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"Etroits Sont les Vaisseaux," the title of Kimberly Bartosik's new dance, means "Narrow Are the Vessels" in French. And the ground level studio of Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, where the work made its debut on Wednesday, is indeed a narrow space. Entering it, audience members brush past the piece's two striking performers, Joanna Kotze and Lance Gries, who are never farther than a few steps from the ring of seats and often close enough to touch. According to the program, the title is borrowed from the German artist Anselm Kiefer's sculpture of the same name: a pile of undulating concrete that resembles the rubble of a demolished building. But Mr. Kiefer's title is itself borrowed from a poem by Saint John Perse, and it is the poem, which evokes the sea and a lovers' dialogue, that seems more on Ms. Bartosik's mind. We find Ms. Kotze and Mr. Gries facing each other, already breathing hard. The shade on the studio's street facing window descends, and we are alone with them in an enclosed space. When they start to move, their motions are tidal, an impression reinforced by the noise of surf in the sound design. As they share the tight quarters, their pendular pacing ebbs and flows, expanding progressively until Ms. Kotze's path washes up against the walls. Although they sometimes touch forehead to forehead or her lying back on him more often they hesitate just before contact. Then one or the other pulls away, looking skyward or into the distance. Even close together, these two people can seem distant from each other. Attraction and repulsion ebb and flow here, too, and a troubled relationship is subtly suggested before the window screen rises and we are invited to leave the dancers as they appear to begin again.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
After Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, suggested this month that the Fed would cut interest rates, the stock market hit new highs . That buoyed investments, but signs of slowing economic growth persisted, as did the fear that it may be too late to stave off another recession. And though traders have been doing well, lower than expected wage growth, underperforming bond yields, trade wars, climate change's effect on resource scarcity, Brexit and geopolitical tensions are leaving long term investors still wondering: What's the best way to stay financially stable? Our quarterly report on investing provides some answers. It includes coverage of some successful mutual funds and exchange traded funds. It also highlights intellectual pitfalls that might hinder investors' judgments, and how best to avoid them. As Conrad de Aenlle wrote in this special report, "The market has been largely unperturbed by the persistent economic weakness because each bad piece of data is taken as confirmation that the Fed will ease."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
I was a skeptic regarding concerts that try to pull double duty as podcasts. But Friday's show by Alarm Will Sound at Zankel Hall converted me to the explainer format gig at least partially. It helps when the subject of the evening is a composer as fascinating as Gyorgy Ligeti. The late modernist's enthusiasm for vertiginous, improbable structures resulted in a slew of masterpieces, including the opera "Le Grand Macabre" and works such as "Lux Aeterna" and "Atmospheres." (The director Stanley Kubrick used the latter two pieces in his film "2001: A Space Odyssey.") It's also a boon when the co hosts of a show like this are performers on the level of the violist Nadia Sirota and the conductor Alan Pierson. In addition to Ms. Sirota's hosting duties on the Peabody winning "Meet the Composer" podcast, she collaborated with Mr. Pierson and Alarm Will Sound on a 2016 album devoted to works by Nico Muhly. In 2017, Ms. Sirota, a contemporary music specialist, and Alarm Will Sound produced a "Meet the Composer" podcast slash album about John Adams, weaving together rigorous new performances and informed commentary. So by the time they brought their second such effort to a Zankel audience, everyone on stage seemed comfortable with one another, and with this still new concept. For nearly an hour and a half, Ms. Sirota moved nimbly between narrating aspects of Ligeti's life story, introducing some prerecorded interview material that provided interesting additional context, and at last! playing her viola in the Alarm Will Sound string section. Near the outset, the harpsichordist Steven Beck gave a vivid account of Ligeti's compact, crazily dense "Continuum." But it took about half an hour for the full ensemble to play a long form piece by the composer: the five movement 1988 Piano Concerto. This performance was a marvel. In the first movement, Mr. Pierson made sure players articulated each madcap twist of rhythm not just with precision, but with a sense of glee. The way the bass and trombone savored droning tones in the second movement served as a reminder of what this group has learned from engaging with the Minimalist aesthetic. The soloist, John Orfe, sounded magnificent throughout, whether pummeling or delicately shaping Ligeti's emotionally varied piano motifs. All told, this made for approximately 25 minutes of the best live music I've heard so far this year. Which raises the question: Did it really need so much setup? Most of the preplanned banter between Ms. Sirota and Mr. Pierson came off smoothly enough. And the sound effects that rolled underneath the narrative material were all tasteful an important hurdle to clear, given that the topics included concentration camps, where some of Ligeti's family members were killed. (He narrowly eluded the same fate.) Yet when Mr. Pierson led the group in a brief excerpt of music, referred to during some radio play aside, I often found that I wanted to hear more of each piece. Why not play all of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Kontra Punkte"? Or more of Charlie Chaplin's score to "Modern Times" (in the arrangement by Courtney Orlando)? The answer, presumably, is that then you'd only have time for a regular concert. Classical performers and venues are well advised to be rethinking inherited strictures of the recital hall. Monastic seriousness isn't the only way to take in a show. Lowering anxieties about what to wear and when to clap is all to the good. (There was some scattered, justly earned applause before Alarm Will Sound presented the final movement of Ligeti's Chamber Concerto for 13 Instruments, which closed the concert. No one went mad.) But neither is innovation where all the excitement is. The most persuasive advocacy on Friday night occurred when these players channeled their evident desire to connect into performances of notes on the page.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Of all the coronavirus's qualities, perhaps the most surprising has been that seemingly healthy people can spread it to others. This trait has made the virus difficult to contain, and continues to challenge efforts to identify and isolate infected people. Most of the evidence for asymptomatic spread has been based on observation (a person without symptoms nevertheless sickened others) or elimination (people became ill but could not be connected to anyone with symptoms). A new study in South Korea, published Thursday in JAMA Internal Medicine, offers more definitive proof that people without symptoms carry just as much virus in their nose, throat and lungs as those with symptoms, and for almost as long. "It's important data, that's for sure," said Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong who was not involved in the work. "And it does confirm what we've suspected for a long time that asymptomatic cases can transmit infection." Discussions about asymptomatic spread have been dogged by confusion about people who are "pre symptomatic" meaning they eventually become visibly ill versus the truly asymptomatic, who appear healthy throughout the course of their infection. The new study is among the first to clearly distinguish between these two groups. "There's been this big question pretty much since January, since data started coming out of China, about people that were asymptomatic or pre symptomatic," said Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba who was not involved in the work. "What we haven't really had any clue of yet is what role people who are asymptomatic play in transmission of disease." The new study measured the virus's genetic material in the patients; the researchers did not follow the chain of transmission or grow live virus, which might have more directly confirmed active infections. Still, experts said the results strongly suggest that asymptomatic people are unwitting broadcasters of the virus. "They don't look any different from the symptomatic population" in terms of how much virus they carry, said Marta Gaglia, a virologist at Tufts University in Massachusetts who was not involved in the work. "There's no actual reason to believe a priori that they would transmit any differently." Dr. Cowling was more circumspect. Because asymptomatic people do not cough or sneeze, he said, it is possible that they are less efficient at expelling the virus than those who are clearly unwell. On the other hand, Dr. Gaglia offered, people who feel ill tend to take to the bed or couch, whereas the infected but unaware may carry on with their business, sickening others along the way. The South Korean team analyzed samples taken between March 6 and March 26 from 193 symptomatic and 110 asymptomatic people isolated at a community treatment center in Cheonan. Of the initially asymptomatic patients, 89 roughly 30 percent of the total appeared healthy throughout, while 21 developed symptoms. The participants were mostly young, with a median age of just 25. (A study last week found that children, who are mostly mildly infected, also harbor at least as much virus as adults do.) Covid vaccines get a muted welcome in South Sudan, a land that's awash in bigger problems. Italy prepares for an 18th weekend of demonstrations against the country's health pass. The pandemic 'is not yet over': Portugal is set to add further restrictions. "The real strength of the study is they have a very large number of patients and they have very good follow up," Dr. Gaglia said. "When they talk about asymptomatic patients, they really, really know that these were true asymptomatics." The study's estimate that 30 percent of infected people never develop symptoms is in line with findings from other studies. In a television interview on Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tendered 40 percent as the figure. "The good news about Covid 19 is that about 40 percent of the population have no symptoms when they get infected," Dr. Fauci said. But "even though you are likely not going to get symptoms, you are propagating the outbreak, which means that you're going to infect someone, who will infect someone, who then will have a serious consequence." The participants in the new study were all isolated when they tested positive for the virus and did not have the opportunity to infect others. Doctors and nurses tracked their temperatures and other symptoms, and tested their sputum which indicates virus present in the lungs as well as their noses and throats. "Both groups had similar amounts of virus pretty much throughout the entire course of infection," Dr. Kindrachuk said. Asymptomatic people became virus free a little sooner: around Day 17, compared with Day 19 or 20 for those with symptoms. Both estimates are much longer than the period of isolation required in most countries, Dr. Gaglia noted. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently decreased the recommended isolation for infected people without symptoms to 10 days from 14. Several studies have suggested that infected people shed or pass into the environment live coronavirus for only about a week, even though the tests may pick up viral fragments in their bodies for much longer. Dr. Cowling also noted that the study was retrospective, meaning the researchers looked at samples collected from people who had tested positive earlier, instead of following a group of people over time, identifying everyone who became infected as well as their contacts, and assessing their symptoms and virus levels. "It would still be valuable to design a study like that," he said. Still, he conceded that comparing people with symptoms and without was challenging because infected people are found in varying ways. Most testing plans focus on people who need medical care, and rarely whole groups regardless of symptoms especially in places like the United States, where tests are often scarce to begin with.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Mikhail Baryshnikov, seated left, coaching Gonzalo Garcia and Sterling Hyltin in "Opus 19/The Dreamer." Next to Mr. Baryshnikov is Jean Pierre Frohlich, a City Ballet ballet master.Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times The walk was too decorative. The hands were too tense. Mikhail Baryshnikov, coaching the New York City Ballet principal Gonzalo Garcia in "Opus 19/The Dreamer," wanted to see the person behind the dancer. In this Jerome Robbins ballet, created for Mr. Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride in 1979 and featuring 14 dancers in total, the interior imagination of a dancer must be ignited. All the same, it's a subtle fire. The stage can't burn up with anguish. "Like everything in dance," Mr. Baryshnikov said later in an interview, where he was joined by Mr. Garcia , you can't be "afraid to go deep." At the same time, he added, you have to be afraid of going too deep, or "it becomes cartoon." Since Mr. Martins's resignation in January of last year, a number of important alumni, including Patricia McBride, Mimi Paul, Edward Villella and Suzanne Farrell, have come back as coaches. In fall 2018, Mr. Baryshnikov worked with Joaquin De Luz on Robbins's "A Suite of Dances," another role created for him, as well as on Robbins's "Other Dances" with Mr. De Luz and Tiler Peck. Not that he is about to become a full time dance coach he runs the Baryshnikov Arts Center, of which he is founder and artistic director and has pursued a successful career as an actor in film and television, as well as on the stage. "He comes and he gives you more vitamins," Mr. Garcia said about being in the studio with Mr. Baryshnikov. "That's the point about this ballet: Not to lock it and make it the same, but how can you make it still grow?" Moody and elusive, "Opus 19/The Dreamer," set to Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D, features a male dancer interacting with a ballerina, but it's not exactly romantic. The man rarely leaves the stage stamina wise, it's exhausting as he undergoes a kind of journey or, more aptly, experiences a dream. Though otherworldly when the ballerina appears, you can't be sure if she is a vision, a memory or a woman "The Dreamer" is also grounded by an earthiness. "Forget that you're onstage," Mr. Baryshnikov told Mr. Garcia at one point during the rehearsal. "We know that you're well turned out," which refers to the rotation of the legs at the hips. Mr. Baryshnikov wanted Mr. Garcia to walk like an ordinary person, not with his toes pointing out, just as he urged him to relax his fingers and hands. "The minute there is tension in the wrist and the hands, then it's like the eyes do not express anything," Mr. Baryshnikov said later. "They are dead. There is something unfinished. When I look at classical dance, if the hands are not telling you something about the interior of a dancer, I'm not interested in the dance." Dance, to Mr. Baryshnikov, is about five points: the head, the two hands and the two feet. "You cannot dance with three elements," he said. "You have to think about those things all the time that it's natural extension." But most of all he urged Mr. Garcia to burrow into his imagination: What was his dream? "What is this about?" Mr. Baryshnikov asked. "Find something personal. Less is more." "It's a little jazzy," Mr. Baryshnikov said. "But you have to find how you would interpret that." This season Mr. Garcia shares the "Dreamer" role with Taylor Stanley, another principal who has been working with Mr. Baryshnikov. Mr. Garcia first learned the part in 2008 from Susan Hendl, a ballet master at City Ballet , when Wendy Whelan, then a principal dancer (and now the company's associate artistic director), needed a new partner. "I remember Susie, from the very beginning, said, 'I'm going to teach you "The Dreamer" and don't grab a tape,'" Mr. Garcia recalled. "They know me that when somebody tells me I'm going to learn a new role, I usually do some research, but Susie wanted to see what I was going to do with it." Mr. Baryshnikov approved. "The more you dance, the more confidence you have doing less and when you're doing less, you are yourself in a way," he said. "You just execute certain requirements, choreographic intentions and then you combine what you do with who you are." Details of the ballet's creation are hazy for Mr. Baryshnikov. But he remembers Robbins in the studio as he always was with squeaky shoes wanting "to dance everything himself in sneakers and jeans. All those jumps. He always had to try everything." The music brought the steps back to Mr. Baryshnikov , who didn't perform the work for long; shortly after he joined City Ballet in 1978, he left to become the artistic director of American Ballet Theater. But perhaps more important than the steps, he said, is "a kind of behavior and romanticism and coolness and internal thoughts." "There is no story and yet it's a reflection of the music he sits, she dances, and she sits, he dances," he said. Mr. Baryshnikov does have a story, though: Once, after a performance of "Opus 19" at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Ms. McBride became angry with him. "But really," he insisted. "She almost wanted to hit me." Mr. Baryshnikov didn't understand what was happening, "She said, 'You didn't pay attention to me!'" he said, explaining that in the first part, his character is dreaming, and then Ms. McBride enters. "Maybe I overacted to dreaming maybe I was dreaming about something else. She didn't think it was funny." It didn't take him long to realize how special it was. "You don't need to concentrate on making the turns and the jumps," he said. "It's so much more than that. It's an artistic journey." "The Dreamer" was special to Mr. Baryshnikov, too, but when he looks back to this time at City Ballet, he said the repertoire was secondary. "To be next to Balanchine and Jerry and Lincoln" Kirstein the founders of City Ballet "for me, it was the most extraordinary experience just to be there and to talk to them. I knew that someday this experience would be terminated." So now he comes back to coach. "If I have time," he said. "If I am helpful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
'The Not Too Late Show With Elmo' When to watch: Now, on HBO Max. If you're living that Elmo life at the moment, this new series is plenty cute, a "Sesame Street" spin on a late night show that winds up seeming a lot like all the actual late night shows thanks to game and goofy celebrity segments. Cookie Monster is in the sidekick slot, and my one qualm is that there's something unholy about seeing the soles of his feet. I wouldn't sign up for HBO Max just for this, but if you already have an HBO subscription in some capacity and enjoy John Mulaney (he's the guest in Episode 3), this is darling.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
A decade and a half ago, three teams of scientists reported that they had detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. Two used observations from Earth, and the third used data from Mars Express. All of the measurements were at the edge of the instruments' capabilities. Two years later, the methane seemed to have disappeared. If that finding was accurate, it suggested not only that something was creating methane on Mars, but that something else was quickly destroying it. The Curiosity mission initially cast more doubt on the methane claims, as it detected very little of the gas, about 0.7 parts per billion. Then in 2013, the levels jumped by a factor of 10. The following January, levels fell back to below 1 part per billion. The methane disappeared so quickly, and the usual levels are so low, that scientists are now trying to explain how methane could have been destroyed so quickly. In the new research, the scientists looked at passes that Mars Express made over Gale Crater during the first 20 months of Curiosity's mission. For all but one of the orbiter's observations, no methane was detected. But on June 16, 2013, the instrument measured about 15 parts per billion of methane. A day earlier, Curiosity had also measured elevated methane. "It reaffirms the hypothesis that Mars is presently active," said Sushil Atreya, a planetary scientist at the University of Michigan and a member of the Curiosity science team. The Mars Express findings also point to a possible source of the methane, about 300 miles east of Gale. In that region, ice must exist just below the surface. "That methane could be released episodically along faults that break through the permafrost due to partial melting of ice," Dr. Giuranna said. If true, that could be a tempting site for a future spacecraft to untangle the methane mystery. Dr. Atreya is less certain of that conclusion, which involves assumptions about Martian weather. The Curiosity scientists thought the methane originated within Gale, to the north of the rover.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to the Euro Zone FRANKFURT This is what passes for good economic news in Europe: Spain just added 265 jobs. "Clearly encouraging," the nation's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, said of the development. Never mind that nearly five million people in Spain are out of work. The latest unemployment report from the government, issued on Tuesday, was held up by Mr. Rajoy as a sign that maybe, just maybe, the economy is getting better. Nearly six years after the financial crisis in the United States spread across the Atlantic, plunging Europe into recession and, in some places, desperate depression, "good" is relative. Economic figures that would be considered disastrous elsewhere are being held up by many politicians and policy makers as really not so bad at all the first tender shoots of a recovery that is out there somewhere. Or perhaps not. Politicians everywhere rarely tire of talking up the economy. The question is whether the supposed good news that European leaders are trumpeting is merely convenient cover. The risk not only to Europe, but to the rest of the world is that they are simply hoping they have done enough to restore growth, and that the hard decisions some say must still be made can be pushed into the future. On Thursday, the European Central Bank left interest rates unchanged, defying calls for bolder action. Even so, Mario Draghi, the president of the bank, highlighted the potential "downside risks surrounding the economic outlook for the euro area." What few politicians acknowledge publicly is that many of the steps that economists say must still be taken are surefire vote losers. Liberalizing rigid labor markets, for instance, might spur growth and help young people break into the work force. But it would surely alienate voters who end up losing jobs they thought they had for life. "Policy makers have a strong interest in the current strategy's appearing to work," said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London. "Even the faintest glimmer of hope is interpreted as a sign of recovery." Mr. Tilford said Europe was trapped in a Japanese style malaise. "There's a surreal debate going on that if we don't do A, B or C there's a risk Europe will be like Japan," he said. "If you look at the data for the last six years, Europe is already worse." The danger is that a sense of economic decline has become so ingrained that mediocrity is mistaken for excellence and the status quo marketed as a forward march. Germany, the economic envy of Europe, is expected to grow a mere 0.3 percent this year a blistering pace only by the new standards of underachievement. Financially, Europe looks less risky than it did a year ago, when fear was rampant that the euro might fall apart. Bond markets have calmed down. Unemployment is declining, albeit very slowly, in a few countries like Spain and Ireland. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. During a visit to Athens last week, the Dutch finance minister said he detected "the first signal of a turn in the economy." Then, on Wednesday, news arrived from Brussels that the Greek economy was indeed getting better. It shrank by only only 5.3 percent in the first three months of the year. That was in fact an improvement: it had contracted 5.7 percent the previous quarter. The financial markets, which have bounced back from their lows, don't fully capture the economic pain many Europeans feel. That is because financial markets ride on hope and look forward, not back. Germany's benchmark DAX index of stocks, for instance, has risen 39 percent in the last year, even though that nation's economy, while strong for Europe, is hardly humming along. On Thursday, European stocks were off just modestly, despite the weak outlook from the central bank. As worries continue about the long term future of Europe and its currency, the euro, some analysts worry that the good news, such as it is, might be too good. Signs of growth could prompt a sell off in European bond markets, driving up interest rates at a time when economies are still fragile. But for many Europeans, that isn't the big worry. The economy of the euro zone has been shrinking for a year and a half, and the Continent is less wealthy than it was in 2008. Euro area governments are still under pressure to cut spending, even if the budgeteers in Brussels last week granted France, Spain, Portugal and four other countries a little extra time to get their books in order. The consulting firm Ernst Young on Wednesday published a survey showing that foreign companies investing in Europe created about 170,000 new jobs in 2012, an 8 percent increase over 2011. But the total value of foreign direct investment to Europe, including Britain and Eastern Europe, plunged by 36 percent to 293.5 billion double the decline worldwide. Foreign businesses, in other words, remained deeply cautious about investing in Europe's future. Even if the euro zone economy does stop declining, that does not mean it will grow. It could simply hit bottom and stay there.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
We have seen the future of European fashion, and it is California. Peering out from behind the curtain of a long lockdown, designers in Paris and Milan seemed unanticipatedly hopeful during the digital shows this past week. It was not so much that they were willing to forgo the inimitable theater of the fashion show as ready to embrace the accelerated alterations in everybody's way of doing business forced on us by the pandemic. Being indoors, onscreen, casual to the point of forgetting to put on our hard pants has affected us all, not least designers. "I was doing all these Zoom meetings, and I didn't have the garments I wanted," Alessandro Sartori, the Zegna designer, said last week by phone from northern Italy. What he needed was lightweight things suited to the new exigencies of the workplace. What he had was summer linen jackets in what he called "vacation" colors. But we are not on vacation, are we? Though we may be working 10 feet from our beds, we still need uniforms that draw a clear distinction between labor and leisure. Take a comfortable shirt, and trousers, and add something tailored a bomber, a windbreaker, a chore coat. Or, swiping a cue from the guayabera, that most elegantly casual of masculine uniforms worn throughout the Caribbean basin, simplify to a mere two pieces. The result is something that, while as presentable as a suit, is not one. The pursuit of the un suit turned out to have allied designers whose names are seldom seen in the same sentence. When Miuccia Prada showed a loose, dropped shoulder version of a chore coat or a boxy three button jacket worn over a snug fitting sweatshirt, she wasn't just experimenting with designs intended to function as, the show notes said, "straightforward, unostentatious machines for living and tools for action and activity." She was also making unexpected common cause with Veronique Nichanian at Hermes, whose collection shown in a film by the experimental director Cyril Teste that replicated the vibe of that electric moment backstage when models dress in first looks was detailed at the achingly refined level of precision you'd expect from a venerable luxury goods house. (To wit: a ribbed sweater with all but invisible leather insets.) California felt like an uncredited collaborator in many collections. It was there in the gorgeously gnarly shirt prints that the Berluti designer Kris Van Assche extracted from his collaboration with Brian Rochefort, a sculptor who works with ceramics. Mr. Rochefort, one of the legions of artists who have transplanted themselves to Los Angeles, traveled the world in the days before quarantines to visit volcanoes, caves and sinkholes. He was seeking inspiration for works that frequently resemble magma samples from the core of Planet Skittles. California was there again in spirit in a Rick Owens show titled "Phlegethon," after one of the five rivers that in Greek mythology flowed through the underworld. (Styx, Lethe, Cocytus and Acheron were the others, just so you know.) "I basically make cutoffs and T shirts," Mr. Owens, a native of Porterville, Calif., said by phone before his presentation went live online last week. "European complexity meets California simplicity that's my gimmick." California was also a presence in an Isabel Marant collection shot at the Centre National de la Danse on the outskirts of Paris. Watching the presentation of a video showing two young models racketing around within the corridors of this Brutalist structure felt like watching two pretty stoners who forgot where they left their car in Parking Structure No. 6 at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. It was a true Reyner Banham moment transplanted to the present. And the clothes were, like so much of what is being designed now, based on simple overlapping pieces that reflect the exigencies of a changing and often fickle climate. That and the fact that one of the few clear ways to mark the progression of a day, a week or a month anymore is by adding or subtracting a layer. A critic for Vogue.com referred to the Marant collection as "L.A. meets the Marais." Yet the low slung trousers with rolled cuffs, the low waist flight suits, the waxed poplin trenches and the fuzzy sweaters looked to be no more inherently French than the French Laundry, Thomas Keller's storied restaurant. Which, as we all know, is just off Highway 29 in Yountville, Calif. In a sense, one could even detect elements of wackadoodle California Republic optimism in an exceptionally exuberant JW Anderson collection. It was presented to critics as a boxed set of fabric samples and photos with the addition of pressed dried flowers, a paper mask of what looked like some rumbustious skate rat and little orange cards printed with New Age dithers: "Never Compromise," "The Future is Unwritten," "Keep Looking Up." There was something irrepressibly D.I.Y. about the collection, an effect that belied the masterful design and construction of patchwork coats slit high and flared like clown garments; oversize pockets ready made for boosting items from the department stores that no longer exist; and wallpaper prints and brocades that looked as if they were swiped from Joni Mitchell's Laurel Canyon attic. "A sentiment of youthful, freewheeling amusement composedly comes to the core," read a line in Jonathan Anderson's press notes. Even that utterance had an oddball SoCal cast to it, as though it had been cribbed from a Red Hot Chili Peppers lyric sheet. If being sentenced to an indefinite term in Zoom jail has taught us anything, it is that in periods of prolonged exposure to tragedy we yearn for escape; often enough, that takes the form of silliness. What else are people doing trading bells for hula skirts and Froggie dresses on Animal Crossing New Horizons? How else does one account for digital hordes of people picking up crochet hooks after a rainbow knit sweater from the JW Anderson spring men's collection went viral on TikTok? Harry Styles wore it in rehearsal for a pre lockdown performance on "Today." "I've never seen anything like it," Mr. Anderson said. Because the nearly 1,500 hand knit sweater is no longer available for sale, he posted the pattern online an act of radical Etsy. Even a gesture like his has roots you could trace, if you wished, to California groups like the utopian activists, the Diggers. Those early anticapitalists once staged semi naked street theater happenings in the San Francisco of the 1960s, gave away food, and opened a bunch of Free Stores in Haight Ashbury. Is it a stretch to imagine that the stuff they offered gratis probably resembled Mr. Anderson's irresistibly kooky granny sweater? I doubt it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Way back in the wild days of fashion yore, in January, 2014, Karl Lagerfeld held a couture show set in a fictional Cambon Club (like the Cotton Club, but not), complete with a full orchestra and grand, sweeping staircase, down which his models tripped in gossamer, bejeweled creations, each one complete with its very own bespoke sneakers. Sixty four different sneakers, with approximately 30 hours of handwork in each, courtesy of the couture shoemaker Massaro. Designers had flirted with sneakers before, including Yohji Yamamoto and Rick Owens, but because this was Mr. Lagerfeld, who does nothing halfway, and because this was couture the fanciest, most elitist kind of fashion the choice was taken as a major cultural signifier. As opposed to, say, a shoe. The Guardian cheered: "This season, all that was needed to conjure up a fresh vision of style was the trainers, which transformed the way the models carried themselves." Comfort for all! A small step forward for footwear, a huge step forward for womankind! Oh, how we eat our words. Four and a half years later, the fashion sneaker phenomenon has reached the point of absurdity. As marketing executives the style world over have become convinced that every single brand has to have a sneaker in its footwear arsenal, and the pressure is on to up the ante with each new design to make it crazier! and bigger! and artier! (and, sometimes, uglier) the form has begun to flirt with being a parody of itself. We want to hear from you about your sneakers. Tell us in the comments how many you own, your favorite kinds and the importance of them to your wardrobe. So did Coach (metallic, with a loafer fringe), Tory Burch (canvas, with contrast laces and soles) and Escada, for its New York runway debut: candy colored high tops with quilted hearts on the ankle, seemingly sourced from a pick 'n mix shop. And it didn't stop there. Gherardo Felloni, Roger Vivier's new creative director, introduced the Viv' Run, a shoe not remotely made for running (as even he admitted), in multiple colors with a giant signature diamante buckle and inbuilt heel, so the shoe is actually a seven centimeter semiwedge. Then Jimmy Choo unveiled the Diamond sneaker, with the "silhouette of a vintage racing shoe, superimposed into a Diamond soled footprint" that had been created using a special plastic mold that encloses the actual sole, all of it adorned with Swarovski crystals. Some of these shoes are great. But many of them, the ones most often referred to as dad shoes, really look more like Frankenstein monsters of the foot, cobbled together from references and peer pressure, unwieldy and aggressively clumpy. They don't free the wearer to take flight. They weigh her down. And they cost an awful lot 580 for Gucci; 895 for Balenciaga's Triple S; 1,090 for Louis Vuitton's Archlight, all among the best sellers of the sector while doing so. So while Rati Levesque, the chief merchant of luxury resale site TheRealReal.com, said that women's fashion sneaker sales are up 35 percent year on year, and while Beth Goldstein, the fashion footwear analyst for the NPD Group, said that designer sneakers are the No. 1 growth area in the entire footwear space for men and women, it's hard not to wonder: Who's really the sucker here? Are sneakers the Dutch tulips of the early 21st century? Have we reached peak sneaker ridiculousness? "I have a bet with Sebastian Manes, the buying and merchandising director of Selfridges, that we are at the top of the trend and the pendulum is about to swing back," said Neil Clifford, the chief executive of Kurt Geiger Ltd, which owns four shoe brands and also administers the shoe departments of Harrods, Selfridges, Brown Thomas and Liberty of London. "In every merchandising meeting we are asking ourselves: 'Do we have enough sneakers? Should we buy more sneakers?'" Mr. Clifford said. "But things change, and they always change quicker than you think." Ms. Goldstein of NPD agrees. "I think it will slow," she said. It took a while to get to this point, after all. Prada introduced its first sneaker in 1996. Adidas brought on Yohji Yamamoto and Jeremy Scott as collaborators in 2002. Lanvin introduced its sneaker in 2005 and Michelle Obama got flak for wearing her 540 pair in 2009, which was the same year Vuitton enlisted Kanye West to help the brand with a sneaker. Six years later he created his own offering in collaboration with Adidas, the Yeezy Boost, and put it on the runway at New York Fashion Week. That paved the way for the Balenciaga Triple S introduced last year the shoe Mr. Clifford calls "the iPhone X of sneakers," and possibly the clunkiest, most triumphantly ugly sneaker of all. It dared consumers not to get it. As Mr. Clifford pointed out: "It's like S.U.V.s. For a long time people said Bentley would never do an S.U.V. Rolls Royce would never do one. But now they all do. Even Ferrari, the last holdout, is making an S.U.V." (It's due by 2022.) The force behind this, all armchair analysts agree, is the rise of street wear and comfort dressing: athleisure, leggings, hoodies. As the world and workplace get increasingly casual, so, too, the footwear. Though the sports brands (Nike, Adidas, Puma) were the first to see the possibilities in combining our yen for a sneaker wardrobe with the planned obsolescence of fashion, the brands themselves soon cottoned on to the possibilities of the style, and the money to be made. And they are expert at framing an accessory as a totem of aspiration and desire. Besides, it is true that once you trade in your stilettos, it is very hard to go back. Serena Williams wore her sneakers to Meghan Markle's wedding after party under her Valentino gown and then she Instagrammed them for all to see. (Not to mention her own wedding party. Remember her bedazzled Nikes?) According to Josh Luber, the co founder and chief executive of StockX, a sneaker resale platform that bills itself as the Nasdaq of commercial products: "Almost everyone has come to sneakers at some point, because they touch on all buttons: retro, arty, fashion, performance, influencers. They are the democratizer of celebrity. I can't fly on Jay Z's jet or buy the same car, but I can wear his shoes. "People have been asking me about the sneaker bubble for years now," Mr. Luber added. He doesn't believe it's popping anytime soon. But now that we are in a situation where the sneaker has become so removed from its original purpose (freedom, functionality) that it has become an end in itself, it may finally be deflating. When designers are making a sneaker just because they think they have to make a sneaker because they are trying to carve off whatever slice of the sneaker market is possible as opposed to because it makes sense for their brand, or their shopper, it's time to stop. Indeed, last season, as striking as the number of designers running pell mell toward the sneaker trend were the early indications that there were some who seemed to be stepping away. Once an irony laden gesture turns mass once it reaches the Escada limits it loses its edge, and appeal. See Balenciaga, where the creative director Demna Gvasalia showed pointy toed pumps and boots and ankle strap heels with every woman's look on the runway. "There's one thing we know: People get bored," Mr. Clifford said. "Whether change is driven by political winds or commercial concerns, it happens. I think there is a return of formalization on the horizon, and that means pumps and high heels. My prediction is 2018 will be the acme, and the backlash is about to begin."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Whether you're a fan of show tunes, operas or classical music, the name Leonard Bernstein likely rings a familiar melody. The composer, conductor and educator, who died in 1990, would have turned 100 on Aug. 25, and events to commemorate his centennial, collectively called "Leonard Bernstein at 100," are happening all over the world in 2018, from Vancouver to Vienna. Bernstein's three children, Jamie, Alex and Nina, co own Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc., and according to their research, there are some 3,000 celebrations honoring their father this year. The majority of them take place during the summer, and a full, searchable calendar is available on their website so you can find an event near you. "The diversity of the events is incredible," Jamie Bernstein said. "There are symposiums at universities, exhibits and film festivals. Opera and theater companies, ballet houses and orchestras are also participating." She added that her and her siblings are traveling to as many of the celebrations as possible. Among the most notable homages to Mr. Bernstein is an exhibition, "Leonard Bernstein: The Power of Music," running at the National Museum of American Jewish History, in Philadelphia, until Sept. 2.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
A family project, "The Place of No Words" clearly means so much to the tight circle of people who made it that it feels almost like an invasion of privacy to call it a depressing, charmless slog. The director, Mark Webber, stars alongside his real life wife, the actress Teresa Palmer, and their young son Bodhi Palmer as a father, mother and son called, well, Mark, Teresa and Bodhi. In the drama, Mark is dying of what appears to be cancer. He and Bodhi have devised a continuously unfolding story set in a world of fairies, goblins, witches and eventually robots from a "Star Wars" like universe.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
LOS ANGELES Studio movies, even exceptionally bad ones, almost always eke out an upbeat review or two. Last year, not one wide release film received a zero percent score on RottenTomatoes.com, which aggregates reviews. So the universal critical hatred aimed at Sony's "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2" last month was truly something to behold. The fat man on a Segway sequel generated a perfect zero on the Tomatometer when it arrived in the United States on April 17 of the 46 reviews published by that time, 46 were hostile. Then Simon Weaving messed it up and suffered the consequences. Mr. Weaving, an Australian critic whose reviews are published in The Canberra Times and on ScreenWize.com, on April 22 gave "Mall Cop 2" three out of five stars, enough to qualify as a positive notice. "I genuinely came out of the cinema with a sense I'd witnessed some warm silliness," he said in an interview last week. He said he did not realize at the time that no other critics agreed with him. The blowback was swift and severe. "You ruined the 0%!" one commenter wrote on ScreenWize. "A pox on you!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Why You Shouldn't Wait to Sign Up for Medicare Part B Twenty years ago, George Zeppenfeldt Cestero left his job as a hospital administrator in New York to open a one person health care consulting firm. Since he was losing his employee medical coverage, he shopped around and bought a private health insurance plan through Aetna. It was expensive, with premiums starting at about 1,000 a month, but "it paid for all my doctors' visits and my medications," he said. "I was a satisfied consumer." But several years ago, Aetna informed him that it was discontinuing that plan, sending him scrambling for another insurer. That's when, applying for coverage through the state marketplace under the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Zeppenfeldt Cestero learned that he (and, he argues, Aetna) had made a serious error. He should have signed up for Medicare Part B three years earlier when he turned 65. By delaying, he had missed the best window the so called Initial Enrollment Period to apply for Part B, which covers much of what we consider health care: doctor visits, tests, injectable drugs (including chemotherapy), ambulances, physical therapy and other non hospital services. As a result, he has to pay permanently higher premiums, and he had to endure an unsettlingly long period from December to July before the coverage actually kicked in. "It was very nerve racking," Mr. Zeppenfeldt Cestero, now 71 and still working. "For six months, I was without any coverage whatsoever." Such Part B mistakes appear to happen with some frequency. Last year, nearly 700,000 Medicare beneficiaries were paying Part B penalties, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "It's one of those issues that has started to snowball," said Fred Riccardi of the nonprofit Medicare Rights Center, which annually fields 20,000 Medicare related questions on its helpline (800 333 4114) and three million through its online tool Medicare Interactive. To simplify a complex process, people are supposed to sign up for Part B when they turn 65, unless they are working and have coverage through an employer, or a working spouse's employer. If you're still employed and working at a company or organization with 20 or more employees (or your spouse is), and you're covered by an employee health plan, you may not need Part B yet. Instead of paying premiums, it could make financial sense to hold off. But it's important to know that after losing employee coverage due to retirement, layoffs or any other reason you have an eight month "special enrollment period" to sign up for Part B. If you miss that window, you have to wait for the general enrollment period, which runs from January 1 through March 31 each year. That creates two problems. First, Medicare will add a permanent 10 percent penalty to your premiums for each year you delayed. Mr. Zeppenfeldt Cestero has to pay 187.60 per month now because he waited more than three years to sign up. If he had enrolled when he was 65, his monthly premium would be 134. "Without good information, people make mistakes and they're costly," Dr. Neuman said. "In this case, it's a cost that continues the rest of your life." The second problem: the general enrollment period imposes coverage gaps. The general enrollment period (not to be confused with the Open Enrollment Period currently underway when those already receiving Medicare can change plans) runs from January through March, remember. But coverage doesn't begin until the following July 1. If you didn't sign up for Part B and recognize your error in March, you can be insured in July. If you figure it out in April, however, you can't enroll until the following January and coverage begins the following July. "It could be well over a year, depending on when you discover the problem," said David Lipschutz, senior policy lawyer at the Center for Medicare Advocacy. "Unfortunately, some people discover it when they get sick." What causes this predicament? Working seniors may be getting bad information from human resources departments, benefits counselors or insurance brokers. They may be relying on a COBRA plan, in which case Medicare should become their primary insurer at 65. Or they may have transitioned from employee coverage to a retiree plan. Then, too, Medicare should become their primary insurer, with the other plan the secondary insurer. "Their retiree coverage looks just the same as when they were working," Mr. Lipschutz said. "But in Medicare's eyes, everything changes when you retire." An insurance company that belatedly learns it's been paying your medical bills, when Medicare should have been your primary insurer, may try to recoup what it spent. Because this process involves many exceptions and caveats (if you're a federal employee, say), and remedies for a few people, there's no substitute for consulting with an expert as you near 65. "You need to investigate," Mr. Lipschutz advised. Given the risks of misinformation from employers, that probably means talking to Social Security by phone or in person, documenting all your conversations with dates and names. "Very educated, astute folks get caught in this trap," Mr. Lipschutz said. "They're not scofflaws. They tried to play by the rules."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
ANAHEIM, Calif. At VidCon, a sprawling conference here for the young stars of online video, success has a particular sound: a sudden, earsplitting shriek, signaling that a legion of tween age fans have spotted one of their idols and are making a frantic selfie run. Hailey Knox, a 17 year old singer from Carmel, N.Y., who was visiting VidCon late last month to promote her debut EP, "A Little Awkward," has not cracked the shriek level of fame. But the team of music and technology executives behind her is betting that, based on her budding popularity online, she could soon be enjoying a screamfest of her own. Ms. Knox is one of the stars of YouNow, a live streaming mobile app on which she broadcasts a few times a week, usually from her bedroom. She plays quirky cover tunes, along with earnest songs she's written herself, all the while interacting with her 80,000 followers. Her popularity on the app helped her land a record deal and a tour, and now Ms. Knox is poised to become the live streaming world's first crossover music star. "There's social media fame, and then there's Justin Bieber fame," Ms. Knox said at VidCon. "I'd love to break out the way Justin Bieber has, through his YouTube to where he is now. That would be cool." Pop stars were once crowned on "American Bandstand" and MTV, but in the YouTube era the connection to fans has been much more personal. The newest talent incubators are apps like YouNow, Musical.ly, Flipagram, Snapchat and Vine, which satisfy millennials' preference for rapid fire interactivity. "This is the new farm club," said David Hyman, a longtime digital music executive whose latest enterprise, Chosen, is a talent contest app. Increasingly, the apps are also live, giving users a sense of taking part in something immediate, and creating a new class of performance stars on Facebook Live, YouNow and Twitter's Periscope app who may make music, dance or simply chat. Their clientele is very young. On YouNow, where the broadcast streams are festooned with emoji and comments, 74 percent of the users are between 13 and 24, according to the company. Musical.ly, which has bite size videos of teenagers lip syncing to pop hits, said it has 90 million users, and Flipagram, which attaches soundtracks to slide shows, said it has 200 million. "This generation was born with screens all around them," said Adi Sideman, the founder and chief executive of YouNow, which said it streams 50 years' worth of video each month. "Performing live, and being live, is completely natural to them." The music industry got a taste of the power of video apps a year ago when 16 year old Shawn Mendes, who got his start on Vine, had a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart. Few other acts have graduated from the app world to significant sales, but that may be less important as the music industry shifts toward a streaming model that makes money from every click. YouNow also lets performers make money from virtual gifts from fans; one performer, Brent Morgan, a 28 year old from Alabama, said he makes 10,000 a month from these tips. At VidCon's panel discussions, social media stars spoke openly about making money from advertising and brand endorsements. But the value of those deals and the return on investment for sponsors can be murky, said Jocelyn Johnson, the founder of VideoInk, a trade publication covering the online video business. Petite but with a snarky edge, Ms. Knox began playing guitar when she was 7. By age 12, her YouTube videos had attracted two experienced producers, Mike Mangini and Peter Zizzo, who have worked with artists like Avril Lavigne and Joss Stone. They decided then that she was too young, but a couple of years ago just as she was beginning to use YouNow they reconnected with Ms. Knox and began bringing her to New York for regular writing and recording sessions. With her parents' blessing, Ms. Knox left school during her senior year and is finishing her course work online to focus on her music career. At VidCon, her entourage included her mother and father, a police officer whose job at the conference was carrying his daughter's guitar, and her younger sister, Samantha. In the more than 300 videos she has made through YouNow, she banters with other users, mugs for the camera on her phone, plays guitar with surprising polish and uses a feature of the app to perform split screen duets with her viewers. In one video from April, she sat at a deli, eating a salad and fielding questions. She has learned that singing viewers' names as they watch her helps keep her play counts high, but that what works best is simply "being yourself." "Showing my goofy personality," she said. "People can relate to that." A year ago Ms. Knox signed with S Curve, whose founder, Steve Greenberg, has worked with acts like Hanson, Ms. Stone and, most recently, Andy Grammer. Mr. Greenberg described YouNow as an accelerated way for an artist to develop the skills of performance and crowd interaction. "In the old days, an artist would have to find some club to get good about relating to an audience," he said. "With YouNow she can just go online and play, whether it's for hundreds or thousands of people, and get real time feedback." Ms. Knox's career so far has been a mix of do it yourself online promotion and connections in the traditional music business. Her manager, Darin Harmon, used to work with Coldplay, and she secured a slot this fall opening for Charlie Puth, known as the guest singer on one of last year's biggest hits, Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again." Yet Ms. Knox has also rejected parts of the Hollywood machine. She was approached to be a contestant on "The Voice," "American Idol" and "America's Got Talent" but turned them all down, favoring YouNow and the freedom to sign with a label of her choosing, according to her mother, Jamie. At VidCon, Ms. Knox shuttled between performances, promotional appearances and impromptu broadcasts at YouNow's dedicated booth, but she seemed most excited about meeting other young live streamers, most of whom she had developed extensive online relationships with. "It's funny seeing faces that I've seen before all over the internet," she said. At the YouNow booth, while Ms. Knox performed on a couch with two new friends, Nick Bean, a 21 year old who is part of 5quad, a performance group made up of YouNow heartthrobs, described the importance of the app to his growing business portfolio, including an app of his own that he said he was on his way to San Francisco to pitch to tech investors. Given all that, is simply releasing an album a little, well, old fashioned? "Not really," Ms. Knox said. "They're all just ways of promoting yourself."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
It is clear that our government has failed to fight Covid 19 effectively. As one health expert said when asked what went wrong, "What went right?" Now President Trump is trying to redeem himself with personal stimulus checks to Americans. Will it work? The litany of administration failures is well known. The Centers for Disease Control botched its initial testing, and the Food and Drug Administration set up obstacles to alternative tests. Hundreds of feverish New Jersey residents waited in line all night at testing centers, day after day. The Health and Human Services Department knew in mid January that the supply of N95 masks met only 1 percent of projected demand, yet on March 30 its chief could not say when more would arrive. FEMA officials said efforts to locate masks were like "chasing rabbits in an open field." The Navy's hospital ship Comfort sat virtually empty in the Hudson as thousands of New Yorkers died in overwhelmed hospitals mere miles away. But bad planning for disaster is not unique to the Trump administration. It is a systemic deficiency of the federal government. Undoubtedly, this White House is especially dysfunctional. Many of its top positions have been vacant or filled with short lived and unqualified appointees. The C.D.C.'s director, appointed last year, is not a public health expert. The acting secretary of homeland security did not know how many respirators were available even at the end of March. As the political scientist David Lewis and colleagues wrote, "Managing the administrative state with acting officials is a little like running a school with a team of substitute teachers." Mr. Trump also underfunded preparedness compared with his predecessors. He proposed cuts to C.D.C.'s funding in each budget, the latest representing a nearly 20 percent drop. But the federal government's failure to prepare for disaster produced catastrophes before Mr. Trump, from Pearl Harbor to Hurricane Katrina. Why isn't our government better prepared? To sharpen the question, consider this fact: Every 1 the federal government spends on preparedness reduces damage by more than 15 long term, according to a study by the social scientists Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra. Yet the federal government typically spends five cents on preparedness for every dollar it spends on relief. Avoiding disaster is much more cost effective than responding afterward. Why does government fail to make this investment? The answer lies in three features of American government. First, our bureaucracy is decentralized. Fragmentation prevents the coordination necessary for disaster planning. It creates mistrust and prevents information sharing. Officials sometimes learned vital details about Covid 19 from the news media rather than from one another. FEMA disbelieved state case counts, releasing ventilators only after states answered "a 'tough series of questions' designed to identify an 'exigent need.'" The Domestic Policy Council, the overseer of the president's domestic agenda, "mistrusted" how Health and Human Services would use funds to fight Covid 19, according to The Washington Post. There are hundreds of agencies in the federal government. They still lack a centralized chain of command for the crisis. Underlying all this, misguided suspicion of "big government" erodes our capacity to coordinate plans and execute responses. Second, our government under serves vulnerable people, and disaster is no exception. Serious infections are disproportionately emerging among the people we have forgotten in understaffed nursing homes. Deaths are plaguing communities of color. The disease is spreading in crowded jails, which are themselves often filled with minority inmates and people who can't afford exorbitant bail. To many officials, disaster seems less disastrous when it strikes the poor. Death seems a price worth paying when the victims are housed in isolated institutions and segregated neighborhoods where their votes are undercounted. Disaster preparedness is not rewarded when the people who bear the brunt of calamity are disempowered. Politicians alleviate disaster more energetically for their own constituencies. If the president and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, are uninterested in "blue state bailouts," New Yorkers will be out of luck. In Mr. Trump's view, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is "supposed to be buying his own ventilators." Social scientists estimate that roughly half of disaster spending is political rather than need based. Presidents send 18 percent more relief dollars to the counties that supported them politically than to counties that opposed them lopsidedly. Finally, democracy amplifies the human bias for visible actions. Voters can't evaluate what they don't know. So voters reward the party of the president when it spends after a disaster. But they seem not to know or care at all what government does before disaster. As Professors Healy and Malhotra concluded, "Voters offer scant incentive to presidents to pursue cost effective preparedness spending, but do encourage them to send in the cavalry after damage has been done and lives have been lost." How can ordinary people know what causes disaster or who is preventing it? These are intangible forces. The popularity of relief over preparedness derives from the fact that relief comes in a personal check. Voters like getting payments because the check in the mailbox is a concrete sign that government is doing something useful. The CARES Act, which is sending 1,200 to most American adults, will likely net more votes for Mr. Trump, whose name will appear right on the check, than President Barack Obama received from the 2009 stimulus bill, which gave Americans tax breaks most didn't realize they got. But a personal check cannot pre empt disaster. Natural disasters require a collective effort to avoid. Only a well funded, adequately staffed federal government can prevent damage from storms, fires, earthquakes or pandemics. This is where journalists must play their essential role. Voters are too busy with their daily lives to track what's going on inside the Beltway. Is Washington mitigating shore erosion and engineering flood resistant dams? How is the national ventilator stockpile doing? The typical person is not asking such questions around the dinner table. But in a healthy democracy, the news media can and should. The job of journalists is to hold government accountable for what is most invisible: how it is preparing to pre empt the disaster that we will not feel. Spending to help victims is necessary sometimes, of course. Stimulus and recovery checks have their place. But relief spending does not lead government to better prepare for future catastrophe. Having to spend on relief does not force a reckoning that in turn increases spending for future preparedness. By contrast, increasing preparedness spending by just 1 per American would save over 4 billion in total future disaster spending. American government has its imperfections, to say the least. It is fragmented. It is biased toward groups with power. Voters are blinded by their all too human limitations. But journalists can ask the tough questions before disaster strikes. This is how the American political system can save enormous amounts of money, prevent suffering and save lives. In a democracy, voters have the ultimate say. Journalists should let us know who is protecting us ahead of time, not only who botches the response. Tali Mendelberg is a professor of politics and director of the Program on Inequality at the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Last week Joe Biden made an off the cuff joke that could be interpreted as taking African American votes for granted. It wasn't a big deal Biden, who loyally served Barack Obama, has long had a strong affinity with black voters, and he has made a point of issuing policy proposals aimed at narrowing racial health and wealth gaps. Still, Biden apologized. And in so doing he made a powerful case for choosing him over Donald Trump in November. You see, Biden, unlike Trump, is capable of admitting error. Everybody makes mistakes, and nobody likes admitting having been wrong. But facing up to past mistakes is a crucial aspect of leadership. Consider, for example, changing guidance on face masks. In the initial phase of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans it wasn't necessary to wear masks in public. In early April, however, the C.D.C. reversed course in the light of new evidence on how the coronavirus spreads, in particular that it can be spread by people who aren't showing any symptoms. So it recommended that everyone start wearing cloth masks when outside the home. What would have happened if the C.D.C. had refused to admit it had been wrong, keeping its initial recommendations instead? The answer, almost surely, is that the death toll from Covid 19 so far would be much higher than it is. In other words, refusing to admit mistakes isn't just a character flaw; it can lead to disaster. And under Donald Trump, that's exactly what has happened. Trump's pathological inability to admit error and yes, it really does rise to the level of pathology has been obvious for years, and has had serious consequences. For example, it has made him an easy mark for foreign dictators like North Korea's Kim Jong un, who know they can safely renege on whatever promises Trump thought they made. After all, for him to condemn Kim's actions would mean admitting he was wrong to claim he had achieved a diplomatic breakthrough. But it took a pandemic to show just how much damage a leader with an infallibility complex can inflict. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that Trump's inability to acknowledge error has killed thousands of Americans. And it looks likely to kill many more before this is over. Indeed, in the same week that Biden committed his harmless gaffe, Trump doubled down on his bizarre idea that the anti malarial drug hydroxychloroquine can prevent Covid 19, claiming that he was taking it himself, even as new studies suggested that the drug actually increases mortality. We may never know how many people died because Trump kept touting the drug, but the number is certainly more than zero. Yet Trump's strange foray into pharmacology pales in significance compared with the way his insistence that he's always right about everything has crippled America's response to a deadly virus. We now know that during January and February Trump ignored repeated warnings from intelligence agencies about the threat posed by the virus. He and his inner circle didn't want to hear bad news, and in particular didn't want to hear anything that might threaten the stock market. What's really striking, however, is what happened in the first half of March. By then the evidence of an emerging pandemic was overwhelming. Yet Trump and company refused to act, persisting in their happy talk largely, one suspects, because they couldn't bring themselves to admit that their earlier reassurances had been wrong. By the time Trump finally (and briefly) faced reality, it was too late to prevent a death toll that's about to pass 100,000. And the worst may be yet to come. If you aren't terrified by photos of large crowds gathering over Memorial Day weekend without either wearing masks or practicing social distancing, you haven't been paying attention. Yet if there is a second wave of Covid 19 cases, Trump who has insistently called for a relaxation of social distancing despite warnings from health experts has already declared that he won't call for a second lockdown. After all, that would mean admitting, at least implicitly, that he was wrong to push for early reopening in the first place. Which brings me back to the contrast between Trump and Biden. In some ways Trump is a pitiful figure or would be, if his character flaws weren't leading to so many deaths. Imagine what it must be like to be so insecure, so lacking in self regard, that you not only feel the need to engage in constant boasting, but have to claim infallibility on every issue. Biden, on the other hand, while he may not be the most impressive presidential candidate ever, is clearly a man comfortable in his own skin. He knows who he is, which is why he has been able to reconcile with former critics like Elizabeth Warren. And when he makes a mistake, he isn't afraid to admit it. Over the past few months we've seen just how much damage a president who's never wrong can do. Wouldn't it be a relief to have the White House occupied by someone who isn't infallible? 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
PORTLAND, Ore. To drivers passing by on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the structure rising above the parking lot is mostly unremarkable. But to the eco elites who gathered in this green leaning city in June for its unveiling, it represented a blueprint for the filling station of the future. The roof of the 12 foot tall steel canopy, built by EV4 Oregon, is covered with solar cells that generate power for a pair of ECOtality Blink Level 2 electric vehicle chargers at the base. The facility is connected to the electrical grid, so any excess electricity from the solar cells can be sent to the local utility. The canopy is more than just a sunny day design: other installations will include an underground bank of batteries to store electricity for distribution after dark. As the electric vehicle population grows, more canopies can be added to create a covered parking lot. "This is the future, my friends, and it will make a difference," said Jeff Cogen, chairman of the Multnomah County Commission and one of several dignitaries to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony. "Hopefully, in 20 years, we can look back and say, 'I remember when these were introduced.' " With major automakers like General Motors and Nissan now selling plug in vehicles, charging stations like this one are seen as a vital element in persuading drivers to adopt zero pollution cars. Without a convenient place to replenish batteries away from home, electric cars would be a hard sell for consumers. And finally coming online after years of false starts and schedule delays even in a city that presents itself as a hub for all things electric these chargers are a welcome sign that the logjams holding back the acceptance of electric cars may at last be breaking up. Rather than just promote electric vehicles and the installation of charging spots, a coalition of government officials, carmakers, academics and local utilities is trying to integrate all forms of electric transportation into the city. "Electric vehicles are just a part of the way we're going to make cities smarter and more efficient," said Deena Platman, a transportation planner at Metro, the regional planning agency. "It's the next evolution in sustainability in the city." In many ways, electric vehicles are a good fit in Portland. The city is compact enough that the average day's driving of most households, about 20 miles, is easily covered on a single battery charge. Three quarters of the state's residents live along the Interstate 5 corridor between Portland and Eugene, two hours south. Oregon also relies heavily on hydroelectric power, which produces no direct carbon emissions. Portland's embrace of all things electric is one reason why Toyota chose it as one of the cities where it is testing its new plug in hybrid Prius, which is expected to be introduced in 2012. Green Lite, a local start up, is creating a plug in hybrid prototype that it says gets 100 miles per gallon. Eaton, an automotive supplier and infrastructure company, plans to build fast chargers at its plant in Wilsonville, south of Portland. "Eaton Corporation is working to expand the electric vehicle charging infrastructure and ensure that drivers of these vehicles have the peace of mind they need when commuting," said Tom Schafer, vice president and general manager of Eaton's Commercial Distribution Products Division. These and other companies in Oregon are trying to tackle a key challenge to the electrification of the vehicle fleet: how to install enough chargers so drivers can get past their concerns of finding charging stations away from home. Installing a charger in a homeowner's garage is relatively straightforward. Putting chargers on public property is more complex. Who, for example, will install and maintain the chargers? How much will the electricity cost? Who is responsible if pedestrians trip over electric cords? How much should electric vehicles pay to park at chargers? "The issues are insane," said Mark Gregory, an associate vice president of finance and administration at Portland State University, which is part of the coalition studying various issues. "In two years, we hope to answer these questions." One laboratory for exploring these issues is a short walk from Mr. Gregory's office. A one block stretch of downtown, nicknamed Electric Avenue, was conceived as an oasis for all types of electric vehicles, and a vision of how these vehicles can fit into a broader transportation system. Indeed, the avenue runs adjacent to a transit mall on Sixth Avenue where buses, street cars and the light rail network converge, making it a vibrant hub for residents on their way to work, class or a shop or restaurant. Electric Avenue's power lines, buried under the street, will provide the electricity for eight chargers made by seven different companies. Drivers pay normal parking rates, and the electricity for their vehicles is free, subsidized for two years by Portland State University. In all, the installation cost about 80,000. "We are trying to figure out how to meld it into the urban landscape," said Mr. Beard of Portland State, which spearheaded the Electric Avenue project with the city and Portland General Electric, the local utility. "We want to capture data on vehicles and chargers and gauge the public's interest." The findings from the Electric Avenue study will complement a 100 million federally financed project to install 1,100 public chargers around the state. About 100 of the chargers have been installed, though the project is about a year behind schedule. The ultimate goal, though, is to make available more of the direct current fast chargers that will replenish a battery in half an hour or less. A handful already exist in Portland, and the Oregon Department of Transportation has chosen AeroVironment, of Monrovia, Calif., to install another 22 of these fast chargers. But because there is not yet a uniform standard for their plugs, their introduction has been slower. At least in Portland, where the appetite for electric vehicles is strong, the fast chargers cannot come soon enough. "We're idled at the green light of opportunity," Mr. Beard said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
ANDREW CARNEGIE'S colossal, understated mansion at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street is closed until 2013 while the current resident, the Cooper Hewitt museum, renovates the interior. The last of the Carnegies left the 1902 house in 1946, but Carnegie, a steel magnate, affected a much wider swath of his hill than just his Fifth Avenue blockfront. Carnegie's 1898 purchase of his house site, from 90th to 91st Street, inspired a land rush as speculators swarmed to what had been a lukewarm stretch of Fifth Avenue, far above the established millionaire zone. Fortunately, Carnegie, the Scottish born partner of Henry Frick, bought plenty of property in the neighborhood, including most of 91st between Fifth and Madison, and up to the south corner of Fifth and 92nd. Much of this he sold to congenial people he knew would build mansions like his. Otto Kahn, for instance, put up what is now the Convent of the Sacred Heart at the north corner of Fifth and 91st. Kahn's house, as well as those of the Burden, Hammond and Trevor families, created a magnificent sweep, New York's best mansion block, kept agreeable by the relative lack of traffic. Another sumptuous house stood at the Madison Avenue corner. At one time owned by the art dealer Joseph Duveen, it fell for an apartment building. Carnegie also bought several town houses, including one at 22 East 91st Street, and built a garage for his electric car on 90th Street east of Madison. One parcel he did not immediately acquire was the southeast corner of Fifth and 90th. But in 1917 a sign appeared: "for sale without restrictions." This was an invitation to a developer to snap it up for a luxury apartment house or to scare Carnegie into buying. Scared or not, he did buy, paying 1.7 million. He did not have a specific plan, but he did not like the idea of any old Tom Dick or Harry millionaire blocking his southern light. Carnegie died in 1919, and seven years later his widow, Louise, a Presbyterian, sold the land for 1 million to another acceptable neighbor, the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest. She placed restrictions effective for 50 years on the property: only a Christian church, no more than 75 feet high, could be built. She exempted steeples, but the 1928 church didn't bother with a tower of any kind. The family maintained its garage through the 1960s, although it must have disposed of the electric charging apparatus sometime long before that. The building is now the Horace Mann Nursery Division. In 1928, when the Spence School, then on West 55th Street, was looking to leave Midtown, Mrs. Carnegie sold it 22 East 91st Street at what the deed termed a "reduced purchase price in consideration of restrictions on height," which were 90 feet at the street wall. Spence built the most elegant private school in New York, a chaste, formal Georgian style building of red brick and limestone designed by John Russell Pope, the architect of the Jefferson Memorial. Because the Carnegies had retained the land between their house and the school, Pope was able to put windows on the side wall facing west, which would otherwise have been blank. Mrs. Carnegie retained design review on the school, as she had on the church. She died in 1946, and willed the intervening lot to Spence, which used it for a playground. In 1988 the architects FXFowle replaced the playground with the present three story annex, designed in close harmony with Pope's design with one exception. Most of the western wall of the addition, directly facing the Carnegie house, is finished in the cheapest way possible painted cinderblock, no ivy, no mural, no nothing. Bruce Fowle, a partner at the firm, says that by then the Smithsonian Institution, of which the Cooper Hewitt is a branch, had design control, and was planning to build an addition on its driveway. "We designed a beautifully articulated brick wall with windows," Mr. Fowle said, "but they insisted it be absolutely blank." The idea was to forestall any fight with the Landmarks Preservation Commission over covering up the Spence annex. "Unfortunately, the addition never got built." Last year Spence acquired the big town house directly behind it, 17 East 90th; it is now joining the two buildings. In 1972 the Carnegie Corporation gave the Carnegie Mansion and 9 East 90th, the former home of the Carnegies' daughter, Margaret, to the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian bought another town house at 11 East 90th Street around 1989 that was later joined with No. 9 East 90th. These purchases put the diminutive town house at 15 East 90th Street, a private dwelling, between buildings belonging to the Cooper Hewitt and Spence. If and when 15 East 90th comes on the market, both would be likely buyers. The Carnegies are long gone, but their legacy is still shaping the neighborhood.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The designer Jonathan Anderson splits his time between London, where his namesake brand is based, and Paris and Madrid, where Loewe, at which he is the creative director, is, though he was in New York last week, shooting a campaign with Steven Meisel. The constant bounce around the world didn't seem to faze him. "Work is easy if you have major teams around you," he said, three iPhones sandwiched in one hand (personal; J. W. Anderson; Loewe). "You just let people do what they're best at." Mr. Anderson, 31, is a believer in division of labor, who prefers to think of himself as an "editor" rather than a designer. It's a peculiarly modern point of view (at least, admitting it is). Over the course of a spin through Printed Matter, the art book and zine shop where he likes to conduct New York interviews, the better to shop all the while, I called him a factory foreman and an impresario. He agreed with both. "Sometimes you think, 'God, how do you let someone just come into the brand?' but it's very fulfilling," he said. "You become like a manager and manage the situation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. By legacy, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association that current men's league Commissioner Bill Robertson followed as a boy in St. Paul in the 1960s and '70s represented the hockey version of Big East basketball. Splashy and formidable, its five marquee programs Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Denver had 31 of the 38 national championships W.C.H.A. teams won between 1951 and 2011. No other conference, not even Hockey East, won more in that span. But when Robertson, a former N.H.L. executive, assumed the commissioner's job in 2014, the W.C.H.A. resembled the Big East in another way a famous name fronting a diminished lineup. Eight schools, the marquees among them, departed in 2013 for the newly formed Big Ten and National Collegiate Hockey Conferences. The ensuing musical chairs of conference realignment left the W.C.H.A. with a loose confederation of remnants and outliers, along with the widest geographic footprint of any Division I conference, stretching from Alaska to Alabama. It seemed untenable from the start. And now Robertson is struggling to hold it together. Last June, seven schools Minnesota State, Bemidji State, Bowling Green, Ferris State, Northern Michigan, Michigan Tech and Lake Superior State announced plans to withdraw from the W.C.H.A. and possibly form a new conference for the 2021 22 season. That left only Alaska Anchorage, Alaska Fairbanks and Alabama Huntsville, the W.C.H.A.'s farthest flung members. This week, the departing seven programs reorganized as the Central Collegiate Hockey Association, reviving the name of a conference that dissolved in the previous realignment. "There is no script for this situation," Robertson said recently at the W.C.H.A. offices, located in a bleak office park near the Mall of America. "It's a challenge every day, and I'm trying to do the best job I can being professional, honest and focused on the job at hand to get us ready for the playoffs, conference championships, and the N.C.A.A. playoffs. I can't take my eye off that piece." Hockey conferences need six teams for an automatic N.C.A.A. Tournament bid. Robertson said the two Alaska schools and Alabama Huntsville are committed to the conference. Realistically, he has less than a year to find three more schools to keep the W.C.H.A. viable as a men's league. The women's W.C.H.A. should not be affected. Of the seven withdrawing schools, only two field women's teams, and Robertson said both plan to remain. The presidents of the seven departing schools declined interview requests and directed inquiries to Morris Kurtz, a former college athletics administrator who serves as the group's adviser. Kurtz would not say why the schools chose to leave. "This is about seven like minded schools going forward," Kurtz said. "No one took a shot at anybody else, any other program." This season, Alaska Anchorage shifted games from the 6,290 seat Sullivan Arena downtown to the 750 seat Seawolf Sports Complex on campus, a move that Athletic Director Greg Myford said saved 200,000 annually. The complex's capacity ranks below the W.C.H.A. minimum of 2,500 and Myford soon plans to announce fund raising for an expansion project to increase seating to as many as 3,000. Robertson approved the venue shift, a decision that did not sit well with some members. Travel costs were another issue. To further cut expenses, the two Alaska programs sought to eliminate the travel subsidies they pay W.C.H.A. schools to come play them once a season. Alabama Huntsville, which joined in 2013, also subsidizes travel. Alaska Fairbanks Chancellor Dan White, chairman of the W.C.H.A.'s board of directors, declined to specify figures, but said the subsidies include airfare and some related costs easily many thousands of dollars. More than once, White said, it came up for a conference vote. "And of course, with seven teams receiving the subsidy and three paying, you can imagine how that vote turns out," White said in a telephone interview from Fairbanks. Two officials familiar with the presidents' discussions said ongoing financial issues in Alaska concerned all seven. So did lackluster play by certain schools. Alabama Huntsville's last winning season came in 2005 06, and Alaska Anchorage is deep into its sixth consecutive losing season. The departing schools felt those sub .500 seasons hampered their pursuit of at large bids to the N.C.A.A. Tournament, where strength of schedule is a factor. Under its current configuration, the W.C.H.A. has yet to win an N.C.A.A. title. The last came in 2011, by Minnesota Duluth, now in the N.C.H.C. Robertson remains hopeful that one or two of the departing schools might reconsider. Beyond that, the W.C.H.A.'s options for luring new members are limited. Only 60 institutions sponsor N.C.A.A. Division I men's college hockey, compared to 351 in men's basketball and 255 in football, and 59 are committed to conferences. The lone independent, Arizona State, declined W.C.H.A. overtures in 2017. Facility and travel costs make hockey an expensive proposition, and the number of Division I programs has remained relatively stagnant for a decade.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Last month, as the coronavirus started to spread here in the United States, I wrote about a smallish online conferencing company, Zoom Video Communications, saying that we might want to pay attention to it because it makes working from home easier. Well, with the escalating crisis, Zoom is now worth more than four airlines combined United, Delta, American and JetBlue with a market cap of just above 44 billion. With all due respect to Zoom, which makes a very good product that is very useful, sometimes problematic (do a search for "ZoomBombing") and even delightful (there has been a Zoom wedding): That's just insane. How crazy? Well, along with its huge valuation, Zoom has seen its share price go from 62 about a year ago when it went public to close to 160 today. The company has an unheard of price to earning ratio of 1,865 (this is usually considered a good measure of a company's true value; by way of comparison, Facebook's is 23 and Google's is 21). Let's start on a positive note: Despite having lost big chunks of market value since the beginning of the year, nearly every company among the big five (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook) will do just fine when this crisis eventually passes. That's because all are larded up with cash, and some have a nearly monopolistic grip on their business arenas, such as online advertising (Google), e commerce (Amazon) and social media (Facebook), that are not going away. That is a head start that lesser rivals who will now have to eat up their seed corn to stay viable cannot compete against. There will be a culling of most competitors of these giants that will only strengthen the power and reach of the behemoths, eliminating pesky roadblocks to their further domination. This is obviously not a good thing in the long run. As the economy returns to normal, the impulse will be toward bolstering our big corporations in hopes they will repair the unemployment problem. And those companies that are able to hire and protect their employees will be the most feted, and their success will be one of the key benchmarks of the economy's health. Its main ad business will no doubt take a hit over the next few quarters, but Facebook is reporting a jump in video views, messaging and news consumption, as users try to connect online while sheltering in place. To generate good will, Facebook has been handing out extra pay to its employees, while also donating face masks it had bought last year for the California wildfires. Alphabet's Google search service and YouTube video unit also subject to the vicissitudes of the advertising market have seen surges in use, while many of the company's other products and its cloud services are doing well. And that trend will persist: More Americans are using these services more intensely and becoming accustomed to their efficacy. Amazon will be one of the main beneficiaries of the crisis as more consumers use its delivery and entertainment services, and as more companies move over to its cloud business, Amazon Web Services. So too for its analog Whole Foods Market, which has remained open during the slowdown for both delivery and walk in customers. Amazon said last week it was looking to hire 100,000 warehouse workers to meet the increased demand, which is no surprise. And so it goes: Apple's supply chain from China is being restored as that country recovers ahead of the rest of the world from Covid 19, and its diversification into other services like streaming has only been bolstered by the crisis. Microsoft's cloud service and Teams collaboration product have also experienced a spike in use. And one major plus for all of them: Their questionable behaviors around competition, the spread of disinformation and hate speech, addiction and more will not be subject to the same regulatory scrutiny that had been building over the last year. In fact, it seems less likely that government officials in the United States, at least, where their hands are full with more pressing issues will be as enthusiastic to pass legislation or levy fines to thwart the growing power of tech. Still, some big tech companies are vulnerable. Airbnb, the home rental giant that has seen its listings drop precipitously, will likely not go public this year as planned. The company will probably need to raise more funds at less attractive terms to add to its 4 billion in liquidity, and need to do yeoman's work to re convince its hosts and customers that high analog touch businesses are OK (side note: Their hotel rivals are even more exposed). The same is true for the car sharing leader, Uber, which was already struggling with increased costs as states seek to recategorize their drivers from contract workers to employees entitled to benefits. And getting people back into the habit of using Uber cars instead of their own after the pandemic ends will be a heavy lift. As for the scooter and other alternate mobility businesses that Uber has been building, along with competitors like Lime and Bird, it's going to be a bumpy ride. The only saving grace is that the onset of warmer weather could mean increased usage. But there's one major thing that tech companies cannot avoid: taxes. As the well known Silicon Valley investor Chamath Palihapitiya pointed out to me in an interview this week, "It's where the money is, so it is where governments are going to go when they need relief." He added that a federal role in backing businesses will make it a bigger player in tech and beyond. "All U.S. citizens will all become shareholders in a way," he said. Governments are racking up ginormous deficits for stimulus packages, and they will have higher costs for health care and as Mr. Palihapitiya noted, all of this has to be paid by someone. There is no question that governments will turn to businesses with huge profits to help foot the bill. That means big tech, more than any other industry, both here in the United States and abroad. Because there are two things we can always rely on, during this horrible pandemic and in normal times: death and taxes. 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, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
O'Meara is now a screenwriter and producer who makes monster movies and works for an independent film company. Her continuing admiration (and tattoo) of Patrick and dismay at the lack of a proper biography propelled her to begin work on "The Lady From the Black Lagoon" when she was 25. Learning that Patrick had to deal with a serious amount of Hollywood sexism further reinforced her bond with her subject. "I could easily put myself in her shoes," she writes. "I have the same pair every woman in film has them. They're standard issue and they're uncomfortable as hell." As the book reveals, Milicent Patrick had an unconventional and fascinating life. Born Mildred Elisabeth Fulvia Rossi, she grew up on the grounds of what would eventually become Hearst Castle in San Simeon, Calif., where her father worked as a structural engineer on the estate. She went on to have a varied film industry career that included work as a bit part actress, as an animator on the 1940 film "Fantasia" for Walt Disney Studios and as a designer in the makeup department led by Bud Westmore at Universal Studios. O'Meara's search for Patrick's life story is helped in part by library archives, digitized genealogy databases and the continued interest in "Creature From the Black Lagoon," with its fandom community willing to share their resources. "Never, ever underestimate the power of nerds," she writes. (The filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is another fan he first saw the movie when he was 7 and has cited his own deep admiration for the Creature's design and story as an inspiration for his Oscar winning 2017 fantasy, "The Shape of Water.") "Creature From the Black Lagoon" is available to buy or rent, but you can also find a free copy of the film in The Internet Archive and read the movie's 1954 review in The Times here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In the mid 20th century, federal, state and local governments pursued explicit racial policies to create, enforce and sustain residential segregation. The policies were so powerful that, as a result, even today blacks and whites rarely live in the same communities and have little interracial contact or friendships outside the workplace. This was not a peculiar Southern obsession, but consistent nationwide. In New York, for example, the State legislature amended its insurance code in 1938 to permit the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to build large housing projects "for white people only" first Parkchester in the Bronx and then Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. New York City granted substantial tax concessions for Stuyvesant Town, even after MetLife's chairman testified that the project would exclude black families because "Negroes and whites don't mix." The insurance company then built a separate Riverton project for African Americans in Harlem. State licensed real estate agents subscribed to a code of ethics that prohibited sales to black families in white neighborhoods. Nationwide, regulators closed their eyes to real estate boards that prohibited agents from using multiple listing services if they dared violate this code. In many hundreds of instances nationwide, mob violence, frequently led or encouraged by police, drove black families out of homes they had purchased or rented in previously all white neighborhoods. Campaigns, even violent ones, to exclude African Americans from all but a few inner city neighborhoods were often led by churches, universities and other nonprofit groups determined to maintain their neighborhoods' ethnic homogeneity. The Internal Revenue Service failed to lift tax exemptions from these institutions, even as they openly promoted and enforced racial exclusion. Each of these policies and practices violated our Constitution in the case of federal government action, the Fifth Amendment; in the case of state and local action, the 14th. Our residential racial boundaries are as much a civil rights violation as the segregation of water fountains, buses and lunch counters that we confronted six decades ago. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order prohibiting federal agencies from continuing to promote housing segregation. In 1968, in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, which made racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing unlawful for private actors as well as government. But the Fair Housing Act was inadequate to undo the damage our government had previously wrought. Patterns were set and have been difficult to reverse. The enormous black white wealth gap, for example, responsible for so much of today's racial inequality, is in large part a product of black exclusion from homes whose appreciation generated substantial equity for white working class families with F.H.A. and V.A. mortgages that propelled them into the middle class. Even if federal, state and local officials, along with banks, insurance companies and real estate brokers, no longer intend to discriminate by race, their policies can sometimes have that effect, reinforcing and perpetuating segregation. Since the very first days of the Fair Housing Act, all 11 of the federal appeals courts that have considered the question and, more recently, the Supreme Court, in Texas v. Inclusive Communities Project, have said the act prohibits not only intentional segregation, but also policies and practices whose effect is to discriminate for no defensible reason, even if there is no evidence of a racial motive. Lawyers describe such actions as having a "disparate impact" on minorities. Now, however, the Trump administration is about to put into effect procedures to make it virtually impossible to prove disparate impact, no matter how egregious a discriminatory policy or practice may be. This fall, reporters at Syracuse.com demonstrated that homeowners in low income, predominantly minority neighborhoods in Syracuse have been paying higher property taxes than they lawfully should. The cause of this "disparate impact" is Syracuse's unlawful failure, since 1996, to conduct an up to date citywide property reassessment. Over the next decades, market values of homes in white neighborhoods have risen much more than market values of homes in black ones. As a result, homeowners in white neighborhoods have tax assessments that are too low compared with the value of their homes, so these homeowners pay a smaller share of the total city tax bill than they should. Homeowners in low income neighborhoods, it follows, are paying a higher share than they should. There are many reasons for the smaller growth of home market values in heavily minority low income neighborhoods than in higher income neighborhoods over the last quarter century, many of them rooted in the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. But one cause is more recent: During the lead up to the financial meltdown of 2008, black and Hispanic homeowners were targeted by mortgage sales firms to refinance properties with new loans that had enticingly low initial interest rates. But the rates exploded into much higher charges a few years later, a result described in the small print of loan documents but one that salespeople rarely highlighted. These "subprime" loans were often marketed to minority homeowners who were fully qualified for mortgage terms like those offered to white suburban homeowners. When the subprime rates escalated, many borrowers were unable to make their monthly payments, and banks foreclosed on their homes. Banks and other mortgage holders boarded up the foreclosed properties, and often failed to mow the lawns or otherwise maintain them in good condition. The eyesores drove market values down for surrounding properties as well. If ever there was a policy that had a disparate impact on African Americans, Syracuse's obdurate refusal to keep its assessments up to date would be it. Under current Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rules, families in Syracuse's black neighborhoods can file a complaint with HUD alleging that the illegally out of date assessment system has a disparate impact upon homeowners like themselves, violating the Fair Housing Act. To start the legal process, they would simply have to show that the assessment delay had caused African Americans unfairly high tax payments. The city would then have to try to defend the delay by showing it had a legitimate justification for failing to keep assessments up to date. Even if the city did so, the homeowners could still prevail by showing that there was a reasonable alternative to the city's practice that would not have such a discriminatory effect. The proposed Trump Administration rule throws up many technical roadblocks to filing and pursuing such a complaint, but one new procedural hurdle wouldn't even let the black homeowners get in the door: Before the city would be required to provide a rationale for its failure to keep assessments current, the complainants would have to imagine every conceivable justification that the city might assert, and prove that each was not legitimate, without knowing what actual defense the city might claim or what standard of legitimacy HUD would impose. If the city then came up with a justification that the homeowners hadn't refuted to HUD's satisfaction (for example, that following state law requiring timely reassessments would be too costly), HUD could dismiss the disparate impact action. A process that requires complainants to refute defenses that haven't yet been offered is one that is designed to block civil rights, not protect them. In the many decades in which civil rights groups have brought disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act, no court has ever required such obstacles to having a disparate impact claim heard. Yet HUD proposes to impose them. Few minority plaintiffs will have the resources to hire the teams of lawyers who can jump through the hoops HUD is erecting, and then to take defendants to court after HUD has dismissed a complaint on spurious procedural grounds. HUD's excuse for promulgating its new rule has been that the modification is required to comply with the 2015 Supreme Court ruling (in Texas v. Inclusive Communities) that upheld the use of disparate impact claims to enforce the Fair Housing Act. But the excuse is patently false. The court's opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is now retired, listed some recent cases in which an analysis of disparate impact was necessary to properly enforce the Fair Housing Act. One, for example, originated in St. Bernard Parish, an almost all white county bordering New Orleans. The county came up with one device after another to exclude African Americans whose homes had been destroyed in Hurricane Katrina and who might try to resettle in the county. The first was a racially motivated "blood relative" ordinance, prohibiting any single family homeowner from renting his or her home to someone who was not a close relative. A federal court ordered the county to repeal the ordinance and to sign an agreement that going forward it would obey the Fair Housing Act's prohibition on racial discrimination. When a developer then proposed to build a mixed income apartment complex, St. Bernard officials announced a moratorium on issuing permits, so the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center went to court, claiming that the county not only breached the agreement but also violated the Fair Housing Act. The housing group showed that a disproportionate share of potential renters would be African Americans who had been displaced by the hurricane, and contended that there was no reasonable basis for prohibiting the project to proceed. The county then had to justify its action, and came up with six reasons. It claimed that medical facilities in the county were insufficient to support the project's renters, although a new 40 bed hospital had been announced months earlier. It claimed that the county was already "flush" with rental housing, although even if the proposed project went forward, only 20 percent of the county's pre Katrina rental units would be replaced. It claimed that the builder of the proposed project was likely to abandon it after construction, although the builder would have to repay all the federal tax credits upon which it relied if the property were not maintained in good condition for at least 15 years. It claimed that the moratorium on new apartment construction was needed because the City Council wanted to prevent a different, lower quality project, from being built, although council members had specifically cited the developer's project when announcing the moratorium. And it claimed that the moratorium was needed to give the county time to update its zoning code, although from announcement of the moratorium to a court hearing six months later, the county had undertaken no efforts to update its zoning code. The court found that none of these explanations justified the policy, and since the moratorium had a disparate impact on African Americans, St. Bernard Parish must withdraw its moratorium, permitting the construction. Under the administration's proposed new rule, builders and civil rights groups could never win such a case at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, even though Justice Kennedy cited the case as exactly the kind that civil rights complainants should be able to win. Under the new rule, the plaintiffs would, in filing their complaint, have to specify the six excuses the county might come up with to justify its moratorium and show why that possible excuse was not reasonable or necessary. Until the complainants had demolished, in advance, these conceivable excuses, the parish would not even be required to respond to the complaint. Civil rights groups should not be required to write fantasy novels before asserting their rights under law. HUD's previous rule that the Trump administration proposes to replace defined a policy or practice that has an unlawful disparate impact as one that "creates, increases, reinforces, or perpetuates segregated housing patterns because of race." The proposed rule eliminates the reference to segregation. This matters because established racial segregation, not ongoing discrimination alone, underlies so many of our most serious social problems, including racial disparities in education, health, criminal justice and wealth that, by the time Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, had become entrenched nationwide, and persist to this day.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Snow hiking is growing in popularity as a wintertime sport globally. Alta Badia ski resort, in Italy's Dolomites region, saw 50,000 snow hikers in the winter of 2017 18, compared with 30,000 the previous winter, according to the local tourist board. Companies that offer snow hiking excursions also report a rise in business: Discover Banff Tours, which runs snow hiking trips in Banff National Park, had more than 10,000 participants last winter, compared with 6,000 in the winter of 2015 16, said its founder, Jonathan Welsh. Here's what you need to know to about snow hiking: Molly Bayer, a senior instructor with the outdoor gear brand REI, said that snow hiking essentially means trekking through snow. Hikers wear snowshoes only when there's enough snow for their feet to sink in. "Ideally, you want a foot of snow, but as little as six inches will do," she said. If they're not using snowshoes, hikers typically wear waterproof ankle height boots with micro spikes, which protect against slippage. And, while winter sports like skiing and snowboarding require some technical skills and lessons, snow hiking doesn't. "The nice thing about the sport is that you can go off on an excursion without any previous experience," Ms. Bayer said. Compared with snowboarding or skiing, where the cost of equipment can run into the thousands, snow hiking is affordable, Ms. Bayer said. You can buy good quality hiking boots for 150. Ms. Bayer recommended that hikers use trekking poles to help with balance, and that they dress in layers. "Since your body heats up when you're hiking, you want to wear breathable, synthetic fabrics that you can take off as you get warm," she said. Other essentials include a hat, gloves, gaiters which protect the lower legs and feet from getting wet water and snacks, especially on hikes of three hours or more. Chocolate bars, energy bars and nuts are all smart choices for refueling and are easy to pack, too. If you are visiting popular areas for snow sports like Vail, Colo., Jackson Hole, Wyo., or the Swiss Alps, you can likely rent equipment such as gaiters and poles from local sporting goods stores. Wearing sunscreen and sunglasses is also key, Ms. Bayer said, because sun reflects off snow, and the rays can be stronger than they are on a sunny summer day. Internationally, in Mont Tremblant, Canada, the Ski de fond Mont Tremblant resort has a network of 20 trails for winter hiking. The Parc National du Mont Tremblant also offers winter hiking, and there's a new trail at the Domaine Saint Bernard park that has 13 miles of winter hiking. It runs through the forest, past lakes and along the Diable River, and hikers can expect to see a variety of bird species and deer along the way. Banff National Park, which encompasses more than 2,500 square miles, has a few hundred hiking trails, according to Mr. Welsh of Discover Banff Tours. The Swiss and French Alps are replete with snow hiking trails, as are the Dolomites. Diego Zanesco, a hiking guide in that region, said there are "an innumerable amount of marked snow hiking trails." Since the hiking is dependent on snow, season varies by destination: In the Dolomites, for example, it usually runs from early December to early April. Hikers can embark on treks using a map and GPS, but local tour companies in ski resort towns often offer half and full day group and private excursions. Mr. Welsh's company, for one, runs half day guided snow hiking trips in Banff National Park for between 40 and 100 a person. Mr. Zanesco offers full day hiking excursions in the Dolomites at a starting cost of 700 for two people, and several adventure companies sell multiday snow hiking trips. REI Adventures, for example, has a four day snowshoeing trip in the White Mountains, in New Hampshire, at a starting price of 749 a person. In addition, some hotels in snow hiking regions, such as Rosa Alpina in the Dolomites, organize excursions for their guests to nearby mountains. The hotel's owner, Hugo Pizzinini, who is an avid snow hiker, also takes guests out on hourlong free hikes in the nearby hills of San Cassiano village. "They're a way for newcomers to get introduced to the sport," he said. When it comes to safety, Ms. Bayer said that hikers need to be concerned about avalanches if they're on steep terrain. Since the risk of these can change daily, they should check in with the local ski center about that day's conditions before setting off. In addition, since some trails aren't marked, it's easy to get lost. Hikers should always head out with at least one other person and a map, compass and GPS. And this is fun? "You're trekking up and down hills, and all of a sudden, you stumble across an open valley with snow covered mountains and frozen lakes," Mr. Zanesco said of snow hiking in the Dolomites. In addition, many of the mountains in the region are home to family owned restaurants and bars, and hikers often trek from spot to spot and enjoy food and drinks along the way. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
SCHENECTADY, N.Y. President Obama is traveling here on Friday to name Jeffrey R. Immelt to run his outside panel of economic advisers, succeeding Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who is stepping down, the White House said. Mr. Immelt is chairman and chief executive of General Electric, the giant conglomerate with deep roots in this somewhat battered industrial city near Albany. Mr. Immelt will be chairman of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness that Mr. Obama intends to create by executive order. In a statement issued shortly after midnight, Mr. Obama said he wanted the council to "focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness." The council will be a reconfigured version of the board Mr. Volcker led, the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. That body, created by Mr. Obama when he took office in the thick of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is set to expire on Feb. 6. Mr. Immelt said that his commitment to G.E. would not change. "This is my passion," he said of G.E. "I am committed. I am a hard worker. I am focused on the company." The changes in the panel signal what the White House describes as "a new phase of our recovery," a shift from crisis to job creation. They come as Mr. Obama has been working to repair his frayed relations with the business community. Mr. Immelt, who was a member of the original board, has often been by the president's side in recent months, as Mr. Obama has sought to spotlight his efforts on behalf of American companies overseas. He was with Mr. Obama when the president traveled to India in November. During a stop in Mumbai, the White House announced a string of business deals between India and American companies, including a 750 million order from India's Reliance Power for steam turbines manufactured by General Electric. And Mr. Immelt was with the president again this week during the visit of President Hu Jintao of China, taking part in a meeting Mr. Obama convened with business leaders and Mr. Hu and attending the state dinner in Mr. Hu's honor on Wednesday. "Jeff Immelt's experience at G.E. and his understanding of the vital role the private sector plays in creating jobs and making America competitive makes him up to the challenge of leading this new council," Mr. Obama said. Schenectady, where the president will make the formal announcement of his appointment, is the birthplace of General Electric and remains home to G.E.'s largest energy division. The steam turbines bought by Reliance Power will be built there. The company reported early on Friday that it had earned 4.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010 and 11.6 billion for the full year, exceeding Wall Street analysts' expectations. Mr. Immelt mentioned his impending appointment in an opinion article published in The Washington Post on Friday. "The president and I are committed to a candid and full dialogue among business, labor and government to help ensure that the United States has the most competitive and innovative economy in the world," he said in the article. "My hope is that the council will be a sounding board for ideas and a catalyst for action on jobs and competitiveness. It will include small and large businesses, labor, economists and government." It was well known in Washington that Mr. Volcker, 83, had sometimes been frustrated in his role as an outside adviser to the president. In the statement, Mr. Obama thanked Mr. Volcker for his service and pledged to continue to call on the former Fed chairman for advice, saying, "He will always be a member of my team." During Mr. Volcker's time as head of the previous panel, the former Fed chairman met periodically with Mr. Obama and had something of a lukewarm relationship with the administration, which mostly obtained its economic guidance from Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Council. Mr. Volcker, however, became well known for crafting a measure that restricts the ability of banks whose deposits are federally insured from trading for their own proprietary accounts. Mr. Obama proposed what became known as the Volcker rule in January 2010 as part of a broader financial regulatory reform effort, though the measure has been fiercely opposed by some banks and Wall Street firms.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
SAN FRANCISCO Uber's corporate culture has been under fire. But the company is focusing on a different message for investors and employees: Business is soaring. The ride hailing service, said on Friday that its gross bookings or the amount of money it garnered from providing rides, excluding costs rose to 20 billion in 2016, double the amount in 2015. Net revenue, or the amount of money Uber makes from rides after its drivers are paid, totaled 6.5 billion. Even as Uber continues to grow, spending remains brisk, and the company is not making money. Last year, its adjusted net loss totaled 2.8 billion, excluding the cost of its Chinese subsidiary, Uber China. Uber, which is privately held, spent billions of dollars developing its operations in China before selling them to Chinese rival Didi Chuxing last year. The release of the numbers, which were reported earlier by Bloomberg and confirmed by Uber, is the first time Uber has allowed a public peek into its financial data. Some information about its financial performance has leaked in the past and the company discloses numbers quarterly to employees and some investors. But Uber made the figures public on Friday as it grappled with questions about its workplace and negative consumer sentiment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. It was midway through the third quarter of Sunday's Super Bowl when Patrick Mahomes seemed to realize he needed to take over the game if his flagging Kansas City Chiefs were going to rally to defeat the San Francisco 49ers, whose confidence had noticeably swelled after taking a 3 point lead. But the immediate result was jarring: Mahomes threw two interceptions as San Francisco's lead grew 10 points and the Chiefs stumbled into the fourth quarter. More than ever, Mahomes sensed that the game, and Kansas City's quest to win its first Super Bowl in 50 years, was again on his shoulders. Just as he did in two previous games during this postseason, Mahomes, only 24, found the pluck and poise to lead the Chiefs to three touchdowns in roughly five minutes of the final quarter for a 31 20 Kansas City victory. In the closing, tense moments of his first appearance on football's biggest stage, Mahomes threw two touchdown passes, scores that sealed the Chiefs' first Super Bowl victory since the 1969 season and resurrected a franchise that is quietly known as Middle America's team. "It means so much to me to do something like this for Kansas City and all its fans in all the states around Kansas City," said Mahomes, who came to the Chiefs in 2017 after a daring trade put Kansas City in a position to select him in the college draft. "The Chiefs brought me here and believed in me from the beginning. And all I've wanted to do since then is to reward their faith in me by winning a Super Bowl." Deep into the second half, it looked as if Mahomes would have to wait another season to reach that goal. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. With five minutes remaining in the third quarter, he tried to force a pass that had to travel nearly 30 yards across the middle of the field and past a handful of 49ers defenders on its way to the intended receiver, Tyreek Hill. San Francisco linebacker Fred Warner cut a few yards in front of Hill and easily intercepted the pass. The 49ers soon led, 20 10. It got worse for Mahomes. Early in the fourth quarter, another pass deflected off Hill and was intercepted by San Francisco's Tarvarius Moore. The Chiefs fans, who outnumbered 49ers fans at Hard Rock Stadium, slumped in their seats. "I really wasn't playing too well there in the third quarter and a little bit beyond that," said Mahomes, who was named the game's most valuable player. "But the guys stuck with me. We don't really back down there. We just kept firing away. "I think we all believed we could come back again like we've done before." In their first playoff game this season, the Chiefs trailed by 21 points in the first quarter. Early in the A.F.C. championship game they trailed the Tennessee Titans by 10 points. "No one doubted what Patrick would do next," Kansas City fullback Anthony Sherman said. "On the sideline it was like: 'He threw a couple picks? So what?' We knew he wouldn't be put off by that. He never flinches; that's who he is." A 44 yard pass to Hill seemed to shock the vaunted 49ers' defense, which did not recover. Mahomes flung the ball sidearm on the play with a defender draped on his left side. Later, Mahomes, who had 29 yards rushing and completed 26 of 42 passes for 286 yards, said it was a play that the Chiefs had been waiting to call against the 49ers' secondary, which had been creeping forward to stop short crossing routes to tight end Travis Kelce.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
It is not actually clear that new states are on the agenda should Democrats win in November. House Democrats have passed a bill to admit the District of Columbia as a state, and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Nydia Velazquez of New York have introduced a bill to let Puerto Ricans hold a binding referendum on their future, but Senate Democrats are still somewhat silent on the issue. Nonetheless, congressional Republicans have raised the specter of new states as they fight to defend their majority in the Senate. In June, after the House passed its D.C. statehood bill, Senate Republicans went on a tear against the measure, with Lindsey Graham of South Carolina condemning it as an unconstitutional power grab that would "empower the most radical agenda in modern American politics." Later, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, used his time at the Republican National Convention to warn of dire consequences should the District become a state. They want to defund the police and take away your Second Amendment rights. They want free health care for illegal immigrants, yet they offer no protection at all for unborn Americans. They want to pack the Supreme Court with liberals intent on eroding our constitutional rights. And they want to codify all this by making the swamp itself, Washington, D.C., America's 51st state. With two more liberal senators, we cannot undo the damage they've done. More recently, on Fox News, Graham fighting an unusually tough battle for re election against his Democratic challenger, Jaime Harrison warned of a "parade of horribles" should Republicans lose the Senate and the White House. "If they win, it is not going to be about a health care debate," he said, referring to the last period of unified Democratic control in 2009, "they are going to structurally change the country to make it harder for a Republican to get elected president. They are going to make D.C. a state, altering the balance of power in the Senate." On Twitter, likewise, Senator John Cornyn of Texas also in a competitive race for re election against the Democratic challenger MJ Hegar warned that a Democratic majority in Congress would make D.C. and Puerto Rico states, adding four additional members to the Senate. This would also, he said, mean "nine new members of the Electoral College, equivalent of New Mexico and New Hampshire combined." Presumably, these states would also vote Democratic in the next presidential election.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Last fall, Kyle Hall's bookstore was destroyed by a tornado. This spring, it was almost wiped out by a pandemic. For the past two months, ever since Texas ordered nonessential businesses to shut down, Mr. Hall, the manager and co owner of Interabang Books in Dallas, has taken one unprecedented step after another to keep the store open. In March, Interabang transformed from a brick and mortar shop into an online retail business. When the stay at home order was lifted at the end of April, it became a curbside takeout operation. Staff members redesigned the storefront display, cramming 100 titles in the window so that customers could browse at a safe distance. "We called it the bookstore bakery case," Mr. Hall said. "That was strange, but in a week we got used to it." Then the state's orders changed again, and retailers were told they could open at 25 percent their usual capacity. Interabang's staff reorganized the layout of the 2,000 square foot space and put markers on the floor to signal how far apart customers should stand. This past weekend, around 150 customers came to shop, most wearing masks. "We felt like, if the governor is going to allow businesses like ours to reopen, and doing business was permissible, then we wanted to do it," Mr. Hall said. Even as health experts working with the Trump administration warned a Senate panel on Tuesday against reopening the country too quickly, the U.S. retail sector is beginning to get back to business. As some states allow a handful of businesses to reopen and other regions charge ahead full throttle, it is an experiment for bookstore owners and other retailers attempting to strike a balance between staying afloat and keeping workers and customers safe. Interabang may be something of an optimistic outlier for now. Elsewhere in Texas,Valerie Koehler, the owner of the Houston bookstore Blue Willow, said she and her staff are unsettled by the prospect of shoppers roaming through the store. "The staff resoundingly said, 'We are not ready,'" she said. Among retail businesses, bookstores, especially smaller independent stores, face particular challenges as they navigate reopening. Many indies occupy cramped spaces with warrens of bookshelves, and serve as community centers and cultural outposts as much as retail operations. Book lovers often come in to linger, browse and chat with the staff about what to read next, all behaviors that in a pandemic are potentially life threatening. Some booksellers are now in the awkward position of having to disappoint eager customers. Malaprop's in Asheville, N.C., told subscribers to its newsletter that even though the state had cleared bookstores to open, it would remain closed until at least May 19. When it reopens, shoppers will be allowed to visit by appointment only, to limit the number of people in the store, and face coverings will be mandatory. 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. In Georgia, where some businesses were allowed to open in late April, Frank Reiss, the owner of A Cappella Books in Atlanta, said his store is sticking with deliveries and curbside orders. "I am not anticipating reopening to the public in quite a while," he said. "The responsible thing is not to encourage people gathering." Some larger bookstore companies are taking a more bullish approach. Last week, Books A Million said it was reopening the majority of its 200 outlets after implementing some safety measures, including masks for employees, acrylic barriers at checkout counters and self distancing markers in the aisles. Barnes Noble has opened 31 of its outlets in 10 states, and by the end of this week it plans to open 20 more stores in five additional states. Another 500 of its stores are doing curbside sales. In stores that are open for browsing, furniture has been removed and signs encouraging social distancing are placed at the entrance and throughout the store. Booksellers will wear masks, and customers will be required to wear masks in places where the state mandates it. Trolleys have been set out with signs instructing customers to leave any books they have touched on the cart, so that the books can be placed in quarantine for five days long enough for any potential viral particles to die off then reshelved. But giant retailers that operate warehouses have additional workplace safety issues to contend with. Amazon and Barnes Noble have had outbreaks of coronavirus in their warehouses, and last month an employee at Barnes Noble's New Jersey distribution center died from complications related to coronavirus, a company spokesman confirmed. The company said the distribution center had safety measures in place since early March, such as providing gloves and cloth face masks for employees, reducing the number of staff members in the warehouses, disinfecting work stations and equipment and closing the facility periodically for deep cleaning. The pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis struck at a moment when booksellers across the country were thriving. After many smaller retailers were crushed by the rise of Amazon, a shift among consumers toward local shopping helped to drive a resurgence among independent booksellers. The number of independent bookstores across the country rose to 2,524 store locations in 2019, up from 1,651 in 2009, according to the American Booksellers Association's membership figures. The coronavirus outbreak threatens to wipe out those gains. When stay at home orders went into effect, most U.S. bookstores closed. Many had to furlough or lay off their staff. Even when stores do open, it will be difficult to recover lost revenue. Foot traffic will be down, either because states have limited how many shoppers can enter stores or because customers are concerned about going in. Most bookstores rely on author signings and community events to drive sales, and such gatherings are unlikely to be safe until the pandemic has passed. "Sales are down across channels, and the cost of business is going up," said Allison Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. In California, where last Friday the state began allowing bookstores to offer curbside shopping, some booksellers remain wary. The California Independent Booksellers Alliance this week is hosting a virtual town hall for booksellers with a nurse practitioner. The Book Catapult, an independent store in San Diego that will begin offering limited curbside shopping this week, is asking customers to wear masks and practice social distancing when they come to pick up books. Seth Marko, one of the store's co owners, said he's not eager to open the store for browsing. "If we are concerned with keeping the store sanitized, safe for customers and booksellers, and limiting the number of people through the doors, then the virus is still too prevalent, and we should not be encouraging things like shopping for books in person just yet," he said. "Believe me, we would like nothing more than to go back to normal, just like everyone else."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
BOSTON The offices of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University sit 10 floors above Boston's Back Bay. Wraparound windows offer a floating panorama of the city, from Boston Common to Fenway Park, as a half dozen young analysts toil quietly at computers. At 10 a.m. on a recent morning, with the early calls to the World Health Organization and European doctors complete and the check in with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scheduled for later, Alessandro Vespignani, the institute's director, had some time to work the room. In a black blazer and jeans, he moved from cubicle to cubicle, giving each member of his team the latest updates on the coronavirus pandemic. "We call this 'wartime,'" Dr. Vespignani said later in his office; he was seated, but his hands hadn't stopped moving. "Before this, we were working on Ebola, and Zika, and when these things are spreading, you are working on the fly, you don't stop. You are continually modeling networks." Historically, scientists trying to anticipate the trajectory of infectious diseases focused on properties of the agent itself, like its level of contagion and lethality. But infectious diseases need help to spread their misery: humans meeting humans, in person. In the past decade or so, leading investigators have begun to incorporate social networks into their models, trying to identify and analyze patterns of individual behavior that amplify or mute potential pandemics. Those findings, in turn, inform policy recommendations. When does it make sense to shut down schools or workplaces? When will closing a border make a difference, and when won't it? World health officials consult with social network modelers on a near daily basis, and Dr. Vespignani's lab is part of one of several consortiums being consulted in the crucial and perhaps disruptive decisions coming in the next few weeks. On Friday, in an analysis posted by the journal Science, the group estimated that China's travel ban on Wuhan delayed the growth of the epidemic by only a few days in mainland China and by two to three weeks elsewhere. "Moving forward we expect that travel restrictions to COVID 19 affected areas will have modest effects," the team concluded. "Today, with the enormous computing power available on the cloud, Dr. Vespignani and other colleagues can model the entire world using" publicly available data, said Dr. Elizabeth Halloran, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington and a senior researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. "On the one hand, there is the rise of network science, and on the other, there is the enormous rise in computing power." Dr. Vespignani came to network analysis through physics. After completing a Ph.D. in his native Italy, he took up postdoctoral studies at Yale, where he began to focus on applying computational techniques to epidemiology and geographical data. "Look, I am Roman, and I am a fan of Lazio," the soccer team, he said. "We were in first place finally, after how many years? and some fans think the coronavirus is a conspiracy against Lazio. I don't say this to be funny, but to say: Each social network functions in its own way." He was on his feet again and roaming past a row of glass walled offices. At one point he stuck his head into an office where Ana Pastore y Piontti, a physicist and research associate, was working on one of the problems du jour: school closings, analyzed state by state and region by region. Health officials across the country are grappling with whether to close local schools which ones, how soon, and for how long. Her project, like many others at the institute, uses census data, which reveals the composition of nearly every American household: the number of adults and children, and their ages. From a single household, a large map can be constructed. First, the connections between mom, dad, son and daughter. Added next are dad's connections at the shop, mom's at an office, and the children's at their respective schools. The analysis might determine that, say, a 12 year old boy living in central Redmond, Wash., near Seattle, will come into regular contact with his parents, his sister, and an average of 20.5 fellow students at his local middle school. Repeating the process with nearby households generates a dense digital map of interconnections over an entire community. On Dr. Pastore y Piontti's computer monitor, it resembles a complex electrical circuit, with multicolored wires and cables to and from packed hubs of interaction. "Think of it like tracing all regular interactions in the video game SimCity," she said. To this map, she adds still more connections, incorporating data on travel in and out of that community by air, train or bus (if such information is available). The final result, which she calls a "contact matrix," looks like a rough heat map a colored slide showing who is most likely to interact with whom, by age. From this she subtracts out of all the school interactions, revealing an estimate of how many fewer interactions and potential new infections would occur by closing certain schools. "Each country, each state, can be very different, depending on the patterns of interaction and compositions of households," Dr. Pastore y Piontti said. "And then there is the question of what is most effective: a week of closing, or two weeks, or closed until next school year." Dr. Vespignani had disappeared back into his own office with a pair of senior analysts. They were huddled around a speakerphone, running through the latest modeling changes with an outside researcher. The lab is part of a consortium that advises the C.D.C., and fields continual calls from infectious disease mapping operations around the world. The conversation and consulting are nonstop, because the institute must navigate the limitations inherent to all predictive modeling. One challenge is that important venues of disease progression cannot all be anticipated: cruise ships, for example. Another is factoring in random events say, an infected person who suddenly decides that now is the moment to take a dream trip to Spain. "It may seem like a small thing at the time, but after the fact you say, 'Oh yeah, that was hugely important,'" said Duncan Watts, a computer and information scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. "How do you handle these unexpected factors?" Finally, as people become more informed about the coronavirus, their behavior will change, sometimes drastically and en masse. "A good analogy is a storm," said Dr. Steven Riley, a professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial College London, which has done modeling for decades. "You can forecast a bad storm in a particular place, and people will take out an umbrella and put on a coat. Well, the impact is less for those people but has no effect on the storm. With infectious diseases, people's precautions like social distancing do change the trajectory of the disease, and it's very hard to predict or model that." By now Dr. Vespignani, in motion again, had cornered a visiting colleague, Mauricio Santillana, director of the Machine Intelligence Research Lab at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Santillana works to understand how the behavior of individuals changes from day to day in the midst of a pandemic. For insight, he draws on a vast array of variables, including mentions of certain words "fever," "pneumonia," "coronavirus" in online searches and social media comments. Together, he and Dr. Vespignani are trying to work out how to best incorporate this continuously updated analysis into the travel and geographical models used at the institute. "We can look, for example, at when X number of people are searching for 'fever' online, there were Y number of people who ended up in the hospital," Dr. Santillana said. "We can then use that kind of day to day data to continually update these social network models." All of this, in raw computational terms, is just the beginning of the campaign. No single predictive model is enough; the Vespignani lab, and their colleagues around the world, run millions of simulations regularly, to help gauge which outcomes are the most likely in a world that changes daily. Google has granted him free space in the cloud to do so, because the in house computing power is not nearly fast enough.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The Techlash Comes to Milan. So Does the Coronavirus Fear. MILAN The last days of Milan Fashion Week took place as cases of the coronavirus crept closer and news reports came that at least two people had died in nearby cities. Though there were temperature checks at the airport a uniformed man with an electronic thermometer greeted people disembarking from London apparently it wasn't enough. Schools and public spaces were ordered closed. But not the shows! Though a cough nearby could often pause conversation, the shows would (and did) go on. At least until the very end. Then Giorgio Armani, given the theoretic honor of being the closer, announced he would unveil his collection "behind closed doors. The decision was taken to safeguard the well being of all his invited guests by not having them attend crowded spaces." Instead, it would be held in his empty theater, and streamed live. Through a screen (or phone), it was possible to see the empty Armani theater, a facsimile of a reflecting pool with nodding lotus blossoms at its core. Out flowed models wearing iterations of Armani classics in black velvet and flowers etched on silk in pink and blue; languorous silhouettes and strains of "Swan Lake;" cavalry epaulets, watery moire and tufts of new leaf marabou and a finale of red, black and blue sequined gowns with pyramid shoulders and traditional knotted black tassels, all gowns taken, according to the news release, "from the Giorgio Armani Prive Spring/Summer 2009 and 2019 collections, which were specifically inspired by China." After the controversy that Mr. Armani caused earlier in the week, when he said during a news conference with Italian journalists after his Emporio Armani show that women were "regularly 'raped' by designers" because they were pushed to submit to trends and wear clothes that were overly sexual and inappropriate for their age, body or mind set (he didn't exactly apologize afterward, though he did make a statement saying he wished had used another word), the ghost show made for a strange, subdued ending to a relatively subdued set of collections. Sex is off the agenda. Even at Versace, the brand that went viral last season with Jennifer Lopez live and leaving little to the imagination in jungle print, Donatella Versace was singing the praises of sensuality that is "almost restrained, sketched and never shouted" in her show notes. Everything is relative, so that actually meant (for both men and women; increasingly the dual gender shows are not about gender fluidity but one for him, one for her) big 1980s shoulders and belted jackets; zebra stripes and supersonic florals; metallic pinstripes and black leather; slashed slip dresses held together by chunky gold staples and chain mail glam. Still, it's a sign of the times: Familiarity can be a refuge, even if it feels a little stale. "I need to return to my culture," said the shoe designer Giuseppe Zanotti during his presentation, looking longingly at one of the delicate court shoes with a tuft of feathers and horsehair at the ankle on display, rather than one of his sneakers, which he called a monster of his own creation (though he still had a lot of them; needs must). He was tired, since he had woken up early to do a series of live streams for his employees, editors and influencers in China, who hadn't been able to make it to Milan. "I killed my sensibility," he said mournfully. Francesco Risso, waxing philosophic at the end of his Marni show, echoed the same idea. "Behind each object is a hand, but is it the hand of time or the time of the hand?" he said, referring to a collection which had been like nothing so much as a D.I.Y. trip down the rabbit hole to the warrior queendom of Zog (Mr. Risso took his bow in a white rabbit mask that encased his entire head; the atelier had made it for him the night before). Even molten gold and silver got collaged in, framing holes in the fabric like melting portals to a recycled world. Make do and mend never looked so good. Tactility is staging a return especially among the founding families of Milanese fashion. At Salvatore Ferragamo, Paul Andrew played with plush shearling and foliage embroidered chunky cashmere and trompe l'oeil corseted tweeds. At Missoni, Angela Missoni sent out geometric knit bathrobe coats and cardigans like a hug for the urban professional (also ribbed Lurex polo dresses over matching leggings).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 8 p.m. on CNN and Univision. Oh, how the world has changed since the last Democratic debate on Feb. 25. That night saw a crowded stage. Seven candidates vied to make their voices heard before Super Tuesday, and Senator Bernie Sanders was still the projected front runner. Now two candidates remain, Sanders and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And the nation is scrambling to contain the spread of the coronavirus, which is why this debate, originally planned for Phoenix, has been moved to Washington to be filmed in a studio with no audience. Biden has been endorsed by several former candidates and politicians, while Sanders has vowed to power through, despite recent losses in several states. On Sunday, they likely will attack President Trump's handling of the health crisis, and Sanders is expected to challenge Biden on his policies and ability to defeat the president. BLACK MONDAY 10 p.m. on Showtime. This comedy series about the stock market crash of 1987 is darkly resonant after Wall Street's fall this week, its worst since then. The second season chronicles the fallout of the crash. Mo (Don Cheadle) is on the run after being framed for murder while his former colleagues (played by Regina Hall and Andrew Rannells) carry on with their conniving ways.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Many critics of the piece's publication think otherwise. The paper's editors' note said the senator's Op Ed didn't meet The Times's editorial standards. To which one might ask: Would the paper have stood by the article if Cotton had made a better case for sending in troops, with stronger legal arguments and a nicer tone? Or were the piece's supposed flaws a pretext for achieving the politically desired result by a paper that lost its nerve in the face of a staff revolt? A second criticism is that the paper could have examined Cotton's views without giving him an unmediated platform; that his proposal should have been evaluated by the news department, not published uncritically in the Opinion pages; and that his arguments went beyond the moral pale. But the value of Cotton's Op Ed doesn't lie in its goodness or rightness. It lies in the fact that Cotton is a leading spokesman for a major current of public opinion. To suggest our readers should not have the chance to examine his opinions for themselves is to patronize them. To say they should look up his opinions elsewhere say, his Twitter feed is to betray our responsibility as a newspaper of record. And to claim that his argument is too repugnant for publication is to write off half of America a remarkable about face for a paper that, after 2016, fretted that it was out of touch with the country we live in. The most serious criticism is that publication of the piece puts black lives at risk, including members of the Times staff. That's a vital consideration, especially now, and one about which no responsible publisher can be indifferent. No one can look away from the deaths of black Americans at the hands of the police, and the overall rise in reported hate crimes in recent years. But as important as it is to try to keep people safe against genuine threats, it is not the duty of the paper to make people feel safe by refusing to publish a dismaying Op Ed. Even if one concedes that Cotton's call to send in the troops poses potential risks, it poses those risks whether his call appears in these pages or not. To know Cotton's views is, if nothing else, to be better armed against them. The same goes for any other type of knowledge, however unpleasant: Having more of it is always a source of strength a belief that lies at the core of our profession.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Instead of trying out the first date stuff with Ms. Ashford, he has looked to Shakespeare's language. "The emotionality of it really gets me and makes it really easy," he said. "When you have these beautiful speeches about how devoted I am to the beauty of your eyes and all, I could almost do it to a rock." "I'll be your rock, baby," Ms. Ashford said, unoffended. For her part, she is grateful that she's had weeks of rehearsal with Mr. Hernandez. She spent several years on the Showtime series "Masters of Sex," where, she said, actors would often introduce themselves in the morning and by afternoon "we'd see them having a tryst without any clothes on except for a sock." "So we are really lucky here," she added. While Ms. Grant and Mr. Beltran began to practice their kisses early on, the better to establish the intimacy between a longtime couple like Hermia and Lysander, Ms. Ashford made Mr. Hernandez wait until a full run through to try out the kiss between Helena and Demetrius. "I've been waiting to get down with him maybe my whole life," Ms. Ashford said, speaking for her character, "so it made sense to just sort of wait. It's a whopper of a kiss." Kissing is a reminder of how strange and funny it is that actors' bodies have to substitute for the bodies of their characters. It's maybe even funnier for Ms. Ashford, whose real life husband, Joe Tapper, whom she thinks of when a scene needs "more crackle," is also in "Midsummer," playing one of the Rude Mechanicals. (He, too, is a little in love with Mr. Hernandez, Ms. Ashford said teasingly. "He is astounded by your physique, as we all are," she said.) But the actors are clear about drawing distinctions between performance and life. Ms. Grant believes in "really healthy, strong boundaries," she said, and as Mr. Hernandez put it: "This is literally my job. I went to school for it. I'm not skeezing on anybody. It is in the text." No carnal appetite here. And yet they have to make audiences feel otherwise, which means substitutions and tricks and what ifs to sell what Mr. Hernandez calls "unadulterated, family friendly passion." At the end of the play, which culminates in that triple wedding, Mr. Beltran, who is unmarried, thinks about "what it would be like to have this moment." In that scene Mr. Hernandez, also unmarried, feels "really like beautifully nervous, and awkward and wonderful," he said. "Playing pretend, you get a second of the real emotion."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Shayla Nastasi had just reached the end of a two and a half year relationship when she joined the dating website OkCupid in 2015. "I went online basically for compliments," said Ms. Nastasi, 31. "When you first start, all of a sudden you get a lot of people messaging you nice things. It's a good way to kind of get your ego back." Her intent was to bask in the digital glow of her OkCupid admirers, though stopping short of accepting requests for real life connection. But only two weeks into her ego reinflation exercise she received a compliment from Steven Sze that caused her to rethink her no dates policy. In posting the Tifa shot, she had unwittingly sent up a smoke signal to a kindred spirit: "I wanted to show that I was actually a real live nerd," said Ms. Nastasi, who is the associate manager of book conservation at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He got the alert. "I consider myself a pretty nerdy guy," Mr. Sze said. Ms. Nastasi grew up in New Castle, Del., and Pennsville, N.J., Mr. Sze is from Worthington, Ohio. Both landed in New York to start careers Ms. Nastasi after finishing college at the University of Delaware in 2011 and Mr. Sze after graduating from Ohio State University in 2009. Ms. Nastasi went to work in the Bronx for AmeriCorps, sometimes referred to as the domestic Peace Corps, to help with local hunger issues. Mr. Sze, 32, a senior designer at Richard Meier and Partners in Manhattan, had been accepted into Parsons School of Design on a path to becoming an architect, a title for which he is still earning his license. Mr. Sze, who describes himself as deeply introverted as well as nerdy, pieced together as an undergraduate that architecture suited his personality. "I've always had an engineer's mind set but also the creative artist's mind set," he said. "Architecture seemed like a way of melding those things." Ms. Nastasi, by contrast, was not entirely sure what she wanted her professional life to look like, but she knew it would have to satisfy her appetite for frequent and meaningful change. "I like to try new things, and I like to go big," she said. That explains her shift from AmeriCorps to her stint as an event manager for Saucy by Nature, a catering company in Brooklyn, and eventually to the Thomas J. Watson Library. There she acts as a sort of air traffic controller for rare and damaged books, ensuring they are properly tagged and labeled after being repaired and recirculated. Over cocktails at the Shanty in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in February 2015, "every half hour we were like, 'Are you still having fun? You can bail anytime you want,'" Ms. Nastasi said. "I probably did most of the questioning. Because there's nothing worse than going on a first date and not feeling it, but not knowing how to end it." Mr. Sze understood the impulse. "I'm not the most forthcoming or talkative person," he said. "But I felt the same. I wanted to be sure she was enjoying herself." One cocktail at the Shanty turned into several before they moved on to Burnside, a bar closer to Mr. Sze's apartment in Williamsburg. "The date lasted hours and hours," Ms. Nastasi said. Topics of conversation included video games and their love of cats Ms. Nastasi has two and Mr. Sze one. When Mr. Sze finally walked Ms. Nastasi to the G train for her commute home to Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, neither was sure how to express their elation over how the night had gone. "We kind of didn't know how to part ways," Mr. Sze said. "So we just sort of said, 'We're so awkward,' and ran away from each other," Ms. Nastasi said. For her, the mutual acknowledgment of social uncertainty was comforting. "I felt like, Wow, we navigate the world in the same way." Within 24 hours, they were making plans for their next date, at El Almacen, an Argentine steakhouse. Both were too nervous to concentrate on the menu, so they ended up with plates heaped with meat, not realizing they were supposed to order side dishes. But food, by then, was beside the point. In the few days since she had met Mr. Sze, Ms. Nastasi found she couldn't stop smiling. "It was that heady first stage of love I couldn't wait to see him," she said. By the end of their second date, which ended with the kiss they were too shy to lean into days earlier, she knew she wanted to commit to him for life. That kind of certainty came easier to Ms. Nastasi than to Mr. Sze. While she had been in several committed relationships, Mr. Sze had never had a serious girlfriend. "He might have brought home a girl from high school once," recalled his older brother, Kevin Sze. "But that's about it." For someone who wasn't used to negotiating the contours of romance, though, Mr. Sze was quick to accept the role of boyfriend. After the steakhouse date, they saw each other daily, biking the 10 minutes between Williamsburg and Bed Stuy for dates and the occasional home cooked meal, including one that Ms. Nastasi recalls for its thoughtfulness. "He wanted to make me breakfast, but he didn't know what kind of pancakes I liked so he bought both chocolate chips and blueberries," she said. "We just wanted to be with each other all the time, and be with each other's cats." His cat, Macky, is female; hers, Orion and Oolie, are both males. By the end of 2015, Mr. Sze had traveled to Delaware to meet Ms. Nastasi's family, including her brothers, Nico Nastasi and Jesse Hassler; her parents, Billi Jo Moran and Nicola Nastasi, who divorced when she was a toddler; and her stepmother, Christine Nastasi, the mother of her 11 year old sister, Ana. Ms. Nastasi had also met Mr. Sze's parents, Irene and Cedric Sze, who still live in Worthington, as well as his brothers, Kevin and Brian Sze. Mr. Sze also remained patient and quietly attentive. In the summer of 2016, when the couple moved to a new place in Bed Stuy, he soothed Macky into her new blended cat family with Orion and Oolie. "And he never complained about the longer commute from Bed Stuy," Ms. Nastasi said. He also was careful to uphold new traditions they were establishing as a couple, like celebrating their anniversary on Super Bowl Sunday. "We don't have any special feelings about the Super Bowl, but if you go to a restaurant that day with no TV, you get really good service," Ms. Nastasi said. On Feb. 4, 2018, Mr. Sze planned for an anniversary dinner at the restaurant Casa Publica, then drinks at the Wythe Hotel. Months before, he had recruited Ms. Nastasi's friend Carolyn Cleveland to accompany him on an engagement ring shopping mission. "I needed Carolyn because I went alone at first, and when the person at the jewelry store asked what I needed help with I couldn't get the words out of my mouth," Mr. Sze said. With Ms. Cleveland's help, he eventually bought a rose gold three diamond ring at Catbird, a Williamsburg boutique. Before the Super Bowl Sunday anniversary date, he tucked the ring in his pocket. "I was like, 'Nerd!,'" Ms. Nastasi said upon hearing the "Friends" reference. But by the time he uttered the words, "Will you marry me?" she was overcome and in tears. "I screamed, 'Yes!' And honestly the rest of it is a blur. I just remember Steve pointing out how beautiful the rain looked in the streetlights." March 31 was another rainy day, as 70 friends and family members gathered at Threes at Franklin and Kent, a Greenpoint, Brooklyn, brewery, for Ms. Nastasi and Mr. Sze's wedding. After greeting each guest near the bar, Ms. Nastasi and Mr. Sze slipped into a private room while their officiant, Sarah Royal, a Universal Life minister, hustled the crowd into a side room outfitted with a few chairs for family; most guests stood. Ms. Nastasi, in a three piece ivory dress from BHLDN that she said she chose for its elegant, whimsical look, walked down a makeshift aisle with her father. Mr. Sze, who preceded her in a dusty blue brushed wool suit custom made at Brooklyn Tailors, was accompanied by both his parents, one on each arm. Three bridesmaids and three groomsmen, including Ms. Cleveland and Kevin Sze, were awaiting them. After an introduction by Ms. Royal and readings by friends first a selection from David Levithan's novel "Every Day," and then the Margaret Atwood poem "Habitation" Mr. Sze and Ms. Nastasi read vows they wrote themselves. Mr. Sze started by saying, "I have never been great with words." But after a few pauses for tears, he convinced the room otherwise. "Whether we're at the top of a mountain or three seasons deep into a Netflix marathon, I will be at your side," he said, closing with "I love you and I like you." Ms. Nastasi, who also fought tears, said, "You love me and our cats with intensity and fullness. And I know you will bring that to everything we endeavor." Ms. Royal advised the couple to "collect all the good moments like Pokemon," before she pronounced them married. And then came the afternoon's only hint that Mr. Sze and Ms. Nastasi might, in fact, share a nerdy tendency: Before they recessed down the aisle, they performed an elaborate secret handshake, complete with finger wiggles.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A branch of Lotte Mart, a South Korean retailer, in Jakarta, Indonesia, a nation that has had an increase in consumer spending. BEKASI, Indonesia When Marcos A. Purty arrived here in 2011 as the chief of General Motors' Indonesian operations, he found a mothballed auto plant. Today, that plant is humming. About 700 people work in the plant, 16 miles east of Jakarta, compared with about 30 just 18 months ago. And next month, G.M. will start delivering its first Indonesian built vehicle in years, the Chevrolet Spin. Auto sales are surging in Indonesia up 17.8 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier rewarding G.M. for the 150 million it recently invested in the country. Other big multinational companies are racing to invest in factories and other operations to cash in on rising consumer demand in Indonesia, Southeast Asia's biggest economy and most populous nation, with an estimated 251 million people. While China and India have far larger economies, investment has slowed or declined. China said last week that foreign direct investment had risen an anemic 1.44 percent in the first quarter, to 29.9 billion. In India, the figure fell 6.3 percent to 3.95 billion in the first two months of the year, the most recent data available, according to India's Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. Despite investors' concerns about an unpredictable regulatory environment, a high level of corruption, inadequate infrastructure and rising labor costs, the money is gushing into Indonesia. The government reported Monday that foreign direct investment rose 27 percent in the first quarter to a record 65.5 trillion rupiah, or nearly 7 billion. Indonesia has been on a roll since it emerged virtually untouched from the 2008 financial crisis. In 2009, it joined the Group of 20 large economies. It won its first investment grade credit ratings in more than a decade in late 2011 and early 2012, and its gross domestic product has expanded at a steady rate of more than 6 percent for the last three years. While overseas capital has long flowed into the resource rich country's mining, oil and natural gas sectors, many of today's new foreign investors are focusing on the Indonesian consumer. With its large population and a young labor force, Indonesia is in the midst of a consumer spending boom that analysts say could continue for years. Last month, the Boston Consulting Group projected that middle class and affluent consumers in Indonesia would double to 141 million by 2020 more than the entire population of Thailand. 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. While Asian conglomerates from Japan, Singapore and South Korea remain the top foreign investors, American and European companies are rushing in like never before. For example, in November the cosmetics giant L'Oreal opened its biggest factory in the world in West Java Province. A decade ago, the last of Subway's 10 franchised restaurants in Indonesia closed, but now the group is returning, said Stefan Grbovac, an area development manager for Subway in Singapore. He declined to provide details on local franchise partners or future store openings but he said the decision to come back to the country had been easy. "Just look at this country all of our competitors are here," Mr. Grbovac said, including American franchises like Burger King, KFC and McDonald's. "We're definitely coming." As for G.M., it sold only 5,600 imported Chevrolets in Indonesia last year, accounting for 0.5 percent of the market. But G.M., the largest American carmaker, sees huge opportunities in reconstructing and expanding the 1.2 million square foot factory complex in Bekasi, that was shut in 2006. The investment equals "a huge vote of confidence, not only in Indonesia but the structure of the country, the economic growth in the country," Mr. Purty said. "We just don't throw money around. We've had some pretty traumatic experiences in our life." Still, the challenges for foreign investors trying to do business in Indonesia are formidable. It can take 80 days to get a business license. In a global survey of the ease of doing business compiled by the World Bank, Indonesia ranked 128 out of 185 economies this year, a drop of 13 places from 2010. Transparency International ranked Indonesia 118 out of 176 countries in its most recent corruption perception index. "Indonesia is punching below its weight as a big country," said Andrew White, the managing director at the American Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia. "Indonesia is growing by 6 percent, but it should be growing by 10 percent." In an effort to reduce red tape, the Indonesian Investment Coordinating Board is cutting by half the number of documents foreign companies need to apply for a business license. It has installed online and real time tracking of applications to further attract global brand names. One such company is Apple, which was granted a business license for manufacturing or retail even though it has yet to decide whether to invest in Indonesia, said M. Chatib Basri, whose job as board chairman is to attract foreign investment. Mr. Basri said his pitch to foreign chief executives has been pretty straightforward, though hardly glowing: Asia in general, and Indonesia in particular, look far better than most regions right now. "Indonesia is the least unattractive country in the world," Mr. Basri said. "Even though they have to deal with the problems of bureaucracy and infrastructure, the returns are higher than if you invest in Europe and the U.S. now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
"We know the path ahead needs to be navigated carefully and deliberately," Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, said Tuesday at the opening of a company conference in Mountain View, Calif. "We feel a deep sense of responsibility to get this right." MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. Google's annual conference for software developers is usually a celebration of technology, an event that highlights how tech advancements no matter how mundane are good for the world. But in a year when some of its most popular products have been used to propagate misinformation, spread conspiracy theories and meddle with elections, Google struck a more measured tone on Tuesday. Speaking at this year's Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, the company's chief executive, said advancements in artificial intelligence had pushed Google to be more reflective about its responsibilities. "There are very real and important questions being raised about the impact of these advances, and the role they will play in our lives," Mr. Pichai said during his keynote speech. "We know the path ahead needs to be navigated carefully and deliberately. We feel a deep sense of responsibility to get this right." Google did not dwell on those headaches, however. In front of an enthusiastic crowd at an outdoor amphitheater near its Mountain View headquarters, the internet giant fell back on a familiar message: Artificial intelligence will change the world. Mr. Pichai said artificial intelligence had uncovered breakthroughs in health care that humans would not have spotted. An artificial intelligence program running on Google's so called machine learning software that helps diagnose eye disease from a retina image found that the same photo could be used to identify cardiovascular risk. It is the type of meaningful breakthrough that Google executives love to promote, but it has little to do with Google's core web products or the way it makes money. But even those services are getting an artificially intelligent makeover. The company demonstrated how its Google Assistant computer software is now capable of calling a person at a hair salon or a restaurant to make a reservation. Google said artificial intelligence had allowed the computer's voice to sound more human complete with "uhs" and natural pauses, as well as logical follow up questions so the person at the other end does not know that he or she is speaking to a computer. Improvements in A.I. have allowed Google's computer assistant to have different voices and accents, including the ability later this year to have the singer John Legend tell you the day's weather. The company also demonstrated a new artificially intelligent feature in Gmail, called Smart Compose, that starts to suggest complete sentences in email as you type. Google said this would help users complete emails more quickly with fewer spelling and grammar mistakes. It plans to add this feature over the next few weeks. But one of its most significant A.I. breakthroughs will never be seen by consumers. Google said it would roll out a new processing chip to power many of its machine learning programs. A.I. programs require a great deal of computing power, and custom made chips housed inside data centers to handle this data crunch have fueled an arms race among the tech industry's biggest companies. Google said its new chip would be eight times more powerful than the chip it introduced last year. Mark Hung, a research vice president at the research firm Gartner, said the conference demonstrated how much Google relied on A.I. to make its products stand out. "Almost everything Google is announcing now is A.I. related," he said. "Google has a lead on artificial intelligence over many of its competitors, and it's going to use that as a weapon to advance their products forward." In keeping with a theme of a more responsible Google, the company also introduced features aimed at addressing how technology is burrowing deeper into our lives sometimes in negative ways. Google unveiled a series of "digital well being" updates in the next version of its Android smartphone software. They include a timer that allows a person to limit time spent on certain apps each day and a Do Not Disturb feature that silences phone calls and notifications, and that can be turned on by placing the smartphone screen face down on a table. The company is also trying to encourage good manners with its Google Assistant. The new "pretty please" feature, which encourages children to use "please" when asking for assistance, aims to address the concern that children are learning to speak impolitely because they are talking to more digital assistants.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Don't save your tax refund check spend it on travel. That is the message some tour operators, cruise lines and hotels want to get across this year, and with Tax Day approaching on April 18, they're offering tax themed trips and stays. Most are priced below 3,000, the amount of the average tax refund in 2017, as of early March, according to the Internal Revenue Service. The South African Tourism office in the United States has created a tax related travel initiative of nine trips to entice aspiring travelers to visit the country. All cost about 3,000 or less and include accommodations and some meals and activities; most include airfare. Each trip is from a different tour operator SmarTours, for example, has a six night package that includes a stay in Cape Town and a safari in Kruger National Park. From 1,799 a person. And Travel Discounters has a six night itinerary that includes stays in Johannesburg and the Karongwe Game Reserve, where guests go on daily game drives. From 2,199 a person. Bangu Masisi, the president of South African Tourism in North America, said the tax season was an ideal opportunity to show that a trip to South Africa is within reach. "Most people think that a vacation to South Africa is out of their budget, but these trips prove that it's more affordable than they may imagine," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Talia Suskauer, left, a member of the "Be More Chill" cast, greets fans after Tuesday's performance at the Pershing Square Signature Center. "Be More Chill," an energetic sci fi musical set in the anxious halls of a high school, is coming to Broadway, propelled not by a presold megabrand or raves from critics, but a surge of social media. Producers are betting that Broadway, increasingly dominated by movie adaptations, jukebox musicals and plays starring celebrities, has room for a no name show whose early evangelists have been adolescents converted to fandom by streaming the cast album online. Encouraged by the success of a current Off Broadway production, which sold out its run before the first performance, the producers announced Wednesday that they would open on Broadway in March at the 900 seat Lyceum Theater. The show, directed by Stephen Brackett, features a pop rock score by Joe Iconis and a book by Joe Tracz. Broadway is a risky business about three quarters of all productions fail, and many a show with a strong tailwind has crashed. But angsty adolescents are hot these days, as evidenced by "Dear Evan Hansen," "Mean Girls" and even "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child." Mr. Goehring said he had raised the "Be More Chill" capitalization costs up to 9.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in just a few days. "Be More Chill," adapted from a young adult novel by Ned Vizzini, is about a high school student who seeks to boost his popularity by swallowing a Japanese pill that turns out to be a computer chip that functions as a de facto life coach. The central characters, as in much popular culture about high school, are teenagers who feel socially ill at ease, and the universality of that experience appears to account for much of the show's popularity. Its breakout song, "Michael in the Bathroom," is about a boy who feels so marginalized that he shuts himself away during a Halloween party. "Even though the story is pretty nuts and there is this crazy sci fi element, it really is a celebration of misfits and geeks and people who feel like they don't quite belong, and actual young people relate to the characters," said Mr. Iconis, who wrote the show's music and lyrics. Mr. Iconis, a favorite on the city's cabaret scene, enjoyed a flash of success writing songs for the television series "Smash," but has yet to have a commercially successful musical, and "Be More Chill" will be his Broadway debut. (His most popular song, by the way, is titled "Broadway, Here I Come!" but it's darker than that title might suggest.) "Be More Chill" had a production in 2015 at New Jersey's Two River Theater, which commissioned the show, but after an unenthusiastic New York Times review, Mr. Iconis thought its journey was over. "It just kind of fizzled there the audiences were loving it so much, but we didn't get the review that a show like that needs to have a life, and we didn't have a commercial producer or a famous person attached, so I felt like that was the end, and it was a huge bummer," he said. But then Two River and Ghostlight Records agreed to make a cast album. The release, in the fall of 2015, was unremarkable. Yet in 2017, the creative team and stars began getting an unusual number of Twitter notifications and Instagram tags for no apparent reason. Mr. Tracz, the book writer, said people even started emailing him to ask questions about the characters. "We started to see these fanimatic, homegrown videos of 'Michael in the Bathroom,' and these Tumblr and Reddit pages were getting a lot of traction, and the streaming numbers were going up substantially," said Kurt Deutsch, the founder and president of Ghostlight Records, using the word "fanimatic" to describe animated storyboards created by fans. "It was completely organic we don't have tons of marketing dollars to make this happen. It just grew to become a viral sensation." The cast album, discovered and shared online, has now been streamed more than 170 million times worldwide, making it among the most streamed theatrical cast albums. Mr. Goehring, the director of the theater arts program at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, had not seen the Two River production and was unaware of the show's growing online fan base, but he was an admirer of Mr. Iconis's work and decided to direct a college version of the show. When fans started to fly in to see it, he snapped up the commercial rights. That, in turn, led to this summer's Off Broadway production, in a rented theater at the Pershing Square Signature Center, which runs until Sept. 30. Again, the Times review was unenthusiastic, but the crowds have been raucous. Most days, 1,500 people enter a digital lottery for two to four last minute seats, and a one week extension sold out in six hours. Among those who saw the show this summer: Robert Wankel, the president of the Shubert Organization, which then offered the producers the Lyceum on Broadway. Mr. Wankel said he had been struck by the youthfulness of the show's fan base, a sharp difference from the usual Broadway audience. "This has truly been created by social media, which is fantastic," he said. "Social media these days, I don't have to tell you, can make or break something, and in this particular case, they're loving it." So now the show's creative team is discussing tweaks as they prepare for what they are thinking of as "Be More Chill: 3.0" Broadway. "The fact that we've gotten here because actual human beings love the show is truly remarkable," Mr. Iconis said. "It gives me faith."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
BRUSSELS The commission's proposal would also ban cigarettes containing large quantities of flavorings including menthol and vanilla, restrict the sale of slimmer cigarettes and maintain a ban in most of the European Union on a form of chewing tobacco called snus. The proposals still are less strict than in Australia, where a prohibition on logos and colorful designs went into effect this month. But the proposed ban on slim and super slim cigarettes that are marketed to young women "is a positive development and a world first," said the Smoke Free Partnership, a European organization that promotes tobacco control and research. Tonio Borg, the E.U. commissioner for health and consumer policy, said the overall goal of the so called Tobacco Products Directive was to make smoking less attractive and to discourage young people from tobacco consumption. "Consumers must not be cheated," Mr. Borg said. "Tobacco products should look and taste like tobacco products, and this proposal ensures that attractive packaging and flavorings are not used as a marketing strategy." But Unitab, a European association of tobacco growers, said regulators had declared "total war" on their industry. The increased restrictions on branding would make price the deciding factor in tobacco sales; that in turn would favor suppliers from countries with lower production costs and put thousands of jobs in Europe at risk, the association said. Written health warnings already must cover about 40 percent of a cigarette pack in the Union, although some countries also use pictorial warnings. In the future, Mr. Borg would like pictorial warnings to be mandatory, and for the warnings to cover three quarters of the front and back of each pack of cigarettes, and half of each side. E.U. officials conceded that the entire top and bottom sides of cigarette packs sold in Europe still could be used for branding under Mr. Borg's proposals. Member states could opt to require plain packaging, however. The directive also would require that smokeless electronic cigarettes providing more than a certain amount of nicotine should be available only in outlets like pharmacies. National or Europe wide "test panels" would determine what quantities of flavoring like menthol should be banned, they said. Much of the interest in the legislation in recent months had focused on apparent attempts to influence its wording. Mr. Borg's predecessor, John Dalli, resigned in October after the commission concluded that he had probably known about an attempt by a lobbyist to solicit a multimillion dollar payoff in exchange for easing the ban on snus. The product can be sold only in Sweden, where some people consider it a safer alternative to smoking. Mr. Dalli denied the allegations and said he was forced to resign under pressure from Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission. Mr. Dalli also said his ouster had jeopardized chances for the revised directive to be passed before the current term of the European Parliament, which must approve the legislation, expires in 2014. Mr. Borg suggested Wednesday that the law still could be adopted before the Parliament's term expires, and go into force in 2015 or 2016. But the Smoke Free Partnership warned that lobbying still could water down the proposals on labeling and packaging, as well as the ban on flavors and slim cigarettes. Governments and members of the European Parliament "are likely to face attempts by the tobacco industry to further block, weaken and delay this important legislation," said Florence Berteletti Kemp, the director of the partnership.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Why Icicles Look the Way They Do The reason Stephen Morris studies icicles is simple. They are common and beautiful, and they make you wonder. And they are now documented online in all their chilly, wet glory in the Icicle Atlas. Dr. Morris, a University of Toronto professor who created the atlas, is a physicist who probes the subtle underpinnings of the kinds of obvious physical phenomena people see every day. "Being Canadian," he said, "I see a lot of icicles." But not enough. And not created in controlled conditions. He recruited a graduate student, Antony Chen, now an instructor at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary. Dr. Chen produced "the most elaborate study of icicle morphology ever done," Dr. Morris said. The atlas also includes images and movies that Dr. Morris said might interest artists and do it yourself types who want to use a 3 D printer to make icicle ornaments, as well as people who just miss winter. A multimedia art installation is already planned for May in Toronto. Raymond Goldstein, of the University of Cambridge, said the availability of all the data "is a fantastic service to the scientific community." He and Dr. Morris had worked on stalactites together, and then they turned to icicles. Dr. Goldstein, then at the University of Arizona, joined with colleagues there to come up with a "platonic theory" of how the ideal icicle shape is created. Growing icicles in a refrigerated lab had its frustrations. "At first they grew into really strange shapes," he said. Without air flow, icicles grow multiple legs. So the researchers had to blow air to get them to form as single upside down cones. Then they rotated the growing icicles to get images of all sides. Some scientists had suggested that the ripples on the surface of icicles had to do with surface tension. Dr. Chen and Dr. Morris found out that this wasn't the cause. When they used distilled water, no ripples formed. When they used tap water or added even tiny amounts of salt, the ripples appeared. They do not yet understand the physics of the ripple formations. But they have uncovered some strange facts. The spacing of the ripples doesn't seem to vary with different levels of impurities. "The ripples have a universal wavelength of exactly one centimeter, no matter what you do," Dr. Morris said. "That's the real mystery." Although information gleaned from studying the formation of icicles could someday help with the management of ice formation or the building of better house gutters, for that matter Dr. Morris said he was motivated more by curiosity than practical applications. "I'm kind of wired to see patterns," Dr. Morris said. "I'm just amazed at these forms." He said that while many people found beauty in flowers or other natural biological phenomena, he found it in "rocks and bumpy roads and icicles." The icicle atlas includes about 237,000 pictures. Each icicle was photographed from eight different points of view, at 10 frames per second as it grew. Data on water, air flow and temperature are also available for each icicle, along with computer analyses of the shapes as the icicles grew. Nonetheless, Dr. Morris said, "I'm not completely, grimly serious about this project." It's partly just visual curiosity, and a delight in the images themselves, some of which he submits to art exhibitions. He likes to think that his pursuits capture the spirit of 19th century natural philosophers, who did not separate beauty, form, mathematics and science into different domains. Classical physics is experiencing a renaissance, he said, "because of the tools that we have now to analyze and look at systems where there are huge amounts of data."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
What comes after "The Good Fight"? Douglas What indeed! One of the things that makes "The Good Fight" so singular is its sense of imagination and ambition, a willingness to take big swings; there just aren't that many shows that are going for it in the same way. I'm going to assume you started with "The Good Wife," from which "The Good Fight" was spun off, but I encourage you to watch it again. Bingeing "Good Wife," which I had previously watched week to week, highlighted how subtle and specific the show is all these small changes and tiny shifts that I only noticed up close, like how Will and Diane prioritize or don't prioritize the other's approval via quick glances in a meeting. For another lawyer show that strikes that classy but horny balance, try "The Split," a British drama about a family of divorce lawyers who go through breakups and shake ups themselves. The show is serious and meaty, with maybe less flair than "The Good Fight" but a little more intimacy. (Season 1 is streaming on Hulu.) If you want something equally polished and simmering with rage, but less about the law and more about business, watch "Succession." (It's streaming on HBO.) Brian Cox stars as the patriarch of a media empire, and his adult children are smart and vicious and hungrily unloved. Characters on "The Good Fight" and "Succession" are obsessed with reputation, though that obsession leads them down different paths, and they understand their legacies in different ways is work your family, or is your family work? In a different vein, there's "Goliath," starring Billy Bob Thornton as a craggy genius lawyer. The show loves seediness and revels in the dirtbag aspects of California, but it has robust legal maneuvers and terrifically vivid characters, though I'll warn you that it loses some potency as the seasons go on. "The Good Fight" and "Goliath" have a similar stylish confidence, the swagger of grown up shows for grown up people. A friend and I (she's in Seattle; I'm in Los Angeles) have had a weekly Netflix viewing party going for about two months now where we chat online while watching something. We tend to gravitate toward darker true crime/cult documentary material ("Wild Wild Country," "The Staircase," "Filthy Rich," "Holy Hell," "Fyre") as the commentary flows pretty naturally with those. In a deviation from our usual genre, we just started "The Last Dance." Any suggestions on series or documentaries that would make for a good viewing party? Amani If you're part of an ESPN household, watch "O.J.: Made in America," which is among the best TV documentaries of all time fascinating and deep, true crime but not lurid. You can also find tremendous joy and options from the "30 for 30" library, which are all sports documentaries and are all at least decent; some are truly excellent. In terms of chitchat potential, start with "9.79 ," which is about the men's 100 meter finals at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Prepare to use the OMG eyes emoji a lot as you learn about steroid use and the various open secrets of the era. For something with more of the cult y "wow, everyone sure is tolerating a lot of bad behavior from the leader of this organization, who is also exerting tremendous control over everyone's lives, and at some point will everyone realize the purported benefits of participating in this group are small compared to the day in day out emotional and physical distress of enduring it?" vibe, watch the first two seasons of the junior college football documentary series "Last Chance U." (The other three seasons are great, too, but have a different energy. They're all on Netflix.) If you want more stories of people buying into a collective delusion, watch "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley" (streaming on HBO and HBO Max), about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos. Come for the juicy, terrible behavior, stay for the animation that reminds you, "Oh yeah, that invention would also leave you with a big old box of blood in your house." After depleting most of what appeals to me from American produced content ... I fled to Australia (virtually, of course). I absolutely loved "Offspring." I also devoured "Rosehaven," basically a slow show about a small hamlet populated by quirky characters. Getting to know them through the seasons was as satisfying as picking leaves off an artichoke to get to the heart. Alas, now I am adrift in an empty sea. Anything to match these? Michelle I also adore "Rosehaven" (on Sundance), and it reminds me a lot of "Please Like Me," a similarly darling, small scale series, this one about a young gay man trying to start his adult life. (It's streaming on Hulu.) If you like plucky Australian heroines, watch "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" (on Acorn), a detective show set in Melbourne in the 1920s. The costumes alone are reason to watch, and for light procedurals and endearing romance, this is tough to beat. But if you prefer your procedurals set in the present day, watch "My Life Is Murder," starring Lucy Lawless. (That's on Acorn.) It reminds me of "Psych" sort of, and has that kind of affection for its characters. For something more grounded, try "Tangle," a domestic suburban drama from 2009. (Season 1 is streaming on Amazon Prime Video). If you like shows where backyard barbecues go awry, and couples gripe to each other for a good long time before bed, watch this. Series' availability on streaming platforms is subject to change, and varies by country. Send in your questions to watching nytimes.com. Questions are edited for length and clarity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The Ryans patriarch Brent (Nicolas Cage), mom Kendall (Selma Blair), snotty girl teen Carly (Anne Winters) and obnoxious boy tween Josh (Zackary Arthur) are the sort of self hating American family who were in cinematic fashion at a time when Hollywood was conducting experiments in satire along the lines of "American Beauty" and "Very Bad Things." That time was the 1990s, so the ostensible edginess here is pretty stale. For instance, in an early scene, little Josh taunts the family's Asian housekeeper by referring to her as "Charlie," the derogatory nickname American soldiers called the Viet Cong, and get this! she gives back as good as she gets, crabbily shooting back, "I am Chinese. Chinese is not Charlie." Ugh. Anyway, "Mom and Dad" soon reveals its high concept: All the parents in its world go mad and try to start killing their kids. The writer and director Brian Taylor shies away from no possibility here, including a delivery room scene in which a woman begins crushing her newborn. As you can imagine, the homicidal frenzy gives Mr. Cage plenty of opportunity to go full him, which, in this case, doesn't yield as much fun as you might have hoped. Mr. Taylor was half of the directing team, with Mark Neveldine, responsible for some hilariously crass and irrational movies such as "Crank" and "Crank: High Voltage." I presume that Mr. Neveldine was the funny one of the duo, because absent his input, Mr. Taylor offers up nothing but glitchy editing and bad vibes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
I watched the dancer, Yasaray Rodriguez, seated on stage perfectly upright and immaculately dressed, listening to the accompanying guitar player. A vocalist began to cry out a song of pain or lost love folk melodies in harsh quarter tones, like a muezzin issuing a call to prayer at a mosque. The emotion in Ms. Rodriguez's face become more and more intense, the angst greater and greater, until it seemed to lift her off her chair. Finally, she began to dance, a series of increasingly complex palos, movements that involved sharp claps and stomps, intricate hand movements and acrobatic turns and seemed to play off the guitar. Watching flamenco for the first time in the performance hall at the Casa de la Guitarra in Seville was both exhausting and exhilarating. The volume and intensity led a child in the front row to clasp his hands tightly over his ears and close his eyes I might have done the same had I not been so enthralled. That show (17 euros, about 19) capped off just another day in Seville, the capital of the Andalusia region, where familiar rituals are anything but ordinary and demonstrate Sevillians' intense lust for life. I spent several such enjoyable days in Seville, taking in the city's rich history, consuming its wonderful food and never once worrying about putting stress on my bank account. If there's a city in Europe with better weather than Seville, I'd like to visit it. Its Mediterranean climate means hot, dry summers and rainy winters. Even in the dead of December and January, average high temperatures rarely dip below 60 degrees. I stayed with my friend Claudia, a native, and she credits the climate for the dynamic buzz of the city and its general aura of happiness. "It makes you feel different. Normally we are always out, in the streets," she said. "Every day you can pick up the phone and say, 'Want a beer?' And someone will want a beer with you, outside. It's not that we're always partying, or we're lazy we're not but every free moment, we have fun." It was tough to argue with that sentiment when I arrived on a sunny afternoon, driving with Claudia down Paseo de Palmeras and watching the tall, gently swaying palm trees pass us on either side. We continued on through Maria Luisa Park, the primary site of the Ibero American Exposition of 1929. The most famous of the structures created for that event may be the Plaza de Espana. The extremely lavish semicircular structure curves around a large open plaza and a series of canals and fountains. Murals constructed from brightly colored ceramic tiles, one for each province of Spain, line the plaza. When Claudia and I visited, the plaza was abuzz with activity from tourists and vendors hawking toys and soliciting boat rides in the canal. A walk through the adjacent gardens, lush and peaceful, is also recommended. Not everyone will be lucky enough to have a friend to stay with, of course. The Cool Sevilla Hotel, with a good central location and solid online reviews, has superior double rooms from 56 euros for select dates at the end of June. Those looking to save further can check out options on Airbnb, where private rooms go for less than 30 per night and entire apartments from around 50. Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, is particularly important in Seville it happened to be when I arrived, and while it made typical tourist activities somewhat difficult (many businesses are closed, and just crossing from one end of the city to another becomes outright impossible during certain times of day), I don't regret the decision at all. The various pasos, or processions, by the cofradias (religious brotherhoods) passing late into the night offered a fascinating glimpse into the traditions that are centuries old. Claudia was perusing a small booklet that looked like a bus schedule actually a timeline of the dozens of processions and their locations during Holy Week. (If you can't locate one of the free booklets, you can do what I did and look online. You can even download a phone app for iPhone and Android called iLlamador, which has route maps.) We walked briskly on narrow, stone streets that squeaked with dried wax from previous processions, remnants of the candles carried by the nazarenos in their pointy hooded robes (outfits that may shock American visitors, as they closely resemble those associated with the Ku Klux Klan). After hitting a blockade of people going down one street and unable to go farther, we doubled back and wound through a back alley to approach the parade from a different locale. The centerpiece of each procession is a large float intricately carved, beautifully decorated, about the size of a small automobile that depicts a scene from the gospels. The floats are also extremely heavy, and are carried by dozens of men, called costaleros, who rotate in and out during the course of the day. The processions all differ in character, some more joyous, some more solemn. A particularly beautiful one passed through the Plaza Cristo de Burgos one night, punctuated by a plaintive, piercing saeta, or unaccompanied song, performed by a singer from a nearby balcony. After a night of procession watching, packed together with thousands of other people, you work up an appetite. After one paso, well after midnight, we headed to Bodeguita Fabiola, a small restaurant where the alcohol and conversation spilled out the door and lit up the dark street. A savory portion of tortilla espanola (2.50 euros), a sort of fluffy egg and potato frittata, was perfect with a slathering of salmorejo, a creamy, tomato based puree. A plate of very sharp, almost spicy, aged sheep's milk cheese was another winner (5.50 euros). A piece of that cheese atop a small montadito of jamon iberico, Iberian ham sliced directly from a whole pig's leg atop the counter, is a perfect late night sandwich. Suffice it to say that most of my days were broken up by five or six small, wonderful meals acorn fed ham, pungent cheeses, perfectly briny olives and a cana (a small glass, less than half a liter) of beer. One morning I took in a late brunch at the Mercado Lonja del Barranco, a modern food court overlooking the Guadalquivir River, and enjoyed a powerfully saline, jet black arroz negro (8 euros), made with cuttlefish and squid ink, from the arroceria stall. Alongside a 2 euro glass of wine from Albero y Vino, it was fuel enough to propel me across the river to the Triana neighborhood, passing by the Castillo de San Jorge, a former headquarters for the Spanish Inquisition. A couple of hours later, I found myself back on the other side of the river, wandering into the Orfeo Cafe Bar for a pringa montadito that resembled a pulled pork sandwich (2.50 euros) and a cana of local favorite Cruzcampo beer (1.50 euros). Another day, I went to Cafe Bar Las Teresas with Claudia and her father, another lifelong Sevillian, where we shared slices of fat specked pork sausage, a plate of ham and sheep's milk cheese, a pork and anchovy sandwich and three beers for a total of 15 euros. After checking out the gorgeous Hospital de los Venerables, a former priests' residence that dates to the 17th century (admission, 8 euros) and the surrounding neighborhood, what was once the Jewish quarter in medieval Seville, we found ourselves feeling peckish again. We went to another classic tapas bar, Casa Roman, and shared plates of bacalao frito (fried cod, 2.80 euros) and fresh tomatoes (4.80 euros). While I wish I could say I spent all my time in Seville eating and navigating around Holy Week processions, there were simply too many other things to do. The Alcazar of Seville is necessary viewing for all visitors a monumental palace built in the 10th century for a Muslim governor and still in use by the Spanish royal family. The Hall of Ambassadors is a particularly stunning room, and the palace's accompanying gardens, fragrant with orange trees and dotted with fountains, are as beautiful as any I've seen. Tickets are 9.50 euros and free for children under 17. They can be bought in advance on the website though expect to wait a good 20 to 30 minutes in line regardless. The Alcazar, along with the Archivo de Indias (Seville had a monopoly on trade with the West Indies for over 200 years) and the awe inspiring Seville Cathedral, make up the historical heart of the city. The cathedral, the largest Gothic building in Europe and one of the largest churches in the world, is worth at least a quick visit no matter how many European cathedrals you've visited (it has the tomb of Christopher Columbus, among other things). Admission is 9 euros, but I highly recommend investing in the rooftop tour for a mere 3 euros more, you get access to the inner workings of the structure and are allowed to climb up through its towers and along its gables. The views of the city are excellent. The hour plus tour is slightly on the long side but it was worth it, though I don't recommend it if you're claustrophobic or afraid of heights. "We don't need to invent anything new," Claudia told me when I first arrived in Seville. At that moment, I wasn't sure exactly what she meant, but by the time I left, I understood. Seville can exist in what seems like a self contained world because it wants for very little many of the people I encountered in Seville had lived there most of their lives. With great weather, centuries of history, art, inexpensive wine and excellent food, who would want to leave?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Joe Biden, then the U.S. vice president, with President Xi Jinping of China in California in 2012. Many Chinese liberals worry about Mr. Biden's recent election because he was at the center of the old U.S. foreign policy establishment for decades. For months, some of China's best known dissidents have served up a striking anomaly: While pushing for democracy and free speech at home, they have supported the re election of Donald Trump, a president who has disdained democratic norms in the United States, sometimes even mimicking China's leaders, for example by calling for political opponents to be locked up. Now that Joe Biden has defeated Mr. Trump, this paradox might seem to be of interest only to historians of Chinese thought. In fact, these Chinese liberal thinkers offer a stark warning about the potential direction of U.S. foreign policy and, more so still, the pitfalls facing American society. Many Chinese liberals have expressed enthusiasm for Mr. Trump for so demonstrably ignoring the conventional wisdom of diplomatic engagement with China, in particular the claims that more trade would soften China's authoritarian politics and that it is better to talk quietly behind closed doors than openly confront China over any disagreements. In some ways this position can be chalked up to the adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend": For some Chinese liberals, Mr. Trump's strident opposition to the Chinese Communist Party automatically made him seem like an ally. Now these thinkers and activists are worried because President elect Biden was at the center of the old U.S. foreign policy establishment for decades. As vice president, for example, Mr. Biden met President Xi Jinping of China on numerous occasions in the hope that what Mr. Biden calls "strategic empathy" could win Mr. Xi's support for U.S. positions but the tactic failed to curb China's growing ambitions in Asia. People like the Hong Kong based media tycoon Jimmy Lai think a return of the Washington consensus would be a mistake. A fervent supporter of the pro democracy movement in Hong Kong, Mr. Lai is also a staunch Trump supporter. "Biden will try to make progress through trade offs, but that hasn't worked in the past," Mr. Lai told me by phone recently. "Trump has succeeded by playing hardball." Mr. Lai pointed out, for example, that Mr. Trump had dramatically increased weapons sales to Taiwan, a self governing island off China's coast that China claims as its own, a move that could help deter an attack from the mainland. Past U.S. administrations had tiptoed around weapons sales for fear of angering Beijing, arguably weakening Taiwan's defenses in the process. Yet these diplomatic issues are secondary to what really interests many Chinese liberal intellectuals: the American culture wars, in which some see a reflection of the debates about the limits of free speech in China. Given how robust public discussion is in the United States, the comparison may seem overdrawn. But it speaks to the intensity with which many Chinese thinkers want Western liberal democracies to remain free. The issue of political correctness in particular fascinates them, with many seeing in it uncomfortable echoes of their own experiences in a society where speech is severely constrained. They perceive Mr. Trump as embodying the sort of no filter approach to free speech that they dream of, while viewing American liberalism as having strayed from its core values. Sun Liping, a leading Chinese sociologist, argued in an essay published last year on WeChat that while political correctness in America began as a way to avoid insulting people and to promote equality, it has helped turn a set of debatable beliefs into an edifice of near dogmas that immigration, free trade and globalization are unquestionably good; that minorities are almost all victims; that major countries are responsible for setting the world right. Nowadays, Mr. Sun wrote, political correctness is "a burden, a kind of shackle America has placed on itself, a kind of self inflicted bondage." Referring to the end of rigid Maoist ideology in the late 1970s, Mr. Sun added that "Trump's attack on political correctness has a similar significance to the attack on the rigid dogma of the past carried out by the campaign to liberate thought at the beginning of reform and opening period." Mr. Trump's defeat in this month's election has not lessened support from these Chinese liberals. The Tsinghua University sociologist Guo Yuhua recently retweeted a Trump tweet that predicted, "we will win," adding emojis of a clenched fist and two hands pressed together in thanks. Ms. Guo, a strong advocate for impoverished farmers and detained academics in China, praises Mr. Trump as a realist who didn't follow the "utopian" policies popular among some on the American left, such as income redistribution. A handful of Chinese liberals disagree that Mr. Trump is a fitting symbol for liberal beliefs. One is the historian Xu Jilin, who in a recent WeChat post called Mr. Trump's election in 2016 one of the four major examples of the rise of destructive populism over the past century. Another skeptic is the Peking University law professor Zhang Qianfan, who chides Chinese liberals for being so enamored of free market thinkers like Friedrich Hayek that they mistakenly believe any right wing U.S. politician is a defender of freedom. "This misunderstanding will not only cost us allies in the fight against totalitarianism, but has already created a confusion of values within the world of Chinese liberals, and may even change the very meaning of 'liberalism,'" Mr. Zhang wrote in a blog post last month, which was translated by the University of Montreal professor David Ownby on his "Reading the China Dream" website. "If Chinese 'liberalism' is opposed to equality, to 'one man, one vote,' to the separation of church and state and secularism, and to at least some freedoms (such as gay marriage) for religious reasons, and if they advocate a particular religious belief as a kind of national orthodoxy, then what's left of liberalism?" he added, referring to Chinese liberals. One answer is provided by the political scientist Yao Lin in an article for The Journal of Contemporary China earlier this year. Mr. Lin wrote that many Chinese liberal intellectuals are victims of what he calls "beaconism": an idolization of the United States that treats ideas from there as a guiding light to follow. One effect, Mr. Lin warned, is that even as these thinkers fight for human rights, they also reflect colonialist, racist attitudes. Some Chinese liberals sympathized with Mr. Trump's 2017 policy to stop Muslims from certain countries from entering the United States. In a 2018 discussion about Edmund Burke that appeared in the magazine Open Times, the Chinese constitutional scholar Gao Quanxi justified the immigration ban by arguing that it was meant to defend "the uniqueness of the American people" and oppose "the weakening of American society due to unrestrained pluralism." Mr. Biden's presidency is unlikely to dampen many Chinese liberals' support for American conservatism. Many criticize left leaning U.S. politicians such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Retweeting a video mash of Ms. Ocasio Cortez speaking with rhetorical flourishes, Ms. Guo commented, "it seems we've seen something like this before in China." She was alluding to the Cultural Revolution. These fierce debates among scholars point to China's febrile intellectual landscape. They also suggest that it may be easier for Washington to calibrate a new foreign policy toward Beijing than to engage with the people the Biden administration wants to help the most: China's dissidents and liberal intellectuals. Ian Johnson, a 2020 21 grantee of the National Endowment for the Humanities' Public Scholars program, is the author, most recently, of "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao." iandenisjohnson 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. 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Every day, for the past 14 years, Bruce Bennett has received packages filled with CDs. Sometimes a few at a time and sometimes in packs of hundreds, shiny old discs arrive at his CD Recycling Center of America in Salem, N.H., a 300 foot blue trailer tucked behind a commercial strip, to ascend to the CD afterlife. The CD recycling process requires Mr. Bennett, 55, to store a truckload, or approximately 44,000 pounds, of CDs in a warehouse before the discs can be granulated into raw polycarbonate plastic, resulting in a white and clear powdery material that glints and resembles large snowflake crystals stuck together. The material, which takes one million years to decompose in a landfill, can eventually be used to mold durable items for cars, home building materials and eyeglasses. But that's assuming anybody buys the raw material. The polycarbonate granules used to be sold mostly to China, where the United States sent the bulk of its recycling until 2018 before China restricted imports of mixed paper and most plastic. The price that China was willing to pay per pound of granulated polycarbonate began to dip in 2008, Mr. Bennett said, and by 2011 it had plummeted. Mr. Bennett did find polycarbonate buyers in India, but now, because of lockdowns caused by the pandemic, he doesn't break even. Still, as a self professed lifelong environmentalist he began to recycle CDs in 1988 because, as a CD manufacturer, he had to learn how to properly dispose of damaged batches Mr. Bennett is hopeful that CD recycling will catch on. "I realized that I know how to recycle this," Mr. Bennett said in an interview. "But I don't think the world knows." His team had started with the goal of making a disc capable of storing music longer than Beethoven's "Symphony No. 9," which is close to 70 minutes long. What resulted was something that could save "other digital media and essentially all software," he recalled. "Mechanical engineers who produced excellent gramophones became instantly obsolete," Mr. Immink said. CDs were less than half the size of 12 inch vinyls, and could rewind or skip forward at the press of a button, unlike tapes, which required winding. Consumers could also travel with their CDs, thanks to Sony's invention of the portable CD player in 1984. The sound quality was better, and discs could hold a lot more information than cassettes could. CDs became ubiquitous: In the 1990s, AOL sent them to potential internet subscribers. In the mid '90s, makers of video games began to shift away from cartridges and toward discs. By 2000, more than 900 million music CDs were sold, a record number that was never surpassed again, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Eminem, Destiny's Child and Britney Spears were all top sellers.) And then, just a year later, Apple released the first iPod, which allowed users to carry 1,000 CD quality songs in a six ounce device in their pocket. Compact discs began their shift from being innovative and covetable to clunky. This month brings another small blow to CDs as Sony and Microsoft are releasing the latest editions of the Playstation and the Xbox. Both come in two versions, one with a disc drive and one without; in both cases, the version with a disc drive costs more. Mr. Immink who now researches ways to store information in DNA said that he has no feelings about the fact that the CD is slowly phasing out of production and use. It's a cycle he understands. Just as he made the engineers of the gramophone obsolete, it is now his turn. Many organizations, like GreenDisk, provide drop boxes for castoff CDs and other outdated tech. David Beschen founded GreenDisk in 1992, after a stint marketing Microsoft products, and he still runs it. "I saw an opportunity to basically clean up some of the stuff I had been responsible for marketing," Mr. Beschen said. "All of this stuff was just being incinerated or buried." He ships the CDs accumulated from the tech drop boxes to the National Industries for the Blind, where they are sorted and ground into polycarbonate flakes. That raw plastic is then shipped to manufacturers to make plastic materials to sell, including spools for producing 3 D printing filament. The filament is then sent back to the N.I.B., where it is packaged to be sold to the federal government, Mr. Beschen said. (He said the government has used the 3 D filament for many things, including repairing broken parts on Humvees and nuclear missiles.) GreenDisk also works with companies including Warner Brothers, Disney and the Library of Congress to dispose of CDs, because GreenDisk will delete the information from them first. "Once a CD is in a trash dump, it can be published to the public domain and people can legally take that, sell it and re market it as well," Mr. Beschen said. Industries were burning millions of units of CDs to avoid that, he added. In a global sense, recycling CDs is not a big environmental priority right now, according to Judith Enck, a former E.P.A. regional administrator, who founded Beyond Plastics, an anti plastic project based at Bennington College in Vermont. "Plastic recycling has been an abysmal failure," she said, adding that the rate for recycling plastics in the United States has been significantly low. "That is an issue that definitely needs attention." "You look at other materials, like cardboard and glass and aluminum, and that's all included in curbside recycling programs because there are businesses that will buy all of that for a reliable market," Ms. Enck said. "There just aren't markets for this type of plastic." So, for now, old CDs languish in basement or attics, or just end up with other plastics in the trash. The AOL campaign, which at one point in the late 1990s had a budget of 750 million, was a huge moneymaker for AOL that brought millions of new users to the internet. Ms. Brandt said she thought that probably every other CD in existence is an AOL CD. (Mr. Bennett still receives AOL CDs to be recycled daily at his plant.) "I thought that the best way was for people to actually see it," Ms. Brandt said, of what AOL had to offer. She orchestrated the placement of CDs in magazines, college campuses, offices, bookstores and banks. At one point AOL was flash freezing CDs and packaging them with Omaha Steaks. She knows how crazy that sounds, and was thoughtful about the possible environmental impact of her marketing. But Ms. Brandt has no regrets. "It really is remarkable, and those things don't sound so remarkable now because it is all at our fingertips," she said, of the internet. At one point, an AOL chat room or instant message was cutting edge virtual gathering. The fact that virtual society is so much more advanced today makes it easy to forget how far we have come. "We drive around, but we don't have a sense of what it took for us to get to the first car," Ms. Brandt said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
John Singleton, the Oscar nominated director and screenwriter, died Monday after being removed from life support in the wake of what was reported to be a stroke. His death at only 51 feels like the passing of an artist interrupted. Though Singleton had focused more on producing and directing for television in recent years, the six films he made in his first decade of work (from 1991 2001), showcase a filmmaker of variety and intelligence, skilled at telling stories on canvases big and small, with an unerring eye for new talent. Here's where to watch them. Where to watch: Rent it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. Singleton's debut film burned with the kind of energy and intensity that only a first timer can produce the feeling that they may not get another shot, so they're making this one count. Singleton's heartfelt story of growing up in the Crenshaw section of Los Angeles netted him Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best director (he was both the youngest ever nominee in the latter category, and its first African American), and launched not only his career, but those of several cast members, including Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube, Angela Bassett, Morris Chestnut, Nia Long and Regina King. Our critic Janet Maslin praised Singleton for "saying something familiar with new dramatic force, and in ways that a wide and varied audience will understand." Where to watch: Rent it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube. Singleton's follow up retained his first film's setting and style, but broadened its narrative canvas, augmenting the mostly male dynamics of its predecessor to tell the story of Justice (Janet Jackson), a young poet trying to make her way in the world. The film's sky high expectations and muted reception led to the expected whispers of "sophomore slump," but freed of that atmosphere of heated expectation, "Poetic Justice" has much to recommend it: Singleton's dialogue and relationships are relaxed and naturalistic, his sense of time and place is again spot on (the picture was shot in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the bones of those South Central buildings make their way into the background) and he again displayed a sharp eye for casting, handing important roles to the likes of Jenifer Lewis, Q Tip, Khandi Alexander, and (most of all) Tupac Shakur, who generates warmth and sincerity as Justice's potential love interest.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
This week's case study in the anxieties of contemporary television: "Dead to Me," a new series on Netflix starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as widows who meet cute at a grief support group. Liz Feldman, who created the show, has been writing and performing comedy for more than half of her 41 years, and she's demonstrated some real flexibility. She was a writer for Ellen DeGeneres's talk show and for "Blue Collar TV," which starred red state favorites like Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. She wrote for conventional sitcoms like "2 Broke Girls" and "Hot in Cleveland" while hosting her own "gay mazing" YouTube series, "This Just Out," from her kitchen table. Nothing she had done before, though, resembled the kind of up to the minute streaming dramedy that "Dead to Me" wants to be. And while its 10 half hour episodes have a lot of the requisite look and feel the enervated, dolorous mood and rhythms; the mysteries within mysteries; the handsomely filmed Southern California locations the show harks back to Feldman's roots. At heart it's a traditional odd couple sitcom, albeit one that's heavy on situation and light on comedy. Applegate plays Jen, whose husband was killed by a hit and run driver, and Cardellini plays Judy, whose fiance died of a heart attack. Jen's angry and cynical and hard edged, Judy's rueful and apologetic and twee, and we know where that's going. Jen will toughen up Judy and Judy will soften up Jen, an exchange of services made easier by the unlikely twist of Judy's moving into Jen's guesthouse.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
For Islanders and Fans, There's No Place Like Home, or Home Most N.H.L. teams do not have to look up where they are playing their home games, but such is the transient nature of the Islanders this season. After 29 games of bouncing between Barclays Center in Brooklyn and Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., the team's quirky double home rink situation comes to an end, for now, after Saturday's 5 2 win over the Edmonton Oilers in Brooklyn. The Islanders' remaining 12 regular season home games will be at the Coliseum, the franchise's home from 1972 to 2015. It is close to its practice facility and most players' homes. "I never had a problem with Barclays Center, but the Coliseum is just home,'' Islanders forward Matt Martin said. "They were great to us in Brooklyn, but the Coliseum is where you get that true Islander experience." The disjointed season has not affected the team in the standings. After missing the playoffs the past two seasons, the Islanders (35 17 6) are surging under their new coach, Barry Trotz. They lead the Metropolitan Division ahead of the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Washington Capitals, the team Trotz coached last season. The Islanders announced Friday that the team and its fans may have to make their way back to Brooklyn in the playoffs. Should the Islanders reach the postseason, the first round of home games would be played at Nassau Coliseum, but subsequent rounds would be at Barclays Center because, according to a team statement, "Nassau Coliseum does not qualify as an N.H.L. major league facility." It remains unclear how long the Islanders will continue to split time between two arenas and, to a degree, two fan bases. In December 2017, the Islanders, with state officials, announced plans to build a new arena adjacent to Belmont Park Race Course. About a month later, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the team would play about half of its 41 home games at Nassau Coliseum until the new arena opens in 2021. This season, the Islanders will ultimately play 21 games in Uniondale; the N.H.L. is not expected to release next season's schedule until June. The Islanders have sold out six of their nine games in Uniondale so far, while Brooklyn games were usually at about 70 percent capacity . Attendance has suffered since the team moved to Brooklyn in 2015. This season, the Islanders are last in attendance, averaging a little less than 12,000 fans a game. But the differences in the two arenas go beyond numbers. Barclays Center, where in 2016 the Islanders won their only playoff series since 1993, was not built with a hockey rink in mind and has unusual sight lines. And most Long Island fans willing to drive to Nassau Coliseum will not often make the trek by train to Brooklyn, though the team's playing close to Manhattan has attracted some new fans. The return to the Coliseum has invigorated the fan base with the boisterous charm it had when the Islanders won the Stanley Cup four times in the 1980s. Fans are overjoyed to have the team back. The tradition of driving to Nassau Coliseum to tailgate and commiserate for hours before the opening face off has been restored. "I prayed they would come back to the Nassau Coliseum," said Annemarie Briskie of Wantagh. "I like the tailgating where everyone is wearing their Islander jerseys and having fun. It feels like family. If Belmont never gets built, so be it. As long as we're here. Brooklyn always felt like a stopgap." In this renaissance season, the Islanders have benefited from being home no matter the arena. Heading into Saturday's game, the Islanders were 6 1 2 this season on Long Island and 12 6 2 at Barclays Center. Forward Cal Clutterbuck, an Islander since 2013, said the two arena situation may be working to the team's advantage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
For nearly two weeks thousands of protesters have marched in cities and towns across the United States to denounce police brutality and systemic racism. In New York, people marched until police officers with cans of pepper spray advanced into the crowd, followed by officers swinging batons. The sounds of screaming and chanting mixed with that of bodies hitting the pavement and zip ties being tightened around wrists. For a moment, the demonstration would subside. But then they would return, more forcefully than before. "I fought to be free for 17 years of my life," said Hammond Ells, an Army veteran. "We export freedom overseas. Why don't we have it at home?" On Tuesday, just south of Union Square, a figure emerged from the crowd and implored the police officers to understand the pain he had experienced as a black man. He then asked them repeatedly to kneel in solidarity. Without a word, an officer took a knee. Then another. The protester cried.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Colin Kaepernick acknowledging cheers after his 49ers beat the Rams at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 2016, the season he started kneeling during the pregame national anthem and his last in the N.F.L. So a compelling two year run of American political and cultural theater comes to a deeply unsatisfying conclusion. Colin Kaepernick, a once brilliant young quarterback, chose to take a knee for his beliefs and endured apparent blackballing by the most powerful sports league in North America. It would be churlish to criticize this man for taking an unspecified financial settlement and signing a nondisclosure agreement with the National Football League after he had accused the league's teams of colluding to keep him out. He sacrificed for his beliefs and with a dignified use of free speech, that grandest of American traditions, he came to personify a coming of political age across several sports. He persevered despite sprays of vitriol from this nation's president, Donald J. Trump, who in 2017 used the specter of this black man to stir resentments. "Wouldn't you love to see one of those N.F.L. owners, when someone disrespects our flag, to say: 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He's fired. He's fired!' " Trump told a crowd in Alabama. It was catnip for the vastly white crowds that roared in disgust over Kaepernick. It is galling that Kaepernick and his former teammate Eric Reid, who joined him in the protest and legal action, must remain mum about the corruptions of the industrial complex known as the N.F.L. The owners almost certainly conspired to blackball Kaepernick, ensuring that he would never throw another pass in the league. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. As he sought to sign on with a new team for the season after his protest began, and less than five years after he had taken the 49ers to the Super Bowl, owners came up with ever more pathetic excuses for refusing to sign a quarterback so swift and so strong of arm. Now he can say nothing about that travesty. It feels a bit like the Freedom Riders integrating a lunch counter and agreeing not to talk about it. I called Ira Glasser, a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union who is also a deep dyed sports fan. He resolutely declined to second guess Kaepernick for surveying the ruin of his career and probably taking a large chunk of money. Kaepernick did not burn a flag or even hold a proud fist aloft. It's a measure of the subtle nature of his protest that fans and sportswriters went three preseason games before they noticed that, oh yeah, Kaepernick was sitting out the national anthem. When they asked the young quarterback about it, he talked about police brutality and too many dead black Americans: "To me this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way." In the next game and thereafter, Kaepernick took a knee instead, at the suggestion of a military veteran. Yet the whirlwind of anger somehow gained in force. In the first weeks of that season, I flew to San Francisco to draw his measure. To step into the 49ers postgame locker room was to find a remarkably composed man with the support of many teammates. He walked out of the shower that night and slipped a form fitting shirt over a lithe, tattooed torso. Then he turned to a bristling array of microphones and cameras and calmly answered every question. Are you proud, a reporter asked him, of your role in stirring players around the N.F.L. several knelt or raised fists Sunday during the various anthems to protest? Kaepernick, a new arrival to the world of political activism, shook his head. No airs, man, no airs. "No, no," he said. "This movement wasn't for me. As I've researched these things, as I've seen more and more, it's not right."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
AMIRAM HAYARDENY'S father was a robust man with a booming voice until he developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Slowly, he lost his ability to communicate and, as the disease laid waste to his body, his ability to move. Mr. Hayardeny's father died in 2013. A year later, Mr. Hayardeny said, a cousin his age died suddenly, leaving behind her three young children and husband. "She never made 52," he said. "I'll be 53 next week." The events shocked Mr. Hayardeny, a technologist who lives in Seattle, into thinking about his own mortality and how he wanted to prepare a legacy for his children. He is certainly not the first man in his 50s to get his affairs in order after losing relatives or friends. But instead of turning to the traditional estate planning strategies wills, trusts and beneficiary designation forms that lawyers and financial planners help clients pull together Mr. Hayardeny is using a new system called SafeBeyond that keeps written and video wishes safe and private until its users are gone or until a set time. SafeBeyond, which likens itself to Dropbox for the hereafter, is one of several similar cloud based systems. "I'm not particularly afraid of death or shy about discussing it," Mr. Hayardeny said. "The way the site is put together, it kind of gives you some kind of comfort. It puts people at ease with the concept of you being gone." Because these services are relatively new, though, they could become problematic to heirs if not used correctly, lawyers and planners said. And the nature of SafeBeyond and similar services online and private except to those explicitly given access also raises broader issues about digital assets in an estate. "With digital assets, who is entitled to have access is a big issue," said Sharon Klein, managing director of family office services and wealth strategies at Wilmington Trust. First, a little background about SafeBeyond. It was started by Moran Zur, whose father died when Mr. Zur was 25 and who nearly lost his wife, who was found to have advanced brain cancer in 2012. "My father was a man of advice," he said. "You start thinking about things that I didn't get to ask him." When his wife's health improved, Mr. Zur raised money for the site. He focused it not on conveying a last message but on being a bank of many emotions and advice for different times in a person's life. "I look at it as emotional life insurance," he said. "We allow you to decide how you'll be remembered." To that end, he said people need to designate a trustee for what they record or write and store in SafeBeyond. That person will have the responsibility of tracking down family and friends whose email addresses and phone numbers may have changed by the time they are supposed to receive the messages. The site is free for now. It promises to update the technology so that today's iPhone video doesn't become tomorrow's Super 8 home movie when someone receives it in the future. In the event the company fails, Mr. Zur said, it will work to find people to let them download what they stored there. His competitors include Incubate, which was co founded by Michael McCluney, who lost his father when he was young and said he wished his father could have recorded advice for important moments in his life, like turning 16 or graduating from college. "Something like that would have been incredible to have gotten," he said. Last Thanksgiving, as the site was about to go online, he recorded his grandmother sending people holiday wishes. She died this year, and he said a half dozen people would be receiving the message from her. "People recognize that this is an emotional experience we want to give," he said. While the services are intended to help people stay in their loved ones' lives after they're gone, more than a few people questioned whether such a message might be disturbing to the recipient. "Some families will cherish a recording of a loved one and others are going to think it's creepy," said Ms. Klein, who pointed to Yahoo Ending, a service started in Japan last year to send emails to loved ones when you die and deal with your social media assets. Mr. Hayardeny said he had not taken video of himself for fear it would be upsetting to his children. "My father, he was a very handsome and tall man and had his hair to the very last day," he said. "He lost a lot of his looks, and it was terrible to watch. That was the memory I have of him." Mr. Hayardeny is leaving only written messages for his family. And that may be for the best if he has an estate that his children might fight over. John Dadakis, a partner at Holland Knight, said videotaping anything meant for heirs when you're sick could have unintended consequences, particularly if not everyone is happy with their inheritance. "If a lawyer is not part of that situation and this person is going off half baked and now all of a sudden this video surfaces in a probate contest, you have a lawyer standing there with his tongue hanging out," Mr. Dadakis said. "Here you have this evidence that this person is half baked and it could cause problem in any probate context." The purpose of SafeBeyond and other such apps is to give people a method to record personal messages whenever they want. But as with other forms of technology, the law of unintended consequences reigns, which is what worries trust and estate lawyers. Mr. Dadakis, who was involved in the protracted legal dispute around the estate of Huguette Clark, the reclusive copper heiress who died with an estimated 300 million fortune and no direct heirs, said he could see a benefit to a video of someone lucidly telling heirs what is to be done. But, he said, there were more downsides than upsides to it. Lawyers prefer that people use a letter of wishes to lay out more emotional messages not appropriate for a will. "People don't want to update their will 12 times a year, so they say my personal effects are to be divided as I've described in my letter of wishes," Ms. Klein said. She said these letters were also good for leaving messages about life goals to children and grandchildren, which is what SafeBeyond aims to do. Advisers said that people should be more focused on existing digital assets from social media accounts to banking and brokerage accounts and who will have access to them when the person who set them up is dead. Terms of service on many social media accounts state that the account will be closed when someone dies, and it may be difficult to find passwords to bank accounts. In cases when all statements are electronic, it may be hard to know if the account even exists. "Let your executor know what your valuable digital assets are, how you want them handled, provide a mechanism to get access to your passwords and advise them of services you're using that would prohibit them from getting access," said Russ Haft, chief digital executor at Mylennium, a company that consults with families about their digital assets. If they don't, he said, their heirs may have to go to court to get access to their digital life. Mr. Zur says his site is a way to help him communicate to his son. "If I die, my son will come and search the Internet and find all kinds of things about me," he said. "Now, I'm giving people the tool of how you will be remembered by your loved ones."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
PHONES in the offices of Morris Habitat for Humanity have been ringing off the hook lately as town officials throughout Morris County have been seeking its help in spending money. The same has been true for other nonprofit housing groups in New Jersey, as local governments scramble to use up affordable housing funds before they are forfeited to the state. "Knowing they're going to lose the money, towns are calling us up and saying: 'We've got money we need to put toward affordable housing. How can you help?' " said Blair Schleicher Bravo, the executive director of Morris Habitat for Humanity. She has recently been contacted by 10 of the county's 39 municipalities, including the town of Randolph, which granted the organization 1.3 million to build 25 affordable homes. They are up against a deadline set in 2008, when the latest phase of the Fair Housing Act went into effect, giving local governments four years to spend the funds. As of June 5, a total of 161.3 million had yet to be spent at the local level, according to the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, the group that has been overseeing the state's affordable housing program in lieu of the Council on Affordable Housing which since last year has been an abolition target of Gov. Chris Christie. (His effort was thwarted by an appeals court in March, and this month the State Supreme Court refused to hear the appealed case, though other court challenges are still pending.) The money must either be spent or committed by July 17. But housing advocates say the affordable housing program has been in such disarray in recent years that it has been difficult to determine what projects qualify and what constitutes a commitment. According to them, the rules were never spelled out, and the housing council, with its uncertain status, was neither reviewing nor approving projects. "It's as if the governor's office set them up to fail," said Staci Berger, the director of policy and advocacy for the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey, a coalition of housing advocates. "They never set the definitions, then they said, 'You never spent the money.' And now they're saying, 'We're going to take the money.' " Only recently, as the deadline looms, have proposals been getting approved by the Department of Community Affairs but with language that indicates decisions may not be final, said Adam M. Gordon, a staff attorney with the Fair Share Housing Center in Cherry Hill. Such uncertainty has made some towns hesitant to sign on to projects. "Towns don't know what their obligation is," said Michael Cerra, an analyst for the New Jersey State League of Municipalities. "So if they make a significant commitment of money without knowing if this is going to meet their obligation, they're taking a risk." Legislation is currently being considered to extend the deadline by two years. Unless it passes, however, the state will make good on the seizure plan, and the money will be deposited in the New Jersey Affordable Housing Trust Fund, to be "allocated pursuant to the law," according to a written statement from a representative for the Department of Community Affairs. Skeptics say that the state programs these funds are destined for are already budgeted, and that this money will be used to help balance the state budget. "This is possibly the most blatant move by the state to wrest control, and money, from municipalities," said Francis Womack III, the mayor of North Brunswick. "Anything the state can get their hands on, they will." Affordable housing has been a battleground in New Jersey since 1975, when the State Supreme Court found local zoning patterns unconstitutional and obligated towns to increase their quotas of such housing. Commonly referred to as the Mount Laurel decision, the ruling generated a program that has over the years sought to overcome impediments to this goal, establishing the housing council as the enforcement agency, and creating a way for towns to raise money for new housing through the collection of fees from local builders. Those funds are the ones that the state now facing budget challenges of its own is threatening to seize, citing the four year deadline established in 2008. In early June, North Brunswick still had 7.8 million to spend, according to the state. Mayor Womack says the town is contributing 5.25 million to the 10.25 million purchase of a 183 unit apartment complex that has been wracked with crime and mismanagement. A private development company paid the balance, and will provide an additional 16 million to renovate the apartments, which, under an agreement with the town, will be deed restricted as affordable housing. Princeton Borough recently bought three foreclosed or vacant homes and deeded them to Princeton Community Housing to turn into affordable housing units. Hamilton Township has signed on with HomeFront, a social services agency that develops and manages low income housing projects throughout Mercer County, to add 12 affordable housing units to an ongoing project there. "We went knocking on doors of towns telling them, 'Come see us, we'll spend your money,' " said Celia Bernstein, Homefront's chief financial officer. "And luckily, that kind of worked." With 11.7 million, Marlboro in Monmouth County has the largest quantity of unspent money. Noting that it "is not anti affordable housing," Mayor Jon Hornik said an acceptable plan had been submitted to the state. "By July 17," he said, "we'll have all our trust funds allocated, plus we're contemplating a lawsuit against the state because we view it as an unfair taking."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
LOS ANGELES Dotting the Sunset Strip are signs of a time gone by: colorful billboards for movies that were supposed to come out during the summertime blockbuster season, only to be pushed back to September and beyond. The Covid 19 pandemic, which closed theaters around the world, wreaked havoc on the premiere dates of would be megahits like "Tenet" and "Wonder Woman 1984," as well as other films with more modest box office ambitions, like "Unhinged," a gritty action film starring Russell Crowe. But unlike dozens of other movies, "Unhinged" will indeed have a theatrical release in the United States this summer, signaling a return to business for Hollywood. The original plan was for a July 1 premiere. The date was pushed back twice more before the film was scheduled to appear on Friday in more than 1,800 theaters in the United States and Canada, a release that came about largely because of the stubbornness of Mark Gill, an independent film producer who was hellbent on getting it to the big screen. "Unhinged" will be the largest new offering in North American theaters this weekend, when 26 percent of theaters in the United States and Canada are scheduled to be open, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners, a trade association. Another new film, the teen drama "Words on Bathroom Walls," from Roadside Attractions, is the second biggest release this weekend, appearing on some 900 screens. While other Hollywood executives decided they had no choice but to reschedule, Mr. Gill made a priority of beating the competition to theaters. "There is no question that the 'first mover' advantage has been a big deal," he said. He believes in the film a throwback to the thrillers of decades ago that sent Charles Bronson into scenery trampling mode but said he could not predict how many moviegoers would show up this weekend, when theaters across the country have heightened safety restrictions. "It's all bananas," Mr. Gill said. "That's the crazy thing. I have no idea." "Unhinged" has already been released outside the United States. In Mr. Crowe's home country, Australia, it was the No. 1 box office attraction three weeks in a row, earning 1.7 million, and it has performed well in Germany and Britain. Last weekend, it started its run in Canada, appearing in nearly 300 theaters. Even before he decided to push for a theatrical release during a pandemic, Mr. Gill showed a contrarian streak among his Hollywood peers. While other producers worked around the rise of Netflix and other streaming platforms, he started a production house, Solstice Studios, devoted to making medium budget, action packed movies with big screen audiences in mind. 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. "For 10 years people have been telling me those movies are dead," Mr. Gill said. "And for 10 years, I've been doing just fine with them." He was a producer of an old fashioned box office success, "The Hitman's Bodyguard," a 2017 thriller starring Ryan Reynolds. It cost 43 million to make and earned 176 million worldwide. And he pulled off the same trick with the "Olympus Has Fallen" franchise, a trio of action movies starring Gerard Butler. Each had a production budget under 50 million and earned at least 140 million in theaters. "Unhinged," which shows Mr. Crowe going on a tear after a road rage incident, is in the same mold. The subject matter may not sound like escapist fare, but Mr. Gill said his research suggested that audiences were hungry for this kind of thing. "It's ridiculous how strong our tracking is," he said. "I thought people would want lollipops and rainbows. Turns out I was wrong." When more than 1,000 are dying from the coronavirus each day in the United States, a high turnout for "Unhinged" may bode well for the much anticipated "Tenet." Warner Bros., the studio behind that film, has settled on a Sept. 3 release date in the United States and a Sept. 4 premiere in China after pushing back the premiere date repeatedly throughout the summer. Mr. Gill started Solstice Studios nearly two years ago with the market strategist Vincent Bruzzese and two fellow producers, Andrew Gunn and Guy Botham. The plan was simple: Create audience friendly movies for anywhere between 30 million and 80 million, a range all but abandoned by major studios intent on the next mega blockbuster, and get those films into theaters. Because they were going against the trend toward streaming, they had a hard time raising funds. Mr. Gill said he had courted more than 600 potential patrons to find two who were willing to put up significant money: Ingenious Media, a division of a London private equity fund, and a private investor. "I heard plenty of times that I was crazy," Mr. Gill said. He said he tried to persuade filmmakers to work with his studio rather than take their projects to digital companies by telling them their work will not be lost in the streaming shuffle. He said his pitch went something like this: "There are a few movies on the streamers that get enormous attention, an advertising budget and so on. Can you name five of them? Nobody ever can. Netflix made 82 movies last year. I hope you are one of the three or five that people can name." Before the pandemic, Hollywood had already shifted much of its focus toward streaming and home viewing, a trend that has only accelerated in recent months. With theaters shuttered, movies that were headed to the big screen, including "Trolls: World Tour" and "The King of Staten Island," instead premiered on streaming platforms. In another sign of the shift, Universal Pictures reached an agreement last month with the world's largest theater chain, AMC Entertainment, to make its films available for streaming three weeks after their theatrical debuts. Under the old system, movies typically played exclusively in theaters 90 days.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Frustrated that you cannot watch the latest British dramas or soap operas on television? Soon, there will be an app for that. The BBC and its rival, ITV, will join forces early next year to offer a video on demand service that will allow fans of some of the broadcasters' favorite shows to watch them on smartphones, televisions or mobile devices in the United States. The service to be called BritBox will be available by March. It will offer a combination of new British shows, including the crime drama "New Blood," to American audiences, as well as a collection of recently aired television programs and other shows like "Upstairs Downstairs" and "Fawlty Towers" from the broadcasters' back catalogs. "The BBC and ITV are the two most prolific content producers and broadcasters in British television," Ann Sarnoff, president of BBC Worldwide North America, said in a statement on Tuesday when the service was announced. "This will be a must have service for lovers of British television."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In the new season of "Tracey Ullman's Show" on HBO, Ms. Ullman slaps on wigs, paint, powder, cheek pads and an upsetting array of false teeth. A comedian and a devilishly gifted impressionist, she scampers from Angela Merkel to Jerry Hall, Brigitte Macron to a shoplifting, poop flinging Judi Dench. But on a recent Friday afternoon, Ms. Ullman, dressed in a bright orange Raquel Allegra linen suit and black chunky sneakers ("my Yeezys," she said) was playing only herself. And she needed some bras. "Now here's the decision," she said, screwing up her face for emphasis. "How many?" Ms. Ullman, who lives in London these days, was in Manhattan to introduce her show at the Tribeca TV Festival and to chat onstage with Meryl Streep. (They starred in the 1985 film "Plenty.") With a few hours to spare, she had stopped into Shen New York, a bitsy store on Lexington Avenue near East 72nd Street, just a few blocks from the apartment she sold last year because they wouldn't let her have pets. She has been buying Shen's seamless knit bras for nearly 20 years, especially its classic cami bra. "This is the one you like," said the store's owner, Carol Shen, pulling out a skimpier design. "That's the sexier, tinier one," Ms. Ullman said. "That when I'm feeling. ..." She completed the sentenced with a wicked grin. Ms. Shen mentioned that Judi Dench, whom Ms. Ullman impersonates so absolutely that it feels like black magic, is another longtime customer. "She buys pants from us," Ms. Shen said. Unlike Ms. Ullman's naughty Judi, the real life Judi does not shoplift, at least as far as Ms. Shen knows. "This is a very Judi shop," Ms. Ullman said approvingly. She asked for five of the cami bras in black, three in gray, two in taupe. "They're lovely," she said. "And they wash so well." "This is like an infomercial" Ms. Shen said, delighted. Ms. Ullman, who can transform her whole self as effortlessly as another woman might switch out her earrings, took the cue, shifting into an American announcer's voice: "But that's not all! Mrs. Shen here says if you buy a bra today, we're going to give you the pants absolutely free, as worn by Judi Dench." Ms. Shen was beside herself. Ms. Ullman, back in her own voice, offered to treat everyone in the shop to a bra. "Bras all around," she said. (There were a few giggles, but no takers.) She added six pairs of underwear to her order ("Stocking up") and put it all on the company card. "I wear them during my work," she said. "I never take those off." Ms. Shen piled them into a shopping bag, and Ms. Ullman added, "Delicious little packets." "I'm going to treat myself to a new bra today," Ms. Ullman sang. Her errand completed, Ms. Ullman piled into the black chauffeured car that was waiting outside and sped uptown to Blue Tree, a Madison Avenue treasure chest stuffed with jewelry, accessories and cheerful kitsch. It's owned by Phoebe Cates, a longtime friend. "There's a great sense of humor with Phoebe's stuff," Ms. Ullman said. At Blue Tree, she greeted the saleswomen cheerfully ("Hello, girls" she said brightly) and admired some chunky Lucite handbags patterned in frogs and fish. She toyed with a gold karaoke microphone and then slipped inside a door beneath the stairs. "It's the kind of store where they let you use the bathroom," she said. Ivana Callahan, a saleswoman, said, "No they don't." But Ms. Ullman is an exception. When she returned, she showed pictures of her dog, Oscar, and of her son, Johnny McKeown, her date to the Emmys last month. Then she went upstairs to browse the clothes. She was drawn to a flowered fanny pack (being English she called it a "really trendy bum bag") and a matching belted dress. "I'm just a funny looking thing," she said. "I was never known for my looks so I never cared how men perceived me. I love fashion and I love clothes, but I never dressed to please a man." Ms. Ullman stayed for 30 minutes. She would have browsed longer, but there was just time to grab a bagel before her Tribeca TV Festival appearance, so she promised the saleswomen she'd come back tomorrow. She hopped back into the car for the one block drive to the Jewish Museum, which has a Russ Daughters branch in its basement. She ordered an orange juice and the classic board, as well as a snack for her driver. "Bras, Blue Tree, bagels," she said, alliteratively. Ms. Ullman, who has racked up a Golden Globe, a couple of Baftas and seven Emmy Awards, seemed slightly surprised to find herself still in show business after 40 years. "When I was 23, I thought I might give this all up and be a travel agent because it's not very dignified," she said. Her bagel arrived. She stuck her tongue through the hole. The HBO show sometimes tires her out, she said, "and Angela Merkel's voice comes out of Theresa May's mouth. I have to pace myself. It's like getting ready for an Olympic event." But she also said that working on the show feels restorative too. "I just like being other people all the time," she said. "I don't want to play myself. I don't want to be myself. I never have. It's not interesting to me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
From left, Michelle Dorrance, Josette Wiggan Freund, Melinda Sullivan and Jillian Meyers rehearsing "Until the Real Thing Comes Along (a letter to ourselves)," a new collaborative dance that is part of Ms. Dorrance's season at the Joyce. With her sharp eye for talent, the dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance has cooked up a tap dream team. Joining her in the premiere of the collaborative "Until the Real Thing Comes Along (a letter to ourselves)" are Jillian Meyers, Melinda Sullivan and Josette Wiggan Freund three singular and rhythmically brilliant dancers who are part of the traditional tap scene, but who also live in the commercial world. "Until the Real Thing" will showcase their different styles and varied experience. Collectively, they have covered some major dance ground. Touring with a major pop artist? That would be Ms. Meyers, who danced for Janet Jackson. Film work? Ms. Meyers was an assistant choreographer on "La La Land"; and Ms. Sullivan, a onetime finalist on "So You Think You Can Dance," performed in it. And what about the circus? Ms. Wiggan Freund has done that, dancing alongside Joseph, her equally talented sibling, in Cirque du Soleil's "Banana Shpeel." Ms. Meyers and Ms. Sullivan live in Los Angeles; Ms. Wiggan Freund resides in Tel Aviv with her husband and young daughter. Ms. Dorrance, the 38 year old MacArthur fellow, brought them to New York, where for the last two weeks they have been immersed in the creation of their new work. Set to music by Fats Waller, "Until the Real Thing" is part of Dorrance Dance's season at the Joyce Theater, through Dec. 31. Style Guide: How Do They Move? Ms. Wiggan Freund, 34, says she doesn't know if she has a specific style she pulls from many, including ballet, which is apparent in her effortless, elegant line. She started dancing at 12 with tap, continued with ballet and jazz, and then discovered West African dance in college at U.C.L.A. Later, she immersed herself in the Lindy Hop, a jazz dance form born in Harlem in the 1920s, which, along with tap, is her current focus. "I've just been trying to find ways to incorporate solo jazz movement into my dancing while I'm tap dancing so that it seems more seamless," she said. In "Until the Real Thing," which involves transformations into different characters there will be, for instance, a sad clown the collaborators are aiming for a similar merging of forms. "Everything didn't used to be separated," Ms. Dorrance said. "It was all social dance." Ms. Wiggan Freund added, "You sang, you 'Lindied,' you did a time step, and you played an instrument." But when the popularity of certain styles started to dissipate, specialists took them over. "Musicians only focused on the music," she said. "Tap dancers focused on tap. It's become very compartmentalized." Ms. Sullivan, 30, said her approach was rooted in theater. "I started learning about tap history and dancing as a musician," she said, "but I've always been influenced by musical theater and movie musicals. I'm drawn to incorporating that sort of theatricality with my tap training." And she's eclectic, counting Jason Samuels Smith, from the Broadway show "Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk," among her mentors. Ms. Dorrance remembers the first time she saw Ms. Sullivan dance. "She was a gangster just a hoofer, period," she said. "Like I wouldn't have even known that she had a theatrical leaning." As for Ms. Meyers, 32, who has worked in both the commercial and concert realms, she said that as a fan of all dance, she feels like "a big grab bag." In addition to touring with Ms. Jackson, she is a member of Peter Chu's contemporary dance company and she has recently started working with the clown and comedian Bill Irwin. "I just want to be able to do it all, so I try," she said with a laugh. Ms. Dorrance is tickled that people might be surprised to see Ms. Meyers tap dancing. "The huge gigantic commercial dance world is not going to expect it, and the tap dance community is going to be like wait she tap dances?" Ms. Dorrance said. "That's also cool." (Hannah Heller will fill in for Ms. Meyers, Dec. 28 31.) Of her guest artists, Ms. Dorrance said: "They could all do so many other things, but in my mind they live as honest and individual practitioners and voices of a particular vernacular era" of classic tap. "And that that's alive inside of their contemporary artist selves is unique for me." Ms Dorrance has lots of ideas about "Until the Real Thing" but she also just wanted to play with these dancers her equals in the studio. "The fact that we have a show is really a shame," she said. Meaning that for this group, the rehearsal process has been fulfilling enough. Ms. Sullivan summed up the studio experience in a word: heaven. "We don't get these opportunities that often," Ms. Wiggan Freund said. "A lot of the time you're hired, you learn the choreography and you go onstage, but this is a moment for us all to share, learn, grow and to be there for each other. It's inspiring." And there's something even more rare, in both the tap and commercial worlds: The collaborators are all women. "It's allows for a very specific perspective that's unfiltered by someone else's idea," Ms. Meyers said. "Usually, even if the choreographers's a female, the director's a male." This time they get final say as a group. "The gift of this for me is that I trust them in every direction," Ms. Dorrance said. "I trust them musically. I trust improvisational moments. And I trust each one of us to save something" meaning fix a mistake in real time "should a part be held together with dental floss."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
As Greece Nears a Big Debt Deal, Investors Now Fret That Portugal Will Ask for the Same MADRID Despite the best efforts of European politicians to place a quarantine fence around the Greek economy, the crisis there continues to plague Portugal. The authorities in Lisbon insist otherwise, but investors are predicting that Portugal will be next in line to impose losses on bondholders as it struggles to meet the terms of a 78 billion euro, or 103 billion, bailout agreement struck with international creditors last May. While a short term debt auction on Wednesday went off comfortably, Portugal's long term borrowing costs remain unsustainably high, and spending cuts that are cleaning up public finances are also helping to plunge Portugal into one of the deepest recessions in the Western world. Its economy is predicted to contract 3 percent this year, and the unemployment rate, at 13.6 percent, is one of the highest in the euro zone. Whatever deal with creditors is reached in Athens in the coming days, "it's most likely that Portugal will say that it wants one of those, too," said Edward Hugh, an economist in Barcelona who has been tracking the euro zone's debt crisis. Portugal "literally has nothing further to lose, except some of its debt burden," he said. Lisbon's center right coalition government, which came into power last June, insists that it needs more time rather than more money. Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho said on Tuesday that Portugal would comply with the agreement reached last May, "whatever the cost." The International Monetary Fund, alongside other creditors involved in the debt repayment negotiations in Athens, also emphasizes that Greece need not set a precedent for other ailing economies like Portugal. "It's going to be hard for Portugal, but we're talking about different numbers, and Portugal's tax collection system is much more effective," said Albert Jaeger, who heads the I.M.F.'s office in Lisbon. He added: "The most important advantage that Portugal has is probably its internal political and social consensus." Domestic discord continues to be one of the main stumbling blocks in Athens, with Prime Minister Lucas D. Papademos struggling to secure backing from the three parties in his shaky coalition particularly over private sector wage cuts before signing a deal with creditors that will also require majority approval from Parliament. Mr. Papademos is set to meet with the party leaders Thursday to work out an agreement that could be discussed at a meeting of European finance ministers in Brussels on Monday. Such a sense of urgency is not felt in Lisbon. The country's public debt is expected to reach 112 percent of gross domestic product this year, compared with 190 percent in Greece, according to the I.M.F. Mr. Jaeger said Portugal would not need to return to the long term debt market for further financing for well over a year. In September 2013, Lisbon must repay 9 billion euros of debt. "Portugal's debt is sustainable, and we do not see the need" for emergency negotiations between Lisbon and private bondholders, he said. On Monday, however, the yield on Portugal's benchmark 10 year bonds flirted with 17 percent, its highest level since the inception of the euro. Five year credit default swaps on Portuguese debt, a type of insurance against default, also recently set record highs, indicating that investors saw a 70 percent chance that the country would default. The yield on Portugal's 10 year bonds was back down to 14.2 percent on Wednesday, part of a broader rebound on European bond markets and following an oversubscribed Portuguese auction in which Lisbon sold 1.5 billion euros of Treasury bills, the targeted amount, at lower yields than two weeks ago. Still, Francesco Franco, an assistant professor at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon, said that "Portugal's efforts have not succeeded in anchoring market expectations," in terms of convincing investors that Lisbon could simply stick to the 78 billion euro package. Instead, he said, "the Greek deal, if successful, is seen as an alternative template." Persuading bondholders otherwise is a tall order for the Portuguese authorities and not only because of the poor example set by Greece. "The markets are pricing a default because Portugal's growth track record has been poor," said Cristina Casalinho, chief economist of BPI, a Portuguese bank. Having missed out on the construction boom years and averaging annual growth of less than 1 percent over the last decade, Portugal is now sinking into recession faster than predicted, with recent public spending and wage cuts, coupled with tax increases, choking off consumer demand. Still, Mr. Passos Coelho is adhering to the economic program agreed to with creditors and winning plaudits from them. "The program is off to a good start and is on track," Mr. Jaeger of the I.M.F. said. Among significant breakthroughs, the government recently agreed with employers and unions to extend working time while cutting severance payments. Lisbon has also made progress in its privatization program, selling a 21 percent stake in EDP Energias de Portugal, the national electric company, to China Three Gorges for 2.69 billion euros in December. Portugal's progress compares favorably with neighboring Spain, whose government has been struggling to persuade employers and unions to agree on a labor market overhaul. Madrid also recently shelved the sale of its national lottery operator and largest airports. "The rise in Portugal's credit default swaps is more a reflection of the external environment and not the result of any domestic failure to implement the reforms agreed last year," said Goncalo Pascoal, chief economist at Millennium BCP, a bank in Lisbon. "If the government continues to implement the required structural reforms, and the external environment improves, the yields are likely to retreat." That is a big if, however, especially given that "economic reforms of this sort take a long time to produce results," said Luis Cabral, an economics professor from Portugal at New York University's Stern School of Business. Until then, he added, "it is likely that Portugal will need longer debt repayment terms or simply additional bailout funds." And however significant the structural and political differences between Greece and Portugal, the two countries are the only euro zone economies to have their debt rated as junk by all three major rating agencies. In a recent report, Erik F. Nielsen, the global chief economist for UniCredit, underlined the growing differentiation made by investors between Greece and Portugal on the one hand, and other euro economies on the other. Even if the market had perhaps "gone a bit ahead of itself on Portugal," he added, "surely it is a country we'll be talking a lot more about in the months to come."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
The tenement at 700 East 134th Street in Port Morris shares the block with a stand of clapboard row houses, a metalworker and a document shredding facility. Tenants, many of whom have lived on this quiet, gritty block in the South Bronx for the better part of a decade, pay around 1,000 a month for their apartments. Soon, they could pay much more. In many ways, this little building exemplifies the anxiety echoed throughout the South Bronx as middle class New Yorkers priced out of Manhattan stream across the Harlem and East Rivers in search of more affordable apartments. Tenants fear that the wave of wealthier newcomers is pushing rents up and poorer residents out. In early January, the 21 unit building containing mostly studios sold for 4 million to a limited liability company after the previous owner filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Soon after the sale, James Giddings, the head officer of the limited liability company, began telling tenants to expect rent increases of around 500 a month, according to tenants. Mr. Giddings has spoken with tenants in the hallways, in their apartments, on the phone and via texts and emails. For years, the previous owner did not sign leases with tenants, meaning the residents essentially have only 30 day agreements. Without a lease, they are vulnerable to sudden rent hikes or losing their apartment. Mr. Giddings insists that the building is free market, allowing him to raise rents as he pleases. Yet he has not actually offered tenants leases at higher rents. Tenants say their new landlord is treading lightly because the building is instead rent stabilized, making the proposed increases illegal. Until a decade ago, the building was officially rent stabilized. But around 2006, when the property was vacant, the previous owner renovated the building and gave new tenants what he considered "free market" leases, but did not renew those leases when they expired. A property, in fact, can be deregulated following a substantial rehabilitation, but it must meet certain specific requirements under the law. Just handing out a so called free market lease does not make an apartment market rate. Mr. Giddings told me in an email that "the previous owner filed" an application with the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, the state agency that oversees rent stabilized properties. But he did not say if the state ever responded. Tenants requested their rental histories from the state, which showed that the building is rent stabilized, said Courtland Hankins, one of the tenants. "Something fishy happened a long time ago," said Stephanie Rudolph, a staff attorney with the Urban Justice Center, who reviewed details of the property with me but does not represent the tenants. A 2005 permit for renovations to bathrooms and kitchens filed with the city Department of Buildings, for example, "doesn't look like it was enough" to meet state requirements for deregulation. "My assumption would be that they never did any of the paperwork" with the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, she said. This spring, the state housing agency informed tenants that it was reviewing an application from the new owner to determine if the property was exempt from rent stabilization. Tenants plan to challenge the landlord's claim. Despite earlier improvements, some apartments have pipes and windows that leak, broken floorboards and missing bathroom tiles, crumbling paint and plaster, kitchens with no cabinets and faulty electrical wiring, according to dozens of photographs of seven apartments provided by tenants. In emails, Mr. Giddings described the building as a well maintained property that had been gut renovated. He said he had no immediate plans to raise rents and dismissed complaints from tenants as overblown. "We have mentioned to some tenants that there will be legal rent increases at some point," he wrote. "But we have not pushed that issue." A 500 rent hike could undo the lives of tenants like TaraMarie Capozello, 37, a single mother of two daughters who moved into the building from a homeless shelter in 2007. She pays 962 a month, with rental assistance from the city, and still struggles to make her payments. She has not had a lease renewal in years. Last January, Mr. Giddings approached her in the hallway, telling her that her rent could jump to 1,500 a month. If that happened, "I'd be done. It's over," she said. "I'd be back in the shelter system or out on the street." Claudia Waterton, 36, a print production artist who pays 1,050 a month for her studio, commutes an hour and 20 minutes to Brooklyn for work. A substantial rent hike could send her deeper into the Bronx and farther from her job. "A lot of people are scared to move," she said. "How are we going to find a place that's affordable?" In 2016, as asking rents stagnated in other parts of the city, they soared in the South Bronx, rising in Mott Haven by nearly 16 percent from the previous year, to 2,050 a month, according to StreetEasy. Indeed, after decades of blight and abandonment, developers are now pouring money into speculative investments in the Bronx. The city has taken steps to rezone neighborhoods to spur more residential development, causing angst among some residents who fear that the revitalization of their neighborhoods could spell displacement. The median income in Port Morris and Mott Haven was 20,334 a year between 2010 and 2014, according to U.S. census data. Yet many of the people moving to the borough make considerably more money than that. So if a studio at 700 East 134th Street could fetch 1,500 a month, a sum that a newer tenant would eagerly pay, where can people of more modest means who have lived here for years go? "In a moment where entire boroughs are no longer options, people are moving to the Bronx," said Susanna Blankley, the director of Community Action for Safe Apartments, a tenant organizing group. "People fear that we are facing displacement pressures like never before." This block of East 134th Street, a spartan stretch opposite the Bruckner Expressway, has no residential amenities. Yet, it is within a five minute walk from the Bronx Brewery, the Port Morris Distillery and Gun Hill Tavern, all relatively new businesses in Port Morris, a triangular swath at the southern tip of the Bronx. "The neighborhood has changed, the complexion has changed. It's SoBro now," said Mr. Hankins, 46, a middle school hip hop teacher who lives in a fourth floor studio in the East 134th Street building. In two conversations last March, Mr. Giddings told him that his rent could jump from 1,039 a month to 1,650 a month. "In the next four to five years, it's definitely going to be a little Williamsburg." For now, tenants are hastily gathering information about their building's history, hoping to prove that the building should remain rent stabilized. Should the state rule in Mr. Giddings's favor, they worry that overtures about rent hikes will turn into forceful demands, leaving them with few options. If management is "able to get some firmer footing, they're not going to be soft with us at all," said Mr. Hankins. "Not one little bit."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Credit...Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York Times Between the international airport in Nadi, Fiji, and the capital city of Suva, the coastal road on the island of Viti Levu is lined with resorts and clogged with tour buses. It's a route I took several times this spring when I visited friends in Suva, a bustling port city where cruise ships drop anchor year round and deposit thousands of tourists. The steady stream of hulking ships is emblematic of Fiji's popularity, and a major source of income. But the country's reliance on tourism, combined with vigorous development and the effects of rising global temperatures, have conspired against Fiji's fragile environment. The country now faces major environmental challenges, including deforestation, unsustainable fishing practices, and the introduction of invasive species, such as the crown of thorns starfish, that have led to the destruction of coral reefs. Rising sea levels has led to the erosion of Fiji's coastal areas, and the intrusion of saltwater has destroyed farmland and forced residents to move to safer ground. Before I arrived, I had read that Pacific Island nations were threatened by rising temperatures and sea levels, but it wasn't until my fifth day there, when my friends and I flew 45 minutes on a small prop plane to the island of Kadavu, that the threat came into full view. Walking around the grounds, which were built on a steep hill, the damage from Tropical Cyclone Keni, which had swept through the islands in mid April, three weeks before our arrival, was obvious. Boats in the lagoon were out of commission. A pool that was under construction was a mess. A tree had fallen on top of the dive shop and hit one of the compressors. A path to a nearby village had disappeared in a landslide. The storm had packed winds of more than 75 miles per hour and dropped nearly a foot of rain on Viti Levu. Kadavu was more directly in the storm's path, and more than 800 homes were damaged. The storm came just a week after another cyclone, Josie. The topic of climate change was everywhere in Fiji, even at the airport in Nadi, where a billboard read, "Airports Addressing Climate Change." Fiji's prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, is the current president of COP23, the United Nations Climate Change conference. In November, he brought two Fijian children with him to a conference in Bonn to remind delegates that the future of Fiji depends on action against the effects of climate change. Already, one quarter of the country's bird species and two thirds of amphibians are threatened or endangered because of rising sea temperatures and overfishing. A billboard I spotted captured the mood well: "We are all in the same canoe rising up against climate change." The ever present discussion about Fiji's fate gave me pause. Would Fiji's stunning islands look the same in a decade or two? The soft breezes and gentle sunsets and crystal blue water at Matava made it hard to muster alarm. It also made me recall a conversation I had a few days before with Dick Watling, the founder of Nature Fiji, an environmental conservation group. Mr. Watling arrived in Fiji about 35 years ago and was an astute observer of local politics and the issue of climate change. Over coffee at Cappuccino Republic in Suva, Mr. Watling said that Fiji's leaders, like those elsewhere in the Pacific region, have become expert at extracting donations from wealthier nations. So he was not surprised that many of Fiji's problems were being blamed on climate change because it might help attract foreign aid, while also letting lawmakers sidestep thornier issues like unbridled development and lax environmental regulations. "The government sees this as a major opportunity," Mr. Watling said. "COP23 is the best tourism marketing program we have ever produced by a country mile." Signs of eco tourism were certainly evident in Fiji. At Matava, solar panels generated most of the electricity, including the lights and fans in our huts. The fruit and vegetables we ate were grown locally and the fish was caught nearby. The eggs came from the chickens at the resort. Bottles, cans and other recyclables were sent back to Viti Levu. Living off the land did little to protect against Cyclone Keni, though. One of the resort's boats had flipped upside down and its outboard motors were damaged. The chickens were swept away and the vegetable gardens were destroyed. Several workers at the resort lost their homes. The damage to the reefs made finding fish harder. Overfishing and the destruction of the reefs was something I heard discussed back on Viti Levu. One day, I took a trip with my friend Sharon to the Outrigger Fiji Beach Resort, about a two hour drive from Suva. There, the reef had been damaged by repeated storms and polluted runoff from a nearby stream. With the help of a Japanese aid organization, the hotel built coral gardens that its guests help maintain. The gardens consist of large metal grates, or propagation racks, placed in the water about 100 feet from the shore. Jonacani Masi, one of the hotel workers, took us out to see them. He brought a dozen cones made of sand mixed with concrete that were the size of my hand. When we reached the grates, he dove underwater and returned with a healthy piece of brown spiky coral that looked like a deer antler. He broke it into smaller, finger length pieces, and placed each one in a cone packed with quick drying cement. Snorkels and masks on, we swam down to the grates and placed the cones in the openings. We saw dozens of other cones with healthy looking coral stems already there. Together, they created a small reef where none had existed. Fish nipped at my legs, protective of their newly claimed territory. When the coral fingerlings were big enough, they were replanted in the natural reef elsewhere. "The reef was there for the taking, but it was also abused," Kinijoji "Kenny" Sarai, Mr. Masi's boss, said over a lunch of Spanish mackerel marinated in coconut milk, lemon and vinegar. Overfishing by locals depleted the reefs' aquatic population, and forests cleared by developers led to more pollutants being dumped into rivers that flowed into the ocean, damaging the reefs. "We're trying to bring the coral back to life." The next day we set off for Beqa, an island six nautical miles offshore, to meet Sefano Katz. An Israeli by way of Australia, Mr. Katz is a marine biologist and an expert in coral ecosystems. He arrived in Fiji three years ago with the nonprofit group Pacific Blue Foundation to help the locals on Beqa preserve their reef, which is 10 miles wide and one of the largest in Fiji. He lives in a village of about 200, where he teaches children about composting and restoring mangrove forests, which help protect the coastline from erosion caused by storm surge. He works with the elders to improve the sewage treatment so that polluted water doesn't seep into the ocean. Villagers are also removing the crown of thorns starfish, which eat coral, from the reef. Mr. Katz said he focuses on steps the villagers can take on their own rather than broad concepts like fighting climate change. He pointed to a study that showed that 48 percent of the damage to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia was from tropical storms and cyclones, and another 42 percent from crown of thorns starfish, whose population has exploded because of an increase in phosphorus runoff from sewage, and other issues. This, he said, was similar in Fiji. "People protect what they understand," he said. "That's the way to make change." Mr. Katz took us to meet Filipe Kirikirikula, the 60 year old head of the council of elders. We sat outside his home in the middle of the well kept village by the beach. He supported Mr. Katz's mission, which he said required changing age old habits. "Most of the people just abuse the environment," he said. "It's quite difficult to teach them about conservation. People here have their own freedom." The days of going out on the reef with a spear to catch dinner were disappearing, he said. So he supported a plan to create an area to raise clams and fish that would be protected from poachers. It would also repopulate the reefs, which in turn would attract more divers who could be charged a fee, he said. As the afternoon waned, Mr. Katz took us back to the mainland on his boat. Beqa, which legend has it, is home to the Fijian shark god, Dakuwaqa, faded from view as we skipped over the waves and around the swells. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Moving day for most New Yorkers involves stacks of boxes, reams of Bubble Wrap and rolls of packing tape, but Amanda Lindner was determined to avoid all of those commonly used supplies when she moved from Hamilton Heights to her first solo apartment in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, this spring. Why? Because so much packing material winds up getting thrown out, and Ms. Lindner had started pursuing a zero waste lifestyle a few months earlier, embracing the environmental movement that seeks to reduce the amount of garbage on the planet by changing people's personal consumption habits. By the time she was ready to move, Ms. Lindner had already made a number of lifestyle changes. She had stopped using plastic takeout containers (bringing reusable metal tins to restaurants instead), switched out her toothpaste for baking soda and started carrying around a metal water bottle and tote bag wherever she went. "I care about a lot of issues, but I feel you can't stand for anything if there's not a planet to stand on," said Ms. Lindner, 29, who works for Avodah, a Jewish social justice nonprofit organization. "There are so many things I can't change as an individual, but I can do these small things every day." Director of communications at Avodah, a Jewish social justice nonprofit On living alone: "It is really nice to come back to a space that's yours, that's filled with things you picked out and love. It's also really nice to not have to be in a queue with three other roommates to take a shower in the morning." Best secondhand shopping surprise: When the owner of the Lion's Den, a Bushwick thrift shop, reupholstered an ottoman for her on the spot after she said she loved everything about it but the tan leather top. On her zero waste lifestyle: "It's been a really fulfilling journey in a lot of ways. I feel more empowered. It's O.K. to say no to trendy items or a disposable straw." But moving and furnishing an apartment while sticking to her zero waste guns has proved trickier than she expected. Fortunately, Ms. Lindner, who had never lived with fewer than three people before renting her own one bedroom, had only had a small bedroom's worth of possessions to transport across the city. Furnishing her new apartment, however, was a challenge. "I didn't have any living room furniture," Ms. Lindner said. "I didn't even have a fork. I just had a bed and dresser." While she once would have gone to stores like Ikea and HomeGoods to get what she needed, now she browsed secondhand marketplaces, a far more time consuming process. Anything she couldn't get used, like cleaning supplies and food receptacles, had to be sustainable that is, either compostable or recyclable. "I have since become an expert thrifter," Ms. Lindner said. She has found furniture through Facebook marketplace, on Craigslist and at a sidewalk sale outside a storage unit. Perhaps her favorite find is a sofa that belonged to an uncle and reminds her of family gatherings. "One of the challenges is that you have to be open to things, you can't be too specific," she said. "But it has been a really cool experience, because you get to talk to all these different people and peek into their lives and homes. And you have a connection to the piece of furniture then: It has a story and it adds to the character of your home." The most difficult thing, ultimately, was deciding whether or not to paint her apartment. When she moved in, the walls were a "dim peach tan." She knew that the real zero waste approach would be not to paint, but "I really wanted it to be brighter, and I decided that it's not about perfection," she said. "If you try to do that you're going to get tripped up." Still, if she was going to paint she wanted to do it in the least wasteful way possible, so she scoured hardware stores for "oops" paint, cans of custom mixed paint rejected by other customers because the colors were not quite right. She visited at least 10 stores, but failed to find enough paint in a color and finish she liked. After a final trip Big Reuse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where she found leftover paint remixed into vibrant colors suitable for an accent wall, but not an entire apartment, she capitulated and went to a paint store. She selected a paint and primer combo in sea glass green and hired a professional painter from TaskRabbit so she wouldn't have to buy equipment she would likely never use again. Afterward, she turned the paint can into her composting bucket, which she brings to the farmer's market in Prospect Park every Saturday. In many respects, living alone has made a zero waste lifestyle easier to pursue, Ms. Lindner said. Although her roommates had been supportive and she was always delighted when one of them would come home and tell her that she had refused a plastic straw, for example the choice of which cleaning products and other shared goods to buy was not entirely up to her. And other things might be a hard sell: In her living room, she keeps a basket of clean hankies to use in lieu of tissues. A zero waste lifestyle, she has realized, is not for everyone. Her current grocery habits save her a considerable amount of money, she said, but involve schlepping large quantities of bulk goods home in reusable cloth bags a few times a month and bringing refillable cleaning bottles to the 4th Street Co op in Manhattan. "If I had a family, mobility issues or was working three part time jobs, this would be difficult," she said. "It's a privilege to be able to do this, but because I have the ability to do it, I feel that I should." Initially, she was worried that her requests to fill reusable containers might annoy or burden others, but for the most part she has encountered only curiosity and encouragement. Still, her parents were disappointed not to be able to buy her things for her first apartment, she said. Her mother begged her to at least get new pots and pans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Over the last three months, the Instagram influencer Emily Gellis has transfixed her followers by posting accusations about the high fiber F Factor diet and its creator Tanya Zuckerbrot. In thousands of Instagram posts, which have included video monologues and screenshots of messages between Ms. Gellis and often anonymous dieters who followed the F Factor plan or bought products from the company, Ms. Gellis asserted that F Factor products were causing rashes and other ailments. She also accused Ms. Zuckerbrot of encouraging disordered eating habits, both through the dietary advice she dispensed and the company culture she cultivated. Ms. Gellis also told her followers that she had been contacted by sources who linked their miscarriages to the F factor diet and products. One of those sources told The New York Times in August that she fabricated the story. Today, lawyers for Ms. Zuckerbrot said they filed a lawsuit in New York, saying that Ms. Gellis has cost her business millions of dollars in revenue because of more than 4,500 "false, defamatory, and/or harassing statements." F Factor was making 1 million a month before Ms. Gellis began posting about the company in July 2020, according to the lawsuit. Now the company's monthly revenue is less than 90,000. Ms. Gellis said she plans to countersue Ms. Zuckerbrot. "I have not defamed her and I will do everything I need to do to assert my innocence," she said in an interview. F Factor is a diet consulting business; registered dietitians can be hired to coach clients on Ms. Zuckerbrot's high fiber eating plan. It requires its adherents to initially follow a 1200 calorie a day meal plan. Clients who worked directly with Ms. Zuckerbrot, who has written two books about the diet, have included high profile figures such as Megyn Kelly. Some clients have paid as much as 25,000 for Ms. Zuckerbrot's services. In 2018, F Factor began selling snack bars and powders as well. "Gellis's illegal, abusive, and harassing social media misconduct has caused, and continues to cause, devastating financial damages and enormous emotional distress," the lawsuit says. Ms. Zuckerbrot is represented by Dan K. Webb, a former United States attorney who has built a private practice focused in part on suing media entities for defamation against companies that sell food. Last summer, Mr. Webb was named as a special prosecutor tasked with investigating the Jussie Smollet case. The F Factor products, Mr. Webb said in an interview, "are completely safe and the diet is safe. Ms. Gellis went on a vendetta to try to destroy this company and she did succeed." Ms. Gellis learned of the lawsuit when she received a message on Instagram from a New York Post reporter asking for her to comment. She addressed Ms. Zuckerbrot directly on Instagram, saying in a video today: "Tanya, you are the devil, you're the devil, and you are going to get what's coming to you." Ms. Gellis criticized Ms. Zuckerbrot for revealing Ms. Gellis's home address in the lawsuit when the filing was posted on the F Factor website. Mr. Webb says that it was Ms. Gellis, and not the pandemic and attendant economic consequences, which has zapped F Factor's revenue and growth. A spokesman for F Factor said that in May the company's gross revenue from product sales were 1.2 million but that in August sales dropped to 254,000 before hitting last month's low of about 90,000. Early this year, Evolution V.C. Partners was poised to make a 2 million investment in F factor, which it valued at 40 million. "That capital investor has completely withdrawn his commitment to make his investment in F Factor," the lawsuit says. Gregg Smith, the principal of Evolution V.C. Partners, said in an interview that he walked away from the deal with F Factor without being aware of any internet criticism of the brand from Ms. Gellis or others. "I was exploring an active investment in the company in the spring and became distracted with family health issues," he said. While Ms. Gellis is the only defendant named in the lawsuit, Ms. Zuckerbrot also blames her company's problems on Instagram and on Facebook, its parent company, as well. "Gellis's conduct was facilitated and made possible by Facebook and Instagram, which were repeatedly and comprehensively notified about Gellis's gross abuse of their platforms," the lawsuit states. "Nevertheless, Facebook and Instagram knowingly and intentionally refused to take any action." Mr. Webb said he is considering future legal action that might include the platforms. "Those companies are not named because of the immunity Congress gave them but I am looking at certain legal theories and we will see where this goes," he said. A spokesman for Facebook did not immediately return a request for comment. In addition to the lawsuit filed by Ms. Zuckerbrot, three sources say that they have been interviewed by a representative of the Department of Justice about their knowledge of the F Factor's company practices. A representative of that office declined to comment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Q. I'm trying to find my contacts list in the new Gmail. Where is it hidden? A. Google's recent revamp of its Gmail service for desktop web browsers moves a few things around. In the previous version, you could switch to the contacts list by clicking the Gmail menu on the left side of the page, but that method no longer works once you update to the refreshed Gmail. You can now get to the contacts page by clicking the Apps icon in the upper right corner of the Gmail inbox. When you click the Apps icon, which is a square made up of nine smaller squares, it unfolds to reveal a panel of icons for other Google programs and services, including Google Photos, Google News and YouTube.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
How Did a Virus From the Atlantic Infect Mammals in the Pacific? None Sea otters and seals in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Alaska, are infected with a virus that once was seen only in animals in the Atlantic. A new study suggests that melting ice in the Arctic may be to blame and that climate change may help spread the disease to new areas and new animals. Tracey Goldstein, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, got curious when sea otters in the Pacific tested positive for phocine distemper virus a cousin of canine distemper virus in 2004, two years after a major outbreak among European harbor seals. Genetic analysis showed that the infections in the two groups were connected. Dr. Goldstein wondered how a virus usually passed through direct contact with a sick animal had managed to get from one northern ocean to another. Until 2002, the seas around the Arctic Circle remained largely frozen even during the late summer. That year, though, the Arctic Ocean between the North Atlantic and Pacific was passable at the end of the summer, she and her colleagues found. Although sea otters don't venture far from home, seals conceivably could have borne the virus from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Dr. Goldstein said. Melting sea ice is a viable explanation for the spread of viruses but not the only one, said Charles Innis, a veterinarian and director of animal health at the New England Aquarium in Boston. "A skeptic could make arguments that maybe this virus could be transmitted through an intermediate host, like a bird that can fly long distance," said Dr. Innis, who was not involved in the new study. "Or maybe it's being transmitted in the ballast water of ships or something like that." Northern fur seals on Bogoslof Island in Alaska. Antibodies to phocine distemper virus were detected in northern fur seal and Steller sea lion populations. Maggie Mooney Seus/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, via Associated Press Even the illegal pet or wildlife trade, or tainted meat shipped from one coast to another, might spread a virus, he added. Dr. Goldstein and her team also looked at antibodies to the virus in the animals. There was no evidence of antibodies in tests conducted before the year 2000. By 2002, though, the new study found "quite a difference" in antibody levels in Steller sea lions, Dr. Goldstein said, suggesting the animals had active infections or had recovered from them. Phocine distemper virus is quite lethal among harbor seals in the Atlantic. Hundreds of harbor seals and gray seals were found dead in 2018 along the New England coast, from Massachusetts to Maine, because of infections with distemper and the flu. But harp seals seem to be better able to survive phocine distemper, Dr. Goldstein said, and may serve as its reservoir the ecological niche in which the infection persists. Outbreaks may begin when a sick harp seal comes into contact with a gray seal . The outbreaks seem to arrive in cycles, Dr. Goldstein said, because the animals build immunity to the infection. Every five to 10 years, as new seals and otters are born and overall immunity wanes, the population becomes susceptible again and another outbreak occurs. The new study identified a second wave of viral antibodies in 2009 in several seal species, including ice seals, northern fur seals and Steller sea lions. The current study ended in 2016, so it's not clear if the virus has been spreading since then, Dr. Goldstein said. But she worries that another cycle of infection may not be far off. "These channels in the ice seem to be open every year, so these rare events might become more common," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The Buyers Adam Fleming and Julia Sommer were surprised by how much they loved Brooklyn. The couple had lived in Morningside Heights in Manhattan when Ms. Sommer was working on her Ph.D. in neurobiology at Columbia University. Back then, Brooklyn had "seemed so far away," Mr. Fleming said. "Although it was physically close, it was mentally far." But when they returned from Europe, where Ms. Sommer completed her studies, a friend suggested Brooklyn. So they rented a studio with a sleeping loft in a small Brooklyn Heights building. Brooklyn suited the pair. The people were nice, the restaurants terrific and the borough "full of authenticity," said Mr. Fleming, a software engineer for Urban Compass, a real estate start up. "If there is anything my generation values, it is authenticity. Brooklyn is dripping with it." The couple began the hunt for a house two years ago, just after their marriage. They decided against a co op or condominium. "I feel like a co op is almost indistinguishable from renting," said Mr. Fleming, who like his wife is in his early 30s. "There is a tremendous maintenance fee to pay, and people to answer to on the co op board. It is not freedom to do things your own way." A condo was slightly better, but "I chafe at the idea of a homeowners' association," he said. "I feel like it's taxation without representation." A small multifamily building, on the other hand, "is your project, your passion," Mr. Fleming said. "I don't think you fall into ownership in New York City. You've got to seek it." Seek it they did, online and off, spending weekends walking or bicycling through Bedford Stuyvesant. On a map, they color coded every block, so they would know to skip the noisy, busy ones and to pursue the leafy, quaint ones. Their budget started in the 600,000 range. They wanted a place near the A or C train, in "mediocre condition that we could work with," Mr. Fleming said. It needed to be authentically brownstone Brooklyn, with high ceilings, original details and "features you cannot recreate later." A two family rowhouse on Pacific Street in Crown Heights, which Mr. Fleming called "a grand old dame," fit the bill. It was listed at 700,000. But the couple weren't familiar with Crown Heights, and preferred Bed Stuy. (That one later sold for 650,000.) Some brownstones were immediately returned to the market at a higher price, "sold with the mattress still warm," Mr. Fleming said. Others were renovated and then either resold or rented out. They liked a three family on Hancock Street in Bed Stuy. The agent said another buyer was interested. "It's really nerve racking," Ms. Sommer said, "because you never know if this other buyer really exists or they are just making it up." After weeks of back and forth, the couple offered the listing price, 700,000. But the appraised value was 550,000. That was a deal breaker, because they could borrow against only the lesser amount. They went to see a two family rowhouse on a beautiful block of MacDonough Street in the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District. The couple offered 880,000. But because of complications, Ms. Sommer said, pursuing the transaction seemed like "an incredibly lengthy and painful process without any guarantee for us of a positive outcome." As the hunt grew more difficult, they loosened their requirements for a postcard perfect block. And so a tip from someone in the neighborhood led them to a three family rowhouse with beautiful bay windows and high ceilings. It was on a bus route in Crown Heights, a location they would have bypassed earlier, but near the desired A and C trains. The house had been used primarily for storage, though it was classified as a single room occupancy dwelling. The couple bought it for 950,000, closing in midsummer. They remain in the studio, awaiting a "certification of no harassment," proving they did not evict any residents, which they expect in a few months. When they are finally able to move in, they will do so with their baby, who is due next month. Meanwhile, they have received more than a dozen solicitations from investors, including phone calls and notes at the door. "They are very aggressive in terms of buying people out and flipping the house," Mr. Fleming said. "They are quite resourceful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
"How is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I'm saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?" Dylan Farrow, left, said to Gayle King on "CBS This Morning." For the first time on television, Dylan Farrow accused her father, Woody Allen, of molesting her as a child, telling "CBS This Morning": "I want to show my face and tell my story." "Why shouldn't I want to bring him down?" Ms. Farrow, 32, told Gayle King during a conversation that aired on Wednesday and Thursday. "Why shouldn't I be angry? Why shouldn't I be hurt? Why shouldn't I feel some sort of outrage that after all these years, being ignored and disbelieved and tossed aside?" Ms. Farrow, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and Mr. Allen, had made the allegations before: First, they were investigated in 1992, and detailed in an article in Vanity Fair. This would be the year of a very public and acrimonious split between Ms. Farrow and Mr. Allen, as well as a bitter custody battle that would dominate headlines. Dylan Farrow again raised the allegations in a 2014 letter published by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. And on CBS, she went into detail about her experience during a period when Hollywood is reckoning with an industrywide movement against sexual misconduct that has brought down powerful figures in Hollywood such as Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein. "I was taken to a small attic crawl space in my mother's country house in Connecticut by my father," Ms. Farrow said, describing an encounter with Mr. Allen that she said occurred in 1992. "He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother's toy train that was set up. And he sat behind me in the doorway, and as I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted." She added: "As a 7 year old I would say, I would have said he touched my private parts. Which I did say. As a 32 year old, he touched my labia and my vulva with his finger." There were other instances, according to Ms. Farrow: "He often asked me to get into bed with him when he had only his underwear on and sometimes when only I had my underwear on." Dr. John M. Leventhal, the doctor who led the Connecticut investigation into Mr. Allen, interviewed Ms. Farrow nine times in 1992 and said that he found inconsistencies in her story, even raising the possibility that she may have been coached by her mother. When pressed by Ms. King on whether she had been coached, Ms. Farrow said, "How is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I'm saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?" She said that her mother had never coached her. At one point, Ms. Farrow became emotional as Ms. King played a clip from an interview Mr. Allen did with "60 Minutes" in 1992 vehemently denying the allegations, as he has always done. "He's lying and he's been lying for so long," Ms. Farrow said. "And it is difficult for me to see him and to hear his voice. I'm sorry." Mr. Allen has always maintained that Ms. Farrow's account is untrue, and he has never been charged with a crime. In a statement to CBS News, he said, "Even though the Farrow family is cynically using the opportunity afforded by the Time's Up movement to repeat this discredited allegation, that doesn't make it any more true today than it was in the past. I never molested my daughter as all investigations concluded a quarter of a century ago." Timothee Chalamet, the star of "Call Me by Your Name," a movie that has been receiving Oscar buzz, announced on Tuesday that he would be donating the wages from his work on Mr. Allen's upcoming film "A Rainy Day in New York" to Time's Up, the recently established sexual harassment initiative; RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, which combats sexual violence; and the L.G.B.T. Center in New York. When asked if she was angry with those in Hollywood who still choose to work with her father, Ms. Farrow said: "I'm not angry with them. I hope that, you know, especially since so many of them have been vocal advocates of this Me Too and Time's Up movement, that they can acknowledge their complicity and maybe hold themselves accountable to how they have perpetuated this culture of silence in their industry."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In presenting the Nobel to Dr. Olah in 1994, Salo Gronowitz, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said, "Olah's discovery resulted in a complete revolution for scientific studies of carbocations, and his contributions occupy a prominent place in all modern textbooks of organic chemistry." Along the way, Dr. Olah overturned scientific dogma that held that, in organic compounds, a carbon atom could bind to no more than four other atoms. He showed that in carbocations, a carbon atom could bond with five, six or seven neighbors, Dr. Prakash said. "These are weak bonds, but they're still held together," he said. "All of his ideas prevailed." George Andrew Olah was born on May 22, 1927, in Budapest, the son of Julius Olah, a lawyer, and the former Magda Krasznai. He attended what he described as one of the best schools in Budapest run by the Piarist Fathers, a Roman Catholic order. He never described himself as Jewish, but in his autobiography, "A Life of Magic Chemistry," he referred to that heritage in recalling World War II. "I do not want to relive here in any detail some of my very difficult, even horrifying, experiences of this period, hiding out the last months of the war in Budapest," he wrote. "Suffice it to say that my parents and I survived." After the war, he attended the Technical University of Budapest, obtaining master's and doctoral degrees. He was an assistant professor of organic chemistry at the university and then appointed deputy director at the Central Research Institute of Chemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1949 he married Judith Lengyel, a technical secretary at the university, whom he had known from his early youth. She went on to study chemistry, as well. In fleeing Hungary after the 1956 uprising, Dr. Olah and his family made brief stops in Vienna and London, where his wife had relatives, before moving to Montreal, where his mother in law lived.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The plants are white as ghosts, and they float in fields as sharply blue as the waters off Dover. Each one is a little miracle, their neuron like roots winding across the page, their leaves revealing every branching vein. These are photographs, produced only with the light of the sun and an amateur's chemistry set. There was no precedent for them in the early 1840s when a woman invented the photobook. She was the British photographer Anna Atkins, who may not be as well known as Louis Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot and other men from the medium's first decade. But her intensely beautiful blueprints of marine plants, which she began making in 1843, are as significant for the development of photography as for the history of science. Her magnum opus, "Photographs of British Algae," whose first sections she published 175 years ago this fall, was the first volume ever to be illustrated with photographs, albeit ones made without a camera. Dozens of pages from that book are on view in "Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins," on the interplay of science and art at the main branch of the New York Public Library. Atkins was born in 1799, in the southeast of England; her father, John George Children, was an amateur chemist who went on to work for the British Museum. He also translated several important scientific treatises into English, like an 1823 taxonomy of shells that young Anna painstakingly illustrated for him. He encouraged his daughter's interest in the natural world; the New York Public Library's show includes an early herbarium in which she pressed dried thistles and mint sprigs, and an album of tender watercolor landscapes, begun in 1835 and continued for decades after, that Anna painted as a gift to her husband, the Kent landowner John Pelly Atkins. In 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot announced that he had discovered a new means of "photogenic drawing," which could trace the details of plants, fabrics or the like on light sensitized paper. (Photography has the rare distinction of being invented twice: Daguerre and Talbot hit on two different techniques, independently of each other, in the same year.) Talbot presented his technique at the Royal Society, of which John George Children was the secretary, and Anna Atkins would soon correspond with Talbot through her father. Like Talbot, she saw that the new technology of photography would allow for a greater scientific accuracy in botanical illustration which until then had relied either on letterpress printing, which was only as good as its illustrators, or else on dried specimens that turned brittle before long. She began to collect seaweed from the southeast coast of England and the ponds around Kent, and she implored friends to lend their own specimens. Then, starting in 1843, she started producing "photographical impressions" of these algae, "many of which," as she wrote in a letter displayed in the show, "are so minute that accurate drawings of them are very difficult to make." Her chosen technique was the cyanotype or blueprint, as it would later be known when architects embraced it. You first slather a sheet of paper with a solution of iron salts, then leave it to dry. Next, you place an object on the paper and compress it under a pane of glass. Leave it in the sun for about 15 minutes, then wash the exposed sheet in water, and the uncovered portion of the paper takes on a rich Prussian blue. The rest of the sheet, obscured by the compressed algae or leaves, features a white negative impression, like an X ray or a snow angel. The species Dictyota dichotoma becomes a bundle of thick, tangled rhizomes, while Furcellaria fastigiata comprises spindlier, daintier strands that look like nerve endings. One seaweed specimen has the density of a chanterelle mushroom; another appears more like a tangle of fallen feathers. Yet these are clearly more than an amateur scientist's recordings. Atkins laid down the plants on the page with a careful eye to composition, often with an attempt at symmetry. Pairs of specimens are arrayed like nearly identical siblings; thicker seaweed results in more indistinct, abstract skeins. The algae bristle and undulate in Atkins's cyanotypes, whose rich blues, of course, recall the ocean. Even the captions exhibit a playful inventiveness. For the title page of one chapter of her book, she fashioned the letters in "British Algae" out of wispy strands of seaweed, forming its name out of its subject. As cyanotypes are not made from a negative, each Atkins photogram was one of a kind making "British Algae" an arduous enterprise that took a decade of labor. (Servants would likely have helped her, though we know next to nothing about her working process.) The resultant books were different, too. Atkins mailed the pages to subscribers as she completed them; readers then sewed the fascicles together as they pleased. Her efforts to circulate her work, both to eminent botanists and to photography pioneers like Talbot (who was then completing his own first book, "The Pencil of Nature"), make Atkins quite a different figure from other undersung women now enjoying the attention of New York museums like Orra White Hitchcock, whose scientific illustrations for her husband's university lessons were shown at the American Folk Art Museum this summer, or Hilma af Klint, the Swedish theosophist whose groundbreaking abstract paintings, now on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, were not exhibited during her lifetime. Atkins, while reserved, was no outsider, and her blueprints are as significant for who saw them as for what they depicted. The New York Public Library's collection of Atkins's photograms, for one, belonged to John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype process.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Ms. Sonmez on Sunday posted a link on Twitter to a 2016 Daily Beast article that detailed an allegation of sexual assault made against Mr. Bryant in 2003. Her tweet appeared amid a flood of public tributes to the retired Los Angeles Lakers star, who died earlier that day in a helicopter crash at age 41. Ms. Sonmez received an email from The Post's executive editor, Martin Baron, at 5:38 p.m., before she was told that she would be placed on leave. The reporter shared the three sentence email with The New York Times. "Felicia," Mr. Baron wrote. "A real lack of judgment to tweet this. Please stop. You're hurting this institution by doing this." The text of Mr. Baron's email was attached to a screen shot of Ms. Sonmez's tweet linking to the Daily Beast article. A spokeswoman for The Post and Mr. Baron did not reply to requests for comment on the email. Mr. Bryant was arrested in 2003 after a complaint by a hotel employee in Colorado. A charge of felony sexual assault was dropped in 2005, and Mr. Bryant settled with his accuser out of court, saying in a statement that he believed the encounter with the woman was "consensual," although he had come to understand that she did not see it the same way. Ms. Sonmez's tweet drew a swift backlash from other Twitter users. She followed it with a post about the negative responses she had received. "Well, THAT was eye opening," she wrote. "To the 10,000 people (literally) who have commented and emailed me with abuse and death threats, please take a moment and read the story which was written (more than three) years ago, and not by me." Ms. Sonmez also posted what appeared to be a screenshot of an email she had received that used offensive language, called her a lewd name and displayed the sender's full name. She deleted the three tweets after being told to do so by Tracy Grant, the newspaper's managing editor, but not before other journalists captured them in screen shots. The Post confirmed the paid suspension on Monday, but didn't specify which of the tweets had prompted it to take action. "National political reporter Felicia Sonmez was placed on administrative leave while The Post reviews whether tweets about the death of Kobe Bryant violated the Post newsroom's social media policy," Ms. Grant said in a statement. "The tweets displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues." After Ms. Sonmez deleted the tweets on Sunday, she received an email from Ms. Grant acknowledging the threats she had received. 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. "Thank you for deleting the tweets," Ms. Grant wrote to her in an email that Ms. Sonmez shared with The Times. "You might want to consider a hotel or a friend's place for this evening." The reaction among Ms. Sonmez's colleagues started to emerge on Monday with a post on Erik Wemple Blog, The Post's media criticism column, and in a letter that was organized by the NewsGuild, the union that represents Post journalists, and signed by more than 200 staff members, including the paper's most prominent reporters. In his post, Mr. Wemple called the suspension "misguided." The letter signed by Post journalists, which was addressed to Mr. Baron and Ms. Grant, criticized how the paper handled the matter. "Felicia received an onslaught of violent messages, including threats that contained her home address, in the wake of a tweet Sunday regarding Kobe Bryant," the letter said. "Instead of protecting and supporting a reporter in the face of abuse, The Post placed her on administrative leave while newsroom leaders review whether she violated the social media policy." While acknowledging the tragedy of Mr. Bryant's death, the letter went on to note that "we believe it is our responsibility as a news organization to tell the public the whole truth as we know it about figures and institutions both popular and unpopular, at moments timely and untimely." Ms. Sonmez said in an interview that she did not add any commentary of her own to the tweet that included a link to the Daily Beast article. "Because The Post does have policies governing these things, all I did was tweet out a link to the story," she said. "I didn't think it was my place to provide any further commentary." When others on social media started sending her messages that called her rude names and made death threats and rape threats, she followed The Post's security protocol by contacting Ms. Grant. Ms. Grant wrote back, telling her to delete the tweets on Mr. Bryant. By then, Ms. Sonmez said, someone had posted her home address online. In the many emails she received on Sunday, Ms. Sonmez said she had missed the one from Mr. Baron, adding that she did not read it until the next afternoon. The debate over when it is appropriate to note the flaws and mistakes of prominent people in the immediate aftermath of their deaths is common on social media. The reaction against Ms. Sonmez's tweets seemed fueled by how the MeToo movement has complicated the legacies of artists, actors, athletes and other popular figures who have been accused of sexual misconduct. Mr. Bryant reached a settlement with his accuser in 2005, more than a decade before powerful men including the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, the CBS anchor Charlie Rose and the CBS Corporation chief executive Leslie Moonves left their posts or were ousted from their roles after allegations were made against them. Ms. Sonmez said she was in The Post's newsroom at the time of her tweets. "I expected to get some blowback," she said. "I can understand that it would be difficult for people to read that, but it's also difficult, I imagine, for all of the survivors in the country to see these allegations essentially be erased, which is how I felt in those couple of hours in the newsroom." Ms. Sonmez was one of two women who accused Jonathan Kaiman, a Beijing bureau chief of The Los Angeles Times, of sexual misconduct. After The Los Angeles Times conducted an investigation in 2018, Mr. Kaiman resigned. The journalist Emily Yoffe wrote an article last year on the accusations against Mr. Kaiman and their repercussions for Reason, a magazine published by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. Ms. Sonmez criticized the article for what she described as its omissions and "basic" factual errors. Reason updated the article and appended a note at the end of it to address what it called "three minor matters of fact." Ms. Sonmez posted some of her criticisms on Twitter. The NewsGuild and The Post's journalists referred to the reporter's personal history in their letter on Monday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
How to watch: From 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time on ESPN2; streaming on the ESPN app. The last of the third round singles matchups will wrap up today at the United States Open, as will the second round of doubles play. Many of the favored players are still settling into a groove, while some young prospects have another chance to shine and make their presence known on the world stage. Here are some matches to keep an eye on. Because of the number of matches cycling through courts, the times for individual matchups are at best a guess and certain to fluctuate based on the times at which earlier play is completed. All times are Eastern. Williams, chasing a record tying 24th Grand Slam singles title, finished second at the U.S. Open in the past two years. This year, she has been leaving every ounce of her energy on the court. Williams's frustrations and ecstasies during her matches are broadcast as if to inform viewers that winning is not a straightforward process but a struggle that even one of tennis's greats must grapple with every day. Now, she'll face yet another challenge on her path to victory in Stephens, a fellow American. Stephens, the 2017 U.S. Open champion, lost in the first round of the 2019 U.S. Open and the 2020 Australian Open. Those struggles with her form continued through last week, when she lost in the first round of the Western and Southern Open. However, through the first two rounds of the U.S. Open, she has delivered dominating performances, dropping only 10 games across four sets. De Minaur, the 21st seed, has often been called the "speed demon" by rivals on tour. To earn that designation is no small feat, especially considering the company he is surrounded by. Last year, de Minaur, 21, won his first three ATP Tour titles, all on hardcourts. He also reached his first Grand Slam round of 16 at the U.S. Open. Khachanov, the 11th seed, is not a particularly pacey player. Instead, he relies on his powerful forehand to dictate points and move his opponents from side to side, creating openings for runaway winners. After a five set victory over Jannik Sinner in the first round, Khachanov cruised past Andrey Kuznetsov in the second, demonstrating how his superior firepower can often smother opponents. This contrast in styles will make for an interesting match. Even though their patterns may be predictable, both players are capable of moments of brilliance when forced into a corner. Medvedev, the runner up at the 2019 U.S. Open, has cruised to the third round, spending just over four hours on the court through his first two rounds. Wolf, in his first main draw at a Grand Slam event, has spent about the same time on the court, upsetting the 29th seeded Guido Pella in the process. Medvedev, one of the favorites for this year's title, especially with Roger Federer out recovering from a knee surgery, is a counterpuncher, using his movement to evade opponents' onslaughts. Wolf's compact, punchy groundstrokes are almost perfect for him to prey on. Even if Wolf does not pose a serious threat in this match, it would be unwise to overlook him. Whatever lessons Wolf, 21, learns today could be fodder for his future on the tour. Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion, has looked dominant in her first two rounds. Her aggressive style of play can overwhelm players, especially on a quicker surface. Her excellent backhand, which she can lean into for pace or deftly disguise to pull her opponents around the court, is just the tip of the iceberg. With her current run of form, there's no reason Kenin, 21, shouldn't feel confident in not only making a deep run, but also going for her second Grand Slam title in a row. Jabeur, the 27th seed from Tunisia, has needed a tiebreaker in each of her two set matches on the way to the third round. Jabeur has a tendency to throw off opponents by mixing up her shots, and not always going for a predictable, effective shot that she could hit. For Jabeur to pull out the upset, she will need to dig through her entire bag of "crazy shots," as she enjoys referring to them, and find the ones Kenin just can't quite handle. Here's this fan's game plan for juggling the matches. I looked at the schedule of play when it was released and realized immediately that I would not be able to watch every match that interested me. Even though this year's digital tools allow me to zip from court to court without wading through crowds of fans, even those precious seconds will seem wasted as I move between excellent matches. At 11 a.m. I could choose to watch Maria Sakkari face off against Amanda Anisimova at Louis Armstrong Stadium, or pick any one of four high level doubles matches to start my day in a more tactical mood. By noon, Wolf and Medvedev will start to warm up, and watching a compact power baseliner against a lanky defensive stalwart may just sway my attention. By 3 p.m., my choices become even harder. By then, surely Williams and Stephens will start their battle, a matchup that tennis fans have waited five years to see again. By then, the men's doubles defending champions, Cabal and Farah will be playing as well, on Court 12. It makes me imagine myself back on Court 17, standing at the top of the stands so I can try to catch a glimpse of Court 12 between points. My main focus on Court 17 would be Berrettini and Ruud, two hard hitters eager to make deep runs in the tournament, who will most likely be finishing their match around this time.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
REAR WHEEL drive, athletic moves, a high end look and room for five describes the BMW 5 Series, Cadillac CTS and Mercedes E Class. For buyers unwilling to tie up finances at that lofty level, the Chrysler 300 offers club membership at a more reasonable rate. True, the 300 doesn't enjoy the triple Teflon coated feel of the luxury brands, and its cabin materials are a rung down the ladder of indulgence. But Chrysler offers more cost conscious shoppers a roomy, dynamic sedan with serious style, along with a hint of menace. Refreshed in 2015 for the nameplate's 60th birthday, the 300 wears a bigger, bolder grille and a tweaked tail. We should all look so confident at that age. New cast aluminum axles turn 20 inch wheels on S models that would not look out of place at the Museum of Modern Art. A 363 horsepower Hemi V8 is available. Most buyers choose the 3.6 liter V6 that squeezes out 300 horsepower and 264 pound feet of torque in the S model. All 300 models have eight speeds now, controlled by a new rotary knob. Steering effort and throttle response can be tweaked. The V6 versions can be had with an all wheel drive system that automatically disengages the front axle when not needed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which oversees the Academy Awards, announced Friday a handful of efforts to improve inclusion both within its organization and for the Oscars themselves. For the annual telecast, which next year may be in flux because of the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the academy will create a task force to develop new inclusion standards for Oscar eligibility by the end of July. The academy has not yet determined what those standards will be, and films submitted this year will not be affected. The organization also announced that the best picture category will be set at 10 films rather than the fluctuating number of nominations that has been in effect since the 2010 Oscars. Internally, the organization's Board of Governors amended its bylaws to limit the number of terms each governor may serve on the board to a maximum of 12. Previously, there was no limit. It's unclear what the diversity requirements will entail but the academy could take a page from its brethren in Britain: In 2019, the British Film Institute became the first major awards body to introduce diversity and inclusion criteria into its eligibility requirements. All entries in two British film categories, outstanding British film and outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer, are now required to increase representation to meet at least two of four diversity standards, like "onscreen representation, themes and narratives," and "industry access and opportunities." among others.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
For days, President Trump has been on a rampage against Twitter for its treatment of him, and it's easy to see why. Early Friday morning, after a tweet from him about the violence in Minneapolis declared, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts," Twitter dispatched police officers to the White House, who handcuffed Mr. Trump and took him into custody on live television in view of the entire nation. Oh, sorry, quick fact check: That did not happen at all. The president remains free and tweeting. Twitter, a private company, remains free to set rules on the use of its service. The president's flagged tweets the "shooting" remark and a misleading attack on mail in voting remain available to read, the first behind a notice that it violates the service's rules on glorifying violence, the second with a fact checking link appended. The arrest on live TV Friday was of Omar Jimenez, a CNN reporter, and his crew, who were handcuffed and walked off down a ravaged Minneapolis block, where they'd been covering protests and violence after the killing of a black man, George Floyd, in police custody. It looked like world news footage from a police state. Mr. Jimenez, wearing a mask in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, calmly negotiates with officers, visored and bunched in around the camera. He tells them they are live on the air, and he offers to get out of their way: "Put us back where you want us." He asks why and gets no answer. And he's walked off, to the stunned play by play of the anchors in the CNN studio. (Mr. Jimenez is black and Latino. Notably, given the racial dynamics of the Minneapolis protests, a white CNN reporter also covering the story said he was treated much more politely.) Then the producer is arrested, then the cameraman, until finally an officer picks up the camera and walks it off, the screen jostling into motion as if we, the audience, were being taken into custody, for getting too close, for seeing too much, for looking at someone the wrong way. The official explanation for the arrest was that the CNN crew refused to move on police orders, an absurdity given what the world saw and heard live. "I've never seen anything like this," the network anchor John Berman said. But we have seen things like this, not long ago, if not so flagrantly and shamelessly. Police in Ferguson, Mo., gave a similar rationalization in 2014 for arresting two journalists ordering one to "Stop videotaping!" as he recorded his arrest during the unrest after the police shooting of Michael Brown. In the past, though, the arrest did not happen to journalists who work for a news organization that the president had designated the "enemy of the people." It did not happen under a president who once retweeted a doctored video that showed him beating on a person with the CNN logo covering his face. And it did not happen in a week when that president threatened punitive measures against a private social media platform for suggesting that the misinformation he tweeted was misinformation. The president, it seems, considers his inconvenience to be a violation of freedom, and actual press freedom to be an inconvenience. Which in the end is the only real connection between Mr. Trump's claims of oppression and the violation we watched on morning cable TV. Actual censorship happens when a government acts to suppress protected speech, not when a private company sets rules for using its platform. Just hours before the arrest, Mr. Trump posted his tweet with the "shooting" line, which the Miami police chief Walter Headley used in 1967 to justify crackdowns on civil rights protesters. And for years, he has used his speech, copious and unfiltered, to argue that the police should have a free hand in dealing with threats, and that among the greatest threats are news outlets like CNN. By noon on Friday, the president was still freely grousing about Twitter, on Twitter. His account made no mention of the CNN arrests. That morning, Mr. Jimenez and his crew were released, with an apology from Minnesota's governor. But the messages had already been sent. The arrest told all media that there are people within law enforcement who now feel empowered enough to shut down coverage of unrest unrest resulting from police violence flat out in the open. And it told American viewers what kind of country they are living in. This country was captured in the final seconds of video by the CNN camera, laid on the concrete, still rolling, the booted feet of police lined up at a 90 degree angle. A country angry, frightened, smoldering and tilted sideways.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
OAKLAND, Calif. After years of criticism about how it keeps a record of what people do online, Google said it would start automatically deleting location history and records of web and app activity as well as voice recordings on new accounts after 18 months. The limited change, announced on Wednesday, comes after Google introduced an option last year to allow users to automatically delete data related to their web searches, requests made with the company's virtual assistant and their location history. At the time, it offered users the ability to erase the data after three months or 18 months. The policy sets Google accounts to delete that data by default on new accounts, instead of requiring users to go into the product's settings to change to an option to delete. The settings on existing accounts will remain unchanged. Google, which boasts that it has more than one billion monthly users for seven of its services, said it did not alter the settings for existing accounts because it did not want to upset users with an unexpected change. However, the company said it planned to alert users to the ability to change the deletion settings in emails and promotions on its products.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Pierre Cardin with models in 1979. He reproduced fashions for ready to wear consumption, dealing a blow to the elitism that had governed the Parisian couture. Pierre Cardin, the visionary designer who clothed the elite but also transformed the business of fashion, reaching the masses by affixing his name to an outpouring of merchandise ranging from off the rack apparel to bath towels, died on Tuesday in Neuilly sur Seine, just outside Paris. He was 98. His death, at the American Hospital there, was confirmed on Tuesday by the French Academy of Fine Arts. No cause was given. "Fashion is not enough," Mr. Cardin once told Eugenia Sheppard, the American newspaper columnist and fashion critic. "I don't want to be just a designer." He was never just that. He dressed the famous artists, political luminaries, tastemakers and members of the haute bourgeoisie but he was also a licensing pioneer, a merchant to the general public with his name on a cornucopia of products, none too exalted or too humble to escape his avid eye. There were bubble dresses and aviator jumpsuits, fragrances and automobiles, ashtrays and even pickle jars. Planting his flag on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore in Paris, he proceeded to turn the country's fashion establishment on its head, reproducing fashions for mass, ready to wear consumption and dealing a blow to the elitism that had governed the Parisian couture. In a career of more than three quarters of a century, Mr. Cardin remained a futurist. "He had this wonderful embrace of technology and was in love with the notion of progress," said Andrew Bolton, the head curator at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As the space age dawned, Mr. Cardin dressed men, and women, in spacesuits. In 1969, NASA commissioned him to create an interpretation of a spacesuit, a signal inspiration in his later work. "The dresses I prefer," he said at the time, "are those I invent for a life that does not yet exist." His designs were influenced by geometric shapes, often rendered in fabrics like silver foil, paper and brightly colored vinyl. The materials would shape the dominant aesthetic of the early 1960s. It was a new silhouette that "denied the body's natural contours and somehow seemed asexual," Mr. Bolton said. "I'm always inspired by something outside, not by the body itself," he told The New York Times in 1985. Clothing, he said, was meant "to give the body its shape, the way a glass gives shape to the water poured into it." Yet his men's ready to wear designs, introduced in 1960, were decidedly more faithful to the body's outlines. Built on narrow shoulders, high armholes and a fitted waist, they were streamlined and somewhat severe, dispensing in some cases with traditional collars in favor of the simple banded Nehru, a namesake adaptation of the style worn by the Indian prime minister. Those suits were slow to catch on in the United States until the Beatles appeared in knockoff versions on the Ed Sullivan television show in 1966. Nehru mania ensued. Mr. Cardin had laid the foundations for a global empire by the late 1950s. At a time when France was fashion's uncontested epicenter, he was bringing his designs to Moscow, Tokyo and Beijing, doing more to erode international boundaries than any designer of the day. In 1957, he became the first to forge business ties with Japan, and within two years he was selling his fashions there. He sensed a vast, untapped market for fashionable clothing in Central Europe and Asia, and by the end of the 1960s he was offering his designs for mass production in China. In 1983, Cardin became the first French couturier to penetrate the Soviet Union: His designs were manufactured in Soviet factories and sold under the Cardin label in Cardin boutiques in Moscow. He conceived of himself above all as a prolific ideas man, relishing his role as the overseer of a realm that encompassed clothing accessories, furniture, household products and fragrances sold through some 800 licensees in more than 140 countries on five continents. "I wash with my own soap," he once boasted. "I wear my own perfume, go to bed with my own sheets, have my own food products. I live on me." Chocolates, pens, cigarettes, frying pans, alarm clocks and cassette tapes all bore the Cardin logo, as did shoes, lingerie, blouses, neckwear, wallets, belts and, more recently, an Android tablet. By the mid 1980s, Mr. Cardin stood at the helm of a marketing organization and network of licensees paying him royalties of 5 to 12 percent, a stream of income that earned him the unofficial title "the Napoleon of licensors." "I was born an artiste," he told The Times in 1987, "but I am a businessman." Not content to preside over an omnipresent global brand, Mr. Cardin turned his rapacious attention to theaters and motels, media and even restaurants, in 1981 buying Maxim's, once the world's most famous restaurant, a landmark of the belle epoque on the Rue Royale in Paris. Two years later, as part of an international expansion, Maxim's opened its first branch in Beijing, prompting Mr. Cardin to exult, with his sense of a limitless future, "If I can put a Maxim's in Beijing, I can put a Maxim's on the moon." Pietro Costante Cardin was born on July 7, 1922, in San Biagio di Callalta, Italy, near Venice, where his parents were vacationing. He grew up in Saint Etienne, in east central France, where his father was a wine merchant. Pierre's impatience with convention asserted itself early. In his early teens he deflected his father's efforts to induct him into the family trade. In deference to his evident artistic ambitions, his parents eventually enrolled him in architectural studies at the school of Saint Etienne. Mr. Cardin, who was captivated by the worlds of theater and ballet, first dreamed of acting, but was later drawn to designing costumes and sets for the stage. In 1936, he left for Vichy. By 14, he was assisting a local tailor named Manby. Impatient to embark on a fashion career, he was 17 and preparing to head to Paris when World War II erupted, and he enlisted. During the war he took an administrative position in the French Red Cross, a job he later credited with fostering a latent talent for tallying balance sheets. He returned to Paris in 1945, intent on establishing himself as a designer. He apprenticed at several prominent fashion houses, among them Paquin and Elsa Schiaparelli. From 1946 to 1950, he designed coats and suits for Christian Dior. During that period he continued to indulge his passion for theater and cinema, designing costumes, based on the sketches of Christian Berard, for the Jean Cocteau film "Beauty and the Beast." Toward the end of his couture apprenticeship he alighted on an opportunity to found his own fashion house when a theatrical costumer with an attic workshop in the Madeleine neighborhood shuttered his business. Mr. Cardin moved in and began designing under his own name, buying additional floors of the building each year until he owned it in its entirety. In 1958, Mr. Cardin was chosen as professor emeritus at Bunka Fashion College in Japan, an association that afforded him the opportunity to forge business relations with the Japanese. On returning to Paris, he created his first ready to wear collection, which made its debut in 1959 in the department store Le Printemps. Mr. Cardin's impetuous departure from couture tradition earned him the ire of his peers and expulsion from the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture Parisienne. But he remained unmoved. Arguing that French manufacturers were already copying his creations, he asked, "Why shouldn't we run the show?" He was reinstated some years later after other designers began to recognize the potential profitability of ready to wear. In 1960 he defied the Chambre Syndicale once more, designing a men's ready to wear collection of slim fitted suits. By the mid 60s, he had elongated and slimmed down his men's silhouette, adding low slung trousers fitted at the waist and flared at the cuffs. Mr. Cardin, whose high profile clients included Cecil Beaton, Yul Brynner and Gregory Peck, argued that the style "brings out the best in a man's figure." During that period, his space age inflected women's couture was widely copied, generating knockoffs around the world. By the late '60s, he was offering women trouser suits and maxi skirts. "The eye is ready for it," he told Marylin Bender of The Times in October 1969, "now that pants have been accepted." Mr. Cardin's ventures that year extended to automotive designs and home furnishings. A Simca with a Cardin designed interior was presented at the Paris auto show. He made good on his vow to place the Cardin imprimatur on a total environment, creating a plastic modular desk that could be disassembled and then refit like a puzzle into a cube. A new chair design was made using foam rubber covered in vinyl; it changed, accordion like, from a couch to a child's chair. In 1970 he bought a faded Paris nightclub, Theatre des Ambassadeurs, on the Champs Elysees, gutting and rebuilding it and turning it into L'Espace Cardin, where he presented his fashions and showed art works, movies and contemporary plays. He neither boasted of his protean ambitions nor apologized for them. "I don't play cards, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't like sports," he told Ms. Bender. "I just work. It's marvelous. It amuses me." His willful, sometimes autocratic manner and gaunt good looks contributed to his magnetism. Writing in The Times, Ms. Bender described a pair of "blue eyes set above high cheekbones, thinning brown hair that curled most into the collar of his green shirt, and parenthesis lines on either side of his mouth," all of which lent him "a melancholy air," she wrote, "reminiscent of the late Aly Khan." The ever vigilant custodian of his own legend, Mr. Cardin did nothing to dispel the notion that the actress Jeanne Moreau had succumbed to his Lothario charms. Ms. Moreau herself professed her passion for Mr. Cardin to Judy Klemesrud of The Times in the fall of 1970. On meeting him at a fitting in his Paris salon in 1964, "it was love at first sight," she recalled. "I bought every dress in his collection." During those years, Mr. Cardin also maintained a close relationship with Andre Oliver, his main assistant for more than 40 years, who died in Paris in 1993. There was no immediate information on survivors. In his atelier, Mr. Cardin viewed the female body as an abstraction, a hanger of sorts. "I think of the dress," he announced baldly. "The woman doesn't matter." He forsook his hard edge aesthetic for a time in the 1970s, incorporating draped fabrics, pleating, quilting and asymmetrical collars and hems into his designs. His couture collection of 1986 featured entire dresses made from billowing scarves, Bernadine Morris, the Times fashion critic at the time, deemed the collection "still quite inventive," but dismissed its various concepts as "scattered like buckshot, so they do not come together in a comprehensive statement." Two years later she referred to a collection of short coats with wired hems as "histrionic." By the late 1980s and early '90s, Cardin was revisiting his fashion archives to issue variations of 1960s space age designs. His far flung ventures fused the commercial and theatrical; he staged extravagant shows in Moscow's Red Square in 1991 and a decade later in the Gobi Desert. Yet his reputation as a couturier was diminishing. By 1994, he was showing his seasonal collections primarily to a small circle of clients and journalists. Mr. Cardin thrived nonetheless as a cultural omnivore whose eclectic interests extended from architecture to interior design and to the performance arts. As early as 1970, he told Ms. Sheppard, the fashion critic, that "I like seeing people looking at TV, seeing avant garde plays." Referring to the choreographer Paul Taylor, he added, "I loved the Japanese marionettes from Osaka and adore the Taylor ballets." Times have changed since the international jet set flocked to Maxim's. In 2016, he was asking roughly one billion euros ( 1.4 billion) for the rights to his licensing empire. "If you don't have the money, then don't buy it," he told a reporter for Bloomberg at the time. "Nobody's forcing you to. I can afford to die without selling it." Mr. Cardin, who made his mark on the 20th century with prophetic, technologically inspired designs, lived to see his fashions reappraised. His collections served as the inspiration for designers like Gareth Pugh, Simon Porte Jacquemus, and to some degree, Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel. That he remained a force in the 21st century was attested to by Lady Gaga, who once wore one of his metallic chain mail creations on the concert stage. Intent on keeping that name alive, Mr. Cardin returned to the fashion world with a splash in September 2011, unveiling a spring collection replete with his signature unisex astronaut style jumpsuits, rubber jewelry and neon, architecturally inspired mini dresses. In 2014 he opened a museum in the Marais district of Paris to display his work, calling it the Past Present Future Museum. In the summer of 2017, the Preservation Society of Newport County, in Rhode Island, hosted a runway show at the Breakers mansion, the 90 piece spectacular serving as an introduction to "Pierre Cardin: 70 Years of Innovation," highlighting the designer's most admired and recognizable work. "His innovations are still relevant," said Trudy Coxe, the chief executive of the Preservation Society, adding that the eight month exhibition attracted well over 100,000 visitors. Intent on burnishing his legacy, that fall Mr. Cardin opened a new boutique on the Rue Royale next door to the original Maxim's. The styles were familiar but rendered with a brash, contemporary spin. Metal studs lent a touch of punk to a black wool mini dress; a similar look featured circular cutouts that evoked his signature futurism. "I made this line for young people," Mr. Cardin said at the time. "It's quite entertaining." As he revisited his past couture landmarks, Mr. Cardin all the while declined to repeat himself outright. Ever venturesome, he insisted: "I design for tomorrow. I never look backward."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Greg Cirulnick, 39, said he had wiped down every piece of machinery before and after he used it. He posited that since the new coronavirus appears to spread through saliva and not sweat, the gym may not be substantially more hazardous to his health than going to a grocery store. The subway may even be worse. Certainly, Mr. Cirulnick said, "I'd rather not get pneumonia and be on my back." Still, he didn't think, given his age and great health, that he was going to be one of the disease's fatalities, or that he should give up going to the gym. Romy Erickson, 30, who was at the leg press with Beats headphones and a bottle of alcohol based sanitizer, admitted that hitting the gym may not be the right thing to do. It was just that she couldn't imagine giving up the gym, except by force. Many felt similarly, which is why Leo Pacheco, one of the gym's most booked trainers, was considering decamping to Miami, where a gym ban isn't in place yet. Mr. Pacheco wasn't convinced the lockdown on gyms was truly about protecting people's health; not after so much government inaction. He also found it strange that the one client who was the most panicked over the last two weeks was a financial type who was freaking out over his investment portfolio.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Think you travel a lot for work? Steve Aoki, the 41 year old D.J., musician and music producer, may have you beat. He spends about a third of the year at home in Las Vegas, where he is the resident D.J. at Hakkasan. The rest of the time is spent bouncing from concerts to music festivals to recording sessions. He compares his grueling schedule to that of a professional athlete. Here's how he stays fit and Zen on the road. I'm rocking about 250 shows on average. If I'm on the road, I'm going to bed around 4 to 5 in the morning. If I'm in Europe, I'm not back in my room until 6 a.m. That also means I'm catching afternoon flights. I usually have to report at 10 a.m. to go to the airport. So I try to get up around 8:30 or 9 a.m. and I'll do a workout right away before the flight. It's usually more cardio based, like a low intensity 30 minute jog. If you don't have that initial motivation, it's really easy to shrug off working out. Flying so much, I have a life hack. When I get to the airport, I go to the duty free shops or beauty stores, and I go down the line and put on moisturizer, serum and maybe even cologne. It's a great way to try new things but also then my skin is all hydrated that I can get on the plane and go directly to sleep. Other than that, I don't buy anything over 100 milliliters so I can always take it on the plane with me. I have stuff from Tatcha, Mario Badescu and I like Skyn Iceland. Those three lines are my staples. My main workout comes when I land. Right when I get to the hotel, there is a very small window of opportunity. I put my bag down or leave it with the concierge, and I go straight to the gym. That's when I do strength conditioning or a real cardio burn. It's also how I came up with the idea for my Aoki Bootcamp, which is on the Neou app. It's all full body workouts that don't require having weights or anything else. I wanted it to be about the busy person, who is traveling or just has maybe 5 or 10 or 30 minutes in a hotel room wherever they are. Right now I'm on a 90 day body fat challenge. The goal is that I'm trying to get down to 10 percent body fat in 90 days. I'm currently at 18.5 percent. In order to get to the goal, I eat below 1,800 calories a day. That's about 80 percent of what I'll usually eat. The main thing about being fit, I've come to realize, is regulating food and it's hard. I'm a foodie. I'm the luckiest guy in the world, getting invitations to Michelin rated restaurants and omakases. I want to try as much as I can. I think of my career like a sport. I prepare for it the way a professional athlete does. My D.J. sets are extremely physical. Then it's how do you deal with the stress and the lifestyle, and I personally like to be more mindful and feel healthy. If you don't think about it as a competition and you don't train, I don't know how long you can really last in this profession. Being a D.J., the work environment is stressful. You're in a club. You're around people that are there to have a big night. When I was younger, I was like, "Wow, this is so much fun." I forgot I was the D.J., and I was having fun with the crowd. Later on, with wisdom and experience, I figured out that I'm actually the conductor for the night, so I need to have a sense of clarity. Whether you're drinking or sober, I'm going to give you something you won't forget. In order to do that, I have to be clairvoyant and situationally aware. So now, I block out what most people go to a club for. I'm there to do a job.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Like most other large regional nonprofit and commercial theaters, the Wilma in Philadelphia plans to stay closed through the fall. But this theater has an unusual idea for how to reopen when the time comes: it will prevent theatergoers from breathing on one another by separating them with wooden dividers. The Wilma, which normally seats 300 people in a traditional auditorium, says it will build a new structure, seating as many as 100 or as few as 35, on its stage. The two tiered structure, which can be configured in the round or as a semicircle, is based in part on Shakespeare's Globe Theater. The most distinctive feature is that each party of patrons whether they be solo or in groups of up to four is seated in a box, physically separated from all other parties.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The troubles on "A New Leaf" (1971), Elaine May's directorial debut, were worrisome before they were legion. She had never directed a movie and had to learn as she went along. The head of the studio changed while she was making it (the new boss wasn't keen). And then there was her peerless star, Walter Matthau, whom she grew to love but who called her Mrs. Hitler. Years later, she suggested what the real problem was. People thought that May, a slight, beautiful woman, was "a nice girl, and the thing is, of course, I wasn't a nice girl." She added, "And when they found this out, they hated me all the more." Being nice can be a liability for a woman; not being nice can be a career killer. By the time May made "A New Leaf," she had already established her place in American cultural history as one half of the comedy team with another future filmmaker, Mike Nichols. Her film trajectory proved far more fraught than his, and was filled with stops and starts. A terrific director of actors whose comedy can lacerate, she remains a criminally underappreciated moviemaker. If you are in New York, you should clear your calendar for a tribute to her that begins Tuesday at Film Forum as part of a larger program on 1970s comedy. (She's currently in a critically lauded Broadway play, "The Waverly Gallery.") After four years together, Nichols and May split up in 1961, and he vaulted forward, directing for Broadway and soon Hollywood. When his film "The Graduate" hit in 1967, Life magazine ran a profile of her asking, "Whatever became of Elaine May?" She was writing an unused, highly regarded draft of "The Loved One" and acting in movies, including alongside Peter Falk, whom she later cast in her film "Mikey and Nicky." "The Graduate" went on to be anointed a cultural touchstone; she appeared in Carl Reiner's less memorable "Enter Laughing." May isn't the star, alas, but she easily steals the movie (it's at Film Forum) playing a bad actress in a worse play. In 1968, when May signed her extraordinary contract with Paramount Pictures to write, direct and star in "A New Leaf," she became the first female director with a Hollywood deal since Ida Lupino. Her manager pushed the female angle, telling the studio that having a woman filmmaker would be of significance. Perhaps he had noticed that second wave feminists were agitating for change, even as the industry remained stuck in its sexist rut: it's been estimated that at the time less than 1 percent of American directors were women. She and Paramount soon clashed, though, and the studio took the movie away from her. She sued and tried to get it to remove her name. It's still wonderful.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve raised its already high marks for the state of the economy on Wednesday, refusing to bow to President Trump's recent push for the central bank to pause its march toward higher interest rates. Federal Open Market Committee officials voted unanimously at the end of their two day meeting to keep interest rates unchanged, at a range of 1.75 to 2 percent. But the statement they issued keeps the Fed on track to raise rates next month and again in December, after two rate increases in the first half of the year. Its revised assessments of economic growth and the inflation rate could signal that those coming increases are even more likely than investors previously thought. The statement declared that the job market continues to strengthen and that "economic activity has been rising at a strong rate." That is a change from the June statement, when the Fed said economic growth was "solid." Officials also improved their assessment of consumer spending, saying that it has "grown strongly." The Fed statement did not convey any concern that Mr. Trump's trade policies could hamper growth, nor did it suggest worry about the sluggish pace of wage increases for most workers. The Fed chairman, Jerome H. Powell, fielded a barrage of questions from members of Congress on those topics in testimony last month. In their statement on Wednesday, Fed officials said the overall inflation rate and the rate that excludes volatile food and energy prices both "remain near 2 percent," which is the Fed's target level. In June, officials said those rates "have moved close to 2 percent." In keeping with previous statements, officials continued to signal they will raise rates again soon, saying they expect "that further gradual increases in the target range for the federal funds rate will be consistent with sustained expansion of economic activity, strong labor market conditions and inflation near the committee's symmetric 2 percent objective over the medium term." The slight changes reflect improving economic data in recent weeks. Economic growth clocked in above a 4 percent rate for the second quarter, and inflation ran slightly above 2 percent. The statement did not come with an updated set of economic forecasts issued after the meeting or a question and answer session with Mr. Powell, who gives quarterly news conferences now but has chosen to pick up the pace next year and brief reporters after every Fed meeting. So there was no direct response to Mr. Trump, who has broken recent protocol and publicly criticized the Fed's path of rate increases, worrying that they will dampen a strong economic run. Here are four takeaways from Wednesday's Fed statement: The economy is running hot, but inflation fears remain contained. Mr. Powell has consistently played down the notion that the economy is close to "overheating" growing so fast, with unemployment so low, that it sets off a rapid escalation in wages and consumer prices. The economy's 4.1 percent growth rate in the second quarter certainly is rapid, but its current pace for the year, about 3 percent, is only slightly above the Fed's most recent forecasts. The statement acknowledged that acceleration but expressed no concern over it. "Risks to the economic outlook appear roughly balanced," officials wrote, meaning that the likelihood is about the same that things could get better or worse in the economy. It's standard language of late for the Fed, and in keeping with analysts' expectations. "We expect only minor changes to the policy statement to reflect the latest developments in the economy," economists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch wrote in a research note on Tuesday. As Mr. Powell noted in his testimony before Congress last month, the Fed has heard a lot anecdotally from businesses about fears of Mr. Trump's tariffs and threats hurting investment and growth but those fears have not shown up in the economic data. That's partly because a pre tariff surge in soybean exports helped prop up growth in the second quarter, a trend that economists warn will reverse in the back half of the year. "The escalating trade rhetoric hampers forecasters' near term view of the economy, which is a particular problem for the Fed currently as it attempts to engineer a soft landing from the current expansion," Deutsche Bank researchers wrote this week. A question before the meeting was whether the trade war had escalated enough to merit a warning in the statement. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." The Fed's next move still looks to be a rate increase. Nothing in the statement suggested that officials are worried about growth or prepared to slow their pace of rate increases, a development that defies some recent Fed attempts to leave its options open on next policy moves. Even when the Fed is not raising or cutting rates, it still sends signals to the market about where monetary policy is headed, through subtle, but crucial, changes in language. Some of those recent changes have sent a purposefully muddy signal, apparently meant to demonstrate flexibility to respond to events in the economy. For example, in his testimony last month, Mr. Powell, the leader of the Federal Open Market Committee, said that "with a strong job market, inflation close to our objective and the risks to the outlook roughly balanced, the F.O.M.C. believes that for now the best way forward is to keep gradually raising the federal funds rate." Analysts saw that phrase and honed in on "for now." "The inclusion of those words diluted the signal for continued gradual tightening, but not necessarily in a dovish or a hawkish way," Jim O'Sullivan, chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics, wrote this week. "Rather, as we have been discussing, their inclusion continued the recent trend toward reduced forward guidance: The pace of tightening could be stepped up or slowed down, depending on the data." That still seems possible, particularly from Mr. Powell's recent testimony, but the statement only points one way for now. The Fed will not be bullied. Mr. Trump has made no secret of his disagreement with the Fed's rate increases, tweeting last month that the central bank's moves undercut the United States economy and that its pattern of rate increases "hurts all that we have done." The president, who had accused the Fed of keeping interest rates artificially low to help President Barack Obama, now appears ready to blame the central bank for trying to slow down a booming economy. Mr. Powell has insisted the Fed is an independent body that moves in response to economic data, not political pressure. The statement seems to back that up. We'll have to wait for direct questioning at the next meeting, but for now, the Fed is telling Mr. Trump, in its very Fed way, to mind his own business.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
AUSTIN, TEX. The houses are often among the nicest on the block, or at least the biggest. They may be new construction where a smaller structure once stood, or an extensively renovated home with cheery paint in shades of yellow or blue. But then the telltale signs appear, including an electronic touch pad on the door that makes it easy for people to get in without a key. The ads on HomeAway or Airbnb eventually confirm it: A party house has come to the neighborhood. Some neighbors have warmed in recent years to travelers dragging suitcases through their residential neighborhoods, and they are happy that the visitors spread their money around. But when profit seeking entrepreneurs furnish homes they do not live in to make them attractive to big groups and then rent out those houses as much as possible, parties and noise are nearly inevitable. And so it goes here in Austin, where a group of enraged and occasionally sleepless residents have taken their complaints to the city. Austin made rules in 2012 that were meant to keep short term rentals under control, but the neighbors argue that many of the rules are unenforceable. This week, I rented one of the most notorious party houses in Austin and invited some of the neighbors over for a chat to ask a few questions. Where do the rights of property owners to rent out their homes end, and where do those of quiet loving neighbors begin? Do all home shoppers now need to be on the lookout for nearby problem properties? And if so, what might happen to home values when revelers can bunk up next door on any given night? These are not new questions. In resort areas in particular, people have been renting out investment properties for ages. What's new is how easy it has become for people to make money by listing rooms or homes and for visitors to save money by staying there. This is particularly true in good time destinations like Austin, Nashville, New Orleans and other bigger cities. When Austin tried to bring some order to the proceedings three years ago, it limited the number of unrelated people who could stay in one place at one time to six. (It also capped the number of certain listings in many neighborhoods, albeit with a loophole that has allowed many unregistered properties to hit the market.) Nevertheless, listings began appearing all over the city advertising beds for 10 or 15 people, or more. Austin has become a popular bachelor party destination, and the website Thrillist described one Airbnb listing as "the perfect place to bed down for a bonkers bachelor party, as it's a short bike ride from downtown, just the right blend of weird huge, and not at all unaccustomed to rowdy entertainment." Emmy Jodoin lives next door to that house with her family. "It is loud, and there is live music and karaoke stuff, and it's all done outside because of the pool," she said. "They're out in front at 4 in the afternoon waiting for their Uber to come, drunk on the front lawn." Homeowners had other complaints about guests, including trash bins overflowing with beer cans, public urination, catcalling, foul language, racist remarks, companies throwing events and the appearance of a rainbow colored painted pony. "Sometimes, when they are outside, they're playing beer pong just wearing their underwear," said Hazel Oldt, age 11, who can see them next door from the third floor rooftop garden of her house. Many of the complaints result when there are well over six people staying at these houses. So how do owners get away with renting to more people than city rules allow? "Determining how many are occupying versus just visiting is almost impossible," Carl Smart, who is the director of Austin's code department, said, chuckling as he did so. What was so funny? Had some of the guests been coached to say that they were related? "I think so," he said. "There is no way for us to disprove or to prove it. We could ask them to, but they don't have to, so we have to take their word for it." KVUE, a local television station, tagged along with code enforcement officers who heard from guests at one house that there were triplets inside and that someone else was related to a fifth guest by marriage. The neighbors would prefer that the city simply cap guests at six people or, better yet, stop allowing what they describe as rogue hotels to operate in residential neighborhoods. (They have no problem with people renting out their entire homes occasionally or renting rooms more frequently, while the owners themselves are in residence.) Even if no one, in this instance, is doing any actual residing? HomeAway's contention is that the visitors coming for the weekend are the residents in this context. Mr. Curtis questioned how widespread the problem was. Airbnb provided some statistics about its customers, noting that from Oct. 1, 2014, to Oct. 1 this year, 87 percent of trips to Austin involved four or fewer people and 97 percent involved eight or fewer. The average age of Airbnb guests in Austin is 36. According to the research company Airdna, of the 1,414 Airbnb listings in Austin as of Aug. 31 with three or more bedrooms, 33 offer lodging for four or more people per bedroom while 618 sleep over two per bedroom. Airbnb offers a hotline for neighbors having problems with hosts anywhere it operates and is building tools that will try to recognize parties before they happen, say when someone books a large house and that listing is immediately viewed by many other site visitors. Since October 2012, Austin has received 266 complaints about the type of registered properties where the homeowner is generally not present. Twenty percent of the properties have at least one complaint, with an average of 2.4 complaints among those. Seventeen percent of the complaints were about over occupancy. The house where I stayed has received 15 complaints, and the city has suspended its license once. The walls have "Dumb and Dumber" and "Anchorman" movie posters, and the three bedrooms are full of bunk beds and futons. "Our neighbors understand that your group is here to have a good time," the listing says. But not too good a time. Each door to the outside has a framed copy of Austin's noise ordinance nearby, and Jason Martin, a limited partner with partial ownership in the property, sends an extensive list of house rules to guests urging them not to disturb the neighbors. "It is extremely professionally run," he said. "Any word of a bachelor party or fraternities is an immediate no go." Those visitors were especially concerned about their property values. For many of them, their homes are their largest asset. Jessie Neufeld, who bought her home right before the local rules changed in 2012 and now has a 2 year old child, put it most bluntly. "We did not buy our house to be living next to a hotel," she said. "Would you buy a home if you knew a hotel like this was operating next door, if you wanted to set your life up and raise a family?" I put the question to two real estate professionals whose names I saw on for sale signs for homes that were next to or close to some of the party houses. Were the properties going to sell for less because of the problem properties nearby, and did they have a duty to disclose these houses to any and all buyers? Katie Brigmon of Dash Realty did not want to answer many questions about her listing, a house that is very close to one problem property, and my call to her quickly went dead. Jeff Grant from Saddle Realty said that he wasn't aware of the short term rental several homes down from the house he's trying to sell on Hidalgo Street. "But my philosophy has always been disclose, disclose, disclose," he said. "I don't think it affects property value in the least." It probably won't if the buyer simply wants to rent out the home every weekend. But every other home buyer ought to be searching Airbnb, HomeAway and similar sites for listings that are close to a home that they're considering buying. Ms. Neufeld said she resented the fact that people making a living from renting out homes for the weekend have put her own home's value at risk. "They are leveraging our neighborhood for their profit, telling people to come stay in this beautiful place where you would like to pretend that you live," she said. "And they are making people miserable."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Credit...Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times Okwui Okpokwasili Wants You to Slow Down and Walk With Her We are walking together, so slowly that it might take 45 minutes to cross the small room. Our bodies are close, but as in a packed subway car, we don't make eye contact. We listen. We hear breath, moans, laughter. These all come from us, as do more mysteriously layers of words and song that rise up and sink, perhaps to resurface later. For long stretches, we walk in silence. This is all highly unusual for me. I'm visiting a rehearsal as a journalist, and in such situations, I normally behave like an audience member, not a participant. But what is being rehearsed, "Sitting on a Man's Head," isn't really for an audience. Guests, however, are invited. And if you attend Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church on a Friday night during the four weeks of "Platform 2020: Utterances From the Chorus" (Feb. 22 March 21), you have the option of remaining outside the enclosed space where "Sitting on a Man's Head" continues for four hours. You could just listen without seeing. Or you can ponder the question "What do you carry that carries you?" And if you write your answer "the pain in my knee," "my daughter" in a book provided, an "artist activator" will talk with you about it. And if you wish, you and that artist can enter the inner sanctum and join others who are walking very slowly. You can walk with them for as long as you like, and you may hear words from your conversation become part of an improvised collective song. You might even sing yourself. A factor in favor of joining: You'll almost certainly be walking with the choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili. For most people, this will also be highly unusual. Tall, striking and charismatic (that's her in the video for Jay Z's "4:44"), Ms. Okpokwasili is the opposite of ordinary, an expectation confounding blend of authority and vulnerability. Her hard to classify works, like "Bronx Gothic," have earned her piles of awards, including a MacArthur grant. They are intense and enigmatic, and often loaded with tests of endurance. And while she says that "Sitting on a Man's Head" isn't a performance, and though it is closer to mindfulness practice than to conventional choreography, participating in it feels something like being inside one of those works, with her. Now, she's inviting the public into this process "where we are compelled to listen to each other and be linked together, with the potential for anything to happen." The concept also emerges from the creation of a recent piece, during which she and the other performers improvised together in song, listening and riffing. "The voice is so deeply personal and singular," she explained, "but also incredibly porous in the way it seems to break the boundaries of other people's skin. So this is a practice of being inside of yourself and projecting to the deep inside of someone else." Like her 2017 work "Poor People's TV Room," this project draws on research that she, the child of Nigerian immigrants, has done into protest movements of Nigerian women. "There was a practice called Sitting on a Man," she said. "When women are feeling aggrieved by a man who has power, they go to his residence and they do a durational performance demanding change, and they don't leave until they get it." Yes, but why the slow walking? "We're surrounded by people regularly enacting acts of virtuosity," she said. "Slowing down helps us be together. It's a rupture from what you normally do, a resensitizing to micro perceptions." Why four hours? "I'm interested in what happens when you stay in one thing for a long time. Sometimes it can be really hard and painful. But when you get past something, I think it's bliss." But, really, why four hours? "Because we couldn't do it any longer. St. Mark's wants its church back." St. Mark's, the home of Danspace Project, which is now in its 45th year, is still an active site of worship. And the space must also be shared with the many other parts of the Platform series, organized by Ms. Okpokwasili with Danspace's executive director, Judy Hussie Taylor. All of this, Ms. Hussie Taylor said, is representative of how the artist curated Platforms have evolved since she introduced the idea 10 years ago: "It's a way of turning questions that might never be answered into a different kind of performance event, where artistic practice can be shared." In the Platforms, monthlong packages of themed performances and discussions, Ms. Hussie Taylor and artist curators like Reggie Wilson and Ishmael Huston Jones have gathered together artists who seem to be investigating similar things. "We're using our collective minds to be generative," she said. "Out of that, people eventually make amazing pieces, but it doesn't always happen within the context of the Platform. It might be the seed. It opens up possibilities." Ms. Okpokwasili likened that process to "Sitting on a Man's Head," which is "not about showing people what we do. It's about opening a channel to be in a relationship with others. We're not all singing the same song, but if the song can hold all those layers of contention and contradiction, the things you need and the things that are necessary to sustain the group, then it goes into one space we're all sharing." Through earlier iterations of "Sitting" at the 2018 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and last year in Houston (it heads to the Tate Modern in London at the end of March), Ms. Okpokwasili and Mr. Born have been refining it. A barrage of questions posed to guests has boiled down to one. An array of gestures developed with guests has narrowed to just the walking and whatever movement is needed to find ease in that walking. "We've been working on keeping it a liberated space," Ms. Okpokwasili said. "How to make the guests understand that they're always free to go? You stay as long as you want to stay, and maybe a little longer because something unexpected could happen." What could that be? Giggle fits, screaming, weeping, boredom, cramps, communion. "It's whatever needs to happen, and sometimes you know when it's landed," she said. "But then I have to critique that, because it's about falling in and out of it, it's about making and unmaking. If it happened the same way all the time, I would be concerned." The key is to help guests grasp the potential of bringing something into the space. "What does it do to somebody to hear a lyric from their conversation get picked up by the others?" she asked. "What does it feel like for that to come back to you?" "I know what it does to me to pay that kind of attention, and to have that attention be paid," she said. "I don't know what it will do to other people, but I want to make the space to see."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Ice cream still needs scooping, beaches still need guarding and campers still need counseling. But now, there are way fewer teenagers doing it all this summer. Since 2000, the share of 16 to 19 year olds who are working has plummeted by 40 percent, with fewer than a third of American teenagers in a job last summer. Their share of the overall work force has never been this low, and about 1.1 million of them would like a job but can't find one, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Experts are struggling to figure out exactly why. "We don't know to what extent they're not working because they can't find a job, or aren't interested, or are doing other stuff like going to summer school, traveling, volunteering, doing service learning," said Martha Ross, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research organization based in Washington. What is clear is that those who need a job the most are often the least likely to get one. To a large extent, the higher a household's income, the more likely a teenager is to get a job. Suburbanites have a better shot than city dwellers, and white teenagers face far better odds than blacks, in part because of disappearing federal support for summer jobs. One factor that affects all teenagers equally is that summer quite literally isn't what it used to be. With the proliferation of standardized tests and intense pressure to meet national academic standards like the Common Core, more students are attending summer school than ever before. At the same time, education districts around the country have cut into the number of weeks available to work full time by moving up their start dates before Labor Day so they can provide more instructional time. Add year round practices for serious athletes and parents who make the annual family vacation mandatory, and working barely seems worth it, even if employers are willing to put teenagers to work for just six or eight weeks. Still, for any teenager to work, the openings have to exist in the first place. Although the proportion of teenagers in a job has inched up from its low point during the depths of the recession in 2009, a sluggish recovery continues to take a toll. Adults, desperate for second and third jobs to make ends meet, may be crowding out many teenagers. In the meantime, the decline in government support for summer jobs programs has been steep. In New York City, for example, federal funds made up 82 percent of the summer jobs program's budget in 1999, compared with 11.5 percent in 2005, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This year, that contribution is zero, said Andre White, the city's acting assistant commissioner of youth work force development. "The federal government has walked away from summer jobs nationally," Mr. White said. Cities like Chicago are responding by trying to fill the gap in funds and cooperating with private companies and researchers who can help make the case for even more paid work. In December, a study by the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Pennsylvania showed that participants in the city's summer jobs program were arrested for violent crimes 43 percent less often than those in a control group of teenagers who were not in Chicago's summer jobs program. This year, the city is putting 24,000 teenagers to work and inviting researchers to study the impact of committed mentors. The absence of work means more than having no money for a mobile phone or a night out with friends. A summer job can provide essential experience that is crucial to snagging better jobs later, experts say. Research shows that for every year teenagers work while in high school, income rises an average of 15 percent when they are in their 20s. If that's true for Nasir Mack, he may be wealthy by the time he turns 30. The 16 year old is starting his third summer in the Philadelphia Youth Network's WorkReady program. In the past, he was employed by an engineering company and a community college. This summer, he will work at the city's Office of Housing and Community Development. When Nasir first heard about the program through friends, he jumped at the chance, given the alternative. "I'm not going to be doing anything but sitting in the house," he said. "Why would I want to do that when there are so many things out there you can be doing?" The drop off in summer jobs for teenagers is an echo of the outsize drop in overall teenage employment year round. And it is one of several puzzling changes in the American labor force. Across nearly every group, the share of people men in particular without a paying job has been on the rise. The United States, which once boasted of having one of the highest labor force participation rates among advanced industrialized nations, is now languishing far behind. As for teenagers, although there are more today than in 2000, a much smaller proportion of them have a job or are hunting for one 4.5 million employed in the summer of 2014 compared with 7.2 million 15 years ago. Even during the recessions of 1991 and 2001, more than half of all teenagers were working. Ms. Ross of Brookings said she was concerned about what it might portend for overall employment rates, which in June fell to their lowest level since 1977. "There is a changing mind set over the last 15 years now," James Borbely, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said of teenagers. "A change in what people are choosing to do." So what are they doing instead? Some of those who don't have to fill in gaps in the family budget are on year round travel teams, training hard at a sport that they hope will land them a scholarship or admissions boost. Others may take the opposite approach and do nothing at all. Julie Lythcott Haims, author of "How to Raise an Adult," recently took to The Times's Motherlode blog to make the case that it is actually good for them. For affluent teenagers, there is an increasing emphasis on buffing college applications with feats of community service, unpaid internships, foreign travel, language programs and volunteer work. This may explain why it's still common in areas where these teenagers vacation to find others their age who normally live outside of the United States waiting tables and working in stores. Camps can face challenges hiring counselors in this environment. In last year's American Camp Association survey, directors noted that counselor applicants were deciding at the last minute, changing their minds and not wanting to work the entire summer. Competition with internships, which do not show up in federal employment figures if they are unpaid, was a particular difficulty. As for those on the hunt, fewer than half of the young people who sought work though a city program found one last summer, said Chauncy Lennon, head of work force initiatives at the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, which donates to summer jobs programs. Mr. Lennon said he expected to see similar numbers of disappointed young job seekers again this year. Left to their own devices, many teenagers can't find a job at all, at least in the places where they think to apply. Sabire Bruce, 16, who is in his first year in the Philadelphia program, said that he knew of other teenagers who were out looking for work every day. "They go to the places that catch their attention," he said. "GameStop. Foot Locker. The things they want to surround themselves with."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
We asked our writers to reflect on PBS's lasting imprint on our culture, while Rachael Ray, Gary Clark Jr., Damon Lindelof, Kal Penn and others share first person reminiscences about the television that changed their lives. Death, war, divorce: None of these seem like auspicious subjects for a children's television program. But for more than 30 years, beginning in 1968 on National Educational Television (the precursor to PBS), Fred Rogers covered all of these topics and more, with empathy and honesty. The soft spoken, cardigan wearing, former Presbyterian minister was concerned with not just the academic but the emotional education of children. As he told members of the Senate who were debating whether to defund public television in 1969, "I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service." With the help of Daniel Tiger, King Friday XIII, Officer Clemmons and the rest of the residents of his neighborhood, Mr. Rogers taught viewers of all ages to not be afraid of their feelings, to always look for the helpers and to like themselves just the way they are. Jennifer Harlan 2. When the mundane became must see TV. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called it "dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV": "An American Family," the 1973 documentary series revealing seven months in the home of Santa Barbara's Loud family, presaged the coming of reality television by many years. In retrospect, the series is an appealingly loose portrait of mundane family life, captured before the tropes of reality TV calcified and the banal was repackaged as slickly sensational. But at the time it was controversial, dismissed by some as voyeuristic, fake seeming or unfairly edited. The series represented a disruption both for television and the American family's self image: It chronicled Bill and Pat Loud's divorce, and followed their eldest son, Lance, as he moved to New York and came out as gay. Lance became perhaps the first reality star, emerging from the show as a gay icon and epitomizing, as he put it himself, "the middle class dream that you can become famous for being just who you are." Amanda Hess While now entrenched in the comedy pantheon, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" was relatively unknown in America when it finished its run in England in 1974. Few, including its six members, thought its humor would translate. It was too highbrow, too weird, too British. That this was proved wrong by PBS, which is not known for anarchic humor, is an absurdity worthy of Python. Classic sketches about the Ministry of Silly Walks, dead parrots or the military's weaponization of a joke so funny people die laughing became instant hits among public television audiences. When ABC aired edited episodes of the show, Monty Python sued, becoming the rare comedians to actually fight to stay off network television. Jason Zinoman 4. For Rachael Ray, a reason to 'just keep going.' When I was a kid my mom and I would watch PBS together, and Julia Child was just the most fascinating figure to me because she took herself not seriously! At all. I just remember how funny and real she was hitting the garlic and it would kick across the room and she'd just keep going, and she'd throw in fistfuls of salt, and she'd drink. My mom worked in restaurants for 60 years and I always wanted to be just like my mom, so I was constantly on her hip in the kitchen and trying to mimic her. Food is what brought us together, so if she liked something, I liked something. When I first started, I would think of Julia often. If the pasta would hit the wall, or if something didn't look just right, I would think to myself, "Well, Julia would just keep going." I just love that about her, that sense of "I've put my heart and my soul into this and it's going to be whatever it's going to be and we're going to do this together, and you're going to see all of it, no matter what." It wasn't about being perfect or the best; it was about living life to its fullest. She took something that was considered complicated, or precious, or for a very elite few, and made it digestible for people and fun. She's just so groundbreaking. Would Emeril have had a band and been Emeril and said "BAM" and thrown a party every night? There's a Galloping Gourmet running all over the room and joking and telling you every little bit of his personal life. I think that she's the one that did that for everyone. Rachael Ray is the host of the syndicated "Rachael Ray Show" and "30 Minute Meals" on the Food Network. Interview by Julia Carmel. I had never really seen live music before. A neighbor used to have parties where a mariachi band would play, and I saw Michael Jackson when I was 5 years old, but that was really it. Seeing blues on "A.C.L.," just down the highway from where we lived outside of Austin, my eyes opened up. It gave me a greater appreciation of where I was from, and it showed me something outside of school pep rallies and football games, that whole thing. One day, when I was about 21, I walked past the executive producer Terry Lickona in Austin. He said, "Hey, Gary! When are you going to play my show?" I was like, "Man, I've been waiting for you to ask me that question for a decade!" The first time I walked onstage in 2007 , I got emotional. There's no feeling like it. The idea that there is this TV show where you can get a real, intimate, honest, raw performance you just can't really beat that. It captures a kind of energy exchange that makes you feel like you're there. As a kid, I felt like I was there, and it changed my whole life. Gary Clark Jr., a Grammy winning singer, songwriter and guitarist, first played "Austin City Limits" in 2007. Interview by Reggie Ugwu. 10. When tuxedos and arias became an unlikely sensation. The boyish star tenor Jose Carreras was just 40 and at the pinnacle of his career when he was diagnosed with leukemia in the mid 1980s. But he beat the odds and survived. To welcome him back to performance, make money for his cancer foundation and celebrate the 1990 World Cup finals, his colleagues Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti sang an outdoor concert with him at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. The three tuxedoed Mediterranean gentlemen, belting arias, pop hits and Neapolitan songs at the top of their lungs while dripping with sweat, were an unlikely sensation, and the combo spent the '90s doing over 30 of the shows. The easy listening pablum was eaten up on PBS telecasts and as best selling records, and became the defining operatic (or pseudo operatic) phenomenon of the past 30 years. Zachary Woolfe The Power of Myth and Bill Moyers 11. A professor, a mantra and a galaxy far, far away. "Follow your bliss": This piece of wisdom was familiar to students who flocked to the classes of Joseph Campbell, a beloved literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College. "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth," Bill Moyers's six part series, which aired in 1988, turned it into a (sometimes misunderstood) cultural mantra. "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," Campbell's 1949 study of comparative mythology, already had fans among the counterculture, including George Lucas, who has cited it as a foundational text for "Star Wars." But the show made the professor, who died before the show aired, into a mainstream hero and Moyers, who had returned to PBS after a 10 year run at CBS, into television's leading explorer of the Big Questions. Jennifer Schuessler 12. Come for the painting lesson. Stay for Bob. In 1994, the talk show host Phil Donahue asked Bob Ross to "say out loud your work will never hang in a museum." "Well, maybe it will," Ross replied, though museums were not of course the point: On "The Joy of Painting" anyone could be an artist. The conceit was simple: Paint a picture in 26 minutes. The shows were taped in one sitting a sunset, some clouds, a mighty mountain, and, in the last moment, a big pine. It made for mesmerizing television, then and now. The show ran for 11 seasons between 1983 and 1994, and in 2015 became a viral sensation on the streaming platform Twitch, where it met an entirely new audience, previously unfamiliar with the calming scrape of a palette knife or the comforts of Ross's soothing voice. "There are no mistakes," he assured viewers, "only happy accidents." In March 2019, 24 years after his death, several of Ross's paintings became part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Alicia DeSantis My folks split up in 1984. This meant every other weekend was spent at my dad's apartment and approximately 20 hours of television before he delivered me back to my mom's, glassy eyed and buzzing with narrative. The old man loved sci fi and horror, but the thing he loved most was a good whodunit, and that is how an 11 year old boy became infatuated with Miss Marple. Miss Marple was smart. Miss Marple was British. She was also funny ("they call it 'dry' over there" my dad would say), tenacious and did not suffer fools. But most of all, in an era where almost every hero curated for an adolescent boy vibrated with unapologetic masculinity, Miss Marple was a lady. Unmarried, unattached and uninterested in anything other than tripping liars up in mistruths and a nice cup of tea, Miss Marple had no job that I recall, just a way of showing up wherever a well dressed corpse did. As PBS presented these adventures sans commercial interruption (aside from the occasional pledge drive, and yes, we had a tote bag for every poisoned cadaver), my father and I had no breaks to gather clues so we had to shout at the television in real time "There's blood on the gardening shears!" "There's the missing cuff link!" Yet we were almost never ahead of Miss Marple, who was almost certainly ahead of her time. Damon Lindelof is a writer and producer whose credits include "Lost," "The Leftovers" and "Watchmen." A New York Times article in 1991, carrying the headline "TV Film About Gay Black Men Is Under Attack," described "Tongues Untied" as "an experimental amalgam of rap music, street poetry, documentary film and dance." Most coverage of the film focused not on the work itself, but on straight, white people's reactions to it: the refusal of certain public television stations to air it, Pat Buchanan's presidential ad campaign that likened the work to "pornography," the congressional hearings with the aim of ensuring that The National Endowment for the Arts from whom the filmmaker received a 5,000 grant to help fund the film would never be used to fund works like this again. Missing were any perspectives from voices that should've mattered: Young gay Black boys like myself, in awe of seeing themselves represented on TV, with honesty and dignity, for the first time. Jamal Jordan The longest running news documentary series on television at more than 700 episodes and counting, "Frontline" raised the standard for tough, long form investigative journalism when it was created, by the filmmaker and producer David Fanning, at WGBH in Boston in 1983. The program was a throwback even then, owing more to the ambitious, Cold War era documentaries of "CBS Reports" than to the ascendant, faster paced style of news coverage that had been inaugurated three years earlier by the arrival of CNN. Today, when mistrust of news is the norm, fueled by powerful forces in government and on cable, the show's unflashy commitment to in depth reporting, standards of proof and, above all, public service has never been less fashionable or more essential. Reggie Ugwu 16. Making grammar cool as only the '70s could. Faster than a rolling "O" and stronger than a silent "E," this mostly live action children's television show debuted in 1971 as the cool cat big sister to "Sesame Street." "We're going to turn it on," the theme song began "it" meant literacy. The original cast included Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby, plus Irene Cara as part of the in house kids band, the Short Circus. Mel Brooks showed up to voice "The Blond Haired Cartoon Man." Each of the 780 half hour episodes, produced by the Children's Television Workshop, taught kids phonics with blinding '70s visuals and short sketches that deployed parody, satire, surrealism and doo wop. Canceled in 1977, it was in the words of Freeman's D.J. character, Mel Mounds, "Righteous, delighteous and out of sighteous." Alexis Soloski 17. Who knew we needed downward dog? She did. Before we had hot yoga, trampoline yoga and goat yoga tutorials at our fingertips, there was Lilias. Lilias Folan wasn't the first to popularize yoga. But she was perhaps the first to bring the exotic seeming practice into middle American living rooms, with her show "Lilias, Yoga and You," which aired from 1970 to 1981. Time magazine once called her "the Julia Child of yoga." A (male) journalist for The San Francisco Chronicle, writing in 1979, was a bit more effusive: "My yoga lady remains a mystery woman, a comely creature from a distant planet. She is demure and quite serious. By far her most intriguing aspect is that she never sweats." A 2006 reboot, "Lilias! Yoga Gets Better With Age," was shorter lived. Her star may have faded, but for many, Lilias still flickers at the edge of childhood memory (and on YouTube), with her long dark braid and boldly colored unitards, leaning into a sun salutation. Jennifer Schuessler Their kids may have their own kids by now, but parents of a certain era still have "Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination," the opening line of the "Barney and Friends" theme song, stuck in their heads. The show, whose purple star spread cheer and nonthreatening messages, began life as a D.I.Y. video project created by a woman in Texas. When the young daughter of a public television executive in Connecticut wouldn't stop watching one of the videos, he smelled a preschool hit and acquired the rights. It was a golden instinct: "Barney" romped from 1992 to 2009 and spawned an avalanche of toys and other spinoffs. Parents, less tolerant of the cloying T. Rex than their offspring, no doubt stocked up on earplugs. Neil Genzlinger Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? 19. When a geography lesson came with a side of crime. This sticky fingered filcher first emerged in a 1985 video game of the same name but was brought to life thanks to the game show that took kids around the world and, later, through history. With her signature red trench coat and fedora, Carmen Sandiego led viewers on wild goose chases from Nashville to Norway while also working to remedy what the show's creators saw as an alarming statistic: According to a National Geographic survey in 1991, the year the series debuted, one in four Americans could not locate the Pacific Ocean. The superthief is still pilfering away today, in a Netflix animated series and on Google Earth. Jennifer Harlan 20. Have you checked your attic lately? Go now. "Antiques Roadshow," the gentlest forebear of the reality TV boom, premiered in 1997 and never left. The premise of this BBC format is simple: People lay their bric a brac before appraisal specialists and discover whether these objects hold value beyond nostalgia. A mild tone of British restraint that survived the show's American assimilation imbues each transaction. When a dusty basement bagatelle does render a hefty estimate (like the Diego Rivera painting valued near 1 million in a 2013 episode), the audience gets the thrill of the reveal, but the owners' responses tend to the understated, typically ranging from speechlessness to "Gosh!" Never lingering on dashed hopes, "Antiques Roadshow" lacks the greedier edge of spawn like "Storage Wars" and "Pawn Stars." Twenty four seasons in, seen by up to eight million viewers a week, it has new relevance as the ultimate upcycler of the declutter age, where "stuff" isn't shameful, but aspirational. Katrina Onstad One of my earliest memories of watching TV was "Sesame Street." The way that show embraces imagination was very, very cool to me. Just the idea that all things are possible, and that when you have a combination of humans and Muppets and animation all of the educational pieces of it to me it was boundary less. It begins in a flash of lightning, followed by widows, detectives, tombstones, a mysterious invalid and a body sliding slowly into a lake. Before audiences could enjoy their polite murder of the week on "Mystery!" (later, "Masterpiece Mystery"), they could delight in this louche and spooky animated opening, courtesy of the deliriously macabre illustrator, Edward Gorey. (Gorey produced several versions; into one, he inserted a bearded be furred self portrait.) Later, tragically, the program shortened the sequence, but the originals, via YouTube, can still chill the spine and gladden the heart. Alexis Soloski 38. Follow the science, or the scientist. "Nova," the long running science documentary series, came to PBS in 1974, and just months later, The New York Times was calling it one of public television's "most glamorous shows." Inspired by the British science series "Horizon," "Nova" brought its science alive by showing scientists at work as when they followed archaeologists trying, by experiment, to figure out how ancient builders moved the enormous stones to create Stonehenge. No wonder it's still going, nearly five decades on. John Schwartz "I died in Vietnam and didn't even know it." When PBS's documentary series aired in 1983, enough time had passed for such vivid self reflection, yet memories also remained lucid. An American Marine recalled mealtimes amid the smell of a battle in the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive: "It was almost like you were eating death." There were 13 hour long episodes and a 750 page book companion by the series's chief correspondent, Stanley Karnow. The epic sweep of these projects captured public attention: Nearly 10 million tuned in a night, and the book, "Vietnam: A History," stayed on the New York Times best seller list for months. Yet in the documentary, American veterans said civilians had not acknowledged their sacrifices. The vet who said he'd unwittingly died in Vietnam, Paul Reutershan, was not exaggerating. Exposed to Agent Orange during the war, he died of cancer before the documentary aired. Alex Traub "Kratts' Creatures" premiered in June 1996, a few months before Steve Irwin made his debut on Animal Planet, and while Chris and Martin Kratt did not share the Crocodile Hunter's accent, their enthusiasm for the world's fauna was just as infectious. On the preschooler aimed "Zoboomafoo," the immersive "Be the Creature" and the animated "Wild Kratts," the brothers have continued to share their expertise on the animal kingdom often by doing their own leaping, strutting, bellowing, mud wallowing impressions of the creatures themselves with generations of young viewers. "For us," Martin told The Times in 2000, "learning equals fun. There's no difference between educational TV shows and entertaining TV shows. That's a false construct." Jennifer Harlan 41. Far out field trips with Miss Frizzle. Biology lab meets "Alice in Wonderland," "The Magic School Bus" ran for just four seasons but left a lasting imprint on the brains of '90s kids. It's remembered for its Little Richard theme song, its trippy animation, and its grotesque plots, in which the bus drove a class of kids through sore throats, pulsing intestines and sewage systems. But mostly it was a star vehicle for the science teacher Miss Frizzle, known as the Frizz (and voiced by Lily Tomlin), whose topical shirt dresses and shock of curly red hair cut a feminine figure in contrast to the male TV nerds of "Bill Nye the Science Guy" and "Beakman's World." The bus is still running, in the form of a Netflix reboot and a forthcoming film starring Elizabeth Banks. Amanda Hess 42. When New York's cultural hub stretched out to America. Like PBS, Lincoln Center was still young in 1976, when it took a chance on a series that continues to bring world class opera, orchestra, dance and theater to millions. From the first broadcast Andre Previn leading the New York Philharmonic and Van Cliburn the experience for the home viewer was that of peering at live performances by stars like Pavarotti, Baryshnikov and Perlman from the best seat in the house. This was the real deal, you were meant to feel not a studio production. Ratings were rarely gangbusters, but the series persisted, including more pops and standards offerings as the years went by, and Lincoln Center was cemented in the American imagination as the country's premier arts complex. Zachary Woolfe 43. If only we'd known. Oh wait. They warned us! America circa 1990 enjoyed a surge in ecological awareness (think acid rain), and this TV event, running over 10 weeks and with few of the adorable animals of most nature specials, stands as a landmark for public seriousness about climate science. Roy Scheider narrated each episode of the impressively global series, introducing us to sailors at the oil slicked port of Rotterdam and farmers on parched grasslands of Botswana, while our host, Meryl Streep, sitting crossed legged outside her home in Connecticut, calmly lamented the smog and the deforestation. "In 10 years, the natural world as we know and cherish it will have changed unalterably," Streep warned, when global carbon emissions totaled 22.5 billion tons. In 2020, global carbon emissions will be more than 50 percent higher. Jason Farago There was already something archaic about "Charlie Rose" before PBS swiftly canceled the talk show in 2017, after eight women accused its host of sexual harassment. The chat around the oak table in the black box theater had a calm and discursiveness that recalled early TV, and that was its appeal: Here, titans of industry and stars of academe could speak freely, and Karl Lagerfeld might cross Madeleine Albright in the green room. Rose had an assurance that viewers could understand all topics if the tone was right, and a knack for getting scientists or artists to expatiate from the most vapid questions. (Were they open ended by design, or just the ad libs of a Southern gentleman who didn't do the reading?) With TV talk now mostly receded to the safe spaces of cable news, "Charlie Rose" appears now almost like a lost horizon, a last gasp of highbrow generalism. Jason Farago "The French Chef" not only revolutionized cooking shows, it also made history on a more technical front when, in 1972, it became the first television show to feature open captioning captions that are always onscreen making it accessible to deaf and hard of hearing viewers. The following year, as ABC began rebroadcasting its national news program on PBS just five hours after it originally aired, it became the first timely and accessible news program. As smaller tests of the closed captioning system (which allows viewers to toggle captions on or off) proved successful, PBS engineers worked to create caption editing consoles, encoding equipment and prototype decoder boxes. And on a Sunday evening in March 1980, closed captioning went mainstream. Deaf and hard of hearing viewers got their chance to enjoy some of the most popular programming on television, getting to choose among "The ABC Sunday Night Movie," "Disney's Wonderful World" on NBC and "Masterpiece Theater." Julia Carmel 46. A science class you will never nod off in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
About a year and a half ago, Robin Collier and her husband, Wayne, were like millions of other Americans: overweight and living with Type 2 diabetes. Despite multiple diets, the couple could not seem to lose much weight. Then Ms. Collier's doctor told her she was going to need daily insulin shots to control her diabetes. That was the motivation she needed. "I made up my mind right then and there," said Ms. Collier, 62, an administrator at an accounting firm in Lafayette, Ind. "I said to myself, 'I'm not going on insulin. I'm too young to have this disease.'" Instead, Ms. Collier and her husband entered a study sponsored by a company called Virta Health, one of a new crop of high tech companies that have designed programs aimed at helping people prevent or even reverse their diabetes. On the program, patients video chat with a remote Virta doctor, who consults with their primary care doctor, reviews their blood tests and medical history, and makes diet and drug recommendations. While studies show that a variety of different diets can benefit people with Type 2 diabetes, Virta, based in San Francisco, takes a low carbohydrate approach, training patients to swap foods like pastries, pasta and sugary snacks for veggie omelets, almonds and salads with grilled chicken and beef. Every day, patients use an app to upload their blood sugar levels, blood pressure, body weight and other measurements. A health coach, usually a registered dietitian, monitors their data and checks in by phone, text or email to discuss any problems or just to provide daily encouragement. Today, Ms. Collier has lost 75 pounds and has avoided taking insulin. Her husband has lost 45 pounds and was able to stop two diabetes medications. Both are still in the program, which she called "life changing," as part of an ongoing clinical trial. Initial results that examined the program's impact on 241 Type 2 diabetics, published in the journal JMIR Diabetes in March, found that 56 percent had lowered their blood sugar to nondiabetic levels after 10 weeks. About 90 percent had reduced or stopped their use of insulin altogether, and three quarters had lost at least 5 percent of their body weight. After six months, 90 percent remained on the Virta program, and most continued to lose weight and improve their blood sugar control. Martin J. Abrahamson, an endocrinologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who has no financial ties to Virta, said the new study was "a great proof of concept" but that he would like to see longer term results. Still, he believes that these kinds of digital programs will be critical for patients who need more support than the current model of treatment provides. "People with diabetes have to manage their diabetes 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year," he said, but most Type 2 diabetics see a doctor four times a year at most. In between those visits, they are largely left on their own and many end up struggling with their diets, their blood sugar and other complicated aspects of their care. "When you think of the amount of time they actually spend in a health care professional's office getting counseling and support, it's negligible. "Developing remote care models is going to be the key if we're going to have some sort of impact on improving glucose control for the millions of people with diabetes," he said. "It's a much more scalable model than seeing people in a doctor's office." While Virta works with patients who already have Type 2 diabetes, other high tech programs, like Omada Health, another San Francisco start up, target the 86 million Americans who have pre diabetes, which means they have high blood sugar and other major risk factors for the disease. Omada trains people to follow a diet and exercise program that was shown in a large clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health to lower the risk of progression to diabetes by 58 percent. To help people stick to their program, the company assigns them to online support groups that meet regularly, and it pairs them with personal health coaches who counsel them through private messages and phone calls. Such programs aren't cheap. The out of pocket cost for Omada, for example, is about 130 a month. But the program is also covered by health plans such as Kaiser Permanente and Humana, as well as large employers like Lowe's, Costco and Iron Mountain. Virta's out of pocket cost is 400 a month. But the company offers financial assistance based on a patient's ability to pay. And it is low or no cost for patients whose employer or health plan sponsors it.	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. Last week Rita Ora released a song called "Girls" featuring Cardi B, Bebe Rexha and Charli XCX. The song was positioned as Ms. Ora's coming out as bisexual, and meant to be received as an empowering celebration. Shortly after its arrival, however, critics began speaking up loudly about the track's lyrics, and artists who identify as queer posted messages on social media decrying how it "fuels the male gaze while marginalizing the idea of women loving women," as Hayley Kiyoko wrote. Kehlani tweeted, "there. were. harmful. lyrics." Ms. Ora issued a statement on Twitter to apologize to anyone hurt by the lyrics that read, "Girls was written to represent my truth and is an accurate account of a very real and honest experience in my life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The founders of "Sesame Street" were joined by Big Bird and other recipients at the 2019 Kennedy Center Honors. PBS Showed TV the Future. But What Does Its Own Look Like? As satires go, Robert Wuhl's "Open Season" seemed particularly far fetched when it was released in 1996. The film's high concept? After the television industry's all powerful ratings system malfunctions, a thinly disguised Public Broadcasting Service becomes the most popular network in the country. Educational programs such as "Kennedy: What's Left to Say?" and a history of Limoges china shoot up the charts. ("What's Limoges?" asks Regis Philbin in a cameo.) Culture is suddenly cool; book sales and museum donations surge. So the top commercial network decides to fight back. It counters with "Greek's Company," "the first culture com," starring Alan Thicke as the counselor in a co ed college dorm in ancient Greece. And Tom Selleck is cast as a renowned cellist who fights bad guys by day in "Rock Maninoff, Classical Crimefighter." His catchphrase: "Time to face the music, scumbag." Alas, the glitch is discovered and the balance in the TV universe is restored. The public network's ratings actually come in below those of the Weather Channel, Wuhl's character moans. Wuhl's satire flopped, too, taking in less than 9,500 at the box office. PBS's signature preschool shows have also been picked off. New episodes of "Sesame Street" air first on HBO Max. Powerhouse commercial media companies ViacomCBS and NBC Universal have muscled in with their Noggin and Sprout (now Universal Kids) services. British police procedurals and costume dramas are found not just on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and HBO Max, but also BritBox and Acorn TV. Documentaries are equally ubiquitous, with HBO and Showtime and streaming services increasingly vying for titles, hefty check books in hand. When PBS arrived a half century ago, television was essentially a three network game, and PBS thrived by championing programming and audiences ignored by NBC, CBS and ABC. But that distinctiveness has faded in today's world of hundreds of cable channels and seemingly unlimited streaming services, many built after rivals saw the commercial value in PBS's embrace of food lovers, costume drama obsessives, home improvement tinkerers and other niches. PBS may still execute many of its programs better than its rivals, and its content remains free and over the air, crucial for reaching those with lesser means and those without broadband. But in a country where the vast majority gets their TV through a paid service, that distinction rarely registers. This cornucopia of programming viewers can enjoy across the television landscape only intensifies the political pressures facing PBS. Why should the federal government subsidize public broadcasting, conservative politicians and others ask, when the commercial marketplace appears to be doing just fine delivering those types of programs? From its beginnings, PBS has grappled with an existential conundrum what it should be, and how it should distinguish itself. Thanks to its success, that quandary has become even thornier. More than ever, a thriving future for PBS will come down to how it manages an organization for the public good in a commercial environment, according to Marcia Smith, a documentary film producer ("The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution"). "Is there still an idea of the public good that we can agree on beyond 'Sesame Street'?," Smith asked. How It Came Together PBS is an odd entity to celebrate, really. It's a "service" not a "system," and not a network like CBS or CNN. Officially, it distributes national programs that it does not produce, and it is charged with operating the satellite system to interconnect all local public television stations. PBS did not originate noncommercial, educational television; there were already more than 100 such stations when PBS debuted in October 1970. "The French Chef" was its first broadcast, but the program had been airing on some public stations for six years. "Sesame Street" had begun a year earlier. But it's an anniversary worth commemorating. PBS and public television are now widely considered synonymous, having met the goal envisioned by its founders: helping autonomous educational stations nationwide combine resources, amplifying the reach of quality programs and shepherding new ones worthy of the federal funds allotted under the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. Those stations, while committing to a common purpose, ultimately retain control over what they air. Call it upside down, or bottom up, as Paula Kerger, the president and chief executive of PBS, does. "You have a lot of responsibility, but not ultimate authority," she said of PBS's role. That leads to what she called "the beauty and the pain of trying to keep this whole system glued together." The act, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, laid out a broad mandate for the programs that public television (and radio) should foster. It sought media for "instructional, educational and cultural purposes," promoting "diversity and excellence," and addressing "the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities." That left room for a wide range of offerings, from the how to shows to gorgeous costume dramas to insightful documentaries and kids shows that weren't trying to sell toys or sugar laced cereal, but learning. Alternative fare did flourish. "Black Journal" looked at public affairs from a Black perspective, a first. On "Zoom," a diverse group of children created high energy activities for their peers, including stunts like trying to whistle after stuffing their mouths with soda crackers. Viewers followed the break up of the Loud family in Santa Barbara, Calif., on "An American Family." In a pre CNN era, PBS alone broadcast taped gavel to gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings, in prime time, no less. And on the irreverent variety show "The Great American Dream Machine," experimental films mixed with sometimes risque comedy. ("Who's the first guy you ever made it with?" Charles Grodin asks his date in one sketch.) "It was a great time in public television; if you thought it, you could do it," Jack Willis, one of the executive producers of "Dream Machine," recalled. The political pressure a constant in PBS's history didn't take long to arrive. One month, to be exact. In November 1970, PBS distributed "Banks and the Poor." It chronicled how banks perpetuated substandard housing for low income Americans of color, ending with a scroll listing some 100 conflicted U.S. lawmakers. Bill Moyers, who as a special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson had worked on the 1967 Act, remembered the reaction in 2006: "All hell broke loose. President Nixon and his director of communications, Patrick Buchanan, were so outraged that the president vetoed C.P.B.'s reauthorization bill and wouldn't sign another until the chairman, president and director of television for C.P.B. resigned." After a few more years of political kerfuffles over programming, a deal was struck in the mid 1970s that executives hoped would insulate PBS from administration meddling. The federal appropriation would now go largely to local stations, rather than directly to PBS. And those stations, more than 330 currently, would funnel the money in part back to PBS. Invoking Hardy may have helped fend off that challenge, but the cycle of outrage and political grandstanding has repeated over the decades. In 2005, an episode of the children's program "Postcards From Buster" featuring lesbian parents set off conservative complaints. Last year, a same sex wedding on the cartoon "Arthur," prompted another round of criticism when Alabama Public Television declined to air the episode. And in 2012, Mitt Romney enlivened a 2012 presidential debate by declaring, "I love Big Bird," but "I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS." Barack Obama's re election prevented Romney from canceling Big Bird, but a different result in 2016 reignited the funding wars. The Trump administration argued in a budget proposal that "alternatives to PBS and NPR programming have grown substantially since C.P.B. was first established in 1967, greatly reducing the need for publicly funded programming options." But Congress restored the appropriation, which this year is 445 million, of which roughly 70 percent goes to the stations, radio and television. (PBS gets a small amount of direct money from the corporation; in the 2019 fiscal year, it was about 29 million.) The most potent weapon in these battles over the years has been the activation of Big Bird, Elmo and characters from PBS's other children's shows. They often make the trek to Capitol Hill and have even testified at congressional hearings. But even as PBS has fended off these funding threats, the culture wars and the push for political balance have taken their toll. PBS never did distribute that episode of "Buster" and an ambitious series of films on America's role in the post Sept. 11 world was criticized for being both too conservative and too liberal. Politicians' threats to slash federal funding make headlines, but that money does not come close to bankrolling PBS shows. The life of the public television producer often means spending years trying to coax backing from foundations and corporate sponsors, and local stations have come to rely on donations from their (older) viewers. And that financial state of affairs has hobbled PBS's ability to compete, and skewed its programming choices. Over the decades, PBS has seen many of its best programming ideas copied by its commercial competitors, who've nabbed some of its audience too. Particularly younger viewers. The runaway success of "Downton Abbey," which ended in 2016, eased some of the pressure on the PBS budget and drew donations to local stations. But any boost they got was temporary. Indeed, "Mercy Street," PBS's first original drama in more than a decade, was abruptly canceled in 2017 after two seasons when the funding fell apart. "We have not solved our funding model," said Sharon Rockefeller, president and chief executive of WETA, the public broadcaster in Washington, D.C., who has been in public broadcasting for more than four decades. PBS, under Kerger, is pushing to bolster its foundation, but that won't be enough. The system, Rockefeller said, is "fragile." Money woes may be a constant in the history of PBS, and the encroachment of their commercial competitors shows no sign of easing. So there have been plenty of proposals for PBS's future, most arguing for a complete do over including focusing on digital first local news, or sticking to children's content only. "It is rather stunning to see how very relevant our original mission is today," WETA's Rockefeller said. "In the midst of this pandemic, public television is delivering free education content right into homes, connecting people with arts and performances, giving context to our history, and providing clear news and analysis." She added: "When other outlets are scrambling to create programming about the complex and troubled racial history in our country, we already have a rich library of programs and educational resources already at hand because examining our history and our culture has been a part of our mission all along." For Kerger, the last months have provided a "clarion call around service," which, after all is built into PBS's name. "This is a moment when the country was looking for us and here we are," she said. The challenge for PBS going forward will be to sustain that focus. It means convincing donors that service and an hour of nightly news and math programs for homebound students are equally worthy causes as sending a pledge to support a favorite costume drama. Corporations will need to be convinced to underwrite difficult examinations of the country's racial tensions, not just "Antiques Roadshow."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
With Manhattan skyscrapers as a backdrop, Roscoe and Sharon Fawcett celebrated their 29th anniversary with a meal of steak, corn and baked potatoes. "She finally got a New York skyline wedding anniversary dinner," said Mr. Fawcett, a firefighter in Stamford, Conn. "But I'd rather not have had to give it to her that way." That's because Ms. Fawcett, 53, has end stage liver disease, and the celebration took place in a ninth floor family lounge at Mount Sinai Hospital, though she was too sick to eat very much. Ms. Fawcett, a retired caterer, is one of 14,100 people in the United States waiting for a liver transplant. One in ten will die before getting an organ. Wait times can vary dramatically across the country. There are 350 people on the list at Mount Sinai, and fewer than a quarter are likely to receive a liver transplant this year, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. At Duke University in North Carolina, there are 49 names on the transplant list, 70 percent of whom are likely to receive a donated liver. "Some people can live quite a while on the transplant list," said Mr. Fawcett, his voice cracking with emotion. "Unfortunately, my wife can't." In an effort to fix a system that some health care experts say is deeply flawed, the nonprofit organization that manages the nation's organ transplant system recently voted to revise how donated livers are distributed. But the new rules, five years in the making, are a disappointment to some critics, who had hoped the organization would approve more significant changes and redraw the geographic regions to ensure equivalent wait times throughout the country. "They don't actually want to solve the problem," said Sommer Gentry, a mathematician at the United States Naval Academy who proposed a more substantial overhaul that was rejected by a U.N.O.S committee in May. "They've decided to do as little as possible." Her proposal would have reduced the number of regions and redrawn their boundaries to balance the ratio of expected donors to those who need organs. She called the new revisions "not even a half measure." Dr. Julie Heimbach, the chair of the committee that advanced the final proposal, said it deeply divided the transplant community. The revised system is a compromise, she said, but one that will significantly shorten wait times for the most desperately ill patients. "It's been a very long and arduous path," said Dr. Heimbach, who is the surgical director of liver transplantation at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Not acting, some U.N.O.S. members said, could have prompted intervention by the federal government, potentially jeopardizing the organization's autonomy. Under the new procedures, the sickest patients are still prioritized for receipt of livers donated in their local area and region, but they will also gain access to donated livers across the regional border, within a range of 170 miles. Any modification to the system has life or death implications. Because the number of people in the United States who need livers vastly outnumbers the availability of donated organs, increasing accessibility to livers in one region inevitably means reducing it somewhere else. Computer simulations conducted by U.N.O.S. suggest that New York City stands to gain the most from the changes, with an annual increase of 50 livers and a 21 percent decline in deaths for those on the waiting list. Places with a higher ratio of donor livers to recipients, among them the regions that include Ann Arbor, Mich., and Philadelphia, are likely to lose. There are 58 so called donor service areas in the United States, and their odd shapes and sizes reflect their origins, emerging organically from the nation's first transplant centers in the 1960s and 1970s. For distribution purposes, the donor areas are configured into 11 larger regions. In the early days of transplantation, there was little need for a complex distribution system because livers did not remain viable long enough to be transported very far. But medical advances have made it logistically possible to consider candidate organs from much longer distances. When a person dies and donates a liver, potential recipients in the region are prioritized and the sickest gets first dibs. In the case of a tie, the system favors those in the local donor service area, and if none of the sickest patients can be matched with the liver, the organ is shared with other regions of the country. Wealthier patients are better able to navigate the inequities of the current system by registering for a transplant in more than one region, as they can bear the costs of staying near a transplant hospital far from home while waiting to reach the top of the list. Such inequities came under heightened scrutiny in 2009, when Steve Jobs, then the chief executive of Apple and desperately ill with pancreatic cancer, flew by private jet to Tennessee from California to receive a liver transplant. Some questioned whether his wealth or prominence allowed him to jump to the head of the list, though his doctors said that was not the case. Mr. Jobs died two years later. Ms. Fawcett, the liver patient at Mount Sinai, has considered moving to increase the odds of getting a liver, but she worries about being far away from the support network doctors, family and friends that has sustained her during her illness. With her health declining, however, Mr. Fawcett said they are pondering a move to North Carolina. Their daughter is in her final semester of college, and Ms. Fawcett is determined to see her graduate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Nobody knows where the mocking animals will emerge next. Then, when they do appear, they are ever elusive. And we are rarely fast enough or strong enough to wallop them all. Given how neatly these facts mirror our flailing efforts to manage our personal affairs, it makes perfect sense that so many people in recent weeks have embraced Whac A Mole as the metaphor for our complicated lives. The Federal Reserve is playing Whac A Mole while trying to manage interest rates, one Fed watcher told The Wall Street Journal. The stock market itself is like Whac A Mole, a trader said. So is fighting age related diseases, per The New York Post. Networking on LinkedIn, too, as MarketWatch noted. So this week, as stock markets yo yoed in the wake of Britain's unexpected vote to exit the European Union and families prepared to hit the midway for the long weekend, I put some questions to former carnies turned financial advisers and Whac A Mole winners on Coney Island in Brooklyn. What do the strong feelings of unpredictability, elusiveness and urgency inspired by Whac A Mole teach us about how and how not to run our financial lives? The game is simple. Five moles pop up from a board at random, and your job is to hit them with a mallet before they duck out of reach. If you are playing against other people, as you might at a carnival, the first person to hit a certain number of moles wins. If you are alone, at an arcade, the moles come faster and faster until you miss too many or time expires, depending on the version of the game. Something about the whacking is both primal and universal. So much so that Bob's Space Racers, the Daytona Beach, Fla., company that owns the license for the carnival and arcade versions of the game, figures that people spend at least 100 million on it each year across about 80 countries. The New York Times's legendary On Language columnist, William Safire, wrote about Whac A Mole. President Obama uses the phrase. And the arcade restaurant chain Dave Buster's has barred Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. from its locations for destroying a rigged Whac A Mole game, or at least that is what The Onion reported. But the game is not rigged. It merely plays upon some of our worst tendencies. Some old Bob's Space Racers promotional material acknowledged it outright: "For adults who challenge the mole, the game becomes an action packed analogy for the things in life that elude us." So what are those things we think we want or can do? PREDICTING THE FUTURE We do not know where the mole will pop up next, that much should be clear. But that unpredictability is itself predictable, so when we liken Whac A Mole to our own lives, we ought to embrace that uncertainty. On a basic budgeting level, that means that we should stop being surprised by the failed air conditioner or the 800 auto repair. "One can view these events like the mole that popped up without your expecting it and did its damage before you could address it," said Barry Korb, a financial planner in Potomac, Md. "Or, one can set up a 'Life Happens' fund." When it comes to investing in stocks, we ought to be aggressive in our humility, lest we think that repeated mole hunting somehow makes us better at divining the future. "You can play it a thousand times, and you still have no control whatsoever in controlling where the mole pops up or detecting a pattern," said Roy Larsen, a financial planner in Cumming, Ga., who worked many game booths at his church's annual carnival when he was growing up. "Sadly, investors create the Whac A Mole analogy because they continue to try to control the uncontrollable." In practice, that often means making the mistake of selling when stocks fall, out of certainty that they will fall further still and buying after they have already gone up, once things are certain to be safe. That course of action runs the risk of locking in losses and then buying when markets are at their peak. Many people who sold stocks at midday on Monday probably regret it now that stocks have recovered most of their losses. SHINY, SLIPPERY THINGS Bob's Space Racers has tweaked the game over the years, especially the solo arcade version. "The idea was to have a game that no one could master," said Michael Lane, the company's vice president. "Therefore, there'd be a little bit of frustration with it." On the day I spoke to Mark Struthers about the game, his sons had run off to Dave Buster's with their mother to cash in coupons. He wields a mallet, too, every so often, but he sees disturbing echoes of Mr. Lane's comments in his financial planning clients who want to chase the latest hot investment. Mr. Struthers, whose business is in Chanhassen, Minn., is a former blackjack dealer, so he knows the type. Those friends of his clients may talk a good game, but they, like the gamblers he met at his tables, only talk about their winners. SPEED In his youth, Mike McCarthy worked a water gun booth at the Maryland State Fair. At 14, he made 2,200 in commission for just 10 days of work. Now, he is the chief operating officer of a financial planning firm, the Financial Consulate, which has offices in Pennsylvania and Maryland, but his carny roots help him see the connections between midway games and his clients' financial lives. "Whac A Mole is a game of chasing a fleeting target, often just missing it," he said. "Sadly, many people feel the same way with their finances, whether chasing debt, investment return or a perceived gap in their quality of life." The seeming pace of change, of action, makes it feel as if we need to react at twitch speed, too. On Monday, Catherine Cardiello danced and yelped after winning two straight Whac A Mole games on Coney Island. "Just go fast," said Ms. Cardiello, a former Wall Street trader. "The only thing I liked about trading was the pace. I want fast, and I want a result, and then I either suffer or celebrate." It is a fine approach to the trading pits and winning at whacking. But there is not much in our own financial lives that requires such haste. In fact, hair trigger decision making on investing or spending quite often leads to regret. Newer versions of Whac A Mole reward the player who hits the animal at just the right moment at its apex once it has fully emerged from the hole. That may be a metaphor that all of us can live by, as making a move that is not too fast and not too slow may be the difference between wielding the mallet and being the mole.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
A bite size sampling of concours, cruise nights, auctions, club races and other upwellings of car culture happening across America this weekend: The Larz Anderson Auto Museum is holding a show featuring Italian cars, motorcycles and culture on Sunday. The event, which includes judging and prizes, ends at 2 p.m., but the museum, which started more than 100 years ago when Larz and Isabel Anderson opened their carriage house and the collection of cars inside to the public, will be open until 4 p.m. More info. Auctions America will feature cars important to Southern California's car culture in the sale, which includes a 1969 Winnebago motor home and the Ghia bodied 1956 Chrysler Plainsman concept. More info. The Sprint Cup series returns to the Pocono Raceway for another 400 miler, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., who won the Pocono 400 in June, is looking to sweep both events. If he succeeds, he will be the first one to do so since Denny Hamlin won both Sprint Cup Pocono races eight years ago. The Nationwide series resumes with an event at the Iowa Speedway. More info. The 2.258 mile, 13 turn Mid Ohio Sports Car Course will be the canvas upon which IndyCar drivers paint the next layer in the 2014 season. Charlie Kimball won there last year, but Scott Dixon has taken three victories at the event since 2007. More info.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
AS a child growing up in Hillsborough, a historic community in the heart of the North Carolina tobacco country, Gray Burton slept in a lime green bedroom beneath a bright purple comforter. Mardi Gras beads dangled from the headboard and African masks stared balefully from his walls. (His older brother, who went on to become a professional fisherman, outfitted his room with the stuffed remains of the turkeys, deer, ducks and bobcat he had shot.) During Mr. Burton's years at the Rhode Island School of Design, from which he graduated in 2008, his apartments in Providence were more notable for his collection of chameleons than for glitz. But soon after moving to New York four summers ago, he began creating a remarkably vibrant environment in the 250 square foot space on Ludlow Street that he rents for 1,350 a month. "Phenomenal, no?" said Mr. Burton, who is 25 and a publicist for Gilt Groupe, a Web site that caters to luxury seeking bargain hunters. "I've been here nearly three years, and I still can't believe what a great deal I have." The space, on the second floor of a century old tenement, retains its original molding, not to mention what appears to be the original shower, and the location places Mr. Burton in the throbbing heart of the Lower East Side club district. His apartment sits directly above the entrance to Darkroom, and down the block are Pink Pony and Max Fish, a celebrity magnet whose patrons have included Lady Gaga and Jake Gyllenhaal. When Mr. Burton arrived, the apartment resembled a bare white box. But like a squirrel hoarding nuts for the winter, he had been preparing for this moment for years, stashing furniture and decorative items in his parents' house and in friends' apartments, and carting family heirlooms from place to place. He also shopped obsessively, trolling eBay and secondhand stores for crystal goblets, bone china, candelabra, chandeliers and much more, all the while awaiting the perfect setting in which to showcase his acquisitions. "When I moved here from Williamsburg, where I'd been renting an apartment," he said, "I literally pushed a cart over the Williamsburg Bridge about 20 times in a week to move all of my breakable crystal and china, because I didn't trust movers." Entering his apartment is like stepping into a Faberge egg. Call it shabby chic, call it bohemian elegance, but whatever name you choose, visitors invariably blink and catch their breath, dazzled by the glitter. Many pieces come from the John Derian Company in the East Village, a decorative arts shop where Mr. Burton worked shortly after moving to New York. The store is the source of wall hangings of skeletons made of Mr. Derian's signature decoupage; a butcher block so heavy that five people were needed to lug it up the stairs; and an armoire from Eastern Europe. Its owner likes to think that the initials M and B carved on either side of the doors stand for Mr. Burton. EBay has yielded especially rich treasures, among them Baccarat crystal goblets for every drink imaginable port, old fashioned, Scotch, Champagne, red and white wine that light up a cabinet in the living room. Shelves hold an impressive collection of flow blue china, made by 19th century English potters and named for the way the glaze blurred or "flowed" during firing. From Mr. Burton's parents back in North Carolina came a chest that was a wedding present and the plump red armchairs from their sitting room. His beloved Aunt Sue, his partner in antiquing who died last year, was a special inspiration. He has the miniature blue teacups that sat on her sun porch and her set of Lenox china dinner, lunch and salad plates for 12 in the delicate blue autumn pattern. Lighting is a particular passion. Mr. Burton is proud of his flickering Edison bulbs and describes himself as obsessed with his chandeliers and candelabra. "I've always been a candle person," he explained. "And I spent 1,600 for a Baccarat candelabra a month and a half rent." A black iron candelabrum was a gift from Aunt Sue, who bought it with him in North Carolina and stored it for a time in her house so as to hide the purchase from his mother. Along with high end pieces, the decor includes oddities, among them a fox skin mounted near the door (someday, perhaps, to be made into an overcoat for Milkshake, Mr. Burton's Italian greyhound puppy); a weathered steel rug beater as handsome as a piece of sculpture; and a ball of red fluff that he snagged in Macy's when it fell off a woman's hat. In making this minute space work, it helps that Mr. Burton is flexible. He brushes his teeth in the shower and uses the one dollhouse size sink for both shaving and washing dishes. It helps, too, that he is immensely handy. He enclosed a checkerboard of reflecting tiles from Ikea in a wooden quilting frame to create a mirror that seems to double the size of the living room. He made the dust ruffle that hides the stuff under the bed. He combined an old board and a typewriter stand to create a bar atop a radiator. A skilled cabinetmaker, he built a pair of end tables from walnut, ash, cocobolo and padauk, steam bent into curvy multicolored strips that look like pieces of luscious taffy. Mr. Burton's apartment has proved surprisingly elastic. "Oh, it's small!" his grandmother exclaimed when she and his parents paid a visit in December. But she gamely shared the couch with Milkshake while Mr. Burton's parents slept in his bed beneath throws made of Indian saris, and he curled up under the oak table that was a gift from his boyfriend, a onetime Goldman Sachs banker turned talent agent. Mr. Burton's grandmother remained a presence even after she headed back home, thanks to a photo of her wearing a jaunty red beret and another of her with her twin sister. The two wear matching shirtwaist dresses they had made themselves. And his parents are still bragging about their son's apartment to friends in Hillsborough. "My parents said that knowing me, it was everything they expected," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Since its beginning in 2002, Gawker has been a veritable schadenfreude machine, taking delight in deflating the egos of New York's cultural elite, among other, perhaps less worthy, targets. So it made sense that it commemorated its own bankruptcy proceedings and impending sale Wednesday night in Manhattan with a party at its Chelsea offices. At 7 p.m., a couple of hundred writer types were milling around the offices, where there was a makeshift bar, serving wine and beer, with boxes of pepperoni pies from Joe's Pizza stacked on top of it. "I'm looking around realizing how few people I know," said David Haskell, the deputy editor of New York magazine. "It's like, did I miss it?" Actually, no. That's just how it feels when you find yourself at a reunion of a media company that has become a revolving door for young writers and editors. Most of them served their apprenticeships under the Gawker founder and chief executive, Nick Denton, before moving out of his sphere. The party, which at times had the feeling of a giddy wake, drew in past and present journalists from its flagship site, as well as those from the offshoots Gizmodo (Gawker for gadgets), Jalopnik (Gawker for car culture), Jezebel (the Gawker "ladyblog"), Deadspin (Gawker for sports), Lifehacker (Gawker for productivity tips) and Kotaku (Gawker for video games). Many returned having gone on to substantial success. Elizabeth Spiers, who established much of the Gawker editorial voice as the namesake site's founding editor, was there. Since her time with Mr. Denton, she served as the editor of The New York Observer and founded her own research and analytics firm. Nearby in a navy Prada shirt and gray pleated Valentino trousers was Choire Sicha, who did two stints at Gawker beginning in 2004, and is now the director of partner platforms at Vox. Also in attendance was Irin Carmon, a Jezebel alumnus who is now a correspondent for MSNBC and a co author of the recent critically acclaimed book "Notorious R.B.G.: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg." She likened the evening (and Gawker's current troubles) to the "Seinfeld" finale. "Do you remember?" she said. "Where they all go to jail after everyone from their past lives shows up to testify against them?" But gimlet eyed humor was not the prevailing sentiment of the evening. Instead, Gawker veterans past and present largely framed the last few years as a David versus Goliath struggle between a scrappy group of renegades and a gaggle of 1 percenters intent on bringing them down. One of its wealthy enemies is Terry Bollea, better known as the WWE titan Hulk Hogan. He successfully sued the site and was awarded 140 million in judgments after it posted a 1 minute 40 second clip of a sex tape of him and Heather Clem, who was the wife of the shock radio host Bubba the Love Sponge. Jurists at the trial in St. Petersburg, Fla., seemed perplexed by Gawker's take no prisoners brand of journalism. Another is Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor of Facebook who, in 2007, was the subject of a post on Valleywag, Gawker's former site on Silicon Valley, titled "Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People." Mr. Thiel subsequently helped bankroll Mr. Bollea's suit against Mr. Denton's company. Describing that conflict and the role Mr. Thiel played in it, Jessica Coen, a former editor of Jezebel, said it was "like watching a sociopath try to light your family home on fire." At 7:45, she and fellow Gawker veterans headed away from the office space and into the adjacent amphitheater. First to speak, standing before a movie screen, was the company's founder and chief executive, Mr. Denton, 49, a London born, Oxford educated onetime financial journalist who started Gawker in his Manhattan apartment. "To all the writers who were here in the early years, I'm sorry," he said. "We were very cheap." Mr. Denton, who wore a fitted white shirt from Banana Republic and gray slacks, said the last year was especially hard on staff members who worked hard to increase traffic even as the ax hung over their heads. "I'm incredibly proud of how they stuck together during this tricky time," he said, going on to note the punishing economics of the media business and the growing power of Facebook. Next to speak was Gawker Media's executive editor, John Cook. He said it was "insane" that Gawker had ended up in bankruptcy proceedings that had ensnared even its former editor in chief, A. J. Daulerio, while Roger Ailes is walking away from Fox News with a 40 million pay package after being accused of sexual harassment. This got big applause. Less successful was an attempt to invoke Khizr and Ghazala Khan and their recent fight with Donald J. Trump. "We just had a national conversation out of the D.N.C. when the father of a soldier who was killed in battle said to Donald Trump, 'What have you sacrificed?'" Mr. Cook said. "Not that the sacrifices here come close to losing a loved one, but it is a sacrifice to be a 23 year old kid and to find your name on a complaint from Hulk Hogan." After that came a toast from Gawker's president and general counsel, Heather Dietrick, along with more remarks from Mr. Denton, who then made his way back to the bar. Many openly discussed the court supervised auction of Gawker scheduled to take place next week. The media publisher Ziff Davis has made an offer of 90 million. Party guests discussed other possible suitors as well. "At this point, you've probably heard more than I," said Tom Scocca, the features editor of Gawker Media. "Ziff Davis has put their name on it, that's the only thing I know." In the early years of the site's existence, Mr. Denton was a hard man to read, seemingly emotionless, with a religious devotion to truth and a seeming indifference to humanity. "This was at the heart of my conflict with Nick," Mr. Sicha said after watching Mr. Denton speak. But at the party, it seemed to Mr. Sicha that something had shifted or that he had misjudged his former boss. "I don't know if we didn't get Nick early on, or if he just opened up," Mr. Sicha said. "People always said that he was this cold, heartless person, and it either wasn't true then or it isn't true now." Nevertheless, Mr. Denton remained defiant. He stood in a sea of current and former employees, and he was talking about Gawker as if it were the only media entity on earth with guts enough to take on the powers that be. "The economy's going to be dominated by a dozen monopolies, and people who have their share of the monopoly profits are going to be able to buy the press and use the court system to their advantage," he said. Mr. Denton and others in the fold seemed somewhat less inclined to address the mix of admiration and contempt journalists hold toward Gawker, recognizing it as both a training ground for gifted young writers and a place where too many of the articles published were not only mean but inconsequential. "I don't think there's many people who work at Gawker who think it is beyond reproach," Mr. Scocca said. "But when you've been put through a show trial, there's not a lot to be gained from adding to that testimony." Toward the end of the party, the scent of Parliaments and Camel Lights filled the room, and Mr. Denton walked around basking in the affection of his troupe. It was hard to see him as the gossipy Julian Assange like character he had once been. He had tears in his eyes as he made the rounds, and he seemed, finally and completely, human.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Where's the snow? James Albis, founder of SnoHub, hopes it comes soon. James Albis cannot wait for it to snow messy, heavy, hard to drive through snow. He probably wants it to snow more than just about anyone but a small child eager to have a day off from school. Without lots of snow, his technology start up, SnoHub, which he has called "the Uber of snowplowing," could suffer. Last year, there were two major snowstorms in southern Connecticut, where Mr. Albis tested his app, which connects homeowners with snow filled driveways to a roving band of snowplows. He said the app had been downloaded 1,000 times and the company brought in 25,000 that winter. In the off season, the company expanded north to Boston and south to Philadelphia by contracting with more snowplow drivers. In a traditional business, this would be a sign that a company was poised for growth. But with SnoHub, all the preparation could be for naught if the snow does not fall. Entrepreneurs with seasonal businesses are a different breed of business owner. Their days are filled with all of the rush and anxiety of a typical business owner, but the time to make a majority of their revenue upward of 70 percent is compressed into a few months. Fluctuations in seasonal employment and by extension, seasonal business activity are well tracked in the labor market, which is why monthly job numbers are seasonally adjusted, removing the peaks and valleys in the economic cycle. But when those figures are not adjusted, the raw data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that businesses increase hiring and business activity two times a year, in the summer with a peak in June and for the holidays, cresting in November. Regardless of how the broader economy is faring, January is always a low point for business activity. But knowing what the statistics say and managing a business with a small window for profit are two different things. There is little margin for error. Here are some tips from small business owners who depend on the seasons. Helen Yarmak, a high end fur designer, said her selling season stretched from a few weeks before Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day. To get clients interested in her new designs, she invites them to her studio in Milan during the summer. But with her business, much of the preparation is based on the availability of top pelts. For example, she said she spent years buying the 80 sable pelts that went into a single coat, which she is selling for 450,000 euros (about 528,000). "We prepare for things that are staples, but every year, there are going to be different things that are popular," Mr. Masters said. That's where adaptability comes in. They make or order products during the off season, Mr. Masters, but they are careful not to order too much of anything new. "In July, we try to catch on to a trend," he said. "We have to be really careful about how we see the trends." At risk in missing a trend, of course, is the financial viability of the store. That adaptability can mean accommodating a client outside of normal business hours. Kenneth Mark, a dermatologist, has offices in the Hamptons and Manhattan. But a decade ago, he got his medical license in Colorado and opened a winter office in Aspen. Many of his well heeled clients vacation in Aspen, but he opened the seasonal business for personal reasons: his love of skiing. Dr. Mark spends one week a month in Aspen from December to April, he said. But that means he has to accommodate clients in the New York area or in Aspen if they call at the last minute. "I can't say, I'll see you next week,' if I'm not around," he said. "It's not as easy or as glamorous as it sounds. I'm working every single day I'm out there." Less than a quarter of his income comes from his Aspen practice, but he said it had helped him to expand his medical practice. Clients from Aspen come to see him in New York in the summer. And being on the slopes has helped market his presence, he said. "I could be skiing down a run under the gondola and people could be yelling down, 'Hey Dr. Kenny, I need Botox,'" he said. Not all businesses can move from one location to another. With SnoHub, Mr. Albis is bound by season, so he puts a premium on accommodating clients. When something goes wrong, like a truck knocking down a mailbox, he does not want customers to worry that the plow driver won't pay for damages. "We control the purse, so we can hold back payment for them for seven days," he said. "That provides a lot more reassurance for the homeowners." "We're looking at the customer focused on convenience," he said. To that end, homeowners are sent before and after photos so they know the job was done. Every entrepreneur has stories of things going wrong, but there is less time to fix them in a seasonal business. David Schreiber owns Club Getaway, which has a traditional summer camp for children but has staked its brand on weekend camps for adults. Each weekend is focused on a group young professionals, entrepreneurs and investors, and even fans of the filmmaker John Waters and he has developed a loyal following. But he struggles with hiring people who can advance his brand. "Every year, it's starting from scratch," he said. "It's hard to find staff who are wiling to work six months on, six months off." His solution is to have a year round staff of about a dozen who can continue to sell camp weekends in the off season and train new employees in the spring. For some seasonal business owners, starting each season fresh is a source of flexibility, not stress. Kimberly Summers founded Student Concierge Services, essentially an on call mom for boarding school students in northern Connecticut, when her son started attending one of those schools. She charges 4,500 for a year for services that include taking a child to see a doctor or to buy a new iPhone. The business gives her summers off, which she wanted to spend with her son. The off season for most of these businesses is a time to regroup. But certain businesses get another blip of activity, which helps with any business's big concern: cash flow. Mr. Masters said he and his mother were getting ready for the Christmas Stroll, which happens on Nantucket the first weekend in December. "Anyone who lives on Nantucket during the summer, they all come back for one last hurrah," he said. "We could make more on that weekend than the entirety of October and November." Mr. Schreiber said he was planning a ski themed Club Getaway weekend at Mount Snow, a resort in Vermont, for January. Typically, 100 people go, compared with 300 for a summer weekend. "It's not that profitable," he said. "But it really helps with cash flow." And managing cash flow is the key to these businesses living to see another season.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
HomePod Speaker and New iMacs: What We Saw at Apple's WWDC Apple gave a sneak peek of HomePod, a speaker, to rival Amazon's Echo and Google's Home. It's the first brand new hardware product for Apple since the Apple Watch. The company also showed new iPads at its annual developer conference, which typically focuses on software instead of hardware. Also unveiled: a new iMac Pro, upgraded iMacs and MacBooks, and updates to its operating systems. Apple had long been rumored to be working on a device meant to take on the Echo, which has become a surprise hit since Amazon released it nearly three years ago. The category is getting pretty crowded: Last year, Google released a talking home computer of its own, called Google Home, and Microsoft's assistant, Cortana, is also making its way to home speakers. So how will Apple compete? In a very Apple like manner: The speaker, powered by the Siri voice assistant, looks spiffier than either Amazon's or Google's version it is a seven inch tall canister wrapped in a shiny mesh speaker. The company also said it had prioritized the speaker's sound, which can be lackluster on rival devices. HomePod has an array of speakers to create virtual surround sound. "You don't have to know what any of that is; just know that it sounds incredible," said Phil Schiller, Apple's marketing chief, who added that HomePod would be priced at 349. Although Apple appears to be trying to make up ground on Amazon and Google, the primary casualty may be Sonos. That company offers a wireless multispeaker system that allows users to listen to music throughout the home, similar to HomePod's ability to chain together speakers. The big question, though, is whether the intelligence inside Apple's speaker is good for anything beyond music. Apple was early to the voice game with Siri on the iPhone, but rivals have since lapped it their voice command devices are faster, they know more, and they are less annoying to use. Apple promises the new Siri is better, but the improvements it showed were only minor. New iPads debut, even as sales shrink. Apple's developer conference typically showcases software improvements. In a departure from that routine, Apple showed a lot of new hardware this time. That included updated versions of the iPad, which has been declining in sales. Apple showed that it was continuing to bet on the tablets by unveiling an iPad upgrade that the company's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said was pushing the device "further than it ever has before." The new version of the iPad Pro has a 10.5 inch display, 20 percent larger than the previous 9.7 inch model, and it will start at 649. Apple said the size made it perfect for displaying a virtual keyboard comparable to a full size physical keyboard. The company also highlighted a feature called ProMotion that increases the refresh rate and makes motion smoother in video content. After Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad in 2010, tablets exploded in popularity, but iPad sales have slumped for more than a year now. So Apple, under increasing pressure from investors to strengthen its revenue, has upgraded iPads more frequently than many of its other products. The company introduced a cheaper version of the 9.7 inch iPad, priced at 329, in March and a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, compatible with an Apple stylus and keyboard, in 2015. Some of Apple's rivals have capitalized on the iPad's stumbles. Amazon said recently that its tablet sales had grown substantially compared with last year. Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets are extremely cheap, starting at 50, and they allow for basic functions like reading e books, streaming Netflix and listening to music. Apple's predicament seems to be that for existing iPad customers, their tablets are still quite capable and running strong, giving them little reason to upgrade. For new customers, the iPad may be overkill for basic tasks, especially if you can just pay 50 for a media tablet from Amazon. One of Apple's splashiest hardware debuts was a brand new iMac Pro that will support up to 18 core processors and include a graphic chipset called Radeon Vega. Translation: It is Apple's all in one desktop on steroids. "It's going to be the most powerful Mac we've ever made," said John Ternus, Apple's vice president for hardware engineering. The new iMac Pro may help compensate for Apple's previous professional desktop, the Mac Pro, which was widely panned by critics and customers. The iMac Pro will start at 5,000 and ship in December. With this device, Apple is broadly catering to members of the professional community, like filmmakers and hard core coders. For years, these users have felt left behind as Apple has focused on consumer oriented products like the iPhone, shifting away from high performance equipment for professionals. The company also announced upgrades of its 27 inch and 21.5 inch iMacs, its desktop computers, which will start at 1,099, with additional models at 1,299 and 1,799. And Apple lowered some prices for its MacBooks and said the MacBook Air, its entry level lightweight laptop, would get a speed increase. The 21.5 inch model with 4K high resolution will start at about 1,300, with a new 13 inch MacBook Pro starting at 1,300. Last year was rough for the Mac. Fans of the MacBook Pro waited for Apple to unveil a major upgrade after the laptop had remained relatively unchanged for about four years. But when Apple introduced a new MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, a virtual touch strip embedded into its keyboard, customers were divided. Some fans concluded that the Mac was now in the back seat because Apple was prioritizing the iPhone, the iPad and the Apple Watch. Because the show is about giving new tools to developers, Apple also focused on emerging technologies. Specifically, Apple highlighted augmented reality, a way for people to view and digitally manipulate the physical world around them through the lens of their smartphone cameras. The iPhone already supports augmented reality with games like Pokemon Go. On Monday, Apple said it was offering a new tool kit for bringing advanced augmented reality applications to the iPhone and the iPad. Mr. Cook has spoken several times of Apple's interest in augmented reality, hinting that the company could be developing an augmented reality headset. Apple demonstrated changes to the operating system for the Apple Watch including a new watch face that uses Siri to suggest directions, show calendar items and generally predict what you will want to see. The most substantive changes focused on fitness, including the ability to track new types of high intensity workouts. Apple also unveiled a new operating system for its Mac computers, called High Sierra. The company made privacy a key selling point with this and said the next version of its Safari web browser would block videos that automatically start playing and stop advertising trackers. While users will probably welcome those changes, the development was another blow to web publishers, who rely on ads that Apple will now block. Apple added optional ad blocking to the iPhone and the iPad last year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Once upon a time, perhaps some 300 million years ago, a tiny stream dwelling insect akin to a caddis fly crawled from the water and began to live on mosses and other land plants. Although drab in appearance, the creature had a glorious future: It would become the ancestor of the 160,000 species of moths and butterflies that populate Earth today. Few insect fossils have been found, so reconstructing the steps in this long evolution has been difficult. A group of biologists has now filled some of the major gaps in the fossil record, with the help of data from the DNA and protein sequences of living insects. On Monday the team, led by Akito Y. Kawahara of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that rewrites key aspects of the narrative of how moths and butterflies evolved. A central part of this story is the furious evolutionary battle between moths and bats. Bats hunt moths by emitting pulses of sound. But moths gradually adapted, developing the capacity to detect the pulses and respond with evasive flight maneuvers. The bats adapted in turn, and new species arose that used sonar frequencies that the moths could not hear as well. New moths arose in response, equipped with countermeasures: They could broadcast sounds that either jammed the bat's sonar, probably by throwing off the estimate of the moths' distance, or advertised that the moth's tissues were poisonous. The team reconstructed the ancient timeline using DNA sequences of contemporary moths and butterflies. They calculated that the ancestral moth emerged some 300 million years ago, at the end of the Carboniferous era, well before the oldest known moth fossil, which is only 200 million years old. Some 240 million years ago, Dr. Kawahara's team found, most moths ceased to have chewing jaws and instead developed tubelike mouthparts capable of sucking up sap and water. The team also determined that the earliest butterflies evolved some 98 million years ag o a major surprise, because echolocating bats emerged only much later, some 50 million years ago. Something other than bats must have turned the butterflies into daytime fliers. The most likely agent of natural selection was the nectar being produced by the many new species of flowering plants, Dr. Kawahara's team believes. Bees evolved some 125 million years ago, and the plants produced nectar to secure them as pollinators. Because moths had already developed strawlike mouthparts, one group was able to exploit the novel food source, and evolved into butterflies. They switched their flying hours from night to day, Dr. Kawahara said , because nectar is more generally available during the day, when flowers are open. Living in daylight, the butterflies exchanged the drab, brown livery of many nighttime moths for a rich palette of colors, useful for broadcasting amatory signals to mates and warnings of toxicity to predators. The new DNA data, sampled from all the major families of butterflies and moths, has helped rewrite another piece of evolutionary history: why hearing developed in moths. Moths evolved ears at least nine different times, in several cases before the evolution of echolocating bats, the DNA data revealed. Perhaps ears helped moths detect the sound of birds' feet and wings, Dr. Kawahara said. These acoustic faculties thus were already in place to meet the challenge of echolocating bats. Dr. Kawahara said that the new techniques of genome analysis have enabled him to fulfill a "childhood dream" of reconstructing how these insects came to be. "My personal passion growing up as a child in Japan and the United States was butterflies and moths," he said. Maria Heikkila, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, described Dr. Kawahara's study as " a step toward a better understanding." But the dates derived from DNA and fossils are likely to be revised in the future, she said, and a new evolutionary story may emerge.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
LONDON Karen Gibson wanted some silence. She was standing before the Kingdom Choir, the gospel ensemble she founded and has led for more than 20 years, during a recent rehearsal at a church in the London neighborhood of Pimlico. The group had just been working on a version of "All of Me," made famous by John Legend, and a couple of dozen singers were enjoying a rambunctious moment of downtime. "O.K., got to listen," Ms. Gibson said, raising her arms and her voice. The chattering continued. "When I say, 'Listen,' I'm serious," she said, much louder. The talking stopped. "You see how things are kicking up. You are going to have to be on the top of your game. When I say, 'Listen,' I'm saying it for a reason. Am I clear?" Once a passion project for part timers, there's a new intensity to rehearsals of the Kingdom Choir. It started soon after May 19, the day the group dazzled millions of viewers at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. For those who hadn't taken a look at the program, there was the initial surprise of a stirring sermon by Michael Curry, an African American preacher. Once he was done, all eyes turned to the rear of the church where the Kingdom Choir launched into three part harmony version of "Stand by Me." "We're used to people shouting during our songs," she said in an interview a few days after the Pimlico rehearsal. "When we were done, all we heard was the rustling of people turning their heads around." In the days that followed, the media in Britain anointed Ms. Gibson the country's "godmother of gospel"; YouTube videos of the choir's performance have been viewed several million times. For a group whose biggest previous audience was 200 people, the transition from obscurity to international acclaim was instant. And just getting started. On Friday, Sony releases the Kingdom Choir's debut album, "Stand By Me," recorded, in part, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The group will perform in Sydney, Australia, at the close of the Invictus Games on Oct. 27, and an 18 city tour of Britain, the group's first, is planned for next year. That will be followed by to be announced dates in the United States, according to the choir's management. The Kingdom Choir's debut album, "Stand by Me," was recorded, in part, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. For Ms. Gibson, a natural introvert with a beatific smile, notoriety has been an adjustment. Her elaborate upswirl of pewter toned hair makes her instantly recognizable, and she said she was getting accustomed to fame, which she finds both strange and exhilarating. As she took a seat for this interview, in a South London cafe, a young man stood to make room. "Your music helped me through a very dark place," he said, as he picked up his backpack and moved. "The weird part is that I am living the same life I've always lived," Ms. Gibson said, after the two talked for a minute. "I go to the same supermarket. I'm making the same music. I'm ordinary. But not." Ms. Gibson has been involved with gospel singing since she was a teenager, growing up in the Battersea neighborhood of South London and attending a black Pentecostal church. Inspired by early work of the Winans, who would become perhaps the United States' foremost gospel family, she, her sister and some childhood friends formed a sextet called New Dawn. The group performed all over England, primarily at churches. After high school, Ms. Gibson spent "11 unhappy years" in information technology for an arm of local government. When she was laid off, she found a job teaching gospel at a girls Catholic school. She formed the Kingdom Choir in 1994, reuniting members of New Dawn and recruiting others who had the right mix of singing chops and positive energy. "I don't audition," Ms. Gibson said. "It's down to our connection." There are dozens of gospel groups in Britain and many were more prominent than the Kingdom Choir. But one former Kingdom member knew Eva Williams, Prince Charles's deputy head of communication. Ms. Gibson was riding a bus one day in March when her cellphone rang. "We'd like to invite you to sing at the royal wedding," Ms. Williams said. "Mostly what I felt was disbelief," Ms. Gibson remembers. "Right up until the wedding, I kept thinking, this is going to fall through." She was initially instructed not to tell anyone, a challenge for a conductor who needs 20 singers to clear their calendar, months in advance. Elaine Simpson, a choir member and longtime friend, was one of those recruited. "Karen called me and asked if I was free on May 19," Ms. Simpson said. "I said, 'I'm not free. Why?' And she said, 'Google the date.' I was thinking, what is the point of Googling a date?" In an instant, Ms. Simpson decided she could be free on May 19. Gathering members was the easy part. The challenge was coming up with an arrangement of "Stand by Me," a request of the royals, that the couple liked. The first version, sent via MP3, got a polite, "No, thank you." Prince Harry and Ms. Markle wanted it stripped down and less syncopated, Ms. Gibson said. Versions two, three, four, five and six were all rejected with the same directive: Pare it back. So Ms. Gibson suggested a face to face meeting with the couple. Off she went to Kensington Palace with five singers and a keyboard player. "They were lovely," she said. "And I just walked through an arrangement on the spot. 'Do "oohs" here. The second verse will come in here.' And the minute we started to sing, I could just feel their approval, the joy, the effect. Both of them said, 'That's the one.' " With no time left for more back and forth, the choir improvised what amounted to version 13 on wedding day. The members met that morning at Buckingham Palace and drove roughly 25 miles to St. George's Chapel with a police escort. "We were so ready," Ms. Gibson said of the performance. "We just prayed that this gift of a song was accepted." Only during the end of the second number, "This Little Light of Mine" sung as the royal couple left the church and got into a horse drawn carriage were there claps and cheers. A few attendees offered congratulations. The actor Tom Hardy gave Ms. Gibson a hug. Then bodyguards came to escort her and other members to a press room, where the group got its first taste of celebrity. "It was a bit of pandemonium," Ms. Simpson said. "We were trying to get to the BBC studio with this escort and we were literally mobbed. People came up to us crying, wanting our photographs. But it was all love. Everyone was smiling, laughing." In a matter of days, the group's Instagram account soared from 700 followers to 32,000. Friends and well wishers called, as did a talent manager, Jonathan Shalit. He'd seen a story about the choir and noticed that Ms. Gibson hadn't mentioned anything about an album either a deal or an imminent release. "They didn't even have a P.R. person, but I managed to track down a contact for her," Mr. Shalit said in an interview. "When I found out that they didn't have a record deal, I was gobsmacked." His pitch to Ms. Gibson emphasized the rewards of the here rather than the hereafter. "He asked me, 'If you had any amount of money, what would you do with it?' " she recalled. "And I said, 'I want to look after my mum. I want to pay off her bills. Pay off my bills." With the promise of added income has come added work. Rehearsals are now twice a week, instead of once every two. Some choir members have quit their full time jobs. But even as the Kingdom Choir goes pro, it has kept the jubilant atmosphere that has long defined it. For every stern word that Ms. Gibson uttered at the Pimlico rehearsal, there were 20 of pure encouragement. The night ended with the choir listening back to a track they'd recorded for the album. It was Jill Scott's "Golden," and for many in the room, it was the first time they'd heard the finished product. The choir was on its feet, singing along to their own voices, dancing and jumping, an almost athletic outburst of bliss. In a corner, Ms. Gibson beamed, clapped and joined in on the chorus: "Living my life like it's golden, living my life like it's golden."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Brian Fligor, chief audiology officer at Lantos Technologies, provided audio clips of "pink noise" at three different volumes that you can use to assess the power of a pair of headphones. Dr. Fligor devised the tests to work as intended in this limited situation: This is how the different volumes sound on an Apple iOS device, like an iPhone 6 or an iPad. The different levels were set for the white earbuds that come standard with current and recent generations of iPhones, iPods and iPads. Dr. Fligor devised the test using himself, which means the test is most accurate for an average adult male ear.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Michael Oreskes, the former NPR news executive who resigned in November amid sexual harassment accusations, was repeatedly warned about his behavior but continued to act inappropriately toward women, according to an independent investigation released on Tuesday. The report by the law firm Morgan Lewis, which was hired by NPR, said that Mr. Oreskes repeatedly expensed meals with young female employees, ostensibly to discuss their careers, but that the conversations often veered into sexual and other personal territory. He set up similar meetings with young women, including college students, who did not work at NPR, the report found. "While management made multiple attempts to counsel Mr. Oreskes about his conduct, he was not deterred from pursuing conversations and dinner meetings with women inside and outside of NPR that were inappropriate and served a nonbusiness purpose," the report said. Concerns about Mr. Oreskes, 63, who was NPR's senior vice president for news and its editorial director, were raised even before he was hired, and continued to be discussed among executives throughout his two and a half years at the company, the report found. And in the course of the two month investigation, the law firm found "a very prominent distrust of management at NPR." He resigned after The Washington Post published an article that included interviews with two women who said he had sexually harassed them in the late 1990s, when he was the Washington bureau chief at The New York Times. NPR says it has already taken steps to bolster its workplace culture, including making changes to the complaint process, creating an anti harassment support group, mandating in person sexual harassment training and strengthening its human resources department. The report suggested further steps, including conducting background checks and asking questions about prior sexual harassment issues during the hiring process, retaining an outside firm to investigate complaints and conducting a study of gender equity in pay and promotions. The report said that some NPR employees had been warned about Mr. Oreskes's behavior, but the knowledge stayed within a "whisper network" that didn't extend outside the newsroom. "As a result, information that many staff members felt was widespread actually was not known to HR or leadership," the report said. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The timeline revealed by the investigation shows that NPR executives frequently expressed concern about Mr. Oreskes's behavior, but repeatedly addressed it through conversations instead of disciplinary action. When NPR hired Mr. Oreskes in March 2015, a search firm delivered "overwhelmingly positive" feedback, with no criticism of his workplace conduct, the report said. But a member of the eight person hiring committee was aware of one episode and raised it to human resources: A woman said Mr. Oreskes had left her multiple voice mail messages late at night asking to discuss his book while they were at a conference. The woman said that she had heard a similar story about another woman at the conference and that "the incidents made the conference attendees very uncomfortable," according to the report. Nonetheless, the committee unanimously voted to hire him. In the summer of 2015, two female NPR employees said they had dinners with Mr. Oreskes that turned excessively personal, the report found. He gave one of them a hug after dinner, which "made her feel uncomfortable," the report said. They reported the dinners to human resources in October 2015, and the company's general counsel, Jon Hart, spoke with Mr. Oreskes within a week. "This conversation was described as a 'stern talking to' in which Mr. Hart told Mr. Oreskes that sexual comments were not appropriate and warned him that it could not happen again," the report said. "Mr. Oreskes committed to Mr. Hart that it would not happen again." But in the spring of 2016, Mr. Oreskes expensed several dinners with women, including one with a female NPR employee, the report found. In August, Mr. Hart and Deborah A. Cowan, the chief financial officer, met with him and asked for business justifications for his dinners, while cautioning him to make sure he had justifications for dinners going forward. Executives again discussed his behavior in October 2017, and they decided that Jarl Mohn, the chief executive, "would have an additional counseling session with Mr. Oreskes," which he did, the report said. "They decided not to terminate Mr. Oreskes at that time because there were only two reported incidents of conduct involving NPR employees and both had been addressed two years prior," the report found. After Mr. Mohn asked the staff to come forward with harassment complaints, an employee said Mr. Oreskes had groped her in the spring of 2017. Around the same time, a woman told NPR's legal team that Mr. Oreskes had kissed her without her consent when he was employed by The Times. He was suspended on Oct. 31 after the Washington Post article was published. Shortly after, an NPR employee said Mr. Oreskes had made an inappropriate comment in 2016 during a conversation about her career, and had invited her to his beach cottage to "continue the conversation over wine," the report found. Mr. Mohn asked for his resignation after hearing her complaint. Mr. Oreskes's career in journalism stretches back about four decades. He started at The Daily News and joined The Times in 1981, holding many jobs in two decades at the paper, including chief political correspondent and deputy managing editor. He worked at The Associated Press from 2008 to 2015, serving as a vice president and senior managing editor. The newly released report, which was not edited by NPR employees, was based on interviews with 86 current and former employees, 71 of whom were women.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"We have it so well under control," he continued, "I mean, we really have done a very good job." Now, of course, the message is quite different. The White House expects a six figure death toll 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, provided most Americans follow federal guidelines for social distancing. This, Trump says, would be a victory, since it could be much worse. "So you're talking about 2.2 million deaths, 2.2 million people from this. And so if we could hold that down, as we're saying, to 100,000. It's a horrible number, maybe even less but to 100,000. So we have between 100 and 200,000, and we altogether have done a very good job." These numbers, it should be said, come from several different projections that use several different models for the disease. The death toll could be lower, or it could be much, much higher. We should put this death toll in context. At the low end, Covid 19 will have killed roughly as many Americans as died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. At the high end, it's that number plus all American deaths in the Spanish American War and the First World War. The difference is that deaths from Covid 19 will occur in a matter of months versus a number of years. And at that scale, this won't just afflict the old and infirm many of the dead will have been in the prime of their lives. And all of this as the economy collapses on itself as of Thursday, nearly 10 million Americans had filed for unemployment benefits, compressing the job losses of the 18 month Great Recession in 2008 9 (and then some) into a two week period. Trump is very likely, over the next several months, to preside over the deaths of at least a hundred thousand Americans in a crisis he chose to ignore until there was no choice but to act. He'll try to say is already trying to say that this was the best he could do, but that will be a lie. He'll make excuses or cite mitigating factors. But Trump wasn't distracted by an impeachment trial or focused on any other area of concern. In February, as the crisis deepened, he was holding rallies for voters and parties for supporters, as well as golfing at his private club. It's true that Trump imposed some travel restrictions on foreign nationals coming from China as the virus came into public view. But he had the time, energy and responsibility to do far more. He didn't. Instead, he said things like this "I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along" and continued to do everything he could to minimize the threat. It was only after action from states, colleges and other institutions that the White House began to take this seriously. And by then, it was too late to move off the path to disaster. As we enter the second full month of the pandemic in the United States, the cost of the president's indifference is clear: thousands dead and thousands who will die because their government didn't care to protect them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion

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