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These foundational elements are still present eight years later, as the trio welcome us, their fellow illusionists, to our magic society's monthly meeting. "I hope you have a ticket for both," Dennis told one of the Zoom attendees, who was watching with her cat. We went through the agenda: minutes; dues; Louie, who appeared to be in a wood paneled basement, executing a trick with five mugs and a billiard ball, followed by one with ESP cards like those used by Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters." The feats of mentalism elicited all cap messages like "WHOAH" and "STOP IT" in the chat window the Zoom equivalents of gasps. It's all great fun, but "Dust From the Stars" really takes off when it literally takes off. Directed, like the earlier one, by Paul Lazar, the show deftly mixes the lo fi aesthetics of budget science fiction (Louie's communication device looks suspiciously like a shower attachment) with dopey humor and experimental theater's sensibility. The last does not come as a surprise: Sobelle is a regular on arty stages, both on his own ("The Object Lesson" and "Home") and with Lyford ("All Wear Bowlers"); Cuiffo is an actual magician who has performed verbatim re creations of Lenny Bruce's acts. (The sets are by Julian Crouch, whose work has been seen on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera.) After Daryl recounts a nighttime encounter involving flashing lights and mysterious creatures, we switch to a galaxy where Louie "was volunteered to make first contact." He disappears and his buddies set out "to find him in our land buggy that flies and stuff." At this point, the show starts integrating the actors into elaborate backdrops and videos (the films are credited to Derrick Belcham and Lyford), peaking in an astonishing final scene in which the galactic travelers find themselves in a ghostly locale. It is, like what preceded, very funny, but this time the laughs may catch in your throat. Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars Live performances on Zoom through Sept. 26. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Week in Tech: Algorithmic Bias Is Bad. Uncovering It Is Good. Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Hi, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at the week's tech news: I'm about to suggest something that sounds controversial: Maybe it's good that we keep discovering biased algorithms? Let's rewind. A pair of articles this past week revealed that software that is used to make decisions on the behalf of humans appears to do so with gender bias. First, it came to light that the algorithm that calculates credit quotas for Apple's new credit card may give higher limits to men than to women. Goldman Sachs, which issues the card, said its credit decisions were "based on a customer's creditworthiness and not on factors like gender, race, age, sexual orientation or any other basis prohibited by law." And my colleague Cade Metz reported that artificial intelligence services from Google and Amazon both failed to recognize the word "hers" as a pronoun, but correctly identified "his." Other, similar algorithms "generally don't give women enough credit" when analyzing text, he added. This isn't surprising. Algorithms are written by humans, who are inherently biased and that can seep into the way they frame the analysis that underlies their code. Artificial intelligence software is trained on data that contains all kinds of human biases, which can then appear in its own inferences. "What algorithms are doing is giving you a look in the mirror," Sandra Wachter, an associate professor in law and A.I. ethics at Oxford University, told me. "They reflect the inequalities of our society." That we often see inequality is troubling. If software is going to choose a credit limit, it should do so fairly. If A.I. is supposed to parse information for us, we would like it to do so objectively. The problem is, algorithms are everywhere, making decisions on our behalf in ways that are often opaque to us. "How many times am I not seeing certain jobs ads? How many times do I get advertised higher prices?" Professor Wachter asked. "I often don't know that I'm being treated unfairly." In that sense, the more often we unearth cases of bias, the better. Because not only is it one algorithm fewer left unchecked, it's more evidence to demonstrate why we must solve the problem. Not that that's easy, of course. Computer scientists are trying to work out how to spot and remove bias in data; others are developing ways to make algorithms better able to explain their decisions. And there are pushes to force companies to be more transparent and accountable about how they use algorithms. It's a slog, but it is happening. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. "It's unrealistic to assume that we'll ever have a neutral system," Professor Wachter said. "But with the right systems in place, we can mitigate some of the biases." With that Apple Card article fresh in your mind, now is a good moment to think about Big Tech's push into personal finance. Google announced that it was teaming up with Citigroup and the Stanford Federal Credit Union to offer a "smart checking" account next year. Exactly what that will entail is unclear, but Google says it will help bank customers "benefit from useful insights and budgeting tools," via its Pay app. Also, Facebook unveiled a digital payment system, called Pay, that will let users make payments across its Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. That's alongside its separate initiative to revolutionize the world of global finance with its own cryptocurrency, Libra. This is all unsurprising. The companies are attracted to the prospect of a new revenue stream. The question is whether or not they can make a go of it. Regulators and lawmakers are already unimpressed. New York State regulators said they would investigate the potentially discriminatory algorithm used by Apple Card. Libra has come under immense criticism from all sides because people don't trust it. And Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, already said of Google's banking effort to CNBC: "There ought to be very strict scrutiny." But there's another question here: Do people even want to use Big Tech to bank? There's a lot of inertia in the world of personal finance, and persuading people to switch from their bank to Apple or Google or Facebook will require features with genuine utility, or higher interest rates, or something else stellar. Fear about financial data privacy is probably a concern for consumers, too. In other words, it's a high bar. News surfaced that a partnership between Google and the hospital provider Ascension could allow the data of the health care company's patients 50 million in total to be uploaded to Google's cloud computing platform. Without patients or doctors being notified, some of that data, including names, dates of birth, lab tests and diagnoses, were already being uploaded. Ascension said it was exploring "machine learning applications that will have the potential to support improvements in clinical quality" through the deal. Google said it would provide "tools that Ascension could use to support improvements in clinical quality and patient safety." This may all be totally O.K. It's perfectly legal for health care providers to share patients' medical information with business partners like electronic medical record companies. Still, the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services plans to seek more information about whether it complies with the law anyway. Nonetheless, many people found it unnerving. That's probably because of Google's motivations: According to The Wall Street Journal, Google hasn't charged Ascension for the work because it hopes to develop systems based on what it learns. It would eventually sell those systems to other health care providers. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. But it comes off as a little tone deaf to slurp up data as intimate as health care records without informing patients, at a time when data privacy concerns are more heightened than ever. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
After years of mounting concerns that the antibacterial chemicals that go into everyday items like soap and toothpaste are doing more harm than good, the Food and Drug Administration said on Monday that it was requiring soap manufacturers to demonstrate that the substances were safe or to take them out of the products altogether. The proposal was applauded by public health experts, who for years have urged the agency to regulate antimicrobial chemicals, warning that they risk scrambling hormones in children and promoting drug resistant infections, among other things. Producers argue that the substances have long been proved to be safe. "It's a big deal that they are taking this on," said Rolf Halden, the director of the Center for Environmental Security at Arizona State University, who has been tracking the issue for years. "These antimicrobials have taken on a life all of their own," Dr. Halden said. "Their use has really proliferated." Studies in animals have shown that the chemicals, triclosan in liquid soaps and triclocarban in bar soaps, can disrupt the normal development of the reproductive system and metabolism, and health experts warn that their effects could be the same in humans. The chemicals were originally used by surgeons to wash their hands before operations, and their use exploded in recent years as manufacturers added them to a variety of products, including mouthwash, laundry detergent, fabrics and baby pacifiers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the chemicals in the urine of three quarters of Americans. The F.D.A. said that accumulated scientific information has prompted it to re evaluate whether these chemicals are safe when used over long periods of time. The agency also said there was no evidence that the substances were any more effective in preventing infection than plain soap and water. The proposed rule does not require producers of the soaps to take them off the market immediately. The F.D.A. has given companies a year to produce data showing that the chemicals are both safe and effective. If they cannot prove, the chemicals will need to be removed from the products, the agency said. The rule is open for public comment for 180 days. It does not apply to hand sanitizers, which will be considered separately. The move seemed to rattle the industry, which said in a statement that it was "perplexed that the agency would suggest there is no evidence that antibacterial soaps are beneficial," because it has long provided data to the agency showing the soaps' safety and efficacy, including at a public meeting in 2008. Changing the products could have a major financial impact. An estimate by the market research firm Kline Company found that antimicrobial and antibacterial hand soaps represented about half of the 900 million market for liquid hand soaps in the United States in 2012. However, the use of triclosan in the 2.2 billion toothpaste market has been decreasing because of growing public concern over the ingredient, said Carrie Mellage, a vice president of consumer products at Kline. Federal regulators started to look more closely at the chemicals in the 1970s, with the F.D.A. first creating regulations to control them in 1978. But very little has been done since, public health advocates complain, partly because of agency slowness, but also because of industry lobbying. The Natural Resources Defense Council, frustrated by the inaction, filed a lawsuit in 2010 to force the agency to issue a final rule. Mae Wu, a lawyer with the council, said that under a settlement signed with the F.D.A. last month, the agency committed to taking final action by 2016. The F.D.A.'s move followed one last week that would phase out the use of antibiotics in animals raised for meat, and another in November that all but banned the use of trans fats in prepared foods. Taken together, the moves seemed to indicate that the F.D.A. is back in action after a long silence during months of bitter political battles that dragged on for months, even after the 2012 election, public health advocates said. "I think they're ready to take on hard issues that they did not before," said Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor of medicine and microbiology at Tufts University and the president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics. Dr. Halden compared triclosan and triclocarban with static on a telephone call, interfering in the final message that is delivered to the body. He said awareness of the risks rarely made it beyond a narrow circle of public health experts, but he hoped that the F.D.A.'s move on Monday would change that. "These chemicals interfere with the regulation of the human body," he said, citing studies in animals. The chemicals accumulate in ground water and soil, and one study of human breast milk found the chemicals in the milk of 97 percent of the women tested, he said. "The fascinating thing is the public has not taken note of this issue." The gathering science that helped prompt the F.D.A.'s move includes studies on laboratory rats that showed decreases in thyroid hormone levels, said Dr. Colleen Rogers, a microbiologist at the F.D.A. Another agency official cited studies showing changes in animal cells' ability to respond to estrogen and testosterone. Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has pressed federal regulators to more closely control antimicrobials, welcomed the move, saying the chemicals had long "existed in a regulatory black hole, despite serious concerns about its impact on public health." He said studies have linked triclosan to the disruption of other hormone functions important for fertility and puberty. He added that proper thyroid function is important for brain development, particularly in children. The industry argued that the active ingredients in antimicrobial soaps are over the counter drugs that go through rigorous reviews by the F.D.A., including of data. Two trade groups, the American Cleaning Institute and the Personal Care Products Council, cited a review of two dozen studies they said showed washing hands with antimicrobial soaps produces "statistically greater reductions in bacteria on the skin" than with plain soap. "In some instances, these products have been found to be critical in the reduction of infection and disease," the groups said. They said they intended to file comments to the F.D.A. "reaffirming" that the use of antibacterial wash products does not contribute to antibiotic resistance. The Henkel Corporation, which makes Dial soaps, some of which include the antimicrobials, said it "takes the proposal seriously," and that it always makes sure "every ingredient in our products meets all applicable legal and regulatory requirements." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
MELBOURNE, Australia There's no rewinding the results in sports, as New Orleans fans still fuming about last week's N.F.C. Championship game can attest. But sometimes, as Sam Stosur proved Friday at the Australian Open, it is possible to get it right the second time. In 2006, Stosur, a Queenslander playing in the women's doubles final in her home Grand Slam, lost her service while attempting to close out the match in the second set. Stosur and her doubles partner, Lisa Raymond, squandered two championship points on their way to a three set defeat to the Chinese team of Yan Zi and Zheng Jie. Thirteen years later, Stosur was back in the women's doubles final, this time alongside China's Zhang Shuai. They were playing the defending champions, Timea Babos and Kristina Mladenovic, and again Stosur was serving in the second set to close out the match. Stosur earned a championship point, which she squandered with a double fault. But the past doesn't have to be prologue. On the next point, Stosur produced an overhead winner to end a 25 shot rally. Then she watched the 13th shot of the next point sail long, near her feet, to seal her 6 3, 6 4 victory with Zhang at Rod Laver Arena. It was sweet redemption for Stosur, not only because of her near miss in 2006 but also because of all her quick exits here in the singles competition. Since defeating Serena Williams in the final to win the 2011 United States Open, Stosur, 34, has exited in the first round in singles in this tournament five times, including the past four years. Stosur held her head high after her latest opening round defeat, last week in straight sets to Dayana Yastremska, an 18 year old from Ukraine, of whom she said, "I think she's going to be a very good player." Stosur, who won the mixed doubles here in 2005 with Scott Draper, immediately turned her attention to the women's doubles. "I think probably for any singles player, playing doubles can almost feel more relaxing or more fun," she said. In Zhang, Stosur found a partner whose wit is as sharp as her net play. She kept Stosur loose and occasionally made her laugh out loud with her on court comments. "If we could transfer that a little bit into the singles court, that would be a good thing," Stosur said. Zhang, 30, had exited in the first round in singles in all 14 majors she had played and was contemplating retirement in early 2016 when Stosur sent her a long and passionate text encouraging her to continue playing. Zhang then advanced to the quarterfinals in singles at the 2016 Australian Open as a qualifier still her best finish in singles in a major and now, on the strength of Stosur's powers of persuasion, she can call herself a Grand Slam champion. These two weeks, Zhang added, have been the most "amazing in my life." Stosur said she had been in communication with Raymond, who told her the other night in a text: "Go get it 13 years later. Get it now." Stosur said, "That was really nice." The stands were roughly half full for the final but wholly behind Stosur and Zhang, ringing the stadium with chants of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oy, Oy, Oy." "You guys definitely are in a good mood right now," Mladenovic said to the crowd during the on court trophy presentation. "That was not our goal." The walk from the court to the locker room took Stosur and Zhang nearly as long as Stosur's opening service game, which lasted 10 minutes, because every few steps she was stopped by well wishers. Tournament workers applauded when Stosur emerged from a media center elevator, and she received more applause from reporters as soon as she stepped inside the main interview room. "I think to be able to play at home is super exciting," Stosur said. "I can feel my phone going off every two seconds at the moment. It's great to know that the support's there from everyone that's close to you, but also feeling it from people you don't even know who are happy and excited, it's an amazing feeling." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
CLEARWATER, Fla. John Middleton knew the opportunity when he saw it. He was 9 years old in September 1964, sitting with his father in the upper deck above third base at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. The Phillies were coasting to the World Series, it seemed, leading the National League by six and a half games with 12 to play. But in the sixth inning of a scoreless tie with the Cincinnati Reds, the Phillies did not notice what the boy from Havertown, Pa., had picked up: The runner on third, Chico Ruiz, was itching to steal home. "I looked at my father and I said, 'Dad, look how far off the base that guy is he's gonna go home!' " Middleton said last Sunday, in his office at the Phillies' training complex. "And the next pitch, he went home. I mean, it was really obvious to me. He just had this extraordinary lead. We were devastated." The rest is seared in the psyche of every Phillies fan of Middleton's generation. Starting with Ruiz's dash, the Phillies lost 10 games in a row to blow the pennant. It took them 16 more years to win their first World Series, and another 28 to win their next championship. They have not had a winning season since 2011, the year before Bryce Harper, then just 19, reached the major leagues with the Washington Nationals. More than half a century later, Middleton, the Phillies' managing partner, has turned to Harper, now a six time All Star, to lead them back. On March 2, Middleton signed Harper to a 13 year, 330 million contract, the longest, richest free agent deal in major league history. It was not the most expensive deal of this off season: Mike Trout the Millville, N.J., native whom Harper had tried to recruit to the Phillies has since signed a 12 year, 426.5 million contract extension with the Los Angeles Angels. But Harper's contract, as a partnership between two parties with no prior relationship, represents baseball's most lucrative leap of faith. For Middleton, it was an opportunity he could not resist. "I approach my job as a fan first," said Middleton, who sold his family's tobacco business to Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris USA, for 2.9 billion in 2007. "The day I stop thinking like a fan, the day I stop feeling that I'm a fan, that's the day I need to retire." It was a deeply personal conversation. The Middletons talked about their 40 year marriage and the challenges of balancing work and family. The Harpers, who met in high school, asked about hospitals and schools they might need when they have children. Harper said he was struck by the way Middleton looked him in the eye, showing an understanding that Harper's goals for this deal made it a life decision, not just a baseball one. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "Understand that my family means the world to me my wife, my mom and dad, everybody," said Harper, who had no interest in an opt out clause. "I want to be able to sit there and have my kids grow up somewhere, not have to move around and go here and go there when that time comes. For me, this is an opportunity to play somewhere for 13 years and try to understand a city, and be into a city and be part of it. That's the greatest thing that could ever happen." Middleton is the team's most powerful link to its own history. The team president Andy MacPhail, General Manager Matt Klentak, Manager Gabe Kapler and all of the coaches were hired from elsewhere, with no ties to a proud, provincial city. Institutional memory is important in Philadelphia, and Middleton has it. "I think Philadelphia fans probably feel that John Middleton's one of their own," said Mike Schmidt, the greatest player in Phillies history. "He's one of our people, one of our guys." Can Harper be a Philly guy, too? Growing up in Las Vegas, he said, his father, Ron, set an example as an ironworker that now helps him relate to his new home. "My dad was blue collar," Harper said. "He worked from 2 in the morning til 1 in the afternoon, he grinded every single day. It was take your freaking lunch pail to work and do your job. I grew up in a family like that, and if I can be around people like that and my family can be around people like that, then they'll grow up the right way." As data savvy teams increasingly keep emotion from their decision making, turning instead to formulaic offers based on cold data, agents have found it harder to appeal to owners' personal drive. The frenzy of old with multiple teams bidding aggressively on free agents has evolved to a painstaking process that often bleeds deep into spring training. So an owner like Middleton stands out to Boras, who also paired starter Jake Arrieta with the Phillies last March on a three year, 75 million contract. In his conversations with Harper, Middleton mentioned the time he lost a high school wrestling championship on a referee's bad call. "He basically personalized his competitiveness," Boras said. "What's funny is that when owners have this dynamic, people inside the game are concerned about it. But what it does is, it actually increases winning and it also increases business. "Look at what Bryce Harper's done for Philadelphia." He has indeed had an effect before even playing a game. The Phillies, who started this decade ranked first in the National League in attendance, dropped to 12th of 15 teams last season, at 2.1 million total fans. In the eight days after the Harper news broke, they sold 340,000 tickets. The apparel company Fanatics said Harper set a record for any sport for first day jersey sales. PlayStation quickly applied an image of Harper in a Phillies jersey to the cover of the video game MLB The Show 19. "He's like a rock star baseball player," Schmidt said. "From Middleton's standpoint or his marketing people's standpoint this kid has an aura about him that Mike Trout doesn't. Now, Mike Trout's numbers may dwarf his, but this kid sells stuff. He's had a pretty good career, and age wise, experience wise, he's coming into his heyday right now. I think that's what the Phillies are banking on." As significant as the off field benefits may be, Middleton insists he signed Harper solely to win; as long as that happens, he said, the fans will respond. Middleton had declared his intentions in November, when he told USA Today he was prepared to spend money in free agency, "and maybe even be a little stupid about it." The comment was calculated, Middleton said, to put public pressure on Klentak and his staff. Of course he craves a moment like the one he had last February, when he watched his beloved Eagles win the Super Bowl from a suite with their owner, Jeffrey Lurie. But more than that, Middleton wants the Harper deal to herald a new era. He wants the Phillies his team, in his town to be the model franchise. "That's what I'd like," Middleton said. "I look at people all the time in this organization and I just say, 'Why shouldn't we be great?' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Apart from a couple of brass weather vanes, there is no art on the walls of Rijks, the principal restaurant at the Rijksmuseum, the cultural institution in Amsterdam that reopened in 2013 after a decade long renovation. Perhaps that's for the best: After long hours of scrutinizing Rembrandts and Vermeers, it's relaxing to enter an old master free zone for lunch, dinner or a midafternoon pause. That said, the gnarl of driftwood and foliage set on our table before the beginning of our meal rose almost to the level of art. The leaves, however, turned out to be a snack: crisp tempura fried spinach dusted with a tart seasoning mix. (The driftwood was whisked away before we could hazard a taste with our first glass of wine Dutch wine, no less.) The restaurant offers a tempting six course tasting, but we chose our own meal a la carte with enthusiastic and well informed advice from a waiter. The menu, by the executive chef Joris Bijdendijk, is almost equally divided among seafood, meat and vegetables. Ingredients are excellent, local and seasonal, and the cooking is precise and imaginative in both flavor and technique, yielding delicious, satisfying, sometimes intriguing dishes. When we visited earlier this year, a good example was spit roasted celeriac, which was fetched from the kitchen on a board and carved and sauced at the table. The consistency was creamy and the flavor intense, but there were layers to this dish: The celeriac was steamed, then studded with Dutch cured smoked pork lardo and slowly roasted and basted for hours. It was served with a smoked oyster emulsion and a rich veal gravy and topped with red sorrel leaves. All those elements were there to support the vegetable, which remained the center of attention. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Bearing the weight of a humongous nation's conflicted identity on your shoulders is surely no easy task for an actor. Yet a graceful BD Wong manages it with barely a stoop of self consciousness in "The Great Leap," Lauren Yee's global vision variation on a by the numbers sports soap opera. Mr. Wong portrays Wen Chang, a Beijing university basketball coach of the 1970s and '80s, in this congested tale of two countries, which opened on Monday night at the Atlantic Theater Company's Stage II. Wen Chang's job has given him unexpected material comforts and, more distressing, a visibility he never asked nor hoped for. A rehabilitated product of the Cultural Revolution, Wen Chang explains that "growing up, you did not want to be someone": "You wanted to be the person three people behind someone. Because being someone could get you killed." And while Mr. Wong has stage presence to burn, his Wen Chang conveys what might be called a radiant invisibility throughout this four character comic drama, directed by Taibi Magar. That is a useful trait for someone who turns out to have a much more dangerously storied past than he lets on. Playing a charismatic Chinese national with a really big secret was what first brought Mr. Wong fame (not to mention a Tony Award), when he portrayed the title role in David Henry Hwang's "M. Butterfly" 30 years ago. Audiences who know him largely for keeping a straight face as a medical theory quoting forensic psychiatrist on "Law Order: SVU" may well want to take this chance to see how artfully he still commands a stage. Ms. Yee ("The Hatmaker's Wife," "King of the Yees") has written a part for him that combines thoughtful research and an imaginative empathy for the Chinese generation that grew up in the stunting shadow of Mao Zedong. "The Great Leap" is at its most affecting when Wen Chang simply tells or avoids telling his own story, with a restrained wistfulness for chances lost that bring to mind the self betraying monologists of Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads" series. The ways in which this life is linked to the others in the play tax credibility, though. Ms. Yee connects generation and nation spanning dots with a labored hand. At the plot's center is a 1989 exhibition basketball game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco, which reunites their respective coaches, Wen Chang and his American counterpart, Saul (Ned Eisenberg, feisty and foul mouthed, of course). A stereotypical tough love coach, Saul had gone to Beijing 18 years earlier to advise the then neophyte Wen Chang on coaching. Now Saul, whose job is in jeopardy, is returning to China to see what his former mentee has become and, he assumes, to beat the pants off the boys of Beijing. (Takeshi Kata's basketball court set, fluidly accented by David Bengali's projections, functions as an all purpose international arena.) Saul's secret weapon is Manford (a tirelessly revved up Tony Aidan Vo), a Chinese American high school student and basketball prodigy who has talked his way into participating. Manford, it turns out, has ulterior motives for going to Beijing, known only to his foster cousin, Connie (Ali Ahn). What makes Manford run is revealed by teasing degrees, though you're likely to figure it out long before the last foul shot. The knottiness of his motives is further snarled by the timing of the exhibition match, which takes place at the height of the Tiananmen Square student protests. Private grievances and public discord come together in a down to the wire tiebreaker as millions watch on television throughout the world. As you may have gathered, "The Great Leap" as befits a play whose title refers both to modern Chinese history and athletic prowess ambitiously straddles several well worn narrative forms, and not without strain. The play is replete with the cliches of sports underdog nail biters, angry young teen stories and roads not taken dramas of middle age regret. But Ms. Magar, who has shone as a director of genre bending works like "Is God Is" and "Underground Railroad Game," keeps the more conventional machinery of "The Great Leap" moving at a well oiled pace. And the performances are smooth and credible, even when the plot is not. This is a show, after all, that brazenly concludes its first act by having Saul, who is about to leave for Beijing with his team, ask, "It's China, four days, what could happen?" That's one of those hoary questions that can be relied on to open the floodgates for a tidal wave of mishaps, misunderstandings and collisions. In that regard, "The Great Leap" does not disappoint. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Oscars are making history again, but there's a catch. As movie theaters across the globe remain closed because of the coronavirus, the motion picture academy met Tuesday to approve several new rules and changes for the next Oscars telecast. Here's the big one: For the first time, a streaming film may skip a theatrical release entirely and still remain eligible for the Academy Awards. "The academy firmly believes there is no greater way to experience the magic of movies than to see them in a theater," the academy president, David Rubin, and chief executive, Dawn Hudson, said in a joint statement. "Our commitment to that is unchanged and unwavering. Nonetheless, the historically tragic Covid 19 pandemic necessitates this temporary exception to our awards eligibility rules." The rule change is not expected to last beyond the 93rd Academy Awards, which are still scheduled for Feb. 28, 2021. It also comes with a strict stipulation: Only films that had a previously planned theatrical release are still eligible for Oscar consideration. That rule will bar traditional TV movies from entering the Oscar fray, but it may also complicate award season bids for independent films that were banking on a buzzy fall festival debut to net a distributor and release date. The academy also noted that the rule would remain in effect at least as long as theaters were closed under federal, state and local guidelines. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Moisturizing masks have traditionally been dense and gloppy, best applied in solitude or, furtively, behind a closed bathroom door. But a new generation of masks is transparent. You could even apply one in the parched atmosphere of an airplane cabin, and your seatmate would be none the wiser. Applied in a thin layer, the masks, which are made with a higher concentration of active ingredients than typical creams or serums, are all but undetectable, though the textures vary. The Intensive Revitalizing Mask from La Mer, for example, is light and lotionlike; it includes what the company calls Miracle Broth, the patented blend of ingredients that's in all of the brand's products and is said to improve the skin's appearance and feel. The Erno Laszlo Hydra Therapy Memory Sleep Mask has a springy consistency reminiscent of a cornstarch heavy Chinese takeout sauce that's been refrigerated. Some, like First Aid Beauty Facial Radiance Overnight Mask and Eve Lom Moisture Mask, have the slick gooeyness of a salve. Lancome Energie de Vie Nuit Night Recovery Beauty Sleep Mask In Cream is, as the name implies (exhaustively), essentially an amped up evening moisturizer, with shea butter high on its ingredient list. Like many beautifiers, these masks offer a discreet boost, both of targeted ingredients and, arguably, morale. As Kate Oldham, a senior vice president and general merchandise manager at Saks Fifth Avenue, put it, a busy woman "can just put it on, go to bed or walk around the house and not feel like they're wearing a Freddy Krueger mask." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
WASHINGTON Judy Shelton, an unorthodox economist with close ties to the Trump administration, moved a step closer to a seat on the Federal Reserve Board after the Senate Banking Committee voted along party lines on Tuesday to advance her nomination to the full Senate. Ms. Shelton moved forward along with Christopher Waller, who is research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and a more conventional pick. If they are confirmed by simple majority votes in the Senate, Ms. Shelton and Mr. Waller will fill the two empty seats on the Fed's seven member board in Washington. While no Democrats on the committee voted for Ms. Shelton, five voted in favor of Mr. Waller. Both nominees would hold a vote on the policy setting Federal Open Market Committee. The committee's 12 voting seats are occupied by the seven governors, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York president, and four regional central bank presidents on a rotating basis. Ms. Shelton's ascent to the powerful policy position has drawn particular scrutiny. That is partly because of her fringe ideas she has been a longtime proponent of tying money to a fixed anchor, such as gold, an idea most economists label impractical or dangerous and partly because analysts and Fed watchers worry that she could politicize the Fed. The central bank closely guards its independence from politics, arguing that it is better for the economy if monetary policy is set without an eye on short term election goals. Ms. Shelton has questioned whether the Fed has too much power, and has at times defended Mr. Trump's criticism of the institution. She abruptly changed her opinions on monetary policy after his election, switching from criticizing easy monetary policy to speaking out in favor of lower interest rates as the president pushed for them. "It would be in keeping with its historical mandate if the Fed were to pursue a more coordinated relationship with both Congress and the president," she wrote in a 2019 opinion piece. The unknown now is whether Ms. Shelton can pass through the full Senate. Her nomination at first seemed imperiled after her February confirmation hearing, as various Senate Banking Committee members voiced skepticism about her economic opinions and autonomy from the White House. Support and pressure from Larry Kudlow, the White House adviser with whom she is close friends, helped Ms. Shelton to gain the 13 Republican votes she needed to pass the Senate committee. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the committee, said in his opening statement that the administration had "made it clear" that the two nominees were a package deal. Bloomberg reported that Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said he had "concerns" about Ms. Shelton's nomination. Assuming no Democrats support Ms. Shelton, four Republican defections would scupper her chances. 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. While Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, the committee's Republican chairman, said Ms. Shelton would be independent if confirmed, Mr. Brown said she would be "dangerous" on the Fed. "Putting one of the president's close advisers on the Fed Board will only make things worse," he said. "Dr. Shelton is a threat to our economy, our democracy, our country." While Fed governors hold just one vote on policy, blunting their impact, they are privy to internal discussions and thus capable of relaying information to both the White House and the press. Ms. Shelton is also seen as a likely candidate for Fed chair should Mr. Trump win re election and decide to replace Jerome H. Powell. Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Powell, but has expressed disappointment with his choice. Ms. Shelton most recently served as American envoy to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Before that, she was a co director of the Sound Money Project at the Atlas Network, which pushes for limited government. Mr. Waller is a more conventional pick for the Fed. He has written extensively on central bank independence, and before joining the Fed's staff he was an economics professor, most recently at the University of Notre Dame. Still, seven Democrats opposed Mr. Waller's nomination, with Mr. Brown raising concerns about his views on regulation, in particular. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
About an hour and a half into his Broadway performance on Tuesday night, Michael Moore paused his rumpled, moralistic ire to offer the audience an Oprah style surprise. Two double decker buses were waiting outside, he said, to whisk theatergoers to Fifth Avenue in a ready made protest delivered straight to the doorstep of President Trump, the chief target of Mr. Moore's solo show. There were so many cheers from the audience who hissed at each mention of the president the way theatergoers once might have booed a vaudeville villain that Mr. Moore checked himself. "We might need four buses," he said. Like any Broadway spectacle, the excursion was a splice of authentic emotion and fabrication. It seemed equal part an earnest bid to get people off the sidelines and into a picket line and equal part showbiz hoopla aimed at bolstering a show that opened last week to mixed reviews and that has not yet caught fire with ticket buyers. The signs were handed out to audience members after they signed a waiver and climbed aboard. And though the field trip called to mind a similar expedition by Andy Kaufman, who took his audience from Carnegie Hall one night in 1979 on charter buses for a snack of milk and cookies, it lacked its originality. The nuance of Mr. Moore's early projects like "Roger Me" seemed to have given way, both on the bus as well on the stage, to fire breathing liberalism that speaks mostly to fellow progressives. Seated in the open air of the buses' upper decks as they whizzed up the Avenue of the Americas toward Trump Tower, what had minutes before been a Broadway audience buying overpriced snacks and drinking wine in plastic sippy cups swiftly evolved into a fired up rally. "I've only done what he said we shouldn't do, which is watch 'Rachel Maddow' and sign online petitions," said Alan Denzer, 66, a retired stockbroker from Bronxville, N.Y., referring to Mr. Moore's excoriation of armchair resistance that permeates the show, as he sat on the bus. It was Mr. Denzer's first time protesting since the Vietnam War, he said. "He makes you feel guilty a little bit for sitting on your duff," he said. Today he realized: "I could be more useful." The protest came at a politically charged moment, hours after Mr. Trump made comments at a news conference blaming both sides, rather than neo Nazis and white supremacists, for the deadly violence Saturday in Charlottesville, Va. The president's words were addressed in Mr. Moore's show, where he appeared almost pained at the retelling. Many of those who followed Mr. Moore to Trump Tower said that if Mr. Moore's buses had not taken them to the streets, Mr. Trump's words that afternoon would have led them to anyway. In his Red Line Tours uniform, Ronald Haynie, 48, a professional New York City guide from the Bronx who had been hired along with the bus for the evening, punched his fist in the air in a joyful Black Power salute. "1968 this!" he said referring to the famed protest gesture at the Mexico City Summer Olympics that year. At 58th Street and the Avenue of the Americas, the police slid back steel barricades blocking off the street, which were an extra security measure while Mr. Trump was in town, and let the buses head east. They drew to a stop by Bergdorf Goodman, where Mr. Moore and Mr. Ruffalo hung over the front of the bus shouting encouragement at the theatergoers turned protesters headed toward Trump Tower at 725 Fifth Avenue. Some paused in their march to ask the actress Olivia Wilde, who had joined in the procession, for her autograph. "This is a way better looking group than most protesters," Jason Trentylon, a street promoter who was not part of the bused in group, said to a friend. The protest itself was brief. Behind a police cordon just north of Tiffany's at 57th Street, the protesters chanted and took pictures of one another for about 45 minutes before the group fractured. At one point Mr. Ruffalo attempted to lead the crowd to another street corner where he said counterprotesters were assembled, but confronted with security blockades, most went home. On Fifth Avenue at 58th Street, as the evening wrapped up, Mr. Moore stood beside Pulitzer Fountain past 10 p.m., signing autographs, surrounded by news camera crews. How would he respond to any criticism, or critiques of his audience participation protest as a stunt? "Who would say something like that?" he said sharply, before turning and walking away. He climbed into a waiting S.U.V. and left. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In the Din of the Dome, the Rams Beat the Saints in Overtime The triumphant locker room at the Super Dome started out so crowded Sunday night that personal space seemed like an extravagance. But as the room emptied, and the jubilant Los Angeles Rams continued a celebration that would rival any bacchanalia in this city's French Quarter, the player who helped preserve their season by blatantly breaking the rules stood in the middle of it all, still in full uniform, delighted to answer question after question about his fateful, and fortunate, moment. Amid the mayhem after a 26 23 overtime victory that propelled the Rams past the Saints and into the Super Bowl, that player, cornerback Nickell Robey Coleman, got his first look at the replay of his helmet to helmet, fourth quarter thump on New Orleans receiver Tommylee Lewis. Peering at a reporter's cell phone, he could see himself slide into view and clobber Lewis before the pass arrived. For Robey Coleman, it was just visual confirmation for what he already knew he had been guilty of pass interference on Lewis and somehow had gotten away with it. The repercussions of that play will be felt everywhere from the league office, which acknowledged to New Orleans Coach Sean Payton afterward that the officiating crew botched the call, to this mystical city, which will now mourn a second consecutive infuriating exit from the postseason for their beloved Saints. Just 53 weeks ago, the Saints lost in the divisional round of the playoffs when Minnesota scored on a last second, 61 yard touchdown nearly the same distance as Greg Zuerlein's 57 yard field goal that doomed them on Sunday. But in the giddy aftermath of Sunday's game, the missed call maybe resonated even deeper for a Los Angeles franchise that went 4 12 two seasons ago after relocating to Southern California from St. Louis and entrusted a 30 year old coaching prodigy, Sean McVay, to return the Rams to prominence. And now, on the 39 year anniversary of their only Super Bowl appearance as a Los Angeles franchise, the Rams have advanced there for the second time. "We walked into the interview saying, 'How on earth could we hire a 30 year old? We walked out of the interview saying, 'How could we not hire Sean McVay?" the Rams' chief operating officer, Kevin Demoff, said in recalling the decision to hire McVay. "He's a great football coach,'' Demoff added. "He's not a quarterback whisperer. He's not an offensive genius. Today he found a great way for our team to play complementary football. We kicked two field goals to go to the Super Bowl." In one night, the Rams vindicated two off seasons' worth of bold personnel moves intended to turn a middling team from St. Louis into a champion in Los Angeles. Having pierced the aura of the Superdome, where Payton and quarterback Drew Brees had won their previous six playoff games, the Rams will now face New England on Feb. 3 in Atlanta. It is not a surprise that the Patriots who also advanced with an overtime victory, by 37 31 at top seeded Kansas City will be there. They always are. But the Rams have gotten this far because, at bottom, every move they made after losing to Atlanta in the playoffs last year, all the off season splurges and in season roster churn, positioned them to thrive amid the jackhammer in your ear din that they confronted on Sunday in the Superdome. "We didn't feel pressure," said cornerback Aqib Talib, one of several new players on the Rams' revamped defense. "We applied it." This N.F.C. title game matchup registered somewhere between sunrise and sunset on the inevitability scale. Since September, New Orleans and Los Angeles had jockeyed for the conference's top seed, with one coaching mastermind named Sean striving to duplicate the success of another. No other matchup embodied the season's offensive boom better than having the conference's most prolific teams who combined for 80 points in the Saints' Week 9 home victory over the Rams vying to outscore each other for a second time. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. On Sunday, a full quarter elapsed before the Rams looked comfortable or, at least, they no longer looked sleeping above an alligator pit uncomfortable and then gradually, they chiseled away at the Saints' lead. They trailed by 13 after the first quarter but by just 3 at halftime and ultimately tied the score, at 20 20, on Zuerlein's 24 yarder with 5:03 left in the game. The other day in the Saints' cafeteria, Brees, newly 40, glanced up and saw himself on television. The channel was showing the N.F.C. championship game from 2010, the last time New Orleans played in the Super Bowl. His teammates ribbed him about all the hair he had nine years ago, all the hair he seems to have lost. Seizing the chance Sunday to lead them to another, Brees drove the Saints to the Rams' 13. On third and 10, Lewis scooted out of the backfield and ran a wheel route. Brees saw him and released a pass down the near sideline the Saints' sideline toward Lewis, who was now inside the 5 yard line. The ball never reached him. Robey Coleman made certain of that. The officiating crew, which could have called any number of penalties on the play pass interference and unnecessary roughness among them opted to call none. The referee, Bill Vinovich, told a pool reporter that he "personally" had not seen what occurred. The Saints protested. Payton ranted and screamed. The public address announcer admonished fans not to throw debris onto the field. Instead of scoring a touchdown or draining time off the clock, the Saints settled for Wil Lutz's 31 yard field goal that put them ahead by 23 20. "It was simple: They blew the call," Payton said. For the Rams and for Jared Goff, the quarterback who blossomed under McVay's tutelage and became one of the best in the league, 101 seconds remained to tie or even win the game. Goff, who overcame a first quarter interception to complete 25 of 40 passes for 297 yards and a touchdown, proceeded to direct the Rams into field goal range, and Zuerlein equalized from 48 yards with just 15 seconds left in the fourth quarter. After winning the overtime coin toss, knowing that a touchdown would win the game but a field goal would return the ball to the Rams, New Orleans faced a 2nd and 16 at its 34. Charging on a stunt, Rams linebacker Dante Fowler, acquired from Jacksonville by the trade deadline, reached Brees and hit him in the wrist as he threw, causing his pass to float. Safety John Johnson, defending Michael Thomas, watched the ball reach its apex from his back. He barely moved as he intercepted it. "I saw it the whole way," Johnson said. "I'm glad I got my contacts in. I probably would have dropped it if I didn't." Goff ran back onto the field, the Rams with the ball at their own 46, five plays from deliverance, and General Manager Les Snead said it all felt akin to climbing the 18th green at Augusta National Golf Club. Demoff harked back to a conversation he had with Goff after that miserable 2016 season, when he lost all seven of his starts. Goff told him that he knew how to turn around the franchise since, he said, he had done it in college, at Berkeley. "I know we're not that far," Goff told him at the time, and indeed the Rams weren't. They won a second consecutive N.F.C. West title this season. They beat Dallas last week, and when Zuerlein went on to kick his 57 yarder, they had conquered New Orleans as well. The fact that the referees helped the Rams, too, won't make them any less proud. "The referee made the call, we respect it," Robey Coleman said. "Now I'm going to the Super Bowl. Nobody can change that." The New England Patriots beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 37 31, in the A.F.C. championship game Sunday, and will face the winner of this game in the Super Bowl. See how they did it here. Here's how the Rams beat the Saints: He's known as Greg the Leg for a reason. A 57 yard kick by Zuerlein has sent the Los Angeles Rams to the Super Bowl for the first time since 2001. What a turnaround by Goff and the Rams, who trailed by 13 in an incredibly loud and hostile stadium, and largely orchestrated that comeback without their Pro Bowl running back, Todd Gurley. And the most accurate quarterback in N.F.L. history is picked off in overtime. Brees's arm was hit as he threw, leaving a ball that hung in the air. Rams defender John Johnson came down with the interception as he was falling down on his back in Saints' territory. Los Angeles can now win it with a field goal. Hello, overtime. The Rams got down to the 31 yard line, but the Saints defense held firm, and a 48 yard field goal by Greg Zuerlein tied the game with 19 seconds left. The Saints elected to kneel it to send it to the extra period. But that no call on the Lewis play on the last drive continues to look worse and worse. Saints Coach Sean Payton is still pleading his case to the referees and the fans are still booing. Hard to believe. Saints settle for a field goal to take a 23 20 lead and give the Rams back the ball with 1 minute 41 seconds left and one timeout. But the Saints and the fans were upset that Rams cornerback Robey Coleman hit Tommylee Lewis early on a pass out in the flat. Both players went up for the ball, but Coleman connected with Lewis before the ball touched him. Fans are booing and, from replay, it certainly looked like the flag should have been thrown there. That could have ended the game because the Saints could have run down the clock before kicking a field goal. Once again, an N.F.L. playoff game could be decided by the referees. You just knew the Saints were going to try to take a shot downfield at some point. They've been thriving on their usual mix of underneath passes and creative screens, but, with time ticking down to the two minute warning, Brees finally uncorked a bomb to Ted Ginn Jr., who out leaped the safety Lamarcus Joyner for the ball 43 yards downfield. The Saints are now in the red zone with three timeouts and less than two minutes left. After trailing 13 0, the Rams have climbed back to tie it with just about five minutes remaining. After starting the drive on their own 9 yard line, Goff drove his team all the way down the field, and a rush by C.J. Anderson was stopped on the 1 yard line. Rams Coach Sean McVay likes to be aggressive, but going for it on fourth down and passing up the chance to tie was a bit too risky even for him. So after a field goal, we are all even. That was a huge series for the Saints defense, which forced the Rams to punt from their own 12 yard line and just when the Rams looked to be seizing momentum (again). Add in a personal foul against the Rams on the punt, and the Saints will take over at the Rams' 46. Third Quarter: The Rams Are Not Done Rams continue to gash the Saints for big yardage plays, just as they did against the Dallas Cowboys last week. Brandin Cooks now has 100 yards receiving after a 25 yard catch and run. An end around by Josh Reynolds then went for 16 yards all the way to the 1 yard line, setting up a touchdown pass to Tyler Higbee to make it 20 17. After the score, Higbee immediately put his finger to his lips. Shhhhhhhh. (Don't think the Saints fans will listen, though). First Quarter: A Little History for Drew Brees It did not take long for Drew Brees to make a little history. With his third completion of the Saints' opening drive, he passed the great Dan Marino for sixth on the all time postseason completions list with 385. Incidentally, the Rams made an unusual decision to defer after winning the coin toss, giving the Saints the ball to start a small gamble when Brees is the opposing quarterback and this crowd is fired up. (The kids might refer to the Superdome as "lit.") All things considered the Rams were fortunate to get off the field after giving up just a field goal. For a Trip to the Super Bowl The last time the Los Angeles Rams and New Orleans Saints met, they combined for 80 points and 970 yards of offense, and the Saints ended the Rams' dreams of going undefeated the entire season. Here is what to know now: None The winner gets to go to the Super Bowl, to face the winner of the AF.C. championship game. That matchup features the Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots (6:40 p.m. Eastern, CBS). Click here for our preview of that game. None The Rams have added two critical pieces: Aqib Talib and C.J. Anderson. Talib has noticeably improved the secondary, and Anderson has shown to be a valuable running option beside Todd Gurley. None Saints quarterback Drew Brees ended the season with 74,437 passing yards, after breaking Peyton Manning's record early in the season. Click here for a timeline charting how offense took over the N.F.L. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
ORQUESTA AKOKAN at National Sawdust (July 10, 8 p.m.) and Damrosch Park (July 12, 7:30 p.m.). These Havana natives perform fluent, easy mambo and son cubano that transports listeners to not just another place, but another time. Their music captures the sound of 1940s and '50s Cuba, when the country was one of the world's most glamorous destinations and an epicenter of music and culture. Though they borrow from the history of an era long gone to create original compositions, the musicians of Orquesta Akokan led by vocalist Jose Gomez, known as Pepito still sound fresh and jubilant. In addition to their concert at National Sawdust, they'll perform at Damrosch Park as a part of Lincoln Center's annual Midsummer Night Swing festival. A salsa dance lesson will precede that set. 646 779 8455, nationalsawdust.org 212 875 5456, lincolncenter.org RADIOHEAD at Madison Square Garden (July 10 11, 7:30 p.m.; through July 14). The British alt rock legends have been performing intermittently at Madison Square Garden for well over a decade, but never for four nights in one tour stop. At this point, though, their brief residency at the arena is just a matter of meeting demand: All four shows are sold out, though there are tickets available on the resale market. Clearly the public fervor for the band's melancholic, experimental rock hasn't slowed in the 26 years since they released the breakout single "Creep," and perhaps most unusually their drive hasn't faded either. 212 465 6741, msg.com WARM UP at MoMA PS1 (July 7, noon). The lineup of artists at MoMA PS1's summer long Warm Up series is reliably hip, and this week's edition is no different: D.J.s from Puerto Rico, Argentina, Haiti and the Bronx are joined by the Atlanta based rapper Key!, as well as the band New Impressionz, a member of Washington's chronically underappreciated go go scene. Riding the most buzz into this concert is the Philadelphia rapper Tierra Whack, whose recently released debut album "Whack World" 15 totally disparate songs, each one minute long has already earned her national attention. 718 784 2084, moma.org CLAUDIA ACUNA at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (July 11 12, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). The bold and clarion singing of Ms. Acuna, a Chilean vocalist based in New York, doesn't line up exactly with the sound of Abbey Lincoln, who addressed spiritual and political matters in a rough, simmering tone. What they had in common were their convictions and an unbending devotion to investigating their respective musical traditions. When Lincoln, who died in 2010, first heard Ms. Acuna, she recognized a kindred spirit, accepting her as a mentee. Here Ms. Acuna will perform a selection of Lincoln's songs with Pablo Vergara on piano, Juancho Herrera on guitar, Carlos Henderson on bass and Keita Ogawa on drums. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys GEORGE COLEMAN QUINTET at Jazz Standard (through July 8, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Mr. Coleman has a warm and ample sound on the tenor saxophone, but he improvises with streamlined focus. As a bandleader, this 83 year old National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master encourages his combo to embrace an open, freewheeling approach to post bop. He performs here with a stalwart band: Peter Bernstein on guitar, Jeb Patton on piano, Gerald Cannon on bass and George Coleman Jr. on drums. 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com BARRY HARRIS at the Village Vanguard (through July 8, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.). A proud apostle of the midcentury jazz culture that raised him, the 88 year old Mr. Harris still leads a weekly bebop workshop, passing on lessons that came to him in the bands of Cannonball Adderley, Max Roach and Coleman Hawkins. He's an affable if mordant raconteur, and his concerts can feel like a kind of seminar in themselves. Mr. Harris will play in a trio with Calvin Hill on bass and Leroy Williams on drums. 212 255 4037, villagevanguard.com BRANDON LOPEZ AND STEVE BACZKOWSKI at Roulette (July 12, 8 p.m.). Mr. Lopez and Mr. Baczkowski have been simpatico for many years, but you might not know it from their music. Mr. Lopez throttles the bass, plucking and bowing it with relentless fervor; Mr. Baczkowski, who's based in Buffalo, uses a range of extended techniques to amplify, distort and detonate the sound of his tenor saxophone. They perform here in a duet as part of Mr. Lopez's 2018 Roulette Van Lier fellowship. 917 267 0368, roulette.org WALLACE RONEY QUINTET at the Blue Note (July 9, 8 and 10:30 p.m.). Mr. Roney, a virtuoso trumpeter, was a leading voice among the Young Lions of the 1980s and '90s, and the only trumpet player to earn an apprenticeship with Miles Davis. Fleet fingered with a bright and keen tone, he's not seen particularly often onstage in New York these days, so this one night engagement provides a rare opportunity. The intergenerational band here features the 18 year old Emilio Modeste on tenor saxophone, Oscar Williams on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass and Ronnie Burrage on drums. 212 475 8592, bluenote.net RANDY WESTON AFRICAN RHYTHMS QUARTET at the Jamaica Performing Arts Center (July 7, 7 p.m.). At 92, the pianist Mr. Weston remains a regal and astonishingly robust performer. Since the 1950s he's made music that argues through subtle inflections of rhythm and harmony, as well as explicit argumentation for the unbreakable connection between jazz and ancient African musical traditions (West and North African, especially). He will perform with three longtime associates: T. K. Blue on woodwinds, Alex Blake on bass and Neil Clarke on percussion. 718 618 6170, jcal.org UNSANE on the Harbor Lights at Skyport Marina (July 11, 8 p.m.). These mercenaries of aggressive swing take to the seas, fulfilling the dreams of punk rock pirates everywhere. For 30 years, Chris Spencer has been tapping into a primal scream, both through his vocals and well constructed wall of noise guitar sound, and for about as many years the drummer Vinny Signorelli has backed it up with a relentlessly impeccable sense of time while the bassist Dave Curran has provided the rhythmic glue. And the ensuing decades have done almost nothing to slow their roll. The boat starts boarding at 7 and leaves promptly at 8, so don't be late. And don't forget the Dramamine. rocksoff.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A well to do cancer patient is nearing the end of her treatments. During an office visit, she says to her doctor, "I can't thank you enough for the care you provided." Should the doctor simply accept the patient's gratitude or gently suggest a way for her to show it: "Perhaps you might consider making a donation?" More and more these days, development offices at major cancer centers are teaching doctors to seize such opportunities to raise money for the medical center or for their own research. A third had been asked to directly solicit donations and half of them refused. Three percent had been promised payments if a patient donated. The study, which was published online Monday in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, was conducted by Dr. Reshma Jagsi, a radiation oncologist and ethicist at the University of Michigan, who had grown concerned about the practice and wanted to know more. Dr. Jagsi said she had sat in on workshops, seminars, training sessions and department meetings that discussed how to identify good prospects for gifts, how to direct grateful patients to the development office, and how to ask them directly if they wanted to donate. She was uncomfortable with the idea, but she also knew some patients want to donate and are grateful for guidance on how to do it. And she knew medical centers needed money now more than ever. What was the ethical way for doctors to help, she wondered? Or should they stay out of the donation business completely? She searched the medical literature for studies on the subject and found pretty much nothing, so she decided to conduct her own research. The issue is "extraordinarily important," said Arthur L. Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, adding that he had never seen a paper that examined the issues as thoroughly as Dr. Jagsi's. "Hopefully, this paper will start a long overdue discussion," he said. He ticked off some ethical pitfalls: "Patients may be emotionally vulnerable; doctors have very close ties to their patients, which can strain asking on both sides; and the fact that incentives to ask sometimes skew toward the doctor's own program rather than the most needy areas of the hospital." Yet, the practice of doctors soliciting donations from patients "is something that is happening and all signs are that it is going to continue and that it will increase," said Dr. Joseph A. Carrese, a primary care doctor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins. Patient donations, he added, are "an important source of resources when money is tight." Dr. Carrese was concerned enough to join his colleagues in conducting an interview study of Hopkins doctors. He said he was reassured that the physicians recognized the ethical tightrope they were on. But some, he said, admitted to giving big donors special treatment. "I'm more likely to arrange a special appointment time for those patients so we are not rushed," one doctor who was interviewed for the study said. Another said, "I'm asking them to go above and beyond their relationship with me as a patient so I feel like I have to go above and beyond." Different medical centers have different policies. At the Harvard Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the goal is to leave the doctor out of the equation, said the president and chief executive, Dr. Edward J. Benz Jr. If a patient asks how to donate, the doctor is supposed to direct the patient to the development office. At one point, administrators considered giving patients brochures on how to donate when their treatment ended, but then decided that would be inappropriate. At the University of North Carolina, said Dr. Norman E. Sharpless, director of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, oncologists are advised not to directly solicit patients but to notify a development officer when a patient seems able and willing to make a donation. He explained how it often works: "A patient with financial capacity expresses an interest in helping. The doctor tells a development officer, who invites the patient and doctor to lunch. "When it comes time to discuss a donation, the doctor gets out of the way." Dr. Sharpless said he has never seen people get special care because they are rich, but added that there are subtle advantages that can accrue to donors. "If you are a prospective donor, or a donor, the development people can visit you at your home, can take you to lunch. If you are having a problem, your Rolodex at U.N.C. is bigger. You can reach out to the development officer and say, 'I am having a problem.'" For Tom and Nancy Chewning of Richmond, Va., the path to donation began when their daughter received what they considered extraordinary care at the Lineberger Center. On their own they made a generous gift in honor of their daughter's oncologist, Lisa Carey. Then the development office asked if they might want to meet with Dr. Carey and discuss her needs. So Mr. and Mrs. Chewning drove to Chapel Hill and sat down with Dr. Carey. When they asked what she needed, she said she could use money for her research and for helping patients, but she did not directly ask the Chewnings to contribute. "I'm not very good at this," Dr. Carey said. Then Mr. Chewning asked her if she thought they could make a difference with a donation. He and his wife went home and made an even more generous donation, 10 times the original amount. "It is something that says, 'I appreciate what you do,' " Mr. Chewning said. "I know it will be well spent." Jack Hyer and his wife, Laura Jensen, who live just outside Chapel Hill, both were treated for cancer at the University of North Carolina and were so grateful for the care they received that they reconsidered their initial impulse to donate money to the university for athletic scholarships. After meeting with the head of the cancer center they ended up allocating about 2 million for research and for an endowed professorship in radiology. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Working with Megan Hopp , an interior designer in Brooklyn, Meg He used low profile furniture, open shelving and vintage clothing displayed as art to make the most of her tiny home. When Meg He moved to the Lower East Side from London last year, decorating her tiny rental apartment was the last thing on her mind. The clothing start up that she had co founded was just taking off, and setting up a new office in SoHo left little time to work on her new home, a one bedroom just shy of 400 square feet. So she made do with a few pieces of furniture and put off figuring out what to do with her wardrobe and a wide assortment of equipment for her various interests. "There is an upright digital piano, three yoga mats and props," she said, ticking off a long list of gear, including dance shoes, figure skates, an easel, paints and canvases, a violin, a pull up bar, rock climbing equipment and a dog crate for Forrest, her toy size Australian shepherd. "I also have more than 20 plants, and some of them have names." By August, when her only closet was completely full and she still didn't have any shelves on the wall, she knew it was time to take action. The tipping point was when her shoes began to overflow the boxes she stored them in. "I just didn't know where to put them," said Ms. He, 29, who was born in Beijing and raised there and Reading, Berkshire, in the United Kingdom. "My first few months, living in New York City was haphazard, focusing on ADAY and with no sense of home. I realized that not having a home I loved was also affecting my work." The start up, ADAY, focuses on style, simplicity and versatility, and Ms. He wanted to incorporate those qualities into her apartment. "I wanted a creative space I could feel balanced in, which inspired me every day to do my best work," she said. "The space also needed to balance all of my interests and feel alive." Working with Megan Hopp, an interior designer in Brooklyn, she used a combination of open shelving, low profile furniture and secondhand clothing as art to make the most of her home. The entryway resembles a large, well organized closet, with coats, bags and shoes on display, heels lined up along the shelves. A low two seater sofa (about 1,700 from HEM Design Studio) and Sayulita chairs ( 349 each from CB2) were added in the living area to emphasize the height of the ceiling. The sofa has no arms, which helps create the illusion of more space, Ms. He said. "It made a huge difference," she said, noting a couple of other tricks of the trade: "We installed a lot of new lighting, from floor lamps to table lamps and sconces, to give the room depth and character." A round bistro table (about 600 from CB2) made from stone composite and natural fibers created space and added texture to the living/dining area. "So often, people push their furniture in a tiny space up against all the walls, and then you're stuck," said Ms. Hopp, the designer. "Furniture with curves lets the air in, and can literally shift around the room depending on your guests, task or needs." In all, Ms. He spent about 5,000 on furniture, lighting, shelves, paint and wallpaper. To save money and gain some home improvement skills, she not only painted the apartment herself, but also hung the wallpaper and some of the shelves. "The shelves were a disaster and not level, so I paid someone to put up all future shelves," she said. Her many plants, which dot the shelves and line the windowsills, add greenery. Special clothing and accessories serve as art: Costume jewelry she wore to the Burning Man festival in northern Nevada, vintage silk scarves from Paris and limited edition shoes and prototypes from her business are on display rather than tucked away. Forrest's dog crate, which sits in a corner of the main room, is camouflaged with a hand stenciled, black and white West African blanket, bought at the Brooklyn Flea. A vintage embroidered silk kimono from her mother is displayed above the bed, against an accent wall. Half the wall is decorated with yellow botanical wallpaper ( 73 on Etsy); the other half is a striking color that Ms. He likes to change from time to time. This summer it was a cool, dark navy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Jordan Fisher, left, and Brennin Hunt in "Rent" on Fox. Hunt injured his foot, so most of what viewers saw on Fox on Sunday night was a previously recorded dress rehearsal. 'Rent Live' Review: How Do You Measure a Show You Were Never Meant to See? A longstanding superstition holds that saying the title of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" while inside a theater unless you are rehearsing or performing the play itself will bring about a terrible curse. The notion is based on an unfounded legend, but it makes you wonder what people were saying in the studio where "Rent: Live" was rehearsing the past few weeks. On Sunday, not long before the 8 p.m. curtain for the musical's live broadcast on Fox, the network announced that Brennin Hunt, the actor playing Roger, seriously injured his foot while performing during the previous day's dress rehearsal. Unlike on Broadway (and in most professional theater productions), the show did not have understudies for its leads. The solution? Much of what viewers would see would be Saturday's recorded performance, the cast noted in a statement during an early commercial break. The final 15 minutes or so were live; Hunt was at a table, his foot in a cast and propped on a chair. (Hashtags like RentNotLive and RentKindaLive trended during the broadcast.) Read more about the barely live "Rent: Live." It feels a bit weird to critique what was almost entirely a recorded dress rehearsal. How do you measure three hours of chaotic visuals and middling audio most of us were never meant to see and hear? Mostly in disappointment, I guess, though this is what Fox gave us. See photos from the original production of "Rent." Few moments from "Rent: Live" evoked what made the show so special. The sound mixing was rough characters' voices were sometimes too soft, too loud or just too muddled to comprehend. It didn't help that the overzealous crowd, perhaps primed from years of "American Idol" and the like, chimed in to "woo" and cheer whenever an actor belted a long note which, if you aren't familiar with "Rent," occurs a lot. In the case of "Today 4 U," a musical showcase for the larger than life optimist Angel (Valentina, a star of "RuPaul's Drag Race"), the audience was so hyped it drowned out much of her vocals. Also too muddled to comprehend: the frantic, overwrought camerawork. "Rent: Live" was directed by Michael Greif, who oversaw the original Broadway production, and Alex Rudzinski, but they both seemed to be channeling Baz Luhrmann. The cameras swooped around the sprawling stage erratically, without any ostensible purpose other than to distinguish this from feeling like a theater production. During "Will I?," a simple melody sung by the chorus in a round, the focus shifted dizzily from one character to another, effectively dulling the moment's emotional resonance. As with network TV's other recent live musicals, the cast was a mix of stage and screen performers, along with a couple of pop stars. The results were all over the place: The R B singers Tinashe and Mario, playing Mimi and Benny, did fine, but they weren't standouts. Jordan Fisher's Mark was lithe and fun to watch while dancing, particularly during "La Vie Boheme." The highlights included Vanessa Hudgens as the flighty performance artist and activist Maureen and Kiersey Clemons as her uptight lawyer girlfriend, Joanne, performing "Take Me or Leave Me." It's a fun duet brimming with flirtations and frustrations, a favorite song of countless high school theater nerds (like me) and karaoke enthusiasts and Hudgens and Clemons nailed it in the dress rehearsal, convincingly playing the feverish couple at a crossroads while hitting those notes. Around 10:45 p.m., the would be live show finally became live. Unfortunately, the last few songs of "Rent" are some of the musical's most unremarkable, as the story hurtles awkwardly toward its jarring ending. Yet in those moments, as the characters comforted one another during the final song and cast members from the original Broadway production, including Idina Menzel, Taye Diggs and Anthony Rapp, appeared onstage for "Seasons of Love," I regretted that these hard working performers didn't get to put on the show that they had signed up for (even if the fully live "Rent" probably would have suffered from the same maddening camera whiplash and bad sound). Yes, it was disappointing. But clearly there was love in this production, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
These days Rihanna is a designer. So is Kanye. So is Pharrell. So is Selena. Musicians have gone from fashion muses to fashion makers in the turn of a few seasons, one upping style heroes of yesteryear like Mick Jagger and David Bowie who nevertheless are routinely name checked as inspiration in show notes. Yet few words, if any, are devoted to the sartorial legacy of a man whose influence has done as much (if not more) to shape what we see on runways today: Marc Bolan, a wild child who once had all of Britain groveling at his shiny heels. Forty years after his death in a car crash just days before his 30th birthday, it is time the rock 'n' roller was given his fashion due. "He wasn't just a dedicated follower of fashion he created fashion," said Alan Edwards, the English publicist who worked with both Bolan and Bowie. "With his black curls, made up eyes and uniquely androgynous look, Marc helped pioneer a look that endures to this day. His hippie chic influence can be seen all over the place, from Lenny Kravitz to Kate Moss." Add to the list Slash (whose signature look owes much to Mr. Bolan's portrait on the cover of the 1972 album "The Slider"), St. Vincent, James Bagshaw of the rock outfit Temples (a spit and image), and Johnny Depp in the "Alice" films. Generally speaking, though, the man behind glam rock is largely shrouded in obscurity, while Bowie is hailed as its poster boy. Born Mark Feld into a Jewish family in London, Mr. Bolan always knew he wanted to be famous. First, he did it with solely with style, appearing in Mod outfits in magazine spreads and cardboard cutouts in department stores; later on, in the early '70s, he did it with his band T. Rex. Widely credited with pioneering the glam rock movement, Mr. Bolan, with his corkscrew hair, sparkly makeup and flamboyant outfits, defined an era of glitter and gobbledygook, though he never broke through in America. "A lot of fashion designers reference him today," said Oriole Cullen, senior fashion and textiles curator at the Victoria Albert Museum. "You can really see that again and again. For instance, at YSL when Hedi Slimane was there, with the chunky platforms, baby doll dresses, the snakeskin jackets." According to Ms. Cullen, a host of other designers has also been influenced by the man once widely known as the "bopping imp" (Mr. Bolan was less than 5 feet 6 inches tall). His influence can be seen in the glittery space boots of the Saint Laurent fall 2017 collection, the lush red velvet trousers in Anna Sui's fall 2017 show and coruscating jackets and vivid patterned flares in Balmain's spring 2017 collections. (A Guardian article explicitly mentioned Mr. Bolan as an influence on Topman's fall 2016 collection.) There also is Michael Halpern, a New Yorker whose debut during London Fashion Week in February was heralded for its use of glitter fabrics and wide flared trousers, and Paula Knorr, a recent graduate of Royal College of Art in London, with a liking for lame and what Ms. Cullen called "wider flowing shapes." And Gucci's current interstellar ad campaign, featuring ornate, shimmering jackets a la Bolan with wide lapels and sequins, has the T. Rex song "Ballrooms of Mars" written all over it. Paul Smith, another Bolan fan, explained why. "Marc Bolan's look was always incredibly theatrical," he said. To the London designer, things have changed for the worse: "Sadly, it seems to me that there is almost no theater left in popular music. Lots of skinny jeans, T shirts and short haircuts." The most overt example of Mr. Bolan's continued influence in fashion, however, can be seen in the designs of John Varvatos. A self described "big fan" of the rocker, Mr. Varvatos's T shirts often have displayed Mr. Bolan's image, and the designer has "definitely" hung posters of the rocker in his studio. For Mr. Varvatos, the rocker has been a longtime source of inspiration. "In men's wear, especially, style isn't just about the individual pieces it's really about how you put your whole look together," Mr. Varvatos said, noting that Mr. Bolan "did this in a unique way that became his own, a hallmark." It's easy to imagine that, had he lived, Mr. Bolan would have had a permanent place in the front row of every fashion week show. As Zowie Broach, head of fashion at the Royal College of Art and a co founder and designer of the brand Boudicca, said, he "would have been deeply adored today and would have adored fashion today." All of us whose wardrobes are in his debt should remember. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Pitchers can be useful all year long for holding juice on a breakfast buffet or keeping water handy at the dinner table but they really come into their own in the summer, for outdoor entertaining. Because "who wants to go back and forth to the kitchen to get water?" asked Young Huh, an interior designer in New York. And even better, she added, with a pitcher, "you can make sangria and other special drinks without having to mix each one individually." But shopping for a pitcher requires more than just thinking about the quantity of sangria you want it to hold. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
PARIS Robert Lepage would like you to know that he doesn't shy away from controversy. To make his point, the Canadian director renamed his latest project, "Kanata," which was briefly canceled in July after an outcry about cultural appropriation, then revived, and, ultimately, had its world premiere in Paris on Saturday. Now it's called "Kanata Episode 1 The Controversy," and runs through Feb. 17. It's not the only sign that Mr. Lepage and the French company Theatre du Soleil, which is staging the play, have let the kerfuffle overwhelm them. "Kanata" was supposed to delve into the troubled relationship between Canada's Indigenous people and their colonizers. The final product does explore the plight of the country's First Nations, but it does so through the defensive gaze of a white artist who can't resist telling us that he, too, has been victimized. Mr. Lepage has been plagued by accusations of cultural insensitivity this year. Performances of his production "SLAV," inspired by African American slave songs, were halted in Montreal after an outcry because it featured a predominantly white cast. Then came "Kanata" and an open letter from Indigenous artists and activists, published in the Quebec newspaper Le Devoir in July. In it, the authors accused Mr. Lepage and the Theatre du Soleil of seeking to tell their stories without Indigenous input. Shortly after, the production's North American co producers withdrew their financial support and it was called off. (Activists said that they never asked for that to happen, only for inclusion.) In September, however, Ariane Mnouchkine, the founder and director of the Theatre du Soleil, announced that the company would stage the production after all, as part of the Festival d'Automne, a yearly arts event in Paris. Ms. Mnouchkine used the opportunity to rail against what she called the "censorship" of the play in Canada. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
As recently as late July, Amar'e Stoudemire was seemingly as far away as possible from joining the Nets' coaching staff and a high wattage reunion of Phoenix Suns alumni in Brooklyn. Stoudemire was still playing abroad and helping Maccabi Tel Aviv win a 54th league championship in Israel. He didn't know at the time that Steve Nash, the former on court conductor of the Suns' "Seven Seconds or Less" era, was a top secret candidate to become the Nets' new head coach. Like most connected to the N.B.A., Stoudemire also had no inkling that Mike D'Antoni who had built a revolutionary offense in Phoenix around the Nash and Stoudemire combination would soon pivot from coaching the Houston Rockets to becoming Nash's offensive coordinator. For most of the summer, Stoudemire, 38, mostly wrestled with whether to keep playing. He was offered a new one year contract by Maccabi soon after his performance (18 points and 7 rebounds) in the Israeli Basketball Premier League title game earned him most valuable player honors. "I never really thought much about coaching, to be honest with you," Stoudemire said. That all changed in September after Nash, who played alongside Stoudemire for six seasons until Stoudemire's high profile move to the Knicks in 2010 free agency, was hired by the Nets as their head coach. Stoudemire reached out with interest in exploring his options to begin a post playing career. Nash, who had also pitched player development roles on his fledgling staff to his former teammates Dirk Nowitzki and Raja Bell, made a similar offer to Stoudemire. "He's just getting his foot in the door," Nash said. "We wanted him to come in and share all the things that he learned from his experiences but also to learn about coaching, video analysis, analytics and the front office." Israel had "absolutely" become a second home, Stoudemire said, after he immersed himself in Judaism over the past decade and then obtained Israeli citizenship in March 2019. That comfort level only added to the lure of playing one more season with Maccabi, but Stoudemire decided to give coaching a try, unsure as he was, even after 14 seasons in the N.B.A. and three playing in Israel and China, that he had reached an age he associated with the profession. "I just never liked the title Coach," Stoudemire said. "There's not a lot of swagger that comes with that title. I'm still not quite there yet. I'm still very young, and I like to feel young." On the Nets' organizational chart, Stoudemire has been officially named a player development assistant. He brings some experience to the role despite his ambivalence about the coaching label, having hosted a few Nike camps in his Suns and Knicks prime in which he worked briefly with future stars such as Blake Griffin, DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis. Stoudemire "brings great energy," Nash said, and can still participate in drills when needed. Nash called him "one of the first true small ball centers" with much to pass on to modern big men. Nash and D'Antoni have often lamented that their groundbreaking Phoenix teams didn't lean even harder on smaller lineups, rampant 3 point shooting and fast paced play all of which is much more accepted now than it was then. They were wildly successful but ultimately fell short of a championship. Beyond the practice floor, yet another Suns alumnus from that period Nets General Manager Sean Marks has given Stoudemire the latitude to sit in on management meetings to get a taste of front office planning, scouting and recruiting strategies and integrating analytics with traditional coaching. "He has complete access," Nash said. "We're pushing him to be as involved as he wants." "I get to learn from all departments," Stoudemire said, "to see where I want my career to go." The varied coursework feeds into a studious side that took hold of Stoudemire as his career progressed in the N.B.A. and blossomed in Israel, where he had two stints with Hapoel Jerusalem, Maccabi's fiercest rival, before a January 2020 move to join the Tel Aviv club. Initially inspired to become a student of Torah after joining the Knicks in July 2010 and gaining more exposure to Judaism and its connections to his family's heritage, Stoudemire enrolled at multiple yeshivas as a Jerusalem player to learn the religion's Orthodox customs. He completed a formal conversion to Orthodox Judaism in August. Stoudemire observes the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbat) from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, keeps a kosher diet and became known in his Maccabi days for arriving at games in all black Orthodox clothing rather than the trendy gear that has transformed player arena entrances in the N.B.A. into a virtual sport unto itself. Stoudemire, whose Hebrew name is Yehosaphat, said he would work with the Nets to determine the best way to maintain the same level of Orthodox Shabbat observance now that he is back in the United States, where businesses do not shut down on Friday nights as they largely do in Israel. "My time in Israel was amazing," Stoudemire said. "It took me to another level of purifying myself and making me more mature. From the first day I got there to the last day to walking off with the M.V.P. trophy, it was simply a remarkable experience." Nash said: "I really admire him. It's not just our history and our relationship, but how open and inquisitive he is. Amar'e never feels like he's fully formed; he's always trying to learn more and do more. So when he showed interest, I said, 'This is the kind of guy I want.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
WASHINGTON Makan Delrahim, the nominee for chief antitrust cop at the Justice Department, was 10 when his family immigrated to the United States from Iran as Jewish political refugees. Unable to speak English, he struggled to keep up in school. He worked afternoons and weekends at his father's gas station near Los Angeles until college. As a young Senate staff member years later, Mr. Delrahim found those early experiences had laid the foundation for his conservative views. "I came to realize that my values identified with the conservative viewpoints of personal responsibility, hard work, respect for individual rights and appreciation of a limited role of government," Mr. Delrahim, 47, said in his first interview since being nominated last month by President Trump for assistant attorney general for antitrust. On Wednesday, Mr. Delrahim will have his confirmation hearing for the Justice Department position, where these views will be closely scrutinized by Congress. If he is confirmed and he is expected to be his philosophies will help shape the corporate competition landscape for the next few years, at a time when mega mergers like AT T's 85 billion acquisition of Time Warner and Bayer's 56 billion purchase of Monsanto are on the docket. In the interview with The New York Times, Mr. Delrahim declined to address AT T's purchase of Time Warner, which is now undergoing regulatory review, or other large deals, saying he would "examine any matter according to evidence and economic analysis." But he gave other hints of how he might act as the department's top antitrust official. Specifically, Mr. Delrahim, a former lobbyist, said he would not go after a company just because it was big, and would do so only if there were violations of antitrust law. "Just like any other industry, if there is wrongdoing, we would investigate," Mr. Delrahim said. But "federal laws should not be used as a fishing expedition by government." He also intimated that he was skeptical of antitrust action against intellectual property rights holders, referring to some earlier comments on the matter. In a 2007 statement, for example, he had warned that cases that blended intellectual property rights with antitrust enforcement could hamper innovation. Legal experts have extrapolated that Mr. Delrahim is also likely to credit mergers with helping competition not only reducing it and to point out how big deals can promote the United States economy. That "would be a major change from his most recent predecessors," the law firm Davis Polk Wardwell recently said in a memo to clients. Mr. Delrahim's views contrast subtly with those of the Obama administration, which took a more aggressive approach in antitrust toward protecting innovation, especially in the technology industry. During the Obama years, the Justice Department rejected several deals including Comcast's pursuit of Time Warner Cable, which ended in 2015, and AT T's bid for T Mobile in 2011 for their potential to impede competition. In the case of AT T and T Mobile, there was also the aim to ensure that the nation had at least four major wireless carriers. The Obama administration also charged Apple and publishers in 2012 with price fixing in e books. Mr. Delrahim would take over antitrust duties at a moment of profound economic transformation, with tech companies like Google and Amazon dominating search and commerce while extending their reach in transportation, media and other industries. Telecom companies are trying to morph into media powerhouses that control the distribution and creation of television and online content. With a wave of corporate mergers in other areas chemicals, agricultural products and health insurance some Democratic lawmakers have warned that industries have become too concentrated, putting consumers in danger of higher prices and giving them fewer options in vital services. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, who will be at the Wednesday hearing, said in a statement, "I plan to ask if Mr. Delrahim will enforce the laws to protect American consumers and if he will commit to being independent, focusing on the merits of each case, not on interference from the White House." Mr. Delrahim has had years of experience in antitrust matters. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1991 with a degree in kinesiology and obtained a law degree at George Washington University in 1995. He then joined the law firm Patton Boggs before leaving to be a counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1998. There, he cut his teeth on antitrust working for Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah. Mr. Hatch had pushed for an investigation into Microsoft's practice of tying its web browser, Internet Explorer, to its ubiquitous Windows operating system. In 2003, Mr. Delrahim joined the Justice Department as deputy assistant attorney general for antitrust, where he worked on issues such as coordination of international antitrust enforcement. He also worked on the department's 2004 suit to stop the software company Oracle from buying the rival software maker PeopleSoft; the transaction ultimately went through. In 2005, Mr. Delrahim left Washington and joined the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck in Los Angeles. Over the years, he was the lawyer or federal lobbyist for clients including Ultimate Fighting Championship, Comcast, Google, Johnson Johnson, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Mr. Delrahim endorsed Mr. Trump relatively early in last year's presidential campaign. In an op ed in The New York Post in March 2016, he called on conservatives to back Mr. Trump, even if he was not their or his top choice. "I understand where they're coming from, but I'm practical, and I'm willing to take my chances with The Donald," he wrote, emphasizing that the main goal was to put conservative justices on the Supreme Court. After Mr. Trump's victory, Mr. Delrahim left private law in January to join the administration as deputy counsel. He helped prepare Neil M. Gorsuch, now a Supreme Court justice, for his confirmation hearings and arranged many meetings with Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee. Former Democratic and Republican colleagues at the Justice Department describe Mr. Delrahim as fiercely loyal to the Republican Party, though he has a reputation for forging bipartisan relationships. His wife was a Democrat when they met and has voted for Democrats; Mr. Delrahim said he still did not know how she voted in the 2016 election. Democrats recall when Mr. Delrahim became a crucial ally in 2000 to help pass amendments to an antitrust law. House Republicans were unwilling to sign on, but Mr. Delrahim worked to allay their concerns and brokered compromises between them and Senate Democrats, said Jonathan Leibowitz, a partner at Davis Polk who was then working on the bill for Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat. Mr. Leibowitz later was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. "He's a conservative but his instincts tend toward pragmatism and not ideology," Mr. Leibowitz said of Mr. Delrahim. In the interview with The Times, Mr. Delrahim indicated at least one topic that he intended to focus on at the department: the coordination of international antitrust enforcement. Over the past decade, he said, American companies have become more vulnerable to a patchwork of global antitrust actions. Regulators in Europe, for example, have filed antitrust charges against Google and other Silicon Valley companies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Thomas Allen Harris has relied on his family photo album and film archives to explore identity in his deeply personal documentary films like "E Minha Cara/That's My Face," "The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela" and "Through a Lens Darkly." He sought to do the same with others' family histories beginning in 2009, when he launched Digital Diaspora Family Reunion. The project took Harris across the country, collecting family photos and stories, through one on one interviews and in community photo sharing events, that he posted online with the goal of preserving the personal histories before they were lost. Now comes the TV version. "Family Pictures USA," premiering Monday night on PBS, is a kind of "Antiques Roadshow" for family photos, built around community sharing events where Harris talks to people about the pictures they bring. Then he investigates the common roots among the various participants, as well as the broader history of the region. The first episode visits North Carolina the other two are set in Detroit and Southwest Florida where Durham's tobacco money transformed a small town into a city of possibilities, as seen in family photos from black and white entrepreneurs, immigrants and a community of drag performers. Viewers also meet members of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, who repurchased their ancestral lands for future generations. "The family album allows us all to start from a certain common space," he said. Harris, who is also a senior lecturer at Yale University in addition to being an artist and filmmaker, defines himself as "many things," he said, including "American, raised by a South African stepfather" (Benjamin Pule Leinaeng, a founder of the African National Congress); "same gender loving" (an alternative to "gay" and "lesbian" coined by the African American activist Cleo Manago ); and "very invested in ideas of families of choice." The many layers of Harris's identity and his buoyant enthusiasm help him uncover connections within communities long defined by division in "Family Pictures USA." In a recent interview, Harris discussed the family album in understanding identity and how his series responds to the concept of the United States as a "divided country." Here are edited excerpts. Who was the person holding the camera in your family? My grandfather, Albert Sidney Johnson Jr. He was my mother's father. There are principally color slides that would become photographs. And then he was also taking Super 8 in the late '60s, early '70s. In the '80s, he started working in video as well. So he would document the family, his extended family which was the church family, and his in laws and cousins. The difference between what's going on now versus what went on in terms of the family album over multiple generations is that you had curation of the album, a curated narrative. For me, the archive or family album is in many ways like a language. The more you use it, the more you see its relevance, maintain and keep it. The less you use it, the more you lose track of it, and it eventually disappears. We frequently hear about how America is a "divided country." Does "Family Pictures USA" wrestle with that concept at all? We've been working in this realm for a long time, across a lot of different administrations and different periods, different social tonalities and political realities. We use a frame that's been informed by compassion and acceptance. And, I dare say, love. When people take family pictures they're like: "Oh my God! I love this person. I love the situation. I want to memorialize that." The project comes out of that space, that energy behind the creation of the family album. So much of our project which doesn't get talked about frequently is our relationship to the land. I was so happy to be able to do at least two of the shows in rural communities, because a lot of the images are images of the land. So when you think about family pictures it's the people, it's their livestock. It's also the other things that sustain us in terms of the earth. When you start with the family album you're starting with something like a family truth, an indelible truth. It's an image of their family. It's a narrative that they claim. It was really important for me to have a kind of neutral attitude toward that. We did a lot of intense research before we'd go to a place, particularly about the narrative and the influence of places. In North Carolina, it's tobacco and textiles moving from the antebellum period to the Civil War, after Reconstruction and beyond, to what's happening today. The reality is that America is an immigrant country. And culturally it's made up of all these immigrant flavors. It has always been combining with the Native American, the anchor. It's not something that just happened once in the past. It's actually something that's ongoing. The old story rooted in colonialism, stories rooted in superiority, whether that has to do with gender, or class, and racial superiority is no longer working for us culturally. So what can replace that? For me the irony is that we can actually replace that with old photos to tell new stories! What surprised you at the photo sharing events? How many people find relatives, blood relatives, extended family in one another's family albums. How many people cry in realizing a story they may have known but didn't understand how it impacted them. Or realize how it impacts them emotionally in terms of a story of transcendence, or a moment in time. You're going from being a farmworker to being the first person in one's family to go to college. Or talking about a dad who was in World War II and flew over 40 different missions and came back, or didn't come back. The deepness of the emotions and how they connect with the larger story of a country or world events. No matter how many I hear, each story seems just as new, just as fresh, just as relevant and just as moving. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In the coming video game Night in the Woods, a young woman named Mae decides to drop out of college and return to the former mining town where she grew up. It's a place where there is little opportunity and most people are struggling to make ends meet. Mae, who is an anthropomorphic cat, drinks too much, shoplifts and likes to break things in parking lots with baseball bats. As she meanders through the fictional town of Possum Springs, players of the game are confronted not only with her memories but also the sense of a place whose better times are behind it. "I grew up in central Pennsylvania, and my town was a steel town," said Bethany Hockenberry, one of the three independent game developers behind Night in the Woods, which is being released for personal computers and PlayStation 4 on Feb. 21. Alongside Scott Benson and Alec Holowka, Ms. Hockenberry drew on her hometown experience to create a game with an aesthetic that the developers describe as "Rust Belt Gothic." Night in the Woods is one of several video games in recent years that tapped into themes that came to the fore during last year's presidential election campaign: the decline of working class towns and what it feels like to be crushed by debt or left behind by the economy. In the games, players explore what it means to be in those situations through role playing and storytelling, in contrast to the shoot 'em up and sports titles that dominate the games industry. Night in the Woods gets part of its inspiration from Kentucky Route Zero, a continuing and episodic PC adventure game from the independent studio Cardboard Computer. That game, which debuted in 2012 and whose most recent episode was released last year, follows an aging deliveryman named Conway as he travels the back roads of Kentucky in search of a secret highway that will allow him to make his final delivery. Last year, a game called Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor imagined the daily grind of a trash collector living hand to mouth on the fringes of an alien society. And Cart Life, which was released in 2011, takes a hard look at the poverty line by simulating the stressful and precarious life of a food cart vendor. These games do not aim to make players feel successful and powerful as conventional video games do, and instead challenge people to look at the world in a different way. Creators of the games said they were more interested in showing the complicated lives of the people and places the world has left behind, as well as the economic realities that inevitably circumscribe their stories. "We want to create stories and mythologies about the places we're from and the people we know, and that includes addressing the economics of it," said Mr. Benson, one of the Night in the Woods developers. "If you don't, I think you're not getting the whole picture." Some of the games have been critically acclaimed. Kentucky Route Zero won the best narrative award at the Game Developers Conference last year, while Cart Life took home the grand prize at the Independent Game Festival in 2013. Sales of these games do not come close to those of matching blockbuster titles, though they can still sell in the hundreds of thousands. Kentucky Route Zero, for instance, has sold around 250,000 copies. Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy, who created Kentucky Route Zero, began making the game in 2010 when the country was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of the housing bubble. Mr. Elliott said the feelings of frailty that emerged from those times, along with the rise of esoteric financial concepts like "shadow banking," helped inspire the game. "When we started working on the game, I was thinking about exploring the mystery of that relationship, of being a person in a precarious financial situation and trying to grapple with these forces that seem almost supernatural," Mr. Elliott said. In Kentucky Route Zero, the two developers mixed together magical realism with the everyday financial difficulties that people were encountering. Players find not just foreclosed houses and abandoned mines, but also giant eagles, ghostly mathematicians and tugboats powered by mechanical mammoths. Conway, the game's main character, is put through numerous tough situations that evoke economic despair. In one scene, after he suffers a serious injury, his leg is replaced by a gleaming skeletal prosthetic, and he is vaguely informed that he owes money to a corporation. In another, he descends into a subterranean whiskey distillery staffed by animated skeletons, whom he learns are doomed to toil endlessly for debts they can never repay. With one more installment of the game to come, Mr. Elliott said he was thrown by the presidential election and the backlash of racism and xenophobia that accompanied it. He wondered how to incorporate that into a story that reflects contemporary working class life. Although there had been subtle references to racial inequality in the game before, he and Mr. Kemenczy now plan to make them more evident. "I don't know that it's responsible to continue to treat it as though it's simmering under the surface anymore," Mr. Elliott said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
At the start of "Midnight in Paris," a documentary shot in Flint, Mich., in 2012, before the water crisis, a teenager in the film's large ensemble notes that the city only attracts news media when something bad happens. The movie, directed by Roni Moore and James Blagden, offers a corrective, observing students at Flint Northern High School from a Monday to a Friday as they prepare for that evening's big event: the prom. ("Midnight in Paris" is the theme of the dance.) The first half of this brief feature deals with the lead up to the dance, as the high schoolers discuss their dates, outfits and plans to make an entrance. Adults lay out rules (no drugs, alcohol or sex), some of which will be violated in the second half, which follows the students to the dance and beyond. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Credit...Jane Hahn for The New York Times FREETOWN, Sierra Leone Hoisted onto the operating table by a nurse, Aminata Conteh, a spunky 8 year old, crossed her skinny ankles jauntily and held stock still as doctors numbed her eye and then pierced it with a needle to withdraw a sample of fluid. Two years ago, Ebola nearly took Aminata's life. Now, complications from it are threatening her sight. She came with her mother to an eye hospital here in late July, hoping for surgery to remove a dense cataract that had clouded the lens of her right eye, erasing most of its vision. Cataracts usually afflict the old, not the young, but doctors have been shocked to find them in Ebola survivors as young as 5. And for reasons that no one understands, some of those children have the toughest, thickest cataracts that eye surgeons have encountered, along with scarring deep inside the eye. There are about 17,000 Ebola survivors in West Africa, and researchers estimate that 20 percent of them have had a type of severe inflammation inside the eye, uveitis. It can cause blindness, but even if it resolves and sight returns, cataracts can quickly follow. Usually, just one eye is affected. Until recently, surgeons have hesitated to remove cataracts from Ebola survivors, for fear that the insides of their eyes might still harbor the virus. But physicians from Emory University have made a series of visits to West Africa to study eye problems in survivors, treat them and find ways to prevent blindness if more Ebola outbreaks occur. One goal has been to look for the virus in the eyes of survivors with cataracts, to let local surgeons know whether it is safe to operate. On a Monday morning, Aminata and her mother joined about 20 other Ebola survivors of all ages at the Kissy/Lowell and Ruth Gess United Methodist Church Eye Hospital, listening as the Emory doctors explained the tests and treatments they would receive. The patients, with their hazy eyes, looked grim and fatigued, old beyond their years. The team included two more ophthalmologists, Dr. Steven Yeh and Dr. Brent Hayek, and Dr. Ian Crozier, an infectious disease specialist who contracted Ebola while treating patients in Sierra Leone in 2014 and who recently joined the National Institutes of Health. "I'm also an Ebola survivor in whom my eye went blind," Dr. Crozier told the group. "The same things you go through today, I went through for the past two years, even with the same doctors." A translator repeated his message in Krio, the country's most widely spoken language. Gesturing to Dr. Yeh, Dr. Crozier said: "Dr. Steve put the needle in my eye. So in a sense we are getting the same care." Aminata lost her father and a grandmother, an aunt and several cousins. Other patients at the eye hospital said their immediate families had been wiped out. Many survivors suffer from "post Ebola syndrome" debilitating muscle and joint pain, headaches, fatigue, hearing loss and other lingering ills, sometimes even seizures. A Virus That Lurks in the Eye Like the patients he is now trying to help, Dr. Crozier was blinded in one eye by uveitis and recovered but then lost his sight a second time, to a cataract. He had surgery in March. His eye disease, described on May 7, 2015, in The New England Journal of Medicine, put the world on alert. Nearly two months after he had seemingly recovered from Ebola, and after his blood was free of it, severe uveitis suddenly developed and Dr. Yeh was stunned to find that the fluid inside Dr. Crozier's eye was teeming with active virus. At that time, uveitis was also emerging in West Africa. Even though the virus may still lurk inside the eye in survivors with uveitis, it is not on the surface or in tears, so patients cannot spread Ebola through casual contact. But operating on them might pose a risk to surgeons who open the eye. Eventually, the immune system seems to eliminate the virus, but no one knows how long that takes. Eighteen months after the virus was first found inside Dr. Crozier's eye, a repeat test was negative. But when the virus level actually dropped is not known. Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health and Sanitation was eager for Emory's help, according to Dr. Kwame Oneill, who manages its Comprehensive Program for Ebola Survivors. "After Ian became ill and had complications, he became a pioneer, a rallying point," Dr. Oneill said. "Ian's story was the turning point for survivors." The eye hospital in Freetown also welcomed the researchers. Dr. Lowell Gess, who founded the hospital in 1982, had recognized that uveitis was a severe problem in many patients. In 2015, during the epidemic, Dr. Gess, who was 94, began alerting Ebola treatment centers to the condition and recommending medications for it. How many survivors have eye trouble is not known. Many live in far flung provinces and have lost touch with health authorities. But a volunteer group, the Sierra Leone Association of Ebola Survivors, has tried to find patients who need help, and has helped pay for travel and lodging so they could consult the doctors from Emory. By this past summer, the Emory team had seen about 50 Ebola survivors with cataracts, from 5 year olds to people in their 60s. So far, 50 taps have been performed in Sierra Leone, all negative. The results have made it possible for many patients to have cataracts removed. Eventually, taps may no longer be needed, and patients who have been well for a certain amount of time will be able to just go ahead and have surgery. "But we're not there yet," Dr. Crozier said, adding that the team needs to collect more data to be sure. The findings have been invaluable to Dr. Moges Teshome, an eye surgeon from the Christian Blind Mission who works at the Kissy hospital. Before the testing, he said, he was afraid to operate on Ebola survivors. "But the idea of studying the samples before the operation changed my mind," Dr. Teshome said. "My decision would have been different if the laboratory results were positive. If the results were positive, I would not have operated at all." Recognizing that the gear might bring back disturbing memories for patients, Dr. Crozier told those waiting for taps: "Some people, when they come in and see the suits again, it can make them scared and have the same feelings they had inside the unit, so I just want to remind you that this is just for us to be careful. So remember that behind the mask is Dr. Jessica, Dr. Steve." Aminata seemed unfazed. Sporting a patch after the test, she told Isatu Tholley, an older girl nervously awaiting her turn, that there was nothing to be afraid of, and urged her to be brave. The fluid samples were sent to a lab to be tested for Ebola, with results due a day later. In some survivors, Ebola has caused problems even worse than cataracts. One woman, age 35, had inflammation that caused soaring eye pressure, which damaged the optic nerve and caused permanent blindness and constant pain. "She's just tough," Dr. Crozier said as she lost consciousness. He scooped her up from the gurney and carried her, cradled in his arms, to the operating room. Torrential rain pounded on the tin roof. Cataract surgery requires cutting into the eye to remove the cloudy lens, and inserting an artificial lens. Dr. Teshome has done it 20,000 times, and it generally takes him 10 or 15 minutes. Aminata's operation took three times that. Scars had fused her lens and iris, and he had to tease them apart. The capsule of tissue around the lens was so calcified that it was like cutting through cement, he said, adding that the scarring likely would have worsened with time, and if they had waited longer to operate, the surgery would only have been more difficult. The rest of the operations were a mixed picture some typical and others difficult, including those on several other young patients. One girl, Jamba, 13, had an extra layer of scar tissue behind her lens that Dr. Teshome had never seen before. The morning after surgery, patients lined up on long benches in the hospital's huge waiting room, to have their eyes examined and vision tested. Some knew instantly that their sight had been restored. Isatu, the girl Aminata had comforted, was one of those. Her father, still at home but reached by cellphone, wept at the news that she could see again. Aminata, Jamba and a few others seemed less fortunate. Their vision had not improved: They still could see only hand motion. If Aminata felt disappointed, she did not show it: Lithe and animated, she seemed ready to do pull ups on the equipment being used to examine her eye. The exam showed inflammation, and possible scarring on the retina. The doctors prescribed drops and steroid pills to quell the inflammation. A month later, Dr. Teshome performed a laser procedure that markedly improved Aminata's vision. It's still not 20/20, but she can see well enough to catch a ball, read with glasses, tell a spoon from a fork. Time will tell whether she improves further. For Aminata and thousands of others in West Africa, the full toll taken by Ebola still has not been tallied. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, where the state's House of Representatives this week passed a bill that would effectively bar women from receiving an abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected. The Ohio House of Representatives this week passed one of the most restrictive abortion bills in the country one that would penalize doctors for performing an abortion when a fetal heartbeat can be detected and pose a potential challenge to Roe v. Wade. A fetal heartbeat can be detected by an ultrasound as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, a time during which most women are unaware they are pregnant. Under the bill, approved Thursday by a vote of 60 to 35, performing an abortion on a fetus with a heartbeat would result in a fifth degree felony, which is punishable in Ohio by up to one year in prison and a 2,500 fine. The bill now heads to the Ohio Senate. The measure includes no exceptions for rape or incest. Doctors may, however, make an exception during a medical emergency or if an abortion would save a woman's life. Representative Christina Hagan, the lead sponsor of the bill, said in an interview on Friday that it was crafted specifically to challenge Roe v. Wade, the 45 year old Supreme Court decision that made abortion a constitutional right. "We believe Ohio is best positioned to send this through the Circuit Courts and to the federal Supreme Court," said Ms. Hagan, a Republican who campaigned on behalf of President Trump. She said she was "confident" the bill would become law by the end of the year. Both the House and the Senate have a Republican dominated veto proof majority. In 2016, Gov. John Kasich vetoed a bill prohibiting abortions when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. "We did not have the strength in the majority to overcome that veto," Ms. Hagan said, adding, "We do now." In his 2016 statement, Mr. Kasich said the bill was contrary to the Supreme Court's rulings on abortion and pointed out that similar legislation in other states had been declared unconstitutional by federal judges. Mr. Kasich did, however, sign a bill banning abortion after 20 weeks. If the current bill does not reach the governor's office until next year, it will land on the desk of his successor, Mike DeWine. During a campaign debate, Mr. DeWine said he would support the legislation. "I will sign the bill," he said. "I believe that the essential function of government is to protect the most vulnerable members of society. That includes the unborn." But some doctors say that the decision to have an abortion is one that ought to be made among a woman, her family and her health care provider. "Every situation truly is unique and every time I think that I've heard it all, I have a patient come in and just surprise me by the circumstances of her needing care," said Dr. Sarah Horvath, a family planning fellow at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The organization urged Ohio's governor to veto the heartbeat legislation presented in 2016. Fetal heartbeat legislation could prevent women from seeking an abortion before they even realize they are pregnant, she added. "If they weren't intending to become pregnant or taking pregnancy tests routinely, most would have no idea they're pregnant at that point," Dr. Horvath said. More than a dozen abortion cases are currently before federal appeals courts, any of which could reach the Supreme Court next year. Now that Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh has replaced Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court has a conservative majority. Abortion rights groups consider Justice Kavanaugh a threat to Roe v. Wade. The Trump administration has already made moves to curb reproductive rights, including a regulation that would allow some employers to deny birth control coverage for moral or religious reasons. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
I've never quite understood why "Shameless" was never as buzzworthy as other youth centric shows on cable. The American version of this British series premiered on Showtime in 2011, but it was "Girls," which debuted a year later on HBO, that became the big media hit. Both shows featured a group of kids trying to become adults in big cities, sometimes living in squalor and making questionable life decisions. But while the characters in "Girls" were just slumming it a bit, post college, the "Shameless" kids were learning to claw their way out, and their show consistently managed to beat "Girls" in the ratings with its combination of topical issues and shocking moments. (Multiple Venn diagrams would be needed to keep track of all the overlapping hookups.) But "Shameless" is much more than the sum of its undraped body parts, as attention grabbing as those might be. It's also, counter intuitively, a family show, although you might not realize that until you really get to know the Gallagher clan, a mostly white, South Side Chicago family that drinks, swears, steals and tries at all costs to keep dad in the dark about where their money is. If you didn't grow up this way, you'll learn just how privileged you really are. If it sounds familiar, you'll relate to their struggles, their addiction to chaos and their disdain for rules of polite society. They're so wrong, they're usually right. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Two of 39 tigers rescued in 2017 from Joe Exotic's G.W. Exotic Animal Park, now in the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, Colo. More tigers live in captivity in backyards, roadside zoos and truck stops in the United States than remain in the wild. This phenomenon is driven by people like Joseph Maldonado Passage, the star known better as "Joe Exotic" in "Tiger King," Netflix's hit documentary series. Before his arrest and conviction, Mr. Maldonado Passage was a major breeder and seller of tigers and other big cats. He churned out cubs for profitable petting and photo sessions, then disposed of them, legally or illegally, when they became too dangerous for play. Some were sold as pets to private buyers, some went to other roadside zoos for breeding and some simply disappeared. "I call it the breed and dump cycle," said Carney Anne Nasser, director of the Animal Welfare Clinic at Michigan State University College of Law. The cub petting industry, she said, is "creating a tiger crisis in America," driven further by widespread animal abuse and a lack of federal oversight. Many of the interview subjects featured in "Tiger King" say the story was presented to them as one that would expose the problem of private big cat ownership in this country, following in the tradition of many conservation themed documentaries. Some in the film even say Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, the show's co directors and co producers, claimed to be making the big cat version of "Blackfish," the award winning 2013 documentary that spurred widespread backlash against SeaWorld. "We're going to start seeing more selfies with cubs, more people wanting tiger cubs," said Tim Harrison, a retired police officer and exotic wildlife specialist in Dayton, Ohio. He declined to be interviewed for "Tiger King," because, he said, "it sounded like potentially it could be a freak show." President Trump, when asked by a reporter on Wednesday if he would consider pardoning Mr. Maldonado Passage, said he was not familiar with the case, but that he would "look into it." When Karl Ammann, a documentary filmmaker whose work has focused on exposing the illegal wildlife trade, was invited to be interviewed for "Tiger King," Mr. Goode and Ms. Chaiklin pitched the show to him as a chance to expose the plight of wild tigers. But he said the end product lacked any clear conservation message. "To totally ignore such key aspects was a real missed opportunity," Mr. Ammann said. Mr. Goode and Ms. Chaiklin declined to be interviewed for this story, as did representatives from Netflix. Documentary films about animals and the environment are often lauded for their ability to engage viewers with the natural world and promote positive change. In some cases, though, documentaries can have the opposite of their intended effect. The Oscar winning 2009 documentary "The Cove," about an annual dolphin hunt in the Japanese village of Taiji, sparked international furor. But Megumi Sasaki, director of "A Whale of a Tale," a documentary exploring the aftermath of the first film, said it also provoked a domestic backlash that invigorated defenders of the Taiji fishermen. "When somebody comes in and says, 'Hey, what you're eating is not right,' it really triggers emotions," she said. "Everybody in Japan, even people who don't care about whaling, felt that they were under attack." What critics of "Tiger King" fear is that the conversation it has sparked, especially around its outlandish characters, might drive a similar dynamic. Mr. Maldonado Passage, the series' central character, is currently serving a 22 year prison sentence for 17 counts of wildlife crimes including trafficking endangered species and illegally killing five tigers as well as two counts of murder for hire. At his trial, the federal government presented extensive evidence supporting Mr. Maldonado Passage's guilt, including a 45 minute recording in which he discussed plans to arrange the murder of Ms. Baskin with an undercover F.B.I. officer. "The Department of Justice remains steadfastly confident that the court record, evidence and trial testimony fully supports the correctness of the jury's verdict," said Timothy Downing, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma. Hashtags such as FreeJoeExotic and JusticeforJoe have trended on Twitter and other social media platforms, which suggests many viewers believe he was framed in the murder for hire charges. Mr. Maldonado Passage is "ecstatic" about "Tiger King's" reception, Mr. Goode said in an interview with The Times. "I don't know why anyone would side with someone who puts animals in a cage and then walks up and shoots them," said James Garretson, who worked with federal authorities to gather evidence used to prosecute Mr. Maldonado Passage. "People are just in a frenzy right now." In the interest of entertainment and narrative arc, some documentary directors may find it acceptable to depart slightly from reality or to influence the participants' actions, words or looks, said Steven Cantor, a documentary filmmaker. "Just because it has the word 'documentary,' doesn't mean that everything in it has to be 100 percent truthful," he said. "Certain stories you can enhance and not feel like you're doing anything deceptive." But critics of "Tiger King" assert that Mr. Goode and Ms. Chaiklin's license went too far, at times taking quotes and shots out of context, presenting inaccurate information as fact and jumbling timelines. This problem, they say, was pronounced in the series' portrayal of its other main character and Mr. Maldonado Passage's intended victim Ms. Baskin. She and other advocates are leading efforts to ban cub petting and phase out private big cat ownership through a bipartisan bill currently under review in the House. Ms. Baskin has been inundated with attention since the documentary's release, she said, much of it hate mail and death threats. Mr. Maldonado Passage's fans have set up a dozen Facebook events threatening to storm Ms. Baskin's sanctuary. Some of the animus toward Ms. Baskin might result from choices the filmmakers made in their storytelling. For instance, Ms. Baskin and other critics assert that footage was edited to imply that the animals Ms. Baskin cares for are kept in small, squalid cages. (In fact, the smallest enclosures on her property are 1,200 square feet, a size considered humane by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries for the species that live in them. ) Ms. Chaiklin told the Los Angeles Times that she and Mr. Goode only paid sources for life rights, archival and personal footage and licensing locations not for interviews. "Categorically, we do not pay people for interviews," Ms. Chaiklin said. But six people interviewed for the film including John Finlay and Mr. Garretson, both major figures in the story claimed that they were paid hundreds to thousands of dollars in cash. Jeff Johnson, a former friend of Mr. Maldonado Passage who runs a popular Joe Exotic watchdog group, said that Mr. Goode "flat out told me he needed me to text him some stuff, send some pictures, so he could legitimize why he was paying me." "Tiger King" is the product of a quickly changing film industry, one in which the lines between documentary and fiction are blurring. "It's all getting mixed up: documentary, entertainment, reality TV," said Marcia Rock, a documentary filmmaker and director of the News and Documentary Program at New York University. She added that because of the financial incentives provided by some streaming outlets, "producers are seduced into going in that direction." As successes of shows like "Tiger King" potentially encourage more programming that blurs the lines between documentary and reality television, some filmmakers worry about the social toll this could take. "I believe film and TV are the most powerful medium there is," said Glen Zipper, a documentary producer and writer. "If we're delivering something to you that is factually inaccurate particularly when it has to do with something that is critically important that ultimately could be quite dangerous." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Each week, Kevin Roose, technology columnist at The New York Times, discusses developments in the tech industry, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. It's hard to imagine now, but at one point, long ago, Facebook did not monopolize the entire tech news cycle a heady and innocent era when you could read an entire day's news without encountering the words "Cambridge Analytica" or "third party developers." I confess that, like many of you, I have been obsessed with the fallout from Facebook's latest privacy scandal, to the point that I had a stress dream that I overslept and missed covering Mark Zuckerberg's testimony on Capitol Hill next week. (Related: I need to get out more, and possibly take up yoga.) But despite the wall to wall news of the past few weeks, lots of important things are happening in the tech world that don't involve Facebook. So let's run down a few of them? I thought this article by Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, about thousands of Google employees who are protesting the company's involvement in a Pentagon A.I. program, was fascinating on a number of levels. First, it's an unusually clear example of the double edged nature of artificial intelligence. Google has spent billions of dollars teaching computers to play Go, drive cars and translate languages on the fly. The company has been extremely proud of its advances in machine learning, even releasing some of its tools to the public via open source frameworks like TensorFlow, which provides a fascinating contrast to what's happening inside the company now. When its image classification algorithms are used to spot tumors on radiology scans, Google puts out a press release, and engineers cheer. But when these same types of algorithms are used by the Pentagon to improve the accuracy of drone strikes, it's a moral outrage. Yonatan Zunger, a former Google engineer, had an interesting op ed the other day in The Boston Globe about the "reckonings" that various scientific fields have undergone, as the scientists who develop powerful tools begin to see how those tools can be used for evil purposes. He used the examples of the atomic bomb, which forever changed the way that physics was taught in universities, and dynamite, which made chemists aware of the consequences of their expertise. It's not hard to see A.I. as a similar kind of turning point for computer scientists and if it is, the Google Pentagon issue might be the first of many similar fights. Second, the Google Pentagon incident is a revealing story about the leverage that Silicon Valley engineers have over their companies. Because the labor market for engineers in the Bay Area is so tight, and because companies live and die on their ability to attract and retain talent, these employees have much more say in how a company like Google governs itself than, say, regulators or outside activists. If an antiwar group protests outside Google's headquarters, it's an annoyance. But if 3,000 engineers walk out, it's a crisis. And as the tech industry goes through its moral reckoning, executives of these companies should bear in mind that their biggest risk isn't regulation, it's rebellion from within. I've also been following the feud between Amazon and President Trump this week, which has led to a bull market for explainers about the business models of the United States Postal Service. My colleague Nick Wingfield wrote that, contra President Trump, the available evidence suggests that "Amazon has been a boon to the Postal Service." But Vox's Jen Kirby added that, because the exact details of the contract between Amazon and the Postal Service aren't known, it's possible that President Trump is partly right: "Maybe the U.S.P.S. isn't actually making the best deals." Meanwhile, Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, says President Trump is "actually right" that Amazon is ripping off the federal government through its U.S.P.S. contracts. I'm a nonexpert on the subject of parcel shipping, so my opinion on Amazon's the U.S.P.S. probably isn't worth one first class stamp. But it's possible, and maybe plausible, that all of these analyses are partly correct that the Postal Service benefits from Amazon's dominance, and that Amazon is getting a sweetheart deal that should be re examined. Anyway, Amazon's stock dipped sharply after President Trump started tweeting angry things about it, but it has now recovered to its pre tweetstorm levels, meaning that investors may be as confused as I am. Last, and most obvious, the horrific shooting at YouTube on Tuesday, which injured three people and left the company badly shaken. As more details have emerged on Nasim Najafi Aghdam, whom the police have identified as the attacker, it has become increasingly clear that this was a new kind of violence an act of revenge by an internet creator against the platform that she felt controlled her economic destiny. As my colleagues Nellie Bowles and Jack Nicas wrote, "Ms. Aghdam's complaints echoed what a wide range of YouTube posters from self described animal rights activists like her to right wing political provocateurs have increasingly been protesting over the last year." It's a tragic reminder that social platforms aren't just websites anymore. They're powerful economies unto themselves, and even seemingly minor policy decisions can alter the lives of millions of people, a few of whom might be disturbed enough to act on their darkest impulses. Kevin Roose writes a column called The Shift and is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter here: kevinroose. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies. NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL at Film at Lincoln Center (through Oct. 13). That kid Francis Ford Coppola dominates the second week of rediscoveries at N.Y.F.F. with two films, both showing on Saturday. "The Cotton Club Encore" (screening at the festival before opening at the Quad on Oct. 11) restores parts of Coppola's Harlem gangland musical fantasia that were cut from the 1984 release, while "The Godfather: Part II," showing in this year's sidebar on the American Society of Cinematographers, screens in an I.B. Technicolor print (which means that Gordon Willis's famously dark images are barely faded). Coppola appears at a Q. and A. after "The Cotton Club Encore" with Maurice Hines (the brother of Gregory Hines, both in life and in the film) and James Remar (who played Dutch Schultz). This weekend also features Projections, the festival's experimental film program, which includes challenging work like the three and a half hour essay film "Heimat Is a Space in Time" (on Friday and Sunday), in which the filmmaker, Thomas Heise, refracts his family history through that of 20th century Germany. Later in the coming week, on Thursday, Kenneth Lonergan introduces a restoration of William Wyler's "Dodsworth" (1936), followed by a Q. and A. with two of Wyler's daughters. 212 875 5601, filmlinc.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Joel Grey's Other Love, Art, Is Not So Far From the Stage None Joel Grey in his loft in front of a Richard Tuttle "rag," "Lake" (1967). On floor: "The Kiss," from the new book of Mr. Grey's photographs, "The Flower Whisperer." Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Winnie Au for The New York Times Yes, Joel Grey is mainly an actor and director, perhaps forever best known for his indelible portrayal of the M.C. in the musical "Cabaret" and, most recently for directing the acclaimed Yiddish version of "Fiddler on the Roof." But Mr. Grey has also steadily and more quietly built something of a side career as a photographer over the last 16 years, with his work featured in books, gallery shows and even in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mr. Grey, 87, also likes to be around artists and has befriended several namely David Hockney, Jim Dine and R.B. Kitaj who have encouraged his artwork and sold him some of their own. Mr. Grey recently released his fifth book of photographs, "The Flower Whisperer," published by PowerHouse Books. And he has opened a companion photo exhibition at Staley Wise Gallery in SoHo. The photographs, featuring the inner workings of vibrantly colored flowers, were all taken on his cellphone and have the shimmering quality of watercolors. Winnie Au for The New York Times "I would have been a watercolorist," Mr. Grey said, "had I had the talent." The walls of his West Village loft overlooking the Hudson River are filled with art he has made and collected including African sculptures that cover an entryway table; black and white photographs outside the open kitchen; Miro drawings in the guest bathroom. There is a rag by Richard Tuttle that he bought from the dealer Betty Parsons; a paper doughnut by Robert Rauschenberg; ladders by Bruce Robbins; and an abstract by Thomas Stokes. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Tell me about the Tuttle. I love it. One of his assistants sent me a note that said: "The best way to carry the thing around is crumpled up in a paper bag like dirty laundry." From left, on wall, the Tuttle; a Robert Rauschenberg paper sculpture from the series "Pages Fuses" (1974); and "From the Billboard Papers" (2013), by Mr. Grey. On table, from left, "Sandplay Box" by Grace Knowlton and a Mexican santo figure. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Winnie Au for The New York Times Winnie Au for The New York Times This is a sand play piece by Grace Knowlton. You make art. It's actually a psychological therapy called sand play therapy. When did you become interested in art? I've always loved it. I was a very good finger painter. Did you grow up around art? When I was 7 or 8 I went to the Cleveland Museum of Art on school trips. I was hoping I could sneak behind the class and they'd forget about me and I could be there all day. Art meant a lot to me from the get go, especially the Egyptian rooms. Why didn't you stay with visual art? I found I couldn't draw for one reason or another and that was the end of my art career. Before I knew it, I was onstage. Test prints for "The Flower Whisperer" and, lower right, a picture Mr. Grey took of the cast of the Yiddish production of "Fiddler on the Roof" he directed. Winnie Au for The New York Times It's sort of like the stage quick moments of a life that are gone the minute you take your eyes away and the curtain comes down. A passion for flowers has always been with me. I've loved all Mapplethorpe's work and O'Keeffe's. I started this flower project four years ago, and I threw out half of them; they weren't abstract or painterly enough. They were too literal. Are you drawn to any flowers in particular? I got very crazy with orchids. All of a sudden I started to say, 'What's inside?' I thought maybe the book would be called, "Petals, Pistils, and Stamens, Oh My." I go to 28th Street a wholesale flower market after the gym and they know me in a certain place where I go every week. I walk among them. Can you imagine making art your career? It's only pleasure. It's never been work. Do you feel like an artist? I'm still learning and I feel like a neophyte always. Winnie Au for The New York Times How do you know Ron Kitaj? We were classmates in Cleveland at Doan Elementary School. Ronnie and I have pictures of the two of us in short pants. I met Hockney through him and Jim. Duane Michals is also a close friend. He photographed me in "Cabaret" for Glamour. That's how long I've known him. Why are you drawn to artists as friends? Whatever it takes to make art, to imagine, to dream are similar to me. As a director, the dreams are everything. Do you go to museums and galleries? I go to the Met to wander and to be inspired all the time. I don't even know where I'm going to go, because it's endless. What do you think about what the art market has become? Nutty. I don't think about that. I think about what's fresh, beautiful, touching and surprising. That's what I like: surprise. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Race Is On to Protect Data From the Next Leap in Computers. And China Has the Lead. SAN FRANCISCO The world's leading technology companies, from Google to Alibaba in China, are racing to build the first quantum computer, a machine that would be far more powerful than today's computers. This device could break the encryption that protects digital information, putting at risk everything from the billions of dollars spent on e commerce to national secrets stored in government databases. An answer? Encryption that relies on the same concepts from the world of physics. Just as some scientists are working on quantum computers, others are working on quantum security techniques that could thwart the code breaking abilities of these machines of the future. It is a race with national security implications, and while building quantum computers is still anyone's game, China has a clear lead in quantum encryption. As it has with other cutting edge technologies, like artificial intelligence, the Chinese government has made different kinds of quantum research a priority. Quantum computing is based on quantum mechanics, the science that explains the strange behavior exhibited by extremely small particles of matter. With traditional computers, transistors store "bits" of information, and each bit is either a 1 or a 0. Those are the fundamental slices of data that tell a computer what to do. When some types of matter are extremely small or extremely cold, they behave differently. That difference allows a quantum bit, or qubit, to store a combination of 1 and 0. Two qubits can hold four values at once. As the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful. Like quantum computing, quantum encryption relies on the nonintuitive behavior of very small objects. The codes that keep data secret are sent by photons, the tiniest particle of light. With the right equipment it is easy to tell if they have been tampered with, not unlike the seal on an aspirin bottle. If carried out properly, the technique could be unbreakable. There is no guarantee that a viable quantum encryption network could be built over long distances. But if it does happen, China's willingness to experiment and put government, academic and commercial resources behind the effort could have a big payoff. The country has invested tens of millions of dollars building networks that can transmit data using quantum encryption. Last year, a Chinese satellite named Micius, after an ancient philosopher, managed a video call between Beijing and Vienna using quantum encryption. A dedicated quantum communication network between Beijing and Shanghai was also put into operation last year, after four years of planning and construction. For now, quantum encryption works only over a limited distance. The satellite link between Beijing and Vienna stretched this limit to a record 4,630 miles. On the ground, using optical fiber lines, the ceiling is about 150 miles. Among China's investments in quantum encryption, the Micius satellite has received the most attention. The University of Science and Technology of China, the government backed university that helped launch Micius, led the construction of the ground network, which spans about 1,200 miles perhaps a hint of aspirations for drastic improvement. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. The governments of Anhui and Shandong Provinces, through which the fiber optic network passes, together invested 80 million in the project. Like all major infrastructure projects in China, the plans have had high level support from the Chinese government. This main line is being extended to other cities and regions. The goal by 2030 is a Chinese built network for sharing quantum encryption keys across the globe. Some security experts question the effectiveness of quantum encryption. Because it is so new, it has not been put through anywhere close to the rigorous testing that would give it a stamp of approval from skeptical cryptographers. But Chao Yang Lu, a professor of physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, said the Beijing Shanghai quantum network was a significant upgrade. With communications sent by traditional means, eavesdroppers can intercept the data stream at every point along a fiber optic line. A government could tap that line just about anywhere. Quantum encryption cut the number of vulnerable spots in the Beijing Shanghai line to just a few dozen across 1,200 miles, Professor Lu said. "We admit that it's an intermediate solution," he said. "It's not the final solution. But it's already a huge improvement in terms of security." In the United States, the government and industry have viewed quantum encryption as little more than a science experiment. Instead, researchers have focused on using ordinary mathematics to build new forms of encryption that can stand up to a quantum computer. This technology would not require new infrastructure. But now, spurred by activity in China and recent advances in quantum research, some in the United States are playing catch up. Qubitekk, a Southern California start up, is working to secure power grids in Tennessee using the technology. A second start up, Quantum Xchange, is building a quantum encryption network in the Northeast, hoping to serve Wall Street banks and other businesses. Researchers at Stony Brook University on Long Island are preparing a third venture. Small start ups like Qubitekk are unlikely to match the millions of dollars in infrastructure already created in China for quantum encryption. But many experts believe the more important work will happen in research labs, and the Department of Energy is funding a test network in Chicago that could eclipse the kind of systems deployed in China. "We're not there yet," said David Awschalom, a professor at the University of Chicago who oversees much of the university's quantum research. "But I am confident this will happen in the next couple of years." Quantum communication techniques require new hardware. This includes vast networks of fiber lines and perhaps satellites as well as specialized devices capable of detecting individual photons of light. As Qubitekk worked on quantum encryption networks, it could not obtain the special light detectors it needed to do the work. The start up originally bought detectors from a small manufacturer in New Jersey, Princeton Lightwave. But in April, this lone American manufacturer handed the detector business over to a company in China, RMY, and Qubitekk's supply line ran dry. RMY has promised hardware to Qubitekk but recently told it that, because of production issues, additional detectors won't be available until March. Small companies in Europe are selling somewhat similar detectors, and labs across the globe are developing a more advanced type of hardware. But for now, supplies, particularly in the United States, are slim. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Credit...Jeff Minton Square, the Twitter Boss's Other Company, Could Pass It in Value SAN FRANCISCO Jack Dorsey has become a household name in Silicon Valley thanks to his role as the chief executive and co founder of Twitter, President Trump's favorite megaphone. People will sometimes mention, as an afterthought, that Mr. Dorsey also runs another start up he helped found, the payment company Square. Sometime in the very near future, though, the value of Mr. Dorsey's distinctly less sexy second company, where he tends to work in the afternoon, is likely to become more valuable than his more well known first company, where he works in the morning, separated by a short walk between the two companies' headquarters in San Francisco. If current trends continue, the two could switch places as soon as Thursday, when Twitter announces its most recent quarterly financial results. Square, coming off five straight quarters of exceeding Wall Street expectations, will provide its results in November. (By one method of counting shares, including options given to employees, Square is already worth more than Twitter.) "Square that's a company that is well grounded for future success," said Ron Shevlin, the director of research at Cornerstone Advisors. "Twitter? Who knows. They've got a gazillion users but they've struggled on the revenue side." Both of Mr. Dorsey's children, as he is known to refer to the companies, bear the imprint of their creator and his careful, trimmed down aesthetic. But Mr. Dorsey's eye for simple solutions has not been enough to turn around Twitter since he returned in 2015 to lead the company he helped found in 2006. He has failed to rein in the use and abuse of the service by trolls and political actors, and he has not found a convincing way to make money despite its ardent user base. Although Twitter's overall revenue shrank 5 percent in the second quarter from the year before, expanding the company's losses, at Square, revenue grew 26 percent, moving the company closer to profitability. The divergent fate of Mr. Dorsey's two companies can be understood simply as a matter of timing and control. When he began his second stint as Twitter's chief executive in 2015, the company was already struggling and had a series of internal problems that were hard to change, including executive turnover and competing strategic visions. At Square, on the other hand, Mr. Dorsey was able to build the whole company from the ground up, with knowledge from Twitter of how things can go wrong. "Square wasn't Jack's first rodeo," said Randy Reddig, who was on the founding team at Square in 2009. "It was obvious early on at the company that he took lessons learned from his time at Twitter and applied them at Square." Mr. Reddig said that Mr. Dorsey's education from Twitter's fractious early years was particularly apparent in the control that Mr. Dorsey kept over hiring and compensation decisions at Square, with a focus on creating a loyal team. Through Twitter and Square, Mr. Dorsey declined to comment for this article. Mr. Dorsey's success at Square and his trouble at Twitter also tell a broader story about Silicon Valley, where the boring, back end businesses often end up generating more money than the flashy social networks and consumer services that capture the public's eye. Mr. Dorsey trained Square's sights on a mostly invisible business electronic payments that has momentum as more and more commerce moves online. Capgemini recently estimated that electronic payments should grow 10.9 percent a year between 2015 and 2020. It is no coincidence that the most successful American financial start up of the last decade, aside from Square, is Stripe, which helps online businesses take payments. Beyond just payments, though, Square has taken aim at the much larger goal of providing a tech savvy alternative to the big banks, expanding out from payments to lending and online deposits. This summer, Square applied for a bank charter in Utah, one of just three so called fintech firms to take such a bold step (the others are Social Finance and Varo). Square is most visibly positioned to use a bank license with its business customers, but the company has also been building more banklike services for consumers, most notably with its app Square Cash. Square Cash is often described as a competitor and imitator of Venmo, the popular app owned by PayPal that makes it possible for friends to send one another payments by smartphone. In recent months, though, Square Cash has quietly bypassed Venmo to become the most frequently downloaded financial app of any kind on both Apple and Android phones, according to Apptopia. At various points over the past week, Square Cash was ahead of Venmo and Twitter on the charts of the most downloaded iPhone apps. The big banks had aimed to challenge Venmo with their own service, Zelle, but that has not posed a credible challenge to either Venmo or Square Cash so far, the rankings show. Mr. Dorsey and his team made several early design choices with Square Cash that helped make it different from Venmo. As would be expected from Mr. Dorsey, Square's app has a clean, green interface, compared with Venmo's busy blue dashboard. Square also made an apparently boring technical decision, to use the debit card networks rather than bank transfers, to move money around. That has made it easier for Square Cash to put money instantly into the bank accounts of its users, and to collect a fee for the service. These differences appear to have made Square Cash more popular with lower income customers who more often need instant access to their money and who don't have as wide a variety of credit cards and other financial options. "We are reaching an audience that may not have a bank account or may not have a full suite of services from a bank," Mr. Dorsey told analysts last quarter. Over time, though, Square has been able to keep its prices stable by offering its business customers other services, such as payroll and scheduling. A KeyBanc analyst recently polled 20 businesses that use Square and found that most of them had been offered lower card transaction fees by other companies but passed them up because of the add ons that Square offers. One of the most profitable such services is Square Capital, which offers small loans to businesses. The revenue from these loans has been increasing faster than the overall growth of the company and has Square looking more like a bank every day. These days, one of the biggest concerns that analysts voice about Square is the time that Mr. Dorsey has to spend on Twitter, with all its problems. During a talk at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum in August, Mr. Dorsey said he thought he had proved that he didn't need to make a choice between the two. "They both have different needs and are in different phases," he said. "Focusing on one thing doesn't mean you completely lose sight of something else." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Two decades ago, Bill O'Reilly's wryly resentful Everyman act became the foundation upon which the Fox News founder Roger Ailes built the right leaning television monopoly that the network became (and remains today). Now, with Mr. O'Reilly out on the market after his ouster from Fox News over sexual harassment allegations, Fox's much smaller rivals believe Mr. O'Reilly could do the same for them help them cut into Fox's prime time, conservative hegemony after years of trying. "O'Reilly needs to have a platform and a voice he's got an important one and we're very open to having that discussion with him," said Christopher Ruddy, the founder of Newsmax, a conservative leaning news network and website. Mr. Ruddy, a close associate of President Trump, said his interest was "serious, and not hot air." Charles Herring, whose family company Herring Networks owns the newer and still smaller but no less ambitious conservative cable network One America News Network, said in an email, "One America News has reached out and spoken directly with Mr. O'Reilly and separately with his agent." And then there's Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is already the country's largest television station group but aims to become even bigger with its proposed takeover of Tribune Media. Sinclair, which has drawn scrutiny for pushing conservative skewing segments onto its local newscasts, says it is not moving on Mr. O'Reilly. But no one is counting it out, including Rupert Murdoch, the 21st Century Fox founding chairman, who is paying close attention to Sinclair and Newsmax, I'm told by people with direct knowledge of his thinking. Whether Mr. O'Reilly would go any of those routes, and whether the advertising boycott that contributed to his Fox ouster would make picking him up prohibitive, remains to be seen. (Mr. O'Reilly's representatives declined to comment on his plans). And challenging Fox is no small undertaking. Its cable news winning streak is now 15 years old. But make no mistake: Things are in flux as never before in the Fox News era, and big movements are afoot that could change the cable news dynamic of the past two decades. That, in turn, could have an outsize effect on the national political scene, given the big part Fox has played in driving the public discourse since Mr. Ailes founded it with Mr. Murdoch in 1996. Fox News made its rise to first place in the ratings during the presidency of George W. Bush with an "America first" approach that gave the Bush White House a boost during the post 9/11 war efforts. "We just do not assume that America's wrong first," Mr. Ailes told me at the time. But then, when Barack Obama assumed the presidency, Fox News personalities played prominent roles in promoting the president's Tea Party opposition, the campaign against his health care bill, and even the so called birther campaign questioning his citizenship. But the network's influence has been most acute in Republican politics. Several presidential candidates over the past couple of election cycles had either worked for Mr. Ailes as contributors at some point or shared a friendship with him, as Mr. Trump did. On Friday, my colleague Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist, captured the two views on the right of Mr. Ailes, who died last week. On the one hand, he wrote, virtually "nobody did more than Ailes to broaden the reach of conservative ideas among the American public." But he also pointed out that "if Ailes broadened, he also debased," embracing populism for populism's sake and ushering in the Trump presidency. He was hardly alone in saying Fox News and Mr. Ailes contributed greatly to Mr. Trump's political success. To the extent that there's something to that and there certainly is it comes from Fox's unique place in conservative media. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. In its early years, Fox News was the prime time megaphone of what was then referred to as the "conservative echo chamber." Over the years, however, the rest of the conservative media factionalized like the Republican Party itself, with new players like Breitbart providing decidedly different views than those of The Wall Street Journal editorial page or The Weekly Standard. The idea of a single conservative "echo chamber" seems quaint. But not on television, where Fox News is so often the echo chamber. The question is, what happens if that changes? It doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. But in 18 years of closely covering the network, I've never seen it in such a vulnerable position. Think about it. In the last year it has lost its founding chairman; the prime time star Megyn Kelly; its 7 p.m. host Greta Van Susteren; and, most significantly, Mr. O'Reilly. Given the turmoil, it's impressive that Fox News remains the most watched cable news network, coming off the most profitable year in its history despite Mr. Ailes's own ouster in July, over sexual harassment allegations. But, as it embarks on a rebuilding period replete with a fresh start new newsroom where Mr. Ailes's office had been there have been warning signs. One came last week, when Fox News lost to MSNBC and CNN in the prime time, 25 54 age category important to advertisers. That could have been an anomaly, a result of the news involving the investigation into the Trump administration and Russia which, true to form, Fox covered less than CNN and MSNBC. But it may not have been. And that rare hint of vulnerability has tantalized Fox's rivals. Both Newsmax and One America News Network view scooping up Mr. O'Reilly as a way to turbocharge their growth. Polls have shown most of his viewers would follow him to another network. (There's surprise throughout the television world that Fox did not include a stricter clause prohibiting him from working for a competitor as part of an exit package estimated to be worth up to 25 million.) Fox News could comfort itself that Mr. Ruddy's Newsmax, for instance, is in only about 10 million homes. But Mr. Ruddy tells me it will be in 35 million homes as of this summer far less than Fox's 90 million, but a big jump nonetheless. Of course, the protest groups behind the advertising boycott that prompted Fox News to oust Mr. O'Reilly would certainly have something to say about any move to bring him back to television. As the National Organization for Women president, Terry O'Neill, said to me, "Any network that hires him, what they're doing is sending a message to women: 'We don't care about sexual harassment.'" Mr. Murdoch, who has taken a hands on role at Fox News, is keenly focused on the possibility that Newsmax would team up with the much larger Sinclair to hire Mr. O'Reilly, two people with direct knowledge of his thinking told me (21st Century Fox had no comment). Mr. Ruddy did not shoot the notion down. Noting that he and Sinclair's executive chairman, David D. Smith, "meet from time to time," he said, "I would be very open to partnering with him or working with him in some way." Newsmax has something Sinclair, a holder of disparate local stations, doesn't have an already functioning, nationally focused 24 hour news network. It's conceivable that Newsmax, with Mr. O'Reilly in its stable, could simulcast its programming on Sinclair's digital channels. It's equally possible Sinclair could buy Newsmax outright and combine it with the WGN America cable network it would acquire in the Tribune deal, though Mr. Ruddy said he had no plans to sell. (Sinclair had no comment other than to say it was not seeking to hire Mr. O'Reilly.) "Fox proved there is a huge and incredible market that has been 100 percent ignored by the mainstream media networks, and it's been in blue ocean territory since its founding," said Mr. Ruddy, who has also been mentioned as a potential Ailes successor at Fox. "I personally think it's ridiculous; I want to get into that market." It would take a tremendous effort, and it would be exceedingly difficult. But I'm old enough to remember when people said that about Fox News. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
President Trump's announcement on Friday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus set off a wave of tweets and Facebook posts with a common refrain, especially on the left: Why should we believe him? There was no evidence that Mr. Trump was lying. But overnight, hundreds of tweets were posted casting doubt on whether the president contracted the coronavirus. The White House has given multiple statements confirming Mr. Trump's condition. His physician confirmed the positive test result, and Mark Meadows, the president's chief of staff, said that Mr. Trump had mild symptoms of Covid 19. The tweets questioning Mr. Trump's announcement peaked at five per minute on Friday morning according to Dataminr, a social media monitoring service. The doubters included Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and Anand Giridharadas, editor at large of Time and an occasional contributor to The New York Times. Researchers at Cornell University published a study this week showing that Mr. Trump was the single largest driver of false and misleading information about the coronavirus. Mentions of Mr. Trump made up nearly 38 percent of the overall "misinformation conversation," the researchers said. Mr. Trump has also stated on at least 34 separate occasions since February that the coronavirus would go away. "We're in an environment where conspiracies are thriving, in part because the president encourages them," said Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation. "And we have a White House comms operation that gives the press and public disinformation constantly." The situation has created "the perfect storm for people to assume that the White House isn't being truthful," Ms. Ryan said. Many of the deniers also latched on to a tweet from Sept. 18 that had originally been shared in conspiracy circles, but was reshared widely on Facebook and Twitter after Mr. Trump's announcement on Friday. "Trump's October surprise will be the announcement of 'his infection,'" it said. "Fake, but quite dramatic." The post collected nearly 15,000 interactions across Facebook and Twitter, mostly from people who falsely asserted that Mr. Trump catching the virus was a known plan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Anthony Davis Wants Out of New Orleans, and the Lakers May Be His Destination The All Star Anthony Davis shook the N.B.A. out of its sleepy run up to the league's annual trade deadline on Monday by formally requesting a trade away from the New Orleans Pelicans. Rich Paul, Davis's agent, confirmed Monday via text message that he had personally notified Pelicans General Manager Dell Demps that Davis wants to be moved, in conjunction with Paul informing them that Davis would not sign an estimated 240 million contract extension that New Orleans planned to offer in July at the first allowable moment. The Pelicans responded with a forceful statement in which they implored the league to monitor the situation for potential tampering violations and declared that its roster moves would not be "dictated by those outside of our organization." It has been widely assumed in league circles that the Pelicans would be forced to trade Davis if he signaled he was unwilling to sign a contract extension, or if he took the step of formally requesting a trade, rather than face the prospect of losing the 6 foot 10 Davis, one of the league's best players, without compensation. Yet it is unclear if New Orleans will accommodate Davis's demand quickly or let the season's most closely watched trade drama drag beyond the Feb. 7 trade deadline. Many rival executives expect the Pelicans to go the latter route, since they may receive stronger trade offers starting in mid May, once the order is set for June's N.B.A. draft. "They haven't said much," Paul said of whether New Orleans officials had revealed their thinking. "But we wanted to do the right thing to let them know by the deadline so they could do what's best for the organization going forward." Paul also said he had not yet given New Orleans a preferred trade destination for Davis. But Davis realistically will have a huge say in where he lands by virtue of his ability to become a free agent in July 2020; any team looking to acquire him this year would be unlikely to surrender meaningful trade assets for a player it could not be certain of re signing. Several hours after news of Davis's trade request became public, New Orleans issued a terse statement which said: "Relative to specific talks of a trade, we will do this on our timeline one that makes sense for our team." The team added: "We have also requested the league to strictly enforce the tampering rules associated with this transaction." The last sentence could be interpreted as a reference to Paul's longtime relationship with his star client LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers since the Lakers have been considered the league's most ardent suitor for Davis for months. Davis also faces possible league discipline because the N.B.A. typically fines players when they, or their representatives, publicly request a trade. "We commenced an investigation this morning upon reading the reports regarding Anthony Davis," the N.B.A. spokesman Mike Bass said Monday. "That process is ongoing." Teams such as the Knicks and Davis's hometown Chicago Bulls are among the many clubs expected to join the Lakers in pursuing a trade for Davis over the days leading to the 3 p.m. trade deadline on Feb. 7. Yet it might behoove New Orleans to wait until closer to the draft to get serious about dealing its franchise player. That is because the Boston Celtics, regarded for some time as the Lakers' foremost challenger in the long anticipated trade sweepstakes for Davis, are ineligible to acquire Davis via trade while the All Star guard Kyrie Irving is on Boston's roster. League rules preclude one team from having two players on the designated rookie scale contract extensions possessed by both Davis and Irving. With a record of 22 28 in a season marred by numerous injuries, New Orleans had slipped to 13th in the Western Conference entering Monday's play and looked increasingly unlikely to make a playoff run. The Pelicans, though, are under no obligation to trade Davis and could decide to wait until after the season, when the Celtics would be able to join the bidding. Irving has the ability to become a free agent on July 1 by declining the 21.3 million player option he holds for next season. Knicks Coach David Fizdale tried to downplay his team's interest in Davis on Monday. But the Knicks who were already planning to make a free agent run in July at the likes of Kevin Durant and Irving could emerge as a team to watch for Davis if they show a willingness to make trade assets such as the star forward Kristaps Porzingis, their prized rookie Kevin Knox and this June's likely top five draft pick part of any discussions. Although Davis has missed the Pelicans' last four games with a finger injury, Coach Alvin Gentry told reporters Monday that he expects Davis back in the lineup soon. Davis, according to Gentry, plans to play out the season even if New Orleans elects to keep him past next week's trade deadline. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Just before 9 p.m. on a Monday this past summer, rays of dust speckled light from the midnight sun poured through gaps between black curtains inside Gaukurinn, a rock bar in downtown Reykjavik where an English language open mike was about to begin. Sitting in a booth by the well stocked bar was an Australian comedian, Jonathan Duffy, 31, holding court with an Icelandic comic, Bylgja Babylons, 29, and a few other aspiring comics. Notebooks were out as people went over their sets for the night. Gisli Johann, 26, the show's organizer and usual host, stopped by to make sure that Mr. Duffy, his stand in for the night, was there and that the show was ready to go on. In the back of the room, Icelanders and tourists took seats at tables with folding chairs in front of a roomy stage with a red curtain backdrop for the weekly open mike called "Come Talk Funny." A wooden sign above the mike stand read "Goldengang Comedy" for this night's comics. Since there are no designated comedy rooms in Iceland, and bars frequently change owners and concepts, comics band together in groups, making a fluid scene. What started as a more traditional open mike has evolved into a showcase for seasoned comedians and beginners alike. In a country of less than 350,000 citizens that now sees over a million tourists per year, stand up comedy, or "Uppistand," is emerging as a subculture of live entertainment in Reykjavik, its capital. Last summer was the first time there had been regular weekly stand up shows in English, like the open mike at Gaukurinn, live improv shows at the next door bar Hurra, and other shows at Lebowski Bar a four year old venue on Reykjavik's busy main street, inspired by the 1998 film by the Coen brothers. "We're sort of playing pretend," Mr. Johann said. "We want to have an American comedy scene, but it doesn't exist here, so we have to create it." Before 2016, the only regular English speaking live comedy show was the overtly tourist targeted "How to Become Icelandic in 60 Minutes." The main source of stand up comedy came from Mid Island, Iceland's seminal stand up comedy collective, made up of four men who almost accidentally kicked off the scene by performing as a lark at a local favorite dive bar, Prikid, in 2009. "We all just decided to become comedians simultaneously," said Ari Eldjarn, one of Iceland's best known comedians and a member of Mid Island. The group's founder, Halldor Halldorsson, a local rapper and comic known as Dori DNA, had put on the first show at Prikid because he owed money to the bar. Now they, along with Johann Alfred, Bjorn Bragi and Bergur Ebbi, have a winter run at the National Theater of Iceland, where they do 60 to 70 shows a season. At the time of Mid Island's formation seven years ago, winter had come both literally and financially for the country. The economic collapse of 2008 and political turmoil created a perfect storm for comedy. A year later, one of Iceland's most noted TV sitcom actors, Jon Gnarr, would form a satirical political party, the Best Party, and become mayor of Reykjavik from 2010 to 2014. Whether his term inspired more people to try stand up or not, by 2013, regular open mikes could be found at back room sites like Bar 11, organized by the local comic Rokkvi Vesteinsson. Once it was obvious that there was enough interest from comics, the next logical step was to start performing in English. "You have a bigger audience with English," Mr. Johann said. "With Icelandic, you're limited to about 300,000 people most of which you don't even like." The night after the open mike, another free show at Lebowski Bar started with a full house, mostly tourists eating cheeseburgers and drinking Viking beer on tap. Lebowski serves its purpose well. Familiar faces from the Gaukurinn show filled the bowling alley themed bar and performed on the American style porch fashioned as a stage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
If dodging selfie sticks and renegade Elmos in the theater district doesn't pack enough Pac Man style diversion in Midtown Manhattan, consider Fishbowl, a bar lounge north of Times Square that doubles as a grown up game den. Opened in February in the basement of the Dream Midtown hotel, Fishbowl caters to millennials seeking retro distractions like Skee Ball and bowling. On a recent visit, I found the bar filled with 20 somethings trying to play vintage games while Snapchatting. On West 55th Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, Fishbowl is guarded by a doorman who directs patrons away from the Dream hotel's glossy lobby, down a curving staircase and toward a wood paneled bar that suggests a rec room in a McMansion. In addition to various bar games, there are red leather bar stools, plaid covered banquettes and a 5,000 gallon aquarium. By 11:30 p.m. on a recent Saturday, the bar was sparsely populated by groups of young men in polo shirts and jeans and women in strappy dresses. A preppy post grad couple challenged each other to Skee Ball. Near the red D.J. booth, a young woman in a bandeau sat by herself, pursing her lips and taking a selfie by a wall painted like a backgammon board. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It's 2016 all over again. A crusading Bernie Sanders now faces off again against a more mainstream candidate, one with flaws that give many voters pause. This time, it's Joe Biden. Sure, Elizabeth Warren is still in the race for the Democratic nomination, but her chances of prevailing have evaporated. And, I must say here, I believe that part of the explanation for that boils down to sexism. I am baffled by her failure to attract more of a following. People will count errors by her campaign, but all candidates make errors. There is something more afoot in people's relationship with Warren, something that they may not be willing to admit to themselves, something that they may not even be conscious of. And, of course, there is Tulsi. That's enough words on that suspect candidacy. But with candidates withdrawing from the race and endorsing Biden, and with Biden's surprisingly strong showing on Super Tuesday, it is clear that this is now a two person race two men, two elderly men, two elderly white men. Democratic voters have decided that what an old white man Donald Trump broke, only an old white man Sanders or Biden can fix. That is a shocking outcome because the Democrats started with a historically diverse field of candidates. Once again, there are questions about whether unity can be achieved once the fighting ends and a nominee is selected. Will "Vote Blue No Matter Who" have currency if the nominee must be chosen at the convention or if Sanders's supporters again believe that the "establishment" has conspired against him to unfairly thwart him? Revolutionaries are by their nature not accommodationists. And that brings us back to the most significant splitting of paths that the Democratic Party faces: Will it choose a path of restoration and incremental reform, or will it choose a path of revolution? According to exit polls, there was a clear preference among Southern Democratic primary voters to return to Barack Obama era policies. Only in two Northeastern states Sanders's home state, Vermont, and nearby Maine was there a strong preference for more liberal policies than the ones Obama had. In the rest of the states where the question was asked, there was a roughly even split between voters wanting Obama era policies and those wanting more liberal policies. There are many ways to consider these splits. Some will attempt to write off the Southern voters because so many live in states that haven't voted for the Democratic nominee for president in a generation. Some will say the Northeast is not representative of the country because the three states that voted there on Tuesday are so white and so small. There are more people in Chicago than in Vermont and Maine combined. And Maine is the whitest state in America. The second whitest? Vermont. Maybe one could argue that we just need to focus on what voters in swing states want. But Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin haven't voted yet. Only Virginia has, and 47 percent of Democratic primary voters there wanted to return to Obama era policies as opposed to 28 percent who wanted more liberal policies. I simply don't see evidence that supports the theory that most Americans are clamoring for revolutionary change that moves the United States closer in line with the norms of other developed countries. There doesn't even appear to be that clamoring by most Democratic voters. That's not a judgment, but rather a fact. I believe that in theory, liberals, no matter how moderate they may be, should include affordable health care, less student debt, more level taxation and a more aggressive climate plan among their noble, widely agreed upon goals. The only question is one of pacing: Does one demand immediacy, or is one satisfied with gradualism? This construct puts progressivism at odds with practicality. Or, more precisely, practicality becomes a self imposed constraint on progressivism. And there is a more fundamental cleavage between what Democrats think can be done considering that those things would have to make their way through Congress, and what should be done, if there were no congressional impediment. Almost all of the boldest proposals I've heard from Democrats this season would fail to make it through a Congress that looked even remotely like the one we have now. That is a strong argument for encouraging massive turnout to change Congress, but that will be a high hill to climb. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
As early as Tuesday, television and movie writers could go on strike, creating the first major work stoppage in the entertainment industry in a decade. The effects could be immediate. "Saturday Night Live," which is having one of its most successful seasons in recent years, would go dark, leaving the show's final three episodes in limbo. Late night programs like Samantha Bee's weekly "Full Frontal" on TBS and CBS's "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" would be forced to air repeats. The broadcast networks would also have to deal with the awkward affair at their annual upfront presentations in mid May, with star studded events aimed at attracting advertisers potentially marred by picket lines and protests. But will any of this actually happen? The Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, have declined to comment on the state of negotiations while adhering to a news media blackout. But people briefed on the talks, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings, said that despite progress on some sticking points like health care benefits, a deal remained elusive and that negotiations would probably keep Hollywood in suspense until the final minute. The guild's contract expires at midnight Pacific time on Monday. Among the writers' other requests, they want studios to adjust the formulas that determine pay, especially for cable network and streaming service shows. Studios are concerned about setting a precedent for talks with other unions, most notably SAG Aftra, which represents actors and is to begin negotiating a new contract in two weeks. (The actors' contract expires on June 30.) But as tension rises studios were expected to begin informing employees on Friday that a writers' strike was possible some senior writers, labor lawyers and longtime agents cited differences between the current environment and the circumstances of the last walkout as reason to hope a deal could be reached. There are key distinctions between the talks taking place now and the 2007 discussions between producers and writers that led to a 100 day strike. Back then, there was a profound question on the table for writers: What was their place in a digital future? The streaming era had yet to arrive YouTube was only two years old but writers wanted studios to carve out a robust compensation formula for programs distributed digitally. Studios, pointing to an uncertain future, wanted to limit payments. In particular, studios wanted to base residual fees for the reuse of programming online (say, reruns of old comedies) on a home video formula established in the early 1980s. The proposal enraged writers. They had long resented the VHS and DVD residuals system, describing it almost from the moment they agreed to it as unfair. The writers' unions saw the offer on digital programming as an attempt by studios to continue cheating them; most felt they had no choice but to take a stand. As the talks grew increasingly acrimonious and a federal mediator was brought in, studios and networks developed elaborate contingency plans, including stockpiling scripts and ordering reality programming to serve as filler. For the most part, television networks were still operating from a position of strength; the decades old television ecosystem viewers tuning in at specific times and watching commercials; reruns delivering decent ratings was more or less intact. This time, negotiators are locking horns over more routine employment matters, including the shoring up of a faltering health care plan. The talks have been tense but not openly hostile. A federal mediator has not stepped in. And production companies have done almost nothing to prepare for a strike, which seems to signal that they may ultimately be prepared to offer a deal palatable to the writers. The actress Katherine Heigl marches in support of the striking Writers Guild of America in 2007, the last time there was a work stoppage involving Hollywood writers. Major media companies, while still generating enormous profits, are more vulnerable than they were in 2007. Most of the broadcast networks now attract only a small percentage of the viewers they did then. Cable networks are hurting as a result of cord cutting by consumers. Two major movie studios, Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures, are struggling because of a dearth of blockbusters. The DVD format is on life support. Practically speaking, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC would not be affected in prime time unless the strike bled into June. That is because production has mostly ended for the season, and writers have not yet begun to work on new series for the fall. A strike that lasted more than a month, however, could delay shows planned for the coming season. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Likewise, for cable networks and streaming services, shows that are scheduled to premiere over the next two months should be fine. But series that debut in the summer? Several of those are still shooting, and would probably be held up. One wrinkle involves showrunners. In the past 10 years, as scripted TV has boomed there were around 200 shows broadcast during the period of the last strike compared with over 450 released in 2016 studios have aggressively courted big name writers and showrunners like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy. If major showrunners wanted to delay the premieres of shows in solidarity with writers, network executives dedicated to keeping them happy might be forced to listen a prospect that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. If, say, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss wanted to delay the July premiere of "Game of Thrones" to show support for the writers, HBO executives could be in an awkward position. They have a business to run, but they also need to keep their star creators happy. For now, networks are mostly concerned about a strike affecting their late night shows. Though the ratings for such shows are down from where they stood years ago, the programs are experiencing a cultural currency they have not enjoyed in a long time. Hosts like Mr. Colbert, John Oliver of HBO's "Last Week Tonight" and Trevor Noah of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" have become appointment television for disaffected liberals craving an antidote to President Trump. The alarm at film companies has been mostly confined to marketing and publicity departments. The late night sofa is an important promotional perch. What if the stars of May releases like "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"and "Baywatch" were unable to drop by "The Tonight Show" to tout their latest wares with Jimmy Fallon? The impact on movie production would be minimal. Most television series work on a just in time system of script delivery. Writers then commonly tweak jokes and dialogue as filming takes place. But most studio movies are assembled years in advance because the postproduction process like digitally rendering entire cities takes so long. "None of the 2018 movies will be affected," Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, told reporters in mid April, referring to films like "Black Panther" and "Avengers: Infinity War." "Most of them are set. What it would really impact is future work on future projects." A strike of more than a couple months could, however, hurt future movies, particularly those with Oscar aspirations, as studios move forward with production on scripts that are not quite up to snuff. During the last strike, several films required last minute script doctoring but studios were out of luck. The James Bond movie "Quantum of Solace" was one. Daniel Craig, who played 007, later said of the predicament, "There was me trying to rewrite scenes and a writer I'm not." Similarly, the director Michael Bay blamed the poor critical reception of his "Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen" on the 2007 walkout. "It was very hard to put it together that quickly after the writers' strike," Mr. Bay told Empire magazine in 2011. "It was just terrible to do a movie where you've got to have a story in three weeks." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The singer songwriter Sufjan Stevens thought he disliked ballet until the New York City Ballet dancer Justin Peck asked him for permission to choreograph a piece to his electronic song cycle, "Enjoy Your Rabbit." The ballet, "Year of the Rabbit," was a raging success in 2012, and Mr. Stevens famous for his folk inspired melodies, haunting narratives and eccentric large scale projects became a convert. Now Mr. Stevens, 38, has composed an original score for a new work by Mr. Peck, who at 26 is widely viewed as one of ballet's most promising choreographic talents. The piece, "Everywhere We Go," will have its premiere on May 8 at City Ballet's spring gala. After a recent rehearsal in which Mr. Peck was still teasing out the details, the two artists talked to Roslyn Sulcas. Mr. Stevens is impulsive and humorous, Mr. Peck reflective and contained. Here are excerpts from the conversation: Q. How did the idea of using Sufjan's music for "Year of the Rabbit" come about? JUSTIN PECK I first heard "Rabbit" on WNYC, in a profile of a string quartet who had done these arrangements of his "Enjoy Your Rabbit" album. I was really taken with the music, found it really innovative and danceable, and I kind of kept it on my radar. I started experimenting with it during a few sessions at the New York Choreographic Institute, and Peter Martins City Ballet's ballet master in chief was encouraging. When he asked me to do a piece for the company, I invited Sufjan to the ballet and told him what I wanted to do. SUFJAN STEVENS You know, actually, when you first approached me I was rolling my eyes, because I was so flabbergasted that you wanted to use this music that most of my fans disliked and that was an anomaly for me. I'm known for folk songs. This was sort of a hobby, goofing around with electronics, I wasn't even a full time musician then. It has beats and sound effects a lot of it is really aggressive. There is a real discrepancy between this album and my songwriting, but it was transcribed for string quartets and then for Justin's ballet. It's this funny little project that won't die. Were you surprised to be approached by a choreographer? STEVENS Not really. I'd had requests before from choreographers, mainly college students doing liturgical modern dance. But I didn't know anything about ballet. When I moved to New York, I had a ballet friend who dragged me to "Apollo," and I hated it. Ballet seemed so anachronistic, so formal and classical and archaic and irrelevant to pop culture, the world of YouTube and reality television. I didn't understand it. But when Justin invited me to do the "Rabbit" ballet, he persuaded me to have an education and kind of curated my experience. He would say, come and watch this, watch that, then we would talk about it. "Agon" was when it really clicked for me. There is no pandering, there is nothing coy about it it is so distilled and perfect, immaculate. That's what convinced me that ballet was important. It is all about absence of self there is no ego in it, even though there is extreme self consciousness. Ballet is like proof of the existence of God, whereas my art is proof of the existence of me. It made me understand how selfish and boring it can be to make art that is all about yourself. At what point did you begin to talk about working together on a new score? PECK I wanted to see how "Rabbit" went, and the process of working with Sufjan was very hands on and engaging, so I brought it up with him. I think he thought about it for a while. STEVENS I was a bit resistant to this new project because I'm not used to working in a big organization like this. I think I was also nervous I didn't know if I had any ideas. It turns out I had too many. Justin, was there any opposition to your working with someone who wasn't really a composer? PECK I think ballet is pretty open about what music is used actually. For me, as opposed to looking for classical music, I'm always looking for danceable music, and that's why I'm drawn to Sufjan's work. It's often rhythmically challenging, but never beyond the point of cohesiveness. There's melody present in a lot of his work, which is very much his own voice in music. He has a natural way with orchestrating music that many others struggle with, and he is able to produce scores written for as many as 70 musicians that possess both balance and precision. STEVENS I had never thought the music I make was danceable until I saw "Rabbit," and then it made sense. For the new piece, I was taking songs I'd written that were discarded and submitting those as ideas alongside sketches of short symphonic movements. Some were piano based, some guitar based, some about rhythm or patterns, almost like technical exercises. I would post them on the server, Justin would listen and respond. He was drawn to the more romantic, lyrical, idiomatic sketches the ones that had color and rhythm and melody. I was a bit resistant and wanting to make something really modern and cool. But I came to terms with the fact that this is classical ballet, and full of formal patterns. Then I realized that all that Rimsky Korsakov I played in my teens had paid off. What is your musical background? STEVENS My first instrument was the oboe, and I came to understand music through playing in my high school orchestra. I also listened to a lot of classical music as a kid, a lot of the Romantics Rachmaninoff and Grieg and think that's in my songwriting. Playing the oboe is a bit like ballet, sort of masochistic. It's years of practice before you can even play in tune. Did you talk about what the music would be like before starting to compose? STEVENS We tried having a conceptual conversation before starting about what the ballet could be, and it just failed. It was like a bad first date. A lot of the music is developed from repetition and rhythmic variation and counting not just time signatures, but an emphasis on dynamics and accents. It's not technically difficult, but lends itself to the athleticism and technicality of City Ballet. All the Stravinsky they dance to has conditioned them to feel really comfortable in any kind of numerical sequence. The foundation of everything in this ballet is the company itself, often certain dancers specifically. PECK Sufjan would say things like, I wrote this for these people, and I want them to be spinning during that time. In that case, I took what he said and tried to isolate specific parts of the body and make them rotate. Once I had made material, I showed him. There has been a lot of dialogue back and forth about the structure of the dance, and what is happening during certain moments in the music. We spent a lot of time combing through the orchestrations in a very meticulous way. That ultimately helps to weave the outcome of the final dance piece. STEVENS My observations are very impulsive and somewhat uneducated; he has this deep scholarship of the form. I don't have a comprehension of the history, whereas his decisions are all informed by his education. So I'm sort of, why are they doing that? I'm not convinced by that gesture. PECK But that's good it makes me stronger about my choices. It's kind of desolate out there for a choreographer. You get so little feedback, so I really cherish the two or three people I bring in. Was writing this music different from the way you usually compose? STEVENS Yes, totally. For one thing, I would never compose for an orchestra. I'm not one of those songwriters who aspires to writing an epic symphony. In a more practical way, I was very aware of rhythm; gotta have a march, a polka very important! a waltz, an adagio. I like that, it's functional. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Credit...Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times Goats were surrounding us. A few hundred of them. All white, with foot long ridged horns, they were elegant but slightly menacing at least to me, a born and bred New Yorker who has always been a little bit wary of farm animals. But my daughter, Sonia, and her best friend, Matteo, both 3 at the time, were standing on the side of the stables, arms extended through the metal bars, holding out palms full of brown food pellets to the creatures. One goat started eating straight from my daughter's little hand, its long pink tongue sandpaper rough, and she was giggling. We were at the Geitenboerderij Ridammerhoeve, a biodynamic goat farm in the Amsterdamse Bos, a forest on the southern edge of the city. We had biked there in about 30 minutes from our apartment in the center of Amsterdam, with two children shoulder to shoulder in the box of my bakfiets, a Dutch bike with a kind of wheelbarrow on the front. Amsterdam is something of an urban jungle, with apartments stacked tightly in three and four story buildings, and streets are congested with cars, trams, buses and ever present bicycles about 800,000 of them. But thanks to Dutch tradition and some clever planning, almost every city neighborhood has either a petting zoo or a children's farm. As a working single mother without a car, I've relied heavily on Amsterdam's local farms for exposure to nature and much needed fresh air. When Sonia was born, we went a few times a week to Zimmerhoeve, a farm built on the site of a former iron foundry. It sits on the bank of a wide canal where steel barges and cargo boats glide through dark green waters under a black drawbridge, adjacent to a sandbox and a wooden playground resembling a pirate ship. Through the open red barn doors, we find sheep, chicken, goats, a pair of grunting pigs and a pen of longhaired rabbits we could join in the hay for a cuddle. We celebrated Sonia's first birthday there. Then I invested in a solidly made city bike with a baby seat, popped her on the front and off we'd go to the nearby Westerpark, which has a larger children's farm in the center of a sprawling park built on the land of a former energy factory. Westerpark features rare red and white Lakenvelder cows, two Shetland ponies and a giant Yorkshire pig named Motti. After pushing Sonia on the swings for a while, I'd sit and drink a cappuccino while she pedaled around on a green and yellow plastic tractor. These reused industrial spaces transformed into throwback barnyards with old farm animals, right in the urban center, seem somehow uniquely Dutch to me, although I know that there are petting zoos in other global cities. I assumed for a long time that these children's farms had been either here forever or that they were part of the 1970s back to the land movement. In fact many of these farms were established more recently, in the '80s and '90s, with great payoff for the urbanites of the 21st century. Corine Riteco founded Geitenboerderij (Goat Farm) Ridammerhoeve with her husband, Willem Dam, in 1988. Wanting to demonstrate the benefits of organic farming to an urban population, they drafted an extensive proposal to the Amsterdam city government, asking to rent land within the forest, and the request was granted. "We liked the goats because they're such pleasant animals, and they like the attention of people who come in, and of course the baby goats are very cute," she said. "We make cheese and buttermilk and yogurt," she said, "to make it attractive for people to come and do their shopping here. We do sell the meat as well, and we started with the goats, but we now have chickens and we sell the eggs, and people can pick their own eggs." The Ridammerhoeve farm is a working farm that sells its products, but most of the others fall under the heading of kinderboerderij, as they're called in Dutch, or children's farms, which are petting zoos where visitors can touch goats, sheep, cows, rabbits and guinea pigs and, if they're more adventurous, pigs and chickens. Thanks to these local farms, my daughter, who has grown up entirely in the city, feels perfectly comfortable around farm animals. Michele Hutchison, an author of "The Happiest Kids in the World," a new book exploring why Unicef in 2013 rated Dutch children highest in the world on measures of happiness, said that many of the ways those children are being raised today may look old fashioned, but that this is more of a conscious choice by contemporary Dutch parents to resurrect old fashioned family values: fresh air, nature, unsupervised play. "Dutch kids' parents played outside unsupervised when they were young, and now they consciously try to allow their children to do the same," she writes. When Sonia was big enough to sit upright, my father surprised us with a classic Dutch bakfiets, which makes traveling 30 minutes to the forest, with more than one child, a picnic blanket and basket on board, perfectly doable. And that's where we found ourselves surrounded by all those goats. Entering the Geitenboerderij Ridammerhoeve, we stopped first at a huge labyrinth made of tall hedges, where Sonia and Matteo disappeared for about a half hour. Matteo's parents and I tracked them by their laughter. After stopping to say hello to an enormous spotted pig rolling in a mud puddle, and waiting while our children climbed through a wooden jungle gym and escaped via the slide, we entered the cavernous goat barn filled with yellow hay, hundreds of goats and a startling, pungent odor. All around us, children were feeding the animals, some with the pellets bought for a coin from a dispenser on the wall, and others were feeding the baby goats with miniature baby bottles full of goat milk. Ms. Riteco, one of the founders, expressed a sentiment that's shared by many parents in the Netherlands: "It's very healthy to bring your children into contact with animals in farms; then you have stronger and healthier kids." She offered a tip: Baby goats are born in January and February, and again in March and April; other newborns come in summer. Last August, 10 piglets were born. "Children have a natural bond with animals anyway, so it's good that they're being given a possibility to explore that," Ms. Hutchison said. "Play here isn't sanitized; it's not fenced off." An association for Dutch children's farms has about 300 member farms throughout the Netherlands. They say they receive nearly 30 million visits a year. Amsterdam has about a dozen official ones, usually run by a couple of part time employees and lots of local volunteers, and there are also other playgrounds where animals are part of the scenery. When my daughter was about 2, for example, we favored a tiny playground off a side street in the Jordaan neighborhood that we nicknamed "the chicken park" (its real name is Vereniging Kippen en Konijnenren Slootstraat). It has a pen full of chickens and rabbits set between the seesaw and the climbing frame, and plenty of little bikes, scooters and other toys appropriate for toddlers, which are always left there for public use (remarkably, no one steals them). I've been to at least two farms in Amsterdam Erasmus Park on the western side of the city and De Werf on the eastern side that have adult male peacocks wandering about, impressively regal when they flourish their feathers, but quite intimidating when they hiss defensively. In De Pijp, a neighborhood to the southeast of the city center, filled with sidewalk cafes, young designers' shops and fusion restaurants, the Kinderboerderij De Pijp, founded in the late '80s, has two donkeys and two ponies, which small children can sometimes ride, as well as three pigs, goats and sheep, ducks, geese, rabbits and three cats. Activities include crafts workshops and opportunities once a year to watch the sheep being sheared (this year on May 14). These days, I have a partner with his own two children, who has a car, and together we journey outside the city more often to enjoy nature. Since Sonia is school age now, with lots of birthday parties at children's "fun palaces" with names like TunFun and Candy Castle, we go less often to our local kinderboerderij. But occasionally I'm nostalgic for those early days, and the memories of strapping Sonia into the baby carrier and walking down to the local farm to watch the boats glide by on the dark green canal, and to sit quietly and pet the longhaired rabbits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Of all contemporary photographers, none has so rigorously explored the nature of his medium as Hiroshi Sugimoto. Since the mid 1970s, and working exclusively in black and white, he has devoted series of images to natural history dioramas, the interiors of movie palaces lighted only by their uncanny glowing screens and the historic personages of Madame Tussauds wax museum. His photographs have stretched and reshaped the concepts of time, space and light endemic to the medium, and in the process they have altered our grasp of history, visual perception and existence itself. He has anointed fossils "the pre photography time recording device" and called photography "a process of making fossils out of the present." About two decades ago, Mr. Sugimoto turned to photographing iconic, mostly modernist buildings (the exception: the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and two years ago inaugurated a building of his own design, his idiosyncratic Odawara Art Foundation Enoura Observatory perched above Sagami Bay in eastern Japan. This month brings the publication of "Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture," many of whose 100 images have never been published before, including two of the Enoura Observatory. How did you start photographing buildings? I was first commissioned by MOCA in Los Angeles, for their survey of 20th century architecture. I don't accept commissions but in this case, I thought, wow, it might be interesting, if it gives me the challenge of visiting the icons of 20th century architecture. I was already very interested in architecture. Your photographs of buildings are deliberately blurred, which reduces the architecture to a kind of essence, a geometric form without finishing or details. Losing all the details brings back the fundamental concept. I'm trying to bring it back to the original vision of the architect. When it is in a purer state. You've written that "a building is the result of an ideal making a compromise with reality." I'm interested that the captions in the new book don't give the reader a lot of information about the buildings. The name of the building, but not who designed it, when or where. So it's for the most professional people. Well, not everybody knows everything. I know quite a few of them, but had to Google others. The Italian buildings from the '30s I didn't know. I see. Just the name of the building. No location. That says something about how you want them perceived. We're supposed to experience the image on its own. This looking at so much architecture seems to have led you to ask yourself, "What would I do if I were an architect?" Yeah, sometimes I thought if I were this architect, I wouldn't have done this. You would have changed that. Right. This is a mistake or failure. So several years ago I made this book in Japanese as a report criticizing the design of museums. I know. I read about this book online and my first thought was: When is it going to be translated into English? I never thought of translating it into English. It's mostly for the Japanese market. I was kind of free to say whatever I said. I have this rating page; each museum has a short explanation and up to five stars. So a lot of people think that, in the United States, the best museum, or one of the very best museums, is the Menil in Houston. Have you seen that one? Houston. Yes, yes. That's beautiful. The light from the ceiling is very nicely diffused but I never had a show there. The book only covers all the museums that have given me a one man show. I was really into each building. And I suffered a lot. This is a consumer report. A user's manual. Well, I'm begging you to translate it into English. It was published like six, seven years ago, so now I have more museums to criticize. Better still, an expanded English edition. I read that you ranked Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus Bregenz as the best. He designed a space to make art look its best, which is quite unusual for an architect. And the galleries had linoleum floors. Remember that? It was very humble and unpretentious. It's in the new book opposite your photograph of the Taniguchi staircase in the lobby of MoMA's 2004 redesign. So did you like the Taniguchi better? Taniguchi, no, no, no. I liked the original one better. The Taniguchi staircase is O.K. But compared to this, it's They've restored the second flight of the Bauhaus staircase. So you can go all the way up to the third floor again. No "Guernica" of course, but it's a big improvement. Oh yeah? Oh, I didn't know that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A revolutionary technology known as "gene drive," which for the first time gives humans the power to alter or perhaps eliminate entire populations of organisms in the wild, has stirred both excitement and fear since scientists proposed a means to construct it two years ago. Scientists dream of deploying gene drive, for example, to wipe out malaria carrying mosquitoes that cause the deaths of 300,000 African children each year, or invasive rodents that damage island ecosystems. But some experts have warned that the technique could lead to unforeseen harm to the environment. Some scientists have called on the federal government to regulate it, and some environmental watchdogs have called for a moratorium. On Wednesday, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the premier advisory group for the federal government on scientific matters, endorsed continued research on the technology, concluding after nearly a yearlong study that while it poses risks, its possible benefits make it crucial to pursue. The group also set out a path to conducting what it called "carefully controlled field trials," despite what some scientists say is the substantial risk of inadvertent release into the environment. The report underscores that there is not yet enough evidence about the unintended consequences of gene drives to justify the release of an organism that has been engineered to carry one. But the green light for gene drive research from the influential group, scientists said, would likely open the door to new funding and provide an impetus for governments around the world to consider how it might be regulated and deployed. For centuries, people have tinkered with the genetic makeup of living things whose survival and reproduction are already largely under our control: pets, farm animals, crops and assorted species of laboratory animals. With the advent of new gene editing tools like one called Crispr, there is even growing debate about modifying human embryos with traits that could be passed on their descendants. But a gene drive involves potentially transforming an entire wild species over a few generations by modifying just a few individuals. Our ability to do that has so far been stymied because any changes humans might make typically reduce an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its natural habitat: natural selection eliminates the altered genes. Gene drives overcome this by ensuring that a particular gene is transmitted to all of an individual's offspring, rather than the usual half, even if that makes them less fit. The phenomenon has long been known to exist in nature, and Crispr provides an effective way to harness it. By encoding the Crispr editing system itself into an organism's DNA, scientists can cause a desired edit to reoccur in each generation, "driving" the trait through the wild population. The science has attracted intense interest from governments, nonprofit organizations and research institutes eager to explore its possibilities for public health, agriculture and environmental conservation, and the report seems likely to open the door to more funding for such efforts. At the same time, it is uncertain how the technology will be regulated. Existing laws, the report noted, are aimed at containing genetically engineered organisms rather than managing those whose purpose is precisely to spread swiftly. The report pointed out the difficulty in predicting what might happen if an organism carrying a gene drive was deliberately or accidentally released, saying it "raises many ethical questions and presents a challenge for existing governance paradigms." Coming up with an international regulatory framework is especially crucial, members of the committee said, given that gene drives will not recognize national or political boundaries. For now, the United States Food and Drug Administration has authority over animals that have been engineered with foreign DNA under a rule that regards them as a type of drug. But the report suggests that other agencies, like the Fish and Wildlife Service or the Bureau of Land Management, might be seen to have a stake in the ecological concerns at the heart of gene drive experiments. "It would be good if we could get our act together to provide a regulatory model for the rest of the world,'' said Jason Delborne, a professor of science, policy and society at North Carolina State University and one of the 16 experts on the advisory panel that produced the report. Some independent scientists say the panel, which included ethicists, biologists and others, struck a good balance by permitting more gene drive research while limiting the use of the technology. But opponents of genetic engineering argue that the panel should have demanded a halt to research on gene drives, at least until some of the many questions it raised are answered. The report is the first in a series of studies by the National Academies on the ethical, scientific and social challenges posed by emerging gene editing technology, including one due later this year on editing the human genome. The committee considered six case studies, including using gene drive to control mice destroying biodiversity on islands, mosquitoes infecting native Hawaiian birds with malaria, and a weed called Palmer amaranth that has become resistant to herbicides and a scourge for some farmers. Each potential use of gene drive carries its own set of risks and benefits, the report says, and should be assessed independently. Even modeling the "cascade of population dynamics and evolutionary processes'' that would influence the ecological effects, the report noted, requires far more research. Risks include the possibility that a gene drive might jump to another species for which it was not intended, or that the suppression of one undesirable organism will lead to the emergence of another that is even worse. The group recommends "phased testing,'' which would include safeguards at each step before eventually releasing organisms into the wild, but it also noted the new ethical challenges posed by how to obtain consent from people whose environments might be affected by such a release. "There are few avenues for such participation," the report noted, "and insufficient guidance on how communities can and should take part." Gene drives spread a trait through a population by ensuring that it is passed to virtually all of an individual's offspring as it reproduces, rather than the usual half. In laboratory experiments, the desired change has appeared in nearly 100 percent of the offspring of flies and mosquitoes. So far, gene drive research has focused largely on mosquitoes that transmit infectious diseases to humans. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped pay for the N.A.S. report, has spent some 40 million on a gene drive project aimed at eradicating the species of mosquitoes that spread malaria. Anthony James, a mosquito researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who is among those advocating the use of gene drive to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits the Zika virus, called the report "reasonable.'' | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"Bedtime is a lovely time," one expert says, "but not the best time to have lengthy conversations about things that are on your kid's mind." Yes, this is an anxious time, and yes, everyone is anxious, but it is particularly hard to be an anxious kid in an anxious time. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders in children and adolescents (and this was true before the pandemic), and they can be linked to other mental health issues, notably depression. Anxiety can bring children into emergency rooms, and into psychiatric hospitalizations, and in a time of generally heightened stress and anxiety, parents with anxious kids find themselves worrying especially about the worriers, wondering how to talk with them about the complexities of life in 2020, and trying to assess when worry is, well, worrisome enough to need professional help. At Boston Children's Hospital, during the first months of the pandemic and the general shutdown, the volume of children and adolescents coming in to the emergency room with mental health issues decreased, said Dr. Patricia Ibeziako, the associate chief for clinical services in the hospital's department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. It picked up in June, and has increased from the summer through the fall, with more coming in for mental health reasons and also who come to the hospital for other reasons and have anxiety issues. Stress and anxiety may manifest as worsening health, especially for children with underlying medical conditions. "The highest volume we're seeing during the pandemic of children presenting to the hospital setting with mental health issues are those with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts many have anxiety as well, sometimes underlying anxiety disorders," Dr. Ibeziako said. Adolescents who come in with eating disorders often have anxiety. Children with developmental disabilities have been coming in with agitation and disruptive behaviors reflecting anxiety as the pandemic has disrupted their regular routines. Even in an anxious time, anxiety is treatable. Dr. Ibeziako said, "First line management for anxiety is therapy; cognitive behavioral therapy is what we use for children and adolescents." It involves understanding the thought process of anxiety, she said, and how that affects emotions and behaviors, and helping the child reframe or change problematic thoughts. Some children, depending on the severity of their symptoms, may require medication as well. Children who are severely affected may need therapy in a day program, or a hospital, at least to begin with, while others will do fine with a weekly appointment. Ideally, children get therapy and medication, if needed, before the anxiety becomes so intense or debilitating that parents consider an emergency room visit. "It would really be great if parents could make outreach to a pediatrician or primary care provider and try to get linked up with a counselor or therapist, start to address this early," Dr. Ibeziako said. During this difficult time, some families are thinking, "help is for the people who really need it, but not my kid," said Rachel Busman, the senior director of the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute in New York, who sees many younger children in her clinical practice. The expansion of telehealth in the pandemic has increased the availability of mental health services for children, she said. Dr. Carolina Zerrate, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia who also works in a school based mental health program, said that while these are stressful times for all families, "Black and Latinx families have been hit by the virus harder." She noted that "some families were already in a stressed situation." Dr. Zerrate suggested that parents model how to express emotions and ask for help and support. Do check ins by asking open ended questions, such as: "How are you feeling? Why are you feeling that way?" Don't dismiss their concerns, she said; don't tell them they're too young to be worrying. "You're opening up space for communicating, it's OK to talk about your feelings, it's OK to share with your family." Seek help, Dr. Zerrate said, if you see patterns that significantly interfere with a child's day to day functioning, or if a child seems to be in distress over time and getting worse, and of course, if a child says anything at all about self harm or suicide. Rebecca Berry, a clinical psychologist at Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at N.Y.U. Langone, said parents often know that a child tends toward anxiety, and perhaps had separation issues around the age of 4 or 5. She described anxious children as having "what I call a worry brain, a sticky brain, worrying, when is the second wave going to come?" "There's so much a parent can be doing to model brave, nonanxious and resilient behavior," Dr. Busman said. Parents tend to want to rush in and protect their children from distress, she said, and may unintentionally send the message that yes, the child is in danger and needs protecting. "You want to be able to convey a message, 'I know it's a little scary to get into bed on your own, but I know you can do it,'" she said, a message like, "We can do hard things." Before the pandemic, Dr. Ibeziako said, school related anxiety was a common problem, but what they are seeing now is "tinged with pandemic implications," reflecting the changes in the school year and the general uncertainty about how long this will go on. Routines and structure are important, and can help us all handle anxiety they matter for young children, for school aged children, for adolescents, and for adults as well. "Young children are not likely going to say, 'Mom, Dad, I'm feeling anxious, and this is how I'm manifesting that anxiety,'" Dr. Busman said. And many older kids, and even adults, she said, don't necessarily connect their sensations and behaviors to the underlying anxieties that may be shaping them. Younger children may show their anxiety by being more clingy, Dr. Busman said, "either metaphorically or literally," and they may have trouble with sleep. But they may also be angry and disruptive, "when we're threatened, we go into fight or flight mode," she said. "Children might retreat and hide or they might protest." So despite the stereotype that an anxious child will be fearful or inhibited, the worried child may actually be the tantrum throwing child, the defiant child, the oppositional child. Dr. Ibeziako suggested parents monitor what children encounter in what is often now more time spent looking at screens. Similarly, Dr. Busman recommended parents be mindful of their own conversations, understanding that children may pick up incomplete information, or adult worries. When children ask about what is going on in the world (or in the family), she said, take time to understand what the child already knows, and what information is being requested. Don't have those conversations late at night. "Bedtime is a lovely time," Dr. Busman said, "but not the best time to have lengthy conversations about things that are on your kid's mind." Try calming exercises, she suggested, or visualization, like a mental vacation to a place the child has been before. "Don't get into bed with your child you will fall asleep, and when you move they wake up," she said. Sit next to the bed, rub the child's back but model that bedtime is not a time for talk. She suggested picking a "worry time" or even setting up a "worry box" where the worry can be written down and put away for later discussion. Remind kids that they have power and agency, Dr. Zerrate said, "There are things they can do to keep themselves and their family safe, wash your hands, wear your mask, and we're good to go." The message should be, "this is really hard and really complicated, and as a family, we're going to be able to cope with this and be OK." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
PARIS Stocks fell modestly in Europe on Monday, after confirmation that Spain had slumped back into recession in the first three months of 2012. The Spanish economy contracted by 0.3 percent in the January March quarter, the same rate of contraction as in the last quarter of 2011, the National Statistics Institute said in Madrid. The common definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of real economic decline. The Euro Stoxx 50 index, which tracks euro zone blue chip shares, fell 1.6 percent by the close of trading. The FTSE 100 index in London was down 0.7 percent. The Spanish economic news was not quite as bad as anticipated a Reuters poll had found a market consensus for a quarterly contraction of around 0.4 percent. Compared with the first quarter a year earlier, the Spanish economy shrank by 0.4 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Just a few years ago, intimacy direction was such a new practice in the theater that hiring someone to choreograph sex scenes was almost unheard of. Then along came MeToo, and awareness rapidly began to shift. By last summer, intimacy direction was on Broadway. Now Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the nation's leading regional theaters, has upped the ante, hiring a resident intimacy director, Sarah Lozoff, for all 11 productions in its 2020 season. In a field that so far has relied largely on show by show contracts for intimacy directors, a salaried position with benefits is a significant step. "It's huge," said Tonia Sina of the organization Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, which certifies intimacy directors for stage and screen work. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The coronavirus toll has risen to 100,000 infections and 4,000 deaths. With governments imposing lockdowns and travel and border restrictions, sports events worldwide continued to be postponed, canceled or played without spectators. The disruption to the world or sports, confined first to Asia and then the Europe, has now moved to the United States, most notably with the suspension of the N.B.A. season after Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the virus, according to a person familiar with the situation. The N.C.A.A. said that its men's and women's basketball tournaments would be played without fans. The move allows the games to go on, largely satisfying fans who plan to watch on television but threatening the lively atmosphere at the games. The N.C.A.A. will allow only essential staff and limited family attendance at its games, normally the highlight of the college basketball season. The SEC, Big 12 and Pac 12 are among the conferences that will proceed with their conference tournaments, but bar spectators. The Ivy League canceled its men's and women's tournaments outright. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. The 16 team team College Basketball Invitational, another postseason tournament, will not be played this year because of the outbreak. The top European basketball competition, Euroleague, suspended all games in Italy until April 11 after several teams expressed a reluctance to play there. The 16 team team College Basketball Invitational, created in 2007, will not be played this year because of the outbreak. It is the second postseason basketball tournament, after the Ivy League's, to be canceled outright. The ban on gatherings in San Francisco currently affects just one Warriors game, as the team will leave for a five game road trip after Thursday's game. No official announcement has been made as to what will happen if the ban is extended. The Miami Open, one of the top tennis tournaments in the country, was canceled on Thursday as the city's mayor announced a suspension of large events, including a NASCAR race and major events at American Airlines Arena, the home of the N.B.A.'s Miami Heat. The Miami Open was scheduled to run March 23 April 5, with top players including Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic and Australian Open champion Sofia Kenin. Its cancellation comes after the BNP Paribas Open, one of the world's leading tennis tournaments, was also canceled because of the spread of coronavirus. Soon after, the governing body of men's tennis suspended tour events for six weeks, until April 27. The Fed Cup finals, scheduled for Budapest in April, have been postponed. Games across Europe and other parts of the world are being played without spectators or postponed to help prevent the spread of the virus. The Manchester City Arsenal match on Wednesday became the first Premier League game postponed. Arsenal had played Olympiakos two weeks ago and some players and staff members had contact with Evangelos Marinakis, the Greek owner of Olympiakos, who has tested positive for the virus. Spain suspended its top two divisions for at least two weeks. The star studded Real Madrid team is in quarantine after a player for the club's basketball team tested positive. France will bar spectators at all games in the top two divisions until April 15. The League Cup final between P.S.G. and Lyon, originally scheduled for April 4, has been postponed indefinitely. Portugal will play league games without fans for at least two weeks and Belgium for a week. All weekend games in the Bundesliga in Germany will be played without fans, a first for the league. In Japan, J League games have been postponed. In China, the Super League schedule has not yet begun, with no date for a return set, as much of the country is under virtual lockdown. All World Cup qualifying games in Asia were postponed until the fall. The Slovakia Ireland playoff for Euro 2020 will be played without fans. The flame lighting ceremony in Greece on Thursday was held without spectators. Olympic officials continue to maintain that the Summer Games will proceed as scheduled in Tokyo in July and August. Yoshiro Mori, the president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, dismissed comments by an executive board member who said the Games should be delayed a year. "He certainly said an outlandish thing," Mori said. The France Ireland game set for this weekend in Paris has been postponed, the third Six Nations match to be put on hold. For now, the last remaining match for the weekend, Wales Scotland, will be played as scheduled. The Seattle Mariners said they were working on alternative plans for their six home games scheduled for March, in accordance with a ban on large group events in the area, which was announced Wednesday. The ban will last at least until the end of March. Japan has postponed the start of its baseball season, scheduled for March 20, until April. The New York City Half Marathon, scheduled for Sunday, has been canceled. The Paris Marathon has been delayed from April to October. The Barcelona Marathon has also been postponed until October. The Rome Marathon on March 29 has been canceled. The World Figure Skating Championships in Montreal, scheduled to run March 18 to 22, have been canceled. The event was expected to feature about 200 skaters from more than 50 countries. The women's world ice hockey championship, to be played in Canada beginning March 31, has been canceled. The Alpine World Cup finals, scheduled to begin March 18 in Italy, have been canceled. The last three races of the women's skiing World Cup, to be held in Sweden, were canceled. A cross country World Cup race this weekend in Minneapolis was canceled. The McLaren team pulled out of the Formula One season opener in Australia later this month after a team member tested positive. The race in China, scheduled for April, was previously postponed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LONDON What does it mean to be British? What does that look like? There's really no way around these questions for anyone in the United Kingdom right now; anyone existing in the shadow of the maybe final the P.M. swears it is so Brexit deadline of Oct. 31 . They overshadow everything else, even climate activism. Banksy' s "Devolved Parliament," a portrait of the House of Commons filled by chimpanzees , is about to go on show for the first time ahead of a scheduled auction. Bankers are being told to have overnight bags packed in case they suddenly have to relocate to Frankfurt . And designers? Designers, stuck with a fashion season that falls just weeks before B day, to show clothes that will be worn in its aftermath, are extrapolating. The point of fashion is to crystallize identity: to give individuals the tools to express who they are. But if you don't know who you are, because who you are today (what you are part of) and who you may be in a month (what you are not part of) are different, the most you can do is provide succor for getting through the moment; for helping to process. It came over long, draped, jersey dresses surrounded at the hip by a thick circlet of rhinestone belt, one sleeve missing, the other sliced open to reveal the arm and billowing out behind. It came over shirts over harem pants; under a flowing silver superhero cape; mirrored in circular cutouts on the hips of dresses or swirled just above the hems of trench coats; embedded among super fringed shawls and mohair slip dresses. Mr. Anderson name checked the Canadian artist Liz Magor as an influence, and the way she uses her work to make you rethink themes and objects of everyday life (shelter, history, survival). But if there was a better or more glamorous stand in for the feedback loop of self recrimination, "what if's" and "not me's" swirling around the ether, it's hard to imagine. Still, there's been a lot of symbolism going on. The biggest trend of the week was a silhouette that was the equivalent of a really gorgeous ... tent. A safe space made of fabric in which to take refuge from the day. To hide not the body politic but just the body ( Hussein Chalayan even wove tentpoles into his crisscross topographic chemises). Fashion often resorts to the most obvious form of dress when protection is involved: the power shouldered military suit! Th ese new volumes were, in many ways, a more interesting proposition. Hemlines were dropped and often dusted the floor, trailing behind like a train or a memory; sleeves extended past the wrists to obscure the hands or got blown up to inflated, absurd proportions; there were acres of fabric involved. For a spring/summer season, there was almost no focus on exposure. Instead there were dresses that took up space, as Richard Malone wrote of his ruched and pieced together and highly constructed evening wear, jutting past shoulders and curving grandly to the side, inspired by conversations with his grandmother about the working class and demanding recognition (he took his bow in a T shirt bearing a four letter word followed by the name "Boris"). Dresses that provided a kind of cloudlike cover, billowing around the body like mist, at Roksanda . Dresses that folded narrative over fantasy, as in Erdem Moralioglu 's ode to Tina Modotti , the Italian actress turned photographer turned activist, complete with classic Victorian silhouettes, high neck, pie crust collars, in high octane floral prints; long, louche silk pants and silk tunics; elaborately fringed shawls (fringe is also a trend); and a triple tiered evening gown in emerald brocade all of it a very elaborate, lusciously tinted cover up . There were exceptions, to be sure: Christopher Kane , whose " Ecosex ual" show was one of the few that dealt head on with the environmental crisis, thanks to silk screen prints of wildflower fields, and LBDs (little bright dresses) with silicone inserts that looked sort of like pervy Georgia O'Keeffe orchids. But even Victoria Beckham , former acolyte of the body con frock, had about faced to dresses that hang like artist's smocks, floating from collarbone to calf with no restrictions. And when there weren't dresses, there were layers: turtlenecks under button downs under 1970s wide lapel blazers in houndstooth check atop flared trousers or below the knee box pleated skirts. Though they are rarely worn as lightly, or with as much nuance, as in Simone Rocha 's organza meets lace meets cotton eyelet meets raffia meets sequins meets Delft pottery (meets more, but you get the idea) mille feuilles of coats and dresses and cropped paperboy pants, rooted in time faded Irish tradition and myth, as well as the interiors of grand homes. Generous in scale, human in detail, they were textural, in all meanings of the word. And they tapped into a strain of historical revisionism oft beloved of fashion but more freighted now that we are at another turning point, that perhaps took most obvious form in Riccardo Tisci's Burberry. It's been a year since Mr. Tisci's arrival at what has always been positioned what he is continuing to position as the ultimate British lifestyle house. That's a big responsibility given the current circumstances; a big claim to take on. Given the stakes, Mr. Tisci had spent, he said backstage after the show, the first two collections establishing what he called "the alphabet" of the house; this was the first attempt to put the variables together to write its new story. So using his letters A is for animal print; S is for scarves; T is for trench; V is for Victorian beginnings, and so on he collaged them into a tale of oppositions: between the queen and the rebels, aristocracy and youth. There was less beige and more gray jersey. Instead of the Burberry horse came a new silk menagerie of wild cats and big game . Shirts sported Burberry logo collars and scarves across the shoulders and sleeves. Hemlines bubbled up and turned under so the blouse became a jacket. There were a lot of high/low skirts cut to the thighs in front, sweeping the floor in back. Some fanciness, some white collar polish, some loose rugby shorts, some club kid gear. Black and white graffiti like "streetwear zebra stripes" (his words) mixed it up with black and white gingham. At the end, sheer leg of mutton sleeve lace gowns shadowed ribbed tank tops or black bodysuits. It was clear, it was referential, it had incrementally progressed, and yet it still felt like looking at a paint by numbers project. The common denominators are too simplistic; the understanding of inheritance too superficial. Richard Quinn plays with many of the same tropes of royalty and punk, but he does it with more humor and less respect steroidal roses and ruffles over latex ; power grasping Cromwell robes in explosive lilacs. The result is more niche but also more fun, even as it responds to what Mr. Quinn called in his show notes, "the nightmare of reality." If anything has become clear over the last many months it is that what it means to be British today is full of complications and deep seated emotions. Full of stories written by the victors that maybe need to be rewritten, and fear and passion and hope about what was and what will be. Strafed by the awareness of multiplicities. It demands a new expression. Perhaps that can't happen until we know exactly what is going to happen. In the meantime, the identity crisis is starting to develop its own look. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
SAN FRANCISCO As new employees were brought into Apple's secret effort to create a self driving car a few years ago, managers told them that they were working on the company's next big thing: A product that would take on Detroit and disrupt the automobile industry. These days, Apple's automotive ambitions are more modest. The company has put off any notion of an Apple branded autonomous vehicle and is instead working on the underlying technology that allows a car to drive itself. Timothy D. Cook, the company's chief executive, said in an interview with Bloomberg in June that Apple is "focusing on autonomous systems." A notable symbol of that retrenchment is a self driving shuttle service that ferries employees from one Apple building to another. The shuttle, which has never been reported before, will likely be a commercial vehicle from an automaker and Apple will use it to test the autonomous driving technology that it develops. Five people familiar with Apple's car project, code named "Titan," discussed with The New York Times the missteps that led the tech giant to move at least for now from creating a self driving Apple car to creating technology for a car that someone else builds. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about Apple's plans. The project's reduced scale aligns Apple more closely with other tech companies that are working on autonomous driving technology but are steering clear of building cars. Even Waymo, the Google self driving spinoff that is probably furthest along among Silicon Valley companies, has said repeatedly that it does not plan to produce its own vehicles. Apple's testing vehicles will carry employees between its various Silicon Valley offices. The new effort is called PAIL, short for Palo Alto to Infinite Loop, the address of the company's main office in Cupertino, Calif., and a few miles down the road from Palo Alto, Calif. Apple's in house shuttle service, which isn't operational yet, follows Waymo, Uber and a number of car companies that have been testing driverless cars on city streets around the world. Apple has a history of tinkering with a technology until its engineers figure out what to do with it. The company worked on touch screens for years, for example, before that technology became an essential part of the iPhone. It was a do it all approach typical of Apple, which prefers to control every aspect of a product, from the software that runs it to the look and feel of the hardware. From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lidar sensors normally protrude from the top of a car like a spinning cone and are essential in driverless cars. Apple, as always focused on clean designs, wanted to do away with the awkward cone. Apple even looked into reinventing the wheel. A team within Titan investigated the possibility of using spherical wheels round like a globe instead of the traditional, round ones, because spherical wheels could allow the car better lateral movement. But the car project ran into trouble, said the five people familiar with it, dogged by its size and by the lack of a clearly defined vision of what Apple wanted in a vehicle. Team members complained of shifting priorities and arbitrary or unrealistic deadlines. There was disagreement about whether Apple should develop a fully autonomous vehicle or a semiautonomous car that could drive itself for stretches but allow the driver to retake control. Steve Zadesky, an Apple executive who was initially in charge of Titan, wanted to pursue the semiautonomous option. But people within the industrial design team including Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief designer, believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company to reimagine the automobile experience, according to the five people. A similar debate raged inside Google's self driving car effort for years. There, the fully autonomous vehicle won out, mainly because researchers worried drivers couldn't be trusted to retake control in an emergency. Even though Apple had not ironed out many of the basics, like how the autonomous systems would work, a team had already started working on an operating system software called CarOS. There was fierce debate about whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple's own programming language, or the industry standard, C . Mr. Zadesky, who worked on the iPod and iPhone, eventually left Titan and took a leave of absence from the company for personal reasons in 2016. He is still at Apple, although he is no longer involved in the project. Mr. Zadesky could not be reached for comment. Last year, Apple started to rein in the project. The company tapped Bob Mansfield, a longtime executive who over the years had led hardware engineering for some of Apple's most successful products, to oversee Titan. Mr. Mansfield shelved plans to build a car and focused the project on the underlying self driving technology. He also laid off some hardware staff, though the exact number of employees dedicated to working on car technology was unclear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
PHILADELPHIA It remains hard to fathom the artistic tastes and inclinations of Angel Corella, the beloved former star of American Ballet Theater who has been artistic director of Pennsylvania Ballet since 2014. He's been scrutinized for the number of dancers he has fired and hired; he also deserves attention for his eclectic taste. But is taste the word? In this 2015 16 season, the first in which he has had full artistic control of the company, he's revived the most obviously flashy 19th century war horse, "Don Quixote" (seen onstage in March), but next month (June 9 12) adds Trisha Brown's postmodernist "O Zlozony/O Composite" to the repertory. The 2016 17 season will feature the same ambitious but puzzling diversity, ranging from "Le Corsaire" (a rival of "Don Quixote" for 19th century flash) to Ben Stevenson's "Cinderella" and "The Third Light," a recent piece set by the experimental David Dawson to music by Gavin Bryars. The company, formerly one of the foremost troupes in America's Balanchine diaspora, still performs as many ballets by Balanchine as it has in decades past, although there are signs that it now dances his work with an alien accent. On Thursday night, the company presented "A Program of Firsts," an exciting on paper triple bill of Balanchine's "Serenade," Matthew Neenan's "Archiva" and Liam Scarlett's "Asphodel Meadows." "Serenade," famous as the first ballet created by Balanchine in the United States, was staged by Kyra Nichols, the superlative former principal of New York City Ballet, who danced lead roles in that work for over 30 years. Mr. Neenan has been the troupe's choreographer in residence since 2007 and is much in demand around the country; "Archiva" was a world premiere. And this was the American premiere of "Asphodel Meadows," the work that put Mr. Scarlett on the map in a 2010 staging by his native Royal Ballet in London. All three works, however, had drawbacks. Tchaikovsky's inspiring Serenade for Strings, the score that gives "Serenade" its name, acquires an awkwardly heightened edge to its orchestral sonority at Philadelphia's Academy of Music here, presumably as a result of assisted acoustics. Ms. Nichols has taught the Pennsylvania dancers plenty about the Balanchine style, above all how energy continues through a fixed position, how lines stretch in space and how speed can be combined with control. In the leading role of the Waltz and Elegy heroine, Lillian DiPiazza has a beauty and poignancy, but she lacks the technical assurance that yields true authority. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
At least six journalists were charged with felony rioting after they were arrested while covering the violent protests that took place just blocks from President Trump's inauguration parade in Washington on Friday, according to police reports and court documents. The journalists were among 230 people detained in the anti Trump demonstrations, during which protesters smashed the glass of commercial buildings and lit a limousine on fire. The charges against the journalists Evan Engel, Alexander Rubinstein, Jack Keller, Matthew Hopard, Shay Horse and Aaron Cantu have been denounced by organizations dedicated to press freedom. All of those arrested have denied participating in the violence. "These felony charges are bizarre and essentially unheard of when it comes to journalists here in America who were simply doing their job," said Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of Pen America. "They weren't even in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were in the right place." Carlos Lauria, a spokesman and senior program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, called the charges "completely inappropriate and excessive," and the organization has asked that they be dropped immediately. "Our concern is that these arrests could send a chilling message to journalists that cover future protests," Mr. Lauria added. The arrests and charges were reported by The Guardian. Witnesses reported that sweeping arrests during the parade targeted rioters, protesters and journalists indiscriminately. A lawyer representing dozens of people arrested, Mark Goldstone, told The Associated Press that the police had "basically identified a location that had problems and arrested everyone in that location." The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington declined to comment Wednesday on why the journalists had been charged along with protesters. Mr. Engel, a Brooklyn based journalist who writes for Vocativ, a media and technology outlet, was among those charged with felony rioting and released. He said by email on Wednesday that he was unable to comment on the case since it was active, but that he was looking forward to the day he could say more. The document charging Mr. Rubinstein, who wrote for RT America, an affiliate of the Russian state run television network, is identical to that charging Mr. Engel: While it says that protesters carrying "anarchist flags" were observed smashing large plate glass windows at businesses and setting a limousine on fire, it does not accuse any individual journalist of criminal activity. 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. Court documents for Mr. Keller who works on the documentary series "Story of America" and for Mr. Hopard, Mr. Horse and Mr. Cantu who are independent journalists included similar information. Jeffrey Light, a lawyer based in Washington who has been working on civil rights and first amendment related cases for about a decade, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of 51 plaintiffs arrested that day against officers from the police department and the park police. The suit accuses the police of surrounding and arresting "not only protesters who had engaged in no criminal conduct, but also members of the media, attorneys, legal observers and medics." Mr. Lauria, of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said it was all the more alarming that journalists had been arrested. "A car set on fire, windows broken in downtown businesses: I think that this is important information that the public needs to be informed about," he said. He said his organization was concerned about what he called "the sharp deterioration of press freedom in the U.S.," which he linked to Mr. Trump's campaign, noting that the candidate had "obstructed major news organization, vilified the press and attacked journalists by name with unrelenting hostility." All those actions were seen to contribute to a threatening climate for journalists covering the election. The committee had sought to meet with Vice President Mike Pence during the transition, Mr. Lauria said, but that meeting never took place. "We've been in touch with aides, and we're talking about the possibility of having this meeting in the future," he said. Ms. Nossel, of Pen America, also linked the charges to a climate fostered by Mr. Trump. "Obviously we were girded for worrisome and troubling developments," she said. "But the speed, pace and ferocity of the attacks on journalists, the purveying of falsehoods, the silencing of government and agencies that interface with the public for all that to happen in a matter of days puts us on notice that some of the worst fears may not have been so far fetched." Representatives of Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Wednesday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We're all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. Stephen Colbert left his remote studio to interview President elect Joe Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, together in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday night. But before their conversation, he weighed in on former Health and Human Services science adviser Paul Alexander's leaked emails urging health officials to adopt a "herd immunity" approach to Covid 19. "If your plan to save humanity involves killing millions of people, you're not a health adviser; you're a Marvel villain." STEPHEN COLBERT Seth Meyers agreed with Colbert's villainous assessment, taking issue with Alexander's writing of Americans, "We want them infected." "'We want them infected.' That is some real super villain expletive right there. I mean, Bane might say that, but even he wouldn't put it down in an email." SETH MEYERS "Just think about how monstrous and sociopathic that is they wanted people to get sick. I know in the Trump era, every news story lasts five minutes and our brains have all been turned to mush by the constant crush of insanity, but this story should never be forgotten. Anyone who enabled this should be held accountable for it. You can't just let something like this go. You go through your spouse's things and find a bunch of love letters to an ex saying, 'I want my husband to die,' you don't just toss it in the trash and say, 'Oh, well. Water under the bridge.'" SETH MEYERS "In January, Atlantic City is blowing up a former Trump casino, and the highest bidder in a live auction will be the one to press the button. I say we hold Biden's inauguration in Atlantic City, and then let him push the button." JIMMY FALLON "We should chip in and get this for Hillary Clinton, right?" JIMMY KIMMEL "You know two seconds before they do it, Eric Trump is going to wander out of the front door like, 'Is the event not inside?'" JIMMY FALLON "Of course, the easiest way to make a Trump casino implode is to just put Trump back in charge of running it again." JIMMY KIMMEL Dua Lipa and Jimmy Fallon performed "Christmas Is All Around," better known as the song from the movie "Love Actually," on Thursday's "Tonight Show." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
I 'm not saying I drank too much Brunello di Montalcino. But if I had drunk too much Brunello di Montalcino the Podere Le Ripi 2014, for example, at, say, 2 a.m. then a hot, dusty barn packed with sheep wouldn't have been my first choice of places to be at 6 in the morning. Yet there I was, surrounded by a hundred little animals, white wool coats matted down with hay and dirt, making small, timid bleats as they trotted past me up the ramp to the milking station. As the sun rose, rivers of dust filled shafts of light; you could sense the day was going to be scalding by breakfast. But for now, in the barn, it was bearable just me, a pretty young farmer named Giulia, and a herd of sheep ready to be milked. I was at Podere Il Casale, an organic farm outside the tiny Renaissance era Tuscan town of Pienza, to educate myself on the intricacies of the town's most famous commodity, pecorino di Pienza. You have likely heard of pecorino but the town, not so much. Outside of Tuscany, it's possible the only place you would hear the word Pienza is at a gourmet cheese counter. Standing there watching a steel device milk the sheep, I didn't consider myself one of the people Mr. Rubiner was talking about. I spend part of every evening eating cheese. I've sampled hundreds in my life. But I would learn my palate is not a sophisticated one. I would learn my palate is akin to a kindergartner . With a head cold. "To make a great pecorino, you must know what your sheep eat, how they live," explained Giancarlo Floris a few days later. Mr. Floris is the owner of Caseificio Piu, another organic farm, home to 1,400 sheep, and some of the most celebrated pecorino di Pienza. He moved to Tuscany from Sardinia when he was only 18. "Half of my sheep eat wild herbs; their milk is very strong. Half eat planted grains so their cheese tastes softer. A great pecorino should always taste different." "Fifty years ago no one wanted to be in the Val d'Orcia," said Paolo Coluccio, a renowned chef and the owner of Gusto E Evoluto, a company that organizes tastings and culinary tours. He had brought me to Caseificio Piu to introduce me to one of his favorite cheese producers. Mr. Coluccio offered some background: In the 1960s, young Italians left here to get jobs in the cities; large swaths of southern Tuscany were effectively abandoned. Meanwhile, Sardinia was teeming with farmers. The Italian government offered huge Tuscan parcels to Sardinians for almost nothing. In exchange, the Sardinians, like Mr. Floris and his father, brought their skills and their sheep and began working the land. I asked Mr. Floris how many pecorino producers there are in the Val d'Orcia. He started counting on his hand. "Twelve," he said, pausing. "But maybe 20." The Val d'Orcia, a Unesco Heritage Site, is Tuscany at its Tuscaniest. I started coming here in 2004 at first with my boyfriend, and many more times once he became my husband, and then with our children. In the last 14 years, I've seen changes. Design hotels, Michelin rated restaurants, high thread counts the Val d'Orcia has become a place people (like me) come to get married or go on their honeymoon or go truffle hunting. In fact, while I standing on this hill, Edward Norton was likely asleep at his villa he was staying one hill over from us. And Wes Anderson was renting the palazzo at the bottom of our dirt road. That's Pienza now: equal parts Edward Norton and sheep. According to the farmers I met, the secret to their product is the unique combination of Sardinian sheep and Tuscan grass: wild fennel, clover and "these pastures are full of absinthe," one farmer told me with a wink, referring to wormwood, the infamous herb that is a primary ingredient of the liquor. Unlike Parmigiano Reggiano or mozzarella di bufala, pecorino di Pienza does not have its own D.O.P. (Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or Protected Designation of Origin), and is therefore not protected. In other words, any sheep cheese made nearby can be labeled pecorino di Pienza. "There are about 3,000 sheep in Pienza," said Mr. Coluccio, a handsome man with an easy smile. "You would need three million to account for all the cheese that calls itself pecorino di Pienza." To understand pecorino di Pienza, to respect it, I had to visit an uncomfortable place that sounded like a Lemony Snicket book: La Camera Calda the Hot Room. This is where the whey drains from the curd a place as humid as the Amazon and fetid as, well, old milk. A place that smells like something horrible happened. A place no one (who wants to love cheese in ignorance) should ever have to visit. La Camera Calda in question is inside a dairy belonging to Silvana Cugusi. As clean and well lit as an operating room I had to wear blue paper slippers over my sneakers it was filled with plastic vats of what would become pecorino di Pienza. Some would be rubbed with ash, some covered in straw, some pressed with tomatoes. The pecorino fresco would remain pure and young, while the larger wheels w ould become the pride of the dairy, the gran riserva aged anywhere from six months to (albeit rarely) as long as two years. I held my breath the whole time. Blessedly, moments later we continued the tour first to La Camera Freda, where the cheese is dried, then to the cantina, the cave in which it is aged. "A good pecorino should be sweet even if it's mature," said Gian Maria Menta, the owner of Romeo Formaggi di Menta Gian Maria e Gionata, a famous cheese store in Piombino, who had come with me to the farm. Mr. Menta and I walked through the dank cantina of Cugusi, past shelves of gran riserva, which are turned twice a day to prevent mold. "We don't want to get bigger," Ms. Cugusi said. "We want to make a quality pecorino." To these artisanal farmers, the two are mutually exclusive. "My father moved his family here in 1962. The Val d'Orcia has gotten richer but the environment hasn't changed we protect the land, we don't use chemicals, the shepherds respect the countryside." My 6 year old son has inherited (or perhaps absorbed) my love of cheese. I have seen him turn spaghetti away when he sensed the parmesan was not Parmigiano Reggiano. I have seen him correct the arrangement of a cheese tray. So when I was invited to a pecorino tasting at my favorite hotel in the valley, I brought Finn. "We will move from light to heavy, sweet to spicy," explained Dario Ferreri, the chef at La Bandita. "This is not a cheese tasting." Finn and I looked at each other, somewhat befuddled. "We must think of what happened to make this cheese," Mr. Ferreri said dramatically. "We must think of the story that it tells. This will be our journey through the valley." We began our odyssey with pecorino fresco paired with vin santo jam. Then pecorino with saffron, drizzles of local honey, aged pecorino wrapped in walnut leaves, Tropean onion preserve, green tomato mostarda, and on and on. The trick to finding your pecorino soul mate: "You try and you try and you taste and you taste and then you arrive at the right match and it's BOOOOOM!" Mr. Ferreri threw out his hands like there was a stick of dynamite in his mouth. (My explosion was the pecorino crusca, with hops jam; Finn's was the pecorino staginato and fig preserve.) As in any industry, there is competition but not between the farmers. "The French sheep are a problem," said Michael Schmidig, the son of a local farmer, talking about another breed that has showed up in the valley recently. "They produce three liters of milk a day. They eat grain and live in a barn. Sardinian sheep produce one liter. They eat grass, they need fences. The French sheep milk is not nearly as good, but you don't have the problem with wolves." "The amazing part of Pienza is that this valley has very poor soil," said Ulisse Braendli, the owner of Podere Il Casale, where I'd watched the milking. "And a suffering plant has to work harder; it will give you more flavor. This valley is full of suffering herbs." Mr. Braendli moved here from Zurich in 1991 and has been making pecorino di Pienza since 2003. ("Let's say it wasn't so legal before that.") Osteria La Porta. If you can't get a table on the terrace, don't worry. The pecorino cacio e pepe is every bit as warm and gooey and satisfying if you sit inside. (Via S. Luigi, 3, Monticchiello; lacantina osterialaporta.it; 39 0578 755170). La Bandita Countryhouse. The chef is a local boy who loves nothing more than pairing cheese with the perfect preserve and explaining the provenance of each. (Podere La Bandita; la bandita.com; 39 333 404 6704). Gusto E Evoluto. Paolo Coluccio is a private chef who will arrange tastings, cooking classes, private dinners, or anything else you want that involves delicious local food. (gustoevoluto.com; 39 349 123 6226). Oreade Ristorante. Perched on the hilltop hamlet of Castiglioncello del Trinoro, Oreade is as impressive for its views as it is for its organic, farm to table menu. (monteverdituscany.com; 39 0578 268 146). Marusco e Maria Enoteca. The best cheese shop in a town of cheese shops make it your last stop out of town. Pick out a few wheels and have them vacuum sealed for the trip home. Ask nicely and the owner will show you the pecorino cantina. (Corso Rossellino, 21; damaruscoemaria virgilio.it; 39 0578 748222). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
BERLIN "We're like surgeons around a body," said David Chipperfield as he looked at Berlin's New National Gallery. The building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the 20th century's greatest architects, was almost as bare as it had been at its topping out ceremony, in April 1967. The British architect and his lieutenant, Martin Reichert, a partner in his sizable Berlin office, surveyed the dirty steel frame and exposed concrete walls atop weed strewn sand. "We've opened him up and now we're looking at him.'" Since Mr. Chipperfield, 63, last visited the site five months before, Mr. Reichert and a team of 10 architects had finished taking apart the innards of Mies's monumental building, a temple like space sheathed by glass walls and topped with a mighty steel roof. Some 35,000 pieces including 14,000 granite slabs, 3,500 light fixtures, and one Mies designed ashtray awaited cleaning and buffing up. The building itself will be worked on to fix problems caused by age, as well as some that have plagued it since birth. "It's like an old man, naked except for socks," Mr. Chipperfield said to Mr. Reichert, half amused, half shocked. The two were surveying their handiwork halfway through a five year restoration project, Miesian in its attention to detail and German in its underpublicized ambition. The goal is to reopen the New National Gallery's stunning collection of Modernist art in 2020 in a building that will work better than it did, but look and feel utterly untouched. It is in marked contrast to his planned design for New York's Metropolitan Museum currently delayed which would have transformed the building with a whole new wing for modern and contemporary art. The New National Gallery in 1968, the year it opened. The New National Gallery project is budgeted at 100 million euros (about 118 million) but, like a Mies building, reveals its daring only at second or third glance. Mr. Chipperfield wants this 50 year old gallery, as delicate as it is monumental, to perform as well as the most modern, assiduously climate controlled and carefully lit museum without any visitor noticing that he was ever there. He is trying to overcome the classic contradiction between the desire to preserve the old and the pressure to raise a building's performance to contemporary standards. "As a building, the New National Gallery probably has more original Mies left in it than any other Mies building in the world, but as an art museum, the New National Gallery has to meet the highest modern building standards," said Kerstin Wittmann Englert, an architectural historian at Berlin's Technical University. She said she could think of few other projects in which the demands of preservation and performance diverged so sharply, and on such a scale. "Chipperfield is, in a way, trying to square that circle." It is quite a circle to square. Having left Nazi Germany for the United States in 1937, Mies was courted by West Berlin in the early 1960s to build something uplifting in the divided city. He chose to build a museum. The upper deck of the New National Gallery became the largest and most uncompromising of Mies's pavilion style designs an open floor plan, no interior columns, walls of little more than glass. It would be used for temporary exhibitions; a cosier lower floor would house the permanent collection. The restoration project is expected to take five years in total, and is half completed. Gordon Welters for The New York Times Unfortunately for Mr. Chipperfield, the aging Mies he died in 1969, a year after the gallery opened put his sense of mission before the laws of physics (and warnings from city planners). The single glazed facade, held upright by delicate window frames, proved unsuited to Berlin's cold winters and hot summers. The humidity demanded by the artworks led to condensation on the inside of the glass, and the expansion and contraction of all that metal cracked one huge pane after another. "Mies took architecture to its extreme," Mr. Chipperfield said. "And as a result, the building has some... let's not call them flaws it has some challenges, which we've had to address." In a more conventional and pliable building, he said, an architect could solve a condensation problem by simply putting more insulation in the walls. "But with Mies, there's no place to hide." Knowing that Mies had left him no choice but to tackle the competing claims of preservation and performance head on, Mr. Chipperfield and his team drew inspiration from their feted restoration of Berlin's 19th century Neues Museum, between 2003 and 2010. Mr. Chipperfield's startling part preservation, part reinterpretation of this badly war damaged building was key in landing him the commission for the New National Gallery. When they started work on the Neues Museum, Mr. Chipperfield and his team dealt separately with the various interested parties most notably the Berlin Heritage Conservation Authority, which was interested in preservation, and the Neues Museum curators, who wanted a building that performed as a modern museum should. "We were in different rooms fighting with different people about different issues," Mr. Chipperfield said. "I just got fed up with that and said, let's all sit in the same room and solve everything together." This collaborative method became key for the New National Gallery. All sides quickly agreed that the facade needed subtle expansion joints to stop the glass cracking. But they realized double glazing to stop condensation would ruin Mies's aesthetic; slightly thicker single glazing would have to do. As a result, the condensation won't be entirely banished, and sensitive works of art won't be on display in the upper hall in deep winter or high summer. Consensus was not always easy to achieve, according to Joachim Jager, head of the New National Gallery. "I think the radical nature of Chipperfield's approach will only become apparent when the gallery reopens," he said. "He and his team were adamant about protecting the spirit of Mies." Some visitors would surely complain about there being no cafe in the sculpture garden, Mr. Jager said Mies planned it as a space for reflection, not for pleasure and he himself was still having trouble accepting that the lower gallery would again be carpeted, 1960s style. Mr. Chipperfield's rigor seems to be leaving its mark on the way Berlin's museums operate. The consensual decision not to alter the Neues Museum's ornate cast iron roof beams means that, because of fire safety rules, no more than 1,200 people can be inside at a time. The Neues Museum showed that "curators can live with restrictions," said Jorg Haspel, head of the Berlin Heritage Conservation Authority. "It takes willpower to not always demand the modernization of a museum, to accept it as an historical artifact, as an exhibit in itself. I think we are really beginning to get there now." Mr. Jager agreed this approach could become "a real Berlin phenomenon" after Mr. Chipperfield puts 35,000 pieces of Mies back where they belong. But, even now, with its granite paving gone and its windows dirty, Mies's upper hall maintained its mystique. Stripped of paneling, dropped ceiling, and carpet, the once elegantly hushed downstairs was an echoey hull. "It's a bit shocking," said Mr. Chipperfield, surveying the lower floor. "You see how thin the illusion of architecture is." To which Mr. Reichert added: "Mies really was a magician. He could do so much with so little even with something that looks like an underground parking garage." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
They said Mr. Cosby, 82, had also been denied a fair trial when the case was allowed to go ahead even after a former district attorney had given what he said was a binding assurance that Mr. Cosby would not be charged in the case. Mr. Cosby is serving a three to 10 year sentence at SCI Phoenix, a maximum security facility outside Philadelphia. Mr. Cosby's case represented one of the most high profile convictions of the MeToo era. His lawyers said that generally, there are sometimes periods of "public panic," when "the criminal justice system teeters on a dangerous precipice." They said that the Cosby case had "pushed the criminal justice system of this Commonwealth, and the bedrock principles upon which it rests, to that precipice." The Superior Court's ruling, his lawyers added, had "far reaching consequences for all future criminal proceedings, including those that proceed outside the national spotlight." "The panel's opinion effectively changed the controlling law and guiding principles that have existed with the Commonwealth for well over a century," they said. A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, said in a statement that Mr. Cosby's lawyers wanted the court "to review his case to consider the vital important questions about the impact of MeToo hysteria" on the principles of the criminal justice system. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LOS ANGELES James Van Der Beek may be best known for playing the title character in "Dawson's Creek," a 1990s teen drama fueled by adolescent angst and Sperry boat shoes, and maybe an ugly crying face GIF that spawned a thousand memes. But on a recent Monday, all he wanted to do was fight. "Let's get into it!" said Mr. Van Der Beek, 41, who was at 87Eleven, a stunt and choreography studio near the Los Angeles International Airport. Wearing a black Under Armour hoodie with matching shorts and compression tights, he was trying to master a fight sequence for an action TV show he is developing. The scene had him fending off multiple assailants, so it involved complex choreography. Mr. Van Der Beek plays a character named Matt Bromley, the swaggering right hand man of Donald J. Trump, who personifies the era's embrace of wealth and greed. Unlike the many transgender actors on "Pose," Mr. Van Der Beek doesn't get to do any dancing or fighting. So he sought out the help of 87Eleven. "What's up, dude?" he said as he bro hugged Kyle McLean, a stuntman with wind swept blond hair who could pass for Mr. Van Der Beek's brother. Turns out, he was Mr. Van Der Beek's stunt double for several episodes of "CSI: Cyber." Entering the hangar like studio, which was equipped with weights, a blue tumbling platform and a massive green screen, Mr. Van Der Beek eyed a wall adorned with movie posters for some of the big budget films that 87Eleven has worked on: "The Matrix," "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," "The Wolverine," "Atomic Blonde." After being introduced to three additional stuntmen, Mr. Van Der Beek put on a black baseball hat and found a spot on the tumbling mat. Mr. McLean stood before the group and attempted to lead them through a set of stretches. But like a P.E. teacher failing to corral unruly students, he couldn't stop them from cracking jokes at every turn. "Have you always been that flexible?" Mr. McLean said after noticing Mr. Van Der Beek's limberness when performing a butterfly stretch. "Oh yeah! I was able to do the splits at age 6," the actor said, prompting the group to burst out laughing. After a brief warm up, the group split off in pairs. Mr. Van Der Beek and Mr. McLean headed to one corner to run through basic fighting moves, including 10 repetition sets of jabs, hooks and uppercuts. "Let's try something more complicated now," said Greg Rementer, a stuntman with a salt and pepper beard and bulging quadriceps, as he demonstrated a balletic fight maneuver. Mr. Van Der Beek, whose mother was a professional dancer, traced a V like shape on the ground with his feet, before returning six punches. "I haven't seen you move before," Mr. Rementer said, impressed by Mr. Van Der Beek's skills. "That's really good. We should hire you." Mr. Van Der Beek smiled. He removed his hat and ran his hands through the long blond highlighted hair he'd grown out for "Pose." He hadn't grown his hair so long since the "Dawson" days. "I keep telling my wife, 'Baby, I was hot the last time I had this haircut,'" he said with a laugh. He was not exaggerating: When "Dawson's Creek" first appeared, in 1998, Mr. Van Der Beek became a heartthrob celebrity. He required a police escort for public appearances and starred in racy coming of age films including "Varsity Blues" and "Rules of Attraction." "Dawson" ended in 2003, and, like many young stars, Mr. Van Der Beek had trouble shedding his most famous role. In recent years, however, he has experienced something of a career turnaround by flexing his comedic muscle with meta roles that play off his fame. He played a fictionalized version of himself on the sitcom "Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23," and a swaggering caricature of the music producer Diplo on the Viceland series "What Would Diplo Do?" (he was also the writer, producer and showrunner). "The fun of having a set of expectations is subverting them," Mr. Van Der Beek said. After an hour of piecing together his fight scene, punch by punch, he was ready to string it together. Mr. McLean yelled, "Action!" Mr. Van Der Beek spun in a circle as three stuntmen lunged at him. He shed the first two with choreographed punches to the throat, and the last with a perfectly timed kick to the midsection. "You crushed it for having not done it for a while," Mr. McLean said. "It's a weird thing to memorize at first," Mr. Van Der Beek said. "Your brain doesn't know what to do. But once you've got it instilled in you, it's like riding a bicycle." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Q. I prefer to keep my backups on the ground and out of the cloud, but where does my iPad backup file live on the computer when I back it up with iTunes? A. When you connect your iOS device to the Mac or PC and back up its data with Apple's iTunes software, the resulting file is deposited in a Backup folder on the hard drive. On a Mac, you can usually find this folder by selecting your user folder and following the file path of /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ to see the contents. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Today, hosts are demanding that parents and often, their children, sign liability waivers acknowledging the party's rules. Adam Wergeles, a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, spent hours, if not days, sweating over a legal document this spring. Taking black pen to paper, he x ed out words, added others, made notations in the margin and sought counsel from another lawyer. Mr. Wergeles has a lot of professional experience working on securities compliance documents, but this was something different, a liability release he needed to sign in order for his 17 year old daughter, Emma, to be able to attend an after prom party with about 90 high school students. The party was to take place at a large rented private home in the Hollywood Hills and would be chaperoned by two adults. Though Mr. Wergeles agreed that it was fair for parents to share responsibility for any problems that might arise during the party, he was surprised to be presented with a legal document. The vague language of an indemnity clause caused him concern. And as a lawyer, he had a difficult time not vetting every word. "I found myself getting slightly insane," he said. His daughter was irritated and embarrassed, particularly after her father called one of her friends to discuss the document (he thought he was calling her parents). "It was frustrating," Emma said. "For the past few years, everyone received a liability form for after prom parties. I'm sure the other parents signed it and went on with their day." Emma submitted the edited document and attended the prom and the after party, at which, she said, her friends celebrated exactly as they would have whether or not their parents had signed a form. "I don't think it affected anyone's behavior at all," she said. (Mr. Wergeles said he was told after the party that the homeowner would most likely not be returning the security deposit.) In some affluent cities and suburbs, the post party legal liability waiver is joining the corsage and limousine in the prom panoply. Parents who host parties and require waivers say they feel awkward asking fellow parents (and often, their children) to sign but ultimately want to encourage a dialogue between adults and children about acceptable behavior. And they think it is only right that accountability be shared should something go wrong. These contracts are probably unenforceable, lawyers said. Many post prom parties are overnight affairs and are planned, in part, to keep teenagers off the roads. Most parents receiving release forms understand the desire of hosts to protect themselves while providing a hangout for teenagers after a big dance. But many bristle at the formality of signing legal papers so that their children can participate in what was once a wholesome, if occasionally beer laden, high school rite of passage. When one Manhattan couple agreed to host their son's friends at their Hamptons house after the Horace Mann School prom this spring, the mother emailed a few dozen parents a form headlined, "Activity release of liability; read carefully this affects your legal rights." The release contained five clauses. One read, in part, "I recognize that there are certain inherent risks associated with the above described activity and I assume full responsibility for personal injury to myself and other participants." An addendum provided rules including, "Keep the volume at a reasonable level outside the house we need to be respectful of the surrounding area" and "No smoking." Both the student who had been invited and a parent were asked to sign. One recipient replied to the emailed group: "We are looking at this document and just wondering where everyone else is coming out on signing this indemnification. Time to engage counsel?" The father who, with his wife, hosted the party said they made a great effort to create a safe post prom experience for all. They provided bus transport from the dance in New York City to their house in the Hamptons, and hired two security guards and lifeguards as well. "It can feel ridiculous to take all of these precautions, but when you have a group of 18 years olds, all parents should share the responsibility for all kids," said the man, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his children's privacy. After the party, he emailed parents, thanking them for sharing their children for the night. "They are a fabulous group, kind, courteous, relaxed and truly warm and considerate of each other," he wrote. The use of waivers in New York City has been taking place for at least a few years. When Emily Listfield's daughter was a senior at the Dalton School four years ago, she was invited to a post prom party in the Hamptons. In order for her daughter to be allowed in, Ms. Listfield was required to sign a two page document. She felt she had no choice but to sign. "It was the hot party, and my daughter was dying to go," she said. Overnight house parties for teenagers sometimes take place without parental oversight and involve alcohol. This month, a party in Sunapee, N.H., to celebrate commencement at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., ended when the police took into custody more than 70 guests suspected of underage drinking, according to David Cahill, Sunapee's police chief. The house at which the party occurred had been rented by an 18 year old through Airbnb, Mr. Cahill said. More than 20 Phillips Academy graduates must return to New Hampshire for a court hearing related to alcohol charges, he said. "We are grateful to the police for keeping the students safe and, over the coming school year, we will redouble our efforts to teach the importance of good decision making," said Tracy Sweet, the school's director of communications. Some parents seek explicit acknowledgment of party rules from other parents without the legalese. When Sarah Lyons of Winnetka, Ill., agreed to give a party in March after a school dance attended by her youngest daughter, Ms. Lyons sent an email to guests' parents. "I think this is not the first rodeo for most of us but I am putting it in writing anyway," began the letter, which then listed rules including, "No one will be allowed to leave until pick up time which is 12:45 a.m. sharp." Ms. Lyons also required that the children, most of them high school juniors, be picked up by parents rather than by Uber. "I didn't want them to be vague about how they're getting home," she said. "I wanted my official responsibility to end at the door. These are all good kids, but they're in high school and you have to lay down the law." (Ms. Lyons's introduction to dealing with high school girls came courtesy of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth Lyons, now 24 and a country music singer, who this year released the single " PartyRules.") Prom related documents can go beyond the liability waiver. When Francesca Grossman's daughter, Gabrielle Lipkin, was invited to attend a junior prom in Los Angeles by a boy from a different school, Gabrielle had to have a form signed by an administrator of her school that attested to her good character. "How is a child supposed to branch out from insularity?" Ms. Grossman said. "It'd be a real shame if a child declined to bring to a dance a child from another community because it's just too much paperwork." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
An informal Japanese restaurant has signed a 10 year lease for this 450 square foot ground floor space with a storage basement in this five story building in Hell's Kitchen. The owner, who received four months rent free for the build out, has five Japanese restaurants in Brooklyn. The former tenant of the Manhattan location was a Pie Face bakery and cafe. 89 66 through 89 78 165th Street (between Jamaica and 89th Avenues) Built in 1951, this 11,000 square foot single story fully occupied retail building with five stores has 100 feet of frontage along the 165th Street pedestrian mall in downtown Jamaica. It also offers 58,830 square feet of unused air rights for possible development. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
HARTFORD Ghosts arrive early in the cavernous playroom, flitting back and forth among the toys. Draped in sheets with eyeholes, these scampering spirits are the size of trick or treaters children, that is and when they make their first appearance the audience is still settling in. Get used to the haunting. Bess Wohl's "Make Believe," a cartoon colored experiment of a play here at Hartford Stage, is more spectral than it looks. Set in a cheery attic with double windows wide enough for a visit from Peter Pan, it's a pensive comedy performed, in its first half, entirely by children which is not, as it turns out, nearly as effective as Ms. Wohl means it to be. Yet this beautifully constructed play a regret tinged examination of family and trauma and sibling connections that maybe, back in those formative years, were not forged solidly enough is emphatically for adults. It is sometime in the 1980s as the play begins. The pigtailed 8 year old Addie (Alexa Skye Swinton) is already in the playroom when her older siblings trickle in: first the studious 10 year old Kate (Sloane Wolfe), then the 9 year old Chris (Roman Malenda), piqued that their mother hasn't left him a snack. A bully seeking a target for his aggression, he grabs Addie's Cabbage Patch doll. "Die, baby!" he yells as his little sister screams for him to stop. "Die, die, die!" Not exactly the Darling children of "Peter Pan," are they. Then again, Ms. Wohl whose best known play, the quiet, piercing ensemble piece "Small Mouth Sounds," also tested theatrical conventions isn't interested in letting nostalgia cloud her vision. Any sweetness in this production, directed by Jackson Gay, comes with a sting. The children, it emerges, have been left alone: their angry father away on a business trip, their unhappy mother somehow missing. The four of them including the youngest, the 5 year old Carl (RJ Vercellone) will have to fend for themselves. In our first glimpse of Carl, he is scrambling out of an elaborate fort made from sheets. (The set is by Antje Ellermann.) Clutching a soccer ball, he wears only underpants, a pajama top and a snorkel with a mask. (Costumes are by Junghyun Georgia Lee.) He is comically adorable, and his tininess makes visceral the siblings' vulnerability. Yet using child actors in substantial roles a temptation that master playwrights including David Rabe (in "Good for Otto") and Tina Howe (in "Singing Beach") have lately also succumbed to is a risky endeavor, all the more so when there is no adult presence onstage. In Ms. Wohl's play, it has a flattening effect, the verisimilitude of the casting lessening the theatricality of a piece so dependent on make believe. When the children are playing house, mimicking their parents' dysfunction, the heightened tone of their pretending can work nicely. But in their interactions with one another the texture goes missing. It's a built in problem, not a reflection on this particular cast. The unfortunate consequence, though, is that the second half when grown up versions of these children return to the playroom doesn't have the emotional undergirding it needs. Is it unfair to wonder how "Make Believe" would feel with an all adult cast, or with puppets as the children? Maybe, but I can't help it: There is something too earthbound and ordinary about it here, an unnecessary tedium to the children's scenes. One of the last times we see the children, beautifully lit by Paul Whitaker, they're imagining themselves blasting into space. "Hold on, you guys!" Chris yells. "Hold on to each other!" They don't, of course, at least not tightly enough. It would be a spoiler to say too much about the second half, in which the now middle aged siblings have come home for a funeral, but they have not loved one another as well as they might have wished. Brad Heberlee, a "Small Mouth Sounds" alumnus, plays the adult Carl, and in his superb performance is proof of the strength of this play. Ms. Wohl has given him a monologue so raw and angry and tender that all around the auditorium, you could hear people weeping. As we spectators sniffled, the ghosts were in the room again. And this time the source of the haunting was our own wistfulness and regret. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Igor Levit who won one of the most prestigious prizes in music this week, the 300,000 Gilmore Artist Award allows his politics to inform his artistry to an extent that is rare in the classical world. At the first night of the BBC Proms last summer, in a London consumed by Brexit, Mr. Levit made a pointed statement with his encore, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," the anthem of the European Union, a point he underlined with the E.U. pin he wore. But the power of the gesture came from his musicianship the way his left hand drew out the ominous undertones of Liszt's transcription, making the familiar, joyful melody seem hard won when it finally rings out clearly. MICHAEL COOPER In his first appearance after winning the Gilmore, a celebratory talk and recital at the Greene Space on Thursday night, Igor Levit opened with understated virtuosity: the Chaconne from Bach's Partita No. 2 for violin, transcribed for the left hand by Brahms. The piece takes place mostly in the piano's lower range, which is notoriously muddy, but not in Mr. Levit's hands er, hand. Many critics have noted his phenomenal precision, and you can hear why in this recording of Frederic Rzewski's 1975 variations on "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!" In the final movement, the theme returns as hammered chords (marked with accents on top of a forte) played almost entirely on the lower half of the piano. The melody inside those chords couldn't be clearer. JOSHUA BARONE Ahead of her performances with the New York Philharmonic this week, the cellist Alisa Weilerstein joined us for a Facebook Live concert and interview. She closed with the two bourrees from Bach's Suite No. 3 in C, which she has been touring as part of a three hour marathon of all six of Bach's cello suites. I asked when we could expect a recording; alas, likely not this year. But this led me back to her other albums, including her impassioned recording of Dvorak's Cello Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in 2014. Her playing has the expressive power of human voice especially in the second movement, in which Dvorak borrows the melody from his lied "Lasst mich allein." The song's opening line, "Leave me alone in my dreams," comes through in Ms. Weilerstein's playing, with the fragile sincerity of a pleading heart. JOSHUA BARONE Watch Alisa Weilerstein on Facebook Live and read our review of her concert with the Philharmonic. Electronic works by the composer Natasha Barrett were among the highlights I encountered at a "spatial audio workshop" last summer at Empac, the experimental performance center in Troy, N.Y. Reading an intriguing best of 2017 list by the music writer Simon Cummings, I was alerted to the existence of a new album focused on some of Ms. Barrett's early pieces. My current favorite from the batch is "Racing Unseen." The composition starts out with some harsh and distorted waves of sound, before settling into a lull influenced by ambient textures. This calm is not long lived, though. Shortly before the two minute mark, a single thwack suggestive of steel percussion heralds a slow turn toward rhythmic chaos. When the composition reaches a feverish peak, Ms. Barrett can be heard toying with the beats in a way that might thrill fans of house music from Chicago's "footwork" scene. SETH COLTER WALLS The charismatic tenor Vittorio Grigolo, who never holds back, is a hotheaded and heroic Cavaradossi in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Puccini's "Tosca." Mr. Grigolo's fans, who love his burnished sound and unbridled passion, are sure to be thrilled. Yet other opera buffs can't get past some rawness in his voice. That downside matters more when he takes on classic bel canto roles, like Nemorino in Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore," which he sang at the Met in 2016. Here he is in the aria "Una furtiva lagrima." He does have a penchant for scooping (that is, sliding) up to higher notes rather than executing them cleanly. (Listen to the second phrase.) Still, if you can accept this as a characteristic of Mr. Grigolo's dramatic approach and not as a vocal mannerism, rewards come with the ardency and sheen of his singing. When he exclaims "M'ama" ("She loves me"), about the woman he loves from afar, Mr. Grigolo sounds overcome with fervor and hope. Of course she loves him. How could she not? ANTHONY TOMMASINI Read our review of the new "Tosca." ...And Many More Sergei Prokofiev, an adherent of Christian Science, was not especially known for settings of music of the Russian Orthodox Church, so he seemed the odd man out amid the likes of Kastalsky, Chesnokov and Rachmaninoff in a New Year's program by the PaTRAM Institute Singers and the Clarion Choir. At the end of the PaTRAM half of the program came "Many Years," Prokofiev's arrangement of a centuries old refrain for the coronation scene in Eisenstein's 1944 film "Ivan the Terrible." Here the festival choir of the Summer School of Liturgical Music at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, N.Y., sings it, after a minute of rising chant a signature of the style sung by a basso profundo acting as deacon: "Grant, O Lord, a prosperous and peaceful life." JAMES R. OESTREICH In a 1910 letter to the composer Edgar Varese, Debussy complained of feeling betrayed by "so called" pianists. "I can't tell you the extent to which my piano music has been deformed," he wrote. This year, the centennial of Debussy's death, will offer many opportunities to hear his music, including the piano works. What bothered him about the way many pianists played his music, I think, is that they took the "Impressionist" label (and Debussy disliked that word) as an invitation for excessively loose rhythm and overly blurry textures. We have a few precious examples of Debussy at the piano. In 1904 he recorded a few short songs and a brief excerpt from "Pelleas et Melisande" with Mary Garden, the soprano Debussy chose to create the role of Melisande in 1902. Here they are in the fifth song ("Green") from his cycle "Ariettes Oubliees." You have to listen closely and disregard the surface noise. Debussy plays the lilting opening lightly and crisply. When splashes of watery arpeggios break out, the sound is milky but also wonderfully scintillating. ANTHONY TOMMASINI Tenet ushered out the Christmas season on Wednesday with Vespers music of the 17th century German master Michael Praetorius, who has always struck me as the proprietor of the holiday candy store. His sweets include multiple settings of the hymn "Puer Natus in Bethlehem" ("A Boy Is Born in Bethlehem"), sung by Tenet this week in a version different from the more elaborate one it sings here, in a 2013 performance in San Diego with the Dark Horse Consort and the Bach Collegium San Diego. JAMES R. OESTREICH | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
There is a story in the Hebrew Bible that tells of God's call for the annihilation of the Canaanites, a people who lived in what are now Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian territories thousands of years ago. "You shall not leave alive anything that breathes," God said in the passage. "But you shall utterly destroy them." But a genetic analysis published on Thursday has found that the ancient population survived that divine call for their extinction, and their descendants live in modern Lebanon. Dr. Tyler Smith and an international team of geneticists and archaeologists recovered ancient DNA from bones belonging to five Canaanites retrieved from an excavation site in Sidon, Lebanon, that were 3,650 to 3,750 years old. The team then compared the ancient DNA with the genomes of 99 living people from Lebanon that the group had sequenced. It found that the modern Lebanese people shared about 93 percent of their ancestry with the Bronze Age Sidon samples. The team published its results in The American Journal of Human Genetics. "The conclusion is clear," said Iosif Lazaridis, a geneticist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. "Based on this study it turns out that people who lived in Lebanon almost 4,000 years ago were quite similar to people who lived there today, to the modern Lebanese." Marc Haber, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England and lead author on the study, said that compared with other Bronze Age civilizations, not much is known about the Canaanites. "We know about ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks, but we know very little about the ancient Canaanites because their records didn't survive," he said. Their writings may have been kept on papyrus, which did not stand the test of time as clay did. What is known about the Canaanites is that they lived and traded along the eastern coast of the present day Mediterranean, a region that was known as the Levant. "What we see is that since the Bronze Age, this ancestry, or the genetics of the people there, didn't change much," Dr. Haber said. "It changed a little, but it didn't change much and that is what surprised me." At first the team was not sure if it would be able to retrieve DNA from the ancient skeletons, which were recovered from the hot and humid excavation site within the last 19 years. Dr. Haber had chosen more than two dozen bones from the site that looked promising and had them investigated for genetic material. It turned out that only five contained ancient DNA. All of those came from the petrous part of the temporal bone, which is the tough part of the skull behind the ear, from five different individuals. After extracting that DNA, the team members compared it with a database that contained genetic information from hundreds of human populations. They then further compared their results with the genomes of the modern day Lebanese population sample, which revealed what happened to the ancient Canaanite population. "Genetics has the power to answer questions that historical records or archaeology are not able to answer," Dr. Haber said. He said researchers thought that migrations, conquests and the intermixing of Eurasian people like the Assyrians, Persians or Macedonians with the Canaanites 3,800 to 2,200 years ago might have contributed to the slight genetic changes seen in modern Lebanese populations. Still, the Lebanese retain most of their ancestral DNA from the Canaanites. "It confirms the continuity of occupation and rooted tradition we have seen on site, which was occupied from the 4th millennium B.C. right to the Crusader period," Claude Doumet Serhal, an archaeologist and director of the Sidon Excavation who is a co author on the paper, said in an email. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
NEW HAVEN Suspension of our disbelief is a natural element of attending theater. Those unhappy folks speaking English under an ornate proscenium are not really Russian aristocrats, after all. The dynamos pouring forth raps about American history are not really fomenting revolution. A theatergoer visiting New Haven now would need to pack a bag pretty much stuffed with disbelief suspension for the trip. The Long Wharf Theater is presenting Samuel Beckett's "Endgame," one of his seminal, bleakly comic but highly stylized dramatic emblems of the human predicament. And at Yale Repertory Theater you can see the premiere of "Imogen Says Nothing," by Aditi Brennan Kapil, an ambitious but rather woolly headed play featuring, among other oddities, a troupe of talking bears. Brian Dennehy stars in "Endgame," playing the irascible Hamm, who presides over a bizarre human menagerie from his movable throne in a grimy bunker. With an unruly gray beard, Mr. Dennehy looks rather like a Santa Claus gone to seed, and Hamm does indeed take an almost jolly pleasure in harassing his servant, Clov, portrayed by Reg E. Cathey. Demanding to be moved an inch this way or that, or just demanding that Clov attend to his needs Hamm is blind and immobile he lords it over Clov, and is scarcely more respectful to his parents, Nagg (Joe Grifasi) and Nell (Lynn Cohen), who live enclosed in canvas garbage bins. From the small windows in their basement, Clov occasionally searches for signs of life but sees only a gray wasteland. Directed by Gordon Edelstein, the production is perhaps the best "Endgame" I've seen: sharp in its savage humor, attentive to the language, and increasingly unsettling as these gruesome figures, at first repellent and almost cartoonish, gnaw at our souls. As they squabble or reminisce, we see in them grotesque emblems of humanity in various states of decay, but still clinging to life, and to one another, because that is what humans do. Even as life becomes absurd and unendurable, it is endured. Mr. Cathey's dead eyed Clov shuffles around the stage, dutifully obeying Hamm's commands, but he also contains a smoldering sense of resentment that threatens at any moment to flare into open rebellion. Despite his humiliatingly submissive stance, Mr. Cathey imbues Clov with a haunting dignity. Mr. Dennehy is terrific as the cantankerous Hamm. Although his eyes are obscured behind dark glasses, Hamm's squirming, sudden changes of mood, from irritated to elegiac to abusive, arrive like small shock waves. And while he lords it over his petty kingdom with a preening arrogance, Hamm is, of course, as pathetically dependent on Clov as Clov is on him ultimately more so and thus he, too, invokes as much pity as horror. (It is vaguely hinted that their relationship goes beyond master and servant, and that Hamm is in fact Clov's father or adoptive father.) The enterprising Ms. Kapil, meanwhile, might take a few tips from Beckett's notable economy (although "Endgame" is among his longer stage works). Her "Imogen Says Nothing" meanders across some mighty strange terrain, and ultimately fails to derive much meaning from the admittedly inventive strands of its story. The title character, played with fortitude and powerful presence by Ashlie Atkinson ("Fat Pig"), is a solidly built, lumbering woman who arrives in Elizabethan London on an odd mission. It seems the town she hails from has been arbitrarily renamed Quaere by a cartographer, confusing residents who had always referred to it as North Burcombe. Through some confusion she finds herself in conversation with two of Shakespeare's actors, the dismissive John Heminges (Christopher Ryan Grant) and the more sympathetic Henry Condell (Hubert Point Du Jour). They offer little help, but somehow Imogen finds herself falling in with the company. Women were not, of course, allowed to appear on stages in Elizabethan England, but Ms. Kapil latches on to a footnote in the history of "Much Ado About Nothing" to spin a fanciful tale suggesting that, on at least one occasion, this rule was broken. The back story: A character named Imogen, Leonato's wife, is referred to only in a few stage directions in early versions of the text, but was later eliminated from it in others and is often cut from contemporary versions. "Imogen Says Nothing" puts forth the whimsical theory that, at the first performance, John, who was portraying Leonato, was so inebriated that Imogen was corralled into shepherding him around the stage so that he could say his lines without collapsing into a puddle, thus making her, in theory, the first woman to appear in a Shakespeare play. Nor does Ms. Kapil's fertile imagination stop at revising Shakespearean history. Noting that bearbaiting was, like the theater of the time, a popular form of entertainment, she folds into her tale a troupe of bears who carp about their degrading lives from inside their cages. And, lo, in the play's truly head scratching twist, it turns out that Imogen herself was once a bear, who escaped from captivity and presto! somehow became human. When trying to urge her former fellow sufferers to escape as she did, she is once again captured by the impresario of the bearbaiting company (a commandingly malicious Ben Horner). While I'd grant Ms. Kapil full marks for invention, "Imogen Says Nothing" comes a little too close to saying nothing fully coherent itself. Buried in its layers is some sort of statement about the injustice of being erased from history. According to the play, Quaere, in Latin, means something missing or absent, and despite Shakespeare's resistance, Imogen eventually has herself written into the First Folio, which Henry has dedicated himself to preparing. Lurking in the bearbaiting plot, too, is a lesson about the cruelty of man's dominion over nature. But while the production, directed by Laurie Woolery, is acted with brio, humor and commitment by its ample cast, the play becomes bogged down in reams of unnecessary dialogue and wayward plotting. In this case, to enter into the world of the play, your ability to suspend disbelief would have to be stretched to the length of a suspension bridge. For this viewer, it was a bridge too far. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
JoAnn Morgan, circled, was the only woman working in the control room when the Apollo 11 mission launched in 1969. This photograph, taken shortly after, shows the launch team along with an additional group of employees listening to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew speak. Five Women Who Made the Moon Landing Possible You're reading In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. Let me know what you think at dearmaya nytimes.com. "My wish would be, all the photos in the future, there will always be women." JoAnn Morgan, the only woman working in NASA's firing room for the liftoff of Apollo 11 The photograph is an American classic: members of the Kennedy Space Center team, packed into the control room shortly after the Apollo 11 mission lifted off on July 16, 1969. The rocket would successfully carry humans to the surface of the moon for the first time. Unless you scan the image closely, it'd be easy to miss her: JoAnn Morgan, an American aerospace engineer, who sat in the center with her hand to her chin. She was the only woman working in the room during liftoff. This month, NASA celebrated Morgan along with some of the many other women who were instrumental in the eight day Apollo 11 mission, which returned to Earth 50 years ago this week. Here's a look at five of these women and their contributions. MORE: To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth's Gender Bias "I've got rocket fuel in my blood." JoAnn Morgan was NASA's only female engineer at that time and Apollo 11 was her debut as the first female launch controller. "I was attracted both by the sheer idea and the fact that it had never been done before." Margaret Hamilton, now 82, was the computer scientist who led NASA's team of software engineers. (In fact, she's credited with creating the term "software engineering.") As a director at the M.I.T. Instrumentation Laboratory, Hamilton helped develop the onboard flight software the most sophisticated of its day for NASA's Apollo moon missions. Her approach was so successful that no software bugs were ever known to have occurred during any crewed Apollo missions. "Sometimes they are not aware of the number of black scientists, and don't even know of the career opportunities until it is too late." In 1958, Mary Jackson became NASA's first African American female engineer. She specialized in boundary layer effects on aerospace vehicles at supersonic speeds. According to NASA, it's possible she was the only black female aeronautical engineer in the world at that time. While Jackson tore down that barrier, she also encouraged others to follow in her footsteps. In the 1970s, she helped students at a Virginia community center, most of whom were black, to build their own wind tunnel to conduct experiments. "We have to do something like this to get them interested in science," she told a local newspaper. Jackson, who died in 2005, was portrayed by Janelle Monae in the 2016 film "Hidden Figures," based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly. It was nominated for an Oscar for best picture. MORE: Ed Dwight Was Set to Be the First Black Astronaut. Here's Why That Never Happened. "I counted everything: the steps, the dishes, the stars in the sky." Katherine Johnson, another of Shetterly's "Hidden Figures" (she was played by Taraji P. Henson), was a gifted student who skipped several grades and attended a high school on the campus of a historically black college at age 13. As an adult, she gained the reputation as a "human computer" for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which in 1958 became NASA. She calculated the trajectories, launch windows and emergency backup return paths for many flights, including Apollo 11. "They'll give you every reason in the world why they can't have a woman over there. They'll even tell you there are no female bathrooms." On the day of the Apollo 11 launch, Judy Sullivan, a former teacher and the first female engineer in NASA's Spacecraft Operations, was the only woman who helped Neil Armstrong suit up for launch. Sullivan, now 76, was the lead engineer for the biomedical system for the mission, working to ensure the astronauts were healthy enough for spaceflight. In the 1970s, she appeared on the game show "To Tell the Truth." The celebrity panel had to guess which female contestant was a biomedical engineer. Wearing a short ruffled skirt, she stumped everyone and won a 500 prize. "They were totally fooled," Sullivan recalled. Sign up here to get future installments of In Her Words delivered to your inbox. What else is happening Here are five articles from The Times you might have missed. When Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, landed back on Earth after the Challenger mission in 1983, she told reporters, "I'm sure it was the most fun that I'll ever have in my life." Ride, who died in 2012 at 61, had been chosen for the mission by Robert L. Crippen, the Challenger's commander, in part because of her expertise with the robotic arm for the space shuttle. When Ride and her crewmates blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., many in the crowd of 250,000 wore T shirts that read "Ride, Sally Ride" from the lyrics of the song "Mustang Sally." "The women's movement," Ride once said, "had already paved the way, I think, for my coming." Read past In Her Words here. Sign up here to get In Her Words delivered to your inbox! | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Commercial tenants have found themselves in a quandary in the last few years thanks to the make do with less downturn. Some companies have shed underused office space in an effort to cut costs, but many of those same companies still require comfortable, high tech rooms for large events like employee orientations, brainstorming sessions and shareholder meetings. Capitalizing on both trends, Convene, a rapidly growing four year old firm that plans and hosts corporate events, may have hit upon a solution, at a time when the corporate event industry is trying to reinvent itself. Convene snaps up cast aside space, spends millions to improve it by adding wide video screens and brightly colored furniture, then rents it out for daytime get togethers, occasionally to the same companies that shed the space in the first place. This month, Convene cut the ribbon on a 36,000 square foot site at 32 Old Slip in the financial district of Manhattan. Spread across the second floor of a 36 story, 1.1 million square foot office building owned by Beacon Capital Partners, the location is Convene's third, joining two others in Midtown. For more than a decade, Goldman Sachs had leased the space to train its workers, but it sat empty after the investment bank opened its new headquarters in 2009 at 200 West Street and consolidated. Today, after a 4 million renovation, the Old Slip space offers a dozen rooms of different sizes, from a 212 seat classroom style auditorium to a narrow passageway with orange couches, where, it is hoped, conference attendees will curl up with laptops. The unrenovated second floor space seemed awkward for many potential tenants. Served by an escalator, and open, it had limited appeal for companies looking for conventional layouts. Retailers might not have liked how high it sits above the sidewalk. Still, Philip J. Brannigan Jr., a Beacon managing director, said Convene was ideal for several reasons, among them that it might benefit the building's other tenants, which include banks, construction management firms and insurance companies. "Tenants these days want to optimize their space, and by having an amenity like this in the building, it helps them to do that," Mr. Brannigan said. In contrast to the often banal hotel ballrooms that have been the industry's bread and butter for decades, Convene's facilities seem strikingly different. In the kitchen, a display case marked "Nourish" offers copies of Wallpaper magazine and blue potato chips. Stools tuck under skinny counters embedded with electrical sockets. Panels of opaque painted glass, gray fabric and wood line halls throughout. For about 250 a head, the most typical package offers attendees a breakfast, lunch and two snacks, with an emphasis on healthy low sodium, high protein food. Included as well are hot and cold drinks, including antioxidant teas; cocktails are extra. There is usually no extra fee for use of the Wi Fi network, projectors and microphones. The rate is comparable to the 225 to 270 per person charged for similar amenities at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, a longtime, popular location. "Our mind set is more young tech company than stodgy hospitality firm," said Chris Kelly, 30, a Convene co founder, during a tour. Joining him was the other founder, Ryan Simonetti, 31, a friend from their undergraduate days at Villanova. There they were fraternity brothers and entrepreneurs, selling discarded textbooks online and holding parties at clubs in Philadelphia, where 25 covered admission and a bus ride from the suburbs and back. "We were the guys who were always scraping for beer money and everything else," said Mr. Simonetti, who went on to work for what is now Gramercy Property Trust, the investment firm affiliated with the commercial landlord S. L. Green Realty. Originally known as Sentry Centers, Convene began in 2009 at 730 Third Avenue, a 46,300 square foot multifloor site that the landlord, the financial management organization TIAA CREF, had used for its own events. TIAA CREF is now one of Convene's clients, accounting for about 10 percent of its business at that site, Mr. Kelly said. In 2011, Convene opened a second location, which encompasses 23,600 square feet at 810 Seventh Avenue, in a space that once played host to conferences organized by KPMG, the accounting firm. KPMG is now a client at the building, which is owned by S. L. Green. Other clients have included Apple, Google, Merck, Aetna and Goldman Sachs. At all three sites, rents are "slightly below market because of our unique ability to take challenged floors," said Mr. Kelly, who added that Convene, which has 92 full time employees, is profitable. Asking rents at 32 Old Slip are about 40 a square foot, says Bruce Surry, a CBRE broker who markets the building. Asking Midtown rents average 65 a foot. For Stephen Fried, a publisher of the Great Places Directory, which lists event locations in New York and other cities, the industry is still bouncing back from the recession. But Mr. Fried, who has worked for the company for a decade, said that the offerings were becoming more varied. Options now include bowling alleys, town homes and even houses of worship, like the 60,000 square foot Third Church of Christ, Scientist, at 583 Park Avenue. "Companies are thinking, 'Let's change it up and do things a little differently,' " Mr. Fried said. "It's all evolving." But the upstarts may have their work cut out for them. Although little data is available, analysts say that properties operated by Hyatt, Sheraton and Marriott, as well as places like the Roosevelt Hotel, which opened in 1924, still dominate the corporate event industry in New York. "Convene has caused us to think about how we do things," said Kevin Croke, the marketing director at the Roosevelt, which is at 45 East 45th Street near Grand Central Terminal. On a typical day, the hotel's 30,000 square feet of space, with Tiffany chandeliers and architectural flourishes, welcomes 1,500 people. And many of those users are from banks like JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and UBS, Mr. Croke said. Aside from Convene's facilities, other less traditional spaces being rented for corporate events include Offsite, a three level space carved out of a former pharmacy at 52 West 39th Street, as well as theaters and university facilities. Offsite, which is whimsically decorated with flowery vinyl wallpaper and neon upholstery, opened last summer and aims for corporate clients of a more creative stripe, like L'Oreal and NBC, said Shaun Kessler, a co owner. Rental of the 4,200 square foot space for a full day, which includes coffee and snacks, is 5,000, Mr. Kessler said. "You go into most of these hotel rooms, and they have beige walls and gray carpets, and very little service. You're meant to fend for yourself," he added. At Liberty Theater, which opened in 2011 at 234 West 42nd Street in Times Square, about 30 percent of its revenue comes from banks and similar companies looking for an alternative to their own offices, even for short periods. William Curran, the 20,000 square foot theater's events director, said that one company recently leased the space for a 1,000 person event that lasted just 45 minutes, to announce that a president was stepping down. "Companies are operating leaner, true, but people still need to have these events," Mr. Curran said. "They're not expendable." Since opening in 2003, the Kimmel Center at New York University has consistently rented out four of its 10 floors for conferences. Its popularity in part prompted the school to add similar space at a building next door, the Global Center, which opened at 238 Thompson Street last year. Its events, such as science festivals, tend to be held by nonprofits rather than corporate clients, said Jonathan Ross, the operations director. The center has three videoconferencing rooms, so overseas tie ins are possible, and high definition projectors will be installed. "We have an obligation to keep everything looking fresh," Mr. Ross said. "But it's also a little, 'If you build it, they will come.' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Among the 2,000 or so enraged messages that I received after the most recent Equifax data breach, the wish that came up most often was that Richard F. Smith, the company's chief executive, be pushed out the door. But the messages also reflected something I had not seen before, not even after the scandals at Wells Fargo and Volkswagen, even though those companies committed similarly egregious offenses. It was a sense of helplessness, the recognition that we are at the mercy of an industry that makes money off our data, treats us with disdain and answers to no one. "They have taken our information to sell it for their own profit," said Brian Schill of Spring Branch, Tex., who recently retired. "And all of a sudden, we find that none of this information is really safe. We're all vulnerable to these kinds of attacks." Why do we feel as if we've been laid so utterly bare? You wrote to me about your uneasiness at the unceasing judgment of Equifax and its partners in oligopoly, Experian and TransUnion, which size you up and score you using algorithms that determine how much you must pay for the most expensive things you buy. You also described the resentment you feel over being trapped in Equifax's vast web of data, with no recourse and no ability to opt out. Finally, there were expressions of pure, raw fear about losing your money and reputation, particularly if you had to endure a long, hard slog to get good credit. The credit reporting industry exists to take bland numbers, run them through mysterious algorithms and then spit out report cards and scores. These become final, generally unappealable judgments that dictate the interest rates that consumers pay on mortgages, car loans and anything else that requires borrowing. Everyone from auto dealers to home loan officers sees the grades that Equifax and its counterparts distribute with the help of a company called FICO. If you're not up to snuff, a stranger at a desk or counter may inform you to your face that your dream house is out of reach or that you won't have a car to drive to work. "It's going to dawn on people that we are defined by these descriptors, markers and measures, but we have no meaningful informational rights to them or over them," Sarah Bloom Raskin, who served as deputy Treasury secretary during the Obama administration, said in an email this week. The credit reporting industry begins with a sort of entrapment, said Amanda Steinberg, chief executive of DailyWorth, a financial website geared toward women, when we discussed the breach this week. If you want to do business with just about any financial services company, you must agree to allow it to report your payment history to the credit reporting agencies. This is reasonable in theory: An accurate central repository of data ought to make getting credit easier and cheaper. But there does not appear to be any way to step out of the system unless you can live a life completely free of the need for credit, mobile phones and many jobs (since employers often make a credit check a condition of employment). And if the information in your credit report turns out to be wrong, good luck getting the bureaus to fix it, as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed in a report this year. The industry's cynical response to its own sloppiness has been to sell highly profitable monitoring services to people who fear errors and identity theft. Want to get in touch with the credit reporting agencies about your credit report or the fact that a thief may have a pile of your data? Good luck. Zeke Trautenberg, who lives in Los Angeles, spoke to two people answering Equifax's phones after the breach. They told him they had no databases of information about what had happened or even any internet access to look simple things up. "It was kind of like calling into a black box," he said, adding that he had been told: "We can't contact anyone at headquarters. We don't even have their phone number." The frustration does not end there. Equifax persisted for days in charging many people for the privilege of freezing their credit files. Such a freeze is helpful because a new creditor cannot obtain a credit report on a person who has one and thus cannot loan money to a criminal impersonating that person. Equifax eventually relented and said it would stop charging fees for freezes, even as its horror show of a website was still charging fees days after the announcement. Richard Russell of the Bronx questioned whether Equifax might have an incentive to be casual about security so that it could turn around later and charge what amounted to protection money. "Isn't that what this credit freeze is essentially?" he asked in an email to me this week. "In many parts of the world, this would be labeled extortion." It was only when I searched my Equifax related email for the words "fear" and "scared" that I fully understood just how defeated so many people felt about walking around with data leeches permanently attached to their wallets. Diane Beeney, who lives in York, Neb., said in an interview that she couldn't even bring herself to put the last six digits of her Social Security number into Equifax's website which is what the company demanded right off the bat of people who wanted to determine whether their information had been compromised. "I'm not very tech savvy, but I'm very tech wary," she said. "There is just too much of this stuff out there that nobody has any control over." For the moment, she has no idea what the status of her data is, because Equifax has not directly informed people who may have been affected by the breach. It could send them letters, but it has chosen not to so far. Many of those who have tried to protect themselves in the wake of the breach have been left feeling as though they are not in good hands. Consider the revelation that the president of Equifax's information solutions unit in the United States and its chief financial officer sold stock after the breach was discovered but before it was made public. If they knew about the break in, they violated insider trading laws. The company says they did not know. Even if you take Equifax at its word, despite its complete lack of credibility at this point, you are still left to wonder this: In what sort of company would Mr. Information Systems and Mr. Money not be in the loop on a problem like this? "That's also horrifying," said Cristi Page of San Diego. "They're either unethical or they're incompetent. Neither of those inspire much confidence." Imagine that you, like Mr. Schill, were a recent retiree. You don't want to go back to work if you can help it. Along comes the Equifax breach. Soon, you are reading totally frightening but utterly real tales of criminals taking over investment and Social Security accounts, and you wonder about your carefully laid plans. "I don't want to see this go up in smoke," he said. So what now? Mr. Smith, Equifax's chief executive, could be forced out at some point, perhaps to slink off to a cushy role at an investment firm, where his new colleagues will pat him on the back and say: "You know, it could have happened to any of us." The big banks and other companies will continue to hand our data to Equifax, because why wouldn't they? But maybe they will be worried enough about their own companies' potential losses to fraud that they will develop stronger security and identity verification measures that don't depend on the very data that just got stolen. And could a few of them please step up, abandon the cloak of anonymity and offer some critical words about any part of this debacle? So far, the only thing I've heard out of the banks is a note from Citigroup asking that we not use its credit card images in our Equifax reporting. As for the credit reporting industry, various elected officials and regulators now have it in their sights. I'm all for the free credit freezes that some politicians hope to require, so by all means sign the Identity Theft Resource Center's online petition in support of this cause. It would be better, though, if officials at the three agencies did not wait to make changes until after they have been forced to march before television cameras in Washington. Why not act now and make it easy for us to freeze all three of our major credit files at once, for free, without having to sign away our legal rights or subject ourselves to the companies' ceaseless spam? Given that it's our data that they have, it's high time we gained more control over who uses it and when. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Starz's splashy half hour drama "Vida" begins with two Mexican American sisters, Lyn (Melissa Barrera) and Emma (Mishel Prada) Hernandez, returning home to a gentrifying Eastside Los Angeles after the death of their mother. While dealing with their loss and the reality of the large debt their mother left behind, they encounter homophobia, wrestle with sexual identity and wade through the heavy emotional baggage that comes with complicated family relationships. And then there's the secret wife their mom never told them about. In its short six episode first season, "Vida" deftly covered a lot of ground the show is an intimate look at the experiences of the grandchildren of immigrants and the struggle to balance being both Mexican and American. Season 2, premiering Thursday, delves even deeper into the sisters' performative bicultural identity. Tanya Saracho, the showrunner, said most of the writers herself included have encountered what she's dubbed the "authenticity police." "You're not brown enough, you're not light enough, you're not Mexican enough. Your Spanish is not good enough," she explained. On the flip side, "We are steeped in the dominant culture. It reminds us of our otherness every day." In a recent phone interview, Saracho discussed being a first time showrunner, tackling colorism in the new episodes and making her television directing debut. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. During Season 1, you posted on social media about the uneasiness you felt being a new showrunner. Did you have mentors for that process? I didn't have mentors, but I did have people who held my hand. There were technical things, like what kind of camera to use ? Those kinds of things that I didn't know about, I felt that it was O.K. to ask. Even though I'd done a showrunner training program and learned about budgets from John Wells in a one day workshop, that's not enough time . Everybody around me was a woman and maybe there's something to that, that I didn't feel dumb asking my producer Robin Schwartz, "What does that mean?" or "How do we hire a line producer?" Starz said, "Show us what you want it to look like." I made a whole presentation, but mostly I said, "I want it to feel this way." Some people, because they've been around cameras a long time, they know shorthand they can say on set. I don't have training in this. Theater is my training. They did give me a pilot presentation where it felt like a great crash course for showrunning because we had to do everything from top to bottom, hire all the same positions. Aesthetically, it was a time where I could learn to communicate with a director. Because I had a specific way I wanted it to look. What motivated those choices you made for the visual style? I wanted it to feel insidery . A lot of times when we watch our communities represented on the screen, it feels like a museum piece. Like we're coming to watch a safari. But that's an outsider's point of view. Also our skin color I find that TV whitewashes our different shades; they wash the diaspora out of us. Latinx a gender neutral term for Latinos we are all subtones and undertones, and they just wash it out with a blue, or something bright. Or they brownface us even more. They just saturate us. I wanted it to look like us, but also to give it that prestige of an indie film. This season, you directed an episode for the first time. Why did you pick the finale? At the end of the last season, Marta Fernandez, my executive at Starz was like, "You should direct next season." I was like, "Yeah, I do want to direct like fourth or fifth season." She was like, "No, just direct next season. You'll be fine. You will have support." When we came to set up the season, the one that made the most sense to direct, so that I could finish my showrunning duties, was the last one. But I was just as scared because I was like, "Hold on, that's the finale. I don't want my finale to suck." It was like this looming thing at the end. It was a source of anxiety, but then it was the best experience. I've directed 16 plays in the theater. And I forgot, "Oh, that's right. I've directed actors. I've done that part." My favorite part was sitting and editing my own stuff. All the stuff I was scared about, like not knowing camera angles, running out of time for a scene none of that happened. So I've got the bug now. I want to do it again and again. Only for my shows I don't want to mess up somebody else's show and maybe a movie. Now the possibilities are endless, and I have to thank Marta for making me do it. Can you talk about the Spanglish that's used on the show? There are opinions on the type of Spanglish we use. It's so complicated because it's a made up way of communicating and there's not one uniform way. There's no dictionary that you could look at. It's how we communicate and if you hear us, the writers, like in our texts the California Spanglish is just very different from the Tex Mex stuff. Also, it's generational. But every character has had a cadence and a rhythm since the beginning. Eddy has a different kind of Spanglish than Mari; Eddy's older. Eddy still says "carnal," "firme" words that Mari should not say. And with marketing, too. The fact that we get the words desmadre and chingona on the key art and teaser art, to me it's radical. It's revolutionary because not even every Latino is going to know what desmadre is it's something like a "hot mess." Mexicans and Mexican Americans haven't gotten a chance to see themselves like that in key art. On Latino TV shows, we rarely see Afro Latinos. Is that something you thought about in regards to casting? Not for this show. I've been very aware of this and I'm in full agreement with you. My next show I'm developing is called "Brujas" and it's all Afro Latinx leads. I just had a mini writers' room for the pilot and it was all Afro Latinx writers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Day by day, as the number of Covid 19 deaths soar, we see more clearly that many of us will not survive this storm. In the most serious cases, breathing becomes so labored that ventilators have to be used to keep patients alive. That there may not be enough of these machines is horrifying and infuriating. But even if there were, it breaks my heart that Americans who get sick enough to need them won't know what desperate situations they face, nor will they understand what ventilators can do to help, and what they can never fix. As hard as the facts may be, knowledge will make us less afraid. Let me begin simply. When we take a breath, we pull air through our windpipe, the trachea. This pipe then branches in two, then again into smaller and smaller pipes finally ending in tiny tubes less than a millimeter across called bronchioles. At the very end of each are clusters of microscopic sacs called alveoli. The lining of each sac is so thin that air floats through them into the red blood cells. These millions of alveoli are so soft, so gentle, that a healthy lung has almost no substance. Touching it feels like reaching into a bowl of whipped cream. Covid 19 changes all that. It causes a gummy yellow fluid, called exudate, to fill the air sacs, stopping the free flow of oxygen. If only a few air sacs are filled, the rest of the lung takes over. When more and more alveoli are filled, the lung texture changes, beginning to feel more like a marshmallow than whipped cream. This terrible disease is called acute respiratory distress syndrome. Covid 19 can cause an incredibly lethal form of this, in which oxygen levels plunge and breathing becomes impossible without a ventilator. Specially trained health care workers insert a 10 inch long tube connected to a ventilator through the mouth and into the windpipe. The ventilator delivers more oxygen into the lungs at pressure high enough to open up the stiffened lungs. It's called life support for a reason; it buys us time. Ventilators keep oxygen going to the brain, the heart and the kidneys. All while we hope the infection will ease, and the lungs will begin to improve. These machines can't fix the terrible damage the virus is causing, and if the virus erupts, the lungs will get even stiffer, as hard as a stale marshmallow. "I feel like I'm trying to ventilate bricks instead of lungs," one intensive care unit doctor who has been treating Covid 19 patients told me. The heart begins to struggle, begins to fail. Blood pressure readings plummet, a condition called shock. For some, the kidneys fail completely, which means a dialysis machine is also needed to survive. Doctors are left with impossible choices. Too much oxygen poisons the air sacs, worsening the lung damage, but too little damages the brain and kidneys. Too much air pressure damages the lung, but too little means the oxygen can't get in. Doctors try to optimize, to tweak. Nobody can tolerate being ventilated like this without sedation. Covid 19 patients are put into a medically induced coma before being placed on a ventilator. They do not suffer, but they cannot talk to us and they cannot tell us how much of this care they want. Eventually, all the efforts of health care workers may not be enough, and the body begins to collapse. No matter how loved, how vital or how needed a person is, even the most modern technology isn't always enough. Death, while typically painless, is no less final. Even among the Covid 19 patients who are ventilated and then discharged from the intensive care unit, some have died within days from heart damage. Even before Covid 19, for those lucky enough to leave the hospital alive after suffering acute respiratory distress syndrome, recovery can take months or years. The amount of sedation needed for Covid 19 patients can cause profound complications, damaging muscles and nerves, making it hard for those who survive to walk, move or even think as well as they did before they became ill. Many spend most of their recovery time in a rehabilitation center, and older patients often never go home. They live out their days bed bound, at higher risk of recurrent infections, bed sores and trips back to the hospital. All this does not mean we shouldn't use ventilators to try to save people. It just means we have to ask ourselves some serious questions: What do I value about my life? If I will die if I am not put in a medical coma and placed on a ventilator, do I want that life support? If I do choose to be placed on a ventilator, how far do I want to go? Do I want to continue on the machine if my kidneys shut down? Do I want tubes feeding me so I can stay on the ventilator for weeks? Right now, all over the country, patients and their families are being asked to make these difficult decisions at a moment's notice, while they are on the verge of dying, breathless and terrified. If patients get worse after being put on a ventilator, critical care doctors are having to ask their family members what they want done. Covid 19 is too contagious to have these conversations in person, so they are being done over the phone. It is yet another heartbreaking reality of dying during a pandemic. Patients cannot tell us what they want. Family members aren't able to be with patients and may not know what they would want. No one can make these choices for us, and no one will know what choices we would make unless we tell them. If you don't want to be put in a coma and placed on life support, please let your family know. Appoint the person you want to make decisions for you and let your doctor know your wishes. The truth is we are facing a disaster. Let's not use up precious resources on someone who doesn't want them. We will still care for you to the end, but we won't put you on a machine if you don't want to be on it. If the person you love is on a ventilator right now, find out exactly how bad his or her lungs are. The doctors will tell you the truth. And the truth, no matter how painful, eases fear. The understanding that comes with it helps us make the best choices for the ones we love. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Until recently, Facebook could feel at times like the virtual equivalent of a sleepy bingo parlor an outmoded gathering place populated mainly by retirees looking for conversation and cheap fun. That was before the coronavirus. Now, stuck inside their homes and isolated from their families and friends, millions of Americans are rediscovering the social network's virtues. That has lifted usage of Facebook features like messaging and video calls to record levels and powered a surge in traffic for publishers of virus related news. As of Thursday, more than half the articles being consumed on Facebook in the United States were related to the coronavirus, according to an internal report obtained by The New York Times. Overall U.S. traffic from Facebook to other websites also increased by more than 50 percent last week from the week before, "almost entirely" owing to intense interest in the virus, the report said. The report, which was posted to Facebook's internal network by Ranjan Subramanian, a data scientist at the company, was a lengthy analysis of what it called an "unprecedented increase in the consumption of news articles on Facebook" over the past several weeks. According to the report, more than 90 percent of the clicks to coronavirus content came from "Power News Consumers" and "Power News Discussers" Facebook's terms for users who read and comment on news stories much more frequently than the average user. The company is now considering several options for targeting those people with higher quality information to make sure it is "being spread downstream." "These users are having an extraordinary impact on the coronavirus information diet of other Facebook users," Mr. Subramanian wrote. The report shows that Facebook is closely monitoring people's news habits during a critical period and actively trying to steer them toward authoritative sources in what amounts to a global, real time experiment in news distribution. At times, Facebook itself seemed unsure which news sources users would turn to in a crisis, with Mr. Subramanian noting that "fortunately" many people were clicking on links from publishers that the company considers high quality. Facebook's revival as a dominant news hub is a striking shift. Sharing of news stories on the social network had declined for years, partly because the company tried to emphasize feel good personal posts over polarizing national news. In 2018, Facebook overhauled its News Feed algorithm to show more posts by family and friends, which hurt news and entertainment publishers who relied on it for traffic. Some of those publishers shut down as a result of Facebook's changes, while others were forced to seek traffic elsewhere. As of last week, much of the new, virus related traffic on Facebook was flowing to mainstream news outlets. The Washington Post got 119 percent more clicks on its Facebook links during a two week period this month than in the same period last month, while traffic to articles published by The Atlantic more than quadrupled over the same period, according to the report. The Times's Facebook traffic has grown by 180 percent, while traffic to NBC News rose 160 percent. In a statement, Campbell Brown, Facebook's vice president for global news partnerships, said, "We are working overtime to help people find and share credible information right now which includes important news from local and national publishers, and expert health organizations. We're actively testing ways to ensure people see more timely and explanatory Covid 19 related news and information, while out of date news gets demoted." Facebook's report also listed the "news ecosystem quality" score, or NEQ, for 100 of its top publishers. Those scores, which Facebook adopted last year and has never spoken about publicly, are calculated based on a number of variables, including whether an outlet is broadly trusted by Facebook users and whether it has a history of sharing clickbait or misinformation. They are one of many factors that determine how often an outlet's articles show up on users' News Feeds. Many of the highest scores listed on the report belonged to large, mainstream news organizations like CNN, The Times and The Post. The report claimed that since early March, when stories about the coronavirus outbreak began catching on with American Facebook users, those users have sought out news from higher quality sources than usual. "We are continuing to see that people are on average reading Covid 19 content from higher NEQ publishers compared to the other news links they are consuming," it said. That was good news for those publishers and for society, given the relationship between getting accurate information about the virus and taking proper health precautions to limit its spread. But it was bad news for publishers with lower scores. The Daily Mirror, a British tabloid that had the most clicks from Facebook of any English language publisher in February, had its traffic drop 28 percent this month. And Facebook traffic to The Daily Wire, a conservative publication that ranked third in clicks among all English language publications on Facebook in February, fell 20 percent. These trends may signal that users are seeking out more authoritative sources on their own. It could also indicate that Facebook was changing its algorithms to promote content from high quality publishers. The report mentioned an experiment called "Mixshift Higher NEQ Health Links," which was meant to test the effects of elevating higher quality publications in Facebook's News Feed on health related topics. The report called the test's initial results "promising," although it also said the change had not yet formally launched. The outlets with the biggest drops in traffic over the month specialize in news unrelated to the virus. Mashable, the technology website, had its Facebook traffic plummet by 72 percent this month, according to the report, while Facebook traffic to BET and Sports Illustrated each dropped more than 50 percent. The report noted that local news publishers had gotten a bigger boost in traffic than nonlocal outlets, reflecting users' interest in how the virus is affecting their immediate communities. Facebook has not been entirely successful at keeping virus related misinformation from spreading. Last week, a Medium post written by a tech marketer that played down the virus's seriousness was shared on Facebook more than 50,000 times, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook owned data platform. The post, whose author claimed it had gotten 2.6 million views, was later taken down by Medium for violating the site's policies. A Medium spokeswoman, Sandee Roston, said the post was removed "based on its violation of our rules, specifically the risk analysis framework we use for controversial, suspect and extreme content." Facebook's report, which lists 100 English language news publishers ranked by the number of clicks they received from the social network in February, also provided a rare glimpse of where users typically get their news. The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail and The Daily Wire made up the top three, followed by GoFundMe, the crowdfunding site. The BBC, CNN, The Washington Post, and Fox News appeared in the top 10, while MSNBC ranked 79th, behind Breitbart, Page Six, and ScaryMommy.com. The report also hinted at Facebook's potential to use its enormous data trove to predict the spread of the virus. Detailed maps and charts in the report showed the rapid spread of the virus coinciding with increased traffic to coronavirus related news stories. As of Feb. 19, few Americans were reading about the virus, according to the report. Two weeks later, nearly 1 out of every 5 articles clicked on in the Pacific Northwest, where the virus first took hold in the nation, were about the outbreak. By March 19, a "radical change" had occurred: Nearly half of all articles clicked on across the United States were about the coronavirus. The report, which noted a "somewhat correlated" relationship between users' interest in virus related news and confirmed cases in a region, also included maps showing regions where interest in the pandemic was on the rise, including areas of South America, Southeast Asia and Africa. In Eastern Europe, the report noted a "huge increase" in the number of people interested in virus news in countries including Poland and Ukraine, which did not align with the number of cases reported in those places. Should those countries begin reporting higher numbers, it could show that Facebook data is a leading indicator of where the virus may have taken hold. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Federal safety regulators indicated on Wednesday that General Motors had yet to turn over significant information related to a defective ignition switch that has been linked to 13 deaths and the recall of 1.6 million cars. A list of 107 questions to G.M. from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration underscores the significant gaps in the chronology of events that the automaker turned over to the safety agency last month. It also shows how slow the agency has been to respond to the deadly ignition problem, which has plagued the Chevrolet Cobalt and several other models for nearly a decade. Mary T. Barra, chief executive of G.M., said in an email to workers on Tuesday that the company would "do the right thing for our customers," but on Wednesday company officials again declined to answer questions about the recall, the deadly accidents or the questions raised in the letter from the safety agency. Aside from several written statements, the company has declined to speak publicly about ignition problem or the recall. For nearly 10 years, both G.M. and the agency received mounting evidence that the faulty switches, if jolted or weighed down by a heavy key ring, could shut off a car's engine and electrical system, disabling its air bags. But it was not until Feb. 13 that G.M. recalled 778,000 vehicles worldwide, expanding it to 1.6 million last Tuesday. The automaker has said it would cooperate fully with regulators, and in her letter to employees on Tuesday, Ms. Barra said that G.M. had "provided federal regulators with comprehensive information on this issue." But the safety agency's compulsory request, made public on its website on Wednesday, showed that regulators needed to know more about G.M.'s recounting of how, by its own admission, it fell short. For example, regulators are asking for a detailed explanation of the statement by G.M.'s North American president, Alan Batey, who said that the company's internal investigation "was not as robust as it should have been." The agency has also asked for the names of a G.M. engineer who proposed a fix to the ignition switch in 2005, and the executives who decided against it. All were unidentified in the chronology. In a similar vein, G.M. is being ordered to name the engineer who in 2007 was told to begin investigating crashes in which the air bags did not deploy and to produce all documents related to the engineer's investigation. Shortly before the engineer was given that task, safety regulators met with G.M. employees to discuss passenger restraint systems, including air bags. At that meeting, G.M. was told of a crash that killed a 16 year old girl in Maryland in 2005. "It is the most detailed special order that I ever recall seeing," Allan Kam, a safety consultant in Bethesda, Md., who worked for the agency for more than 25 years and retired as its senior enforcement lawyer, wrote in an email when asked about the agency's request to G.M. "What did you know and when did you know it?" Safety regulators also focused on recent events in its order, asking for G.M. to describe what happened in executive meetings in December 2013 and in January about which vehicles to recall. Initially the automaker recalled only the 2005 7 Cobalt and 2007 Pontiac G5, and then 12 days later more than doubled the recall with four additional models the 2003 7 Saturn Ion; the 2006 7 Chevrolet HHR and Pontiac Solstice; and the 2007 Saturn Sky. All of those cars used the same ignition switch. G.M. received the request from regulators on Tuesday, a spokesman, Alan Adler, wrote in an email. He said the company welcomed "the opportunity to help the agency have a full understanding of the facts." Under federal regulations, manufacturers that detect a safety problem must inform the safety agency of its plan for a recall within five business days, or face a civil fine of up to 35 million. The safety agency rarely makes such requests for information. In 2010, it issued similar requests to Toyota over its handling of complaints of unintended acceleration in its vehicles. One request involved floor mats and the other sticking accelerator pedals. In April 2010, Toyota agreed to pay a 16.375 million fine the maximum at the time to settle the allegation that it delayed recalling vehicles with accelerator pedals that might stick in a depressed position or be slow to return to idle. In December of that year, Toyota paid another 16.375 million over a similar allegation involving floor mats that could snag accelerator pedals. Toyota did not admit any wrongdoing in either case. But the United States attorney's office for the Southern District of New York has been conducting a criminal investigation of Toyota over the way the automaker disclosed complaints of unintended acceleration. The safety agency has come under mounting pressure over its own failure to act on complaints about the recalled G.M. cars. Twice, it has taken an in depth look at fatal crashes, but has never begun a broader investigation. Sen. Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, has said the agency needs changes. Last month, he sent a letter to the agency saying that significant improvements were needed in the way it gathers information about potential defects. The agency has defended itself, saying "the data available to N.H.T.S.A. at the time did not contain sufficient evidence of a possible safety defect trend that would warrant the agency opening a formal investigation." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Harlequin has a problem. He wishes to marry his love, Columbine, but her father rejects him as too poor and keeps her locked up. Lucky for Harlequin, he and the others are fictional characters in a ballet. Soon, a good fairy appears and gives him a magical stick and lots of money. Problem solved. Alexei Ratmansky has a different problem. He is in love with old ballets, especially in their original form, insofar as that original form can be reconstructed after decades of neglect and alteration. Lucky for him, he is one of the world's most sought after choreographers and the artist in residence at American Ballet Theater. If he wants to rescue an antique ballet from the archives say, "Les Millions d'Arlequin," a 1900 work by Marius Petipa, the foremost choreographer of 19th century Russian ballet money appears. This money, however, doesn't exactly solve the problem. "Harlequinade," Mr. Ratmansky's reconstruction for Ballet Theater of that two act Petipa antique, had its debut at the Metropolitan Opera House on Monday. The sets and costumes, by Robert Perdziola, are beautifully detailed. The large cast, led by James Whiteside and Isabella Boylston and including 34 adorable children from the ABT Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, was excellent, ably displaying all that Mr. Ratmansky has restored with affectionate care. And yet a question hung over the whole enterprise: Was it worth doing? Ballet aficionados know that the plots of most 19th century ballets are thin and frivolous, though many works that have survived ("Giselle," "Swan Lake," "Sleeping Beauty") have stronger stories or distinguished scores. The plot of "Harlequinade," based on the conventions and stock characters of commedia dell'arte, is only slightly more fleshed out than the Harlequin story I've described above. The speed and ease with which the predicaments are resolved accentuates their weightlessness. In any case, the plot is just scaffolding a pretext for the dancing. And the dances here have charm. You can become absorbed, for example, by how Petipa frames soloists with other dancers; the balance of symmetry and asymmetry, of motion and stasis are all intriguingly different, in small ways, from 19th century conventions as they're usually presented. The plentiful mime is both broad and exact, capable of showing without sound how Harlequin's foppish rival sings poorly. Time after time, the choreography sparkles with some tricky little thing, a bauble of a step to make you smile. But I confess that I kept wondering, "Is this all there is?" I say "confess," because I am in theory supportive of Mr. Ratmansky's larger project with Petipa, a sort of originalist return to the text that has already revised our ideas of ballet classicism. This is his fourth attempt to restore a Petipa ballet using arcane dance notations stowed away in the Harvard Theater Collection. I was a fan of "The Sleeping Beauty," which he reconstructed for Ballet Theater in 2015. It was like seeing a famous, familiar painting from which layers of dirt and supposed improvements had been painstakingly removed. Suddenly, wonderfully, it was surprising, even strange. But "Harlequinade" is no "Sleeping Beauty." And Mr. Ratmansky's attitude to the past has relaxed. He's given up on certain period details, like raising legs no higher than 90 degrees, that turn back the clock and allow us to look at technical advancements more neutrally, aware of gains and losses. It's a great chore to fight against dancer habit, but every decrease in strict adherence to the old ways in "Harlequinade" is a decrease in strangeness, weakening the power of what's left, making it seem smaller, of only antiquarian interest. These compromises put pressure on the whole approach, raising the question of whether these reconstructions, however valuable to historically curious ballet fans and to Mr. Ratmansky, can satisfy as theater. This "Harlequinade" suggests, at least, that not all Petipa deserves full restoration. Mr. Ratmansky's archival study isn't the only way to deal with the past. When George Balanchine made a "Harlequinade" in 1965, he worked from his memory but also reinvented freely to suit modern tastes. Watching Mr. Ratmansky's "Harlequinade," I often wished for more meddling more of his feeling for character and off kilter sense of humor. But then there were moments when I longed for something different altogether, a sendup in the manner of the all male Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Such fond mockery might be the best way left to take this outmoded material seriously. Another approach is excerption. There's a good reason that ballets like "Harlequinade" are often presented in pieces or "variations," sans story. When excerpts from "Harlequinade" were performed at the Ballet Theater gala a few weeks ago, it was easier to appreciate their happy spirit and savor the performances: the childlike exuberance of Mr. Whiteside, limbs whirling with joy, leaping high; the freshness of Ms. Boylston, who makes the best case for the simple pleasures of the choreography. But on Monday night, we had the quaint whole. When the Good Fairy (played by Mr. Ratmansky's wife, Tatiana, who has performed a different kind of magic in helping him decipher the old notation) intervened at the wedding, cash started flying, blown by a fan. It was hard not to think, even as you laughed, about money that might have been better spent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
THE rich are sitting firmly in the public cross hairs, especially as the economy continues to stumble. Reports that Wall Street bonuses will again be high, and the debate in Congress over tax increases for the wealthy, just add to the outrage. So it was a serendipitous time for Columbia University to convene the first Elites Research Network conference last week. The conference drew in scholars focused on inequality across academic disciplines, like economics, political science, sociology and history. In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them. "When we study the poor, it's relatively easy," said Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia and the author of "Gang Leader for a Day" (Penguin Press, 2008). "The poor don't have the power to say no. Elites don't grant us interviews. They don't let us hang out at their country clubs." But Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, said the increasing concentration of wealth, moving from the top 10 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, has made this the right time to look more closely at the group. "We have to understand what's going on at the top," Mr. Warren said. The discussion quickly went beyond examining how those with more had traditionally exercised control over those with less. Many of the younger scholars said their goal was to do more than just look at tax returns and see who sat on boards. Instead, they said, they want to start looking at the relationships between the elite and the non elite. "If you look at the poor as a problem, you'll be angry at elites or you'll expect them to come up with a solution," said Mr. Venkatesh, who took the most pragmatic line. "You have to come in accepting that there will always be poor people in society and there will always be wealthy people in society, and neither of the two reached that status by their own efforts." That's not the usual description of this issue. But otherwise, you risk viewing the rich as rapacious thieves or seeing the poor as lazy freeloaders. That said, there were other academics who hewed to an older model of power dynamics. Jeffrey Winters, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, talked of the wealthy in America in terms of oligarchy. And he advanced an argument against what he called the "income defense industry." The term referred to the accountants, lawyers and financial advisers employed by the wealthy and the merely affluent to manage their financial affairs. Mr. Winters argued that this group was hurting the non elite by minimizing tax collection. He estimated that 70 billion was lost yearly just from offshore accounts. There is no denying that members of the elite have a lot of money and would like to hang on to as much of it as they can. But that's true of most people. Olivier Godechot, a French academic on the sociology panel, presented research that quantified just how skewed the increase in wealth at the very top has become. Mr. Godechot, a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, said that two professions finance and business services accounted for almost all of the increase in income inequality. D. Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University, said his research showed that many of the people now considered elite in America did not start out that way. He is conducting what he described as the largest study ever of top leaders in America, having talked to over 500 so far across business, nonprofits and academia. He said he had found that a privileged upbringing did not matter as much as generally thought. Nor, he said, did many of the top leaders inherit large sums of money. While many went to top colleges and a large number attended Harvard Business School, the biggest determining factor of whether someone moved into the elite was an early career opportunity. Being able to look beyond their specialty early as opposed to being highly specialized their entire career and then thrust into a leadership role distinguished great leaders more than any inherent advantage in their upbringing, he said. "These people had a chance to be a generalist early on, as opposed to being specialists their whole career," Mr. Lindsay said. "They had that experience in their early 30s or 40s." Some of the conference presenters took note that they themselves were almost entirely from Ivy League and other elite universities only one was from a state university. "When we send our kids to the Brookline schools, we're not making a judgment about the Boston schools," said Michele Lamont, a sociology professor at Harvard University. "There are unintended consequences to our actions." Mr. Warren put it more bluntly: "I did not come up as a child of privilege, but I got into Yale for graduate school. I'm going to want to do the same for my kids. It's not a malicious intent to exclude others; it's a rational impulse to maintain the advantage." Those at the conference defined the elite as people with power over others, and the debate was framed largely in economic terms. But professors at an Ivy League university are part of an elite, even if their salaries do not reflect it. Shamus Rahman Khan, a conference organizer and assistant professor of sociology at Columbia, seemed to be most at ease with the conflict. The son of a Pakistani father and Irish mother who both emigrated to the United States, he said he came from a wealthy but not elite family. His father, a successful surgeon, paid his son's way to the St. Paul's School, a top boarding school. Yet when Mr. Khan arrived there in the mid 1990s, he said he lived in the "minority students dorm." He used that experience and a later teaching stint at St. Paul's to write a book on the nature of advantage, "Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School," which will be published by Princeton University Press in January. "Is it morally responsible for you to get your kids into very expensive schools if it will advantage them?" Mr. Khan said. "It's hard not to do it. But by doing it, you're not explicitly squirting some other kid in the eye with pepper spray. It's more subtle." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Now Lives One bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side with his boyfriend, the fashion photographer and film director Santiago Sierra, and their Pomeranian. Claim to Fame A former model who has been shot by Steven Meisel and who starred in a suggestive Calvin Klein advertisement that featured a same sex embrace, Mr. Green is now more comfortable behind the lens as a socially conscious photographer drawn to the underground edges of society. He frequently posts his black and white images of night life ingenues and young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists on his Instagram account. "Instead of trying to shoot for magazines, I decided to create images and have complete control over it," he said. Big Break After Mr. Green moved to New York in 2008, the legendary photographer David Armstrong took him under his wing after meeting on a shoot. Inspired by Mr. Armstrong's body of work on social outsiders, Mr. Green began connecting with potential subjects at clubs like Up Down, starting with the transgender model Hari Nef. "She pulled me into this small new bubble of artists, fashion designers and street kids," he said. His monochrome portraits won him second place in the 2016 LensCulture Portrait Awards and have been featured in i D magazine. Latest Project Mr. Green's eye toward after dark subcultures is not limited to the young. He is currently documenting L.G.B.T. residents at senior housing centers. "A lot of my friends in New York think, 'Oh, being gay doesn't define who I am,'" he said. "But spending time with the older generation is a reminder that identity is important, and that there is a lot more to fight for." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
If there's a single lesson Americans have learned from the events of the past year, it might be this: Hackers are dangerous people. They interfere in our elections, bring giant corporations to their knees, and steal passwords and credit card numbers by the truckload. They ignore boundaries. They delight in creating chaos. But what if that's the wrong narrative? What if we're ignoring a different group of hackers who aren't lawless renegades, who are in fact patriotic, public spirited Americans who want to use their technical skills to protect our country from cyberattacks, but are being held back by outdated rules and overly protective institutions? In other words: What if the problem we face is not too many bad hackers, but too few good ones? The topic of ethical hacking was on everyone's mind at Def Con, the hacker convention last week in Las Vegas. It's the security community's annual gathering, where thousands of hackers gathered to show their latest exploits, discuss new security research and swap cyberwar stories. Many of the hackers I spoke to were gravely concerned about Russia's wide ranging interference in last year's election. They wanted to know: How can we stop attacks like these in the future? The problem, they told me, is that the government doesn't make it easy for well meaning hackers to pitch in on defense. Laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act make poking around inside many government systems, even for innocent research purposes, a criminal offense. More than 209,000 cybersecurity jobs in the United States currently sit unfilled, according to a 2015 analysis of labor data by Peninsula Press, and the former head of the National Security Agency said last year that the agency's cybersecurity experts "are increasingly leaving in large numbers" for jobs in the private sector. Partly, that's because private sector jobs tend to pay more. But it's also because the government can be an inhospitable place for a hacker. Talented hackers can be disqualified for government jobs by strict background checks, and dissuaded by hiring processes that favor candidates with more formal credentials. At Def Con, I heard stories about hackers who had interviewed for government security jobs only to be turned away because they'd smoked pot as a teenager, or violated copyright law by jail breaking their video game console. These rules may keep a few bad apples away from critical government systems, but they also prevent many talented hackers from contributing. At Def Con, I spoke with Sean Kanuck, a former C.I.A. intelligence analyst who served as the federal government's national intelligence officer for cyberissues from 2011 to 2016. He said that hackers could be enormously valuable, if they were properly enlisted in the fight against attacks. "These people may be all hackers, and they may occasionally break the law, but they all still want the banking system to work," Mr. Kanuck said. "All of them, if they end up in a hospital room, they want the infusion pump working. There's common ground. And the knowledge here is incredible." The private sector has already discovered the benefits of hackers. Most major tech companies including Facebook, Apple and Microsoft offer "bug bounty" programs, in which they offer financial rewards to hackers who find holes in their security measures. These companies know that paying hackers up front for their expertise is significantly cheaper than cleaning up after a breach, and they understand that the risk of a hacker going rogue inside their systems is outweighed by the benefits of having well trained experts catch bugs and vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. Government agencies are beginning to experiment with a similar approach. The Defense Department offered the first ever federal bug bounty program last year, called Hack the Pentagon. The agency allowed more than 1,400 hackers to take aim at its public facing websites without fear of punishment, and the effort resulted in 138 legitimate vulnerabilities being reported. A similar program involving the Department of Homeland Security has been proposed in the Senate. The most talked about session at this year's Def Con was when hackers were let loose on a series of computerized voting machines. These machines had been used in recent American elections, and most ran on comically outdated software. Hackers eventually broke into every machine and were able to manipulate the software to register fake ballots and change vote totals. (One enterprising hacker even rigged a voting machine to play the music video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up.") There is, of course, the problem of outdated software. But some of the world's best security researchers have also been prohibited from poking and prodding at these machines by a thicket of copyright and anti tampering laws. (The reason Def Con was able to test them at all is a 2015 exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that gave researchers a temporary pass to experiment on voting machines.) Now that white hat hackers have found flaws in these machines, they can pass that knowledge on to the manufacturers and election officials, who can secure the machines ahead of the next election cycle. Hackers, it turns out, respond to incentives. But current laws don't allow hackers to test critical government systems outside of official agency sponsored programs. As a result, we're missing out on important advice. Take it from me. Several years ago, as part of an article on ethical hacking, I invited a pair of world class hackers to hack me, using all of the tools at their disposal. The results were shocking. Within days, the hackers had gained access to nearly every piece of my digital life: my cellphone, my bank account, all of my email inboxes and social media profiles. The hackers showed me how, with a few more clicks, they could have stolen all of my data and used it to ruin my life. Then, they helped me protect myself against a future attack by strengthening my passwords, fortifying my devices and teaching me what suspicious activities to look out for. Not all hackers are so helpful. But many are, and we should take advantage of their willingness to help secure our national infrastructure. Maybe federal workers should be subjected to a simulated hack before being allowed to access sensitive information. Or perhaps the government could create a white list of approved security researchers with a track record of ethical hacking, who would be given legal immunity for their work. Private sector companies have figured out how to bring in outside security expertise carefully, without creating a hacker free for all, and the government can, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. Lisa Kerney once earned her living hosting "SportsCenter" on ESPN, making her a nightly fixture in the vast American conversation between sports fans and their favorite athletes, teams and leagues. Her latest endeavor, she believes, is just as all American. Every Saturday, Kerney slips into the anchor's chair of a very different kind of television program: a sports betting show from a makeshift studio at the Meadowlands Racetrack. Instead of reporting just scores and news, Kerney now also rattles off N.F.L. point spreads and money line odds as easily as a CNBC host talks stock prices and P/E ratios. She will be on the air again this Sunday, serving up information on the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams in the hours before Super Bowl LIII. The game will take its place in American gambling history because, for the first time, bettors will be allowed to wager on the N.F.L.'s championship game legally, not only in Nevada but also in seven other states. By next year, gambling may be legal in more than a dozen more states, a shift that is already moving betting on games into the mainstream of American culture and teaching fans to look at the sports contests they love as investment opportunities as well as entertainment. "Now fans are able to play the game within the game," Kerney said. "It goes beyond the nuts and bolts of who's going to win. It is a whole new way of experiencing sports." Last May, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited expanded sports gambling, it created almost overnight a billion dollar market that bookmakers, media companies, tech entrepreneurs, touts and quants have rushed in to dominate. On the high end, that has meant sports shows that incorporate into their coverage market moving information like injury reports and their effect on bettors. But it also means digital subscription services that make a tsunami of sports data available, and app makers eager to help bettors slice it. "If you have a way to make betting more fun, or to otherwise increase consumer investment in betting, the market needs you," said Chris Grove, a managing director at Eilers Krejcik Gaming, an independent research firm. "If you have a way to salve any of the pain points for consumers in the regulated sports betting the learning curve, hassles with payments, ensuring that you're getting the price then the market absolutely needs you." None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. As sports betting and bills are being shepherded through legislatures in at least 15 other states, the early returns show there is plenty of opportunity in what is a familiar but nascent industry. In New Jersey, for example, sportsbooks at Meadowlands Racetrack and their online counterparts have handled more than 1.2 billion in wagers since the market was born in mid June, despite having only three brick and mortar outlets in the early going and no availability for online wagering until August. If retail and online wagering were to become accessible in all 50 states, Eilers Krejcik predicted, sports betting in America could become a 16 billion industry. Figures from regulators in Mississippi and Rhode Island also show an upward trend. New Jersey is on pace to surpass Nevada in sports wagering. And though market oversaturation could eventually slow or halt the industry's rapid growth, that is not a pressing concern. Legalized sports betting has already changed the way some fans consume sports. This month, NBC Sports Washington Plus, a regional sports network, offered an alternate telecast of several Washington Wizards games, starting with one against the Milwaukee Bucks, that looked like a cross between CNBC and ESPNews. Unlike most N.B.A. telecasts, the productions included statistics, odds and point spreads alongside the live action. It was a preview of what game telecasts may look like in a mature sports betting landscape. Last year, for example, 159 million was bet on the Super Bowl legally in Nevada, a respectable take for any business but one that paled in comparison to the estimates of the amount as high as 4.6 billion wagered on the game illegally. This year, with eight states now offering legal sports betting, projections for wagering on Sunday's Super Bowl LIII have risen to more than 325 million, according to PlayUSA, which monitors the legal sports market. That haul is expected to soar as more states bring betting on games out of the realm of corner bar bookies and offshore operators and onto their tax rolls. At the same time, the popularity of fantasy sports and the growing amounts of easily accessible data and analytics have not merely hastened the acceptance of sports betting: They have transformed the nature of fandom. "This is a generational thing, and what we've seen is a perfect storm develop over the last 20 years, with a boom in fantasy sports, the interest in 'moneyball' and the democracy of information through technology," said Chad Millman, the chief content officer at The Action Network, a subscriber based media company. "It's meant that fans have become more opportunistic about their fandom. They think about winning individually, not about rooting for a team." The Action Network runs a website and an app offering data, research and betting tools, as well as general coverage of sports and the nuances of cashing in on them. It also produces a betting show called "I'll Take That Bet" for ESPN , the sports broadcaster's new streaming platform. Millman would not say how many subscribers the Action Network has in its first year, but since April, he said, users of the company's app have logged 13 million bets, and the circulation of the Action Network's email newsletter has grown nearly tenfold, to 240,000. "In general, sports fans want to be smarter than their friends," Millman said. "As sports betting becomes more and more part of the conversation, people are trying to figure out what the language of it is." For now at least, there is a difference between a general sports audience and sports betting audience, a gap Kerney, the former "SportsCenter" anchor, is trying to navigate on her show, created by the bookmaker FanDuel, from the Meadowlands. "Most sports bettors will notice every second on or off the clock, every yard, every pitch, every shot, because any of these can ultimately affect their bets," said Kevin Grigsby, the show's executive producer. "So your story, programming, messaging needs narrative that caters to both cohorts." Kerney and Grigsby's bosses at FanDuel are making a big bet that they can close that gap quickly. FanDuel is owned by the European bookmakers Paddy Power, as is TVG, the cable network that is home to Kerney's show. TVG reaches 40 million homes and gives horseplayers wall to wall coverage of races that they can bet on through a proprietary website or app. As sports betting expands, TVG is poised to also expand programming like Kerney's show. FanDuel already takes bets on all sports. With a more than half century head start on legalized betting, European bookmakers handled more than 13 billion in wagers in 2018, according to Eilers Krejcik. That is a number Paddy Power and other bookmakers expect the United States market to surpass in as few as five to seven years. "The biggest advantage we have right now is that the leagues, the networks, or me and you don't have to pretend anymore that there are not hundreds of millions of dollars bet every day on the games we follow," Kerney said. "We are here to educate and inform but also to become an authority in this space. If we do our jobs, we believe people who follow us will make money." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LINCOLN RHYME: HUNT FOR THE BONE COLLECTOR 8 p.m. on NBC. Human bones are strewn about New York in "The Bone Collector," Jeffery Deaver's 1997 novel about Lincoln Rhyme, a forensics expert who solves cases without leaving his apartment. He works with a younger detective who does the ground work in tracing a serial killer. The book was adapted into a 1999 feature with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, who had only the roughly two hour running time of the film to crack the case. This new TV series adaptation should give its stars more wiggle room. It casts Russell Hornsby as Rhyme, who is left unable to walk after an injury on the job. So he works remotely, electronically communicating with a young officer (played by Arielle Kebbel), who pursues the case's mysteries with Rhyme in her ear. BILL BURR PRESENTS: THE RINGERS 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. The comedians Rosebud Baker, Jordan Temple and Josh Adam Meyers will be the first to appear on this new stand up show from Bill Burr. Episodes are a sampler of rising talent, with three comics each performing a short set, after briefinterviews with Burr. It's an opportunity, Burr explains, for the comics to net "a TV credit that'll get you a hotel room where your door opens up to the hallway, rather than a parking lot." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In the second episode of "Star Trek: Picard," we learn about a super secret group of Romulans, called Zhat Vash. I admit I'm not sure if I'm spelling that correctly, which is partially a good sign: It means there's something new being introduced in the familiar "Trek" universe (or old, depending on how you look at it). I'll also overlook the old television trope of there always being a villain that is truly behind the villains we are already familiar with. But I found this offering of "Picard" to be just as compelling as its premiere. It has some key elements of what made the best episodes of "The Next Generation" strong. For example, characters like Laris and Picard, use deductive reasoning to solve a problem instead of brute force. The stakes are gradually raised as Picard finds out he has some sort of syndrome that is likely terminal. It is unclear whether this is the Irumodic Syndrome that Picard discovers he has in the series finale of "Next Generation," but nevertheless, it gives Picard's story a bit more urgency. By the end of the episode, we've uncovered a mysterious Starfleet related conspiracy that could destabilize the Federation. In this case, Laris refers to the Romulan group as a "cabal" and that the Tal Shiar, seen often throughout different "Trek" iterations, are merely a front for this cultlike institution with a secret. This organization of radicalized Romulans has a particular antipathy for synthetic life forms for a reason that is yet to be revealed. There are other mysteries that need solving, like why the late Dahj seemed to be created only three years before Picard met her. We do know just a bit more than Picard does this villainous and secretive Romulan group perhaps has infiltrated Starfleet for a mysterious purpose. Their plan involves the shady but charismatic Narek (Harry Treadaway), a Romulan agent, who is particularly interested in Dahj's twin sister, Soji Asha. Narek's sister posing as Lieutenant Rizzo at Starfleet headquarters suggests that they are looking for other androids. Soji is working on what appears to be an artifact of a Borg cube, a "Romulan Reclamation Site." This place seems to be, in part, a research facility where former Borg drones are pulled from the collective, much like our old friends Seven of Nine and Hugh, who will show up at some point in this series. "There's nothing very Romulan about this place at all," Narek says in bed with Soji. We don't fully know Narek's intentions yet, other then that he is a Romulan and that Romulans are known to be a treacherous bunch. (It's always a red flag when the person you're involved with tells you not to tell anyone about it.) The episode really takes off when Picard arrives at Starfleet headquarters. You get a sense of just how alienated the legendary figure is from the institution he once revered. Even though he feels a familiar sense of coming home as soon as he walks through the door perfectly played by Patrick Stewart the man at the front desk doesn't even recognize him, much to his chagrin. (It was a nice touch to have a hologram of the Enterprise floating above the door.) The admiral Picard meets with is immediately icy toward him, defensive about Picard's public thrashing of Starfleet. "There is no we," Admiral Clancy says. (It is not clear whether this Clancy is the same character as the one who was an ensign on the Enterprise played by Anne Elizabeth Ramsay in a handful of "Next Generation" episodes.) There is a remarkable exchange as the argument quickly escalates. "Ignore me again at your cost," Picard spits out. "You are in peril, Admiral." "There is no peril here," Clancy responds. "Only the pitiable delusions of a once great man desperate to matter. This is no longer your house, Jean Luc. So do what you were best at. Go home." The gravity of this conversation is stark. For decades, Picard's sole purpose in life was to serve Starfleet. He rarely showed an interest outside of his work. He did not date, save for his love interest in "Star Trek: Insurrection." He did not have his own family. It's not clear he had many friends outside of his crew. The Enterprise, and by extension, Starfleet was his home. That the relationship has deteriorated to the point that a fellow admiral will barely acknowledge his presence is surprising, no matter what has happened in the past. (This wouldn't be the first time Picard has clashed with Starfleet note the events of "Insurrection." But even then, the plot seemed to suggest a rogue Admiral rather than an institution gone wayward.) Any good will Picard built up with the Federation has evaporated. But this argument animates Picard nonetheless. He has a focus we haven't seen since Picard was an active member of Starfleet. He realizes that he is going to have to chart his own path without the Federation's help which would have been unthinkable for much of Picard's life. And of course, Picard is right. Starfleet is in peril. Clancy should have listened to a man whose instincts have saved Earth several times over. It took two episodes, but by the time Picard is putting together his own crew, he feels more comfortable with himself ready to set off on an adventure, perhaps his last one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Justin Peck's "Murder Ballades" (2013) takes its name from Bryce Dessner's score. Is there murder in this choreography? If so, it passed me by. Likewise any murder in the music or decor is a matter strictly for hermeneutics. (My companion, a Peck loyalist, detected graveyard antics in the decor and first duet.) But it's an attractive dance; and both Mr. Dessner's music (played live by the sextet eighth blackbird) and Sterling Ruby's set are more attractive yet. The score has vivid instrumentation, with marvelous upward string slides; and the very handsome, painterly set is an abstract array of rectangles in differently colored patterns. An interesting feature in Mr. Peck's choreography is his recurrent belief in overall structure. Whatever tensions "Murder Ballades" may contain are framed by larger patterns and symmetries; in that respect, this young choreographer is a classical artist. But not a dated one: Pointedly he shows us that same sex partnering can be the equal of male female partnering. (Some modern dance choreographers made this breakthrough in the 1980s, and Mr. Peck is just one of several ballet choreographers this decade who have suddenly caught up.) Everything here is admirable and, alas, forgettable. William Forsythe's "Quintett" (1993), a calling card of the L.A. Dance Project, is a study in surface. In the Gertrude Stein line so often used today, there is no there there. The five dancers deliver marvelous mini phrases that get stuck in a rut; Mr. Forsythe knows about ballet vocabulary and how to mix it with nonballet movement. It's set to Gavin Bryars's famous score "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet," in which the same line is chanted endlessly. You can see what Mr. Forsythe has learned from both George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham in mixing the orthodox with the unorthodox, and with a mind that seems far more inclusive than exclusive. And yet the mood of "Quintett" recalls not those artists but instead Maurice Bejart, that Euro horror of sensationalist choreography, because everything here becomes so showy. Each dancer gets lots of wow effects. One enters like a crab crawling sideways. Penchee arabesques out of nowhere are standard. All of the dancers wheel their arms in big circles to draw attention to the way they step off balance or the fluidity of their torsos. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Chadwick Boseman, Who Starred in 'Black Panther,' Is Mourned as a 'Superhero' After the announcement late Friday that the "Black Panther" star Chadwick Boseman had died, tributes began pouring in on social media from prominent figures in entertainment, politics and beyond. Mr. Boseman, 43, had portrayed pathbreaking Black Americans onscreen, including Jackie Robinson, James Brown and Thurgood Marshall. He died on Friday after a yearslong battle with colon cancer.Within minutes, Martin Luther King III, a human rights activist and the eldest son of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said that the actor had "brought history to life on the silver screen" in his portrayals of Black leaders. "As Black Panther, he was also a superhero to many," Mr. King wrote. "And despite his 4 year long battle with cancer, he kept fighting and he kept inspiring. He will be missed." "You could tell right away that he was blessed," Mr. Obama wrote. "To be young, gifted, and Black; to use that power to give them heroes to look up to; to do it all while in pain what a use of his years." Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for president, wrote that Mr. Boseman's "true power" stretched far beyond Hollywood, and that he had "inspired generations and showed them they can be anything they want even super heroes." He "brought with him not only toys for our patients but also joy, courage and inspiration," the hospital wrote on Twitter. Others, like the HuffPost editor Philip Lewis, called Mr. Boseman a "superhero" for having filmed so many movies while undergoing treatment for cancer. Still other tributes, from people like Oprah Winfrey and Mr. Biden's running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, called attention to Mr. Boseman's humility. "He was a gentle soul and a brilliant artist, who will stay with us for eternity through his iconic performances over his short yet illustrious career," the actor Denzel Washington, who once financed Mr. Boseman's studies at an elite theater program at the University of Oxford, said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. "God bless Chadwick Boseman." Mr. Boseman portrayed the baseball icon Jackie Robinson in "42," in 2013, the soul singer James Brown in "Get On Up," in 2014, and the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall in "Marshall," in 2017. But he was best known for his role as T'Challa, king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, in "Black Panther," the 2018 Marvel superhero movie. "Black Panther," which smashed box office records, was the first major superhero film with an African protagonist, a majority Black cast and a Black writer and director. Some African American moviegoers planned special outings to see it and came dressed in African inspired clothing and accessories. Mr. Boseman played T'Challa in three other Marvel films, including two of the "Avengers" movies. On Friday, many of his co stars from those films tweeted about him in personal terms. "You were always light and love to me," wrote Don Cheadle, who played a superhero called War Machine. "What a man, and what an immense talent," wrote Mark Ruffalo, who played the Hulk. "Brother, you were one of the all time greats and your greatness was only beginning." Bob Iger, executive chairman of the Walt Disney Company (which owns Marvel Entertainment), wrote on Twitter that Mr. Boseman "brought enormous strength, dignity and depth to his groundbreaking role of Black Panther; shattering myths and stereotypes." "For his friends and millions of fans, his absence from the screen is only eclipsed by his absence from our lives," Mr. Iger wrote. Marvel's rival DC Comics, the home of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, praised Mr. Boseman in a tweet with a photo of the actor in his "Black Panther" role. "To a hero who transcends universes," the company said. "Wakanda Forever." As the night wore on, tributes to Mr. Boseman's talents and character came from dozens of actors, directors, musicians, politicians and other celebrities. The list included Beyonce, Serena Williams, Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, Ava DuVernay, Chosen Jacobs, Samuel L. Jackson, Viola Davis, Brie Larson, Representative Ilhan Omar, Sharon Stone and many more. In a statement, the Jackie Robinson Foundation called Mr. Boseman "a consummate professional," touching on his preparation for the movie "42" and the time he spent with Mr. Robinson's wife, Rachel Robinson. "He absorbed every story, every memory and every photo and film excerpt he could consume to help translate the soul of an American hero," the foundation wrote. "And now, Chadwick will be etched in history as a hero in his own right, especially having shown millions of Black and Brown children the power of a superhero who looks like them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In a related article, Elizabeth A. Harris writes about why homelessness is pervasive among college students. Preston Roberson Charles is studying economics at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens. Well spoken and charming, he wears gray Warby Parker glasses and keeps his jeans fashionably rolled at the ankle. Not exactly the stereotype of a homeless person. But for two years, until last December, he lived in New York City's shelter system, hostels and on friends' couches. He agreed to revisit the experience with a reporter and photographer, to share the grim reality for thousands of homeless students across the country. "Being homeless, it's like you're in limbo," said Mr. Roberson Charles, now 29. "You're in this purgatory where you're falling in and out of society. You spend a lot of time by yourself when you're homeless because you get tired of explaining yourself to people." Growing up in Saginaw, Mich., Mr. Roberson Charles liked to watch MTV's "Real World," which throws strangers together in a house and films the sparks as they fly. One cast member, Pedro Zamora, who was openly gay, made a strong impression. Mr. Roberson Charles remembers hearing the word "gay" for the first time a word he would later use to identify himself. He hoped one day to be on the show. So when college didn't go very well he wasn't ready to concentrate on his studies, he said, and dropped out he grabbed for the brass ring and in 2010 was cast in "The Real World: New Orleans," pictured above. (One memorable moment: defiling a roommate's toothbrush, leading to a visit by the police and tabloid headlines.) But reality TV is rarely a career path. He appeared on MTV game shows, traveled, worked as a nanny and lived off savings while trying to figure out what was next. When he sublet a Brooklyn apartment that had bed bugs, his troubles really set in. "The money I was making wasn't sufficient to rent out another room, and I didn't have a deposit," he said, so he started crashing on friends' couches. "It just snowballed. It was like, all right, this is what I'm doing." For about six months, Mr. Roberson Charles slept at friends' places, including scrunching his 6 foot 2 frame onto a blue Ikea sectional in this East Village apartment building. Sometimes, when one of the renters in the apartment was out of town, he would pay to sleep in her bedroom (all told, 1,100). It was hard to revisit the building, he said, because he'd "had a bad falling out" with his friend there. The Garden Inn and Suites near Kennedy International Airport looks like any other cookie cutter airport hotel. The lobby floors are a creamy marble, the hallway carpets worn. A black and gold sign near an elevator directs visitors to meeting rooms with names like the Regent, the Wellington and the Kensington. Then you notice that there are no children around, and hardly any women. The hotel is used as a men's shelter, the city having run out of space in its shelter system. Hotels are not set up for this purpose; they are often far from a subway, and basic shelter services like laundry are lacking. One roommate at the Garden stole Mr. Roberson Charles's laptop, he said, and another took things from his pockets. The pickpocket claimed to have killed someone. Mr. Roberson Charles did not press the issue. He stayed there about a year, during which time he got a job doing phone surveys. He hated it. He was berated and hung up on, but it was work. He kept applying for other jobs. No one even called him back. He realized then that he needed college credentials, and LaGuardia was right across the street from the survey company. He enrolled for the fall semester. Mr. Roberson Charles was moved to another shelter, where he felt even more uncomfortable and desperate. In late October, he left the shelter system but he still did not have money to put down a deposit on an apartment. So he stayed in hostels. One was the Local in Long Island City, with a bar at the front and funky, colorful art lining the walls. He slept in a six person dorm, the cheapest setup on offer at nearly 50 a night. Some hostels require ID that shows guests live elsewhere. Mr. Roberson Charles presented his passport, which lists Michigan. Mr. Roberson Charles got a job on the LaGuardia campus as a counselor at Strive for Success, a program that helps students at risk of dropping out stay in school. On and off last fall, he slept under a desk in his windowless office to save money on the accruing cost of hostels. He would lay a suit bag down on the linoleum and put his coat on top of it. He picked the desk along the same wall as the door so when security guards looked through a small window in the door, they wouldn't see him. In the morning, when the cafeteria began to hum with activity, he knew it was safe to go brush his teeth. While homeless students aren't supposed to spend the night, they are allowed to shower at the gym. Rhonda Mouton, program director of LaGuardia's Single Stop program, which connects low income students with services, said, "If you ever get to college early in the morning, at like 7 a.m., you find students grooming in the bathroom." Today, Mr. Roberson Charles rents a room in Woodside, Queens, for 850 a month. He found it on Craigslist. LaGuardia helped him secure a loan so he could put down a deposit. His bedroom, tidy and bright, is carved out of the living room, separated by a flimsy wall cobbled together out of cheap wardrobes, bookshelves and paper blinds. He padlocks his door a closet door to another piece of the partition when he leaves the apartment, which he shares with four others. With his new home, job and school, he said, he is starting to feel more like himself. But he can't shake the feeling that the other chapter of his life may not be entirely behind him. "I'm on the verge of being back there," he said. "All it takes is one wrong thing, and I'll be right back there." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
ASAP Ferg is the first male rapper to act as a spokesman for Tiffany Co. In a recent interview, he said he planned to use the partnership to teach "kids about wealth versus being rich and just having gaudy jewelry." Nathan Bajar for The New York Times When ASAP Ferg was still a teenager in Harlem, he started making crystal studded pendants. He would sketch designs of characters like Bart Simpson and Mega Man, then hand the drawings over to Earl Harley (also known as "Harley, the buckle man"). Mr. Harley would create the bases for Ferg, who would then add Swarovski crystals and sell the pendants. They cost him about 200 to make; he sold them for about 700 a piece. A decade later, Ferg, born Darold Ferguson Jr., is hawking pricier gems. This month, he became the first male rapper to appear as a spokesman for Tiffany Co., the luxury jeweler. Ferg, 29, is not yet a megastar nor the most famous artist in the ASAP crew (that would be Rocky). But in collaborating with him, Tiffany has aligned itself with a princeling of Harlem fashion who aims to honor the legacy of his father, the designer Darold Ferguson Sr., by out accomplishing him. During a recent interview at The Blue Box Cafe at the Tiffany flagship store on Fifth Avenue, Ferg was frank about the mutual interest driving the partnership. "I feel like we open up doors for each other," he said of Tiffany. "I show them my world, they show me their world." In working with him, the jewelry brand follows other luxury brands that have sought to reupholster their stuffy brand images by collaborating with luminaries of the hip hop world. The conglomerate LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton recruited Jay Z as a brand ambassador for its Hublot watches in 2011, and in the years since, it has been rewarded with hundreds of bars, from his songs and others', testifying to the status of its brands. Virgil Abloh, Kanye West's longtime creative director, was tapped in March as the artistic director of men's wear at Louis Vuitton. And in January, Gucci opened a studio with the Harlem fashion legend Dapper Dan, who worked with Ferg's father and is close enough with the rapper to refer to him as his nephew. Before Mr. Ferguson Sr. died of kidney failure in 2005, days before Ferg's 17th birthday, he designed T shirts for stars like Teddy Riley and Heavy D and logos, like the one he created for Bad Boy Records. Also in 2005, Ferg started his own line, Devoni Clothing. "I always ask my grandmother, when did my father have his first car, when did my father have his first apartment," he said. "That was a way of measuring myself." Eventually, Rocky, who had known Ferg for years, helped convince him to start making music in addition to designing clothing. A couple of studio albums and mixtapes into his career, Ferg now feels as if he's beginning to reach a new level of fame. Ferg's love of jewelry is obvious in his music. The first verse of his highest charting song to date, a remix of his 2018 single "Plain Jane," opens with him decked out in a chain he had made in honor of his friend ASAP Yams, the mastermind behind the ASAP crew, who died in 2015. In a song he created with the actress Elle Fanning, "Moon River," he raps about a Tiffany grill with all gold filling. If such a piece were real, it would be the first grill manufactured by the company. ("I'm a strong believer in talking things into existence and I've gotten everything I wanted so far," Ferg said.) These days, he cares less about flash. He said he believes in the artistic value of the jewelry he's promoting referring to himself as a "a walking MoMA installation" but also understands what it could mean for young people to see him wearing gold from Tiffany Co. "I couldn't afford anything in here so I never walked in the store," he said, gesturing at the room. "Kids, I can imagine them feeling the same way, they didn't have anything to connect to." He imagined what he might say to someone from his neighborhood: "I came from where you came from. You could attain this as well." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
It was 8:30 a.m. on a beautiful Saturday near the end of the school year, but the 127 teachers in Newark that day came ready to work: Not only were they attending a conference, they were also coming up with the conference topics from scratch, on the spot. Scrawling ideas on sticky notes, they swarmed a grid showing room numbers and times and claimed their spaces; in a few minutes, the morning's schedule was set. Interested in "Cultivating a Growth Mind set"? Head to Room 203. "Supporting Youth Activism and Civic Engagement"? 204. "Building a 'Black Panther' Curriculum"? Join the team in 301. In contrast to the kind of professional development many teachers are used to one size fits all presentations by an administrator or outside expert the Newark conference was an Edcamp, an innovative form of training with no predetermined speakers or sessions, led by the participants themselves. Or, as Kisha Slaughter put it in Newark that morning: "Edcamps are more of a conversation than a presentation." Ms. Slaughter, a 39 year old math teacher at Marion P. Thomas, the charter school that hosted the Newark event, was at the conference even though she was not being paid to attend or receiving credit. Her school offers regular professional development, or PD, but she said she did not find it very useful. "We have official PD every Friday and they'll tell us how to do something like how to 'differentiate' our students and I'm sitting there as a 13 year veteran and I'm thinking, 'I could teach this,' " she said. That frustration is at the heart of several new ways teachers are taking training into their own hands. Through social media educators are one of the largest professional groups on Twitter as well as in person meetups, they are reaching beyond their schools to find like minded teachers who can act as their Personal Learning Networks, or PLNs. For some, taking charge of their own development might mean being part of a regular conversation on Twitter like the social studies teachers who, via the hashtag sschat, share resources, discuss issues and cheer each other on every Monday night. For others, like those in the 10 a.m. "Student Engagement" session in Newark that day, it could mean sharing stories, problems and solutions with 18 other educators who know exactly how they feel when they've tried everything from games to reward systems and nothing is working with that fifth period class. At a time when thousands of demoralized teachers are walking out of schools, Edcamps offer both community and empowerment. They also fill a gap between the mandatory professional development a school provides and the large traditional conferences that teachers must often pay out of pocket to attend if, that is, their school district will allow them the time off. Edcamps are "soul refilling, a booster shot, a way to realize you're not alone," said Robert Dillon, 44, the director of Innovative Learning at the School District of University City in St. Louis and one of the founders of EdcampSTL. This year his camp attracted nearly 600 people from states across the Midwest. The first Edcamp took place in Philadelphia in 2010, after teachers there attended a local technology industry unconference called BarCamp and realized how well a similar event could work for educators. From there it grew, and eight years later more than 2,100 camps have been held in 33 countries, according to Hadley Ferguson, 63, a former middle school history teacher, who was one of the founders of the original camp and is now the executive director of the Edcamp Foundation. Created in 2013, the foundation has largely been supported since 2015 by grants of nearly 4 million from the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, and its work has begun to creep into traditional education spaces. Large education conferences like ASCD and NCTE have added Edcamp like sessions to their programs, and in 2014 and 2015, the United States Department of Education experimented with the model, holding Edcamps of its own in Washington. This year, a partnership between the Edcamp Foundation and PBS has brought the philosophy to a new audience of early childhood educators and with it, raised new issues to discuss. At a recent camp for those who work with 1 to 3 year olds, "What do we do about biting?" was a hot topic. Juli Anne Benjamin, 46, an instructional coach at Marion P. Thomas Charter School, is an unconference veteran who not only founded EdcampNewark, but also started EdcampBrooklyn. She said she is beginning to see more principals and superintendents at these events and knows they often take the philosophy back to their schools. Some districts are even beginning to offer their teachers professional development credits to attend. In fact, Michael Johanek, who directs a Mid Career Doctorate program in Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, said his program is helping to spread the idea by running camps specifically for school leaders so they can experience them firsthand. He acknowledges that, at first, there can be resistance to the idea. "Right away some raise the question, 'What if the teachers in the room have limited knowledge about the issues they want to discuss?'" But that very hesitation is one reason Edcamps have become so popular. The model "leans against this kind of cultural bias against teachers," he said, adding that administrators willing to experiment with them often discover leaders among their staff they didn't know were there. For Ms. Benjamin, involving those leaders is important, but her main goal in Newark that Saturday was welcoming another audience often missing from Edcamps teachers of color. "We have this amazing tool for professional learning, but black people just like me have sat in so many PD sessions over the years and wondered, 'Is anyone going to talk about cultural responsiveness?' These teachers have to know they're invited in." Because Edcamps are designed to address teachers' immediate needs, the topics that bubble up there are often far ahead of where packaged development programs can be. In the early years, Ms. Ferguson said, participants shared cutting edge tech tools. Now, as the camps reach a wider audience, the conversations have expanded to take on tough political issues like equity and access for all students. Dr. Dillon has watched the St. Louis camp evolve since it began in 2012. At its February 2015 event, held just three months after the grand jury decision in the shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, Mo., much of the conversation focused on creating a "Ferguson syllabus" with strategies for talking about race in the classroom. "Those conversations have been a beautiful part of what's happened at Edcamp," he said. "We've really grown." Anyone who visits an Edcamp today can "get the pulse of what's on the minds of teachers." Ms. Ferguson has goals for the foundation. Most camps happen just once a year, and though they generate good feeling and professional connections, she wants to help teachers build more sustained relationships across schools. And there is still a big divide between teachers who are digitally connected and those who are not. "One of our goals is to break out of our digital bubble," she said. At EdcampNewark, the model seemed to be working as intended. Ms. Slaughter, the math teacher, put her own session, "Brain Breaks," on the afternoon schedule. "I saw other people do it, and somewhere in the day I got inspired," she said. It was a hit: the room was packed as teachers gathered to suggest tools to help students "rejuvenate" during 90 minute block periods. "Such a simple idea," Ms. Benjamin said after it was over, "but if you were a new teacher, that session answered prayers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Our weekday morning digest that includes consumer news, deals, tips and anything else that travelers may want to know. One of the world's most acclaimed restaurants, the Copenhagen based Noma, renowned for using foraged foods, is heading to Sydney for its second temporary residency abroad. Starting in January, Noma will shut down in Copenhagen and relocate for a 10 week period to Sydney Harbour, in a new waterfront development known as Barangaroo. Just as it did this past winter, when it moved to Tokyo, Noma will take its entire staff from chef to dishwasher, along with spouses and children over to Sydney. The restaurant plans to serve lunch and dinner five days a week, with bookings available later this year on its website. "I have always been attracted to the incredible diversity you find in Australia's landscapes and ingredients, because they are like no other place I've seen before," said Rene Redzepi, Noma's chef, said in an announcement. "Australia combines strong influences from its Indigenous people with new communities from around the world. When you mix it all together, the result is something truly inspiring. It really is the perfect place to come and learn." Routehappy, a website that rates flights based on amenities and comfort, will begin detailing food on board and include the data in its happiness ratings, a one to 10 scale that takes into account aircraft model, seat pitch, seat configuration, power availability, entertainment options and Wi Fi. The website now identifies the availability of food and whether it is free or provided for a fee on over 100 airlines. According to the site, United States carriers typically offer food for sale on domestic flights that are longer than about 700 miles. LOT Polish Airlines announced this week it would expand service to the United States in 2016. Starting in January, LOT will schedule daily flights from Warsaw to Kennedy International Airport in New York and Chicago O'Hare Airport. The airline is also bulking up its European network, in an effort to make Warsaw a connecting hub for passengers coming from the United States. Travelers will soon be able to connect to more than a dozen European destinations, including Venice, beginning in January, and Ljubljana, in March. LOT will also add direct flights to Tokyo in January. LOT is a member of the Star Alliance along with United Airlines. Thai Airways, another Star Alliance member, said over the weekend that it would eliminate its flights between Los Angeles and Bangkok, a money losing route and the last of the airline's operations in the United States, according to a report by Reuters. Thai ended its unprofitable route to New York in 2008. The announcement came as the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this week gave Thailand 65 days to correct some critical safety issues the agency found with the country's commercial aviation industry. Failure to comply could lead to a ban of Thai airlines flying to the United States. Carnival Corporation, parent of Costa Cruises, announced yesterday that it has ordered two megaships for the Italian line's fleet, with launches expected in 2019 and 2020. Each of the two 180,000 gross ton ships will be able to accommodate 6,600 passengers, making them the largest in the world by number of guests. The current largest ships, Royal Caribbean's twin ships Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas, accommodate about 5,400 passengers each. Carnival's new ships will both have Italian themes, through their interior design, food and entertainment choices. In a first for the industry, Carnival said the ships will be powered by liquefied natural gas. The two new ships will be built by the German shipbuilder Meyer Werft at the company's shipyard in Turku, Finland. CroisiEurope, which owns and operates 43 cruising ships, primarily on Europe rivers, has added nine new itineraries in 2016 in France, Germany and Hungary. Several of the new trips feature four ships CroisiEurope plans to launch in 2016, including the 24 passenger barge Deborah, which will run seven day itineraries along the Loire (from 2,738 per person, for double occupancy) and the new 80 passenger paddle wheel ship Elbe Princesse, which will accommodate nine day journeys from Berlin to Prague (from 3,087). Travelers booking any 2016 cruise before Oct. 31 will receive a 10 percent discount on fares by using the code BOOK2016 online. Introduced this week, ThemeGo offers advice and reviews of 24 major theme parks around the world, including Disney, Universal and SeaWorld parks. Founded by Yariv Padva, a Tel Aviv based theme park fan, the site aims to consolidate information on competing parks for travelers, provide recommendations on top attractions, restaurants and hotels at the parks, and offer a platform for user reviews. For now, users can build daily itineraries on the site and bookmark them for reference at the park. In the next few weeks, the site promises to offer hotel bookings. Full travel packages including flights, accommodation and theme park entry will be added later this year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
MUSIC PLAYING SPEAKING SPANISH MUSIC PLAYING You're right, Grandma. I'm a pretty great actor. The best in the world is a big statement, but sure. Gracias, Abuelita. Watch out, Denzel. Abuelita didn't know the rules. Mission No. 1 in L.A., go unnoticed, sort of. Blend in, not too edgy, and too soft. Be you, if you are something we all see you as make sense? It's tough. Be the best and stand out while blending in, got it? It takes time, practice, and thick skin, but not too thick or too dark, OK? Signed, Hollywood. Man, you've come a long way, Chris, Since that acting school big thick ass Dominican 'fro you used to rock. Calm your curls, Rivas, calm your curls, Rivas, calm your curls. There's a conversation you don't want to have anymore. You've been sitting in this chair for six years calming these curls so you can look like something classic and unidentifiable. Mr. Rivas, have a seat and listen up. Now, your job, as a man of color, isn't to stand out, but to fit in, to fit the roles they want you to play. And you have fit in. You have done a real good job of fitting in. Congrats, Rivas, on a life of blending in in response to the stories and heroes on TV played by the white boys who don't look like you. Their hair don't curl the same way. But you too want to tell these stories. And so you chop. You get a cut that says, yeah, I can fit into your boxes. For who do I want to look this way? Do I really want to kick it on fake stoops in fake urban cities on fake landscapes with a bunch of brown people with crew cuts? Will I get everything I ever wanted, only to realize it is a nightmare to be seen by eyes that don't actually see you? In jungles, you find your pack. In prison, you find the ones who will protect you. In Hollywood, if you look as ethnically ambiguous as you, and you want to play the game, then you've got to know the rules, their rules, and you've got to play the part. And that means code switching, and staying out of the sun, and keeping your thick curls at bay, because it's all a part of survival. That's it, huh? Survival? That's grim. That's bleak, Rivas. Montages of false people, people of color, it's not you, it's not our friends, it's not our family, it's not the people we love, so who cares? I want to care. You want to care. You want to thrive, I know. Thrive, don't just survive, and leave a good tip. MUSIC PLAYING | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
PARTNERS IN DESIGN: ALFRED H. BARR JR. AND PHILIP JOHNSON at the Grey Art Gallery (through Dec. 9). Five minutes on StreetEasy, browsing through seven figure "contemporary" condos whose furniture was designed a century ago, should offer all the proof necessary that Modernism will never die. This intriguing if incomplete exhibition reveals how two young, Bauhaus mad men of MoMA Barr, the museum's first director, and Johnson, its first architecture curator imported European design to the United States, and showcased it not only in their new museum but also in their own apartments. Johnson had family money, and hired Mies van der Rohe to kit out his apartment with a rosewood chest, a spare tea table, and a camel colored Barcelona chair; Barr, who had to work for a living, ordered entirely passable knockoffs from Ypsilanti, Mich. This show is too small for its subject, but if you're into Modernist revivals, you'll do better here than at the ghastly new restaurant in Johnson's old Four Seasons. (Jason Farago) 212 998 6780, greyartgallery.nyu.edu 'STREAMS AND MOUNTAINS WITHOUT END: LANDSCAPE TRADITIONS OF CHINA' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 6, 2019). If you've seen only ash aired Beijing, or that architectural Oz Shanghai, you haven't seen China. Most of the country is wide open space, green and blue: hills, plains, water. And it was for an escape to that openness that some Chinese urbanites yearned in centuries past. Their dream: to sit in on a terrace halfway up a mountain, with tea steeping, an ink brush at hand, a friend at the door, and a waterfall splashing nearby. Not just for vacation. Forever. One way they could live the dream was through images of the kind seen in this show. Technically, it's a collection reinstallation spiced with a few loans. But the Met's China holdings are so broad and deep that some of the pictures here are resurfacing for the first time in almost a decade; one is finally making its debut a century after it was acquired. And there's more than just paintings on view: ceramics, textiles and scholar's rocks fill out the panorama. (Holland Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In her online profile, Abigail seems like the perfect nanny, and that's what Tom and Evelyn need to make their problem go away. They've been dealing with this hassle ever since Tom's brother died and left his young children in their care. What with their go go global lifestyle so many planes to catch, so many TED Talk style lectures to give they're a less than ideal choice, guardian wise. Surely the children's upbringing is an obligation they can outsource? "We're really looking for someone to take over the kids completely," Tom tells Abigail shortly into the job interview, and if he speaks with the obliviousness of the egregiously entitled, that doesn't deter the levelheaded nanny from signing on. The children, Miles and Flora, live with a housekeeper at Tom and Evelyn's country home, and soon Abigail moves there to join them. In the interest of full disclosure, her new employers might have mentioned that the place is riddled with ghosts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Not snow, not rain, not gusting winds or the Great Depression have caused the cancellation of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in its 96 year history. On Thursday it seems poised to power through a pandemic. The other parades of New York City have fallen one by one, as city and state officials determined it would be unsafe to proceed with the St. Patrick's Day Parade, the Pride March and the Puerto Rican Day Parade because they draw such huge crowds. The West Indian American Day Parade on Labor Day was forced to go virtual for similar reasons. But the Thanksgiving Day Parade is sailing forth, largely because the millions who typically attend have been told to stay home and the event has been scaled down to a television show, albeit one that many view as itself a ritual marker of the holiday. So the parade route will be one block long, not two miles. Those high school bands from around the country will not be marching, and instead of some 2,000 balloon handlers to coordinate, there will only be about 130. But anyone who thinks staging this year's parade has been a layup, not a singular feat of logistical legerdemain, has been dipping too deeply into the holiday punch. Starting in March, the parade planners at Macy's and NBC, which airs the event, had to rip up the carefully calibrated script and come up with an entirely new blueprint, one that evolved as new questions surfaced day after day. What are the physics of flying the balloons, typically handled by people, if one uses squat utility vehicles instead? How to arrange for socially distanced stage numbers that capture the magic of Broadway without endangering anyone's health? How to break it to the balloon handlers and the marching bands, some of whom view the parade as somewhere between a lifelong dream and a religious event, that they won't be involved this year? "What I knew about Thanksgiving Day a month ago is different from what I know now," said Susan Tercero, who is the executive producer of the event for Macy's. "How do you plan something in June that's going to happen in November when you have no idea where the country is going to be at then?" History has set a high bar for canceling the parade, which has gone off every year since 1924, except for three years during World War II. Instead, the planners kept in communication with city and state officials and responded as evidence of a second wave in New York mounted, reducing the number of participants a second time from 25 percent of their typical work force to 12 percent. Instead of about 8,000 people working a packed parade route in a normal year, the efforts of 960 people are being spread over three days of filming. The giant balloons were cut to 12 from 16, the floats to 18 from 26. At one point, the parade planners had imagined a shortened route that still allowed for some travel down Manhattan streets. But even that was determined to be too much of an invitation for crowds, and officials ultimately landed on a stub of parade route on 34th Street between the Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue. The result, in effect, is a broadcast set based around Macy's flagship department store, where much of the parade has been pretaped. Macy's is adamant that there will be nothing to see for spectators on Thursday and police officers have been assigned to disperse any crowds that might develop. Still, police officials have reduced the detail that usually works the parade by 80 percent, said Terence A. Monahan, the chief of department. "It's a lot less work for us, that's for sure," he said. "But I'd rather be challenged to protect hundreds of thousands of people out enjoying the parade than protecting a show that people watch on TV." Also disappointed are the high school and college marching bands that had been selected for the lineup. Usually, Wesley Whatley, the parade's creative producer, flies across the country to surprise band members with the news that they had scored spots on the parade route. This year, his tour ended before it started. The parade planners toyed with the idea of sending out film crews to capture the marching bands on their home turf, but that idea was dropped because it would involve a lot of cross country travel, and in many cases, the young band members would have been learning remotely, away from school for several months, and unable to practice in person. Eventually, Mr. Whatley called the directors of bands set to perform this year with the news that they could not come in November, but that they were saving them spots for the 2021 parade. The bands set for 2021 would move to 2022. Also staying home will be most of the balloon handlers. Typically, each giant balloon from the 49 foot tall Astronaut Snoopy to the 53 foot tall Pikachu is guided by 80 to 100 uniformed handlers. Those numbers were untenable during a pandemic. So the parade team hatched a plan to offset the weight of the balloon handlers with a formation of five utility vehicles (in a typical year, each giant balloon would have just one of these vehicles anchoring it in the center). The parade's engineering team used the weight of the vehicle plus two "standard" 175 pound people a total of 2,985 pounds to calculate the proper formation of handlers underneath the balloons, said Kathleen Wright, the parade's production director. Each of the large balloons will have about 25 humans assigned to them, either walking or riding in the utility vehicles down the blocklong parade route. One handler who made the cut was Kathy Kramer, a Macy's employee who has been on the balloon team for 36 years. She is a balloon pilot, who walks backward about 30 yards in front of the balloon and directs the handlers using hand signals and a whistle. But this year, Ms. Kramer will be wearing a mask and she discovered during practice runs that it was too difficult to operate a whistle, so Macy's shifted to hand held electric whistles. The balloons are being inflated overnight on the broadcast set before they fly down 34th Street. Some will make the trip live on Thanksgiving Day. Others will have had pretaped flights. "Even though it's a short parade this year, my stomach will start to churn on Monday and it will continue to do so until we deflate," Ms. Kramer said. In another bow to a special year, Macy's has organized it so that some groups whose parades were canceled will now have a place in the Thanksgiving event. So parade watchers on television can expect to see the New York Fire Department's Emerald Society band with their bagpipes and bearskin hats and the Lesbian Gay Big Apple Corps Marching Band, in their rainbow sashes, all pretaped. The dancers, stilt walkers and steel pan players who would have lit up Eastern Parkway for Carnival are being taped on Wednesday. But they will start getting their makeup done on Tuesday night because the process can take hours, said Anne Rhea Smith, vice president of the West Indian American Day Carnival Association. She said she hopes the makeup session will resemble the preparations and feel of a typical carnival eve in Brooklyn. In replacing the absences of the parades of past months, this event will become something of an ode to New York, at one time the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States and a cultural beacon that went largely dark in recent months. So while visitors to Lincoln Center cannot see "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker," this year, viewers of the parade will be able to see Ashley Bouder, a New York City Ballet principal dancer, perform as the pink tutu ed Sugarplum Fairy. Similarly, numbers from four Broadway shows, shuttered since March, were taped in Times Square in advance of Thanksgiving week and will be part of the parade. And despite the cancellation of the "Christmas Spectacular" at Radio City Music Hall, 18 of the 80 Rockettes will appear in their wooden soldiers costume with custom made masks. (That particular Rockettes number was chosen because the dancers have limited contact with one another, which means no kickline.) Hovering over the hectic planning process has been the sense that New Yorkers, and Americans, need this spirited display of joy at a time when there is much to be sad about. That mission was also evident in 1963, six days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when amid nationwide mourning, Macy's decided against canceling the parade. The parade went on again in 2001, as New York struggled to recover from the 9/11 attacks. The poignancy of the moment was noted in some patriotic touches: a Lady Liberty float replaced Tom Turkey, for example, and the red and white candy canes in Santa's sleigh wore ribbons of red, white and blue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is finding itself in an unfamiliar position: as a lightning rod for the fierce debate over the Obama administration's role in the Syrian civil war. The museum is facing withering criticism after pulling a study that it commissioned on Syria and published online Aug. 29. The report examined whether alternate strategies could have lessened the bloodshed, now in its sixth year. Museum leaders and the study's authors had sought lessons on how a future president could mitigate similar crises. Though the authors found much to dislike in President Obama's decisions on Syria, they also concluded that no single American action would have guaranteed a significant reduction in the violence there. Critics of the study have portrayed that conclusion as an attempt to let Mr. Obama off the hook for the killings in Syria a weighty charge for the Holocaust museum to confront, given that it is a moral force on issues of war, mass killings and government intervention. The museum ultimately pulled down the study after receiving complaints from allies. Since then, the museum has been caught in a political debate and faced questions about academic freedom and the board's ties to the Obama administration. The Times reached out to all 63 museum board members who are presidential appointees or members of Congress, as well as other museum officials. Interviews show that the museum was caught off guard by the impact and furor that its own report would have, and at least some board members were unaware that the museum was wading into a debate about atrocities in Syria. Leon Wieseltier, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the former literary editor of The New Republic, is among the critics of both the study's findings and its publication. He said the museum did the right thing by pulling it a move that was first reported by Tablet magazine. "The Holocaust museum, if it stands for anything, stands for the idea that we should always act against genocide and that there's something forever wrong and unsatisfying about the idea that we can do nothing to alleviate radical evil," Mr. Wieseltier said in an interview. "This paper basically whitewashes the Obama administration's inaction on Syria and says that there's nothing we can do." That characterization, echoed by other critics, incorrectly describes the report, according to several academics and Syria watchers. They also said the study's removal sets a troubling precedent for suppressing independent research. "It's absolutely shocking that they would pull a report simply because their supporters didn't like the conclusions, which is the only way to interpret what they did," said Marc Lynch, an international affairs professor at George Washington University and one of several experts interviewed by the study's authors. The museum, which opened in Washington in 1993 and operates with a mix of federal funding and private donations, has not explained its decision beyond a brief statement on its website citing "concerns" from "a number of people with whom we have worked closely on Syria." The study was commissioned a year ago by a think tank within the museum, the Simon Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. The think tank is overseen by the museum's Committee on Conscience and undertakes research to help guide policy makers "to prevent or, if necessary, halt genocide and related crimes against humanity." The center's director, Cameron Hudson, a National Security Council official under President George W. Bush who also worked on Sudan policy under Mr. Obama, said in a statement that the center had "clearly missed the mark" in seeking to "foster a constructive dialogue about how future genocide and mass atrocities can be prevented." Several members of the Committee on Conscience said they did not know about the Syria study until it was published online. Another member, Elliott Abrams, a leading conservative foreign policy expert and former museum board member, said he learned about it the day before it was posted. "I don't think I was the first person," said Mr. Abrams, who served under President Ronald Reagan and President George W. Bush. Mr. Abrams added that he had not asked the museum to pull the study and was unaware of who had. Ms. Bloomfield declined several requests for an interview over the last week. Of the 63 trustees whom The Times contacted, many did not respond. Those who did either declined to comment or said that they had not heard of the study until its publication. Mr. Wieseltier said he had written to a museum official he was friends with to register his outrage but had not asked for it to be withdrawn. Mr. Hudson said no trustees had been involved in the study or its withdrawal. He did not respond to further inquiries. None of the study's authors would comment. Of the eight sitting federal lawmakers who are trustees, two responded. Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, had no comment on the study, a spokesman said. Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, said he supported the decision to remove it. "Of all the monuments and symbols in our nation's capital, none has a more important message than the Holocaust museum," Mr. Hatch said in a statement. "It would be a tragedy for that message to be even slightly diminished by partisan politics." Menachem Z. Rosensaft, who was appointed as a museum trustee by President Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama, said that he learned of the report after it was published, and understood the decision to pull it. Mr. Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell University and Columbia University, said, "It leaves the option of discussing the report internally, deciding whether or not to keep it pulled, deciding whether to repost it, or deciding to post or publish it but in a broader context together with other opinions." Though publicly unavailable, the study is circulating among academics as a sort of email attachment samizdat. On social media, many researchers have hailed the study's rigor. As more people read the report, anger over its removal has grown. Speculation flew among conservatives on social media that Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama's deputy national security adviser and an architect of Mr. Obama's Syria policy, was involved in the study, since he was named to the museum's board before leaving the White House. Mr. Rhodes denied this and said in an email that he learned of the study only earlier this month. Mr. Abrams, the Republican foreign policy expert, said that it was unfair to characterize the study as being designed by former administration officials to exonerate Mr. Obama. "I was on the board for I think it was nine years," Mr. Abrams said. "I did not see one single case in which there was political influence on a staff product." The Obama administration's role in the civil war, in which hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been displaced, has been a divisive topic in weighing Mr. Obama's legacy. The 193 page study is ambitious and highly technical. The authors applied five research models to project the outcomes of five alternate strategies that Mr. Obama could have pursued, effectively producing 25 distinct scenarios, each with its own lessons and nuances. Of the 25, five found solid evidence that the examined strategy, had Mr. Obama pursued it, would have worked better. Six found that the alternate strategy would have been worse. Some were contradictory. In addition, the authors, in evaluating the strategy Mr. Obama did pursue, found his administration did too much in some moments, worsening the violence, and too little in others. They declined to endorse Mr. Obama's approach or the more aggressive policies commonly championed by his critics. Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa divisions, said in an email that she was "disappointed" that the museum withdrew the research. The study "revealed through rigorous inquiry just how difficult it is to be certain that military intervention will do more good than harm in dynamics as complex as Syria's," Ms. Whitson said, "especially when you factor in the disastrous U.S. record for military intervention in the region." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
WASHINGTON In addition to a deadly pandemic and a weakened economy, President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will inherit one more challenge when he takes office in January: a toxic relationship with the world's second largest economy. President Trump has placed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of products from China, imposed sanctions on Chinese companies and restricted Chinese businesses from buying American technology a multiyear onslaught aimed at forcing Beijing to change its trade practices and as punishment for its authoritarian ways. He shows no sign of letting up in his final days in office: On Thursday, Mr. Trump issued an executive order barring investments in Chinese firms with military ties. The hard choices for Mr. Biden will include deciding whether to maintain tariffs on about 360 billion worth of Chinese imports, which have raised costs for American businesses and consumers, or whether to relax those levies in exchange for concessions on economic issues or other fronts, like climate change. Mr. Biden will need to walk a careful line. He and his advisers view many of Mr. Trump's measures, which were aimed at severing ties between the Chinese and American economies, as clumsy, costly and unstrategic. They say they want to take a smarter approach that combines working with the Chinese on some issues like global warming and the pandemic, while competing with them on technological leadership and confronting them on other issues like military expansionism, human rights violations or unfair trade. In a speech on Monday, Mr. Biden promised to make significant investments into American industry, including 300 billion in technology industries that he said would create three million "good paying" jobs, as well as channeling more government dollars into purchasing American products like automobiles and pharmaceuticals. "We're going to invest in American workers and make them more competitive," Mr. Biden said. He added that he would ensure that labor unions and environment groups were "at the table" in any trade negotiations and push for the United States, rather than China, to set the world's trading rules, along with other democracies. "The idea that we are poking our finger in the eyes of our friends and embracing autocrats makes no sense to me," Mr. Biden said. Even if Mr. Biden departs from Mr. Trump's punishing approach, his administration will be eager to maintain leverage over China to accomplish its own policy goals. And the new administration will face pressure from lawmakers in both parties who view China as a national security threat and have introduced legislation aimed at penalizing Beijing for its human rights abuses, global influence operations and economic practices. Mr. Biden has given few details about his plans for U.S. China relations, other than saying he wants to recruit American allies such as Europe and Japan to pressure China to make economic reforms, like protecting intellectual property. He has pledged to devote more resources to enhancing American manufacturing capacity, infrastructure and technological development, to ensure the United States retains an edge over China even as it invests huge sums in fields like telecommunications, artificial intelligence and semiconductors. But Mr. Biden will face pressure from both parties not to revert to the approach that he and many of his predecessors had earlier embraced in trying to transform China's economic practices by bringing it into the global economy. Like many Democrats and Republicans in the 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Biden argued that integrating China into the global trading system would force Beijing to play by international rules, to the benefit of American workers. In 2000, he voted to grant China permanent normal trading relations, which paved the way for China's entry into the World Trade Organization and deeper global economic ties. In 2016, Mr. Trump won the presidency in part by loudly rejecting that approach, arguing that the United States needed to isolate, not integrate, Beijing. 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. Two decades later, Mr. Biden acknowledges that China exploited the international system, and he has called for a more aggressive approach. Mr. Biden has said the United States must get "tough with China," and referred to Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, as a "thug." Congress is also relatively unified on taking a tough stance on China. Hundreds of China related bills are circulating, including several bipartisan efforts that echo Mr. Biden's emphasis on competing with China by investing in American industries like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Mr. Biden's first moves could also be dictated by Mr. Trump's final months. Many trade experts say they are concerned that Mr. Trump, who has promised to make China "pay" for not doing enough to contain the coronavirus, could amp up his economic fight. Several of Mr. Trump's aides are bitter at China for its role as the source of the coronavirus, which they see as a major contributor to Mr. Trump's loss, people familiar with their thinking say. One area of focus is the trade deal that Mr. Trump signed with Chinese officials in January. While China has largely kept commitments to open up its markets to American companies and Mr. Trump's advisers have continued to defend the pact, Beijing has fallen far behind schedule in its promise to buy an additional 200 billion of goods and services by the end of next year. Mr. Trump's most likely path will be to leave the deal intact, said Chris Rogers, a global trade and logistics analyst at Panjiva. But he wouldn't rule out "a scorched earth policy where China is declared to be in violation of its Phase 1 trade deal commitments and there's a return to tariff escalation," he said. "President elect Biden will be left holding the pieces if the deal is broken," Mr. Rogers added. And the president shows no signs of backing off a confrontational approach in other areas. On Friday, his administration is expected to begin economic talks with Taiwan that are likely to rankle Beijing. His advisers are considering other measures to punish China in the coming weeks, including sanctions related to China's security crackdowns in Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has carried out mass detentions and harsh policing of ethnic minorities. "We are worried that he's going to do some rash things that aren't going to make sense for the future of the country or global stability," said Rufus Yerxa, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents major multinational companies. "Given the history of President Trump's use of executive authority, we're taking nothing for granted in these next few months." Still, "most of what he could do is through executive orders and executive actions, which can be reversed by a Biden administration," Mr. Yerxa added. Whether Mr. Biden opts to roll back Mr. Trump's more punitive measures will depend, at least in part, on China's future behavior, including whether it pursues more aggressive incursions into the South China Sea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, people close to his campaign say. Beijing has recently endorsed a policy of greater technological self reliance and a stronger military to protect itself from a more antagonistic United States, and moved ahead with cementing other economic partnerships. On Sunday, China signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a pan Asian trade pact that includes Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Vietnam, and will help cement China's image as the dominant economic power in the region. In his remarks Monday, Mr. Biden argued for America to regain leadership in the trade sphere. "We make up 25 percent of the world's trading capacity of the economy in the world," he said. "We need to be aligned with the other democracies, another 25 percent or more, so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town." Mr. Biden's appointments for trade and foreign policy posts could help determine his approach toward China, though it remains unclear whom he might nominate for such critical jobs as secretary of state and commerce and the United States trade representative. Similar to Mr. Biden himself, many of his closest advisers have a moderate track record on trade and China, believing they can work with Chinese leaders on some issues even as they challenge them on others. But several of his national security advisers are more skeptical of China. No matter the path, business groups, economists and others are hoping for a coherent strategy that does not result in the type of economic brinkmanship Mr. Trump appeared to thrive on. While Democrats and Republicans have credited Mr. Trump with drawing attention to China's security threats, and its unfair economic practices like intellectual property theft, his dealings with China have also been transactional and inconsistent. In an attempt to secure a trade deal, Mr. Trump lavished praise on Mr. Xi, delayed sanctions against China's human rights violations for months and pardoned the Chinese company ZTE for running afoul of U.S. law. And he has employed racist and xenophobic language, like calling the coronavirus the "kung flu," that has fueled attacks on people of Asian descent around the country. "The Trump administration never did lay out a coherent, comprehensive, engaged trade strategy," said Thea M. Lee, an economist and the president of the Economic Policy Institute. "It was much more scattershot: Throw up a tariff here, do a deal with China, disparate elements that didn't seem to talk to each other." "But there are a lot of tools in that toolbox, and I would like to see the Biden administration be thoughtful and strategic about how to use them," Ms. Lee said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
WASHINGTON As finishing touches are put on the most comprehensive rewriting of financial rules since the Depression, a 57 year old former law professor is emerging as one of the most influential financial regulators in the United States. For all the criticism of the Federal Reserve for failing to anticipate and prevent the financial crisis, the central bank and its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, are emerging with vast new responsibilities to safeguard the financial system. Alongside Mr. Bernanke is Daniel K. Tarullo, who was President Obama's first appointment to the central bank's board of governors, and who believes that re engineering the regulatory system could soften the blow of a future crisis. "I would characterize my aspiration as follows," Mr. Tarullo says in his characteristically professorial tones. "That the regulatory and supervisory reforms we undertake will significantly reduce the incidence and severity of financial crises." That is hardly a modest aim. Then again, the legislation on Capitol Hill envisions the Fed as a kind of supercop for the financial system, a backstop against the kind of extreme risk taking that produced the financial crisis that reached a peak in 2008. "We need to do more than adjust our regulatory system," Mr. Tarullo said in an interview at the Fed's headquarters. "We really need to redesign the system, but in doing so, to draw on regulatory tools that have developed over the years." Mr. Tarullo, who blends an expertise in economic regulation with a passion for Faulkner and Eliot, took office eight days after Mr. Obama did, as the economy was reeling from the aftershocks of the crisis. He quickly won the confidence of Mr. Bernanke. He helped oversee stress tests of the 19 largest bank holding companies, which helped them to raise capital and regain investor confidence. And then he set out to tighten the way the Fed's 2,800 bank regulators and supervisors around the country oversee 5,800 financial institutions, large and small. The effects of Mr. Tarullo's influence are rippling through the Fed and the banking industry. Within the 12 Fed districts, there is a greater awareness of scrutiny from Washington. Mr. Tarullo is overseeing a review of bonuses and pay practices at 28 banks that is expected to be released shortly. And he has put in place two new regulatory approaches: reviews that look at risk taking across banks, not just individual institutions; and quantitative surveillance, which marshals the Fed's statistical powers to "identify developing strains and imbalances" across the financial sector. The new faith in regulation, which is shared by the Obama administration, has its skeptics, even within the Fed. On Thursday evening, Richard W. Fisher, the outspoken president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, warned that regulation could do only so much. "The industry is unfortunately evolving toward larger and larger bank size with financial resources concentrated in fewer and fewer hands," he said, adding, "We must cap their size or break them up in one way or another shrink them relative to the size of the industry." But for now, the Fed and the Obama administration are siding with Mr. Tarullo's approach, which sees breaking up banks only as a last resort. Last year, after the Fed's director of supervision and regulation, Roger T. Cole, retired, Mr. Tarullo replaced him with a longtime Fed economist, Patrick M. Parkinson, who had been helping the Treasury Department devise the regulatory overhaul the administration would present to Congress. The blueprint was the basis for the legislation approved by the House and Senate, which is about to be merged by a conference committee. Mr. Tarullo is also crucial in talks over the updating of the international rules that set out the minimum levels of capital large banks must hold. How those requirements, known as the Basel standards, are determined and enforced, will have a big effect on global financial stability. It all amounts to a greater role for regulators, whose failings were apparent in the last crisis. "Understandably, there is some hesitancy to leave too much to the discretion of regulators, because regulators did not do a great job before the crisis," Mr. Tarullo said. "But that consideration is balanced to some degree by a concern that if you specify rules or outcomes based solely on current circumstances, then three or five years from now, they may not be effective." Mr. Tarullo said that a "macroprudential perspective on financial regulation" that is, a view of the financial system as a whole, not just a narrow focus on individual banks requires "broad expertise in economic and financial markets." He added, "There is no other agency in the United States government that has that breadth of relevant experience." So for Mr. Tarullo, coming to the Fed after serving as an adviser to the Obama campaign was "an easy decision," he said. "I felt then, and nothing in the intervening 16 months has changed by mind, that difficult as the task is, the Fed was by a substantial margin the institution best positioned to effectively supervise the integration of capital markets and traditional financial intermediation," Mr. Tarullo said. Mr. Tarullo is likely to see his role enhanced even further, given that the Fed's vice chairman, Donald L. Kohn, a 40 year Fed veteran, is retiring later this month. In addition, the Senate version of the regulatory legislation would create a second vice chairman's position at the Fed, to focus on regulation. Mr. Tarullo would "be a standout choice for that," said Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Born in Boston, the eldest of three children of a salesman and a homemaker, Mr. Tarullo studied English at Georgetown and received a master's in the subject at Duke. During law school at the University of Michigan, he says he became deeply interested in economic and regulatory issues. From 1981 to 1987, Mr. Tarullo taught law at Harvard; in an influential 1987 article he argued that workers displaced by trade should be entitled to financial compensation and help seeking or training for new work. It was a time of ideological tumult, and Mr. Tarullo was denied tenure a rarity for an assistant professor. He returned to Washington and was chief employment counsel to the Senate labor committee, led by Edward M. Kennedy. He later served in economic roles at the State Department and at the White House in the Clinton administration before teaching law at Georgetown (which gave him tenure). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
LARAMIE, WYO. After her family moved from suburban New Hampshire to the wind whipped plains of southeastern Wyoming, Monica Morin embraced small town life, forging lasting friendships and celebrating her own quirky style. Dark haired, with hipster glasses and a disarming sense of humor, Monica was a "why not kind of kid," her mother, Kim Morin, said. The kind who would wear a giraffe costume to the grocery store, just because. Last year, during Monica's sophomore year of high school, her mood began to darken. She turned to alcohol and marijuana, and some days withdrew from the close relationship she had always had with her parents, who, although long divorced, remained friends and partners in raising their only child. After her descent into drinking, she started cutting herself. Ms. Morin was alarmed, aware that family history was not in her daughter's favor. Her sister had developed bipolar disorder in her teens, eventually drinking herself to death. Her father had taken his own life when Ms. Morin was 19. Monica's parents sought help for their daughter's despair, driving her two and a half hours to Casper for inpatient treatment. As the year drew to a close, Monica seemed to be improving, clinging to a fragile stability with twice weekly counseling. On the afternoon of Feb. 4, after Monica and her mother returned to their apartment from a doctor's appointment, Monica said she needed to finish homework in her room. Some time later, she took a shower and asked her mother if they could snuggle on the sofa and watch a movie before going to bed. "I love you, Mom," she said, as Ms. Morin stroked her hair. Not long into the film, Monica suffered a seizure. The paramedics who responded to Ms. Morin's frantic call searched Monica's room and discovered an empty bottle of over the counter allergy pills pilfered from her mother's medicine cabinet. She died at Ivinson Memorial Hospital that night. "You replay everything in your head," Ms. Morin said in her living room recently, her voice shaking. "Wondering what else you could have done." "The rates are higher, and the gap is getting wider." Suicide is a threat not just to the young. Rates over all rose 7 percent in metropolitan counties from 2004 to 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In rural counties, the increase was 20 percent. The problem reaches across demographic boundaries, encompassing such groups as older men, Native Americans and veterans. The sons and daughters of small towns are more likely to serve in the military, and nearly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans live in rural communities. The C.D.C. reported last year that Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the nation, almost 30 deaths per 100,000 people in 2012, far above the national average of 12.6 per 100,000. Not far behind were Alaska, Montana, New Mexico and Utah, all states where isolation can be common. The village of Hooper Bay, Alaska, recently recorded four suicides in two weeks. In one telephone survey of 1,000 Wyoming residents, half of those who responded said someone close to them had attempted or died by suicide. In September, mental health experts, community volunteers and law enforcement officers gathered in Casper to discuss possible solutions. Among the participants was Bobbi Barrasso, the wife of Senator John Barrasso, who has made suicide prevention a personal and political mission. "Wyoming is a beautiful state," she told the crowd. "We have great open spaces. We are a state of small population. We care about one another. We're resourceful, we're resilient, we cowboy up. And of course, I've learned it's those very things that have led to a high incidence of suicide in our state." "Rather than say, 'I need help,' they keep working and they get overwhelmed. They can start to think they are a burden on their family and lose hope." Country life can be lonely for people in the grip of mental illness or emotional upheaval, and the means to follow through on suicidal thoughts are close at hand. Firearms, the most common method, are a pervasive part of the culture; 51 percent of rural households own a gun, compared with 25 percent of urban homes, the Pew Research Center reported last year. Experts also note a mind set, born long ago of necessity, dictating that people solve their own problems. Leonard Jacobs, who grew up in southeast Iowa, moved to Laramie when his wife, Sarah, enrolled in law school at the University of Wyoming. After 9/11, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, and he spent a year deployed in Iraq in 2005. He came back a different man, Ms. Jacobs said prone to anger and paranoia, troubled by nightmares and obsession over cleanliness and order. He refused to discuss the war and insisted on trying to fix himself, just as he had their car, their dishwasher and anything else in need of repair. Eventually, fearing for the safety of their two children, Ms. Jacobs filed for divorce. The day she brought him the final papers, in February 2014, he retrieved a gun she had never seen from his truck and ended his life as she watched, horrified. It was their son's birthday. Mr. Jacobs never sought help. Ms. Jacobs says her husband's sense of self sufficiency combined with a fear of stigma to keep him from treatment. "For him, it was like admitting weakness," she said. Stigma is not unique to rural life, but it can become more acute in places where it's hard to disappear into anonymity. Ms. Jacobs said she experienced this as she sought counseling for her own distress, walking past the awkward gazes of her clients in the waiting room. Self medication with alcohol and drugs can add to the challenges, and a study this year in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse noted that rural treatment centers have "reduced access to highly educated counselors." Volunteers in Wyoming are trying to promote change from the bottom up, training citizens to talk to someone who may be in danger of hurting themselves. The program has been adopted by some of the state's largest employers, community organizations and churches, said Terresa Humphries Wadsworth, a psychologist in Cody who is the statewide director of suicide prevention for the nonprofit Prevention Management Organization of Wyoming. Since the effort began two years ago, she said, referral rates to mental health services are rising. She cautioned that meaningful change took time, but said, "As we continue, we should see suicide rates coming down, because people are getting help earlier and earlier." In Wyoming and other rural settings, medical practices also are trying to integrate mental health treatment into a variety of settings. Patients reluctant to see a psychologist may nonetheless visit a doctor with vague complaints, such as headaches or trouble sleeping. A 2002 analysis published in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that 45 percent of people who committed suicide had visited their primary care provider within the previous month. Identifying at risk patients in private doctors' offices or adding a mental health component to a public clinic can catch people who would otherwise avoid being seen at an office obviously associated with mental health. The Affordable Care Act has helped increase access by encouraging "whole patient" coverage that includes behavioral mental health, she said. An evaluation of the idea published in General Hospital Psychiatry in 2013 concluded that adding psychological services to a primary care office led to greater access and patient satisfaction. Technology may also provide an answer, enabling doctors to reach patients in underserved areas via live video chats streamed to computers, television screens and iPads in clinics and schools. "With psychiatry, the equivalent of a physical exam is a mental status examination, most of which can be done quite well with video conferencing," said Dr. Kathleen Myers, the director of telemental health services at Seattle Children's Hospital, which just completed a five year evaluation of the concept. "The ideal what I think everybody wants is that some primary care practice would have a conference room or a room next door where docs could just refer in their patients and a psychiatrist would see them," Dr. Myers said. Although such examinations are promising, logistical challenges remain. "Most practices, especially in rural areas, don't have a lot of extra space," she said, "and there's not an easy mechanism for payment." In the meantime, many small communities racked by suicide are doing what small communities always have pulling together to respond to crisis. By the time school started this fall in Laramie, a friend of Monica Morin's had formed a peer group at the high school, hoping to provide teenagers a safe place to talk about their struggles and to talk frankly with one another about thoughts of harming themselves. Monica isn't the only classmate to have died. "I have lost two friends in the past year to suicide, and that's been pretty hard," Madison Uehara, the Laramie High sophomore who started the peer group, told The Laramie Boomerang. "But another issue is, I nearly lost myself to it a few times." Dr. Humphries Wadsworth says she hopes these efforts will begin to elevate the conversation around mental health, and to restore hope where it has been lost. "We're tied to one another," she said. "On the one hand, that is really annoying, because everybody knows your business. On the other hand, it is how you really survive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER at the David H. Koch Theater (June 14, 7:30 p.m.; June 15, 7 p.m.; through June 18). For its annual Lincoln Center season, the company presents three mixed bills under the headings "Musical Inspirations," "Global Voices" and "Bold Visions," showcasing recent additions to its repertoire by the artistic director Robert Battle, the Swedish choreographer Johan Inger and the longtime company member Hope Boykin, among others. Each program culminates in Ailey's beloved 1960 masterpiece, "Revelations." The Ailey Spirit Gala (Thursday) features performances by members of Ailey II, the Ailey School and AileyCamp, as well as a live rendition of "Moonlight x Ailey," originally a short film tribute to the Academy Award winning movie. 212 496 0600, alvinailey.org AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (through July 8). A pirate in love with a harem girl; a prince in love with a woman turned swan: Two versions of romance are at the Met this week, as Ballet Theater wraps up its run of "Le Corsaire" (Friday and Saturday), and brings back another war horse, "Swan Lake" (opening Monday). The soloist Devon Teuscher makes her New York debut in the dual role of Odette Odile at the Wednesday matinee, alongside Alexandre Hammoudi as Prince Siegfried. It's one of the toughest roles in the ballet canon, but Ms. Teuscher, with her lucid technique and nuanced acting, should be able to rise to the challenge. 212 362 6000, abt.org TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY at Brooklyn Studios for Dance (June 11, 6 p.m.). When a choreographer dies, how do her dances stay alive? The company founded by Trisha Brown, who died in March, is breathing new life into her "Opal Loop/Cloud Installation 72503" a gossamer dance from 1980 set to the sound of water passing through high pressure nozzles through a two day workshop in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. After learning excerpts from the work, participants will build their own movement phrases in response. The workshop concludes with an informal public showing of these studies, titled "Opal Loop (Looped)," and of Brown's "Geometry of Quiet" (2002), performed by the troupe members Marc Crousillat, Leah Ives, Amanda Kmett'Pendry and Oluwadamilare Ayorinde. bksd.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Kenny Anderson, a celebrated point guard from Queens who had a 14 year N.B.A. career, was hospitalized over the weekend after suffering a stroke. Lina Catalfamo Plath, a family spokeswoman, said via email that Anderson was recovering. Plath also released a statement from Anderson's wife, Natasha. "We would like to thank everyone for reaching out on behalf of Kenny," Natasha Anderson said in the statement. "Our family is extremely grateful for all the prayers and love that we have received over the last few days. We appreciate you continuing to respect our privacy as Kenny heals." Anderson, 48, recently concluded his first season as the men's basketball coach at Fisk University, a historically black school in Nashville that plays at the N.A.I.A. level. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Throughout the month of March, Historic Hotels of America and Historic Hotels Worldwide will offer discounts of up to 65 percent on over 100 hotels. Travel windows vary by property, but the sale includes rooms at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs from 230 a night, a 40 percent savings, valid on stays through April 30; and the 1927 vintage Hotel New Grand in Yokohama, Japan, from 83 a night, a 65 percent savings, through May 25. Other properties on sale include the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn Spa in Sonoma, Calif.; the Jekyll Island Club Hotel in Georgia; and the Sagamore in Adirondack State Park in New York. A southern Italian farmhouse, or "masseria," will open March 18 as the 19 room Masseria Le Carrube, a boutique resort near Ostuni in the Puglia region. Rooms in the whitewashed stone farmhouse, which dates back to the 17th century, retain their rustic quality with the addition of modern conveniences like air conditioning and Wi Fi. Outside, the former sheep pen will be the site of two swimming pools, including one that is heated, and a garden is planted in orange and olive groves. Indoors, an ancient olive oil press resides on the ground floor and the restaurant will serve vegetarian food. The property is the latest from San Dominico Hotels, which runs other intimate properties in Puglia and in London. Rooms start at 140 euros ( 153), including breakfast. International Nature Cultural Adventures is launching a 12 day Galapagos Safari combining eight days aboard the 16 passenger yacht Integrity and three days on Santa Cruz Island in an upscale safari style camp. On the island, guests will stay in furnished tents set on wooden platforms with access to amenities including a swimming pool. The land stay offers opportunities to hike up the volcanic cone of Puntudo, mountain bike around a crater, see giant tortoises in the wild and visit the Darwin Research Station. The sea portion of the trip visits a series of islands in search of wildlife, and the vessel carries kayaks and snorkeling equipment for guest use. The trip, which includes two nights in Quito, starts at 6,995 a person. The 32 room Hotel Walloon, on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan where Ernest Hemingway spent many boyhood summers, is offering a three day special event in tribute to the writer. Called "The Last Good Country," it features a reception with Valerie Hemingway, his daughter in law and personal assistant, a boat tour of the lake and a fly fishing demonstration marking the opening of trout season. Named after the writer's description of the area, the special event takes place April 29 to May 1. Package rates start a 920 for two, including two nights, double occupancy, and all events. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
On Dec. 23, 2009, Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state, sent an email on her private server to her aide Huma Abedin asking how to switch her home phone to fax mode. In the long chain that followed, Ms. Abedin explained, more than once: "Just pick up phone and hang it up. And leave it hung up." The former first lady and current presidential candidate is also like a lot of other men and women who were adults when personal computers came into use, and who to this day cannot scan, iChat, use Spotify or hook up their Roku, and would prefer not to let the world or their younger colleagues in on their tech inadequacy. It's the kind of admission of age based incompetence best shared with only the closest advisers. That's the number reporters here at The New York Times call when they are having trouble with the paper's secure server; technicians are available 24/7 to help people who can't remember their password, don't understand iCloud or don't know how to get past the locked key icon that blocks intruders from getting in. I know them by name, and they sigh when they hear mine. Unlike Bernie Sanders, the Trump campaign is not sick and tired of hearing about Mrs. Clinton's emails. Yet oddly, in all the failings hurled at Mrs. Clinton at the Republican National Convention during the past week venality, murder and reckless disregard for national security there was no mention of her internet ignorance. Even Donald J. Trump's 22 year old daughter, Tiffany, didn't try to court her millennial peers by painting her father's opponent as a technoramus. Obviously, internet aversion was not the primary reason Mrs. Clinton had a private server installed in her house in Chappaqua, N.Y., rather than relying on the State Department system. Mrs. Clinton's own emails made it clear she was far more obsessed with shielding herself from prying reporters and Republicans than enemy hackers. When a State Department deputy chief of staff for operations suggested in a 2010 email that she use the government system to avoid spam, she declined, writing, "I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible." But it could be that one of the personal secrets she was hiding was her discomfort with the digital revolution. On July 24, 2010, Mrs. Clinton had trouble using her iPad. "I don't know if I have WIFI," she wrote in an email to another close aide. "How do I find out?" On Oct. 7, 2012, Mrs. Clinton emailed that aide: "Do you know what channel on the TV in DC is the program listing? And, specifically, what channel number is Showtime?" She added, "Because I want to watch 'Homeland.'" Mrs. Clinton is not known for excessive humility or self deprecation, so there is something almost touching about what she wrote in the subject line of the Showtime email: "stupid question." And there were signs Mrs. Clinton wanted to improve. She asked her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, to lend her a book called "Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better." Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, confirmed that on the road, Mrs. Clinton still uses a BlackBerry, even though the company announced this month that it was discontinuing the classic version with a physical keyboard and trackpad. "Sometimes it can be very tough to let go," Ralph Pini, BlackBerry's chief operating officer, wrote in a company blog post. Mr. Merrill did not allow that his boss might be technologically challenged. He noted that, among other things, she sometimes uses Spotify. Tech consultants are careful not to use the word "stupid" when instructing baby boomers. Some even avoid the word "easy." Tariq Fayad, 27, a programmer and app designer in New York, said he no longer says a task is easy. "Because," he explained, "sometimes it's hard to teach." He said he had learned to keep his instructions simple, especially with his parents. "I don't tell my dad to swipe," he said, "I say, 'Put your finger on the screen and move it across really quickly.'" Mr. Fayad gives his relatives free lessons. On the other hand, he is still on the family phone plan in Texas. Once the server scandal erupted and investigations began, it was tricky for Mrs. Clinton's aides to explain to outsiders what they were up against. Their private emails said it all. "I talked to Cheryl about this," Lewis Lukens, a former high level State Department official, wrote to a colleague who didn't understand why the secretary of state didn't check her emails on her office computer. "She says the problem is HRC does not know how to use a computer to do email, only BB." There are plenty of people who remember hot pants and Nixon's wage and price controls and who clung to their BlackBerries at any cost. Amanda Urban, the renowned literary agent, was so attached to hers that when her company, ICM Partners, stopped supporting the BlackBerry in 2014, she bought a 100 BlackBerry keyboard to fit on her iPhone. She then had to travel with two chargers and extra battery packs. "My entire handbag was given over to the care and maintenance of my BB," Ms. Urban said. "Frankly, I was relieved when ICM confiscated it which is what they did. It was a Monday morning intervention no other way to describe it." Ms. Urban adjusted to the iPhone, but she still mourns her first device. "The BB was far superior to do email on, and that is what Hillary has to think, too." For my personal devices, I rely on Kai Lui, a whiz technology consultant who makes house calls. I called Kai for this article and explained that I sympathized with Mrs. Clinton because when people say I am not tech savvy, that hurts my feelings. He waited a beat and replied, "You're tech savvy enough, Alessandra." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
John A. Catsimatidis may have made his name and a good part of his considerable fortune Forbes puts his worth at 3.1 billion as the owner of supermarkets, but these days he is looking more and more like a real estate developer. While grocery stores have shrunk to less than 2 percent of the assets of the Manhattan based Red Apple Group, real estate development in New York City now represents about 15 to 20 percent of Mr. Catsimatidis's multifaceted company. And it's growing. Ocean Dreams, a 425 unit luxury rental complex overlooking the Atlantic on the western end of Coney Island, recently topped out and is expected to open next summer. Comprising two 21 story towers on a podium, it is the fifth project Mr. Catsimatidis has undertaken in Brooklyn in less than a decade, following four on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene, each more ambitious than the last. He also owns land on either side of the Ocean Dreams towers that he is itching to build on, as well as another beachfront parcel a couple blocks east. "We tamed Myrtle Avenue," said Mr. Catsimatidis, 70, who has lived in New York City ever since his Greek parents brought him here as an infant, and who ran unsuccessfully in the Republican mayoral primary in 2013. "Now we're taming Coney Island." What he calls "taming" others might call gentrification, but terminology aside, his projects to date have taken a page from the same playbook: Buy land in what some may regard as off the beaten path areas, hold it until the time is right and development incentives have been extracted from the city and then build projects for more affluent renters than those who have historically inhabited those neighborhoods. Increasingly, his buildings stand out for their design as well. Consider the Fort Greene apartment buildings, all standing in a row across Myrtle Avenue from Ingersoll Houses, a 1940s public housing complex where the average tenant income is 26,483 and the average monthly rent is 573. Mr. Catsimatidis purchased the three block parcel on which his buildings now stand back in the early 1980s, but he had already been investing in real estate for years, at first so he could ensure permanent homes for his supermarkets. (He founded the Red Apple chain and later purchased Gristedes, now merged with D'Agostino.) But in many cases, the land turned out to be vastly more valuable than the stores, and over the years he has sold many properties for considerable profit. He held onto the Myrtle Avenue site, however, until a zoning change prompted him to try something different. In 2010, he completed a nine story building at the intersection of Myrtle Avenue and Navy Street and called it the Andrea, after his eldest child, 28, who works in the family business. Five years later, the 15 story Giovanni went up next to it. It is named for John Jr., 25, who also helps run Red Apple, but, as Mr. Catsimatidis's wife, Margo, explained, "no one wants to live in 'the John.'" In 2016, the 16 story Margo was completed in her honor. The fourth and final Fort Greene building twice the height of the Margo and with 440 units, including 29 affordable apartments awarded through a lottery opened this year. The luxury rental tower (StreetEasy recently listed units ranging from a 2,662 studio to a 6,689 two bedroom) is named the Eagle because, Mr. Catsimatidis said, he wanted his building "to soar." While the first three buildings in Fort Greene are relatively modest in design and mostly brick (like their neighboring buildings), the new tower, designed by Hill West Architects as a cylinder enclosed within a rectilinear form, is sheathed in glass. David West, co founder of Hill West, said Mr. Catsimatidis liked the Eagle's curves and glass in part because it evoked the glamour of Miami architecture. Ocean Dreams, another Hill West design, will also have a glass facade, the better to take in those water views. The Ocean Dreams complex fronts on Surf Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets, steps from the private Seagate enclave. To the west is a smaller parcel that has already been approved for an 11 story apartment building. But Mr. Catsimatidis has a bigger vision for the spot, according to an updated rendering he shared for a building that would be considerably taller than the 21 story towers that have just topped out. And to the east of Ocean Dreams where a shuttered complex that once housed a social service agency is set to be demolished, despite efforts by locals to convince the city to turn it into a community center the rendering shows two more towers that would also eclipse the ones currently being built. Red Apple owns this site, but its current zoning only allows four or five story buildings. Mr. Catsimatidis, who goes by "Cats" on his radio talk show on WNYM, "The Cats Roundtable," clearly envisions his own boardwalk empire. Whether he will get permission to realize it remains to be seen. "We've got to talk to the city," he said. John Catsimatidis's Red Apple Group has expanded beyond supermarkets to real estate development, including a project in Coney Island. For now, work proceeds on the two towers, which have angled sides to increase the number of apartments with ocean views, as well as terraces and balconies. Three quarters of the apartments will be studios and one bedrooms, with the remainder mostly two bedrooms. Although rents won't be set until closer to the start of leasing in the spring, Mr. Catsimatidis said that a two bedroom might be priced at 4,000 to 5,000, "depending on the floor." A 24,000 square foot common terrace on the second floor will include a bocce court and a putting green, among other things. Mr. Catsimatidis who said he had "one more" political campaign in him but would not elaborate on which office he might run for is also including public amenities in the project. In the rear of Ocean Dreams, the Coney Island boardwalk will be widened and outfitted with exercise equipment, benches, and plantings by Weintraub Diaz Landscape Architecture. At the front of the building facing Surf Avenue, ground floor retail space has been earmarked for a grocery store and a pharmacy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"Boulez is perfect," a composer friend said to me with a resigned shrug sometime in the late 1970s. My friend, an American, had just returned from a residency at Ircam, the state of the art electronic music center Pierre Boulez had then recently created in Paris. His shrug said as much as his words. The air of perfection that surrounded Boulez, who died in 2016 at 90, was daunting. There seemed to be nothing at which he didn't excel: composing his dense, detailed, exquisitely honed music; conducting Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival; leading the New York Philharmonic; making revelatory recordings; founding, in Ircam and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, both a research laboratory and a virtuosic modern orchestra. And teaching, as we find in "Music Lessons," a new English translation of 16 lectures he gave at the College de France between 1976 and 1995. Readers can now take stock of the daunting, demanding Boulezian worldview and, whether they warm to his own works or not, appreciate him as one of the most important writers ever about music. Although Boulez was to live over 20 years after the final lecture, "Music Lessons" has the feel of a vast expository Gesamtkunstwerk that ponders and probes musical experience to its very essence. It ranges over music's fundamental building blocks its modes of organization and how we perceive it, both acoustically and culturally to how memory both aids and interferes with the process of cognition, and on to matters of notation, style, idea, technology and tradition. There is something Wagnerian about all this, and not just in its expansiveness and the gravitas of its utterance. From the start of these lectures, Boulez clearly envisaged a grand plan that would be carried out over the 20 year span; his brain, both as a composer and thinker, analyzed dozens of moves ahead, like a grandmaster chess player. I never visited Ircam, although in 1994 I spent a contentious week conducting my music with the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Two decades Boulez's junior, I became aware of him as a teen in the 1960s from his recordings and by studying his compositions, the hard to find scores of which were circulated among my fellow college students like samizdat. I deeply admired his recordings of 20th century classics, obsessing in particular over a Debussy album that included "La Mer" and the enigmatic "Jeux," performed with the utmost delicacy and sense of formal balance. His "Rite of Spring," made with the Cleveland Orchestra, nearly blew a loudspeaker cone when I cranked up the "Danse Sacrale" to overload level. But for his own music I could never advance beyond respect to love. Some of his pieces dazzle with explosive virtuosity, especially the brilliant ensemble work "Sur Incises" and the electroacoustic "Repons." The fact that he continued to tweak and refine his pieces over decades was exemplary, and is even more so in an era when composers, aided by composing software, are tempted to indiscriminately overproduce. But aside from its supreme technical facility and its glistening surfaces, his music always struck me as hobbled by an emotional disconnect, an intellectual "froidure" of the kind that leaves one impressed but too often empty and unmoved. And as Boulez during the 1970s became a cultural icon in both Europe and America, principally through his conducting, I became increasingly troubled by his tunnel vision, particularly his dismissive attitude toward American music. Only Elliott Carter, the grand paterfamilias of American modernism, managed to squeeze through the infinitesimally small needle's eye of Boulezian approval. What made our American music so vibrant and important its energy; its exuberant, sometimes messy embrace of the vernacular; its capacity to communicate a wide range of feeling in an often unashamedly simple and direct language; and its penchant for coupling art with political messaging seemed too crude to warrant his interest, let alone participation. Unlike Leonard Bernstein, who loved the grit and earthiness of our best popular music (and who contributed to its tradition in no small way), Boulez remained adamantly removed from the demotic. Many composers are unable or unwilling to talk or write about their music, but Boulez was always astonishingly prolific with words. Among major composers only the compulsively loquacious Richard Wagner wrote more. In his 20s, in the unsteady wake of World War II, Boulez lobbed critical grenades even at his heroes. One infamous essay, a jeremiad bluntly titled "Schoenberg Is Dead," excoriated that recently deceased composer for having force fitted his new serial language into antiquated musical forms, such as the Baroque suite. "From Schoenberg's pen," the young Boulez wrote, "flows a stream of infuriating cliches and formidable stereotypes redolent of the most wearily ostentatious Romanticism." Ravel is "a musical organism which had lost its power of self renewal and was ineluctably headed for its own destruction." Even Stravinsky was not safe from condemnation for the "insufferable" faults and "purposeless automatism" of his Neoclassical works. Aside from these confrontational brickbats, much of Boulez's early writing was highly technical, addressed to an exclusive company of fellow composers and all but impenetrable to anyone not intimately familiar with serialism and the radical discarding of musical convention that was in the air during the decade after the end of the war. They are documents from a period when the impulse to wipe the slate clean and systematize all aspects of the composing process came to epitomize a brave new world of the avant garde. Composers convened at courses and symposiums, such as the famous one in Darmstadt, Germany, that felt more like scientific conferences than music festivals, and they believed, with Boulez, that high art was an organism that must evolve presumably to ever more complex stages or else founder in sterility. While his language may have softened over the years, Boulez never really changed this fundamental perspective, which makes reading "Music Lessons" a daunting task. The chapter titles confirm his intention to remain on the "meta" plain as often as possible: "Language, Material and Structure," "Automatism and Decision," "Writing and Idea" and so on. For all his determination to articulate his thoughts, Boulez has little use for metaphor, the absence of which can make reading him a grind. At the heart of the book is an 85 page chapter, "Memory and Creation," in which Boulez grapples with the problem of how history and tradition can both nourish and contaminate our capacity to encounter a work free from preconceptions and how that impacts the task of creating something genuinely new. "The era of avant gardes and exploration being definitively over," this doyen of the avant garde proclaims, perhaps sardonically, "what follows is the era of perpetual return, consolidation, citation." "One feels," he writes, "that in the midst of an era ever more imbued with memory, to forget becomes so urgent." It could be Sartre speaking, but it's Boulez trying to cut a clean path through the overgrown thicket of too much tradition, thoughtless habit and unquestioning routine. When he laments that "we wilt under the weight of models," he expresses the burden that we composers today must endure, living and working in the shadow of past masterpieces and the culture of "greatness." But memory, both collective and individual, is for him a double edged sword, capable of stimulating and informing the creative act, while also threatening to corrupt it. Boulez believed in the absolute value of the work of art. Anything not contained in the notes on the page he dismisses as "documentary evidence," be it performance tradition, anecdotal history, biographical gloss or even recordings. The "text" for him is the notated score, the only true "mentally reliable resource, safe from any other form of dissemination." So issues of identity, society, politics and environment that are dominant forces in the creation of new works today play no role in "Music Lessons." In judging an artwork, Boulez is adamantly indifferent to its back story, its sociopolitical implications or its creator's personal narrative. This skepticism and his Apollonian sense of exclusivity can seem old fashioned, and were he alive in 2019 as the conventional canon is being probed and re examined he might well be called upon to defend his position. A glance at the book's index reveals the areas that instead dominate Boulez's concerns. Most of the entries border on what might be called musical metaphysics: articulation, chance, composition, continuity, deduction, duration, form, idea, language, material, notation, perception, rhythm, structure, succession, theme, timbre, tradition, variation. If this seems dry, it isn't. Boulez inevitably has something observant to say, in prose that's refreshingly free of academic jargon. That's a good thing, because his theses often demand patience and effort to unpack. But be warned: His universe of valued music is a severely limited one. A reader who cannot immediately identify with a handful of canonical names Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg, Webern, Bartok and, of course, Boulez may feel left out of the conversation. And when it comes to new music, although he is too subtle to be prescriptive, the elephant in the room is atonality: Tonal harmony has, for Boulez, been essentially exhausted of its potential over a century ago. I couldn't help but wonder how a highly intelligent and aware musician living in the latter half of the 20th century, and the opening of the 21st, could write a 650 page book that completely ignores popular music, the defining cultural phenomenon of our time. Perhaps for Boulez, popular music was a social discourse rather than a musical one, its essential characteristics being too primitive to discuss as art? About jazz he is only marginally more conscious than Adorno, who could never get beyond its association with commerce to appreciate it as an art. And of Minimalism, surely one of the most important stylistic watersheds of 20th century music, Boulez makes only a passing reference to its "simple phasing or superimposing different periodicities, of which one quickly wearies as soon as one senses how they function." Really? He can be unforgiving when he senses a composer, no matter how great, has gone astray: misunderstanding the potential of his own discoveries or in the case of the Neoclassical Stravinsky opting for respectability over uninhibited exuberance. Others, such as Satie, Hauer, Cage and Ives, he classifies as "musical pataphysicians," useful in "forcing others to ask themselves questions, to interrogate their language and poetics." But, he concludes, "the strength of their imagination went only so far, and their language suffered not from being simple, to be sure, but from being simplistic." As in passages like this, Boulez's rigor, as well as his tastes and his compositional voice, can seem now like a relic of the chilly era of high modernism that prevailed a half century ago. A young composer recently said to me, "Boulez is of zero relevance to me at the current moment." But he would be mistaken to dismiss "Music Lessons" and miss out on the depth of Boulez's experience, the brilliance of his perceptions and the clarity of his presentation, all of which make this a book of incommensurable importance to any serious thinker about music. John Adams is the composer of, among other works, the operas "Nixon in China" and "Doctor Atomic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Nissan is recalling about 13,500 Frontier pickup trucks from the 2012 14 model years for a possible fire hazard, the automaker said in a report posted on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website. The recall is among several recent safety actions, including General Motors asking the federal government to excuse it from an instrument panel related recall of 200,000 pickup trucks from the 2014 model year, a motorcycle recall by Yamaha and an air bag related recall affecting some Mitsubishi models. In its report to N.H.T.S.A., Nissan said an employee at its plant in Canton, Miss., installed circuit breakers facing the wrong direction, an error that could "potentially" cause contact with a metal bolt and cause a short circuit and fire. Nissan said it was not aware of any accidents or injuries related to the problem, which it learned of in early December when a customer in Mexico "observed smoke in the cabin." Nissan described the recall as voluntary, but once an automaker is aware of a safety problem it must within five business days tell the safety agency of its plan for a recall or face a civil fine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
American and European choreographers reacted strongly this week to the recent announcement that the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, the most important opera house in Belgium and a source of some of Europe's most cutting edge music and dance productions, would eliminate all dance programming after a forthcoming production by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The reason, said Peter de Caluwe, the general and artistic director of La Monnaie, is the steep reduction in funding to the Brussels opera house since 2009, with further cuts announced in mid October by the newly formed Belgian coalition government. The figures are complicated and still subject to negotiation, but if put in effect they will mean a budget reduction of around 20 percent over a 10 year period that began in 2009. (La Monnaie's 2015 budget is 44.5 million euros, or 54.2 million, down from about 47.5 million euros in 2014.) Mr. de Caluwe said that he had no wish to stop producing dance but was backed into a corner by the combination of less money and the need to further reduce personnel. (Sixteen employees, 11 of whom are retiring, will leave in the next few months.) "Because we will have fewer technical staff, we will have to cut down from three to two shifts a day," he said. "This means each production takes more time to prepare and will have to run for longer to recoup costs. We don't have a resident dance company; what we give them is money to invest and time on stage. Now we have neither of those things to offer." The potential break with dance is startling at a theater that has had exceptionally strong links to the form since 1960, when Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the Twentieth Century became its resident company. Mr. Bejart remained at the theater until 1988, when controversially a little known American choreographer named Mark Morris was invited by La Monnaie's general director at the time, Gerard Mortier, to make a home there. Ms. De Keersmaeker, who is Belgian, and her company, Rosas, followed Mr. Morris in 1992, establishing an international reputation at La Monnaie. Although the opera house has not had a resident dance company since Mr. de Caluwe's tenure began in 2005, he has regularly programmed and supported work by Ms. De Keersmaeker and other Belgian and international choreographers, including Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Sasha Waltz. Ms. De Keersmaeker and Mr. Cherkaoui, who are among the best known contemporary dance makers worldwide, expressed pessimism about dance's future in Brussels. "This situation creates no guarantee that I'll be able to continue my work here and the relationship with the public I've built over 30 years," Ms. De Keersmaeker said in a telephone interview. "I do have an understanding of how much pressure there is on the opera house, but to cut all dance is a choice I find very hard to take." Nancy Palmieri for The New York Times In an interview with the Belgian newspaper La Libre, Mr. Cherkaoui said that if ambitious dance works can no longer be created in Brussels, the city would lose its influence in the dance world, adding, "I will no doubt have to reorientate my work toward London, Paris or Tokyo." The politics of state funding are especially complicated in Belgium, where most money for the arts comes from the separate governments of the Flemish and French speaking populations. Only three cultural institutions La Monnaie, the National Orchestra and the Center for Fine Arts are federally funded, reflecting the devolution into local politics in the country and the difficulties of establishing a common Belgian identity. "Federal funding is much harder," Mr. de Caluwe said in a telephone interview. "People want to invest in their own communities. It's a very complicated discussion and a very peculiar situation, a mirror image of what's happening in Europe." Belgian choreography has been a major force in the dance world since Ms. De Keersmaeker, Jan Fabre, Wim Vandekeybus, Alain Platel and others burst on to the scene in the 1980s, and it has been fueled to a large extent by the financial support given by the Belgian government. Even in Europe, where state funding for the arts is widespread, Belgian support was exceptional, Ms. De Keersmaeker said, in backing experimental as well as more established work. In an email, Mr. Morris described his time at La Monnaie as "a miraculous period of exploration and development for my company and my work" in a climate that allowed budgets for new productions, benefits for the dancers, musical resources and artistic liberty. "The Monnaie has for many years been a profound force in opera, dance, music," he added. "It is sad but not surprising that government money is being withdrawn. There is a diminishing interest in the already marginal pure dance experience in its theater form." The decision has broader implications for the visibility of Belgian choreography and for contemporary dance worldwide, said Alistair Spalding, the chief executive and artistic director of Sadler's Wells Theater in London. "There is an international network of presenters, including Sadler's Wells, who have supported choreographers like Anne Teresa or Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui or Alain Platel for many years," Mr. Spalding said. "You take one large, meaty leg from that stool, and it means either we have to come up with more money, or ambitious projects can't be done or toured. That's a big loss to dance." Mr. de Caluwe, who also plans to reduce the number of productions at the opera house and cut an annual Baroque opera staging unless circumstances change, said he was still fighting to maintain his budget. "Of course we should be doing these things," he said. "We are not asking for more money, just not to be cut further. This is a message to the politicians. If this is what you want, people will have to readjust their expectations." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
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