas at 5,500 meters, or 18,000 feet, in the Himalayas the retreating glaciers are leaving slopes of unstable rock, "once you get about 23,000 feet you're in a land of eternal winter," Mr. House said. The International Center for Integrated Mountain Development has also found that glacial retreat is less significant at higher elevations, said David J. Molden, the institute's director general. Even so, Mr. Breashears of GlacierWorks said he had noticed changes on the traverse leading to the Hillary Step not far below the Everest summit. And in May 2004, when he was about 8,000 meters up Everest, he saw an unexpected sight running water. "It was astonishing to see running water that high," he said. In the Alps, recent rockfalls have rendered some historic routes inaccessible. On Le Petit Dru, a peak in the French Alps that was first climbed in 1879, the collapse of the west face in recent years has obliterated the challenging American Direct Route, first established in 1962, as well as another route established 10 years earlier, Mr. House said. This autumn, a group including Mr. House climbed the mountain's north face for a film project. While driving down the valley after the climb, "we heard a huge noise, looked up and saw a massive cloud of dust pouring off the face," Mr. House said. A pile of rocks had plunged off the peak. Had the rockfall happened a day earlier, "It was clear that we all would have been killed," said Mr. House, who links the problems at Le Petit Dru to global warming. Scientists like Mr. Schluchter cautioned that not every rockfall could be attributed to the climate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
The remaining candidates should emulate his fighting words and try to win him to their side. Julian Castro Is Worth More Out of the Presidential Race Than He Was in It Julian Castro is the latest Democrat to drop out of the 2020 presidential race. He will probably receive more press coverage today and tomorrow than he has on any other day since he announced his candidacy. But unlike other Democrats who have thrown in the towel, Mr. Castro should continue to have a significant impact on the presidential campaign. As the race's only Latino, extremely well versed in policy and comfortable on the stump and the debate stage, Mr. Castro is in a unique position: If and when he endorses one of his former rivals, he will be a huge asset to the fortunate candidate. This is not because Mr. Castro, a former San Antonio mayor best known nationally for being a housing secretary in the Obama administration, has a large base of voters to throw anyone's way if he did, he wouldn't have been dropped from the last two Democratic debates. Nor is it because he has a big roster of donors to pass on to the candidate who wins his backing. It's because Mr. Castro was the deftest communicator among all the 2020 contenders and probably one of the deftest communicators in presidential politics over the last few decades. In particular, he was skilled at making policy arguments with a smile while simultaneously doing the unpleasant but very necessary rhetorical wounding of those he tangled with. Mr. Castro's performances this year recalled the ruthlessness, back in the Republican primary debates of 2007, of Rudolph Giuliani's "sanctuary mansion" charge against Mitt Romney, the effect of which was crushing for Mr. Romney. Remember how Beto O'Rourke entered the first Democratic debate to high expectations? Remember how Mr. Castro thoroughly gutted him in their exchange during that debate over unlawful immigration and left him basically for dead? Even if you weren't a fan of Mr. O'Rourke, you may have cringed as you watched it. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Mr. Castro also went after Joe Biden effectively in the third Democratic debate in Houston. Lots of viewers thought him impudent or underhanded for asking Mr. Biden, "Are you forgetting what you said just two minutes ago?" Mean though it might have been, it put a spotlight on Mr. Castro's skills as an attack dog and it hurt Mr. Biden. This political knife wielding is a skill that the other Democratic candidates haven't mastered, or even much tried to develop. As we saw in the last debate, Senator Amy Klobuchar can bring some fire when she wants to, but it doesn't look easy for her the way it did for Mr. Castro. Mayor Pete Buttigieg has shown he's able to seriously injure Senator Elizabeth Warren in particular, but it doesn't seem natural or comfortable for him. Where these candidates still aren't quite there, Mr. Castro proved himself to be a rhetorical hit man right out of the gate. Now he can put those skills to great use on behalf of whomever he chooses to endorse on TV as a surrogate, at town halls, at rallies, in post debate spin rooms, and indeed in debate prep. Usually, it doesn't work like this. An also ran who polled in low single digits and didn't bring in a ton of cash typically endorses a rival to signal party unity, and then disappears, making only the odd cable news appearance and maybe getting a speaking slot at the convention. But there is some, albeit imperfect, precedent. When former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and announced he was "all in" for Donald Trump, it suggested that maybe a thrice married businessman who did not seem particularly religious or socially conservative could gain traction with evangelicals. It also made it clear that Mr. Huckabee, Bill Clinton's successor in Arkansas, was ready and willing to speak out about the perceived sins of the Clintons, with devastating effect in areas where it counted most. Obviously, Mr. Castro and Mr. Huckabee are not political twins. But Mr. Castro could, say, add fire to Mr. Biden's team and underline his strength with nonwhite voters. Mr. Biden often comes off as more of a fun guy to have a (nonalcoholic) beer with than a political fighter. To win this contest, he may need to TKO a fellow Democrat or an incumbent Republican. Mr. Castro can help with that, especially should he become the vice presidential nominee, a job for which the main qualification is being a pull no punches attack dog. Whether it's Mr. Biden or someone else, Democrats will need a vice presidential nominee who relishes slicing, dicing, hitting, kicking and generally bloodying the other side up. President Trump will be tough to beat partly because he's not just another cookie cutter politician. He's deliberately and intensely mean, he throws his weight around, he hits incredibly hard over and over again, he does not abide by the rules, and above all, he does not care what anyone thinks. The Democratic nominee will need all the reinforcements he or she can get to put Mr. Trump in a bind. Yes, Mr. Trump enters his re election campaign with low approval ratings, scandals, and impeachment. But he still has the benefit of incumbency and he has gotten very, very far politically by refusing to play the game the way anyone else does. It would be unfair and inaccurate to put Mr. Castro and Mr. Trump on a par. But they do have two things in common. First, their zero damns given attitude. Second, their lack of interest in deferring to the supposed power players, the bright and shining stars, the elders in the room. Mr. Biden, Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Warren all need to work on reviving, or developing, that attitude much more. Getting Mr. Castro on their team now would be smart. Adopting more of his approach will be valuable in dispatching Democratic rivals nasty work though it is. It will also better prepare the Democratic Party for taking on an incumbent who will not go easily or quietly. Liz Mair ( LizMair), a strategist for campaigns by Scott Walker, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry, is the founder and president of Mair Strategies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
As Georgia election officials work to complete a recount of nearly five million ballots by Wednesday, President Trump is trying to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the process a hand recount that his own campaign demanded. In a series of tweets in recent days, Mr. Trump has alleged that vote counters have not been permitted to match signatures included with absentee ballots and has falsely claimed that this renders the recount meaningless. He has also claimed incorrectly that the inability to match the signatures is the result of a consent decree signed by the state. Here are the facts: In Georgia, where the initial count showed that Mr. Trump lost to President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. by several thousand votes, the recount process does not include the reverification of signatures included with absentee ballots. When absentee ballots are received by Georgia's election officials, the signature on the envelope is matched to other signatures that are part of the voter's record. Once that is verified, the envelope containing the signature is separated from the ballot to protect the secrecy of the voter's choice. Voters whose signatures do not match those on record are notified and asked for clarification.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A couple of weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund told the world that China was essentially doing O.K. It is "transitioning to a new normal," the I.M.F. said in its regular economic assessment, toward "slower but safer and more sustainable growth." The main risk, it argued, was that the Chinese government's push for economic reform might prove "insufficient." It seems this is a pretty big risk. Financial markets were shaken by China's decision to abruptly devalue its currency on Aug. 11, days ahead of the publication of the I.M.F. report. For all the I.M.F.'s assurances that this was a minor adjustment after a sharp appreciation of the currency until then, a welcome step that "should allow market forces to have a greater role in setting the exchange rate," investors seem to have taken it as an unsettling signal that the Chinese authorities are desperate. "The stumbling economy desperately needs a weaker currency," wrote Diana Choyleva of Lombard Street Research. "Is this the start of a more flexible currency regime or an old style devaluation?" On Tuesday, after a 22 percent drop in Shanghai's main stock market over three days, the Chinese government unleashed a new volley of measures to try to stop the slide, including cutting interest rates and reducing the reserve requirement on banks to stimulate lending again. This added to a rash of less orthodox interventions over the last few weeks, from encouraging borrowing to buy stocks to pledging billions to state controlled banks to lend to favored projects. The aggressive actions by the Chinese authorities signal their growing concern over the country's declining stock market and weakening economy. But, these sorts of moves are not quite what the I.M.F. means when it calls on China to transition from a single minded export machine into a more complex market economy powered by consumers. And this brings up a deep, lingering mistrust about Chinese economic governance: There is scant evidence from history that an authoritarian, undemocratic regime like China's could actually pull off the kind of transformation that it is being called on to make. "On average, autocratic nations grow faster than democratic ones up to around where China is now," said David Dollar, a former China hand at the World Bank and emissary to China at the Treasury Department who is now at the Brookings Institution. "But successful cases democratize at around this level of income per capita." Here's how that sounds in Beijing: Further economic change will inevitably lead to political instability not exactly the strongest incentive for government reform. A totalitarian regime may be good at deploying capital and labor to deliver raw economic growth. Yet autocracies are not good at fostering innovation and creativity, which rarely flourish where there is no freedom of thought or speech. While "make the economy grow and don't have demonstrations" might have worked in the past, a bureaucratic command and control structure will have a hard time handling the more complex demands of citizens in countries that reach middle income status. "It must rely more on innovation and provide more services to urban migrants," said Kenneth Lieberthal, an expert on China at the Brookings Institution. "It also has environmental constraints and a demographic profile that is shifting dramatically, with a rising proportion of dependents and a shrinking proportion of workers." Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. It's easy to get things wrong. Spending in rural areas on health and education has been dismal. For all the progress of urban schools, the low quality of rural education suggests China may face an acute shortage of skilled labor as it moves up the development ladder. China's succession of five year plans has given local government officials a single goal: Grow. This set them off on a binge of borrowing to build everything from roads to industrial parks, often generating lucrative kickbacks for local officials and their families. "Local governments have been very successful at generating investment and growth, contributing to China's extraordinary growth performance," Mr. Dollar wrote. "On the other hand, they have not put as much effort into public goods such as environmental protection or social services." To understand China's predicament, Mr. Dollar compared its experience with some of the best known stories of successful economic development of the last half century: Japan, which reached China's income level per capita in the early 1970s; Taiwan, which passed this threshold in the early 1980s; and South Korea, which hit it around 1990. What is most striking is not how all three countries followed quite similar paths, but how China's trajectory has diverged from the others'. Construction workers in the Yujiapu financial district, in Tianjin in northern China. The huge project has been described as a "ghost town." Household spending was always the main source of demand in all three, declining gradually to about 50 percent of gross domestic product when they were about as rich as China is today. Investment rates, which rose sharply in the early stages of their development, peaked at that time at around 35 percent of G.D.P. By these metrics, China's economy is upside down: Consumer spending by households is only 35 percent of the nation's G.D.P. one of the lowest levels in the world. Its investment rate nearly 50 percent of G.D.P. is extraordinarily high. And the productivity of this investment is dismal. To a large extent, its authoritarian command and control economic governance is to blame. Limits on legal migration to cities promoted an underclass of illegal urban workers toiling for meager wages, slowing consumer spending and hindering urban development. State owned monopolies plowed profits back into investment rather than into government spending on social welfare. Near zero interest rates on deposit accounts provided cheap loans to business but penalized savers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Credit...Celia Talbot Tobin for The New York Times CHARLESTON, S.C. The United States basked in the glory of a total eclipse on Monday, as the moon's shadow swept from the rocky beaches of Oregon to the marshes of South Carolina. Over an hour and a half, along a 70 mile wide ribbon of land, in tiny towns like Glendo, Wyo., and metropolises like Nashville, on dirt roads and superhighways, in modest yards and grand national parks, coastal lowlands and high mountains, the world appeared to hush for a few minutes as the moon stood up to the sun, perfectly blocking its fierce light except for the corona, the halo of hot gas that surrounds it. This was totality, an event that had not happened in the continental United States since 1979 and had not traversed such a broad swath of the country in nearly a century. Even humans who knew what was going on were left to hunt for words to describe the spectacle. "I'm in awe," whispered Ibeth Arriaga, who had traveled from Los Angeles to Depoe Bay, where, despite some fog, the moon's slip across the sun was just visible. The weather cooperated along much of the eclipse's path, which included parts of 14 states. Scientists in Salem, Ore., who had gambled that skies would be clear, were not disappointed. They shouted and hugged each other as totality ended, knowing that their cameras and other instruments many of them meant to gain a better understanding of the mysterious corona captured the eclipse under ideal conditions. After a morning of brilliant sunshine, a line of enormous clouds began to appear in the hour before totality. At 10 minutes to zero hour, all seemed lost despite chants from the crowd, pleading with the clouds to move. With five minutes to go, the clouds opened up to huge cheers only to close again. Then another brief break allowed a view of the first moments of totality before this window, too, closed. But being in Carbondale, where totality lasted a generous 2 minutes 38 seconds, paid off. Another gap in the clouds opened up, and the eclipsed sun was visible for a few more moments as totality ended. "That one little second was beautiful," said Masumi Iriye, from Urbana, Ill. Over the weekend and into Monday, people had flocked to places where they could see the full eclipse, clogging roads, filling hotel rooms and taxing local facilities in some places. Some paid nothing to see the spectacle; others paid a lot. For both, the experience proved overwhelming. A couple from Portland got out of their minivan along a guard rail on Interstate 5 in Oregon against advice from the state police, who worried that eclipse watchers might become highway hazards. Michael and Nancy Worstell, 71 and 73 years old, clutched each other, beamed and laughed as totality began. Trucks barreled past them, oblivious to the show in the sky. Mr. Worstell, who like his wife is deaf, explained by writing on a pad that he had always regretted that the last total eclipse in Portland, in 1979, took place under cloudy skies. He had no regrets this time. He lifted his two hands to his eyes and raised his index fingers to form a smile at the corners of his eyes. Then as totality ended and the sky brightened, the Worstells got back in the minivan and continued their drive north. Less than 20 minutes later, people who had paid 595 for a private viewing party on Snow King Mountain near Jackson, Wyo., stopped sipping their mimosas as totality arrived. A string trio that had been entertaining them put down their instruments. The crags of the Tetons blushed scarlet as if in the last robes of dusk, and a cheer raced through the crowd. People laughed uncontrollably and stammered as they stared dumbfounded at the midday darkness. Strangers hugged each other. For a brief moment everyone's attention was as aligned as the moon and the sun. "Magical," said Jennifer Ross, a violinist who had been playing for the crowd minutes before totality. She was trembling. "Honestly I was ready to not be that impressed, but it was spiritual." Ten minutes later in the ranch town of Glendo, population 204, some of the thousands of visitors watched from a beach on a reservoir as totality set in. An estimated 10,000 people gathered in Jefferson Barracks Park, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, well inside the totality zone. Shortly before the total eclipse, locusts began chirping in the trees, only to be drowned out by roars from the crowd. Terry McGarrigle of White Plains, N.Y., traveled to St. Louis to experience totality firsthand. "You can read about it, but I am a witness to something powerful in the universe," she said. In downtown St. Louis, people jammed rooftops to witness a near total eclipse. The sudden dusk caused street and bridge lights to turn on. Here in Charleston, the final city on the eclipse route, the clouds wreaked havoc with totality. But with classes starting Tuesday, hundreds of College of Charleston students gathered for a campus viewing of the eclipse celebrated anyway. They hooted and hollered as the moon slowly worked its way across the sun a sight that, with glasses, was visible through the clouds. And they screamed again after totality, when a crescent sun again made an appearance. Then the eclipse headed past Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, across slivers of coastal wetlands and out over the Atlantic Ocean, where it ended for good at sunset near Africa. The nation won't have to wait decades for the next one a total eclipse will sweep from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
After lugging them out on his hands and knees through the grime, he took the boxes downstairs to his team including his wife, Sohui Kim, a co owner who is also the restaurant's chef and excitedly held up a maroon and gold 85th anniversary flag that presumably dated to 1964. As the restaurateurs dove into the boxes, they quickly came to realize that Mr. Schneider had turned up an eclectic, eye opening trove of archival materials from Gage Tollner, which opened under another name at 302 Fulton Street in 1879 before decamping to its current location, at 372 374 Fulton, in 1892. "It was pretty exciting," said St. John Frizell, another co owner. "It was like finding a message in a bottle from previous ownership to us." The newly unearthed historic materials cover a considerable span of time and subject matter: cryptic handwritten notes about turn of the 20th century cash transactions; menus; price quotes from a butcher; notes on celebrity customers and the prodigious speed of an oyster shucker; correspondence about a restaurant display at the 1939 40 World's Fair; fliers from a 1948 strike; a 1965 WQXR radio advertisement recording; and a bill from a dinner for retired Brooklyn Dodgers players. These artifacts supplement the information previously provided by seven linear feet of Gage Tollner records donated to the Brooklyn Historical Society by a longtime owner's daughter in 2016. Among the first items pulled from the newly discovered boxes were award certificates from Holiday magazine, a national travel publication that honored Gage Tollner for 24 straight years beginning in 1952. In an era before the James Beard Awards or Zagat's or Yelp, the Holiday awards were so coveted that the longtime owner Ed Dewey collected all kinds of ephemera from the galas, including invitations, menus, matchbooks, train tickets and pictures of him and his wife, Trudy, with other winners. "Nationally it was a tight knit little group," said John Simmons, who co owned the restaurant with Mr. Dewey from 1973 to the mid 1980s. "We were friends with restaurateurs from New Orleans, Monterey and San Francisco." Also in the trove of discovered ephemera were pages of notes in pencil that Janet Dewey Pawlukiewicz, Mr. Dewey's daughter, confirmed were written in her father's hand. Many of the notations track information attributed to the headwaiter Leon Gaskill in a 1957 Holiday magazine article, suggesting that Mr. Dewey took his own notes while the reporter interviewed Mr. Gaskill. According to the Holiday story, the headwaiter was a 51 year veteran of Gage Tollner at the time, meaning his restaurant memories reached back to the first decade of the 1900s. The handwritten notes are valuable because they contain information excluded from the article. "Gage and Tollner kept no books or records," the notes say, "split up proceeds each nite," and "all goods came in C.O.D." The wait staff, too, apparently dealt in cash: "Waiters paid off cooks to keep jobs. Cooks were hired on basis that they would be p'd by waiters." Mr. Gaskill's memories also extended to old time fashions ("customers wore black or brown derbies in winter skimmers in summer") and traced the evolution of transportation ("came by horse carriage or hansom cab, Fords, Packards, the 'El'" a reference to the Fulton Street elevated train). The notes also shed light on race relations. While the waiters and bartenders were primarily African American throughout the 125 year life of the restaurant, all the owners were white. Among the many white celebrities Mr. Gaskill recalled dining there were the actress Lillian Russell, the businessman gourmand Diamond Jim Brady and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. But according to the notes, "Williams and George Walker only colored here then," likely a reference to the African American vaudeville duo of Bert Williams and Mr. Walker, who died in 1911. Waiters at Gage Tollner were known to remain for years or decades, earning gold ornaments for their uniforms with each milestone: a bar for one year, a star for five and an eagle for 25. But in late 1948, labor discord broke out in the form of a strike. Leaflets found in the restaurant's "attic" articulate the two sides' positions. The restaurant's owners, the Dewey family, asserted in a flier that workers were striking "because we refused to grant them a closed shop or a hiring hall, the granting of which" would make it impossible "to provide our patrons with the type of courteous service in the traditional manner to which they have become accustomed." The strike ended after two months, with ownership hiring back the picketers but holding firm on its refusal to hire new workers through a union hall or to require new employees to join a union. A mysterious page of notes, written in the owner Mr. Dewey's hand but expressing anti management sentiments, hints at the resentments that flared: "Being Served by Scab Labor Un Amer," " 19 a week to live on." Wade Siler, a maitre d' who worked at Gage Tollner for most of the years between 1968 and 2004, said that the staff "made good tips" and were well treated. The customers, he added, were predominantly white. "I don't think blacks felt they wouldn't be served," said Mr. Siler, who is African American. "They just didn't have the money." "In the '60s there was a delivery entrance to the basement from the sidewalk, and one day this thing, maybe five feet in diameter, came down the chute," Mr. Simmons said. "It was a live turtle, upside down, and they put it on a table. Its head was in its shell, and it was someone's job to stand there very quietly and wait for it to stick its head up. One big swing with the knife, and that was the demise of the turtle." History has its place, but not every suspended tradition deserves reviving.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
I smell the stench of panic on Donald Trump. Every week that passes with him trailing in the polls and with the very real possibility of defeat lurking his Twitter tirades and public utterances seem to grow more erratic. He is leaning into a campaign of chaos. He has undertaken an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Postal Service to prevent mail in voting, trying to force voters to choose between protecting their health and exercising their right to vote. This is an attempt at voter suppression on a massive scale. It is out in the open, designed to reduce the number of ballots cast (to give him a better chance of winning), and to create a pretext for contesting and delegitimizing the result should he lose. The Obama White House went so far as to devise a secret plan in case he did this. As New York Magazine reported in 2018, the plan, according to interviews with Ben Rhodes, Obama's senior aide and speechwriter, and Jen Psaki, Obama's communications director, "called for congressional Republicans, former presidents, and former Cabinet level officials including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, to try and forestall a political crisis by validating the election result. In the event that Trump tried to dispute a Clinton victory, they would affirm the result as well as the conclusions reached by the U.S. intelligence community that Russian interference in the election sought to favor Trump, and not Clinton." The difference between then and now is that Trump now holds the power of the presidency. This time, a bipartisan group of political figures has tried to game out what will happen if Trump refuses to accept the verdict this year, and the results aren't pretty. As Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor, a former Defense Department official and a co organizer of the group known as the Transition Integrity Project, told the Boston Globe in July, "All of our scenarios ended in both street level violence and political impasse." She continued, "The law is essentially ... it's almost helpless against a president who's willing to ignore it." Bodies continue to pile up because of his incompetent response to the pandemic. Some 176,000 Americans have already been lost to the coronavirus, and that number could rise to nearly 300,000 by December. Millions of people are unemployed and anxious. There is ongoing civil unrest, and there have been large scale protests against racism. More than three and a half years of endless outrages have culminated in our current catastrophes, and many voters are exasperated and outraged. And yet, Trump has somehow managed to convince millions of Americans that he is not the cause of the chaos, but that he is somehow the last rampart against it. Other Trump supporters realize that he is the cause of the chaos, and they actually cheer it. As Trump said Friday while speaking at the 2020 Council for National Policy Meeting in Arlington, Va: "I'm the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness and chaos. And that's what it is. I'm representing you. I'm just here. And I'm not sure it's an enviable position, but that's what it is. That's what it is." He continued: "You know, when I made that statement, I was a little embarrassed by it because it sounds so egotistical. It's like an egotistical statement. And I was a little embarrassed: 'I'm the only one.' But there was no other way to say it. We have to win the election." He is selling the fear of a dystopian Joe Biden/Kamala Harris future. It is a fear of loss: loss of racial privilege and protection, loss of economic stability, loss of religious liberty, loss of gun culture and loss of political power and control. Trump has taught conservatism to cowards. He has taught conservatives to see monsters in shadows. He has taught them to view fear as power. Trump will no doubt bring his fear message to this week's Republican National Convention, hoping to alter the polling that has remained stubbornly steady. But, if that doesn't work, expect Trump to take an even more dramatic step. Time is winding down. The election is in a few months. He needs a narrative altering event, and don't put anything past him. He would be willing to create one, even if it damages the country and its institutions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Mazda, which posted a 1.8 billion operating profit for the fiscal year that ended in March, projected a 2.3 billion operating profit for fiscal 2016. Helped as have been many Japanese automakers in recent months by a weaker yen, Mazda had surpassed its recent profit goal of 1.5 billion. (Reuters) Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors, received total compensation of only 69,989 this year, compared with 78.2 million a year earlier. Much of the compensation he receives from the company is tied to the value of the stock and his options. (Bloomberg) In other Tesla related news, a blog post on the Federal Trade Commission's website said that Tesla's direct sales model was a good example of how consumers could be offered new ways to shop for cars. The article says most states have laws requiring that vehicles be sold by local, independent dealers, limiting choices for consumers. (The Federal Trade Commission) Robert Griffin III, the Washington Redskins quarterback, will drive the pace car in the Nascar race at Richmond International Raceway Saturday, according to a series of tweets between Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Griffin. Earnhardt had invited Griffin to drive, and Griffin accepted. (USA Today)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The day before Megan LeCrone, a soloist dancer with the New York City Ballet, turned 36, she got an urgent call from her longtime friend and fellow soloist Harrison Ball. "If we don't leave now, we're not going to be able to get out," he told her. The date was March 20, when only 17,000 Americans had tested positive for the coronavirus, schools around the country had just closed and nonessential workers were beginning to tire of the "are you wearing pants?" jokes on Zoom. Ms. LeCrone and Mr. Ball sped through Kennedy International Airport, which was deserted, and, despite takeoffs being canceled all around them, boarded the final flight to their destination. "It felt like we were crossing into West Berlin," Mr. Ball said. They were, in fact, flying to the Bahamas. And there they have remained. If you're going on week nine of an air shaft view, with 17 varieties of pasta shapes for company, you may be breathing into a paper bag right now. And while many who can afford it stayed proudly in their home cities, some decided to move, "Green Acres" like, to less infected pastures. Not just the Matt Damons or Jerry Seinfelds of the world. (Mr. Damon is staying in the seaside resort town of Dalkey, Ireland, after production for a forthcoming Ridley Scott film was shut down nearby; Mr. Seinfeld, who lives with his family in a terraced duplex in the Beresford on Central Park West, is sequestered in East Hampton.) The New York City Department of Sanitation has recorded a more than a 3 percent drop in garbage in the more affluent ZIP codes of the Upper East and West Sides. But there are also those who thought they could sneak in a quick getaway and be back in plenty of time for Dr. Fauci's next warning of impending doom. Which brings us back to Ms. LeCrone and Mr. Ball, and everyone else interviewed for this story. To put it bluntly, they get it. They know that their privilege financial, physical, professional, personal allowed them to leave their homes, where infections were rapidly multiplying. They know you will have about as much sympathy for them as you did for David Geffen on his 590 million superyacht in the Grenadines, or those newlyweds who kept an entire hotel staff at work in the Maldives. They also know they cannot get home. After a spring break family ski trip to Lake Tahoe in California was canceled, Morgan Bernstein, the director of strategic initiatives at U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business, thought of an empty house her mother keeps in Honolulu. "We floated the idea of going to Hawaii by a couple of friends and they said, 'It sounds amazing, but you know you might get stuck there,'" Ms. Bernstein said. "At the time it was, 'Ha ha, yeah, right.'" Two months later, her husband is unemployed, the family car is in need of repairs after a Bay Area break in, and their kids are happily playing catch with floating coconuts. "I really struggled at first feeling trapped between work and vacation, feeling displaced and isolated, even though it's definitely not a 'poor me' situation," Ms. Bernstein said. "I would half jokingly bring things up on Zoom happy hours with my friends about not having my pajamas and face lotions and all the little things that make me feel like I'm at home. They were like, 'Seriously, Morgan? You're complaining about cleansers when you're in Hawaii?'" Ms. Bernstein also worries about the faux rosy reality she has created for her 5 and 7 year olds. "They get that there is a virus that is making people sick, but I've never seen them happier," she said. "They think they're on an extended vacation. It makes me wonder if I'm robbing my kids of the experience of understanding what the world is going through. Are they not going to relate to their peers because they will have experienced this time in such a different way?" They spent their first 12 days surfing on remote beaches with no internet access. The second Ms. Boher walked into her hotel room in Granada, she turned on the air conditioner and flipped on CNN. "The first thing we thought when we saw what had happened to the world was, 'Dear God,'" she said. Just then, a truck drove down the street with someone claiming to be from the government yelling through a megaphone in Spanish, "Hey, everybody! You know how the United States and China think they're better than us? They're screwed now!" After several failed attempts to find a place to stay (locals were understandably wary of renting to possibly infected tourists), Ms. Boher met a woman who charged 500 for a casita on a property shared by a virus fleeing Australian couple, sack of coconuts and plantains included. "I'm still in the same mental reality as everyone else, regardless of where I physically am," she said. "I look at the news and I'm devastated for hours. But I also have gratitude for real change. I've lived in cities my whole life and now I watch the first star come out every night." She has a friend in Los Angeles fulfilling pipe orders and no ticket home, since the airline she flew down doesn't operate the route anymore. "We all have a story of this time," Ms. Boher said. "And this is just my little story. This is my chain of weird events. It's not better. It's not worse. It just is." Across the planet, Josh Anchors, the director of global admissions at Leman Manhattan Preparatory School in New York, and his girlfriend of three months, Navia Nguyen, landed in Indonesia with hours to spare before visitors were banned. Without the same social restrictions that were in place in New York, Mr. Anchors got to Bali in time for five surf sessions and a trip to the wellness center that his girlfriend owns, where he luxuriated in a microdermabrasion facial, manicure, pedicure and vitamin C drip. But once the government closed nonessential businesses on April 1, he was quarantined at his girlfriend's house, testing out the nascent relationship under conditions so extreme it's a wonder producers of "The Bachelor" didn't devise them. "You really get to know someone in depth in these circumstances," Mr. Anchors said. "This is isolation ship. Quaran ship? Every once in a while we are like, 'What are we doing?'" (Plus an expletive.) At first, he hid from colleagues the fact that he was halfway across the globe, and set his alarm to 2 or 3 a.m. to join meetings that would have been midafternoon back in New York. He has since come clean. "There's no reason to go home now, other than hugging my parents, which I can't even do," Mr. Anchors said. Working remotely has only increased his job efficiency, and he's hopeful that with comparatively few cases on the island, his dry surfboard will be back in action soon. "I don't feel stranded," he said. "I feel liberated." After years working as an event planner in New York, Laura Ling had saved up enough money to travel for months and caught the last flight into Medellin, Colombia, before the borders closed. "It was very weird to be two or three weeks ahead in terms of the virus. I knew their corona future," she said. After hearing that immigration officers were picking up tourists on the streets and throwing them out of the country, she began self quarantining, venturing out occasionally to her balcony or rooftop terrace. "My industry is dead," Ms. Ling said. "I talk to colleagues, and we know we won't be making any money off events in 2020. I've just started to think about what other career options I have." Every night she watches President Ivan Duque's nightly address to the nation, where he talks about saving abuelos and abuelas. "I have no regrets about coming here and I don't think about anything beyond the next three days," she said. "At least I am still learning Spanish." Back in the Bahamas, Mr. Ball and Ms. LeCrone also don't know when they'll return to the barre, with their ballet company's entire spring season canceled. They stick to a strict daily regimen of swimming, ballet, yoga and a scary sounding class called "Shaun T's Insanity." They pay an islander 10 to deliver giant bags of mangoes and eat whatever they can catch spearfishing. They also check in on New York friends whose practice jetes have become the bane of downstairs neighbors' lives. "Artists are dramatic by nature so there is a lot of, 'Are we ever going to dance again?'" Mr. Ball said. "We decided maybe we shouldn't have the ocean in the background," Ms. LeCrone said. "We're trying to be sensitive." Minus the exercise, I can relate from a few islands away. I, too, booked an impromptu trip, in my case to St. John, a few days after a long planned family vacation to Israel had to be shelved. In retrospect, the plan hatched on a crowded R train home from work was far from responsible, though then schools were still in session and my office was open. After our third attempt at a flight home got canceled, my husband took his new mask of frolicking turtle print fabric, made by a local who calls himself Iron Man, and hopped a choppy 30 minute ferry to another island to procure a printer and cheap laptop so our daughters could attend online school. I tried to convince vacation property owners that they could indeed rent to us because we had arrived before the government mandated tourist ban. (Luckily, I didn't have to ask the woman with whom I six foot distance chatted on a hike, who sprinted away when I told her where I'd arrived from five weeks earlier.) I sometimes feel guilt for not being "New York strong," as Gov. Andrew Cuomo would say (yes, I watch him here too), along with sadness for my city, relief that I didn't bring illness to this hospital free island and worry about paying my bills after renting a vacation home for three months instead of two weeks. But my time on this island (the two known Covid 19 cases are on the mend) is also a tonic, and I don't take for granted the simpler life of afternoon beach swims and visits to the island's beloved, songwriting organic gardener, Josephine, for her immunity boosting "bush tea." A couple of days before I left New York, the comedian Sarah Silverman flew in there and settled into a rented apartment that her friend Adam Schlesinger had found. They had plans to workshop "The Bedwetter," the musical they'd co written with Joshua Harmon, based on Ms. Silverman's memoir. The afternoon Broadway went dark, Ms. Silverman, Mr. Schlesinger and the show's director, Anne Kauffman, sat around the rental eating pizza, drinking wine and getting updates on when Linda Lavin, a cast member, would land in the city. "We figured, well, this is what it is, and eventually when it passes, we'll all be together rehearsing," Ms. Silverman later told me. "That was the last time I socialized in person. And it was the last time I will ever see Adam." Eighteen days later, Mr. Schlesinger, the frontman of Fountains of Wayne, died of Covid 19 at 52. Ms. Silverman is staying put until at least mid June, her apartment eerily quiet ("I never realized how many New Yorkers seem to have a place 'upstate.'") but with a washer and dryer (which, to New Yorkers, may be a bigger brag than a Zoom ocean background). Ms. Silverman also takes in the view every evening, from her vacation balcony, a.k.a. fire escape. "I live for 7 to 7:03 p.m. when the whole city seems to be howling and banging pots and pans in a collective primal scream." She is also not rushing to hop on a plane home. "Against all reason," she said. "I feel safer here."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
In 2017, the first season of Leon Neyfakh's podcast, "Slow Burn," retold the story of the Watergate scandal, unearthing key details and subjecting them to close analysis. It was a hit, something Mr. Neyfakh, then working for Slate, attributes to its timing: The Trump administration was in the midst of its own scandal, under investigation by Robert Mueller. Since then Mr. Neyfakh, 35, has continued to produce podcast seasons that delve into moments in semi recent history that can help illuminate the present. After making two seasons of "Slow Burn" the second was about the impeachment of President Bill Clinton after his relationship with Monica Lewinsky Mr. Neyfakh and his collaborators Andrew Parsons and Madeline Kaplan left Slate and formed their own production company, Prologue Projects (as in "the past is prologue"). The current season of their new podcast, "Fiasco," looks at the yearslong fight over school desegregation in Boston, which intensified in 1974 after a federal judge ruled that the city's public schools must be integrated. Thousands of white parents pulled their children out of class, and violence erupted in the city's streets, stoked in part by the mobster Whitey Bulger, who torched an elementary school. White protesters threw rocks at the buses carrying Black students to and from newly integrated schools, and deadly clashes between teenagers made national news, cementing an image of Boston as a bastion of northern racism. This period of violence has often been referred to as a "busing" crisis (buses were used to transport Black children to mostly white schools and vice versa), which Mr. Neyfakh believes confuses the story. "For a lot of people who know and remember busing, it's this word that connotes chaos, and violence and failure," he said. "Our show tries to question that a little bit and tries to understand what really went wrong. Was it really inevitable that it went as wrong as it did in Boston?" In the interview below, which has been edited, Mr. Neyfakh talks about the new season of "Fiasco," why he doesn't consider himself a historian and whether there's any danger in using the past as a way to understand the present. You emphasized while doing "Slow Burn" that you wanted to get into how it felt to live through these historic moments. Why was that? "Slow Burn" started in 2017. It hadn't been that long since Trump became president. Every day just felt like a series of emergencies and we wanted to know: Did it feel the same way back in the Watergate days when the White House was going through a comparable kind of turmoil? Were people obsessively checking for the latest the way we do with our alerts? Part of what led us to that angle "What did it feel like to live through at the time?" was a sort of a disbelief that it could have ever been this way before. And people moved on and the country survived. It just felt so overwhelming, as it continues to be. But I think hearing about this previous era in American history when people felt similarly, I think for a lot of listeners was maybe a little bit reassuring. It was proof that there could be a future after that. The current season feels really relevant to the moment in its discussion of racism and segregation, particularly when it comes to schools. Are you always looking for the story you're telling about the past to line up nicely with the present? I'm definitely looking for resonance. I've sort of realized that you can't just tell a fascinating story from the past if there's no way to process it with an eye on the present. I think people need that motivation, that promise that they'll be able to understand the world they live in through hearing the story. With the story of desegregation in Boston, what drew me to it, is it's the kind of story if you hear it in detail, it can really teach you something about how the world works, now and forever. If you zoom in close enough, which is what we always try to do, you find enough little subplots and individuals who can conjure up memories and you can say something true. And it will be true not just about the past but also about the present. It also appealed to me because it presented a chance to slowly and methodically describe a morally complicated situation, one where it's not 100 percent obvious what was motivating everyone. You can look back all these years later and ask questions about whether the opposition to desegregation was all about race or about class or was it some mix of the two. Those resonances with the present have been punctuated, on both "Fiasco" and "Slow Burn," by phrases that are currently in circulation right now. In one episode of the new season, for instance, the phrases "law and order" and "enemy of the people" are both used to refer what was happening in Boston. Do you, like, fist pump in interviews when a source says something that very directly echoes of the present? There's a line you can cross with those things where it feels coy. I think we had a couple of moments in the first season of "Slow Burn" where obviously we were trying to draw attention to the fact that there were parallels to the Trump administration. I was always a little bit nervous about whether subtlety is coming across as coyness. How subtle was it, really, if it's obvious to everyone who's listening to what you're doing? With this season, it never felt like we were in danger of being coy. It was more like an overt indication to the listener that these ideas and these political weapons have been around forever and they've always been so potent. To me that's one of the resonances of the season. Some politicians choose to harness anger and fear and hatred, and it can be really, really, really powerful when they do. And it's a little bit scary to think that's the main difference between an era when we have this kind of concentrated, organized, violent opposition and one where we don't: It's just because someone chose to activate it. It's always there. The recurrence of those phrases, like "law and order," how persistently certain phrases have remained dog whistles even as their meaning has become clear over the years, is just kind of amazing. It didn't feel like we were in danger of being coy, more kind of an attempt to remind people how eternal some of these dynamics are. You said earlier that you're not a historian. Why do you make sure to emphasize that? Academic historians have a very specialized set of skills and training. And I just don't have those. And I'll be the first to admit that as much as we rely on historians as secondary sources in our podcast, I don't study primary sources in the same rigorous way they do. I don't conduct my analysis in any kind of formalistic way that adheres to one school of historiography versus another one. I'm just not in that world. The tools of our trade are very much reporting. Nothing against historians! Quite the opposite. You're engaged in using events of the past to shed light on the present. Is there anything we stand to miss in that kind of exercise? You see a lot of pretty facile attempts to conjure up parallels between different eras in history. I've done some of it myself! I wrote a piece for the ideas section of The Boston Globe about whether 1968 was the right reference point for the Arab Spring, and I talked to a bunch of people about whether 1848 was the more informative parallel. And I remember all the historians I talked to were like, "You know, you really shouldn't go too far with the one to one analysis." I knew they were right then. I still think there's something to be gained from it, as long as you're not coming into it thinking that it's a crystal ball. I think it's possible to learn about certain internal dynamics that are consistent and predictable. Our main objective is not to give people a road map to the present but to provoke them to think about the present using new questions. We want to raise serious moral issues that people are still obviously dealing with. And we want people to process the present in a way that's hopefully richer for having been exposed to our prodding.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
As an eager but clueless student accepted to New York University about a decade ago, I signed away my financial future to the entities that lent me the money to attend. I had no clue how student loans worked, and N.Y.U.'s meager attempts to explain didn't help much, so I just figured I'd worry about all that stuff later. Of course, that "later" has come for me and most of my peers: About seven out of 10 college graduates have student debt, averaging around 30,000. I, like many others, dutifully but mindlessly make my monthly payments, mostly resigned to being in debt forever. But robotically making monthly payments doesn't have to be the whole story. I'm not ashamed to admit I don't know much about money, but my pal Ron Lieber The Times's personal finance columnist sure does. Here are three lessons I've learned from Ron on how to be more strategic about student loans. (And let's assume you've been paying them for a while. If you're just starting out, this is a great place to begin, as is The Times's student loan calculator.) Do you know how your interest and payments work? Let's start at the beginning with principal and compound interest. The easiest way to wrap your head around this is just to see it in action: Play around with our student loan calculator here to see exactly how your loan payments work. When you make a student loan payment, your money is applied first to the interest and then to the principal, which is the original amount you borrowed. If your payment is late, however, your money is applied first to your late fee. As your principal shrinks, so too does the interest you pay, since you're charged interest only on the remaining balance. This means that over time, the proportion of your payments that goes to your principal will gradually become larger. This is a good thing. Should you increase your monthly payments so you can be debt free sooner? Maybe, but in most cases, probably not. The most important thing to consider is whether, in the (very) long term, you'll make more money by ridding yourself of student debt early or by putting that extra payment money into a retirement savings plan. There are many variables that go into making this decision, but in nearly all cases, the smarter move is to put that extra money into a retirement savings account before putting it toward student loans especially if you have an employer that will match retirement savings contributions. You can cheat yourself out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by forgoing retirement savings early on. What is refinancing? Is it worth it? Let's say you, like me, have five student loans with five different interest rates. If you refinance your loans, those five loans would be combined into a single loan that would have a single interest rate. This can be a smart move if you can get a lower interest rate, which may be possible if you have a great credit score. However, that new rate might be variable and could potentially increase over time. (Your current student loans are most likely fixed, meaning the rate doesn't change.) And, keep in mind, the larger the debt, the more important it is to have the lowest rate possible. Perhaps an even bigger issue to keep in mind if you're thinking about refinancing is that you might lose access to benefits you get from having federal loans, such as the ability to make payments based on income (which caps your payments at a certain percentage of your income), loan forgiveness, death and disability discharges, and longer deferment and forbearance options. Generally, if you're doing O.K. with your loans and your interest rate isn't outrageous say, 8 percent or below you don't have to worry much about refinancing. But if you have a rate much higher than that, you might want to reach out to a professional to get advice on refinancing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The 52 Places to Go list is one of Travel's biggest efforts of the year, for which The Times enlists writers and photographers around the globe, as well as a cadre of editors, designers and interactive specialists who work to produce it. Until the list is published early on Wednesday morning, I can't reveal what spots made it, but I can offer some insight into how it is put together. I became The Times's Travel editor at the end of October, just as the process was ramping up, and I had to leap into the deep end. To start, the editors on the Travel desk asked the journalists who have written for us in the past what places they find most intriguing. We asked them to pitch their favorite destinations in about 150 words or so, about the length of the final write ups. Their suggestions were compiled into one big document, which this year ran to more than 70 pages. In some cases, multiple writers suggested the same place often because there was some new development, or a special event taking place in 2019 and a number of them made our final list. The Times is incredibly lucky to have an army of great journalists stationed around the world, so once we had the travel writers' candidates in hand, I sent out a blast to our foreign correspondents, asking for their suggestions (you will see a number of their bylines on our final list). Editors also reached out to people who know certain parts of the world well: cultural correspondents, former writers for The Times, friends who travel frequently. Then we scheduled a bunch of marathon meetings to go through the list. What are we looking for? Change is key: What is different in each destination that makes it a place to go right now? That could mean an exciting building that has just gone up, a major piece of infrastructure that has made the place more accessible or political events that have made it safer for travelers. I wanted us to make climate change a priority. What places are we in danger of losing? You will find destinations threatened by global warming, from islands where sea levels are rising and powerful and more frequent storms are presenting a special threat, to cold weather spots where winter's full beauty is endangered. We thought putting them on the list could help raise important red flags. History matters, and there are places that earned spots on our list because they are marking major milestones in interesting ways. Other key factors: What's happening culturally that might make a destination particularly interesting this year? Are there natural phenomena making certain places must sees? Are there spots that might offer new alternatives to old favorites? About 20 destinations were shoo ins. I personally had strong ideas about two spots, and yes, they are on the list. We argued. One editor pushed for a certain city, saying its cultural merits earned it a spot. Another argued that a particular country deserved a nod, even after we had passed over it. It is on the list. Our photo editor, Phaedra Brown, who has worked on this project for many years, provided institutional knowledge sorry, City X, you made it four years ago. Some early contenders got cut. Everyone who watches travel is interested in Egypt , where a big new museum complex was supposed to open near the Giza pyramids in 2019. It was on our list until it became clear the museum won't open until at least 2020. Some people question the very existence of this kind of list in the age of overtourism and when travel itself contributes to climate change. I think those are legitimate questions, and we certainly don't think that all our readers are going to travel to these exact spots this year. But our 52 Places Traveler whose identity will also be revealed on Wednesday morning will, and contend with some of those issues in the year's dispatches. And one secret is that we actually pick more than 52 places, just in case. In fact, we swapped a spot just last week. What was on and what was off? Ask me once the list is published. 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The question writers are asked most often is Where do you get your ideas? And the answers ranging from the occult to the mundane always seem to disappoint. Perhaps a better answer is the one Maurice Swift, the protagonist of 's new novel, "A Ladder to the Sky," gives: "The answer is no one knows where they come from and nobody should know." Not the most original response, but to be fair, Maurice Swift is a plagiarist. While Maurice Swift lacks a nose for original story, he's an expert at sniffing out opportunities for advancement by exploiting, in particular, the libidinous desires of older gay authors. Unencumbered by any sense of shame, and driven by a pathological level of ambition, Maurice has the heart of a sniper. Fortunately for him, almost all of his material, whether in the form of story or professional connections, comes his way with an antelope stumbles in front of a lion serendipity. It helps that along with his charm and intellect (he jousts in Latin with Gore Vidal), Maurice is also disconcertingly attractive to both women and men. There is little sport for Maurice at 22, a Caravaggio in his Savoy waiter's uniform working the bar, in landing his first conquest, Erich Ackermann, a closeted 66 year old professor at Cambridge (wink, wink) and prizewinning novelist. Soon smitten, Ackermann unwittingly provides Maurice with a story a devastating betrayal he committed out of lust during his time as a member of Hitler Youth which Maurice pockets as easily as an apple. The seeds of it will become his debut novel, "Two Germans." While the publicity is personally and professionally shattering for Ackermann, it catapults Maurice into the center of London's literary society.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
WASHINGTON Three years after discovering that a military laboratory had shipped live anthrax to facilities around the world, the Department of Defense still has not developed a plan to evaluate its biological security practices, the federal Government Accountability Office reported on Thursday. The department has implemented about half of the procedural changes that had been recommended, the G.A.O. said. But the Pentagon still has not established a way to measure the effectiveness of these reforms, making it difficult for experts to determine whether safety has improved. "When it comes to reforming procedures, this is not a one off thing that you can do once and take a vacation," said Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "We must be careful that the evaluations and procedures intended to increase safety actually do that," she added.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A reader who wrote in as R from L.A. was also born at 26 weeks. "I was born in the mid 1980s, weighing 2 pounds, 5 ounces," he said. "Doctors warned my parents that I would be deaf and severely mentally impaired. I am neither. I graduated at the top of my high school class and cum laude from one of the best colleges in the nation. And even if I had been disabled, my parents would have been overjoyed to have me live." Many readers pointed out that infants surviving with impairments can still have meaningful lives. "My son was born at 24 weeks and now in childhood has severe disabilities," Susan wrote from New York. "I understand that cost is a factor in medical policy decisions, but my son is loved deeply and his life has value. I hope we will weigh these decisions understanding that people with all kinds of disabilities can be happy and can contribute to society." Writing from California, Michele described weighing 1 pound, 13 ounces when she was born three months early in 1952. She added: "Being born too soon was a blessing and a curse. Blessing: breathing, seeing the beautiful planet earth, parents, siblings, etc. Curse: mild cerebral palsy. Hearing problems, eye problems, curvature of spine, back problems. Yet in spite of times I wish I didn't survive, the truth is, look at all I would have missed. I was lucky." Plenty of other readers, though, cautioned that triumphal stories about surviving, thriving preemies can gloss over certain grim realities. They wondered if the United States is fully prepared for the consequences of saving these young infants. One parent of twin boys born at 28 weeks, noted that at 16, they suffer from autism, cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities; one is in a group home.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Researchers in Europe have found that the larvae of a common insect have an unusual ability to digest plastic, a discovery that could lead to biotechnical advances that help deplete the continual buildup of one of the world's most stubborn pollutants. Scientists discovered that the wax worm, a caterpillar used for fishing bait that takes its name from its habit of feeding on beeswax, is able to break down the chemical bonds in polyethylene, a synthetic polymer and widely produced plastic used in packaging, bags and other everyday materials. Federica Bertocchini, a scientist with the Spanish National Research Council, stumbled upon the insects' unusual ability several years ago. An amateur beekeeper, Ms. Bertocchini had plucked several worms out of her beehives and was keeping them in a plastic bag. She soon discovered that the worms had chewed holes in the bags and, realizing the potential implications, got in touch with peers at the University of Cambridge, Paolo Bombelli and Christopher J. Howe. A paper that the group published this week in Current Biology explains how they discovered exactly what allows the worms to break down the plastic.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
This seven bedroom, seven bathroom house is on a steep jungle mountainside in the coastal Puntarenas province of southwest Costa Rica. There are several large estates in the area, which is known as Escaleras (Spanish for "stairs") and is near the town of Dominical. A winding dirt road (requiring a four wheel drive during the rainy season) leads to the multilevel, 9,100 square foot home, which was built in 2010 and offers panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean. The three acre property sits about 900 feet above sea level, where the temperature is often 10 to 15 degrees cooler than it is on the coast, said Matthew Hogan, an agent with 2 Costa Rica Real Estate, which is listing the property. Through the steel and glass front doors, a foyer with 40 foot hardwood ceilings leads to an open area that includes the living room, dining room, kitchen and a space currently used as a game room. The kitchen has Viking appliances, an industrial size refrigerator and freezer, black granite countertops and an island with counter seating. Glass walls fold back to connect the ground floor living areas to the outdoor covered patio, which is bordered by a three level infinity pool that includes a covered children's pool and a swim up bar. A separate patio kitchen has a grill and a large paella stove. There are six bedrooms in the main house, including one currently used as an office. In the hallway outside the office, a bookshelf slides to reveal a hidden stairway down to a 900 square foot children's bedroom with three sets of bunk beds. There are three bedrooms upstairs, each with its own bathroom. The master bedroom is below the living areas, with its own deck, pool, walk in closet and en suite bathroom with stone tub. The house has an array of modern and sustainable technology, including a wireless entertainment system, computer controlled lighting, a rain capture network and two 48 panel solar grids. All the furniture is included in the asking price. The owner often rents the property, for 800 to 1,500 a night. The house is about halfway between the towns of Uvita and Dominical, in an area known for surfing and whale watching. Less than an hour's drive up Route 34 are Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica's most popular tourist destination, and a small airport in the town of Quepos that offers flights to the capital city of San Jose. Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose is about a three and a half hour drive. There is no official multiple listing service or housing database in Costa Rica, which makes it difficult to track sales and pricing. But Dominical area agents said they have seen a surge in sales in the past year. "We are a lot more active," said Dave West, an owner of Re/Max Costa del Sol Properties. Prices in the Dominical area have been relatively flat for some time but are now rising, said Robert Cooper, director of 7th Heaven Properties, an international real estate agency. Demand has been driven by the affordability of larger homes that can be converted into hotels or guesthouses. Joshua Kanter, a broker with Dominical Property, said asking prices are 5 to 10 percent higher than they were a year ago, and there are fewer discounted sales. The average price of his sales this year, he said, has been up about 5 percent from last year, to 435,000. "Sellers are being firmer on their price," Mr. Kanter said. "They don't have to negotiate as much to make a sale." But prices are still below the peak levels they reached before the global financial crisis, agents said. A house along the coast that would have sold for 1 million in 2006 is valued closer to 600,000 today, Mr. Hogan said. Mr. West said about 20 percent of his sales are empty lots, primarily bought by North Americans looking to build a house as a second home or an investment property. A one acre lot with an ocean view might sell for about 90,000, he said, depending on the location and accessibility. With no official data on sales, prices can fluctuate widely in Costa Rica, with sellers seeking unrealistically high prices and buyers submitting lowball offers, agents said. "People are trying to test the market," Mr. Hogan said. "Some people are fishing, trying to get the most bang for the buck." The majority of buyers are from the United States and Canada, and many of them discovered the area as tourists visiting Manuel Antonio Park, agents said. Mr. Kanter estimated that 70 percent of his clients are American, many looking for "turnkey, move in ready properties they can rent out." Recent years have seen an increase in European and South American buyers, agents said, due in part to expanded international flights to the San Jose airport. Buyers tend to be a mix of retirees and those seeking second homes, but younger people are increasingly choosing the area for its eco friendly lifestyle, Mr. Hogan said: "A lot of young families are moving down here to get off the hamster wheel." There are no restrictions on foreigners buying property in Costa Rica, except on a narrow strip running along the waterfront, known as the maritime zone, where the land belongs to the state. Most homes are listed and sold in American dollars. Buyers typically hire a lawyer to research the title and oversee the transaction, agents said. A notary will prepare the documents, manage the process and confirm the title. (In Costa Rica, a lawyer is often a notary.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
SEATTLE With little more than a whiff of Amazon's interest in a new business, the company can crater the stocks of potential competitors, prompting them to consider bold acquisitions and other drastic measures in response. Just ask companies in the home improvement, meal kit and grocery businesses. The latest category alarmed by the specter of competition from Amazon is the pharmacy market. With huge amounts of consumer spending and frustrating inefficiencies, it is the type of business that invariably attracts Amazon's attention. CVS Health is now in talks to acquire Aetna, one of the nation's largest health insurance providers, a move considered to be partly a reaction to the footsteps of Amazon. The likelihood of Amazon's eventually getting into the pharmacy business is high, several analysts and a former employee said. But it is not clear when it will make that move or how aggressive it intends to be. The near term threat may be somewhat overstated. Amazon has received wholesale pharmacy licenses in at least a dozen states, as The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on Thursday. But the licenses permit the company to sell other kinds of products too. In Connecticut, for example, the license is for "wholesale of drugs, cosmetics and medical devices," while in Louisiana it was granted to a "drug or device distributor." Brian Tanquilut, an analyst for Jefferies, noted that the company acquired many of the wholesale pharmacy licenses between fall of last year and early this year, around when the company started selling medical supplies to businesses. "It's not evidence of a retail entry into the pharmacy business," he said. An Amazon spokeswoman, Lori Torgerson, refused to comment on "rumors or speculation" about Amazon entering the pharmacy business, but she shared a statement that suggested other motivations for the paperwork. "Wholesale licenses are required for Amazon Business to sell professional use only medical devices in certain states," she said. There is little doubt, though, that Amazon is interested in at least some aspects of the pharmacy business. Brittain Ladd, a supply chain consultant who worked at Amazon until earlier this year on groceries and other initiatives, said he participated in discussions about how Amazon could enter the category, including through acquisitions. "The pharmacy business was always a topic of interest when I was with Amazon, and there was a sincere desire on the part of Amazon to create a better customer experience across pharmacy and health care as a whole," he said. While Mr. Ladd said he isn't privy to the company's current strategy, he believes existing pharmacy companies are right to be worried. "My advice is that executives at pharmaceutical companies should crush all assumptions when it comes to Amazon and their ability to enter, innovate and reimagine the pharmacy business and health care," he said. If Amazon decides to enter the market, it could take a variety of avenues, analysts said. The easiest way in would be to set up a mail order pharmacy that focused on price sensitive customers without health insurance or who have high deductible plans that require them to pay for some drug costs upfront. To do this, Amazon would need retail pharmacy licenses in every state a hurdle, certainly, but not an insurmountable one, the analysts said. "They can at least dip their toe in the water with the cash pay customers, and learn the business," said Ana Gupte, an analyst for Leerink Partners. She said cash paying customers account for 5 percent to 10 percent of the 560 billion prescription drug business. The idea could prove attractive to customers who already go to Amazon for a wide range of shopping items, from shoes to electronics to diapers. Retailers like Target and Walmart have added pharmacies to bring in extra business for a similar reason. Amazon's recent acquisition of Whole Foods could also provide a physical location for pharmacies. "A large part of the infrastructure is already there," said David Maris, an analyst for Wells Fargo. In a call with analysts this week, Timothy C. Wentworth, the chief executive of the pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts, indicated a willingness to work with Amazon to reach these cash paying customers. "We certainly see that as something where if they wanted to move into a space, we could be a very natural collaborator," he said. If Amazon wanted to go bigger, Ms. Gupte and others said, it could sell to insured customers and even serve as a pharmacy benefit manager, overseeing drug coverage for people on behalf of insurers and large employers. This would be far more complex. It would likely require Amazon to either acquire a pharmacy benefit manager or enter into a partnership with an existing one. Expanding the pharmacy business without the aid of a major pharmacy benefit manager would be tough, because the benefit managers serve as gatekeepers to insured patients, deciding which pharmacies they can and cannot use. The benefit managers also operate their own mail order pharmacies, which might make them less willing to accommodate Amazon. Some said they expect that if Amazon chooses to enter the health care business, it would do so in a big way. The company could attempt to provide comprehensive services to patients, doctors and others, far beyond selling drugs. Nadina J. Rosier, the health and group benefits pharmacy practice leader at Willis Towers Watson, said other areas the company could explore include offering virtual doctor consults, or using the Amazon Echo, its voice controlled smart device, for health care applications. No matter the short term steps Amazon is taking, Ms. Rosier said, her research has demonstrated that it is "clearly looking to revolutionize how health care is delivered in some way." But while Amazon has a track record for upending major industries, from books to groceries, she said health care is complicated and there would be intense pressure to get it right. "It is just a sensitive topic," she said. "We don't have as much scrutiny of how much you paid for your jeans, or your shoes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A roundup of motoring news from the web: With the national average gasoline price at about 3.50 per gallon this year, sales of alternative fuel vehicles are in decline. Although new vehicle sales in September were, on average, up by 5.4 percent, sales of the Toyota Prius, the best selling hybrid, fell 11.3 percent. Chevrolet Volt sales dropped 13.2 percent, Ford C Max sales went down 23 percent and sales of Mitsubishi's i Miev electric vehicle plummeted 85 percent. The exception was the Nissan Leaf, whose sales rose 35 percent. (The Dallas Morning News) Volkswagen announced over the weekend that it would recall 1.1 million vehicles worldwide for a problem with the rear suspension that could lead to crashes. The recall covers 2011 13 Jettas and 2012 13 Beetles, including about 442,000 vehicles in the United States and 126,000 in Canada. Volkswagen said it was not aware of any accidents or injuries related to the defect. (Reuters) Chevrolet said this week that the 2016 Camaro would be smaller than the current model and built on the same platform as the Cadillac ATS. The automaker said that the new Camaro might even be offered with a turbocharged 4 cylinder engine option like its competitor, the Ford Mustang. (USA Today) Jaguar Land Rover opened a new factory in China this week. The automaker said it planned to produce 130,000 vehicles a year there, including the Range Rover Evoque sport utility vehicle, by 2016. (The Wall Street Journal, subscription required)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
At one end of the church plaza, men stirred a caldron of oil so big it could have staved off invaders at a medieval castle. Instead, it was full of frying picarel, a small fish found in the Mediterranean, which would be doled out with a chunk of bread, a wedge of lemon and a cup of Cannonau wine to locals and visitors by the hundreds. Toward the middle of the plaza on a raised wooden stage, lines of men in burgundy vests hooked elbows with women in white blouses and performed a precise folk dance to lively accordion music. And at the other end, near streets lined with vendors selling the nougat candy called torrone and balloons in the shape of pink cats, I ordered a cup of the locally brewed Ichnusa beer for 1.50 euros ( 1.65) from a young bartender. "Where are you from?" she asked. "What are you doing here?" "Here" was La Caletta, a beach and fishing village in northeast Sardinia, and unless she was wondering why I was paying for beer while the wine was free and unlimited, I thought the answer was rather obvious: I had come for the final Sunday night blowout of the Festa di Fatima, in honor of the town's patroness. The streets were full of nattily dressed older couples, families with balloon bearing children in tow, and gaggles of teenagers optimistically dressed in shorts for the May evening. If there were other foreigners there, I didn't hear them. Why wouldn't I be here? In the coming months, little La Caletta and Sardinia's larger coastal resorts will swell with summer residents and visitors, most of them mainland Italians and other Europeans in search of a beach vacation. Jet setters in yachts will cruise into the famed Emerald Coast, not far north of La Caletta. But more culturally minded visitors will find a less explored and unique region of Italy, one accessible (often for less than 100) via direct Ryan Air flights from Paris, Barcelona, Munich and elsewhere. I went in May at the advice of my Sardinian friend Sebastian, who told me that the island's calendar is cluttered with local festivals like La Caletta's. But you don't need festivals to make a visit worthwhile. The island's landscape of wrinkled, ancient looking mountains and rugged but gorgeous coastlines is dotted with mysterious millennia old stone structures called nuraghe. Their exact purpose is unknown, but they are unique to the island, as is the fading Sardinian language and rustic but wonderful cuisine. Even the deer (short legged) and donkeys (striped) differ from the mainland's. But though the second largest island in the Mediterranean has autonomous status, its people are as gifted and gregarious hosts as those I've encountered on the mainland. To wit: earlier that evening, I had picked up my fried picarel and wine (double ration and two cups when they realized I was from abroad) and made friends with a group of older locals ripping apart the fish at long grease splotched tables. And then, to my utter surprise in a town where I knew no one, I heard my name. "Seth, come eat with me and my girlfriend." Ah, I did know one person, barely: Antonello Deiana, the owner of the modest but comfortable Locanda del Mare B B where I was staying for 37 euros a night. He grabbed my wine and plate and led me to his table. Seth Kugel for The New York Times Even when the beaches do fill up, you can escape them by taking your rental car (a necessity) into the interior. My source on that was another local, a man named Salvatore with a gargantuan belly and pudgy face, whom I met a few days later in On my way to the western coast, I had purposefully turned off the main road to explore the countryside. The road I had randomly chosen passed through Burgos, where I could barely wriggle my Renault Clio through narrow streets. He and his friends were sitting in a small square at an 1891 fountain that provided drinking water to the townspeople (and I assume the town's horses) in times past and is still potable to this day or so the men told me when I asked in Google translated Italian if I could drink it. I asked if many tourists come through Burgos, which would be overrun if it were located in, say, Tuscany. "Not many," he said. "Most tourists come to Sardinia for the sea." "But in July and August, you must get a lot," I said. "Not really," he said. (In fact, the town's Museum of Sardinian Castles has a total of zero reviews on TripAdvisor. Its actual castle, visible for miles as it towers from a seemingly impregnable craggy hill, has four.) Our chat halted abruptly at half past 12 when the men took off; it was time for lunch, they said. So I drove up a winding road to the castle, only to find that it was indeed impregnable, at least at the moment, as it was closed for lunch. (As was the museum; so much for its first review.) The men had encouraged me to visit a nearby nuraghi, in an area called Foresta di Burgos. I found it marked on Google maps, and drove off down winding roads until I found a worn, peeling brown arrow shaped sign with what looked like nuraghi symbols on it. It pointed down a dirt road, which was blocked by a chained wooden gate and overgrown with yellowed grass. Midafternoon, I arrived in Bosa, a love at first sight city. That first sight, which comes as you wind down route "SS 129 bis" toward the Temo River, is a cluster of pastel houses, and above them, a castle far more majestic than the one in Burgos. The town is almost entirely on the other side of the river, which seems odd. But it wouldn't have in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the tanneries along the near bank that kept the town humming also kept it stinking a fact I learned at the Museu delle Conce (3.50 euros), housed in one of the old tanneries. The English on the museum handout was tortured but vivid: "The living conditions of the tanners were indeed terrible because the work was carried out in confined spaces, wet, always in contact with the liquid mass emitting terrible stench." I eschewed a 16 euro boat trip in favor of a 654 step staircase built into the cliff, admission 13 euros. I spent the savings at Il Milese, a bustling sandwich shop with outdoor seating, on a 2.50 euro focaccia Milese, freshly made with tomato, tuna, pancetta, anchovies, hard boiled egg and arugula. It wasn't the only bargain I found in town. I returned to my car to find a 50 cent parking ticket on the windshield. The best deal on the island was yet to come: a startlingly great deal for room and half board at an agriturismo, or farmstay, at the southern end of the island. But that's a delicious story for a future article.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Despite India's enormous population, it would be cost effective to fight its growing AIDS epidemic by testing all 800 million sexually active adults in the country every five years and treating all those infected, a new statistical study has concluded. The study, published online in May by PLoS One, notes that testing there costs only 3.33, and that first line antiretroviral therapy is about 100 a year. The World Health Organization measure for a medical intervention's cost effectiveness is whether it saves one year of life for less than three times the per capita gross domestic product. In India's case, that is 3,900 per year of life saved. Testing as often as every year would be cost effective in high risk groups like drug injectors, gay and bisexual men, female prostitutes, migrants and visitors to S.T.D. clinics, the study found. Treatment makes people with H.I.V. less infectious, so early treatment would prevent the virus's spread to others. With an organized medical system, cheap drugs and relatively low paid doctors, India is probably one of the most cost effective places for fighting AIDS, said the study's lead author, Dr. Kartik K. Venkatesh of the Alpert Medical School at Brown University. African countries import cheap Indian drugs, but their medical systems often must be propped up by foreign donors and doctors.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Gary Oldman, center, as the title character in "Mank," with Adam Shapiro, left, and Joseph Cross. The film argues that Orson Welles had little to do with the screenplay. "Mank," the new drama from David Fincher, revives an old charge against Orson Welles. Was Welles, who with "Citizen Kane" (1941) created what is often cited as the greatest movie ever made on his first try, actually standing on the shoulders of another genius? The movie, which began streaming on Netflix on Friday, dramatizes the writing of "Citizen Kane" through the eyes of Herman J. Mankiewicz, who received top billing on the shared screenplay credit with Welles. The film focuses on the period when Mankiewicz wrote what became a 300 page doorstop called "American," partly drawing on his own experiences as a dinner guest of the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for the character of Charles Foster Kane. Fincher's movie, using a screenplay by his father, Jack Fincher, implies that Mankiewicz was the principal author of the script. When "Citizen Kane" won the Oscar for best original screenplay, neither Welles nor Mankiewicz attended the ceremony, but "Mank" concludes with its title character (Gary Oldman) telling reporters the acceptance speech he would have delivered: "I am very happy to accept this award in the manner in which the screenplay was written, which is to say, in the absence of Orson Welles." (As recounted in Richard Meryman's 1978 biography of Mankiewicz, he really did devise an after the fact acceptance speech close to those words, although he also enjoyed a teasing correspondence with Welles at that time.) "It's the greatest film ever made, it has the longest track record of representing what cinema can be, and who's responsible for making it that way is a continuing story," Harlan Lebo, the author of "Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker's Journey," an exhaustive account of the movie's making, said. Any controversy began in 1940, Lebo said. Welles, known for his spellbinding stage and radio productions with the Mercury Theater in New York, was making a much watched arrival in Hollywood, having signed at age 24 to direct his first picture. He told the gossip columnist Louella Parsons that he had written the forthcoming "Kane." "Herman immediately flips, is threatening to sue, wants to make sure he maintains credit," Lebo said. Mercury Theater's radio writers typically didn't get credit, and Mankiewicz had waived his claim to authorship of "Kane" in a contract with the company. Welles could have pressed for full credit, Lebo writes, but his lawyer advised against the publicity of a dispute, and a shared credit was ultimately agreed to by both writers. The "Mank" producer Douglas Urbanski said that Welles's lawyer, L. Arnold Weissberger, had left credit contractually vague. "If they got Herman the drunk who didn't deliver," Urbanski said, "there was no way they were going to give it, quite rightly, and if he earned it, Orson was going to do what he ultimately did." (He acknowledged that some of Weissberger's communications cut against this theory.) The question of who wrote what has surfaced periodically over the years, but it lives on mainly because of the New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. In 1971, she wrote a two part essay in which she asserted, quoting Mankiewicz's secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins in "Mank"), that "Welles didn't write (or dictate) one line of the shooting script." Fincher told The New York Times Magazine that the essay, "Raising Kane," provided the germ of an idea for the screenplay. The 50,000 word essay is widely regarded as a misstep in Kael's work as a journalist. She was accused of not having spoken to Welles or Kathryn Trosper, his assistant when "Kane" was written, and of ignoring archival material that might have complicated the article's contentions. She was even accused of using, without credit, the research of Howard Suber, a young professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose interviews with Mankiewicz's wife, Sara, and others can be found on file with Kael's papers at Indiana University. Peter Bogdanovich raised all these charges in 1972 in an Esquire essay, which itself has an air of mystique surrounding its authorship. "I did all the legwork, research and interviews, and the byline carried only my name, but Orson had taken a strong hand in revising and rewriting," Bogdanovich wrote in 1997. Brian Kellow's biography of Kael suggests that the critic, who died in 2001, chose not to respond to Bogdanovich's charges. For all this, today there is relatively little argument over who wrote what in "Citizen Kane." In research published in 1978, Robert L. Carringer examined seven drafts of the screenplay in great detail and concluded that the writing Mankiewicz had done in Victorville, Calif., during the period depicted in the film "elaborated the plot logic and laid down the overall story contours," but that Welles, principally, transformed the script "from a solid basis for a story into an authentic plan for a masterpiece." Carringer, who in a recent phone interview professed no interest in seeing "Mank," described the differences between the two writers' perspectives. Mankiewicz, he said, was a narrator. "You have a character well, you have to say his age, family situation, economics," he said. Welles, on the other hand, "hated that. So at every point possible, he created alternative ways of doing things." Mankiewicz's contributions were essential and in some cases drew on his own experiences. Kael and Meryman both note that as a drama critic at The New York Times in 1925, Mankiewicz passed out drunk while writing a review, just as Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten) does in "Kane." (The Times ran a notice indicating the review's absence.) But Lebo, who has done his own analysis of the scripts and posted various versions of the screenplay online for easy comparison, noted that even the closest thing we have to a final script the Museum of Modern Art, which holds one of two known copies of that draft, calls it the "Correction Script" is still filled with strange things that didn't end up in the movie. "The final film is not really at all like the final script," he said. "Every script goes through revisions during production, but this one much more than most, and what Orson Welles did to it, probably literally at the last second during production just as he did with his theater productions that's what made the movie the movie we remember today." "She picks the guy who is the epitome of the auteur in America and tears down his one great achievement that everybody can agree on," said Joseph McBride, who wrote three books on Welles and acted for him in "The Other Side of the Wind," a film belatedly completed in 2018. "But there's a misunderstanding about the auteur theory, too." The French critics who devised it "were accounting mostly for directors who didn't write scripts, like Raoul Walsh, and how they could put their imprint on films that they hadn't written." That point is made in "Mank," when Welles (Tom Burke) angrily responds to Mankiewicz's demand for credit by saying, "Ask yourself, who's producing this picture, directing it, starring in it?" The critic Andrew Sarris, in an April 1971 retort to Kael's essay, noted that even if Mankiewicz had written every word, Welles was no less the auteur of "Citizen Kane" than he was of his 1942 adaptation of "The Magnificent Ambersons," whose "best lines and scenes were written by Booth Tarkington." While Urbanski said that Kael's argument had been discredited by historians, he added: "You could equally say that our film is 100 percent accurate if, and here's the if, you accept that you're looking at it through Herman Mankiewicz's alcoholic perspective, because that changes everything." Mankiewicz, he said, was the "motor" of a movie that functions on several layers. McBride, who defended moviemakers' right to dramatic leeway, nevertheless views "Mank" as a gross distortion and a missed opportunity to capture what was already an interesting relationship between Mankiewicz and Welles. "They both worked on it, they both contributed their talents and they were better working together than they were alone," he said. "You could show that. It wouldn't detract from Mankiewicz's genius and Welles's genius." To Fincher, the point of "Mank" isn't who wrote what. He said through a representative: "It was not my interest to make a movie about a posthumous credit arbitration. I was interested in making a movie about a man who agreed not to take any credit. And who then changed his mind. That was interesting to me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Caitlin Mulhall and Matthew Robison couldn't afford a two bedroom they liked, so they opted for the next best thing: sharing a one bedroom. Caitlin Mulhall and Matthew Robison went to college together and moved to New York with plans to share a two bedroom apartment. But as they quickly discovered, their limited budget made that a challenge. One day, Ms. Mulhall's aunt, who was privy to their apartment hunting woes, suggested something else: Why not share a one bedroom? So Ms. Mulhall, 22, and Mr. Robison, 23, shifted gears last spring after they nearly rented a teeny two bedroom on the Upper West Side that not only exceeded their 2,500 monthly budget, but was also so small that it would have been hard to socialize with one another inside let alone with anyone else. "Even when I was growing up, I could never be by myself in my room for very long," Mr. Robison said. "No, me neither," Ms. Mulhall said. "That's how my whole family is: all up in each other's faces all the time. No one knocks." Last June, they rented a one bedroom on East 85th Street for 2,450 a month, putting their cavalier attitude toward personal space to the test. Ms. Mulhall took the bedroom which has two good sized closets and overhead storage and Mr. Robison has a loft bed in the living room. Underneath it, he keeps his clothes on a garment rack and in a large wicker trunk he found on the street. "People will just throw stuff out at the end of the month their couches, their beds," Mr. Robison said. "It's entertaining just to see all the random stuff." They split the rent, with Ms. Mulhall shouldering the utilities, which run about 150 a month. "We must have seen at least 80 apartments," she said. Their broker, Kim Bloomfield, of Citi Habitats, convinced them to look on the East Side for more space and a shorter commute. At the time, Ms. Mulhall was doing package design in White Plains, N.Y. "We'd walk into a place, and Kim would look at my face and be like, 'No, never mind,'" Ms. Mulhall said. "Or we'd go in and be like, 'Where would the bed fit in the living room?' And she'd be like, 'A bed doesn't fit in here. Let's go.'" By the time Mr. Robison saw their current place, they had already lost out on several places they loved. He immediately called Ms. Mulhall to tell her that it was the ideal layout: The living room and bedroom were on opposite ends of the apartment, with the kitchen and bathroom in between, so neither one getting up in the middle of the night would disturb the other. "If we wait," he warned, "it will be gone." There was only one major drawback: a mini fridge rather than a full size one (though, oddly enough, there is a full size dishwasher). But while they're a very short walk from many major train lines, Ms. Mulhall still wishes they had found something on the Upper West Side. "I feel like it's sunnier over there," she said ruefully. "The buildings are shorter." "But you could not fit this couch into most places we saw," said Mr. Robison, perching on the arm of the big sofa they bought for 65 on Craigslist. "And it doesn't feel crammed it feels open," he said of the apartment, which is cheery and spacious, with large, storybook like casement windows, high ceilings and a kitchen with a pretty blue and white tile backsplash. "Not even when we have other people over," Ms. Mulhall agreed, pointing out that they often invite friends and even her mother to stay over on the sofa. It was her mother's stories about working in New York in her 20s that made Ms. Mulhall want to move to New York. But the first job she got out of school both she and Mr. Robinson attended the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio was in the Bay Area, designing packaging for E. J. Gallo Winery. Mr. Robison had also gone west and was doing set design in Los Angeles. During one late night phone call, Ms. Mulhall told Mr. Robison that she wanted to move east and that he had to come with her. "I didn't know anyone in L.A.," Mr. Robison said. "All my family is from Ohio and Pennsylvania." "I love it," Ms. Mulhall said of New York. "This is where I'm supposed to be. There's so much to do here: Carl Schurz Park, Central Park, tempting shopping on 86th."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Jack Harrison Quintana, Grindr's director for equality, said that the company hoped testing reminders would both slow H.I.V. transmission and reduce the stigma of being tested. In an effort to shrink the global AIDS epidemic, the world's largest gay dating app is changing its software this week to urge millions of users to get frequent H.I.V. tests. Grindr, which claims to have 3.3 million daily users from every country in the world, will send men who opt into the service a reminder every three to six months, and simultaneously point them to the nearest testing site. It will also let clinics, gay community centers and other testing sites advertise for free. The company is making the move to "reduce H.I.V. transmission and support our whole community regardless of H.I.V. status in living long and fulfilling lives," said Jack Harrison Quintana, Grindr's director for equality. "Wow that's great!" said Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, a former chief of sexually transmitted disease prevention in San Francisco who has used Grindr to promote testing. "For a company of this magnitude to do this is groundbreaking." Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health and an expert in gay male behavior, called the decision "excellent." "This will 'demedicalize' testing and destigmatize it," Dr. Halkitis said. "The more you make it normal, the more people are going to access it." Dr. Jonathan Mermin, chief of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said many men who use location based phone apps to find other men nearby seeking sex are considered at high risk of getting infected. Therefore, "all effective efforts to increase testing are welcome," he said of Grindr's decision. "The more organizations and people involved in this effort, the better." In some venues, even more frequent testing is the norm. In California's pornography industry, for example, actors in films where condoms are not used must test negative every two weeks. More than 107,000 gay and bisexual men in this country have H.I.V. but don't know it, Dr. Mermin said, and there is typically a three year gap between the day they get infected and the day they find out. Over that time, a man can spread the virus to dozens of partners; but a man who has been tested and takes his antiretroviral pills every day is at virtually zero risk of passing on the virus. Three years "is too long," Dr. Mermin said. "Testing is good for people, and sound public health practice." Dr. Klausner has studied using Grindr to distribute H.I.V. home test kits to gay black and Hispanic men, who are the country's highest risk group. Numerous studies, he said, have shown that reminders by text or phone can triple or even quadruple the chance that the recipient will get tested. Dr. Halkitis predicted that other gay dating apps would soon imitate Grindr. Reminders could be especially effective, he said, if they appeared on apps that appeal to black men like Jack'd or Adam4Adam. Mr. Harrison Quintana said Grindr would welcome such imitation and not sue to stop it. Grindr also encourages the use of pre exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a daily pill that protects against the virus. Since 2016, the app has sent users two weekly messages asking them to consider it, and tells them where they can get a prescription. To help gay men in the South and rural areas, who are much less likely than urbanites to find H.I.V. testing nearby, Grindr is working with CenterLink, which represents over 200 gay oriented community centers around the country, many in remote areas. Adrian Shanker, founder of the Bradbury Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown, Pa., said Grindr tested its service last year in his Lehigh Valley area, which is semirural and economically depressed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
"Between the strong dollar and the price about 20 percent lower than the original listed price I think I saved about 35 to 40 percent,"Kenneth Bermudez says of the villa he and his family are buying in Italy. BARCELONA With the exchange rate against the euro persistently not in his favor and his retirement still 20 years away, Dr. Kenneth Bermudez had decided to delay his dream of owning a villa in Tuscany, Italy. "I originally thought I was going to look much later, but now with the strong dollar and drop in property prices, I couldn't pass up the opportunity," he said. Dr. Bermudez, a plastic surgeon based in San Francisco, spent three weeks house hunting in Tuscany, visiting 30 properties before choosing a villa in the Chianti region near the town of Gaiole, 45 minutes from Florence. The purchase is in escrow and expected to clear by January. "Between the strong dollar and the price about 20 percent lower than the original listed price I think I saved about 35 to 40 percent," he said, adding that he had spent "less than 1 million" for a home of 8,000 square feet on nine acres. The dollar's climb in value against the euro it remains near the recent peak reached in March and languishing prices in some European markets have emboldened many Americans to consider buying a second home in Europe after more than a decade of near inactivity. "If we compared data through the end of the third quarter of 2015 with the same period the prior year, the growth of U.S. home buyer interest in Europe is up 180 percent," said Erin Koops, executive vice president for member services at Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, a company based in Chicago that represents 500 broker firms in 50 countries. Ms. Koops said the measure was based on requests by Americans at broker companies in the United States for introductions to Europe agents. The countries that received the most inquiries were those that traditionally appealed to Americans: France, Italy, Spain and, in a virtual tie for fourth, England and Germany, Ms. Koops said. The market conditions in each of those markets vary, but the common denominator is the stronger dollar. According to Daragh Maher, a currency strategist at HSBC in New York, the rise in the dollar began last year when the Federal Reserve stopped injecting money into the American economy, a policy known as quantitative easing, and the European Central Bank did the opposite, pumping in money, which weakened the euro. "The consensus expectation is that the dollar will be at 1.06 to the euro at the end of 2016" it now hovers around 1.10 "but will remain broadly stable until then," Mr. Maher said. "If you believe that outlook, the exchange rate is less of a factor to consider." Most buyers consulted had not postponed decisions to buy in the hopes of getting an even better rate. In fact, the current environment is actually more favorable to American buyers, Mr. Maher said. "What's changed is that the market is not as pessimistic about the euro now, but that has created a helpful combination," he said. "Affordability has improved, but stability in the euro means you're not so worried about where you'll be in 12 months' time with a euro asset." The villa that the Bermudez family is buying in Italy. When it comes to the gold plated addresses of Paris and London, however, affordability is a relative term. In the French capital, the average price for a two bedroom, two bath apartment in St. Germain des Pres is more than 4,600 a square foot. In Mayfair in London, the same size apartment can be more than 7,500 a square foot. By contrast, the average price a square foot in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin, the city's most popular property destination for international buyers, is roughly 1,600 a square foot; in the Eixample district in Barcelona, Spain, it is just under 1,300. London's expensive prices stand out for another reason: It is one of the few, if any, cities in Europe where buyers in dollars would still pay more today for the same apartment in a prime location than they would have in July 2008, when the dollar hit its all time low, worth just 0.62 euro. This is partly because Britain uses the pound, not the euro, so it is largely shielded from the economic uncertainty in the eurozone that is caused by Greece and other factors; also, the London market is buoyed by the city's status as a global financial center. Largely as a result, a 1,000 square foot, three bedroom, two bath apartment in Mayfair that cost around 4 million in 2008 would cost 4.6 million today. (The Knightsbridge and Holland Park areas are also in the same price category.) In Paris and Barcelona, however, Americans can get better value today. In the case of the Spanish city, the distressed property market combined with the stronger dollar can yield extraordinary value. In Paris, buyers are still able to benefit from a downturn in prices after the Socialist Francois Hollande's election as president in 2012. In anticipation of higher taxes, some wealthy Parisians left France, which increased high end inventory by 40 percent, according to Marie Helene Lundgreen, director at Belles Demeures de France, a company that represents luxury real estate brokers in France. "It's a very good market now for Americans and dollar based buyers," Ms. Lundgreen said, adding that inventory has already dropped 25 percent, partly because of increased American buying. "If the trend continues, it will be a sellers' market again." Kathryn Brown of the Paris Property Group said American buyers had been coming on strong since September. "The official indicators are trailing what's going on here," she said. "We actually had a bidding war on a property. That's the first time that's happened in recent memory." The prices of prime property in central London flattened before Britain's general elections in May, but with the conservative victory, they have resumed climbing. "We expect prices to increase 2.5 percent in 2015 and 6 percent year on year for the next three years," said Giles Hannah, a senior vice president at Christie's International Real Estate in London. He said there had been a 22 percent increase in American buyers over last year. In Barcelona, inquiries from Americans have remained steady over the last year, but those that have resulted in sales have increased, according to Lucas Fox International Properties, a real estate agency with a focus on Spain's luxury market. "Prices dropped 30 percent to 40 percent in late 2006 and only stopped dropping in the last quarter of 2014," said Alexander Vaughan, a partner in the firm. "Combine that with the dollar, and it's crazy good value." Most American buyers in Europe are absentee owners much of the time, so a property's appeal to renters is crucial to make the most out of their investment. Lindsay Webster, a community volunteer in Spartanburg, S.C., said she spent a sabbatical year in Barcelona a decade ago with her family and fell in love with the city. Now she is looking to buy an apartment in the upscale neighborhood of Sarria, near the city's American school, and rent it out to another American family on sabbatical. "I need something sunny and attractive that will rent easily," she said. "The timing is good because of the dollar, and my hope is to spend summers there."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
How many albums do you need to sell to reach No. 1 on Billboard's chart? This week, the number is 823 along with 83 million streams, that is. Those are the numbers for "Hoodie SZN" (Highbridge/Atlantic), by the New York rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, the latest and most extreme example of the disparity that now exists in the music industry between the still rapid growth of streaming and the cratering business of old fashioned album sales. Billboard and Nielsen credit "Hoodie SZN" with the equivalent of 58,000 sales in the United States last week, a number that incorporates streams and downloads of individual tracks, as well as sales of the full album. But the vast majority of that composite number is from streaming so much so that the sales number represents a new low on the chart. The 823 copies of "Hoodie SZN" that were sold last week all as downloads, since that title has not been released on any physical formats is the least number of copies that any album has sold in the week it went to No. 1. It tops a record set just the week before by 21 Savage's "I Am I Was," which sold 3,481 copies and had 84 million streams.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
What looks like a page ripped from an alien's dream journal is actually a frozen lake containing methane bubbles trapped in icy cells in Alberta, Canada. In January and February when the lake has frozen over and abrasive winter winds have polished the ice, visitors can peer through a window into one of Earth's most mesmerizing natural prisons. Over the past couple of months visits with these gaseous captives at Abraham Lake and a number of other locations have left photographers spellbound, scattering mementos of their otherworldly encounters all over the Internet. "Some years the bubbles are few and hard to find, but this year they covered the lake, making it look like something from fiction," wrote one of these photographers, Rachel Jones Ross, of her experience at Abraham Lake. "I had heard about them before and seen pictures online, but nothing would have prepared me for how surreal it feels to walk across this frozen lake." Curious commenters on the photos that have appeared on Instagram under tags such as methanebubbles or less scientifically, lovely, have asked how this can be real. It's far from the first time this question has emerged it seems that at some point, every winter for the past few years, a photo or video of the phenomenon begins to spiral its way across the Internet. This year, one of the standouts was an image taken by Ms. Ross, who figured out how to illuminate the lake from below at night. The answer to the how and why of this and this begins with bacteria in the mud at the bottom of the lake munching on dead plants and other organic matter. This releases methane gas. As the methane attempts to escape, it bubbles toward the frozen surface of the lake and gets trapped beneath the ice. Although the winds which keep the surface of man made Abraham Lake clear have made it a particularly good spot to see the bubbles, thousands of other lakes support this phenomenon according to Katey M. Walter Anthony, a scientist at The University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has identified similar patterns at natural and man made lakes in Minnesota, Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Russia, Greenland and beyond. In Canada, Vermillion Lakes and Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park bubble beautifully too. Dr. Walter Anthony studies these bubbles, not because of their striking aesthetics, but the because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Warming in the Arctic is causing the once frozen ground there, known as permafrost, to thaw across millions of acres. An immense amount of organic material is trapped in the permafrost, and after it thaws, bacteria can break it down, releasing methane or carbon dioxide, depending on how wet the area is. Dr. Walter Anthony is trying to determine how much the release of these gases will intensify global warming. She first happened across the bubbles by accident in Siberia when the lake she was studying in warmer weather froze over. She told New York Times reporter Justin Gillis in 2011: "I went out on the ice, this black ice, and it looked like the starry night sky. You could see these bubble clusters everywhere. I realized 'aha!' this is where all the methane is." (View a slide show of her at work setting "bubble traps.") The increasing rapidity at which these photos spread through social media has meant that a wide array of people across the globe are learning about them and finding their own potentially precarious ways to get up close to the bubbles. "It's an eerie experience because the lake is so clear that you can see down to the bottom; if there are no cracks or bubbles to use as a reference you can't tell how thick the ice is, and it feels as though you could fall through at any moment," wrote Ms. Ross, who is a Ph.D candidate in experimental psychology at the University of Calgary. She said she wore spikes on her shoes so as not to be swept away by wind when capturing her image of her feet. Falling through is actually a real concern. "January is probably the safest," said Madeleine Ernst, who is the proprietor of the nearby Aurum Lodge, which offers tours of the lake. In mid February the ice begins to thaw, meaning it gets more dangerous. Mr. Ernst said Thursday, that as it has now warmed to the point that she no longer could spot any bubbles. Visitors often wonder of another danger: flammability. When methane finally reaches the air and mixes with oxygen, it can ignite with the spark of a match as you can see in this video, shot at a lake in Norway in 2014. Rune Pettersen, a YouTube experimenter, punctured the ice to release methane into the air before lighting it with a match.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
PARIS How would you like to have a go at some Shakespeare? On Wednesday night, the British theater director Peter Brook, 94, sat onstage at the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, as half a dozen audience members tried their hand at a line from "Othello." One inserted a long pause; another shouted it too close to the microphone, and the audience giggled. Brook listened intently. "Let's just allow the words to vibrate," he said. The evening was a rare opportunity to hear from the director, too. For three nights, Brook, who has worked as a director since the 1960s and commands awed respect worldwide, was letting audiences in on his creative process. The project, called "Shakespeare Resonance," was divided into two parts: an interactive lesson on the musical nature of Shakespeare's verse, drawing on other plays, and an in progress staging of "The Tempest." And Brook wasn't the only esteemed director to pull back the curtain this month in Paris. At the Theatre des Abbesses, the German director Thomas Ostermeier presented a preview of a production still in its early stages: "Who Killed My Father," an adaptation of a 2018 book by Edouard Louis with the lead role played by the young literary star himself, in his stage debut. It's a vulnerable setup. Many artists hate presenting "unfinished" work, and in both cases, the actors had less than two weeks of rehearsals before the public were let in. Yes, the atmosphere at both performances was sympathetic: Everyone around me seemed to be on the edge of their seats, willing the artists on. When Brook, supported by one of his actors, and the rest of the cast first entered, the audience burst into spontaneous applause. As a critic, workshop presentations are a tricky proposition. It would be churlish to review them like any other production or to complain about slip ups (not that they were many in either performance). Yet this format also cuts through the pretense that we are dispassionate, all knowing observers of fundamentally fixed works. Watching "Shakespeare Resonance" and "Who Killed My Father," I didn't care about the loose ends. I rooted for the artists involved, and I learned a great deal. It's a special privilege to listen to Brook talk about Shakespeare, a playwright he has returned to time and again over 70 years. He made his remarks in French, but the actors performed in English. While Brook's main focus was on rhythm and inflections, he isn't precious about accents: As often, he cast actors from all around the world in "Shakespeare Resonance." In the first part, Brook asked them to read a handful of lines from various plays, gently chiding them if their musical phrasing wasn't to his satisfaction. On hearing Lear's "Is man no more than this?", he asked the performer to let the word "man" resonate "like a question." Brook moved to the first row of the orchestra level for the second part, and the cast launched into a one hour condensed version of "The Tempest," which pared the play down to an elliptical suite of scenes, performed with just a handful of props. At one point, when the mercurial Marcello Magni, playing Ariel, concluded a reply to Prospero with the words "were I human," he lingered for a second on "human," with a hint of regret. Suddenly, after hearing Brook's earlier notes, his inflection stood out in the flow of the dialogue. It felt like being in on a trade secret. Anyone hoping to see Brook direct in real time, however, will be disappointed. On the first night of "Shakespeare Resonance," neither he nor his longtime collaborator, Marie Helene Estienne, intervened during the run through, or commented afterward. Then again, the cast didn't need much help. Alongside Magni, Ery Nzaramba grew nicely into the role of Prospero, occasionally channeling a sinister, Gollum like voice. As Miranda, Brook's granddaughter Maia Jemmett, continued the family tradition with endearing sincerity. Brook has worked at the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord since 1974, when he discovered the abandoned venue and brought it back without bothering to add a fresh coat of paint. The wear and tear on the walls and the arch framing the stage (on which Hiran Abeysekera, as Caliban, climbs dexterously) are an integral part of the play's atmosphere. "Resonance is a word that holds special meaning for me in this place," Brook said at the beginning. "At night, here, you can hear the sound of silence." Ostermeier, the director of Berlin's Schaubuhne playhouse, made himself scarcer during the workshop presentation of "Who Killed My Father." He warned the audience at the start that he might interrupt if anything went wrong, but he didn't have to. In this one man show, Louis held the stage for 90 minutes with genuine instinct and feeling. It would be impressive under most circumstances, but Louis, 27, who shot to global fame with his novelistic memoir "The End of Eddy," had never acted professionally before. While he writes in his books that theater classes were an escape for him during his teenage years, working with a star director like Ostermeier who has previously adapted Louis's autobiographical novel "A History of Violence" is like going from high school music lessons straight to the Paris Opera. "Who Killed My Father" starts with family history and ends in social critique, as Louis explores the government policies that cut his father's welfare benefits and, according to him, worsened his dad's health. Given that Louis wrote it, it might be unfair to say that he was far more believable than the actor and director who initially commissioned and performed "Who Killed My Father" for the stage, Stanislas Nordey.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A newcomer to the cantina in the pirate city of Mos Eisley in a galaxy far away would be confronted by a crowd of intimidating thugs: Rodians, Devaronians, Ithorians, Morseerians, Lutrillians, Siniteens and other alien buccaneers swilling liquor and picking fights while a band of hairless Biths play some kind of cosmic jazz. Just another night at the Star Wars bar. As exotic as they appear, these beings share a comforting familiarity: They are bilaterally symmetrical with, for the most part, a pair of eyes staring from a head connected by a neck to a torso equipped with matching pairs of limbs. They move across the floor on legs, not wheels. They make sounds with mouths and register them with ears. In their basic body plan they are little different from the motley crew in the public room of the Spouter Inn where Ishmael meets Queequeg, Melville's illustrated man. Scientists have long debated how closely extraterrestrial life would evolve to resemble that on earth. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book "Wonderful Life," took a contrarian view, arguing that with a slightly different roll of the Darwinian dice, earth would have been inhabited by creatures unimaginable. , an astrobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, is the anti Gould. In his new book, "The Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution," he argues for a cosmos populated, if at all, by anthropocentric creatures like those George Lucas dreamed up for the "Star Wars" films.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Honeybees and other pollinating insects are crucial helpers in putting food on American tables. But the bees' colonies have declined over the years, leading concerned beekeepers and scientists to speculate about the causes. A new lawsuit by leaders in the beekeeping industry against the Environmental Protection Agency highlights one often cited worry: that pesticides are playing a role in those losses. The focus of the lawsuit, filed last week in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, is the E.P.A.'s reauthorization of the use of an insecticide that has previously harmed honeybee colonies . That chemical, sulfoxaflor, is absorbed into plants, where it can be ingested by pollinating bees. When the bees return to the hive, they can transfer the chemical to the colony. This affects the bees' ability to breed and survive according to studies cited by Earthjustice, whose lawyer Gregory C. Loarie is representing the petitioners. "Honeybees and other pollinators are dying in droves because of insecticides like sulfoxaflor," Mr. Loarie said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit. "This is illegal and an affront to our food system, economy and environment." The lawsuit names the E.P.A. and its administrator, Andrew Wheeler, as the defendants. It was filed by the Pollinator Stewardship Council; the American Beekeeping Federation; and Jeff Anderson, a beekeeper. The petitioners are asking the court to review the environmental agency's decision in July to allow the use of sulfoxaflor on crops, the latest twist in a series of challenges and approvals surrounding its use, according to a summary of those actions on the E.P.A.'s website. The first applications for the use of sulfoxaflor came to the agency in 2010 from the agriculture chemical company Dow AgroSciences, now called Corteva Agriscience, to register three products containing the chemical. After a period of public comment, the E.P.A. approved its use in 2013. But the Pollinator Stewardship Council, an advocacy organization that documents the effects of pesticides on pollinating insects, and others in the industry petitioned for a review of that decision. In 2015, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned it, saying the agency had not provided "substantial evidence" of the chemical's effects on bees, and ordered further studies. After collecting more data, the E.P.A. in 2016 again approved registrations for the use of sulfoxaflor, but not on blooming crops that attracted bees and other pollinators. On July 12 of this year, however, the agency announced it had removed the restrictions and approved other uses for the insecticide, calling it "an effective tool to control challenging pests with fewer environmental impacts." The decision "shows the agency's commitment to making decisions that are based on sound science," Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, the assistant administrator for the E.P.A.'s office of chemical safety and pollution prevention, said in the announcement. The Trump administration has been rolling back environmental regulations it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses. In some cases, agencies have skipped key steps in the process, like notifying the public and asking for comment. Mr. Loarie, the lawyer for the beekeepers, said the suit aimed to set aside the E.P.A.'s decision on sulfoxaflor because it was "contrary to federal law and unsupported by substantial evidence." He said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the agency's July decision to approve use of the insecticide was "out of the blue" and that it had not solicited public comments or feedback from the beekeeping industry, as it had done in 2013, in light of the industry's history of legal objections. "To cut them out of the process is definitely something we have not seen before," Mr. Loarie said. An E.P.A. spokesman said that the agency does not comment on pending litigatio n. He said the agency had sought public comments in previous stages of registering the pesticide, receiving "considerable feedback on sulfoxaflor from stakeholders." Corteva said in a statement on Wednesday that it was "pleased that the U.S. E.P.A. has restored and expanded" the use of one of its insecticides that has sulfoxaflor as its active ingredient.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
POSE 10 p.m. on FX. With its large ensemble of transgender actors, and the trans writers and producers Janet Mock and Our Lady J, "Pose" has continued to revolutionize the way L.G.B.T. stories are told onscreen. Set in New York City's ball scene in the early '90s during the height of the AIDS crisis, Season 2 has seen its characters strive for their dancing, modeling, activist and entrepreneurial dreams, amid medical, financial and societal setbacks. In the season finale, directed by Mock, Blanca (Mj Rodriguez) tries to reassemble her house after a medical scare, Angel (Indya Moore) encounters a fan during a modeling gig and Elektra (Dominique Jackson) and Pray Tell (Billy Porter) confront a new ball category. MOST EXPENSIVEST 10 p.m. on Viceland. Over three seasons of his Viceland show, the rapper 2 Chainz, with his French bulldog Trappy in tow, has gotten his hands on some of the priciest toys, products and services tailor made for the one percent. On the summer season finale, the rapper dives into the rich world of viticulture, visiting the Napa Valley winery Promontory to sample a 900 bottle of wine. Then he tries out a 2,000 decanter that comes with its own instructional DVD.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Alcoholics tend to isolate themselves, both physically and emotionally. Advanced alcoholics will do it to extremes. Ray, one half of this movie's title couple, is introduced in a form of isolation that may turn many viewers' stomachs. He occupies a single room in public housing in England's Black Country. The room has one window and is infested with fruit flies. Every morning, Sid, a potbellied, longhaired neighbor, brings Ray three long plastic bottles filled with a thick brown liquid. Home brew, they call it later. Every day Ray drinks the bottles dry and looks out the window. Sometimes he listens to the radio. Sometimes he sees his estranged wife, Liz, on the street and calls out to her, asking her to visit. He doesn't eat. And that's it. But then there are the memories. Written and directed by the artist Richard Billingham, "Ray Liz" is an extension of his work as a photographer, which subsists largely of portraits of his own family. This is a fiction film, with actors playing all the real life characters, but Billingham has crafted it with a documentary concern for detail. Ray's life in his lonely room is the frame for two extended flashback sequences.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies

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