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A federal trial last spring made a compelling case that several of the most successful college basketball teams in America thrive on illicitly paying top dollars to top recruits. Only small fry stood trial, a small set of fixers and assistant coaches. No charges were brought against head coaches, not even those whose actions were called into question because of the investigation, a group that included Sean Miller of Arizona, Will Wade of Louisiana State and Bill Self of Kansas. Those same coaches then waxed indignant for the news media, insisting they would never break the rules. Along comes Christian Dawkins to wreak a peculiarly 21st century revenge on those preening coaches and federal prosecutors. Dawkins was a middle man and a scout for a top N.B.A. agent, and he was among those convicted. "These schools make millions and the coaches know what is going on, but I buy hamburgers for parents and players and that's illegal?" Dawkins told me in January. "This is my 'drop the mic' moment." The Dawkins who appears in the documentary is the same man who took the stand in federal court last year, which is to say a dude who speaks with striking candor. Did he pay the families of players in violation of N.C.A.A. strictures? Yes. Did coaches and officials know what was happening? Oh yes. "We were definitely not the most ethical people in the world," Dawkins says in the film. This documentary presents delicious recordings of coaches talking oh so frankly of cash on the barrel recruiting. And its strength lies in its strand pulling, building a narrative that allows viewers to make sense of the recruiting game. If you are an alumnus, or even just a fan, of Arizona, L.S.U. or Kansas or, if we're honest, most universities and tempted to close your eyes, clap your hands over ears and deny your coach knew anything, this documentary arrives like a cold shower. Miller now pretends to know Dawkins only in passing. But he can be heard on F.B.I. recordings cursing like an old friend of that same young man, talking about recruits and the coaches he competes against. This audio, collected through wiretaps, was not used at the trial and is presented here publicly for the first time. Miller's assistant coach Book Richardson is heard saying that Miller paid top dollar to secure the services of Deandre Ayton, a center who became the first pick in the N.B.A. draft. "Sean's the one that fronted the deal," Richardson says. Miller has waved off that claim as calumny, even though Richardson served as Miller's faithful No. 2 for more than a decade at Xavier and Arizona. On another recording, which has never been heard publicly and remains under a judge's seal, Dawkins listens as Wade, the L.S.U. coach, boasts with an expletive of a "strong" offer to a recruit, with the dollar value apparently tilted toward the family. "I know why he didn't take it. It was," Wade said, "tilted toward his family." This offer, Wade added a touch hyperbolically, would "compensate him more than" the N.B.A.'s rookie minimum salary. Miller later talks with Dawkins and gives Wade an appreciative nod, saying he is driving up the costs of recruiting. "I'll tell you what, I give him credit," Miller said, adding a vulgarity. Let's pause. We should not compound the mistake of federal prosecutors. Sentencing Dawkins and Richardson to prison time was absurd, and little is to be gained from making felons of these head coaches. It would be splendid, however, if the coaches all of whom earn salaries of at least 2.5 million per year broke with their Omerta and urged the N.C.A.A. to remove its blinders and allow players to get paid. Dawkins is the star of this documentary. He grew up in Michigan's fertile basketball crescent, which runs from Saginaw to Flint to East Lansing. His father was a coach, and Dawkins started a website that assessed Michigan recruits, to which many coaches subscribed. Only later did they discover its proprietor was 12 years old. He became expert at the recruiting game that goes on in hundreds of gyms across the nation. The sooner a top prospect is spotted, the better. Ninth grade is good, middle school is better, fourth grade better still. Sneaker company money lubricates all of it. "We were funding players and families in hopes they would sign with us," Dawkins says in the documentary. "It's a blood sport." Dawkins notes that his former boss, the N.B.A. agent Andy Miller, "had been paying players since I was born." "You pay 50K to make 5 million," Dawkins explains in the documentary. "I would think people in Silicon Valley would like those odds." It took overly ambitious federal prosecutors to transmute this tawdry spectacle into something illegal. They came up with a pretzel theory of law: If they could persuade agent's runners to offer money to coaches, all could be charged with defrauding the same universities that hired and encouraged these coaches. The documentary leads us through the sting, as undercover F.B.I. agents pose as investors. They urge Dawkins and his partners to pay coaches. Dawkins resists, saying this was "a waste of money." Dawkins laughs. This is a joke, right? She offers a way out: Give us Rick Pitino, Andy Miller and Sean Miller, and you'll be fine. He asks for a lawyer instead, and officers pace into the room with rifles pointed at his face. "I figured they are just going to kill me," he says in the film. "I died because of basketball." There's a last wrinkle. The F.B.I. agents who worked undercover do not testify at his trial. The agency suspected one of fleecing the F.B.I. of hundreds of thousands of dollars used in the sting. The jury is not told that. Dawkins was sentenced to a year and a day, a penalty he is appealing. Richardson served a short sentence and is knocking around amateur basketball again, a middle aged hoop man trying to make his way as a felon. As for those millionaire coaches? Sean Miller read a statement brimming with righteousness. It began "I never" and ended that "any reporting to the contrary is inaccurate, false and defamatory." Dawkins advises viewers not to feel sorry for him. After his arrest, he began his transformation into a music agent, signing a deal with Atlantic Records even as his trial was going on. What, he is asked in the documentary, do you make of Miller's insistence on his innocence? The young man smiles generously. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Credit...Amanda Jasnowski Pascual for The New York Times What happens when a choreographer loses her muse? During the past two and a half years, Ivy Baldwin has been wrestling with such a loss. In 2015, her close friend and longtime dancer Lawrence Cassella, an exuberant presence in her work since 2003, died at 38 after a three month struggle with HLH, a rare immune system disease. For Ms. Baldwin, there was no moving past it. "It was too big and too traumatic to put aside and think about something else," she said recently over breakfast near her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. "It was the only thing I could make anything about." With her dancers Anna Carapetyan, Eleanor Smith and Katie Workum, who had also been close to Mr. Cassella, Ms. Baldwin embarked on "Keen (Part 1)," an exploration of grieving created for the Glass House grounds in New Canaan, Conn., last summer. A related work, "Keen No. 2 ," opens at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side on Thursday, presented with the Chocolate Factory Theater and Joyce Theater as part of Joyce Unleashed, the theater's off site series for experimental dance. In search of mourning rituals, Ms. Baldwin began, with "Keen (Part 1)," to research keening, the Irish tradition of vocal lamenting historically practiced by women, and to play with its features of rocking, kneeling and clapping. In "Keen No. 2 ," she builds on those studies with a cast of 10 women including herself, Ms. Smith and Ms. Workum, whose searing solos and duets anchor the work against an ornate paper tapestry designed by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen. Ms. Baldwin spoke, in person and by phone, about creating dances in and about Mr. Cassella's absence. Below are edited excerpts from those conversations. How did you meet Lawrence? We met at the Yard, the dance residency center on Martha's Vineyard, and we just clicked. We wanted to move the same way and talk about the same things. Just like you fall in love with someone and spend your life with them, we fell in love and wanted to dance together all the time. How has your process been different without him? Even though there are 10 people in this piece, it's very lonely. I haven't been ready to dance with people in an intimate way, to look someone in the eye and be sweaty and feel their muscles, the way I was with him. My relationship to performing, I've realized, was intensely fed by dancing with him. It's been hard, to have to ask myself: 'Who am I? How do I make things? How do I touch someone?' I don't know yet. Can you say more about how he influenced you? So many ways his theatricality, his humor. He had this amazing combination of showmanship the way he could capture and hold someone's gaze and being vulnerable and insecure, even though he exuded this sexiness and confidence and danger. And he was willing to try anything, even if he was uncomfortable or scared. We really trusted each other, so he would go to some pretty dark, scary places. He seemed very strong physically, too. He biked everywhere, he swam constantly, he danced, he walked dogs. Everything about him was this powerful, strong, healthy human being. It was shocking to watch someone like that get weaker and weaker. How have these new works helped you through losing him? I had no guidelines for what to do with myself when it happened. There were things we could plan, like his wake and planting a tree for him. After those early markers, making these dances offered a similar sense of structure. When I started out, I was thinking: 'What if you don't just stuff it all away and move on, in this very American way of dealing with grief? What if you don't replace this person? What if you live there and embrace that hole?' Over time, I've felt a push to move past that, to find a way to talk about it that's not so personal. And with this new group of women, many of whom didn't really know him, it has become something bigger. Do you think you've moved in a new direction creatively? Because it's so personal, it feels freeing in a way. Even though it's heavy, there's some relief in being big and bold and unashamedly tackling this subject. It's a bit more unapologetic and brave for me. You're also working with a larger cast and more improvisation than usual. The big group parts are basically all structured improvisations, which is quite different and terrifying for me. I tend to be really specific I'll micromanage someone's pinkie so embracing the risk and the little bit of chaos, the chances of some nights being better than others, feels exciting. There are sections that are more controlled and desolate, too, like your solo for yourself. What does that solo mean to you? Part of me wishes I could have just screamed and been fierce in some way after Lawrence died. But what comes out of me is this kind of quiet, lonely, removed version of grief. It isn't busy or noisy, it's just still. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In periods when the world and its inhabitants seem too vicious to bear, some people find themselves drawn magnetically to what might be called feel bad entertainment. I mean the sort of book, song or show that massages your anxiety the way your tongue might insistently probe an abscessed tooth. If that's the way you're feeling at the moment and why do I suspect that's the case? you may well find pleasurable pain in Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan's discombobulating stage adaptation of George Orwell's "1984," which opened on Thursday night at the Hudson Theater. But it will be pain of a different order (possibly involving nausea) from the empathetic kind you experience reading Orwell's ever engrossing book. That 1949 novel, a staple of high school syllabuses, has returned to the best seller lists since the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, jibing with worries about the rebirth of fascism in democratic countries. Its vision of a totalitarian land in which reality is what the government tells you it is has been read as a prognostication of our age of "fake news" and "alternative facts." In Orwell's novel, Winston is the unlikeliest of heroes, a mild mannered middle aged cog in the immense, soulless machine that makes his country, called Oceania, run. His job is to rewrite history to match the government's changing positions to eliminate (or "unperson") references to citizens now out of favor and to alter accounts of wars and political alliances. But within his nondescript exterior lurks the heart of a maverick, alert to the evils of a surveillance state where even thinking subversively is a crime. The book painstakingly establishes the grim, color stripped reality of Winston's everyday world (which isn't all that different from the bombed out, rations ruled postwar London that Orwell knew), and then follows him in his hopeful, hopeless acts of dissidence with his secret lover, Julia (played here by Olivia Wilde). Mr. Icke and Mr. Macmillan's version seems to assume that we're already acquainted with the political and domestic particulars of life in Oceania, and Orwell's much recycled vocabulary, which includes terms like "doublethink," "Newspeak," "thoughtcrime" and of course "Big Brother." The production dispenses with conventional time and place establishing anchors, and part of the play, maybe even all of it, occurs not in 1984 (all dates are suspect, anyway) but in some hazy future. We segue from Winston's first writing down his inchoately rebellious thoughts to a group of latter day readers debating his diary's origins and meanings. (The play's creators have said that this time frame was inspired by Orwell's often overlooked appendix to "1984," a retrospective discussion of the language of Newspeak, which suggests that a less oppressive civilization existed after Oceania.) He portrays Winston as a wounded bird from the get go, fragile and teetering on the edge of breakdown. His shorn sided haircut and stricken expression mark him as someone Big Brother would surely have put out of circulation already. This feeble creature also keeps hearing a voice (audible to us, too), asking, "Winston, do you know where you are?" Excellent question. For its Broadway incarnation, "1984" has been transplanted from what was once London to, apparently, what was once New York, where even British actors speak with American accents. Chloe Lamford's central set lighted to chill by Natasha Chivers, with nerve shredding sound effects by Tom Gibbons is much the same as when I saw it in London. Thus we find ourselves in a drab room with a sliding window panel and tired furniture evoking bureaucratic interiors of the mid 20th century. The performers we have previously met as our book group of the future return in early 21st century street clothes as Winston's colleagues, a bland and hearty group who nonetheless foster an atmosphere of sustained paranoia. The technology is of today and tomorrow. Winston plies his trade at the Ministry of Truth, with the aid of an Alexa like voice and outsize computer graphics. Projected images of enemies of the state are deployed to muster the ministry employees into a Pavlovian rage in "two minute hate" sessions. (Tim Reid is the video designer.) So once again, do we know where we are? Why, yes, we're in that post postmodern landscape, so fashionable in theater today (it is a framework used, most effectively, in Lucas Hnath's "A Doll's House, Part 2"), where anachronisms meet and merge into a universal whole. Those last century walls come tumbling down eventually, anyway, to reveal the sci fi palace of horrors in which renegades like Winston meet gruesome fates. Before that, the play telegraphically covers most of the plot points leading to that ghastly reckoning, though not in ways that particularly bring to mind the America of today. We see Winston's discovery of a beautiful fellow traveler at his workplace (a feral Ms. Wilde, in her Broadway debut), and watch their subsequent blissful liaisons in a secret trysting place (shown in simultaneous videocast); and the pair's recruitment into a resistance movement by a bureaucrat named O'Brien (a creepily avuncular Reed Birney, who here unnervingly resembles Dick Cheney). Then again, is what we're seeing really happening, or is it merely Winston's deluded version of it? Confusion is further fed by the poor guy's habit of speaking his thoughts out loud (during a mid "hate" session, he screams, "Down with Big Brother!"), though it appears that only we, the audience, can hear them. There is an ordering intelligence behind this ostensible muddle. I'm referring to Mr. Icke and Mr. Macmillan, not Big Brother. The show's self sabotaging ambiguity is meant to make us question every version of reality that's on offer and the last scene throws in another one that makes you doubt the entire narrative framework. That nebulousness is the play's most ingenious aspect, and also its most irritating. Though I usually don't provide trigger warnings in my reviews, I feel obliged to do so here. The interrogations that Winston undergoes in the play's second half are graphic enough to verge on torture porn. Surely these episodes, at least, really happened to poor Winston and have a cautionary point. Otherwise, this deliberately disorienting "1984" would seem to be trafficking in the same kind of titillating violence with which Big Brother keeps his populace both cowed and entertained. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The rule of thumb, or rather feet, has been to stand six feet apart in public. That's supposed to be a safe distance if a person nearby is coughing or sneezing and is infected with the novel coronavirus, spreading droplets that may carry virus particles. And scientists agree that six feet is a sensible and useful minimum distance, but, some say, farther away would be better. Six feet has never been a magic number that guarantees complete protection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the organizations using that measure, bases its recommendation on the idea that most large droplets that people expel when they cough or sneeze will fall to the ground within six feet. But some scientists, having looked at studies of air flow and being concerned about smaller particles called aerosols, suggest that people consider a number of factors, including their own vulnerability and whether they are outdoors or in an enclosed room, when deciding whether six feet is enough distance. No scientists are suggesting a wholesale change in behavior, or proposing that some other length for separation from another human, like seven, or nine feet, is actually the right one. "Everything is about probability," said Dr. Harvey Fineberg, who is the head of the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. "Three feet is better than nothing. Six feet is better than three feet. At that point, the larger drops have pretty much fallen down. Maybe if you're out of spitting range, that could be even safer, but six feet is a pretty good number." One complicating factor is that aerosols, smaller droplets that can be emitted when people are breathing and talking, play some role in spreading the new coronavirus. Studies have shown that aerosols can be created during certain hospital or laboratory procedures like when using nebulizers to help patients inhale medication, which makes such procedures risky for doctors who do them. If the aerosols that people exhale in other settings are significant in spreading the disease, the six foot distance would not be completely protective because those are carried more easily by air currents. Aerosols are generally considered to be particles under 5 microns in diameter, about the size of a red blood cell, and can be spread in the environment by talking and breathing. But some researchers argue that this is a false dichotomy. Infectious droplets can't easily be divided into those that are big enough to fall to the ground quickly and those that stay aloft because so much depends on environmental conditions and how deeply they penetrate into the respiratory tract. "It's really a continuum," said Dr. Donald Milton, who studies bioaerosols at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Even without the launching power of a sneeze, air currents could carry a flow of aerosol sized virus particles exhaled by an infected person 20 feet or more away. "In any confined geometry like an office room, meeting room, department store, food store," said Eugene Chudnovsky, a physicist at Lehman College and the City University of New York's Graduate Center. In a study not yet peer reviewed, he analyzed air flow and showed how, "the vortices in the air are taking the virus to different places." A preliminary study at the University of Nebraska Medical Center found evidence of coronavirus genetic material on various surfaces in isolation rooms where infected patients were being treated, including on air vents more than six feet from the patients. The research, which has not yet been peer reviewed, indicates that the virus can occasionally travel long distances. "The virus is so small, it can hitch a ride even on tiny, tiny particles," Dr. Fineberg said. "But how important is each size and how well they can transmit disease is not fully understood." It is also unclear how many virus particles it takes to start an infection, how long the viral particles remain viable or if studies like the one in Nebraska simply detected the genetic calling card the virus left behind. Spacing is an effective solution because it also reduces the number of people in a confined space. That reduces the likelihood of an infected person being in the group. And if there is one, fewer other people might be infected. Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the six foot distance would clearly "reduce the number of droplets you come in contact with. I have no doubt about that." But, he said: "The question is what does it take for you to get infected? And that I think is the trillion dollar question we have." He said, "Maybe all it takes is an aerosol. You don't need any droplets at all." If that's the case, he said, then someone who is at high risk would not want to be in the same room with someone who is infected or might be infected. Current guidelines already suggest that anyone at high risk should stay home and not be out in public in the first place. And they seem to be working. Places where people reduced travel and started social distancing weeks ago, especially in California, New York and Washington, are starting to show a reduction in the number of new coronavirus cases. People still need to shop and take care of necessities, Dr. Osterholm said, but reducing the risk of exposure to all possible modes of transmission infected surfaces, droplets and smaller aerosols is important. "Your job is to limit it as much as you can." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Judy Dyble in 1971. She sang on the folk group Fairport Convention's 1968 debut album before moving on to several other bands and sounds. Judy Dyble, a singer and songwriter who was in the first recorded lineup of the British folk rock institution Fairport Convention before going on to an extensive, though interrupted, recording career, died on Sunday in Oxfordshire, England. She was 71. Her death, at a hospital, was announced on her Facebook page. No specific cause was given, but she learned she had lung cancer in 2019. She had lived in Oxfordshire since the 1970s. With her crystalline soprano voice, Ms. Dyble emerged from London's early 1960s folk scene as a teenager and joined the newly formed Fairport Convention in 1967. Fairport Convention set out to create a distinctively British folk rock, glancing toward American rock 'n' roll, psychedelia and country but also drawing on centuries of Celtic tradition. The band spawned a durable British genre: trad rock. Ms. Dyble sang on its 1968 debut album, "Fairport Convention," but had been "unceremoniously dumped" from the band before it was released, she wrote on her website. She went on to work within and beyond folky contexts, dipping into progressive rock and electronic music, while joining anniversary reunions of Fairport Convention and its many ex members through the decades. Ms. Dyble was born on Feb. 13, 1949, in London. She took piano lessons as a child and frequented London's folk pubs and clubs as a teenager. In her first group, Judy and the Folkmen, she played autoharp, holding it vertically and picking it like a banjo. Fairport Convention was founded by musicians she had sung with around London: Ashley Hutchings, Simon Nicol and Richard Thompson, who was Ms. Dyble's boyfriend at the time. On her website, she wrote, "They quite fancied having a girl in the band and I guess I was the nearest, so I was asked." The "Fairport Convention" album included songs from Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan alongside Fairport's own, and it presented the band as England's answer to Jefferson Airplane. After leaving Fairport Convention, Ms. Dyble met the saxophonist Ian McDonald. They advertised their services to work with other musicians and were answered by the brothers Peter and Michael Giles and the guitarist Robert Fripp; the three had already made an album as Giles, Giles and Fripp. All five recorded demo songs together, later released as "The Brondesbury Tapes," before Ms. Dyble moved on. Mr. Fripp, Mr. McDonald and Michael Giles formed the now eminent progressive rock band King Crimson. Ms. Dyble soon joined the singer and songwriter Jackie McAuley, who had backed Van Morrison in the group Them, to start Trader Horne. The band toured widely in Britain but made just one album, of Baroque tinged psych folk pop, titled "Morning Way" (1970), before Ms. Dyble dissolved it. In 1971, she had a short lived group, DC and the MBs, with musicians from the Canterbury scene of jazz influenced progressive rock the saxophonist Lol Coxhill and the brothers Phil and Steve Miller. She married the disc jockey and music critic Simon Stable (born Simon de la Bedoyere) in 1971. From 1973 to 1997, Ms. Dyble largely left music behind, although she appeared with Fairport Convention for its annual Cropredy Festival in 1981 and 1982. She worked as a librarian, started a cassette tape duplication company with her husband and raised their two children, Stephanie Hellsten and Dan de la Bedoyere, who survive her along with two grandchildren. After the death of her husband in 1994, with her children in college, she rejoined Fairport Convention at Cropredy for its 30th anniversary in 1997. She also sang at the group's 35th, 40th and 50th anniversary reunions. At 53, Ms. Dyble was drawn back into recording by a fan of Trader Horne: Marc Swordfish of the electronic band Astralasia, who asked her in 2002 to sing and write lyrics over his loops. They collaborated on her 2004 solo debut album, "Enchanted Garden," as well as on two albums released in 2006, "Spindle" and "The Whorf," both of which updated late 1960s psych folk with digital technology. She continued to record with other collaborators in songs that ranged from intricate folk pop to boundary stretching suites on "Talking With Strangers" (2009), "Starcrazy" (2011), "Flow and Change" (2013), "Earth Is Sleeping" and a 2017 duet album with Andy Lewis, "Summer Dancing." Ms. Dyble was reluctant to categorize her music. "All the lyrics I sing have a story behind them, and I guess that's what the folky thing is," she said in a 2013 interview with the website Let It Rock. "But I try not to tell a whole story; I just try to tell something that means something to me and it might resonate with someone else, but it might not mean the same thing." In 2015, she released "Gathering the Threads," an anthology of her own rare recordings, while she worked with Dave Thompson on her autobiography, "An Accidental Musician" (2016). Ms. Dyble performed a few gigs a year with her Band of Perfect Strangers, and recorded live albums at club shows. In 2015, she reunited with Jerry McAuley of Trader Horne for a 45th anniversary performance of their album. Ms. Dyble recorded with the progressive rock band Big Big Train on "The Ivy Gate" and began writing songs with the band's singer, David Longdon. Their album, "Between a Breath and a Breath," is due for release in September under the name Dyble Longdon. Announcing the album, Ms. Dyble wrote, "Quite a few of my lyrics have a touch of sadness about them but always with an optimism for the future and a desire to know what happens next." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Very First Animal Appeared Amid an Explosion of DNA The animal kingdom is one of life's great success stories a collection of millions of species that swim, burrow, run and fly across the planet. All that diversity, from ladybugs to killer whales, evolved from a common ancestor that likely lived over 650 million years ago. No one has found a fossil of the ur animal, so we can't say for sure what it looked like. But two scientists in Britain have done the next best thing. They've reconstructed its genome. Their study, published in Nature Communications, offers an important clue to how the animal kingdom arose: with an evolutionary burst of new genes. These may have played a crucial part in transforming our single celled ancestors into creatures with complex bodies made of many kinds of cells. The new genes also proved to be remarkably durable. Of all the genes in the human genome, 55 percent were already present in the first animal. "The big surprise was how many of them there were," said Jordi Paps, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Essex and co author of the new study. Dr. Paps and Peter W.H. Holland, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, began by drawing an animal family tree. Our own species belongs to one branch, the vertebrates (animals with spines), along with birds, reptiles and fish. Genetic studies have shown that our closest invertebrate relatives include creatures like starfish, while jellyfish and sponges are among our most distant cousins. Researchers also have identified the single celled species that are the closest relatives to the animal kingdom tiny aquatic protozoans that prey on bacteria. From all these tree branches, the scientists picked 62 species, including our own, to study closely. They searched the DNA of the organisms, cataloging all the genes that encode proteins, the molecules that carry out countless chemical reactions in our bodies and give it structure. (Humans have about 20,000 protein coding genes.) Dr. Paps and Dr. Holland toted up nearly 1.5 million genes in all, and then estimated when they first evolved. It makes for a wide ranging genetic history. Humans and sharks, for example, make hemoglobin using nearly identical genes. That means hemoglobin genes were already present in their common ancestor. But hemoglobin genes can't be found in more distantly related animal species, such as sponges. So the gene evolved in early vertebrates long after the origin of the animal kingdom. While some genes like hemoglobin are young, others are old. The researchers found 6,331 genes that were present in the common ancestor of all living animals. Many of those genes appeared long before animals themselves. Some are essential to the basic workings of all living things such as copying DNA and first evolved billions of years ago. Other genes arose more recently and can be found today in our close single celled relatives. These findings confirmed earlier studies, which had been carried out on fewer species. When animals arose, evolution gave old genes new jobs. Single celled protozoans, for example, use some genes to make proteins that let them cling together in tiny colonies. In animals, these genes helped cells to glue themselves permanently together a requirement for building a body. But 1,189 of the genes in the ancestral animal can't be found in our closest known single celled relatives. These new genes must have evolved in proto animals. Dr. Paps said there were at least two ways for that to have happened. Sometimes a random string of DNA with no function mutates and begins producing a protein. Alternatively, an existing gene may be accidentally duplicated. One of the copies may accumulate mutations until it produces a new kind of protein, even as the other copy keeps doing the original gene's original job. The newly acquired DNA turns out not to be involved in a random assortment of jobs. Instead, many of these genes play crucial roles in building and running animal bodies for example, making proteins that cells use to send signals to other cells. Dr. Paps and Dr. Holland also found that a number of the genes developed by proto animals are implicated in cancer. Many of these genes keep cells working together harmoniously, and when they mutate, cells may multiply out of control. Inaki Ruiz Trillo, a biologist at Instituto de Biologia Evolutiva in Barcelona who was not involved in the new study, said that the flowering of new genes might represent a fundamental characteristic of the animal kingdom. They "could be used to define what an animal is," he said. Dr. Paps speculated that the burst of new genes might have appeared in early animals because the environment somehow triggered lots of mutations. But another possibility is that proto animals gradually accumulated all these new genes over hundreds of millions of years a stretch of evolutionary history that scientists cannot yet document by studying living species. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The swimsuit reflects the underbelly of society: It privileges superficiality, has been used to police cultures and values increasingly irrelevant norms of gender and sexuality. Yet, it survives and lives unstably in the public imagination, vacillating between our collective affection and disdain. Last June, Miss America ended its nearly 100 year old swimsuit competition. "We are moving it forward and evolving it in this cultural revolution," Gretchen Carlson, the organization's chairwoman, said at the time. In April, Halima Aden made history as the first Muslim model to wear a hijab and burkini in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. It's hard to say when the garment came to be , but attitudes have certainly changed over time. Early rules about swimwear were governed almost exclusively by modesty; women wore long skirts and men were required to wear T shirts; and progress was glacial. In 1866 (one of the earliest mentions in this paper), the Times referred to swimsuits, or at least a variant, as "dresses for sea bathing" and recommended that women wear "a tunic and knickerbockers of a stout brown holland." The best material for this look was still up for debate. It wasn't until 1925 almost two decades after Annette Kellermann, an Australian swimmer who famously wore a form fitting one piece bathing suit that the mayor of Atlantic City Beach ruled that women could wear "one piece suits with skirts and bare legs." But even with this new relaxed policy, the mayor asked women not to "go beyond reason in their beach attire," and, according to a New York Times article about the rule, there would be men and women "beach censors" to enforce the dress code. With these positions, it's difficult to imagine that an even more scandalous item the bikini came on the scene in 1946. Louis Reard, a French automobile engineer, designed the two piece, naming it after the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, according to his wife, Michelle. The design shocked, and Mr. Reard could find only one person to model the suit, Micheline Bernardini, a 19 year old nude dancer. The bikini was not an instant hit, particularly in the United States; it chafed against the moral barometer of the day, and celebrity endorsements from the likes of Brigitte Bardot confirmed its immodesty. The Times has dutifully, if not always intentionally, tracked the evolution of swimwear. In the archives are personal essays describing the dreadful ordeal of swimsuit shopping; the advertisements of carefree women announcing significant sales; and unexpected articles with quotations from young women, one saying that if her teachers at her Catholic school in New Rochelle saw the cut of her swimsuit "they'd probably go crazy." The articles in the archives reflect the swimsuit's slippery definition and suggest that perhaps this garment's survival is less about its meaning and more about its role as a vehicle for enjoying life's low key pleasures: water and the sun. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
THE SILENCE OF THE AMPS : The first all electric BMW, the ActiveE is an eerily quiet sporty coupe. FALLING trees may not make a sound when nobody is there to hear but the sound not coming from the BMW ActiveE poses an equally profound riddle. Even in full sprint, the rear drive coupe has absolutely no exhaust note. That's because the car doesn't have a tailpipe or an engine, for that matter. It's the first 100 percent electric Bimmer, offered to 700 Americans who will help BMW evaluate its electric technology. I recently spent a week driving one of the first production units around the San Francisco Bay Area, and never stopped marveling at the muted whir, like a jet turbine's, from the 125 kilowatt electric motor. Which poses the question: Is a BMW any less of an ultimate driving machine if it is silent? The limited production ActiveE only 1,100 will be produced globally weighs a hefty 4,000 pounds, some 800 pounds more than the BMW 1 Series on which it is based. But the ActiveE carries its bulk with near gymnastic dexterity. I thoroughly enjoyed tossing the two ton Teutonic subcompact between the lanes of the Bay Area's bridges, up and down San Francisco's steeply pitched streets and along the winding roads of Berkeley's hills. Acceleration from a stop to 60 miles per hour comes in an unremarkable 8.5 seconds, but the feel behind the wheel especially the swift and smooth as silk surges from 0 to 30 m.p.h., and from 50 to 80 was blissful. The steering response is everything you would expect from a BMW. A well calibrated suspension helps to counter the extra weight. Dave Buchko, a BMW spokesman, said, "Our engineers are really good at selecting shocks and spring rates that provide well controlled jounce and rebound." Removing the engine and related parts lightened the 1 Series donor car, but installing a 32 kilowatt hour lithium ion battery pack added back 992 pounds. The 192 battery cells are crammed all over the place: under the raised "power dome" hood, along the driveshaft tunnel and where the fuel tank used to be. The added bulk takes a toll on driving range. Yet I managed at least 80 miles of charge every day, even when flogging the system. Driving with more restraint took me closer to 90 miles. One evening I took a two hour highway spin, averaging 49 m.p.h. Using the Ecopro setting which dials back the throttle response, but not to a compromising degree I went 101 miles with 9 percent of the battery charge remaining, according to the dashboard monitor. Plugged into a 240 volt circuit, the on board 7.7 kilowatt charger provides an empty to full charge in about four hours. The interior is quintessential BMW, with tasteful materials, austere but useful displays for information like the battery state of charge and attention to detail that extends to each meticulous stitch in the leather upholstery. "It's a step up from the Mini E," said Rich Steinberg, BMW's manager of electric vehicle operations and strategy in the United States. "It's got leather. It's got navi. It's got cruise. It's got heated seats. It's got satellite. All the things you'd expect from BMW." Mr. Steinberg was referring to the all electric version of the Mini, the previous test platform, since discontinued, in BMW's electric car program. The Mini E was a relatively spartan car with a rough ride and batteries where the backseat might have been. The ActiveE is more refined in all respects, and it uses the same battery, motor and electric drivetrain developed by BMW in partnership with Bosch and SB LiMotive that will end up in the company's full production electric car, the i3, which is to start trickling into the market late next year. In the ActiveE, BMW added a liquid based thermal management system to keep the batteries from becoming too cold or too hot. This helps to prevent the loss of driving range as much as 40 percent experienced by Mini E drivers in extremely cold weather. The most remarkable feature carried over from the Mini E to the ActiveE is the very assertive regenerative braking, which applies strong deceleration as soon as you lift your foot off the accelerator. I drove the ActiveE down Marin Avenue, the steepest street in the Berkeley hills. Without my touching either pedal, the ActiveE slowly glided down the incline to 20 m.p.h. and eased to a crawl as if in an ultralow "granny gear." Imagine that same sub first gear feel applied on flat roads as soon as you lift your foot, bringing the car from 40 m.p.h. to a stop in about four seconds. "One pedal drive is something we're proud of," Mr. Steinberg said. "We're continuing to exploit it not only for the energy reasons, but also because of the driving experience." BMW estimates that one pedal driving increases by 20 percent the amount of energy reclaimed when the electric drive motor switches into generator mode and pumps juice into the battery pack. It took me only a few stops to figure out how to approach a stoplight lifting my foot off the accelerator at the right time to reach a complete stop at the right spot without touching the brake pedal. On highways or surface roads, I learned how to gently move the accelerator pedal slightly up and down, never taking my foot off, to produce the desired speed or to find the sweet spot where the car glides along as if coasting. E.V.'s like the Tesla Roadster have used the single pedal approach, but BMW's one pedal E.V. driving will become, I believe, the model for electric car engineering. I'm a convert to the single pedal, and wish the Nissan Leaf my usual car for daily commutes drove the same way. Most E.V. makers aim to give their electric vehicles a driving and braking experience as familiar as possible to drivers of conventional gas powered cars. The Leaf, even with its impressive quickness, has a wispy feel, whereas the ActiveE operates like a maglev train, hurtling forward, hugging corners and engaging the road (while not burning a drop of petroleum, I might add). I had ample opportunity to switch back and forth between the ActiveE and my own Leaf. My week with the ActiveE coincided with the week I was to drive my daughter's car pool to high school. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in my latest effort to convince my daughter that her electric Bimmer driving dad is cool. The driver seat, slid all the way back to make room for my 6 foot 4 frame, touched the rear cushion, leaving insufficient room in the back seat for her schoolmates. The batteries in back also trim the trunk space to a barely usable 7 cubic feet. The Leaf, on the other hand, can handle five people along with some gear under the hatch. So the four students piled into the Leaf each morning. As soon as my parental duties were completed, I rushed back to park and plug in the Nissan and jump into the ActiveE transforming myself from dad nerd to electronaut, the name BMW invented for the 700 consumers in a few Northeast and West Coast cities who are putting down 2,250 and paying 499 a month for a two year lease. The ActiveE is not available for purchase. The car is a "technology shakedown," according to Mr. Steinberg, letting BMW gain feedback as it continues development of the i3. That purpose built electric four seater not a conversion is to go on sale in a few markets by late next year, followed by wider release in 2014. The company hasn't officially announced prices or sales goals for the i3, but a year ago Ian Robertson, BMW's head of global sales and marketing, told Automotive News that the company hoped to sell 30,000 of the futuristic cars in 2014. Given that the ActiveE is a test platform, it was perhaps not surprising that I encountered a few glitches. Several times, a warning screen told me the shifter couldn't be moved to "P" and to take the car to a service center. Another time, a more emphatic "drivetrain malfunction" screen warned, "Stop carefully and turn off vehicle." I knew from online forums to ignore these as false alarms. There were also small hiccups in ultra low speed driving when various conditions that were hard to identify or replicate maybe high torque on wet roads or braking software miscommunications produced momentary wheel shake. This happened three times during my week of driving; BMW said fixes were expected within days. As engaging as I found the ActiveE, it is just a step toward the i3, which will have a body mostly of lightweight carbon fiber. The i3 will have more legroom, four doors and subfloor packaging of the batteries and most important, weigh some 1,300 pounds less than the ActiveE. This will let BMW reduce the size of the battery pack to about 20 kilowatt hours, from 32, while still providing 100 miles of range. Using the ActiveE's drivetrain and 170 horsepower motor, the much lighter i3 is likely to be a startling performer. BMW's electric efforts won't end with the i3. "To one degree or another, you'll see plugs cascade throughout the entire BMW line," said Mr. Steinberg, the company's electric vehicle manager. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. At the airport here, there is a reminder to travelers of the jobs that global trade can bring. A shiny 2017 Volkswagen Passat is stationed near the entryway and labeled: "Designed in Germany. Built in Chattanooga." The American map is dotted with towns drained of jobs after homegrown factories bolted to lower wage countries. But for many spots throughout the country, the same strategy of moving operations overseas when practiced by foreign companies has buoyed local fortunes. In Chattanooga and the surrounding region, for example, more than two dozen companies from 20 countries have set up shop, generating billions of dollars in investment, employing thousands of workers and helping drive Tennessee's jobless rate to 3.6 percent in June, a record low for the state. He saw his business explode in 2010, thanks in part to growing sales of vehicles made by the Indian manufacturer Mahindra. Mr. Topping is now teamed up with the company and is president of Southeast Mahindra, where nearly 60 people assemble and distribute small red tractors suited to gentleman farmers. The parts are made in the United States as well as India, South Korea and Japan. "Everything has foreign content," he said. Production workers at Southeast Mahindra start at a wage of 12 an hour, eventually earning up to 20 an hour. The competition with rivals, both in the United States and in developing countries, can be brutal, and success is counted in nickels and minutes. Like other Southern states, Tennessee makes a selling point of the scarcity of unions, largely a result of laws exempting workers who don't join from paying the equivalent of dues. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. "It's hard work," Mr. Topping acknowledged as the temperature outside neared 97 degrees, making the air in the assembly shed hot and thick. "But this is a close margin business," he said, explaining why he is not offering more money despite adding a second shift. Tennessee, which actively courts firms from abroad, ranks first in the nation in jobs created by foreign owned companies, according to the State Economic and Community Development Department: 136,000 workers at 931 foreign based businesses. In the Chattanooga area, where the unemployment rate dropped to 3.3 percent, foreign companies account for roughly 20,000 jobs, according to a list compiled by the local Chamber of Commerce. "We love to say, 'Buy American,'" said William B. Kilbride, the chamber's president and chief executive, "but we both know how hard that is." He pointed to Pilgrim's Pride, a large chicken processing plant in the Southside neighborhood. It employs 1,200 people, and many of the chickens are raised on north Georgia farms, but most of the profits flow back to the majority owner, JBS of Brazil. "So are you buying American or not?" he asked. Volkswagen, which made this spot its North American manufacturing headquarters, now employs more than 3,200 people at the plant it opened in 2011. The automaker's presence has attracted other firms, like the Spanish company Gestamp, which manufactures metal automotive components and employs 634 people. "You can throw a baseball and almost hit the Volkswagen plant," said Corey Jahn, the Gestamp plant director, standing next to powerful cold stamping machines that press sheets of metal into wheelhouses, door sills and floor plenums. The neighborhood supply chain significantly reduces shipping costs and turnaround times, while an American presence avoids the effect of currency fluctuations on profits. "We follow our customers throughout the world," Mr. Jahn said. Japan is the biggest foreign investor, employing 3,000 nearby residents at Japanese companies like Komatsu, Toshiba, Hitachi Metals and Toyota. The Haier Group of China has 1,500 people working at its appliance manufacturing factory. Wacker Polysilicon North America, a German company, employed 650 people full time in its Bradley County plant after investing 2.5 billion the largest private investment in the state's history. A 150 million expansion will add 50 jobs. Many of the companies have also established apprenticeship, training and internship programs with the local community college and high schools, Mr. Kilbride said. Foreign businesses seeking to expand their piece of the North American market say they are drawn to Chattanooga's location; its rail, port and interstate highway connections; dependable electric power; supply pipelines; pro business tax provisions; and trainable work force. Political leaders and the chamber also highlight as incentives the lack of state property and income taxes and the absence of unions. Still, the antitrade talk currently streaming out of the White House is unsettling. "That keeps me up at night," said Mary Beth Hudson, vice president of Wacker Polysilicon. "We depend on global trade." Some raw materials, equipment and spare parts come from abroad, she said. Of greater concern are the import duties that the Trump administration could impose on the foreign solar panel makers that Wacker supplies, potentially cutting into the sales of the final product in the United States. "We want to make sure there's customers out there to buy our materials," Ms. Hudson said. Germany sells much more to the United States than it buys, creating a multibillion dollar trade imbalance that has agitated the White House. "We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany," Mr. Trump tweeted in May. "Very bad for U.S. This will change." It is much too early to measure whether recent pronouncements in Washington have put off potential foreign investors. But Mr. Kilbride of the chamber worries that uncertainty surrounding Mr. Trump's trade, tax and immigration policies could have a chilling effect. "If you're concerned about anything, you sit it out," he said. For other firms, the decision to set up manufacturing in the United States has much less to do with who is in the White House than who will buy their product. Nokian Tyres, a Finnish company that is preparing to break ground on a 360 million plant with 400 jobs, can grow only if it has a local presence, said Tommi Heinonen, head of Nokian North America. "When we started the project, there was a different administration, and it will be different again," Mr. Heinonen said, noting that the company started scouting American locations in 2015. "The factory is built to be there for decades. If you start to change your corporate strategy every time there is a new person in some chair, you end up changing it quite often." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"The Car Chasers," an auto themed reality show on CNBC, comes back for a second season of wheeling and dealing on Tuesday. Jeff Allen, the owner of Flat 12 Gallery in Lubbock, Tex., roams the countryside looking for bargains that he and his team including his bottom line oriented wife, Meg Bailey; his fixer, Perry Brandt; and a master mechanic, Eric Ables can flip for a profit. Providing dramatic tension, the gallery's chief competition is Mr. Allen's car aficionado father, Tom Souter, also known as "Roundman." A major theme in the first episode is Mr. Allen's 17,000 purchase and subsequent over the top restoration of a 1957 Chevy Bel Air, which he (unconvincingly) argues has nothing to do with an attempt to equal or outdo his father's pristine example. In a telephone interview, Mr. Allen said that what distinguishes "The Car Chasers" from, say, "Counting Cars" on History, is an emphasis not on transforming rusted wrecks into showpieces but on how much money is made or lost when a car is sold. On screen graphics give viewers the numbers from offers on the table to the profit or loss. "We're on CNBC, so it's more about the investment," he said. "We mostly deal in cars that are 25,000 and below, because for prices like that people will say, 'Yeah, I could own that car and drive it on the weekends.' On the higher end, a Camaro might be 75,000 or 80,000, and very few can pull the trigger and write a check to us in an amount like that. Sometimes I'd rather have five 20,000 cars than one 100,000 car." Mr. Allen says he has sold or acquired cars for actors, including Tim Allen (no relation) and Charlie Sheen. One rule of thumb he said he acquired from that experience is that celebrity ownership of that type can add perhaps 5,000 to the value of a car. In the first two episodes of this season's show, cars the team deals with include the '57 Bel Air, a 1969 Pontiac Catalina convertible, a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS and a 1978 Pontiac Trans Am. The emphasis is on muscle cars, but Mr. Allen said that some foreign vehicles will also be traded in coming shows. Asked to name three "holy grail" cars he would like to add to his collection, Mr. Allen offered these: First, a Ferrari Testarossa. More specifically, Mr. Allen is after one of the original white cars driven by Det. James Crockett, known as Sonny, played by Don Johnson, on "Miami Vice." He claims to know where it is. "I've been keeping my eye on it for a long time," he said. Another is the 1970s Australian version of the Ford Falcon. The models that most interest Mr. Allen are those made famous by "The Road Warrior" starring Mel Gibson. "Those Cobras are very radical looking," Mr. Allen said. "I don't like to fly, but for the right car I would hop on a plane to Australia." The last entry in his automotive trifecta would be the Corvette Grand Sport. According to the Grand Sport Registry, this very special 'Vette was the byproduct of a Chevrolet racing program that began in 1962, but was stopped by the automaker after only five were built as Cobra fighting racers. They were to be the precursors of an intended 125 car run. The lightweight Grand Sports produced 550 horsepower, and were briefly campaigned, the registry said. Mr. Allen does not expect to find one of these cars gathering dust in a barn. "All of the Grand Sports have been found everybody knows where they are," he said. "But if price was no object, I'd definitely go after one of those." Mr. Allen said his "unicorn" car was the ill fated DeLorean, which he acquires on this season's show. "I wanted one of those ever since I was 16 and drove one my father had," he said. "When I finally bought the car I'd been chasing for 17 years it was an emotional moment. I was a huge fan, but I knew the car is gutless, can't get out of its own way, and is in many ways antiquated. When it comes down to it, I love the chase more than anything, so as fast as I got it running, I sold it. It's kind of like what they say about boats the two happiest days are when you buy it and when you sell it." See the second season trailer from "The Car Chasers" here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
"Yeah, I'm real," says Femi, a sharp witted transgender den mother to abandoned youth, during the second episode of "David Makes Man." Emerging out of nowhere with a group of homeless teens, Femi offers the 14 year old David water and protection as he walks home with drugs he has been forced to carry. She is one of the show's several characters who could be real or a figment of David's vivid imagination. "You didn't see all these eyes on you?" she asks. "That's all right, everybody don't need to see everything." It's a representative exchange on a show that may blur reality and fantasy at any given moment. But it also continues the nuanced explorations of black boyhood by the writer Tarell Alvin McCraney , best known for his Tony nominated play "Choir Boy" and as a writer of the Oscar winning "Moonlight." And while "David Makes Man" shares a Miami setting with "Moonlight," its 10 hour arc enables McCraney, who grew up there, to flesh out the hopes and tragedies of an entire South Florida black community. The series, which premieres Wednesday on Oprah Winfrey Network, follows David (Akili McDowell) as he navigates life in a public housing project while dealing with multiple pressures: to sell drugs and help support his family, but also to succeed as one of the few black students at his magnet school. Complicating these challenges is the death of Sky, a drug dealer and father figure who continues to mentor David by appearing to him in visions after he dies. "The show came about because I was trying to track down those moments of trauma that were making it difficult for me to enjoy the moments of relative success that I was having," McCraney said in a phone interview last month. "So many great things were happening for me, and I'd find myself depressed, in a fetal position, and then I realized I did not know how to be in the moment, take care of myself, love my body, my space, and the people around me." "I wondered why I didn't learn those things," he added. "I was surviving rather than living." When McCraney turned to his past in order to heal, he began to conceive of his title character, David, a dark skinned African American wunderkind who is mired in poverty, racism and colorism. Michael B. Jordan, who is an executive producer for the show, noted how similar his own childhood in Newark, N.J., was to McCraney's. "We thought it was important," Jordan said, "to show other kids that have similar experiences or live in a similar situation that you can take the stereotypical disadvantages that you grew up with and turn them into strengths." And it was this complex portrayal of childhood trauma that caught the eye of Oprah Winfrey, who first heard about the show's concept by chance. In 2017 she happened to attend a meeting just a few rooms from where McCraney and Jordan were promoting the show, and Winfrey said she had intended to stop by briefly to greet them. Once McCraney started relating his personal path to this story, though, she was so captivated that she sat through their entire presentation. "It was the best pitch I've ever heard," she said. The show's slow paced, hyper vibrant aesthetics, steeped in magical realism, make "David Makes Man" the most experimental show on her network. But Winfrey was drawn mainly to David's desire to work through tragedy. "Everything we know about trauma is that most kids who've experienced it have trouble regulating themselves," Winfrey said by phone. "And when David has trouble regulating himself, he dissociates and his imagination takes over. I love the fact that the show doesn't pause to explain what is happening in his head. We just see him navigating between these two worlds." McCraney and the showrunner Dee Harris Lawrence ("Shots Fired," "Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G.") knew they had to push the limits of realism in order to capture the creativity and coping mechanisms of David's mind. Much like "Six Feet Under" and "The Leftovers," the series explores the boundaries between life and death; it does so, in part, by referencing West African spiritual practices such as ancestor worship and divination rituals. "We had a lot of practical conversations about how to show his imagination," Harris Lawrence said. "We weren't 'Krypton' and did not have a lot of special effects. So we went to all the different departments helping us make this show and asked them to think out of the box and use sound, color and music differently, beyond their usual television tropes." As a result, "David Makes Man" upends preconceived notions about so called urban dramas and the black characters they feature. Just as he did with "Moonlight" and his other previous works, McCraney turns the coming of age story into a complex treatment of black interiority and resilience. "He always gives us multiple layers of black masculinity," said E. Patrick Johnson, the author of the book and one man show "Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South an Oral History." "In one character, you may have a whole range of masculinities. The person who you perceive initially as a queen is the same man, or boy, that may, on the turn of a dime, become probably the most traditionally masculine person standing before you. "In his art," Johnson added, "masculinity is seen as a performance that has a whole range of modes and expression." That fluidity shows up in the series's portrayal of the inner lives of its black male characters, as well as in the way it centralizes gender nonconforming characters like David's neighbor Mx. Elijah (Travis Coles), whose nurturing spirit, along with those of David's mother ( Alana Arenas ) and teacher ( Phylicia Rashad ), are all essential to David's maturation. In the end, we begin to see the world not simply as David lives it, but as he wills it to be. And "David Makes Man" emerges as one of the most innovative television shows debuting this year. Jordan said he hoped it would also inspire children growing up the way he did. "We want to show a way for them to take their reality and turn it into a dream and a bigger opportunity," he said. "And that your imagination is sometimes the only safe place that you have." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The contest between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 1960, was expected to be close, and Americans were glued to their televisions until long after dawn. Coverage of the changing returns revealed some of the stresses and growing pains of early television news, which was little more than a decade old at the time. NBC and CBS, wary of granting a head start to the competitor, each moved up its broadcast to the early evening from 9 p.m. ABC News, showing how much of an also ran it was at the time, interrupted its coverage to run episodes of "Bugs Bunny" and "The Rifleman." This helped cause its already disgruntled vice president and anchor, John Charles Daly, to quit in protest the next week. The Big Two news divisions paid lavishly for their election night coverage commercials alone would not be enough to cover all expenses. NBC opted for a new space age set at 30 Rock. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley sat at an X shaped desk that was suspended above the floor of Studio 8 H, now home to "Saturday Night Live." In 1960, "The Huntley Brinkley Report," celebrated for its sometimes witty dialogue between the principals, was, by far, the nation's most watched nightly news program. Huntley opened election night by telling viewers, "You may choose to do a little dial twisting to see how our competitors are doing, but we hope and trust you'll be back." True to form, their election coverage drew many more viewers than that of the more old school Walter Cronkite on CBS. Starring at all three networks that evening were state of the art computers, programmed to estimate returns in advance. But in a belly flop at the start of the night, the CBS machine, an IBM 7090, concluded that Nixon, the Republican candidate, would be elected. The machine gave Nixon odds of 100 to 1, and by an Electoral College landslide of 459 to 78 votes. A nervous Kennedy, watching at his brother Robert's home in Hyannis Port, Mass., was reassured by his pollster, Louis Harris, that the CBS prediction was "crazy." ABC's Univac computer also predicted Nixon would win. As the night wore on and Kennedy's edge became clearer, Richard Harkness of NBC boasted on the air that his network's computer an RCA 501, made by its corporate parent had achieved a "truly amazing electronic coup" by predicting a narrow Kennedy victory. Twisting the knife into his network rivals, Brinkley told viewers that NBC's computer was the only one "that has not at any time predicted Nixon would win the others did." At that early stage of television technology, election night coverage was limited largely to the New York studios, except for reports from the candidates' headquarters. By about 3 a.m. New York time, although Nixon was closing the gap in the popular vote, Kennedy had moved within striking distance of an Electoral College victory. A CBS correspondent reported that Nixon would soon speak to supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where, "on reliable authority," he would concede defeat. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. From the Nixon campaign's ballroom, Herb Kaplow of NBC said, "Most of the people here seem to know that their candidate is not doing very well." The Nixons, with pained, forced smiles, were shown descending into a crowd singing (to the tune of "Goodnight, Ladies"), "We want Nixon / to be our pres i dent!" One Nixon hater shouted, "We want Tricky Dicky!" Pat Nixon winced and clearly tried to suppress her tears. Her husband declared, "Many are listening here who are supporting Senator Kennedy I know too that he is probably listening to this program." This was followed by laughter and then boos, which Nixon closed down. "If the present trend continues," he said, Kennedy would be the next president. The vice president added that after "hard fought" campaigns, "we unite behind the man who is elected." If Kennedy should be declared the winner, "he will have my wholehearted support and yours too," Nixon said, to more catcalls. Huntley told Brinkley, "I don't know whether that was a concession or not, do you?" Cronkite said that Nixon "came as close as a man can, but did not actually concede." Some of Kennedy's aides were angered by Nixon's failure to throw in the towel. But Kennedy told his family: "Why should he concede? I wouldn't." And with that, he went to bed. Later that morning, Brinkley announced: "At 7:19 a.m. Eastern time, Senator Kennedy was elected president of the United States. The NBC Victory Desk has just given California to Kennedy, and that gives him the election." (NBC proved to have been premature: After absentee ballots were counted the next week, California's 32 electoral votes were assigned to Nixon.) Almost an hour after noon Eastern time came the denouement. NBC interrupted "Play Your Hunch," starring Merv Griffin, with the image of Nixon's press secretary, Herbert Klein, in Los Angeles, reading Nixon's telegram assuring Kennedy that "you will have the united support of all Americans as you lead the nation." Klein said that Nixon "looked at this thing philosophically" and showed "wonderful grace" and "very good spirits" as he explained his defeat to his daughters, Tricia and Julie. President Dwight D. Eisenhower also wired congratulations to Kennedy. (In Nixon's and Eisenhower's messages and the rest of the TV coverage was not even a faint insinuation that Kennedy's victory was anything less than absolute. If Nixon had any private desire to investigate possible voting irregularities, there was no sign of it on this day.) Watching at his brother's house, Kennedy was appalled that Nixon had not conceded in person, if only to thank his followers. "He went out the way he came in," Kennedy told his circle. "No class." An hour after Klein spoke, viewers saw the smiling victor, waving from the front seat of a white Lincoln Continental, in a motorcade moving away from Hyannis Port. When the victor arrived at the Hyannis Armory in a flurry of confetti, people shouted, "Hey, Jack, Jack!" Inside the building, Kennedy, with glistening eyes, and his wife, Jacqueline, neared the platform. An NBC reporter intoned that the winner had achieved "the rarest of tributes a standing ovation from newsmen." In December 1960, the Electoral College confirmed Kennedy's victory, giving him 303 votes to Nixon's 219, with Kennedy taking a hairbreadth popular vote margin over Nixon of slightly more than 100,000 votes. The television critic Eve Starr called it "the most suspenseful evening anyone ever spent in front of a TV set." Election nights had been televised since the tiny audience of 1948 that saw Harry S. Truman's comeback victory over Thomas Dewey, but November 1960 was the first time that so many Americans gathered before their screens to watch the results. That election night audience was far exceeded three years and two weeks later, when the networks covered the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination an event that confirmed the rise of television as the nation's pre eminent source of news. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The apocalypse has been postponed. Astronomers have long known that the Andromeda galaxy, a.k.a. Messier 31, a swirling city state of a trillion stars plus all the accouterments of gas, dust, dark matter and black holes is rumbling through the cosmos right toward us at 68 miles per second. Five years ago astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope calculated that M31 would hit our Milky Way galaxy head on 3.9 billion years from now. That collision, they said, would initiate a series of do si do encounters that would splash streamers of stars and gas across space, and end with the two galaxies merged into a single, supergiant globe of stars. New data have now revised this forecast. It turns out that the Andromeda galaxy is also going about 20 miles per second sideways. As a result, it will take a more winding path toward us, won't arrive for another 4.5 billion years and won't hit so hard, at least not at first, according to a paper in the Astrophysical Journal. A Galaxy Far, Far Away...Will Hit Ours From 2014: Hubble Space Telescope measurements have confirmed that the Milky Way will collide with a sibling galaxy known as the Andromeda nebula in billions of years. Visit Andromeda before it visits you. The Milky Way galaxy, home to the Sun and its few billion close friends, has a sibling, a slightly larger big brother galaxy known as the Andromeda nebula, M31, in astronomical parlance. The pair, the Milky Way and Andromeda, are the dominant members of a small family of galaxies known as the Local Group. Whereas the universe is expanding and galaxies are generally getting farther and farther away from each other with time, the galaxies in the Local Group are bound together by family ties in the form of their mutual gravity. And so our neighbors aren't going anywhere. And there is the problem. Andromeda and the Milky Way are actually heading toward each other in the dose do that constitutes life in a galaxy cluster. Recent measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed that they will hit head on in about 2 billion years. Since galaxies, like atoms, are mostly empty space, they will pass through each other like ghosts, but gravity will disrupt the stars and strew them all over space in gigantic spectacular streamers. Eventually they merge into a single giant galaxy. The bad news is that we will be dead. The Earth will have been boiled and sterilized eons earlier as the Sun swells and dies. The good news is that the collision will be a fiesta of new stars forming as that disruptive gravity collapses clouds of gas and dust and they make new stars. New worlds, another chance. Maybe. From 2014: Hubble Space Telescope measurements have confirmed that the Milky Way will collide with a sibling galaxy known as the Andromeda nebula in billions of years. "The earlier results suggested a more head on collision, and the new results suggest a more glancing blow," wrote Roland van der Marel, of the Space Telescope Science Institute, and lead author of the paper, in an email. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. But the ending will be the same, he said: the merger of both galaxies into a cosmic monstrosity. So enjoy the extra half billion years here in the tranquil suburbs of the Milky Way. This reprieve, if it can be called one, is the latest tidbit in a cornucopia of data from Gaia, a European spacecraft tasked with measuring the precise positions, velocities and other attributes of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies. The data have provided new insight into the history, dynamics and future of the Local Group, the small cluster of galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs. Joining us is the Andromeda galaxy, a slightly larger twin of the Milky Way, about 2.5 million light years distant, and, slightly farther away, a smaller spiral in the Triangulum constellation called M33. Other members of the group include a few dozen dwarf galaxies such as the Large and Small Magellanic clouds puffs of light visible in the Southern hemisphere. By precisely measuring the motions of stars in M31 and M33, Dr. van der Marel and his colleagues were able to measure the sidelong trajectories of those two galaxies for the first time, and determine that Andromeda is not coming straight at us. Instead it will sideswipe our galaxy, like an out of control driver, 4.5 billion years from now. That event will be less dramatic than it sounds, however. Because galaxies are mostly empty space, they will pass through each other like ghosts. The chances of stars or planets actually colliding are the inverse of astronomical, astronomers say. But gravity will disrupt the stars and strew them across space in vast, spectacular ribbons. Eventually the stars will collect themselves into a giant elliptical galaxy. The supermassive black holes that anchor the core of each galaxy will find each other and slowly circle inward. In the end they will collide, producing one of those space quivering explosions of gravitational waves detected by the LIGO antennas. The data also allowed the astronomers to refine their knowledge of the motions of M33. That galaxy, they concluded, is still on its first trip into the center of the Local Group from farther out in space. Eventually it will enter a wide orbit around the merged galaxies, until, slowed by friction, it spirals into the center and joins the crowd. "But this will take a long time after the elliptical galaxy has formed," Dr. van der Marel said. "Billions of years." You might ask what the view from Earth will be like by then. If our world exists at all in that far future, it will be a cinder: Long before the galaxies collide, the dying Sun will billow into a red giant and roast it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
When Microsoft previewed Windows to InfoWorld magazine in 1983, two years before the now ubiquitous operating system was first sold, the company showcased just one application: a pared down painting program. Now, more than three decades, billions of dollars and dozens of iterations later, Microsoft plans to stop developing that iconic Paint program, nudging it a step closer to death. Microsoft announced last week that it will stop actively developing Paint starting with a fall update to Windows 10, its flagship operating system. As a result, Paint could be removed altogether in future updates: The once vital component is now vestigial. In a statement, Microsoft played down the news, noting that Paint will continue to be available for free download and many of its features will remain in other places, including Paint 3D, a three dimensional drawing application it unveiled last year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
WRITER'S BLOCK Eddie S. Glaude Jr. says he first envisioned "Begin Again," now at No. 5 on the hardcover nonfiction list, as an intellectual biography of James Baldwin: "But then I ran into this wall. A year went by and I hadn't written a sentence." While on sabbatical from Princeton University, where he is a professor of African American studies, Glaude rented an apartment in St. Thomas, figuring: "If I'm going to write a book on Baldwin, I need to be out of the country. Baldwin said the best way to think about America is not to be in America." Hurricane Maria interfered with this plan, so Glaude headed to Heidelberg, Germany. Within an hour of his arrival, he witnessed a horrific scene at a train station that changed the trajectory of his book: Four white policemen piled on top of a distraught Black man. Glaude describes the incident in the introduction to "Begin Again": "One officer had his knee in the man's back; the others twisted his arms." In a phone interview, Glaude says: "I went back to my apartment and started writing furiously. I realized what I needed to do. I needed to work through my own rage, my own despair, and offer an account of this moment." That account weaving biography, literary criticism and social criticism with a thread of memoir was originally scheduled to come out on April 24. Then the pandemic hit and Glaude's publication date was moved to Aug. 4; after George Floyd's murder, it changed again, to June 30. Glaude says: "We thought the book spoke to the moment. It was heart wrenching. When I was asked to comment, I found myself reaching for Baldwin." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Bouchra Jarrar's decision to show her first spring/summer collection for Lanvin at midday on Wednesday in a light filled salon of the Hotel de Ville in Paris is worth considering, for a number of reasons. Not just because Lanvin's former creative director, Alber Elbaz, always showed in the evening, or because his deeply romantic aesthetic for the house turned on the axis of tender is the night. But because the time indicates an entirely new focus for the brand daywear is to be Lanvin's plat du jour and reflects the overall shift wrought by Ms. Jarrar, the 45 year old French designer. Gone is the cocooning, all black office of Mr. Elbaz' tenure: Ms. Jarrar had it painted white. White voile drapes hang from the full length windows, and there are green plants perched on high wooden tables; a ceramic tortoise peeks out from under one. "For me, Lanvin is femininity," she said a few weeks before the show. "I want there to be lightness, to be pleasure, because we all need pleasure in our lives. And sensuality a drape in the back of a dress say but always with a twist, so there is self assurance and there is modernity." At the moment, she needs all the self assurance she can get. There is a lot riding on her petite shoulders. Not only is she one of two female designers suddenly elevated to the highest creative echelons of heritage couture houses for the first time in decades (Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior is the other), but Ms. Jarrar takes the helm at Lanvin's women's wear after a period of particularly bitter internal strife that played out in the public domain. Last October Mr. Elbaz was fired after 14 years spent breathing new life and luster into what is the oldest Parisian couture house in continuous existence. Staff members revolted, a testament to the extraordinary affection in which Mr. Elbaz was held "God and father," is how one Lanvin employee described it and the relationship between management and the 330 employees went into free fall, hitting rock bottom in December 2015 when Lanvin took its works' council to court to try to silence the insurgency. Ms. Jarrar showed her first resort collection for Lanvin in June to critical approval. But some stores found the new direction too minimalist for the spirit of the brand, and chose either to reduce their buying or not to buy at all. Neiman Marcus, for example, cut 29 points of sale for Lanvin ready to wear. Although such fluctuations are inevitable after a change in aesthetic direction, it is significant for a brand that is dependent on wholesale, which accounts for some 70 percent of its sales, with only 30 percent of sales coming from Lanvin's own stores. And although Michele Huiban, Lanvin's chief executive, said that "the turbulence ended some time ago, and the house is united in this new adventure with Bouchra," there is still a palpable feeling of insecurity in the corridors of Lanvin. This is a house that has had three chief executives in the last 10 years, where office doors are reportedly locked, and where external public relations teams are airdropped in just two weeks before shows. Recent significant staff losses include a design team reduced to three people from 11; the director of ready to wear fired; the head of accessories leaving for Marc Jacobs; and the head of ateliers resigning after several years service. In Paris, rumors persist that Lanvin's minority shareholder, the German born Ralph Bartel, is getting ready to increase his 25 percent investment to a majority stake. Ms. Huiban said, "I have no knowledge of that," and Mr. Bartel declined to comment. And the departure of Mr. Elbaz remains a hot topic. A recent issue of the French economics weekly Challenges reported that he was claiming 40 million euros in damages from the brand. It is a momentous challenge, but Ms. Jarrar exuded a quiet and steely determination in her office on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore in the days before the spring show. Dark eyed, dark haired, focused and precise in beige cashmere, black pants, and black boots with gold chains, she said: "I am fully conscious of my responsibility. I look at things calmly. I weigh up the situation. I create to sell." Amid the unrest, she is getting on with implementing her design vision for the house. The open plan studio where Mr. Elbaz worked in an exuberant free for all of international stylists, patisseries and noise, has been divided into two rooms. Now there is what Ms. Jarrar calls "a space for sharing," to which a small and select number of stylists are invited for creative meetings, and Ms. Jarrar's private design space: a large, light room inhabited by only Ms. Jarrar and her design assistant. "I need to be with my team, but I also need to be by myself to create," she explained of her need for considered isolation. "I need to be alone with my cutting and my fabric. I am very centered in my work. I have to generate and create for others to work, for the house to operate on every level." Floriane de Saint Pierre, founder of the fashion and luxury executive search firm that carries her name, said the hiring of Ms. Jarrar and Ms. Chiuri marked the return of the strong female designer and businesswoman to the Paris couture scene. "Bouchra is a great talent and very much a woman entrepreneur designer,'' Ms. de Saint Pierre said. "When you are a woman who has run your own company, then you are automatically plugged in and aligned with everyday life." It is true that Ms. Jarrar has a resume that denotes both talent and resilience. She had her own couture house for six years, spent three seasons as an assistant to Christian Lacroix, and before that was the studio director at Balenciaga for 10 years under Nicolas Ghesquiere. There, she said, "I learned the chain of production, every stage of the creative process. It was a colossal responsibility. I trained myself. There was no one to hold my hand." Mr. Lacroix remembered Ms. Bouchra as "more than a perfectionist in technique, cut and final results. She was very demanding in terms of craftsmanship and very focused on her future." Like the founder of Lanvin, Ms. Jarrar comes from a large family. While Jeanne Lanvin was the eldest of 11 children, Ms. Jarrar is the sixth of seven. Her parents were Moroccan and moved to Cannes before Ms. Jarrar was born. Her father was an artisan plasterer, creating arches, domes and decorative niches in Provencal villas, while her mother stayed home to look after the children. "As a child, Bouchra always had this remarkable ability to concentrate, to isolate herself from the noise of the household," her sister, Ida Jarrar, recalled. "Even if the television was on or someone was listening to music, she was able to be in her own world. She has intense concentration and a huge capacity for work." She also had an early love of fabrics. Ms. Bouchra's most vivid childhood memories are trips with her mother to the local fabric store at age 6 or 7, running up and down the aisles, touching the rolls of fabric and picking up snippets to take home. At age 13, while still in school, she started making clothes to sell. "I didn't want to work as a waitress, so I started making dresses for my friends and for my friends' mothers, proposing tops and skirts, different fabrics,'' Ms. Jarrar said with a smile. "And as it turned out, it paid much better." Crucially for a fashion house that has been identified for so long with the aesthetic of one designer, Ms. Jarrar brings to Lanvin her own defined and recognizable style, honed over six years at her small, successful Paris couture house: A smart fusion of urban modernity with a quiet yet tangible luxury. "Her clothes have a kind of tension to them, an elegance that is extremely feminine but never girlish," said Pascale Cayla, a contemporary art consultant who has long been a client. "You are never overdressed. Her fashion communicates that you're a woman of your time, that you have understood." Ikram Goldman, who has sold both Ms. Jarrar's collections and Lanvin at her Chicago fashion boutique, said: "Her understanding of a woman's body means she makes clothes that are really very chic, that make you feel current but with the kind of ease you get from wearing vintage. She drapes a dress beautifully, and no one cuts a short sleeve that covers the upper arm better." The way Ms. Jarrar herself puts it is: "I know how to optimize a woman's silhouette, no matter what her size. I look at all women: the baker, the mother, the actress, my friends. I am interested in, and curious about, every type of woman." As Paris Fashion Week begins, everyone is curious right back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Mr. Giuliani has brought up Philadelphia and Pittsburgh several times. That's because a Trump campaign lawsuit had claimed that some 682,000 ballots in those cities' two counties were processed "when no observation was allowed" and sought to have those votes thrown out. But as The Washington Post and The Associated Press have reported, and as Mr. Giuliani said in court on Tuesday, the Trump campaign recently revised its lawsuit and withdrew this particular claim. "My judgment is that when Hillary Clinton said to Biden about four weeks ago don't concede no matter what, she meant even if you're behind by 800,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Joe, don't worry, we'll fix it for you," Mr. Giuliani misleadingly said on Nov. 9. (Mrs. Clinton did not say Mr. Biden should "never" concede, but rather he shouldn't on election night because counting mail in ballots could "drag out" for days.) Mr. Giuliani has also accused Dominion Voting Systems, a voting software company, of having foreign, and seemingly nefarious ties. The company, he has said in several Fox News appearances, is associated with those who were "very close" to two Venezuelan presidents, Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, as well as the billionaire financier George Soros, because it is "owned by another company called Smartmatic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
GENEVA As the industry convenes here for the Geneva auto show amid the worst European car market slump in decades, there is at least one ray of hope: the green light President Barack Obama recently gave to negotiations for a U.S. E.U. free trade pact. Prospects for a trade pact have brightened the spirits of automakers along with many other types of Continental companies. And not only because it might make it easier for their products to compete in America's giant consumer market. European auto companies, particularly German ones, want to make it easier to sell cars they now make in the United States in their home markets. "I am a big advocate of a free trade agreement with the United States," Norbert Reithofer, the chief executive of Bayerische Motoren Werke, said here on Tuesday. An agreement could add hundreds of millions of euros annually to BMW's revenue, in part by easing restrictions that now add tariffs to the cars his company makes in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but ships back to sell in Germany and other European countries. Mercedes faces similar issues with the vehicles it makes in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Right now, a Mercedes M Class utility vehicle made there carries a 10 percent European Union import tariff not levied on Mercedes sedans made in Rastatt, Germany. Companies decide where to manufacture based on many factors including labor costs, taxes and currency risk. With a trade pact in place, though, tariffs and regulations might no longer need to be part of that calculation. Whether their business is cars, instant coffee or carbon steel, with corporations that work both sides of the Atlantic, the old style notions of import vs. export and country of origin may no longer obtain. European companies like Siemens, Nestle and ThyssenKrupp have manufactured products in America for decades. But usually those were products destined for U.S. buyers. Once a free trade pact is in place, it might make more sense for companies to export those products back to Europe. The United States and the European Union are each other's biggest trading partners, and a pact is seen as a cheap way for both sides to generate growth. But European automakers in particular could use a lift. Europe's auto market has all but collapsed since the financial and economic crisis of 2007; last year, the number of vehicles sold in the Union was the lowest since the mid 1990s. German automakers, which now sell more cars in the United States than they do in Germany, are particularly eager for a trade deal, which some optimists hope could be reached by the end of next year. A trade pact would no doubt intensify competition in the U.S. auto market, particularly at the premium end, by making it easier for BMW and Mercedes to export to the United States. But the benefits could also flow the other way. What is more, a free trade pact could create jobs in the United States, said Joachim Schmidt, a member of the Mercedes Benz management board who is responsible for sales. Mercedes plans to manufacture the next generation of its C Class sedan in Tuscaloosa as well as other locations beginning next year, Mr. Schmidt said during an interview here. Momentum toward a pact has been building since Mr. Obama endorsed efforts to begin formal negotiations in his February State of the Union address. While the negotiations will be complex, officials have already agreed informally on the broad outlines of a treaty in preliminary talks that concluded earlier this year. That is why trade representatives on both sides of the Atlantic have said they could reach a formal agreement by the end of 2014. For the first time, said Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Daimler, "leadership on both sides have been in favor." But he quickly added, "There is a still a long way to go." Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Tariffs are not the only issue. In the case of automakers, a trade accord ideally would harmonize safety requirements and emissions standards, so that the same car built in Europe could be sold in the United States, and vice versa, without modifying bumpers, headlights and other components. Some industry executives are doubtful that American and European regulators can agree to accept each other's crash tests and other standards. "It's very difficult to do," said Stephen T. Odell, president of Ford of Europe. The company is planning to export the Ford Mustang to Europe, which will also require various adjustments to meet European regulations. Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of Fiat and Chrysler, said here that he was concerned that efforts to synchronize regulations could lead to more red tape rather than less. But he noted: "I have a lot of hope. President Obama made this an important item on his agenda. We're certainly willing to work with authorities to make it happen." A free trade pact could help Fiat as it seeks to reintroduce its Alfa Romeo brand in the United States. Mr. Marchionne said the long awaited return of Alfa would come this year when the company began selling its 4C sports car in America. Alfa presented the two seat coupe in Geneva this week. Noting that Dustin Hoffman drove an Alfa in the classic 1960s movie "The Graduate," Mr. Marchionne said the brand had a good heritage in America and was "uniquely revivable." Volkswagen could also benefit from a trade pact, though probably less than BMW or Mercedes. Since 2011, VW has been producing a version of its Passat in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has helped revived its American sales. But the Passat built in Tennessee is designed for American consumers, and VW is not expected to export it to back to Europe. Volkswagen's Audi unit, which has been able to improve U.S. sales recently, would also benefit from an accord. Audi builds most of its cars in Europe. The European carmakers least likely to get much benefit from a trade deal the French companies. Renault and PSA Peugeot Citroen abandoned the U.S. market decades ago, and as they struggle financially back home, it is unlikely they will return anytime soon. There is also some wariness among the European manufacturers, like Ford, that focus on selling lower priced models. They still feel burned by a trade pact with South Korea that they complain opened up Europe to Hyundai and Kia, which have been gaining market share, without providing reciprocal benefits to European companies mainly because the Korean domestic market is so relatively small. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
BEIJING A former Beijing bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times has resigned amid accusations of sexual misconduct. The journalist, Jonathan Kaiman, was suspended in May after accusations were made against him by two women. Hillary Manning, director of communications for The Times, confirmed Mr. Kaiman's resignation in an email. Felicia Sonmez, a fellow journalist in Beijing, accused Mr. Kaiman in May of "problematic behavior" in a letter addressed to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China. Mr. Kaiman was president of the club until January. She was the second woman to come forward with accusations against Mr. Kaiman. In January, a law student and former housemate of Mr. Kaiman, Laura Tucker, accused him of pressuring her into a sexual encounter after a night of drinking. Mr. Kaiman has disputed the allegations and said that "all acts we engaged in were mutually consensual." In an emailed statement, Mr. Kaiman said that the allegations "have irrevocably destroyed my reputation, my professional network, my nine year career in journalism, and any hope for a rewarding career in the future; they have branded me with a scarlet letter for life, and driven me to the brink of suicide." The accusations by both women shook Beijing's tightknit community of foreign correspondents and shined a light on the sometimes bad behavior of male reporters abroad. It also came amid a broader wave of accusations of sexual harassment, mainly made by women against high profile media figures including Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer, and Bill O'Reilly, the former Fox News host. "The phenomenon is not a problem unique to the press, but it's one that's especially problematic for journalists," Joanna Chiu, a reporter based in Beijing at the time, wrote in an article soon after Ms. Sonmez's accusations against Mr. Kaiman were made public. Ms. Sonmez said on Tuesday that she was grateful to The Los Angeles Times for taking her allegations seriously but added that "several questions remained unanswered" about whether Mr. Kaiman was fired or resigned voluntarily. "The voices of women are a crucial part of the equation when it comes to combating sexual misconduct. But the response of institutions is another essential part," Ms. Sonmez wrote in an emailed statement. In her letter to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China this year, Ms. Sonmez described being repeatedly groped by Mr. Kaiman without her consent and being pressured into having sex after a night of drinking last September. She also complained at the time about how the club handled Mr. Kaiman's resignation. Ms. Tucker made similar accusations of being pressured into a sexual encounter in 2013 by Mr. Kaiman. "I explicitly voiced my lack of consent several times, and my words had no effect," Ms. Tucker wrote at the time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
LOS ANGELES Voting for the 91st Academy Awards ends on Tuesday, with roughly 8,200 movie industry insiders using a private website to mark their choices. Just what goes through their minds when they point and click? In a perfect world, each voter would approach the task with solemnity, taking time to watch all of the nominated films and putting aside biases to consider the degree of artistry onscreen. But Hollywood is no utopia. To a large degree, Oscar voting is about personal prejudices and petty grievances. (Just read the anonymous voter columns The Hollywood Reporter has published in the past.) It is about who has the most pals in the voting pool, which remains 69 percent male and 84 percent white despite years of diversification efforts. It also involves Hollywood's changing business landscape namely, whether Netflix should be embraced by the industry or kept out of the club for as long as possible, regardless of the quality of the films it serves up. So, as an experiment, I called 20 academy members (none directly associated with any of this year's nominees) and asked for utter candor: How are you evaluating the eight candidates for best picture? None would speak for attribution, but their answers said a lot about the Oscars in particular and Hollywood in general. (High school with much, much more money, indeed.) Below is an amalgamation of their comments. One vinegary older voter compared superhero films to "the stuff that oozes out of dumpsters behind fast food restaurants." Then he confessed that he hadn't yet seen "Black Panther." But many of the people I called said they would place this comic book blockbuster near the top of their ballots citing its commanding performances, sumptuous production design and overall cultural importance. (The academy uses a complicated "preferential" voting system for best picture, in which nominees are ranked 1 through 8, and the second and third place positions can carry as much weight as first place.) The problem, at least for a few voters: "Black Panther" was made by Marvel, which is owned by Disney, which has turned every other studio into a box office also ran. It will be even worse when Disney completes its takeover of 20th Century Fox. "And now we're also supposed to give Disney the Oscar for best picture?" one voter from a rival studio told me. Directed by Spike Lee, "BlacKkKlansman" drew praise for its originality and intellectual heft. As one person put it, "BlacKkKlansman" is the kind of film that holds up in the history books. There will be no "Did we really vote for this?" regret in a couple of years. (See: "Shakespeare in Love.") On the downside, movies that win best picture usually connect with voters on an emotional level. At least in my little sample, "BlacKkKlansman" fell more into the "deeply admire but don't feel the need to watch it again" zone. Lee could be the ceremony's best hope for a viral moment, however. Some people relished the idea of his striding onto the Oscar stage and excoriating studios for sidelining minorities. (He's never been one to mince words.) "Can you imagine?" said a voter who is a member of the academy's writers branch. "People would have to be hauled out on stretchers." (Lee is also nominated for best director for the first time in his singular career.) This Queen biopic, directed by Bryan Singer (at least until he was fired for erratic behavior), ranks as one of the more puzzling best picture contenders in memory. (And that's saying something, considering that the talking pig movie "Babe" was a contender in 1996.) Voters used words like "superficial" and "messy" to describe the film, which received lukewarm reviews from critics and prompted an outcry for soft pedaling gay plot points. Almost everyone admitted that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was a guilty pleasure to watch, however, as Rami Malek turned in an Oscar worthy performance as Freddie Mercury. (All 20 people I contacted said Malek had their vote for best actor.) In a surprise or not, given the way that Hollywood likes to sweep problems under the rug most voters said they would not hold Singer's involvement against the film. The director has long been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct and new claims about sex with underage boys that surfaced in The Atlantic the day after Oscar nominations were announced. Singer denied wrongdoing and labeled the article "a homophobic smear piece." Voters like being on the winning team. And this dark comedy set in the court of Queen Anne (circa 1710), while widely admired for its performances, script and costumes, has mostly been a loser at the big pre Oscar ceremonies. "I love this nasty little movie, but I don't want to throw my vote away," one person told me, adding that she was waiting until the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards to make her decision. ("The Favourite" won seven Baftas on Sunday, but lost the big prize to "Roma.") Others seemed unsure whether "The Favourite" sent a positive message about women (Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz lead the cast) or ultimately reinforces a "Mean Girls" stereotype (they scheme, double cross and manipulate). Nobody thought this period segregation comedy was perfect. Could we please have a touch of nuance? And that fried chicken scene makes everyone cringe. But "Green Book" tugged hard on a lot of voter heartstrings. One producer in his late 60s said the movie's feel good ending made him "absolutely melt." Peter Farrelly, who directed "Green Book" and was one of its writers, has also proved to be an effective campaigner, a couple of voters noted, with his self effacing speech at the Producers Guild Awards in January as Exhibit A. "When you make 'Dumb and Dumber,' you never expect to get an award," Farrelly said, referring to one of his early films. "I'm damn thankful." One voter, a studio executive in his 50s, admitted that his support for "Green Book" was rooted in rage. He said he was tired of being told what movies to like and not like. (Much of the public debate about "Green Book" has turned on its handling of racial issues, which some see as woefully retrograde and borderline bigoted.) Directed by Alfonso Cuaron and distributed by Netflix, "Roma" seems to be prompting a crisis of conscience. Do we vote for "Roma" because we think it's the best? Or do we withhold our support regardless of the film's artistic merit because we see Netflix as a threat to moviegoing? Although the company pushed "Roma" into about 250 independent theaters in the United States, on par with many foreign language releases, the streaming giant mostly bypasses cinemas. There are voters in both camps. A couple of those in the anti Netflix group told me that they would vote for Cuaron for best director as a way to assuage their guilt. The chief complaint about "Roma" involved its leisurely pace. One voter in the acting branch described the period black and white film as important but boring. It's a long, bumpy road to the Oscars. And this blockbuster remake a front runner for best picture late last year went kerplop somewhere along the way. Some voters said they lost their zeal for "A Star Is Born" after the film converted only one of its five Golden Globe nominations into a win (best song). Others faulted Lady Gaga, who plays the main role, for giving speeches on the awards trail (the Globes, National Board of Review) that struck them as cloying. A few older voters said they had gone back to watch the 1954 version of "A Star Is Born," with Judy Garland, and come away with the belief that the current version wasn't as good, especially in its second hour. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The specific power of the unhurt, Sills implies, is clear sight. Is it? Whether or not she's right, the book isn't proof. It tells Sills's story from young childhood to her current role at Purchase College (staging, among other works, revivals of many Balanchine pieces), with the bulk of the book treating her time at City Ballet. But there's a barrier between her somatic understanding of the master's form and the verbalization of it. Her "lens for understanding" mostly sees things that were obvious from the seats or the videos: the way he insisted that dancers cover huge amounts of space, for example. The lens is open she's an enthusiastic partisan of a technique but it doesn't focus. Nor, whatever Sills says in that introduction, is she unhurt. The Balanchine "look" was extraordinary thinness, and Sills, apologizing all the while, reveals the mental torture that enforced it. It's disturbing to see her protect a man who insulted and infantilized her; even now, Sills berates herself for failing "Mr. B" by gaining five pounds during the annual layoff. The moment the polite little book tips accidentally into nightmare comes halfway through. Having already been reprimanded for weight gain, Sills is called into Balanchine's office, and he takes her hand, squeezing her fingers. "When I asked what he was doing," she writes, "he reminded me of the story of Hansel and Gretel. Did I remember the old witch who in order to tell whether the children were plump enough for eating, would squeeze their fingers every day?" Get out, I thought. But she danced for that witch for 10 more years. Marianne Preger Simon, on the other hand, writes the gentle "Dancing With Merce Cunningham" from a position of preternatural acceptance and love. Her leaving was a gracious one, which is noted by both the critic Alastair Macaulay (who wrote the perceptive afterword) and her fellow dancer Carolyn Brown. Brown's own memoir, "Chance and Circumstance," is required Cunninghamian reading: It's gorgeous, rich, observant and, perhaps most important, written by a performer who stayed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company through its transition from scrappy eccentric to global superpower. In contrast, Preger Simon left in 1958, so early that her gossamer light memoir is about a season of calm weather, unbuffeted by worldly success. Preger Simon's whole dancing life is caught up in Cunningham. She was studying theater in Paris in the late '40s when she saw him perform in a salon and felt swayed by his strong current. Back in New York, she became his first student; she graduated from being one of the untrained "kids" to being a founding member of the company. She often reprints letters she wrote to friends or family so the book can sometimes have the tenor of a cheery postcard even as she is taking part in historic events: She danced "Septet"; she was there at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1953, "officially considered the beginning" of the company. In ultrabrief chapters, she notes what she ate or the beauty of a field as the troupe drove by in its rattling VW bus. Yet somehow this never seems beside the point. Cage and Cunningham were incorporating Zen precepts into their work; mindfulness itself (noticing the sandwich, the flowers) is the lesson. "We weren't doing nothing we were standing still," she writes of one moment in a performance. I found I carried her book around for longer than it took to read it. I would open it sometimes, just to remind myself: It may look to the world like nothing, but everything is the dance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In New York, everything has a price even sunshine. As Manhattan rents rise over all, retailers are jockeying for prime locations, and are paying a premium for areas like the east side of Fifth Avenue the sunnier side of the street. New York's most expensive retail space, prime Fifth Avenue, is the second most expensive in the world, after Lan Kwai Fong in Hong Kong, beating out the Champs Elysees in Paris and New Bond Street in London, according to the retail group at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, which supplied most of the figures for this article. Elliman recently arranged deals for Orogold Cosmetics on 57th and Park, and Buccellati jewelry, Armani Junior and Perrin Paris 1893, a leather accessory brand, on Madison. "It sounds cocky, but it's New York and then it's the rest of the world, and that's why everybody wants to be here," said Faith Hope Consolo, a broker and chairman of the retail group at Douglas Elliman. According to the latest figures available from the Real Estate Board of New York, the average retail price sought per square foot in Manhattan in spring 2013 was 116, up 5.4 percent from fall 2012. Walk up and down Fifth Avenue, or shop on 57th Street, and the reasons for the variations in the price of retail space are mostly secrets known to retailers and developers. Sun is a major factor. Shoppers generally gravitate to the sunny side of the street, and the natural light helps showcase retailers' goods. Transportation is another. Pedestrian traffic will be higher on streets with subway exits. And the lineup of shops around a location may be most significant. "Your neighbors are very important," said Larry Meyer, chief operating officer for United States business at Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing retailer. The chain opened a 90,000 square foot store on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street two years ago, and has Zara and Hollister clothing stores next door. Counterintuitively, retailers like to set up shop next to direct competitors, so customers can wander from one like minded store into the next. "There are many nuances where literally half a block can make a difference of double the rent," said Donald J. Trump, the real estate developer, whose Trump Tower sits at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, and who leases retail space throughout the city. And now that the recession is over, retail rents over all have begun to rise, signifying changes in some notable blocks and streets in Manhattan. Here are some patterns in Manhattan's liveliest retail districts, and in a couple of clunkers. (Of one particular avenue, Ms. Consolo said, sighing, "We don't even talk about it." The east side of Fifth, between 49th and 59th Streets, commands the most expensive retail rents in the city, with asking prices of 3,500 a square foot, according to estimates by Douglas Elliman Real Estate's retail group. The sunny stretch starts with the tourist destinations Saks Fifth Avenue and St. Patrick's Cathedral, then continues north with store after store, Cartier, De Beers, Tiffany, F.A.O. Schwarz and Apple. The west side of Fifth Avenue, while still desirable, asks about 3,000 a square foot, as "the institutions, the clubs, the churches" interrupt a much preferred store after store march along the avenue, Mr. Trump said. The watch retailer Wempe opened its first multibrand boutique in 1980 on the east side of Fifth. A decade later, when that lease expired, it searched for another East Side location. "The west side at the time was still sort of underdeveloped, almost like a no man's land," dotted with electronics stores, said Ruediger Albers, president of American Wempe Corporation. It had "nothing that would make you want to cross the street." But when Wempe could not find East Side space, it opened a store on Fifth and 55th, on the west side of the avenue. In recent years, the west side has become a magnet for mass market stores, like Uniqlo, Abercrombie Fitch and H M, all of which opened flashy stores. "We get a lot of tourists into Fifth Avenue," said Mr. Meyer of Uniqlo. "As basically an embryonic company here in the U.S., we thought it was important to establish that flagship so there was some benefit to suburban stores as well." Last year, Wempe opened a second boutique, which sells Rolex watches, on the east side of the street. Mr. Albers says he sees no big difference in traffic now that he has stores on both sides.Having those big retailers as neighbors can actually be a plus on the west side, he said. "There's a lot of high end on this side, but also something for the kids that might attract families to walk" on the west side of the street, he said. Retail rents drop substantially as Fifth goes south, to about 1,000 a square foot from 49th to 42nd streets, where mall staples like Ann Taylor and Sephora have stores. Rents are 425 a square foot from 42nd to 34th streets, where Bryant Park breaks up the retail landscape, but also where Lord Taylor and the Empire State Building draw tourists farther south. Madison has a haute couture reputation, but it commands rents much lower than Fifth. From 57th to 72nd Streets, the west side of the street is priced about 1,300 a square foot, and the east side is about 1,400 a square foot. "People know to go to Madison for luxury, but it's not a high traffic destination," said Susan Kurland, an executive vice president with CBRE. In an example of how one store can change a pattern, the west side of Madison "always had the lackluster tenants" until Barneys New York opened on the west side of 61st and Madison in 1993, Ms. Consolo said. Now, retailers are equally interested in both sides, although the east side still carries a slight premium again, because of the sun. "The designers all run to Madison because the scale, after you get to 61st, is much easier to digest," Ms. Consolo said. Chanel, Jimmy Choo, Hermes and Prada line up along Madison, with two Ralph Lauren mansions facing each other at 72nd Street, ending the southern swath of chic boutiques. Above 72nd Street, rents fall to about 700 a square foot, and it becomes "middle to high end and aspirational retailers there," Ms. Kurland said, like Missoni and Lilly Pulitzer. Farther north above 79th Street, rents drop to about 500, and brands with multiple locations like Lululemon and Theory cater largely to neighborhood shoppers. "We had a store for years on Madison and what we realized is, Madison is more for the locals and it's not so much for the tourists," said Thomas Linemayr, chief executive of Lindt USA, which now has two stores on Fifth instead. It is see and be seen for mass market chains here, thanks to the tourist traffic that Macy's, Penn Station, Madison Square Garden and the Empire State Building attract. H M just announced it was opening a 63,000 square foot store, its biggest, on the southwest corner of 34th and Broadway, cater corner from its current store. The asking price for the new H M space was 1,200 a square foot. In spring 2012, asking rents in the area were just 558 a square foot, according to the Real Estate Board of New York. "Thirty fourth does get tourists, but it's considered a real shopping street; people go there to really shop, not for any other reason, and they do real numbers," said Ms. Kurland, who represented the landlord in the H M deal. Once Madison Square Garden is redeveloped, she predicted, the surrounding area will become more vibrant. Cross the street, and double the rent. The north side of 57th, between Fifth and Park, goes for 2,000 a square foot. The south side in that space gets half that, mainly because there is just not much in the way of grand stores, brokers say. "When you hit Madison Avenue, you have the I.B.M. building," Ms. Kurland said. "There's no retail, so that's a dead spot." And while Niketown, perhaps the most prominent tenant on the south side, may be flashy and popular, it does not exactly ooze prestige. The north side, in contrast, is a murderers' row of luxe, including Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent, and Bergdorf's. Meanwhile, the long overlooked western section of 57th is undergoing a big makeover, real estate agents say. Nordstrom will open a 285,000 square foot space between Broadway and Seventh in 2018, and Viceroy Hotels and Resorts and Quin are opening hotels there this fall. First, Second and Third Avenues, uptown A revival is occurring on Third Avenue. "When the market crashed, you could throw a bowling ball down Third Avenue in the 60s, low 70s, which had gotten somewhat hot," Ms. Kurland said. Prices have been inching up to about 250 a square foot. That is thanks in part to Bloomingdale's the closer to Bloomie's, the higher the rents, Mr. Trump said and in large part to the Second Avenue subway construction one street away. "Oh, it's a mess, it's such a mess there," Ms. Consolo said. "It's disrupted rental life, retail life, so it's not only hurt accessibility, but it's completely destroyed visibility, and you've had a lot of stores closing. I could say that you could almost give away the locations on Second. No one's interested." Rents, she said, have dropped to about 75 a square foot there. "The retail it's a nonstreet street now," she said. "We don't even talk about it." First Avenue, or "the forgotten sister," as Ms. Consolo called it, is reaping the benefits as retail shifts, she said. Between Bank and Christopher Streets, Bleecker's blocks of boutiques still unsettle those who cling to the West Village's reputation as Bob Dylan territory. Starting a decade ago, "I made deals on Bleecker on the best blocks, Ralph and everybody," Ms. Consolo said, referring to Ralph Lauren, "for 75 a foot, and now I'm making deals for like 600 a foot." Retailers like the European feel and small scale of Bleecker, she said, and the fact that "you're a big fish, you stick out." The once popular neighborhood is slipping a bit. With few zoning restrictions, it became a night life destination. And while designers like Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney tried opening stores there, they have moved out and are being replaced by more mass appeal brands. "You have, like, Uggs and Patagonia, tenants like that," Ms. Kurland said. "They're good tenants, but tenants that you would find in every urban setting and in malls." "There's a lot of space on the market down there now, where there hadn't been," she said, and "it hasn't done well for the luxury brands." Still, rents were about 366 a square foot in the second quarter of 2013, up about 3.4 percent from the first quarter, according to CBRE. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
FOR THE PEOPLE 10 p.m. on ABC. What does justice look like for a swatter? The swatting phenomenon, in which video game players lure SWAT teams to one another's doorsteps with false emergency calls, is partly the subject of this legal drama's Season 2 premiere. Allison Adams (Jasmin Savoy Brown), a lawyer and one of the legal whippersnappers introduced in the first season, is defending a teenager whose SWAT prank leads to the death of a senator. The series at large, created by Paul William Davies (a writer for "Scandal"), gives a multidimensional view of fictitious lawyers in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. It follows their cases and sex lives with equal gusto. WONDER WOMAN (2017) 6:35 p.m. on HBO Signature. When the Brie Larson led superhero origin story "Captain Marvel" is released on Friday, it will be in good company thanks to this DC Warner Bros. adventure, which broke a superhero glass ceiling last year by being the first movie in the genre in over a decade to be led by a woman. Gal Gadot stars as the Amazonian princess turned superwoman; how that transformation happens is the focus here. (It involves World War I, a spy played by Chris Pine and one very cool sword.) In his review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote that the film "feels less like yet another installment in an endless sequence of apocalyptic merchandising opportunities than like ... what's the word I'm looking for? A movie. A pretty good one, too." IRON MAN (2008) Rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The above pairing of "Captain Marvel" with the rival DC Comics born "Wonder Woman" might be considered treason by loyalists to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that ever ballooning franchise of superhero movies that includes Marvel and Disney collaborations like "Captain Marvel," "The Avengers," "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Black Panther." To stick within the Marvel world, revisit "Iron Man," the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movie was hardly a modest beginning; "Iron Man" represented not only the explosive start of the film franchise but also the revival of Robert Downey Jr.'s acting career. He stars here as the rich playboy Tony Stark (and, soon enough, Iron Man) alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges. It begins with a kidnapping in Afghanistan, where Stark is showing off defense technology to the United States military. W. (2008) Stream on Hulu and Netflix; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Here's an interesting double feature: pair the war on terror focused "Iron Man" with this Oliver Stone George W. Bush biopic, another relic of late Bush era America. An origin story that vacillates between sendup and appraisal, the film follows Bush (Josh Brolin) from his Yale days through the earlier years of his presidency. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis called the movie "queasily enjoyable." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
MADRID It has become Spain's version of Godot: waiting for Rajoy. For various reasons, Mariano Rajoy, the country's prime minister, has deferred seeking help from a financial assistance program that Europe has tailored to Spain's needs. Many economists, analysts and business executives here are increasingly worried about the costs of further delay. They warn that waiting to seek aid, and the uncertainty the delay engenders, threaten to push the economy deeper into recession. And that, they say, could increase the ultimate cost to Spain and Europe if the aid eventually needs to be granted under crisis conditions. As long as Spain's borrowing costs remain below 6 percent, as they have since the European Central Bank said it would buy the country's bonds if asked, the Rajoy government might seem to have no reason to rush. But the downgrade of Spanish debt to near junk status last week by Standard Poor's underscored the fragility of the country's finances. And the seeming political paralysis in Madrid may be reinforcing a wider economic stasis. "The economy has stopped," said Angel Berges, the chief executive of AFI, an economic consulting firm based in Madrid. The bond buying program that the central bank announced in early September is meant to help keep a lid on the borrowing costs of besieged countries like Spain, if they ask for the help. Under the plan, the big new European bailout fund, whose financial firepower is to eventually reach 500 billion euros, or 648 billion, would buy newly issued Spanish bonds directly in the government's auctions, while the central bank would stand ready to buy existing bonds in the secondary market. Analysts said there was more at stake than the yield on Spain's government bonds. They pointed out that those lower interest rates would lead to reduced borrowing rates across the board, providing a cheaper source of financing for Spanish banks and corporations that could stimulate investment. And yet Mr. Rajoy's reluctance to seek help has its own logic. To begin with, German officials have urged him to wait, as they have no desire to present yet another euro zone rescue package to their fed up voters. But Mr. Rajoy, a stolid, cautious man, has plenty of domestic reasons, too. Since coming to power in late 2011, his popularity has plummeted in the wake of a series of wrenching austerity programs. Now, with regional elections on Sunday in his home state of Galicia that could test the strength of his center right Popular Party, Mr. Rajoy has every incentive to wait a bit longer to request help from Europe, which would bring with it further outside oversight of the Spanish budget. "There is no pressure on us we will take the decision when we know everything we need to know," said a senior government spokeswoman in Madrid, who declined to be identified by name as a matter of policy. But analysts said that by waiting several more months, as many here predict will happen, Mr. Rajoy was playing a dangerous game. Not only will the economy continue to suffer from uncertainty, but Mr. Rajoy also runs the risk of being forced to seek help under the duress of a market panic, if bond investors once again begin to bet against Spain. Europe's intervention under that circumstance could lead it to demand even harsher policy measures like the socially disruptive cuts in Spanish pensions that so far Mr. Rajoy has avoided. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. "If you wait too long, you will be forced into a program that will have much tougher conditions so better to ask for it now," said Jose Manuel Campa, who was secretary of state for the economy during the previous government and is now a professor at the IESE Business School at the University of Navarra in Madrid. The main worry is not the size of the debt, though, but how quickly it has been amassed. By next year, when it is expected to rise to 96 percent, Spain's debt burden will have grown by nearly one third since 2011, according to the International Monetary Fund. That rate of debt expansion outpaces every other country in the world and is the result of a plummeting economy, high interest rates and the burden of rescuing Spain's collapsing banks. One of the concerns S. P. raised in its downgrade last week was that the austerity measures already adopted by Spain were choking off economic growth. Consider the auto industry. Hard hit by the recession, it now sells about the same number of cars projected to be about 700,000 this year that it did in the 1990s. At the industry's peak volume, in 2006, Spaniards purchased 1.6 million vehicles. Further curbing demand is the recent increase in Spain's value added tax, essentially a sales tax. It is now 21 percent, up from 18 percent, and it helped send Spanish car sales plunging by 38 percent in September, the first month of the higher tax. "We are worried about the market because sales are so dependent on the economy," Juan Antonio Sanchez Torres, the president of Ganvam, the Spanish car retailers' association. "The recent VAT tax increase raised the cost of a car by 650 euros on average. That has an important psychological impact that can stop consumption." Downward pressure on wages in both the public and private sector has helped the economy by making Spanish exports, like machinery parts and chemicals, more competitive. But the Spanish economy is largely driven by domestic demand, and there are few signs that will pick up any time soon. Analysts at AFI, the Spanish financial consultancy, said they did not expect the country's banks many of them still trying to dig themselves out from a mountain of bad real estate loans to resume lending in a measurable way until 2014 at the earliest. All the more reason, they said, for Spain to seek help quickly. Adding to the potential costs of delay, it seems nearly certain that the government will miss the deficit cutting targets for this year and next that are part of its euro zone obligations. That raises the prospect that Madrid will be forced to submit to even tougher budgetary strictures if it waits until later to qualify for the bond buying support. "The government will have to take additional measures to reach the 6.3 percent of G.D.P. target," its goal for 2012, said Federico Steinberg, an economist at the Real Instituto Elcano, a research group. "They will need to freeze pensions or even reduce them." Pensions take up about 100 billion euros of Spain's 350 billion euros in annual spending, Mr. Steinberg said. But they have been one area that has been spared budget cuts; in fact, they recently were increased by 1 percent. Because many pensioners are now the sole bread winners of their families, any cutbacks in retirement payments would carry a devastating social cost. Mr. Rajoy's critics said it would be better to not risk such an outcome by waiting to ask for aid. In Madrid, it is jokingly said that if you meet a Galician on the stairs, you won't know if he is going up or down. Mr. Rajoy's ambivalence about seeking Europe's help might be partly explained by his Galician roots, say those who tell the joke. But as they wonder whether Spain is heading back up, or farther down, few are laughing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
After a two year renovation and expansion in three adjacent industrial buildings on West 22nd Street in New York, Dia Chelsea will reopen in April with new, internally connected spaces and a cohesive look to its facade. Admission will be permanently free. The 20 million, 32,500 square foot project completes the first phase of the institution's master plan, overseen by Architecture Research Office, that includes an upgrade of Dia spaces in SoHo and the lower level of its Beacon, N.Y., facility. All is being funded by a 90 million capital campaign, more than half of which is being set aside for its endowment. "From the beginning, we've been trying to do this in an economical fashion and really not overextend," said the Dia director, Jessica Morgan. The pandemic delayed but did not alter the project, said Ms. Morgan, who has raised approximately 80 million of the campaign. (It was originally intended to open in September.) Founded in SoHo in 1974 and a pioneer to Chelsea in 1987, before galleries started following suit in the 1990s, Dia was a forerunner in using raw warehouse spaces as frames for contemporary art, particularly monumental projects by Walter De Maria, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and other minimal and land artists. Kim Yao, a partner in the architectural firm, said: "A found Dia space can allow for artists to come in and interact with it. That's very different from dropping a new building into a city." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
If you ask even a longtime New Yorker for directions to Minetta Lane, you will likely be met with a blank stare. The quaint one way street, nestled in the heart of Manhattan's Greenwich Village between Sixth Avenue and Macdougal Street, is only a few blocks from the wonderfully frenetic Washington Square Park, but it remains largely unknown. Still, it feels timeless. For Barry Jenkins, director of the film "If Beale Street Could Talk," which was adapted from the 1974 James Baldwin novel and tells the story of love and injustice in 1970s New York, largely in the African American cultural mecca of Harlem and what was then a more rough and tumble Greenwich Village, capturing the New York City of yesteryear was paramount. New York has, of course, changed dramatically since the 1970s. Local institutions like B. Altman and Horn Hardart are no longer part of the landscape. Entire neighborhoods have become denser and more vertical. However, on foot, remnants of the past still stick out, providing a sensory overload that is distinctly New York. While many of the rough spots in Greenwich Village have been smoothed out over the years, many scenes in the film were still shot there, and other neighborhoods within walking distance or an easy subway ride away were able to stand in. Throughout the city, narrow streets, urban parks and restaurants that have seen better days give a sense of the time and place that the novel and the movie sought to convey. To visually reflect the richness of Baldwin's prose, Mr. Jenkins worked closely with the film's production designer, Mark Friedberg, and Samson Jacobson, the locations manager, both native New Yorkers. "I leaned on those guys to not only try and find what places are organically part of the world of our characters, but also are New York, in all caps," Mr. Jenkins said. In the film, a pivotal scene between main characters Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) at the intersection of Minetta Lane and Minetta Street, reflected such a sentiment and revealed New York as a place of promise, despite the many obstacles that both characters would soon face. "The Minetta scene was interesting because it was pouring rain," Mr. Jenkins said. "This wasn't our intention in the script, but on the day of filming these two young black actors who are unfamiliar to many people were just walking down the block on the night of essentially their first love and the skies have opened. It's so picturesque, like 1950s Hollywood Americana." If you visit Greenwich Village now, you'll see a mishmash of boutiques and local restaurants, especially on the side streets like Charles Street and Greenwich Avenue, roads that don't adhere to the uniform Manhattan street grid. Longtime music haunts like Village Vanguard and the Bitter End remain. In the novel, Greenwich Village is richly narrated in Tish's voice, who observes not only the layout of Washington Square Park, but the eclectic people who have defined its existence. "We passed Minetta Tavern, crossed Minetta Lane, passed the newspaper stand on the next corner, and crossed diagonally into the park, which seemed to huddle in the shadow of the heavy new buildings of N.Y.U. and the high new apartment buildings on the east and the north. We passed the men who had been playing chess in the lamplight for generations, and people walking their dogs, and young men with bright hair and very tight pants, who looked quickly at Fonny and resignedly at me. We sat down on the stone edge of the dry fountain, facing the arch." Fonny tells Tish that he used to occasionally sleep in the park. Filming for the Washington Square Park scenes actually took place at Stuyvesant Square Park near the Stuyvesant Town Peter Cooper Village development on the East Side of Manhattan. Washington Square Park, with its 1892 triumphal arch, remains a magnet for chess players and social activism. Its large size allows it to thrive as a universal meeting place of sorts, while Stuyvesant Square Park, located between East 15th and East 17th Streets and bisected by Second Avenue, is a much smaller park. "Washington Square Park doesn't look at all like their Washington Square Park," Mr. Friedberg said. "It looks like Versailles right now compared to the Washington Square Park that Fonny slept in. We ended up shooting in Stuyvesant park, which was also nice, but had the old benches and wrought iron." Tish, who was employed in a department store, worked tirelessly through her pregnancy. Bergdorf Goodman, the luxury retailer on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, allowed scenes to be filmed in their store, but with a caveat. "They were really cool about us shooting there, but we had to get there when they closed and be out of there before they opened," Mr. Friedberg said. After a lot of prodding, Mr. Friedberg was able to film in El Quijote, the Spanish restaurant at the Hotel Chelsea which operated for 88 years before it closed last year. (There are tentative plans for the restaurant, at 226 West 23rd Street in the Chelsea neighborhood, to reopen after a renovation.) In the film, El Quijote stood in for El Faro, a long gone Spanish restaurant that was located at the corner of Greenwich and Horatio streets in Greenwich Village. Fonny has a basement apartment on Bank Street in the West Village, which was extensively designed by Mr. Friedberg on a sound stage to resemble an older apartment, complete with a bathtub in the kitchen. In the novel, Tish is accosted at a market on Bleecker Street by a deranged man, which resulted in Fonny defending her and subsequently being framed for rape by a racist police officer; the filming for those dramatic scenes was completed on location in the Bronx. On Arthur Avenue, the "Little Italy" of the Bronx, located south of Fordham Road, a few minutes from the Fordham Road station (B and D lines) and the Fordham Metro North station, excellent pizzerias, delis and bakeries remain a way of life. It is a perfect stand in for 1960s era Greenwich Village. "The area still has the last bit of its Italian commercial culture," Mr. Friedberg said. "Also, like Greenwich Village, the streets don't perfectly line up in that area." Tish and Fonny first meet as children in Harlem. On film, we see them as adults, walking in Riverside Park, with the Hudson River and the sounds of the Henry Hudson Parkway in the distance. When Tish finds out that she is pregnant and is comforted by her mother, Sharon Rivers (Regina King), her family invites Fonny's family to their apartment to tell them the news about the impending baby. The apartment scenes were filmed on location in Harlem, in a townhouse near St. Nicholas Park, which runs alongside St. Nicholas Avenue from West 128th to West 141st Streets. When Daniel Carty (Brian Tyree Henry) runs into Fonny on Lenox Avenue near 123rd Street, it feels like a family reunion of sorts; it goes back to the theme of Harlem as this unifying force for African Americans. They were in a neighborhood filled with brownstones and grand avenues that also produced Baldwin and was at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. While Harlem experienced a high level of urban decay in the 1970s, which Baldwin details, it still is seen as a force more positive than not throughout the film. Reflecting on some of the most memorable film locations in the city, Mr. Jenkins honed in on the Showmans Jazz Club on 125th Street near Convent Avenue in Harlem, which featured a scene with Joseph Rivers (Colman Domingo) and Frank Hunt (Michael Beach), two fathers sitting at a bar, trying to figure out how to save Fonny from a jail sentence. The bar impressed Mr. Jenkins during the film preproduction, and made it into the film. "Showmans is a place where I would go to unwind if I lived in the neighborhood," he said. "It's one of my favorite Harlem locations because it's still there. The essence and spirit of your work really comes alive when you can get a lot of the city into a film." Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Credit...Bryan Derballa for The New York Times TRENTON David Byrne is his own narrator. In conversation, he frequently interrupts himself to interject his internal monologue, as though he's both performing a play and announcing the stage directions. Backstage at the CURE Insurance Arena here, where he and his band are rehearsing for a tour, he starred in a brief pas de deux with a malfunctioning electric kettle. "What's wrong with this thing? C'mon! Be nice!" he said. "I think it might be broken. Or the outlet might not be on." He laughed. Just as it seemed his laugh had ended, he laughed again. "I'll come back to that later." Although he's often construed as a cheeky urban ironist, much of Mr. Byrne's music, in the Pop Art tradition of Richard Hamilton or Andy Warhol, arises from an ingenuous fascination with mundane objects. Cynicism and wonder both permeate his new slippery art pop album, "American Utopia," which, he said, portrays "the state of the country: who we are, who we hope to be, all this kind of thing." The album title is neither ironic nor literal. "I'm certainly not describing any utopia," said Mr. Byrne, 65, as he sliced a ginger root with a serrated chef's knife. "Some of the verses, especially, are kind of dystopian, or not exactly cheerful. But they're countered by the choruses, which seem to give a sense of hope." At the start of his career, when Mr. Byrne was the singer in Talking Heads, fans turned to him for alienation, not hope. He was so stressed and awkward onstage that people with Asperger's syndrome embraced him as one of their own. After a final Talking Heads album in 1988, he pushed into a solo career that has set an enviable standard for variety and prestige: He started a record label that promoted the music of Brazil and Africa, wrote books and op ed pieces, won an Oscar (in 1988, as one of the writers of "The Last Emperor" score), composed an operetta about Imelda Marcos and a musical about Joan of Arc, exhibited his visual art, and even had a guest spot on "The Simpsons." In Trenton, he was preparing a show so complicated and untraditional, the band and tech crew spent 90 minutes rehearsing how to block and light one transition. To create a bare stage no amps, stands or risers the drum parts have been divided between six percussionists. To make all 12 performers fully mobile, some musicians wear harnesses to hold their instruments, which means their matching gray Kenzo jackets need to be cut and resewn. The choreographer Annie B Parson, who is collaborating on the new show and has worked with Mr. Byrne since 2008, said he is "writing things that are much warmer now." The Byrne she sees onstage is a giddy extrovert. "It's almost like he's from the old vaudevillian, British music hall tradition." Without turning into Norman Vincent Peale or Dory, he has edged in the direction of hope. "I think I am fairly cheerful most of the time," Mr. Byrne said cheerfully, calling from a hotel room two days after our interview in Trenton. "But I can also be cynical and pessimistic about politics and issues like that." Mr. Byrne recorded this album the follow up to "Love This Giant," his 2012 collaboration with St. Vincent using a labyrinthine method. He heard some drum tracks created by the British producer Brian Eno, with whom he has worked steadily since 1978, and decided to pair them with lyrics he'd written in his notebooks. Mr. Byrne added more instruments, and felt the album was finished. Then he played it for Mattis With, a producer and musician who also is an executive at Young Turks, the taste making British label whose artists include the xx, Sampha and FKA twigs. Mr. With, 28, is a Norwegian living in London. (His gallivanting Instagram account will remind you how little you travel, how early you go to sleep and how few gorgeous people you know.) It takes no small amount of chutzpah for a 28 year old to say that Brian Eno's tracks aren't good enough, but that's what Mr. With gently did. "I thought they were maybe a starting point rather than a finished record," he explained in an email. He proposed that Mr. Byrne revamp the tracks, using a new set of young collaborators. Mr. With enlisted his pal Rodaidh McDonald, who produced the record with Mr. Byrne and Patrick Dillett. A 36 year old Scotsman who's worked with the xx, King Krule and Adele, and fell in love with Talking Heads while he was in art college, Mr. McDonald set up a kind of audition process, sending the songs electronically to different musicians, and instructing them to keep the structure, tempo and key, but "send me back a reimagined version of the song." Then he and Mr. Byrne evaluated the competing tracks, decided which they liked best, deleted existing music they no longer loved (including, often, Mr. Eno's), and sent the songs back to the collaborators who'd done the best job, with directions for further refinements. The credits on "American Utopia" are full of mononymous musicians from the digital underground: Happa, Koreless, Airhead, MMPH. "They all have kind of electronic D.J. names," Mr. Byrne said with an avuncular smile. There were more than two dozen collaborators all of them male, which Mr. Byrne recently apologized for on his Instagram, after he was criticized for not recording the album with women. Mr. Byrne has been clear in his hatred of the president, but "American Utopia," he said, is not his "Trump album." He wrote the lyrics before the election, and even took some from nearly ancient notebooks. (An early draft of the song "Here" included the phrase "sound of gunfire off in the distance," which he used in 1979 for the Talking Heads song "Life During Wartime.") It is, though, an album about America, written by a guy who's foreign in several ways. Mr. Byrne was born in Scotland, moved with his family to Baltimore when he was 8, and didn't trade his Green Card for United States citizenship until 2012. For an artist who's thought of as a global cosmopolitan, he's written a lot of songs about America. In "The Big Country," from 1978, a man flies over the heartland and says disdainfully, "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." Two years later, in "Listening Wind," Mr. Byrne imagined an aggrieved man in a poor Third World country who builds mail bombs to kill American colonialists. In the 1986 album and film "True Stories," he depicted small town Americans who, he said, "had invented odd ways of being that were completely original, but it was all working out fine for them." A few years after 9/11, Byrne told an interviewer he had "a little bit" of empathy for people who commit acts of terror against the U.S. Over 40 years, Mr. Byrne has shown gratitude and delight, mixed with embarrassment and fear, for his adopted country. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
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. "The Late Show" has been airing live during the political conventions, with Stephen Colbert offering his immediate thoughts on each night's events. But on Wednesday, Colbert admitted that he hadn't watched the third night of the Republican National Convention. "Because right now in America, we're facing a global pandemic that has killed 180,000 Americans, heavily armed Rambo wannabes are murdering people in our streets, the strongest hurricane in the history of the Gulf Coast is making landfall as I speak," Colbert said in his monologue. "And the R.N.C.'s message is, 'Who's up for four more years?'" "Now, I know by not watching the R.N.C., I didn't do my job tonight. I just want to say, I feel great about it. Why should we pay attention to what they're saying if none of what they're saying tonight is about what's happening in America right now? Why should we watch their reality show if it doesn't reflect our reality? Why subject ourselves to their lies that stick to your soul like hot tar? Lies like 'Donald Trump cares whether you live or die.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Here's another reason I'm not watching the convention: I'm a TV professional and it's terribly produced. I know what's going to happen, because they revealed the monster on the first night, and it's them: a multiheaded spineless creature that lives on your fear." STEPHEN COLBERT "Once again, we are watching a basic function of our government that has always been apolitical die in front of our eyes. We are one news cycle away from the C.D.C. warning that mail in ballots give you chlamydia." STEPHEN COLBERT, on reports that the Trump administration pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into changing its virus testing guidelines "President Trump is being criticized, very much, for using the White House as a backdrop for political television. But today he fought back, and he was like, 'Oh, I get it no one criticized President Martin Sheen when he did it on 'The West Wing.'" JAMES CORDEN "The idea is that taxpayers shouldn't foot the bill for the presidential campaign of a guy that they might not support. I mean, think about it: American taxpayers paid for the Rose Garden. American taxpayers paid for the secretary of state's travels. So those things shouldn't be used for partisan purposes. They should be used for nonpartisan things, like Easter egg hunts or presenting fake evidence to get America into a war." TREVOR NOAH "And look, I get why Trump wants to do these events it's good TV, yo. I mean, that live surprise pardon, that had some strong Roman emperor energy." TREVOR NOAH "Plus, I'm not going to lie that naturalization ceremony, that was inspiring. You know, because say what you want, becoming an American citizen is a long and hard process, so congratulations to those people. Plus it's extra cool having Donald Trump give your naturalization ceremony, because as soon as it's done, he is also the guy who will tell you to go back to where you came from, so it's a full service experience." TREVOR NOAH "But here's the deal: The Hatch Act is a law, whether we care about it or not doesn't matter. What's important is that it exists. A lot of people outside car mechanics don't care what brake fluid is, but you'll miss it when it's gone." STEPHEN COLBERT "It's almost like America's laws were designed by the same people who designed the Death Star: 'This is an impenetrable and flawlessly designed system and we're going to leave a little gap in here so somebody can come in and blow the whole thing up.'" TREVOR NOAH "People outside the Beltway should care about every law the president is breaking, and I think they actually do it's just that it's hard to keep track at this point." STEPHEN COLBERT Samantha Bee and "Full Frontal" took a deep dive into America's racist symbols. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
TURIN, Italy Not long after Cristiano Ronaldo scored the first of his three goals, as belief, rather than hope, pulsed around the stadium, as Juventus's fans bounced and sang and roared, Mario Mandzukic turned inside, and floated a cross into Atletico Madrid's box. He misjudged the weight of the pass, just a little: a few inches too high for his target, Federico Bernardeschi, and maybe a yard or so behind him. No matter. It was one opportunity lost. Another would surely soon be on its way. Bernardeschi, though, was not quite so quick to write it off. He adjusted his run, twisted his body, planted his right foot and leaped upward, swinging his left leg towards the ball, making contact, full and thick. It would have been some goal, the sort that would belong in a computer game or a comic book. Instead, it skimmed the outside of Jan Oblak's net. The crowd purred in appreciation of what might have been. The mere attempt was fantastical, really, a shot with such a slim chance of success, one that required such precise measurements of vision and technique and timing, one that any half decent analyst would tell you was not worth the bother. Most players would have written off the idea as soon as it had occurred to them. That Bernardeschi did not says a lot about him, of course his was a performance brimming with intent and ambition and no little skill but it offers a little insight, too, into the nature of the modern Champions League. This is a competition that has, in recent years, discarded the very notion of unlikely. With every year that passes, it seems to stretch the bounds of credulity a little further, to demand an even greater suspension of disbelief. It is infused, now, with a sense of fantasy. There is something in the air on these nights that encourages players and teams to give something to give anything a go. It is a competition of you never know, of why not. It is the place where those overhead kicks go in. Indeed, by recent standards, it is hard to categorize what happened here on Tuesday as any sort of seismic shock. Yes, Juventus recovered from two goals down in the first leg to win by 3 0, and reach the quarterfinals. Yes, Atletico Madrid, for so long regarded as soccer's most obdurate, unyielding opponent, the sport's great immovable object, collapsed into itself, Diego Simeone's players succumbing to their fate with barely a whimper. Ronaldo had scored only one goal in his last nine Champions League games. As has been the case every year for the last few, it had become acceptable to wonder if his brilliance was starting to fade. No, as it turns out. This is his stage, and these are his games. He comes alive when the world is watching, when there is a chance to be a hero. He feeds off it. Obviously he was going to score the goals two towering headers that drew Juventus level. And who else, exactly, was going to take the penalty, won by Bernardeschi, that sent Manager Massimiliano Allegri's team through? But it was not simply the confidence that comes with the player who is, by almost every metric, the greatest Champions League player of all time that fed Juventus's conviction. Allegri's players need only to have seen what happened last week Ajax eliminating Real Madrid after losing the first leg at home; Manchester United's reserves eliminating Paris St. Germain after losing the first leg at home to feel that their task was not too onerous. Those are just the most recent examples. Last year, Roma overturned a three goal deficit against no less than Barcelona to reach the semifinals; Juventus itself, even without Ronaldo, lost by 3 0 to Real Madrid in Turin, and then build a three goal lead in the Santiago Bernabeu in the return before a late penalty brought it all to a crushing close. And, of course, 12 months earlier came the most remarkable of them all: Barcelona's 6 1 comeback to recover from four goals down against P.S.G., Sergi Roberto scoring in the final minute of more than 180, one of the most expensive teams ever assembled humiliated and cowed. It is worth asking why these results keep happening, why a competition that once was marked by its caution and its caginess has become so chaotic. Allegri was not, particularly, in the mood to do so Tuesday "These things have always happened," he said though he did suggest that the quality of the teams, as well as the sense of a second chance even after a first leg defeat, might feed into it. And perhaps all of those precedents, too, have persuaded players that there is no such thing as a lost cause. But that is only telling one side, allowing the victors to write history. What explains the gulf in performances over the course of two games for the losing teams: for Atletico and Real Madrid and, invariably, P.S.G.? Is it complacency, the converse of the avenging energies of the defeated? Is it the exposure of some fatal flaw? Is it an inherent respect for the epic? Or is it as Luka Milivojevic, a Serb midfielder for Crystal Palace, put it earlier this season something to do with the nature of the challenge? A team like Lyon, he explained, is able to carry a game to Manchester City in the Champions League in a way that could not happen domestically because it is used to having the initiative; its default mode is to have the ball. That is true of almost all of the teams in Europe's elite competition. They are unaccustomed even Atletico, whose reputation for doughty defending is rooted in its performances against Real, Barcelona and in the Champions League to ceding control. That tends to make games much more open, much more exciting, much more chaotic; and when an opponent can wrest the momentum from them, it makes them much more vulnerable. They are placed in a situation they do not have a great deal of experience in handling. They are powerless to resist. Perhaps that is what has created this version of the Champions League, where anything can happen, where improbable is not enough and impossible might not be, too, where it is worth giving something, no matter how fantastical, a go. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Credit...Oriana Koren for The New York Times As we drove along the heavily pocked dirt road, bouncing our way through near total darkness, with no signs to indicate the proximity to our destination with no signs of any sort the whites of my girlfriend's eyes were plainly visible in the night as she murmured, "I'm not so sure about this." Perhaps, it now occurred to me, I had not thought all of this completely through. Here we were, deep in rural western Mexico, about 50 miles from the Pacific, rattling down a profoundly vacant road in an unmarked taxi bound for a restaurant recommended to me by a stranger. Kirsten's dubiousness was understandable. But more than that, it was no trifling matter, given that I intended to propose marriage to her the following night, at a different restaurant at the end of another endless dirt road. I sputtered out my assurances. Appearances to the contrary, I told her, tourists came here to the Guadalupe Valley all the time. The restaurant, Finca Altozano, had been given high marks on various websites. The driver, whom our innkeeper identified as Eduardo, appeared to know where he was going and seemed too courtly to have foul play on his mind. Kirsten seemed to be listening only to her heartbeat. The restaurant's parking lot was itself made of dirt. But it was packed with cars, and when we stepped into the buzzing and low lit veranda perched high over the valley, I felt all residue of self doubt transmute into shimmering bravado. Finca Altozano seemed instantly familiar only because it's the kind of casually evocative country establishment that so many American restaurateurs spend millions on to get wrong. Seated near the rotisserie, we ordered grilled octopus, grilled chorizo, tacos with grilled beef grilled everything, and nothing disappointed, least of all the bottle of white blended grapes that was produced by a winemaker down the way named Amado Garza. It was apple crisp and surging with minerality. Those flavors originated from the same brawny terrain that had delivered us here. As a native Texan, I have visited Mexico many times, and, even more frequently, Alta California, all the way down to the border where San Diego County gives way to Tijuana. But my only excursion into Baja had been many years ago, to its baja most tip, the uproarious beach and nightclub resort city Cabo San Lucas, an episode in my earlier life of Hombres Behaving Badly of which, thankfully, there is no known documentation. The thousand mile fishhook shape stretch of land extending from Cabo up to Tijuana, and separating the Gulf of California from the Pacific, always struck me as a geographic anomaly of unknown utility, belonging to neither country, and in no particular way announcing itself as worthy of exploration. But then last March I happened to be on assignment in Mexico City, where I met various sources at restaurants of their choosing. It's no surprise that there is outstanding food in Mexico's capital city. What stunned me was the quality of the wines. White and red, across the varietal spectrum from viognier to Sangiovese each was bristling with territorial expressiveness, and completely affordable. The best were unambiguously world class. And all of them hailed from something called the Valle de Guadalupe, in the Free and Sovereign State of Baja California. A week after voters in the United States elected a man who had vowed to erect a wall on America's southern border, I drove across it with San Diego in my rearview. There are three crossings from San Diego County: Tijuana, Tecate and the one I randomly chose, Otay Mesa. It's worth noting that the breezy, 90 mile journey from San Diego International Airport to most Valle de Guadalupe attractions along the main expressways (Routes 1 and 3) can be a great deal more plodding in the opposite direction. Driving back into the United States can, depending on day and time, involve anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours in the checkpoint line. To help with planning, a Border Wait Time app is available. Whatever qualms you may have brought with you about driving to Mexico are likely to fall away once you take leave of the mangy border townscape of Otay Mesa and the slender, well tended expressway plunges you into a bronze desert spiked with granite protrusions. The stern beauty of this backcountry will seem familiar to visitors of southern Arizona or the Big Bend country of southwest Texas. What it does not in any way call to mind are the Cancuns and Cozumels that constitute a vacuum packaged offering of Mexico. About two hours south of the San Diego airport, I arrived at the five year old resort known as Encuentro Guadalupe, which, from the approach, appears to be a space colony of metallic abodes jutting from a lunar mountain. A dirt road, my first of what would be many, led uphill to the reception area. From here my room was accessible farther up the mountain by means of a dusty hotel van. I was in no hurry for this. Instead, I spent the next hour on the open air bar terrace hanging over the valley, eating a delicious avocado and tuna ceviche while relishing the view and the keen desert air with other tourists, most of them Mexican. Eventually I hailed the driver and we trundled up to my "king eco loft," which Encuentro Guadalupe in its promotional materials characterizes as "luxury camping." The "luxury" part was right: My quarters, including breakfast, cost over 300, considerably more than I had expected to pay. The room was narrow and austere: a king size bed with a white bedspread, white steel walls, a small bathroom and windows that faced the desert mountains. Upon closing the heavy metal door and drawing the curtains, I experienced the sensation of being in a clean, low lit refrigerator. As soon as I could, I retreated to the resort's infinity pool, with its spectacular view of the desert crags. The Jacuzzi was occupied by several hairy chested Sinaloans who beckoned me to share their bottle of mezcal. I did so, and after clinking glasses and exchanging a few guarded speculations on United States Mexico relations in the Trump era, I left them to stew in the frothing water and commenced what would become a multiday driving meander down the Guadalupe Valley's Ruta de Vino. In 1988, a scientist of German ancestry named Hans Backoff Senior founded Monte Xanic and thereupon became the first maker of high quality wines in the Valley. Others followed, and the oenologists they hired from France, Italy and Spain brought their native varietals with them. You would think the resulting wine would be a hopeless multicultural jumble, everywhere tasting wine in the middle of nowhere. But then you would start drinking and stop quibbling. As one of the region's pre eminent winemakers, Jose Luis Durand, told me: "That eclecticism is part of our wine's character. It expresses the freedom that our culture affords us." I dined with Mr. Durand, a native Chilean, one evening in the unprepossessing oceanside city of Ensenada, a half hour from the valley, at an Italian restaurant called Da Toni. My brilliant if endearingly attention disordered companion makes deeply personal valley wines featuring far flung grapes like nebbiolo and tannat. Elsewhere in Ensenada, at Sano's, a dignified steakhouse, I washed down my filet mignon with a silky tempranillo syrah blend from Norte 32, whose owner, a retired pilot named Oscar Obregon, beamed modestly as I stammered out praise. And one afternoon in the city I found, alongside a clutter of docked fishing boats, a sunny seafood shack named Muelle 3. The yellowfin tuna sashimi and shrimp puff pastry might have been flawless by themselves but, leaving nothing to chance, I ordered a needle sharp sauvignon blanc made by Wenceslao Martinez Santos of Relieve Winery, and perfection was assured. In the preceding paragraph I unintentionally made the case for simply staying in the poor man's Cabo San Lucas of Ensenada where, in addition to the excellent restaurants, the usual beach hotels and tequila bars abound and the roads are paved. I won't stop you, though you are especially likely to regret your choice should you linger in Ensenada in the middle of November, when the so called Baja Mil procession of Americans in off road vehicles makes its bellowing way down the thousand mile coastline from Tijuana to Cabo. The serene rusticity of the valley has the feeling of a place rather than a playground. "If you come here directly from Napa, you'll feel like you're on a safari," the winemaker Fernando Perez Castro said as we enjoyed a grand lunch of pig's feet taquitos, tomato salad, radishes with black mole sauce and cabrito tortas (a sandwich of grilled baby goat) on the shady patio of TrasLomita, the restaurant on the premises of his family's winery, Hacienda La Lomita. "But you see that this isn't a place where big corporations have imposed a narrative. This is all about small families who actually live on the property. And along with making a tiny amount of high quality wine, we've now brought tourism to the table. We're giving our clients a full experience." At certain sites like La Lomita, that experience superb wine and food in a picturesque setting presided over by a charming host feels unassailably complete. Or it would, if there were rooms. Once Kirsten arrived three days into my weeklong trip, we stayed two nights in the area's oldest hotel, Adobe Guadalupe, an elegant inn built in 1999 by an American businessman and his Dutch wife, who came to the valley to make wine and raise horses. Today, according to its website, the hotel is the most prolific breeder of Azteca Sporthorses in the world, and guests may ride them through Adobe Guadalupe's vineyards. As I prefer horses from a distance, we largely contented ourselves with the view from the hotel's lovely pool, the armada of mountains providing a backdrop of surly majesty. Adobe Guadalupe's conceit is that of a self contained refuge. Its gracious courtyard and high ceiling public rooms stocked with well traveled books invite the visitor to proceed slowly, if at all. Just by the entrance, a gift shop of local crafts is also well stocked with early vintages of Adobe Guadalupe's excellent wine at startlingly low prices. More recent versions of the same wine are available by the glass at the adjacent charming food truck, which sells flavorful if strangely non Mexican snacks. The greater disappointment comes with Adobe Guadalupe's dinners, which feature the banal sort of beef and asparagus fare one encounters at Middle American country clubs. Thus come evening we would find ourselves bumping down the unlit desert roads. One particular three mile divot riddled byway connecting two paved thoroughfares is the address for some of the valley's best regarded restaurants. These include the aforementioned veranda grill Finca Altozano; across the street, Brasa del Valle, another campestre style restaurant emphasizing fresh ingredients; and a quarter mile down the road, Laja, the valley's venerated ranch house establishment with a prix fixe menu that leans more to the Mediterranean than to down home Mexican. From Adobe Guadalupe, the drive to each of these is a mere 10 minutes, though getting there is not half the fun. We were glad, then, to procure a room for our final night in the valley at Bruma Valle de Guadalupe, a first class resort in the making owned by Juan Pablo Arroyuelo, a restless Mexico City developer. When we visited, Bruma's rambling complex consisted of six sleek guest rooms, a pool, dirt biking trails, a vineyard, a kitchen for daytime meals and an architecturally stunning winery built out of recycled optical glass and discarded wooden beams from a San Francisco bridge. Though we didn't have benefit of the on site restaurant during our stay, just outside of Bruma's entrance lies La Esperanza BajaMed a restaurant situated on one of the valley's largest vineyards and which, in addition to delicious inland Mexican fare, serves outstanding plump oysters from the Pacific. I told Mr. Arroyuelo that after days of jostling from winery to hotel to restaurant, it was a relief to find a single area that encompassed pretty much everything we craved, requiring no nocturnal voyages. The valley's most ambitious developer considered this. Then he said gravely: "We shouldn't turn this into a tourist zone. It needs to stay rough." So there will probably be more vineyards and delicacies and luxuries, but the same steadfast absence of polish when the time comes for us to revisit the Guadalupe Valley. And a return visit is pretty much guaranteed, not least because of an occurrence one evening at a long dirt road that dead ended at La Villa del Valle, a splendid six room inn cradled by the desert mountains where we stayed two pleasantly drowsy days. On one of those, after a day of poolside massages, we settled in for dinner at the hotel's well regarded restaurant Corazon de Tierra. There, at a table for two beside the kitchen where the servers rolled out bite after magnificently garden fresh bite to accompany the fine local wine, I seized the moment, fell to one knee, held out the ring and asked my girlfriend to marry me. I'm afraid I don't recall what dishes came after "yes." But La Villa's owner materialized with congratulatory champagne, roses appeared in our bedroom, and from our terrace a necklace of stars sparkled over the mountains a desert evening of the unforgettable kind. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Read about how our dance critic Gia Kourlas aims to expand her role beyond what happens between the curtain's rise and fall. 2019 CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL The French Institute Alliance Francaise's annual festival 11 performances, along with a gallery exhibition embraces artists of different disciplines; this edition is the first programmed by Courtney Geraghty, who took over as the institute's artistic director in 2018. Established artists, including Peter Brook and Germaine Acogny, will present new works, while Isabelle Adjani makes her New York theatrical debut in "Opening Night," directed by Cyril Teste. Jerome Bel returns to the festival with a commissioned portrait of Isadora Duncan in the form of a solo for Catherine Gallant, a New York dancer, historian and teacher who has long explored Duncan's work. Stefanie Batten Bland modernizes Stanley Kramer's 1967 film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" in "Look Who's Coming to Dinner," and Francois Chaignaud excavates the rituals of Western theater in "Dumi moyi Dumy Moyi," an intimate solo. Through Oct. 12; crossingtheline.org. NEW YORK CITY BALLET This season may be the first under the new team of Jonathan Stafford (artistic director) and Wendy Whelan (associate artistic director), but they did not plan it. (It was organized by Mr. Stafford and Justin Peck, the company's artistic adviser, when they were part of the interim leadership team.) The fall lineup (Sept. 17 Oct. 13) includes premieres by Edwaard Liang and Lauren Lovette as part of the fall fashion gala. Mr. Liang , a former soloist with the company and now artistic director of BalletMet, is paired with the designer Anna Sui, while Ms. Lovette , a City Ballet principal, is working with Zac Posen. Along with George Balanchine's evening length "Jewels," the season welcomes Merce Cunningham's "Summerspace," choreographed in 1958 and first performed by City Ballet in 1966. It's been nearly 20 years since the company danced it: What took so long? It's breathtaking. Also breathtaking is the perennial "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" (Nov. 29 Jan. 5). David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; nycballet.com. RUBBERBAND The Joyce Theater's fall season is the first organized by Aaron Mattocks, the new director of programming, and it will feature live music as part of every performance . The breadth of dance from tap and flamenco to modern and ballet signals a hopeful future for the Joyce. The season opens with Rubberband, a Canadian company led by Victor Quijada a former dancer with Twyla Tharp performing "Ever So Slightly," a work for 10 with music by Jasper Gahunia. (The score will be mixed live onstage.) For this Joyce debut, the performers explore the natural reflexes we develop while dealing with the chaos of daily life. Sept. 17 22; joyce.org. JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS The new season coincides with the opening of the REACH, the center's first expansion since 1971. It's an immersive learning center, a public incubator and a set of performance spaces as well as the backdrop for a festival running through Sept. 22. On Sept. 21, that festival includes a National Dance Day event with classes, outdoor performances, live music, film screenings and panel discussions. Later in the season, the Kennedy Center will host a Merce Cunningham celebration featuring Compagnie Centre National de Danse Contemporaine Angers in "Beach Birds" and "BIPED" (Oct. 3 5). It will also feature the Mariinsky Ballet in "Paquita" (Oct. 8 13): Here, a point of interest is Yuri Burlaka's reconstruction of Marius Petipa's choreography in the Act III "Grand Pas" wedding celebration. Other events include "Demo," a look at the Philadelphia company BalletX, presented by Damian Woetzel (Oct. 25 26); and the Mark Morris Dance Group in "Pepperland" (Nov. 13 16). kennedy center.org. TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY The group travels to Philadelphia for the enticing "In Motion, In Place: Trisha Brown Dance Company in Fairmount Park," a series of free outdoor public performances of three of Ms. Brown's works in and around the Fairmount Park Conservancy: "Foray Foret"; "Raft Piece" (floating on the reservoir); and "Roof Piece" (along the rooftops surrounding Logan Circle). Sept. 24 29; trishabrowncompany.org. AYODELE CASEL ARTURO O'FARRILL The collaboration between this exceptional tap choreographer and dancer and the Grammy Award winning Mr. O'Farrill has its base in Afro Latin jazz culture. Their shared musical language ranges from modal jazz to stride piano to danzon to salsa and rhumba. Is it a dance or a music show? Mercifully, in this case, the playing field is level and a delight. One rule applies: Go. Sept. 24 29; joyce.org. AMERICAN BALLET THEATER The company's fall season is always a feast of one act ballets: Along with premieres from Twyla Tharp and Gemma Bond, there will be a program devoted to Herman Cornejo, who celebrates his 20th anniversary with Ballet Theater (Oct. 26). He will be featured in Ms. Tharp's latest work, set to Johannes Brahms's String Quintet No. 2 in G (Op. 111). Ms. Bond, a member of the company's corps de ballet, has chosen Benjamin Britten's Suite on English Folk Tunes for orchestra for her first work for the main company. Other ballets include the New York premiere of Jessica Lang's "Let Me Sing Forevermore," a pas de deux set to a medley of songs recorded by Tony Bennett; and revivals of George Balanchine's "Apollo" and Clark Tippet's "Some Assembly Required." Oct. 16 27; abt.org. YANIRA CASTRO/A CANARY TORSI Live Arts presents the world premiere of "Last Audience," which Ms. Castro views as a live laboratory involving performer and spectator. In it, she contemplates agency and manipulation and incorporates themes from requiems and Greek tragedies. All performances are free with a reservation and include a public meal in the Live Arts lobby before the show. Oct. 16 20; newyorklivearts.org. 'THE DAY' A cellist, a dancer, a choreographer and a composer walk into a theater .... In "The Day," the cellist Maya Beiser performs alongside Wendy Whelan, who dances choreography by Lucinda Childs. David Lang is the composer; for this production, he has extended "the day" and "world to come," which he created after Sept. 11, and included text generated from an internet search of the phrase "I remember the day I ...." The production, conceived by Ms. Beiser, investigates loss and resilience. Oct. 22 27; joyce.org. WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL Circa Ensemble, a boundary blurring group from Australia that first appeared at White Light in 2014, presents "En Masse," a work created by Yaron Lifschitz that blends circus and contemporary dance. The production features 10 acrobats and three musicians; the score has original music by the Swedish composer Klara Lewis, along with selections from Schubert's "Winterreise" and "Schwanengesang," and a two piano arrangement of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Oct. 23 25; whitelightfestival.org. PERFORMA 19 BIENNIAL Dedicated to live performance, Performa presents its eighth edition with a variety of headliners, among them Yvonne Rainer, working in collaboration with Emily Coates to stage a new version of "Parts of Some Sextets," which hasn't been seen since the 1960s. In a co production with the Kitchen, Nairy Baghramian and Maria Hassabi explore intimacy and domesticity in an installation of new sculptures and live performance at an Upper East Side townhouse; Cecilia Bengolea juxtaposes classical ballet, modern dance, vogueing, dancehall and other club forms in a large scale performance created with Michele Lamy, the fashion figure who is also the wife and collaborator of the designer Rick Owens. In addition, the biennial hosts Eva Mag , who looks at the dynamics between bodies and objects with a work for 20 dancers, gymnasts and acrobats alongside 20 sculptures at the gym at Judson Memorial Church. Nov. 1 24; performa arts.org. EPHRAT ASHERIE DANCE Ms. Asherie, who specializes in breaking, hip hop, house and vogue, is another breath of fresh air at the Joyce this fall. She's presenting "Odeon," a collaboration with her brother, the jazz pianist Ehud Asherie, in which they explore Afro Brazilian rhythms in a reimagining of the compositions of the Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth. Nazareth mixed early 20th century romantic music with samba and other Afro Brazilian rhythms; Ms. Asherie follows suit with movement. Nov. 5 7; joyce.org. PERFORMANCE SPACE NEW YORK The organization hosts Kia LaBeija's first large scale performance work, "Untitled, the Black Act," which takes inspiration from "Das Triadische Ballett," Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus dance in three acts. In this commission, presented with Performa (see above), Ms. LaBeija reinterprets the final act, which delves into fantasy and mysticism (Nov. 7 9). And in December, Ray Ferreira, a blaqlatinx dance artist, presents "to spiral seems to be the only option," in which she uses her body to connect to the spirits of those who leapt from slave ships traveling to North America and the Caribbean, and the underwater communities they could have formed (Dec. 19 21). performancespacenewyork.org RASHAAD NEWSOME New York Live Arts and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center team up for Mr. Newsome's "Black Magic," a holistic exploration of race, identity and oppression. It includes an exhibition at the photo arts center, an installation at New York Live Arts and performances there and at Icebox in Philadelphia. For the performance piece "FIVE," local artists will join the cast for a multimedia work that explores, in part, the art of vogueing. Dancers will represent five elements of the style known as vogue femme: hands, catwalk, floor performance, spin dips and duckwalking. As each dancer takes the stage, an M.C., an operatic vocalist, a black gospel choir and five musicians will improvise. Nov. 8 9; newyorklivearts.org. CAMILLE A. BROWN DANCERS This choreographer revisits her 2014 Bessie Award winning "Mr. TOL E. RAncE," the first installment of a trilogy exploring black identity. Ms. Brown examines the humor and perseverance of black performers, while taking a sharp look at stereotypes that persist in popular culture. Nov. 9 10; joyce.org. SOLEDAD BARRIO NOCHE FLAMENCA Ms. Barrio, a force of nature, returns to the Joyce with an array of distinct flamenco artists as incredible as she is, she isn't afraid to share the stage and an evening length production of solos, duets and ensemble pieces. "Entre Tu y Yo," or "Between You and Me," begins with an exploration of the duet form and gradually builds to a fiery finale in which she, naturally, is the star: Ms. Barrio will perform a semi improvised solo that explores themes of love, passion, jealousy and death. Nov. 19 Dec. 1; joyce.org. "AND STILL YOU MUST SWING" An all star trio of tap dancers, led by Dormeshia she goes by her first name performs at the Joyce in a production that also features Derick K. Grant and Jason Samuels Smith. The piece explores the legacy of tap dance by honoring its jazz roots. Dormeshia is a breathtakingly musical dancer and one of the finest tap artists of the day. The evening also includes a special collaboration with Camille A. Brown. Dec. 3 8; joyce.org. ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER This ever popular company returns to City Center with a newly appointed resident choreographer: Jamar Roberts. A veteran company member, Mr. Roberts presents the premiere of "Ode," set to Don Pullen's jazz composition "Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part 1 Memories and Gunshots)"; this work for six dancers takes a timely look at the fragility of life amid a wave of gun violence. In other new repertory, Donald Byrd takes inspiration from Ailey's theatrical roots and history of exploring social issues in "Greenwood." There are also company premieres by Aszure Barton ("Busk," an episodic look at performance) and Camille A. Brown ("City of Rain," a quiet work that pays homage to a lost friend), as well as new productions of dances by Judith Jamison ("Divining," from 1984) and Lar Lubovitch ( "Fandango," which was created in 1990 and entered the Ailey repertory in 1995 ). The season also celebrates the career of Masazumi Chaya, who is retiring as associate artistic director after this season, and honors the Ailey School, which turns 50 this year. Dec. 4 Jan. 5; nycitycenter.org. PAM TANOWITZ SIMONE DINNERSTEIN Collaborations that look good on paper can fall apart onstage, but the evening length "New Work for Goldberg Variations" is stellar from start to finish. Ms. Tanowitz's rigorous, playful choreography blooms around Ms. Dinnerstein, who performs the Bach score at the piano onstage. Dec. 10 15; joyce.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
RIMOUSKI, Quebec The walls inside Sun Life Financial Coliseum in this eastern Quebec town along the Saint Lawrence River are swathed in tributes to the history of the Rimouski Oceanic, which entered the competitive ranks of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League in 1995. There are homages to former players like Vincent Lecavalier and Brad Richards, who in 2000 led the club to its only Memorial Cup, Canadian junior hockey's ultimate prize. Naturally, there is plenty of space dedicated to Sidney Crosby, the superstar who played two seasons in Rimouski. There's a new player causing a stir among the locals 17 year old Alexis Lafreniere and he will not even be eligible for the N.H.L. draft until 2020. With a remarkable season and a standout international career, Lafreniere has been drawing comparisons to Crosby, whose talent belied his age 15 years ago before being drafted first over all by the Pittsburgh Penguins. A native of Saint Eustache, Quebec, a suburb just west of Montreal, Lafreniere dismisses such comparisons. But in a proud province whose die hard hockey fans have waited some time for the next French Canadian superstar, he has been forced to contend with some lofty expectations. "He played in Rimouski, and I did too. That's something people say," Lafreniere said. "But I'm not Crosby. I just try to be myself and play my game. If I can watch Crosby play and do things like he do, for sure I will do it to try to get better, but I don't think I'm Crosby." Like Crosby, Lafreniere was selected first over all by Rimouski in the Q.M.J.H.L. draft. And like Crosby, Lafreniere dominated the league at 16, being named the league's top rookie last season as well as a first team All Star. His 42 goals last season were the most for a 16 year old in the league since Crosby in 2003 4. "We haven't felt this kind of response since Sidney," the Oceanic owner Alex Tanguay said. "It's a different kind of response, obviously with the social media and stuff, but you can definitely feel a vibe around him. Back then, if you wanted to see Sid play, you needed to drive down to Rimouski. "Now in 2019, you can know what type of player Alexis is just by watching him on the internet or on TV. I guess it's a different kind of response, but in a way the same vibe we felt almost 15 years ago." Any dominant 16 year old hockey player naturally draws comparisons to Crosby, one of Canada's most fabled native sons. But Lafreniere's dominance has not been confined to the league colloquially known as the Q. At the 2018 Hlinka Gretzky Cup, the top international tournament for players 17 and younger, Lafreniere tied for the scoring lead despite being the second youngest player on his team. He sealed Canada's tournament victory with two goals, including the winner, in the final against Sweden. In December and January, he was the youngest player to compete at the International Ice Hockey Federation world junior championship, for players 20 and younger. In part because of injuries to other players, Lafreniere became the ninth youngest to compete for Canada at the annual holiday tournament, behind names like Wayne Gretzky, Connor McDavid, Eric Lindros and, of course, Crosby. But Lafreniere's world junior showcase was not exactly a grand coronation. Canada, the host nation, lost in the quarterfinal to Finland, the eventual champion. After a third period benching against Switzerland in group play, Lafreniere encountered the first real adversity of his young career. He responded with a goal against the Czech Republic in the next game. The Rimouski coach and general manager, Serge Beausoleil, added: "In many ways, it helped him. It's one of the first times that he faced adversity. He has to react to that. That's really good for him. He's a tremendous player, but he has room for improvement." Aside from their biographical similarities, Lafreniere and Crosby differ drastically in style. Whereas Crosby's legend was built on subtlety and the facility with which he makes the extraordinary appear ordinary, Lafreniere is more the showman. He appears most in his element driving offensive play with the puck on his stick. It's a style he adopted as a child emulating his favorite player, the Chicago Blackhawks star Patrick Kane. A fastidious student of the game, Lafreniere can still describe a personal favorite pass from Kane to then teammate Marian Hossa. "The pass to Hossa," he recalled. "He spin around and back door. That was pretty sick." Lafreniere is expected to be a prominent player in next season's world junior tournament in the Czech Republic. By then, every game he plays will draw the kind of scrutiny reserved for a player expected to go No. 1 in the N.H.L. draft. The last Quebecois player selected first over all was goaltender Marc Andre Fleury in 2003. The last nongoalie from Quebec to go first was Lecavalier in 1998. That's a startling drought for a province known as the proving ground for icons like Maurice Richard, Jean Beliveau, Gilbert Perreault, Guy Lafleur, Mario Lemieux, Ray Bourque and Patrick Roy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Real estate market temperatures in the commuter suburbs around New York City range from warm to sizzling, having never really cooled down for the winter. As 2016 ended, prices remained stable, but most markets showed rising sales volume and a dwindling supply of homes for sale. Now, on the cusp of spring, any slack left over from the financial crisis is largely gone, with the exception of an oversupply of luxury homes at the very top. In Westchester and Fairfield Counties, "I wouldn't characterize anywhere as dead or nonactive," said Jim Gricar, the general sales manager for Houlihan Lawrence. "Two years ago, I couldn't have said that. But today, I feel confident saying it." On Long Island, in both Suffolk and Nassau Counties, the housing markets are moving at a "blistering pace," and prices are accelerating, according to a fourth quarter market report from Douglas Elliman Real Estate. And in the inner ring New Jersey suburbs closest to Manhattan, the markets are so brisk that many have less than three months' worth of inventory, according to Jeffrey Otteau, the president of the Otteau Group, an appraisal and advisory firm. By way of comparison, in 2012, most of those markets had a four to eight month supply, a more typical range. The dynamics driving demand vary from suburb to suburb, but industry experts cited several overall reasons for the busy winter. First, many buyers had been holding off on making a purchase until after the presidential election, largely because of uncertainty about the outcome. That pent up demand was unleashed after Nov. 8, and has been helped along by a mild winter. "Anecdotally, the brokerage community said literally the day after the election there was a pop activity jumped," said Jonathan Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, which prepares the Douglas Elliman market reports. "We saw the same thing after the 2012 election. When the numbers come in for the first quarter, I think we will see an uptick over a year ago." And then there was "the real noise" that began toward the end of last year about the likelihood of rising interest rates this year, Mr. Gricar said, adding, "Buyers decided to get to work." The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would raise its benchmark interest rate, which will likely mean a rise in mortgage rates. A 30 year fixed rate currently averages just above 4 percent. Indeed, 2017 "started out with a bang" for sellers in the Mount Pleasant and Ossining areas, said Susan Strawgate Code, an associate broker in the Briarcliff Manor office of Houlihan Lawrence. Take Pleasantville, a village in Mount Pleasant popular with New York City buyers because of its quick commute to Manhattan and its Brooklynesque feel. "Over the last six months, the average days on market in Pleasantville before going to contract was only 83 days," Ms. Code said. "That's a pretty quick turnaround." Inventory is so low just 34 homes were on the market as of last week that buyers are waiting in the wings for new listings to come on, she said. And multiple bids are common. For Westchester as a whole, the absorption rate the number of months it would take to sell all active listings based on the pace of sales was 3.7 months in the last quarter of 2016, the fastest pace since 2001, according to Douglas Elliman. The overall median sales price rose by a modest 3 percent compared with a year earlier, though increases were greater in the White Plains and lower Westchester markets. On Long Island, sales have been so brisk over the past couple of years that inventory is at its lowest level in 13 years, Elliman reported. As a result, prices are accelerating more quickly than in other metropolitan area markets, especially in Nassau County, which had a median sale price increase of about 7 percent last quarter compared with a year ago. He noted that January brought an unusual statewide spike in sales of homes priced between 1 million and 2.5 million, a market segment that had slowed in recent years. While the 19 percent year over year surge might be an anomaly, Mr. Otteau said, it could also be a sign that high income buyers are feeling extra confident, possibly because of the Trump administration's talk of financial deregulation and tax reform. "It's completely opposite to what we'd been seeing previously," he said. Still, the market above 2 million remains soft throughout the suburbs. In Fairfield County, Conn., for example, the median price for the top 10 percent of sales dropped by more than 15 percent in the last quarter of 2016 to 1.7 million, due primarily to a shift toward lower priced sales, according to Elliman. (The median sale price for the county as a whole declined by 3 percent, to 372,000.) In Greenwich, Conn., where the median single family sale price is around 1.6 million, the sluggish high end market is contributing to concerns among some agents and business people that the town might have a perception problem. Sabine H. Schoenberg, the chief executive of Prime Sites, said that derogatory comments about the Greenwich housing market made publicly last fall by Barry Sternlicht, the chairman and chief executive of Starwood Capital Group, were one of the first things buyers saw when researching the town on the internet. (Mr. Sternlicht, who had been frustrated in his efforts to sell his Greenwich mansion, claimed the market was so bad "you can't give away" a home.) Ms. Schoenberg and other members of a Greenwich economic advisory council are pushing the town to help fund a public relations campaign that would promote its positive attributes as a counterpoint to the negative perceptions. A similar effort is happening in the small town of Weston, Conn., where some residents are frustrated that the town "isn't getting the attention it should from potential home buyers," said Bill Douglass, who is helping to craft the campaign. Without rail service or a downtown, Weston has lost some buyer appeal in recent years. A new website, the Weston Way, promotes the town's two acre zoning, abundance of nature and high performing schools as part of an effort to put Weston "in a proper context," Mr. Douglass said. "Say you're thinking of moving from Brooklyn, and you like farmers' markets, fresh food," Mr. Douglass said. "Here, you could have your own chicken coops, and maybe have a farmers' market just a short drive away." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Not long after researchers completed their work with mice, guinea pigs, ferrets and monkeys, Human Subject 8, an art director for a software company in Missouri, received an injection. Four days later, her sister, a schoolteacher, became Subject 14. Together, the sisters make up about 5 percent of the first ever clinical trial of a DNA vaccine for the novel coronavirus. How they respond to it will help determine the future of the vaccine. If it proves safe in this trial and effective in future trials, it could become not only one of the first coronavirus vaccines, but also the first DNA vaccine ever approved for commercial use against a human disease. Hundreds of experimental vaccines for the new coronavirus are currently being developed across the world. These vaccines' ability to advance will depend not only on science and funding, but also on the willingness of tens of thousands of healthy people to have an unproven solution injected into their bodies. In many of these studies, the vaccine recipe isn't the only thing on trial. Gene based vaccines and at least 20 coronavirus vaccines in development fall into this category have yet to make it to market. Should one end up in doctors' offices amid the rush to shield billions from Covid 19, it would represent a new chapter for vaccine development. And though vaccine research has never moved this quickly potentially meaning enhanced risks for volunteers it has never been easier to recruit subjects, according to Dr. John E. Ervin, who is overseeing the DNA vaccine trial at the Center for Pharmaceutical Research in Kansas City, Mo., in which the sisters are involved. For the Phase 1 trial of the vaccine, which was developed by Inovio Pharmaceuticals, 90 people applied for the 20 slots in Kansas City. "We probably could charge people to let them in and still fill it up," he said. (In fact, the participants were paid per visit.) The art director, Heather Wiley of Independence, Mo., said that realizing she would make around 1,000 for her participation was a bonus, not her primary motivation. "I'm in the middle of the country trying to process 100,000 dead and how all those people died alone," she said. Her fears for her family left her so anxious she couldn't sleep. While looking up vaccines, she stumbled on Dr. Ervin's trial, which was recruiting volunteers just 20 miles from her. Two months shy of 50 and healthy, she qualified. Two weeks later, Dr. Ervin was injecting Ms. Wiley just beneath the skin of her upper arm with a transparent liquid containing the experimental vaccine. The solution contains a computer engineered DNA sequence, which includes genetic instructions for building the spike that makes the coronavirus so superb at entering its host's cells. Cells are equipped to read genetic instructions; that's just part of what they do. When these instructions arrive, the cells follow them and make the very same spike protein present on the surface of the coronavirus now wreaking havoc on the world. The immune system responds to these spike proteins, now being manufactured by the body, and mounts a defense. These spike proteins are harmless; they are not attached to a virus. But the hope is that in the future, should a virus wearing spikes with that same genetic code attempt to invade, the immune system's arsenal would be prepared. Inovio researchers engineered the vaccine in just three hours, according to Kate Broderick, the company's senior vice president for research and development. Or, rather, their computer algorithm did: On Jan. 10, when Chinese researchers released the genetic code of the novel coronavirus, the team ran the sequence through its software, which popped out a formula. This timeline struck some in the financial sector as too good to be true. Citron Research, which advises investors on companies to bet on, called Inovio "the Covid 19 version of Theranos," referring to the blood testing device company that imploded as its supposedly revolutionary product was revealed to be a hoax. "Much like Theranos, Inovio claims to have a 'secret sauce' that, miraculously, no pharma giant has been able to figure out," Citron Research wrote. "This is the same 'secret sauce' that supposedly developed a vaccine for Covid 19 in just three hours." There are several reasons that vaccine scientists are skeptical that we will ever see a DNA vaccine for the coronavirus. But speed is not one of them. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. "That's the beauty of these DNA vaccines," said Wolfgang W. Leitner, the chief of the innate immunity section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "They are simple and fast in terms of development." Nor are vaccine scientists concerned about the supposed "secret sauce." In fact, it's quite the opposite: They are skeptical precisely because the technology behind DNA vaccines has been around for decades and has been applied toward so many infectious diseases H.I.V., the flu, malaria yet none of the vaccines have made it to market. They believe that this approach is capable of producing immunity. Already, DNA vaccines have been licensed for use in pigs, dogs and poultry. But the big if, according to Dr. Dennis M. Klinman, a vaccine scientist who worked at the Food and Drug Administration for 18 years, is whether one will ever be able to generate strong enough an immune response in humans. Step 2: A series of zaps to 'steer the DNA' Even though Ms. Wiley had read the packet on the science of it all, the next step felt like entering uncharted territory. Shortly after the initial injection, a nurse handed Dr. Ervin a device resembling an electric toothbrush. He pressed the head which contains three tiny needles instead of bristles over the raised skin on her arm, where she'd just had a shot. Then he zapped her. "It was not painful, but it's unlike anything I've ever experienced," Ms. Wiley said. The carefully calibrated electrical pulses "basically steer the DNA" into the cells by briefly opening up pores in their membrane, according to David B. Weiner, the director of the vaccine and immunotherapy center at the Wistar Institute and an adviser to Inovio. Although it may sound fantastical, the technology, called electroporation, dates to the 1980s, when a similar approach was first used to make transgenic plants, according to Dr. Leitner. Phase 1 trials are focused on safety. As a whole, DNA vaccines are known to be very safe, Dr. Klinman has written. Early fears that they might change a person's DNA, for example were proved unfounded long ago. But there is still no way to know how subjects will respond to the new formula or how the new approach to administering the vaccine will go over. When Dr. Ervin used a different electrical pulse system in an Ebola DNA vaccine trial in 2018, "Boom! They were ready to jump off the table," he said, adding that he wished he could have paid the subjects extra. (Dr. Ervin runs trials for many biotech companies and is not involved in deciding dosages or implementation methods. His job is to follow the company's instructions and report back, he said.) Ms. Wiley spent the next couple of hours after her injection watching "The King's Speech" as researchers monitored her for an adverse response. But she felt only relief at being useful in some way. "I'm not a health care worker; I'm not an essential worker," she said. "But I'm healthy, so I can do this." Soon her sister Ellie Lilly, 46, a seventh grade history teacher in Lee's Summit, Mo., had enrolled as well. Throughout a Phase 1 trial, the newest subjects receive larger doses than participants who started earlier. Ms. Lilly, who entered the trial as Subject 14 four days after her sister, learned that she would be receiving twice as many shots and zaps. Still, the pulses didn't hurt. "It just feels strange," she said. By the time Ms. Lilly got home she felt exhausted and a little nauseous, she said. She told a nurse who called to check in that she wasn't sure if that was a function of the vaccine or an emotional day. Either way, she felt well enough the following day that her husband wanted to enroll. (He was rejected.) Four weeks after their first injections, the sisters returned for their second and final doses. Step 4: Wait to see if it's deemed safe, and whether it actually did anything The first hint of whether anyone in the trial developed the coveted antibodies, which would suggest that the vaccine might be helping the immune system, won't come until Inovio releases that data later this month. That report will include findings from both the Kansas City trial and a simultaneous trial of 20 volunteers in Pennsylvania. This data will influence whether the vaccine dies in the first stage, as most vaccines do, or whether it moves on. The Phase 1 trial has already been expanded to include older patients at a third location. If everything goes as hoped, the F.D.A. has granted the company permission to start testing effectiveness in the community, according to Inovio. At that point, researchers would inject thousands of people with the vaccine and thousands more with a placebo. No one would be intentionally exposed to the coronavirus, but by studying rates of infection of the two groups, the researchers could draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the vaccine. The sisters are rooting for the Inovio vaccine. But, "even if it doesn't work, we're still a piece of the research," Ms. Lilly said. Ms. Lilly knows that the chances are low that her two experimental doses will protect her, but she can't help hoping. Come fall, she is headed back to the classroom, where it feels inevitable that sooner or later, she too will be exposed to this tiny but powerful virus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WASHINGTON As House Republicans mull another round of fiscal brinkmanship with President Obama, a dark cloud is threatening to return to otherwise clearing economic skies: fiscal and political uncertainty. Republican leaders moved Tuesday to finesse their way around another government shutdown next week, but the fiscal gantlet extends well beyond Dec. 11, when the current stopgap spending law that funds much of the federal government expires. Absent congressional action, a host of business and personal tax breaks expires on Jan. 1. The government's borrowing limit is reinstated on March 16, although the government might not actually hit the ceiling until August. On March 28, unless lawmakers act, physician reimbursements from Medicare drop off a cliff. On May 31, the highway trust fund runs out of money. In June, the Export Import Bank, which helps finance overseas purchases of American exports, might shut in the face of conservative opposition to its mission. Then on Sept. 30, the entire Children's Health Insurance Program faces its expiration. A few days later, across the board spending cuts loom once again. "I see a lot of potential for Republicans to use all these fiscal speed bumps as leverage points," said Joel Prakken, a co founder of Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm that calculated that previous fiscal fights, combined with tighter budgets, shaved as much as 1 percentage point off economic growth, a big sum considering that growth has averaged an annual rate of 2.15 percent since Republicans took control of the House in 2011. Washington brinkmanship is returning just as federal, state and local governments finally cease to be a drag on the economy through spending cuts and, in some cases, tax increases. Federal spending rose nearly 10 percent in July, August and September, mainly for the military, after falling 1 percent the quarter before, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. But with Republicans taking over both houses of Congress next month, budget cutting will be back in style. "Investors should prepare for a return of this type of behavior and volatility in Washington in 2015 as governing by crisis appears ready to return," Chris Krueger, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, warned clients on Tuesday. The Business Roundtable, which represents chief executives of the nation's largest companies, released a tepid 2.4 percent economic growth forecast for next year on Tuesday, citing continuing weakness in capital investment. Leaders of the group will meet with President Obama and congressional leaders on Wednesday, in part to press an agenda that is craving stability in tax and fiscal policy. "From a businessman's standpoint, uncertainty in general just has a huge impact in how you think of the future, how you plan for capital investment and how you plan for hiring," said Randall L. Stephenson, chairman of AT T and of the Business Roundtable. "Just go down the long list. There's a wide range of possible outcomes on policy, so you have to come to a more conservative approach to planning." Congressional leaders moved to clear up some uncertainty Tuesday, but in so doing, they may merely create more. House Republican leaders would like to pass a measure funding the government through Sept. 30, but keeping the Homeland Security office open only for short bursts to pressure the president over his executive action deferring deportation of illegal immigrants. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Most House Republicans appeared ready to go along with this half measure, but conservative groups opposed the strategy as not confrontational enough on issues like the Environmental Protection Agency's climate change regulations or the Department of Housing and Urban Development's antidiscrimination efforts. Anti immigration conservatives made it clear they would keep opposing the undocumented worker executive order. "This is the time to fight, this is the ground to fight on, and I'm a little bit amazed that that isn't more clear to more people," declared Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa. Negotiators have all but given up culling the government's growing list of temporary tax measures, making some permanent and jettisoning the most egregious tax giveaways. Instead, the House will vote Wednesday on a measure to restore almost all the tax breaks that expired last year for one year retroactively. That would allow taxpayers to claim them on their 2014 tax returns while forcing Congress to grapple with the issue again early next year. "Short of not passing anything at all, this is probably the worst of all possible worlds," said Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and the incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "Rather than the certainty that would come with making some of the more prominent individual and business tax extenders permanent, families, individuals, and businesses will have to once again put long term plans on hold in hopes that Congress can get its act together next time around." Meantime, 45 House Republicans pleaded with their leaders to bring to a vote a multiyear extension of federal terrorism risk insurance, which is set to expire this month. The issue is vital to developers in Lower Manhattan and elsewhere, who cannot get large building projects insured in the private sector without a government backstop. Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and an opponent of the seven year terrorism insurance bill passed 93 4 by the Senate, said no, blaming Senate Democrats for not agreeing with his position. "If Senate Democrats continue to insist on their 'my way or the highway' approach, I fear a long term reauthorization may have to wait until the next Congress," he said. The price of such shenanigans is high. Macroeconomic Advisers' analysis in October 2013 said spending cuts alone many forced by budget standoffs cut economic growth by 0.7 percentage points since 2010, while raising unemployment by 0.8 percentage points. Uncertainty alone raised corporate bond prices, lowered growth by 0.3 percentage points a year and raised unemployment last year by 0.6 percentage points. Some economists say the overall impact may be overblown. As Washington nears another showdown, stock prices tend to sag and some bonds get dumped in a fire sale, said Alec Phillips, managing director for United States economic research at Goldman Sachs. Then they snap back postcrisis. Leaders in neither party wanted to defend the contortions to come. "The American people certainly do not want to face another year being governed by crisis," warned Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader until next month. "No one wants the kind of cliffhanger fights we've had again and again in years past." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Now lives: In a three bedroom apartment in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens that she shares with two roommates. Claim to fame: Ms. Boateng is a young actress who uses the theater to dissect race and politics. She appears in the play "Fairview," which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in drama (and is currently at the Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn through Aug. 11). Ms. Boateng hopes her provocative performances make her audience sweat. "I don't think it's a mistake that I find myself in unconventional and unapologetic theater," she said. "As an artist, discomfort is my sweet spot." Big break: At the age of 9, she joined a local Christian performance troupe, where she learned how to step dance and performed at nearby churches and homeless shelters. "Even at a young age, I was always at the center of performance and social justice," she said. Her first professional role (before getting her master of fine arts degree at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts) was in a free outdoor production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem in 2013. "I learned how fearless I wanted to become because I was surrounded by artists who had a handle and facility with the text and their bodies in ways I didn't, but I was eager to get," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
For the first of her four years at Parsons the New School for Design, Sabrina Banta lived in a siren tormented dorm on East 15th Street near a hospital. She later moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for three years, sharing two different light deprived rentals with several roommates. The commute between Williamsburg and school or internship she had a total of five internships during her photography studies took its toll. If she didn't have to awaken early and be on site at 6 a.m., she braved the L train, so jammed during the morning rush that she often let several trains pass before shoving her way in. With assorted retail, restaurant, babysitting and freelance jobs, she found herself constantly on the run. When she graduated in the spring, her family flew out from Honolulu, where Ms. Banta, now 21, grew up. After the commencement, her father, Norman Banta, returned home with her brother, while her mother, Liza Nordin, remained for a few weeks to help her figure out where to live. "We knew we had to do something about permanent housing, because we knew she was not coming back to Hawaii," Ms. Nordin said. "She was spending an obscene amount of money on cabs because she was always running late." WEST 72ND STREET A studio in the Bancroft, a large prewar building, took one room living a bit far for the prospective buyer's taste. Ms. Banta's parents are both real estate agents in Hawaii, yet they were shocked at New York's tiny studios, high prices and unheard of broker fees. A rental budget of 2,000 a month didn't go far. "We were just horrified," Ms. Nordin said. For a similar monthly cost, they could buy a nicer place. So Ms. Banta and her mother went on the hunt for a studio co op costing up to 300,000. They found candidates like a rectangular room in a large prewar elevator building on West 72nd Street near Central Park West. At just under 300,000, with monthly maintenance in the mid 800s, the place was more of an eat in bedroom than an apartment. Ms. Banta found it "kind of scary" that for a moment she actually thought, "I could live here." (It sold for 285,000.) A 269,000 studio on East 18th Street was in contract when they saw the listing, but the ad connected them with an agent, Angela Britzman of Bond New York. WEST 34th STREET Another studio was a possibility, but it was near the Hudson Yards development, still a long way from completion. They soon arrived at a studio with a loft sleeping area in a five story walk up in Chelsea. The price was 299,000, with monthly maintenance of 500. The 450 square foot studio was in good shape, with high ceilings, an exposed brick wall, a large closet and a quiet back view. A partial wall separated the kitchen from the living/bedroom. Ms. Banta climbed into the loft. "When you know, you know," she said. "I loved the way the apartment felt to me. I didn't want to see anything else. There was something so comforting about it." The studio was in a small, self managed building in a Housing Development Fund Corporation co op with a household income restriction of around 50,000 a year. But the building also required a down payment of at least 50 percent. "I've never heard of such a thing," Ms. Nordin said. "It's just weird. If you're young, where are you going to get the money to put down, unless a parent or somebody is helping you?" WEST 85TH STREET The open house for a studio in a small walk up was a mob scene. But why join the fray when downtown is where you want to be? But the family fit that narrow category. "We were in a position to help Sabrina and believe this is an investment in her, because I want her to be settled and safe and start her career," Ms. Nordin said. "I am 5,000 miles away." The family put in an offer. But because of the financial requirements, "I thought we had to have some backup," Ms. Britzman said. She lined up other places to see. Ms. Banta, busy with work, had no time. So her mother went "and ruled them out for me," she said. Madison Gardens, a small postwar elevator building on far West 34th Street, had a rectangular studio, over budget at 399,000, with monthly maintenance of around 600. Ms. Nordin thought the place was nice, but decided the nearby Hudson Yards area "was very industrial and had no neighborhood feeling." On West 85th Street, Ms. Nordin saw a cute renovated studio with a loft on the ground floor of a small walk up. The price was nearly 300,000, with monthly maintenance in the low 600s. CHELSEA A studio in an income restricted prewar building in the West 20s seemed to have the buyer's name on it. The open house was crowded, and "it seemed like it was going to go really fast," Ms. Britzman said. And Ms. Banta preferred to remain downtown, on familiar turf. (Both it and the Madison Gardens studio are now in contract.) Meanwhile, the application for the Chelsea studio went forward. "That was a steep learning curve. It was very nerve racking and stressful," Ms. Nordin said. She even blogged about it for her Hawaii readers. The family bought the studio for 294,000. "Sabrina fit the profile of the building, and it was love at first sight," said Neil Tilbury of Halstead Property, the selling agent. "For her, it was a rare opportunity to find something downtown in a lower price range." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Climate science reached an unhappy milestone last week. And then things went a little crazy. One of the world's most important sentinel sites for measuring levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, reported that levels had recently risen above the symbolically important figure of 400 parts per million, and were likely to stay that way "for the indefinite future." Because rising amounts of carbon dioxide, a heat trapping gas, in the atmosphere have been linked to climate change, scientists suggest that rising above 400 parts per million line makes it even harder to prevent global temperatures from rising beyond the goal of two degrees Celsius agreed to in Paris. It has been millions of years since atmospheric levels of CO have risen so high. In recent years, monitoring stations have reported periods in which CO had climbed above 400 parts per million, but the new announcement from Scripps suggested that the line has probably been passed for good. Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist and activist, has said that CO levels will actually have to be reduced to 350 parts per million "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted." (This is the origin of the name of the climate activism group 350.org.) That is sobering news. But some of the reaction has been, to put it mildly, crazed. Vice Motherboard, for example, screamed: "Goodbye World: We've Passed the Carbon Tipping Point for Good." Ralph Keeling, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and director of the Scripps CO program, wrote the blog post announcing the news, and seems a bit taken aback by such apocalyptic headlines. His father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. In an interview, Ralph Keeling stressed that the 400 parts per million is "a good yardstick," but "to call it a tipping point is incorrect." Gavin Schmidt, a scientist who heads a NASA climate research unit in New York, agreed. "400 ppm is definitely a milestone, but there's no evidence it's a tipping point," he wrote in an email response to questions. One danger of alarmism, Dr. Keeling said, is that it can make people feel hopeless and throw up their hands. "The first step is just to stop the increase," he said, no matter how high the numbers rise in the meantime. "There's no punting on global warming." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Kenyan runner Ben Jipcho, left, congratulates his teammate Kip Keino on his gold medal win in the men's 1,500 meter race at the 1968 Summer Olympics. "I had to sacrifice to set the pace because we wanted the gold medal for Kenya," Jipcho later said. Ben Jipcho, a Kenyan distance runner who set a torrid pace in the 1,500 meter race at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City to help his countryman, Kip Keino, defeat Jim Ryun, the American favorite, died on July 24 at a hospital in Eldoret, Kenya. He was 77. His death was confirmed by Athletics Kenya, the country's governing body of sport. His daughter Ruth Jipcho told the Kenyan news media that the cause was cancer. Taking advantage of the high altitude that was familiar to them from home, Kenyan runners won eight medals in Mexico City. But Jipcho was not among them. Instead, Kenyan officials used him in a plan to give Keino an advantage after he had lost to Ryun in a 1,500 meter semifinal. Ryun was formidable. He had not lost a mile or 1,500 meter race in three years and held world records for the 880, the mile and the 1,500. Kenyan coaches wanted Jipcho to run so fast from the start, as the race's rabbit, that he would tire Ryun and catapult Keino to the lead. "I was not really willing, but they convinced me they said I was young and that Kip was getting old," Jipcho, 25, who was three years younger than Keino, told The Associated Press in 1975. "I had to sacrifice to set the pace because we wanted the gold medal for Kenya." Jipcho did his job well. He ran the first 400 meters in a stunning 55.9 seconds, with Keino in third place and Ryun in the back of the field. Jipcho kept up the pace through 800 meters, when Keino took the lead. He won the gold medal with a time of 3 minutes 34.9 seconds, an Olympic record. Ryun finished second, nearly three seconds behind. Jipcho faded to 10th. "He felt he owed me an apology for what happened in Mexico City," Ryun told The A.P. in 1989. "I said, 'You didn't have to say that.' But he felt he had to do it. I think if he had given it a second thought, he might not have done it. But the pressures during international competition are enormous." At the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, Jipcho began to shed his reputation as a supporting player. In the 3,000 meter steeplechase, he won the silver medal. Keino won the gold. Over the next few years, Jipcho would become one of the world's top distance runners. Benjamin Wabura Jipcho was born on March 1, 1943, in the Mount Elgon district of western Kenya. He grew up in the village of Kapkateny, where his father was a farmer. He did not start running until high school, when he was encouraged by a British born coach. Jipcho who supported himself as a teacher in a prison while he was running did not reach his athletic peak until after the 1972 Olympics. In early 1973, he won gold medals at the All Africa Games in Nigeria in the 5,000 meters and the 3,000 meter steeplechase. And, in a two week stretch that summer, he twice broke the world record in the 3,000 meter steeplechase in Helsinki and ran the second fastest mile, 3:52.0, in Stockholm. Ryun held the record at 3:51.1. "Jipcho has emerged this summer as his sport's most versatile and impressive runner" and the successor to Keino, Sports Illustrated wrote in July 1973. After winning two gold medals (in the 5,000 meter and 3,000 meter steeplechase races) and a bronze (in the 1,500 meters) at the 1974 British Commonwealth Games in New Zealand, Jipcho joined the International Track Association professional circuit. He became one of its stars until it folded in 1976. At one meet in Los Angeles, he set an indoor professional record for the two mile; less than an hour later, he ran the third fastest indoor mile ever. As a professional, Jipcho said, he was running not for records but for money to help his family. After winning a mile race in a relatively slow 4:02.8 in El Paso in 1974, he told Sports Illustrated: "The 500 will buy some cows for my farm in Kenya. A winning time is always a good time. If the I.T.A. people want a sub four minute mile, all they have to do is come to me. With money." After his racing career ended, he worked as a teacher, a school principal and a farmer and went into local politics. In addition to his daughter Ruth, his survivors include his wife, Bilia; two other daughters, Catherine and Jacky; five sons, Godfrey, Geoffrey, Moses, Oliver and Anthony; seven grandchildren; and four great grandchildren. Jipcho, whose athletic renown was tied partly to helping Keino beat Ryun in 1968, died on the same day that Ryun received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"One Day at a Time" recently escaped a brush with cancellation, so it's appropriate that the new season begins with a head count to make sure that everyone's OK. The occasion is the 2020 census. A government worker (a cameo by Ray Romano) knocks on the apartment door of the Alvarezes, the Cuban American family that resided for three seasons on Netflix until the streaming service dropped the deeply loved but (we're told) insufficiently watched sitcom. The scene serves a practical function for the show, which was saved by the Pop TV network and begins its fourth season Tuesday. For the benefit of a new cable audience, Romano's character walks us through a thumbnail introduction of everyone: Penelope Alvarez (Justina Machado), a single mother and military veteran; Lydia (Rita Moreno), Penelope's irrepressible mother; and the Alvarez kids and hangers on. As for the longtime fans, you can relax. "One Day at a Time," in three episodes screened for critics, is fully intact in personnel, laughs and creative mission. The only things missing are a concession to the shorter run times of ad supported TV: a few minutes off the average episode and, sadly, a sharply truncated version of the addictive theme song. ("This is it," indeed.) What's not diminished is the show's commitment to its theme of representation, as the opening also makes plain. A census, after all, is more than simply counting; it also sorts the population by demography and identity. This is something a little more fraught for a family like the Alvarezes in 2020, as Penelope says after she answers the door: "A guy wanting a list of Latinos in my house? No, thanks!" But it is also like having a family sitcom on prime time TV a chance to stand up and be counted. And "One Day at a Time" is still about identity, in many forms. The census bit reintroduces us, for instance, to Penelope's teenage daughter, Elena (Isabella Gomez), who came out as gay in the show's first season, and her gender nonbinary significant other, Syd (Sheridan Pierce). Schneider (Todd Grinnell), the family's hipster landlord and needy friend, introduces himself as "cis white male ally, privileged but super woke." The comedy, adapted by Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce from the 1970s classic (whose producer Norman Lear executive produces here), works within the decades old sitcom format while staking out room in it for a broader America. This is still the sort of show in which the audience gives a big "whoo!" every time Moreno enters dramatically through the curtains of Lydia's apartment alcove. It's a delight to see Moreno, given a plum late career role, glory in the audience's energy and feel her comedic powers. One of the show's theatrical pleasures is seeing a top notch cast put a spin on its familiar rhythms, from Machado as its anchor to Stephen Tobolowsky as Dr. Leslie Berkowitz, Penelope's boss and Lydia's resignedly platonic companion. But within its format of zingers and comic misunderstandings, the new "One Day" has a lot to say. Penelope's veterans' support group, for instance, recurs frequently as a sounding board, one of the rare instances of a sitcom's paying close attention to the emotional and practical challenges of vets. The show is money conscious, race conscious, gender conscious, but too funny and heartfelt to feel self conscious. Where past seasons have taken on immigration, mortality and intra family homophobia, the new season focuses on the characters' romantic relationships (or for Penelope, the lack thereof) and on the stresses of having a close sometimes too close extended family. Penelope's son, Alex (Marcel Ruiz), is getting older and now has a girlfriend, while Penelope, having broken things off with her boyfriend Max (Ed Quinn), is dealing with regrets and pent up physical energy. "One Day at a Time" is not too proud to handle these story lines with awkward jokes and double entendres. But it grounds its sitcom premises with real stakes and character history in this case, Penelope's being torn between loneliness and wanting to keep the sense of self she has regained since her divorce. None of this blows open the sitcom format, and with this level of execution, the show doesn't need to. Likewise, the move from streaming to a more traditional form cable TV with ad breaks doesn't much change "One Day at a Time," which is all to the good. This is it, and it's enough. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Koalas have been running into hard times. They have suffered for years from habitat destruction, dog attacks, automobile accidents. But that's only the beginning. They are also plagued by chlamydia and cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, and in researching those problems, scientists have found a natural laboratory in which to study one of the hottest topics in biology: how viruses can insert themselves into an animal's DNA and sometimes change the course of evolution. The target of this research is Koala retrovirus, or KoRV, a bit of protein and genetic material in the same family as H.I.V. that began inserting itself into the koala genome about 40,000 years ago and is now passed on from generation to generation, like genes. It is also still passed from animal, as a typical viral infection. In recent years, scientists have found that the insertion of viruses into the genomes of animals has occurred over and over again. An estimated 8 percent of the human genome is made up of viruses left over from ancient infections, ancient as in millions of years ago, many of them in primate ancestors before human beings existed. The koala retrovirus is unusual because 40,000 years is the blink of an eye in evolutionary time, and because the process appears to be continuing. A group of scientists reported in Cell on Thursday that they observed a genome immune system fighting to render the virus inactive now that it has established itself in the koala DNA. They also reported that koala retrovirus may have activated other ancient viral DNA. All of this activity stirs the pot of mutation and variation that is the raw material for natural selection. Koala genetics are a gold mine, said William Theurkauf, a professor in molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and one of the authors of the report. "What they are going through is the process of what's driven the evolution of every animal on the planet." Past viral infections have led to major evolutionary changes, he said. For example: "A gene that is absolutely essential for the placenta was derived from the shell of a virus millions of years ago." Humans would not exist without that ancient retroviral infection. Retroviruses are made of RNA, a single strand of genetic information. When they infect a cell, they translate themselves into DNA, the two stranded molecule that carries all the information for making humans, koalas and other animals. The retroviruses take over the DNA machinery to make more of themselves , which keeps the process going. That process makes us and other animals sick. AIDS is probably the best known retroviral disease. But when the insertion of a retrovirus occurs in a sperm or an egg cell, the change can become permanent, passed on forever. When retroviruses become part of an animal's inherited DNA, they are called endogenous and eventually they no longer cause the kind of original infection they once did. But they can still be used by the animal's genetic machinery for other purposes, like making a placenta. "It was long thought they were just junk DNA," said Shawn L. Chavez, a molecular biologist at the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine in Portland, who wrote a review of research on endogenous retroviruses in mammals. Now it is clear that some of them have changed the course of evolution. Exactly how is what scientists are trying to find out. "It seems like there's a new publication every day," she said. Consequently, koalas are drawing a lot of attention from scientists who did not start out with an interest in the animal or its conservation. "I'm a fruit fly guy," Dr. Theurkauf said. He became interested after a report in 2006 by Rachael Tarlinton of the University of Nottingham and other scientists about the invasion of the koala genome by the retrovirus. Dr. Tarlinton began her career in Australia as a veterinarian with an interest in infectious diseases in wildlife. She became involved in the study of koala genetics because of the problem of chlamydia and because Jon Hanger, an independent researcher, had noticed very high death rates from leukemia and other cancers in koalas kept in zoos. Their research led to the discovery that koala retrovirus was causing some of the cancers and that it was not only infecting the animals but part of their genome. Dr. Tarlinton and her colleagues established the presence of the retrovirus in koalas in Queensland, but there is another, more southern population of koalas that at first seemed not to have the virus. These koalas also had fewer chlamydia infections. The genetics of the southern population are different because most koalas in that region had been killed for the fur trade by the 1920s. A small number survived by being moved to small islands in the early 20th century. "From that population, they've been reintroduced," Dr. Tarlinton said. And those koalas have done extraordinarily well, even though they have some genetic problems. There are tens of thousands of them. In some areas they have been killed to keep the population down. The researchers expected the southern koalas to be less healthy than the northern ones, she said. But the opposite was true. Still, a deeper look at the southerners' DNA showed that they weren't free from the inherited retrovirus as initially thought. The virus was there but it was damaged. The beginning and end of its genetic code were present, but the middle was missing. A report on this work is now in bioRxiv (pronounced bio archive), an online database for papers that have been written but not yet accepted by peer reviewed journals. Dr. Tarlinton and the other researchers plan to submit the research soon. The missing middle could be the key to the health of the southern koalas. "I think there's a pretty good chance that having this defective version can be protective," she said. An experiment could provide an answer, she said. "We have cell lines that we can get KoRV to grow in. We can insert the defective version of the DNA sequence into the cell line." In essence those cells would then have the damaged retrovirus built in. The researchers could see if the full virus would successfully infect them or be inhibited. Dr. Theurkauf and his colleagues focused their work on snippets of RNA called piRNAs, which turn off endogenous retroviruses and keep them from replicating and jumping from spot to spot. "It's a genome immune system," he said, and is part of how infecting viruses are eventually disabled, so that they don't keep causing disease. He and his colleagues found that in koalas there appears to be an initial first line genome defense involving the piRNA snippets that responds to any virus trying to jump around the genome. Later, a more specific response geared to a particular virus comes into play. This is something they want to test further, by looking at koalas in different populations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
PARIS One day in July, not long after Clare Waight Keller had begun work as the first female artistic director of Givenchy succeeding its longtime designer, Riccardo Tisci, and helping further reset the gender imbalance that has long existed at the top of famous French fashion brands she was sitting at a long table in the vast white design studio of the brand's headquarters on Avenue George V. She was framed by 23 mood boards propped up against the walls one for ruffles, one for black dresses, one for blouses, her pale face shadowed by long brown hair, quietly and efficiently turning the pages of a book of fabric swatches as assistants hovered silently around her. You couldn't hear a pin drop, but you could hear her bracelets jangle. "The word that most comes to mind when I think of Clare is 'serenity,' " said Philippe Fortunato, chief executive of Givenchy and the man who hired Ms. Waight Keller. "Calm," agreed Bernard Arnault, chief executive of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the conglomerate that owns the brand. But that does not mean that on Sunday, when Ms. Waight Keller's first women's and men's collection for Givenchy is unveiled the last of three big designer debuts taking place this Paris Fashion Week, and potentially the most freighted she does not have revolution in mind. "I want to build an entirely new story," she said. "I want people to think, 'that was completely unexpected.' " She was talking both about the brand and herself. WHEN IT WAS FIRST ANNOUNCED that Ms. Waight Keller was taking over at Givenchy after Mr. Tisci resigned earlier in the year, a lot of eyebrows were raised. Part of it had to do with fashion's increasingly short memory ("But wait she's never done men's wear," was a common refrain, even though she had done it for both Ralph Lauren and Pringle). Part of it had to do with the fact that her success at Chloe over the preceding six years had been built on a soft focus aesthetic different from the more severely chic lines of Givenchy. And part of it had to do with the fact that, in an industry that tends to associate oversize personalities with creativity, her reticence had made her easy to overlook. "It was a big, bold choice for them both," said Daniella Vitale, chief executive of Barneys New York. One not without risk. Especially in the wake of Mr. Tisci, an emotive, Instagram savvy Italian who reinvigorated the brand by crossbreeding its Audrey Hepburn past with his own gothic sensibility and a dose of the street to make it relevant to the Kardashians and Beyonce alike. "He had a different kind of energy," Mr. Fortunato said, which is one way of putting it. By contrast, when she left Chloe in January, speculation was rife that Ms. Waight Keller wanted to return to England to spend more time with her family. (If you think that sounds like gender bias, you are probably right.) She has three children, 14 year old identical twin girls and a 6 year old son, who live in London with her husband, an architect; she spends Friday to Monday with them and then takes the Eurostar back to Paris. Ms. Waight Keller rolled her eyes at the suggestion of time out. "Six months of gardening leave was not really something I wanted to contemplate," she said. Her low key manner has always masked an ambition that is only now really becoming clear. She now has the sort of control over the house that a designer such as Alessandro Michele has at Gucci and Hedi Slimane had at Yves Saint Laurent. But LVMH has historically been reluctant to grant its artistic directors broad oversight, and that was one of the reasons Raf Simons, a much feted designer at Christian Dior, left that brand in 2015. It's not just the clothes and the bags and the shoes and the jewels and the children's wear and the sunglasses it's also the ad campaigns and the image of the beauty and fragrance lines, and the packaging, the website, store displays and lighting, and celebrity relationships. She is planning monthly capsule collection drops online a la Supreme. She is going to bring back the couture runway, which Givenchy discontinued in 2012. And not just for women for men, too. All of which means she is very likely doing the most collections of any designer in Paris, at a time when most of her peers have been very vocal about the need to do less, and think more. "I'm quite organized," Ms. Waight Keller said of her management style. "I think process creates structure and structure creates clarity. Chaos creates neuroses." LVMH has a lot riding on the idea she is right; the brand now has revenues believed to be approaching 600 million euros ( 715 million) annually (LVMH's annual reports do not break out the performance of brands in what it calls "the Fashion Group") and, Mr. Arnault said, "I think it will grow very fast in the next two years." He says he thinks it has the potential to reach the size of Dior, which is a member of the billion euro club. "Clare has a very clear vision, even if she comes across as peaceful," Mr. Fortunato said. "She's actually quite demanding. And very driven." One of her first moves was to sign up the photographer Steven Meisel, to shoot not only her first teaser ad campaign but also her new official portrait. It's black and white, and she is staring directly at the viewer. (A famous earlier portrait had her laughing and looking down, face half hidden by her hair). She is preparing herself for her close up. RECENTLY, "WANTED" POSTERS have popped up around Milan, Paris, London and New York featuring a photo of a glossy black cat with staring eyes, plus the usual tear off tags with contact information. If you look closely, they are invitations to register on the Givenchy website for tickets to the spring 2018 show. Three winners will be chosen; as of Sunday morning, 50,000 had signed up. "I really have no idea what we are going to see," Ken Downing, fashion director of Neiman Marcus, said not long before the show. Originally, industry speculation centered on the assumption that Ms. Waight Keller, who has a gamin air about her, was going to reorient the brand toward its Hepburn history, an idea she dismissed as a bit obvious. Rather, what interested her about that relationship was the partnership between a man Hubert de Givenchy and a woman. It's one of "the founding myths" of the brand, she said, and part of the reason one of her first decisions was to give the men's and women's sides parity: to combine the genders in her shows, her campaigns, her stories. (Givenchy is also the rare brand where sales are divided equally between the sexes.) She did go into the archive, and she did spend a lot of time thinking about M. de Givenchy, whom she refers to as "Hubert" (though they have yet to meet), and she did connect to his shapes from the 1950s and '60s, and yes, there is lace, and, yes, there is a trench. But the end result is, she said, "very graphic, much darker." She borrowed an animal print, and one of gold lips. On the runway, expect to see a lot of "drama through the shoulder" for women and flared legs for men. Also daywear. Also bags. Accessories, and in particular leather goods, are the driver of luxury brands with one size fits all and highly attractive margins, they can buoy a bottom line. When it comes to bags, Givenchy has a spotty record but, as it happens, Ms. Waight Keller "has a special talent for accessories," Mr. Arnault said. It's one area she takes very personally. The new style, which will be introduced on the runway, has been named GV3, in honor of the brand's address. That this might be a focus was fairly predictable. Otherwise, Pamela Golbin, chief curator of the Musee de la Mode et du Textile in Paris, said she expected a "unique vision of the archetypical Parisienne." Mr. Downing summed it up: "The only thing I know is: It's not going to be Givenchy as we know it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Their version of a classic roadside stand speaks with a distinct California accent: There are homemade potato chips freckled with nutritional yeast; a vivid herb salad loaded with red orach, chickweed and oxalis flowers; and a statement on the brief menu declaring that all of the ingredients except the cheese are local and organic. But this is not food that puts on airs. If anything, it puts ideas in your head. Chief among them is that a hamburger belongs on grilled white bread, particularly if it's accompanied by pickled onions, red oak lettuce, melted cheese and Dad's sauce, a tart, ruinously addictive condiment. White bread also swaddles the hen of the woods mushroom sandwich, a vegetarian number with impressive brawn. Mr. Clark describes these sandwiches as the "two pillars" of his restaurant. The third could be the soups du jour, like a lusty, deeply satisfying curried Japanese sweet potato, tinged with lemongrass and topped with walnuts. All can be chased with cans of wine, beer or La Croix (along with weekend only mimosas) or followed by Dad's sole dessert, a crisp gooey cast iron pan blondie whose changing flavors include matcha white chocolate and snickerdoodle. The question of what travelers might want dictated everything on the menu, Ms. Liu said. Judging by the lines outside the caboose, she and Mr. Clark have found some answers. And judging by Mr. Clark's eternal good cheer, they've found what they wanted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Directed by Jacqueline Stone for the Chicago based Tuta Theater, this production ran in Chicago two years ago. (The play's premiere was in 2011, at the Humana Festival.) It's a head scratcher to be staging it post MeToo. Bernadette, en route to New York on a Metro North train, is like a J.D. Salinger homage in three dimensions part Holden Caulfield, part the kind of (very) young woman Salinger had an eye for. As she passes through Cheever country, it emerges that Bernadette is newly pregnant. To judge by the smile on her lips and the thrill in her voice, this is happy news. (Um, what?) She's on her way to tell her 19 year old boyfriend, who lives in Brooklyn and doesn't care for contraception. There is a brief flashback to her roommate clutching the used stick from Bernadette's pregnancy test. (Does the roommate realize it's been peed on? Does the playwright?) Stop reading here if you don't want to know that Bernadette will never meet up with her boyfriend, but she will hang out with his father. She will also go to a dive bar and pick up a lowlife a few decades her senior. He has herpes, so when they go to a cheap hotel there's no penetration. "His penis is oddly dark," she narrates. "It looks poisonous and yet I find it comforting." That may be the nadir. Mr. Rapp, who absolutely can do better ("Finer Noble Gases," "Red Light Winter"), tosses in some references to Jean Genet's "The Maids," and toward the end reframes events with a dramatic device. I'm still not buying it. The audience watches most of Ms. Stone's production through a sheer black curtain on a set (by Martin Andrew) illuminated by scarlet bulbs. (The lighting is by Keith Parham.) It's a stylish, would be sexy design. Is it really necessary, though, for Bernadette bare thighed in a short skirt (costumes are by Branimira Ivanova) to spend so much time with the crotch of her underwear visible to the audience? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Planes carrying nukes, the terrifying sound of life atomized into static noise: "Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)" feels very much of the minute. Yet the feminist duo Split Britches has spent almost two years working on its new play, which bears the 1960s aesthetic of Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" rather than the totalitarian kitsch of Kim Jong un, so you can't accuse the company of hot button opportunism. These theatermakers have steadfastly remained on the outer edge of the mainstream since 1980. While it's impossible to avoid the (mushroom) cloud hovering above the show which is at La MaMa as part of the Under the Radar festival the Split Britches co founders Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, who perform in "Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)" and wrote it with Hannah Maxwell, take a broader view. This is only fitting for a pair that has long explored the connections between gender roles, class, feminism and homosexuality against a background of American political and literary mythmaking. The title refers to buried or forgotten munitions, and the problem, as Ms. Weaver puts it onstage, is that "we don't know where UXOs are exactly, what energy is left in them, what would happen if we uncovered one we just know we should be careful with our curiosity." By extension, the show suggests that potentially dangerous ammo includes our pent up desires and abandoned dreams. Sitting at a situation room's round table, Ms. Weaver, who also directs, portrays an unnamed President in a blazer, short skirt and sock garters. She is a dryly comic foil to Ms. Shaw's General a part played with such sly machismo, you wish someone would cast her in a Tom Clancy adaptation. Ms. Weaver, however, sometimes breaks character and it may be "Lois" who invites volunteers to sit at the table for a "council of elders." She selects the oldest audience members by asking questions such as "Who was born during World War II?" and "Who remembers the Cuban missile crisis?" The approach reflects Split Britches' longstanding interest in the personal and political impact of aging Ms. Shaw once did a solo titled "Menopausal Gentleman" as well as a staunch belief in the importance of talking things out. At the Thursday performance, Ms. Weaver kept things moving, and when they slowed down, Ms. Shaw would remind her that the clock was ticking earlier on, we had been asked to set our cellphone timers to an hour. Still, the show can feel structurally wobbly: It has a lot to say and is not always sure how to say it. Inspired moments do bubble up, as when the country ballad "As Soon As I Hang Up the Phone" plays over a photo montage of world leaders holding receivers, or when the General picks up a ringing red telephone and sternly admonishes, "I told you never to call me here." It is also wonderful to watch the rapport Ms. Weaver and Ms. Shaw have forged over shared decades. When the ringing cellphones mark the end of the show, you wish you could continue chatting at the bar around the corner nuclear winter can wait. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
With new practices in place, it would be hard for the Oscars to repeat last year's best picture mix up. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confirmed several changes in January, including presenters ensuring they have the correct envelope before they go on stage, with that fact confirmed by stage managers, too. PwC accountants were forbidden from using social media during the show, in hopes of reducing distractions. But the biggest change became quickly apparent on Sunday as Viola Davis presented the award for best supporting actor. The gold, giant bold type on the dark envelope, loudly announcing the name of the category, was so unmistakable it could be read clearly on TV. Last year's envelope was an elegant red, but the smaller gold lettering on it was not so easily readable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The first time I met up with the astrologer Chani Nicholas in Los Angeles, in December, it was for a lunch interview. We sipped our drinks and chewed truffle French fries; I asked questions and she answered them. The conversation flowed easily. We laughed a lot. It was a good interview, by all accounts, but it went slightly sideways in a way I had never experienced. After I had turned off my recorder and paid the bill and packed my things and arranged for my exit, she turned the tables on me. "I looked at your chart again," she said. "Do you want to talk about it?" Ms. Nicholas, like my mother, my crush and the D.M.V., knows the exact date, time and place of my birth. We had met twice before: at the brunch of a mutual friend, where I gave her this information, raw from a breakup and looking for any kind of salve, and then, briefly, at a coffee shop to talk about it. So when I received a copy of her new book, "You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self Acceptance," she had tabbed all the portions that related to my birth chart: sun in Scorpio (I am passionate), moon in Taurus (I am deeply emotional), rising sign, or ascendant, in Scorpio (I am passionate about all my emotions). Thus began the part of the interview that was about me, which I loved. In March of this year, she told me, I will begin my Saturn return, an astrological period in a person's life that initially occurs between the ages of 27 and 29, when Saturn returns to the planetary position it occupied when you were born, as measured in part through astrological charts. Saturn returns have a reputation for being chaotic and messy, but they are, more accurately, a time of immense change, however disruptive. Still, every time I drop a glass or miss a bus, I think: this is it, the stars and planets have begun to test me. My return is concentrated in the fourth house of my chart, Ms. Nicholas said, which is related to parents, home and foundations, and should last until this fall. Inasmuch as astrology is a chicken and egg scenario will I experience changes in my relationship with my parents and in my home because of Saturn or because I'm 28 and my lease is almost up, who is to say? Ms. Nicholas's words still covered me in a sheen of being known. And being known, or at least, being treated as knowable and worth knowing, is the most comforting thing in the universe. I've heard two main criticisms of astrology: that it's fake and that it's narcissistic. Many things are both, but astrology seems to bear the brunt of all this ire. A friend of mine always says that "astrology is fake until it's real" that is, until it confirms a presupposition or dovetails with a future outcome. (Yes, she's a Gemini.) But I never gave it much thought until I came out as queer a few years ago, and found that my new dating scene was populated with people asking not just "What's your sign?" but for my whole astrological chart. Over time, I have found it to be a useful organizing system toward self definition and a fun way to deploy memes. The rise of astrology, especially among the internet generation, has been widely chronicled (it travels because we love archetypes, it's easier to understand because we love apps, it's popular because we are all miserable). But Ms. Nicholas, 44, and other socially conscious astrologers, manage to sidestep the individualized self obsession of it, which can easily venture into amateur self analysis and endless confirmation bias. She approaches it more as a system of encouragement toward living a life in accordance with one's skill sets and values. To that end, her book isn't prescriptive. It doesn't arbitrate exact personality traits based on astrological signs. Instead, it consists of a series of prompts meant to help readers interrogate notions about themselves and make practical decisions for their futures, albeit with the help of some guidelines based on patterns and myths associated with various sun, moon and rising signs. It's a self help manual mixed with a more practical, self determining career guide a kind of "What Color Is Your Parachute?" for those seeking their place or purpose in the 21st century. And it looks like a New Age workbook: The title is rendered on the cover in 1970s influenced typography, with glittering letters that look like a rainbow refracted through light. The book is divided into three groovy sections that offer advice on determining your life's purpose, which is ruled by your sun sign; your emotional and physical needs, which correspond with your moon; and your motivation and drive, steered by your ascendant planet. Ms. Nicholas sees her work as part of a historical continuum. "We've made myths out of the sky forever," she said, citing ancient drawings of the Pleiades constellation, and the many religious traditions that coincide with or happen around new and full moons. She makes her living doing astrology readings and workshops, priced from 28 to 44, and through online courses and her newsletter. Her bigger mission is to tie an understanding of astrology today with social consciousness: how we are interrelated and what we owe each other, how our lives are in conjunction with the universe. Ms. Nicholas often integrates current events into her readings and newsletter, which reaches more than 200,000 people. Or she spurs her hundreds of thousands of followers into passionate action or agreement on social media. In September: "It's Friday the 13th. It's a full Moon. Polish your cauldron. Wands at the ready. Sacrifice an ex. Hex the patriarchy. Burn capitalism to the ground. HARNESS THE POWER OF NATURE TO BANISH ALL SYSTEMS THAT ALLOW CORPORATE GREED TO MAKE A PROFIT FROM THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EARTH." Ms. Nicholas was born in Nelson, British Columbia, into an upbringing that she describes as a cross between "a Neil Simon play and 'The Trailer Park Boys.'" Many of her neighbors were Americans who, opposed to the Vietnam War, had crossed the border and settled into the small, isolated enclave. She describes her hometown as hedonistic. "Rules and regulations did not apply," she said. "Everyone was allowed to create their own identity." Unlike others in her town, Ms. Nicholas did not see this as ideal, enduring a childhood she said was filled with violence and drugs and disruption. (She writes in the book that she knew what cocaine tasted like by the time she was 5.) But the chaos also ushered in her first brush with mysticism: One day, a strange woman looked up her birth chart and told Ms. Nicholas that she was very judgmental. "I had no idea what that word actually meant," Ms. Nicholas writes in her book, "but I immediately resonated with what it implied. She was distinguishing me from my surroundings. She saw that I possessed the kind of discernment that others around me lacked. I had judgment and, with it, I would find a way out of this mess." After her father remarried, Ms. Nicholas began spending time in Toronto, where her new step grandmother, a reiki master, lived. Ms. Nicholas ended up apprenticing with her in the practice, which is a healing technique based on energy movement. She traveled after high school, before landing back in Toronto and attending a women's and children's counselor advocate program, or "lesbian finishing school," as she put it. She worked at an L.G.B.T.Q. hotline doing community work, and acted on the side. Her first time in Los Angeles was the day she moved there, in 2005, with 1,200 and an ability to drive on the highway. ("I knew one route to the beach: Laurel Canyon to Sunset for Santa Monica, then take Santa Monica all the way over," she said. "It took me like an hour and a half.") She tried out an acting career, landing a few auditions, but quit before she could get bitter. She started yoga teacher training and met her future wife, Sonya Priyam Passi, who is the founder and chief executive of FreeFrom, a nonprofit that supports those who have experienced domestic violence. In between all this, Ms. Nicholas started writing horoscopes. "My way of learning has always been astrologically," she said. "It's the only way that I really know how to write, or it was the only way that I could figure out how to express myself because, at that time, I'd only been exposed to people who like astrology who were kind of West Side L.A. woo woo types, and not at all interested in understanding their privilege." She wanted her approach to be different. "I've always been really sensitive to what isn't right, and why, and who's at fault, and feeling a need to figure that out," she said. After starting to write horoscopes for friends and family, sent via email, Ms. Nicholas started posting them on her Blogspot, then on a website of her own. She began offering workshops on astrological happenings "The Year Ahead for Your Sign," "Your Money: Understanding the Power of Your Assets, Resources and Talents" and Spotify playlists tailored to each sun sign, each costing 10 to 50. (The collaboration with Spotify has also included a number of events, including one last February in which Ms. Nicholas gave Lizzo a reading onstage.) Ms. Nicholas said, at this point, more than a million people regularly visit her website. Her idea for the book came through her interest in teaching. Ms. Nicholas didn't want to tell people how to deal with a Taurus roommate or an Aries ex. She wanted to offer tangible skills to guide people toward their best life. Despite the popularity of her earnest and sometimes impassioned approach in combining current events and news analysis with star movements, Ms. Nicholas briefly considered giving up astrology after the 2016 election, convinced there were better ways she could be spending her time. But she realized that she was, indeed, just following her calling, and that she was exactly where she needed to be. "This is my tool set, and if it offends you, then I hope you find the things that do feel affirming to you," she said. The Known and the Unknowable The final time Ms. Nicholas and I met in Los Angeles, we went for a walk on the beach, where we took in a delicious sunset and Ms. Nicholas explained to me how transcendent and sublime it is to have a wife, and how she knows I want one too, because of my Taurus moon. She was clear that she doesn't see herself as a psychic or a fortune teller, and wasn't telling me what to do (although she's right about the wife thing): Any predictive sense she has about the future is based on a pre existing structures and patterns sort of like a Farmer's Almanac but mystical. She noted that Christine Blasey Ford's September 2018 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee occurred during a Venus retrograde. "Because Venus represents women and the feminine, whenever it goes retrograde, we can usually expect something to come up into public consciousness about gender," Ms. Nicholas said. It is the same with the Mars retrograde, which she said spurs conflict, and occurred during the 2016 election; it will happen again in September, she said. She integrated that analysis into her newsletter. "To write about it is not to be able to solve, and not be able to make it right, but it's to say, this is happening, this is alive in both our collective experience and most likely most of our personal experiences," she told me. "My work every horoscope, all of it is just me talking to myself," she said. "I guess I need to always know that I'm not in it alone." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
While a team approach to real estate development is not unusual, a new residential project near Madison Square Park is putting a different spin on the concept. Instead of a single high rise created by multiple partners, the building is essentially split in half between two partners. The tower is a joint effort by Toll Brothers City Living, the urban arm of the home building company, and Equity Residential, the national rental apartment developer. At the corner of Park Avenue South and East 28th Street, the soaring, angular 40 story building, designed by the architect Christian de Portzamparc, will offer 81 condominiums across its top 18 floors, from studios to three bedrooms, plus penthouses. These are being built by Toll and will be reached through their own lobby at 400 Park Avenue South. Condo owners also will have exclusive access to a 27th floor indoor and outdoor amenity space. Floors 2 through 22, meanwhile, will have rental apartments, from studios to three bedrooms, developed by Equity. To be called Prism at Park Avenue South, this rental portion will likely have the address 402 Park Avenue South, but will be entered on 28th Street through its own lobby. All residents, however, will share a 15,000 square foot basement amenity space, with a theater, fitness center and 60 foot swimming pool. The arrangement wasn't always harmonious there was some back and forth over what kind of material should line the walls of a lounge area in the basement, for instance. (The partners chose dark wood panels.) But in a city where sites are scarce, competition fierce and land prices high, the developers were willing to put up with some annoyances to help defray costs on the roughly 400 million project, which are hefty even for well established companies, said David Von Spreckelsen, the president of Toll Brothers City Living. The city had already approved plans for a large building that had been drawn up for the site under a previous developer, and creating a partnership to tackle the project seemed to make more sense than opting to build a smaller building. "It was really just too much square footage otherwise," said Mr. Von Spreckelsen, who added that for Toll, anything with more than 100 condo units usually takes too long to sell out to be profitable. George Kruse, an Equity vice president who used to work for Toll, a connection that helped the unusual deal come together, agreed, "We loved the location, but we were kind of wrestling with the size." Toll, which is spending about 155 million on its half, will offer glass counters, Miele appliances and marble vanities. Because the units are on the building's upper stories, many will also have expansive views from floor to ceiling windows. When the condo's amended offering plan is approved by the state attorney general's office, which is expected within weeks, these units will likely be priced at about 3,000 a square foot, or starting at 1.2 million for studios, said Todd Dumaresq, a Toll marketing manager. In late May, a list of people interested in the project was 4,000 names long, he added. The Equity units will feature synthetic stone counters, oak strip floors and Whirlpool appliances. Equity's portion is costing 245 million, said Mr. Kruse, who added that rents will be in the 80 a square foot range, or about 3,300 a month for the cheapest studios, which will be higher, on average, than at other Equity properties in the city. These rentals will be ready by the end of the year, though the condos will not open until 2015, the developers said. Equity will also be the landlord of the building's two storefronts, which total about 5,200 square feet. Although Equity's apartment finishes may not be as fancy as those in the condos, the company seems to have acceded to Toll's wish that the amenity space look luxurious. The area will include textured Venetian plaster walls and a landscaped courtyard. "The condo guys are looking for high end finishes, while the apartment guys usually like middle of the road stuff," Mr. Kruse said. "But we thought that because of the exterior design of the building, we had to carry a certain look and feel throughout" the common areas. The building's design, which is heavy on glass and has protruding sections that seem to levitate over Park Avenue, is by the same award winning architect who designed One57, the Extell Development Company condominium in Midtown. The city approved the de Portzamparc design when it was completed for an apartment building that A R Kalimian Realty, the previous owner, had planned there. And rather than tweak it and be subjected to another lengthy approval process, Toll and Equity decided to keep it. To avoid future in building fights, about, say, how to pay for roof repairs, there will be a board established for the whole building, separate from the standard condo board, on which Equity will have a seat. Hybrid buildings like this one may be rare, but they are not entirely unknown. The Related Companies has a few, like the Caledonia in West Chelsea, which has 190 condos atop 288 rentals, and One Carnegie Hill, which has 261 rentals and 200 condos. But with costs of doing business in Manhattan remaining high, other developers may be forced to divvy up high rises. "Any time you have a big site, when someone is not comfortable taking it on themselves, I think you could see it again," Mr. Von Spreckelsen said. "I know we could consider it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
WOODSTOCK, N.Y. Cabin fever is bad enough. But when you share your extended winter quarters with 8.4 million people, as one does in New York City, it's no wonder the roommates get a little testy. For me, a powerful balm for the punishing, depressing, recurring winter finally arrived with an unexpectedly glorious spring weekend in the Catskills, at the wheel of a Corvette convertible. The timing was perfect, the car nearly so: an open air version of the formidable new Stingray coupe. Like Olaf, the sun loving snowman in "Frozen," the Corvette had me ready to sing a melting, dripping paean to summer. And it was only April. Rumbling through this artsy upstate village in a Laguna Blue Stingray, I noted that I wasn't the only one celebrating the sunshine. Owners of convertible Mini Coopers, Mustangs, Miatas and MGs were out in force, almost surely dropping their tops for the first time since autumn. The Corvette that joined them for a quick tan is simply the best in the nameplate's 61 year history, not least for its angular, road strafing Top Gun styling. More than one New Yorker expressed surprise at its near exotic character, with lines like, "Wow, that's the new Corvette?" It wasn't hard to read between those lines, because I was thinking the same thing: Yes, this is a Corvette. A Corvette that's not gauche or faintly embarrassing, one that is finally free of the disco era scent that has clung to the nameplate like a whiff of Paco Rabanne. It's just a sports car now, as purely capable as a Porsche 911 Carrera S, but at barely half the price. The styling may be hectic in places, but it works with the exception perhaps of the four exhaust outlets, packed together like a gaudy quartet of mariachi horns. The Stingray had already demonstrated the first of its dual natures on the drive up from Brooklyn. Its driver adjustable magnetic suspension admirably cushioned the ride. With its manual transmission popped into seventh gear yes, seventh the 6.2 liter direct injection V8 loafed at barely 1,100 r.p.m. at 65 miles per hour, returning a no fooling 30 m.p.g. And that was without dialing up Eco mode, which lets the engine run on four cylinders. The Stingray's smartly fitted cloth top tucks away without robbing trunk space. The cargo space isn't huge, but it's easily enough for two person getaways. The roof can open or shut at speeds up to 30 m.p.h. and can be operated by the keyfob as the owner strikes a nonchalant pose outside. Believe it or not, some otherwise rational car enthusiasts look down on convertibles. Recalling the bad old days of flabby and flexing bodies, these buzz killers suggest that real men drive coupes, that convertibles are basically for wimps and posers. But especially for street driving, that worldview is rapidly becoming obsolete. If the Corvette convertible compromises on the coupe's lusty performance, it's hard to see it. Corvette engineers designed the coupe and convertible simultaneously, using a lightweight aluminum chassis and carbon fiber hood like those usually found on far more expensive cars. This seventh generation convertible is actually stiffer than the previous generation Corvette coupe with a steel chassis. Every weak area has been shored up. The structure and precise suspension tuning allowed engineers to use narrower tires, bucking the trend, while still improving the car's already tenacious roadholding above 1 g in lateral force. The slimmer tires improve the steering and elicit less wandering over rough pavement. And though this is the Corvette's first try at electrically assisted steering a technology that has tripped up other automakers the engineers nailed it. There's a pleasing balance between lightness and sensation. The cabin, too, is worthy of a 195 m.p.h. rocket that starts at 56,995, or 66,080 as tested. Once notoriously flimsy, the standard seats look and feel good, though I'd prefer thicker bolsters for high force cornering. A handsome gauge cluster features a configurable display, including a bar graph tachometer that changes color as the redline approaches. That tach, along with navigation, audio and other data, is repeated on the optional head up display. One option, the 1,195 multimode exhaust, seems a must have. The freer flowing exhaust raises horsepower to 460 and torque to 465 (up five for each), and dials up a burlier V8 soundtrack. Its driver settings include a permanent loud mode for those who like to rumble through sleepy Catskills towns. Not me, of course. With as much low range torque as the previous Z06 version which had a larger 7 liter engine the Corvette blazes a fast trail: It scoots from zero to 60 m.p.h. in roughly 3.8 seconds and runs a quarter mile in 12 seconds at nearly 120 m.p.h. But the 'Vette has always put up big numbers. The bigger achievement is the subjective feeling of safe, accessible thrills. The wide stance Corvette still takes up more lane than a 911. But it feels less like a sweaty bronco that, with one wrong move, might buck its driver into the weeds. On forested roads near the scenic Ashokan Reservoir, this convertible 'Vette let its hair down while wildly mussing the hairstyles of driver and passenger. The gates between the manual's gears remain too vague, especially with so many speeds to choose from. But a nifty rev matching feature predicts shifts and automatically adjusts the throttle for perfectly smooth gear changes. Brembo brakes, 35 percent larger than before, make this the shortest stopping base Corvette ever. This Stingray provided more than ample thrills without the Z51 package, which for 2,800 adds features like dry sump engine oiling, a limited slip differential, a stiffer nonmagnetic suspension and enlarged brakes, wheels and summer tires. That modern convertibles are more than sun idolaters should be further affirmed by the coming Corvette Z06 droptop. That version's racetrack handling and roughly 625 horsepower supercharged V8 aim to meet or beat supercars like the 194,000 Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet or the 260,000 Ferrari 458 Spider at a starting price well below 100,000. That Z06 may put an end, finally, to the nonsense that real enthusiasts don't drive convertibles. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
My name is Spike Lee, and I'm the director of "Da 5 Bloods." "This is the voice of Vietnam." That character you see is Hanoi Hannah, and that's a real life character. She was the voice of Radio Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and like Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose in World War II, their job was to play music that the American soldiers wanted to listen to. And in between the music, they would start with propaganda. And so this scene is when our five bloods are told over the radio two days after the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. And this scene is skillfully intercut with archival footage of many of those over 122 cities that were aflame black folks enraged. We also deal with how the armed forces, the National Guard were sent out to quell the uprising I'm not going to use the word riot. I use the word uprising. "Negroes are only 11% of the US populations, but among troops here in Vietnam, you are 32%." I remember that day when Dr. King was assassinated. I was 11 years old, and also the Vietnam War was the first war that was televised into American homes. A little known story is that, when the bloods, the black soldiers in Vietnam heard that Dr. King had been assassinated, when they heard their brothers and sisters were burning down over 122 cities, they were very, you might say, hot. "Be safe." There almost was a civil war in Vietnam, where black soldiers were getting ready to take up arms, and they would not be shooting at the Viet Cong. "We need to kill some crackers." I had four screenings of this film for black and Puerto Rican Vietnam vets that they were there. Each one of them confirmed this happened. Thank god it didn't. "I'm as mad as everybody. All us bloods got a right to be, but we bloods don't let nobody use our rage against us. We control our rage." But it was about to to be the jump off for those black soldiers. "Stand down! That's an order!" Knowing they're fighting an immoral war, knowing they have nothing against the Viet Cong. "You're gonna have to kill me." But also knowing their brothers and sisters are fighting for their justice, and that's what this film is about how we, as descendants of slaves, have fought for this country from day one. The first person that died for this country in a war the American Revolutionary War was a black man, Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre. So you can make the case that we've been more patriotic than anybody. And even today, we're still being shot down, choked to death, and people are marching all over the world, seeing the gruesome 8 plus minutes of our king, king Floyd's life. And Black Lives do matter. Black Lives have to matter. That's what this scene is about. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
MARISSA YORK, a real estate broker in Manhattan, used a 50 online do it yourself divorce kit when she and her husband of more than nine years decided to part ways. Their breakup was relatively amicable, she said, so she figured they could save money by avoiding lawyers. "We didn't want to drag it out over months or years," she said. But after the courthouse clerk rejected her filing because the document formatting was incorrect, she had the paperwork reviewed by a lawyer, who informed her that if she waited six more months to file, she would be entitled to a portion of her husband's pension benefits. She ended up paying about 10,000 in legal fees, which was worth it because she received part of the pension, she said. "If I had to do it over, I would hire an attorney immediately," she said. Costs vary by location, but Randall M. Kessler, a family law specialist in Atlanta, said a typical divorce with no major disagreements over assets and custody issues might cost a few thousand dollars, while cases with significant disputes can easily cost 25,000 or more. Despite the potential pitfalls, D.I.Y. divorce remains a lure for people seeking to avoid the cost and time of a traditional dissolution. Those who enter the system without lawyers, however, may be unaware of what the law entitles them to, and the process can end up taking longer than it would otherwise. "It's like going to WebMD and deciding to treat yourself," said Michael Stutman, a family law specialist in New York. In California, roughly three fourths of family law litigants lack lawyers, said Maureen F. Hallahan, supervising judge in the family law division at San Diego Superior Court. Typically, people file initial divorce paperwork on their own, but they don't know what to do next, so their file languishes for months. Budget cuts in the state courts reduced available personnel and made the problem worse. So now some courts in California offer one day divorce programs for people who either can't afford or don't want to hire a lawyer. "The reality is, people are going to do it without lawyers, and we had to accommodate that," said Judge Hallahan. The program doesn't mean a divorce is truly started and completed in a single day residency and notification requirements have to be met first. You must, for example, already have filed a divorce petition and served your spouse with divorce papers to participate. But the program does allow you to wrap things up in a single day, or even a matter of hours, once you meet the initial criteria. "This is designed to help people get through the system," said Judge Hallahan. Under the San Diego program, you answer a series of questions online to see whether you qualify to use the program; a family law expert, acting as the program's coordinator, advises you ahead of time what forms and documentation you must bring to court. Couples arrive at court in the morning having generally agreed on the division of property and debts and a plan for the care of any children. The coordinator makes sure the paperwork is in order and helps wrap up any remaining details. (The coordinator isn't representing either side and doesn't offer legal advice or strategy, said Judge Hallahan.) Then, you go before a judge in the afternoon and leave with a divorce judgment. Since the program made its debut in March, the court has handled four to five such divorces a week, said Judge Hallahan. Comment cards provided by the court, with the participants' names redacted, suggest users are pleased. One reported being "lost" in the court system for months until receiving help from the one day program, which enabled the completion of "all the necessary things to get this final in one day." Such abbreviated options work best when there is no dispute over custody of children or division of property and no request for financial support, said Ann Margaret Carrozza, a lawyer in New York who specializes in asset protection. Maria P. Cognetti, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, noted that many courts already offered self help clinics to teach divorcing couples how to navigate the legal system. She strongly cautioned couples with any significant assets to avoid one day programs, since both parties may benefit from legal advice. If either spouse has any assets, "you should be booted out of the one day divorce scenario," she said. Here are some additional questions about divorce options: Are one day divorce programs likely to become widely available? Mr. Kessler, the Atlanta lawyer, said such one day programs may be "the wave of the future" because court dockets in many areas are clogged by people whose cases are stalled as a result of their lack of experience with court rules. Their spread may depend in part on the success of the California programs. Another legal trend that began in California, no fault divorce, is now an option in all 50 states. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
INDIO, Calif. As the gates to Coachella opened Friday and thousands of fans began to stream across the grass of the Empire Polo Club here, Paul Tollett, the impresario behind the music festival, was as calm as could be. His phone beeped constantly with last minute crises one performer, George Ezra, got laryngitis and canceled yet Mr. Tollett, wearing sunglasses and a black Dodgers cap, stayed mellow during his one last loop around the venue before the fields filled up with nearly 100,000 revelers. "We were up late last night, of course," Mr. Tollett said, "but it seems like everything's in place." The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has just finished its first weekend, with AC/DC, Drake, Jack White and more than 160 other acts. It will return with an identical three day lineup on Friday. Now in its 16th year, Coachella has firmly settled into the formula that has made it the nation's premier pop festival: high profile performances, celebrities galore and a constant on the ground fashion show all with a backdrop of pastel hued desert scenery that plays well on social media. Last year's edition of Coachella sold 78.3 million in tickets, far more than any other festival, according to the trade publication Pollstar. Since it began, Coachella has presided over a vast shift in the concert industry that has pushed large, destination festivals once a minority on the American scene into the forefront. That has given Coachella a rare power in the music business to serve as the anchor for a world tour, a great place for an artist to build buzz or one where an act can reshape a career altogether. "It almost matters too much," Flying Lotus, a producer and D.J. who has appeared at Coachella multiple times, said before his show Friday night. "This is one of those festivals where the whole world is watching." With increased competition from Live Nation Entertainment and SFX Entertainment, each of which has dozens of festivals, Coachella's dominance is now being challenged as never before. But, so far, it is holding strong: This year's event has sold out once again, Mr. Tollett said. "When they started out, people thought they were nuts, and then when they didn't make money, they said, 'I told you so,' " said Tom Windish, a leading independent booking agent whose firm, the Windish Agency, has 36 acts on the bill this year. "It wasn't until many years later that they realized it's a gold mine." In 2007, Goldenvoice introduced Stagecoach, a country music festival held at the Empire Polo Club in late April, which helps amortize its production costs. Mr. Tollett, 49, is modest about Coachella's success, describing it as a natural progression from his early days promoting punk shows in Southern California in the 1980s. Goldenvoice is now owned by AEG Live, the second largest promoter in the world after Live Nation, and Mr. Tollett has a 50 percent ownership stake in Coachella, he said. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. "You do a small show, the next one gets bigger," Mr. Tollett said while walking the grounds early Friday. "It's punk rock at first, then the next thing you know it's alternative, then it's a little electronic, and then the next thing you know you've got all these skills and a staff and a whole festival." As he spoke, Mr. Tollett adjusted a garbage can with graffiti on one side and took a call about a refrigerator in the vendors' area that seemed to be displaying unauthorized logos. He sent an employee to check it out. With Coachella's growth, it has been dogged by criticism that it caters too much to the wealthy. While a standard weekend ticket costs 375, V.I.P. access which comes with a shaded lounge and special viewing areas is 899. Among the super perks on offer are a 225 gourmet dinner and a 7,000 air conditioned "safari tent" for two. Coachella has come to represent a kind of lifestyle brand as much as a music festival, with a look somewhere between thrift store hippie and an Art Nouveau nature goddess. This year H M, a longtime sponsor, introduced a fashion line meant to capture the aesthetic for customers everywhere. The festival grounds are also dotted with whimsical art pieces in iridescent colors like a giant, swaying caterpillar that by Sunday transformed into a butterfly. The combination of must see performances and must be seen fashion and celebrity spotting helps Coachella sell most of its tickets long in advance. Kendall Krieger, an 18 year old from Chicago making her second visit, said that when she bought her ticket she did not know who the performers would be. "I would have come either way," she said. "It's just cool vibes here." Coachella's ability to sell tickets so quickly, and to all but guarantee its performers abundant media attention, gives it tremendous negotiating leverage with acts and their agents. In what has become an annual ritual, Coachella announces its lineup in early January; other festivals around the country then follow. Coachella has an advantage because it takes place early in the year, but Mr. Tollett acknowledged there were restrictions in the festival's booking contracts preventing many of its biggest names from announcing their involvement with other festivals first. That has caused friction in the industry, but Mr. Tollett said it was done to preserve the surprise after what could be months or even years spent trying to lure a particular act to the stage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The yearlong celebration of Shakespeare's 400th death i versary ends on Saturday. But before the clock strikes midnight, the American Shakespeare Center, a theater company in Staunton, Va., is announcing a future oriented tribute: a 20 year contest to create 38 modern companion pieces to his plays. The project, called "Shakespeare's New Contemporaries," invites writers to submit plays inspired by each of Shakespeare's, on a schedule coordinated with the theater's season. Two winners will be chosen each year, and will be performed in repertory along with the Shakespeare play that inspired them, starting in 2019. (Each winning playwright will receive 25,000.) The final year will consist of a retrospective of the best work from the project. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times Like a man on a flying trapeze, K.T. Jones has leapt from one medical study to another during his 15 year struggle with cancer, and he has no doubt that the experimental treatments he has received have saved his life. Mr. Jones, 45, has an aggressive type of Hodgkin's lymphoma that resists the usual therapies. At the start of his most recent clinical trial, his life expectancy was measured in months. That was more than three years ago. He received a drug that helped his immune system fight cancer a type of immunotherapy, the hottest area in cancer research and treatment. "I've been over 12 months now with no treatment at all," he said. "I walk half marathons." Mr. Jones is one of many patients who have benefited from lifesaving advances in immunotherapy. But he's an outlier: He is African American. As money pours into immunotherapy research and promising results multiply, patients getting the new treatments in studies have been overwhelmingly white. Minority participation in most clinical trials is low, often out of proportion with the groups' numbers in the general population and their cancer rates. Many researchers acknowledge the imbalance, and say they are trying to correct it. Two major studies of immunotherapy last year starkly illustrate the problem. The drug being tested was nivolumab, a type of checkpoint inhibitor, one of the most promising drug classes for cancer. In both studies, patients taking it lived significantly longer than those given chemotherapy. According to 2015 census figures, whites make up 77 percent of the United States population, blacks 13.3 percent and Asians 5.6 percent. A 1993 law requires that all medical research conducted or paid for by the National Institutes of Health include enough minorities and women to determine whether they respond to treatment differently than other groups. Minority enrollment in its studies was about 28 percent in clinical research and 40 percent in Phase III clinical trials in 2015, the N.I.H. said. But the N.I.H. paid for only about 6 percent of all clinical trials in the United States in 2014, and those it does not support do not have to adhere to its rules. The lung and kidney studies of nivolumab, for instance, were paid for by the drug's maker, Bristol Myers Squibb. Researchers say such studies, geared toward getting a drug approved for new uses, are often done quickly, and minority patients may be left out because it can take longer to find and enroll them. "One of the biggest barriers is doctors not asking patients to join clinical trials because they assume they would not be trial candidates," said Dr. Elise D. Cook, from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. But many, she said, "would participate if they were asked." Trials can offer huge advantages, like new treatments that may otherwise be unavailable. Expensive drugs and tests are usually free. The overall care is often better than routine treatment, because patients see doctors and nurses more frequently and have more tests. Though success is not guaranteed, a clinical trial can be a lifeline. "Clinical trials are the most advanced treatment, the most cutting edge therapies we have," said Dina G. Lansey, the assistant director for diversity and inclusion in clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. "They should be available to everybody." At Queens Hospital's Cancer Center in New York, researchers are trying to reach disadvantaged patients by bringing clinical trials to them. "It's something you don't want to hear," said the patient, a slight, sad faced man of 61 with a soft voice and a strong Jamaican accent. He asked to be identified only as Mr. M., to protect his privacy. "We all have to go," he said. Linda Bulone, a research nurse manager, was hoping to buy him some time with a study that would test for mutations that might make his cancer vulnerable to certain new drugs, which he could then receive. Her effort was part of an unusual collaboration between the Queens center, where 92 percent of patients are from minority groups, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of the nation's most renowned cancer hospitals. Opened in 2002 by Dr. M. Margaret Kemeny, a surgical oncologist and professor of surgery at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the Queens center is part of NYC Health Hospitals/Queens, a public hospital that turns no one away. Many patients there are uninsured; 85 percent of those with cancer qualify for emergency Medicaid, Dr. Kemeny said. The cancer center operates a food pantry, and many patients need it. "You can't do good medicine for cancer without a research program," Dr. Kemeny said. Most of her patients in Queens have never heard of clinical trials. Mr. M., for instance, knew nothing about genetics, mutations or Memorial Sloan Kettering. Sensing that he, like many of her patients, had trouble reading, Ms. Bulone took most of an hour to read the consent form for the study aloud and explain it. He signed. "Once you're in the study, you're a patient of mine forever," Ms. Bulone told him. As she does with every study patient, she gave him her cellphone number and said he could call her any time night or day. He hugged her on the way out. "I don't convince them of anything," she said. "I educate them. We have to protect them, inform them, make sure they're getting a true impression of the study. Not every clinical trial is for every person." The center has patients in about 35 trials, she said, adding that drug companies looking to enroll minorities sometimes seek out the Queens center because it's such a melting pot. Though she is white, she has had no trouble signing up patients from other races, she said. "You have to really care," she said. "You have to put yourself into it." She said it was important to work with patients who are illiterate or have little education, factors that some may think would impede their ability to follow directions, and make them poor candidates for clinical trials. She considers that discriminatory. "We want to give them the best treatment we can," she said. "But there's also the emotional part. That's all you have left when the medicine runs out." Ms. Bulone uses a telephone translating service to explain studies to patients who do not speak English, and the hospital or drug companies pay 2,000 to 6,000 to have consent forms translated. To find patients who might be helped but know nothing of trials, she recently began asking another city hospital for its list of patients to be discussed at its "tumor board" meetings, where doctors evaluate difficult cases. If any patients meet the criteria for a study, she contacts them. Recently, she found Sung Yoo, a Korean man with gastric cancer who qualified for a promising study of a checkpoint inhibitor. It took 16 days to get the consent form translated, but he waited and eagerly signed up. But Dr. Otis W. Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said, "When we look at race, it matters sociopolitically far more than biologically." He said lower enrollment of minorities in clinical trials was part of a larger problem of unequal care that contributes to higher death rates from treatable cancers in some groups. "I sometimes cynically say, 'The drug certainly does not work in blacks when blacks don't get prescribed the drug,'" Dr. Brawley said. He added: "When there's a rumor that a new drug is hot, if it is being offered, upper class Americans with good insurance will fly to the medical center, stay in a hotel, get on the trial." The notorious Tuskeegee study, in which black men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated during the mid 20th century, is frequently cited as a reason that blacks avoid studies. But once the safeguards to prevent abuse are explained, researchers said, minorities are just as willing as whites to participate. Most people are wary of studies with control groups given placebos, but cancer studies do not use placebos: The control group generally gets the best available standard care. One way to increase minority enrollment that some researchers favor is conducting studies that focus on specific racial or ethnic groups. Few such studies are done, though Dr. Brawley warned that requiring certain enrollment levels for minorities could backfire, tempting research teams to pressure patients to sign up. Another solution, some suggest, would be for medical journals to refuse to publish studies unless they include appropriate numbers of women and minorities. He scoured ClinicalTrials.gov, which lists available studies for many diseases. A drug name he saw there led him to an online video describing a study at MD Anderson Cancer Center for patients like him. Mr. Jones lives in Delaware and thought MD stood for Maryland, a few hours' drive away. He was stunned to find out the hospital was in Houston. He and his wife had to stop paying their mortgage to afford plane tickets. Eventually, they lost their house. But the treatment worked for a while. When he relapsed again, he could not afford to keep traveling to MD Anderson. His doctor there helped him transfer his care to Sloan Kettering in New York. Again, experimental treatments helped, but temporarily. Then he hit the jackpot. In 2013, he entered a trial of the checkpoint inhibitor nivolumab. He was treated for two years. The study became a landmark, with an 87 percent response rate among patients like Mr. Jones, who had burned through every other option. "This was just hitting it out of the park," said Dr. Alexander M. Lesokhin, his oncologist at Sloan Kettering. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
ZHENGZHOU, China They perch on poles and glare from streetlamps. Some hang barely visible in the ceiling of the subway, and others seem to stretch out on braced necks and peer into your eyes. Surveillance cameras are everywhere in China. I pass more than 200 on my 30 minute commute in Shanghai. After a while, they mostly blend into the background. But when spotting a new one, I wonder about them. Is anyone watching? Is a computer parsing the feed? Is it even on? Trying to get to the bottom of these questions can be infuriating. Chinese people are often unwilling to talk about their run ins with the police. And the authorities are usually under standing orders not to talk to foreign journalists about much of anything, let alone cutting edge technologies that snoop on criminals. Read more on China's efforts to assemble a vast national surveillance system. So when I got the chance to see the world through the eyes of a police camera, it was oddly exhilarating. As it goes with reporting in China, often you just have to show up, camp out and hope for the best. In my case, patience and a hefty dose of luck paid off. The opportunity arose during a reporting trip to the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou several months ago. A colleague and I had traveled there to try to learn about facial recognition glasses that the police had been experimenting with ahead of the big Chinese New Year holiday. When we first got to the city's train station, a police officer gleefully likened the specs to a pair in "Mission Impossible." But then press officials rebuffed requests to try them. The glasses had been on display, but no longer, they said. We roamed the cavernous train station, hoping to catch a glimpse of them while taking in the scenes. Often in China, the mundane contains a bit of the absurd. On the second floor, the military was decamped to help with crowd control ahead of the holiday. Their green camouflage tents, pitched inside the building, stuck out inside the drab gray station. Outside the camp was a sign warning all who approached that they were entering a battlefield. Below, on the departures floor, janitors had attached mops to the front of motorized scooters, cleaning the large marble floors with the efficiency of a Zamboni. We tagged along and caught a break. Mr. Shan, who was affably holding court, gladly handed over the device to try. One of the more dystopian tools of China's burgeoning surveillance industrial complex, it was not exactly slick or really all that functional. A small camera is mounted to a pair of sunglasses. The camera is then connected by wire to a minicomputer that looks and works a bit like an oversize smartphone. The device checks the images snapped by the camera against a database. In essence, it's a moving version of the photo systems that some countries have at customs checkpoints. With a bit of squinting and adjustment I found my right eye looking through a view finder like one on an old video camera. First I was instructed to aim it at a female officer. A small rectangle appeared around her head, and after a few seconds, the screen displayed her name and national identification number. I then repeated the process on Mr. Shan. Emboldened, I tried the glasses out on a group standing about 20 feet away. For a moment, the glasses got a lock on a man's face. But then the group noticed me, and the man blocked his face with his hand. The minicomputer failed to register a match before he moved. Seconds later, the people scattered. Their reaction was somewhat surprising. Chinese people often report that they're comfortable with government surveillance, and train stations are known to be closely watched. The logic often expressed is that those who are law abiding have nothing to fear. The men fleeing from my techno enhanced gaze clearly felt differently and I assume they weren't criminals on the lam. Having a foreigner like me leering at them was certainly unusual. But later, as I watched the police continue to demonstrate the device, I noticed a similar pattern, if less exaggerated. The curious clustered to check out this brave new tech, but plenty of others strode quickly away, faces turned. In some ways, a lack of information has conditioned such behavior. The abilities and intentions of the authorities here are rarely clear, and uncertainty is part of the point. The less people know, the more they need to use their imagination. China's surveillance state is far from perfect, but if people don't know where it excels and where it breaks down, there's a better chance they'll assume it's working and behave. Later, we learned that the press officer had initially rejected our request to see the glasses to avoid unmasking too much about the databases that powered it. Someone from Beijing, the press officer said, had called and said the exposure could show gaps in their new methods for tracking criminals. With so much obscurity, many Chinese people see the authorities for what they are erratic, unrestrained and now equipped with unpredictable new powers. The group in the train station was simply making a prudent choice and giving the police, their goofy electronic glasses and their strange foreign friend wide berth. Many critics call China's surveillance ambitions Orwellian, and they are. But for China today, the world imagined by Franz Kafka offers a closer vision: bureaucratic, unknowable and ruled by uncertainty as much as fear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
February is Black History Month, and the Fearrington House Inn, a Relais Chateaux property in Pittsboro, N.C., is commemorating the occasion by hosting a lunch on Feb. 17 with Toni Tipton Martin, author of "The Jemima Code," a cookbook with recipes by female African American chefs from the early 19th century to present day. Fearrington's executive chef, Colin Bedford, is serving a menu for the event that is inspired by the recipes of the legendary Southern chef Edna Lewis, who is featured in the book. Ms. Lewis was a guest at Fearrington in the 1980s, and it was at the hotel that she developed her chocolate souffle, which remains on the inn's restaurant menu to this day. The dessert will be part of the three course meal along with several other dishes such as chestnut soup and braised beef short ribs. The price is 80 a person, which includes lunch with wine and a signed copy of "The Jemima Code." A tour followed by a tasting is the gist of most winery visits, but at Palmaz Vineyards in Napa Valley, guests get to go beyond the usual by getting a firsthand look at the unique technology the winery uses to produce its six different wines. The president of Palmaz, Christian Gaston Palmaz, has invented a Fermentation Intelligence Logic Control System, a setup that gives the team of winemakers the information they need to adjust temperatures in different parts of the tank. A probe inside each tank measures the liquid's sugar and alcohol levels as well as its fermentation rate. The data is displayed on a series of screens in the winery's fermentation cave; an employee gives guests a tour of this cave and educates them on how the technology works. Following their lesson, they have a tasting of the wines paired with seasonal hors d'oeuvres. The price is 80 a person. Reserve by calling 707 226 5587. HIKING AND DINING (AND SAMPLING) IN NAPA VALLEY There's also a nontraditional visit in store at B Cellars in Napa Valley with the winery's new "Wine and Wellness: Hike the Vines" offering. The activity begins with a three mile hike past Napa vineyards including Conn Creek Winery. Following the hourlong hike, guests return to B Cellars to pick produce from the winery's garden; the chef de cuisine, Brian Michael Green, uses these vegetables, herbs and fruits to prepare vegetarian, vegan and gluten free dishes that are paired with the winery's red and white wines. The price is 150 a person. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Only months after most economists forecast that the recession could be viewed safely through the rearview mirror, the European fiscal crisis poses an unsettling new challenge for the United States economy. Few economists predict the United States will pitch into another recession soon. But a still weakened American economy could be slowed by its wounded European allies and trading partners. Even the optimists are wondering aloud if the United States will encounter a slower and bumpier recovery than expected. "Look, a double dip recession is a genuine risk I'd place it at 20 percent as opposed to 5 percent a few weeks ago," said Robert J. Barbera, chief economist for ITG, who has been notably bullish on the United States economy. "We have some chronic problems in Europe, but I don't see it leading us to a Lehman style contagion. "At some point," he added, "you revert to a focus on our fundamentals, and those are decidedly better than conventional wisdom has it." Perhaps so, but vertiginous drops in stock markets, belligerent rumbles from North Korea and an American economy throwing off mixed signals has economists treading carefully. Rarely have so many central banks taken such extraordinary steps to stave off banking and national collapses. Their wariness about what they have wrought is palpable. James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, traveled to London and assayed a noticeably careful defense of the global economy in a speech. He did not discount the risk of a financial contagion jumping the Atlantic, given the weakened state of global finances and the risky nature of the bailouts. Governments and central banks must strive to re establish credibility, he said, even as markets shake and gyrate. "This new threat to global recovery will probably fall short of becoming a worldwide recessionary shock," he said. There is no shortage of storm clouds to bolster a gloomier take. Japan and Europe are perched near the edge of deflation. And as one European leader after another takes a vow of austerity amid talk of layoffs and deep spending cuts, American manufacturers which have led the domestic recovery could find their goods piling up in warehouses and on docks. "We were counting on a weak dollar and a strong European economy; instead we got a strong dollar and a weak Europe that is clearly not good for our economy," said Joseph E. Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and a professor of economics at Columbia University. "It certainly increases our likelihood of a double dip recession." As well, the rate set in London that banks charge each other for short term loans, known as Libor, has marched steadily upward in recent weeks, reaching a 10 month high this week. Such loans act as the fiscal grease that lets banks lend freely. Their rising cost slows lending something Mr. Stiglitz says is a consequence of governments' bailing out banks without forcing them to make a clean accounting of their losses and bad loans. "The credit markets' reaction is sending a strong message that the banks don't trust each other's balance sheets," Mr. Stiglitz said. There are, too, lingering questions about the strength and sustainability of the American recovery questions that loom as more important than ever given the weaknesses in Europe. The American economy has picked up recently, with consumer spending jumping higher and debt falling sharply. Manufacturers, too, have put a collective toe back into the hiring market, and bankers are exhaling even if they are not lending at their former levels. Mr. Barbera speculates that the quirks of federal data collection have understated the strength of hiring. "All the measures of industrial production are better than expected," he said. But state governments, from California to New Jersey and New York, are readying draconian spending cuts, with forecasts of layoffs of hundreds of thousands of state workers. Residential housing inventories continue to grow and prices continue to soften. And large businesses have yet to begin hiring in considerable numbers; the ranks of long term unemployed have swelled to a number not seen for decades. "This has to go down as one of the most fragile economic recoveries in recorded history," said David Rosenberg, chief economist for Gluskin Sheff, an investment firm. "We've had jobless recoveries before, but this recovery has been totally devoid of income growth, and that's very disturbing." Salvation could come from unexpected corners. The United States, in the words of the St. Louis Fed chief, might be "an unwitting beneficiary of the crisis in Europe." That is the lesson suggested by recent history. When the Asian economies shuddered and currencies nearly collapsed in 1998, many economists predicted the tremors would take down the United States and European economies. Quite the opposite occurred. A stream of money flowed from Asian banks into United States Treasury bonds, and interest rates fell as a result. Oil prices also dropped. And the United States emerged stronger. "Everyone competed to reduce their G.D.P. forecasts and it ended up being much stronger than forecast," recalled Mr. Barbera. There is suggestive evidence that this could happen again. American interest rates have fallen in recent days, as investors apparently seek refuge in Treasury bonds. And talk of a slowdown has caused the price of oil to fall, which helps the American consumer. A risk attends here, too. Pumping so much money into a nation can be like pumping adrenalin into a sick patient it masks the underlying infection. It could be argued that the infusion of cash in 1998 further inflated the Internet stock bubble, which popped several years later with disastrous consequences. Mr. Bullard raised that warning obliquely in his speech Tuesday, suggesting that while the United States might draw temporary advantage from the European crisis, it must "directly address" its fiscal problems if it is to retain credibility with credit markets. After all, along with the countries of the euro zone, Britain and the United States are running outsize deficits, compounded by their spending to stimulate the economy. The ability of American officials to pull this off while markets jump and twist poses a considerable challenge. "A lot of our recovery was financed by government handouts, and the sustainability of that is open to question," said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist for MFR Inc. "I see lots of fits and starts ahead." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In many workplaces, there are procedures for employees in danger of getting the ax. There are meetings; there are hearings; you step into an office and plead your case. So it is in the Trump administration, whose labor secretary, R. Alexander Acosta, has been in danger amid growing outcry over his role in cutting what has been called a "sweetheart" plea deal over a decade ago for Jeffrey E. Epstein, who was indicted on Monday for child sex trafficking. But in a workplace run by a video junkie, you defend yourself not in front of a disciplinary committee, but on TV. The case involved numerous victims of sexual abuse, but Mr. Acosta had little to say to them. Asked repeatedly by journalists whether he had an apology or any other message for them, he instead repeated that Mr. Epstein should be punished, that victims should continue to come forward and that the late aughts were "a different time." Asked pointedly abut his dealings as a United States attorney, he offered fluffy, passive verbiage. But the real communication was directed offscreen, to the fabled audience of one, Donald J. Trump. Mr. Acosta was in the cable crucible in part because, reportedly, the binge watching president had been keeping a close eye on coverage of Mr. Acosta and the Epstein case and did not like how things were looking. According to journalists covering the White House, Mr. Trump directed him to go on the air. There is a long history of Trump administration officials, or would be appointees, pleading their cases to Mr. Trump through TV. Staffers in the White House have appeared on his favorite news shows to send their boss messages through a screen that are apparently less persuasive when delivered by a mere flesh and blood human. Officials like Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump's chief policy adviser, have seemed to rocket in the President's esteem, and built power, on the basis of his boffo reviews of their aggressive media hits. Most memorably, Brett Kavanaugh may have salvaged his Supreme Court nomination on national TV in a Senate hearing in which he showed Mr. Trump his own furious reflection. After Mr. Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford, Mr. Trump was disappointed by a restrained interview on Fox News in which he believed that Mr. Kavanaugh had come across as feeble. After Mr. Kavanaugh came back and detonated in front of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Trump tweeted a delighted review, and stuck with him through confirmation. In Mr. Acosta's case, the charges against Mr. Epstein are so ghastly, and the stories continuing to emerge from his accusers so numerous and wrenching, that aggressive defensiveness and counterattack were not likely options. But neither was apology, given that for his boss, the presidency means never having to say you're sorry. (This was underscored in Tim Alberta's recent reporting on the Trump campaign's reaction to the "Access Hollywood" tape; the candidate ruled out an ABC interview that, he believed, would be about "extracting as many apologies as possible.") So in his TV defense, Mr. Acosta was caught between the indefensible and the unapologetic. He couldn't say he was sorry, and he couldn't seem not sorry. He instead seemed to want to muffle the controversy in a blanket of vague sympathy and lukewarm language, sidestepping the specific questions of why his office had not prosecuted the case more aggressively. As for his present case: "I'm not here to send any signal to the president," Mr. Acosta said. And yet, asked whether he had any confidence that the president would keep him on, he segued from "I serve at the pleasure of the president" to serving some of the talking points that most pleasure that president, praising the administration for "creating growth" and for standing for "the forgotten man and woman." We will have to see whether his hourlong episode more tepid than the explosive drama that Mr. Trump usually prefers was enough to save his job. It hardly began to address the anguish of the victims who have argued that Mr. Acosta let them down. But it reminds us of the continuing reality of this administration: That it treats TV news as a show produced by and for a single viewer, and that when you are called to perform in it, you had better put on the show he wants. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
HELENA, Mont. Federal wildlife officials are proposing to strip endangered species protections from the gray wolf populations in the Lower 48 states, citing significant increases in their numbers across much of the nation. The decision, announced on Wednesday by David Bernhardt, the acting secretary of the Interior Department, is likely to set off another round of court battles. Conservationists and biologists contend that some areas of the country, like the Adirondacks in New York and the southern Rocky Mountains, could be suitable habitats but wolf populations in those regions are vulnerable and still need protection to recover. The gray wolf populations had dwindled to about 1,000 in the Lower 48 states when they received protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1975. But since their reintroduction to various regions, mostly in the West, the wolves' numbers have rebounded to about 5,000. "Recovery of the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of our nation's great conservation successes," the United States Fish and Wildlife Service said in a statement, "with the wolf joining other cherished species, such as the bald eagle, that have been brought back from the brink with the help of the ESA." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The model Natalia Vodianova, 33, is known for her Cinderella story: She went from selling fruit in her native Nizhny Novgorod in Russia to scaling the heights of the fashion world. A luxury campaign favorite she is currently the face of Calvin Klein Euphoria perfume Ms. Vodianova has also become a philanthropist, founding the Naked Heart Foundation, which supports Russian families raising children with special needs, and hosting the organization's annual Fund Fair, to be held this year in London on Feb. 20. Ms. Vodianova lives in Paris with her boyfriend, Antoine Arnault, and her four children, though she still finds time for pampering once in a while. The most important thing is to keep the skin clean and moisturized. Cleansing can be very rough on the skin, so I use a French pharmaceutical brand, La Roche Posay, which is mild. Then for creams, I use the Super Aqua day and Super Aqua night creams by Guerlain. I'm an ambassador for the brand, but these are not the most famous products in the line. They are just ideal for me because I like how it's very smooth to put on makeup afterward. Then, since I have very, very sensitive eyes, I use this cream that my dermatologist recommended. It's called SVR Topialyse, and it's specifically for irritated eyelids. It's not like my eyelids are itching all the time, but it's a really soft cream and it's soothing. Another thing I'm absolutely loving is the Fresh Black Tea Firming Overnight Mask. Masks, the thing about them is that you have to put it on and stay put and not do anything. It's really boring. I'm a mother; I don't have time for these things. The fact that the mask is overnight is just a genius process. I pile it on and go to bed, and that's it. I don't have to think about it. During the day, I like a little eye pencil. Sometimes I don't wear mascara and just use the Charlotte Tilbury classic eyeliner powder pencil and maybe smudge it a tad. I also love Eyeko brow gel. The formula is not matte but has a little shine to it. My eyes are light, and I think it's nice to have a darker brow to set them off. And in my bag I have all these little Fresh tinted lip moisturizers, like Sugar Petal. They're so great because they're so easy. One thing I learned from modeling is that a little shine in the corner of the eyes is really festive. You can use something like Vaseline if you're really looking for light, but I like this beautiful Charlotte Tilbury pencil called Champagne Diamonds. It says it's for blue eyes that's probably why I like it! I like how fragrance is like treating yourself, this little extra something that makes me feel like I'm making an effort. I like the fact that Euphoria is beautiful, but there's also something sensual about it. During the day, I love the Euphoria body lotion. It's so discreet, but you feel fresh and extra clean somehow. My hair is very fine. I have a lot of it, but being a model means I undergo a lot of blow drying and a lot of pulling, so it's important to rejuvenate the hair and feed it as much as possible. I do a lot of Leonor Greyl. It's a very French brand, and a hairstylist, Odile Gilbert, said I should try the cream for the ends of the hair. They have a little clinic in Paris, and it's one of my only real indulgences. I'll go every couple of weeks and it takes two hours, but you get a full head massage and amazing oils and masks. I feel like I've had a week of holiday after I leave the place. I also use a lot of Christophe Robin products. I get my hair colored by Christophe I get it a little blonder than my natural color; I need the pick me up! and I also get it cut when I'm at the salon. I'm obsessed with his volumizing mist with rose water. And I do rotate shampoos, so when I'm not using Leonor Greyl, I like his cleansing milk with blueberry. It's really incredible. What bothers me about yoga and Pilates is that I get very strong arms very defined shoulders and such very quickly. Everybody loves it, but I completely hate it. I don't want defined arms. I want to look very feminine. I want to have soft curves and not be too skinny and be in good shape but not have defined arms. This bothered me always. Then one day I woke up and had, like, a revelation. I thought, 'Ahh, I know what I want to do!' I'll do dancing because I figured in dance the arms are more like accessories. You never pull yourself up with your arms, but you do move them around. I found a lovely, very quiet dance studio where I take private classes. I do jazz and contemporary. I do it once a week, and there's something so wonderful about it. You get more in touch with yourself as a woman, I think. For diet, I do have rules. I follow the blood type diet. I know a lot of people don't believe in it. But I've had problems with my digestive system ever since I was a little girl. I had ulcers, and then in my 20s, I was having really deep problems. Then I tried this, and in two weeks I found a huge difference in how I felt. I'm lucky because I am AB blood type, and I don't have to be too disciplined. I can still eat meat and carbs and fish. But there are rules, like I can't have red meat except for lamb. And same with vegetables. I can't have a ton of things, but I am allowed others. I like it, though. I've been doing it for over 10 years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Jimmy Buffett's tropical paradise is coming to Broadway but not before going on tour. "Escape to Margaritaville," Mr. Buffett's musical featuring new songs and past hits, is scheduled to open on Broadway in spring 2018, its producers announced on Friday. The play will come to New York after its previously announced premiere in May at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, followed by engagements in New Orleans, Houston and Chicago. "We'll set sail from California on a pre Broadway national tour stopping first in the city that gave me my start New Orleans," Mr. Buffett said in a statement. "Then to some of my other favorites," he added, "before arriving at that port of all ports, Broadway and New York City." The musical about a part time bartender and singer named Tully who thinks he has life figured out until a tourist steals his heart is being written by two veterans of the TV series "My Name Is Earl": its creator, Greg Garcia, and the comic actor Mike O'Malley. Christopher Ashley, who is directing the new Broadway musical "Come From Away," will direct. He was a Tony nominee for his direction of "Memphis" and "The Rocky Horror Show." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In 2011, Fox News announced that a new guest would appear weekly on "Fox Friends," its chummy morning show. "Bold, brash, and never bashful," a network ad declared. "The Donald now makes his voice loud and clear, every Monday on Fox." It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Seven years later, the symbiosis between Donald J. Trump and his favorite cable network has only deepened. Fox News, whose commentators resolutely defend the president's agenda, has seen ratings and revenues rise. President Trump views the network as a convenient safe space where he can express himself with little criticism from eager to please hosts. Now, the line between the network's studios and Mr. Trump's White House is blurring further. Bill Shine, a former Fox News co president who helped create the look and feel of the channel's conservative programming, is expected to be hired as the president's new deputy chief of staff, overseeing communications. He was recommended to Mr. Trump by a mutual friend: Sean Hannity, the Fox News star who has become a confidant of the president and promoter of the administration's message to his average nightly audience of about 3.4 million viewers, the biggest in cable news. Presidents have long cultivated influencers in the media: Lyndon B. Johnson sought Walter Lippmann's policy advice, and John F. Kennedy was family friends with Benjamin Bradlee, who covered his administration for Newsweek (and occasionally enjoyed flights on the president's plane). Barack Obama held dinners with political columnists and had his preferred interlocutors: Steve Kroft of "60 Minutes" interviewed him 17 times. The Trump Fox connection, though, extends beyond friendship and flattery to outright advocacy. The president is the beneficiary of a sustained three hour block of aggressive prime time punditry, which has amplified his unfounded claims and given ballast to his attacks on the news media as the "enemy of the American people." Commentators like Mr. Hannity both parrot and help shape the president's narratives. In Mr. Hannity's case, he has denounced the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as part of a "deep state" conspiracy carried out by a "crime family." Laura Ingraham recently described the facilities holding children separated from their migrant parents as "essentially summer camps." Talking points from "Fox Friends" are a staple of the president's Twitter feed. The prime time rallying cry of "fake news," in particular, has led some veteran journalists in the Fox newsroom to publicly chastise their opinion side counterparts: Chris Wallace, the host of "Fox News Sunday," recently dinged his network's commentators for "bashing the media," calling it "bad form." But the attacks have apparently pleased the president, who as of Sunday had granted 23 interviews to Fox News and Fox Business Network roughly two thirds of his television interviews since Inauguration Day. The coziness has angered critics who label Fox News "state TV," a sobriquet lobbed by rival TV news leaders like Jeff Zucker of CNN and Andrew Lack of NBC that Fox News executives emphatically reject. Mr. Trump's preference for Fox News pundits has also meant fewer opportunities for him to be questioned by journalists who do not share his ideology including reporters at Fox News. The network's chief political anchor, Bret Baier, was shut out for nearly 18 months before Mr. Trump agreed to sit with him, and Mr. Wallace has not interviewed the president since he took office. Ken LaCorte, who was the senior vice president of Fox News Digital before leaving in November 2016, said that Mr. Trump received more favorable coverage at the network "after he became the Republican nominee, and part of that, I think, is ratings driven." "I do see more news stories that are more Republican leaning than I ever had," said Mr. LaCorte, who also faulted CNN and MSNBC for what he derided as anti Trump "resistance" punditry. "I've seen the shift in all the national media to harden their positions, and play more to their perceived audiences." The network pointed out that its commentary has always skewed to the right and has been generally supportive of Republican leaders, and noted that Ms. Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, another prime time host, occasionally knock Mr. Trump for intemperate tweeting, or not taking a harder line on immigration. Mr. Shine is also not the first Fox News figure to join a White House in a high ranking role: Tony Snow, the original host of "Fox News Sunday," became George W. Bush's press secretary in 2006. 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. There was a time when Fox News commentators were more willing to criticize Mr. Trump. In July 2015, Mr. Trump, then a long shot candidate, derided Senator John McCain's captivity in Vietnam. "If Eric Holder had said this Fox News, we'd be covering it 24 7," Greg Gutfeld, co host of "The Five," said on the show. "We would be demanding resignations and investigations, which is why we need to hold Donald Trump to the same standards." Roger E. Ailes, the channel's late chairman, said it was "disturbing" after Mr. Trump suggested that Megyn Kelly had asked tough questions during a primary season debate because she was menstruating. And Bill O'Reilly, while still the No. 1 anchor on Fox News, challenged Mr. Trump over his sympathies for Vladimir Putin. Ms. Kelly has since left Fox News for NBC, and Mr. O'Reilly was ousted after a sexual harassment scandal. They were replaced in prime time by Ms. Ingraham and Mr. Carlson, who frequently draw bigger audiences than their predecessors. Those higher ratings have kept Fox News ahead of MSNBC and CNN in the Nielsen charts, and the network recently celebrated its 197th consecutive month that's 16 years, 5 months as the most watched cable news network in prime time and over the 24 hour broadcast day. It generates more than 1 billion in annual advertising revenue for Rupert Murdoch's media empire. People inside Fox News say that with Mr. Ailes out of the picture, the network's producers and hosts have more leeway. These days they intuit what their viewers want and adjust their programming accordingly. Ralph Peters, a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army with an expertise in United States Russia relations, recently quit his job as a Fox News analyst, calling the network a "propaganda machine." In an interview, he said that during his final months at the network, "I was asked ever less frequently to speak about anything that touched Trump and Russia." Asked if he considered Fox News "state TV," Mr. Peters said that was a stretch. "They are not controlled by the state," he said. "Fox is influenced by an administration." (At the time Mr. Peters quit, the network said he "is entitled to his opinion despite the fact that he's choosing to use it as a weapon in order to gain attention.") Back in 2011, the decision to bring Mr. Trump into the "Fox Friends" fold was a ratings driven move: His occasional guest appearances had proved so popular that executives offered him a regular slot. Disdain for the Obama White House was a bonding point for the co hosts and Mr. Trump, who shared his false theories about Mr. Obama's place of birth. Mr. Ailes, who died in 2017, saw the allure of his network's new guest. Once, at a meeting with senior producers, according to a person in attendance, the executive said Mr. Trump appealed to Fox News viewers because he lived his life in a manner that many of them imagined they would, too if they were rich. At the time, Mr. Trump was a white male in his 60s, squarely in the network's core audience, and his unfussy patriotism and keen sense of aggrievement made him a natural fit for the Fox News aesthetic. And when it came time for President Trump to build out his administration, he knew where to turn. At least three Fox personalities Mr. Carlson, Ms. Ingraham and Kimberly Guilfoyle were considered as potential White House press secretaries. Jeanine Pirro, whose weekend show has ballooned in viewership since Mr. Trump took office, interviewed to be a deputy attorney general. Heather Nauert, after a decade at Fox News, became a State Department spokeswoman. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SAN FRANCISCO Twitter said on Tuesday that it would continue to be lenient with world leaders who appeared to violate its policies against violent speech because the company believed preserving those tweets served the public interest. The announcement came as Twitter grapples with scrutiny for hosting President Trump's increasingly virulent messages about the impeachment proceedings against him. Under pressure from Democrats to take action against Mr. Trump's account, Twitter said that it would take action against a world leader's account only if it was used to threaten an individual, promote terrorism or self harm, or post private information like a phone number. "The accounts of world leaders are not above our policies entirely," the company said in a blog post. "Presently, direct interactions with fellow public figures, comments on political issues of the day, or foreign policy saber rattling on economic or military issues are generally not in violation of the Twitter Rules." The social media service has been under growing pressure since a whistle blower complaint emerged in September that Mr. Trump sought to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain. Since then, the House has initiated a formal impeachment inquiry against the president, prompting Mr. Trump to tweet a string of messages that some have called threatening and bullying. In one instance, the president said on Twitter that the unnamed whistle blower might be a spy. He also quoted a Fox News guest who said impeachment could lead to chaos akin to a civil war and referred to the impeachment proceedings as a "coup" intended to strip Americans of their rights. He also called for the arrest of Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who is closely involved in the impeachment process, for treason. The tweets have raised questions for Twitter. Jake Tapper, a CNN news anchor, said the tweets needed to come with a parental advisory. And Senator Kamala Harris of California, who is running to be the Democratic presidential nominee, called on Twitter this month to suspend Mr. Trump's account. In a letter to Twitter's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, Ms. Harris said the president's tweets were "blatant threats" that clearly violated Twitter's policies. Twitter responded to Ms. Harris on Tuesday with a letter summarizing its blog post, a spokeswoman said. A spokesman for Ms. Harris's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. Trump's posts have regularly caused issues for Twitter. The president has long used the service as a megaphone to speak directly to the public, sometimes using threatening language, including when he insinuated last year that he might start a nuclear war against North Korea. The San Francisco company has faced questions about why it allows Mr. Trump to keep a Twitter account at all because it does not allow bullying on its site. In 2017, a rogue Twitter worker deleted Mr. Trump's account, which was restored in about 10 minutes. In June, Twitter said it planned to roll out a feature to hide abusive tweets from world leaders behind warning labels, rather than scrubbing them from the platform because the messages are newsworthy. That would strike a balance between making information available to the public and enforcing its policies against violence and abuse, the company said. The feature has yet to be used against any world leader's account, including Mr. Trump's. "There are certain cases where it may be in the public's interest to have access to certain tweets, even if they would otherwise be in violation of our rules," Twitter said at the time. Mr. Trump has argued that Twitter and other social media services are biased against conservative figures like himself and are preventing their posts from reaching broad audiences. The Trump administration has threatened to take action against social media companies for censorship, and any action Twitter takes against Mr. Trump's account is likely to be met with a backlash. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
At the bottom of the planet is the Southern Ocean, its waters cold and roiling and sheathed with ice many months of the year. The edge of the ice cover, which melts during summer and forms again in winter, is called the marginal ice zone, and it is incredibly difficult to study. Large icebreaking ships, which have traditionally been used for research in the region, cannot consistently observe small scale ocean activity. And sea gliders small, relatively cheap instruments that sink in the water and bob back up periodically don't work under the ice. "It's a blind spot of knowledge in our climate system," said Sebastiaan Swart, an oceanographer at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. What is known about the marginal ice zone is that it is an important storage system for carbon and heat emitted by humans. The global ocean as a whole stores more than 90 percent of Earth's excess heat, and the Southern Ocean is the portal through which much of this heat is transferred from the atmosphere. This makes ignorance of the region particularly worrisome. But Dr. Swart and Louise Biddle, a researcher also at Gothenburg, found a way around this methodological roadblock in a paper published in May. To do so, they turned to unique organic instruments that can gather consistent information from under the ice: southern elephant seals. Seals in the Southern Ocean have been monitored for decades. Small sensors and trackers that are attached to their bodies and the tops of their heads, like tiny hats, transmit information from dives depth, lateral distance, water temperature, salinity that gets filed into open access databases. A typical southern elephant seal is a masterful diver, and spends around 90 percent of its time underwater foraging for fish and squid, only surfacing for a couple minutes between expeditions to catch its breath before sinking back down to the inky depths. Because of the frequency of these dives, seal data, like sea glider data, can reveal small eddies and flows in the water. These water fluxes result from many of the same forces, including winds and heat gradients, that create large currents like the Gulf Stream, but are far smaller and called submesoscale flows. Some are only the length of a football field and last no more than a day. As tiny as they are, submesoscale flows have a direct effect on what Dr. Swart calls the "window between the atmosphere and the whole ocean." This window is known as the mixed layer, a sliver of water on the surface whose depth and stratification determines how much heat and carbon are absorbed by the ocean; the deeper and more well mixed the layer, the wider the window opens and the easier it is for the ocean to absorb heat and carbon from the atmosphere. Submesoscale flows change this depth and stratification, and thus the aperture of the window. Without the technology to peer under the ice cover, no one knew what kind of submesoscale flows were occurring in the marginal ice zone. Scientists guessed that the ice would dampen the strength of the eddies, "but we didn't even have the observations to show if they were even there," said Dr. Biddle. Then the two researchers realized "that the seals had been going under the sea ice for years and years and years," Dr. Swart said. "And because they do that, they were collecting the right kind of observations for us to look at the upper ocean under sea ice." The open access seal data sets could potentially illustrate what kind of submesoscale flows occur under the ice, and whether they occur at all. So the two turned to southern elephant seals, which, they found, were challenging collaborators. Many of the dives, and the corresponding data, were clustered outside the zone of study. "You can't tell them where to go," Dr. Biddle said, laughing. "That's the biggest issue. They follow the food." But there was enough information to provide a first glimpse of the tiny currents swirling under the Southern Ocean's ice cover. And what Dr. Biddle and Dr. Swart found, surprisingly, was that submesoscale flows are nearly as active under the ice as they are in the open ocean, and that they are strongest in the midwinter, when the ice is thickest. In short, the seals showed that water in the Southern Ocean moves a lot more under the ice, and particularly under thick ice, than many scientists had anticipated. Perhaps this has to do with the variable concentration of what Dr. Biddle called "pancake ice," which creates heat variations in the mixed layer. Perhaps it has to do with certain wind and weather patterns. Either way, it is an important finding. "If these submesoscales are to change in the future, they actually will really change how much heat and carbon is stored in the atmosphere or in the ocean," Dr. Swart said. "And so they're really, really important, cumulatively, to the habitable planet." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Five minutes before midnight on June 30, movers hauled the last boxes from a spectacular rented home in the Oakland Hills. The tenant's lease was about to expire, and in his haste to get out, he left behind thousands of dollars of damage to the hardwood floors and Venetian plastered walls. The tenant was Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California. His midnight move was the latest chapter in a two year housing drama that has cost the university more than 600,000 and has drawn senior U.C. officials into an increasingly time consuming and acrimonious ordeal over the president's private residence. The effort to resolve Mr. Yudof's housing problems has taken place while the U.C., the nation's largest and most prestigious public university system, struggles with one of the worst financial crises in its history, including layoffs, student protests and tuition increases. After six years as chancellor at the University of Texas, Mr. Yudof arrived here in 2008, vowing to bring fiscal responsibility to the 10 campus U.C. system. He chose not to live at university owned Blake House, the traditional presidential mansion, which the university estimates requires 10 million of renovations and repairs. Instead, Mr. Yudof, 65, moved with his wife into a 10,000 square foot, four story house with 16 rooms, 8 bathrooms and panoramic views. He said he needed the house, which rented for 13,365 a month by the end of the lease and was paid for by U.C., to fulfill his obligation to host functions for staff members, donors and visiting dignitaries. Mr. Yudof held 23 such functions over a two year period, according to the university. He also ordered a list of improvements and repairs including air conditioning and 12 phones that drove up costs and, according to staff members, tied up university officials in meetings and lengthy negotiations on issues ranging from water bills to gopher eradication. After the Yudofs vacated the property at the end of June, Brennan Mulligan, the landlord, informed university officials that he intended to keep the U.C.'s 32,100 security deposit. Mr. Mulligan requested an additional 45,000 to cover the repairs for hundreds of holes left from hanging art, a scratched marble bathtub, a broken 2,000 Sivoia window shade and other claims. "At some point, I got a call from the general counsel, and I'm like, 'Why am I talking to the general counsel?' " said Mr. Mulligan, 40, a boyish Hong Kong based business consultant and a U.C. Berkeley graduate who bought the Oakland house in 2003 after selling his bike messenger bag company, Timbuk2. "To me it's like, 'Is this how they spend their time?' " Mr. Mulligan said. Among Mr. Mulligan's list of complaints was the university's failure to respond to a May 2010 notification from the East Bay Municipal Utility District that the district suspected a water leak on the property. By the time the leak was discovered, shortly after Mr. Yudof moved, the house's bimonthly water bill had spiked to nearly 5,000 and 1.2 million gallons of water had trickled into the Oakland Hills, according to copies of the bills. "It took the plumber 10 minutes to find the leak, literally 10 minutes," Mr. Mulligan said at an evening interview at the house, the lights of San Francisco visible beyond the glass facade of the living room. "There was a broken pipe and a pool of water and I was just like, 'Wow, this looks like that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It's just coming out.' " Mr. Yudof said he was unaware of the leak. On Aug. 5, Mr. Yudof's aides presented Mr. Mulligan with a settlement agreement that would allow him to keep the security deposit and receive an additional 19,759.05. The university presented the written agreement to Mr. Mulligan on the same day The Bay Citizen filed a public records request for information about the university's expenditures on the house. He said he had been aware of the university's discussions with Mr. Mulligan but balked at the settlement when he learned about the "outrageous and ridiculous" terms. He said his decision was unrelated to the public records request. "I thought it was totally inappropriate what they were doing," Mr. Yudof said of his staff. "I don't have to sign a settlement proposal drafted by the staff on this or any other matter. And I didn't." In an interview last week, Mr. Yudof attributed the housing problems and higher than expected costs to Mr. Mulligan, whom he described as "the landlord from hell." He said Mr. Mulligan was often unresponsive to maintenance requests, and in one instance missed a payment to a vendor, forcing the university to pick up the tab for a significant repair. According to university records, U.C. spent 19,423 to repair a two person elevator that sometimes stalled between floors. E mails released by U.C. under The Bay Citizen's records request show that Mr. Yudof's wife, Judith who has knee problems that make it difficult to climb stairs gently implored Mr. Mulligan to pay a delinquent bill from the elevator's installer, which refused to service the elevator until the bill was paid. The university ultimately used another company to repair the elevator; on one occasion U.C. paid 3,180.24 in overtime ( 530.04 per hour) to complete the work, according to a copy of the bill. Mr. Mulligan said he unknowingly missed the payment to the elevator company but then immediately sent a check by express mail. He said he did not see a bill from the university until he entered into negotiations for damages two years later and U.C. officials sought reimbursement. The university paid 70,806.73 to move Mr. Yudof to Oakland from Texas and 39,107.30 to move him again when Mr. Mulligan refused to extend the lease. The frantic move from the Oakland location lasted from 7:30 a.m. to 1:45 a.m. the next day, according to billing records. During the three week search for a new house, the Yudofs took up residence in a discounted suite at the Claremont Hotel Spa in the Berkeley Hills, at a cost of 8,394.16 to the U.C. "I don't think it was a good experience," Mr. Yudof said, referring to living in the Oakland house. "Under the circumstances, it was the best I could do." The home was comparable to that of other university presidents, he added. The U.C. spent 127,443 on security at the house, following threats against Mr. Yudof and several visits to the house by protesters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
A few months ago, the actress Sarah Paulson was at a restaurant in Los Angeles, waiting for a woman she had never met. She had spent weeks obsessing over her dinner date, even wearing the same fragrance. "I remember her coming through the revolving door, and there was this dappled light coming through the windows, so I couldn't quite see her face," Ms. Paulson said. "But I had studied her physical mannerisms so much that I could tell by her walk and her hands, the way she was pushing. And then, of course, the one thing I could see was that mole, illuminated and kissed by the sun." They ate, ordered tequila and talked for so long that they closed the place down. "The whole thing had this date quality," Ms. Paulson said, still sounding giddy, as she recalled the rendezvous over lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. She felt "an incredible sense of kinship" with the prosecutor, whom she plays in the FX series "The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story." As an actress, Ms. Paulson could relate to the scrutiny. "Every time that you go anywhere on the red carpet, now there are websites dedicated to picking you apart, like Tom and Lorenzo or whoever those guys are," she said. "And they are so mean." But not long ago, she experienced something new: becoming the subject of a hot tabloid story, not out of mockery but out of widespread delight. In December, news got out that Ms. Paulson, who was about to turn 41, was dating the actress Holland Taylor, who is 32 years her senior. The online reaction was immediate and (rare for a celebrity dating story) almost entirely positive, as if pop culture were craving a couple that so entirely broke the mold. A typical headline, from BuzzFeed: "Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor Are Dating and It's Everything." Ms. Paulson, for her part, found the sudden attention "surreal." She has tried to keep her distance from the hubbub but acknowledged, "My choices in romantic partners have not been conventional, and therefore the idea that it is 'other' makes it compelling." Before dating Ms. Taylor, she was in a seven year relationship with the actress Cherry Jones, who is 18 years older than she is. Before that, she dated men, including the actor and playwright Tracy Letts, who is nine years older and to whom she was engaged. She never kept her same sex relationships secret, smooching Ms. Jones on live television at the 2005 Tony Awards and, more recently, appearing hand in hand with Ms. Taylor at the 2016 Critics' Choice Awards and the Broadway opening of "Fiddler on the Roof." (People Magazine declared it an "adorable PDA parade.") But she has been wary of labeling her sexuality, for fear of being "skewered" should she change her dating habits later on. The women first met at a dinner party about a decade ago, when Ms. Paulson was still with Ms. Jones. Nevertheless, she thought that Ms. Taylor was "probably the most exquisitely beautiful woman I'd ever seen." They crossed paths again a few years later, when the actress Martha Plimpton asked both to record videos for her reproductive rights organization, A Is For. Ms. Paulson was filming "American Horror Story: Asylum" at the time, and Ms. Taylor was working on her one woman play, "Ann," about the former Texas governor Ann Richards. After that, they followed each other on Twitter and exchanged direct messages before finally deciding to go out for dinner. They have now been together for a little more than a year. Ms. Paulson said she had never seriously dated anyone her own age. "There's a poignancy to being with someone older," she observed. "I think there's a greater appreciation of time and what you have together and what's important, and it can make the little things seem very small. It puts a kind of sharp light mixed with a sort of diffused light on something. I can't say it any other way than there's a poignancy to it, and a heightened sense of time and the value of time." She has always gravitated toward her elders, she added, beginning in junior high school. "I had a complicated home life, and my teachers, predominantly my theater teachers and my English teachers, were very dedicated to taking care of me in a particular way," she said. "And in doing so, I think I developed a very easy rapport with people older than myself." Ms. Paulson was born in Tampa, Fla., in 1974. When she was 5, her mother, an aspiring writer, moved her and her younger sister to New York, leaving their father, an executive at a door manufacturing company, in Florida. They got a small apartment in Queens and slept on a mattress on the floor. Ms. Paulson's mother worked as a waitress at Sardi's while taking writing classes on the side. By the time Ms. Paulson was in seventh grade, the family had moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, and she had discovered the stage at the private school Berkeley Carroll. A teacher there told her about a high school where she could study acting, and she enrolled at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan. She booked her first professional acting job months after graduation, understudying for Amy Ryan in Wendy Wasserstein's "The Sisters Rosensweig" on Broadway. "I opened the door and I said, 'Mom I got the part!'" she recalled. "And her first response was, 'Oh, no, you're really going to do this?'" She was at a friend's house in Brooklyn in 1994 when the notorious white Bronco chase took over the airwaves. By then, Ms. Paulson was a fledgling 19 year old actress whose focus, she admitted, was "decidedly self interested." She idolized Julia Roberts, whose image had been plastered all over her high school locker, and envisioned herself becoming a similarly "glamorous, glitzy, charming" leading lady. But she quickly discovered that she was a character actress, able to metamorphose into people who are off center, off putting, damaged or cruel. Steadily, she made a career playing such divergent roles as the fragile Laura Wingfield in "The Glass Menagerie" on Broadway and a conservative Christian comedian on Aaron Sorkin's series "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." "She's effortlessly tough," Mr. Sorkin said. "She's always honest, there's never a false note. She's warm, sexy, incredibly funny and very, very smart. There's no such thing as 'a Sarah Paulson type.'" Nowhere has her versatility been more evident than on "American Horror Story," the anthology series on which she has played a lesbian journalist ("Asylum"), the headmistress of a witch academy ("Coven"), a heroin addicted ghost ("Hotel") and, perhaps most memorably, a pair of conjoined twins ("Freak Show"). "She just has a real faculty for being somebody else," said Ryan Murphy, a co creator of "American Horror Story" and an executive producer and director of "American Crime Story." "'If I said, 'Sarah, next year you're going to play Pope Francis,' she'd say, "O.K.!'" Mr. Murphy first met her on his show "Nip/Tuck," and was amazed by her dead on impersonations of Kathleen Turner and Holly Hunter. "She does a hilarious impersonation of me, which I also love," he said. Her profile has risen in recent years thanks to a string of celebrated films including HBO's "Game Change," Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave" and "Carol," in which she played the former lover of the title character, played by Cate Blanchett. "To me, her biggest mistake was being so ill prepared for the onslaught of circus activities surrounding the trial," Ms. Paulson said. During filming of the O. J. series, Mr. Murphy advised her not to seek out Ms. Clark so that she could arrive at a characterization on her own. But six episodes in, she got the green light. By then, she had already asked Ms. Clark, through a mutual acquaintance, what perfume she wore during the 1995 trial (Lancome's Magie Noire), then scoured eBay for a vintage specimen and wore it on set, despite its "fecund earthy dirt scent." (Ms. Clark now wears Acqua di Gio and "smells much better," Ms. Paulson added.) "I like it when I don't recognize myself," said the actress, who wears Le Labo's Musc 25 when she wants to smell like herself. To Mr. Murphy, she has been both muse and confidante. "Steve McQueen thinks she's like Bette Davis, and I think that's true," he said. He also attested to her spunky social presence: "There is nobody who is a bigger life of the party than Sarah Paulson." Inevitably, her success has intensified the spotlight on her free spirited romantic life. Like Ms. Clark, whose private travails were once splashed across the tabloids, Ms. Paulson never sought out the attention. But she does accept it as a fact of life. "Marcia didn't ask for any of it," she said. "I didn't ask for any of it, but some of it comes with the job." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A new year, a new opportunity to get healthy: Resolutions to exercise more and eat right are popular come Jan. 1. With all of these intentions in mind, hotels typically offer limited time fitness and nutrition themed packages to attract guests for stays during the first few months of the year. This year, however, some properties are changing their approach by introducing wellness programs and packages that travelers can take advantage of at any time. "The hotel industry is realizing that travelers today want to stay on top of their health all the time, not just as a New Year's resolution, so they're now using January as an opportunity to launch long term wellness initiatives," said Sean Hennessy, a hotel consultant and an assistant professor of hospitality at the Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism at New York University. To his point, Westin Hotels and Resorts recently commissioned a survey in partnership with the market research firm StudyLogic that looked at trends around New Year's resolutions. It found that 75 percent of more than 1,500 respondents in the United States and Canada will drop the "New Year's" from their resolution and make yearlong wellness commitments to themselves. Several Westin hotels are introducing fitness programs this month, including the Westin Austin Downtown in Austin, Tex., which will host the weeklong Lean Seventeen in each quarter of the year. This program is inclusive of a cross fit class, rooftop yoga, guided runs of downtown, a juicing class and a seminar taught by Michael Cerrie, the executive chef of the property's restaurant Stella San Jac, on how to make healthy food taste delicious. All Lean Seventeen activities are free; guests pay for accommodations, and nightly rates begin at 199. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Finally, at Port in the Caribbean. Now, How to Escape it? When I disembarked and took a look at Amber Cove, my initial thought was: "Oh, no." We had just docked in the Dominican Republic after a full travel day at sea a fairly smooth, tranquil journey (this was, thankfully, weeks before Hurricane Matthew struck the region) through the Caribbean on our ship, the Adonia. I was on the third day of a weeklong Fathom "impact" cruise, the goal of which is to engage the several hundred passengers in on the ground volunteer activities in and around the Dominican town of Puerto Plata, on the northern coast of the country. In addition to volunteering, I was excited to do some exploring of the surrounding area. Where we had landed, however, an 85 million "town" called Amber Cove, didn't instill in me a lot of hope. The port of call, built specifically by Carnival to entertain cruise passengers (and separate them from their money) is a complex of cabanas, overpriced shops and deck chairs that's about as interesting as a tract housing development. I knew that if I were going to get any real sense of the country during my limited time there, I would have to escape Amber Cove. Armed with nothing more than some cash, my passport and my cruise card (which I needed to be readmitted to Amber Cove and the ship), I made the long walk to the front gate of the town. The taxis inside the complex had friendly drivers and well maintained cars, but are on the pricier side, so I decided to take my chances outside on the street. I was immediately approached by a group of men with their personal automobiles, and we began to haggle. Haggling happens constantly in the Dominican Republic, and I would encourage travelers to embrace it. Big gestures, overreactions and feigned outrage are commonplace just keep a good sense of humor and remember that the price difference probably means more to them than it does to you. I negotiated a half day trip around the nearby town of Puerto Plata with a middle aged man named Modesto Toribio. He quoted me 50. After a few grand gestures and some faux exasperation we settled on 30. Our first stop was the teleferico, or cable car, which bills itself as the only one in the Caribbean. The fee is 350 Dominican pesos (about 8) or 100 pesos for Dominican citizens. The brightly colored teleferico is suspended high above ground like a ski lift. It lurched into the air and I was treated to a gorgeous view of the town below. After roughly 10 minutes, we arrived at the top of Mount Isabel de Torres, greeted by an enormous Christ the Redeemer statue. Modesto met me back at the bottom of the mountain and we drove into town. We got to talking as the day went on, and I asked him about the economic situation in the country. He spoke eloquently about the income inequality and poverty that afflicts the Dominican Republic, but said he had hope. "But many things have to change," he said. He also said that, on balance, he appreciated the influx of tourists. "For many Dominicans, tourism is the only way they make money." We drove through the center of town, past hawkers of candy, magazines and fresh fruit, until we arrived at the Fortaleza San Felipe, a 16th century Spanish fortress that sits imposingly on the shore, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The old weapons, armaments and homage to Juan Pablo Duarte, one of the country's founding fathers, are interesting (there's also an English language audio tour), but what was really breathtaking were the grounds around the fort and vistas. Puerto Plata is famous for its beaches, which are quite lovely. Modesto and I drove along the coast until we came to a pair of adjacent beaches, Cosita Rica and Long Beach. Modesto called out to a man on the sidewalk, "Levantale la cabeza, levantale!" "Lift up your head!" It turned out they were old friends. "Tranquilo," said the man, with a smile. "Luchando." Struggling. We sat at a beachside cafe called D'Mariolis and ordered a cafe con leche and a milkshake made with sapote a soft tropical fruit that tastes vaguely of caramel and blends wonderfully into icy, milky drinks. The total cost was 115 pesos, or about 2.50. Beach chairs can be rented for 100 pesos. I had a great time exploring with Modesto, but some activities are more fun when done in a group. On a different day, I set out with 10 fellow cruise passengers in a rented white minibus (my share was 10) for 27 Charcos, the waterfalls of the Damajagua river. Yes, there are 27 waterfalls, and yes, it is possible to jump, splash and slide down each and every one of them. Visitors can pay for access to seven, 12 or all 27 waterfalls; we decided to do the whole thing, and each forked over 12. Plan to be gone most of the day, and bring food and water. If you want, lunch can be provided for you, which adds 7 to the price of your waterfall adventure. Our dutiful guides outfitted us with helmets and life jackets, and we began a long, uphill trek that took about an hour. We stopped periodically to catch our breath, our guides forging ahead and encouraging us by happily shouting, "Only five more minutes Dominican time!" After five minutes had passed, then 10, we soon learned the meaning of "Dominican time" whenever you get there, you get there. But even the most out of shape of us got there, and that's when the fun began. One by one, we slid, jumped or otherwise traversed down more than two dozen waterfalls of varying length and ferocity. Some were just trickles into a deep pool, others were mammoth 20 foot plunges off a rocky cliff. For some of the scarier jumps, those who didn't wish to plunge were able to glide down the smooth rock, as if on a waterslide. Access to the different falls depends on precipitation, one of the guides explained; if there hasn't been enough rain, some of the pools will be too shallow to jump into. A few words of advice: Wear a swimsuit, one that you don't mind getting slightly damaged. Also, wear sneakers. They'll be drenched, but it's far better to have the support when you're hiking on the sharp rocks; those who rented the park's thin water shoes ended up with very sore feet. Last, leave your phone in your car it's going to get soaked. (You can hire an additional guide to follow you the whole day and take photos.) By the time we'd completed the last waterfall, we were tired and famished. After tipping our guides (everyone chipped in a few bucks) we piled into our van and headed back to the ship. It was a full, exhausting day the duty free shopping and 4 cappuccinos of Amber Cove were almost a welcome sight. That evening, thanks to the all you can eat dining aboard the cruise ship, I had two entrees and two desserts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When Chris Christie first met Donald Trump, over dinner at the Manhattan restaurant Jean Georges in 2002, the developer ordered for both of them. This power move has received insufficient study. When Zadie Smith met Jay Z, he did this to her, too. "Apparently," she wrote about the encounter, "I look like the fish sandwich type." Trump had waiters bring Christie the seared scallops and the roasted lamb loin. "I'm allergic to scallops," Christie recalls in his new memoir, "Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In Your Face Politics." He adds, "I've always hated lamb." The future governor of New Jersey was gleaning lessons in domination. He was an apt pupil. "Let Me Finish" is a superficial and ungainly book that tries to cover so many bases at once it's a series of attacks and justifications, it's a master class in sucking up and kicking down, it's a potted memoir, it's a stab at political rehabilitation that reading it is like watching an octopus try to play the bagpipes. At heart it's a reminder that, before Bridgegate, before the 2016 presidential election and before the infamous photographs of him sunbathing on a closed beach during a 2017 state government shutdown, Christie was the favorite political intimidator of many Americans. An alternative title for this unintentionally poignant book might have been, "You Used to Really Like Me, Remember?" On YouTube, you can still find Christie's insult highlight reels. "Listen, pal," he'd respond to a question. He'd call reporters and others "idiot" or "dope" or "stupid." He'd say, "I look like Tony Soprano, for godsakes." Christie managed to be almost cuddly while dispatching this contumely. With his fleece sweaters and his quasi bipartisan approach (a Republican governor in a blue state), he seemed more like an excitable high school football coach than a mentally unstable uncle. He had a saving sense of humor. He'd surely seen the bumper stickers about his weight, the ones that read, "My governor can eat your governor." When he appeared on "Late Show With David Letterman" in 2013, he pulled a jelly doughnut out of his coat pocket and took a bite. "I didn't know this was going to be this long," he deadpanned. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Because Christie was positioned to be the brashest candidate in 2016, he had the most to lose from a Trump insurgency. He saw the threat instantly. After the first Republican debate, he said to his wife, "We've got a problem." "From a stylistic perspective," Christie writes, "he was everything I was but on jet fuel." Christie must have felt like Ewan MacColl, or some other acoustic folkie, watching Bob Dylan plug into his amplifiers at the Newport Folk Festival. After he dropped out of the 2016 race, Christie became the first governor to endorse Trump. He climbed aboard a Trump campaign that, in this telling, as in so many others, sounds like a train that loses one conductor and six hobos at every turn. Christie drew on his long friendship with Trump and became a close adviser. Often enough, in his own estimation, he was the only adult in the room. He nearly became Trump's running mate. He was repeatedly stymied by Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law. Like a fawn, Kushner is seen in this book grazing on what Christie calls "his typical salad." Bambi was bent on payback. Christie had helped send Kushner's father, the prominent New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner, to prison in a lurid case that involved tax evasion and witness tampering. According to Steve Bannon, Christie writes, Jared Kushner was "obsessed with destroying me." Every chair Christie sat in had a trap door underneath. Christie saves his real fire in this book which was written by a ghostwriter named Ellis Henican for Bannon, the one time chief executive of Trump's campaign. He calls Bannon "self impressed," a "snake" and "the only person I have ever met who can look pretentious and like an unmade bed at the very same time." Christie accuses Bannon of peddling lies about him to Bob Woodward, among other journalists. More crucially, he remains apoplectic over Bannon's decision, alongside other advisers, to toss out Christie's monumental 30 volume plan for Trump's transition. This sounds like some document. In addition to a list of vetted candidates for each cabinet post and numerous other leadership roles, Christie writes, "We had a day one plan and a 100 day plan once the administration started. We had a 200 day plan after that." Trump didn't want to talk about the transition. Bad karma, he thought. "C'mon, Chris, just close it down," Trump told him. "Chris, you and I are so smart, and we've known each other for so long, we could do the whole transition together if we just leave the victory party two hours early!" Expecting Trump's other senior advisers to read 30 volumes, especially from Christie, was like waiting for monkeys to begin typing Shakespeare. In Christie's view, trashing the transition plan was the original sin of the Trump administration. The president didn't get the right people. Instead he got "the revolving door of deeply flawed individuals amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia." If Trump had only listened to him, Christie writes, he would have fired James B. Comey, then director of the F.B.I., at the start of his administration. His later firing would become, according to Bannon, the worst mistake in modern political history. If you skim through "Let Me Finish," riffling the book like a deck of cards, nearly all you will see is Christie saying, in so many words, I told you so. He told Trump that retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn was trouble. He told Trump to stop picking on Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father. He was the only one who could tell Trump when he'd done poorly in a debate. "He needed someone from the world of politics he could talk to," Christie writes. "Being his peer was a key part of the role that I played." Christie's sense of being right at every moment is wearying. Like a fan that blows for too long, his grille fills with dust. As a literary performance, this book is nylon, not wool or silk. About his relationship with his brother while growing up, we read: "We fought. We laughed. We played." If you want to read an excellent book about Christie and about New Jersey politics, find a copy of Matt Katz's 2016 biography, "American Governor: Chris Christie's Bridge to Redemption." It's cleareyed but sympathetic. Christie is vastly more likable in it than he is here. Christie takes care of some old business in "Let Me Finish." He says he didn't order or encourage the bridge lane redirections. He didn't "hug" Barack Obama in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. He was only out there on the closed beach for a short time. Trump himself comes off rather well in this book. Christie remains a believer. He praises Trump as a father. He writes: "He knows who he is and what he believes in. He has a keen understanding of what regular people are feeling. He commands extraordinary loyalty from his supporters and has unique communication skills." He thinks it's not too late for Trump to turn things around. Is "Let Me Finish" a plea to be let back in, at a high level, to Trump's administration? Is it a platform from which to run for president in 2020 if Trump drops out? It seems unlikely that Christie will be content to continue wandering the earth like a masterless samurai, a ronin. Do voters want him back? This self serving book doesn't make the most appealing case. Is anyone longing for another in your face president? And does he have too much baggage? It may be true that, as Karl Ove Knausgaard put it in one of his "My Struggle" novels, "What's done is dung and cannot be undung." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Russia has been testing new disinformation tactics in an enormous Facebook campaign in parts of Africa, as part of an evolution of its manipulation techniques ahead of the 2020 American presidential election. Facebook said on Wednesday that it removed three Russian backed influence networks on its site that were aimed at African countries including Mozambique, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya. The company said the online networks were linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who was indicted by the United States and accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Unlike past influence campaigns from Russia, the networks targeted several countries through Arabic language posts, according to the Stanford Internet Observatory, which collaborated with Facebook to unravel the effort. Russians also worked with locals in the African countries to set up Facebook accounts that were disguised as authentic to avoid detection. Some of the posts promoted Russian policies, while others criticized French and American policies in Africa. A Facebook page set up by the Russians in Sudan that masqueraded as a news network, called Sudan Daily, regularly reposted articles from Russia's state owned Sputnik news organization. The effort was at times larger in volume than what the Russians deployed in the United States in 2016. While the Kremlin backed Internet Research Agency posted on Facebook 2,442 times a month on average in 2016, one of the networks in Africa posted 8,900 times in October alone, according to the Stanford researchers. "They are trying to make it harder for us and civil society to try and detect their operations," Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, said of the Russian actions. The campaign underlined how Russia is continuing to aggressively try different disinformation techniques, even as it has come under scrutiny for its online interference methods. By spreading the use of its tactics to a region that is less closely monitored than the United States and Europe, researchers said Russia appeared to be trying to expand its sphere of influence in Africa, where it has started distributing propaganda and building a political infrastructure. Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former Facebook executive, said the campaign had implications for the United States ahead of next year's presidential election. He said it was highly likely that Russian groups were already using the same model of working with locals in the United States to post inflammatory messages on Facebook. By employing locals, he said, Russians did not need to set up fake accounts or create accounts that originated in Russia, making it easier to sidestep being noticed. For Facebook, the evolution of Russia's disinformation techniques means it cannot afford to lose vigilance. The Silicon Valley company faced a barrage of criticism after Russians abused the social network in 2016 to plant divisive content to influence the American electorate. Since then, Facebook has set up war rooms and hired more security experts to head off foreign interference in elections. But Russia has kept up a steady stream of influence efforts on Facebook. Last week, the company revealed it had taken down four state backed disinformation campaigns, three from Iran and one of which started in Russia. Facebook is dealing with other issues related to the 2020 election. For weeks, it has been under attack by presidential candidates, lawmakers and even its own employees over how it treats political advertising. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, has said he will allow politicians to post any claims they want in an ad even if they are false in the name of free expression. Facebook faces a difficult adversary in Russia. The country had previously indicated that its disinformation techniques were changing and that it was aiming to work with locals on online influence campaigns. In Ukraine, which held a presidential election this year, local authorities announced in March that they had arrested a Russian agent in the capital, Kiev. The agent, they said, had been ordered by his Russian handlers to "find people in Ukraine on Facebook who wanted to sell their accounts or temporarily rent them out." The latest campaign in Africa is the first well documented case of Russia "franchising," or outsourcing, its disinformation efforts to local parties, said Facebook and the Stanford researchers. It's unusual for a nation to try to influence so many countries at once, they said. Shelby Grossman, one of the Stanford researchers, said that Russians in some cases set up local media organizations in the African countries to employ locals who would post the propaganda and false content on Facebook. In other cases, the Russians hired existing media groups to do so. Facebook said it was unclear specifically when the Russian activity in Africa started because the Russians took over some existing pages on the social network. But the posts ramped up last year when the influence networks bought Facebook ads. In total, the networks spent more than 87,000 on Facebook ads. The networks often posted about political news, including elections in Madagascar and Mozambique. They sought to drive Facebook users from the platform and into public groups on WhatsApp and Telegram, which are encrypted messaging apps, to increase interaction. And they used Facebook Live videos, Google Forms and quizzes to draw people into their Facebook pages and groups. Some of the Facebook pages pushing Russian disinformation were not sophisticated. A cluster of pages posing as Libyan news entities posted about Libyan issues, but the page managers were in Egypt, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries, said the Stanford researchers. Some of the pages experienced unnatural jumps in followers and other telltale signs of inauthentic behavior. Mr. Gleicher said some of the Russian run pages and groups also used compromised Facebook accounts that once belonged to real people but had been stolen and repurposed by hackers. He said that Facebook is still building out its automated systems for detecting compromised accounts, so the company still misses some and pulls in its investigative team to catch them. Facebook said its investigation had "connected these campaigns to entities associated with" Mr. Prigozhin, but the company declined to say how. Mr. Prigozhin controlled the entity that financed Russia's Internet Research Agency. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The puny width of your ambition becomes clear as soon as you walk into the new Stone Island store in SoHo. You are durable, sure, but not particularly rugged. You understand that man wasn't built for the elements or maybe it's that man hasn't evolved to keep up with the elements. You are tender, with your UberX rides and your cold pressed juice and your membership at the local CrossFit gym, which you use, like, once or twice a week, because that's just plenty, thank you. That's why you came to Stone Island in the first place: to find a jacket that would do the work for you. For more than 30 years, Stone Island has made outerwear for the discerning, both in terms of function and fashion. It is a company obsessed with the minutiae of fabric. And it's Italian, which means a relentless emphasis on design. So when you walk into the store, there it is right in front of you, the jacket that will protect you from the elements while also protecting your sense of self image. It hangs to mid thigh, is puffy but not disruptively so, and is covered in a translucent shell atop a neon liner, pink or green ( 1,788). But here's the rub, literally. Touch the parchment like shell, and it becomes almost fully see through, revealing the colored liner beneath. The jacket is regal and austerely flamboyant. The pink one stood at attention by the door (it's a limited run), and off to the side, one of the green ones was in what appeared to be an oversize beer fridge. It should be said right here, though, that if you are the type of person to overcompensate for your toughness shortcomings by wearing the most vividly effective outerwear possible, this would be the jacket to underscore that. So maybe you should move elsewhere in the store, off to the more modestly designed jackets, which won't call undue attention to your need for emotional climatological reinforcement. At its best, Stone Island creates sleek, officious performance clothing, as if the tactical sections of the military were induced to put together a runway show. The information tags on the sleeves identify the garments primarily by fabric, and only sometimes by design. Most of the jackets are treated with an anti drop finish, which is to say they are water resistant, if not totally waterproof. The denim is cut through with polypropylene, which makes it lighter while maintaining a heavier feel. Most Stone Island pieces are marked by a badge affixed to the left sleeve by two buttons. I own a couple of items, but I prefer to detach the badge; there can be something gauche about it. In England, the label is so desirable that wearing it, or carrying it in your store, can make you a target of robbery. (That thirst is perhaps more a reflection of exclusivity than a need for weather protection, even in England.) The tagging, though, makes for a pleasing uniformity in the store. On the right were vast selections of outerwear, primarily in black. The David TC silhouettes ( 1,200 to 1,500) were the most appealing in their blend of modesty and resilience. On the left wall were racks of more versatile pieces, heavy on sweaters and pants, in a range of seasonal colors pink, purple, mustard, chartreuse that a staff member said was inspired by a photograph of an oil spill. In the back of the store was clothing from the company's Shadow Project offshoot, a collaboration with Errolson Hugh of Acronym. Here, the dyeing process is reversed, with color extracted from the fabric rather than applied to it; the badge, too, is hidden on the inside of the coats. These are the company's most experimental pieces, in appearance and silhouette, and almost uniformly gorgeous in their mildly wilted forlornness, especially the faded black bomber ( 998) and the wrinkled red gilet designed to be zipped into other pieces in the collection ( 413) but which was eminently wearable on its own. But in a way, these were the least representative pieces in the store. They were designed for flash. The ur Stone Island piece may actually be far more anonymous: pants. Few things in life are less gratifying than the quest for a decent pair of pants. I was hoping to find the purple five pocket pants ( 213) in my size, but they weren't available. This was a recurring issue the store was stocked wide but not deep, and many sizes weren't available so I tried on similarly cut chinos ( 253). Rarely do pants inspire awe. These were pants that only you would know were this effective. You could go about your life continuing to play the role of the almost layabout, while deep down, you'd know you were something more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
As the festive notes of a guitar fill the room, and smartly dressed men and women set up towers of tamales that threaten to overwhelm their containers, it feels for a moment as if nothing could go wrong in the world of Andrea Thome's rapturous "Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)." But the truth is that most of the characters in this En Garde Arts production are undocumented immigrants gathering in a church on the eve of an ICE raid that threatens their presence in the United States. They are there for a fandango, a traditional gathering in which musicians, dancers and guests take turns performing on a wooden platform surrounded by the others. Inspired by stories of real life immigrants (including Sinuhe Padilla, who wrote the songs and portrays a musician), Thome's play is a sensitive portrait of the in between: characters balancing the small joys of everyday life with the fear of uncertainty. At the center of the festivities is Mariposa (Jen Anaya), who has become the unofficial leader of this immigrant community. As Anaya portrays her, Mariposa (the word for butterfly in Spanish) is the embodiment of Zen, all sweet smiles and softly spoken responses. But look closely at her careful movements and alert eyes and Anaya also reveals anxiety. She is not exempt from the terror. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
For years now, scientists have sought to build aerial robots inspired by bees and other flying insects. But they have always run into a fundamental problem: Flying takes a lot of energy. Insects flap their wings, generating the thrust needed to move through the air by utilizing the energy stored in strong muscles. Their robot doppelgangers must rely on batteries, which are less efficient and tend to be heavy, or must be hooked up externally. Now researchers at Harvard University have built a new type of robot that is capable of true, untethered flight. The unit, called the RoboBee X Wing, is equipped with four tiny wings made of carbon fiber and polyester, and even tinier photovoltaic cells. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In bright light, its solar cells generate about five volts of electricity, which a minuscule transformer then boosts to the 200 volts necessary for liftoff. When the high voltage is applied to two components called piezoelectric actuators, they bend and contract, much as an insect's muscles would. This drives the flapping motion of the RoboBee's wings. Clever engineering keeps the device small and light about one quarter the weight of a paper clip. This allows the RoboBee to flit about freely, whereas previous iterations of the robot could only take off, land, or perch mid flight while leashed to a power supply. "We wanted to keep pushing the limit on how much power we could squeeze out of the artificial muscles in the robot, and how efficient we could make the whole system," said Noah Jafferis, a postdoctoral engineer at Harvard and one of the leaders of the research. On Wednesday, Dr. Jafferis and his colleagues reported in Nature that the RoboBee is now able to match the thrust efficiency of similarly sized insects, such as bees. The first time the robot took off in the lab, it lifted off with such force and speed that some of the researchers yelped in surprise. "We weren't expecting it to take off like that at all," said Farrell Helbling, a postdoctoral roboticist who also led research on the seminal flight. So far, each of the RoboBee's test flights have only lasted a couple seconds. One of the robot's shortcomings is that it still can't store energy. As soon as it flies out of a small, well lit area, it slows down and falls to the ground. But Dr. Helbling and Dr. Jafferis are confident that the robot could stay aloft for several minutes if its solar cells and circuits were given the proper tweaks. Further advances in engineering could make microrobots even more autonomous, said F. Zeynep Temel, who works on ant sized jumping robots at Carnegie Mellon University. And once these tiny robots are able to zip up, down and sideways outdoors, they could be used to take air quality measurements, help search collapsed buildings for survivors, or even be deployed in swarms. "Having onboard power is the first big step to getting microrobots out of the lab and into the real world," Dr. Temel said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
I'm not sure how it is for most novelists, but when I create characters, their faces always look a little blurry to me. Though I come to know who these people are in the important ways their general physical selves and how it feels to be around them; how their presence in a scene changes the emotional room temperature; who or what they love or desire still their facial features remain indistinct, as in a dream. This blurriness is never a real problem. It's not like being unable to, say, find a friend at a crowded restaurant or pick out your own child across a playground. While I always try to burrow into my perceptions in order to create characters, I am stopped short of actually visualizing them with police artist precision. For me, facial blurriness comes with the territory, and I've grown accustomed to it over the years I've been writing fiction. Twice I've had the good fortune to have my characters take on a big screen physical specificity. My 1988 novel "This Is Your Life" was adapted for a feature film; it became "This Is My Life," the first film Nora Ephron directed, co written by Nora and Delia Ephron, and starring Julie Kavner as a stand up comedian. Now, my 2003 novel "The Wife" is a film for which Glenn Close, playing the title character, won a Golden Globe and a SAG award and was nominated for a Bafta and an Academy Award. All of this is heady, effervescent stuff for a novelist. I attended the premiere of "The Wife" at the Toronto Film Festival, sitting in a cluster that included Close, and during the standing ovation at the end of the film, I felt a particular kind of excitement. It wasn't just the generic Hollywood feeling to which many of us are susceptible. The face for which I had created the outline had been filled in, saturated with new meaning. The book (and the film) is about the long marriage between Joan and Joseph Castleman. He is a much celebrated American novelist who, in the film, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature; in the book it is a made up award called the Helsinki Prize, which I describe as slightly less grand than the Nobel but still hugely important. (My older son is convinced that part of the reason I write novels is so I can make up the names of things like prizes, rock bands, television shows and breakfast cereals.) Together they travel to Europe for the ceremony. In both book and film, Joe Castleman is an unreconstructed narcissist who believes his own publicity. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The novel is told from Joan's point of view, and I worked to give her a voice of controlled rage and pissed off humor. Near the beginning, she describes her husband as "one of those men who own the world. You know the type I mean: those advertisements for themselves, those sleepwalking giants, roaming the earth and knocking over other men, women, furniture, villages. ... There are many varieties of this kind of man: Joe was the writer version, a short, wound up, slack bellied novelist who almost never slept, who loved to consume runny cheeses and whiskey and wine, all of which he used as a vessel to carry the pills that kept his blood lipids from congealing like yesterday's pan drippings ... who had no idea of how to take care of himself or anyone else, and who derived much of his style from 'The Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette.'" The film has no voice over to stand in for a first person narrative. Instead of hearing a stream of piquant and sometimes skewering reflections on what it's like to be the invisible wife of a supposed Great Man, we are given something different, and equally powerful: Glenn Close's face. Audiences are treated to the many, many shades of feeling that Close expresses, sometimes through the barest eye movement or slight lift or droop of a lip. How does she do it? I kept wondering, just as people marvel at how fiction writers give characters that authentic human sense, somehow managing to whoosh life into them. As a teenager I spent a summer at a performing arts workshop in the Berkshires, which later became the jumping off place for my novel "The Interestings." When I acted in plays there whether by Lorca or Thornton Wilder I spoke my lines in what I can only call my Katharine Hepburn voice, inappropriate though it was. Soon enough, I realized it was much easier for me to locate "voice" when writing fiction than when performing the part of the old woman in "The House of Bernarda Alba" or playing Hollow Man No. 3 in a staged mash up of T. S. Eliot poems. Because "The Wife" is so voice fueled, I would never have imagined that the film version would come to depend so much on the face. It's hard to look away when Close is onscreen. She has a wonderful co star in Jonathan Pryce, who plays Joe, but the pull of the movie, the true imperative, is with Joan, as the title tells us it should be. Joan is an older woman who has lived in the shadow of the male "genius" over all the years of their long marriage. The Swedish director Bjorn Runge lets the camera linger not on Joe, where it has stayed for most of their life together, but on Joan. While my novel is about what Joan tells us, the film, as people have noted, is really about what she doesn't tell us at least not for a while. Her face can be cryptic, intriguing, unsettling. As I watched "The Wife" in that concert hall in Toronto, I felt myself tensely sitting there waiting for the torrent, the spew, the things that the wife has been keeping inside that head, behind that face. I've always felt that novels are like Advent calendars; the novelist gets to decide which particular door is the best one through which to enter. In writing "The Wife," I knew from the start that I wanted to tell the story of the spouse of an emotionally bloated male novelist, through his wife's experience. So I let her rip. In the screenplay (adapted by the screenwriter and playwright Jane Anderson, who won an Emmy for her TV version of Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge"), not only has the Helsinki Prize been notched up to the Nobel, but also, Joan's verdict on her marriage comes far later. That makes for a different kind of drama. In the book she tells the reader from the start where things stand between Joe and her, and then she gets a chance to describe what it's been like for her over the years. The great difference between my book and the film is that in the book, Joan Castleman tells her own story. The "I" voice allows her to do that. In the movie, Joan's face does the work. The first time I saw "The Wife" it hadn't been released yet I'd been sent a link and a passcode, and wanted to see it by myself. I had no idea how I would feel. As soon as I saw the face of this actress, I felt as if I were watching a home movie I hadn't known existed. There was Glenn Close, she of "Fatal Attraction" and "Damages" and "Dangerous Liaisons" and "The Big Chill"; she of "The World According to Garp." But now she was Joan of "The Wife." She was my Joan. We were connected through the strange alchemy that is the transformation of book to film. What is it that happens to you, the writer, when the blurry face you've lived with for years is sharpened into specificity? And when the person playing your character has a face so familiar to you that you won't ever be able to think of your character again in a more impressionistic form? What happened to me is as simple and as complicated as this: One of my characters will always be someone I know as my own invention, and now, in addition, she will always have the face of Glenn Close, the person who became Joan Castleman. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
For the past 20 years, in his second career as a best selling author, Howard Bloom has been grappling with the big questions, all of which can be boiled down to, as he puts it here, "What does the universe want from you and me?" Bloom has, in the pre Covid 19 world chronicled in this documentary about him, a strict routine that helps him in this discipline. It includes morning exercise and consulting a list of reminders of what to take with him when he ventures out of his Brooklyn brownstone. It also involves a staggering number of medications, which he needs to combat his chronic fatigue syndrome, which struck him in 1988 and left him unable to step out of his bed, let alone his apartment, for many years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Kate McKinnon as Kellyanne Conway on "Saturday Night Live," which this week mostly eschewed celebrity impersonations and stuck to the host Scarlett Johansson and the core cast. It was a Christmas miracle: a "Saturday Night Live" opening sketch that wasn't in any way dependent on a series of surprise celebrity cameos or an onslaught of political impersonations. Instead, this weekend's "S.N.L." broadcast (which was hosted by Scarlett Johansson and featured the musical guest Niall Horan) began with a comedic look at the dinner tables of three families celebrating the holidays around the country. The first was a liberal leaning family, led by Cecily Strong, living in San Francisco; the second a conservative leaning family, led by Beck Bennett, in Charleston, S.C.; and the third a black family, led by Kenan Thompson, in Atlanta. For starters, Strong expressed her pleasure that President Trump seemed on the verge of being impeached, while Bennett lamented it and called it "a disgrace." Thompson asked his family, "Y'all think 'Bad Boys 3' is going to be good or not? I mean, it's got to be good. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence back together." When Chris Redd asked him to please talk about politics instead, Thompson replied, "Oh you mean how Trump is definitely getting impeached, and then definitely getting re elected? I'm good." The dinner guests around Strong's table wondered who could possibly vote for Trump now, while at Bennett's table they asked how anyone couldn't vote for him. To his family, Thompson asked, "Who do you think is going to get voted off 'The Masked Singer' next week?" Redd, trying to steer the conversation back to politics again, said that people would not vote for Trump again. "What people?" Thompson said. "White people? If white people tell you I might not vote for Trump this time, you know what that's called, right? A lie. Nobody was going to vote for Trump in 2016 either. And then guess who did? Everybody." Strong and her guests said they would take any Democratic candidate over four more years of a Trump presidency, while Bennett and his family said they liked Trump better than any of the Democrats. Thompson said to his guests, "You know who I'm starting to like a lot? That Pete Buttigieg." After a pause, everyone around the table laughed knowingly. At its conclusion the sketch returned to a snowman played by Aidy Bryant, who told the audience that all three families had one important thing in common: "They live in states where their votes don't matter," she said. "Because none of them live in the three states that will decide our election. They'll debate the issues all year long, but then it all comes down to 1,000 people in Wisconsin who won't even think about the election until the morning of. And that's the magic of the Electoral College." For good measure, the sketch threw in Kate McKinnon as the 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg, who replied to Trump's social media mockery of her. When you have an episode hosted by Scarlett Johansson you've got to satirize the meme friendly Netflix movie she's currently starring in, right? The "S.N.L." take on Noah Baumbach's "Marriage Story" trades the squabbling artistic couple played by Johansson and Adam Driver for the political spouses George T. Conway III (Bennett), the conservative lawyer and Trump critic, and Kellyanne Conway (McKinnon), the White House counselor. As in the movie, the Conways list their favorite qualities about each other, which they then proceed to undermine, and engage in an intensely personal argument: "You're not even verified on Twitter," McKinnon taunts Bennett. "Where's your blue check, George?" In response, Bennett punches his fist through a wall. Over at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the latest developments in the process to impeach President Trump. After yesterday's vote approving articles of impeachment, President Trump could become the first president to face impeachment while also running for re election. Because only Democrats could figure out a way to lose twice in the same year. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, who was accidentally CGI'd to look like both Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, appealed to Republicans on the committee, saying, "When Trump's time is past, how will you be remembered?" Remembered? I barely know you know now and I think you're my congressman. I hate to break it to you, but the only way Americans ever remember a congressman is if he sent someone a picture of his penis. And we only remember that because his name was Weiner. President Trump set a personal record on Thursday when he reacted to impeachment news by posting more than 100 tweets. Causing White House officials to ask, Is everything O.K. in there, sir? the screen displays a picture of a bathroom door I don't get why Trump's so worked up. I mean, it's still going to take two thirds of the Senate to vote him out of office. And that's not going to happen because, well, take a look at the Senate. the screen displays the images of several white Senators It would be like if Obama got voted out of office by the Wu Tang Clan. But look on the bright side, Democrats, now you know you can cheat. Why are you nerds still playing by the rules? Literally nothing matters anymore. Kamala dropped out because she ran out of money. Rob a bank! Do y'all want this or not? If we were making this selection solely with our hearts, we would probably choose the return visit from Chen Biao, the irrepressible Chinese trade official played by Bowen Yang. But for obvious zeitgeist reasons, we have to give the edge to this inevitable appearance from Baby Yoda, the breakout Disney Plus character portrayed by Kyle Mooney as a self aware entertainment industry player. He may not know anything about the Force, but this Baby Yoda eagerly shared photos of his squad (consisting of Timothee Chalamet, Robert Pattinson and "the two guys from the Sonic commercials") and boasted about his new stand up special on Netflix. ("I basically just tell stories about who hooked up on the 'Mandalorian' set: me.") He also revealed that he has some enemies: "Baby Groot, do me a favor. Keep my name out your lil tree mouth before I snap you like a twig." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Throughout his storied career, the versatile director Joe Mantello, 53, has had success with musical spectaculars like "Wicked" and small scale pieces such as "Dogfight." This season, two of the plays he directs, "Blackbird" and "The Humans," have been nominated for Tony Awards. Mr. Mantello's latest, "An Act of God," a comedy written by David Javerbaum, opens Monday at the Booth Theater. The never not busy Broadway veteran took a few moments to share five of his fashion favorites. Suit I used to be the guy wearing jeans and sneakers to rehearsal. I never put a lot of thought into the way I dress. But I'm dressing up more these days, because my boyfriend, Paul Marlow, does these made to measure custom suits and shirts. Even before I met Paul, I did like pieces that were a bit more tailored and to the body. But I never had anything custom made before, and now when I try my old things, I see they don't fit. The interesting thing about dressing up is that it has changed the way I interact with the room and made me think about my clothes differently. It changes the way I hold myself. It changes the way people react to you. It's kind of opened up a whole new world for me. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Calling Milford Graves an autodidact would be basically correct, but it gets at the wrong idea. Known as a game changing drummer of the 1960s avant garde, he's also become a kind of underground thought leader in martial arts, natural healing and cellular biology. That wasn't just by learning from what was available; he likes to build new systems, reshaping the channels by which information comes to him. Mr. Graves prefers to live in territory that's uncharted, which often means unseen, but a small wave of recognition has started to flow his way. Since the fall, he's been featured in a range of major art magazines and has exhibited his first sculpture (exploring connections between body and rhythm) at Hunter College. Last month, he played two triumphant sets at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn. And on Friday, the documentary "Milford Graves Full Mantis" has its New York premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The film's main lesson is that it's possible for an artist to spend an entire life working his way back from the source material: If he makes his principles expansive enough, he might even succeed in creating a loose society of learners around him, with or without an institution's help. In one scene, Mr. Graves, now 76, stands in his backyard garden in Jamaica, Queens, speaking to the film's director, Jake Meginsky. A vegetable provides more nutrients if you eat it directly, he says. Then he bends over and gobbles up a spinach leaf, chewing it down to the stem. This moment shows where his creativity flourishes at the square root of super seriousness and total innocence. Walking into his basement laboratory last Saturday, I found a wall lined with bottles of herbal extracts he's made. He's frequently sought out as a healer and acupuncturist by neighbors and artists across the city. Even to a knowledgeable jazz fan, the depth of Mr. Graves's inquiries would probably be a surprise. He's spent decades directly researching the human heart in that basement, using software he's built to measure its textured pulse and convert it into a melody. By feeding those sounds back to a person, he's found he can increase blood flow and possibly even stimulate cell growth. This work recently led Mr. Graves to a partnership with a team of Italian biologists. Last year, they patented a device that aims to use these melodies to regenerate stem cells. Mr. Graves does this research in the semi suburban Queens home where he and his wife, Lois, have lived since 1970. (He grew up nearby, then inherited the house from his grandmother.) Years ago, he festooned its exterior with a creeping, Gaudiesque mosaic of stones and colored glass. In the comfortably cluttered basement, books on biology, Kundalini yoga and 20th century music perch next to West African drums and Indian tablas. "I guess I've always been my own person," Mr. Graves said, sitting in baggy sweatpants and a flannel jacket by a bank of six computer monitors. "I didn't have no teacher, and that was great, because I was allowed to figure it out without anybody telling me to do it this way or that way. That came later, when I said, Oh, that's the conventional way." He grew up playing timbales in Latin jazz and mambo bands, where the rhythmic complexity is greater and more gravity defying than in standard jazz drumming. Mr. Graves decided to move to the kit after hearing Elvin Jones with John Coltrane at a club not to imitate what he'd heard, but to transcend it, add more range. "I said, 'He's cool, but I hear something else, man,'" Mr. Graves said. "I heard what he wasn't doing." On the drum kit, he met the new challenge of incorporating foot pedals. Playing Latin percussion, he recalled, "we'd be doing dance movements while we were playing. So I said: 'That's all I'll do. I'm going to start dancing down below.' I started dancing on the high hat." He fell in with the improvising avant garde around 1963, recording first with the New York Art Quartet, a group that's now iconic. He had begun to develop a polyrhythmic style of free playing, shapely and articulate and unabating. Delivering most strokes at about 60 to 80 percent force, Mr. Graves sometimes holds multiple sticks in one hand, each tapping a different drum with a different rhythm. He maintains a low and certain flow, even as patterns tilt and tempos shift. Soon he had radically remodeled his drum kit, ditching the snare drum and taking the bottom skins off his toms, getting a soupier resonance. He said the snare's stiff toned sound fit its European military origins better than it did his music. "The potential of how you can manipulate a vibrating drum membrane is much greater," Mr. Graves said. He suggested that jazz drummers who use the snare might simply be "following orders without questioning those orders" his idea of a grave sin. In 1973, he began teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, where he stayed on as a professor until 2012, holding forth on topics well beyond any single subject, despite having no more than a high school diploma. But he spent most of each week back in Queens, teaching percussion and yara, a hybrid martial art of his own creation, to interested artists and neighborhood residents. In "Full Mantis," Mr. Graves is the only speaker, which makes for both a captivating sound poem (philosophical speech interleaved with performances) and a risk: It positions him as a solitary figure, too far ahead to relate to, whereas, in fact, he's always been a convener and a sharer. For many years, he has hosted informal Sunday get togethers in his basement, assembling different groups of guests, teaching and opening up broad discussions. "At the house, you meet people from all over," said Mr. Meginsky, who served as Mr. Graves's personal assistant for over a decade before making "Full Mantis" out of a combination of his own recordings and Mr. Graves's old videos. "You're meeting classical musicians there, you're meeting consecrated priests in Santeria and Ifa and voodoo, you're meeting doctors, you're meeting guys who run the health food store in South Jamaica, drummers, gardeners." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
He Took Her Parts in 'Fires in the Mirror.' All 25 of Them. On August 19, 1991 , in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a car in the motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, sped through a red light, struck another car, swerved onto the sidewalk and hit and killed Gavin Cato, a 7 year old black boy from Guyana, while severely injuring his cousin Angela. Almost immediately, rumors spread that an ambulance, privately run by the Hasidim, had taken the driver and his fellow passengers to the hospital, while the young black children lay bleeding on the ground. That night, a group of young black men retaliated by stabbing Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29 year old Orthodox Jewish scholar from Australia, who eventually died in the same hospital as Gavin. Over the next three days, a race riot erupted, in which black residents protested the police, stormed the Lubavitcher headquarters, and targeted Jewish businesses. Shortly afterward, the playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith began interviewing black and Jewish residents of Crown Heights, as well as creative artists and community leaders. She managed to talk to those most personally affected by the tragedies, too, including Yankel Rosenbaum's brother, Norman, and Gavin Cato's father, Carmel. "Fires in the Mirror," a one woman show based on the interviews, was set to premiere at the Public Theater on April 30, 1992. But the day before, when a mostly white jury acquitted the four Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, the Public briefly closed over fears of racial violence. In May, "Fires in the Mirror," which had Smith playing nearly 30 real life characters, debuted to rave reviews. What makes the show "so moving and provocative, so remarkably free of cant and polemics," Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, "is its creator's ability to find the unexpected and unguarded in nearly each speaker and her objective grasp of the troubling big picture." In subsequent versions, even the one filmed in 1993 for "American Playhouse" on PBS, Smith changed the sequencing but continued to do the performance as a one woman show. Opening on Nov. 11 at the Signature Theater Company, "Fires in the Mirror" stars Michael Benjamin Washington ("The Boys in the Band"), as the rare solo actor besides Smith to take on this multifaceted role. Saheem Ali ("The Rolling Stone") is the director. The production kicks off Smith's Signature residency; her "Twilight: Los Angeles 1992," on the riots there, will be revived later in its season. In a lively interview at the theater last week, Smith and Washington talked about what a male actor brings to the play, his appreciation for the fluidity of her characters and what the play still has to teach us about race and American identity. An edited version of the conversation follows. Anna, I read an interview in which you described being disappointed when a man came up to you after an early performance and told you, "I wish that a male actor had been cast." How did that impact how you approached this revival? ANNA DEAVERE SMITH This was when it was at the Public Theater. This brother came over and said: "You know, I'm just curious. Didn't you meet any strong, black man that you wanted to include?" I was like: "Strong black men? Well, how about Mr. Cato? How about Conrad Muhammad, whether you agree with him or not. You can't say he's not strong. How about Al Sharpton?" I thought, "Oh, for him, if he doesn't see the black male body, he's not seeing himself." And so I don't count either. There is this feeling that only a black man could be a black man. That's not philosophically where I live. When we went looking for an individual who was going to play this part, everyone assumed it was going to be a woman. But I wanted to see if it makes a difference to have the presence of a black male body onstage. So I campaigned for them to see men as well as women in casting. Michael, you play so many characters a Haitian teenage girl, an anonymous Lubavitcher woman, Angela Davis, and black and Jewish adolescent boys. Were you at all concerned with taking on so many different types at once? MICHAEL BENJAMIN WASHINGTON Not at all. I grew up doing competitive speech and debate. "Fires in the Mirror" was a piece that was run on the circuit of our high school competitions. It was part of our training to become as fluid as possible, to play men and women and different races and ethnicities and religions and sexual orientations. So when I got this part, it was like a return home. Back then, it was considered part journalism, part theater. Now can we just call it a play? SMITH I'm happy to hear you call it a play. I've always wanted other actors to do this work. My early work had 20 actors in a group, and I was working toward having an acting troupe that would go around America and mirror cities and their incidents . What you see now came out of that process. WASHINGTON Dramaturgically, it's one of the soundest plays I've ever read. Every time I read it, which is every morning and every night, I find another thread in the tapestry that connects the themes. And since I didn't have access to all the tape recordings, because some of them no longer exist, I get to use my imagination. What's important to remember is that she was able to write it down on the page in poem form. If you follow the line breaks, which is following the logic of the thought, you can hear the person come alive. This play was performed at a really contentious moment in American history. How do you think it stands today? SMITH My theory about race in this country is it goes up and down. We have this period "Oh, post racial" and then all of a sudden: "Oh, no. We're not!" But I think it's always there. When Richard Green the former director of the Crown Heights Youth Collective says, "These kids are running to cops with nothing in their hands," that distinct image makes me think of right now. WASHINGTON Yeah. I would usually have a breakdown at that moment in the rehearsal room, and I was like, "Nope, you've got to keep going because these men lived it." SMITH It breaks your heart. Right? WASHINGTON It does. But they would fight through that emotionality and go into action. Even Mr. Cato at the very end, he's telling his story, but you can tell that he is not going to be victimized. He's going to figure out what he has to do to overcome. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
If that's why the documents are being kept from the public, the secrecy is underhanded. The war in Afghanistan has cost the United States far too much in lives and treasure 2,400 service members killed, 2 trillion spent to be used for cheap political manipulation. The deal has been broadly, if grimly, welcomed by a wide political spectrum at home, including this page. No, it is not a peace agreement the Taliban did not agree to recognize the current Afghan government, which was not involved in the negotiations, nor to place any limits on their own military capabilities. There is nothing in the deal about the rights of women, elections, a constitution or the role of religion. At its core, the deal is a mechanism allowing American and allied troops to cut their losses in a war that has gone on too long and offers no prospect of a military victory. But if Americans are ready to exit this war, they want to know that their government is at least leaving its Afghan allies a fighting chance against a ruthless Islamist organization. They want some assurance that the Trump administration has not simply given the Taliban license to break their pledges and restore their brutal dictatorship. The agreement is already tottering. Peace talks are delayed, and Kabul is in chaos as two contenders for the presidency, the incumbent Ashraf Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah, each claim to have won the election and held competing inaugurations on Monday. According to reporting by Al Jazeera, there have been nearly 80 attacks in Afghanistan since the agreement was signed. All that may be beyond America's ability to halt, and further proof of the wisdom of getting out. But it's incumbent on the United States to ensure that the Taliban meet their obligations under the agreement, including what the State Department described in a statement as "specific commitments by all parties to efforts to continue to reduce violence until a permanent and comprehensive cease fire is agreed in intra Afghan negotiations, while preserving the right of all parties to self defense." For that, the statement said, the United States has a "robust monitoring and verification mechanism." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Regarding President Trump's suggestion that U.S. soldiers should be used against American civilians who are protesting, and the resistance to this idea among military leaders like Gen. Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary: I cannot help but think of the Tiananmen era of China in 1989. Then, too, the government was calling for military force against its citizens. In the months and weeks leading up to the massacre, there were many instances of the People's Liberation Army standing down in the face of the protesters. The P.L.A. had a special relationship with ordinary Chinese citizens, a relationship that was permanently shattered when finally in and around Tiananmen Square the military moved with brutal force against democracy demonstrators. Our soldiers and leaders must surely understand the permanent damage that would be done to the reputation of the military if it allows itself to be used by Mr. Trump in this rash and plainly partisan manner. Michael A. Santoro Santa Clara, Calif. The writer, a professor of business ethics at Santa Clara University, is co editor in chief of the Business and Human Rights Journal. Gen. Jim Mattis's statement was brilliant and on point. The sad part is that the U.S. divide started long before Donald Trump. We have become a nation whose politics are dominated by ideologues. It gets worse with each election cycle. We have divided ourselves, and newspapers, TV, social media and the political class have exploited and encouraged this division and intolerance of "the other." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The perception of American ballet could be transformed if only money were invested in broadcasting its greatest live performances in HD to local cinemas and then transferring them to DVD, as the Royal Ballet in London and the Metropolitan Opera do. In this age, why should only a few thousand people have seen Ashley Bouder in "Donizetti Variations," Herman Cornejo in "Sinatra Suite," Jeanette Delgado in "Square Dance," Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild in "Duo Concertant," Sara Mearns in "Walpurgisnacht Ballet," Gillian Murphy in "Sylvia," Tiler Peck in the "Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux" or Teresa Reichlen in "Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2"? This spring in London, Natalia Osipova and Steven McRae led the Royal Ballet in a performance of Frederick Ashton's "La Fille Mal Gardee" that was shown around the world. That ballet touches zones of joy in ways rare in any art; and the many New Yorkers who watched it one morning at Symphony Space were further elated by that remarkable cast. The good news is that DVD and Blu ray copies (Opus Arte) are now available. There has been a whole series of broadcasts and DVDs from the Royal Ballet, recording dance works old and new. Members of my family in England now watch London theater, opera and ballet on a regular basis on screen in the rural town where I went to my first school. And friends all around America watch them too. It's impossible not to wish that the glories of American ballet today were reaching these and other audiences on both sides of the Atlantic | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In February, the spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk conducted a test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which successfully sent its payload into orbit around the sun. Its cargo included a Tesla Roadster which now looks like a sign of Musk's midlife crisis and a digital copy of the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. Two months later, Apple announced that it was developing a television version of the classic science fiction saga for its new streaming service. Previous attempts to adapt the series have failed, which might not have surprised Asimov, who, after rereading it, confessed, "I couldn't help noticing, of course, that there was not very much action in it." If the Foundation trilogy still appeals to a wide audience as well as to corporations hoping to associate themselves with its vision of tomorrow this has less to do with the plots or characters than with the books' fictional science of psychohistory, a system for predicting future events even thousands of years from the present. The notion captivated fans like the economist Paul Krugman, who recalled of the mathematician and psychologist portrayed by Asimov as the creator of psychohistory: "I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon." The books made an equally profound impression on a teenage Newt Gingrich, who later wrote, "For a high school student who loved history, Asimov's most exhilarating invention was the 'psychohistorian' Hari Seldon." The historical moment that inspired Asimov has striking parallels to our own. On Aug. 1, 1941, Asimov, then a 21 year old writer and graduate student at Columbia University, was riding the subway in New York. He was headed to his monthly meeting with John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, whom Asimov later praised as an intellectual mentor and "the most powerful force in science fiction ever." On the train, Asimov came up with the premise for a story about the decline of a galactic empire, and when he described it in the meeting that afternoon, he remembered, "Campbell blazed up as I had never seen him do." Yet Campbell was drawn less to the story line than to the opportunity it suggested for exploring the idea of forecasting the future, which doesn't seem to have been part of Asimov's initial pitch. The year before, shortly after German troops marched into Paris, Campbell had published an article by the writer L. Sprague de Camp on the theories of historians like Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee, who conceived of civilization as a series of recurring cycles. As the world entered an era of frightening instability, Campbell urged his writers to expand on a theme later expressed by a character in a story he printed by Jack Williamson: "It remained for me to reduce the laws of the rise and fall of human cultures to the exact science that I call destiny." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. At the office, the two men hashed out the rules of psychohistory, and Asimov returned the following month with the first story of the series, which was published in the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The details of psychohistory were vague, but Asimov left no doubt about its effectiveness: "A great psychologist such as Seldon could unravel human emotions and human reactions sufficiently to be able to predict broadly the historical sweep of the future." As Hitler rewrote the map of Europe, Asimov's story implied that such events could be foreseen, even altered before they occurred, and the idea resonated with readers who were justifiably afraid of what the future might bring. Asimov later acknowledged that psychohistory amounted to a kind of emotional reassurance: "Hitler kept winning victories, and the only way that I could possibly find life bearable at the time was to convince myself that no matter what he did, he was doomed to defeat in the end." The notion was framed as a science that could predict events centuries in advance, but it was driven by a desire to know what would happen in the war over the next few months a form of wishful thinking that is all but inevitable at times of profound uncertainty. Before the last presidential election, this impulse manifested itself in a widespread obsession with poll numbers and data journalism, as captured by a headline in Wired: "I Just Want Nate Silver to Tell Me It's All Going to Be Fine." As we all know by now, this approach has its limits, especially when it comes to "black swan" events that upend our expectations about how the future will resemble the past. Such surprises can be exciting in fiction, if not in real life, and Campbell eventually realized that a science of prediction, taken to its logical conclusion, led to predictable stories. In 1945, after four more installments in the Foundation series had appeared, he ordered a reluctant Asimov to "upset the Seldon Plan," the system of forecasts that Seldon's foundation of psychohistorians had devised to save civilization. After brooding over the problem, Asimov came up with the Mule, a mutant telepath who uses mind control to conquer the galaxy a black swan that Hari Seldon could never have foreseen. The Mule also suffers from megalomania, an inferiority complex and "an intensely psychopathic paranoia," which may strike some readers today as uncomfortably familiar. When the journal Science devoted several articles to prediction in an issue last year, it included both an obligatory nod to Asimov and a huge picture of Donald Trump. As the journalist Chris Taylor noted on Mashable, upset wins like Trump's make psychohistory seem "as useless, say, as pre election polling in November 2016." Fiction has an unsettling way of anticipating reality. In a later story in the series, a man who was brainwashed by the Mule reflects on how he's changed: "He had always loved the Mule. If there had ever been a time long before as long before as five short years when he had thought he hadn't loved him, that he had hated him that was just a horrid illusion." Meanwhile, in our timeline, Gingrich, a lifelong Asimov fan, marvels at our current president's "sixth sense about connecting with the American people," while our Republican senators stand exposed as men who saw themselves as Hari Seldons, but who were ultimately willing to throw in their lot with the Mule. As the midterms approach, many of us have returned to compulsively clicking on the latest polling data, but we have no better sense than our predecessors did of how the story will end. In one of the first editorials in Astounding after the war, across from the opening page of "The Mule," Campbell ventured a prediction of his own: "Civilization the civilization of Big Power balances, of war and peace and bad international manners, of intolerance and hates, of grinding poverty and useless luxury is dead." Hitler was gone, but the atomic bomb had introduced an existential threat of a kind we continue to face, and there was no guarantee of a happy ending. As Campbell reminded his readers: "The interregnum is beginning now, and we do not have a Hari Seldon." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Ask tap dancers what inspires them, and the conversation will probably turn to teachers, mentors, artistic ancestors. Perhaps more than any other, this is a dance form that knows where it came from, reveres its roots and doesn't relegate its history to the past. But that doesn't stop it from hurtling forward. On Tuesday at the Theater at the 14th Street Y, the American Tap Dance Foundation brought back "Rhythm in Motion," its second annual showcase of artists who are taking tap in new directions. In his introduction, Tony Waag, the organization's industrious, optimistic director, praised the evening's participants for proving that tap "can take you somewhere," can tell a story, can transcend "nostalgia and fluff" (although, he added, "We love that, too"). All eight works, created at the American Tap Dance Center over the past year (a feel good documentary chronicled the rehearsal process), lived up to that promise with varying degrees of finesse. This frequently dazzling program (the first of two) belongs to the present, a product of right now. What clearer way to signal "contemporary" than with sound manipulating machines and a voice over about "the new generation"? Both are featured in "Thank you Forest," in which the gargantuan Nicholas Young distorts and amplifies his bracing body percussion with three electronically rigged platforms. When five women in tight dresses join Mr. Young, the choreographer, the rhythmic results are astounding but the gender dynamic questionable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Whitney Museum of American Art is reopening on Thursday, with new safety guidelines that will require visitors to purchase timed tickets in advance. By the time the museum announced its closure in March, our critics had reviewed two remarkable shows: the first New York museum exhibition of the still mysterious painter Agnes Pelton; and a grand retrospective of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Below is an overview of those reviews, plus insights into another strong show at the Whitney, "Cauleen Smith: Mutualities." Pelton's exquisitely finished, otherworldly abstractions are the stuff of dreams, visions and mirages; they often came to the artist while she slept or meditated, and they arrived remarkably whole, as indicated by the sketches from her journal reproduced in the catalog, which originated, with the show, at the Phoenix Art Museum. (It was organized by Gilbert Vicario, chief curator there, and overseen at the Whitney by Barbara Haskell, with Sarah Humphreville.) There is nothing quite like Pelton's paintings in 20th century American art. It is not just their much admired spirituality that distinguishes them their blend of theosophy, Buddhism, astrology and the occult was not unusual among artists of the moment. It is rather the insouciant ease with which her images navigate between high and low, making that spirituality widely available, if not irresistible. In the 1929 work "Star Gazer," a multicolored bud stands like a pilgrim, offering itself to an azure vase, behind which brilliant red hills soften into the distance. A single star reinforces the symmetry of the scene. And then she does it again and again in deliriously perfect paintings like "Sand Storm" and "Messengers" (both from 1932) and "Even Song," from 1934, in which an immense vase aglow with inner fire releases tendrils of smoke, flanked by two white shapes reminiscent of O'Keeffe cattle skulls. After the last Pelton retrospective, 25 years ago, her achievement receded from view. That seems unlikely this time. The Whitney show underscores too tellingly the lesson of the Guggenheim's Hilma af Klint exhibition, that the largely all male narrative of modernist abstraction needs reworking, with much more credit to female artists and their implicitly feminist embrace of spirituality. Let's put it this way: Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton did not act alone. ROBERTA SMITH This exhibition, on view through Jan. 31, represents a decade of hard thought and labor, and that effort has paid off. The show is stupendous and complicated, and lands right on time. Just by existing, it does three vital things: It reshapes a stretch of art history to give credit where credit is due; it suggests that the Whitney is, at last, on the way to fully embracing American art; and it offers yet another argument for why this country's build the wall mania has to go. Judging by the story told here, we should be actively inviting our southern neighbor to enrich our cultural soil. That story begins in Mexico in the 1920s. After 10 years of civil war and revolution, the country's new government turned to art to invent and broadcast a unifying national self image, one that emphasized both its deep roots in Indigenous, pre Hispanic culture and the heroism of its recent revolutionary struggles. The exhibition's opening gallery suggest a fiesta atmosphere, as do the paintings gathered there: Alfredo Ramos Martinez's 1929 image of an itinerant flower vendor; a 1928 painting by Rivera of Oaxacan dancers in orchidaceous gowns; and, from the same year, a scene, in Rivera's smooth brushed, Paris trained style, of women harvesting cactus by the American artist Everett Gee Jackson. (Barbara Haskell is the show's originating curator, joined by Marcela Guerrero, Sarah Humphreville and Alana Hernandez.) It was important for a nation that identified itself with populist struggle to keep the memory of that struggle burning. You see this in a large charcoal painting study by Rivera of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata trampling an enemy underfoot. And in an inky Siqueiros portrait of the same leader, looking as blank eyed as a corpse. And in a spiky, depressed Orozco painting of the peasant guerrillas known as Zapatistas, their figures as stiff as the machetes they carry, locked in a grim forced march. By the time these pictures were made in 1931, two of the artists were working primarily in the United States; Siqueiros would arrive the next year. Orozco came first, to New York in 1927. There he taught easel painting and printmaking to a rapt cohort of local artists before moving on to California to execute a mural commission for Pomona College in Claremont a 1930 fresco called "Prometheus" that the teenage Jackson Pollock, then living in Los Angeles, saw and never forgot. The exhibition's final gallery is basically a Siqueiros Pollock showcase. It's set in New York, where, beginning in 1936, the two artists worked together as teacher and student. We see examples of the anti conventional techniques the muralist developed: spraying, splattered, dripping paint anything to make the results look unpolished and unsettling. And we see Pollock beginning to test out these unorthodoxies. It's clear that even in the 1930s, he was on fire. And the evidence is that Siqueiros held the igniting match. The film's coherence owes to its underpinning theme: how visionary practice overflows the boundaries of art, spirituality and politics, and gathers all these together when they're exercised with generosity. Narrations of texts by Rebecca Cox Jackson, a 19th century Black Shaker eldress, and words and music by Alice Coltrane are crucial to the weave. But this cumulative tour de force belongs to Ms. Smith, an experimental filmmaker at the pinnacle of her craft who has brilliantly paced many elements into a resonant journey in which the trace of fellow seekers, past and present, ultimately leads to freedom. The Whitney has installed "Sojourner" appropriately, with its own room and a large screen. Another Smith film, "Pilgrim," which revisits the ashram and the Shaker site in a melancholy register, suffers from its placement in a corridor that leads to the terrace. Also on view are Ms. Smith's drawings of book covers; in this series, "Firespitters," she celebrates books by some of her favorite poets and others that they, in turn, have recommended. A big show developing Ms. Smith's vision across mediums film, installation, performance, textile is desperately overdue in New York. But "Sojourner," a masterpiece, is essential balm and ballast for now. SIDDHARTHA MITTER 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212 570 3600, whitney.org. Purchase of timed tickets in advance is required. (Admission is pay what you wish through Sept. 28.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit...Leah Nash for The New York Times The Washoe people have long revered Lake Tahoe, a sapphire bowl nestled on the border of California and Nevada. So, too, the climbers rocking the vanlife, stand up paddle boarders, mountain bikers, outdoor enthusiasts and families alike who flock to the largest alpine lake in the country. Much of the 72 mile shoreline is steep, boulder strewn and thick with pine trees, making the sandy public beaches an even bigger draw. Favorites include Commons Beach and nearby Kings Beach, where I've skipped pebbles and pondered the granite peaks since childhood. Now my twin sons delight in the brisk waters too. Who goes there: Many visitors come from Northern California and Western Nevada, staying in vacation rental homes, funky motels or bougier options a short drive away at the mountain resorts of Northstar and Squaw Valley. Must eat: The tangy, tender ribs at Moe's Original Barbecue in Tahoe City. Grab a local microbrew and dine on the deck overlooking the lake. VANESSA HUA Packing for a beach weekend on this Marin County peninsula isn't like packing for beach weekends back East. Yes, I always bring a bathing suit, maybe even a sundress, but I don't always wear them. Woolly hats and hoodies and hiking shoes, though? Every time. Point Reyes isn't for lazing in the sun (which is inevitably steamrollered by the fog anyway). It's for braving the cold of the Pacific, trekking through herds of tule elk and slurping barbecued oysters on Tomales Bay. And on a rare superhot, Cape Cod level crowded Saturday: trying to find your friends, sans cell service, for sunset on Limantour's endless stretch of sand. Who goes there: Yoga bending and bay swimming retirees; couples who consider kayaking more romantic than wine tasting; and families who've owned creaky cabins for generations. Must eat: The owners of the famed Hog Island Oyster Farm in Marshall recently took over Tony's Seafood down the road and are now serving their barbecued sweetwaters, and more, on the water (without the wind). RACHEL LEVIN Californians are spoiled for beaches, which might explain why, even when it's 75 and sunny, there tends to be room to sprawl on the flat, wide stretch of sand that sits between Cabrillo Boulevard and the Pacific. Stearns Wharf, a 1,940 foot wooden pier that divides Santa Barbara's east and west beaches, has a handful of seafood joints as well as a natural history museum with an aquarium stocked with sharks, rays and sea urchins. But there could be another reason for the relative lack of crowds: the wealth of things to do a mere block from the ocean fine dining, wine tasting rooms and hawkers of upmarket street food abound in the "Funk Zone." Who goes there: Angelenos seeking a break from gridlock, "nature lovers" and pinot noir fiends who want a side of beach with their wine tastings. Transportation tip: If you're coming from Los Angeles, skip the traffic and take the train the Santa Barbara Amtrak station is a short walk from the beach. SHEILA MARIKAR In the summer, tourists from around the world crowd Rocky Mountain National Park, turning Colorado's best known getaway into an international traffic jam. For those looking for a quieter mountain escape and a beach there is Grand Lake. Located next to the southwest corner of the park, at more than 8,000 feet above sea level, the town sits on a large, deep lake surrounded by the Rockies. On offer: paddleboarding, kayaking, boating, fishing, swimming and hiking. Who goes there: Denver families; out of staters escaping Rocky Mountain National Park. Where to stay: Cabins, hotels and bed and breakfasts are all options, and the Western Riviera has lakefront access. For those who want an earthier experience, camp at nearby Lake Granby, where you can pitch a tent next to the beach. Uniform: This is not Aspen. Expect Birkenstocks and cowboy boots and wet suits. The water can be icy. Travel tip: Drive the slow route in from Denver by taking U.S. 36 West to U.S. 34 West. This takes you onto Trail Ridge Road, a 40 mile stretch that climbs 4,000 feet in minutes and offers a sweeping view into the center of the Rockies. During a few summer weeks, you'll find bursts of alpine wildflowers in red, pink and purple. JULIE TURKEWITZ Among the rolling scablands and flammable forests of the Inland Northwest, open water is as scarce as hoppy beer is ubiquitous. No wonder so many locals flee annually to Coeur d'Alene, where the lake is icy, the motorboats are loud and the vibe is about as chichi as North Idaho gets (think Jackson Hole for people who'd rather ride Jet Skis than horses). Once trafficked by miners and fur trappers, the 25 mile long lake today attracts a more glamorous set: Last year TMZ dubbed it New North Hollywood after Kanye and Kim spent July 4 in one of the mansions that dot some would say blight the lake. Who goes there: Tatted up teenagers from rural Idaho and R.V. ing retirees share the lake with wealthy Californians who consider Lake Tahoe passe. Not that they actually rub shoulders visitors to the lavish Coeur d'Alene Resort steer well clear of the plebes' campgrounds but, hey, we all pee in the same lake. Initiation rite: Cliff jump into Lake Coeur d'Alene from the rocks along the Tubbs Hill trail. BEN GOLDFARB Do you have a favorite beach vacation spot? Tell us in the comments. Please include your recommendations for the best thing to do, where to stay and places to eat. Rainy day on the beach might sound like a recipe for a wistful afternoon of "Baywatch" reruns in the hotel room. But at First Beach, in La Push, in the far northwest tip of Washington State, wet weather and storms are part of the draw and the charm for a certain caste of beachgoer I plead guilty who likes the idea of hunkering down in the presence of nature in full. Huge logs snaggle the sand in some places, washed in by storms. Crashing waves draw people from hundreds of miles away just to sit in awe, or test their fortitude with a dip in the icy Pacific waters. Who goes there: Sophisticated Chicago residents with second homes on the beach, Michigan families with three generations in tow and weekend visitors checking out the beach and bar scene. Where to stay: Lakeshore Lodging is the best bet for a house with your own beach access. Initiation rite: Stop by the Red Dock and enjoy a rum drink on Kalamazoo Lake. JENNIFER CONLIN Nestled on the shore of Lake Superior 40 miles from Canada, Grand Marais might not seem like an obvious choice for a beach vacation: The lake is frigid, and the shore is rock strewn and wild. But what Grand Marais lacks in sand and cabanas, it more than makes up for with awe inspiring beauty there are few things as beautiful as a glittering Lake Superior sunrise, especially from Artists' Point. The town is situated on the harbor, which provides the main access to the water and includes a pebbled shoreline that is often full of kids skipping stones and blissed out parents watching the waves roll in. Make sure to stop in to Drury Lane Books or the North House Folk School, where you can take classes in anything from boat building to basket weaving. Who goes there: The main road into town can be busy on weekends, as crowds flock from the Twin Cities. Must Eat: For the love of God, visit World's Best Donuts. PETER GEYE Sometimes drolly referred to as the "Iowa Great Lakes," Okoboji, a resort region made up of a chain of lakes and a handful of towns near the state's northern border, offers the perfect antidote to the "Midwestern work ethic." The action is on West Okoboji Lake, where you can stroll past shops and restaurants, grab a tavern sandwich and onion rings and visit the vintage Arnolds Park Amusement Park, complete with a wooden roller coaster, the Legend, which opened in 1930. The park's free beach is small but well loved, full of toddlers, high schoolers and grandparents wading, strutting or strolling in the sand. I've been returning to Okoboji since I was a kid, and now I take my own kids here there's a reassuring delight in returning to waters you'll never grow out of. Who goes there: Farm kids, suburban families, boaters and other landlocked Midwesterners from Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and South Dakota. Classic souvenir: Gear emblazoned with the logo of the (fictional) University of Okoboji. Must eat: The signature chocolate dipped, peanut encrusted ice cream pop from the Nutty Bar Stand, open since 1945. ANNA BAHNEY Door County, which juts out into Lake Michigan like a finger, still retains a strong vibe of the low key artists' retreat that it was in the 1960s, when my grandparents first visited and began a family tradition of spending summers there. Sister Bay, on the west side of the peninsula, feels like a healthy mix of the midcentury and the new. The beach, in the heart of the village, is pocket size (600 feet of shoreline), with a retro floating dock for diving into the bracing waters of Green Bay. Steps away is a nautical themed playground, an outdoor band shell and a wood fired pizza place, Wild Tomato. Get a pizza margherita to go, a bottle of sparkling rose from the Door County Creamery and have a B.Y.O.B. feast at one of the picnic tables by the water. (This is Wisconsin. Outdoor drinking is absolutely fine.) Who goes there: Families with young children driving up from places like Madison and Chicago; day trippers from Green Bay; retired locals who can deal with crowds. Initiation rite: Trying to catch a glimpse of the goats grazing on the grass lined roof of Al Johnson's, a 70 year old Swedish restaurant across the street from the beach. JULIE BOSMAN Lake life in Oklahoma and Texas is a peculiar mixture of scenic country living and adrenaline fueled debauchery. In no place is that lifestyle better exemplified than the tree lined choppy waters of Lake Texoma, situated on the border of the two states. As a college student, I found it was easy to be drawn in by the bonfires, beer and euphoria on the Islands, a string of sandy bluffs in the middle of the lake where partygoers and thong enthusiasts anchor their boats in lines to make party hopping easier. Along the sprawling lake's snaking arms, you'll find coves, bars, marinas and incredible barbecue (get the fried okra). The only rules: Wear a lot of sunscreen, and keep the cooler full of drinks and your boat full of gas you never know what distant beach will be calling your name. Who goes there: College students on break and locals who call it a second home. Transportation tip: The lake itself is large, and renting a boat is a must. Mill Creek Marina is popular and closest to the action. GRAHAM LEE BREWER Who goes there: Easily accessible both geographically and financially for families from across the Houston area and beyond, Galveston is a colorful playground for just about anyone. Must eat: My family always piles into the tiny Texas Star Bakery to load up on strawberry and Mexican wedding cookies and empanadas. RICK ROJAS To many families in the Southeast, "going to the beach" means jumping into a sleek dreadnought of an S.U.V. and gliding toward the studiously laid back stretch of Gulf Coast commonly known as 30A. Though some still refer to the Florida Panhandle as the Redneck Riviera, 30A a string of upscale beach communities between Destin and Panama City Beach has expunged, for better or worse, most whiffs of the classic workingman's beach holiday. So instead of airbrushed T shirts and Skee Ball halls there are roasted vegetable power bowls and a carefully curated Martha Stewart vision of beachiness. But the beach itself is still the real draw, replete with gentle, kid friendly water in Rothko bands of blue, frolicking dolphins and white sand as fine as the all purpose flour in the kitchen of a doting Southern mother. Who goes there: If you have a rooting interest in a Southeastern Conference football team, you've probably already been. Where to stay: Accommodations include the meticulously tasteful Seaside, (used as a Truman Show set!), and the austere, whitewashed development of Alys Beach, which feels like an Ayahuasca hallucination of Santorini, albeit with a donut truck. Must eat: Skip the overpriced restos and head to Buddy's Seafood Market in Santa Rosa Beach for sacks of fat, wild caught Florida shrimp. RICHARD FAUSSET The Mid Atlantic's answer to Fire Island, Rehoboth Beach is a land of young men in skimpy swimsuits strutting alongside aging gay couples in matching boat shoes and pastel polos. It's also a place where families find the nostalgic joys of an old school boardwalk where kids beg for saltwater taffy or another strip of Funland tickets while their parents plot a visit to Dogfish Head, an oddball destination brewery. At the end of the day, everyone crowds into the same festive, family friendly gay bars and casual seafood restaurants, sunburned and sandy. Who goes there: The closest Atlantic beach town to the D.C. Metro area, Rehoboth has long been a gay getaway and an affordable option for vacationing families. Initiation rite: Happy hour is practically a sport in Rehoboth, where nearly every restaurant or bar offers a seafood special: raw oysters, buckets of crab legs or heaping bowls of steamed clams. FREDA MOON Mention Asbury Park to any Jersey Shore regulars of a certain age, and they'll recall summer nights in packed clubs, sun kissed skin glowing with the sheen of rock 'n' roll sweat, hunting for a blessing from Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt or Southside Johnny. For a time, as this iconic city crumbled, those memories seemed confined to history. But visit Asbury Park now and see not just recovery but the Jersey Shore ideal: beaches packed towel to towel for 10 blocks, surfers picking waves off a jetty and a boardwalk lined with seafood restaurants, open air watering holes, a lemonade stand and a taco joint. And on those perfect days, the twang of an electric guitar still seeps out from the Stone Pony and soaks up the boardwalk. Who goes there: Tattooed and trendy visitors from Brooklyn and Manhattan, who stay at the stylish new and renovated hotels, mix with a large local L.G.B.T.Q. community and a growing influx of Shore regulars who frequent smaller inns and Airbnbs. Rainy day activity: Watching the wizards down at the Silverball pinball "museum" on the boardwalk, where you can play on machines dating back to the 1950s. Lodged like a piece of chewed taffy between the ocean and the Delaware Bay, the dune wrapped coastline of the "other Cape" is a getaway from getaways. It catches dregs of traffic from Atlantic City and Wildwood but is otherwise the calmest spot on the raucous Jersey Shore. Expect raw, low frills excursions with wistful sunsets, winding climbs through a still working lighthouse and crab stuffed everything at the Rusty Nail beach shack. A two mile promenade, built in the late 1800s, reveals the town's resort ier roots, complete with a family run fudge shop, coin arcades and grande dame hotels. Who goes there: A healthy mix of locals, East Coasters and Quebecois. Extended families snap up new age villas and Victorians, but rows of one room cottages dubbed tiny houses run plenty farther inland. Classic souvenir: Mine the bayside for "Cape May diamonds": slick, quartz pebbles that the Kechemeche tribe once used for trade. PURBITA SAHA For over a century Oak Bluffs, on the north shoreline of Martha's Vineyard, has been a summer vacation locale for African American families, with Inkwell Beach at the heart of the community. Today the town is a retreat of choice for both seasoned ladies with floppy straw hats and hip young families wearing Johnny Cupcakes T shirts. During August, black leisure life is on peak display along Circuit Avenue, a folksy commercial cluster of seasonal shops and cafes, and Inkwell Beach becomes a fanciful illustration of bliss set by the Atlantic Ocean, as golden rays brush babies and chatter bounces off bold hued umbrellas. I'm the mother sporting shoulder length cornrows, facedown in a book. Who goes there: In addition to native New Englanders, you'll find folks who hail from everywhere from the American South to Oakland, Calif. Must Eat: The whole fried clams from the takeout counter at Giordano's Restaurant (a mainstay since 1930). Ordering a mess of slightly sweet hand cut onion rings is mandatory. Classic souvenir: Original pieces from the art galleries situated in shingle style houses or the nearby Chilmark flea market. NICOLE TAYLOR Rainy day activity: The local library, with an upstairs ocean view, has everything from yoga to children's robot building. HELENE STAPINSKI Fire Island is a sliver of Eden just off Long Island, only a few dozen miles (and a ferry ride) from New York City but a universe away. It has historically been a refuge for gay and lesbian travelers, and as younger men my husband and I vacationed in the Pines, probably the Island's best known enclave. Since becoming parents, we've found the neighboring community of Cherry Grove, long a destination for lesbians, a little more welcoming. The beach is beautiful, clean and quiet, especially on weekdays. Rainy days or early mornings we stroll the circuit of elevated boardwalk that is the island's artery, looking at the birds, butterflies and deer who really own the place. There's nothing else to do, which is what makes it so perfect. Who goes there: Primarily but not exclusively queer travelers. Uniform: Anything goes. Shorts and flip flops or full drag, daring bathing suits or partial nudity. There's a prevailing attitude of come as you are that's truly wonderful. RUMAAN ALAM North Carolinians tend to be beach loyal. The rest of the world stops anywhere from the Outer Banks to Calabash, but Tar Heels pick their spot usually the one where their parents and grandparents went and return every year like sea turtles. Swarmed by surfers, boaters and day trippers, Wrightsville keeps its old school feel, with a 700 foot pier, originally built in the 1930s. The town was walloped by Hurricane Florence last fall, but most stores and restaurants have reopened for summer. Who goes there: Roughly halfway between Maine and South Florida, the area gets visitors from the Northeast alongside loyal Carolinians. Locals joke that I 40 from Raleigh to the coast is so wide, smooth and fast because of all the state legislators who scurry to the beaches for long weekends. Must eat: Hit Roberts Market, the tiny downtown grocery, for a tub of the best chicken salad in the South. It's the perfect thing to tuck into a boat cooler. KATHLEEN PURVIS There's a reason Folly Beach still proudly proclaims itself "the Edge of America." Barely 20 minutes from Charleston's Southern charms, this six mile stretch of mossy oaks, ramshackle cottages and white sand is equal parts old Southern vacation retreat and hip, foodie friendly surf town. Barefoot locals long ago recognized that this bohemian barrier island, former home of the "Porgy and Bess" co writer DuBose Heyward, was worth protecting. They've zealously guarded the wizened trees that shade Folly's interior and kept most of the beach open to surfers and surf schools creating a distinctly Caro Californian vibe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Tekashi69's rise to fame was sudden. His fall was faster. Brought up on a slew of federal firearm and racketeering charges and enticed to cooperate to reduce his sentence, Tekashi69 testified against nearly a dozen members of the Brooklyn gang Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods. Branded a rat, he's since become one of the most widely loathed figures in the world of hip hop. Gandhi's insights into Tekashi69's psyche are limited, and some of his conclusions about the disgraced rapper's character are bizarre. He admits to a feeling of "deep sympathy" for his subject, but the movie doesn't mount a particularly compelling defense. Gandhi also proposes that Tekashi69 may be a "cautionary tale" for the relentless pursuit of clout, and that feels closer to the truth he wanted the attention of the internet so badly that he didn't notice the likes turning to hate. 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Hulu. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Elena Ferrante, the Italian writer whose Neapolitan quartet of novels have sold more than 11 million copies worldwide and inspired last year's HBO series "My Brilliant Friend," has a new book slated for publication in the United States next year. The book, "The Lying Life of Adults," will come out on June 9, 2020, her United States publisher, Europa Editions, announced Monday. It is expected to be published next month in Italian. "The Lying Life of Adults" will be Ms. Ferrante's 10th book. According to Michael Reynolds, her editor at Europa, it will center on similar themes to her other books, which have explored female friendship, motherhood and class. Ms. Ferrante, who writes under a pseudonym, has gained a following over the last few years for her Neapolitan series, starting with the 2012 novel "My Brilliant Friend." The four books, which include "The Story of a New Name," "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay," and "The Story of the Lost Child," all follow the lifelong friendship of two women from Naples. The books have been released in dozens of countries 2.5 million copies sold in the United States and have prompted passionate debate about their story lines as well as the identity of their author. In a 2014 interview, Ms. Ferrante told The New York Times that she writes "to put my writing on display, not me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Alternately, officials said they would be willing to ship an experimental drug to the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where the baby is now being treated, if the Food and Drug Administration approves. American physicians would "advise their medical staff on administering it if they are willing to do so," the statement said. Charlie Gard was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of a disease called mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, believed to affect just over a dozen children worldwide. The syndrome prevents cells from producing the energy needed to sustain organs. The baby was brought to the London hospital on Oct. 11, when his parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, both in their 30s, noticed he was not growing and could not lift his head. He has been there since, breathing with the help of a ventilator and fed through a tube. He is deaf and suffers from persistent seizures, and appears to have suffered brain damage. Researchers at Columbia University have provided an experimental treatment to a child in Baltimore, Art Estopinan Jr., suffering from a similar but less severe form of the syndrome. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Grimes finds herself by losing herself: in concepts and characters and costumes, in surreally larger than life music, in overarching ideas and omens of apocalypse. That doesn't stop her from being playful, hedonistic or perverse when she chooses. "We party when the sun goes low/Imminent annihilation is so dope," she chirps in "My Name Is Dark," a souped up neo grunge rocker she released to preview "Miss Anthropocene," her fifth album. Soon she adds, "You know me as the girl who plays with fire," ending the phrase with a scream. The album cover shows a winged, Grimes like cartoon figure holding a candle as she apparently takes a selfie. Grimes, 31, is the Canadian songwriter Claire Boucher, who is also a one woman studio band, producer, engineer, graphic artist and video director. (She does allow guest mixers on "Miss Anthropocene.") Grimes was also a fashion adventurer and a fount of social media content long before the Tesla mogul Elon Musk became her boyfriend and she seemingly announced, with Twitter and Instagram photos in January, that she is pregnant. Grimes emerged from the arty side of electronic pop on her early albums, mingling her voice with lo fi electroacoustic constructions. Since her third album, "Visions" in 2012, she has operated in increasingly polished pop song forms packed with subtext. Her verses and choruses are neatly delineated and laced with hooks, though her concerns are rarely straightforward. Her voice is usually high and piping, conveying a girlish innocence that her lyrics often cheerfully belie. Her music fully exploits the possibilities of the digital studio: looping and layering, sampling and manipulating, smashing together disparate sounds and genres, mixing sweetness and abrasion. "Art Angels," her 2015 album, was giddy with possibilities, flaunting high impact beats and juggling thoughts about art, fame, gender roles and cultural impact. In her videos, Grimes has been a sword wielding warrior, a comic book superheroine, an angel, a schoolgirl, a blood drenched 18th century aristocrat and an assortment of spiky outfitted, talon fingered sci fi fashionistas. "Miss Anthropocene" is more somber. It's full of dire scenarios, deep bass abysses and floating soprano refrains. The album, Grimes said in Interview, is "a modern demonology or a modern pantheon where every song is about a different way to suffer or a different way to die." Miss Anthropocene is the goddess of climate crisis; the Anthropocene era is the epoch of human domination of the Earth. No Miss Anthropocene is mentioned directly in any of the songs, but a sense of impending doom fills most of the album: to be worried over in complicity, met head on, mourned or sardonically embraced. "This is the sound of the end of the world," Grimes sings in "Before the Fever," a murky, resolute waltz. The album's most straightforward song, "Delete Forever," addresses the deaths of opioid addiction. Over folky guitar chords (sampled not strummed) and later banjo and drums, Grimes dips into her lower register and admits to both her own temptations with drugs "I did everything/More lines on the mirror than a sonnet" and the grim results she has seen in her generation. Grimes doesn't make her songs depend on the words. The nervous energy, dread, anxiety, death wish and poppy nihilism are also in the sound of her music. Throughout "Miss Anthropocene," personal and societal disasters seem imminent. "New Gods" longs for deities who might offer salvation from catastrophe "I pray but the world burns," Grimes sings but new, dark spaces keep opening outward under its hesitantly stately chords. The intro to "4AEM" suggests an intersection of Baroque opera and Bollywood, with a feathery high melody over delicate arpeggios; then a brisk rock beat charges in and a nasal horde of Grimes's voices mimics an attack of insomniac jitters, announcing, "You're gonna get sick you don't know when." "Violence," a collaboration with the producer i o, is a queasy mixture of plea, flirtation, warning and dance tune, suggesting a sadomasochistic relationship or a mutual self destruction pact: "You feed off hurting me," Grimes sings, but later boasts, "I like it like that." Her voice hovers far above the rhythm track, a little like Donna Summer in "I Feel Love," but with far less promise of bliss. There is an Edenic moment on the album. "Idoru" begins with bird calls and little hoots from what sounds like an Asian mouth organ, and expands into rippling Minimalistic patterns of overlapping instruments and vocals. Grimes wafts her most guileless voice to urge, "We could play a beautiful game/You could chase me down in the name of love." But the object of her affection is a mass market fabrication. "Idoru" is the Japanese word for a groomed, manufactured pop idol, a new god intended for consumer worship; it's also the title of a William Gibson novel about an artificial, holographic pop star. The singer knows that her love is a hopeless illusion, and pretty as the music is in the moment, it can't stave off the inevitable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Ford said on Tuesday that it was recalling 65,000 Fusion cars from the 2014 15 model years in North America because of a problem with the ignition key. A software malfunction in the instrument cluster could make it possible for the key to be removed even if the vehicle's transmission is not in park, which could in turn allow the vehicle to roll away. (ABC News) Consumer Reports warned this week that counterfeit Chinese tires could pose a safety risk to consumers. The publication said the tires, which sold for as little as 89 each as tested, underperformed in basic safety and wear tests, and most likely came from manufacturers operating outside the bounds of American consumer protection laws. (Consumer Reports) Toyota announced pricing this week for its Mirai hydrogen fuel cell car, which the automaker says has a range of about 300 miles. Before state and federal tax credits, the Mirai will start at 57,500, and Toyota says it will offer a 499 a month lease. (The Wall Street Journal, subscription required) In other Toyota related news, a report from Automotive News says that about two thirds of the work force at the automaker's North American headquarters in Southern California may not relocate to Plano, Tex., when the company moves its North American operations center there in 2017. Toyota refuted the claim, made by an unnamed source, calling it speculation. (Dallas Business Journal) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Educators are giving YouTube long dismissed as a storehouse of whimsical, time wasting and occasionally distasteful videos another look. As Google, YouTube's parent company, fine tunes a portal that lets schools limit students' access to selected content, the video sharing Web site is gaining popularity as a trove of free educational materials. Schools across the country commonly block access to YouTube, shielding students from the irresistible distractions of, say, the cat in a T shirt playing a piano, or worse. So in December, Google started YouTube for Schools, offering schools the ability to pluck only the videos they want, scrubbed of all comments and linked only to other related educational videos. The program gives schools the ability to allow access to the YouTube EDU educational library, and to specific videos within its own network while blocking the general site. That has enabled teachers to bring popular educational videos from YouTube into classrooms, like the famous TED talk on population growth by Hans Rosling, the Swedish data presentation expert, or a series of hugely popular short videos about each element of the periodic table that somehow turns a rote memorization exercise into gripping entertainment. Slowly but surely, schools are taking down some of the barriers. "We're really excited about it here," said John Connolly, educational technology director for the Chicago Public Schools, which began allowing teachers to use YouTube for Schools last month. "We're making content and tools available to our teachers to help them increase and enhance their teaching." Chicago is perhaps the largest school district to loosen its restrictions, but school technology administrators say it is just a matter of time until more barriers fall. At a time when financially ailing states are slashing public education budgets and there is mounting evidence of a widening achievement gap between rich and poor students, schools can ill afford to turn off a free source of credible, often premium, educational tools. Robert Gulick, director of technology in the Washington Local Schools in Toledo, Ohio, said, "If we didn't have a system for filtering it, we couldn't partake, but we do now, and at a time of declining resources, it is a great way to find additional materials." Schools in the Toledo district previously allowed limited use of YouTube videos in class, but the process was cumbersome. Teachers logged onto a filtering system, and submitted a video for review by the technology department. If approved, the video could been viewed in the district's "safe videos library." In school districts where YouTube is blocked, teachers sometimes go to great lengths to show videos that they believe enhance their lessons. "It can be a challenge," said Jesse Spevack, assistant principal at the NYC iSchool in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan, which limits students' ability to navigate and post on the Web from computers in classrooms and labs. "I've tried opening the window and loading the video on a laptop, or bringing a video in on my phone or just asking the kids in my class, because there's always some proxy hack site that a student will know how to use." When those techniques fail, he puts links to lessons on Khan Academy, TED talk videos and HipHughesHistory, a set of history related videos created by a history teacher in Buffalo, on the class Web site, and asks students to view them outside of school. Mr. Spevack said he understands New York City's policy. "There is a lot of stuff on YouTube I wouldn't be comfortable with my students seeing," he said, "so I think trying to set up a way to differentiate content that is useful to schools and teachers from everything else is an awesome idea." Teachers have proved to be Google's best emissaries for the filtering system, said Angela Lin, head of YouTube EDU. "The challenge now is getting these enthusiastic individual teachers to work with administrators and I.T. staff to make this a reality." Google has begun to create and solicit new channels in the hope of increasing its appeal. For instance, TED, a nonprofit group that works to spread the ideas of thought leaders from around the world, on Monday will start a channel that will eventually have hundreds of videos as part of a new educational initiative. Brady Haran, the producer of the Deep Sky astronomy videos and Numberphile math videos, will develop two of the channels. "I don't really think of them as lessons or teaching," he said of his videos. "It's far more useful to show something that's tangential to the lesson, but supports it." Over the last two and a half years, though, school administrators, teachers and students worked to convince the district of the merits of some YouTube content. That led to the creation of a committee to consider how the site might be filtered and, eventually, to a pilot program that was used in 15 schools. "It has been a tremendous resource," said Allan Fluharty, a teacher at Prosser Career Academy on Chicago's West Side, which participated in the pilot. Mr. Fluharty is teaching the concept of retrograde motion in astronomy. "You can describe it a planet moving in one way and then all of a sudden moving the other way and kids will be fine with that," he said. "But if you can show them a video of it happening, then they will really understand what retrograde motion is in a much more meaningful way." His video playlist includes chemistry and quantum mechanics features, as well as videos on the history of astronomic theory. Now that teachers in Chicago have access to YouTube, Mr. Connolly said the district would consider giving students access, something Mr. Fluharty favors. "It's kind of like banning books, which we try to avoid," he said. More teachers are creating YouTube channels and playlists that are used as resources by other teachers and by Google itself. "Last summer," Ms. Lin said, "we had a YouTube Teachers Studio, where teachers came from all over to train on how to use YouTube in the classroom as well as how to create video themselves. What we quickly realized was that some of them were way further ahead than we had thought and had already come up with some really innovative uses." Karen Mensing, who teaches gifted second graders in the Paradise Valley Unified School District in Scottsdale, Ariz., has her own YouTube channel that includes videos like "Confusing Words Phrases" and "Using Technology in the Classroom." She makes videos of herself teaching so students who are absent can keep up, and of classroom activities so parents can see what's going on. "For Chinese New Year, I showed my homeroom class a short YouTube video of a New Year's parade in China," Ms. Mensing said. "That caught their attention so much more than seeing a picture in a textbook would have." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
While planning a trip to Peru last July, Brian Twite and his girlfriend, Constance Hansen, decided to skip hotels and stay with a host family. At 35 a night, the accommodation in the Santiago district of Cusco was a bargain. But the warmth of their host mother, a 65 year old widow named Marie, won them over. "We'd wake up and she'd yell, 'Chicos!', calling us for breakfast down the hall," said Mr. Twite, a Chicagoan who works in manufacturing logistics. After a long day of sightseeing in the Sacred Valley, Mr. Twite, 32, said he was grateful to come home and share highlights of his day with Marie and her son, Jonathan. "You sit down to a meal and talk about your day. They asked us, 'What did you do? Where did you go?' That was really magical, because you don't get that with a hotel." As travelers' appetites move toward wanting more intimate, locally driven and nongeneric experiences in recent years, homestays traditionally the fallback for backpackers and foreign exchange students are emerging in a new light. "It's the best way to get a feel for the place you're visiting," said Cliff Carruthers, a retired urban planner in York, England, who booked a homestay in Pakistan last month. At London based Wild Frontiers, a luxury tour planner, the founder, Jonny Bealby, says 80 percent of his tours today include at least some kind of homestay. In some cases, popular itineraries have been revised to include a homestay; a walking tour of Palestine that's been offered since 2013, for example, now features a village stay in Sanur. "It's being driven by the customer," Mr. Bealby said, noting that travelers from London, Boston and New York seem willing to forgo the conveniences of a plush hotel every night. "What they want to do is connect." Homestays also have a practical appeal. With Cuba's limited hotel inventory, homestays are often the best option. One boutique travel company, Pelorus, pairs guests with specific hosts and neighborhoods, depending on their interests food, music or retracing family roots. "Homestays allow us to be more flexible," Jimmy Carroll, the company's co founder, said. Of course, there is also the benefit of going further off the grid. Iya Romantei, a rustic 1950s cabin with tatami floors and firewood stacked outside the front door, is a hotel in Japan's Iya Valley, an ancient forested landscape six hours from Tokyo. It's also the home of Yasuki Shinomiya. Inside, guests sleep on futon mats and gather around the sunken irori hearth for home cooked meals. Favorite activities include raiding the "sake shrine" (a comprehensive collection with more than 300 bottles) and soaking in the outdoor goemonburo (coal fired hot tub) while enjoying plunging views of the surrounding mountains. Since 2012, more than 30 nationalities have logged entries in Mr. Shinomiya's guest book, and guests range in age from 2 to 80. An Australian woman came recently, he said, after booking one night at a fancy hotel in Tokyo. The reason for the detour? "She wanted to feel nature." On a trip to Granada in October, 30 year old Jeanne Volomi chose a particular homestay because the owner had a son the same age as her own. "He got language immersion and a roomful of toys to play with. It was pretty ideal," said Ms. Volomi, who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo. Toys weren't the only draw: the two story house was tucked in the quiet Albayzin district, with plenty of space and a patio overlooking the entire city. Before booking, Ms. Volomi asked the homeowner to send her a short video of herself walking through the house, which she did. "I feel like people are looking for safety," Ms. Volomi said. In June, Wild Frontiers created an itinerary that whisks travelers off to a remote corner of the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. During the 11 day "Altai Adventure" tour, guests spend the night in basic pine huts alongside their host, a 42 year old Altaian wolf hunter named Valerii Orgunov. (Meals are served in a separate felt yurt that once belonged to Valerii's grandparents.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
BOSTON The Beanpot remains the most parochial of college hockey tournaments, as much a part of Boston's fabric as the marathon in April and the Fourth of July fireworks on the Charles River Esplanade. The latest version of the 68 year old tournament, which annually pits four powerhouse programs Boston College, Boston University, Harvard and Northeastern against one another for local bragging rights, will end on Monday night when Northeastern faces Boston University in the championship game. The four campuses are situated within eight miles of one another, but whereas most of their players once hailed almost exclusively from Eastern Massachusetts, the Beanpot is no longer strictly a neighborhood affair contested by players who drop their "r's" and spend summers on Cape Cod. Boston University secured its spot in the final when the freshman Wilmer Skoog, the pride of Tyreso, Sweden, scored in the second overtime of a semifinal last Monday to upset Boston College, which was ranked fourth in the country. "It was the biggest game of my life," Skoog said afterward. Also celebrating the Terriers' victory was the Finnish defenseman Kasper Kotkansalo, another of a record 117 European born skaters who are playing Division I hockey this season, nine more than last season's record number, according to College Hockey Inc. Driving this trend is the increased skill level of European players and better coaching on the continent, as well as the desire of college coaches to improve their rosters, wherever the player is from. But it isn't just Europeans who are changing the face of the Beanpot. What proved to be the winning goal in Northeastern's 3 1 semifinal victory over Harvard was scored by Brendan van Riemsdyk, a graduate transfer from the University of New Hampshire, who was playing in his first Beanpot game. One of Harvard's captains, Nathan Krusko, is from Alpharetta, Ga. Boston University's captain, Patrick Curry, hails from Schaumburg, Ill., and David Cotton, who leads Boston College's team, comes from Parker, Texas, not far from the Oklahoma border. Joining Cotton on the Eagles' roster are players from Florida, Georgia, Idaho and Las Vegas. Boston College Coach Jerry York, who owns college hockey's wins record with 1,083 career victories, grew up in nearby Watertown, went to B.C. High and played for the Eagles from 1963 to '67, said he had seen the Beanpot evolve. "In earlier years, Northeastern typically got its out of state kids from upper Ontario," York said. "Harvard and B.U. would get kids from Minnesota, Canada and occasionally Europe, and we joined the mix about 20 years ago," said York, who has three Finns on this year's roster. "One of the great things about Europeans playing in the U.S. is it's helped the local kids get better." According to York, many local recruits have stepped up their training year round in order to secure roster spots alongside players from afar. There has been an emphasis on better training, working with private coaches and attending summer hockey camps. Whether they're from Stockholm, Scottsdale or St. Paul, the outsiders say they quickly digest the importance of the Beanpot on their campuses. "It doesn't take too much time to learn how special it is," said Harvard's Krusko, who was named the tournament's most valuable player as a freshman in 2017, when the Crimson won their first Beanpot in 24 years. The coaches are able to convey the significance of this annual clash to their players because they've lived it themselves. All four played for the teams they now oversee, and all but Northeastern's Jim Madigan, a native of Canada, grew up in Eastern Massachusetts. Boston University's Albie O'Connell played on four straight Beanpot winning teams. Harvard's Ted Donato won as a player in 1989 and as the coach in 2017. Madigan was on two Beanpot champions as a player and has won the last two as the coach. York won twice as a player and nine times as a coach, most recently in 2016. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Not long ago, the struggle between racial liberalism and racial conservatism was a battle fought inside the Democratic and Republican parties. Now it's a battle fought between the parties. Even with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, the importance of ethnicity and race in American politics is growing, not diminishing. As African Americans and other racial minorities increasingly occupy positions of influence and authority in American society, they also face backlash from those on the right whose opposition to ceding power is fierce, whether their opposition is veiled or out in the open. This opposition is now lodged solidly in the contemporary Republican Party, and the two parties regularly confront each other with rising intensity over the issue. The many sources of frustration for Black Americans are evident in "The Economic State of Black America in 2020," a report released on Feb. 14 by Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia and vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee. None Black household income grew from 1980 to 2018 by over 11,000 annually in inflation adjusted dollars, but whites did even better. In 2018, "for every dollar earned by the typical white household, the typical Black household earned only 59 cents. This is significantly worse than in 2000, when the typical Black household earned about 65 cents for every dollar earned by a White household." None Racial disparities are largest for the most successful: both the racial pay gap and the racial wealth gap are "largest for college graduates." Whites with degrees made 60,000 in 2018 compared with 49,000 for African Americans. None Less than "half of Black families own their homes (42 percent), compared with nearly three quarters of white families (73 percent). This is a significant decline from the peak Black homeownership rate of 49 percent in 2004." With virtually all opinion polls suggesting that the Biden Harris team is at present positioned to win 7.6 points ahead at RealClearPolitics, with FiveThirtyEight putting the odds of a Biden victory at 73 to 27 Trump and the Republican Party are pulling out the heavy artillery. The tactics they are using targeted at voters of color and their supporters include poll watchers to challenge ballots cast by minority voters, voter ID requirements, a tooth and nail fight against voting by mail, a war against the Postal Service and claims of voter fraud to lay the groundwork for discrediting, or refusing to acknowledge, the outcome of the election. Ron Brownstein summarized this strategy perfectly in The Atlantic as the "weaponization of the federal government." Fanning the flames of racial animosity lies at the core of Trump's election strategy, as it did in 2016. In their 2019 paper, "The Increasing Racialization of American Electoral Politics, 1988 2016," Adam M. Enders and Jamil S. Scott, political scientists at the University of Louisville and Georgetown, found that The relationships between racial resentment and partisan and ideological self identifications, evaluations of the major party presidential candidates, and attitudes about health insurance and governmental services have strengthened each subsequent year beginning in 1988 through 2016. Enders and Scott look first at statistics: The marginal effect of racial resentment on partisan self identifications increased from 0.01 in 1988 to 0.14 in 2016, and the same effect on ideological self identifications increased from 0.05 to 0.12 over the same time period. Enders expanded on the numbers in an email: The strength of the relationship between racial resentment and partisanship increased by more than 600 percent from 1988 2016, while the relationship between racial resentment and ideological self identifications more than doubled, increasing 177 percent. Moreover, the strength of the relationship between racial resentment and partisanship actually eclipsed that between racial resentment and ideology, the former starting weaker and ending stronger than the latter. "Race relations and racism have emerged as a focus of American politics in the last twenty years unlike at any time since the Civil Rights movement," Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, wrote in an email. The lack of progress in the incorporation and equalization of African Americans is the broad background condition, put into ever starker relief in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The rise of white Evangelicals on the Republican side with white Christian churches being one of the most racially segregated sectors of voluntary associations has profoundly deepened the racial divide. As the share of whites in the population steadily declines, the demographic impact is significant. This fall, for the first time, the overall number of Latino, African American, and Asian students in public K 12 classrooms is expected to surpass the number of non Hispanic whites. The new collective majority of minority schoolchildren projected to be 50.3 percent by the National Center for Education Statistics is driven largely by dramatic growth in the Latino population and a decline in the white population, and, to a lesser degree, by a steady rise in the number of Asian Americans. African American growth has been mostly flat. In a June 2019 report, Pew found that the "U.S. foreign born population reached a record 44.4 million in 2017." From 1970 to 2017, the immigrant share of the population grew from 4.7 to 13.6 percent. The intensity of the conflict between the two parties over demographic change has been a driving force shaping politics, often in ways that on the surface seem peripheral to race. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Asked to describe how the politics of today compare to the politics of 1988, when Biden first ran for president, Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, replied that what stands out to him is how animosity is driving the current versions of both parties. The electorate in 1988 was far more likely to view the other side with respect. Voters believed that both candidates sought to better the American way of life. Contrast this with today's candidates who are both focused on corralling anger to their advantage, with Biden searching for those angry with Trump and Trump searching for angry middle class whites. Over the past three plus decades, the Democratic Party has been on the leading edge of change, one step or more ahead of the nation as a whole. Democrats have become decisively more liberal, especially on cultural issues; more dependent on states on the East and West Coasts; more diverse; more ideologically orthodox, less religious, less white; and in many cases more highly educated. "The race and religion gap jumps out to me, specifically white Christians vs. everyone else," Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote in an email describing how the parties have changed in recent decades. While "the Republican Party doesn't look terribly different than it did in the 1980s: about 88 percent were white Christians in 1984; in 2018, it's still 75 percent." In contrast, the Democrats have changed radically, Burge continued: "About 68 percent of Democrats were white Christians in 1984, today it's 38 percent." From 1991 to 2018, the share of Democrats who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has grown from 10 percent to 38 percent. While a majority of Democrats say they believe in God, the party has become the home on nonbelievers. In an interview with The Times, Robert P. Jones, founder and C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, described in blunt terms the underlying rationale for the alliance between the Republican Party and white evangelicals: "The new culture war is not abortion or same sex marriage, the new culture war is about preserving a white, Christian America," Jones said, adding That's what Trump's really leading with. The "Make America Great Again" thing the way that was heard by most white evangelical Protestants, white working class folks, was saying: "I'm going to preserve the composition of the country." As the Republican Party has continued to remain fairly homogeneous and has organized itself, fueled by decades of deploying the so called Southern Strategy, around a politics of white racial grievances, the Democratic Party has become the default party for those who do not share those grievances and has come to more closely reflect the changing demographics of the country. As a result, the Democratic coalition, in terms of race and religion, is notably more diverse today than it was when Biden first ran for president in 1988. And issues of religious and racial identity are more salient today in defining the partisan divides. As the share of white Christians has eroded within the Democratic Party, the share of Democrats describing themselves as liberal has more than doubled. In 1994, only a quarter of Democrats described themselves as liberal. An equal share called themselves conservatives, and 48 percent said they were moderates according to Gallup. Today, the party has moved decisively leftward in terms of ideological self identification. By the start of 2020, Gallup found that 53 percent of Democrats called themselves liberal, while self identified Democratic conservatives had shrunk to 11 percent and moderates fell to 35 percent. White Democrats are driving an increase in liberal self identification: over the past 20 years, Gallup found that the percentage of white Democrats who said they were liberal grew by 20 points, from 34 to 54 percent. For Black Democrats, the increase was 9 points, from 29 to 38 percent, and for Hispanic Democrats, the increase was 8 points, from 25 to 33 percent. In 1992, six out of ten Democrats had only a high school degrees or less, while 17 percent had taken some college courses and 24 percent had college degrees. 26 percent of Republican voters had degrees Since then, the Democrats have eclipsed Republicans as the party of the college educated. The percentage of Democrats with college degrees grew from 22 to 37 percent, from 1999 to 2019, according to Pew. Over the same period, the percentage of Republicans with college degrees barely changed, growing by one point to 27 percent. Crucial to the changing ideology and demographics of the Democratic electorate is the geographic shift in the base of the Party. While more complex analytically, one of the most significant developments in recent years is the decline of what political professionals call "cross pressured voters." Christopher Warshaw, a political scientist at George Washington University, described this phenomenon in an email: At the mass level, people in the two parties have become much more sorted ideologically during this time period. For instance, in the 1980s, there were many pro life Democrats and pro choice Republicans, whereas today the vast majority of pro choice people are Democrats and pro life people are Republicans. People are much more 'one dimensional' in their preferences today. That is, there used to be many people that were liberals on economic issues and conservatives on cultural issues such as abortion or race (or vice versa). But today most people have views that largely fall upon a single ideological/partisan continuum. So if you're liberal on cultural/social issues you're probably also liberal on most economic issues. Warshaw, writing with Devin Caughey and James Dunham, political scientists at M.I.T., describe what they call "the ideological nationalization" of politics. They found that in the 1950s, the economic conservatism of voters and elected officials was "unrelated to their racial and social conservatism." Among Senators, these "three domains had become roughly equally correlated by 1970" and, moving more slowly, "by the 2000s, mass conservatism was just as highly correlated." In other words, conservatism and liberalism both became one dimensional consistent across economics, race and sociocultural issues: By century's end, conservatism at both levels had become highly correlated across domains. The primary difference between elite and mass trends is that ideological conflict collapsed to one dimension earlier in the Senate than in the public. Kitschelt, whom I cited above, described this trend in different terms: Political scientists like to compare the effect of "mutually reinforcing" and "crosscutting" divides in a polity, with the typical hypothesis being that crosscutting divides contain and dampen societal conflict, while mutually reinforcing divides deepen it. political divisions in the United States became progressively less crosscutting than reinforcing and have now configured the country into two warlike camps, with deep mutual hatred and anger, more so than at any time since the Civil War. In one camp, he wrote are the highly educated; postindustrial economic sectors; nonreligious/atheist or non Christian religion; almost all ethnic minorities; sympathy with non heterosexual orientations; the more urban than rural; the distinctively younger; and the slightly more female, particularly if single. In the opposing camp are the less educated; industrial and agro /extractive industries economic sectors; evangelical Christians; European stock whites; heterosexuals; the more rural than urban; the distinctively older; the slightly more male, particularly if married. While left and right have multiple concerns, among the most prominent of these is race and its first cousin immigration, and both of these concerns have become more and more central to partisan politics. Democrats twice nominated and the nation elected Barack Obama as its first Black president. On Wednesday night, the party will nominate Kamala Harris for vice president, the first woman of color Indian American and African American on a national party ticket. As never before, Democratic racial liberalism is challenging Republican racial conservatism. The election will not bring this conflict to an end, but the outcome will determine whether the nation moves forward or backward in the struggle to realize the promise of full equality that has been central to the country since its founding. 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 |
The Art of the Internet, Restored and Out in the World For many people, the term "net art" might conjure specific associations from a certain era the '90s, hackers, Berlin, Web 1.0. These things are part of the story of digital born art, but only part of it. Net art was never a specific scene: It was born before the internet existed and continues to be created today, worldwide, in disparate media. A project called Net Art Anthology, curated by Rhizome, an affiliate of the New Museum, was an attempt to tentatively create a historical understanding of net art. Unveiled online over the course of two years, the effort involved the archiving and restoration of 100 digital artworks often a laborious process because browsers that could display the pieces no longer existed, or other aspects of the technology had to be preserved or emulated. "It was intended really as a way of filling in major gaps in public understanding of and access to net art's past, to make it more of a resource for the present for artists and people interested in internet culture and how we got here," said Michael Connor, artistic director of Rhizome. It's easy to forget that before the internet, there were other networks. One of the more advanced was videotex, an information system invented in the 1970s that relied on a television or terminal you could communicate, read the news, publish content or look up telephone numbers. In France, the government distributed more than a million such terminals, called Minitel, to citizens. After a version called Videotexto was implemented in Brazil in 1982, mostly in public spaces like libraries and airports, the performance and multimedia artist Eduardo Kac became interested in the technology. Mr. Kac said he had an epiphany of sorts: Physical artworks could exist in a whole new sphere. "We were no longer preoccupied with dematerialization," he said. "We could now produce immaterial work directly." In 1985, Mr. Kac made the work "Reabracadabra," a digital poem created for Videotexto that he described as a " personal , formal attempt at holographic work." This piece will be on display in the New Museum show on a terminal, after Mr. Kac painstakingly restored and recreated his videotex pieces over the course of 15 years. "A lot of my work is about looking back," said Olia Lialina, who is best known for her 1996 piece "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War." Part of Net Art Anthology, that interactive browser based work tells the story of a woman's awkward reunion with a soldier. Her work in the New Museum show is drawn from a different project. Ms. Lialina and her partner , Dragan Espenschied, created a research blog in early 2011 and a Tumblr account in 2013 called "One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age" to preserve and explore the archives of GeoCities, an early web hosting service. Yahoo! bought GeoCities in 1999 and shut it down in 2009, leading to the disappearance of much of its data except for one terabyte preserved by volunteer archivists. Ms. Lialina and Mr. Espenschied are interested in the early web aesthetic as a form of folk art the much mocked and also beloved Web 1.0 design, with its rainbows, glitter, neon clip art and random text placement. Their Tumblr automatically generates screenshots of old sites from the GeoCities archive. "It's an attempt to preserve this moment of these very special web pages, made by people who had such hope and excitement about the web," Ms. Lialina said. In the museum, two slide shows will play next to each other, one featuring screenshots of pages promising updates, and the other displaying announcements from sites that were shutting down. The preservation and cataloging of net art was difficult, even at the time when it was first made. Brian Mackern turned that process into its own art form with his "netart latino database," created in 2000 and updated until 2005. "It was a bit of a response or a statement because at that time there were a lot of stories and narratives about the history of net art going on, and Latin America was kept a bit aside," Mr. Mackern, a Uruguayan artist, said. He compiled hundreds of links to these projects, and created a site map for them based on Joaquin Torres Garcia's 1943 drawing "America Invertida," which orients the south toward the north. Many of the links are now dead, though Mr. Mackern said he sees this as a piece of the project. The Taiwanese artist Shu Lea Cheang combined net art with performance in "Garlic Rich Air," which imagined a postcapitalist society in the year 2030, when currency would be replaced by garlic. It was inspired by economic crashes that happened around 2000, including one in Argentina, where alternative economies emerged when the currency was devalued. "When that happens, you invent your own currency locally," Ms. Cheang said, adding, "Why not use garlic?" With friends of hers who were farmers, Ms. Cheang grew and harvested bulbs in upstate New York; online, a game allowed users to exchange digital goods for garlic. Ms. Cheang and others drove a pickup truck around New York City in 2002, asking people what they would trade for garlic. (One woman offered several strands of her hair.) The truck also provided mobile Wi Fi a kind of digitized farm stand that operated outside traditional systems of exchange. "Rather than treating this project archaeologically, we wanted to revitalize and reperform it," Mr. Connor, Rhizome's artistic director, said. For the New Museum show, the artist Melanie Hoff has created a new online game inspired by Ms. Cheang's garlic trading universe, and a tricycle in the museum lobby will pay homage to the truck. The storefront in Queens was mysterious. For six months, Sister Unn's stood on Austin Street in Forest Hills , backlit only by a refrigerator and filled with vases of wilted roses. In the center was a lavender colored rose preserved in ice. But you couldn't enter the store it was like a mausoleum, or something frozen in time. This was the physical aspect of a project by Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski, who lived in Forest Hills and were struck by an abandoned flower shop. "It looked like it had been packed up overnight," Ms. Rogers said. That, coupled with their reading of a classic Norwegian novel Tarjei Vesaas's "The Ice Palace," whose main characters are named Siss and Unn inspired this strange memorial. The artists also made a website where each visitor can add a pixelated icon of a rose to an online gallery. Outside the storefront, neighborhood residents began dropping off flowers, candles and other gifts. "That was when it felt like maybe we had actually produced something that was successful, in being a place of memorial or to reflect on personal loss, or to be a quiet space of mourning within the street," Ms. Rogers said. A version of the storefront will be recreated inside the New Museum a brief resurrection of an open ended memorial that lives on, online. The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics Through May 26 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Ronald Feldman, the pioneering contemporary art dealer, has stepped down from his role of director at the Ronald Feldman Gallery after nearly 50 years at the helm, for health reasons. Mr. Feldman, 82, founded the gallery with his wife, Frayda Feldman, in 1971 on East 74th Street. In 1982, the gallery moved to SoHo, establishing an early beachhead in Lower Manhattan that seemed to suit an institution that broke boundaries and championed a wide range of risk taking artists and their (often political) works. Some of his early partnerships included the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, the performance artist Chris Burden, the feminist artist Hannah Wilke , and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the longtime unpaid artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation. He and Ms. Feldman also developed a friendship with Andy Warhol in the 1980s, and Mr. Feldman commissioned Warhol to do portfolios of paintings and prints. "He is so passionate about championing ideas based work, and advancing and creating platforms for artists that truly engage with the widest range of social issues and political causes in our world," said Mark Feldman , his eldest son, who has taken over the gallery's operations. "He supported artists who were really groundbreaking and willing to take risks." Mr. Feldman came to art after a career as a corporate lawyer, which made him "miserable," Mark Feldman said in an interview on Thursday. He quit and pursued his passion for fine art. In addition to his work in the gallery, Mr. Feldman was politically engaged, eventually serving on the National Council on the Arts under President Bill Clinton for five years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
New York City Ballet will not be returning to the David H. Koch Theater this fall, but the company's coming digital season will culminate with performances of new dances by Pam Tanowitz, Jamar Roberts, Justin Peck, Sidra Bell and Andrea Miller. The commissioned ballets will be recorded outdoors in New York City and shared with audiences, one each night, from Oct. 27 to Oct. 31. "We couldn't go a whole year without creating new works," Jonathan Stafford, City Ballet's artistic director, said in an interview. "It's simply not in our D.N.A." The choreographers chosen for this mini festival, all of whom were set to make new pieces for the company this year before the pandemic struck, face various restrictions as they prepare their new works. The number of dancers in each piece has been capped at four, and dancers who are not in a couple or otherwise in isolation together must maintain social distancing while performing. "The choreographers, I think, are really into the limitations," said Wendy Whelan, the company's associate artistic director. "They all seem very keen to play within the rules and create with the new elements." The online season, City Ballet's second since performing arts venues were shut down around the world because of the coronavirus, will begin on Sept. 28 and will feature, for its first four weeks, past performances captured by the company's cameras. Programs will debut on YouTube, Facebook and the City Ballet website each Tuesday at 8 p.m. and remain available for a week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The American voters chose to give the Democrats the White House, but denied them a mandate. Even if Democrats somehow squeak out wins in both Georgia Senate races, the Senate will then pivot on Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Not only does this take much of the liberal wish list off the table, it also makes deep structural reform of federal institutions impossible. There will be no new voting rights act in honor of the late Representative John Lewis, no statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and no Supreme Court packing. For that matter, the filibuster will not be eliminated, which would have been the essential predicate for all of those other changes as well as expansive climate or health care legislation. Anything that Democrats want to do that requires a party line vote is forlorn. In response to this disappointment, a number of left of center commentators have concluded that "democracy lost" in 2020. Our constitutional order, they argue, is rotten and an obstacle to majority rule. The Electoral College and the overrepresentation of small, mostly conservative states in the Senate is an outrage. As Ezra Klein has argued, our constitution "forces Democrats to win voters ranging from the far left to the center right, but Republicans can win with only right of center votes." As a consequence, liberals can't have nice things. The argument is logical, but it is also a strategic dead end. The United States is and in almost any plausible scenario will continue to be a federal republic. We are constituted as a nation of states, not as a single unitary community, a fact that is hard wired into our constitutional structure. Liberals may not like this, just as a man standing outside in a rainstorm does not like the fact he is getting soaked. But instead of cursing the rain, it makes a lot more sense for him to find an umbrella. Liberals need to adjust their political strategy and ideological ambitions to the country and political system we actually have, and make the most of it, rather than cursing that which they cannot change. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." There are certainly some profound democratic deficits built into our federal constitution. Even federal systems like Germany, Australia and Canada do not have the same degree of representative inequality that the Electoral College and Senate generate between a citizen living in California versus one living in Wyoming. There is also next to nothing we can do about it. The same system that generates this pattern of representative inequality also means that short of violent revolution the beneficiaries of our federal system will not allow for it to be changed, except at the margins. If Democrats at some point get a chance to get full representation for Washington, D.C., they should take it. But beyond that, there are few if any pathways to changing either the Electoral College or the structure of the Senate. So any near term strategy for Democrats must accept these structures as fixed. The initial step in accepting our federal system is for Democrats to commit to organizing everywhere even places where we are not currently competitive. Led by Stacey Abrams, Democrats have organized and hustled in Georgia over the last couple of years, and the results are hard to argue with. Joe Biden should beg Ms. Abrams (or another proven organizer like Ben Wikler, the head of the party in Wisconsin) to take over the Democratic National Committee, dust off Howard Dean's planning memos for a "50 state strategy" from the mid 2000s and commit to building the formal apparatus of the Democratic Party everywhere. This party building needs to happen across the country, even where the odds seem slim, in order to help Democrats prospect for attractive issues in red states (and red places in purple states), to identify attractive candidates and groom them for higher office and to build networks of citizens who can work together to rebuild the party at the local level. A necessary corollary of a 50 state strategy is accepting that creating a serious governing majority means putting together a policy agenda that recognizes where voters are, not where they would be if we had a fairer system of representation. That starts with an economics that addresses the radically uneven patterns of economic growth in the country, even if doing so means attending disproportionately to the interests of voters outside of the Democrats' urban base. That is not a matter of justice, necessarily, but brute electoral arithmetic. That does not mean being moderate, in the sense of incremental and toothless. From the financialization of our economy to our constrictive intellectual property laws to our unjust tax competition between states for firms, the economic deck really is stacked for the concentration of economic power on the coasts. Democrats in the places where the party is less competitive should be far more populist on these and other related issues, even if it puts them in tension with the party's megadonors. We also need to recognize that the cultural values and rituals of Democrats in cosmopolitan cities and liberal institutional bastions like universities do not seem to travel well. Slogans like "defund the police" and "abolish ICE" may be mobilizing in places where three quarters of voters pull the lever for Democrats. But it is madness to imagine that they could be the platform of a competitive party nationwide. That doesn't mean that we should expect members of the Squad not to speak out for fear of freaking out the small town voters that Democrats like Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia represent. But it does mean recognizing that, unlike the more homogeneous Republicans, the Democrats have no choice but to be a confederation of subcultures. We need to develop internal norms of pluralism and coexistence appropriate to a loose band of affiliated politicians and groups, rather than those of a party that is the arm of a cohesive social movement. The Democratic Party has a future within the constitution the country has. The question for the next decade is, will we withdraw into pointless dreams of sweeping constitutional change or make our peace with our country and its constitution, seeking allies in unlikely places and squeezing out what progress we can get by organizing everywhere, even when the odds of success seem slim. Steven Teles, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, is an author, with Robert Saldin, of the book "Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
John Cassavetes's "Opening Night" ha s long been catnip to theater fans. It's easy to see why: The 1977 film is about an aging, hard drinking actress, portrayed by Gena Rowlands, who becomes increasingly unhinged during a play's out of town tryout. Cassavetes shot a lot of it in front of a live audience in Pasadena, Calif., and the result constantly threads the line between fantasy and reality, performance and life. Coincidentally, New Yorkers will be able to see two different theatrical works drawing from "Opening Night" this fall. And they are radically different from each other: The Australian import "The Second Woman" has a cast of 101 one woman and 100 men and runs 24 hours; a French "Opening Night" features three actors and lasts 75 minutes. (The original film has a large ensemble and goes on for two and a half hours.) "This is an experiment: don't expect the movie or you'll be disappointed," the Parisian director Cyril Teste said of his "Opening Night" a warning that applies to both of the new shows. In comparison, Ivo van Hove's adaptation of "Opening Night," seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008, feels downright conventional in retrospect, despite his reputation as an iconoclast. Ms. Adjani is exactly the kind of outsize performer suited to the flamboyant role of Myrtle Gordon, a leading lady haunted by a young fan who was hit by a car after trying to talk to Myrtle. And the role spoke to the French actress. "I found personal echoes with her journey, her emotions, her relations with the director and the other actors, her self investigation," Ms. Adjani said in an email. "Why do I do this job? What's the point? Do I trust myself enough?" But Mr. Teste did not want a star vehicle. He tried to evoke not so much Cassavetes's film as the director's process. His "Opening Night," which he described in a FaceTime interview from France as a "filmic performance," mixes live video and actors, and a degree of uncertainty was baked into the production. Back in February, Mr. Teste, 44, scrapped everything after the dress rehearsal and had his cast basically rehearse a new version live during the show's premiere, in Belgium. Since then, each evening has been slightly different from the previous one. "Everything that changes on that stage, including my part, is fine with me because that's how you stay alert," Ms. Adjani said. "My pledge as an actress is to never settle down." This approach is not far from Cassavetes's own modus operandi: He often re edited and sometimes even reshot his films, most notoriously "Shadows." "Doing the film isn't interesting I hope what we do is a tribute to Cassavetes via his working methods," Mr. Teste said. "The process is the show." Despite its high tech trappings, his production is very much actor centered, as was Cassavetes's work. "John's writing is all about characterization, to let actors perform in ways that they seldom get a chance to," said Al Ruban, 86, a longtime Cassavetes associate who was the producer and cinematographer on "Opening Night" and is in charge of licensing rights to the filmmaker's oeuvre. "When we shot the movies, it was really the characters driving each one of these productions. I think stage directors see that and see opportunities for them and for actors." "Opening Night" deals with the complicated professional and personal relationships among writers, directors and performers, but also between men and women which may explain why the film, in which Myrtle has fraught relationships with the men around her, is an object of scrutiny right now. That was one of the aspects that drew the young Australian theatermakers Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, both of whom wrote and directed "The Second Woman." Their show borrows its title from the play within the film but uses fewer than 10 lines from the original. Speaking by Skype from Adelaide, Australia, where she and Ms. Randall were developing a new project, Ms. Breckon, 35, described the one scene as "two people negotiating a relation that has become toxic but are sufficiently attached to each other not to leave. The idea is that small emotional interactions say something about the way men and women treat each other in a particular cultural context." Ideally the men are nonactors, sourced from "spaces and communities that don't necessarily have a strong relationship with the theater," as Ms. Randall, 33, put it. Their not being used to the stage helps spark variations and physical improvisation that evoke the often unpredictable energy of the Cassavetes piece , she said. The length adds an extra layer of potential tension. "It's rough, it's very hard to do because that element of surprise is really intense when you're also quite fatigued and something radical comes in or something more aggressive or more sexual," Ms. Randall said. (She created the part, but in Brooklyn there will be a new actress, whose name has not been announced yet.) Ms. Breckon and Ms. Randall often talked about their production in abstract terms, with references to the Meisner acting technique and theories of the male gaze. Audience members unfamiliar with academic research should not fret, though: "The piece is quite funny," Ms. Randall said, laughing. "It's light and entertaining!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
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