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A Family of Four, Then Five, Now Six Back when Vanessa Hylande and Jesse Peckham lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, rents there were rising steeply, so they decided they might as well move to Manhattan. They rented a two bedroom two bath apartment in the Archstone on West End Avenue at 64th Street. Their sons, Emmett, now 10, and Elliot, now 6, shared the master bedroom, "because we wanted the toys out of the living room," Ms. Hylande said. By the time their third son, Julian, now 2, arrived, they were facing a big rent increase. (Two bedrooms in the Archstone now start at 5,400 a month.) So they moved farther uptown to one of the few postwar high rises in the West 80s. They paid around 3,000 for a two bedroom with one bathroom. Mr. Peckham called the situation "a serious downgrade," though they lived on a high floor with great views. Sirens often screamed up Amsterdam Avenue, Ms. Hylande said, and "I was getting really sick of carrying enormous bags of laundry down to the laundry room, even though it was in the building." After a year there, with a fourth child on the way, the family went on the hunt for more space. They thought they could afford a three bedroom rental somewhere in Upper Manhattan, where the A train would take them straight to SoHo, where the couple direct an a cappella singing group called Khorikos. Mr. Peckham is its founder and conductor. The two first met when Ms. Hylande, a singer and a dancer, auditioned. She is now the chief executive of the group, and he is an executive in the dairy industry. Upper Manhattan was also an easy ride to the kids' school and to the Lincoln Center area, where the boys take violin lessons and where Emmett sings in the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus. "We really love that area," Ms. Hylande said. "We just can't afford to move there." The couple sought a rent in the mid 2,000 range. A three bedroom would do, as would a two bedroom convertible to three. "We needed the separate room so the older kids could close the door and not have the little one scribbling all over their homework," Ms. Hylande said. They hoped for a location near a park so the boys could play outside, and longed for a second bathroom. But rents, even far uptown, weren't as low as they expected. For around 2,400, they found a three bedroom near the Morris Jumel Mansion in the West 160s and left a deposit. But the rent was bid up. By that time, their second choice, a three bedroom in the far West 140s, near Riverbank State Park, was taken. One day, on the way to see an apartment, they took the wrong train and found themselves in Central Harlem. They walked past Jackie Robinson Park, which has play equipment, ball fields and even a swimming pool. They found the neighborhood beautiful, with plenty of new buildings. At the same time, they realized it would be better in the long run to buy a place, so they wouldn't be priced out by unpredictable rents. So, last fall, with interest rates low, the couple decided to look in Central Harlem. Their budget was around 500,000. Because they had a fourth child on the way, "I felt so bad they were even considering a two bedroom two bath," said Charlie Lewis of Warburg Realty, the building's sales manager. "They were looking at how they could convert the living room into a bedroom, and brought measuring tapes." Other offers were coming in, Mr. Lewis said. The two bedroom sold. The couple loved the look of Bradhurst Court nearby, but they didn't quite meet the co op's income restrictions. They realized, too, that its location on the main thoroughfare, 145th Street, might be noisy. The Park Lane Condominium on West 112th Street was a small renovated building with prewar charm. But the elevator was too small for a double stroller. Three bedrooms there were in the 500,000s and 600,000s, while two bedrooms were listed around 500,000, but those layouts didn't easily allow for the conversion of a third bedroom. The same problem arose at Odell Clark Place, a condominium on West 138th Street three bedrooms were too pricey and two bedrooms didn't convert well. Back at Ellington on the Park, the couple negotiated for the three bedroom, and bought it for 580,000. They closed last winter, just before their fourth son, Liam, was born. Now they are glad they decided to buy. "In almost every way it is better than I thought it would be," Mr. Peckham said. "This is probably the best investment I ever made in my life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Ms. Whang moved to Los Angeles in 1998 to pursue a career in show business. The daughter of a Navy engineer who moved the family frequently, she was determined to keep friendships throughout adulthood. "Suzanne is the kind of human being who will spoon feed you when you are a mess," the actress Vanessa Marcil, who worked with Ms. Whang on "Las Vegas," told The New York Times in 2013, when Ms. Whang married her second husband, Jay Nickerson. (The pair filed for divorce in 2015, according to court records. ) On set and beyond, Ms. Whang developed a reputation as an exceptionally positive person. In the fall of 2006, when she learned that she had breast cancer, she said she told the doctor, "This will be great material for my act." Though at first she was private about the diagnosis, she eventually did precisely that, incorporating her health problems in her stand up routine. She credited her paternal grandfather, a prominent Presbyterian leader in Washington, with teaching her how to incorporate comedy into unlikely topics. People would tell him that church was not funny, she told the The New York Times in 2013, and he would remind her that without humor, people would fall asleep. Five years after her diagnosis, doctors told her she was free of cancer. But it returned last October, according to Mr. Culbertson, who represented her for nearly 25 years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The top and bottom of Jupiter are pockmarked with a chaotic melange of swirls that are immense storms hundreds of miles across. The planet's interior core appears bigger than expected, and swirling electric currents are generating surprisingly strong magnetic fields. Auroral lights shining in Jupiter's polar regions seem to operate in a reverse way to those on Earth. And a belt of ammonia may be rising around the planet's equator. Those are some early findings of scientists working on NASA's Juno mission, an orbiter that arrived at Jupiter last July. Juno takes 53 days to loop around Jupiter in a highly elliptical orbit, but most of the data gathering occurs in two hour bursts when it accelerates to 129,000 miles an hour and dives to within about 2,600 miles of the cloud tops. The spacecraft's instruments peer far beneath, giving glimpses of the inside of the planet, the solar system's largest. Two papers, one describing the polar storms, the other examining the magnetic fields and auroras, appear in this week's issue of the journal Science. A cornucopia of 44 additional papers are being published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The papers describe findings based largely on the first two close passes of Jupiter in which Juno was able to make measurements. Juno has now made five, with the next on July 11, when it is to pass directly over the Great Red Spot. Scientists are puzzled to see that the familiar striped cloud patterns of Jupiter may be only skin deep. An instrument collecting microwave emissions probes the top layers of the atmosphere, but that data does not reflect what is seen in the clouds. "These zones and belts either don't exist or this instrument isn't sensitive to it for some reason," Dr. Bolton said. The microwave instrument did detect a band of ammonia rising in the equatorial region from at least a couple of hundred miles down "the most startling feature that was brand new and unexpected," Dr. Bolton said. In measuring the gravitational field, scientists hoped to learn what lies at the center of Jupiter. Some predicted a rocky core, perhaps the size of Earth or several Earths. Others expected no rocky core, but hydrogen, the planet's main constituent, all the way down. "Most scientists were in one camp or the other," Dr. Bolton said, "and what we found is neither is true." Instead, the data suggests a "fuzzy core," one that is larger than expected, but without a sharp boundary, perhaps partly dissolved. The magnetic field is also not simple. "What scientists expected was that Jupiter was relatively boring and uniform inside," Dr. Bolton said. "What we're finding is anything but that is the truth." John E.P. Connerney, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the deputy principal investigator on the mission, reported spatial variations in the magnetic field that were much stronger than expected in some areas and much weaker in others. The magnetic field is generated by the churning of electrically charged fluids at the core. On Earth, that comes from the convection of molten iron in the outer core. On Jupiter, the currents come from hydrogen, which turns into a metallic fluid under crushing pressures. During a close flyby of Jupiter in August last year, one of Juno's cameras took this picture, the first to Jupiter's wispy ring seen from the inside looking out. The spatial variations suggest that the dynamo of churning currents is larger than had been thought and may extend beyond the metallic hydrogen region, Dr. Connerney said. For the magnetic field and gravity measurements, a glitch that has greatly slowed the pace of data gathering could turn out to be beneficial. A final engine burn last October was to put Juno in a 14 day orbit, but a pair of sluggish valves in the fuel system led mission managers to forgo that, and Juno remains in the 53 day orbit instead. The spacecraft is to make the same number of orbits and collect the same amount of data, and the longer mission means that Juno may be able to detect slow changes in the magnetic field. More surprises were found at the top and bottom of Jupiter. With Juno's orbits passing almost directly over the north and south poles, scientists can better study the powerful auroras, which are generated by charged particles traveling along Jupiter's magnetic field and colliding with molecules in the atmosphere. In Earth's case, charged particles from the sun speeding outward through the solar system are diverted by the planet's magnetic field toward the poles, generating light when they collide with air molecules. The expectation was that the same would occur at Jupiter, and it does to some extent. But Juno also detected charged particles mostly electrons traveling in the opposite direction at Jupiter: out of the planet into space. "It's a 180 degree turnabout from the way we were thinking about those emissions," Dr. Connerney said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The new operators of Elvis Presley's estate and brand took their show on the road for the first time with a nine month exhibition of Presley artifacts at London's O2 arena that began in December. Now Graceland, the longtime Presley home that opened to the public in Memphis in 1982, five years after the star's death, will establish a second permanent home in Las Vegas, where the singer had some of his greatest triumphs. The plan will not be officially announced until later this month, but Joel Weinshanker, the managing partner of Graceland, said that the new Presley outpost featuring an exhibition space and live performances will be at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort and Casino on the site of the former International Hotel, where Presley played a record 58 consecutive sold out shows in 1969. Presley would eventually play 837 performances in Las Vegas. "We have everything from a 35 foot high outdoor sign promoting Elvis's show there to a Stutz car he had delivered to him when he first performed in Las Vegas in 1956," Mr. Weinshanker said, adding that the live performances will be "Elvis related but not Elvis impersonators." "Once you give someone a taste of this they'll want more," he said. Mr. Weinshanker, who is also founder of the National Entertainment Collectibles Association, partnered in late 2013 with the Authentic Brands Group, which bought 85 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises. Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, owns the rest as well as Graceland and its artifacts. Mr. Weinshanker oversees Graceland and live events, while Authentic Brands Group manages licensing and intellectual property. There has been plenty going on at Graceland since Mr. Weinshanker and Authentic Brands Group took over. In August, they introduced an interactive iPad tour guide and the Graceland Archive, in which curators exhibit and discuss material not on permanent display. Additionally, the Guest House, a 450 room hotel and conference center that is owned by Elvis Presley Enterprises, is scheduled to open in 2016 to replace the 128 room Heartbreak Hotel. It is Memphis's largest new hotel since the Peabody Hotel was built in 1925 and features a 500 seat theater. "The Heartbreak Hotel did not have enough rooms and was not comfortable enough for the 21st century," Mr. Weinshanker said, adding that the city embraced the new hotel because Memphis often loses overflow Graceland hotel business to other towns in Tennessee and Mississippi. "We have firefighters and policemen wanting to hold conventions here and there is never enough room," he said. He promised that some of the "kitsch factor" would survive in the special Elvis suites, which will have things like televisions in the ceiling, the way Presley liked it. One recent decision by Elvis Presley Enterprises has made some fans unhappy. It is planning to evict Presley's two planes, the Lisa Marie and the Hound Dog II, from Graceland, inspiring a Save the Planes campaign on Facebook that alternates between pleading and vitriol. OKC Partnership, which owns the planes, has been trying to sell them for months. Presley owned the planes only during his final two years and barely used the smaller Hound Dog; he spent more time aboard the Lisa Marie, which he customized with gold bathroom fixtures, four TVs and a stereo with 52 speakers. His father, Vernon, later sold both, but after Graceland opened to the public, a leasing deal led to their display. Mr. Weinshanker said only half of Graceland guests visited the planes; as the only items Graceland does not own, improving the exhibit was difficult, he said. Elvis Presley Enterprises sent a letter last April telling OKC that a new Graceland Archive would replace the airplanes on the premium ticket package and asking the company to "make arrangements for the removal of the airplanes and the restoration of the site." OKC previously tried unsuccessfully to sell the planes through an aviation website and Ebay. Now Julien's Auctions, a well known seller of entertainment memorabilia, has put them back on the block, with a silent bidding auction that was scheduled to conclude on Feb. 2. Darren Julien, president and chief executive of Julien's Auctions, said he could not disclose the reserve but said that "the planes are priced to sell." "Whoever buys these planes is buying an instant museum or attraction. People will travel all over the world to see them wherever they are located," he said. Stefaan Demarest of Belgium, one of Save the Planes' leading voices, said that there is only one suitable location. "Graceland wouldn't be the same without the planes," he wrote in an email. Presley, he said, "always called the 'Lisa Marie' his 'Flying Graceland.' '' and added that "When one visits the planes, you step into Elvis' world. Removing them would be destroying a part of his world that we love." Mr. Weinshanker said that the space would be part of a new exhibit area "that is completely indoors and climate controlled so when it's 20 degrees or 90 degrees out you can have a comfortable experience." Although details are not settled, construction is scheduled to begin late this year. Still, depending on the outcome of the auction, Mr. Weinshanker said, he is willing to negotiate new terms to keep the planes. "We are open to everything," he said. "If there is an opportunity to keep them then we would." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It's hard to know why anyone thought "Lucy in the Sky," a drama about an astronaut's fall, would make a good movie. Was it the appeal of outer space, with its beauties, mysteries and infinite possibilities? Or was it the faintly exotic if rather basic romance that blows up so many lives? Was it the diapers? Inspired by real events, as movies like to say, "Lucy" selectively draws on the bleak story of Capt. Lisa M. Nowak , an astronaut who earned national notoriety in 2007 when she was arrested after attacking Colleen Shipman , an Air Force captain she saw as a romantic rival. Nowak was charged on several counts, including attempted kidnapping; later, she was charged with attempted murder. It was wild and weird. She had gone full on Jason Bourne for the attack, dressed in a wig and a trench coat, and armed with a BB gun, a steel mallet and a buck knife. But all that anyone cared about were the diapers she said she wore on a long, futile drive the night of the assault. Some of this makes it into "Lucy in the Sky," which takes curious liberties (no diapers) with the real story to not much point. Its main draws are Natalie Portman, who plays a sympathetic variation on Nowak called Lucy Cola ; and Jon Hamm as her swaggering heartbreaker, Mark Goodwin, another astronaut. In their shared and individual scenes, these nicely synced performers create an emotional and psychological foundation for the story that holds your attention even as the rest of the movie collapses around them. It's a dispiriting mess and waste of talent, sunk by a lack of focus, misguided choices and insistently unproductive, at times incoherent clashing tones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
By any measure, the Spanish real estate boom was one of the headiest ever. Spurred by record low interest rates, Spaniards piled into holiday villas along the Costa Blanca, gaudy apartments in Madrid and millions of starter homes throughout the country. But since the frenzy drove Spanish home prices to a peak in 2007, they have fallen by at least one fourth, and the bottom seems nowhere in sight. As Spain endures its second recession in three years and unemployment nears 25 percent, an increasing number of debt heavy Spaniards can no longer meet monthly payments on the mortgages that their banks were all too eager to give. With a rising portion of Spain's 663 billion euros, or 876 billion, in home mortgages at risk of default, many economists say it is only a matter of time before some of Spain's biggest banks will need a bailout. And the Spanish government, staggering under its own debt and budget deficit burdens, may not have the money to come to the rescue. The implications of all this for the rest of Europe were a prime topic at last weekend's meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington. The big fear is that the European Union will need to step in with a Spanish bailout one much bigger than any of those already extended to Ireland, Greece and Portugal. Two years ago, when Ireland's banks succumbed to a real estate bust, the Irish government's rescue effort eventually forced it to take 80 billion euros from the European Union and I.M.F. Analysts say that a similar rescue for Spain would cost at least 200 billion euros, or 264 billion nearly double the 110 billion euros given to Greece, whose debt travails had long raised the question of which European economy might be next to require a rescue. Last week, the Spanish central bank reported that the nation's nonperforming loans had hit the highest level since 1994. And while the government's official estimate of mortgages going unpaid is only 3 percent, Mr. Hugh and other economists say the actual numbers are probably much higher in double digits for some lenders. There is no doubt that the number of new home mortgages has fallen off sharply in Spain. The number of mortgages signed in February was down by 46 percent from a year earlier the biggest drop since such figures were first published in 2004, Spain's national statistics institute said Tuesday. The real estate boom, while it lasted, gave Spain the world's highest rate of homeownership with more than 8 of every 10 Spanish households owning the places they lived. But lenders are now depending on people like Marta Afuera Pons, who is juggling two mortgages one on her house, another on an investment property that went sour and is about 350,000 euros in debt. In late 2010, Ms. Afuera Pons, who had just lost her job as a social security administrator, stopped making payments on the mortgage of 132,000 euros that she and the man she lived with had taken out for their home in Tordera, near Barcelona. Separately, they still owe 185,000 euros to the same bank after receiving further financing in 2007 to buy a house that was never built, because the developer went bankrupt a year later. Like many Spaniards, Ms. Afuera Pons is hitting the two year limit for receiving unemployment benefits. This month, she will receive her last 1,100 euro unemployment check. 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. Bank regulators released a 'road map' for crypto regulation that is short on details. Finding no buyers for her Tordera house, Ms. Afuera Pons says she is trying to persuade her lender, the savings banks BMN, to take back the mortgage and the property. She would then probably move in with her mother, because her partner left last summer for Brazil and is now married there. Ms. Afuera Pons says she accepts blame for her financial disaster but considers her lender, BMN, the enabler. She has joined an association of mortgage holders that has been staging demonstrations to demand relief. "It's now easy to say that wanting this new house was a risky investment, but the bank fully supported this idea," she said. "Everybody lost any sense of caution, starting with the banks." BMN said it would not comment on Ms. Afuera Pons's specific case. But a spokesman, Miguel Portilla, said that the bank's policy was "always to try to find every way possible to avoid throwing people out of their home and on to the street." Real estate experts in Spain estimated that about 300,000 properties have been repossessed since the onset of the financial crisis in 2007. Unwilling to take losses, banks have mainly held onto these homes. But now, facing pressure to raise more capital, banks are rushing to unload them, offering discounts of up to 60 percent. Many investors also see a warning signal in the deteriorating performance of Spain's 100 billion euro mortgage backed securities market. Much as their counterparts did in the United States during the American housing bubble, Spanish banks sold off the mortgages to financial companies, which repackaged them into bundles of securitized mortgages investment vehicles that paid high yields and were bought by insurance companies and European pension funds and other institutional investors. There was supposed to be a crucial difference, though. In the United States, many of the mortgages underlying the securities bundles that turned bad were subprime, meaning the home buying borrowers had dubious credit histories. In Spain, the mortgages used as collateral for the bundled securities were considered to be prime lent only to creditworthy borrowers. But with unemployment nearing 25 percent, the distinction between a prime and subprime borrower can be hazy. Many of these mortgages are now failing, prompting a wave of downgrades by ratings agencies like Standard Poor's and Moody's, which had given the mortgage backed securities top notch ratings during the boom, just as they did in the United States. Investors are anxiously monitoring the Web site of a Spanish association of fund managers who deal in the mortgage securities. In some cases, up to 14 percent of the assets in certain mortgage pools are more than 90 days overdue. "It's really scary," said an investment banker who buys and sells the securities but who was not authorized by his bank to discuss them publicly. "Every quarter the numbers get worse." According to the association's Web site, among the worst performing mortgage securities in investment funds are the ones backed by Bankia, which is now Spain's largest provider of home loans. Bankia said it does not comment on the performance of such funds. Until recently, banks had been buying back, at full price, some of the worst performing mortgage securities in order to protect the mostly foreign investors that hold them, in hopes of preserving the banks' investment standing. But as more loans default and capital becomes even more scarce, some banks are now facing up to the inevitable and are offering to buy back these securities at discounts of 10 to 30 percent. Many analysts say that official data on Spanish real estate prices, down by 25 percent according to some measures, do not truly reflect how far prices have actually plummeted. Until price adjustments are made, and banks and securities investors book their losses as happened in Ireland and the United States economists say it will be impossible for the Spanish economy to truly recover. As those losses are acknowledged, though, the question then becomes whether Spain can afford to absorb them. The government's own bank bailout fund is running out of money. In a telling contradiction, Madrid has proposed that the country's banks lend the government the money to keep the fund going. Borja Mateo, author of a recent book on the Spanish real estate market, said there were now 1.9 million housing units for sale in Spain and about 3.9 million that could go on to the market in the coming years. With current housing demand now at about 175,000 units a year, Mr. Mateo predicted the glut would cause home prices eventually to fall by 60 percent. Because the typical Spaniard has 80 percent of his or her assets tied up in real estate, a plunge in prices of this magnitude would be devastating. "What we are seeing," he said, "is a massive impoverishment of a country." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
A new species of nerd and an old patriarch of blockbuster cinema are joining forces in pursuit of global box office domination this weekend. "Ready Player One," Steven Spielberg's much heralded return to the sci fi action adventure genre (it officially hit theaters on Thursday), makes high frame rate popcorn fare out of the Ernest Cline novel of the same name a paean to retro video games and pop culture ephemera that captivated, and eventually polarized, readers after it was published in 2011. At a time when nerd culture from "Transformers," to Marvel and DC's super films, to "Star Wars" already has Hollywood in a seemingly unbreakable five finger death grip, "Ready Player One" tries to reach in two directions at once. It giddily embraces the modern film industry's dependence on prefabricated (and largely male centric) fandoms; but it also gestures toward more innocent times, invoking memories of Mr. Spielberg's earnest early filmography. How does it compare to the novel? How much nerd porn is one person (or one nation) built to handle? And is the film's prominent vision of virtual reality the future that we really want? If you haven't seen "Ready Player One," consider this your content advisory sticker: this article is for discussing its plot and biggest "Did I just see what I think I saw?" moments in detail. SPOILERS AHOY. Mr. Cline, working with Zak Penn ("The Incredible Hulk," "Alphas"), co wrote the screenplay, so it's no surprise that both film and novel closely mirror one another in terms of basic plot, characters and overarching themes. In the story, teenage Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his gamer friends Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Aech (Lena Waithe), Daito (Win Morisaki) and Shoto (Philip Zhao) team up to find an Easter egg hidden in a global virtual reality community known as the Oasis, thereby unlocking a vast fortune. The main characters and James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the late founder of the Oasis are obsessed with '80s pop culture trivia, and the book is crammed with references that don't make it into the movie (which, to a greater extent than the book, is bound by trademark law). Conversely, the movie introduces or expands several settings and characters that are nowhere or minimal in the book. If you read the book, what did you think of the trade offs? Did you miss the "WarGames" and Dungeons and Dragons story lines from the book? Additionally, there are major differences in some of the character arcs. In the book, Ogden Morrow, Halliday's business partner and co founder of the Oasis, is an active presence in the story; Daito is murdered by the corporate thugs at Innovative Online Industries, or IOI; and Wade, not Art3mis, infiltrates IOI in the final act. Not so in the movie. For book readers, what did you make of the character changes? Was Art3mis's new back story as the leader of a secret rebellion a welcome addition or did it throw you off? Easily the biggest water cooler moment in the movie doesn't appear in the book at all a lengthy trip for Wade and crew to the Overlook Hotel from "The Shining." How did your theater react to the eerie recreations of Stanley Kubrick's horror classic, including the hotel lobby and typewriter, Room 237 and that cameo from the Grady twins? Did the references connect for you or, like Aech in the film, did they leave you feeling more alienated than seen? Is there something rotten in the premise? Or is it harmless and welcome escapism? After Gamergate, the noxious video game and internet culture war in 2015, in which female gamers and critics were publicly threatened and harassed by their male counterparts, popular perception of Mr. Cline's book shifted. "Ready Player One" suggests none of the toxic misogyny that typified that controversy. But the high profile episode cast the stock image of socially maladroit yet self entitled straight white men like those Mr. Cline exalted in a less forgiving light. Did the movie evoke any negative connotations for you? How sympathetic or relatable did you find Wade? Another seismic shift in the zeitgeist since "Ready Player One" was first published: The sort of nostalgia for fictional, carefully curated heroes from a brighter yesterday that gave the book a cult following, and that the movie positions as the righteous refuge of orphans and underdogs is, here in the real world, arguably among the most dominant forces in mainstream contemporary culture. Hot on the heels of "Jumanji" and "Tomb Raider" reboots, and with "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park" follow ups just over the horizon, did the movie's remember when thrills still get your blood going? Let us know your thoughts on all things "Ready Player One," including what we missed, in the comments. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A PILGRIMAGE TO ETERNITY From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith By Timothy Egan If you're looking for something to believe in, you could do worse than Timothy Egan's particular blend of intelligence and empathy. In his ninth book, "A Pilgrimage to Eternity," this self described "lapsed but listening" Irish Catholic makes the 1,200 mile journey from Canterbury to Rome along the Via Francigena "on foot, on two wheels, four wheels, or train so long as I stay on the ground," as he attempts to decide what he believes. If this book doesn't quite settle the question of belief for you, it will at least fortify your faith in scrupulous reporting and captivating storytelling. Egan was educated by Jesuits and is a "skeptic by profession." He says he has arrived at a point in life where he is "no longer comfortable in the squishy middle" and so he undertakes this journey willing to be led to deeper belief. He writes, "Until atheism can tell a story, it will always have trouble packing a house." Egan pithily sums up the current state of Christianity in Europe: "Where the rules of the spiritual here and hereafter were shaped over centuries of bloodshed, it's all a shrug." And why not a shrug, some might ask, when God seems to ignore the plight of the suffering: "You can see why people shun a supposedly benevolent creator who presided over the slaughter of the Wars of Religion, the African slave trade, the butchery of the Great War, Stalin's mass executions, genocide in Germany and Uganda and Cambodia." For his part, Egan unabashedly wants to believe in miracles, in part because of his beloved sister in law's late stage cancer. His dry response to the miracles attributed to the remains of Thomas Becket, who was martyred at the hands of King Henry II, is: "Of course, as an alternative to common medieval practices like drilling a hole in the skull of the sick the practice known as trepanning the concentrated mental power of belief had a chance at success." He tells us, conversely, that the Lourdes Medical Bureau has documented 68 "medically inexplicable" cures at the site of the apparition of the Virgin. Egan wields a suspicion of the relics he encounters on his pilgrimage, until a potentially numinous experience at the crypt of St. Lucia Filippini challenges his idea of what might be possible. Egan keeps many people in mind as he walks: his sister in law; his wife; his children; his brother, whose faith was ruined by a predatory priest. He reserves special fondness for Pope Francis, who "washes the feet of prisoners and the poor, shares meals with the homeless and refugees." Hoping to gain an audience with the pontiff, Egan drafts a letter praising Francis' anticonsumerism and treatment of refugees. His efforts make for an absorbing subplot even if they don't bear fruit. 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. But this isn't just a book about religion: It's also one about family. Egan is visited in his travels by his son, his daughter and, finally, for the last leg, his wife. He writes of how the two of them tried to expose their children to the basics of major religions and then "let the free market of ideas settle the debate as they thought it through." Now full fledged adults, Egan's children have "a reasonable person's skepticism toward the supernatural claims of religion." Egan expresses some misgivings about his own flexibility as a parent, wanting his children "not to foreclose on the idea that a great faith, though flawed, can contain great truths." His journey can also be enjoyed as a travelogue, complete with the kinds of absurdities that happen on any long trip. For instance, Egan learns that "Canterbury Tales" is not sold at Canterbury Cathedral; the book is too bawdy. When he arrives at the Abbey of St. Paul in Wisques, Egan must pass an amusing entrance exam. In a series of rapid fire questions, the abbot asks, "How are things in America?" "I'll show you to your room," the abbot says, satisfied. Then there are the meals many good, some spartan. And the mishaps: Egan doesn't properly tape his toes in the Alps and carries on, blistered and mangled, until his discomfort finally forces him into a car. At this point, the reader shares his sense of relief and defeat. Along the way, Egan sets a goal for himself: to get enough stamps in his pilgrim passport to earn a special seal from the Vatican at the end of the journey. Considerable energy builds around the lengths he goes to to get those stamps. When he finally lands the hard won certificate, he says: "It's official. I know how the Scarecrow felt when he got his brain." "A Pilgrimage to Eternity" is also a stunningly comprehensive history of both Christianity and Western Europe. It's all here: from St. Maurice, "believed to be 'the first black saint'" (wrote Henry Louis Gates Jr.), and the 1,500 year long uninterrupted prayer at the abbey named for him; to the 1518 Treaty of London forever outlawing war between Christians (it lasted "barely two years"); to Mencken on Puritanism: "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy." In fact, there's so much history that the plot can sometimes feel like an excuse to get the background in, though one hardly complains; Egan is so well informed, he starts to seem like the world's greatest tour guide. You follow along as much to hear him talk as to see the sights. It feels as if there's nothing he hasn't digested for the reader, and his extraordinary reliability is reminiscent of that of the monks he describes so evocatively throughout the book. Egan doesn't shy away from contentious subjects. He calls for more women in the church's hierarchy. "The desire among women to be a guiding part of this faith is great," he writes. "There are more than 50 percent more nuns and sisters in the world than priests." He's sick of the church's censorious attitude about sex little basis for which can be found in Jesus' teachings and harbors a healthy skepticism about Mary's perpetual virginity and Jesus' celibacy. He sees misogyny in this history, and in the revisionist denigration of Mary Magdalene, and traces this thread from St. Paul an "early celibate" to SS. Jerome and Augustine, who preached celibacy after long careers of debauchery, and to St. Benedict, who "feared sex so much that whenever he was aroused he threw himself into a patch of nettles or a bed of thorns." Of the 1968 Vatican encyclical against birth control, Egan writes that it "is almost universally ignored by Western Catholics and has little basis in the philosophy of Christ." Egan also turns a critical eye on those who treat refugees poorly. For instance, he describes how the police in St. Omer, France, "fired tear gas at volunteers" who were distributing food and clothing to refugees. Representatives of Secours Catholique, the charity behind the effort, pleaded, "Didn't Christ say we have an obligation to help 'the least of these brothers of mine'?" The authorities' response: Such assistance would only encourage the refugees to stay. Egan writes, "A religion whose leaders once called on followers to wage savage war against faraway cities held by people of a different religion now fights to feed and protect forsaken members of that same faith from those same faraway cities." After traveling through England, France and Switzerland, bedraggled and untouched by strangers, Egan finally receives a hug from a woman in Italy. She is no longer a Catholic but she still asks Egan to say a prayer for her when he sees Francis. "I like this pope," she says. The woman would never know if Egan failed to utter that prayer, but he keeps his promise at a Mass at St. Peter's Basilica. Of course he does, you think at the end of this marvelous account. Reading it, you feel yourself in the presence of goodness the kind you might simply have to decide to believe in. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Whales, eels, birds, and even ladybugs are known for epic migrations that take them hundreds or even thousands of miles through the air and across the sea. But the land has its fair share of long distance travelers, too. Recently, an international team of researchers set out to determine which terrestrial mammals migrate the farthest, and just how incredible their journeys are. They published a ranking last month in Scientific Reports. Caribou, those stately ungulates from North America, have "long been credited with the world's longest migration," said Kyle Joly, a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service who studies caribou, and is the report's lead author. But for decades, that claim relied on a single paper. "It really hadn't been validated very robustly," Dr. Joly said. He decided it was time to double check and to "see if there's another animal out there that might take the crown," he said. He and his collaborators started asking around for data sets, and amassed dozens from across the globe. They measured each distance as the crow flies, from where the animals started to where they ended up, and then back again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
JOSEPH HART and Anika Selhorst were the ultimate college sweethearts. They have been an item ever since they crossed paths 13 years ago in a college darkroom in Providence, R.I., in a meeting that Ms. Selhorst describes as "a scene out of a movie." Their backgrounds couldn't have been more dissimilar. Mr. Hart is a child of rural New England through and through. His mother grew up on a horse farm in Massachusetts, and he was born and raised in Peterborough, N.H., the historically rich community that is widely believed to have inspired the setting of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." "I'm the cliche country boy in the big city," said Mr. Hart, who lived just down the street from the MacDowell Colony, the century old writers' retreat, and once described his favorite place in the world as "a small glacier fed lake in New Hampshire during summertime, at dusk." Ms. Selhorst, who likes to describe herself as a red diaper baby, grew up in the political hotbed of Berkeley, Calif., the daughter of deeply liberal activist parents. Her father was an emergency room nurse and her mother a midwife. A great aunt was one of the first African American women to travel to post revolutionary Cuba, where according to family lore she cut sugar cane alongside Che Guevara. When the couple met in 1998, they were juniors, Ms. Selhorst at Brown and Mr. Hart at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was taking a photography class. Though the pair did not marry until 2008 "I like to say we took it slow and steady," Mr. Hart said they became a couple almost immediately. Mr. Hart is a painter, and Ms. Selhorst works as an arts administrator at City Lore, an organization that supports urban folk culture. Almost immediately after graduation they settled in Brooklyn, to their mind the only place to be. But given their limited financial resources, they bounced around the borough considerably. Starting in a railroad apartment in Greenpoint, they made their way to a brownstone apartment in Fort Greene ("with a wonderful fireplace," Mr. Hart said, "but we were so young and innocent, we were ripped off by the landlord"), to East Williamsburg and then to what he remembered as "a crummy but affordable apartment" in Bushwick. Next came four different rentals in Red Hook, culminating three years ago with an airy 800 square foot apartment on Van Brunt Street for which they pay 1,800 in rent. Their space sits atop a small red brick building where a retired ironworker once made metal sculptures. The building is so close to Mr. Hart's studio on Valentino Pier that he can shuttle back and forth to help take care of the couple's 19 month old daughter, Ruba. From the little terrace, shaded by a curly willow, they can see the Fourth of July fireworks over the harbor. Being peripatetic types, the pair have always traveled light. They've never been tempted to accumulate large numbers of possessions, and as Mr. Hart added, "Because we've moved so often, we couldn't have anything too fragile or superexpensive." As a result, the decor of their apartment, with its white walls and narrow plank pine floors, is decidedly spare. Yet despite the minimalism, the look weaves together multiple strands of their professional and personal lives. From Mr. Hart's family in New England come treasures handed down over generations, among them an intricate gateleg table that belonged to a maternal great grandmother and a rocker from his maternal grandparents. His maternal grandmother is further represented by the Windsor chairs that surround a dining table made of reclaimed barn wood, and by braided rugs, their glowing colors softened by decades of use. "I always loved those rugs growing up," Mr. Hart said. To have them in this apartment, the first one with enough room to accommodate them, makes him feel as if friendly ancestors were not far away. From Ms. Selhorst's side of the family come a little ukulele of Honduran mahogany that her father made for her, along with a quilt stitched by her mother that incorporates a gold and turquoise T shirt Ms. Selhorst wore during a college semester in South Africa. Not surprisingly, the apartment overflows with original art, starting with Mr. Hart's paintings. His ghostly black and white concoctions are layered with cryptic scrawls and markings that beg a visitor to lean in for a closer look. Taking other visual arts honors are presents or trades from talented artist friends. They include a mirror laced with delicate spider webs by Julia Hechtman, a lithograph depicting a burnt forest by Glen Baldridge, and a bright assemblage of vinyl stickers on aluminum the first piece of art Mr. Hart ever bought for his wife by Shelter Serra, a classmate of his. It hangs near the first work Ms. Selhorst ever bought for herself, a woodcut from South Africa depicting the huge face of a girl, her hair in braids, her eyes enormous and deep set. For Ruba, who was born in the kitchen with a midwife in attendance, the apartment is a place of wonders. At night she falls asleep soothed by light up plastic cherry blossoms and a glow in the dark toy turtle that projects pinprick constellations onto the walls and ceiling. An orange and black butterfly costume that her father made for her from a sofa cushion when she was three months old hangs near her crib. When not at day care or hanging out at her father's studio, she fingerpaints at the dining table, plays with the two family cats, and curls up on the gleaming pine floor and draws, just as her mother did when she was young. Sometimes she lies under the small skylight that punctures the 14 foot living room ceiling and watches planes and clouds sail by. "And she is fixated by the moon," her father said. "At night, she'll lie in this tiny patch of moonlight and look at it in the sky." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In the midst of the solemn starkness of "The Prisoner," the new play by Peter Brook and Marie Helene Estienne, there's a moment you will want to memorize and nurture. The title character, a young man who will soon begin serving a long sentence in a desert, is allowed one last visit to the forest where he played as a child. The air vibrates with the songs of birds, and the man, Mavuso (Hiran Abeysekera), answers them in shy whistles. His face, which has been fixed in blankness, opens up into a tentative smile. Like the boy he was, he climbs a tree or to be literal, a pole leading to a balcony from the stage of the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where "The Prisoner" opened on Monday night. The inhabitants of the balcony look delighted as well as startled. And a warmth, as welcome as sunshine in February, spreads through the audience. No wonder that Mavuso has been told by his uncle, Ezekiel (Herve Goffings), "I want you to keep this inside you. It will help you." The advice is worth heeding by anyone who sees "The Prisoner," which has been brought to New York by the Theater for a New Audience. That sylvan interlude is one of the few glimmers of something like happiness in this cryptic production from the Paris based C.I.C.T./Theatre des Bouffes du Nord. Read our critics' list of the year's best theater, from a sprawling family drama to a bold "Oklahoma!" The tree climbing idyll is also a rare scene in which the audience may feel a direct connection to what's happening onstage. As this tale of crime and punishment proceeds, you may find yourself wondering if Mavuso is indeed remembering his brief experience of freedom. The odds are that you at least will keep returning to it. During a career that spans more than 70 years, Mr. Brook, 93, has forged an original vocabulary of playmaking whose influence cannot be underestimated. His watershed accomplishments include an airy, acrobatic "Midsummer Night's Dream," from 1970, that redefined Shakespeare productions; the truly epic (as in nine hour) "Mahabharata" (1985) and its smaller scale but deeply affecting postscript, "Battlefield," seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music two years ago. "The Prisoner," written and directed by Mr. Brook and his frequent collaborator Ms. Estienne, shares with those works a spartan and elliptical presentation that asks audience members to fill in blank spaces with their own imagination. What it lacks is the sense of inevitability of those earlier productions, the feeling that every gesture and image onstage is there for a reason and that if you just concentrate on what's before you, a pattern and logic will emerge. The problem may be, strangely, that the text here provides too much information. Inspired by an encounter from Mr. Brook's travels in Afghanistan 40 years ago, "The Prisoner" is centered on a criminal whose punishment is to serve his sentence outside a jail, facing a building where inmates are confined to cells. He is technically free to leave, presumably, yet he does not. In an interview with Artforum, Mr. Brook said he never learned the nature of the crime committed by the man he had met in Afghanistan. In "The Prisoner," however, we discover early what Mavuso's offense was. He found his sister, Nadia, in bed with his father, whom he killed on the spot. It is implied that Mavuso, too, harbored sexual feelings for Nadia (Kalieaswari Srinivasan). It is she who heals Mavuso after their uncle, Ezekiel, has punished him physically, and she seeks him out during his exile. Mavuso sends her away in disgust. Instead, he holds his vigil amid a landscape in which the scenic elements (by David Violi) are limited to parts of trees a trunk, staff like branches and wood shavings. Darkness falls and day dawns in a cosmic cycle of lighting (by Philippe Vialatte). Mavuso befriends then kills and eats a rat and is visited by townspeople and employees of the prison (portrayed by Ms. Srinivasan, Omar Silva and Hayley Carmichael, who also plays the Peter Brook like narrator). These encounters vary the show's pace, but they aren't particularly illuminating. Though it lasts only 75 minutes, the production feels long and oddly cluttered by its gnomic dialogue. (Ezekiel: "We dream, we think that what we do is right, but we are so often wrong, we want to possess everything without seeing that we have nothing.") Mavuso must learn to repair (not repent), we are told. Nadia tells her brother that his patricide was motivated by intolerance (of incest?) and a hate that "ate you." Presumably, these are the feelings he must expunge. Mr. Abeysekera has an appropriately haunted gaze. And the production is most involving when we watch him staring into space, silent, and perhaps thinking of that lovely, long gone, fleeting moment when he was allowed to play in a forest like the innocent boy he once was. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Not so long ago, travelers might have stopped in the Glories area of Barcelona only if they were stuck in traffic. Three major roads leading in and out of this Spanish city Avenida Diagonal, Avenida Meridiana and the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes converged here at an elevated roundabout, where cars often came to a standstill. But lately this northeastern axis of the Catalan capital situated in the Sant Marti district, bordering Eixample is becoming a place to go to, not just through, especially for those interested in design. The roundabout has been torn down as part of a roadway reconfiguration, making the area more walkable. And some of the city's most exciting public spaces have sprung up nearby, including a popular flea market under a modernist metal roof and, opening last December, the Barcelona Design Museum. "The area is definitely up and coming," said the tour guide Jordan Susselman, whose company, Hi. This Is Barcelona ... , increasingly makes stops in Glories and adjacent Poblenou. In fact, the city has been trying to invigorate this part of town for some time. Ildefons Cerda, the engineer who drew up the 1859 plan for the expansion of Barcelona, envisioned his Placa de les Glories Catalanes as a new town center. Instead, Glories (pronounced GLO rias), as it's commonly called, became the aforementioned traffic snarl, a no man's land at the top point of a triangular swath stretching down to the Mediterranean, encompassing Poblenou, or "new city," a longtime manufacturing zone that declined in the 20th century. Redevelopment efforts before the 1992 Olympics led to a rebranding of Poblenou as the "22 " district, Barcelona's mini Silicon Valley. In recent years, artists, architects and designers have joined technology companies here, and galleries and furniture showrooms have opened amid auto repair shops, abandoned lots and nondescript low rise housing blocks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A political drama that sketches a dark vision of an America in recovery after the imagined impeachment of President Trump will close its New York production on Sunday about a month before the play's producers originally intended, according to the producer, Jeffrey Richards. The Off Broadway play, "Building the Wall," was scheduled to run through July 9, according to a news release announcing the premiere. Robert Schenkkan, the play's author, said on Twitter that its "final performances" would be this weekend. Mr. Schenkkan has won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for his work. The Tony was for "All the Way," his examination of the first year of Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, which starred Bryan Cranston on Broadway in 2014. Mr. Richards said the vast majority of the new play's reviews were favorable, but noted that a few including one from The New York Times's Jesse Green were not. "Our author built a powerful play; however, during this Tony Awards season and during a season which has not been kind to straight plays, we were unable to build an audience," he said. "It is especially difficult to do so when you are Off Broadway." In "Building the Wall," Gloria, a history professor, interviews a former security officer named Rick in 2019. Mr. Trump has been exiled after a terrorist event prompted him to declare martial law and place Muslims and Mexicans and other groups in containment camps, which devolve into killing chambers. Rick, one of the men who helped carry out the atrocities, is in prison and Gloria has offered to tell his story. In an interview with The Times, Mr. Schenkkan said the 90 minute play took him just one week to complete as he wrote it in what he called a "white hot fury." "We no longer live in a world that is business as usual Trump has made that very clear and if theater is going to remain relevant, we must become faster to respond," Mr. Schenkkan said. "We cannot hope to be useful if we can't respond until 18 months after the fact." In his review, Mr. Green said it was "inevitable that dialogue written so hastily" would lean "on familiar ideas." He also called the play shortsighted for suggesting that the "chaos of Trumpism" would "be back in its bottle just two years from now." But a review in The Los Angeles Times said the play "should be seen and shuddered over, if only to heighten our collective vigilance" and called Mr. Schenkkan's swift response to current events "heartening." Mr. Richards said the play was recently extended for a third time in Los Angeles, adding that the production is in rehearsal in Chicago; Tucson; Miami; and Santa Fe, N.M. Productions are also scheduled for Austria, Canada, Iran and Mexico, he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
What, you thought the home decor industry was going to escape millennial disruption? Benjamin Moore offers consumers a choice of more than 3,500 paint colors. Sherwin Williams, a competitor, sells a more limited but still substantial palette of 1,500 hues. To buy either brand, you generally have to visit a hardware store or big box retailer like Lowe's, select from an array of color chips and wait while the paint is mixed by an employee. You may have to buy sample cans to test the paint on your walls at home, and make a return trip to the store, before you settle on the right color. It's not exactly a soulful task, but for decades it was a manageable one. Or perhaps it wasn't. Because as with so many consumer categories that have been transformed over the past decade by tech entrepreneurs, from mattresses to eyewear to hailing a cab, paint is being "disrupted." Say goodbye to the hardware store, because now you choose the paint online and have it shipped to your home. Say goodbye to testing paint on your walls, because now the samples are disposable peel away stickers. Say goodbye, too, to choice overload, because Clare and Backdrop each offer a "curated" selection of about 50 colors. That's less than half of the 132 colors offered by Farrow Ball, the high end British brand that previously marketed an edited palette. (One Kings Lane, with its new direct to consumer paint collection, offers an even more edited 32 hues.) Brad Sherman, a designer in New York who specializes in commercial design for tech companies like Casper and Food52, said he was recently served an ad for Backdrop on Instagram and was intrigued. "I felt it was about time somebody looked at disrupting this industry," Mr. Sherman said. "The branding, the repackaging of the paint can, the tools. Looking at chips, the color is never accurate." It can be difficult at first to tell Clare and Backdrop apart (just as with Uber and Lyft in the ride hailing business). Both are New York based companies founded by young people who wax on about "storytelling" and "pain points." Both tout their eco friendly bona fides. Both offer a subdued selection of colors sure to look great on Instagram, and at prices comparable to most midrange paints (about 45 per gallon). And where Farrow Ball made an art out of twee names (Elephant's Breath, anyone?), Clare and Backdrop give it an on trend spin: Clare's natural green is Avocado Toast; Backdrop's warm beige is Palo Santo. First mover advantage, however, goes to Clare, which debuted last July, four months ahead of Backdrop. With its uncluttered design and simple navigation, Clare's website is perhaps better at conveying the mood of domestic ease, while the brand's colors "seem to be a little brighter, a littler clearer," than Backdrop's, said Annie Elliott, an interior designer and blogger in Washington, D.C., who goes by the nom de plume Bossy Color. "I'm a sucker for kits, and that adorable yellow Clare box sign me up," Ms. Elliott said, referring to the brand's five piece tool kit, which sells for 25. Clare's founder, Nicole Gibbons, 37, is a former interior designer who appeared on the TV show "Home Made Simple," on the OWN network. Working with clients on the show and through her interiors firm showed her how lost people were about painting without an expert guide. "Like white, for example. You would think white was just white. Easy," Ms. Gibbons said. "But you go to any other company and there are usually a hundred or more whites to choose from. People start to get confused and doubt." Taking a "hyper curated" approach, Ms. Gibbons offered only three whites with Clare, and one paint finish for walls (eggshell) and one finish for trim (semigloss). She also developed a "color genius" tool that asks questions about your space and spits out a recommended hue. "The whole premise of Clare is to simplify, so by the time you're at the end of this process, it's joy, not hassle," Ms. Gibbons said. "Sometimes people just want fewer, better choices." Caleb and Natalie Ebel, the married founders of Backdrop, also espouse fewer, better, but unlike Ms. Gibbons, they celebrate the messiness of painting. Colors are represented on their site as gooey drops of wet paint, and the imagery in their ad campaign is of people ready to paint, not static, furnished rooms. The Ebels, both in their early 30s, have no background in design or color theory. Ms. Ebel worked in marketing and branding for an education nonprofit, while Mr. Ebel, who has a finance degree, touts his early experience at Warby Parker ("I worked at Warby Parker" is the new "I was at Woodstock"). With Backdrop, the Ebels have applied personal branding and style signifiers to a business "void of any emotion," Mr. Ebel said. Thus, Backdrop's neutral beige is named Ryokan Guesthouse because two years ago, before their daughter was born, the Ebels spent their babymoon in Japan. They are developing Spotify playlists for each color. Inspired by olive oil canisters, they redesigned the boring round paint can; the Backdrop can is square, with a rubber stopper that gives what Mr. Ebel called "a beautiful pour." In addition to paint and tools, the Ebels sell branded work T shirts, drop cloths and coveralls. Indeed, they say they want to make painting appear so fun and easy that people will be inspired to change their walls every six months. "Well, it's the cheapest way to transform your space," Ms. Ebel said. Fifty percent of Backdrop's customers don't bother testing samples, she added: "They're commenting on social that they're purchasing paint because of the names. When your backdrop is Surf Camp, you're much more able to remember that versus just blue." Ms. Elliott, the designer, said she is unlikely to buy paint based on a catchy name. At the moment, one go to is Benjamin Moore's Simply White, a shade she has used time and again. But, she admitted, "this is for a generation of folks who are probably not going to hire a designer anyway. It's for someone who wants to spend a Saturday changing the room for not a lot of money. And for that, I see the appeal." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
As the editor of the Culture department at The New York Times, Gilbert Cruz relies on critics, reporters and editors in every field of the arts for their expertise. Now we're bringing his questions and our writers' answers to you. Currently on his mind: how to enjoy streaming theater, which he posed to Jesse Green, the co chief theater critic. Gilbert asks: Jesse, before the pandemic, I'd go to the theater several times a month in New York City and one of the things that I most appreciated about the experience was the forced focus no phones, no distractions, pure absorption. Since the lockdown began, I've tried several times at home to watch Zoom productions, or even filmed productions like stuff from the National Theater, and I find myself largely unable to sit down and commit. What is my problem? Jesse answers: It's not just your problem. One of the things we've all lost is the blurring of public and private, of self and community, that theater traditionally plays on. Everything is private now because we're all stuck in our homes. If you're by yourself in a comfy chair with the phone nearby and the lights blaring, that blur is impossible. To mitigate the problem, I turn the lights down, shut off notifications and sit on the weird sofa no one ever sits on. It helps to watch with someone else. Or maybe you just need some zippier fare? Gilbert: I tried to start with zippier fare, so many months ago. I recall trying to watch James Corden in "One Man, Two Guvnors," which by all accounts is a madcap time! And my mind just kept drifting and drifting ... Didn't make it more than 20 30 minutes. Have you seen that there is there a certain type of theater production that works best online? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Acuras that chirp and Toyotas that seep oil are among the mechanical maladies covered in the latest technical service bulletins. The bulletins, compiled by alldatapro.com, offer automakers' insights into some recurring problems with various models. The bulletins, known as T.S.B.s, are not recalls; they are information provided by manufacturers to dealers' service departments and mechanics. Unless otherwise noted, the carmakers do not offer payment assistance for these repairs beyond normal warranty coverage. Alldata.com sells a more comprehensive version of the bulletins to consumers. Here are some recent examples: ACURA Quieting chirpy ILX sedans may be straightforward. In T.S.B. 14 024 issued on July 23, Acura said the noise from 2013 14 models in high ambient temperatures or on rough roads could be caused by the side engine mount's internal parts rubbing together. Replacing the engine mount should restore the peace. Chirps may also haunt 2014 MDX and RDX crossovers. In T.S.B. 14 025 issued on July 31, Acura said noise from the timing belt might be caused by the belt contacting the crankshaft pulley. Spacing it away with a shim should end the tweeting. BMW Some 2014 4 Series convertibles may be eligible for a free inspection of their fuel pump wiring harness. In T.S.B. 612114 issued on July 1, BMW said the harness might have been routed or secured incorrectly, causing it to contact sharp edges on the fuel pump access cover. Drivers may notice a "check control" message displayed on the dash if the wiring has been damaged. GENERAL MOTORS Superchargers on some performance models may be eligible for an extended warranty. In T.S.B. 13313 issued on May 22, General Motors said the superchargers on 2009 13 Cadillac CTS V models and 2012 13 Chevrolet Camaros could develop a rattle at idle. If left unchecked, a squeal could develop, and over time a bearing could overheat and seize. The supercharger warranty is extended to 10 years or 120,000 miles. KIA Wind noise at highway speeds in a wide range of Sedona minivans may have a cure. In T.S.B. BOD107 issued on Aug. 1, Kia said the problem in 2006 13 models may be caused by improper seating of the glass in both front doors. Replacing the door glass run channels should end the stormy racket. Also, shifting out of Park can be a problem for some Range Rovers. In T.S.B. TECLTB00677 issued on July 8, the company said this problem in 2014 models could be fixed at the dealership with a software update. TOYOTA Repairs related to oil seepage from an engine oil cooler pipe will now get a longer warranty in several models. In T.S.B. SC ZE2 issued on Aug. 1, Toyota said the leak might develop in 2007 11 Siennas, 2008 11 Highlanders and 2009 11 Venzas. (The same problem may affect 2007 11 Lexus RX 350 and 2010 11 RX 450h models, as noted in T.S.B. SC ZLC issued on Aug. 1.) Instead of the standard four year, 50,000 mile warranty, the part will have an unlimited mileage warranty through Jan. 31, 2016, and then 10 year, 150,000 mile coverage. In addition, brake issues are developing in some Camry Hybrids. In T.S.B. SC E0U issued on July 10, Toyota said the brake reservoir assembly filter could become clogged. Toyota is inspecting all models with the potential to develop the problem until June 30, 2017. If needed, a new brake fluid reservoir will be installed to resolve the problem. Also, a wide range of Avalons may now get an extended warranty on the steering wheel telescoping clip. In T.S.B. CSP ZTY issued on April 14, Toyota said the clips on 2005 12 models may not let the telescoping steering wheel stay in its set position. The part will be covered with no mileage limit until May 31, 2015, on all vehicles, followed by coverage of 10 years from the date of service with no mileage limit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
MILAN Let a brick be a brick. To paraphrase the great American architect Louis Kahn, professional achievement at a fundamental level requires a practitioner first to consult the materials. "If you think of brick, you say to brick, 'What do you want, brick?' " Mr. Kahn said during a legendary 1971 master class lecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps brick spoke and said it wanted to be an arch. "And it's important, you see, that you honor the material that you use," Mr. Kahn said. "You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it." If it would be overreach to liken the designer Neil Barrett to one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, it would also sell him short to suggest he is anything less than a master. Few in the current design landscape are more consistently exploratory than Mr. Barrett or deploy materials with anything like his confidence and restraint. Fourth generation in a family of military tailors, Mr. Barrett has what seems like a bone bred regard for the integrity of materials, as some press notes for his austere fall 2018 show make clear: "Fabrics are honest, authentic and real." By that he presumably meant that the materials of his current collection were not the often tricky technological fabrics he has deployed in the past, but cotton, leather and wool. Shown in his new concrete headquarters, the collection took as a baseline the military uniforms that are the origin of virtually all the core elements of men's wear. In Mr. Barrett's hands that meant taut (mainly monochrome) suits, elegant bombers, cropped Eisenhower jackets, puffy blousons, crisp pea coats, flap pocketed field jackets, great coats lined with shearling and whose funnel necks framed the face like an Elizabethan ruff, and also elevated versions of fatigues. When the Chicken Littles of fashion run around squawking that men's wear has run its course; that the separation of the cisgendered sexes into two separate seasons is as anachronistic as binaries themselves; that women's wear will soon swallow whole the male side of the business like a Hanna Barbera alley cat and then stand by smacking its lips, what they are forgetting is that most of the labels that have skipped the men's wear cycle, like Gucci, are accessories driven. The part of the population still comfortable identifying as male can still use some guidance and, yes, the occasional thrill when considering what to wear. Mr. Barrett showed women's wear, too, this season, as he has in the recent past. And what was fascinating was how, by utilizing dressmaking techniques like the cocoon shaped back so much favored by the Spanish couturier Cristobal Balenciaga, he managed to propose plausible new uniforms for stylish humans predicated on what is in their heads and not between their legs. That goes for the suits, the coats and even the padded motocross trousers that were Mr. Barrett's nod not just to the fetish appeal of certain kinds of sports gear but to the inherent camp of butch masculinity. It is understood that the things in the toy chest of style are no longer gender specific. Anyone can play. That includes, in a notable way, ball players. If any single group has influenced men's wear in recent memory it is athletes. Their new wealth and visibility helped rescue once niche magazines like GQ from the dung heap of print media. The cycle of their work lives has helped normalize casual clothes as a new uniform in the workplace. Their exceptional physiques were, in general, a boon to designers. True, you would have had to splice together multiple pairs of skinny jeans by Hedi Slimane in his Saint Laurent days to get something that might fit the circumference of Nolan Carroll's thighs. Yet were Mr. Slimane still designing, he would surely find a way to address the problem. (That is a guess.) Mr. Carroll, a former Miami Dolphins cornerback and now a free agent, has been making the rounds of the shows here, his movements closely tracked on an Instagram account devoted to the sartorial doings of pro athletes founded by the Brooklyn born Jamaal Rich. If not for Mr. Rich's morethanstats, an observer of Donatella Versace's all but the kitchen sink presentation might have been left in a muddle. There were zebra stripes, tiger spots, tartans, mythological motifs, velvet suits, prints from the housewares archive, fringed overcoats, kilts, silk shirts, bovver boots aerated with grommets, even the caterpillar fringe that rich Italians use to edge pillows. What felt incoherent as a runway presentation fell into place quite neatly when one viewed the slide show afterward and then consulted Mr. Rich's Instagram creation. Clearly pro ball players have gotten into the influencer game in a big way. How else can you explain the phenomenal stylishness of men constantly being photographed as if for the red carpet on their way to practice? Take any single element of the Versace show a zebra pattern swing coat, let's say and put it on Mr. Carroll as he heads for the locker room. What in ordinary circumstances might look like day wear for a circus performer seems not only plausible but desirable when you spot it on a football player in his physical prime. Hollywood actors, as it turns out, have nothing on ball players. Just check out Mr. Carroll in an Instagram video shot in a Versace fitting room, where the player is trying on a garishly printed silk tunic in gold. Or tap on the panel showing the Minnesota Timberwolves player Andrew Wiggins dressed for practice in a Dries Van Noten bomber and jeans from Amiri. Or scroll to the UFC champion Conor McGregor flaunting a crazily printed tracksuit by Gucci for Mr Porter. Seen on the runway these elements might seem so outlandish as to be comic. Yet worn with ineffable confidence and swagger by athletes, even the most excessive designer efforts seem justified. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Some research has suggested that vitamin E and selenium supplements might lower the risk for Alzheimer's disease, but a new long term trial has found no evidence that they will. The study began as a randomized clinical trial in 2002 testing the supplements for the prevention of prostate cancer. When that study was stopped in 2009 because no effect was found, 3,786 of the original 7,540 men participated in a continuing study to test the antioxidants as a preventive for Alzheimer's. The study, in JAMA Neurology, randomly assigned the men, whose average age was 67 at the start, to take either vitamin E, selenium, both supplements, or a placebo. By 2015, 4.4 percent of the men had dementia, but there was no difference between the groups. Neither selenium, vitamin E, nor both in combination were any more effective than a placebo. The study controlled for age, family history of Alzheimer's disease, education, race, diabetes and other factors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
LONDON These days, it's via streaming that theater lovers here get their fix, and a look through some of the available archived performances can be revealing. What was a particular actor up to before they came onto your radar? An answer surely exists online not least in Britain, where theater stars rise not meteorically, but gradually. Consider three productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company (R.S.C.) dating back five years or more, each of which showcases a top rank performer while they were still honing their craft. Lucian Msamati, Patsy Ferran and Michelle Terry were all working on attention worthy projects just before the pandemic, but we now have a digital opportunity to catch them earlier, playing Iago, Portia and Beatrice, respectively. These productions form part of the "Culture in Quarantine: Shakespeare" series on iPlayer, the BBC's digital platform, and they are also among 25 R.S.C. titles available to stream via Marquee TV. After an initial abundance of streaming opportunities at the beginning of the lockdown, our options are beginning to shrink. An early sequence of online titles from the Hampstead Theater concluded months ago, and the popular "National Theater at Home" series ended July 23, having shown 16 plays to an audience of 15 million across 173 countries, according to the theater. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Esther Scott, an actress who specialized in playing matriarchal roles in films and on television most notably in the movies "Boyz N the Hood" and "Dreamgirls" died on Feb. 14 in Los Angeles. She was 66. Her sister Shaun Scott, said that Ms. Scott had a heart attack and was found unconscious in her home in Santa Monica on Feb. 11, and that she died at the UCLA Medical Center. Esther Scott made a career of being the familiar face of nurturing but sometimes strict characters in over 70 movies and on many TV shows. In "Boyz N the Hood," John Singleton's 1991 movie about the challenges young black men faced growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Ms. Scott played the grandmother of the protagonist's love interest. In a memorable scene, she chases the young man out of her granddaughter's bedroom while wielding a meat cleaver. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
For the first time, one commercial satellite has grabbed hold of another one in orbit around Earth, demonstrating a technology that could help reduce the proliferation of space debris around our planet by enabling the repair and refueling of dying spacecraft. "This is the first time in history a docking has been performed with a satellite that was not pre designed with docking in mind," Joe Anderson, a vice president at SpaceLogistics, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, said during a telephone news conference on Wednesday. The company built the robotic Mission Extension Vehicle 1, or MEV 1, which was launched in October on top of a Russian Proton rocket. Over the past few months, it has made its way to more than 22,000 miles above Earth's surface, just above what is known as geosynchronous orbit. Its target was Intelsat 901, an 18 year old communications satellite that is working fine but running low on fuel. MEV 1 docked with Intelsat 901 on Tuesday at 2:15 a.m. Eastern time, Northrop Grumman announced. MEV 1 will remain connected, providing propulsion for the Intelsat with its electric thrusters. After tests of its systems, MEV 1 will push the Intelsat satellite to a new operational orbit in late March or early April. Without MEV 1, Intelsat 901 would need to be retired within months. Under the contract, MEV 1 is to extend the lifetime of Intelsat 901 by five years. MEV 1 will then push it to a higher orbit known as the graveyard, where it will be decommissioned and not in danger of colliding with other satellites. Designed to last 15 years, MEV 1 will then undock and can be sent to help another satellite. Northrop Grumman is scheduled to launch a second MEV satellite this year, aiming it for another Intelsat satellite. With this week's success, that docking would occur at the Intelsat satellite's current location, without taking it out of service. Since the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957, the space around Earth has become increasingly cluttered. Today, there are more than 2,200 operational satellites, and it is estimated that there are 34,000 pieces of debris at least four inches wide, from used rocket bodies to fragments of satellites, speeding in orbit. Most of the congestion is in lower orbits, a few hundred miles above the surface. But space in geosynchronous orbits is limited, and one collision there could damage several satellites. (Batteries on a DirecTV satellite operated by Intelsat malfunctioned in December, leading to a hasty decommissioning and move to a graveyard orbit because of fears it would explode.) Companies like SpaceX and OneWeb are now planning to launch constellations of thousands of new satellites in lower Earth orbits, which would further increase the chances of collisions. In January, two dead satellites with no ability to maneuver barely missed a head on collision at 32,800 miles per hour above Pittsburgh. Satellite crashes have occurred. In February 2009, an Iridium satellite was destroyed when it was hit by a defunct Russian military satellite at 26,000 m.p.h. Makers of orbital machinery now more often include plans to dispose of their spacecraft before they become uncontrollable hunks of metal speeding at thousands of miles per hour, and there are other efforts to develop methods to pull defunct objects out of orbit. A Japanese company, for example, wants to use a glue armed satellite to collect space debris. Satellite servicing is another approach. In addition to MEV 1, NASA is financing RESTORE L, a spacecraft that is to launch in a few years and latch onto an aging Landsat observation satellite in low Earth orbit. Northrop Grumman officials said that at present their focus is on satellites in geosynchronous orbits, which are typically bigger, more complex and more expensive. But similar technology could be used to drag derelict satellites out of low Earth orbit or to move satellites between orbits. It could even be used for a space tug to transfer spacecraft to high Earth orbit where they could be captured around the moon. Earlier satellite servicing in orbit was completed by human hands. The most prominent examples were five space shuttle missions where NASA astronauts performed repairs and upgrades to the Hubble Space Telescope. In the aftermath of the destruction of the Columbia shuttle during re entry in 2003 and the deaths of the seven astronauts aboard, NASA investigated whether a robotic mission could perform additional repairs on Hubble. However, the agency concluded that the technology was not yet ready, and a final shuttle mission to repair Hubble occurred in 2009. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
She looks so much like Jacqueline Kennedy, if Jacqueline Kennedy had been dressed in black instead of pink on the day her husband was assassinated at her side. This is another widow, though Betty Shabazz, wife of the civil rights leader Malcolm X, and the simple lines of her dress and the flip of her hair place her in the same era as Camelot. But don't let that demure strand of pearls trick you into underestimating her. In Roslyn Ruff's instantly commanding performance in Marcus Gardley's "X: Or, Betty Shabazz v. The Nation," Shabazz is no whisper voiced helpmate. Angry, aggrieved, utterly composed, she is out for justice on behalf of her slain husband, prosecuting a case in some cosmic court. She's seeking to hold members of the Nation of Islam accountable for his murder, 53 years ago this month at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. Shabazz wants to prove the guilt of those men "categorically, putting to bed all ifs, ands and a few butts," she says in her opening statement, aiming her contemptuous pun straight at the accused. Who wouldn't love her immediately? The show's current run at the Theater at St. Clement's is a return engagement for a production that won praise in a brief run last year at the New Victory Theater. Directed by Ian Belknap, it has largely the same cast this time around, with Jimonn Cole once again playing Malcolm X. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Playlist: A Vintage Surprise From the Weeknd, and 9 More New Songs None The Weeknd released a new EP, "My Dear Melancholy," with little notice this week. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, Cardi B blasts a cheater, Stephen Malkmus the Jicks get riled up and John Parish and PJ Harvey sing a tribute to Mark Linkous. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Anxiety and resentment drip off "My Dear Melancholy," a great new EP by the Weeknd announced and released on short notice this week that's filled with scarred, tart songwriting and dismal moods. Which is to say: vintage Weeknd! Here, he is both savior and judge, sweet singer of cruel sentiments. The beat produced by Gesaffelstein and Guy Manuel de Homem Christo (of Daft Punk) with Cirkut is stormy and dreamy in equal measure, and the Weeknd is coolly vicious atop it. Throughout this EP, he applies the polished songwriting he's picked up on his path to pop saturation, but the most gratifying parts are the moments of unvarnished bitterness that can't be smoothed over. JON CARAMANICA Cheat on Cardi B? Not a good idea. The track combines a tinny, off the shelf vamp that could have been marked "Latin" on a 1950s chord organ with a few trap accents, but there's no mistaking the fury in the song. "My heart is like a package with a fragile label on it," Cardi B sings, and that makes her bitterness mount in verses that detail how he kept sneaking around while she was faithful, even thinking about marriage. There's suspicion, disgust, self doubt, anger and thoughts of karmic retribution but it's still not over: "This is not a threat, it's a warning." JON PARELES The old indie rock indifference doesn't play so well in 2018, and Stephen Malkmus who perfected the noisy offhand shrug as the leader of Pavement is unmistakably riled up in "Shiggy," from an album with the Jicks that's due in May. The bass is more bruising and the drums are heftier; guitars unite to blare out hooks. And when he sings, "Don't speak your dumb wisdom/I'm not so easily confused," it's not hard to guess his target. J.P. The guitarist Mary Halvorson is basically opposed to things that could spark any easy association or soft comfort. She doesn't do campfire strums or snaky jazz guitar lines or steadily arcing song structures. And apparently her M.O. as a lyricist is roughly the same: fragmented and semi opaque, unrhymed, sometimes verging toward language poetry. We know this thanks to "Code Girl," Ms. Halvorson's new album, named for the quintet she recently assembled with Amirtha Kidambi on vocals, Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet, Michael Formanek on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. Case in point: Is "In the Second Before" a love song? A loneliness song? A defiant dance? After a low, rustling intro, the group finds itself in a lovely flow, and Ms. Kidambi intones: "His voice comes/out of the sound/of the million people/we are known/to discard." But that gentle sway is fleeting: The track ends in a cloud of Ms. Halvorson's electric scuzz. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO The sound and imagery of gospel infuse this enigmatic song, an anticipatory elegy that's the B side to a more combative new single, "I Owe You Nothing," by the Swedish songwriter Seinabo Sey. "You say you want to be remembered," Ms. Sey begins, singing completely alone; a choir, slow organ chords and eventually the deep rasp of Jacob Banks are all that join her through the first half of the song, which vows, "When the trumpets call/you can send me to the Lord." Finally, drums and orchestral strings arrive for a rousing march that's also a plea: "Remember me." J.P. All the attention given to the wink tossed at Timothee Chalamet on "OKRA" obscures something far more important: This is one of Tyler, the Creator's sharpest songs in years, full of urgently mumbled and funny lyrics " 30,000 just for luggage, financial adviser buggin'" over a beat that's a low, slimy, persistent groan. J.C. "The sun never felt colder," PJ Harvey sings in "Sorry for Your Loss," which is dedicated to the songwriter Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, who committed suicide in 2010. He had worked with both the songwriter producer John Parish and Ms. Harvey. The music echoes Sparklehorse, setting a Celtic modal banjo against a looming, distorted electric guitar; the song captures the eerie persistence of grief. "The window rattled and I wondered if you'd just passed over." J.P. Phum Viphurit is a young Thai singer raised largely in New Zealand with an unpretentious style: a mild Buble croon over Mraz esque guitar breeze. "Lover Boy" is his best song to date he leans hard into the syllables, making them sound sticky, but keeps his flirtation light. J.C. "Kolorblind," the new album by DJ Esco Future's D.J. is, from some angles, a backdoor Future album, and a welcome one, more breathable than his own recent full length releases. Out of several strong songs here, this one has sinuous charm and a chipper 1980s back and forth lightness. J.C. Vortex is a Swiss quartet whose music tends toward a percussive, guitar driven minimalism, not ambience. But on "Vortex," the group's fourth full length, the guitarist David Torn joins as special guest and spirit guide, and he changes things. A frequent composer of film scores, he's a fan of atmosphere and accrual. The single, sustained note is his friend; so is the loop pedal. At the beginning of "Red Shift," a stubborn, puddly bass opens up a wide bed, and a throng of guitars begins to bite and snipe over top. But here comes Mr. Torn, crafting a big, luminescent haze above it all. Five and a half minutes in, the track strips down nearly to silence: The troops are in retreat, provisioning for another salvo. Then the build starts again, more urgent than before. By the end we're beyond gravity. G.R. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Joko Avianto's "The border between good and evil is terribly frizzy," at the Yokohama Triennale in 2017. Organizers are eager not to postpone its July 3 opening, though the region is currently under a state of emergency. They point to art's therapeutic role for the city. As the pandemic clears the calendar, curators around the world reimagine how and if we will gather for art. The Prospect New Orleans art triennial in October has been postponed to next year. So has the Liverpool Biennial. Sao Paulo's Bienal is delayed by at least a month. The Dakar Biennale has yet to set new dates. Front International, in Cleveland, has decided to skip 2021 altogether and return in 2022. The coronavirus crisis has thrown into question the post pandemic future of contemporary art biennials (and their cousins, triennials and quadrennials). Of an estimated such 43 exhibitions in 2020, some 20 have been postponed so far, according to a tally by the Biennial Foundation, with further changes near certain. The Biennale of Sydney opened in March for a three month run and had to close after 10 days. "The biennial is a testing ground," said Defne Ayas, co artistic director, with Natasha Ginwala, of the Gwangju Biennale, in South Korea, which is still preparing to open in September.But the testing ground is itself being tested. The idea of the international art exhibition has flourished at least since the Venice Biennale was founded in 1895, but they have proliferated in the last two decades as the contemporary art field has gone global. Now their fate is linked to the big question of how culture industries, and cultural habits, will emerge from the pandemic. The crisis also threatens art fairs, which are driven by the market, itself facing great uncertainty, and the global ecosystem of workshops and residencies that have become vital to the careers of artists. But the premise of a biennial is distinctly cosmopolitan and civic. The bet is that mingling artists, out of town visitors, and the local public big biennials often draw a half million attendees around a theme that seeks to interpret the world, will benefit everyone involved, while helping cities boost their cultural profiles. Some biennials are postponing for up to a year. Others hope to proceed on schedule at least for the local audience. And still more are commissioning new projects expressly designed for online. The lurking question is whether the biennial model still makes sense in a post pandemic world. What happens to an art show may not be top priority now in places battered by the coronavirus not least New Orleans, where the disease has killed hundreds, including standard bearers of the city's culture or even in the aftermath. A few weeks ago, as travel began to shut down, I spoke with the curators and artistic directors of seven upcoming biennials on five continents to hear the implications of the pandemic, and the stakes for their craft. All had their highly itinerant lives abruptly paused. Ms. Ayas, for instance, is Turkish and lives in Berlin; Ms. Moscoso is Ecuadorean, and was living in Mexico City before moving to Liverpool with her family for this project. But when I reached them, all were in some form of lockdown. "There's been a few weeks of shell shock," said Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the artistic director for the Sonsbeek exhibition in the Netherlands, who is Cameroonian and based in Berlin. But with their events in the balance involving artists, public and private partners in host cities, and endless logistics they did not have the luxury of waiting out the crisis. One approach is to forge ahead. The Yokohama municipal authorities are eager not to postpone the Triennale's opening on July 3, though the region is currently under a state of emergency. The 2011 edition, soon after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, was well attended, playing a possibly therapeutic role. The exhibition as planned is typically large and diverse, with 65 participants, including luminaries like Nick Cave or Korakrit Arunanondchai, emerging stars like Farah Al Qasimi or Lebohang Kganye, as well as 13 artists from Japan. Its title is "Afterglow," a reference to white noise, radiation, and how to live amid destruction and toxicity. Ms. Narula and her colleagues, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, face the odd prospect of directing the process remotely, and of arriving late to their own exhibition as will, surely, many artworks and the artists. The idea is that the show will build over the course of the summer, and be complete by the time it is scheduled to close in October. It could work, Ms. Narula said. "This is what us and the world will discover together." The Bienal de Sao Paulo is also proceeding, with only a one month delay; it is now scheduled to open in October, said Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, its curator, who is Italian and based in the Brazilian metropolis. The Bienal draws a large local audience, and the hope was to deliver for them, with exhibitions in 24 venues across the sprawling city that the art world professionals if they can jet in for opening week would be unlikely to absorb in full. Many artists in the main group show will have solo shows as well. And some exhibitions will include historical artists, not just contemporary ones, to create reference points. "That may be an entrance door for a large audience," Mr. Visconti said. Sao Paulo is far ahead of other Brazilian states in coronavirus cases, and Mr. Visconti acknowledged that prospects for the Bienal were fluid. The program would be partly improvised. "We're approaching the whole exhibition as a rehearsal." Rather than embrace the uncertainty, other biennials are choosing the clarity of postponement. But with it comes the responsibility of making a show that is not only visitable, but relevant after a pandemic, and possibly in a depression. "After what we're experiencing, you can't come with an exhibition that just tries to forget it all," said El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, the artistic director of the Dakar Biennale, which was supposed to open in late May. "But it doesn't make sense to do an exhibition that's solely about the pandemic either." In New Orleans, the Prospect triennial is working with other groups to shore up resources and protect arts jobs threatened by the crisis, said Nick Stillman, its director. Eight of the 51 artists and collectives in the show are based in New Orleans, and others are preparing projects about the city. Naima Keith and Diana Nawi, the co curators, said they had invited all the artists to rethink their projects, if they so choose. It was too soon, they said, to know how the final program would reflect the new situation both in New Orleans and the world at large. "Next year is a time of listening and working with people on the ground," Ms. Nawi said. "We take our lead from them. New Orleans is a city that has survived a lot." "One benefit of postponing is that it gives us time," Ms. Keith said. "Time to understand what it means to be to be sheltered, to have social distance, and how society is reacting." But the idea of insular art events, where the international exchanges only happen online, contradicts the cosmopolitan, cross fertilizing impulse of biennials. "Foreigners have a function to connect locals to locals," said Ms. Ayas, noting that some Korean artists she and Ms. Ginwala selected for Gwangju are little known in their own country. "It would be strange to only access different contexts, cultures, and ways of being through the screen," said Ms. Ustek, the Liverpool director. "I still believe in the physicality of encounter." Ultimately, Mr. Ndikung, for one, is fine with discarding biennials should they no longer fit the purpose. "I don't care," he said. "The point is, can people still do art? Can people express themselves? The biennial is just the container. If it's not the biennial it will be something else." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
It begins with the death of a lawyer and ends with the anointing of a new one. In between, this episode of "Perry Mason" covers a good deal of ground with nearly all of its characters, from the fed up Black cop, Paul Drake, to the true believer evangelist, Sister Alice, to the dogged legal secretary, Della Street, to the title character. It's the hour when "Perry Mason" stops being an origin story and starts becoming the first proper Perry Mason case. In that regard, the episode's approach is refreshingly simple and unlabored. After the death by suicide of E.B. Jonathan duly covered up by Della and Perry in order to make it look as if he died of natural causes, thus preserving both his reputation and his life insurance payout the falsely accused Emily Dodson is in need of new representation. But no one in town, not even E.B.'s former partner Lyle (Mark Harelik), will touch the case for love or money. The cold reception to Della's entreaties mirrors that of E.B.'s son (played by the actor John Lithgow's real life son, Ian Lithgow), who dutifully entombs his father in the family mausoleum but refuses to mince words about his absentee father's lack of devotion to his kin. But as another great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, often said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." And the truth of the matter is this: No one is more committed to Emily Dodson's defense than Perry Mason. You can all but see the thought form in Della's mind as Perry rants and raves about Emily's innocence and the bogus legal system that's railroading her (sample quote: "If you walk out of that door and you think for one second that you are entering into a nation of laws, you are a complete expletive idiot"): Perhaps the right representation was right in front of them all along. So Della does what any enterprising legal secretary might do, hewing to Perry's mantra, "There's what's legal, and there's what's right." She forges E.B.'s signature on a document attesting that E.B. was mentoring Perry. Then she secures the help of a deputy district attorney who is out to unseat the ambitious D.A. Maynard Barnes, who helps Perry cheat his way through the bar exam and become a defense attorney practically overnight. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A special edition pair of Crocs released in collaboration with the Latin pop star Bad Bunny went on sale on Tuesday at noon. Within 16 minutes, they were sold out. The Bad Bunny Crocs, adorned with glow in the dark versions of the brand's proprietary Jibbitz charms and Bad Bunny's logo, were the latest in a series of highly anticipated, quick to sell out collaborations between the famously comfortable foam clogs and a well known musical artist. Designs the company created with the Grateful Dead and Post Malone a serial Crocs collaborator all sold out within an hour. Other recent Crocs collaborations, including one with Kentucky Fried Chicken, have been similarly popular. By late Tuesday afternoon, the lowest price at which the shoes could be purchased on the resale site StockX was 265. Hours earlier, they retailed for 64.99. Danny Morales, 26, from Rialto, Calif., tried to buy the Crocs with three separate devices, only to find out that they were unavailable. "I was shocked," he said. "I really wanted those too." He already had a pair of Crocs, he said, "but these were Bad Bunny's. Who wouldn't want anything he puts out?" Crocs has been gaining ground for the past five years but it has had a banner 2020. At a time when U.S. retail sales of footwear are down 20 percent so far this year when compared to the same period in 2019, sales of Crocs are up 48 percent, according to Matt Powell, an analyst at the NPD Group, a market research firm. "Under the pandemic, frankly anything that you could call 'comfortable' has done well," Mr. Powell said. "The slipper business is one of the few other footwear categories that's up under Covid." Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican trap star, released his second major studio album, "YHLQMDLG," this year. It quickly became the highest charting all Spanish language album ever, according to Billboard, and broke several sales records. He has also become notable for his out there look, which toggles between Caribbean dad core and designer streetwear, and become a go to magazine cover star. Michelle Poole, the newly appointed president of Crocs, said that Bad Bunny embodied the "come as you are" attitude that Crocs is always looking to sell. "He's got a very daring style, a very unapologetic attitude and he's also someone who loves Crocs," she said. "He's been spotted wearing Crocs in live performances and in music videos." "I am always trying to be comfortable," Bad Bunny said by email when asked about the collaboration. "It isn't something that I suddenly decided to do, be comfortable. It's something I've done my whole life. I always like to feel good with what I have on." He added that he was happy that the shoe had been so popular and clarified that his favorite Crocs colors are yellow and green. "WOW they were SOLD OUT in like 15 minutes I think," he wrote. "FELIZ." The idea for the collaboration originated with Pedro Rodriguez, 33, a merchandising manager at Crocs and a Bad Bunny fan, originally from Puerto Rico. Conversations with the artist started in 2019. Crocs has had notable collaborations with other brands since 2017, when it helped Balenciaga send its models down the runway in the foam clogs. Its string of memorable collaborations with musicians kicked off the following year with the first set of Post Malone shoes. "Post was the first really broad collaboration that everyone was talking about," Ms. Poole said. "He's the marmite. People love or hate him." (Ms. Poole, who grew up outside of London, was referring to the deep brown vegetable extract that British people inexplicably love.) "Crocs is marmite as well so we like pairing up with other marmite brands," she added. Collaborations have become a fashion staple over the last decade. Pioneered by the streetwear brand Supreme, which broke ground by working with fine artists including George Condo and Takashi Murakami, such collaborations pile fan bases on top of each other, creating a built in demographic for what is often limited edition merchandise. "Ten years ago it wasn't common," said Angelo Baque, the head of the clothing line Awake NY and the former creative director of Supreme. "Now, if you go on Hypebeast, there's 40 collaborations to announce a day. I think that everything is fair game in terms of collaboration. I don't think there's anything that's sacred." To fans of Bad Bunny, the near instantaneous unavailability of the new Crocs felt like sacrilege. By Tuesday evening, more than 1,300 people had signed a petition asking that more of the shoes be released, and blaming "bots," software programmed to speed buy limited merchandise, for snapping up all the wares. (A spokeswoman for Crocs, Melissa Layton, said that bots are on the brand's radar, and that the company is "doing everything we can to mitigate that bot action.") Mariela Benavides was one of those who signed the petition, writing, "I'm signing this because the bots did me dirty I just wanted to vibe with my crocs man." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Adding to the disarray in the current fashion world, Ennio Capasa, creative director of Costume National, and his brother, Carlo Capasa, its chief executive, announced on Tuesday that they were leaving the brand they founded 30 years ago. "Today is for us a bittersweet time, as we end this extraordinary creative cycle," the Capasas said in a joint announcement. Costume National, which is based in Milan although it shows in Paris, rose to prominence by defining a certain cool minimalist style in the 1990s. Their signature look was the black trouser suit with a rock 'n' roll edge. In recent years, the brand has struggled financially: After its former partner Ittierre declared bankruptcy, Costume National accepted another minority shareholder, the Asian investment firm Sequedge, in 2009. The deal included an option to buy out the Capasas after a certain time, which Sequedge exercised this year. Though Carlo Capasa said he and his brother had explored ways to raise enough money to buy out their partners, he added that they had not been successful. On Monday evening, they decided it would be better to leave than to become employees serving someone else's vision. The brothers had different ideas from their investor, he said, about retail growth and online strategy, among other issues. However, he added, there was no rancor in the parting. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LES EPESSES, France While most French theaters remain closed and live sports won't resume until July, there is one arena in the country where thousands can already sit down to watch a show. In a Roman style amphitheater at the Puy du Fou, a historical theme park in western France, gladiators in period costumes have been performing daily since June 11. The reopening of the Puy du Fou, which offers 15 productions involving professional actors, was met with dismay by the performing arts sector when it was announced in late May. Most summer festivals, including the one in Avignon, France's biggest theater showcase, have been canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. Accusations of favoritism flew after Philippe de Villiers, the far right politician who founded the Puy du Fou, shared on Twitter that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had interceded to help the park. While other theme parks in low risk areas, like the Parc Asterix, also reopened this month, the Puy du Fou is almost entirely reliant on theatrical performances rather than amusement rides. It started life in 1977 as a large scale re enactment of the history of the Vendee region, the "Cinescenie," featuring hundreds of local amateurs. In 1989, the current park came into being, with a mix of immersive, open air and traditional stage shows dotted around reconstructed historical villages and plenty of green space. Last weekend, the crowds were already somewhat overwhelming after months of lockdown and social distancing. According to a spokeswoman for the park, the Puy du Fou had an average of 5,000 visitors a day on Saturday and Sunday. It felt as if all of them were sitting in the amphitheater for "The Sign of Triumph," an extravagant show involving a parade inspired by the Roman Empire; chariot racing; and choreographed gladiatorial fights. Social distancing guidelines were, plainly, impossible to follow at many points. While the Puy du Fou limited the number of visitors allowed in each show and kept every other row of seats empty in some venues, the free seating policy made it difficult to enforce a set distance between audience members. Officials recommended that visitors wear masks, but they were mandatory only in enclosed spaces, and few guests seemed moved to put them on while outside. Does it matter, now that the pandemic is more under control in France? It's hard to tell, especially since government regulations change regularly. Still, as I sat nearly shoulder to shoulder with others to watch what was ostensibly a form of theater, the overall setup of the Puy du Fou didn't feel very different from that of many open air summer festivals that won't go ahead this year. As theater, the Puy du Fou's offerings, whose typical running time is 20 to 40 minutes, are an odd mix of high quality production values and one dimensional storytelling. As is par for the course with amusement parks, the goal is clearly to wow and entertain, and a lot of effort has gone into the stage designs and visual effects. Medieval fortresses and castles have been recreated as background for shows including "The Vikings" and "The Secret of the Lance," while "The Last Panache" takes place in a revolving auditorium, in which the seating area slowly turns to follow the action on a 360 degree stage. (Just imagine what some of today's top theater directors would do with such a setting, given the chance.) "The Wedding of Fire," new this year and performed at dusk, involves astonishing feats of engineering: Its set materializes from underwater as characters appear to dance on the surface of a lake. Unfortunately, the stories being told aren't merely frothy excuses for visual stunts. While a spokeswoman took pains to note that the park shouldn't be seen as striving for historical accuracy, the Puy du Fou sends mixed messages to visitors. The motto featured on its merchandising is "History Awaits Only You," and multiple shows do make historical assertions without a disclaimer. Historians have long disputed the Puy du Fou's narratives, which initially stemmed from a desire to shine a spotlight on a traumatic period in local history. The Vendee was a staunchly Catholic and royalist region at the time of the French Revolution, and many lives were lost there in the civil war that ensued. Still, while asserting that its story is "authentic" in the final credits, "The Last Panache" is hardly subtle or balanced in recounting that period. Onstage, the revolutionaries are depicted as bloodthirsty monsters whose goal is to suppress "freedom" (the creators must be immune to irony) and "exterminate the Vendean race." Nearly all the narratives also come with a disturbing level of religious subtext. In "The Vikings," a saint literally comes out of a reliquary to subjugate said Vikings, who fall to their knees and promise to follow his teachings an actual deus ex machina. "The Secret of the Lance" endows Joan of Arc's lance with divine fire based powers. "The First Kingdom," an immersive production in which the audience meanders from scene to scene, culminates in the Catholic baptism of King Clovis I, recreated here in grandiose fashion, with fleurs de lis (a symbol of French royalty) projected onto large screens of water around him. It's all in keeping with the politics of de Villiers, a nationalist and traditionalist figure who received just over 2 percent of the vote in the 2007 presidential election. According to the spokeswoman, de Villiers has written all the shows presented at the Puy du Fou and co directs them with his son, Nicolas de Villiers, and the park's general director, Laurent Albert. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The news that eight Florida nursing home residents died in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma has prompted a criminal investigation and spurred widespread outrage. But it also poses unsettling, difficult questions for people selecting a nursing home for themselves or a loved one. This emotionally fraught choice often must be made at a chaotic moment when a relative is sick, his or her time in the hospital is running short and the options seem confusing. Experts in nursing home quality say there are some steps families can take that will improve their odds of picking a well run place. "You have more time than you think," said Tony Chicotel, the staff attorney at the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, a nonprofit group. Hospitals may have an incentive to save money by discharging patients, putting pressure on families to make a decision quickly, but consumers should know they can ask for more time. "I tell people this may be one of the most important decisions you ever make regarding this person's life," Mr. Chicotel said. "Don't feel pressure to go to a place that you haven't vetted." Investigate the track record of the facilities you are considering. A federal website, Nursing Home Compare, is the most comprehensive source of data on nursing homes and allows consumers to sort and compare facilities based on geography and other factors. The site includes information about a home's staffing levels, recent inspection reports and measurements of the quality of residents' care. Another website, Nursing Home Inspect run by ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism group allows visitors to dig more deeply into facilities' inspection reports and any citations they have received from regulators. The federal website is not perfect some key information, like staffing data, is reported by the nursing homes themselves, for example but changes in recent years have improved the site. Nursing Home Compare also does not always include state level reports or penalties. To view those, families must search the websites of individual states, such as the one run by the state of Florida. Taken as a whole, the websites can provide an overview of a nursing home's quality and identify potential red flags. A facility that has been given only one or two stars on the federal website, for example, should likely be ruled out, advocates said. Florida officials are still sorting out who is to blame for the death of residents this week when the facility's air conditioning stopped working, but the nursing home in question the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills had a federal rating of two stars (out of a possible five). Inspection reports show that in 2016 and 2014, it was cited for problems with maintaining its emergency generators, though this year, a follow up inspection concluded that the issues had been corrected. Some experts also recommend asking a nursing home you're considering for the minutes of meetings of its residents council, which can reveal quality of life problems that may not show up elsewhere. Others warned that the nursing homes themselves often run these councils, so the minutes may not be that revealing in all cases. Even so, try to get copies of the minutes before you visit, "so you can clue in on those problems and see if those have been fixed," said Brian Lee, who was the Florida state nursing home ombudsman from 2003 to 2011 and is now executive director of Families for Better Care, an advocacy group based in Texas. Visit all homes you are considering, ideally in the evening or on weekends. Scheduling a tour or making an appointment is fine, but many also advised visiting during a shift change, a busy hour like dinnertime, or on weekends when staffing levels are lower, to gain a sense of how the facility operates when conditions are not ideal. If a nursing home resists or advises against making an unannounced visit consider that a red flag, Mr. Chicotel said. As you walk through the nursing home, use all your senses. If you smell urine or feces, that is a sign that staff members are not attending to residents' needs quickly enough. Are residents parked in wheelchairs in the hallway? In front of the television? "You don't want them to be potted plants sitting in the corner," Mr. Lee said. He also advised eating a meal at the nursing home if there is time. Food is often one of residents' top complaints, Mr. Lee said. "The quality is bad, the temperature is bad, the choice and selection," he said. "If people don't eat, they become malnourished, so you want to be able to sit down, have a meal, and it should be palatable." Richard J. Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a New York based advocacy group, recommended asking about quality of life issues that are often overlooked in the rush to find a nursing home, such as what religious services are available. To get a sense for how well staffed a nursing home is and staffing levels are considered the best measure of a facility's overall quality Mr. Chicotel advised looking at residents' hair, fingernails and teeth. "Those are the shortcuts that understaffed facilities make," he said. "Those are less visible those things don't go in the chart." Ask for the facility's emergency management plan. While natural disasters are rare, people who live in vulnerable areas like Florida may want to pay extra attention to a nursing home's emergency management plan. All facilities are required to have such a plan and to file it with local emergency management officials, Mr. Lee said. The trouble is, he said, the plans often receive little scrutiny and end up gathering dust in a government office. "Many of these plans are just rubber stamped, and it becomes this bureaucratic paper push," he said. Families might also want to ask whether a nursing home has a backup generator to power its air conditioning system. A new federal rule, set to be enforced in November, requires nursing homes to have "alternate sources of energy" to maintain safe temperatures in facilities, but does not specifically require backup generators for air conditioning systems. Asking questions about the plan allows you to evaluate whether it is adequate, but it also keeps staff members on their toes. "It's a training system for the nursing home," said Mr. Lee, who weathered four hurricanes during the time he was the state's nursing home ombudsman. If you're having trouble sorting out your options, contact the local nursing home ombudsman. Every state has a network of ombudsmen whose job is to investigate residents' concerns. Many can also help families evaluate facilities. "It's a free service, they'll sit down with people, and if there's a problem, you've got someone you know is in your corner," Mr. Lee said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. Tommy DeVito, an original member of the Four Seasons, the close harmony quartet that rocketed to fame in the early 1960s with "Sherry" and other hits and earned new generations of fans when the Broadway musical "Jersey Boys" told a semi factual version of the group's story, died on Monday in Henderson, Nev. He was 92. Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio, the two surviving original members of the group, announced his death. A spokeswoman for Mr. Valli said the cause was the novel coronavirus. Mr. DeVito had moved to Las Vegas decades ago after leaving the Four Seasons in 1970. Growing up in difficult circumstances in his native New Jersey, Mr. DeVito was, in his own words, "a hell raiser" as a youth, but he found a purpose with music. He formed a band called the Variety Trio with one of his brothers and Nick Massi, who would become the fourth member of the Four Seasons when that group coalesced in about 1960. (Mr. Massi died in 2000 at 73.) The key component, though, was Mr. Valli, with his falsetto vocals. In a 2008 interview with the music publication Goldmine, Mr. DeVito recalled that his trio performed regularly at a bar in Belleville, N.J., when Mr. Valli, a teenager six years younger than him, would sneak in to watch them play. He and the other band members knew Mr. Valli from the neighborhood and knew that he had pipes. "I'd call him up to the stage and let him sing," Mr. DeVito said. "He'd get off right away, because he wasn't really supposed to be in there; he was underage." Before long Mr. Valli was part of the group, which went through name and lineup changes before becoming the Four Seasons. "Sherry," the group's breakout hit, topped the charts in 1962, and a stream of hits followed, including "Walk Like a Man" (1963) and "Rag Doll" (1964). Mr. DeVito didn't entirely shed his hell raiser past; he ran up debts, for one thing, and caused tensions within the group. In 1970 he was either forced out, as some accounts say, or left because the pressures of touring had disagreed with him, as he explained it. He quickly burned through whatever money he had from the group's heyday and took jobs working in casinos and cleaning houses to get by. The actor Joe Pesci, a friend for many years (whose character in Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" is named for Mr. DeVito), had lived with Mr. DeVito for a time before he was famous, and once Mr. Pesci broke through, he repaid the favor, helping Mr. DeVito out and getting him bit parts in movies, including "Casino" (1995), also directed by Mr. Scorsese. Mr. DeVito also had some success as a record producer and recorded an album of Italian folk songs. Seeing a version of himself portrayed in "Jersey Boys" was startling, he said. But he was comfortable with the show, which he described as "about 85 percent true to life." "When you first see yourself being played, you look at the actor, who is Christian Hoff, and say: 'Do I look like that? Did I talk like that? Was I really a bad guy?'" he told Goldmine. "And I was. I was pretty bad when I was a kid. There's a lot of things I'd never do today that I did back then as a kid." Gaetano DeVito was born on June 19, 1928, in Belleville, the youngest of nine children. When he was still too small to hold a guitar, he borrowed an older brother's and tried playing it while it was lying on the floor. His brother discovered him, he told The Star Ledger of Newark in 2005, and gave him first a beating and then a counterintuitive warning. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Run or fight? That is the question prompted by a series of recent animalattacks on humans, including an alligator that dragged a 2 year old to his death in an Orlando lake last month. And CNN reported recently that a mountain lion in Colorado had attacked a 5 year old boy, who was saved when his mother pried the child away from the animal. While both of those incidents were rare events, travelers seeking to watch wildlife or spend time in national parks and preserves should keep a safe distance from any animals they encounter, experts say. "You're safer in a national park than you are in any city if you use respect and allow the animal a comfort zone," said Jack Hanna, the director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium who has hosted several television series devoted to wildlife. Safe distances depend on the animal. A rattlesnake, he said, can spring a body length or more from its coil, and should be given at least a six foot berth. Give an alligator 50 to 60 feet and a bear not less than 30 yards and up to 50 if they have cubs. How to respond to an encounter with a wild animal depends on which animal it is, as outlined in these species specific responses to North American wildlife. Alligators are found from North Carolina to Texas but are especially prevalent in Florida where, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, they number 1.3 million and populate all 67 counties. "They prefer freshwater lakes and slow moving rivers and their associated wetlands, but they also can be found in brackish water habitats," wrote Tammy Sapp, spokeswoman for the commission, in an email. The agency reports that alligator incidents are rare. From 1948 through April 2016, 383 people were bitten. Of those, 23 died. It advises not swimming between dusk and dawn, when the animals are more active. If an alligator does attack, fight back by hitting, kicking or poking it in the eyes. The commission recommends getting immediate medical attention, as alligator bites can result in severe infection. Bears are usually a threat only when surprised or when they are protecting their cubs, situations that can occur when hikers are in remote areas. Rangers at Yellowstone National Park recommend hiking with bear spray, a pepper spray that inhibits a bear's ability to see, smell or breathe. To deter surprise encounters, the park recommends avoiding hiking at dawn, dusk or night, and making noise while walking along, such as periodically yelling out "Hey, bear!" especially when encountering blind corners or heading through brush. It also encourages visitors to hike in groups of three or more. Ninety one percent of people injured by bears in Yellowstone since 1970 were hiking alone or with just one companion. If you do encounter a bear at a distance, slowly back away. If you surprise one, do not run, as it may trigger a chase response from the animal. Slowly retreat, drawing your bear spray. If the bear charges, stand your ground and begin spraying it when it is 30 to 60 feet away. Only when it makes contact should you play dead to show that you are not a threat. Fighting back during an attack only makes it worse. According to park statistics dating to 1970, those who fought back sustained very severe injuries 80 percent of the time. Those who remained passive received only minor injuries 75 percent of the time. The advice holds for black and brown bears. "Black bear are more carnivorous than a grizzly," Mr. Hanna said. He survived his own encounter with a mother grizzly and two cubs on a hiking trail in Montana six years ago. By backing away, he and a group of hikers successfully escaped two bears. One cub, however, charged, forcing Mr. Hanna to use his bear spray, after which the animal fled. "As a human being you want to run like hell, but if you run you won't make it," he said. According to the nonprofit Mountain Lion Foundation, which is devoted to protecting the cats and their habitats, mountain lions are generally found in 14 Western states. Because they are solitary and hard to spot, population estimates are difficult, though the foundation believes there are fewer than 30,000 in the country. "I've seen one three times in 40 years of being in the mountains," said Mr. Hanna, who has a home in Montana. "The mountain lion is one of the most elusive cats in the wild." He said attacks are extremely rare, "and when they do hurt people it's when they're injured or older. That's like a needle in a haystack." Avoid hiking alone, or take bear or pepper spray along. If you are attacked, according to the Mountain Lion Foundation, do not run, but stand tall and open your coat or raise your arms to look big. Maintain eye contact, slowly wave your arms, speak firmly and throw items at the mountain lion if necessary. Normally, the cat will move on. Shark attacks are on the rise, according to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida, which tracks incidents worldwide. There were 98 shark attacks in 2015, surpassing the previous record of 88 set in 2000. Of those, the largest share, 59, took place in the United States. To prevent a shark attack, the university research center recommends not swimming at dawn, dusk or night; not swimming where people are fishing, where fish are schooling or where seabirds are feeding; and not wearing shiny jewelry in the water. If you are attacked by a shark, pound it on the nose and scratch at its eyes and gills. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LOS ANGELES The coming film "The Birth of a Nation," which recounts a violent 1831 slave rebellion and includes scenes that evoke present day outrage over fatal police shootings of black men, has been marketed as an urgent call to action. In publicity materials, Nate Parker, the film's director, writer, producer and star, says audiences should leave theaters asking, "When injustice knocks at our own front door, are we going to counter it with everything we have?" The distributor of the historical drama, Fox Searchlight, has promoted it with provocative posters depicting Mr. Parker's character with his head in a noose made from an American flag and with trailers that feature Andra Day's stirring rhythm and blues song "Rise Up." But when "The Birth of a Nation" arrives in roughly 2,000 theaters on Friday, Fox Searchlight is hoping that a parallel and largely invisible marketing effort one intended to contain and frame Mr. Parker's message will ease the film into communities already on edge. As the nation struggles to deal with the issue of race after a number of episodes in which unarmed black men have been killed by the police, prompting protests in cities across the country, the studio wants "The Birth of a Nation" to inspire but not incite. Whether Fox Searchlight can have it both ways will depend on the effectiveness of a grass roots campaign aimed at churches, schools and pockets of political influence. As it has publicly dealt with new attention on a rape case from 1999 involving Mr. Parker, the studio has quietly hosted an unusually expansive series of private screenings of the film for groups like the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches. Aja Brown, the mayor of Compton, Calif., will be a co host of an advance screening at a local theater on Monday. Studio operatives have also distributed guides to roughly 80,000 churches that contain suggestions for weaving the film and its themes into sermons. Classroom study materials were made available to more than 30,000 teachers. "We can't control how the film is ultimately read, what actions people may take, but one message has been that there are very viable and practical steps," said the Rev. Marshall Mitchell, a pastor and movie consultant who since April has been among those working to build interest in Mr. Parker's film while also reducing its volatility. "Rise up by voting. Rise up to build affordable housing. Rise up in a constructive way." In conjunction with the film, Fox Searchlight helped organize a voter enrollment effort in multiplex lobbies. Actors from "The Birth of a Nation" also recorded a video to raise voting awareness, which has run in participating theaters. "This fall, we will all have the opportunity to put our differences aside and celebrate the rights that unite us as Americans," says Colman Domingo, who plays a slave named Hark in the movie. "The Birth of a Nation" recounts the true story of Nat Turner, a slave who gained a following as a preacher. But repugnant events atrocities by slave owners, the gang rape of his wife by white men turn Turner into the leader of a murderous rebellion. He hopes the killings will be the first shots in a war for equality and justice, but whites slay him and his followers as retribution. The film is direct in its effort to connect America's racist past to the present. In one jarring scene that echoes contemporary accounts of police shootings, slave hunters stop Turner's innocent father on a road and try to kill him. Mr. Parker declined an interview request, but studio publicity materials quote him as explaining, "If you look at history if you look at the history, say, of how Southern police departments developed out of slave patrols then you can better analyze where we are now." Fox Searchlight, which also declined to comment, paid a hefty 17.5 million in January to acquire distribution rights to "The Birth of a Nation," which takes its title from the 1915 D. W. Griffith silent movie, which is considered a landmark for its innovative filmmaking technique but is derided as racist for its stereotypical depiction of blacks and its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. At the time, the studio was confident it could turn the well reviewed movie into a hit. 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. The subject matter of Mr. Parker's film is timely and relevant, dovetailing with the Black Lives Matter movement. Mr. Parker, who spent seven years struggling to get "The Birth of a Nation" made, had a compelling story to tell. And there was a shortage of prestige minded films with diverse casts. The shutout of black actors by Academy Awards voters (for a second year in a row) and subsequent OscarsSoWhite outcry made that clear. But the marketing plan grew complicated in a hurry. Police shootings of black men many of them captured on video continued to set off protests around the country. Then, in July, a demonstration in Dallas turned violent when a gunman killed five police officers. He set out to kill as many white officers as possible, Texas officials said. Fox Searchlight had conducted focus group research to see if "The Birth of a Nation" might be viewed as a call to aggression and concluded there was no risk. Even so, the studio leaned into its effort to position the film as a specific type of provocation a peaceful one. "Part of our work has been to distill that 'rise up' message down," said Mr. Mitchell, who is the pastor of Salem Baptist Church in Jenkintown, Pa., and a founder of Wit PR, a firm that specializes in outreach to spiritually minded moviegoers. Then, in late August, news reports brought renewed attention to a case in which Mr. Parker was accused and later acquitted of raping a fellow student while at Penn State. It was revealed that Mr. Parker's accuser later committed suicide in 2012 at the age of 30. That disclosure prompted a backlash against the filmmaker. Some called to boycott the film. The movie's awards prospects dimmed dramatically. On Sunday, "60 Minutes" dedicated part of a segment to the controversy, with an unapologetic Mr. Parker saying he was "falsely accused" and "vindicated." All of that means the financial prospects for "The Birth of a Nation" are now murky. Some movie marketing experts say the question at this point, in fact, is not how the masses will receive the film but whether there will be any masses at all. Will women shun "The Birth of a Nation" because of the controversy about Mr. Parker's past? Do black audiences want to see another movie with slavery at its center? Will the potential lack of awards season buzz depress ticket sales, particularly overseas? Analysts who forecast ticket sales predict an opening weekend in the 7 million to 9 million range in the vicinity of "Selma," which took in 11.3 million during its first three days in wide release in 2014. The problem: Even with the promotional support of Oprah Winfrey and an Oscar nomination for best picture, "Selma" collected only 52 million at the domestic box office and 14.7 million overseas. Still, Fox Searchlight is not giving up. On Sunday the studio began running new 30 second television ads that show scenes from the film intercut with still images of Black Lives Matter protests. New posters have also gone up in cities; the image depicts the hooded Klansman on horseback from the 1915 film's poster with "Nat Turner Lives" spray painted over it, a reference to the slave hero played by Mr. Parker. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The opening of the Second Avenue subway on Jan. 1, 2017, did more than add a couple of stops on the Q train to Yorkville. "There's sort of a renaissance going on," said Neal J. Blangiardo, 49, a psychologist who works and teaches in the fields of public health and sexuality. For the past 11 years, he has lived on the southern edge of Yorkville, which by most definitions stretches from Third Avenue to the East River and from East 79th Street to East 96th Street, though some area residents peg its starting point as far south as East 72nd Street. He chose his apartment because of a lingering memory of "a gorgeous Beaux Arts building" he had admired 15 years earlier, when he worked in the neighborhood. His wife, Sarah Chu, now 42, already lived in Yorkville and agreed that it was her favorite neighborhood, too. "There's a sense of safety, of community, of diversity, and it's quiet in the evening," Mr. Blangiardo said. "It's really kind of got it all." He and Ms. Chu, a member of the local community board and a policy adviser for the Innocence Project, bought a large one bedroom that had once been a two bedroom on the fifth floor of a walk up co op building. Six years ago, they had a daughter, and a year later they bought the apartment next to theirs, a one bedroom that had once been a three bedroom. Both were "reasonably priced for Yorkville," which also caters to more affluent "captains of industry," Mr. Blangiardo said. Now they have four balconies and river views. Their daughter attends public school nearby and often plays at Carl Schurz Park. But it also brought a lot of construction, as developers who had been waiting for the completion of the subway a drawn out process that took many years knocked down some of her favorite shops and started erecting more apartment buildings. "I have four high rises going up around me," said Ms. Shapiro, who became a stay at home mother after a career in the fashion industry. She and Mr. Shapiro, who works in textiles, considered moving to the suburbs, but found the Yorkville public schools to be invaluable to her older son, who needed special education classes. So they stayed in their one bedroom, one and half bathroom apartment, with a dining room they converted to a second bedroom, for less than 5,000 in rent. Both sons are now in college, where they didn't have to adjust to bunk beds, she said. As for the construction, Ms. Shapiro has watched her neighborhood go through many cycles and knows the development spurt will give way to new stores. "It's making a big circle," she said. Odette Petersen, 77, lives in an apartment overlooking East 81st Street. She and her husband discovered it while walking along First Avenue in 2005, seeking a new home after selling their co op on East 72nd Street. "It was getting too noisy," she said. "We just started to walk north. We wanted something comparable, but not as noisy. We like apartment living, but not old buildings." They found a 34th floor apartment that could be converted into a two bedroom, with a terrace and "so much light" in a sleek 1980 building with "a pool and a million conveniences." They were surprised it was a rental building. "We figured we'd just take it and move in six months," she said. "Fourteen years later, we've been out looking with a broker twice, but we got attached to our terrace and our indoor pool." The building recently renovated its gym and created a playroom, as many "starter families" are moving in, largely because of the new transportation available. "The Second Avenue subway is huge," said Ms. Petersen, who has two adult daughters and has worked in a variety of jobs. "We suffered for a long time" as it was being built, she added. "I always said, 'What are they bothering for?' But now we find that the Q train takes us everywhere" including directly to Times Square, Herald Square and Union Square. "It's much more pleasant." Because of zoning laws, most buildings on Yorkville's side streets are five or six stories tall, including many walk ups that were once tenements, recalling a time when working class immigrants from countries like Germany, Hungary and Ireland flocked there for housing and employment in such industries as beer brewing and cigar manufacturing. 2 EAST END AVENUE, NO. 7A A two bedroom, two and a half bath co op with an eat in kitchen, a marble master bathroom, a washer dryer and a river view, in a 1910 converted lighting factory with a full time doorman and a fitness center, listed for 2.495 million. 917 749 6522 Historic townhouses and luxury apartment buildings are also part of the mix, mostly along the avenues, where tall buildings are permitted. The Second Avenue subway, which has stops on East 86th and East 96th Streets (as well as East 72nd and East 63rd Streets to the south), has brought gleaming new stations filled with space age entrances, impressive mosaics and numerous escalators. "Yorkville no longer feels like a frontier neighborhood," said Carolyn B. Joy, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens. "They went through a war, a war of the intrusion of construction. But it's done. Nobody even remembers." Major developers started to assemble sites for high rises as many as 10 years before the subway was scheduled to open, said Robert Lemle, whose German immigrant grandfather started the family business, Copperwood Real Estate, in 1921. (The company now owns about a dozen rental buildings in the area.) Partly inspired by the new subway, Mr. Lemle transformed two 1905 tenement buildings into a single luxury rental building with an elevator, which allowed him to remove the fire escapes as he restored the original curved brick and terra cotta facade. The building, on East 78th Street, won the 2019 Yorkville Heritage Award, given by the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts. 530 EAST 90TH STREET, NO. 2L A two bedroom, one bath co op with partial park and river views in a building with a 24 hour doorman, a live in super and laundry facilities that is part of Gracie Gardens, a four building cluster with a courtyard and common garden, listed for 735,000. 917 292 7063 The Friends group "has a more expansive concept of the geography than real estate agents have," said Rachel Levy, the executive director. Recently, the organization published a book about Yorkville that includes a few buildings in the East 60s, as well as many spots designed to serve immigrants, including houses of worship like St. Joseph's Church on East 87th Street, built in 1884 by the German community, where the German born Pope Benedict XVI led a prayer service in 2008. Through early September, the average sales price for a Yorkville apartment in 2019 was 1.368 million, and the average sales price for a one bedroom was 757,942, said Ms. Joy of Brown Harris Stevens, based on her company's analysis. Overall prices had been climbing for the last several years, "as more people saw that the opening of the Second Avenue subway line was in sight," she said, but the average dipped this year, from 1.494 million in 2018, "because real estate elsewhere is going down." The neighborhood "has been attractive lately, because it's still considered a place where you get more for your money than in almost any other area," Ms. Joy said. "Now it's more livable and comparatively inexpensive." 509 EAST 88th STRET, NO. 2D A one bedroom, one bath co op with a windowed kitchen and two basement storage units, in a five story building with a laundry room and bicycle storage, listed for 365,000. 646 246 8949 While new construction and renovations have brought higher prices, plenty of lower priced apartments in older walk up and elevator buildings remain. The least expensive of the 361 listings on StreetEasy as of Oct. 1 was a co op studio in a 1958 elevator building on East 85th Street, offered for 244,900. The most expensive was a five bedroom, five and a half bathroom, full floor condo in a 2017 building, listed for 35 million. As of Oct. 1, there were 474 rental listings, ranging from a 1,750 studio on East 81st Street to a 21,500 four bedroom townhouse on East 84th Street. Although many well known stores and eateries have closed in recent years, the neighborhood still has plenty of "fun little restaurants that offer quality food, mom and pop shops, an intimacy that a lot of Manhattan has lost," said Maria Manuche, a real estate agent with Compass. The turnover has been happening for decades, said Franny Eberhart, president of the Friends organization, as populations disperse and "demands change." She remembered the Elk Candy Company, which closed its brick and mortar store in 2006. "I'm in conservation, and I wish that the candy was still there, but things are going to change," she said. A wide variety of food is available now, she said, including Belgian, Thai, Chinese and Mexican. Among the restaurants that recall historic Yorkville are Schaller Weber, which sells German food; Heidelberg Restaurant; and the Budapest Cafe (a.k.a. Andre's Cafe Bakery). All are on Second Avenue near East 86th Street, the area's commercial core. The M31 bus runs up and down York Avenue; the M15 bus runs up First Avenue and down Second, and several buses run on Third Avenue. The M79, M86 and M96 travel crosstown. Wealthy New Yorkers began building country estates in Yorkville in the 18th century, but the only one still standing is Gracie Mansion, according to "Shaped by Immigrants: A History of Yorkville," published by Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts. Known today as the official residence for New York City's mayor, Gracie Mansion is a Federal style house built in 1799 by Archibald Gracie, a Scottish immigrant and shipping magnate. In 1942, Fiorello H. La Guardia became the first mayor to live there. Free tours are offered on Mondays by reservation. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Staff members of The Wall Street Journal have been pressing newsroom leaders to make fundamental changes in how the newspaper covers race, policing, and its primary focus, the business world, along with other matters. In a June 23 letter to the editor in chief, Matt Murray, a group identifying itself only as "members of the WSJ newsroom" said the paper must "encourage more muscular reporting about race and social inequities," and laid out detailed proposals for revising its news coverage. "In part because WSJ's coverage has focused historically on industries and leadership ranks dominated by white men, many of our newsroom practices are inadequate for the present moment," the letter said. Among its proposals: Mr. Murray should appoint journalists to cover "race, ethnicity and inequality"; name two standards editors specializing in diversity; conduct a study of the race, ethnicity and gender breakdown of the subjects of The Journal's "most prominent and resource intensive stories"; and bring more diversity to the newsroom and leadership positions. "Reporters frequently meet resistance when trying to reflect the accounts and voices of workers, residents or customers, with some editors voicing heightened skepticism of those sources' credibility compared with executives, government officials or other entities," the letter said. "We should apply the same healthy skepticism toward everyone we cover." On Friday, Kamilah M. Thomas, chief people officer with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, sent an internal email announcing the recent creation of a new position of senior vice president of inclusion and people management as well as other initiatives that, she said, are part of "a comprehensive review of diversity, equity and inclusion across our business." The Journal is one of many media organizations, including The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Los Angeles Times and Conde Nast, where staff members have questioned leadership at a time of widespread protests against racism and police brutality prompted by the killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who died after a white police officer pressed a knee to his neck. The week before that, the union representing Journal reporters and editors sent a letter requesting that Mr. Baker, who stayed on in the news department as a columnist, be reassigned to the opinion section, which is operated separately from the newsroom. Faulting columns Mr. Baker had written on race, that letter said his work had violated newsroom standards. Mr. Baker was moved to the opinion staff the day after the letter was sent. One of the proposals in the June 23 letter concerned changes to The Journal's stylebook. "Review the terminology used across WSJ content, including editorial, to refer to various identity groups and compare with latest industry standards," it suggested. The following week, The Journal announced that it would capitalize "Black" when referring to members of the African diaspora. Several other news organizations have made the same decision in recent weeks, including The Associated Press and The Times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Although binge drinking among young people has declined, it's still a concern for certain groups especially girls, black adolescents and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. American adolescents are binge drinking less than they used to, according to a new report. "It's good news," said Bohyun Joy Jang, a researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, and the first author of a study that appeared in the May issue of the journal Pediatrics. The bad news, Dr. Jang said, is that frequent binge drinking is not decreasing as rapidly among members of lower socioeconomic groups, African Americans and girls. The study showed that "frequent binge drinking" at least two occasions of drinking five or more drinks in a row over the past two weeks decreased among American adolescents over the period from 1991 to 2015. The study found, however, that drinking rates are decreasing faster among the economically better off, and among boys. "Maybe some policy or some other intervention or prevention has worked," Dr. Jang said. But it is "not equally effective across all these populations." The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The kinds of policies that are aimed at reducing underage alcohol consumption include stronger laws about ID checks, minimum ages for alcohol sellers, servers and bartenders, and keg registration requirements. And of course, there have been numerous efforts made to educate adolescents about the risks of heavy alcohol use. Dr. Jang said that adolescent drinking and binge drinking have been decreasing since the early 2000s, but that this study shows a decrease specifically in the pattern of frequent binge drinking. "The overall declines in frequent binge drinking indicate that national and state level policies and programs targeted at underage drinking may have been effective, although I'm not sure to what extent each of the policies specifically contributes to the declines," Dr. Jang said. The differential effects on different populations, however, are worrying. "One of the crucial messages from our study is that the public efforts may not be reaching all adolescents equally," Dr. Jang said. So the researchers would like to see more attention from parents, from health care providers and from researchers to the populations that are not being reached as successfully: black adolescents, young women and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. "I think this is a real public health success that hasn't actually been really celebrated," said Dr. Scott Hadland, a pediatrician and adolescent addiction specialist at the Grayken Center for Addiction Medicine at Boston Medical Center, who was a co author of a commentary on the study. And it's not just alcohol use that has declined. "Rates of teen use and, for most substances, rates of teen heavy use have declined," he said, steadily since about the 1990s. The exception, he said, is marijuana; daily use and near daily use of that drug have increased, while perceptions of harm have decreased. In the late '90s, he said, about one in two high school seniors reported having used alcohol in the last 30 days, whereas in 2016, it was down to one in three. Binge drinking, he said, has declined notably among all age groups. "More teens than ever are expressing disapproval around binge drinking, fewer teens than ever are reporting that alcohol is readily available, easy to get," he said. But he agreed with other experts' concerns about the ways that the improvements were more significant in some groups than in others. "The public health successes are not being equally shared by everybody." This is one of the first papers to really look carefully at drinking in this kind of detail, he said. And it's important, even while we celebrate the public health success we think is connected to effective messaging and good preventive care, to think about whether there are adolescents cut off from the potential benefits of anti drinking programs. "Not all youth have the same access to high quality care and to high quality screening and referral services," Dr. Hadland said. "We need to think about whether our school systems have equal access to high quality preventive messaging, whether our schools are managing this problem equally and across the board for all youth." How can parents best help their teenagers navigate this issue and keep an eye out for trouble? "I'm also a parent, and I have been asked a lot of those kinds of questions by my friends and my co workers," Dr. Jang said. She pointed to the important role of screening at health care visits. "We have to talk with the practitioners at the regular checkup because there are these short checkup guidelines so practitioners can see whether the child has any problems or not," she said. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism publishes a guide for practitioners on how to screen young people relatively quickly for alcohol problems and intervene when necessary. Dr. Hadland acknowledged that parents can feel that they are being asked to give contradictory messages. "What I say to teens and what I recommend that parents reinforce with teens," he said, "is first and foremost, for your health it's best not to drink or to use any substances. We have data underlying that." But then there has to be a second message, particularly for young people who are drinking: "I say, for your health, I recommend that you reduce the amount that you drink and you drink less often to reduce the harms of drinking." In addition, of course, there are other essential messages about how to take care of yourself if you are drinking, especially regarding safe rides home, protected sex practices and mental health. "I do think it is really important in these conversations with teens to help reset their understanding of what is excessive drinking," he said. Adolescents may not be measuring their alcohol intake by the same standards as researchers. "Many of the teens I care for are not measuring alcohol as we would," Dr. Hadland said. "They'll tell me oh, just one or two drinks, but if you drill down you realize each of those may have four or five ounces of hard liquor." Researchers define a drink as containing 12 ounces of beer, five ounces of wine or one and a half ounces of hard liquor. Dr. Hadland also uses hist conversations with young patients to talk about the consequences of heavy drinking. The top three causes of death in adolescence are motor vehicle crashes, homicide and suicide, and he said alcohol can be a contributing factor in all three. The long term dangers of heavy drinking may be harder for adolescents to grasp, he said, though starting to drink young puts you at risk for long term addiction. Over the long haul, heavy drinking is linked to many other kinds of illness, from liver disease and heart disease to cancer. "I say, I'm really having this conversation because I'm worried about you and I want to keep you safe with this drinking." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Here's what the two presenters said: TIFFANY HADDISH: We are so happy to be here but our feet hurt. MAYA RUDOLPH: Yeah. I had to take my shoes off. HADDISH: Girl, me too. I've been wearing these shoes since 11 o'clock this morning. How long you been wearing your shoes? HADDISH: Well, I got blisters bubbling up on the bottom of my foot. RUDOLPH: We are so happy to be here, but a little nervous too, because a few years ago, people were saying that Oscars were so white. And since then, some real progress has been made. HADDISH: But when we came out together, we know some of you were thinking, "Are the Oscars too black now?" RUDOLPH: But we just want to say, don't worry. There are so many more white people to come tonight. HADDISH: So many. We just came from backstage, and there are tons of them back there. HADDISH: And not just movie stars, there are white people walking around with headsets, white people with clipboards. HADDISH: Now, I'm personally not a fan of white people with clipboards, because I'm always wondering, what are they writing down about me? RUDOLPH: Oh yeah. When they're like, "I'm sorry, you're not on the list." And they didn't check all the pages. And I'm like, "Hey white dude with the clipboard, check all the pages." HADDISH: Oh, oh, and what about when they're on the headset and you're like, "Who are they talking to?" Hold on one second. One moment. RUDOLPH: Are you talking to me? Oh, you're not talking to me. Oh, you want me to wait. I'm sorry? HADDISH: I don't know, but it feels like I'm in a department store. RUDOLPH: Guys. Guys. enough about our personal issues. We are presenting two awards tonight, documentary short subject and live action short film. Here are the nominees for best documentary short subject. HADDISH: Hi, Meryl! I want you to be my mama one day. RUDOLPH: One day. Just one day. RUDOLPH: Tiffany, can I just say, when you peed off a zip line in "Girls Trip," it was brilliant. HADDISH: Oh my God, Maya, when you took a dookie in the street in "Bridesmaids," it changed my life. It was inspiring. RUDOLPH: Thank you. Thank you, and look where we are now. HADDISH: Yeah. It was all worth it! RUDOLPH: It was worth it. RUDOLPH: There she is. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
WHAT IS IT? A serious small bore sportbike suitable for beginners and veterans. HOW MUCH? 5,119 as tested, 5,819 for the model with antilock brakes. WHAT MAKES IT GO? A liquid cooled fuel injected 296 cc 2 cylinder engine. It's not much more than the volume of a shot glass, but the 47 cubic centimeters of displacement that Kawasaki added to the engine of its smallest sportbike makes an amazing difference. The bigger engine powers the 2013 Ninja 300, a redesigned and hopped up successor to the company's longtime entry level Ninja, the 250R. Although engine size grew less than 20 percent between the two models, horsepower and torque made bigger gains. The effect of the added power, and the way it is delivered across the r.p.m. range, make the Ninja 300 a much more satisfying ride than its predecessor. Other welcome upgrades combine to make this a bike that will put novice riders at ease. A new slipper type clutch operates with a very light pull at the lever, and it is forgiving should you forget to match engine revs to road speed when downshifting, an oversight that, with a conventional clutch, could cause the rear tire to break loose. The narrow engagement range of the clutch takes a little getting used to, though. A manageable 379 pound weight, and a seat height that lets a rider with a 30 inch inseam easily reach the ground, contribute to the feeling of confidence and control. Ninja 300 riders on a budget will also appreciate the absence of decals or graphics announcing the engine size, making it possible that onlookers would take it for one of Kawasaki's bigger 636 cc or even 1000 cc Ninjas. Nobody's the wiser. My test bike was painted Pearl Stardust White, prompting me to nickname it "the nurse." Whose idea is it to paint motorcycles white these days, anyway? Small high performance engines make their power by spinning at high r.p.m., moving lots of fuel and air through their cylinders every minute. In the Ninja's case, this translates to a limit of 13,000 r.p.m., where the rider will be spending a lot of time because it feels so great. But now there's also useful power available from idle through midrange, a span where the Ninja 250 fell short. While 250 riders found themselves shifting gears at 9,000 or 10,000 r.p.m. to accelerate with traffic, 300 riders get by revving the engine far less. That benefit did not come at the sacrifice of high speed performance. Keeping pace with 75 m.p.h. traffic on an Interstate, the 300 will accelerate when you open the throttle, letting you stay in sixth gear, where the 250 needed a downshift. It's even possible to judiciously pass a slower vehicle on a two lane road aboard the 300. Kawasaki engineers achieved the power increase by lengthening the piston stroke by nearly eight millimeters, bringing the engine displacement to 296 cc. They also replaced the carburetors of 2012 models with responsive electronic fuel injection using larger diameter throttle bores, revised the inlet passages and installed bigger intake valves. An increase in the diameter of the exhaust plumbing also improves engine breathing. Not only do these changes improve power output, they have actually increased fuel efficiency too, Kawasaki says. With its overall redesign and added power, the Ninja 300 pulls away from its closest rival, Honda's well liked single cylinder CBR250R, introduced for 2011. The Honda arrived on the market delivering the low and midrange power the Ninja 250 lacked, making it easier to ride and winning fans. But the Ninja 300 has 35 horsepower at the rear wheel, according to tests by Cycle World magazine, surpassing the Ninja 250's tepid 25 horses and the Honda CBR250's 24 a decided edge. Riders with decades of experience on much more powerful bikes often come to appreciate the appeal of light, lithe bikes that can dive into curves at brisk speeds. That's exactly where the Ninja 300 is stable and inspires confidence, a bargain when calculated in terms of thrills per dollar. STUART F. BROWN | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Hudson Yards, the 26 acre urban hub rising from obscurity on the Far West Side, some of it on a customized platform deftly suspended above an unlovely rail yard, is the genesis of a vibrant neighborhood and skyline where now there is none. As is usual in her line of work, the input of the structural engineer Aine M. Brazil won't be visible once the finished product is. She's the quintessential behind the scenes player. But without envelope pushing calculations in steel, concrete and physics by Ms. Brazil and her fellow engineers at Thorton Tomasetti, the new Hudson Yards and other high rise cityscapes, among them three million square feet of development in Times Square, might not exist. "I make the buildings stand up and stay up," she said when asked for a reductive description of her far from fragile handiwork. "As an engineer, the last thing you want to hear about is a building falling down, but I don't think it was until after 9/11 that the average person became aware that it was not an absolute fact that a skyscraper could stand up under any conditions." Her job is the ultimate in heavy lifting: Her team at Thornton Tomasetti, where she is a vice chairman, conjured the 37,000 ton platform at Hudson Yards that will support 500,000 tons of construction divided between two towers and a retail podium. The two other towers on the southern fringe of the site will mostly sit on actual terra firma. "Structural engineering is a tough one," she said. "People trust you with their buildings, so you can imagine the worries. But contributing to the vision of owners and architects by figuring out how to make their vision real is what makes this job fun. And sometimes it gets painful on the way to being fun." By 2018, half of the development, which hugs the final phase of the High Line, will be in business, and Ms. Brazil will have moved on, including projects at Roosevelt Island and NewYork Presbyterian Hospital. But she'll be able to look east across the Hudson River and see Hudson Yards from her home in Hoboken, a bold new West Side horizon made possible by a man made platform that serves the same purpose as bedrock. "We're still in the baby steps of the whole project," she said. "But I'm finding it fun to be involved in because it's not just about creating the land beneath a development or the structure of a tower, it's about creating an entire neighborhood." On this day, Ms. Brazil, 57, was in her office at 51 Madison Avenue, surrounded by piles of Hudson Yards themed renderings, blueprints and otherworldly 3 D mock ups. The phone rang incessantly. Her deadline, she joked, was yesterday. "As an engineer, you always want to be innovative, but this project demands that you be," she said. "I do the skeleton, the architect does the skin, and it's their project," she said, referring to the developers, the Related Companies and the Oxford Properties Group, which hired the architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox to design the master plan. "But it's my reputation if anything goes wrong. Obviously the first thing we have to do is make it safe. It required some very unusual structural gymnastics." L. Jay Cross, the president of Related Hudson Yards, concurred. "I've worked with Thornton Tomasetti before on sports facilities, so I knew they were already very good at building very big structures and dealing with big steel," he said. "But the secret here is in figuring how to build a deck over a working rail yard where you can't put the support columns where you want them. You have to thread them between the tracks. "At a certain point in the exercise, there's a real specialty involved, and you want someone with a lot of experience, and that's where Aine is coming from. You're talking about an enormous, enormous load getting distributed in complex ways: She and her team make it happen." Mr. Cross said Ms. Brazil's experience and intellect was coming in handy at Hudson Yards: "Our tendency as developers is that we change our mind about things every week, and we're always kidding her about that while she's tearing her hair out trying to make our ideas workable. People don't tend to think of intellectual firepower when they think of structural engineers, but they should. What we do would be impossible without them." The Irish born Ms. Brazil found her way into the profession 32 years ago, mainly because she was a whiz at math. She was the only woman in her graduating class at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, from which she received her master's degree in engineering. She and her husband, John Whelan, a structural engineer at Gace (they occasionally compete for projects, though not for Hudson Yards), moved to New York in 1982 and she almost immediately went to work for Thornton Tomasetti. Since then, the firm has grown to 850 people from 50. "There was no glass ceiling here," she said, "and part of my passion is to make sure there never is one. People are always asking how I've been able to thrive in such a male dominated profession. We don't have children, so I didn't have to balance family and career, but I'm very aware of my co workers who do need to." Ms. Brazil and her team were tapped almost a decade ago to begin devising the complicated platform, which relies on strategically placed 50 to 70 foot caissons and 50 by 150 foot steel trusses. She is also a lead engineer for 10 Hudson Yards, an under construction 180,000 ton concrete high rise whose anchor tenant is Coach, the leather goods company. She says it is the city's first all concrete commercial skyscraper. "At first everyone was resistant to using concrete," she said. "But as it turned out, Coach loved the idea of having loft like interiors that exposed some of the structural elements." Besides 10 million square feet earmarked for commercial towers, the finished development will contain 14 acres of public plazas and parkland, residential units, a hotel, a school and more than a million square feet of retail space, all of it a heavy load for a web of steel beams and concrete pylons to partially (and invisibly) support. "If nobody mentions it ever again, it means we've done our work correctly," she said. While Hudson Yards is her most challenging project to date, Ms. Brazil has often tweaked the city's skyline. The firm provided the structural design for One Beacon Court, a k a the Bloomberg Tower at East 58th Street and Lexington Avenue. She was the lead engineer when NewYork Presbyterian Hospital needed a 485 foot platform to bridge Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and bear the weight of a 12 story extension. Her firm handled the structural design for the rehabilitation of the Roosevelt Island aerial tramway and the 71st Street pedestrian bridge above the F.D.R. On a slightly more whimsical note, she worked on the novel structural design for West57, the 709 unit residential/retail tower at 625 West 57th Street that is the first New York project by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his Bjarke Ingels Group. The apartments will be rentals, with some designated for low income residents, and the sustainable design blends a European low rise courtyard focused vibe with the classic aspirational New York skyscraper. Ms. Brazil is excited about it, but she and the architect take issue with its unofficial nickname, the Pyramid Building. "It's not a pyramid. A pyramid is symmetrical, flat sided and comes to a point. This does not have any flat sides; if anything, it's a hexahedron. "It's a swooping surface that reaches up to a peak," she said. "It's all sloping wall and balconies and almost no roof, and it was so inventive to put something like that out there, that you also have to ask the question, 'Is it advisable to do this?' We had to find a way of getting all of these little balconies integrated and make a design in a very nontraditional form as close to the traditional method of building a residential building as possible. There is a complex geometry going on." West57 is being developed by Durst Fetner Residential; Ms. Brazil felt it crucial that the developer was willing "to embrace the architect's experiment. The partnerships that form in the process of figuring out these projects are what make it all worth it." As for her role in expanding the built landscape, Ms. Brazil said, "The fact is, people want to live and work in this city. High rise living is here to stay, and I see nothing wrong in that, providing it doesn't destroy what goes on at street level. New York City has to be a modern city, at street level and at sky level." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Before he became my husband, Stephen Mack would say, "I want to be married, not get married." He hates being the center of attention, so after he proposed to me a few years ago (out of nowhere, at a theater, right as the curtain was going up), we struggled with how to proceed with a wedding. Eloping was an obvious option, but we couldn't imagine excluding our families. I suggested a small, highly selective, casual reception. But by the time we counted aunts, uncles, cousins and our closest friends, we could never get it under 100 people. As the numbers crept up, I'd watch Stephen shrivel and was reminded that he took no joy in imagining this event. Then one night, after I suggested yet another variation on the traditional reception, Stephen said in exasperation: "You know the thing I like most? Small dinners with friends." "Then let's just do that," I blurted back. "Let's do a bunch of them." Stephen sat up. We looked at each like, "Is that allowed?" As we began brainstorming what this idea might look like, it was the first time I saw him excited for our wedding. And so that's what we've done. Instead of the usual one night only, blowout bash, we broke down our wedding reception into intimate gatherings of unexpected guest pairings, spread over six months. The process was a leap of faith (just like our relationship, which started out long distance between New York and Tel Aviv). But as we near the end of this experiment, we're relieved to discover that it has been as fun, meaningful, cost effective and low stress as we hoped it would be. Not to mention a nifty sidestep around the wedding industry. We soon took to calling it our Deconstructed Reception and it looks like this: After a ceremony last September in the Hudson Valley of New York for our immediate families (grand total: 11 guests), we're holding a dozen mini receptions for extended family and small groups of friends through May. The idea was that we would get to sit at each reception table for an entire evening, and every guest in turn would be seated at the grooms' table. No quick hugs and a breathless "thanks for coming" on repeat; rather, we'd get a whole, unrushed meal with our favorite people to celebrate our union. The trade off, of course, is that none of our friends witnessed our ceremony. They didn't see the rain clear and the sun cut through the clouds right before we began, they didn't get to hear our parents share advice from their 40 year marriages, they didn't get to cheer our big, concluding smooch or watch me fall into Stephen's chest immediately afterward for a deep ugly cry. So, what does that actually look like from the perspective of our guests? Using Eventbrite (which Stephen, a tech consultant by trade, wrangled to fit our needs), we created an "event" for each dinner and its location: Starting in November, we held eight in New York (where we live), two in Los Angeles (where I'm from), one in San Francisco (where many of our friends ended up), and concluding with one in Tel Aviv (where I went to graduate school). We chose multiple locations out of consideration for our guests a dinner, after all, is not a wedding and we felt uncomfortable asking friends to travel long distances for a meal, however special that meal might be. We scheduled the out of town dinners to coincide with work trips and family events and made Tel Aviv part of our honeymoon to justify that trek. The theme here is ease and convenience for all, including us. Our friends selected the date and city that worked best for them. The New York dinners have a maximum of 10 guests each; the out of town dinners are slightly larger, but no more than 20 (any larger and you begin to lose the relaxed coziness that defines these dinners). We didn't curate the guests; rather, we let our friends sort themselves randomly, which has led to wonderfully unexpected mixings of our various circles. Once the dinners began to fill up, we started calling restaurants. Private rooms were necessary, we realized, given the amount of talking we planned to do. We also learned that each dinner must take place at a different venue to keep the experience fresh for us and so that each leaves a distinct imprint. Otherwise, they'd all blur together, becoming as foggy as a typical reception. Part of what made Stephen uneasy about a big reception in the first place was the feeling of asking so much of our friends and family the time, the travel, the cost. And one of the reasons the deconstructed model works for us is that it allowed us to reframe the celebration as a gift to them instead, to thank them for the years of love and laughs. We wanted to treat them to top shelf dining experiences, essentially getting the city's best chefs to cater our wedding inclusive of venue, decor and centerpieces. That comes at a price, but a relatively reasonable one when compared to a standard wedding. A recent study by the Knot found that the average New York wedding costs around 77,000. Combined, our low key ceremony and mini receptions at some of the best restaurants in town were about a third less. And the cost could have been lower still, because the beauty of this model is how flexible it is to any budget. We're lucky to have access and the resources to enjoy fancy New York spots, but a Deconstructed Reception can take place in favorite barbecue joints, mom and pop establishments or even your home. We're holding 12, which will accommodate about 140 guests, but you can do as few as five or as many as 20 and spread them over a month or a year. The biggest question we asked ourselves going into this process was: How do we make our guests feel like they're witnessing something personal without fully restaging the ritual? We wanted it to feel profound without feeling performative. This is the program we came up with: It begins with mingling and champagne. ("Wow," said a high school friend of Stephen's not long after arriving at our first dinner. "I've been here five minutes and I've already spent more time with you than I would have at a regular reception!") After we're seated, we welcome our guests and introduce everyone in the room, allowing us to acknowledge our friends individually for their contributions to our lives. We place photos from our wedding weekend at each setting, and during the meal walk our guests through the ceremony, explaining how we made our own flower arrangements, relaying our parents' marriage advice and showing off the impromptu Betty Crocker cake that Stephen's sister and niece whipped up at the last minute when they learned we didn't have one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WHEN Rebecca Markillie of ITM Power in Sheffield, England, attends trade shows to promote her company's ambitious plan to build hydrogen fueling stations for cars in Britain, she sometimes must calm skittish consumers. "You get people saying, 'Oh, no: hydrogen. That is dangerous,' " she said. "And you go, 'Well, why do you say that?' And straightaway, the only knowledge of hydrogen would be the Hindenburg." Thomas Kosbau, principal of Ore Design and Technology in Brooklyn, which hopes to power homes by harnessing algae that produce hydrogen, often deals with similar doubts from investors. The Hindenburg, he frets, "is synonymous with hydrogen technology." The Hindenburg, a diesel propelled Zeppelin held aloft by hydrogen, erupted in flames and crashed in Lakehurst, N.J., on May 6, 1937, killing 36 people. The film of the silver giant floating in the sky, then suddenly catching fire and crumpling to the ground, and the emotional recorded dispatch from the scene of the radio reporter Herbert Morrison "Oh, the humanity!" retains a jaw dropping power. Even Mr. Kosbau's mother brought up the ill fated Zeppelin when questioning him about his research. She nervously asked him several questions: "Is that safe? "Is it going to be explosive? Is it going to be an issue to putting these in dense urban areas?" Mr. Kosbau's answers were no, no, and yes, easing his mother's concerns. The reflexive fear of hydrogen has a name: Hindenburg syndrome. It may be dissipating slightly, as people who were alive at the time of the crash die off. But although the gas "has been used safely for many years in chemical and metallurgical applications, the food industry and the space program," as noted by the Energy Department's website, some consumers still associate hydrogen with the searing imagery of the Hindenburg. "Those are iconic moments in the history of the 20th century," said Tom Crouch, senior curator of the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions," imagines that the hydrogen Hindenburg association develops through an unconscious question and answer session: "What do I know about the risk of hydrogen? Let me try to remember past cases that used hydrogen? Oh, yes, I remember the Hindenburg explosion very vividly. It thus must be the case that this is dangerous." Consumers, he observes in an email, tend to search their memories for dangerous examples, "and if they find one, they estimate the risk as much higher." Passengers on dirigibles in the early 20th century were playing with fire; several airships and blimps preceding the Hindenburg crashed only without newsreel cameras and recording machines to chronicle the events. The exact cause of the Hindenburg disaster remains a mystery, but Daniel Grossman, an airship historian, among other historians and scientists, cites the ignition of the highly flammable hydrogen, which somehow escaped its fabric chambers, as a significant reason for the accident. "The theory accepted by both the German and American investigating commissions, and universally accepted by contemporary scientists and historians," Mr. Grossman said in an email, "is that free hydrogen was ignited by electrostatic discharge." Mr. Grossman criticizes some hydrogen proponents for minimizing the role of the gas in the calamity. The website of the American Hydrogen Association, for instance, displays an excerpt from the book "The Philosopher Mechanic," which argues that the Hindenburg fire was started by "flammable aluminum powder filled paint varnish that coated the infamous airship." Mr. Grossman dismisses that theory. "I have never understood the perceived need to exonerate hydrogen's role in the Hindenburg disaster," he said. "Many people support solar energy, but they don't feel the need to claim that sunlight never causes skin cancer." Mr. Crouch concurs that hydrogen was "the central problem." Nevertheless, he recently bet his life on hydrogen; he crossed the English Channel in a hydrogen filled balloon. "I'm not suicidal," he said. "People do it all the time." Aside from balloonists who use hydrogen because it is much cheaper than helium many companies view the gas as the next big thing in alternative fuels. Hyundai Motor recently started mass producing a hydrogen powered sport utility vehicle for the United States, Korean and European markets. And in July, General Motors and Honda announced a joint venture to develop hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Compressed hydrogen in fuel cell vehicles combines with oxygen from the air that is pumped into fuel cell stacks. The ensuing chemical reaction generates electricity to drive the car. "Like all energy storage media, you have to treat it with respect," said Charles E. Freese, executive director, fuel cell activities at General Motors. "And if you do, you can handle it safely." In the event of a leak, hydrogen, which diffuses more quickly than gasoline, rapidly gushes into the atmosphere. In 2001, Michael R. Swain, associate professor and associate chairman at the University of Miami's College of Engineering, conducted an experiment comparing the flammability of hydrogen and gasoline. Mr. Swain's team disabled the pressure release valve in the rear of an S.U.V. outfitted with a hydrogen tank and applied a spark by remote control. Later, the experimenters punctured the fuel line under the middle of a conventional car and set it on fire. Within two minutes, fire consumed the gasoline powered vehicle; the vehicle with the hydrogen tank suffered little damage as a stream of flames shot up and away from the car and petered out. Catherine Dunwoody, executive director of the California Fuel Cell Partnership, an alliance of private companies and government agencies that promotes hydrogen as a transportation fuel, says tanks in fuel cell vehicles are wrapped in carbon and undergo vigorous testing. "Almost routinely on the nightly news you see tanker trucks on fire or fires at gas stations, but yet we still think nothing of driving around in a car that has gasoline in a plastic tank," said Ms. Dunwoody. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
President Trumpreeled off a list of his favorite media personalities on Friday when asked who might have influenced his decision to declare a national emergency after Congress refused to give him money for a border wall. Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham a powerful bloc of conservative voices who have railed against any budget compromise on wall funding all received shout outs in a Rose Garden news conference. "Sean Hannity has been a terrific, terrific supporter of what I do," Mr. Trump said of the Fox News commentator. He praised Mr. Limbaugh for his ability to command an audience. "He can speak for three hours without a phone call," Mr. Trump said. "Try doing that sometime. For three hours he speaks. He's got one of the biggest audiences in the history of the world. I mean, this guy is unbelievable." The president added that none of the favorites he mentioned, most of whom work for Fox News, drove his decisions: "They don't decide policy," he said. The question that got Mr. Trump to discuss his cable and radio cheering squad came from the NBC News reporter Kelly O'Donnell. It seemed apt after what had occurred in December, when the presidency seemed perhaps more entwined than usual with prominent figures in conservative media. At the time, Mr. Trump appeared willing to sign a continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown, even without money for the wall. Then a few of his most influential supporters, including Mr. Hannity and Mr. Limbaugh, lasered in on the lack of wall funding and pleaded with Mr. Trump to refuse to sign the bill. He did exactly that, leading to a 35 day shutdown, the longest in the government's history. This week, as the deadline on the temporary spending measure that ended the shutdown loomed, the president was willing to go ahead with a newly proposed budget, even though it had less money for a border wall than was on the table at one point last year. In contrast to December, Mr. Trump reached out to a synod of conservative commentators in an effort to assuage their concerns. He also would declare a national emergency as a way to get around Congress and provide dollars for the wall, a move conservatives championed. "We're going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border, and we're going to do it one way or the other," Mr. Trump said in the Rose Garden. "It's an invasion. We have an invasion of drugs and criminals coming into our country." 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. But not everyone in the right wing punditocracy endorsed Mr. Trump. Ann Coulter, who was an early supporter of the president, has now become a thorn in his side. In December, she published a blistering column on her website calling Mr. Trump a "gigantic douchebag" for not having made headway on a border wall. This week, as many anticipated Mr. Trump's willingness to approve the spending bill, she didn't let up, saying on Twitter that the goal of the national emergency "is for Trump to scam the stupidest people in his base for 2 more years." The president spoke of Ms. Coulter on Friday, but not in the most glowing terms. "I don't know her," the president said Friday. "I haven't spoken to her in way over a year. But the press loves saying 'Ann Coulter.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A trove of beautifully engraved gold rings and gemstones, found in the untouched grave of an ancient Greek warrior last year, were possessions from his culture, not loot from the nearby island of Crete, archaeologists now believe. The gold rings, they say, were rings of power. These items served as insignia of the elite who ruled the local inhabitants of Pylos, the town on the southwestern coast of Greece where the warrior's grave was found. The grave throws light on a dramatic historical process, the extension of the Minoan culture of Crete to southern Greece, where it formed the basis of Mycenaean civilization, the first in mainland Europe. Mycenaean rulers such as Achilles, Agamemnon and Odysseus were the heroes of Homer's epics, and Mycenaean civilization, even though it collapsed shortly after 1200 B.C., was the forerunner of the classical Greek era that arose some 700 years later. The grave was discovered last year by Jack L. Davis and Sharon R. Stocker, a husband and wife team at the University of Cincinnati, and is judged by other archaeologists to be one of the richest tombs to have been found in Greece in the last half century. The warrior was buried around 1450 B.C., a date derived from pottery found around the grave. His facial appearance has been reconstructed from his skull by Lynne Schepartz and Tobias Houlton of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The gold rings, engraved gemstones and many other items in the grave bear Minoan themes, so they could have been plunder from a raid on Crete. But Dr. Davis and Dr. Stocker believe otherwise, noting that objects in the grave are echoed in the iconography of the gold rings, they write in an article to be published in the journal Hesperia. The grave contained a bronze mirror and six ivory combs, accessories the archaeologists were surprised to find in a warrior's tomb. But Greek warriors wore their hair long, and Spartan warriors are known to have combed their hair before battle. And the mirror may have had a ritual significance: One of the gold rings depicts a goddess holding a similar mirror. Another object both in the grave and shown on the rings is a staff. A twisted piece of metal found in the grave appeared at first to be a meat hook. But when untwisted it turned out to be the head of a horned animal, probably a bull, with a socket and nail hole as if to be mounted on a staff. A goddess is holding just such a staff on one of the gold rings. The archaeologists do not yet know if the warrior and those who buried him were Minoans or Mycenaeans steeped in Minoan culture. "Whoever they are, they are the people introducing Minoan ways to the mainland and forging Mycenaean culture," Dr. Davis said. "They were probably dressing like Minoans and building their houses according to styles used on Crete, using Minoan building techniques." The warrior's grave "is telling us that right from the beginning there were people on the mainland who knew what Minoan culture meant and were bringing it to the mainland for a specific reason, that of establishing themselves in positions of power," he said. Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, an expert on the Aegean Bronze Age at the University of Texas, said she agreed that the rings and gemstone seals in the warrior's grave represented administrative and political power. "These things clearly have a power connection," she said, whether or not the rings were used in the Minoan way for sealing objects. The grave, whether dug by Minoans or Mycenaeans, "fits with other evidence that the elites on the mainland are increasingly closely connected to the elites on Crete," Dr. Shelmerdine said. The Mycenaeans continued to use Minoan themes, such as gymnasts leaping over bulls, in their art and administration until the end of the palatial period. But by classical times the memory of Minoan culture had faded, and survived mostly in the myth of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, who showed Theseus how to kill the dreaded Minotaur and escape from the labyrinth at Knossos. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Last Saturday afternoon, the designer Alan Eckstein, 34, was busy installing an interior decorating project he took on as a bill payer. Afterward he pulled an all nighter at his studio, putting finishing touches on outfits for the Timo Weiland men's wear show. On Sunday, he took a five hour paying D.J. gig at the One Hotel in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. Then on Monday, he was on hand for the Timo Weiland presentation, for which he also did the casting, styling and created the soundtrack. Monday night, he was back at home again, bubble wrapping and packing up some of the vintage Gio Ponti furniture he hawks online to make the rent. "That's me every single day," Mr. Eckstein said at the Timo Weiland show, held in a sunny loft just paces east of Hudson Yards, and which was the comeback, after a two year hiatus, of a men's wear label that for a fashion minute was by every accounts the one to watch. If there is a moral to this story it is the following: You need a side hustle. Oftentimes one side hustle is not enough. It was in the prehistory of 2010 that Timo Weiland, the label created by Mr. Eckstein, Mr. Weiland and Donna Kang was first hailed as one of the industry's top 10 breakouts. In the years that followed, the label won awards, start up grants and press plaudits, and its presence quickly expanded into 100 wholesale accounts and stores that included Barneys New York and Saks. With several million dollars in annual revenues, the brand was quietly a success. Then, in 2017, the three friends abruptly closed the doors. "A whole bunch of things happened, and we decided to walk away," Mr. Eckstein said. Things fall apart. That could hardly have been made more clear than when the Council of Fashion Designers of America announced in January that, while it would continue to organize the experiment that was a stand alone New York men's wear fashion week, it could no longer provide it with financial support. Designers would have to fend for themselves. Some of the more inspiriting moments in the life of this longtime observer of the industry were generated by folks of infinite creative resources and zero cash. Think of the soulful and supremely gifted Miguel Adrover and his jackets made from Yankees caps or shreds of Quentin Crisp's mattress. Think of As Four's wild runway romps in the still raw Far East Village, replete with pit bulls tinted pink and clothes designed according to abstruse philosophical precepts involving the circle (and that produced a handbag immediately ripped off by a designer of international renown). Think of the gender mosh pit that was any given show by Heatherette. Those moments were exciting, and nothing says they cannot return, provided you rebut the notions that universal domination is a sane business model or that New York is forever condemned to becoming a playpen for overage toddlers living on Daddy or Mommy's dime. "My parents definitely should not be supporting me," Mr. Eckstein said. The city itself will do that. And mall culture, of the sort exemplified by Hudson Yards, may not have the last word. On the first (and all but final) day of a diminished New York Fashion Week: Men's, this reporter took a stroll through the polished vaults of that retailing cavern and found himself wondering how long the global labels can afford to keep the lights on in stores where salespeople in glossy though largely empty emporiums looked as if their main job was holding up walls. Returning to the New York Men's Day presentations afterward felt somehow invigorating. Though little on view was very commercial, the atmosphere was fertile and loamy, and not merely because Jon James and Jene Stefaniak, the designers of a first season label called Feign, had trucked in a half ton of mulch for an installation whose theme was environmental degradation and corporate greed. Here was David Hart at this point the O.G. of indie men's wear showing car coats surprinted with a saucy Weegee image of a burlesque queen or else cabana sets patterned all over with the dense sea of humans packed into the frame of "Coney Island Beach," a 1940 image also by Weegee, that quintessential New York street photographer. "It's probably Weegee's most famous picture," Mr. Hart said. "I kept bugging ICP," he added, referring to the International Center of Photography, which holds an archive of work by Arthur Fellig, Weegee's real name. "And they agreed to license them to me." Why had nobody ever thought of that before? "We're all designers, not artists," Mr. Eckstein said during the Timo Weiland presentation. And yet there was plenty of artistry on display that morning, including, at Abysm, a pair of leather paper trousers with vast upturned cuffs resembling the caps worn by Tibetan nomads. (The designer, Qian Wu, 26, grew up shuttling between Shanghai and Minneapolis with her family.) At Ka Wa Key, there were washy, ethereally floral printed shorts and frocks worn by a group of dancers. "There's a social anthropology of fashion," Mr. Eckstein said. "And I feel like we're studying humans and trying to figure out how to make something of it and where to go next." What his team did was make suits. The suits were outstanding. They were simple; some boxy and double breasted, some single breasted and unlined. They had three patch pockets and softly rolled lapels neither too wide nor too narrow but somewhere in the middle a Goldilocks proportion. Certain of them were paired with trousers cropped to a length that made it look as if the model had experienced an unexpected growth spurt. Others were more contemporarily conventional, long and lean. What most delighted the eye, though, were the colors: fire engine red, azure blue, a pink not quite the saccharine millennial hue but something closer to baby boomer bassinet. Why not? A suit, when adapted to the needs of the moment, is a kind of bombproof armor. Check out the new niche lifestyle journal Wm Brown to see how easeful one can be. Consider that, when the young designers behind Timo Weiland decided to return to the business and give men's wear another try, it was with a radically different business mode, one based almost entirely on the suit. Before, Mr. Eckstein said, he and his team produced 180 products a year, sourced from seven different factories and mills on three continents and attempted to sell their goods in a crumbling bricks and mortar environment "It was not sustainable," he said. "If someone gave me a million dollars to do a fashion brand that spans the categories, I would turn it down immediately. It's not the modern model." As it happens, the Timo Weiland designers came to the conclusion that the most modern model was also the traditional one. "We decided what we wanted was to do one thing really, really well," said Mr. Eckstein, caffeinated and jubilant after his show on Monday. "I have stayed in fashion, despite my wife saying, 'When are we going to be able to buy a house?' because I love that feeling of collaborating with friends. I love seeing the work come together. I love making something I can really get behind." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Jamey Gambrell, an award winning translator who conveyed the intricacies of work by contemporary Russian authors like Tatyana Tolstaya and Vladimir Sorokin to English language readers, died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. She was 65. Her mother, Helen Gambrell, said the cause was cancer, which had only recently been diagnosed. Ms. Gambrell, a native New Yorker, steeped herself in Russian culture and literature, spending time in Moscow in the 1980s and '90s and becoming involved in its art scene as artists there who had once been underground rose to international prominence. She was a critic, writer and editor for Art in America magazine for about 15 years, covering the careers of artists like Alexander Melamid, Vitaly Komar and Ilya Kabakov, and providing insights into modern art, made near the end of the Soviet era, that was unfamiliar to many in the West. Ms. Gambrell told the critic Liesl Schillinger in an interview in The Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016 that translation felt like a natural extension of her work as a writer and editor, calling it "the most intimate and intensive form of reading there is." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
I've written recently about teenagers having too heavy periods and too painful periods, and now I want to talk about too irregular periods. These issues can overlap, but let's focus on what it can mean when an adolescent doesn't menstruate regularly and on the question of how irregular is too irregular. Dr. Andrea Bonny, an associate professor of pediatrics at The Ohio State University and chief of adolescent medicine at Nationwide Children's Hospital, said that in the past, many doctors had thought that in the first two years after menstruation begins, "really, anything goes," as far as frequency. Now, she said, the thinking is that some irregularity is OK, but to go more than 90 days without a period for two consecutive periods is concerning and should get worked up medically. After someone has been menstruating for two years, she said, intervals shorter than 21 days or longer than 45 days are considered abnormal, especially if they recur. And many adolescents with irregular cycles like those with heavy periods, and like those with very painful periods may be offered hormone treatments, either oral contraceptives or other hormone based contraceptives. The diagnosis hanging like a shadow over these conversations is polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, the most common endocrine problem in reproductive age women, which has been the subject of recent work developing diagnosis and management guidelines in women. But it is a difficult and sometimes controversial diagnosis in adolescents, because the polycystic ovarian changes that give the syndrome its name, usually identified on ultrasound, can overlap with what ovaries normally look like in adolescents. So in adolescents, making this diagnosis is not about doing ultrasounds, but about paying attention to menstrual cycles and also to other symptoms. The underlying cause is a high level of androgens, or what we usually think of as male sex hormones. Hyperandrogenism more testosterone in the blood than is usual for adolescent girls can also mean bad acne and hirsutism, body hair growing heavily and in patterns more associated with male puberty than with female puberty (for example, hair on the upper lip and chin, on the chest and abdomen, or on the back and arms). Girls with these symptoms should also be tested for other sources of androgens and for other hormonal issues like thyroid problems. Raising awareness around PCOS is important because many adult women feel, looking back, that this diagnosis was not considered soon enough as a possible cause of fertility problems and other health issues they experienced; it is associated with metabolic alterations that can put women at risk for obesity, diabetes and heart disease. With adolescents, the priority should be treating the symptoms and helping girls understand the importance of the choices they can make around diet and exercise, which should be the real first line treatment. Read more: Information from the National PCOS Association "You don't have to label to treat," said Dr. Sharon Oberfield, a professor of pediatrics at Columbia University and chief of pediatric endocrinology, who was one of the authors of a recent update on the diagnosis and treatment of PCOS in adolescents. The formal diagnosis in adolescents, she said, which should not be made until at least two years after menarche, has to be based on high androgen levels and irregular menstrual periods. And many adolescents with irregular periods will not go on to develop PCOS. Dr. Oberfield worries that making the diagnosis too early may give some younger girls the sense that the later problems are inevitable, and therefore bring up issues of anxiety and depression and body image problems, not to mention concerns about fertility. "We like to use the words, 'at risk,'" she said. "The key issue of looking at these girls is sometimes with early screening you can do early intervention." Some of the adolescents with these symptoms will go on to develop polycystic ovaries, but the priority when they are young should be to make sure there are no other underlying medical problem causing the excess androgens, and to help them understand what's going on in their bodies. Dr. Bonny said she explains to patients that men make a lot of testosterone, gesturing with her hand up near her head, and that most "women make a teeny tiny bit, but some make a bit more." She explains that usually it's the ovary producing it, and that the extra hormone tends to shut down their periods, and cause the acne and the hair growth. Dr. Susan Coupey, an expert in adolescent medicine and gynecology at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx, said that she explains, "there are two kinds of cells in the ovaries, the ones that make the eggs and the ones that make the hormones." Too much testosterone in some girls, she said, "causes them often to have acne and have unwanted hair; it can also change their lipid metabolism." The hormone imbalance and its associated troubling symptoms are often treated with oral contraceptives, which stimulate the regular shedding of the endometrium that is, the menstrual period. And that's also important because it lowers the risk of endometrial cancer down the line. In girls who can't take hormonal contraceptives because of medical contraindications, or whose families don't want them to, Provera, another form of female hormone that helps regulate menstruation, is sometimes used to induce what is called a "withdrawal bleed" if they go for more than three months without a period. Dr. Bonny said she tries to make sure that either a period or a withdrawal bleed happens at least four times a year. Dr. Coupey said that with young girls and their families, though she explains that older women use these pills for birth control, for them, "I say, 'You've got a hormone imbalance, taking this pill will put your ovaries to sleep.'" For overweight patients, losing weight can help with the symptoms but the hormonal issues can make this even harder than usual; the androgens and the insulin resistance tend to spur the body to gain weight, not lose it. Adolescents who have evidence of insulin resistance may be started on a medication called metformin, an oral treatment that helps control insulin resistance and blood sugar levels and sometimes makes weight management a little easier as well for kids with this problem. Dr. Coupey said she suggests those prone to weight gain make a single change usually cutting out sugary drinks and then perhaps move on to a low carbohydrate diet. And many of them eventually take both metformin and birth control pills. "Many of them do quite well," she said. If the metabolic issues are not addressed with lifestyle changes, with medication, with close follow up these adolescents with persistent symptoms are at risk for Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular problems as they grow, in addition to the reproductive and fertility problems that may arise, as well as mental health issues. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times. It covers the latest in pop music criticism, trends and news. This week, just before the Grammy Awards celebrate the year that just concluded, the Popcast is celebrating the year that's yet to unfold. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Friday and Saturday nights offered, at Damrosch Park as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series, performances by Dorrance Dance (tap) and Lil Buck (the style called Memphis jookin) that were, in their different ways, phenomenal. But Dorrance Dance left an impression of marvelously developed plenitude, with a program that ideally celebrated and renewed the resources of its genre, whereas Lil Buck looked like an artistically under realized genius, a dazzling prodigy whose gifts are in danger of turning into point scoring stunts. The word "genius" should be applied sparingly to performing artists: It implies, as the philosopher historian Isaiah Berlin wrote of Vaslav Nijinsky's jumping ability and the dazzling conversation of the poet novelist Boris Pasternak, "the power to do something perfectly simple and visible which ordinary people cannot, and know that they cannot, do nor do they know how it is done, or why they cannot begin to do it." Lil Buck has joined a list that, for me, includes Mikhail Baryshnikov, the skater John Curry and the former Merce Cunningham dancer Foofwa d'Imobilite; and yet the experience of observing such bewildering talent as when New York saw Mr. d'Imobilite in 2010 can be frustrating, with some considerable sense of waste. Lil Buck's very few numbers on Saturday ended with his most celebrated number, "The Dying Swan." It's said that Anna Pavlova, the most legendary exponent of the ballet version of this solo, never did it the same way twice; I'd guess from the few times I've seen Lil Buck that the same may well be true of him. He always ends, on the floor, wrapping his bent legs like hooks around his shoulders, but this time he gazed out at the audience while so doing, perhaps as if aware that this feat was part of his own legend and that he was trapped by it. Earlier, he reared up hugely and opened his body out to the air with a more amazingly throwaway speed than I have seen from him before; he spun around the stage on his knees; and inevitably his feet took him across the stage in gliding variants on the moonwalk. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The United States economy rebounded strongly in the second quarter of the year, shaking off the negative effects of an unusually harsh winter and stirring hopes that it might finally be establishing a solid enough footing to put the lingering effects of the recession squarely in the past. The Commerce Department, in its initial estimate for April, May and June, reported on Wednesday that the economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 percent, surpassing expectations. During the first quarter, output shrank at a rate of 2.1 percent, less than had been reported. The department had earlier said that first quarter output fell 2.9 percent. Some experts, citing a range of indicators including an improving job market, were encouraged by the signs of healthy business investment and consumer spending, but others cautioned that the economy had yet to break out of an underlying pattern of steady but relatively sluggish growth that has plagued the nation since the Great Recession officially ended in mid 2009. President Obama heralded the positive economic news on a visit to Kansas City, Mo. Federal Reserve policy makers, meeting this week in Washington, said they were taking a wait and see attitude toward the latest data, emphasizing concern about the millions of Americans who still cannot find jobs. In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, the Fed acknowledged that growth had "rebounded," but its tone was measured and it made clear that it had no plans to raise interest rates anytime soon. It described the chances of faster growth as roughly even with the chances that the expansion would slow down. "The recovery so far has been unspectacular," said Ben Herzon, a senior economist at Macroeconomic Advisers, a consulting firm based in St. Louis. "With the exception of a few wiggles here and there, it's been on this steady growth path, which is not great but it's been good enough." Democrats are hoping to use the signs of an improving economy as a selling point in the run up to midterm elections as proof their policies are working. Mr. Obama seemed energized by the report, though even his take was muted. He said a healthy jobs market was the real measure of whether the economy was working. "I'm glad that G.D.P. is growing, and I'm glad that corporate profits are high, and I'm glad that the stock market is booming," the president told a boisterous crowd in Kansas City. "But what I really want to see is a guy working 9 to 5, and then working some overtime. I want that guy making more than the minimum wage." The rate at which businesses stock their shelves can be volatile, and the second quarter gains could falter if consumers do not continue to spend freely in the second half of the year. For all the exuberance over Wednesday's news, at least one economist chalked up the latest numbers mostly to "payback" for the poor showing in the first quarter. Looking back over the last 12 months, the overall inflation adjusted output of goods and services for the second quarter was 2.4 percent higher than the same quarter a year earlier, barely ahead of the average pace of 2.2 percent growth since the recession ended. 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. Still, most economists say that little by little the economy is returning to a healthier state. "It isn't something people are going to get excited about, but it does represent honest, real progress," said Michael Gapen, a senior economist for Barclays, which predicted more of the same for the rest of the year. Perhaps the biggest factor holding back the economy has been slow wage growth, as the high number of people out of work means that businesses see little need to pay much more to attract new employees. Housing has partly recovered from the depths it fell to during the recession but has not significantly helped power the economy forward as it did in the early stages of past expansions. Second quarter earnings for many companies have been mixed. Labor conditions continue to be underwhelming, contributing to the belief of many jobless Americans that the economy is leaving them behind. "We made up some of the ground lost in the first three months of this year, but there's nothing in today's data to indicate that the economy is growing more strongly than it has for the past couple of years," the Economic Policy Institute, a left leaning nonprofit group focused on low and middle income workers, said in a release on Wednesday. The White House Council of Economic Advisers said in a statement that the economy could perform even better if Congress makes sure infrastructure improvements such as road and bridge work do not stall. Bob Baur, chief global economist for Principal Global Investors, made up a name for what he thinks has been holding back both consumers and businesses from the more exuberant kind of spending that would help close the gap of as much as 1 trillion between the economy's current level and its larger capacity for generating goods and services without setting off a significant rise in inflation. He called it "post crisis relapse disorder," which he defined as behavior based on the expectation that the economic outlook will be grim merely because it has been so grim for months before. Still, another positive sign for the economy came this week when the Conference Board said consumers were more upbeat about the economy than they had been in the last seven years. On Wednesday, ADP, the payroll processing company, said private employers added 218,000 jobs in the last month, down from 281,000 in June. It was the fourth straight month of job gains above 200,000. But the company's figures cover only private businesses and often do not track with the government's jobs report, which will be released Friday morning. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
'LADY IN THE LAKE' at IFC Center (Oct. 25 27). Released in the United States in 1947, Robert Montgomery's adaptation of a Raymond Chandler book took a novel approach by telling the story through Philip Marlowe's eyes, quite literally: Almost the entire movie is filmed from his point of view, so when Marlowe crawls away from a car crash, all we see are his hands. Not many movies have been shot this way the storytelling limitations of the device quickly become apparent but watching "Lady in the Lake" is a uniquely disorienting experience that ought to be undertaken at least once. 212 924 7771, ifccenter.com Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. NEWFEST at Cinepolis Chelsea, SVA Theater and Screening Room at the Center (through Oct. 29). The United States centerpiece at this annual L.G.B.T.Q. film festival was popular with some critics at Sundance: Martha Stephens's black and white "To the Stars" (on Sunday) stars Kara Hayward ("Moonrise Kingdom") as a mousy outcast in Oklahoma who becomes close with a newcomer to town (Liana Liberato) in the 1960s; the atmosphere is very "Last Picture Show." NewFest is also getting into the Halloween spirit with a special section that includes "Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street" (about Mark Patton, star of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 2," which some say contains a gay subtext), showing on Monday, and the vampire film "Bit," on Saturday. newfest.org 'NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD' MOVIE AND MASQUERADE at Loew's Jersey (Oct. 26, 7 p.m.). Be sure to shuffle into this event very slowly zombielike, even to appreciate the ambience of one of the original Wonder Theaters, movie palaces opened by Loew's in the New York area in 1929 and 1930. The screening of George A. Romero's genre originating classic will be followed by a costume ball. Proceeds will go toward the theater's continued refurbishment and operation. ("Night of the Living Dead" is all over the place this week: The latest restoration will run on a loop on Friday at the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art, and it plays at Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park on Wednesday with a live score.) loewsjersey.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It's unclear why this interested the early computer scientist, but Turing had told a friend that he wanted to defeat Argument From Design, the idea that for complex patterns to exist in nature, something supernatural, like God, had to create them. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. A keen natural observer since childhood, Turing noticed that many plants contained clues that math might be involved. Some plant traits emerged as Fibonacci numbers. These were part of a series: Each number equals the sum of the two preceding numbers. Daisies, for example, had 34, 55 or 89 petals. "He certainly was no militant atheist," said Jonathan Swinton, a computational biologist and visiting professor at the University of Oxford who has researched Turing's later work and life. "He just thought mathematics was very powerful, and you could use it to explain lots and lots of things and you should try." "He came up with a mathematical representation that allows form to emerge from blankness," said Dr. Swinton. In Turing's model, two chemicals he called morphogens interacted on a blank arena. "Suppose you've got two of these, and one will make the skin of an animal go black and the skin of the animal go white," explained Dr. Swinton. "If you just mix these things in an arena, what you get is a gray animal." But if something caused one chemical to diffuse, or spread, faster than the other, then each chemical could concentrate in evenly spaced localized spots, together forming black and white spots or stripes. This is known as a "Turing instability," and, the Chinese researchers who published the new paper determined that it could explain the way shapes emerged in salt filtering membranes. By creating three dimensional Turing patterns like bubbles and tubes in membranes, the researchers increased their permeability, creating filters that could better separate salt from water than traditional ones. "We can use one membrane to finish the work of two or three," said Zhe Tan, a graduate student at Zhejiang University in China and first author of the paper, which means less energy and lower cost if used for large scale desalination operations in the future. Turing appeared to be looking for a general mechanism for the creation of form like how thought or consciousness spontaneously emerges or how sunflowers neatly pack their seeds together. But Turing would die before completing and publishing his final musings. "What I hope we appreciate more because of him, is to value diversity and individual creativity in our science base," Dr. Dawes said. "We need people who we allow to be driven by their curiosity, and we also need people who will take those basic science ideas and turn them into useful technology." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Roddy Ricch, a 21 year old rapper from Compton, Calif., has topped the latest Billboard album chart, beating out the newest LPs from the Who and Camila Cabello, while news of the death of Juice WRLD sent his two albums back to the Top 10. Ricch's "Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial," his first studio album, opened at No. 1 with the equivalent of 101,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen. The vast majority of that total was from streaming, with songs from the album being played almost 131 million times; just 3,000 copies of "Please Excuse Me" were sold as a complete package. Also this week, "Who," the latest from the Who, opened at No. 2, the band's best chart position since "Who Are You" in 1978, which also went to No. 2. "Who" was credited with 89,000 sales, most of which were made as part of a deal bundling it with tickets to the band's latest tour. Cabello's second album, "Romance," opened at No. 3, while Post Malone's "Hollywood's Bleeding" fell two spots to No. 4. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Writing in the middle of two devastating cholera pandemics in the early 1800s, the great French culinary thinker Brillat Savarin articulated a truth we urgently need to grasp today: "The destiny of nations depends on how they feed themselves." The coronavirus pandemic threatens to create both a public health and economic catastrophe. But we cannot afford to ignore the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding out of sight. Our fate as a nation depends on how we feed our most vulnerable citizens through this crisis. If our leaders step up now with federal aid, food can be the solution supporting millions of jobs while also feeding millions of people in desperate need. There is historical precedent for spending federal dollars to preserve jobs and serve the public: the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Over eight years, the W.P.A. put more than eight million Americans to work, building schools, hospitals and vital infrastructure. Today we need a W.P.A. to feed America. In honor of one of its food programs, I suggest calling this new emergency relief America Eats Now. We combined a private sector mentality with federal dollars and private donations to pump cash through the food supply chain, putting people to work by feeding those in the greatest need. We activated a large scale kitchen at an arena and smaller kitchens in restaurants and schools, serving millions of meals at a time when everything seemed paralyzed. In Puerto Rico we used three clear approaches to feed our fellow Americans that can be a guide to heading off an economic and food crisis today: Support the private sector as quickly as possible when the economy crashes, as it did after Maria: activate kitchens with federal dollars to serve the people. Repurpose and deploy community facilities, while expanding their mission: use the kitchens in schools and arenas to feed more people, more quickly. Solve the informational and logistical challenge: Matching demand and supply by getting food to the people who need it most is even more challenging than cooking in a crisis. Distribution is the Achilles' heel of any disaster response. Since then we have adapted our model to feeding first responders in the California wildfires, as well as stricken communities after natural disasters in the Caribbean and Mozambique. This week I have re opened several of my own shuttered restaurants as community kitchens, serving meals at low or no cost to people in need. But these are only models for what we should do now; they are too small to meet the unprecedented challenges we face as a nation. We need to understand that these crises threaten our national security. Today an army of American cooks stands ready to serve our most vulnerable citizens, at a time when those cooks are themselves in desperate need of support. They are our food first responders. With the full support of the federal government, they can serve the many, while saving so many jobs. There are three groups in our communities who face the greatest threat from the pandemic: the elderly, the homeless and families struggling to make ends meet. As we know from public health officials, the elderly face the greatest risk of infection and mortality. We know that many of them are afraid for their lives in doing something as routine as going to the supermarket. Isolation may be the best option for avoiding the pandemic, but our parents and grandparents still need to eat to be healthy in body and soul. The plight of Italy's elderly is an unspeakable tragedy that we should avoid at all costs. Now is the time to stand up the private sector our neighborhood restaurants to sustain the lives of our elderly neighbors. Congress is currently contemplating a 54 billion request to support our airlines. I respectfully request that at least a similar amount be dedicated to America Eats Now, so that our restaurants and delivery partners can feed our elderly citizens and deliver meals to their doorsteps. That measure of spending could sustain our elderly citizens in daily meals, freshly prepared, through the peak of this crisis. It would also sustain our farm workers, food suppliers and delivery agents, who in turn would spend the cash sustaining their own families. There are many hundreds of thousands of food jobs that depend on our restaurants. America's technological innovators, such as Uber and GrubHub, can rapidly adapt a home delivery service for our neighbors who are too fearful to buy their own food. This country's world class entrepreneurs can solve these challenges creatively and economically. The second group that needs our urgent support are families on the brink of economic disaster. Governors and mayors across the country have rightly grappled with the competing needs to close down schools to limit the spread of the virus, while maintaining the school meal services that keep our kids healthy. We need to go several steps further, however. The children who rely on free school meals live in families who are struggling financially at the best of times. Now is the time to extend the school meal program to their families: to turn our school kitchens into community kitchens. For those in suburban and rural areas, we should use the school bus network to deliver food packages along the routes where they normally pick up and drop off students. Sadly, school kitchens may not be enough. As the crisis worsens, we need to maintain the capacity to support our medical heroes, first responders, senior centers and the homeless, with safe havens of food preparation and distribution. Hospital kitchens and senior centers will lose staff to sickness. An army marches on its stomach: Our police and National Guard can no longer rely on their favorite neighborhood food stands and delis. Now is the time to prepare our arenas and convention centers all subsidized by taxpayer dollars, even when owned and operated by private entities to meet the food needs of this public health catastrophe. Trained to the highest standards of food hygiene, with strict protocols to ensure that infection is not spread through food, our arena chefs should be the last resort for safe cooking for our frontline workers in this war. The National Restaurant Association is advocating for a much larger package of support, worth more than 300 billion, as it seeks to save up to seven million jobs through a mixture of grants, loans and deferments. Our restaurant industry faces an existential challenge that we all recognize. It is one of the foundational sectors in our economy: four times bigger than our airline industry in sales, and 18 times bigger in jobs. Every industry group should make its case in this crisis. But only those of us who work in restaurants can help revive the economy while feeding and building our communities at the same time. Restaurants were shut down by our governments; they can be revived by our governments to serve the people in their hour of greatest need. These challenges can seem overwhelming, but we believe the most effective solutions are often right in front of us. Our small nonprofit has safely prepared and served food in cholera stricken Mozambique by being meticulous about our daily work. That cholera experience equipped us with the sanitation protocols to feed the virus infected cruise ships in Japan and California. In every disaster zone where we cook for the many, we find that a plate of food is never just a meal on a dish. It is a plate of hope: a message from the community that someone, somewhere cares. Now is the time for Congress and the Trump administration to show they care. Together we can ensure that America Eats Now. Jose Andres is the Chef/Owner of ThinkFoodGroup and founder of World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit founded in 2010 whose team of food first responders has served over 15 millions meals in the wake of domestic and international emergencies. 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 |
"Prince of Monkeys" speaks in constant hyperbolic language; the kind where characters use adages like, "Every problem has its own man of God ascribed to it," and chapters close with phrases such as, "Always pay attention to the secrets in colors that are too terrible to be spoken aloud." And how could they not? Taking place in Nigeria during the 1980s and '90s, 's first novel shows us a Nigeria that exists in both fantastic and tragic terms. It's a Nigeria in which a group of friends, anchored by the protagonist, Ihechi, can lose almost everything in a single night out, to see their idol, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, perform at the Afrika Shrine. That night is punctuated by a sudden riot that serves the same purpose as others that occur throughout the novel: It is both a funeral and an awakening. In "Prince of Monkeys," though, those become necessary baptisms, offering a diverse cast (Ihechi, a "nonbeliever" named Pastor's son, Mendaus, Maradona, Zeenat), separated by class, religion, education and eventually much, much more, a chance to redefine themselves by those contradictions and inequalities, and by the strife that continuously pocks their homeland. Their preachy vernacular and pop culture diversions ("Citizen Kane," "The Aristocats," Chaka Khan and Luther Vandross) all become exercises in avoiding vulnerability directly. This dishonesty, inherited from their elders, who also speak in a too golden tongue, plagues these characters as both children and adults. The group experiences the aftermath of a classist unrest that they were not there to witness. Traversing from Lagos to Enugu, Ihechi encounters firsthand Nigeria's religious extremes, from his mother's Ifa to his Aunt Kosiso's devout Christianity. To Ihechi, the Ifa practice appears grotesque, where the practices of the Pentecostal church are smoothed out to appear proper despite the bloody history of how it insinuated itself into Nigerian society. But time and again "Prince of Monkeys" reminds us that differences of religion are arbitrary tools given by the white man to Nigerians for sowing deep divides among themselves, divides that are used to justify abandonments: of families, faiths, morals, entire systems. Mistakenly thinking that the scarcity they're sold to believe in represents the only option they have, each character struggles to be born anew, whether that be Maradona of the many identities; Mendaus, who goes from a bookish rascal to a movement leader; or Ihechi's cousins, Tessy and Effy, who slip in and out of clothes just as easily as they do their adherence to their faith. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
BERLIN Barrie Kosky may be the most interesting opera director of the past decade. At the Komische Oper Berlin here, where Mr. Kosky has been the artistic director since 2012, he has reintroduced lesser known pieces to the repertory. But there have been glosses on familiar works, too: a Monteverdi cycle, for example, and a charming take on "The Magic Flute" that has toured the world. And he has had successes away from this home base. As the first Jewish director invited to the Bayreuth Festival, Mr. Kosky created a meta version of "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" that placed Wagner himself onstage, held up to scrutiny at the Nuremberg trials. His production of Offenbach's "Orphee aux Enfers," at the Salzburg Festival this summer, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times, heightened that operetta's cynicism "to preposterous hilarity." Yet it is here in Berlin where you can binge the capaciousness of his vision. During a long weekend this month, I saw revivals of Mr. Kosky's comedic stagings of Oscar Straus operettas that had been largely neglected before he brought them to the Komische. There was also a coolly visionary new production of Hans Werner Henze's "The Bassarids." (A video of the premiere is available, with English subtitles, at operavision.eu though April 12.) Mr. Kosky has an answer. He keeps the staging austere, as if it were in a Greek amphitheater. And the mood is often serenely surreal at least until the production second guesses Henze by reinserting the opera's Intermezzo, which the composer cut after the world premiere. That section includes teasing, nearly burlesque music that dramatizes the spell like states of Dionysus' latest cult members, and provides a useful contrast with the choral exclamations and orchestral pandemonium that otherwise lends this work its gravity. (Vladimir Jurowski, conducting the Komische's orchestra, made that satirically minded 1965 Intermezzo work alongside the experimentalism of Henze's final 1992 revision of the rest of the score.) With a broad, slightly bawdy staging of the Intermezzo in which the royal family, under Dionysian sway, plays dress up and enacts a story about Adonis Mr. Kosky allows his audience greater access to the human hallucinations that presage the opera's bloody climax. Mortals, he seems to say, are predisposed to dreams, and thus to the irrational; only a slight push is needed. Dionysus' task, then, is all too easy: When King Pentheus joins the cult, wearing one of his mother's dresses, it makes more sense abstractly than matter of factly, as it is in the version without the Intermezzo. At the performance I saw, the tenor Sean Panikkar was powerful yet sometimes honeyed as Dionysus. The German mezzo soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner's English wasn't always clear, but as King Pentheus' mother, Agave, her creamy sound had no trouble inhabiting the character's states of arrogance, inebriation and horror. They joined a cast that included several Komische veterans including the punchy bass of Jens Larsen as Cadmus; the oaky baritone of Gunter Papendell as Pentheus; and the laser beam soprano of Vera Lotte Boecker, playing the king's aunt. Dagmar Manzel, reprising the role of Cleopatra this month, indulged cabaret textures, like the use of arid exhalations for the character's vamping put ons. (Amplification helped every dramatic rasp hit the back row.) She also has more bell like notes, fit for exultation, though, and smoky timbres full of irony. The contrast between those modes was heightened even more during Ms. Manzel's performance in Straus's "A Woman Who Knows What She Wants!," from 1932. Though this production was radically spare consisting of only a single wall and door it was the highest energy offering of the weekend. Ms. Manzel and her co star, Max Hopp, executed the central conceit of Mr. Kosky's staging: two singers playing all the roles in a tale set backstage at a theater. (Each singer dived out of sight just long enough to put on a new costume before reappearing.) Bernard Grun's biography of the composer, "Prince of Vienna," explains how, despite Straus's admiration for American musical forms, he didn't think he would ever write a great jazz song. Even so, the push and pull of tempos throughout the Komische's production of "A Woman," conducted by Adam Benzwi, brought to mind some theatrical numbers by Harlem stride pianists. Ms. Manzel used the varying speeds to find even more moods in this Straus operetta than she had in "Cleopatra." Most moving was her character's sense of impending obsolescence, whenever the music slowed down a bit. (You can hear that same dramatic acuity in her 2014 album for Deutsche Grammophon, mostly devoted to the songs of Friedrich Hollaender.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Despite a 10 percent drop in pretax profits (and a related fall in share price) at Burberry, it will continue with the grand experiment that was the promotion in 2013 of its designer, Christopher Bailey, to chief executive and chief creative officer a move that made him the first designer at a publicly listed global luxury company to hold both posts. On Wednesday at its annual results presentation, Burberry moved to squash or at least sidestep rumors first reported in The Financial Times that after rumblings from dissatisfied shareholders, a senior executive would be brought in to support Mr. Bailey on the corporate side. Speaking on a conference call, Carol Fairweather, Burberry's chief financial officer, said that while appointments were planned, especially in the retail and digital sides of the business, no such senior level addition was anticipated. Change, however, was specifically in the Burberry fashion offering. Mr. Bailey's new three year turnaround plan, which envisions PS100 million (about 146.4 million) in cost savings, reorganization of the company structure, and investment to improve the retail and e tail experience, also continues what has been a pretty meaningful shake up of how Burberry thinks about what it makes. This may seem obvious given Mr. Bailey's background in fashion. But in recent years, most of Burberry's news, and the attention on the brand, has been focused on its digital initiatives (to the extent that Mr. Bailey's predecessor as C.E.O., Angela Ahrendts, moved to Apple in 2014). In the shadow of the drumroll over the Art of the Trench blog, and the Burberry channel on Apple music, and shows previewed on Snapchat, the clothes and accessories often seemed like something of an afterthought, and the runway like an exercise in repetition. Things are bad in China (especially for Burberry, which has more exposure than many of its competitors to the country). And with an uncertain political environment, growth in the luxury sector is slow over all, points the brand made in its presentation. But it's worth remembering that when people aren't buying, it nearly always comes down to what's on the racks. Especially in an industry in which purchases are based not on need, but desire. As a result, in the third of a series of moves designed to streamline and simplify Burberry's offerings, Ms. Fairweather said the product lineup would be reduced by 15 to 20 percent over the next year, the better to focus consumer attention on new and special pieces: the products that define the brand's point of difference. Or, as the company put it in its webcast, not product "breadth," but product depth. And handbags! Burberry thinks there is lots of opportunity in bags. This follows earlier decisions to combine Burberry's three lines Prorsum, London and Brit into one, as well as to unite the men's and women's wear shows into a seasonless collection that would be sold immediately after it was unveiled on the runway, the better to tap into the see now want now urge. There will also be a renewed focus on retail offerings, especially "localization" of product: not, in other words, selling winter clothes in a hemisphere where it is summer. (Before you say "duh!" consider that fashion works on its own schedule, which often seems far removed from temporal logic. It is currently delivering prefall clothes to stores, and in a recent conversation with one e tailer, I was told it had just received a fur collection.) It boils down to an acknowledgment that, at least at the high end of the market, an excess of stuff may not necessarily add up to more than the sum of its parts, but rather less. Optionality is not always optimum. Or at least that's how it sounds. When the first joint show is revealed in September, and people are free to rush to their iPads to purchase, we'll have a better sense of whether it is working. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Now Lives A recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Huang is relocating to a one bedroom apartment in Gramercy Park in September. Claim to Fame He is a founder of M Woods, a contemporary art museum in Beijing that focuses on internet minded works from artists like He Xiangyu and Olafur Eliasson. With his penchant for bright suits and a flair for publicity, he could be considered something of a next generation Jeffrey Deitch of China. "Everyone in Beijing is really hungry for culture," he said. "We really see a lot of young people who are very engaged with us and learning about art and making it a part of their life." Big Break Last year, M Woods's debut exhibition, "Andy Warhol: Contact," received immediate international recognition. The wide ranging retrospective of Warhol's lesser known film, photography and interactive installations shed new light on the pop icon's reputation outside the United States. "A lot of people in China know him as a brand," Mr. Huang said. "The show explains how he became who he is." Four months after the show opened, Mr. Huang became a member of the board of trustees for the New Museum. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Hiran Abeysekera, left, and a tiger operated by puppeteers in "Life of Pi" at the Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England. SHEFFIELD, England In 2001, Yann Martel's internationally best selling novel "Life of Pi" asked the question: What would happen if a teenage boy and a 450 pound tiger were stranded on a lifeboat for 227 days? Now, a new theatrical production is trying to answer another question: How on earth would you put such a story onstage? Manipulated by three puppeteers, the tiger in "Life of Pi," playing at the Crucible Theater in the northern English city of Sheffield through July 20, is fast and flexible enough to prowl and pounce across the stage. The eye quickly tunes the handlers out, and every flick of the tail feels full of life. The production opened this month to shining reviews: The critic of The Daily Telegraph called it "a worthy successor to 'War Horse,'" the Tony Award winning play that also used animal puppets to striking effect. "Life of Pi" begins in a zoo in Pondicherry, India, in 1976; i n the face of political upheaval, the family of the 17 year old Pi decide to relocate to Canada, taking with them their animals including giraffes, orangutans and zebras all created in the play through puppetry. When the family's ship sinks, only Pi survives, on a lifeboat he must share with the tiger. The playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, who adapted Mr. Mantel's work for the stage, said that the show's creative team immediately settled on using puppetry when it came together in 2017. Ms. Chakrabarti was approached by the theater producer Simon Friend about adapting the book; the director, Max Webster, brought Mr. Caldwell on board. "I'd loved the book when I read it in 2002, and without really any idea how I was going to do it, I said yes," Ms. Chakrabarti said in an interview. Mr. Martel gave her his blessing, she said. "He just said: Take it, do what you feel, and good luck," Ms. Chakrabarti recalled. Designing any animal puppet always begins with research into the real creature, Mr. Caldwell said. The internal frame for the tiger was based on the animal's skeleton, and constructed of wood and aluminum, he explained, and the joints were made with elasticated bungee cords. "It's what we call a universal puppet, capable of everything that the live creature would be," Mr. Caldwell said. "The tiger has to be able to look seasick, to attack with great speed, to turn tight circles on that lifeboat," he added. Putting someone inside the puppet (the actress Kate Colebrook) meant it could move quicker than any other Mr. Caldwell has designed, he said. "Kate can swing a tiger's paw as fast as she can swing a punch," he added. Ms. Colebrook has worked with Mr. Caldwell before, but many of the cast were operating puppets for the first time. It's a huge challenge, Mr. Caldwell said, and the actors worked long hours to get up to scratch. Backstage before a performance last week, the puppets hung lifeless in the wings. Although made from a lightweight material called Plastazote, which can be sculpted and painted, they're designed to look like they're made of driftwood. Emma Cook, a stage manager, shone a flashlight into the tiger's mouth and tested its joints to make sure every cord and screw was secure. "Before the show, we have to go through every nut, bolt, bungee, to make sure they're not falling apart," Ms. Cook said. "Despite that, sometimes things go wrong," she added. "A nut came off a zebra in a preview, but the leg stayed on." Rob Hastie, artistic director at the Crucible, said during the backstage tour that "Life of Pi" was a leap of faith for the 980 seat theater. "We try to do as much new work as possible, but even a title as acclaimed as 'Life of Pi' comes with a lot of risks," he said. With an untested script, experimental puppetry and a cast that had to be specially trained, it was a show in which lots could go wrong. But when he first saw the tiger spring to life onstage, he said, he knew all would be well. "I had the same reaction as our audiences, really: just a sense of wonder," Mr. Hastie said, adding that he hoped the show would have a further life after its Sheffield run. Given its success, a West End transfer surely calls. Life of Pi Through July 20 at the Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England; sheffieldtheatres.co.uk. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Judge Gives DMX a Year in Prison and a Chance to Be Heard, Musically The music filled the courtroom Wednesday, introduced by insistent beats and the wail of a siren. Sitting at the defense table, wearing baggy blue jail garb, the rapper Earl Simmons, known as DMX, nodded as a recording of his voice spit out lyrics he had written about his life. And said that I'ma be that seed That doesn't need much to succeed The recording of "Slippin'," was played by his defense team as Mr. Simmons' faced sentencing for tax evasion in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The aim of the unusual audio presentation, according to a letter by Mr. Simmons's lawyer, Murray Richman, was to give the court a sense of "raw Earl." In court, Mr. Richman compared his client to the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron and Keats. "It's spectacular and it's meaningful," he said of Mr. Simmons's rapping. "It's so catchy, it talks to you." Judge Jed S. Rakoff listened to the music with a neutral expression. Later he sentenced Mr. Simmons to a year in prison, saying that it was important he be punished for a "particularly brazen and blatant" crime but adding that he also had some sympathy for the defendant. "In the court's view Mr. Simmons is a good man, a very far from perfect man," Judge Rakoff said. "In many ways he is, to give the cliche, his own worst enemy." Prosecutors had recommended a five year prison term for Mr. Simmons, who has sold millions of hip hop records, performed around the world and starred in movies. But last year he was charged with evading income taxes and trying to obstruct the Internal Revenue Service. Federal prosecutors said that Mr. Simmons owed 1.7 million in unpaid taxes and penalties derived from income be brought in between 2002 and 2005. He also failed to file taxes from 2010 to 2015, prosecutors said, while earning at least 2.3 million during that time. Mr. Simmons schemed to evade the taxes by maintaining a "cash lifestyle," prosecutors added, using bank accounts belonging to others and demanding that a 125,000 fee from the television show "Celebrity Couples Therapy" be issued to him without taxes being withheld. He also listed his gross income incorrectly during bankruptcy proceedings, prosecutors said. In November Mr. Simmons pleaded guilty to one count of tax fraud. He told Judge Rakoff on Wednesday that he had not plotted to steal "like a criminal in a comic book," but also acknowledged his misdeeds. "I take responsibility," he said in court. "I know the taxes needed to be paid." In addition to the year in prison, Judge Rakoff ordered that Mr. Simmons make 2.29 million in restitution to the government and be subject to three years of supervised release. His lawyer, Mr. Richman, had asked for leniency, calling Mr. Simmons "a modern gospel" and "a child of chaos" and saying that he had been abused by his mother who once knocked out some of his teeth with a broom handle. In his heyday Mr. Simmons was a hip hop powerhouse, rapping about violence and redemption in what Rolling Stone termed "the roughest and grimiest voice in hip hop, the sound of gravel hitting the grave." He became the only artist in the history of the Billboard 200 to reach No. 1 with his first five albums, the company said in 2003. And he acted in television shows like "Third Watch" and movies including "Never Die Alone," in which he portrayed a drug dealer named King David. But Mr. Simmons also became known for getting into trouble with the law. In 2004 he pleaded guilty in Queens to reckless endangerment and driving under the influence of drugs. In 2008 in Arizona he pleaded guilty to charges of theft, drug possession and animal cruelty. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
I read the final pages of Kirkland Hamill's "Filthy Beasts" as the Los Angeles solidarity march reached my apartment off Sunset Boulevard. I arrived downstairs to hundreds of rainbow flags framed between Mexican fan palms and the jagged Hollywood Hills. A question scrawled on a piece of cardboard stopped me cold: Do You Feel Liberated? Returning to Hamill's tragicomic memoir of a mother son relationship, I couldn't help wondering: What if Hamill's childhood had been swaddled in the optimism of Obama era rainbows? If he'd grown up watching "Will Grace," "Pose" and "Ellen," would the author, who is gay, ever have spent a moment let alone 35 years in shame? Also, I wondered, what will I be reading two decades from now, when today's L.G.B.T.Q. youth write their memoirs? With little doubt, few will share Hamill's formative queer moment: dressed up at the age of 4 in a pink halter top and heels for a skit at his family's Adirondack lodge, with a placard announcing "Gay Liberation" dangling from his neck. The crowd laughed; his mom was proud. Hamill would spend the next three decades struggling to keep her attention. "Wake up, you filthy beasts!" Hamill's mother hollered to her three sons on school mornings. Those were the all too brief good years, before divorce and alcoholism took her under; before Hamill and his brothers' lives took on a feral quality. As with many gay men before him, Hamill's axis of identity/sexuality hinges on his relationship with his mother. And, whoa, did Wendy Hamill ever deliver as an archetype: a beacon of distant fabulosity coupled with deft microaggression. As written here, Wendy (who died surrounded by her sons) deserves placement in the gay canon, somewhere between Endora on "Bewitched" and Jessica Lange in anything directed by Ryan Murphy. Born working class in Bermuda, Hamill's mother was an exceptionally beautiful and childlike woman. Over 61 years, two marriages and two countries, through alcoholism and megalomania, she nearly destroyed her children. Wendy watched them fend for themselves through the bottom of a highball. 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. But Hamill's memoir is about survival and recovery: of his identity, memories and compassion for his mother. Wendy married into extreme wealth, but her son was born into it immense, Nantucket red pants wealth. From an early age, Hamill became an astute observer of privilege, picking up the codes of the rich with a fluency only a formerly rich person could master. His parents divorced when he was 8. Hamill and his brothers then fell from the Mayflower stock private clubs of the Northeast to Bermuda, where there wasn't enough food; there was barely enough water. From that point on, Hamill's adolescence was shaped by a lack of supervision and his siblings' intense heterosexuality. He writes, "My two brothers roamed the earth figuratively lifting their legs on everything around them and trotting off in new directions without feeling the slightest sense of shame." Without their father (who quickly remarried) and household staff, the Hamill boys discovered they were living with an alcoholic: "The gentle sloshing of the liquid in the bottle made my body tense." These pages are steeped in gin. The collateral damage of a home with an alcoholic parent floats to the top. Hamill knew that "no one is coming to save us. I realized that I was increasingly living in a world in which I had no choice but to heal myself." (Hamill found his way to Al Anon. Both of his brothers have struggled with alcohol.) In Bermuda, during his mother's "self imposed exile," Hamill's middle child syndrome expanded. He was neither Bermudian nor English expat. At home, "I didn't want to be a girl, but I knew I wasn't performing boy correctly." At Andover for high school, he was too poor to be at prep school, too privileged to be a townie. At Tulane, where he fell in love for the first time, Hamill was struck with the innate feeling of being "other." The pop psych term hadn't yet arrived, but he had a scorching case of impostor syndrome. The screws began tightening with a sense of they're going to find out and that feeling would not begin to dissipate until he came out as gay. He did so at 35. Two years later, Hamill's mother died, of liver failure. "If it's not one thing, it's your mother," goes a popular bumper sticker slogan oft refrained in the rooms of 12 step programs. At his mother's funeral in Bermuda, Hamill and five other pallbearers struggled to get his mother's coffin up the aisle of the church. The aisle was too narrow, and she was too heavy. "I let go," Hamill writes. "I was tired of carrying her." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Some researchers think mechanical brushes aren't just some spa amenity for dairy cows they're important to the animal's well being. Cows, like dogs and people, like a good scratch. Outside, they'll rub their bodies against fence posts or trees to remove parasites or just stay clean. Some do it so much, they can break radio transmission towers if you don't fence it off . But many dairy cows in the United States never go to pasture . And even when they do, cows may spend winters tied up in a barn. So if a cow has an itch to scratch what's a cow to do? In a lot of places, nothing. But in some places, there's the mechanical brush. This bristly, swiveling, motorized apparatus spins when a cow touches it, allowing the animal to reach places it couldn't on its own. On average, cows will spend seven minutes a day rubbing their heads, necks and backs on these bulky body buffers. And some researchers think these mechanical brushes aren't just some spa amenity for dairy cows they're important to the animal's well being. "We have no idea how these cows think," said Marina von Keyserlingk, who studies animal welfare at the University of British Columbia in Canada. "But what we do know is that she's highly motivated to brush. And what happens if she can't?" Testing the animals' willingness to work for access to fresh feed, mechanical brushes and empty space, Dr. von Keyserlingk and her team trained pregnant, healthy, indoor dairy cows to open a weighted gate. By looking at how much weight they were willing to push before giving up, the researchers got an idea of the relative importance of each resource to the cows. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The researchers suspected the brush would come in second for hungry cows. But the cows worked just as hard for the brush as fresh food. Their results, published Wednesday in Biology Letters, suggest that a cow may need mechanical brushes for grooming indoors and that dairy farmers should consider having these in their barns. The brushes may benefit farmers by keeping cows from destroying surfaces inside barns and pleasing consumers who increasingly want to know that the animals are healthy and, more important, happy. "The way I see a cow move under that brush goes way beyond just relieving that itch," said Temple Grandin, a researcher at Colorado State University, known for her work on farm animal behavior and welfare and who was not involved in the study. Animals have emotions, perhaps not as complex, but similar to humans, she said (although the nature of these emotions is a hot topic among animal behaviorists). They have the same basic nervous system and the same neurotransmitters in emotional parts of the brain. "What they don't have is a gigantic cortex that can do things like fly to the moon or build that gigantic computer you're using right now," said Dr. Grandin. "I'm going to say the dairy cow enjoys it. It's like going to the spa." But Dr. Grandin and Dr. von Keyserlingk think because the cows are so determined to get to the brush, grooming with it may be more like the need to clip your nails. Mechanical brushes are required in Denmark, but not in the United States or Canada. And it may be some time before we see more of them, said Dr. von Keyserlingk, because states and provinces govern animal care in the United States and Canada. They are also expensive and high maintenance. Instead, industry and consumers may drive the demand for cattle brushes. "If you can get industry to take charge and they can adapt these best practices, they're much more nimble than legislation," Dr. von Keyserlingk said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Keith Smith was 14 when he was raped by a driver who picked him up after a hockey team meeting. He had hitchhiked home, which is why, for decades, he continued to blame himself for the assault. When the driver barreled past Hartley's Pork Pies on the outskirts of Providence, R.I., where Mr. Smith had asked to be dropped off, and then past a firehouse, he knew something was wrong. "I tried to open the car door, but he had rigged the lock," said Mr. Smith, of East Windsor, N.J., now 52. Still, he said, "I had no idea it was going to be a sexual assault." Even today, years after the disclosure of the still unfolding child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the arrest of a former Pennsylvania State University assistant football coach accused of sexually abusing boys, rape is widely thought of as a crime against women. Until just a few weeks ago, when the federal government expanded its definition of rape to include a wider range of sexual assaults, national crime statistics on rape included only assaults against women and girls committed by men under a narrow set of circumstances. Now they will also include male victims. While most experts agree women are raped far more often than men, 1.4 percent of men in a recent national survey said they had been raped at some point. The study, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that when rape was defined as oral or anal penetration, one in 71 men said they had been raped or had been the target of attempted rape, usually by a man they knew. (The study did not include men in prison.) And one in 21 said they had been forced to penetrate an acquaintance or a partner, usually a woman; had been the victim of an attempt to force penetration; or had been made to receive oral sex. Other estimates have run even higher. A Department of Justice report found that 3 percent of men, or one in 33, had been raped. Some experts believe that one in six men have experienced unwanted sexual contact of some kind as minors. But for many men, the subject is so discomfiting that it is rarely discussed virtually taboo, experts say, because of societal notions about masculinity and the idea that men are invulnerable and can take care of themselves. "We have a cultural blind spot about this," said David Lisak, a clinical psychologist who has done research on interpersonal violence and sexual abuse and is a founding board member of 1in6, an organization that offers information and services to men who had unwanted or abusive sexual experiences as children. "We recognize that male children are being abused," Dr. Lisak said, "but then when boys cross some kind of threshold somewhere in adolescence and become what we perceive to be men, we no longer want to think about it in this way." Even when high profile cases dominate the news, said Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime advocacy organization in Washington, "attention goes to the things we feel more comfortable talking about such as whether Penn State had done enough, and what will happen to their football program and not to the question, 'What do we do to prevent boys from being sexually assaulted?' " In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach who was fired after the abuse scandal erupted and who died of lung cancer on Sunday, said that when an assistant had told him about witnessing an inappropriate encounter between a young boy and Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach who is facing charges of sexual abuse, he had been confused and unsure how to proceed. Mr. Paterno said the assistant "didn't want to get specific. And to be frank with you, I don't know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of rape and a man." Much of the research on the sexual assault of men has focused on prisons. But men are also raped outside of prison, usually by people they know, including acquaintances and intimate partners, but occasionally by complete strangers. They are raped as part of violent, drunken or drug induced assaults; war crimes; interrogations; antigay bias crimes; and hazing rites for male clubs and organizations, like fraternities, and in the military. A Pentagon report released on Thursday found a 64 percent increase in sexual crimes in the Army since 2006, with rape, sexual assault and forcible sodomy the most frequent violent sex crimes committed last year; 95 percent of all victims were women. Some studies have reported that the risk of rape is greatest for men who are young, are living in poverty or homeless, or are disabled or mentally ill. The C.D.C. study found that one quarter of men who had been raped were assaulted before they were 10 , usually by someone they knew. And young men raised by poor single mothers are especially vulnerable to male predators, said Dr. Zane Gates, an internist who cares for low income patients on Medicaid at a community health center in Altoona, Pa. "You're looking for a male figure in your life desperately, and you'll give anything for that," he said. Eugene Porter, a therapist in Oakland, Calif., and the author of the book "Treating the Young Male Victim of Sexual Assault," said that while some assailants seek power and dominance, others "find that aggression enhances their sexual experience." "There is no arena in which rape takes place between men and women that it does not take place between men and men," he said. Like women, men who are raped feel violated and ashamed and may become severely depressed or suicidal. They are at increased risk for substance abuse, problems with interpersonal relationships, physical impairments, chronic pain, insomnia and other health problems. But men also face a challenge to their sense of masculinity. Many feel they should have done more to fight off their attackers. Since they may believe that men are never raped, they may feel isolated and reluctant to confide in anyone. Male rape victims may become confused about their sexual orientation or, if gay and raped by a man, blame their sexual orientation for the rape. "If you're sexually assaulted, there's this idea that you're no longer a man," said Neil Irvin, executive director of the organization Men Can Stop Rape. "The violence is ignored, and your sexual orientation and gender are confronted." Many rape crisis centers which often also provide services for victims of domestic violence do not have the resources to counsel male victims. Remarkably few male victims seek professional help for injuries, screening for sexually transmitted diseases or counseling after an attack, often waiting years or decades. One study of 705 men in Virginia found that 91, or 13 percent, had been sexually assaulted, a vast majority of them before they turned 18. Fewer than one fifth of victims had ever received professional services related to the assault. "Men are affected they have high rates of P.T.S.D. and depression but the majority don't get help," said Dr. Saba W. Masho, the lead author of the Virginia study and an associate professor of epidemiology and community health at Virginia Commonwealth University. "It's easy for you and I to talk about it, but when you put yourself in that victim's shoes, they're asking, 'Do I want people to know? How do I seek help? Do I want my doctor to know? Where do I go?' " Mr. Smith told his older brother and father about what had happened as soon as he got home, and the three went to the police to file a report. Mr. Smith had memorized the license plate number of the car, and the owner, who was known to the police because of a conviction for distributing pornography, was arrested. He was killed on the streets of Providence before he could stand trial. Today, Mr. Smith is a member of the speakers bureau for Rainn, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, which provides online counseling for victims. For years, he said, he suffered from nightmares in which he was fleeing his assailant's car, scared that the man, who had handed him 10 and dropped him off almost three hours after picking him up, was coming back. "I was waking up screaming," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Marc Marquez continued his perfect 2014 MotoGP season, winning his ninth race in a row on Sunday at the rain slicked Sachsenring in Germany. He also broke a lap record at the track that had stood for six years. After the warmup, Marquez and most of the other competitors started the race on their dry weather bikes, while Stefan Bradl led the early stages on a wet weather bike. The track dried quickly after a brief downpour, allowing Marquez to a clear shot at the front. Marquez was followed closely to the checkered flag by his Honda teammate, Dani Pedrosa. Jorge Lorenzo, riding for Yamaha, trailed the Honda riders by 10 seconds to take third. MotoGP is now on summer break until the Aug. 8 race in Indianapolis. Brad Keselowski had a perfect weekend in New Hampshire, winning both of the Nascar events there. On Saturday night, he took the victory in the 200 lap Nationwide series race. The next afternoon, he added the trophy from the 301 lap Sprint Cup race to his growing collection of hardware. Keselowski was dominant in the Sprint Cup race, leading 138 laps of the last 232. In a green white checker sprint to the finish, he was able to hold off Kyle Busch by three quarters of a second for his third Sprint Cup win of the season. Several of Keselowski's main competitors didn't have enough fuel to reach the finish after a post caution restart extended to race to 305 laps. Jeff Gordon and Kevin Harvick ran their tanks dry before the checkered flag. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A quirky subgenre of narrative history has emerged in recent years that explores the lives of iconic heroes of Hollywood westerns. A good example is Charles Leerhsen's worthy biography of Butch Cassidy, the former Mormon farm boy and leader of the Wild Bunch, a gang of five immortalized in an old studio photo. They were responsible for a succession of bank and train robberies across the intermountain West between 1896 and 1901. Despite a lengthy career that flip flopped between dull but honest work as a ranch hand and his carefully plotted holdup schemes, Robert LeRoy Parker, a.k.a. Butch Cassidy, is better remembered today as the wisecracking lead character whom Paul Newman played in the George Roy Hill film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." The new genre has its limitations, and "Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw" can't escape them. The movie heroes are larger than life, thanks to the actors' quips and star power, whereas the real outlaws were smallish cowboys of dubious morals, whose backgrounds, behavior and life chronologies are prone to extreme sketchiness and heated historical disputes. The Wild Bunch, for example, featured a changing cast of bandits who weren't that wild; they weren't even a bunch. No wonder the dime novels and yellow press of the day exaggerated the facts surrounding the western gangs and gunfighters: Too often those facts won't stand on their own. Leerhsen, who is the author of biographies of Ty Cobb and the harness horse Dan Patch, amply demonstrates that cowboys are in his corral. He has taken the trouble to read the literature and track down the living descendants of the Wild Bunch in order to get the slippery details as straight as he can. Then he starts his own one man posse in pursuit of the charismatic outlaw, visiting homesteads and following the historical trail all the way to Bolivia and Argentina, where Cassidy and his friend and fellow thief Harry Longabaugh, rechristened the Sundance Kid, spent their final years. At one point he says of his research, "I am standing in about six inches of llama poop." Yet even an investigator as diligent as Leerhsen can't get close enough to the outlaw or lay his hands on enough original material to bring Cassidy, "a kind of backwater Anthony Bourdain," to life. And that is too bad because Leerhsen does a fine job of recounting the events surrounding the heists like the gang's use of fresh horses spread out along their escape routes so that they could outgallop whatever lawmen were trailing along in dogged pursuit, thus stealing a trick from the old Pony Express. Cassidy, who was kind to shopkeepers and children, at first refused to rob anyone other than flush banks and railroads, which accounted for his Robin Hood like appeal to the tabloids of the day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
On the rainy fall morning of their first appointment, Dr. Mark Willenbring, a psychiatrist, welcomed a young web designer into his spacious office with a firm handshake and motioned for him to sit. The slender 29 year old patient, dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans and a baseball cap, slouched into his chair and began pouring out a story of woe stretching back a dozen years. Addicted to heroin, he had tried more than 20 traditional faith and abstinence based rehabilitation programs. In 2009, a brother died of an OxyContin overdose. Last summer, he attempted suicide by swallowing a fistful of Xanax. When he woke up to find he was still alive, he overdosed on heroin. At a boot camp for troubled teenagers, he said, staffers beat him and withheld food. After he refused to climb a mountain in a team building exercise, they strapped him to a gurney and dragged him up themselves. The young man in the psychiatrist's office paused, tears sliding down his cheeks. "Sounds like a prison camp," Dr. Willenbring said softly, leaning forward in his chair to pass a box of tissues. He began explaining the neuroscience of alcohol and drug dependence, 60 percent of which, he said, is attributable to a person's genetic makeup. Listening intently, the young patient seemed relieved at the idea that his previous failures in rehab might reflect more than a lack of will. Dr. Willenbring, 66, has repeated this talk hundreds of times. But while scientifically unassailable, it is not what patients usually hear at addiction treatment centers. Rehabilitation programs largely adhere to the 12 step principles of the 80 year old Alcoholics Anonymous and its offshoot, Narcotics Anonymous. Addicts have a moral and spiritual defect, they are told; they must abstain from alcohol and drugs and surrender to a higher power to escape substance abuse. This treatment is typically delivered through group therapy led by counselors whose main qualification is their own completion of the program. In some states, drug counselors with only a high school degree may treat patients, according to a 2012 study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Dr. Willenbring says he believes this approach ignores the most recent research on the subject, a judgment he is well qualified to make. From 2004 to 2009, he was the director of treatment research at the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and he oversaw dozens of studies proving the efficacy of medications and new behavioral therapies to treat drinking problems. But he grew frustrated at the failure of most traditional rehabilitation facilities to take advantage of the findings. "The taxpayers had paid for them," he said of the studies, "but nobody was paying attention." When the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, another federal research facility, publishes a major study on blood pressure, he said, cardiologists and other physicians in the field often move quickly to integrate the new drug or behavioral approach into their practices. But the 35 billion a year treatment industry has proved far more resistant. "When the facts change and they've changed a lot the minds have not," Dr. Willenbring said. "When we publish studies in our field, nobody who is running these centers reads them. If it counters what they already know, they discount them," he continued. "In the addiction world, the knee jerk response is typically, 'We know what to do.' And when that doesn't work, we blame patients if they fail." And so in 2009, after five years in Washington, D.C., Dr. Willenbring returned to his home state, Minnesota, the birthplace of traditional inpatient rehab, to open a private clinic called Alltyr that treats people with alcohol and drug problems on an outpatient basis. Unlike many rehabilitation concepts, in which treatment may be limited to a few weeks or months, Dr. Willenbring's clinic, whose name was inspired by a stone with healing properties in Russian folklore, treats addiction as a chronic medical condition. After he makes an initial evaluation, his diagnoses may include a wide range of substance and psychological disorders. His treatment plans can involve antidepressants; medication for anxiety, A.D.H.D. and chronic pain; anti relapse medications; psychotherapy; and family training. Patients may come for a single consultation, or be treated for years. The question of effective treatment for alcohol and substance use disorders is more pressing than ever. According to a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, the number of Americans admitted to treatment programs for prescription opioids more than quadrupled from 2002 to 2012. Deaths from heroin overdoses nearly quadrupled from 2002 to 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. In addition, an estimated 18 million Americans have alcohol use disorder, according to the N.I.A.A.A., and a study published in JAMA last year found that the number of Americans who drank to excess was rising. Last month, President Obama proposed 1.1 billion in new federal spending to fight the growing epidemic of heroin and prescription opioid addiction. His 2017 proposed budget designates 920 million for states to expand access to drug assisted treatment over the next two years. It also calls for more prescription drug monitoring programs and increasing the use of the opioid reversal treatment naloxone. Only 10 percent of those with alcohol and substance use disorders ever seek treatment, said Brad Stone, a spokesman for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The Affordable Care Act covers treatment for alcohol and substance abuse disorders, but many who need it fear they will be stigmatized if they ask for help. Many people in need of treatment believe that the only way to recover is to spend time at a rehab facility, which can cost as much as 50,000 a month. Yet there is no reliable evidence that intensive inpatient treatment is more effective than continual outpatient care, Anne M. Fletcher, the author of the 2013 expose of the treatment system, "Inside Rehab," said in an interview. Dr. Willenbring founded his outpatient center, Alltyr, in St. Paul in 2012. Instead of spiritual confession, he relies on a range of behavioral therapies to help patients identify the triggers that lead to risky behaviors. They include motivational interviewing, in which therapists ask a series of questions intended to help clients understand why they drink or use drugs, and cognitive behavioral therapy, short term counseling that helps patients recognize and avoid high risk situations. Dr. Willenbring also treats patients for depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder, which can make recovery from addiction difficult. He prescribes medications to reduce alcohol cravings, along with Suboxone to eliminate opioid cravings and block their highs. And he trains relatives to support their loved ones with kindness and compassion, not ultimatums. The first year of treatment costs roughly 2,600; it decreases afterward. A gentle man with a trim beard, graying buzz cut and green framed glasses, Dr. Willenbring was raised in the rugged Iron Range of northern Minnesota. An avid skier and cyclist, he has been married to Kate Meyers, an artist and his business partner, for 37 years, and they have two sons. He has an eclectic style: He pairs John Varvatos suits with cowboy boots, and his office speakers pipe in blues and hip hop. Most of Alltyr's 500 patients have mild to moderate alcohol use disorder and want to try to curb their habits before they are out of control. But some have been on a long, tangled journey to multiple treatment programs. "I don't want anybody to have to go through the crap I had to," said Joe Karkoska, 32, an elder care worker. Mr. Karkoska said he had tried 10 rehab clinics before he found Alltyr. Dr. Willenbring prescribed Suboxone, the drug Mr. Karkoska credits for his not having taken opioids for three years. Dr. Willenbring's embrace of medications for those who struggle with addictions is anathema to many involved in traditional recovery programs. Only about 2 percent of Americans with alcohol use disorder are ever prescribed anti craving medications, according to John Bowersox, a National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism spokesman. The majority of those addicted to heroin or prescription painkillers do not receive methadone or Suboxone, Dr. Willenbring and other experts said, despite evidence of their effectiveness. In abstinence based rehab, users are detoxed and lose their tolerance for drugs, he said but they do not lose the cravings. "So what do they do when they get out?" he said. "They use the same amount as they did before and die of an overdose." Dr. Willenbring supports open ended, long term drug replacement therapy for his patients with opioid use disorder. That raises eyebrows among those who favor abstinence. John Johnston, a counselor at Serenity Lane, a treatment center in Eugene, Ore., said that although the drugs could help prevent overdoses, they did not address the core cause of addiction. "Substituting one drug for another is an external solution for an internal problem," Mr. Johnston said. Dr. Willenbring's approach deprives "his patients of the opportunity to have a full range of emotional experiences, a change of spiritual perspective and a return to an improved quality of life." But for many of Dr. Willenbring's patients, Suboxone has been instrumental in helping to find just that. Most, like Kyle Larsen, a 23 year old nursing student from Albert Lea, Minn., began misusing opioids after they were prescribed for sporting injuries or operations. He found Alltyr after a stint at Hazelden Betty Ford and another in a so called sober living facility. "It was one size fits all, except that it didn't fit," Mr. Larsen said. Suboxone, he said, has eliminated his cravings, allowed him to regain the equilibrium he needed to return to school and to restore his family's trust. Like many of Dr. Willenbring's patients, Mr. Larsen attends a regular Suboxone group, which costs 100 a session and is offered to those who have been on a sustained, stable dose for many months. (They must submit urine samples to check for recreational drug use.) The meeting offers a forum for patients to discuss struggles and successful coping strategies, as well as the camaraderie some studies have found to be supportive in drug and alcohol use recovery. Despite being in addiction programs for years, many patients have never been treated effectively for depression, anxiety or other emotional disorders. Mr. Karkoska, for example, began having severe social anxiety when he was in elementary school. He discovered opiates as a young adult, and they helped blunt his fears. Yet the repeated instructions he received in rehab to "do the steps" and call his sponsor when he had cravings did little to ease the panic that returned whenever he stopped shooting heroin. Some years ago, one doctor prescribed high doses of the anti anxiety medication clonazepam, which helped a little. "But I really didn't have any idea how to calm myself down otherwise," Mr. Karkoska said. Since he began taking Suboxone, he has worked with Ian McLoone, an Alltyr therapist, to learn breathing exercises and cognitive behavioral techniques that help identify and change unhelpful, irrational beliefs. They have helped him cut down on clonazepam, overcome his fear of groups and work. "I've got people depending on me now," he said. "I'm a part of my community." The group's conversation does not steer away from somber topics: friends who have overdosed; sad breakups, suicidal thoughts and job disappointments. But members encourage one another, and there are moments of levity, too. Dan Bolmgren, an aspiring Minneapolis filmmaker who tried 12 rehab programs from Antigua to Utah, mentioned that he had smoked a lot of marijuana the past week. Dr. Willenbring made a theatrical gasp: "Oh no, not weed!" Still, their use is becoming more mainstream. The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, long a bastion of 12 step care, has been offering patients Suboxone and extended release naltrexone, another drug that blocks the high of opioids, since 2013. Dr. Willenbring did not set out to be an addictions psychiatrist. During his residency at the University of California, Davis, in the late 1970s, fellow residents were clamoring for grant money to study psychotherapy. His mentor directed him to an even larger set of National Institutes of Health funds to study effective treatments for complex patients, including medically ill veterans who were also alcohol dependent. Quickly, he became an expert in a field that had attracted relatively few researchers and was neglected by general practitioners, who often have biases against patients with alcohol and substance use disorders. Indeed, few medical school students ever learn about addiction, and only a small percentage of physicians are specifically trained to treat them, said Kathryn Cates Wessel, the executive director of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. By the early 1980s, Dr. Willenbring was treating patients with severe drinking problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis. Most had dire living circumstances but aspired to conventional lives: a wife, children, two cars in the driveway. "They were in the deep, deep hole of addiction," Dr. Willenbring said. "And the traditional approach to treatment just work this program and you'll dig yourself out wasn't working." One night while walking his dog in a snowstorm, Dr. Willenbring wondered why so few of his patients were able to abstain from drugs and alcohol. Most people with alcohol and substance use disorders need months or years to achieve stable recovery. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
PARIS Virginia Woolf is proving one of the more unexpected fashion muses of the moment. First, the author was announced as the inspiration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's coming Costume Institute blockbuster and gala, "About Time: Fashion and Duration." Then her book "Orlando" formed the basis of a new production at the Vienna State Opera with costumes by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons (who was also inspired by Woolf in her own men's and women's wear collections). And on Tuesday evening she popped up in Paris, name checked at Clare Waight Keller's Givenchy couture show. Or to be specific, the orchard of Woolf's home in England, Monk's House, did, as did her relationship with Vita Sackville West and one of her most famous literary creations, the gender bending time traveling character Orlando. Which is, perhaps, a clue to Woolf's sudden super relevance, given the broader conversation around gender, as well as the way digital life has collapsed time, allowing everyone access to almost everything from almost every era at once. As the Givenchy show notes read, "Hours, days and decades melt away." In Ms. Waight Keller's case, for example, it meant plundering not just gardens, but the house archives particularly those of the post "Sabrina" 1950s Audrey Hepburn years melding past and present in knife edge skinny cigarette trousers under big, blossoming whorls of organza tops, waists often caught with a slick corset wide patent leather belt. It meant giant, face framing umbrella hats atop strapless balloon frocks in pansy shades. It meant a pink petal skirt under a black lace T shirt, and a strict white tuxedo traced with shine. When the Met theme was announced in November, there was a lot of scratching of heads and musing on social media about what attendees would wear. Now they have an answer. It's on that red carpet in May that many of these clothes may end up, after all (at least the evening looks), along with the Oscars, taking place in a couple of weeks. As far as the latter, Giorgio Armani's Prive show provided a plethora of contenders in the sparkling, beaded, jewel tone category. While he also referenced travel in his show notes, it was less about moving through time than journeying down his own rabbit hole. One paved with ikat: ikat toned jacquard track pants in bright pink or apple green under his signature varieties of neutral jackets; ikat print silk pants covered in crystals; long ikat skirts veiled in a scrim of tulle and topped by camisoles dripping beaded fringe. There were peacock colored princess line abstract ikat evening looks, and silk fringed ikat effect coats; one shouldered gowns and a sheer ikat inlaid cape. (There was a lot of ikat.) Though whether simply absorbing a motif from another culture qualifies as "inclusion," as the notes asserted, is a hot button question that the collection raised, but did not even begin to address. It's not that every couture show needs to grapple with major issues of the day. That would be exhausting. But they should at least recognize they exist. Which John Galliano understands at Maison Margiela. In his remaking of the house in his own image, he has found a focus in the de and reconstruction of clothing, stripping a garment down to its bones and building it back up by merging it with another, addressing not just issues of overconsumption but also the jumbled freneticism of how we receive information; the clash of chronologies and genders (he dispensed with distinctions between men's and women's wear, male and female models, a few seasons ago, even before "Orlando" had its renaissance). This has, in the past, sometimes resulted in sensory overload, but more and more Mr. Galliano is mastering his message. Not in the podcast that accompanies the presentation, and that often seems an exercise in exaggerated pontification ("her EE TAHHHHHge," he trills in your ear), but in the clothes themselves. Which, after all, (and interesting as it can be to hear designers explain what they are thinking) should need no explanation but what they contain between the seams. In the eloquence expressed, for example, in a collection made from largely repurposed fabrics and materials. In an oversize lime green wool coat, one shoulder bowed and cowled and inset with a dressmaker's toile, visible basting along the seams. In a faux fur cape, hole punched to create little flapping sequins, like doorways into time, atop a tweed skirt. And via painterly bias cut slip dresses, in a former fashion life Mr. Galliano's stock in trade, this time trimmed in what looked like plastic wrap, layered under rough cut tulle. If heritage is one of his raw materials (and isn't it really for us all?), he might as well use his own. Upcycling, like "Orlando," has become something of a contemporary trend. Rarely, however, has it looked so convincing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Mr. Rubin helped popularize the use of keyboards on phones when he introduced the Sidekick device in 2002. He went on to develop Android, which Google acquired in 2005. Android software now runs on about 80 percent of the world's smartphones. In 2018, Essential received buyout interest from larger companies like Amazon, Walmart and several telecom carriers, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Walmart and Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Any potential buyout would have valued the company below its 1 billion valuation, the person said. But interest evaporated, in part because of the risk associated with Mr. Rubin's workplace scandals. In 2017, The Information, a technology news site, reported that he had departed Google after an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, prompting him to take a leave of absence from Essential to deal with "personal matters." By the time The Times investigation into his departure from Google was published in October 2018, Essential was already experiencing difficulties. The company slashed the price of its first phone after disappointing sales. It dropped plans to build a home device and laid off a large number of employees, reducing its work force by the end of the year to fewer than 50 from around 120. Essential will be shutting with around 30 million in cash remaining, the person familiar with the situation said. Investors, some of whom had written off the investment after Mr. Rubin's scandals, will get "pennies on the dollar" back, the person said. Several months ago, Mr. Rubin tweeted a photo of what appeared to be Essential's next phone, which the company called Project Gem. The elongated phone in a variety of shiny colors had a long, thin screen resembling a candy bar. The handset was supposed to be a so called companion phone, according to former employees familiar with the project. It was intended to free people from being overly reliant on smartphones and would allow them to use a smaller device for tasks like sending and responding to messages using artificial intelligence and voice controls, said the former employees, who declined to be identified because they did not have permission to speak about Essential products. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Mother Jones was named magazine of the year on Tuesday for finding "new ways to engage audiences and continue its practice of fearless journalism," the sponsors of the National Magazine Awards announced. New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine each won three awards: New York for magazine section, video and single topic issue, and The Times Magazine for feature writing, essays and criticism, and public interest. California Sunday won for design and photography, and Mother Jones won for reporting as well as for magazine of the year. Nineteen titles had received nominations in multiple categories, led by New York with 10. The Times Magazine received seven, and The New Yorker received five. Known as the Ellies for the elephant shaped statuettes given to winners, the National Magazine Awards are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors in association with the Columbia Journalism School. The awards were announced at a ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
When Donald Trump Jr.'s new book "Triggered" appeared at the top of the New York Times best seller list this month, a debate erupted over how and why it had claimed the No. 1 spot. The book, a broad attack on his critics, Democrats and the news media, was published on Nov. 5. The following week, it topped the list. But some skeptics noted that Mr. Trump had gotten a boost from his father's Twitter feed and from the Republican National Committee, which emailed supporters the day the book came out, asking them to purchase signed copies and touting it as the book the "left doesn't want you to read." Others noted a tiny dagger symbol that appeared next to the title on the list, indicating that bulk purchases of the book had boosted its ranking. (Of the 10 nonfiction hardcover titles currently on The Times's best seller list, "Triggered" is the only one featuring that symbol.) Some of Mr. Trump's supporters pushed back on social media and anonymously to Fox News, saying that even without bulk sales, "Triggered" would still top the list. "We haven't made a large bulk purchase, but are ordering copies to keep up with demand," Mike Reed, an R.N.C. spokesman, said two days after the fund raising email promoting "Triggered" was sent. "Each book is sold to an individual who supports the Republican Party." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In partnership with Broadreach, a summer adventure learning program, Exclusive Resorts is offering a new summer kids' camp aboard private catamarans in the Caribbean. Each of the two sessions of the Voyagers Camp Aug. 2 to 9 and Aug. 9 to 16 starts in St. Martin and will give boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 16 the opportunity to snorkel, water ski, wakeboard, paddleboard, hike and earn a PADI Open Water scuba certification or International Yachting Certification. "People can go online and buy a sailing adventure for their kids, but what's different about this camp is that we customize the itinerary to what the kids want to do," said Cathy Ross, chief executive of Exclusive Resorts. "Customizing the trip helps us give them the best experience possible." There will be 10 to 12 campers and three staff aboard each 44 to 46 foot catamaran, which will also make stops in Tintamarre Island, Ile Fourche and St. Barts. Exclusive Resorts is offering the camp to its members' children and their friends, as well as to children of nonmembers who sign up, at no fee, for Exclusive Resorts' Gateway program and purchase a minimum of three nights ( 2,000 a night) at one of the formerly members only selection of homes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Gail Collins: Bret, welcome to our new conversing day. Let's celebrate by disagreeing. This week Congress is trying to work out a second stage coronavirus relief program. But the president has been stalling in an attempt to get them to cut payroll taxes. If I remember correctly, you're a big champion of cutting the tax, which is used to help fund Social Security. Does that put you on the Trump side? Bret Stephens: Gail, my feelings about tax cuts are basically the same as my feelings about ice cream. It's not that I dislike any particular flavor, but I like some more than others. In the case of a temporary payroll tax cut, the good thing about it is that it's money in people's pockets when they may need it the most. Just think of all the parents who'll need child care because their kids can't go to school in the fall. The bad thing about it is that because it's temporary it doesn't give people or businesses a motive to hire and invest. Most of the Republican caucus in Congress doesn't seem particularly enthusiastic. Gail: We don't need to be losing sleep over it. No rational politician is going to mess with Social Security. Even the Senate Republicans aren't keen about Trump's idea. Bret: The best thing Trump could do to improve the economy is eliminate all the tariffs he's imposed, which are a direct tax on the consumer and a huge burden on any importer. But of course he won't. Gail: Can I confess that I'm not really into tariffs? But a hike clearly isn't in the interest of the average consumer. 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." Bret: Think of tariffs as what happens nine months after an ardent xenophobe and a failing businessman get hitched. Gail: Let me ask you about something I've been obsessing about recently: the polls. I see all the polls showing that the public is never, ever, going to re elect Trump. But then I remember how the polls seemed to show the same thing last time around. Hillary was a shoo in! Until election night. Are you as insecure about this as I am? Bret: The same fear spins around in my head like a scene in a horror movie the one in which the evil ax murderer has a knife in his back and seems to be dead, but you know he's coming back for one last terrifying chop. Gail: I hate when that happens. Bret: I can think of all kinds of things that could derail a Biden bid. He stumbles really badly in an interview. Police officers get massacred at a protest, as they were in Dallas in 2016. His veep pick is too far to the left. China shoots down an American surveillance plane. Fed up parents start a movement to send their kids back to school, and Biden opposes them to take sides with the teachers' unions. Covid 19 fatality rates reach a plateau and then fall, unemployment comes down, crime shoots up. In other words, a lot can happen. On the flip side of this is the likelihood, or at least the prayer, that most Americans have really soured on Trump, and they're just waiting for Biden and his V.P. pick to give them a sense of reassurance that they'll be the right mix of harmless and hopeful. Gail: Well, things look so good for Biden now there are only two possible worries. Yours is the classic Joe Screws Up, and I am not going to try to convince you that's impossible. Mine is a suspicion of polls. I've always suspected that when people get called by a poll taker, they want to say something they think will make them look good. There was a period in which some Black candidates did better in the polls than they did in the actual votes on Election Day, and one thought was that respondents just wanted to seem tolerant. Bret: I think you're referring to the Bradley effect, after the African American L.A. mayor Tom Bradley, who lost a governor's race in California to a white opponent even though pre election polls had him ahead. Gail: I've wondered if the polls showing Hillary way ahead four years ago were the product of people not wanting a stranger on the telephone to know they were a Trump kind of voter. And now we're back again, except supporting Trump is even more embarrassing. Could we be seeing the same thing? Bret: It's a good question. My guess is, probably not. I think the main reason the polls failed to predict the outcome in 2016 wasn't so much that people lied to pollsters. It's that swing voters who hated both candidates decided late in the day that they hated Hillary more. The release of James Comey's letter saying he had reopened the investigation into Clinton's emails was a big deciding factor. And Trump was, unquestionably, the "change" candidate, whereas Hillary ran as the candidate of the status quo. Gail: And I must admit a friend who knows a lot about such things told me the embarrassed by Trump voters I was describing wouldn't say they were voting for Biden. They'd just claim "undecided." Bret: My main doubt about the current polling is that Trump is basically running against a candidate named "Not Trump." Remember how "Doonesbury" used to depict George H.W. Bush as an invisible figure? That's Biden today. But eventually he's going to have to become more visible, and that's when the polls will really start to count. Can I switch the subject? I know we've often discussed this before, but this is probably our last conversation before Biden names his running mate. How about we place a small bet a glass of wine on whom he chooses? Bret: OK, and I'll bet you a reasonably priced Sancerre that it's Val Demings. Give me your thinking on Harris. Gail: Well, he's promised to nominate a woman and there's a growing expectation it'll be a woman of color. There's quite a talent pool for him to choose from, but Harris has some of the strongest national political experience. She can point to her work in the Senate, and she's usually good on TV. Her own presidential campaign wasn't very well run, but that shouldn't be a problem if she's on Team Joe. Plus, she's got a lot of experience in criminal justice, which will be a big topic this fall. Now you. Bret: My thinking about Harris is that she comes from a state, California, that Biden doesn't need to win. Demings comes from Florida, which Biden really would like to win. Harris is a senator, and Biden an ex senator, so there isn't a good mix of legislative and executive experience. Demings was a police chief, meaning she's inhabited the sphere most Americans think of as the real world. Harris attacked Biden pretty viciously in the early debates, and those attacks will be used against them both. Demings has, as far as I know, stayed out of the intramural Democratic squabbles. I suspect that many white voters feel that Harris projects establishmentarian entitlement while making them feel uncomfortable on subjects like busing. Demings's life story is a classic tale of pulling herself up every step of the way, from deep poverty to the floor of Congress. Harris's background as a tough on crime prosecutor may haunt her. But Demings's background as a police officer will refute the G.O.P. attack line that the Democratic Party hates the cops. Gail: You've made a good argument about why Demings should get the nomination. But when it comes to who will I just feel Democrats may be more comfortable with Harris, who they've known a lot longer. Bret: Then again, our colleague Frank Bruni made a compelling case for Illinois's heroic Tammy Duckworth. And I know Susan Rice would make the case that she knows her way around the White House and would be ready for the job, though some of her poor judgments, her notoriously brusque manners and her lack of normal political experience will be big strikes against her. Anyway, that's my bid for the Sancerre. If we're both wrong we can just trade bottles. Gail: I can think of a lot worse ways to spend an evening. Cheers! 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 |
How did you discover Tomory Dodge? Through my friends at CRG Gallery, who represent him. It's about color. I think it's very expressionistic. For something so meaningless, it has a lot of meaning. And I could stare at it forever and never see the same thing. I find there's something wildly controlled and madly composed about all of his paintings. Almost to the point where they're figurative. You look at that painting and go, oh my God, it's the end of the world, but what a happy end of the world. As opposed to when you look at paintings that are incredibly apocalyptic and doomed. I don't think any artist that I collect really goes to that doomed gloom kind of thing. What is that painting on the floor, alongside it? His name is Benjamin Butler. There's something flirty about it. And he is such a not flirty guy, but I think all of his good humor and sex appeal comes out in his paintings. What is it? It's trees. I always think that he would make the most fabulous backdrops or curtains, and it would be amazing to see that blown up on a giant scale. You have many different styles. I do think this girl Pam Jorden is a great, great abstract painter, and I feel this painting on the floor near his chair relates distinctly to the Dodge. I like that it's thematic. Like there's actually an editing of color. You don't notice it until you stand back and go, oh that painting is about green and lilac and yellow. You're around texture and color and pattern all the time, but you don't shy away from it in your art collection. Why? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
One can become fast friends with a stranger. The same can happen with a new restaurant. Mon Lapin, which opened in March, immediately puts one at ease, like slipping into a long shared history. This magic is thanks to the particularly Quebecois qualities of generous hospitality and a spirit of pleasure that David McMillan, Frederic Morin and Allison Cunningham have cultivated in their Joe Beef family of restaurants. Mon Lapin came about by chance. Vanya Filipovic and Marc Olivier Frappier, long part of the family (they both worked at Joe Beef) and, along with that original trio, owners of Le Vin Papillon and Mon Lapin, discovered the sunny corner location while walking around their Little Italy neighborhood. The traditional area, north of trendy Mile End, made them nostalgic for the old vibe of Little Burgundy, home to the first three Joe Beef restaurants. The narrow space, white and crammed with colorful paintings populated by rabbits, forests and hunting scenes, glows with dusk light. With only 30 seats, including five at the bar in front of the open kitchen, the room is cozy but comfortable. There are no reservations accepted; guests waited at the entrance with a glass of sparkling wine. Anchoring the middle of the room was a cart with a cold bath from which sprouted the necks of several magnums of wine. The wine list one of the most interesting in the city, if not the country is built on long relationships with natural wine producers, primarily in Europe. Ms. Filipovic, also the wine director, said there is no dogma to how she chooses bottles: "It's a little bit cheesy but it's really all about emotion, it's really all about finding things that stand out in terms of energy in the bottle." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Sierra Palantino's walls are covered with images from a collage kit by the influencer Tezza Barton. "I've always been someone who collaged, but it's cool to have something that you can buy," Ms. Palantino, 22, said. The wall behind Sierra Palantino's bed is covered with photographs: a bushel of coral and pearl colored roses; a bouquet of ruby and pink Mylar balloons; a close up of a neon sign that says, "all the feels." In thousands of bedrooms around the world, the same pictures are arranged in a neat collage. Collage kits, as these color coordinated stacks of prints are called, have grown in popularity with the rise of Instagram and the decline of print magazines, whose pages could double as bedroom decor. On Etsy, there are almost 1,300 listings for "collage kit." One popular kit is made by Tezza Barton, an Instagram influencer. (Her fans know her simply as Tezza.) "I've always been someone who collaged, but it's cool to have something that you can buy," Ms. Palantino, who is 22 and a sample coordinator for Free People, said of her Tezza kit. "It just looked aesthetically pleasing." Ms. Barton began selling collage kits on her website in 2017. Each 150 page assemblage costs 89 and is loosely thematic: The Coastal Kit features beachy travel photos from the Amalfi Coast in Italy, Southern California and Hawaii, while the City Kit is an ode to the architecture and pace of New York. In January, she introduced the Dream Kit, a budget package of 75 images for 49. For that price, you could also buy up to two dozen print magazines and create your own stack of collage worthy images. "It feels a little bit like a prepackaged imagination," said Erin Hover, a former creative director of Teen Vogue. "It's kind of doing the work for you rather than going out and being inspired by real life and taking your own photos or taking the time to flip through a magazine." Fashion spreads, she said, could take months and multiple paychecks (photographer, makeup artist, stylist, designer) to produce. For comparison, it takes Ms. Barton and her husband, Cole Herrmann, a month to photograph and design a kit. Then she prints the images on pages that approximate the thickness of a magazine cover. Mr. Herrmann came up with the idea; many of his wife's followers wanted to know how she made the collage pasted up in her studio apartment. "You can buy a lot of magazines and curate your wall, but it was never like you could get this scene or a curated feel," Ms. Barton said. Collages loom large in popular culture and frequently appear in sets for TV shows and movies with young central characters. Chris August, the production designer for "To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You," sees them as a means of self expression and self actualization. "I think that the collage is just a way of them making specific choices to reinforce something they're already feeling," Mr. August said. "'I want to be more like this.'" Lara Jean Covey, the film's protagonist, sleeps and dreams in a colorful, whimsically decorated room. Letters, drawings, photographs and colorful prints cover the walls on either side of her bed. Between the first film and the sequel, Mr. August added images to the collages to reflect her development over time. Ms. Barton encourages buyers to add their personal prints to make the collages distinct. Isabel Collins, a fashion stylist, purchased the Tezza coastal collage kit and added her own artifacts to its arrangement: postcards, Polaroids and some magazine pages. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Websites like The Glow and MiniMode showcase stylish mothers and their equally stylish tots. In a campaign earlier this month, MiniMode featured Luca, the 5 year old son of the New York stylist Nicole Fasolino; in it, the boy has shoulder length blond hair with bright green highlights. "It used to be that boys went to the barber and got traditional haircuts," said Denni Weisler, a stylist at My Little Sunshine in TriBeCa, who has cut children's hair for 30 years. "Now, parents are being more progressive and letting their kids be who they want to be." Some parents, consciously or not, model their sons' hairstyles after their own. Mara Hoffman, a fashion designer known for her bohemian inspired ready to wear, said that when her son, Joaquin, was born in 2011, "the nurse said he was the hairiest baby she'd ever seen." As Joaquin got older, the decision to let his hair grow seemed like a natural one. Neither Ms. Hoffman nor her husband, Javier Pinon, an artist, cut their hair on a regular basis. "The idea of bringing him to get his hair cut every other month was simply not a forethought for us," said Ms. Hoffman, who lives with her family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "We don't maintain short hairdos. It's not in our internal tribe. So why should Joaquin be any different? That said, the second he wants to cut his hair off, we cut it off." Some boys' first trip to the barber comes when they transition from toddler or when they are old enough to form their own opinions. But many are in no rush. Ms. Osborn from Park Slope said that strangers have sometimes mistaken Jackson for a girl, but that most friends and family think that his long blond hair looks cool. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This article contains spoilers for "It Chapter Two." All the member s of the Losers' Club in "It Chapter Two" have a secret to hide a detail or experience dating back to childhood and their initial encounter with the evil force of the film's title that they are desperately hoping is never revealed. Some of these secrets are already known to viewers who watched the original movie, which was released in 2017, while others are disclosed over the course of "Chapter Two," which opened on Friday. We learn that Richie Tozier, the fast talking, foul mouthed teenager (played by Finn Wolfhard) who grew up to be a popular stand up comedian (Bill Hader) is gay and has been secretly in love with his friend and fellow club member Eddie Kaspbrak (played as an adult by James Ransone). Alas, Richie is never able to share these feelings with Eddie, who is killed in the final confrontation with It (Bill Skarsgard). (Both films are directed by Andy Muschietti and adapted from the Stephen King novel, in which some of these scenes play somewhat differently.) In a previous interview, Hader discussed how he had been sought to play Richie in "It Chapter Two." Here, he talks about the specific decision to reveal Richie's love for Eddie and how it factored into his performance. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. Was Richie's sexuality something you discussed with Andy Muschietti before filming started? Andy and I talked about how overt we should make it, and I said if it's not overt, then why is he in the movie? You can't do a half measure on it. You've got to go the full way or don't even allude to it. Let's not be coy. Let's just say what it is. Did knowing this detail about him affect how you played the character? It just gave me more to play. We did a lot of different versions of Eddie's death scene. We did one where he's clearly dead, and I'm refusing to recognize it. And some where I was very tender with him, where I'm caressing his face this is the person I love, and it wasn't just lust. It's truly love. In other scenes I was playing off James, but knowing on some level that I loved him. It's something Richie can't connect to, so he has to hate that thing. It's very adolescent. "I have a crush on you, but I don't want to tell you that, so I'm going to push you away. But man, if he made the first move, that'd be the best thing ever." Some readers of the original novel have speculated that Eddie might be gay or queer coded. And some viewers of the previous "It" movie felt it was hinting at the possibility of a romantic relationship between Richie and Eddie. Were you trying to respond to any of these ideas? I wasn't aware of that. I just knew if we're going to do this story, play it for what it wants to be, because you can outthink yourself in a lot of ways. And I feel like it wants to be this. You've set the stage for this. You've got to think, too, the book is set in the '50s and the '80s, and that's already different from the movies, set in the '80s and today . To deal with this in the 21st century, it's got to be a different thing. There was just no possibility that Richie could have been mature and told Eddie how he really felt about him? I think with Eddie, it's frozen like that. It's like when you've known someone forever. My best friend, Duffy, we're good, but we're kind of stuck in the age we first started hanging out, at 15. Or like when you get together with your siblings. You revert back because your relationship's been established at a certain age. There's little moments where I tried to play that. When the Losers' Club has its first adult reunion Richie might be in a place where, he's like, I don't really care about him anymore. And then he immediately gets smashed. He sees Eddie's there. He's like, oh yeah, feelings still there I'm going to get drunk. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Although the tunneling for the Second Avenue subway is going on far below the street, on the surface whole blocks are in chaos, strewn with barriers, fences, ventilators and huge elevated construction sheds. It was just as much an obstacle course in the early 20th century, when our first subways were built, as we can see from hundreds of thousands of photographs, now divided like a broken Greek vase among various institutions, at least two dealers, several collectors and, on occasion, sale tables at flea markets. Work on New York's first subway began in 1900, running from City Hall up to Grand Central, across to Times Square, and then up the West Side on Broadway. The contractor, the Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company, embarked on not only a construction project of unprecedented scope, but also a program of photographic documentation without precursor. The huge portfolio got its start when Pierre P. Pullis and other photographers, using cameras with 8 by 10 inch glass negatives, were assigned to record the progress of construction as well as every dislodged flagstone, every cracked brick, every odd building and anything that smelled like a possible lawsuit. Pullis, the principal photographer in the early years, was born in 1869. He left school after the eighth grade, and his training is unknown an 1897 directory lists him simply as "clerk." Although he was described in one census index as mulatto, all prior and subsequent censuses show him and his parents as white. He worked at least through 1930, and died in 1942. One of the earliest views in the subway collection, taken in 1900, shows the malls along Broadway above 72nd Street as peaceful tree lined plots of turf, many with a walkway up the center. But when a photographer returned in 1902, Broadway was in turmoil, the trees felled, the street ripped up and covered with timbers, disrupted by subway construction just a few feet below. A shot of West 73rd shows the Ansonia apartment house near the end of construction, with its six foot high safe just delivered to the sidewalk. A photo of Broadway taken a year later shows the malls back in place, as if nothing had happened, but minus their cover of mature oaks. Without the trees, the view up the center of the Broadway malls is open and spare, like Interstate 70 running across Kansas, light years from their current bunkerlike incarnations. The mission of the subway photographers was broad. The Lafayette Street of 1903 looked like a city after a bombing, gaunt hummocks of earth and debris. But a 1908 photograph looking north on West End Avenue past 97th Street is almost sleepy: a collie type dog, brown or black with a splash of white around its neck, wanders across the street, not a vehicle in sight. At a sewer rerouting site at Broadway and 100th Street, a posed shot captures a group of workmen with one beefy guy sitting astride a six foot wide pipe, like Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb at the end of the movie "Dr. Strangelove." At Lexington Avenue and 109th Street, one building looked suspicious: a keystone over a tenement window arch had settled perhaps two inches, apparently before construction. A man looks out the window. He is wearing a tie indeed, at least half the men in the pictures are wearing ties. The great thing about these photographs is that they capture the miscellany of city life in a way that formal architectural photographs rarely do. A photograph of a cracked sidewalk at Lexington Avenue and 79th Street records a childish four foot high chalk drawing of a girl, signed "Allan." A testament of love? Some pedestrians are caught in the lens by surprise, but others are rowed up as if they expect complimentary prints. A workman at Broadway and 88th Street, slightly out of focus, turns around with Bogart like malevolence as if to say, "Hey, buddy, waddya lookin' at?" On the other hand, three cute girls are lined up at Lexington and 89th, right in front of four equally cute Queen Anne houses. Seven blocks south, at East 82nd Street, Joseph Richardson's famous "Spite House," built only five feet wide and four stories high after a dispute with a neighboring owner, was the subject of at least six images. The subway construction company spent 15,000 in precautionary shoring, although The New York Times suggested that the strange structure was "hardly worth the money." Although most of the subway images by Pullis and others carry individual negative numbers, there is no central catalog. A few hundreds are scattered through the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, the New York City Municipal Archives and the New York Public Library. The New York Historical Society has at least 65,000, says Marilyn S. Kushner, the head of the department of prints, photographs and architectural collections. The collector Brian Merlis has a thousand or so, which he reprints and sells on eBay and at various street fairs. Carey Stumm, the collections manager at the New York Transit Museum, says it has about 300,000 transit related images. Only 10,000 are on its website, and most of those are from the 1920s and later. If you want to immerse yourself in this remarkable documentation of day to day New York, you have to visit the New York Historical Society or the Transit Museum archives (which are closed until later this year) and look through the photos, one by one. Watch out it is intoxicating. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Netflix is now available in most countries around the world, putting more pressure on the company to continue its fast paced growth abroad as well as at home. On Monday, Netflix announced that it expected to add just two million members outside the United States in the second quarter this year less than the 3.5 million analysts had expected. The figure also represents a decrease from the 2.4 million members the streaming service added internationally in the same period the previous year. That cloudy forecast sent shares down more than 10 percent in after hours trading, as Netflix has tied its future to its bold global push. The company has been pouring resources into its expanding international footprint, telling investors that it would run at break even profitability until the end of 2016 as it continued to roll out the service abroad and increased its investment in content. In January, Netflix announced that it had added 130 countries to its service map, bringing the total number of countries where Netflix is available to 190. As the company experienced slowing growth in the United States over the past year, executives pointed to the rest of the world as the next frontier for streaming television to hundreds of millions more potential customers. While the United States counts about 100 million broadband households, for instance, there are about 730 million broadband households worldwide, according to analyst estimates. On Monday, Netflix executives said that they had just skimmed the surface of that growth potential and that there was still a big opportunity ahead. The executives attributed the soft international forecast for the second quarter this year to a tough comparison from the previous year, when Netflix started the service in Australia and New Zealand. "We cannot wait to break through 100 million subscribers sometime next year," Mr. Hastings said during an earnings call. At the same time, Netflix said that it expected to add just 500,000 members in the United States in the second quarter because of what it described as a "modest impact" from price increases. The company characterized the forecast as "in line" with previous years; it added 900,000 members in the United States during the same period in 2015. The development came in what was already a rough start to the week for the streaming service. On Sunday, Amazon created a more direct competitor to Netflix with the introduction of a new 9 monthly subscription for its Prime movie and television streaming service. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. On the fast changing competitive landscape, Mr. Hastings said in a letter to investors that the "market for relaxation time and disposable income is huge, and we are but a little boat in a vast sea." He added, "We earn a tiny fraction of consumers' time and money, and have lots of opportunity ahead to win more of your evenings away from all those other activities if we can keep improving." That uncertainty over the competitive landscape, as well as fears about growth prospects both inside and outside the United States, overshadowed the generally positive first quarter financial results that Netflix announced on Monday. The company beat expectations for profit and revenue growth during the first quarter. Profits totaled 28 million, up 16 percent from the same period last year, and total revenues increased 24 percent to nearly 2 billion. Netflix added a record 6.7 million total streaming members during the first quarter, bringing its total to 81.5 million, with about 42 percent outside the United States. Netflix had forecast that it would reach nearly 80.9 million total paid members in the quarter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The Mets agreed to a deal Tuesday with a free agent right handed pitcher named Trevor not Trevor Bauer, the National League Cy Young Award winner, but Trevor May, one of the better relievers in the majors as a setup man for the Minnesota Twins. A baseball official with knowledge of the deal confirmed the agreement but spoke on condition of anonymity because May must first pass a physical exam. The deal will be for two years, according to ESPN. May, 31, had a 3.86 earned run average in 24 games for the Twins last season, with 38 strikeouts in 23 1/3 innings. Since returning from Tommy John surgery in 2018, he is one of only 10 active pitchers with at least 100 relief appearances, an E.R.A. below 3.20 and at least 12 strikeouts per nine innings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A tanning bed inside the Sunset Beach Tanning Salon in Fort Collins, Colo. About a third of adults in the United States have reported ever using a tanning bed most of them women. "This is a tremendous advance," said Dr. Jeffrey E. Gershenwald, a professor of surgery and the medical director of the Melanoma and Skin Center at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. "There will now be a national order against using indoor tanning devices for youth around the country. It will no longer be dependent solely on grass roots state and local initiatives." Eric Pahon, a spokesman for the F.D.A., said the agency would work through state authorities to enforce the proposed requirements, if they become final. Manufacturers of the beds already have to register with the F.D.A., he said, but tanning salons do not, and some experts said the proposal could be tricky to enforce. He said the agency could enforce the order by seizing devices, filing civil penalties with fines or even criminally prosecuting. The proposal is important, health experts say, because young people are most at risk from the health consequences of indoor tanning. The risk of melanoma jumps by 59 percent in people who use tanning beds at all before the age of 35. Overall, indoor tanning increased the risk of melanoma by 20 percent, studies have found. The F.D.A. proposal will be open for public comment for 90 days. "Indoor tanning is particularly dangerous for younger users," said Dr. Vasum Peiris, chief medical officer for pediatrics and special populations at the F.D.A.'s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. The proposal, if made final, would be broad reaching. There are 18,000 to 19,000 indoor tanning salons in the United States and as many as 20,000 other facilities, such as health clubs, offering tanning services, according to the F.D.A. The Indoor Tanning Association said in a statement that the industry is "heavily regulated at both the federal and state levels and our customers are well aware of the potential risks of overexposure." The group said it was concerned that the proposal would burden its members with "unnecessary" governmental costs. About a third of adults in the United States have reported using a tanning bed at least once most of them women. Clinicians have become concerned about the incidence rate of melanoma in women under 40, which has risen by a third since the early 1990s, according to data from the National Cancer Institute. (Death rates have not gone up, however, a testament to earlier detection and better treatment.) "The data has been building steadily over the past 5 to 10 years," said Dr. Eleni Linos, assistant professor of dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco, who has been working to reduce young women's use of tanning beds. "I think there's momentum now that has allowed the F.D.A. to take this step. I think it's fantastic." The number of young people using tanning beds has started to decline in recent years, but the figure is still high about 1.6 million minors tan indoors every year, according to a federal youth health survey from 2013. But those who use them, use them frequently. The federal government has collected data on tanning among high school students only since 2009, but researchers were surprised at the findings: Among those who used tanning beds, more than half had used them 10 times or more in the past year. The F.D.A. also proposed new preventive measures for adults, including that they sign a document before using a tanning bed saying that they understand the risks. The agency is also requiring tanning bed companies and manufacturers to make warning labels more prominent and easier to read, have an emergency shut off switch, and make sure protective eyewear is worn during tanning sessions to block out more light. More than 40 states now have some sort of restriction on the use of tanning salons by minors, according to AIM at Melanoma, an advocacy and research group based in California, which in 2011 became the first state to prohibit minors from using them. There are now at least 11 states, plus the District of Columbia, with full under 18 bans, according to AIM, including Texas, Hawaii, Louisiana, Minnesota, Illinois and North Carolina. Sarah Hughes, 31, of Dothan, Ala., who started tanning at 16 and had a tumor on her left leg by age 25, gasped when she heard the proposal. "I'm kind of in shock," she said by telephone on Friday. "I don't know if I have 50 years left, or only one. But this right here, this is going to save so many lives." She added: "So much is pushed into your head when you are younger. Don't do drugs. Don't drink. Don't smoke. Well nobody ever said, don't get in a tanning bed." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A demonstrator in Rockland County, N.Y., after officials banned unvaccinated children from public spaces. The Anti Defamation League has strongly objected to the appropriation of Holocaust symbols by vaccine critics. Religious Objections to the Measles Vaccine? Get the Shots, Faith Leaders Say The measles outbreak in the United States is now the largest since the disease was declared eliminated here 19 years ago. The return of this scourge has been driven by one factor in particular: misinformation, spread by vaccine critics , that scares parents into not immunizing their children. Along with rumors that vaccines cause autism or that the trace amounts of mercury and aluminum in them are dangerous falsehoods that were long ago debunked have come innuendos aimed at deeply religious parents. Vaccines, the activists say, contain ingredients made from pigs, dogs, monkeys and aborted fetuses. Indeed, most of those assertions are based in fact . Ingredient lists published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins show that vaccines may contain these elements (although any residual DNA is present only at the parts per million level). Nonetheless, vaccination is endorsed by top Jewish and Islamic scholars, and by the Vatican. Religious authorities have meticulously studied how vaccines are made and what is in them, and still have ruled that they do not violate Jewish, Islamic or Catholic law. "Since it is proven that vaccines are effective to prevent the spread of disease, it is an obligation upon every father to vaccinate his children," Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, vice president of the Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem, recently wrote in an open letter to the dean of a major Orthodox yeshiva in the United States. Vaccines are highly purified, but they still may contain isolated cells or traces of DNA from the human or animal cells they were grown in. Those "growth media" include cell lines originally derived often decades ago from monkey or dog kidneys, moth caterpillars, calf blood, or the immature tissues of aborted human fetuses. (The widely circulated assertion that vaccines contain rat DNA is untrue.) Some vaccines grown in eggs or using dairy products contain residual egg or casein proteins. And in some vaccines, the manufacturers add small doses of gelatin made from pig skin to prevent damage from heat or freeze drying. But kosher dietary laws are "just a total nonissue" with regard to vaccines, said Dr. Naor Bar Zeev, a professor of international health and vaccine science at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "All these complex laws apply to food ingested by mouth and are not in any way relevant to injected material." Observant Jews may inject insulin derived from pig pancreas or have pig valves implanted in a failing heart, Dr. Bar Zeev noted. They may also take oral vaccines, such as those against rotavirus, polio and cholera, even if they contain pork gelatin, because they are considered medicine, not food. Some Jewish scholars have also ruled that "denatured" substances like gelatin are not subject to the same restrictions as pork flesh. Vaccine ingredients are not just an issue among Orthodox Jews. Because Islam also forbids eating pork, alarms about gelatin and porcine viral DNA have hampered vaccination in some Muslim countries. Some older vaccines contained cow gelatin, but manufacturers changed to pork after studies found it triggered fewer dangerous reactions in children with gelatin allergies. In a typical vaccine dose, only about three one hundredths of a teaspoon is gelatin. In 1995, a meeting of 112 leading Islamic scholars considered many ingested substances, including alcohol, rennet and even nutmeg, and approved the use of porcine gelatin in medicines. "Gelatin formed as a result of the transformation of the bones, skin and tendons of a judicially impure animal is pure, and it is judicially permissible to eat it," the Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences ruled. More than 200 years ago, Rabbi Weiss noted in a recent article, Rabbi Israel Lifschitz, author of a famous commentary on oral Jewish law, declared that Dr. Edward Jenner, the English inventor of the smallpox vaccine, was "one of the righteous among nations" for saving thousands of lives. The current measles epidemic among Orthodox Jews in Israel, Britain and this country was triggered in part by a pilgrimage last fall to the Ukrainian grave of Rabbi Nachman, founder of the Breslov branch of Hasidism. Rabbi Nachman was himself a strong vaccination advocate. Failing to vaccinate children against smallpox before they were three months old "is like spilling blood," he wrote. Earlier generations of Orthodox scholars had ruled that vaccination was "permissible and proper," Rabbi Weiss also said, even with the crude early vaccines that sometimes killed recipients. Vaccines against viral diseases are made from viruses, which are just protein shells containing short stretches of DNA or RNA and can multiply only when grown in broths of live cells. Those cells are unusual in that they must be "immortal" that is, able to replicate for decades without suffering "cell death," the aging process. The cells also must be free of cancer and viruses, which is one reason the ancestor cells come from fetuses that have never been exposed to pathogens fetuses that were removed in sterile surgical environments, not from miscarriages . Among Buddhists, the Dalai Lama has personally given polio vaccine to children to further the world polio eradication drive. One of the first accounts of variolation an ancient form of smallpox prevention was from an 11th century Buddhist nun, who blew ground smallpox scabs into the noses of her patients. Although the Vatican would like vaccine companies to replace old cell lines with new ones, that is extremely unlikely, experts said. Human fetal tissue would presumably still be required. The multiyear testing process also would have to start all over again and anything other than a product perfect the first time could endanger the thousands of infants it would have to be tested in. "It would probably cost a vaccine company over a billion dollars," said Dr. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "And they'd be competing against themselves. There is absolutely no incentive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, faces the increasingly difficult challenge of shaping investor expectations about the future course of Fed policy amid growing signs that the Bernanke era at the central bank is drawing to a close. President Obama suggested late Monday that he was likely to nominate a new Fed chairman this year, saying that Mr. Bernanke had "already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to." Mr. Obama added that Mr. Bernanke, whose second four year term in office ends in January, has done an "outstanding job." The comments bounced around Washington on Tuesday even as Mr. Bernanke convened a regularly scheduled meeting of the Fed's policy making committee to debate how much longer the Fed will continue its current efforts to stimulate the economy. The Fed is not expected to announce any immediate changes on Wednesday, at the close of the meeting, but investors are watching for signs that the Fed is considering scaling back later this year. The central bank is buying 85 billion a month in mortgage backed securities and Treasury securities, in addition to holding short term interest rates near zero. Both measures are intended to encourage job creation by easing financial conditions, and the Fed pledged to press the campaign until it saw "sustained improvement" in the outlook for the labor market. But that message has been muddled recently by conflicting pronouncements about the duration of the asset purchases from several of the 19 Fed officials who help make policy. Mr. Bernanke contributed to the confusion by telling Congress last month that the Fed might begin to reduce the pace of its purchases this year but might not while avoiding any clear account of how the central bank would make such a decision. Uncertainty about the Fed's plans and its leadership has focused attention on the news conference that Mr. Bernanke plans to hold on Wednesday afternoon after the Federal Open Market Committee releases a policy statement. The Fed also will release economic projections by the 19 officials, which could help to explain the apparent momentum toward doing less by showing how quickly they expect the economy to grow and unemployment to decline. "Federal Reserve officials believe that clear communication about policy intentions can help manage market expectations and so increase the effectiveness of monetary policy," Kevin Logan, chief United States economist at HSBC, wrote to clients on Monday. "Lately, however, the policy makers appear to have muddled the message and so have created confusion rather than clarity on the policy outlook." The news conference, he said, is a chance "to clarify." The confusion is costly. A recent survey of the 21 companies authorized to trade securities with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a list that includes most of the nation's largest financial companies, found widespread agreement that uncertainty about the Fed's plans was effectively tightening financial conditions. Interest rates on 10 year Treasuries, a benchmark for the Fed's efforts to reduce borrowing costs, rose to 2.20 percent on Tuesday from a low of 1.66 percent at the start of May. Some analysts argue that the Fed still intends to press ahead with asset purchases at least through the end of the year. They note that Mr. Bernanke has allowed dissenters to command the public stage even as they exercise relatively little influence over the course of Fed policy. Some also see the cacophony as an intentional damper on the ebullience of investors, carving out time for the benefits of low interest rates to spread through the economy. The unemployment rate has fallen only slightly since the Fed began its latest round of bond buying, to 7.6 percent in May from 7.8 percent in September. And even that decline happened mostly because people stopped looking for work. The share of American adults with jobs has not increased in three years. The Fed's preferred measure of inflation has sagged to 1.05 percent, the lowest level in more than 50 years and markedly below the 2 percent annual pace the Fed considers healthy. "In our view it would be risky to deliver a hawkish monetary policy message at a time when growth remains sluggish, inflation continues to trend down and market inflation expectations are dropping sharply," Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a note to clients last week. Other analysts, however, see mounting evidence that Mr. Bernanke and his allies would like to buy fewer bonds, although most still do not expect the Fed to reduce the pace of its asset purchases before September at the earliest. Fed officials have described the asset purchases as an experiment with uncertain consequences, particularly the potential disruption of financial markets, and warned that those risks might increase with the size of the Fed's holdings. While the pace of growth has increased only modestly, the worst case possibility, in which mismanaged fiscal policy sends the economy sliding back into recession, has faded. "The asset purchases may have been simply insurance against a fiscal disaster that did not materialize," wrote Tim Duy, an economist at the University of Oregon. Moreover, some Fed officials have concluded that large job gains are beyond reach. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland wrote recently that the Fed should be satisfied if the economy adds 150,000 jobs a month well below the monthly average of 176,000 so far this year. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago set the bar even lower, at 80,000 jobs a month. Both estimates are based on the assumption that many of the people who stopped looking for work in recent years will never return, allowing the unemployment rate to return closer to its normal levels during an economic expansion even without a rebound in employment. Some of these decisions will most likely be made after Mr. Bernanke leaves office. Mr. Obama, in an interview with the journalist Charlie Rose on PBS, avoided answering a direct question about reappointing Mr. Bernanke. He said instead that Mr. Bernanke "has been an outstanding partner along with the White House, in helping us recover much stronger than, for example, our European partners, from what could have been an economic crisis of epic proportions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Credit...Arthur Eddington So this is what it is like to play cosmic pinball. The worlds move, and sometimes they line up. Then you find yourself staring up the tube of blackness that is the moon's shadow, a sudden hole in the sky during a total solar eclipse. Such moments have left their marks on human consciousness like the monoliths in the classic movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey" since before history was recorded. Few eclipses have had more impact on modern history than the one that occurred on May 29, 1919, more than six minutes of darkness sweeping across South America and across the Atlantic to Africa. It was during that eclipse that the British astronomer Arthur Eddington ascertained that the light rays from distant stars had been wrenched off their paths by the gravitational field of the sun. That affirmed the prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity, ascribing gravity to a warp in the geometry of space time, that gravity could bend light beams. "Lights All Askew in the Heavens," read a headline in this newspaper. But the first step wasn't easy. How it happened illustrates that even the most fundamental advances in science can be hostage to luck and sometimes divine inspiration. The bending of light by gravity was the most stunning and obvious prediction of Einstein's theory. Astronomers had been trying to detect the effect at solar eclipses since before he had even finished formulating the theory. Nature and politics did not always cooperate. One of the earliest to try was Erwin Finlay Freundlich, an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory who was to become a big Einstein booster. Freundlich led an expedition to the Crimea in 1914 to observe an eclipse, but World War I began and he was arrested as a spy before the eclipse occurred. A team from the Lick Observatory in California did make it to the Crimean eclipse but it rained. "I must confess that I never before seriously faced the situation of having everything spoiled by clouds," said William W. Campbell, the team's frustrated leader. "One wishes that he could come home by the backdoor and not see anybody." Worse, Lick's special eclipse camera was impounded by the Russians and not returned in time for the next eclipse, in Venezuela in 1916. The next big chance to prove Einstein correct came in 1918, when the moon's shadow tracked right up the Columbia River between Washington State and Oregon. Lick sent another team of observers, but their camera was still not back from the Crimea and their improvised optics fell short, leaving the stars looking like fuzzy dumbbells as darkness fell. So the universe was still up for grabs in March 1919, when Eddington and his colleagues set sail for Africa to observe the next eclipse. Astronomically, the prospects were as good as they could get. During the eclipse, the sun would pass before a big cluster of stars known as the Hyades, so there ought to be plenty of bright lights to see yanked askew. Eddington was the right man for the job. A math prodigy and professor at Cambridge, he had been an early convert to Einstein's new theory, and an enthusiastic expositor to his colleagues and countrymen. A story went that he was once complimented on being one of only three people in the world who understood the theory. Admonished for false modesty when he didn't respond, Eddington replied that, on the contrary, he was trying to think of who the third person was. General relativity was so obviously true, he said later, that if it had been up to him he wouldn't have bothered trying to prove it. But it wasn't up to him, due to a quirk of history. Eddington was also a Quaker and so had refused to be drafted into the army. His boss, Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal of Britain, saved Eddington from jail by promising that he would undertake an important scientific task, namely the expedition to test the Einstein theory. Eddington also hoped to help reunite European science, which had been badly splintered by the war, Germans having been essentially disinvited from conferences. Now, an Englishman was setting off to prove the theory of a German, Einstein. According to Einstein's final version of the theory, completed in 1915, as their light rays curved around the sun during an eclipse, stars just grazing the sun should appear deflected from their normal positions by an angle of about 1.75 second of arc, about a thousandth of the width of a full moon. According to old fashioned Newtonian gravity, starlight would be deflected by only half that amount, 0.86 second, as it passed the sun during an eclipse. A second of arc is about the size of a star as it appears to the eye under the best and calmest of conditions from a mountaintop observatory. But atmospheric turbulence and optical exigencies often smudge the stars into bigger blurs. So Eddington's job, as he saw it, was to ascertain whether a bunch of blurs had been nudged off their centers by as much as Einstein had predicted, or half that amount or none at all. It was Newton versus Einstein. And what if Eddington measured twice the Einstein deflection?, Dyson was asked by Edwin Cottingham, one of the astronomers on the expedition. "Then Eddington will go mad and you will come home alone," Dyson answered. To improve the chances of success, two teams were sent: Eddington and Cottingham to the island of Principe, off the coast of Africa, and Charles Davidson and Andrew Crommelin to Sobral, a city in Brazil. The fail safe strategy almost didn't work. In Sobral, the weather was unusually cloudy, but a clearing in the clouds opened up only one minute before totality, the moment the moon fully eclipsed the sun. On Principe, it rained for an hour and a half on the morning of the eclipse, and Eddington took pictures through fleeting clouds, hoping that some stars would show up. A few blurry stars were visible on a couple of his photographic plates, and a preliminary examination convinced Eddington that the positions of the stars had moved during the eclipse. He turned to his colleague and said, "Cottingham, you won't have to go home alone." In the end, there were three sets of plates from which the deflection of starlight could be measured. How Eddington and his colleagues played them off against one another sealed the fate of Einstein's theory. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Will President Trump be able to make Mexico pay for his "big, beautiful wall"? Over the course of his campaign he offered a variety of ways to dip into pots of Mexican money. The latest, proposed on Thursday, was a 20 percent tax on imports from Mexico, which total roughly 300 billion in goods and services. Like other proposals Mr. Trump has floated impounding remittances of Mexicans working in the United States, or charging Mexicans more for visas it seems straightforward. But carrying it out would be another matter. For starters, a 20 percent tax on imports from Mexico would violate the North American Free Trade Agreement and most likely the rules of the World Trade Organization, which frowns on punitive levies imposed arbitrarily on imports from specific countries. (It is hard to tell from the tangle of announcements from Mr. Trump and his advisers whether they are planning a broad new tax regime that would affect all exports and imports. That, too, would most likely invite challenges at the W.T.O.) Mr. Trump, of course, has also talked about taking the United States out of the global trade accord. But that might seem a bit too drastic just to get Mexico to pay perhaps 20 billion for a wall. It is likely to impose enormous costs on the American and world economies, opening the door for a free for all trade war. But if the president did it anyway, the people paying the 20 percent tariff would not be Mexicans, but American consumers. That 2017 Ford Fusion built in Hermosillo, Mexico? It would no longer cost 22,610. It would cost 27,132. So what about the other ideas? The big one Mr. Trump mentioned early on is remittances. Mexico receives about 25 billion a year from Mexicans living abroad, mostly in the United States, in myriad transfers of a few hundred dollars apiece channeled primarily through services like Western Union and MoneyGram. Mr. Trump originally threatened to simply impound remittances, a matter of dubious legal standing and some logistical complication. Later he suggested a more sophisticated strategy. He would just threaten to change rules under the Patriot Act antiterrorism law to prohibit immigrants who couldn't prove legal residence from wiring money abroad. Under threat of losing these resources, the reasoning went, the Mexican government would soon cave and offer to pay for the wall. Remittances are indeed a big deal for Mexico. In a foreign policy speech delivered on Monday, President Enrique Pena Nieto said that ensuring "the free flow of remittances from our compatriots living in the United States" was one of 10 core Mexican objectives in the renegotiation of its relationship with America. What Mr. Trump seems not to reckon with is that people find a way around barriers like these. Mexicans would come up with other conduits to send the 100 a week that their parents, children or siblings back home rely on to pay the bills. As the Government Accountability Office noted in a report published last year, these sorts of obstacles often have the effect of "pushing remittances out of formal financial systems to less detectable methods." Or what about taxing remittances instead of impounding them? As Oklahoma discovered when it imposed a fee on money transfers abroad in 2010, that would drive remittances into some other, untaxed channel. As Monica de Bolle of the Peterson Institute for International Economics notes, it might also reduce remittances, hitting consumption in Mexico and thus, probably, American exports. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. And it might be illegal, too. Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, said that taxing remittances just to Mexico would probably be challenged as discriminatory on the basis of national origin. After all, many people who send remittances are American citizens or legal residents. Taxing remittances only by illegal immigrants would be, to say the least, implausible. Getting at Other Money What about charging Mexicans more for visas and border cards? It would take a lot of them to add up to the cost of Mr. Trump's barrier. What's more, visa fees are dedicated by statute to finance United States consular activities around the world. Mr. Trump could probably find some Mexican money somewhere. Twelve million Mexicans live in the United States. Mexican companies have invested nearly 20 billion in the country. There are tons of flows of money between the two. The question is whether Mr. Trump can get at it without breaking the law. Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, notes that the two countries have an income tax treaty. That means that Washington agrees to tax Mexican residents subject to United States income tax at a reduced rate. "I suppose Trump could simply violate this treaty and subject Mexican residents in the United States at a higher rate and call this part of the payment," he said. Perhaps none of this matters. Mr. Trump has acknowledged that how Mexico pays might be complicated, which suggests he may be open to calling any flow of money part of this payment. Or as Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations suggests, Mr. Trump may not actually be looking for good ideas to subtly draw money from Mexico to pay for a wall, but instead to prove strength and to humiliate the United States' southern neighbor. "Trump is focused on the optics," he said. "He is not in the market for clever schemes." Maybe cutting all aid to Mexico could help serve this purpose. It wouldn't pay for much. And it would amount to shooting oneself in the foot. What little aid Mexico gets from Washington is mostly destined to help finance Mexico's efforts to stop migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras from traveling across Mexico and into the United States. But that might not matter anymore. When the dust settles on Mr. Trump's rearrangement of relations with Mexico, Mexico is unlikely to keep lending a hand. The United States' most effective tool to curb illegal immigration will be lost. And then his wall might come in handy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
This month has seen a torrent of news about experimental vaccines to prevent Covid 19, with the latest development from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. On Monday they announced that a preliminary analysis showed their vaccine was effective especially when the first dose was mistakenly cut in half. The announcement came on the heels of stunning reports from Moderna, as well as Pfizer and BioNTech. But AstraZeneca's news was murkier, leaving many experts wanting to see more data before passing final judgment on how effective the vaccine may turn out to be. What is the AstraZeneca vaccine? Researchers at the University of Oxford built the vaccine using a kind of virus, called an adenovirus, that typically causes colds in chimpanzees. They genetically altered the virus so that it carried a gene for a coronavirus protein, which would theoretically train a person's immune system to recognize the real coronavirus. Adenovirus based vaccines are also being tested by Johnson Johnson, as well as by labs in China, Italy and elsewhere. An adenovirus based vaccine called Sputnik V is already being distributed in Russia on an emergency basis, although researchers have yet to release detailed results from their late stage trial. Scientists have been testing adenovirus based vaccines for decades, but it wasn't until July of this year that the first one was licensed, when Johnson Johnson got approval from European regulators for an Ebola vaccine. What have the AstraZeneca trials found? In the spring, AstraZeneca and Oxford started running clinical trials, first in Britain and then in other countries including the United States. The first round of trials showed that the vaccine prompted volunteers to produce antibodies against the coronavirus a good sign. On Monday, AstraZeneca and Oxford released details about the first 131 volunteers to get Covid 19 in late stage trials in the United Kingdom and Brazil. All of the volunteers got two doses about a month apart, but in some cases the first dose was only at half strength. Surprisingly, the vaccine combination in which the first dose was only at half strength was 90 percent effective at preventing Covid 19 in the trial. In contrast, the combination of two, full dose shots led to just 62 percent efficacy. Why would that be? No one knows. The researchers speculated that the lower first dose did a better job of mimicking the experience of an infection, promoting a stronger immune response. But other factors, like the size and makeup of the groups that got different doses, may also be at play. Why did the researchers test two different doses? It was a lucky mistake. Researchers in Britain had been meaning to give volunteers the initial dose at full strength, but they made a miscalculation and accidentally gave it at half strength, Reuters reported. After discovering the error, the researchers gave each affected participant the full strength booster shot as planned about a month later. The European Union's drug regulator recommends the use of Merck's antiviral pill. Canada approves the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11. Ahead of the holidays, a C.D.C. panel is weighing Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna boosters for all adults. Fewer than 2,800 volunteers got the half strength initial dose, out of the more than 23,000 participants whose results were reported on Monday. That's a pretty small number of participants on which to base the spectacular efficacy results far fewer than in Pfizer's and Moderna's trials. For years, Oxford researchers have been testing their chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine, ChAdOx1, on a number of other diseases including Ebola and Zika. Although none of those studies have reached the final, so called Phase 3 trials, they have allowed researchers to examine the safety of the vaccine platform. The researchers have not found any serious side effects. When the researchers adapted ChAdOx1 for Covid 19, their early clinical trials also did not turn up any adverse reactions. In Phase 3 trials, however, the testing had to be paused twice when volunteers experienced neurological problems. The Food and Drug Administration did not directly tie the vaccine to the problems, but when the agency allowed the trial to resume in the United States, it advised the company to be vigilant for any signs of similar problems. In their announcement on Monday, AstraZeneca and Oxford said that no serious safety issues were confirmed related to the vaccine. How much does the vaccine cost? AstraZeneca's vaccine has a number of advantages over other leading vaccine candidates: It's easier to mass produce and store, and it's also cheaper, at 3 to 4 per dose. That reflects the prices paid by governments like the United States that have placed orders for tens or even hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine. U.S. health officials have promised that Covid 19 vaccines will be available free of charge to any American who wants one. Does this mean it will soon be available in the United States? There's still a long way to go. It is not yet clear whether the results announced on Monday are enough for AstraZeneca to take the first formal step of the regulatory process: submitting an application to the F.D.A. to get emergency authorization to distribute its vaccine. AstraZeneca plans to start testing the half strength initial dose in its continuing United States trial and to ask the agency for guidance on how to proceed. The agency is likely to advise the company to collect more data on its promising dosing plan before submitting a formal application to authorization, several vaccine experts said. Collecting more data might mean waiting for more results from participants in Britain who got the half dose. It might also mean waiting for the first results from the American study, which aren't expected until next year. How does the AstraZeneca vaccine stack up to the other candidates? Outside experts have plenty of unanswered questions. "The only thing that you can really say right now is that the vaccine seems to work," Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. "It's just hard to say how well it works compared to others." Experts have had a hard time parsing the results because of the way they were announced. Like the results from Pfizer and Moderna, the data on AstraZeneca's vaccine was summarized in a news release. Although the announcement gave efficacy rates, it left out details that would have helped outside researchers independently assess the data: It did not say how many cases of Covid 19 were found in the group that got the half strength initial dose, or in the group that got the regular strength initial dose, or in the group that got a placebo. It also did not say how many severe cases were found in the placebo group. The results were pooled from across the two studies in Britain and Brazil, which have slightly different designs. AstraZeneca and Oxford have publicly released the protocol documents that serve as a road map for how the trials in the United States and the United Kingdom are evaluating the vaccine. But some details have not been made public, such as how many Covid 19 cases will need to turn up in order to prompt the end of the British and Brazilian studies. Some of these questions may be answered when the results are published in a peer reviewed journal, which is expected soon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Zach Barela, a sophomore at N.Y.U., was assigned a room at Manhattan NYC, an Affinia Hotel, in Midtown, which he shares with a roommate. Each fall, thousands of students take up residence in New York City to attend colleges and universities, exacerbating the city's housing crunch. Many live in dormitories on campus. Others double or triple up in apartments farther afield to save on rent. This year a lucky few are living in 300 a night hotel rooms. An increase in the number of students wanting to live in dorms at New York University this fall created something of a housing shortage for some 145 of the approximately 12,000 students the university houses each year. To accommodate the overflow, N.Y.U. gave some upperclassmen the option to live at Manhattan NYC, an Affinia Hotel, with 618 rooms near Madison Square Garden. Anton Sorkin, a 19 year old sophomore studying business and Russian, was among them. The hotel room he shares with a roommate is outfitted with two double beds, a desk, a flat screen TV, a coffee maker, a two burner Miele gas cooktop, a microwave, and an iPhone docking station. Housekeeping comes twice a week to clean the room, change the sheets and refresh the bathroom, including changing the towels and refilling the shampoo and conditioner, which are dispensed via pump bottles. The basement has a 24 hour gym and a Ping Pong table. Room service, while not part of the meal plan, is available to students who leave a credit card on file with the front desk. Mr. Sorkin said this amenity is beyond his student budget. ("Two eggs your way," which comes with a side of bacon or sausage, is 14, in addition to the 17 percent service charge.) He has considered using the dry cleaning service, however, as it's only a few dollars more than the place down the block. The Midtown accommodations, while a bit of a trek from his classes and school cafeterias in Greenwich Village, where the university is based, are a major upgrade from dorm life, where an outstretched arm can typically reach a roommate's twin bed. "I'd definitely give it three and a half, four stars," said Mr. Sorkin, who plans to study abroad in Shanghai next semester and will return to the dorms after that, if somewhat reluctantly. N.Y.U. guarantees on campus housing for four years to students who want to, and can afford to, live in a residence hall, as the dorms are called. But even for schools that don't guarantee four years of housing, finding enough room for students is a challenge, as the institutions keep stretching, in some cases, beyond the perimeters of their campuses. N.Y.U. plans to add nearly two million square feet to its Greenwich Village campus. Columbia University, which has campuses in Morningside Heights and Washington Heights, plans to open the first of more than a dozen new buildings next year in West Harlem. The Manhattanville Campus, as it is being called, will be built over several decades on a former industrial site and will include new buildings for science, business and the arts as well as housing. Bracing for a possible housing shortage because of increased enrollment this year, Pratt Institute in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, considered securing space at a new rental building in nearby Downtown Brooklyn. Ultimately, the school didn't have to go that route. "We managed somehow," said Helen Matusow Ayres, the vice president for student affairs at Pratt, crediting the "creativity" of the housing staff, which converted some of its largest double dorm rooms into triples. N.Y.U. has been working with the Affinia hotel chain in Manhattan for the last five years to house "overflow" students, typically 45 to 80 of them, for a few weeks at the start of the fall semester, according to Tom Ellett, the senior associate vice president for student affairs at New York University. As the semester progresses, enrollment begins to level off, with some students leaving for various reasons, thus freeing up space in the residence halls. "Within four weeks, those students are out," he said of those in the hotel. Last year, however, a major dorm, Hayden Hall, was closed for renovations for the entire school year, pushing the overflow number to roughly 200 students who stayed in one of three Affinia hotels for the entire school year. This year, an uptick in upperclass students who wanted to return to the residence halls contributed to a similar housing shortage. "We don't see that going for the long term," Mr. Ellett said. By putting students up at Manhattan NYC, he noted, the university can continue to maintain certain standards offered in the dorms, including kitchenettes for upperclassmen, at least one bathroom for every room or suite (as opposed to a common bathroom with shower stalls down a hall) and a certain level of security. Also, because N.Y.U. needed extra housing for only one semester this year, a 16 week arrangement, there were few alternatives. "What other options were there out there?" Mr. Ellett said in an email. "If you know of any, please let us know!" N.Y.U. students living at the Manhattan NYC hotel pay 7,942 a semester for housing, the same amount charged for suite style housing on campus, according to Mr. Ellett. Scattered throughout the hotel, the students share floors with regular hotel guests. Five resident assistants, commonly called R.A.'s, including a "resident life assistant" who focuses on community development, live in the hotel with students, just as they would in a dorm, serving as peer counselors, policy enforcers and event organizers. A Twitter bio for the NYUAffinia account, run by the R.A. staff, states: "The Fall 2015 NYU Affinia hotel residential experience! We live in luxury." Still, there are drawbacks to hotel life for one, the location on Seventh Avenue at 31st Street. Students use MetroCards provided by the university to commute to class and cafeterias on campus in Greenwich Village. They also must contend with throngs of tourists and commuters flooding in and out of nearby Penn Station, Madison Square Garden and Macy's department store. "I don't want to sound like a stereotypical N.Y.U. kid saying: 'Oh, I hate Midtown,' " said Zach Barela, a 19 year old sophomore majoring in acting, "but it does get so crowded that walking like a few blocks can take forever." But hotel perks, students say, outweigh such inconveniences. For example, on a recent Friday afternoon, the hotel had set out chilled water flavored with cucumber and with lemon in the lobby. The gym stays open 24 hours. And there are ice machines on every other floor. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. During New York Fashion Week, Mr. Sorkin noticed a party going on in an event space. "There were a lot of people taking photos," he said, and he paused to see what was going on. A security guard invited him in. Mr. Sorkin helped himself to soda and hors d'oeuvres, including shrimp, and said he thought he recognized a couple of people from T.V. but couldn't quite place them. "It was a cool experience," he said, quickly adding, "I don't know how the hotel felt about me being there." As much as hotel living may seem more conducive to parties, students say that's not necessarily the case. One reason: Neighboring hotel guests can complain to the front desk if things get out of hand. If that happens, students not only get a knock on their door from hotel security; their resident assistant is also notified. "The hotel has stricter policies than we do," said Naftali Ehrenkranz, a 21 year old resident assistant studying dramatic writing, who lives at the hotel in a room with a couch and a king size bed. "Students realize they don't want to give up this hotel experience so they don't want to screw it up." Cole Hernandez, a spokeswoman for Manhattan NYC, said there have been no reported issues so far this year. "They've all been pretty well behaved from what I understand," she said. On a reporter's recent visit to the hotel, Craig Hunt, a retiree from Washington, had just checked into a room on the 17th floor, paying a discounted rate he had found online of 273 a night. Mr. Hunt, who was in New York visiting his daughter who lives in Brooklyn, said he wasn't even aware that students were living at the hotel. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In 2010, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hired Erin Coburn away from the J. Paul Getty Museum, lauding her as its "first chief officer of digital media" a role created and promoted by the Met director and chief executive, Thomas P. Campbell, as part of his efforts to move the museum into the 21st century. Two years later, Ms. Coburn quietly left, along with a confidential settlement from the Met. Though no clear explanation was given at the time, recent interviews with former and current staff members reveal that Ms. Coburn had long complained that she was unable to do her job effectively because of a close personal relationship between Mr. Campbell and a female staff member in her department. Mr. Campbell announced his resignation in February. And while the relationship was not the reason he left, staff members say that it contributed to a yearslong erosion of respect for his authority and judgment within the Met and that it reflects larger problems in how the institution is managed by top executives and the board of trustees. Despite its vaunted collection, prodigious 332 million budget and a board stocked with some of the country's most powerful donors, the Met is largely run by a dozen or so executives and trustees, interviews show, with little transparency or accountability. The recent discovery of a looming 40 million deficit that forced the institution to cut staff, trim its exhibition schedule and postpone a heralded 600 million expansion are signs that the system is showing cracks. Now, details about how dysfunction in the digital media department was allowed to continue are revealing additional consequences of the Met's turning a blind eye to problems. Ms. Coburn filed a formal complaint in 2012. Met executives investigated her claims but concluded they didn't warrant action. The board's chairman, Daniel Brodsky, and several museum executives negotiated Ms. Coburn's departure and settlement while Mr. Campbell stayed on. Yet, for many then at the Met, the results of Mr. Campbell's relationship with a member of Ms. Coburn's staff were plain. The employee had a direct line to Mr. Campbell and amassed power well beyond her rank, they say, sidelining certain colleagues as well as commanding resources and hiring outside staff members for her projects, which added costs and created infrastructure complications. Leaders of the Met board and staff knew of the relationship before Ms. Coburn was hired, and at times had urged Mr. Campbell to end it, according to several people inside the museum. Mr. Campbell and the staff member "had an inappropriate relationship," said Matthew R. Morgan, the general manager of the Met's website from 2006 to 2012. "It was the reason I left," he said. Mr. Campbell's decisions favored the "vanity" of the staff member with whom he had close ties "over doing digital the right way," Mr. Morgan added. This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen people during the past month, including Met trustees, senior executives, curators and former and current members of the digital staff. All expressed admiration for the museum and its acclaimed exhibitions, but many indicated concern that Met leaders would not take a hard look at themselves and find ways to change. "This is not just the singular responsibility of the C.E.O.," said Reynold Levy, the former president of Lincoln Center and an expert on nonprofits, speaking generally about the Met's culture and recent struggles. "The board needs to hold a mirror up to itself and assess its own performance." As boards go, the Met's is high end and old school. An international jewel of the art world, the museum sits atop the hierarchy of major New York cultural institutions and a spot on its board has long been considered the pinnacle of prestige. At 101 members, the board is also unusually large, which means decisions tend to be made in committees, the most important of which are the executive and finance committees. Expectations for most everyone else are relatively simple: deep pockets, attendance at five meetings a year and a willingness to let the Met's top executives handle the details. "If you're not on the executive committee, you don't know anything," said a trustee, who insisted on anonymity because board members have been warned against speaking publicly. "You're expected to work and give, but not to question what goes on." Another trustee said, "Few people have spoken up in a meeting for about 40 years." This laissez faire style appeared to work well enough, including throughout the 31 year tenure of Philippe de Montebello, who retired as director in 2008, just before the financial crisis. But the world has changed for the Met since then. Corporate and government donations to cultural institutions have declined; competition from contemporary art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art has increased; and the demands to reach new audiences digitally have become urgent. It was in this environment that the board promoted Mr. Campbell, a former tapestry curator who while erudite and elegant had never managed an institution, let alone one with 2,200 employees. Many inside and outside the Met describe Mr. Brodsky, a real estate executive who has been chairman since 2011, as a likable but passive leader who avoids conflict and has continued the Met tradition of informing the full board of museum developments at the last minute or, in the case of the Coburn investigation, not until he learned about the impending publication of this article. Inside the Met, several top executives knew about Ms. Coburn's complaints, former employees say, including Emily K. Rafferty, then president; Sharon H. Cott, the senior vice president, secretary and general counsel; Debra A. McDowell, the vice president for human resources; and Carrie Rebora Barratt, the associate director for collections and administration, all of whom declined to comment. But aside from Mr. Brodsky and Candace K. Beinecke, chairwoman of the board's legal committee, other trustees were not made aware of the complaint. The Met said that this was to protect the confidentiality of the parties involved. Moreover, without the approval or knowledge of the entire board, the Met brought the full force of its resources to bear on the case, hiring an external management consultant as well as two law firms, which conducted a six week investigation. Tax records show that Ms. Coburn received 183,000 in addition to her annual salary of 166,000 in her final year at the museum, an unusually high payment given that she had been employed for just two years. The museum would not comment on whether the size of the payment was connected to her claim or why the terms of her departure had been kept confidential. As for the staff, no one was told the real reasons for the departure of Ms. Coburn, an executive described by former colleagues as "visionary" and "principled." "To drive someone like Erin Coburn out and see her undermined was very disconcerting to the whole department," said Paco Link, the digital department's former general manager of creative development, who had also worked with Ms. Coburn at the Getty. The exact nature of Mr. Campbell's relationship with the staff member whom The New York Times is not naming to protect her privacy is not widely known, except that she became friendly with Mr. Campbell when he was chief tapestry curator and that their relationship grew closer after he became director in 2009, current and former employees say. The staff member joined the Met in 2000 and was promoted to manager of online publications in 2009. She was generally considered capable and helped develop the museum's acclaimed online timeline, as well as website programs that feature curators and artists discussing pieces in the museum. Nevertheless, her relationship with the museum director made her "very hard" to manage, said Morgan S. Holzer, a former project manager at the Met. Neither the staff member nor Mr. Campbell responded to requests for comment. During the past seven years, newer trustees from the business world have, by many accounts, brought a more bottom line metabolism to the board zeroing in on the Met's financial troubles; hiring a new president and chief operating officer, Daniel H. Weiss, a former president of Haverford College, in 2015; and enlisting Boston Consulting to do one of the "360 evaluations" commonly used by Fortune 500 companies to assess employees. Mr. Campbell remains director until June. Mr. Weiss, who has taken over Mr. Campbell's role as chief executive on an interim basis, is considered a leading candidate for the next director, though the Met is planning a formal search. At a recent board meeting the Met agreed to examine the job descriptions of president and director. Mr. Brodsky, in response to detailed questions from The Times, said in a prepared statement: "The board is deeply committed to ensuring a professional workplace, and one that is free of favoritism of any kind. While we believe, in this case, that the board responded appropriately by ordering an investigation by independent, external experts which concluded Ms. Coburn's complaint was without merit there is more we can do." Ms. Coburn was replaced by Sree Sreenivasan, who left in June, and then by Loic Tallon, under whom the female staff member was laid off, along with several others, in October. The current president, Mr. Weiss, said he was committed to establishing a very different management culture at the museum. "I know that this has been a difficult time at the Met," he said in an email last week. "I look forward to working with my administrative and board colleagues to support a climate of candor, transparency, accountability and mutual respect." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. Bonnie Clearwater cast a covetous eye on a pair of wool coats. "I'd love to own one," she said. "Wear it and you won't end up looking like a box." Capacious, cut to flatter and surprisingly contemporary, those coats were among the highlights of "Bellissima: Italy and High Fashion 1945 1968," an exhibition at the Nova Southeastern University Art Museum here, where Ms. Clearwater is director. The show, created in partnership with Bulgari, "is about giving credit to the many Italian designers who provided the foundation for Versace and Armani," said Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W and a curator of the installation. It showcases designers like Simonetta, Roberto Capucci and Mila Schon, who provided the sumptuous underpinnings for the cavalcade of damask and brocade, leather and lace on the Milanese runways this week. On view through June 5 are some 90 coats, suits, gowns and dresses, some meticulously tailored for comfort and ease, others more showy, as if they had sauntered off the soundstage of "La Dolce Vita," or the fabled Via Veneto. Showpieces include a scarlet redingote and cardinal's hat, made for Ava Gardner by Sorelle Fontana; an evening jumpsuit and boots by Federico Forquet; a chevron patterned double breasted mink coat and black rabbit jumpsuit, both by Fendi; a buoyant silk evening dress, hand painted with a coral motif, by Valentino; and a Fernanda Gattinoni moire silk dress and velvet cape worn by Anna Magnani. Ms. Clearwater's intent, and that of the curators, was to demonstrate, she said, "that fashion does not arise in a cultural vacuum." Far from erupting spontaneously amid the ruins of postwar Italy, Italian fashion, confected for the haute bourgeoisie and, not less, the American movie stars who became ambassadors for Italian style, was the fruit of a collaboration with a rising textile industry, one rebuilt in part with infusions of cash from Americans working through the Marshall Plan. The point in those years, Ms. Clearwater said, was to promote the image of Italy as a thriving alternative to its economically deprived Communist neighbors across the border. Their designs, often photographed against a backdrop of marble palazzos and classical ruins, were sold to American retailers in an effort to brand not just Italian fashion, but the image of Italy itself. The strategy worked all too well, it seemed, as American retailers rushed to purchase the Italian originals, copy them and return them to their source. But basta. "It was time for Italy to take ownership of its own creativity," Mr. Tonchi said. "The Italians began thinking, why let others copy us, when we can do a better job ourselves." It was also the period when Italy turned from France as a source of inspiration and began looking inward. What set apart their creations from the more showily contrived French couture of the day, and what renders them fresh even now, was a deliberately unfussy cut and emphatically functional approach to design. The princess Irene Galitzine was acquainted firsthand with the ballrooms and opera house foyers where her opulent fashions were worn. But like many of her peers, she kept one eye firmly trained on practical realities. She whipped up her fabled palazzo pants as a pared down alternative to the elaborate formal wear of the prewar years. "She knew that in those pants you could drive yourself to a party," Mr. Tonchi said, "and that you wouldn't need two men to help carry your gown." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
At the end of 2017, Hank Azaria, the voice behind Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, a convenience store owner on "The Simpsons" with a thick Indian accent, responded to a recent groundswell of criticism that the character was racist. It came to the forefront thanks to Hari Kondabolu, a comedian of South Asian descent, who made a documentary, "The Problem With Apu," which debuted last fall. "I think the documentary made some really interesting points and gave us a lot of things to think about and we really are thinking about it," Mr. Azaria told TMZ. He said he found the situation "upsetting." On Sunday night, "The Simpsons," a cultural staple and television's longest running sitcom, now in its 29th season, finally responded: with a dismissive nod that earned the show more criticism, especially from Mr. Kondabolu himself. The episode, titled "No Good Read Goes Unpunished," featured a scene with Marge Simpson sitting in bed with her daughter Lisa, reading a book called "The Princess in the Garden," and attempting to make it inoffensive for 2018. Want to know what's new on your streaming services? Lucky for you, we've done all the hard work and picked the best new titles to watch on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu this month. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"This will break the internet," said Jen Atkin, the founder of Ouai Haircare and stylist to several Kardashians. Her excitement was not for a celebrity makeover or magazine cover but for the latest product introduction from Dyson: the Airwrap, a tool that can curl or smooth or dry hair. "My reaction was, like, this is so incredible," she said. Ms. Atkin is a brand ambassador whose job is to whip up interest in the new product and to educate interested parties on its use. The Airwrap release follows the introduction in spring 2016 of the Supersonic, the doughnut shaped hair dryer with a 399.99 price tag that was Dyson's first foray into the beauty market. A Google search for Dyson Supersonic and "worth the hype" yields more than 9,000 results. So one may expect the Airwrap to be met with a similar blend of curiosity and excitement. But unlike the Supersonic, whose features are familiar to anyone who has used a standard blow dryer, the Airwrap requires a certain measure of coaching. On a recent morning in a SoHo hotel suite, representatives from Dyson joined Jon Reyman, a hairstylist and an owner of the Spoke Weal salons, to demonstrate. The product is shaped like a traditional curling iron but with a detachable head. There are 30 and 40 millimeter barrels for curling as well as a hair dryer attachment, a round brush and two kinds of smoothing brushes. They are sold in various combinations: Volume Shape (for straighter and thinner hair with the dryer, soft brush, round brush and 30 millimeter barrel); Smooth Control (for curlier and thicker hair, with the dryer, firm brush and both 30 and 40 millimeter barrels). Each is 499.99, or there is a kit with all of the attachments for 549.99. All three come in a camel color leather storage case that looks almost like something Hermes might produce. The result was a bouncier, more voluminous curl than one has come to expect from a standard curling wand and lacked the singed smell often associated with irons. "Curling irons damage your hair and compress the hair shaft," Mr. Reyman said. "With this, you get the same pattern without the damage, but the result is also fuller." While the a large majority of curling irons or hot brushes sold on Amazon are under 50, Dyson promises benefits in exchange for the high cost. The Airwrap can be used on wet hair and, with heat at less than 300 degrees, is much less hot than the 360 to 450 degrees that other curling wands average, which is good for protecting hair from damage but also skin from injury. A 2001 study in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine found that over five years studied, there were an estimated 105,081 injuries related to hair care products, of which thermal burns were the most common. Dyson was previously best known for vacuum cleaners and hand dryers (and the rare product that didn't catch on, like its discontinued washing machine). Last year, The New York Times reported that the company's revenue was PS2.5 billion ( 3.1 billion), and that the company's founder, James Dyson, was worth about PS5 billion ( 6.2 billion). Revenue in 2017, reported in February, was PS3.5 billion ( 4.8 billion). "It was kind of a historic launch," said Priya Venkatesh, the senior vice president of merchandising for skin and hair at the Sephora beauty chain. "It was a case where it totally delivered and surpassed expectations. Dyson is priced higher in every category they enter, and I don't recall there being a big protest on the price itself." In fact, she said, it was one of Sephora's top selling brands online and the first time a hair product hit the top five holiday sellers, which it did for the last two years. It also became a status symbol Dyson recently released a version of the Supersonic plated in 23.75 karat gold that sells for 499.99 and a cult object. Helen Rosner, a food correspondent for The New Yorker, published a recipe for Roast Chicken a la Dyson: "Using a hand held hair dryer on the Cool setting, blow air all over the chicken, making sure to dry any parts of the chicken that are still damp, particularly the underside of the bird and inside the cavity." "We never go into a category looking to do a single product," said Tom Crawford, Dyson's global research and development director for personal care. The development process of the Airwrap has taken about six years, 642 prototype iterations and 31.4 million in development costs. "When we're going to a new product, we start from scratch, and we try to understand the fundamentals first," Mr. Crawford said. "Instead of having a funky idea and seeing if it works, we go back to basics and specify what we're trying to achieve." In this case the mission was to engineer a styling tool that eliminated the problem of high heat and damaged hair. At the early stages Dyson had two teams working in parallel. One was a research team looking at technology, motors, air flow, acoustics, noise or the science of hair. Another team looked at the science of human interaction with the product. As Mr. Crawford explained, "They're saying: 'Having to wrap your hair around a hot iron and rotate it is awkward. Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to do that. Let's try to get rid of that process.' It's scientific research working in tandem with blue sky thinkers coming up with wild ideas. Then we force fit these two approaches to one." Then there's testing, in both the virtual and physical world: dropping it from overhead, knocking it on walls, smashing it on the ground. Engineers were encouraged to try it out and test prototypes to see if they broke. A fringe benefit, one imagines, is to let out a little steam. Some of Dyson's 12,000 employees tested it, as did about 20 hairstylists, like Mr. Reyman and Ms. Atkin, who said she was often observed by engineers recording her using it. "I was this loudmouth hairstylist giving my frank critique to months and months of work," she said with a laugh. Mr. Crawford emphasized the importance of feedback. "We learn the frustrations and problems that different people will be responding to," he said. "In Japanese culture, people bathe and shower before bed. And in sunny states in the U.S., they're concerned about UV damage to the hair." What about future personal care ventures, like a flat iron? "We're always looking to solve problems," Mr. Crawford said. "Are we developing things? Maybe." For the Airwrap introduction, expectations are high but managed. "In general blow dyers are a bigger market," Ms. Venkatesh of Sephora said. "The consumer will have a little more learning to do with this one, but it's a very compelling proposition. I'm not yet expecting it to beat the Supersonic, but we're willing to be surprised." Mr. Reyman doesn't think it has a lot of competition. "Nothing on the market is exceptional," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, said on Friday that she saw a stronger case for raising the Fed's benchmark interest rate, suggesting the central bank was likely to act in the coming months. "In light of the continued solid performance of the labor market and our outlook for economic activity and inflation, I believe the case for an increase in the federal funds rate has strengthened in recent months," Ms. Yellen said. The remarks, delivered at an annual policy conference here, indicated that the Fed would consider raising rates at its next meeting in mid September, though most analysts say they think the central bank is more likely to move in December. In trading on Friday, the chances of a September increase rose to 36 percent from 21 percent, according to a measure derived from asset prices. The chances of a rate increase by the end of the year rose to 61 percent from 52 percent. Stanley Fischer, the Fed's vice chairman, who has suggested in recent months that the economy is strong enough to move, told the cable business network CNBC that a strong August employment report, due Sept. 2, "would probably weigh in our decision." But some officials remain nervous about the fragility of this long but tepid period of economic growth. The Fed also may be inclined to wait until after the presidential election in November, like earlier this year, when Fed officials said they did not want to raise rates before Britain's referendum on European Union membership in June. Ms. Yellen's speech "leaves the Fed in a stance of watchful waiting, which is exactly where it was at the end of the last F.O.M.C. meeting in July," Kevin Logan, chief United States economist at HSBC, wrote in an analysis. "Policy makers are leaning toward a rate hike, but feel that they can wait until they are more confident that the expansion will continue at a sustainable pace." The Fed raised interest rates in December for the first time since the financial crisis and predicted four more rate increases this year. Instead, it has kept its benchmark rate between 0.25 and 0.5 percent. Low rates encourage borrowing and risk taking, which can bolster economic growth. Raising rates will gradually reduce that stimulus, and the Fed has been reluctant so far to take its foot off the gas. Ms. Yellen's remarks appeared aimed in part at jarring the complacency of investors who had concluded that the Fed would not raise rates in September. Fed officials have repeatedly warned that markets had too much confidence in the likely path of policy, given the central bank's considerable uncertainty about its own plans. Ms. Yellen underscored the point with a chart showing that Fed officials thought rates could plausibly end 2017 anywhere from nearly zero to 4 percent. Yet she also stopped short of echoing other Fed officials who have suggested in recent weeks that they are inclined to raise rates in September. The Fed's policy making committee is scheduled to meet Sept. 20 and 21 in Washington. John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said last week in Anchorage that a rate increase "makes good sense." He repeated that point Thursday during an unusual meeting attended by 10 Fed policy makers and more than 100 activists brought to Jackson Hole by the Fed Up campaign, a coalition of community and labor groups pressing the central bank to postpone rate hikes. "It's not about trying to stop the economy from growing," Mr. Williams said, explaining his view that the economy no longer required quite as much help from the Fed. "We're going to keep this economy growing; we are going to run it hot." Yasenia Castro, a protester from Brooklyn, said at a demonstration before the meeting that she had not been able to find a full time job since 2013. Ms. Castro, 35, has an associate degree in criminal justice and works weekends as a babysitter; she and her three children live with her mother to make ends meet. "If you're a Fed official, and you think the economy has recovered, tell me why I'm still working as a babysitter when I have a degree," Ms. Castro said. Fed officials said repeatedly that they sympathized with the protesters, but they added that pushing too hard to increase employment could be counterproductive if it led to a recession. Those struggling now would likely suffer most. "Everybody on this panel is painfully aware of what the costs of the last recession were and wants to avoid a future recession," Eric Rosengren, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said during the Thursday meeting. Much of Ms. Yellen's speech on Friday was devoted to the question of whether the central bank will be ready when the next recession inevitably comes. Even as the Fed moves to continue raising rates, officials expect that they will not rise nearly as much in the coming years as they did during previous periods of economic growth. That means the Fed will not be able to match the scale of the rate cuts it used to combat previous downturns. But Ms. Yellen said that the Fed in recent years had shown that other kinds of stimulus could also be effective. After cutting its benchmark rate to nearly zero, the Fed amplified the effect by promising to keep rates low. It also bought trillions of dollars in Treasury securities and mortgage bonds, forcing investors to accept lower interest rates. "Even if average interest rates remain lower than in the past, I believe that monetary policy will, under most conditions, be able to respond effectively," Ms. Yellen said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Claudio Roditi, a Brazilian born jazz trumpeter celebrated for his impeccable technique, warm sound and lyrical playing, died on Jan. 17 at his home in South Orange, N.J. He was 73. His wife and only immediate survivor, Kristen Park, said the cause was prostate cancer. Mr. Roditi was a force on the New York jazz scene almost from the moment he arrived in 1976. He worked with top musicians like the pianist McCoy Tyner, the flutist Herbie Mann and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, one of his earliest influences. He was for many years a featured member of Gillespie's United Nation Orchestra, a big band comprising musicians from the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil, and he continued to perform with what was billed as the Dizzy Gillespie All Star Big Band after Gillespie's death in 1993. He also led his own bands and recorded more than 20 albums as a leader, most recently for the Resonance label. Mr. Roditi's playing was a seamless fusion of Brazilian music and jazz, combining the gentle lilt of samba with the drive of the post bop trumpet tradition. "I am a Gemini," he once said. "I was born in one country and live in another, but I love them both and both kinds of music, too." The dual nature of his approach was reflected in album titles like "Samba Manhattan Style" (1995), "Jazz Turns Samba" (1996) and "Brazilliance x 4" (2009). The "Brazilliance" album, on which he was accompanied by an all Brazilian rhythm section, garnered him his first and only Grammy Award nomination, in the Latin jazz category. Mr. Roditi also had an affinity for Afro Cuban music, as heard most notably in his work with the Cuban expatriate saxophonist and clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera, with whom he performed and recorded on and off for more than three decades. In an interview with the Newark jazz radio station WBGO shortly after Mr. Roditi's death, Mr. D'Rivera called him a "very special" musician who was "original without really trying." Claudio Braga Roditi was born in Rio de Janeiro on May 28, 1946, the only child of Alberto and Deise (de Braga) Roditi. His father was a coffee buyer, and the family had homes in both Rio and the town of Varginha, in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, a center of coffee production. Interested in music from an early age, he began taking piano lessons at age 6 and playing trumpet in his school's marching band shortly after that. When he was 9, his father bought him his first trumpet; frustrated at the limitations of his playing, Ms. Park said, he destroyed the instrument in anger but his father bought him a new one the next day. Mr. Roditi's interest in jazz, especially the modern kind as played by Gillespie and Charlie Parker, was sparked by an uncle who, he later recalled, "must have had the best jazz record collection in the whole of Brazil." In 1966 he reached the finals of an international jazz competition in Vienna organized by the pianist Friedrich Gulda. One of the judges of that contest, the trumpeter and fluegelhornist Art Farmer, became a friend and mentor and encouraged him to pursue jazz as a career. He moved to Boston in 1970 to study at the Berklee College of Music and was soon a fixture of the local scene. After relocating to New York six years later, he found work with Brazilian and Afro Cuban bands as well as jazz ensembles. Critics took note. Reviewing a performance by the saxophonist Charlie Rouse's band in 1977, Robert Palmer of The New York Times praised Mr. Roditi's "swaggering work" on both trumpet and valve trombone. (He also played fluegelhorn, although trumpet was always his primary instrument.) He recorded his first album as a leader, "Red on Red," in 1984. Among the more unusual items in his discography is "Symphonic Bossa Nova" (1994), on which the conductor Ettore Stratta led the Royal Philharmonic in orchestral arrangements of compositions by Antonio Carlos Jobim and others. Mr. Roditi most recently recorded as a guest soloist with the all female Diva Jazz Orchestra on the album "Diva the Boys," released last year. "Over the years," Ms. Park said in a statement, "many reviewers of his performances have noted Claudio's 'selflessness' onstage, how he happily shared any limelight with his band mates. He was completely inspired by the communication he felt on the bandstand. He actually felt happiest in that type of musical sharing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The Cannes Film Festival on Thursday unveiled a set of movies in contention for this year's Palme d'Or. The American director Terrence Malick who won in 2011 for "The Tree of Life" is back with "A Hidden Life," set during World War II. Films by Pedro Almodovar of Spain and Ken Loach of Britain are also in the running. Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" could join the lineup if it's completed in time, said the festival's artistic director, Thierry Fremaux, at a news conference in Paris. Mr. Fremaux said he had seen most of it, and it was "magnificent." The festival opens on May 14 with Jim Jarmusch's zombie movie "The Dead Don't Die" and ends on May 25. There are 19 movies in the race so far, though Mr. Fremaux said there were likely to be additions. "You will see women directors, first films, Americans, zombies, genetic manipulations," Mr. Fremaux said, adding that the titles in the competition would also feature "painters, singers, cops, parasites, violent mafiosos." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It's not literally true that "Saturday Night Live" has been around forever. But it is true that for two generations of viewers and, for that matter, for all the members of the current cast there has never been a time it didn't exist. The undeniable fact, though, is that until the fall of 1975 it didn't, and somebody had to invent it. Lorne Michaels justifiably gets most of the credit for bringing unorthodox and irreverent sketch comedy to late night, but he didn't do it by himself. Alan Zweibel was among those present at the creation. A member of the original "S.N.L." writing staff, he never became as famous as the performers he wrote for, or even fellow writers like Michael O'Donoghue and Al Franken (who got a lot more screen time than he got, or wanted). But few of his colleagues have gone on to more diverse or distinguished careers. In "Laugh Lines," Zweibel looks back, affectionately and informatively, at a career that began when he was a young deli worker grinding out jokes for old school borscht belt comedians in his spare time, and that, after his "S.N.L." years, included rewarding collaborations with, among others, Garry Shandling, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Larry David and Dave Barry. 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. Like most show business memoirs, "Laugh Lines" becomes less interesting as its author becomes more successful. The stories of people making it up as they went along at "S.N.L." and especially of his close personal and professional relationship with Gilda Radner, about which he has written before but still has a lot to say are fascinating. But "Laugh Lines" eventually devolves into a litany of name dropping and "And then I wrote ..." reminiscences, which is much less so. Zweibel's failures are ultimately more fun to read about than his triumphs. His saga of writing "North," the 1994 Rob Reiner flop that famously inspired Roger Ebert to declare that he "hated hated hated hated hated this movie," is probably more entertaining than the movie itself, which I confess I have never seen. And while I do remember seeing an episode or two of "Good Sports," the ill fated and extremely short lived 1991 sitcom Zweibel created for Ryan O'Neal and Farrah Fawcett, I don't remember it well but I have no doubt that it was as big a misfire as Zweibel says it was, or that the stars made the crew's lives as miserable as he says they did. Colin Jost has been a "Saturday Night Live" writer for 15 years, a tenure 10 years longer than Zweibel's. And by virtue of having been on camera since 2014 as co anchor of the "Weekend Update" news segment, he is almost certainly better known. But Jost, who was born in 1982, obviously has less of a career to reflect on, and his is more one dimensional, even if he acknowledges that he is "preparing mentally to leave 'S.N.L.' in the near future." (He says he hopes to continue doing "Weekend Update" at least through the 2020 election, so "maybe Donald Trump and I will leave our jobs at the same time!") It is not surprising, then, that a lot of Jost's memoir, "A Very Punchable Face" (to be published in July), is not about his work but about subjects like his strange childhood he didn't speak until he was almost 4 years old and the many stupid things he did in his teens and 20s, about which he writes with dry wit and, as his title indicates, a great deal of self deprecation. Jost also makes a cameo appearance near the end of "Laugh Lines." "I first remember meeting Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers and Colin Jost on the picket line during a Writers Guild strike," Zweibel writes, right after saying he doubts that he could write for "Saturday Night Live" today because "I'd sound like an old man trying to figure out what would make younger people laugh." That's both a striking confession and a telling observation: Comedy does indeed change with the times. Jost arrives at a similar point from a different direction when he recalls the epiphany that led to his career as a stand up comic, which in turn led to "S.N.L." Although he had long loved comedy, he writes, it did not occur to him that he could be a comedian himself until he saw young performers like John Mulaney and Zach Galifianakis doing "weird material" at an East Village club in the early 2000s. (One performer, he recalls, "read aloud from a diner menu and described what kind of fart went with each item of food.") The comedians he had admired growing up, like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, "seemed of a different generation and also way more polished." The purveyors of this looser and more askew comedy showed Jost a new path, just as the nascent "S.N.L." had done for Alan Zweibel. The notion of Seinfeld and Rock as the old guard took me aback, but for Jost's generation that's exactly what they were: The age difference between Colin Jost and Jerry Seinfeld is actually more than the 21 years that separated Alan Zweibel and Morty Gunty, the first Catskill comic he wrote for. So, yes, comedy changes. On the other hand, I love seeing John Belushi as a samurai warrior in sketches written by Zweibel 40 something years ago as much as I love the interplay between Jost and Michael Che on "Weekend Update." And if I'm in the right mood, even a vintage Catskill joke, like Zweibel's line about the pacemaker that accidentally opens the garage door, can make me laugh. If there is a lesson here and it's fine with me if there isn't it's just this: Funny is funny. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
NEW ORLEANS The signs of a renewed football empire were everywhere as Monday night merged with Tuesday morning: the cigar smoke cloaking Louisiana State's locker room, the purple and gold confetti on the Superdome's field, the crush of reporters and state troopers surrounding a coach whose career had been all but left for dead not long ago. On Monday night, L.S.U. a program that just two years ago failed to beat Troy, a team it paid nearly 1 million to play again reached a single season pinnacle. But the recent history of college football shows that L.S.U., which began this season as an underdog even within its own division, faces a mighty challenge in keeping its toehold at the very top. "Everything fell into place to have the season we needed to have," said Ed Orgeron, the Louisiana native who grew up harboring a dream to coach the Tigers. Since the start of the Bowl Championship Series era in the 1998 season, which ultimately gave way to the College Football Playoff system in 2014, a champion has successfully repeated winning the crown just once: Alabama. But L.S.U. has now amassed the second most titles of that 22 season stretch more than Florida, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Southern California or, yes, Clemson. Indeed, L.S.U. is well versed in the challenges of remaining the champion: It tumbled to 9 3 immediately after the 2003 season title, and to 8 5 after it came out on top of the 2007 season. And no matter how the next campaign goes for L.S.U., any future team, in Baton Rouge or elsewhere, will struggle to match its success this past season. L.S.U.'s perfect record included victories over five teams Clemson, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma and Alabama that finished in the top eight of the Associated Press Top 25 poll. The Heisman Trophy winner, Joe Burrow, threw 60 touchdowns to set a Football Bowl Subdivision record. The offensive quartet of Burrow, Ja'Marr Chase, Clyde Edwards Helaire and Justin Jefferson flourished in a spread offense that was new to L.S.U., and played with a resurgent line that terrorized opponents. Its defense was less potent than its offense but also unnerved plenty of quarterbacks. "We're national champs," Orgeron said soon after the game. "We're 15 0. Whether we're mentioned as one of the greatest teams or not, that doesn't matter to me. I think we're going to get to work, we'll go to class on Wednesday and we'll start working on next year." To be sure, the L.S.U. roster will still be among the most well stocked in college football. K'Lavon Chaisson, an outside linebacker, and Chase, a wide receiver who had a team leading 221 yards and a pair of touchdown catches on Monday night, have finished only their sophomore campaigns. Derek Stingley Jr., a cornerback from Baton Rouge, started every game of his freshman year. But Burrow, after a college career that started at Ohio State and skyrocketed at L.S.U., is bound for the N.F.L., possibly as the top pick of April's draft. Jefferson, a wide receiver, was a junior this past season and could elect to enter the draft, as could Edwards Helaire, a star tailback, and two safeties, Grant Delpit and Jacoby Stevens, who were defensive staples. The snake pit of the Southeastern Conference also will be refreshed. Nick Saban, who was on the sideline in New Orleans on Monday, is plotting a comeback at Alabama. Gus Malzahn, whose Auburn Tigers came closer than anyone else to beating L.S.U. this season, will be seeking another signature win at home, and Texas A M, under Jimbo Fisher, will take its shot at L.S.U. in College Station. Mike Leach's Air Raid playbook has arrived at Mississippi State, and Lane Kiffin, a veteran of the SEC's assorted wars, is now in charge at Mississippi. And that is just the West Division. The rest of L.S.U.'s schedule includes Florida and Texas. L.S.U. certainly gained plenty this season, including months of public attention and a soaring reputation that may help the Tigers to guard somewhat against the pitfalls of college football. Dave Aranda, who just finished his fourth year as the defensive coordinator at L.S.U., said that the championship campaign had signaled to prospective players that the team from Baton Rouge had "energy and moxie and swagger," and that his recruiting pitches were already finding more receptive audiences. "We've shown that the L.S.U. brand is strong, and we've shown that you can have special years here," he said. "We're counting on this being the first of many." But Aranda conceded that L.S.U. would have to search for a new chemistry like the one that fueled this season's mounting momentum, limited crises and gave credence to Orgeron's "one team, one heartbeat" mantra. "You have to start over again," Aranda said in a crowded Superdome corridor early Tuesday. "You have to identify your leaders, you've got to put them through stress and through breakdown so you can identify the right people to build them up the right way." Patrick Queen, a linebacker who could be among the Tigers in the N.F.L. by this time next year, argued Tuesday morning that the L.S.U. culture was an enduring lifeline for the program, whose last three head coaches have now brought championships back to Baton Rouge. "L.S.U. is always going to be capable of doing what we did this year," said Queen, who is from a small community northwest of the Louisiana capital. "We've got great players, great coaches. As long as we believe in each other, we'll be able to accomplish anything." L.S.U. is already on the clock. The semester's start, delayed because of L.S.U.'s appearance in the title game, will come on Wednesday. Recruiting, Orgeron said, had already resumed with volleys of text messages ahead of weekend meetings. The lobbying to salvage this season's roster, as much as the coaches can, will soon begin. But Orgeron did savor the victory, at least for a meal: Ensconced in the Marriott on Canal Street, he and his wife had fried chicken from Popeyes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
THE bad news was not unexpected: sweeping cutbacks at the State University of New York at Albany, prompted by sweeping cutbacks in state aid. The reactions, too, had a whiff of the familiar: student rallies, faculty resolutions, an online petition. But then came an op ed article in the French newspaper Le Monde, calling the cuts Orwellian. And an open letter from the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy, sarcastically suggesting that universities give up teaching the humanities altogether. If the cuts have struck a nerve far from this upstate campus and in more than one language, it is in large part because they involve language itself, and some cherished staples of the curriculum. The university announced this fall that it would stop letting new students major in French, Italian, Russian and the classics. The move mirrors similar prunings around the country at other public colleges and universities that are reeling from steep drops in state aid. After a generation of expansion, academic officials are being forced to lop entire majors. More often than not, foreign languages European ones in particular are on the chopping block. The reasons for their plight are many. Some languages may seem less vital in a world increasingly dominated by English. Web sites and new technologies offer instant translations. The small, interactive classes typical of foreign language instruction are costly for universities. But the paradox, some experts in higher education say, is that many schools are eliminating language degrees and graduate programs just as they begin to embrace an international mission: opening campuses abroad, recruiting students from overseas and talking about graduating citizens of the world. The University at Albany's motto is "The World Within Reach." "There's no way on earth we should be cutting these languages," said John M. Hamilton, executive vice chancellor and provost at Louisiana State University, where officials this year decided to phase out majors in German and Latin, as well as basic instruction in Portuguese, Russian, Swahili and Japanese, after losing 42 million in public financing over the last two years. "We should be adding languages and urging more students to take them," Dr. Hamilton added. "I'm being asked to prepare students for the global economy, but this is almost like asking them to use the abacus instead of computers." Most public colleges still teach languages, but fewer are allowing students to make them a specialty. The University of Maine's president, Robert A. Kennedy, has recommended suspending undergraduate degree programs in German and Latin. This fall at the University of Nevada, Reno, students can no longer declare majors in German Studies or minors in Italian. At Winona State University in Minnesota, officials have placed a moratorium on new majors in French and German while it challenges the faculty to make those disciplines more relevant to the contemporary world. Other schools, public and private, have recently eliminated or diluted the foreign language component of their core curriculums. Starting next fall at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at the George Washington University, students will no longer have to take a foreign language to graduate, although they may use language courses to help fulfill a broader humanities requirement. Bob Peckham, a professor of French at the University of Tennessee at Martin whose own program came under threat, has made it his mission to fight the retrenchments nationwide. As chairman of the Commission on Advocacy of the American Association of Teachers of French, he monitors cutback proposals and provides research that helps campuses tailor their protests. "There are at least 54 foreign language majors that have been either threatened or eliminated," Dr. Peckham said. "People don't realize that this is happening in a lot of places." Still, languages are holding their own on campus. A report due Wednesday from the Modern Language Association, which advocates for language programs nationwide, will show that overall enrollments in college language classes are actually up over 2006, when the last survey was conducted, and are at their highest level since 1960. One reason is a surge of interest in languages like Arabic and Spanish, which is thriving on campus in response to the nation's growing Latino population. China's rising importance has prompted more college programs in Mandarin, and the Chinese government has been generous in financing them. Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, caused a stir with a speech last month to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in which he questioned the prominence of European language instruction, given the shift of power centers and political hot spots from Europe to Asia and the Middle East. "My argument wasn't so much against this or that language," Dr. Haass, a former State Department official, said in an interview. "But if we're going to remain economically competitive and provide the skill and manpower for government, I think we need more Americans to learn Chinese or Hindi or Farsi or Portuguese or Korean or Arabic. In an ideal world, that wouldn't mean fewer people would know Spanish, French, German and Italian. But in a real world, it might." Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, rejected the notion of languages as "a zero sum game," and said the field had become too responsive to fads. "We always do these things in fits and starts," said Dr. Feal, who is a Spanish professor at the University at Buffalo. "We pick targets of opportunity as the geopolitical circumstances change, and we don't create a steady infrastructure so that language learning at a deep level is possible." She said the program cuts also revealed an "Anglocentric perspective" that fluency in English was enough to understand the world. "How can you be a comprehensive university center," Dr. Feal said, "and not offer students even the chance to take advanced courses in French, German, Russian and Italian, to read Goethe in the original?" It is a tough choice, but a necessary one as publicly funded universities can no longer rely on piecemeal, one time cuts to balance budgets, said Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president of the American Council on Education. Across the country, he said, foreign language programs "are being looked at carefully with an eye toward measuring student demand versus expenses." At SUNY Albany, which has lost tens of millions of dollars in state aid in the past few years and faces another 13 million loss this year, the situation has "reached a breaking point," said its provost, Susan D. Phillips. The French department has seven full time faculty members and 40 majors, while 15 doctoral students do "a great deal of the undergraduate instruction," Dr. Phillips said. In Russian, there are three full time faculty members for 19 majors. By contrast, the communications department employs six full time faculty members for 520 majors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Jordan Peele, who grew up revering "The Twilight Zone," has helped to create a new version of it for CBS All Access. LOS ANGELES The woman in the black and white program on the flat screen TV was teetering on the brink of madness, delivering a disjointed monologue about parallel worlds and the possibility that our own physical duplicates might walk among us. As the camera hovered above her troubled face and the decades old audio crackled with the sound of a persistent rainstorm, Jordan Peele sat captivated on a nearby couch. "Beautiful shot," he said with quiet awe. Here in his personal office, Peele, the celebrated comedian turned Academy Award winning horror filmmaker, was watching an old episode of "The Twilight Zone," the classic science fiction anthology series that he is helping to revive. On a recent March morning, Peele had, with some calculation, chosen a 1960 installment called "Mirror Image," from the show's debut season. It stars Vera Miles ("Psycho") as a woman convinced she is being followed by her exact double, and Martin Milner ("Route 66") as the man who doesn't believe her until it is too late. Peele has pointed to "Mirror Image" as an inspiration for his new film, "Us," in which Lupita Nyong'o and her family are besieged by murderous doppelgangers. He also admires the episode, written by the "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, for its ability to elicit jump scares without relying on supernatural beasts or extraterrestrial beings. In his favorite tales of terror, Peele told me, "I love human beings as the monster, as the horror." Four years after the end of "Key Peele" and two years after his directorial debut, "Get Out," his hit thriller about seemingly well intentioned white people who insert themselves into black people's bodies, Peele is now an executive producer of a new "Twilight Zone" series. (The first episodes will be released April 1 on CBS All Access.) He is also playing the part of its dapper, deadpan narrator, book ending each episode as Serling did on the show. Peele accepted this on camera role warily, and was uneasy about bringing back "The Twilight Zone" at all. He doesn't easily embrace comparisons to Serling, a singularly influential figure in television who wrote many of the show's most beloved segments and helped audiences see contemporary consequences in his stories of enchanted artifacts, interstellar travel and nuclear Armageddon. But in this tale of unlikely parallels, Peele has been shadowing Serling's trajectory all along, whether or not he wants to admit it. He, too, has used genre entertainment to convey otherwise unpalatable truths to his viewers, deploying sketch comedy to comment on police brutality or horror movies to skewer self satisfied liberals. These days there are many twists and turns in Peele's life, including the vertiginous path up the Hollywood Hills to an outpost of his company, Monkeypaw Productions. The building is a sparsely furnished colonial home where "Us" was edited, and his personal office is decorated with vinyl dolls of the creepy twin girls from "The Shining"; a lunch box depicting Daniel Kaluuya's tear streaked face in "Get Out"; and oh, yes the Oscar that Peele won for writing its screenplay. The smash success of "Get Out" (which took in more than 255 million worldwide) has enabled Peele to produce countless other projects, including Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman" and the Amazon documentary series "Lorena," as well as coming horror offerings like the HBO series "Lovecraft Country" and a remake of the movie "Candyman." Peele, 40, doesn't carry himself like a budding media mogul. He was dressed today like a stylish cult member, in black sweat clothes and white Nikes, and he spoke softly and haltingly about his accomplishments. "Obviously, I have an ego," he said, "but I'm in constant attempts to remind myself where I come from and to humble myself. It's how I work best." Before he broke through as a professional portrayer of President Obama and college football players with names like L'Carpetron Dookmarriot, Peele was and still is an unapologetic pop culture geek who grew up on "Gremlins," "Jaws" and Tim Burton movies. Another crucial touchstone was "The Twilight Zone": It originally aired on CBS from 1959 to 1964, and his mother introduced him to the reruns. Peele is pretty sure the first episode he saw was "To Serve Man," from 1962, in which humans discover that the titular text of a seemingly benevolent alien race is actually a cookbook. Though time and familiarity have reduced this twist ending to a dad joke, Peele argued that "To Serve Man" was still bone chilling. "You tell somebody that and it sounds pretty silly watch the episode and you're ready to believe it," he said. His pop perspective was shaped by other vintage installments, also written by Serling: "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and "I Am the Night Color Me Black," which dealt directly with societal bias and racism, and cruelly ironic episodes like "Time Enough at Last," in which Burgess Meredith plays the bookish survivor of an atomic apocalypse, stranded with a lifetime supply of reading material and a pair of broken glasses. "I love the ones that, essentially, take someone's tragic flaw and exploit it," Peele said. "You set up a character and you show their tailor made worst nightmare." Serling, who died in 1975, envisioned "The Twilight Zone" as a delivery system for parables with deliberate messages of social justice and allegories of human weakness and folly, coated in a digestible layer of fantasy. "The Twilight Zone" has already spawned a 1983 movie and two other TV revivals, from 1985 9 and 2002 3, none regarded anywhere near as fondly as the original series. For the past few years, Simon Kinberg (a writer, producer and director of the "X Men" film franchise) had been contemplating a new TV incarnation but couldn't crack it. Should it tell a serialized story? Feature a repertory cast? Take place in an actual location called the Twilight Zone? These changes felt gimmicky and wrong. More crucially, Kinberg said, "There wasn't a feeling of historical relevancy to the show, because we were living in a moment of, at least, perceived stability." Then two things happened: first, the 2016 presidential election. Next, Kinberg and his colleagues saw "Get Out," which they regarded as a modern day "Twilight Zone" in its own right. Soon, Peele and Kinberg were meeting to hash out ideas and realizing that perhaps the show's classic formula didn't need updating after all. "In many ways it feels like somehow the wires got crossed and we're in the wrong dimension this was not supposed to be like this," Peele said. "It felt like, if Serling were here, he'd have a lot to say and a lot of new episodes he couldn't have written back in his time." Their new installments include "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet" (which has a teleplay by Marco Ramirez, and a story by Peele, Kinberg and Ramirez), a homage, of sorts, to the "Twilight Zone" original "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and starring Adam Scott as an airline passenger convinced his flight is in terrible danger. Another episode, "Replay" (written by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds) follows a mother and son, played by Sanaa Lathan and Damson Idris, on a road trip, pursued by a tenacious state trooper (Glenn Fleshler). What this "Twilight Zone" shares with Serling's series, Peele said, is "a sense of simplicity" a narrative arc of heightening revelations, "and then, at the end, the pattern is subverted or committed to even further." Each episode also requires what he called "that Serling wink": "We take ourselves seriously but never too seriously," Peele said. "It can't go so dark that it makes us want to curl up in a ball." (This is one way that he believes "The Twilight Zone" will distinguish itself from "Black Mirror," Netflix's acclaimed anthology series about technological dystopias. Peele said he was a fan of that show, but "it goes darrrrrrk. Dark dark. As dark as anything I've ever seen and I love that.") There was also the matter of getting Peele to be narrator of the new show, to recite an eerie prologue over an adaptation of Marius Constant's nerve ruffling "Twilight Zone" theme, dress in a Serlingesque suit and appear unexpectedly on, say, a TV monitor or in a diner booth to deliver crucial context and moral accounting. When he turned his attention to the TV screen playing "Mirror Image," Peele was fascinated by the strange but economical decision to set its action in a small bus station in upstate New York. He empathized with its protagonist, whose truthful complaints go largely unheeded, and relished a climactic scene in which she sees her double already sitting on the bus she is about to board, smiling back at her through the window. "That little knowing smirk is so terrifying," he said, sounding half horrified and half delighted. "It's one thing to see another you in existence it's another thing to see another you that is already aware that you exist." At least two Jordan Peeles would seem to be required in the world to account for the volume and variety of work that he has generated recently. Or maybe his productivity is an act of defying his double, of making something before his counterpart can do it first or before he shows up with more sinister intentions. "O.K., we can deal with this," Peele said, now chuckling outright. "There's innately something about a doppelganger that suggests one of you must die. There's only space for one." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The stock market has been shaken by turbulence in the last few weeks, something it hasn't experienced in a few years. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index plunged more than 10 percent from Jan. 26 to Feb. 8, a sell off that pushed the market into a correction. The S. P. has since rebounded, regaining much of those losses. That type of volatility is a normal occurrence, but theories abound to explain what caused it. Adam I. Taback, deputy chief investment officer for Wells Fargo Private Bank, said the volatility was the result of the economic expansion's being in the seventh or eighth inning of a baseball game. "We may have extra innings in this cycle," he said. "But people are more cognizant that the equity markets have more risk in them. They're happy that their portfolios are diversified but worried where they are in the economic cycle." Some try to take a more historical view. Jack Ablin, founding partner and chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors, said volatility typically arose for three reasons: a technical correction where stocks pause but continue rising because company fundamentals are sound; a correction that reflects a change in the business cycle; or a systemic correction, like the 1929 stock market crash or 2008 financial crisis. "The one we experienced last week was the mildest," Mr. Ablin said. In other words, just a technical correction. Others think it was a return to the normal function of a stock market: Some days, investors sell more stock than they buy. "When the Dow drops 1,000 points, that's more a testament to the growth of the Dow," said Francis M. Kinniry, head of portfolio construction at Vanguard. "That's still just a 4 percent move, because the Dow is at 25,000. Dropping 100 points on the S. P. 500 doesn't get people upset, but it's the same thing." Don't fret. Here are five tips from professionals that could help ensure that a volatile ride doesn't derail your financial planning. Pick individual winners. With wild swings in the markets, active investment managers those who buy and sell individual stocks instead of allocating money to an investment fund that tracks an index say their skills are more in need now. They argue that stocks are going to begin to show differences and that their skills at stock selection will keep investors' portfolios from being dragged down with an entire index. In other words, in a market where everything isn't going up, selecting the best individual companies makes more sense. Francisco Bido, the head of quantitative research and a portfolio manager at Cognios Capital, said he had reduced the number of stocks he invested in after the recent volatility. The move came out of conviction, not fear, he said. "A lot of those big passive vehicles out there buy so many stocks because they have a mandate to track an index," he said. "I think it helps to be a bit more concentrated. It allows investors to find a different avenue." His strategy is also an argument to know what you own. That's good advice in any market. But an indexing behemoth like Vanguard says that is an overused argument. Nearly 90 percent of active managers have underperformed the indexes they track, Mr. Kinniry said. "It's not an active versus index story," he said. "It's high cost versus low cost. They underperform because they're charging too much for the 'alpha' they generate," he added, referring to the return in excess of the market return. Mr. Kinniry is correct that fees eat into any return, regardless of how volatile the market is. Consider bonds carefully. Years of low interest rates have had the same lulling effect on investors as the steadily climbing stock market. But bonds, which remained low for years, are now returning a higher yield, adding pressure to the shaky stock market. But rising interest rates could eat away returns for individual investors. Driving this worry is a new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, who took charge on Feb. 5, as the stock market dipped. An alternative to bonds for affluent investors is private debt, which provides loans to small and medium size companies. The loans are generally just a few years in duration and pay an annual yield of about 10 percent. The risk is in the credit quality of the borrower. Mr. Taback of Wells Fargo Private Bank said that although there was credit risk in the loans, private debt does not feel the same impact that bond portfolios do when interest rates rise. "Now that you're seeing losses in bond portfolios, clients are more receptive to this," he said. But volatility is not necessary a bad thing when you have a plan. Mr. Cronk pointed out that even big corrections were a normal part of an economic cycle. The last two economic recovery cycles, in the 1990s and the 2000s, had three corrections apiece toward the end, he said. Investors who bailed after the first correction in each recovery missed out because the markets rose 20 percent afterward. "Corrections are normal and healthy," Mr. Cronk said. "Investors should look at them opportunistically more so than be afraid of them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Carmelo Anthony said he wants to be more proactive against injustice. "We realize that we're still in the same situation that we've been in for a very long time," he said. There was a time in Carmelo Anthony's nearly two decade N.B.A. career when his maturity was called into question. As recently as last summer, there was even uncertainty about whether Anthony, the aging 10 time All Star, was employable as a professional basketball player and could accept being a part of a supporting cast. But in November, Anthony signed with the Portland Trail Blazers, embraced a reduced role and began having his best season in years. Now, his story is one of redemption. At 36, he is considered a valued elder statesman who is destined for the Basketball Hall of Fame. After spending much of his N.B.A. tenure fending off questions about his commitment to winning, Anthony showed up noticeably slimmer last month for the league's restart at Walt Disney World, and he has hit key baskets that have helped Portland remain in the hunt for the playoffs. "I feel like we could have been in the finals last year if we had him," Damian Lillard, Portland's franchise star, told reporters recently, referring to Anthony. Maybe this is the year. But even if it's not, Anthony's strong play has helped him maintain a platform for an endeavor for which he says he will never accept a reduced role: speaking out about social justice. "Everything is shifting," Anthony said in a phone interview. "We have to adapt to the change." His latest foray into activism comes in a partnership with Chris Paul, the All Star Oklahoma City Thunder guard, and Dwyane Wade, the retired N.B.A. star. The three helped create the Social Change Fund, a philanthropic effort to invest in organizations that support people of color, both from a policy perspective such as advancing causes like criminal justice reform and expanded voting rights and at a community level by targeting racial inequities in housing and education. Anthony said the group came together because of the conversations about racism after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by the police in Minneapolis in May, setting off nationwide protests. Several N.B.A. players participated. Anthony said he hoped this fund would be able to address inequality on the front end, short circuiting the familiar conversations after the fact. "Before, we would say things and we would follow through, then it would just die out until something else happened," Anthony said. "And then something else happened. We keep being reactive as opposed to being proactive." He added, "We realize that we're still in the same situation that we've been in for a very long time." Anthony, Paul and Wade contributed the initial funds for the project with the hope that their names could draw more investments. Goldman Sachs and Creative Artists Agency have signed on as seed funders, according to a news release. "We all have our different lanes," Anthony said. "Whether I'm on criminal justice reform, or I want to be on educational reform, we all have these different lanes. So we just want to build this whole actual fund so we could then attack those lanes." Anthony has been one of the more outspoken players in the N.B.A. for several years. Last month, he guest edited Slam, a basketball magazine, and appeared on the cover with his 13 year old son, Kiyan, both in black hoodies. In a column, Anthony wrote, "Will you ever take your knee off our necks? Is it because I'm Black? Does that scare you?" In 2016, Anthony, Wade, Paul and LeBron James took the stage at the ESPYs and began the show with a monologue decrying racism and police brutality. The year before, Anthony marched in Baltimore, where he grew up, to protest the death of Freddie Gray, a 25 year old Black man who died in police custody. Early in Anthony's N.B.A. career, he was criticized for appearing briefly in an anti snitching DVD that was filmed in Baltimore and threatened potential witnesses to crimes. Soon after the video emerged, Anthony disavowed its content. Now, Anthony is speaking out about police reform. He said he grew up in a community where everyone knew each other and some police officers had a strong relationship with the neighborhood. But others were unfamiliar, and that caused issues. "I've dealt with it all. Have I ever experienced police brutality before? Yes," Anthony said, adding: "Whether it was being pulled over, being racially profiled, or being in my neighborhood and being on my block and the police jumping out of their cars and snatching you up and throwing you on the sidewalk and make you sit there I've experienced that." Asked if he supported the movement to defund the police, Anthony said he wanted to learn more. "Have I thought about it? Yes. Have I come to a solution? No, I haven't," Anthony said. He added, "If we don't understand the root of policies and police and where that stems from, then going out there and trying to speak on defunding the police would not make sense." He continued: "At the end of the day, do we need police? Yes, we need police, but we need them to do their job or we need them to do it the right way and we need to hold them accountable for that the same way we are held accountable for the things we do as well." Anthony has rarely spoken about President Trump, but in June, after the National Guard and other law enforcement tear gassed peaceful protesters outside the White House, he said in an Instagram post that the president had "declared war on the American people." But Anthony said that he was not interested in getting involved in the presidential campaign. A few other players have, such as James, who has publicly supported Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Paul, who signed a letter published this week calling on Biden to name a Black woman as his running mate. "I'm not a politician so I don't want to get involved in politics," Anthony said. "Where I will get involved in is my community and the future of my community and where my community is at right now." Issues motivate Anthony more than specific candidates, from his telling. "I want what's right for my people," he said. "If you're a Republican and it's right for my people, then it is what it is. If you're a Democrat and it's right for my people, then it is what it is. I'm not in the business of picking a side just to pick a side." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Silvia Grossi, the executive chef at Il Salviatino , in Fiesole, near Florence, Italy, has taken to social media to host cooking lessons. With flights canceled around the world, and bars and restaurants shutting down as efforts to control coronavirus cases accelerate, some hotels, cultural institutions and car rental companies are extending a helping hand with efforts that range from community outreach to fee waivers. Others, including museums, are coming up with virtual offerings. Enterprise car rental is waiving fees for prepaid rentals and is dropping fees if customers need to drive cars and drop them off at a different location from the pickup points. "If your doctor says you can't fly home at this time, and you need to drive the car back to Michigan, the drop off fees will be waived," a customer service representative said. The holistic minded Soul Community Planet's 49 room property in Redmond, Ore., typically offers weekly yoga and meditation classes in partnership with Namaspa Yoga Massage; these have transitioned online through the Zoom app or Facebook live and are posted on the hotel's Facebook timeline for everyone to use. Many cultural institutions, including museums, are bringing their collections to armchair travelers. The digital platform, Google Arts Culture, has partnered with more than 2,000 cultural institutions from 80 countries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Exhibitions feature works like Vincent Van Gogh's "Terrace of a Cafe at Night," from the Kroller Muller Museum in the Netherlands, to modern art collections from the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan. Irvin Lippman, executive director of the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida has just started a series of free online programs for children called "Keep Kids Smart with ART" to help families who can't travel but want to foster creativity at home. "We are still developing these digital programs for all ages, not only for children, but also for seniors," Mr. Lippman said. The museum and art school, which opened in 1950, normally receives more than 100,000 annual visitors. The moving and storage company U Haul, which has 22,000 truck and trailer sharing locations, is offering 30 days of free storage to students who have been displaced. Jeremy Collins, a U Haul representative, said that "for serious conditions in the world, we've typically offered people a free month of storage." (Storage rates for a 5 by 10 foot unit typically start from 99.95 per month). The six year old Gaythering hotel in Miami, which caters to the L.G. B. T. Q. community, has taken its weekly karaoke, bingo and trivia nights online. The drag queen Karla Croqueta hosted a virtual karaoke night on Instagram on Monday, March 16 from 8 to 10 p.m., which drew 485 viewers. "We sang Britney Spears' 'Toxic' and Salt N Pepa's 'Shoop' and we could have kept going," the co owner Alex Guerra said. Virtual Trivia nights are on Wednesdays at 8 p.m., and Bingo nights are on Thursdays at 9 p.m., on the property's social media channels. "When kids are stuck at home, they can still travel the world through storybooks," said the author Sucheta Rawal, who has written a series of five "Beato Goes To" books, in which the main character, an explorer cat, visits places from Greenland to Japan. Children around the world are invited to join 30 minute long live session to "meet" the author and listen to a book reading; sessions are held on her Facebook page. Silvia Grossi, executive chef of the 44 room villa, Il Salviatino, in Fiesole, near Florence, Italy, has taken to social media to host cooking lessons from her own kitchen. She said that these are "easy recipes that can be created with ingredients most people already have in their homes flour, spices, canned foods and eggs, for example." Her Instagram stories are conducted in Italian and have had an "uplifting response," she said. "It's incredible how connected we are, even when apart." She kicked off her lessons with a homemade whole grain pici pasta (a thick, hand rolled pasta), garnished with spring onions, spices and bergamot. The wine educator Caroline Conner, who works with tourists in Lyon, France, is hosting free virtual wine tastings that meet through the Zoom app, for six people at a time. "I'll talk them through how to write a tasting note, we'll compare our wines and hopefully have a fun, distracting and social experience," she said. Participants can sign up and see the complete schedule here. The 85 room Hari hotel in Belgravia, London, is supporting its neighborhood by lending a helping hand to those in need in the form of grocery and general shopping services, collecting supplies from the pharmacy and even being on hand for a friendly phone call. "Hotels have a kind of responsibility to provide their community with what they really need," said the general manager Andrew Coney, adding that the property has started working with local suppliers and has helped 40 to 50 households in just a few days. "The response has been phenomenal." If you live in London, send theharilondon a direct message through Instagram or email info thehari.com for any assistance. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Boston Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask has opted out of the team's playoff run to be with his family. The defending Eastern Conference champions announced the decision Saturday morning, less than two hours before Game 3 of their first round playoff series against the Carolina Hurricanes. "I want to be with my teammates competing, but at this moment there are things more important than hockey in my life, and that is being with my family," Rask said in a statement. "I want to thank the Bruins and my teammates for their support and wish them success." A Vezina Trophy finalist who won the N.H.L.'s top goaltender award in 2014, Rask is the highest profile player to opt out of the return to play from the coronavirus pandemic shutdown. After leading Boston to the Stanley Cup final last season, he led the league with a 2.12 goals against average and was second in save percentage (.929) and shutouts (5). General manager Don Sweeney said during a conference call 80 minutes before Saturday's game that Rask left the N.H.L.'s so called bubble in Toronto to be with his wife and three young children, including a newborn. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
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