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African Americans have long been among the country's most fervent Christians, from the choir to the pulpit to the affirming voices from every "amen corner." Their deep faith saw them through the trials of slavery and then a century of Jim Crow repression. Finally, it emboldened them to leave the sanctuary of their churches and join the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in a quest, his "dream," for their full freedom and equality. Just when and how their ancestors broke with traditional African spirit practices and adopted Christianity has never been fully resolved. Now archaeologists in Maryland have announced the discovery of an intact set of objects that they interpret as religious symbols traditional ones from Africa, mixed with what they believe to be a biblical image: a representation of Ezekiel's Wheel. Two of Dr. Leone's graduate students, Benjamin A. Skolnik and Elizabeth Pruitt, made the discovery and excavated the artifacts, which were just below the surface where a tenant farmer's house once stood on land of a former plantation near Easton, Md. That was four years ago. Dr. Leone and others familiar with the religious history of African Americans then sought to interpret what they had found. In the late 18th century, Methodist Episcopal and later African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) preachers carried the Christian message to the plantations on Maryland's Eastern Shore. They seemed to have been successful converting slaves, in part by giving new meaning to traditional symbols. For example, a powerful symbol from the BaKongo belief system in West Central Africa, where many of the slaves came from, was the cosmogram, a circle with an X inside. African Americans repurposed these materials because they had symbolic value as well in the form of Ezekiel's blazing chariot wheel, Dr. Pruitt said. The wheel imagery is described in the Book of Ezekiel 10:9 10: "And when I looked, behold the four wheels by the cherubim, one wheel by one cherub, and another wheel by another cherub and the appearance of the wheels was as the color of aberyl stone. And as for their appearances, the four had one likeness, as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel." The wheel like image in the Book of Ezekiel and the cosmogram, Dr. Pruitt suggested, "represented the universe, and the path we travel through this world and the afterlife" and "it stands for the enduring connections between this world and the next, the power from above and below." For the first time, the two circle images had been found together virtually side by side. It seems that the Christian preachers had discovered the powerful resonance the wheel image held for African Americans. One of the most popular spirituals among people in A.M.E. churches and camp meetings on the Eastern Shore is "'Zekiel Saw the Wheel." 'Zekiel saw de wheel, way up in the middle of the air 'Zekiel saw de wheel, way up in the middle of the air De big wheel run by faith, little wheel by the grace of God Wheel in a wheel, way in de middle of de air.' An A.M.E. bishop in the 19th century, Daniel Payne, wrote that the circle and wheel imagery extended the "Ring Shout," in which participants move counterclockwise singing and dancing at camp meetings. This motion is in the same direction as the cycle of life in the cosmogram. It was said that "sinners won't get converted unless there is a ring here, a ring there, a ring over yonder, or sinners will not get converted." The artifacts gathered by Dr. Leone's team are on display at a new exhibition at the University of Maryland's Hornbake Library. The display, "Frederick Douglass Wye House: Archaeology and African American Culture in Maryland" runs through July 2017, Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
NORTHAMPTON, England The British rapper Slowthai has a tattoo in scratchy letters on his stomach. It reads, "Nothing great about Britain." That provocative phrase is also the title of his debut album, which is due to be issued in Britain on May 17. The release date was intended to coincide with one of the proposed dates for Britain's departure from the European Union, but the withdrawal from the bloc was postponed twice somewhat spoiling the symmetry but perhaps underlining the rapper's point. Slowthai, whose real name is Tyron Frampton, released his first single in 2016, the year Britain voted in favor of Brexit. As the country's leaders have squabbled about how and when the country should depart, Frampton has been releasing stridently political tracks and performing them for a growing base of young fans. On "Nothing Great About Britain," Frampton, 24, challenges Britons to question the status quo and to reflect on their sense of identity. "I want to speak about the place that I'm from and what I see as great," he said of the album in an interview. "It's pushing you in a direction to ask what actually makes this place a good place." Frampton was sitting in his favorite coffee shop in his hometown, Northampton, about 70 miles northwest of London, at the tail end of his "Brexit Bandit" tour. In less than three years, he's grown a cult following: His single "T N Biscuits" has been streamed more than 5.5 million times on Spotify, and Slowthai was one of 10 artists chosen for the BBC's Sound of 2019, the national broadcaster's annual survey of rising music talent. Through his subversive lyrics and the punk ethos of his performances, Slowthai has tapped into and helped expand an interest in politics among young people in Britain. One fan, Aidan Ray, 22, said Slowthai was "pushing to give everything he has to all of his fans from all backgrounds." In that spirit, Frampton recently announced a tour in which tickets cost 99 pence, or about 1.30. With only a handful of released tracks to his name, Frampton's fan base has grown primarily through frenzied live performances, which often culminate in the rapper crowd surfing over his jostling fans. A Slowthai gig is like a live political cartoon sketch, with the rapper whipping the crowd into a fevered mockery of authority. He leads the audience in shouting foul mouthed invectives against the British prime minister, Theresa May; against the queen; and against Brexit. At a recent show in East London, Frampton divided the crowd into two groups and had them shout obscenities at each other. "Everything I'm telling people to say is like football hooligan violence," he said, explaining that he was trying to demonstrate the futility of tribal behavior. "It doesn't matter what you believe in, or where you're from," he said. "It doesn't matter what group you're in, we're all the same. We all end up in the same sized box." Alex Crossan, 23, an electronic musician who performs under the name Mura Masa and who has produced some of Frampton's tracks, said the onstage theatrics were "reflective of the attitude in his music." "There are two things you need when governments aren't working for the people: revolutionary politics and revolutionary music," Crossan said in a telephone interview, adding that Frampton "provides both of those things in equal measure." Crossan produced the track "Doorman" on the new album, a tale of a working class boy on a night out partying with a wealthy girl. Behind the song's snarling punk melody is an E. M. Forster like plotline, critiquing class division in Britain: Doorman, let me in the door Spent all my money, you ain't getting no more wages Sure Sir, Sir, are you sure? In short, I'm not a mop you can drag 'cross the floor. Frampton's mother was 16 when he was born, and his father left the family when Frampton was a toddler. When Frampton was 9, his youngest brother died of muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition, two weeks after his first birthday. After the boy's death, Frampton, his mother and four other siblings initially moved to a town farther north, but they returned to Northampton a year later. Frampton's grief and the upheaval of moving disrupted his schooling, he said, and set him on an outsider's path. "I always felt just that I didn't fit into certain groups," he said. Julie Adenuga, a host on Apple Music's Beats 1 radio show, said in an email that people like Slowthai, with working class backgrounds, were often left out of the political conversation in Britain. Like Frampton, Adenuga grew up in public housing. "Our upbringing has required us to take different routes because most of the time, we're not encouraged to be in the same spaces as everybody else," she said. "Slowthai is an example of how taking a separate path can still inspire change and empower the same young people who are constantly ignored by everyone else." As a teenager, Frampton's reaction to feeling that he didn't fit in was to act out; in "T N Biscuits," he describes himself as the "class clown dunce." Frampton said that his stage name, Slowthai, was a nickname he had been given when he was 10 a play on the first syllable of his given name, it was intended as an insult because he slurred his words. He said he had reclaimed the slight when he started making music because he knew it would raise eyebrows in his hometown, where he was known as a rebel. "It was my diss," he said. "Everyone used to use it in a bad way and I turned a negative into a positive." Crossan, the electronic musician, said that Frampton was a deft hand at turning a situation on its head. His songs have "an excited energy, not a dour message," he said, that gave listeners "a hopeful feeling and a really positive message wrapped in anger, outrage, and all these other complicated emotions." The "Nothing Great About Britain" album is part polemic, part ode to his hometown. The album opens with the politically charged title track, about the police, race and patriotism, and closes with "Northampton's Child," a ballad for his mother, whom he hails in the song as his "only queen." Frampton, who said he voted for Britain to remain in the European Union and supports a second referendum on the matter, said he wasn't interested in the minutiae of political bickering. "What does it matter about us being part of a union when we can't resolve the issues in our country?" he said. "Look at the rest of it, what we're actually forgetting by taking so much time to look at this one thing." The album's promotional campaign has included white billboards erected around London with text highlighting facts about Britain since the May 2016 referendum. One reads "Recorded offenses of hate crime in the U.K. have increased by 123 percent in the last five years"; another says "78 percent of large companies in the U.K. pay men more than they pay women." "Community and families are what we're neglecting," Frampton said. "This is what's holding us back as people and instead, we want to look at everything else." Grinning broadly and looking out of the cafe window, he added: "I'm just giving the facts that are already there, the facts that I've been seeing my whole life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
So let's say you decided to place your home or a few rooms inside it among the million plus listings that the rental site Airbnb now claims to have. And let's also say that you're the rule abiding sort and find the part of the company's website where it encourages you to check with your homeowners or renter's insurance company to make sure you have proper liability coverage for guests. What would happen if you did so? If you're Julie Pfeffer, who rents two rooms in her 200 year old home in Hockessin, Del., and your insurer is State Farm, it would tell you that your policy was going to be canceled in 30 days. At which point, you would be in a real pickle. Airbnb now provides backup liability protection for people who put United States listings on its site. It kicks in when and if your own insurance company denies the claim, and many would, given that they don't like covering commercial activity in people's homes. This secondary coverage is all well and good, but most homeowners need (or at least want) primary coverage in the first place. Their mortgage company probably requires it, or they worry about placing too much faith in the free liability coverage provided by a start up like Airbnb. And if insurers won't sell any coverage to homeowners if they have a part time home rental operation going on, it will be trouble for everyone involved. Ms. Pfeffer eventually found a solution, but it wasn't easy. And this is mostly the fault of the insurance industry, which doesn't always want to answer questions about this sort of activity, whose agents aren't always as knowledgeable as they should be and whose own policy language can be incredibly confusing. Airbnb's site says that "some" homeowners and renters insurance policies protect its users from "certain" lawsuits that result from an injury and tells users to "confirm" that rentals are covered before putting up a listing. This is rather rosy language, given that plenty of insurance companies explicitly deny coverage for any kind of regular commercial activity in the home. Airbnb knows this, which is why it will begin offering the 1 million of secondary coverage next month. It's called Host Protection Insurance, it's free and it applies even when hosts are violating local ordinances by renting in the first place, violating the terms of their lease by renting or breaking a condo or homeowners insurance association rule by doing so But Airbnb didn't have anything like that when Ms. Pfeffer started renting out rooms a few times each month, and she wanted primary coverage anyway. A retired equity analyst, she owns her home outright and does not answer to a condo board or homeowners association. An experienced traveler herself, she joined Airbnb because she enjoyed meeting new people and liked the idea of generating some income to cover the costs of living in a historic home. She doesn't need the money, but she likes hosting. (Guests like her, too; she has five star reviews across the board.) For a quarter century, Ms. Pfeffer had been a loyal State Farm customer, but when she talked to an agent about her rental activity, it quickly became clear that it could not offer her any kind of liability rider and no longer wanted her as a customer. The agent made some noises about installing fire escapes from every bedroom and buying a commercial policy that might have cost more than her annual rental income, but that was out of the question. State Farm confirms that this is standard operating procedure for Airbnb hosts like Ms. Pfeffer and others like them who come clean about their rental activities. "The property owner changed the way she used her home on a fairly regular basis. Renting rooms in a home brings exposures that an individual and insurer should mitigate," said Rachael Risinger, a company spokeswoman, in an emailed statement. "Homeowners insurance is intended for owner occupied properties and we do not anticipate regular renting of a home under our current policy." I explained all of this to Airbnb and asked how often it heard about the hosts for its 150,000 United States listings losing their homeowners insurance or being threatened by insurers. "The situation you've described is extremely rare," said Jakob Kerr, a company spokesman, in an emailed statement. "We built Host Protection Insurance to give our hosts more peace of mind, and it covers every host in the United States, in every city for every reservation." The company also encourages hosts to tell policy makers and business leaders about what being a host adds to their lives, all in the interest of updating laws and insurance company rules. State Farm is the largest provider of homeowners insurance in the United State, according to SNL Financial. So how could this be rare? One possible reason: Most likely, only a tiny number of Airbnb hosts are as responsible as Ms. Pfeffer and come clean with their insurance companies about their rental activity. Rather than be fired as a State Farm customer, Ms. Pfeffer quit. Then she had to shop for a new policy. One of the companies she considered working with was Chubb, which tends to cover more expensive properties. But the independent agent she spoke to said that the company would not cover her rental activity, either. Ms. Pfeffer got better news at the Liberty Mutual office in Wilmington, Del. There, the agent said that she didn't need any special rider or commercial coverage for her room rentals; the standard homeowners coverage was fine. Given what had gone on with State Farm, she was wary, so she got it in writing. Then she read my column, however, and wondered if her agent had gotten it wrong. In that column, Liberty Mutual did not answer any of the questions I posed to it about its rules, but one state insurance commissioner stated quite plainly that homeowners policies generally do not cover business activities in the home. When Ms. Pfeffer and I first spoke, she did not want to go public. As she put it, she had at least one leg to stand on given that she had her coverage parameters in writing from the agent. Why go to Liberty Mutual with her concerns and run the risk of losing her insurance altogether if the agent was wrong? Liberty Mutual finally agreed to have an actual conversation with me about their policies but was understandably reluctant to comment on a customer who would not offer up her name. Back and forth we went, and eventually everyone came around. The agent, it turns out, was right all along. Liberty Mutual's policy in Delaware allows for liability coverage for "occasional" use of a residence as a rental, which covers her few times a month activity. This is true even though the previous paragraph in her policy makes it clear that there will be no liability coverage when the policyholder is "engaged" in a "business." Any random homeowner could be forgiven for not knowing the precise definitions of engaged and occasional and business, particularly in this context. Maybe we could let the insurance agents off, too, though it's a stretch given that I and others have been asking versions of these insurance questions for years. The insurance companies, however, ought to do better. It is not too much to ask that for every policy in every state, they have a list that has been reviewed by a lawyer and contains frequently asked questions. That document should also define occasional, define business and define engaged. Even better, they could just do what Chubb does and set a reasonable cap on rental income or some other clear rule about when it no longer covers the activity. Insurance company actuaries eat data for breakfast. Airbnb has a lot of it at this point. They ought to share it with the insurers so they can figure out what level of coverage they want to offer and then explain it to the rest of us in plain English. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Benjamin Albucker is, by his own description, an exacting, opinionated, slightly neurotic aesthete. He has a refined eye and a drive to sharpen it further. His canvas is his vintage design store in Lambertville, N.J. The carefully curated space stands out from the many antiques shops and galleries in the town along the Delaware River. For starters, it has been open for more than a year without a name. "Naming a business is a creative endeavor," said Mr. Albucker, pronounced All beu KER. "I want something that feels and tastes right, or I'm not going to be happy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
When you've decided to sell your home, the last thing you want to do is spend money to spruce the place up. After all, whoever buys it is going to replace those outdated kitchen cabinets and grungy bathroom tiles anyway, right? "We're often asked why any money should be spent freshening," said Mickey Conlon, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate. "The answer has to do with the psychological effect of assessing a renovation on a prospective purchase. Buyers assign dollar values to repairs that typically exceed the actual cost of remediation." To get the best return on your investment and avoid turning off potential buyers you need to ensure your home looks its best when it hits the market. At the same time, you don't want to waste effort or money on improvements that won't pay off. To find out what you absolutely must do before putting your home on the market, I reached out to several real estate professionals for their essential presale fix ups. Here are their top suggestions for making sure your house or apartment is market ready. 1. PAINT THE WALLS A fresh coat of paint is a cost effective way to make a place feel new again. But stick with neutral tones like grays and whites, which let the best features of your home stand out, rather than going with bold colors that might not suit everyone's taste. You can find painters starting at 60 an hour on a site like Handy, which offers on demand handyman and cleaning services in New York and other major cities. "As an added bonus," said Mr. Conlon of Douglas Elliman, "the faint whiff of paint can be as alluring to home buyers as new car smell is to auto shoppers." 2. SHINE THE FLOORS "Unless your floors are severely damaged, it doesn't make sense to have them refinished," said Pat Christodoulou, who stages homes for sale in Connecticut and New York. Instead, she hires a handyman with a floor buffer, paying anywhere from 300 to wax and polish the floor of a small living room to 1,500 for a Classic Six. "Many good buildings have a buffing machine," she said, adding that if yours doesn't, you could try asking for a handyman at another building down the block. 3. CLEAN UP THE BATHROOM Replacing missing tiles and re caulking moldy areas are must dos. Small upgrades, like swapping out an old faucet, can brighten up the space. If your tub is looking dingy, a professional refinisher can repair dents, rub out rust spots and recoat it with a new finish in a day or so, for about 500 for a standard size bathtub, according to Homeadvisor.com, a home improvement website. This technique, called reglazing, can be applied to those dated pink wall tiles as well, so long as they are in good shape. And if your bathroom is already in decent condition, a new bath mat, shower curtain and fresh towels may be all the sprucing up you need. 4. UPGRADE THE KITCHEN While remodeling an old kitchen is a sure way to help your home sell faster and at a higher price, it is possible to transform a dated space without a complete overhaul. A fresh coat of paint and new hardware will help refresh old cabinets. Peel and stick wall tiles, which can be found at home improvement stores for as little as 8 a square foot, make adding a backsplash easy on the budget. Trevor Tondro for The New York Times And if you're feeling a little more ambitious, an epoxy coating, sold at most home improvement stores for about 20, can give laminate countertops a new look and feel. Louise M. Devlin, an agent with Brown Harris Stevens who does a fair amount of business in 1960s co ops, swears by this trick. "It's a fantastic affordable option," said Ms. Devlin, who hires a handyman to do the work, which involves sanding the countertop and mixing and applying several coatings of epoxy. The end result, which can be finished in a weekend, she said, "looks like a granite industrial finish." But what about those old appliances? While real estate professionals agree that replacing them can add value, it may not be worth the time involved or the cost of new high end appliances. If your budget allows, consider buying steeply discounted appliances at stores that sell used kitchens, like BIG Reuse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens, or Green Demolitions in Fairfield, N.J. 5. CLEAR THE CLUTTER "Sellers don't realize how much stuff they have and how it deters most buyers," said Kathleen Perkins, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman. "A good rule of thumb is to get rid of 50 percent of your stuff." This includes books, furniture and the clothes hanging in your closets, and it has the added effect of making small spaces seem bigger. Coffee tables, kitchen counters, windowsills and other surfaces should be cleared of family photos, plants and tchotchkes. Also, be sure to put away any personal effects razors, hair dryers, shampoo bottles, toothbrushes before showings. 6. DO A DEEP CLEANING Wash the windows inside and out and vacuum all the dust that's accumulated in those exhaust fans, said Heather McMaster, an associate broker at the Corcoran Group: "Deep cleaning is so important, because while an apartment can show very neatly, it's the details that people pick up on." According to Handy, the handyman and cleaning service, it usually takes about four or five hours to thoroughly scrub down a two bedroom two bath apartment including inside the cabinets, oven and refrigerator and costs 100 to 135. 7. LIGHT IT UP "Every room should have at least three points of light," said Alison Draper, an agent with Halstead Property who writes for a company blog about design and staging. That means a table lamp, a floor lamp and a task light, for example, or an overhead fixture and a couple of table lamps. Her go to resource for inexpensive lighting is Ikea. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
WHEN I first heard rumors that Chevrolet was going to produce the 2012 Camaro ZL1, I thought, "Fine, G.M. is building a Camaro with a supercharger and more horsepower. Big deal." Now I've driven it and I know better: defining the ZL1 solely by its extra power is similar to saying that Dennis Rodman is famous just for his rebounding ability. There's quite a bit more to the story. Adding a supercharger is only the first step in making a ZL1 out of a workaday Camaro SS. If you want to do it Chevy's way that is, create a car that will stand up to the output of a deep breathing V 8 you'll need to install a new clutch and flywheel, along with improved synchronizers for better shifting of the 6 speed manual transmission. Then upgrade the differential and axle shafts. And brakes and antiroll bars. Next, throw in a performance traction control system and Magnetic Ride Control shock absorbers and tweak the bodywork in a wind tunnel so it generates downforce at higher speeds. Voila! That's most of it. In short, wringing 580 horsepower from a 6.2 liter V 8 is relatively easy. Creating a Camaro that laps Germany's Nurburgring in a Porsche hounding seven minutes and 41 seconds is not. While the ZL1's styling is as subtle as an anvil falling from the sky, its performance is defined by Chevy's attention to nuance. That might sound counterintuitive, given that we're talking about a monster Camaro whose LSA V 8 (a close cousin of the 638 horsepower LS9 in the Corvette ZR1) pushes it to 0 to 60 times in about four seconds flat. But a day of driving during the press introduction at Virginia International Raceway here a fast, challenging road course near the North Carolina border revealed a Camaro that evokes blue ribbon sport coupes like the BMW M3. Except that the ZL1 surely gets around V.I.R. much quicker. The handling of the current generation Camaro SS has always been characterized by understeer, the tendency for the front tires to lose grip before the rears, causing the front end to push wide in hard cornering. Understeer makes a chassis benign and predictable, but it's not exactly fun. "Understeer is irrelevant for 99 percent of drivers, because they'll never push hard enough for it to be a problem," said Tony Roma, engineering manager of the ZL1 program. "But for the other 1 percent, it was a big issue." So the ZL1 got a different layout for its antiroll bars, which gives the car lively, neutral handling, and in similar form trickles down to 2012 SS models. Call it voodoo chassis nomics. At the racetrack, Chevy had a car propped up to show off the cleverness underneath. There was a lot to take in, but I was immediately intrigued by what looked like miniature shock absorbers on the suspension control arms. These turned out to be wheel position sensors, part of the ZL1's Performance Traction Management system. Conventional traction control systems detect a loss of grip and then reduce the engine's torque or tap the brakes. The ZL1 aims for a predictive approach. If, say, you're going full throttle through a corner and the front tires hit a bump, the system will start cutting torque before the rear wheels arrive at the bump, saving you from a lurching half slide followed by a scolding computer intervention. The suspension is a partner in this exercise, processing input from the sensors 1,000 times a second (which means that at 60 m.p.h., the ZL1 "reads" each inch of road). The Magnetic Ride Control shock absorbers make the most of this information, instantly adapting their responses to the circumstances. I put all of that wizardry to the test on the track, a great place to remind yourself how little you know about driving. I rode with Mr. Roma to reacquaint myself with the course; on the first lap the driver behind us went into a corner too hot and skidded into the grass. They weren't joking about spicing up the Camaro's handling. For my turn at the wheel, I set the traction management system to mode three, which firms up the suspension and dials back the traction control intervention but retains the safety net of the stability control electronics. The next two settings progressively banish the electronic nannies, culminating in mode five, in which the electronic handling aids are shut off. In theory, this is much like Ferrari's F1 Trac system, which lets the driver decide the extent of the car's computer aided heroics. On the track, Performance Traction Management functions like Ferrari's system, letting the driver use full throttle when exiting corners while the computer precisely metes out torque. The Ferrari system is no doubt slicker, but hey, I just compared Camaros to Ferraris. Raining frogs are imminent. This Camaro is one of the rare road cars that generates aerodynamic downforce. At 150 m.p.h., the ZL1's vented hood, flat underbody and rear spoiler help it to produce 65 pounds of downforce. It doesn't sound like much, but at the same speed a Camaro SS is contending with 200 pounds of aerodynamic lift. Trust me, rocketing through the Climbing Esses section at V.I.R. you'll appreciate the difference. I'm sure some buyers will confine their track time to dragstrips, where the original ZL1, a limited production and barely domesticated 1969 model earned its reputation. G.M. says that the 2012 version's 556 pound feet of torque will help it to pound out quarter mile elapsed times in the high 11 second neighborhood on the factory tires. But this car is really built for road courses, and it would be a shame to condemn it to a life of quarter mile runs. For a big car, the ZL1 dances. You can wrestle a 426 horsepower Camaro SS around a track at respectable speed, but the ZL1 behaves as if it were born to be there. Instead of plowing through corners, the rear end is willing to step out and point the front end into the turn. I've driven an M3 on this track, and the ZL1 really feels like a big BMW M car. Call it the M6's American pen pal. The uberCamaro also costs nearly as much as an M3, which brings me to my caveats. Is 54,995 too much for a Camaro? (Don't forget to add the 1,300 guzzler tax for the manual transmission model or 2,600 for the automatic.) That's a question only you and your wallet can answer. But I will say that for your money, nothing else with a back seat can approach the ZL1's thundering performance. The other smirch on the ZL1's report card is its weight: 4,120 pounds with the manual transmission, some 241 pounds more than a Camaro SS. The ZL1 weighs so much because it's built to survive the severe abuse that will inevitably be heaped upon it. The huge differential, for instance, has a cast iron housing and its own cooler. The optional 6 speed 6L90 automatic transmission is the same one used on G.M.'s heavy duty pickups. The brakes are enormous 14.6 inch front rotors with six piston calipers, 14.4 inch rear rotors with four piston calipers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
For people with asthma, the outbreak of a pandemic that can lead to respiratory failure has not been a welcome event. Many health organizations have cautioned that asthmatics are most likely at higher risk for severe illness if they get the coronavirus. There's been a run on inhalers, and coronavirus patients like the actor Idris Elba have openly worried about their asthma. But this month, when New York State, the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States, began releasing data on the top 10 chronic health problems suffered by people who died from coronavirus, asthma was notably absent from the list. State officials said only about five percent of Covid 19 deaths in New York were of people who were known to also have asthma, a relatively modest amount. The research at this early stage is minimal and not always consistent, as one would expect. A recent commentary published in Lancet by a group of European researchers called it "striking" that asthma appeared "to be underrepresented in the comorbidities reported for patients with Covid 19" comorbidity being the term for a secondary health problem. A small study of 24 critically ill patients in Washington State noted that three had asthma. "We're not seeing a lot of patients with asthma," said Dr. Bushra Mina, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, which has treated more than 800 Covid cases. The more common risk factors, he added, are "morbid obesity, diabetes and chronic heart disease." The top Covid 19 comorbidities listed by New York, in order, are hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, coronary artery disease, dementia and atrial fibrillation, a heart condition. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, another respiratory ailment, but one with an older demographic than asthma, ranks seventh. Renal disease, cancer and congestive heart failure round out the list. Nearly eight percent of the U.S. population close to 25 million people has asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is a lung disease that causes the airways to constrict and can make breathing hard work as the body fights for enough oxygen. Symptoms include wheezing and coughing. One thing doctors agree on is that people with asthma should be taking long acting medications like steroids that keep their symptoms in check, because having your asthma under control is better than battling asthma and a virus simultaneously. Health experts have generally seen little to no evidence that asthma increases the risk of developing Covid 19, but the question has been whether it causes worse outcomes for those who do have it. "If you have mild or moderate disease, you're probably not going to behave much differently than someone who doesn't have asthma, particularly if you're a younger person," said Dr. David Hill, a board member of the American Lung Association. But he added that those with more severe cases "may get more severity of the disease." Dr. Linda Rogers, a specialist in pulmonary medicine at the Mt. Sinai Health system, which is on the front line of Covid treatment, said one would assume that patients with underlying lung diseases would be "at risk of worse outcomes." But she said that "asthma is underrepresented" in patients that are sick enough to seek treatment. Her practice focuses on people with more serious cases of asthma, but she has been able to successfully manage many of her asthma patients through telemedicine. "These are patients who, just based on their asthma alone, are on steroids all the time. I'm just surprised some of them haven't done worse." Still, the data analysis on the effects of asthma is in its infancy, and health experts cited an existing body of research that shows the flu and milder coronaviruses exacerbate asthma as worrisome indicators for those with Covid 19. Dr. Rogers said that she did not want to exclude asthma "as a potential problem as it is well known that viral infections are the No. 1 cause of asthma flares in both children and adults under normal conditions." Dr. J. Allen Meadows, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, said much the same: "Since common coronaviruses in the United States, and influenza, trigger asthma flares in well controlled patients, we might expect Covid 19 to be similar." One doctor who has studied viruses extensively is Young J. Juhn, a clinical epidemiologist, and professor of pediatrics and medicine at the Mayo Clinic, whose laboratory research has examined the impact of asthma on the risk of infectious and inflammatory diseases. Dr. Juhn said the data would have to be studied and weighted in more detail, but added that, in his view, asthma put people at greater risk of poor outcomes, and potentially even more susceptible to infection, though there was limited data on the latter point. He noted that asthma disproportionately affects lower income people who have less access to Covid testing and care. "It may be still fair to say that the emerging data support the current guidelines considering asthma as a high risk condition," he cautioned, adding that "we need more definite data." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LOS ANGELES The threat of a Hollywood strike is getting real. On Wednesday, television and movie writers roughly 12,000, all members of the Writers Guild of America will begin voting on whether to authorize a walkout. The online vote will end on Monday. If members approve a strike, as they almost certainly will, and no pact with studios has been reached by May 1, fingers will stop typing and picketing will begin the next day. A strike would have serious implications. When writers walked out a decade ago, the impasse cost the Los Angeles economy an estimated 2.5 billion. As production halted, income dried up not only for writers but also for set decorators, caterers, limo drivers and florists. Fans were not thrilled, either, as television schedules became a sea of reruns. Here is what you need to know this time around. Longtime Hollywood power players agents, studio executives, labor lawyers put the chance at roughly 51 percent. But it changes by the day. Tempers have cooled (a bit) over the past week, as negotiators for the Writers Guild and an organization that represents studios, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, have made progress on pay increases. But at least one radioactive issue remains unsettled: health care. And the union could be easily thrown into a rage by a single bit of news. Members were incensed on April 7, for instance, when CBS revealed in a regulatory filing that its chief executive and chairman, Leslie Moonves, had received a 2016 pay package worth 69.6 million, a 22 percent increase over the previous year, when the company did not perform as well. How would it affect television? Late night comedy shows would instantly revert to reruns. Summer reality shows, such as "Big Brother," would arrive the writer producers who work on them have a different contract but some scripted series scheduled for the fall would most likely be delayed. A strike could be a death knell for daytime soap operas, which rely on a new episode almost every weekday, unless producers bring in nonunion writers, which happened during the last strike. But there could also be bigger consequences. Most networks have been losing viewers as Netflix and Amazon have risen in popularity. A strike could speed that shift: Streaming services have some big shows ready to go new seasons of "Orange Is the New Black" and "Stranger Things" on Netflix, for instance and a huge array of on demand older programming. ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox are also set to unveil their offerings for the coming season at mid May "upfront" presentations in New York. How do you woo advertisers amid pickets? As analysts at Barclays wrote in a report last week, "Given the anemic growth rates for television advertising already, any uncertainty over the fall season is likely to force more advertisers to expand their allocations towards digital platforms." At first, it would be business as usual. Because big budget event films take years to make, summer movies would continue to arrive on schedule. Films with finished scripts and perhaps some with not so finished ones would continue to go into production. Movie executives really started to sweat the last writers' strike, which took place in the winter, only when it threatened to derail the Academy Awards, a crucial marketing platform. How long could a strike go on? Anybody's guess. The Writers Guild walked out for 100 days in 2007 8 and 155 days in 1988. In both cases, the most in demand writers eventually got tired of losing income and applied pressure to wrap it up. (Thousands of guild members are unemployed in any given year.) Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Why are writers upset? With the boom in scripted television shows, isn't there more work than ever? There are definitely more union made series at least 300 last season, or about 40 percent more than two years before that. But networks are ordering fewer episodes per season (10 to 13) than in the past (22 to 24). So a series writing job pays less. At the same time, in a contract provision known as exclusivity, most TV writers can write for only one series at a time, taking them off the market for up to a year. And to top it off, reruns don't attract very many viewers anymore, limiting residual payments. Movie writers say they are hurting because the major studios are making fewer films. Studios have also cut way back on what is development, or the polishing and reworking of scripts to find a good one. What does the union want? Negotiators started with a laundry list of requests, including easing that exclusivity rule, but it boils down to raises and bigger payments from studios for the guild's health plan. Raises were relatively easy: The Directors Guild of America agreed to a new three year contract with studios in January, and writers are likely to receive similar wage increases. But the health plan is a bear. In part because it provides extremely generous benefits, the plan has begun to run steep deficits. The union wants the studios to shore it up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
When Mena Massoud, the star of the new "Aladdin" live action remake, got the first callback for the title role, he decided not to revisit the beloved 1992 animated original. Instead he wanted to draw inspiration from the underlying theme: a "journey of personal identity." The cartoon does carry a well intentioned, universal message of being true to yourself. But it has also been criticized for promoting the stereotype of "barbaric" Arabs. And though it's set in a fictional port city in Arabia, its characters were voiced by a majority white cast. Born in Cairo and raised in Toronto, Massoud, 27, has a rosier view of the earlier movie . "My parents knew about the story of Aladdin far before the animation film. It's a folk tale that is very prevalent in Egypt," he said, adding that the movie is a "very positive depiction of where we came from." Still, Disney needed to update the revival for woke audiences. After an open, worldwide casting call, it wound up with a diverse cast that includes the British actress Naomi Scott, who plays Jasmine and is of Indian descent, and actors with Iranian and Tunisian roots. Massoud, who had a recurring role in "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan," won out over more than 2,000 hopefuls who auditioned for his role. The film has received decidedly mixed reviews from critics, though in his New York Times review, A.O Scott called the casting "admirable." In a recent phone interview, Massoud explained why he thought it was "counterproductive" to critique the story and casting process and shared his thoughts on Will Smith's blue genie. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Were you a fan of the animated "Aladdin" growing up? Yeah, he's one of the only characters that I could relate to on a cultural level. I have two older sisters. They had it on at the house before I could even walk, so I grew up with it in my childhood in a big way. Did you ever have any thoughts about the backlash it received for the original "Arabian Nights" lyrics and its portrayal of the characters? No. Growing up in my family, we just celebrated that film because it was one of the few that had any representation for us. It's very pretentious to start nit picking things when there's not a lot of representation out there anyway. You have to start somewhere. Casting for the live action remake took longer than expected because it was difficult to find an actor for the lead role. Were you following that process as it played out? When I first saw the online casting call , I was very excited. I put a tape together. I didn't have much hope because when they're getting tens of thousands of tapes from around the world, the chance of it even getting seen is very low. So we didn't hear anything back, I assumed they were going to one of the Hollywood established stars, and that was it. Four months later, I heard from my reps and I was shocked that they were still looking for someone. I put another tape together and flew to London twice to test for it. Why do you think the parts of Aladdin and Jasmine went to relative newcomers? From my understanding, the producers and the director did go out to stars at the beginning, but they just couldn't find anyone able to pull off the singing and dancing and acting. They were looking for a singer that could pull off the acting. And they came to realize over months of searching that they actually needed a really strong actor because Aladdin only really sings two songs. So I think that's when they started changing their approach. When Disney announced that Naomi Scott would play Jasmine, some fans reacted angrily on Twitter and said the role should have gone to someone of Arab heritage. It's a funny thing that's happening online. The Middle Easterners want "Aladdin" to be a Middle Eastern story, and the Indians want "Aladdin" to be an Indian story. The truth is, it's really a folk tale from the 1800s, and Agrabah is a fictional place that's a culmination of India and Asia and the Middle East. In fact, in the original folk tale, Aladdin was actually of Chinese descent. So what we wanted to do with this was represent as many different cultures from that part of the world as possible. How did the filmmakers address concerns about cultural sensitivity and representation beyond casting? Did you ever feel the need to flag anything that seemed off? They had a team of cultural advisers on set . And no, to answer your question. It's the most represented and the most respect, culturally, that I've ever felt in my career. My first professional gig was on a show called "Nikita," and I played Al Qaeda No. 2. At that time I had to take those roles because I just wanted to get my foot in the door. So I think Disney handled it beautifully and this needs to happen more in Hollywood. What was it like working with Will Smith? How did you hold your own on set? I've been in the industry for about 10 years, and I think if you want to work with the best directors in the world and the best performers in the world, you have to value yourself and what you have to offer. Don't get me wrong I was really nervous the first time I met Will. But we had a lot of time to prep and to get to know each other, so by the time we got to filming, he was just a co star of mine. What did you think of his take on the blue genie? I honestly think he's the only one that could have played it. I think what Robin Williams did so well, and the reason Robin's genie is so iconic, is because he brought his whole self to the role. And Will has done the same in his rendition. He's brought his past 30 years of experience. The genie's got a little bit of "Hitch" in it; it's got a little bit of "Bad Boys" in it; a little bit of "The Pursuit of Happyness" it's got a little bit of everything. I think he nailed it. You recently sent out a message to Egyptian viewers in Arabic on Twitter. Do you still have ties to the country? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Of the many winners and losers in the overhaul of the tax code, one change makes real estate investors the biggest beneficiaries, while art collectors seem to have drawn the short straw. Real estate investors were given a gift after Congress voted to maintain what are known as 1031 exchanges, a section in the tax code that allows for property to be sold tax free as long as the proceeds are used to buy more property. The loophole had been open to others as well, including art collectors, classic car aficionados and franchisees, but not any longer. Investors whose real estate holdings are comparatively modest and their heirs were given an added bonus: The estate tax exemption for couples doubled to 22.4 million, allowing those investors to conceivably pay no tax on their properties, ever. They can use exchanges to buy ever more valuable property, and when they die, all of the capital gains are erased, so their heirs inherit the real estate at whatever it's worth at the time. The exchange loophole would appear to help wealthy real estate developers like President Trump, whose fortune is made up of commercial properties, and his son in law, Jared Kushner, who also hails from a real estate family. "People keep rolling it over," said Christopher Pegg, senior director of wealth planning for California and Nevada at Wells Fargo Private Bank. Investors can continue to take advantage of the exchanges until their death, at which point the capital gains tax is eliminated, he said. "You get that big basis step up in the sky, and the tax is entirely avoided." And the cost for investors to save millions of dollars in taxes? A few thousand dollars in fees to the firm that manages the exchange proceeds. This preferential treatment is great if you're a real estate investor. But it's baffling for anyone else and may be downright infuriating to homeowners in high tax states who could end up paying more in taxes because of limits placed on their ability to deduct property taxes on their federal income tax. Take, for example, someone who bought real estate in San Francisco 20 years ago versus someone who bought an equivalent amount of stock in Apple, based nearby in Cupertino. Both assets have appreciated wildly and made a tremendous amount of money for their investors. But here's where the investors' fortunes diverge. If the owner of Apple stock sold it all and put the proceeds into other technology companies, the stock sale would be subject to a capital gains tax of 20 percent. If the investor who bought real estate in San Francisco sold the property, the money could be used to buy another property in San Francisco or anywhere in the country without the seller's paying a tax on the appreciated gains in the original property. "From the I.R.S.'s perspective, the taxpayer gives up property and what they receive is other like kind property," said Matthew K. Scheriff, a certified public accountant and executive vice president of Legal 1031 Exchange Services. "Why that should apply to real estate and not other property? Obviously, real estate received a little bit of a favorable outcome on that side of the tax package." Combine those tax free gains with the higher estate tax exemption, and it is possible that a real estate investor would never have to pay capital gains or estate tax on tens of millions of dollars in real estate. If, at the investor's death, the assets totaled less than the 22.4 million exemption for a couple, decades of embedded gains would be erased. Moreover, any property tax the investor paid over the years would have been deducted as a business expense even though the deduction for property taxes for a homeowner has been capped at 10,000. Clever investors could even sell the properties tax free. Mr. Scheriff, who completed about 400 exchanges for his clients last year, gave this example: A person sells a building in New York for 1 million and uses 1031 exchanges to buy two rental houses on a golf course in Florida. A few years later, the investor evicts one tenant and moves into the house. After a few years, the investor sells it and claims the personal residence exemption, then repeats the process with the second home. There are some residency requirements, but if handled the correct way, the strategy produces tax free gains to be enjoyed in the investor's lifetime gains that would be taxed if they were from other investments. Why is this allowed? "It's a result of tax law inertia," Mr. Pegg said. He pointed to the history of farmers swapping odd parcels of land to create contiguous farms that were easier to maintain. In the last major tax overhaul, which occurred in 1986, a provision in the code allowed for a delay of 180 days between selling one property and buying another, without any tax on the gains from the sale of the first property. A ruling from the I.R.S. also allows people to do "reverse exchanges" buying a property first and then picking other properties of equal value to sell without paying tax. Today, 1031 exchanges can turn air into a McDonald's on Long Island, tax free. Peter E. Buell, a partner at Marcum, the national accounting firm, said that one of his clients had sold the air rights over a three story building on 125th Street in Harlem that he had owned for decades. Without doing a 1031 exchange, the client would have had to pay tax on the entire sale price. To avoid paying tax, the client used the proceeds to buy the land on which a McDonald's sits. "He'll collect his rent check for what was air rights," Mr. Buell said. In keeping these exchanges just for real estate, lawmakers may have inadvertently signed a decree that will send some museum worthy pieces of art outside the country. Top collectors, who may spend millions of dollars for a single work of art, have taken advantage of 1031 exchanges that allowed them to use sales from their collection to buy new art and save the nearly 30 percent tax on the gains. But that stopped with the new law. Michael Kosnitzky, a partner at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, said American art collectors could lose their advantage over those in the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia, who have been buying big ticket works like Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi," which sold for 450 million to a Saudi prince who did not have the same tax concerns. "This is really bad for U.S. collectors," Mr. Kosnitzky said. And, he said, it is a potential blow for museums in the United States. "When Steven Cohen or Steve Wynn or another significant U.S. investor and there are only a handful of them buys a piece of art, they're often going to place their artwork in U.S. museums," Mr. Kosnitzky said. "Now, those works are going to be out of the U.S. because of that tax law change," he added. "Or they'll be kept in private collections where no one will be able to see them unless you know the Saudi prince or the Malaysian billionaire. That's not cool." William J. Kambas, a partner at Withersworldwide, a law firm that was particularly active in doing 1031 exchanges for art, hopes buyers' passion for collecting overrides their tax concerns. "I think many collectors, with or without the tax benefit, are going to buy and sell art," he said. "But maybe a piece that someone had to reach for, it might be difficult." One thing he is certain of: "This is a boon for those in real estate." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Mr. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, announced that the Fed would scale back the stimulus, saying the economy had made progress but still had "much farther to travel." WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it would gradually end its bond buying program during 2014, a modest first step toward unwinding the central bank's broader stimulus campaign as its officials gain confidence that the economy is growing steadily. The Fed plans to cut its monthly purchases of Treasury and mortgage backed securities from 85 billion in December to nothing by the end of next year in a series of small steps, starting with a reduction to 75 billion in January, the central bank announced after a two day meeting of its policy making committee. At the same time, the Fed sought to offset concerns that it was once again pulling back too soon by strengthening its plans to hold short term interest rates near zero, which officials regard as a more powerful means of stimulating growth. Both policies aim to hold down borrowing costs and revive risk taking. The Fed's shift in policy, in effect, means it plans to do less now and more later. That is a result of a compromise that has been months in the making between a group of officials convinced that the economy needs more help, and a range of internal critics who regarded the bond buying campaign as ineffective or dangerous. The Fed's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, insisted that the net effect was not a withdrawal of support for the economy. "We are not doing less," he said at a news conference on Wednesday. "I think we have been aggressive to try to keep the economy growing, and we are seeing progress in the labor market. I would dispute the idea that we are not providing a lot of accommodation to the economy." Investors appeared to agree with Mr. Bernanke, defying predictions that stock prices would retreat along with the Fed's pullback. Major stock indexes spiked when the Fed's statement was released at 2 p.m., and the Standard Poor's 500 stock index rose 1.7 percent by the end of the trading day. Importantly, interest rates on benchmark bonds the rates the Fed is trying to influence ended the day roughly where they started. One reason for investor enthusiasm, said Michael Hanson, senior economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is the stimulus will be withdrawn very gradually. The markets now have a clear though tentative schedule for the course of Fed policy over the next two years, including an end to asset purchases by late next year and a signal from Mr. Bernanke that the first increase in short term interest rates is not likely to come until near the end of 2015. That is particularly striking because the plan, set in the final months of Mr. Bernanke's tenure, will now define the first two years of the term of his successor, Janet Yellen, whom the Senate is expected to confirm this week. Mr. Bernanke said on Wednesday that Ms. Yellen "fully supports what we did today." The Fed is struggling to calibrate its stimulus campaign in an environment of steady but mediocre growth. The unemployment rate has declined over the last year, reaching 7 percent in November. But that is still a high rate by historical standards, and other measures of the labor market look even worse. Wages are rising slowly, and the share of adults with jobs has not climbed since the recession. A variety of indicators suggest the American economy may now be growing more quickly than analysts predicted, and Fed officials anticipate somewhat faster growth in the coming year. But the persistence of low inflation indicates the economy is operating well below its capacity. Prices increased only 0.7 percent during the 12 months ending in October, according to a Commerce Department index that is the Fed's preferred gauge of inflation, well below the 2 percent pace the Fed considers healthy. Economic projections by Fed officials, also published on Wednesday, showed that the officials did not expect inflation to exceed 2 percent in the next three years. In beginning its retreat, the Fed said that it expected inflation to slowly increase in coming years. But it also made clear, for the first time, that it did not intend to raise short term rates until prices actually started to rise. In doing so, it joins a growing list of central banks grappling with the novel challenge of trying to drive up inflation after decades spent trying to drive it down. "The committee is determined to avoid inflation that is too low, as well as inflation that is too high," Mr. Bernanke said at the news conference. Some analysts saw an inconsistency between that rhetoric and the Fed's shift, however. "The Federal Reserve essentially disregarded the trajectory of inflation in this decision," wrote Tim Duy, an economist at the University of Oregon. Over the last year, the Fed has bought more than 1 trillion in Treasury and mortgage backed securities in its effort to encourage job creation. Fed officials say the purchases have modestly reduced a range of borrowing costs, contributing, for example, to a rise in auto sales and an improving housing market. They say the program has also helped to revive an appetite for taking risks, driving up stock prices. "The ripple effects go through the economy and bring benefits to, I would say, all Americans," Ms. Yellen said at her confirmation hearing last month. But independent analysts have struggled to isolate the effects of the program. Some Fed officials, and outside analysts including some at the International Monetary Fund, also see evidence that the impact of the bond buying has diminished as markets have returned to normalcy. Officials are increasingly concerned as well about the potential consequences, including the disruption of financial markets and the difficulty of unwinding the program. Fed officials also are frustrated that the bond buying program has become a source of financial instability as investors hang on every shift in policy. Those concerns were reflected in the Fed's decision to announce not just an initial cut in bond buying, but a probable timetable for ending the purchases completely. The policy shift won the support of Esther L. George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, who has dissented at each previous meeting this year over concerns that the Fed was doing too much. But with the balance swinging in favor of her views, the decision drew a dissent from Eric S. Rosengren, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, who called it premature. The decision won broad support from the policy making committee, including most proponents of the overall stimulus campaign, because of the accompanying decision to strengthen the Fed's commitment to holding down interest rates. Wednesday's announcement went well beyond the previous declaration of an intent to keep rates near zero at least as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent. The Fed said instead that "it likely will be appropriate to maintain the current target range for the federal funds rate well past the time that the unemployment rate declines below 6 1/2 percent, especially if projected inflation continues to run below the committee's 2 percent longer run goal." Some economists doubt the power of such guidance, however, including Stanley Fischer, whom the White House plans to nominate as Ms. Yellen's vice chairman. Another critic of forward guidance, Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former central banker at the Bank of England, described the "fine tuning" in a Twitter message as "not so fine policy." Stock prices fell earlier in the year when the Fed first talked about tapering, and the Wall Street economist Henry Kaufman of Henry Kaufman and Company was among the many who predicted a similar reaction once the Fed began to carry it out. On Wednesday afternoon, he said that the Fed had succeeded instead in focusing the attention of investors on its forward guidance. "The market has concluded that the key issue is the level of short term interest rates," he said. "That will allow the market to continue to be aggressive risk takers, to make speculative investments." Both the Standard Poor's 500 stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average reached new highs, without adjustment for inflation, with the Dow rising 292.71 points, or 1.8 percent, to close at 16,167.97, and the S. P. 500 rising 29.65 points, or 1.7 percent, to 1,810.65. The Nasdaq composite index advanced 46.38 points, or 1.2 percent, to 4,070.06. At the same time, the assurance that rates would remain low soothed bond investors. The yield on the Treasury's 10 year note rose to 2.89 percent from 2.84 percent late on Tuesday, while its price fell 16/32, to 98 24/32. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Nathan Lane, center left, as Gomez and Bebe Neuwirth, center right, as Morticia, with members of the cast of "The Addams Family" at the Lunt Fontanne Theater in New York in 2010. The Broadway reviews for "The Addams Family" were gruesome the kind of notices that, in theory, could kill a show. Panning it in The New York Times, Ben Brantley described it as a "tepid goulash of vaudeville song and dance routines, Borscht Belt jokes, stingless sitcom zingers and homey romantic plotlines that were mossy in the age of 'Father Knows Best.'" The musical, he persevered, was "most distinctive for its wholesale inability to hold on to a consistent tone or an internal logic." Yet "The Addams Family," which opened on Broadway 10 years ago this month with Nathan Lane as Gomez Addams and Bebe Neuwirth as his beloved Morticia, refused to succumb. Cushioned by a bountiful box office advance, it ran for 20 months shorter than hoped for a starry show based on beloved characters, but hardly a flameout. Then things got interesting. Becoming one of the rare shows that retool and flourish after their New York debut, the musical has proved an enduring hit in youth and community theater productions and has played in more than three dozen countries. "It's our best seller by volume of production," said Steve Spiegel, the president and C.E.O. of Theatrical Rights Worldwide, which licenses the show in several formats, including a 30 minute version for elementary school performers, and is eyeing the possibility of a sequel by the same authors. "In the last five years, 'Addams Family' was the No. 1 produced high school show four of those years, and the other year it was No. 2." What "The Addams Family" became isn't what the producer Stuart Oken had in mind when he tapped Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, the British creators of the artfully macabre "Shockheaded Peter," to direct and design, teaming them with the Broadway veterans Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice ("Jersey Boys") and the composer lyricist Andrew Lippa ("Big Fish"). Oken, who called the project "the biggest missed opportunity of my professional life," blames himself for that ill advised creative marriage and the rocky path that followed. A former executive vice president at Disney Theatrical, Oken said he had hoped that a "nonprofit artist attack on a piece of mainstream, well known material" would ignite "The Addams Family" the way that Julie Taymor did "The Lion King." Instead, he found himself calling for emergency show doctoring by the director Jerry Zaks a four time Tony Award winner and longtime Lane collaborator to get the production to New York. Signs of trouble emerged at the musical's out of town tryout in Chicago. When it opened there, to great anticipation in December 2009, the Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones judged it "overly weighty," lacking humor, spontaneity and narrative focus. To fix it, the creative team had only four months not enough time. Oken, the writers and two others from that original production Jackie Hoffman, who played Grandma, and the producer Eva Price ("Tina"; "Jagged Little Pill"), who a decade ago was a novice co producer spoke in separate phone interviews about their experiences of the show. These excerpts have been edited and condensed. STUART OKEN (lead producer) I thought we were going to do something dangerous. ANDREW LIPPA (composer and lyricist) We were given access to all of the original drawings, and that's where we drew all our inspiration from. OKEN I thought this was the kind of property where I should take a risk, and that the property was muscular enough to stand up to it. EVA PRICE (co producer) It felt like it was stacked with that wonderful combination of broad commercial appeal and creative artfulness. It smelled right in all of its ways. MARSHALL BRICKMAN (book writer) We had to have the song with the clicks in it, the snaps. There was a lot of metaphysical discussion of whether that should come at the beginning of the show or whether it should be saved for the end. You don't want to violate too much audience expectation with a brand name. RICK ELICE (book writer) What we discovered, rather too late (laughs), was that even by 2010, the idea of going out of town so that you could be under the radar was impossible. Anything with Nathan Lane in it is going to be high profile. Anything with Bebe Neuwirth. Everybody was there at the first preview. I think before the overture was over, there were already chat rooms. Everybody's thumbs were exhausted by the intermission. PRICE It got pretty tough reviews in Chicago and really disappointed industry people, so that was very worrisome. OKEN There were problems in the company, there were relationship issues that we were struggling with and the material needed a lot more work. I didn't think we could achieve it without making a change. By making a change, I was basically giving up the thing that I kind of thought I was trying to do. I put it in the hands of an experienced showman who could help get me out of trouble. And that's when Jerry came in. Julian Crouch, the designer, stayed with the production. Phelim departed. JACKIE HOFFMAN (actress) It's a shame, because if we kept that director, what would the vision have been? It was great that I got to meet and have a relationship with Jerry. But it certainly was emotionally difficult, and it was very awkward. But, you know, it's show business, not "show love." OKEN I thought the joy of it would be in the cleverness of the way it was done. But it turned out it wasn't enough. It became a star driven vehicle. It just morphed differently. LIPPA It's a very public forum, writing a Broadway musical. If you're going to play in the big leagues, as it were, you have to learn how to tune out the voices that you don't necessarily want to listen to. HOFFMAN Nothing really prepared us for the unleashing of absolute cruelty and vitriol when the New York press got wind of it. PRICE One of the most enlightening moments of my producing career was the day after opening night in New York, where Stuart Oken and Roy Furman laid out the disastrous New York Times review that we all read the night before. That team started that ad meeting reading the terrible first paragraph, and then the terrible first paragraph of the "Mamma Mia!" review and of the "Les Miz" review and of the "Wicked" review and of the "Cats" review all these hit shows. It was very encouraging, because we were like, "You're right, it's not over." HOFFMAN It only really affects you as a performer if the audiences are affected. There were a couple of nights where you felt from the audience, "Well, I kind of like it, but I'm not supposed to." I mean, people are very, very affected by reviews. They shouldn't be, but unfortunately they are. ELICE I was in the elevator in my building with some neighbors who live on a lower floor. The woman said, "Well, we just came from 'The Addams Family.' What a disaster." Fortunately for me, the elevator opened and they got out. The next morning, under my door was a note: "Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed. When we got out of the elevator, my husband said, 'You idiot. He wrote it.' So I just want you to know I'm really sorry for being so rude. But we would like our money back." My husband, who was a wonderful actor and a great human being, said, "I want you to write her a check right now." OKEN Even though the show ran 20 months and recouped a big chunk of its money on Broadway, it was hard. It was a hard experience. HOFFMAN It gave me a lot of material for a Joe's Pub show. I just stood there and read excerpts from reviews, especially the one that called me hunched over, shrill and irritating. BRICKMAN We did like 700 performances, which is not chopped liver. It wasn't a total embarrassment. I think that's a triumph in this business. BRICKMAN We learned a lot on Broadway. A piece, in a sense, tells you what it wants to be. And the audience tells you what it would be willing to accept. LIPPA By 2011, we were still running on Broadway and planning our national tour, and Stuart said, "We have the resources to help if you guys want to make changes. What would you like to do?" ELICE This never happens. OKEN I said I didn't want to do the tour if we were just going to leave it incomplete. LIPPA We ripped apart our show. We looked at the central conflict, and we looked at the score, and where we could make improvements. ELICE We rewrote it to make the show more about the characters, not just the family characters but the new characters that we introduced to make it less bizarre and more human. Broadly, that was the trick. OKEN We made three song changes, I think, between Chicago and New York, and then made four more between New York and the tour. ELICE In the summer of '11, we all moved down to New Orleans and spent five weeks down there, as though it were a brand new show. By the time we started playing in New Orleans, we felt like we had finally something akin to what we had originally started thinking about way back in 2007, 2008. OKEN The DNA was still the DNA that was captured at the very beginning, and that made the first tryout and made the New York production. We had the hindsight of a deep breath and the ability to kind of be ruthless with our own work. LIPPA The version of the show that is seen all over the world and has played to millions of people is the version that we made for the national tour. OKEN We were so comfortable together as a creative team doing the last version of the show. Maybe it's because Broadway had passed, a little of the craving had passed, the hurt had passed. I thought the Australian production was unbelievable. Then we did the same thing in Buenos Aires. It was just a wonderful feeling to know that could happen. LIPPA I only hoped that I would make something I was proud of. And ultimately I did. BRICKMAN I have no regrets about it. The thing is still alive. That's ridiculous. LIPPA The singular joy of "The Addams Family" is that in the 10 years since we've made it, the world has echoed back that they like what we've done. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In the fall of 2014, when Emma Petkofsky arrived for graduate school at New York University, she heard about two roommates who needed a third in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She eagerly moved in with them, happy to avoid a dorm room and the difficulty she might otherwise face in finding a home. Her share, in a small walk up building, was a bit less than 1,100 a month. Her classmate Michael Maisch had a similar story. He took a spot as a third roommate in a financial district high rise. His monthly rent was 1,500, which he thought was too expensive. After two years, with both roommate situations dissolving, the friends who are pursuing degrees in occupational therapy decided to hunt for a two bedroom together. "I don't think we knew what we were looking for," said Ms. Petkofsky, who, like Mr. Maisch, is 23. "We had never done the New York thing before." What they cared about most was a location close to a subway. Their combined budget was 2,500 a month. As nervous beginners, they started the hunt too early two full months before their desired moving date "which we learned quickly gets you laughed at," Ms. Petkofsky said. "We came across as students, and I don't think people took us seriously." Most of the apartments that would fit their bill, they discovered, were in small walk up buildings or private houses, and most rented for a few hundred dollars less than their budget. They dismissed some places simply because they didn't feel right. One had "two very messy dudes who were still living there," Ms. Petkofsky said. Another had an air mattress in the living room. "They said there were contractors working and they slept there sometimes," she said. "There was something kind of off." For 2,200 a month, Mr. Maisch found a two bedroom in a small building on Astoria Boulevard. "Looking at the pictures online, Mike could see the potential for it and I just couldn't," Ms. Petkofsky said. It was advertised as having "box rooms, not railroad style." A gas station was across the street. But it turned out to be fine inside, if not especially large. "It helped that a family had been living there and it was all furnished very nicely," she said. She wasn't sure that the oven door would open all the way, but neither is much of a cook. "I came around to it after my initial pessimism," she said. They had an appointment the next day to see a two bedroom in another small brick building a few blocks away on 33rd Street. This one was 2,195 a month. "I was, like, 'Yes, this is our apartment,' because the location was so good," Ms. Petkofsky said. Then they saw it. From the online photos, "you couldn't tell it had no living room and the bedrooms were drastically different sizes," she said. One room had two windows and a giant closet. The other had one window and no closet. "We didn't want to have an awkward exchange who's going to pay more, who's going to pay less so we decided not even to bother," Mr. Maisch said. But though that apartment didn't suit, the agent there, Victoria Vasile, a saleswoman at DSA Realty, had more to show them. One place was near 41st Street, much farther from the train than they wanted. In they walked, to find a large and renovated two bedroom with a washer dryer in the kitchen, something "I didn't even imagine could be in a New York apartment," Ms. Petkofsky said. It had two similarly sized bedrooms with windows and closets, and a courtyard view. The interior was so nice and the washer dryer so irresistible that they decided they didn't mind the 10 minute plus walk to the subway. The rent was 2,300 a month. Many of Astoria's prewar walk ups have no basement and consequently have no laundry room, Ms. Vasile said, though elevator buildings often feature one. "It is kind of as you go," she said. But the neighborhood is filled with laundromats. The apartment's terms, however, were not ideal. It was available within days, and the roommates wanted to wait a month. The broker fee was 15 percent of a year's rent, and they were reluctant to pay more than one month's rent. And the landlord required a guarantor in the tristate area. Their parents did not qualify, with Ms. Petkofsky from Virginia and Mr. Maisch from Massachusetts. "We thought there was no way in a million years we would ever move into this apartment," Ms. Petkofsky said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Still obsessing over this disaster more than four decades later, Medak who would go on to make a series of notable films like "The Changeling" (1980) and "The Krays" (1990) returns to Cyprus to wander and ponder his near derailed career. Marvelous archival clips from the troubled film play like dissociated, outlandish skits, the kind of inspired madness that often resulted whenever Sellers and Milligan shared the limelight. "I mean, it's not as though we didn't know Peter was nuts," the producer John Heyman says, grinning amiably. "Truth of the matter is, none of us knew how nuts." Yet Medak takes full blame for his role in the debacle, his admiration for Sellers's tormented genius as evident as his own psychological wounds from a childhood in Nazi occupied Hungary and later personal tragedies. This introspection gives the film an emotionalism that its entertaining contributors respond to with bracing, pick yourself up pragmatism. Neither bitter nor maudlin, "The Ghost of Peter Sellers" is a movie about filmmaking and soul searching, a tale of two Peters and maybe the worst of times for both. The Ghost of Peter Sellers Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Reports of reinfection with the coronavirus evoke a nightmarish future: Repeat bouts of illness, impotent vaccines, unrelenting lockdowns a pandemic without an end. A case study published on Monday, about a 25 year old man in Nevada, has stoked those fears anew. The man, who was not named, became sicker the second time that he was infected with the virus, a pattern the immune system is supposed to prevent. But these cases make the news precisely because they are rare, experts said: More than 38 million people worldwide have been infected with the coronavirus, and as of Monday, fewer than five of those cases have been confirmed by scientists to be reinfections. "That's tiny it's like a microliter sized drop in the bucket, compared to the number of cases that have happened all over the world," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York. In most cases, a second bout with the virus produced milder symptoms or none at all. But for at least three people, including one patient in Ecuador, the illness was more severe the second time around than during the first infection. An 89 year old woman in the Netherlands died during her second illness. Rare as these cases may be, they do indicate that reinfection is possible, said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, who wrote a commentary accompanying the Nevada case study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. "It's important to note that there are people who do get reinfected, and in some of those cases you get worse disease," Dr. Iwasaki said. "You still need to keep wearing masks and practice social distancing even if you have recovered once from this infection." We asked experts what is known about reinfections with the coronavirus, and what the phenomenon means for vaccinations and the course of the pandemic. Reinfection with the coronavirus is an unusual event. First, the good news: Reinfection seems to be vanishingly rare. Since the first confirmed case of reinfection, reported in Hong Kong on Aug. 24, there have been three published cases; reports of another 20 await scientific review. But it's impossible to know exactly how widespread the phenomenon is. To confirm a case of reinfection, scientists must look for significant differences in the genes of the two coronaviruses causing both illnesses. In the United States, where testing was a rare resource much of this year, many people were not tested unless they were sick enough to be hospitalized. Even then, their samples were usually not preserved for genetic analysis, making it impossible to confirm suspected reinfections. A vast majority of people who do get reinfected may go undetected. For example, the man in Hong Kong had no symptoms the second time, and his infection was discovered only because of routine screening at the airport. "There are a lot of people that are going to also have been exposed that aren't having symptoms, that we're never going to hear about," said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. People whose second infections are more severe are more likely to be identified, because they return to the hospital. But those are likely to be even rarer, experts said. "If this was a very common event, we would have seen thousands of cases," Dr. Iwasaki said. In most people, the immune system works as expected. Reinfections can occur for any number of reasons: because the initial infection was too mild to produce an immune response, for example, or because the immune system was compromised by other health conditions. On occasion, a patient may be exposed to a large amount of virus that seeded an infection before the immune response could respond. This variability is entirely expected, experts said, and has been observed in patients with diseases like measles and malaria. "You'll never have the distribution of anything with millions of people where you don't have some very severe rare cases happening at the fringe," said Dr. Michael Mina, a pediatric immunologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. At least two of the reinfected patients in Europe had compromised immune systems, for example, and the 89 year old woman who died was receiving chemotherapy. In other reinfected patients, genetic factors or the lack of certain previous immune exposures may have blunted the body's ability to fight off a second attack. "There are some people who just don't develop good immune responses to certain pathogens," said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "What is causing that? We're not sure, but it's rare, usually." In a vast majority of known infected patients, experts said, the immune system functions as it should against other pathogens. "There are a lot of different infections where you can get re exposed to the virus, and we would probably not know because you don't have symptoms," Dr. Pepper said. "And that might be an important part of boosting immunity." When the body is exposed to an unfamiliar virus, it's normal first to develop some immunity and then to increase that response with each additional exposure. This phenomenon is well known among children, but it is less often seen in adults because they rarely encounter new viruses, Dr. Mina said. "I think it's important to recognize that reinfections are literally embedded in the evolution of our immune system," he added. "We sometimes lose track of that with so many people talking about this who really haven't studied the immune system." For every confirmed case of reinfection, there are dozens of anecdotal reports of infected people who were sick and seemingly recovered but then became ill again weeks to months later. Usually there are crucial data missing in those cases, like a confirmed lab diagnosis, or a virus sample that can be sequenced. "The question is always, Is it a real reinfection?" Dr. Krammer said. "It's very often very challenging to kind of get that kind of data." A vast majority of these cases are unlikely to be true infections. More likely, these are people experiencing a resurgence of symptoms connected to the original infection. The virus may set off an inflammatory response that can flare up even weeks later and cause symptoms like fatigue and heart problems. In rare cases, some patients may develop a chronic low grade infection with the virus that never quite goes away. "Even with viruses that can cause acute infections, like flu," Dr. Krammer said, "you can have persistent infections if your immune system is sufficiently compromised." Although these are not real reinfections, they are still worrying if they lead to renewed illness or hospitalization months after the initial infection, Dr. Rasmussen said. "If there's recrudescence happening frequently, and people are getting severely ill the second time around, that's potentially its own problem," she said. People with a second bout may pass the virus to others. Reinfected people without symptoms may still transmit the virus to others. The patient in Hong Kong, for example, was isolated in a hospital even though he had no symptoms. But his viral load was high enough that he could have passed the virus to others. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
UP IN THE AIR: If you murdered someone, would you know it? That's the premise of 's new novel, "The Flight Attendant," which enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 8. A seasoned flight attendant on a layover in Dubai a hard partying, hard working woman who's also a functioning alcoholic wakes up one morning to find the Russian businessman next to her dead, his neck sliced open with the shards of a Stoli bottle. There's a "great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets." Furred by the previous night's vodka, she doesn't remember what happened. The idea for the novel popped into Bohjalian's head one evening: "Three ingredients came together alchemically one night in a bar. I had just flown from Armenia to New York and was meeting a friend for dinner in Manhattan. I fly a lot, but I've never lost my wonder at the miracle of aviation. I had just had breakfast in Yerevan, and now I was having dinner in New York City. Second, I had flown through Moscow on Aeroflot. I've always been fascinated by Russia the literature, the soul and the fact they always wind up with a Bond villain running the show in the Kremlin." And then, he says, "there was the booze before me. I was at a handsome bar and I was jet lagged just enough to see the aesthetic beauty in the rituals around which we drink: the colors, the bottles, the glasses. I asked the bartender for all the scrap paper he had, and for the next 45 minutes I wrote frenetically. I think I wrote the first three and a half pages of the novel." Bohjalian doesn't outline his novels. "I'm in awe of writers who outline or even those writers who know how a book is going to end when they begin," he says. "I never have even the slightest clue. I depend upon my characters to take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story. I've always loved the E.L. Doctorow observation: 'Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'" Bohjalian admits that he likes writing books where a character's life changes in a heartbeat. "I love stories that begin with cataclysmic disequilibrium. How do women and men deal with the sudden, disastrous and possibly ruinous trials? Will they rise to the challenges or be destroyed by them? I have no idea when I'm in the midst of the book," he says. "Sometimes these characters break my heart. Other times they surprise me and, rather like a parent, I'm moved by their resilience." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Full Course of Antibiotics Is Best for Infant Ear Infections, Study Finds When babies have an acute ear infection, they tug at their ears, get cranky and struggle to sleep through the night. Ear infections are the most common reason doctors prescribe antibiotics to children. Because of the growing threat of drug resistant bacteria, many physicians had hoped that a shorter course of antibiotics would be as effective as the standard 10 days of treatment for babies. If five days did the trick, parents would benefit, too: It would cost less, and the inconsolable infant would be back to her old self and to day care more quickly with possibly fewer days of nasty side effects, like diarrhea. But a trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday dashed those hopes. "Our intuition was that shorter courses would likely be as effective and lead to less antibiotic resistance, but neither of those proved to be the case," said Dr. Donald H. Arnold, an associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Ear infections are often caused by bacteria, but some are caused by viruses and should not be treated with antibiotics. Babies with a middle ear infection, known as acute otitis media, have pain, an eardrum that's at least moderately protruding, and other symptoms. The new study included 520 babies 6 to 23 months old, the age group most prone to middle ear infections. By their first birthday, almost half of infants will have had one. Treatment was considered a failure if a child still had a bulging eardrum or persistent symptoms on the day of the last dose of antibiotic, in this case amoxicillin combined with clavulanate. One group was given the antibiotics for 10 days, and the other took the drugs for five days and a liquid placebo for five more. Parents did not know which group their child was in. The results were unexpected. About one third of babies in the five day group failed treatment, compared with 16 percent of those in the 10 day group. "In this case, five day treatment wasn't on par; it was worse," said Dr. Alejandro Hoberman, the study's first author and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. There was no difference between the two groups in bacterial resistance or side effects, like diarrhea and diaper rash. He says he thinks the study "settles the question," confirming a 10 day course is best. But other physicians interpreted the results differently. Dr. Richard M. Rosenfeld, the chairman of otolaryngology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, said he would still tailor the duration of therapy to each child's response, not just "condemn them to 10 days of antibiotic, like it or not." Dr. Rosenfeld, who helped compile the guidelines on ear infection for the American Academy of Pediatrics, quibbled with the study's assumption that some babies who felt better should nonetheless be counted as treatment failures just because their eardrums were still bulging. On the fifth day of treatment, if a baby's "eardrum looks nasty and they feel great, why would I marinate them in more antibiotics?" he asked. However, if a child has infections in both ears or fraternizes with other children in day care, "the full 10 days is the way to go," Dr. Rosenfeld said. In the study, 44 percent of babies with double ear infections failed the five day treatment, compared with 25 percent given antibiotics for 10 days. Similarly, 40 percent of the babies in proximity to three or more children for at least 10 hours weekly failed after five days of antibiotics, compared with just 19 percent of those in the prolonged group. When parents were asked about their child's symptoms a week or two after starting antibiotics, there was hardly a difference. All reported a mean score of under 2 on a symptom scale that ranges from 0 to 14, where 14 is totally miserable. Importantly, months after the initial ear infection, "both groups looked very similar in term of the rate of recurrent infection," Dr. Margaret A. Kenna, the director of clinical research in the department of otolaryngology at Boston Children's Hospital, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new study. Dr. Hoberman and his colleagues also took swabs from the backs of infants' noses to test for bacteria resistant to penicillin and ones still susceptible. For almost a year, they swabbed participating babies every six weeks or during any visit for an illness. Babies given amoxicillin clavulanate temporarily had a greater proportion of resistant strains of bacteria, and fewer suspectible strains, in the samples. In short, Dr. Hoberman said, "reducing the duration of antibiotics did not result in less bacteria resistance." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Shulman, who appears to have read everything ever written by or about them, aims to change that fact, arguing that the family's story "held within it Spain's story across the breadth of the 20th century" from fascism to democracy, from repression to openness. Leopoldo Panero was a 27 year old Marxist poet and aspiring diplomat when Francisco Franco's fascist rebellion set off the Spanish Civil War. Imprisoned by the rebels and fearful that he'd be executed (as his friend Lorca had been) for his political beliefs, Panero became someone else entirely: a fascist, a Nationalist soldier and, finally, after the Nationalist victory, an arts czar for the fascist regime. His poetry elegant, introspective won Spain's National Literature Prize in 1953, but soon began to seem old fashioned and apologistic because, Shulman believes, Panero "had confused national emotions with personal ones, patriotism with propaganda." Felicidad performed the same chameleon act in reverse. The daughter of a conservative Madrid surgeon, she volunteered during the war as a nurse at her father's hospital, developing "new ideas" about "what a woman could contribute to society." When she married Panero, after the war, it was in part because she loved the idea of being his muse. But before long her husband was conforming to the reactionary cliches of Franquist machismo: neglecting her for his drinking companions and indulging in casual affairs. She made a brief bid for fulfillment as a writer of short stories, but seemingly lost courage, retreating to the roles of wife and mother to her three sons the last born at home when Panero couldn't be disturbed from his writing to take her to the hospital. Leopoldo died suddenly of a heart attack at 52, and his hometown had barely erected a monument to him when his family began indulging in Oedipal revenge. Felicidad went clubbing with her eldest son, Juan Luis, describing him as "my new husband." Both Juan Luis and Leopoldo Maria pursued careers as poets, though only the latter, a nihilistic, drug using iconoclast, enjoyed real success marred only (or maybe enhanced) by his frequent stays in the mental hospitals to which Felicidad committed him. Michi, the youngest brother, a drinker, womanizer and scenester, largely stayed away from literature. But he masterminded a project whose impact exceeded anything his brothers, or, arguably, his father, achieved. This was "El Desencanto": a Walpurgisnacht of memory, confession and blame that appeared just as Spain was making the transition to democracy in the wake of Franco's death. In such a context, the film seemed to "attack the political idea of the national family," and it turned the surviving Paneros into symbols of Francoist excess, even as they aged and died. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The ADAA Art Show has made a smart move, scheduling its annual occupation of the Park Avenue Armory a week before the March Madness of New York's art fairs. Those who give it their undivided attention, without pressure of competing events, will be richly rewarded. This year's incarnation is the 30th gathering organized by the Art Dealers Association of America and it overflows with interesting material, new and not, in solo and group presentations. Herewith, some tips to help you navigate your way. The New New The latest work by several artists shines in solo shows. At Casey Kaplan Jonathan Gardner continues to cultivate his stylized figurative, still life and landscape painting, in beautiful colors and multiple spatial shifts. He could be our Fernand Leger. At David Nolan the artist Wardell Milan reprises his recent breakthrough into panoramic, subtly dystopian paintings of figures in gardens, building on his drawing skill with color, collage and a touches of Cubism. At Van Doren Waxter, Jackie Saccoccio's latest abstractions effervesce more than ever with dots and carefully directed drips, suggesting windows onto worlds of atomized color. Marian Goodman is showing the exquisitely pastel pods of the sculptor Nairy Baghramian, each fastened to the floor or wall by a black stem, creating a delicious distortion of scale. Sperone Westwater is spotlighting the work of Otto Piene (1928 2014), a founder of Germany's Zero group, who made his minimalist forms in glamorous glazed ceramic during his last years. The New Old Several galleries have solo shows of older material often never seen before (or not lately). In three instances works from the 1960s or '70s underscore the achievements of distinguished female artists. Anglim Gilbert has an extraordinary trove of mostly delicate drawings of women's bodies by the pioneering Lynn Hershman Leeson; all were discovered when the artist recently moved house. At Paul Kasmin: Jane Freilicher's silken paintings of self possessed nudes add stunningly to her excursions still life and landscape. Fergus McCaffrey has brought back a series of painting reliefs by the Italian artist Carol Rama from her recent show at the New Museum, where their truth to materials toughness was sometimes lost in the sexual extravagance of her watercolors and etchings. One of the standouts in this group is Hirschl Adler's tribute to Frank Walter, the polymorphous, self taught Antiguan genius painter, sculptor, composer, writer included in Antigua and Barbuda's inaugural participation in the 2017 Venice Biennale. This display touches all bases and includes a family tree, with the artist tracing his ancestry back to Charlemagne. Other don't miss moments include, at Washburn, some newly discovered drawings by Myron Stout from the early '50s showing Provincetown dunes and trees in quick jagged lines. Pavel Zoubok is showing little known collages from the late 1950s and early '60s by the American expatriate painter Janice Biala (1903 2000) that ambitiously conjure Abstract Expressionist gestures in collages incorporating cut paper. At Alexander Gray, Harmony Hammond's prescient Weave paintings of the mid 1970s add a subversive domestic twist to the modernist monochrome. And three dealers present distinctive abstract paintings from the late 1980s and early '90s: at Michael Rosenfeld, William T. Williams achieves the colors of Byzantine icons and the solidity of fortress walls; at Lelong, the fiery compositions of Mildred Thompson (1936 2003) spin Kandinsky toward still unknown galaxies; and at Peter Freeman, Mel Bochner's early post conceptual forays into (shaped) painting build intensity with jousting, improvised lines, rather than as currently with words. Bluemner's prismatic red barns abound, but some may prefer a gentle watercolor of a red cabin at Debra Force. Also here, Man Ray's 1925 "Still Life With Banjo" shows the touchingly awkward searcher who preceded the suave Surrealist. Thomas Colville's packed display offers a small unusual Charles Burchfield watercolor, nature in Japonisme mode. The James Reinish booth is blanketed with works by artists exhibited by Alfred Stieglitz, including his own photographs, a small, excellent, nearly abstract nocturne by Georgia O'Keeffe and a 1908 tribute to Cezanne's bathers by Abraham Walkowitz. Hirschl Adler's tribute to the Museum of Modern Art's 1943 exhibition "American Realists and Magic Realists" is dotted with forgotten names, recalling the museum's laissez faire beginnings. Also here: a snapshot size watercolor of farm buildings by Charles Sheeler that is perfection. Mexican and Latin American art are represented at Mary Anne Martin, with an enchanting display of Gunther Gerzso's ink caricatures, Diego Rivera's studies of artworks in European museums and Leonora Carrington's studies of heads, mostly, in wispy pencil. And at Sicardi Ayers Bacino you'll find a riveting Op Art painting by Carlos Cruz Diez of Venezuela from 1974, and, by the Brazilian Helio Oiticica, a tribute to Jean Arp's dropped paper collages exquisitely rendered in gouache on cardboard. Less Is More Some stalls, with their sparse displays, provide welcome rest for the eyes. At Matthew Marks the offerings include a tiny collage by Ellsworth Kelly, a suite of prints by Terry Winters, a vivid gouache by Anne Truitt and, from Martin Puryear, a 2009 bronze head whose subtle shape and reticent features retain the textures of the original carved wood. At Bortolami, four sculptures by Ann Veronica Janssens keep things minimal and light one is an iridescent leaning piece made from two sheets of shatterproof glass and some cellophane. (Don't try this at home.) Other booths have single works that are so compelling it's hard to look at anything else. A 1960 untitled Tony Smith painting of a curling geometric presence in red and dusty pink on black is commanding at Pace. At Galerie St. Etienne, Max Beckmann's nearly life size "Portrait of Irma Simon" (1924) overpowers. Jonathan Boos offers a big 1962 abstraction in black and white on green by Charles Green Shaw, one of the trust funded Park Avenue Cubists, that is a startling surprise.. You don't expect sensory overload from Chelsea types. Nonetheless, the 303 Gallery gave the multi dexterous Mary Heilmann the run of its booth, filled with her ceramics, furniture and paintings in tones of red and pink. Luhring Augustine has a terrific group show of sculptures by artists including Lygia Clark, Rachel Whiteread and Christopher Wool spread across two tall tables. And David Zwirner continues its 25th anniversary celebration with a floor to ceiling, something for everyone hang of works by 50 artists. Among many notable efforts is Josh Smith's festive depiction of Death in an ornamented frame that borders on the living end. Another batch of small fine drawings, these by the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El Salahi, commands the back wall at Salon 94. In a two artist show at Locks Gallery, Joseph Cornell overshadows Thomas Chimes, but don't miss the latter's small fine paintings, including one based on the famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp as Adam, in fig leaf and wristwatch. Peter Blum is showcasing the poignant photographs of everyday life taken by the French avant garde filmmaker Chris Marker in North Korea in 1957, as the country was sealing itself off from the world. The ADAA Art Show kicks off a month of art fairs in New York. Here are the period's major fairs, most of which focus on modern and contemporary art: | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"Wow, how times have changed," said Terry McMillan as she gazed at a yacht floating in the Hudson River along Lower Manhattan. "There used to be rats down here. I'm not into rats." Ms. McMillan, 64, was in New York for a day to promote her latest novel about a woman seeking to reinvent herself, "I Almost Forgot About You." She became famous in the 1990s for strong female characters in books like "Waiting to Exhale" and "How Stella Got Her Groove Back." Now, she lives in Pasadena, Calif. But she spent earlier years at Columbia University when, she said, she rarely came downtown. On a recent Wednesday, though, she had a few hours to spare until her appearance on "The Daily Show" that night. Ms. McMillan likes to shop, and gasped when she walked into Brookfield Place, a palatial glass and metal indoor mall near the World Trade Center. Palm trees stand sentry in a large atrium as sculpted birds float overhead. "It feels like London," she said. "Or Paris." A toddler walked by and stared. Ms. McMillan cackled and laughed, a wide grin splitting her face in two. The boy clapped. "I'm a baby whisperer," she said. "Did you see how he looked at me and smiled? They know when you like them. Like puppies." She passed the window at Salvatore Ferragamo. "You really have to be gainfully employed to shop here," she said. She pointed at her tangerine purse. "This is from Target 39.99. Those over there? 1,000." Her fitted black dress came from a shop in New Orleans called Trashy Diva. "Every time I go there, I buy something," she said. Accessories are an obsession. "I wear hats when I'm not wearing a fake bun," she said, pointing at a globe of burnished red curls atop her head. She said she owns about 40 hats. "Every time I go to Paris, London, Covent Garden, it's hats." And leather gloves. "I have orange, yellow, a pair of mustard suede, purple, hot pink." Another young boy walked by in a black polo shirt, his skin the color of cream and coffee. "Oh, look at that," she said, pointing and staring at the boy. "Is he decked out or what?" He scowled at Ms. McMillan and reached for his mother. "'Uh, uh, mama, Negro,'" said Ms. McMillan, laughing. "Do you see how he grabbed her hand? Never mind. We are both brown." She saw Vince, a favorite store, ahead. "I'm not buying anything," she said. Still, she perused a rack of monochrome tops before landing on a winter white cashmere sweater. "I like this," she said, looking at the tag. It was extra small, but sized more like a medium. "Is this for skinny people?" she asked the clerk. The clerk said no. "Why don't they put a large out here?" Ms. McMillan asked. "These people kill me. I hate that." She decided to buy the extra small anyway. It cost 321.18. As she handed the clerk her credit card, she admired the young woman's curls. "I like your hair," Ms. McMillan said. "Can I touch it?" The clerk said no. "Why?" she asked. "Because I'm not a petting zoo," the clerk replied. Ms. McMillan demurred: "I didn't mean it that way. I apologize. I'm black and I know better." Later, Ms. McMillan said, "I thought she would be flattered." The author left the mall and marveled at a manicured baseball field next to the West Side Highway. Her thoughts turned to President Obama. "For the most part he did the best that he could," she said. Republicans, she added, "started out saying they weren't going to support him. 'No matter what he does, we are going to block.'" "The Republicans aren't the way they used to be," she said. "They used to be smart and civilized and conservative. Now they are all tea partyers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A popular manga series gets a worthy film installment with "My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising," an exhilarating animation that frames heroism as an act of community. In it, superpowered teenagers train to become professional heroes, then find themselves tested by the emergence of real villains. When they're charged with defending a peaceful village, they become a team, sacrificing their individual dreams of glory for the greater good as if "Seven Samurai" had gotten a pastel and playful transformation. Directed by Kenji Nagasaki, the movie follows Midoriya (who goes by the nickname Deku and is voiced by Daiki Yamashita), a bright eyed, green haired student of U.A. High School, where aspiring heroes are trained. Though he has been gifted with a much admired super ability aptly dubbed the power of One for All Deku is gentle. He's driven by his love for the people he aspires to protect, a quality that makes him a sharp contrast with his egotistic rival, Bakugo (Nobuhiko Okamoto). But when villains appear, Deku and Bakugo band together with their classmates to fight against forces they don't know if they can defeat alone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Dr. John S. Najarian, a groundbreaking transplant surgeon who made headlines for taking on difficult cases, and who weathered a different type of headline when he was accused, and then exonerated, of improprieties related to a drug he had developed, died on Aug. 31 in Stillwater, Minn., east of Minneapolis. He was 92. His son Peter confirmed his death, at a care center. Dr. Najarian, who for many years was chief of surgery at the University of Minnesota Hospitals, was revered in the transplant field, which he entered when human organ transplantation was new. Recruited to replace Dr. Owen H. Wangensteen, a noted surgeon, as chief of surgery in 1967, Dr. Najarian soon built the program into a leader in kidney, liver, pancreas and other types of transplants. He "did the tough cases," Dr. Sayeed Ikramuddin, current chairman of the university's department of surgery, said by email. Dr. Najarian performed transplants on kidney patients with diabetes, for instance, or patients so fragile that other doctors would not operate. Months later, he and his team transplanted an adult kidney into a 10 month old boy who, at 8.8 pounds (the child's use of an artificial kidney machine had prevented him from growing), was the smallest patient ever to receive such an operation at the Minnesota center, which by then was performing transplants on children regularly. In November 1982, Dr. Najarian performed what may have been his highest profile surgery. The patient was Jamie Fiske, who became the youngest successful liver transplant recipient when Dr. Najarian performed the operation a few weeks before her first birthday. Her parents had made a widely publicized appeal for a donor. "They were told that she wouldn't survive that kind of an operation," Dr. Najarian said in an oral history recorded in 2011 for the University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center. "I'm not the kind of guy that takes that lightly. So I told them, 'If a liver becomes available, we'll transplant it, and it will work' a pretty brash statement, but it did." Dr. Najarian's success with transplants was aided by a drug he developed in 1970, a type of antilymphocyte globulin known as Minnesota ALG, which addressed the biggest problem with early transplants: the rejection of the new organ. He said the drug, which he began using around 1970, gave the Minnesota transplant teams notably better results than other surgical centers were getting with a product offered by a pharmaceutical company. Other transplant centers began asking for the product, and it turned into a multimillion dollar business for the university. But in 1992, the Food and Drug Administration, which had approved ALG as an investigational drug but not for interstate sale, stopped the program, and the federal authorities began an investigation. The university turned on Dr. Najarian, pressuring him to resign, and in 1995 he was charged with violating drug safety laws and other crimes. Dr. Najarian maintained that the case was an attempt by the pharmaceutical industry and its friends in the F.D.A. to squash a successful treatment that was costing drug companies money by besting their products. "The F.D.A. and the drug houses were in bed together," he said bluntly in the oral history. His trial in federal court in St. Paul, Minn., in 1996 provided vindication. Judge Richard Kyle threw out six of the charges, and a jury acquitted him of the other 15. The judge then took the extraordinary step of blasting the F.D.A. and the prosecutors. "I have some questions as to why we were here at all," Judge Kyle said. The F.D.A., he added, "was certainly aware of what was going on, and yet they came in here as a witness to testify that somehow they were hoodwinked by this defendant and his colleagues and other people at the university." "We had a program here in Minnesota," the judge added, "which, for all its problems and shortcomings, was a good program, literally saved thousands of lives." Peter Najarian, a former professional football player and a market analyst who often appears on CNBC, said the suggestion by prosecutors that his father was somehow lining his pockets did not mesh with the man. "What he was being accused of was financial, and the reality was he was never a guy who was interested in money," Mr. Najarian said in a phone interview. "I was embarrassed when I started playing professional football that I was making more money than my father, who was saving lives." After his exoneration, Mr. Najarian said, his father was urged to sue the university or otherwise seek redress, but he just wanted to get back to helping patients. "I was amazed that he took the higher ground," Dr. Najarian's son said. John Sarkis Najarian was born on Dec. 22, 1927, in Oakland, Calif., to Armenian parents. His father, Garabed, sold rugs, and his mother, Siran, was a homemaker. Dr. Najarian said he began thinking of a medical career when, at 12, he was hospitalized for six weeks with a ruptured appendix. His doctors and nurses impressed him. "I was going to do everything I could, if I made it through this, to find out how I could become one of them," he said in the oral history. Dr. Najarian, a physically imposing man at 6 foot 4, played football at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1948. He earned his medical degree in 1952 at the University of California, San Francisco; completed his surgical internship the next year; and then served two years in the Air Force. While stationed in Albuquerque, where he was given responsibility for the medical care of airmen there and in three nearby states, two things occurred in medicine that shaped his future. One was a rapid improvement in cardiac surgery, the field he had been considering, making him wonder if that specialty would offer the kinds of challenges he craved. The other was the first successful human organ transplant moving a kidney from one identical twin to another performed by Dr. Joseph E. Murray in Boston in 1954. "What an opportunity," Dr. Najarian said in the oral history. "I mean, to take somebody who is going to die simply because his organ doesn't function, and you take it out, or leave it in, and put in another one and keep him alive well, that's fantastic." After leaving the military in 1955, he returned to the medical school in San Francisco as a surgical resident, then moved to the University of Pittsburgh's medical school in 1960. By 1963 he was back at San Francisco as director of the surgical research laboratories and head of transplantation services. He moved to Minnesota in 1967. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It took four years, but there's a new "it" squad and it's taking applications. It had seemed that "squads," as made infamous by Taylor Swift circa 2015, had gone the way of "on fleek" and "lit." Not long after the term made the jump from hip hop culture to a broader (whiter and older) audience, it had already overstayed its welcome. The once ubiquitous squadgoals hashtags grew few and far between. Fast forward to this week, when four progressive women lawmakers leaned into their nickname, "the squad," to present a united front against President Trump. "Our squad is big," Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said during a news conference on Monday with Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan by her side. "Our squad includes any person committed to creating a more equitable and just world." Last night, at a rally in North Carolina, Mr. Trump described them as "hate filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down," and invited them to leave the country. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Professional basketball, soccer and hockey games were suspended. Major League Baseball canceled the start of its season, and the Olympics have been postponed. But at least one sport remains: marble racing. Videos of competitive marble racing have gained widespread attention as nearly every sporting event, major and minor, has been placed on hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic. "It sucks us into another world, another dimension without war, misery and negativity," said Dion Bakker, a founder of the YouTube channel Jelle's Marble Runs. The world of marble racing recently got a boost from a tweet featuring a video of marbles rebounding along an outdoor sand track. Celebrities such as Pete Wentz, bassist for Fall Out Boy, drew attention to the video, which has been viewed more than 35 million times. But marble games are not new. Marbles have been rolled, thrown, dropped and flicked all over the world for thousands of years. Historically, they've been made of a variety of materials, including baked clay, onyx, porcelain and now typically glass. Dion Bakker, 38, and his brother, Jelle, 36, started the YouTube channel in 2006, posting simple videos of marbles rolling down tracks. The brothers added racing years later to keep viewers engaged. "We brought the competition element when we made marble rallies in the sand dunes," said Dion Bakker, referring to the recent viral video. 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. Other YouTube channels, such as M H Racing and Fubeca's Marble Runs, also post racing content, each with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Greg Woods, 31, of Iowa, a commentator for Jelle's Marble Runs, said the races provide the same emotional experience as sports with human players. "There are still underdogs and upsets something to cheer about," he said. The Bakkers' YouTube channel, which gained more than 150,000 subscribers last month, has partnered with Federation Internationale de l'Automobile and been featured on ESPN and NBC Sports. The videos draw about 10 million views per month, with nearly half coming from the United States, Dion Bakker said. Jelle Bakker has been making marble runs since he was 4 because he liked the colors, movements and sounds of the marbles, his brother said. Mr. Woods stumbled upon his first Jelle's Marble Runs video in 2016 and was struck by the starting lineup and the marbles' names. For example, Team Galactic are transparent spheres with brown and silver swirls and the O'rangers are solid orange. Mr. Woods, a car racing enthusiast with a background in public health, posted a commentary of that run on YouTube. Jelle Bakker contacted him, and Mr. Woods has been the channel's official play by play announcer ever since. "There's really no handbook for how you call these races," Mr. Woods said. "Certain things you can pull from auto racing and human sports, but there's only so many ways to describe how marbles roll." Marble racing fans, estimated to be in the millions, take an active role in creating the sport's culture. Jelle Bakker sets the scene, but thousands of fans analyze stats, share memes, build elaborate back stories and discuss the marbles' "personal" lives on the channel's subreddit. Once, a marble streaked across the track, delaying an event, before it was escorted off the premises. Another time, a fight broke out in the audience among rival fans. The marbles' teams have home tracks. There are referees and a stadium of fans all marbles. When the races begin, gravity pulls each glass ball, 16 millimeters wide, down a winding track to the soundtrack of a cheering crowd. Time Check, an all male a cappella group at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., has even recorded chants for each of the marble teams. The team behind Jelle's Marble Runs has since expanded to 15 people. In addition to the Bakker brothers in the Netherlands and Mr. Woods in the United States, there's a composer in Greece, a graphic designer in Belgium, a manager in Germany and others in charge of frame by frame analyses. "We had no expectations when we started filming marble runs," Dion Bakker said. "We thought we would stop eventually, but it was a big success." Jelle's Marble Runs turns a profit through sponsorships, partnerships and ads, and now showcases several categories of events. The Marble Rally is a basic race downhill: first to the bottom wins. Then there's Marbula One, a multi lap race inspired by the real world Grand Prix. Marbula E, a collaboration with British based Formula E racing team Envision Virgin Racing, is a new addition to the channel's lineup. And finally, the main event: the Marble League, formerly called MarbleLympics, is an annual "Olympic style" extravaganza with more than 15 team and individual events, including hurdles, relays and underwater races. Depending on the event, a race can last anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. Marble League 2020 was scheduled to begin in June and overlap with the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which have since been postponed to July 2021. With about two months until the opening ceremony for Marble League 2020, Dion Bakker said he's already heard from panicked fans who said they "can't survive" the wait. The races are meant to be an escape from the real world, Mr. Woods said. Jelle's Marble Runs tries to operate outside the realm of Covid 19, reminding the online community to avoid talking about the virus. "I don't think we totally realized the role sports played in our lives until it was gone, and what that meant emotionally," Mr. Woods said. "When you don't have that outlet, I do wonder if it's something that people look for: the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Growing up in central Connecticut in the 1980s, Joshua Siegel loved everything about flying. He couldn't afford flying lessons, let alone his own plane, but he kept dreaming. By his 20s, he had achieved some financial success and was able to take advantage of a new tax deduction meant to spur private plane sales in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Using the tax break, he deducted the entire cost of a new Cessna more quickly than he could have otherwise five years versus 20 years or more. The plane was restricted to business use, but it fulfilled a childhood dream for virtually no money. "My cost to fly, between 2001 and 2005, was free," he said. After that, he sold the plane, and had to pay tax on the sale. The deduction known as bonus depreciation was enhanced in Republican lawmakers' sweeping tax overhaul, which was meant to strengthen manufacturing by offering a tax break to any business that invested in equipment or machinery. But because it also allowed the full cost of a plane to be deducted in the first year of ownership, it has bolstered sales of new and used planes. Shipments of general aviation aircraft rose nearly 5 percent in 2018 from the year before, according to data from the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, an industry trade group. Mr. Siegel, now the chief executive of StoneCastle Partners, which invests in community banks, said he used the tax deduction to buy a used plane last year and was planning to use it again when he takes delivery of a 2019 Cirrus SR20, which cost 600,000. Better still, the tax break is structured so that most of his plane costs, like fuel and maintenance, will be deductible, too. First, it allows a business to deduct the cost of the machinery, dollar for dollar, in one year. Typically, business equipment is amortized over a multiyear schedule, which is calculated based on how long the equipment might last, a formula known as useful life. Adding used aircraft to the deduction has been a boon to sales, said Lewis Liebert, chief executive of Performance Flight, an aircraft training, management and chartering company. "Buying used without bonus depreciation was a big reach for some people," he said. It has also helped the aircraft market. "The inventory of used aircraft was too high, and it created a disparity in value" that hurt sales of new planes, he said. It may seem tantalizing to use this tax deduction as a way to get a free plane, but it's not that simple. On the face of it, anyone can deduct 100 percent of a plane's purchase price and maintenance expenses if the plane is used for nonrecreational purposes or leased to a flight school. After the first year, to keep the deduction, the owner has to ensure that the plane is used at least 50 percent of the time for business. Mr. Siegel said he put his used plane, a 2011 Cirrus, into a rental program through Performance Flight at Westchester County Airport in White Plains, and he intends to do the same with his new plane. This arrangement, called a lease back program, fulfills the Internal Revenue Service requirement on business use. Thomas Rossomondo, a certified public accountant who works with FlyWealthServe, a consulting firm that specializes in aviation, said qualifying for bonus depreciation was more nuanced than it seemed. To be able to deduct the full cost, for example, the owner could use the plane 50 percent of the time for business, 25 percent for flight training and 25 percent for personal but non entertainment use. An example of the last one, he said, would be transporting relatives somewhere; a violation would be taking the same relatives to Disney World. "There are gray areas," Mr. Rossomondo said. But he said that FlyWealthServe's clients wanted to be compliant because of the auditing risks associated with such a large deduction. "They don't want to create red flags, over and above taking depreciation for a plane," he said. If the I.R.S. finds an owner is not in compliance, the penalties are severe. The owner could lose the deduction and be required to depreciate the plane over a longer period, which could be five to seven years depending on the type of aircraft, said Jerald D. August, tax partner and head of the international tax and wealth planning practice group at Fox Rothschild. That substantially increases the cost paid for the plane. "You need to be a stickler for record keeping," Mr. August said. Additionally, not all states allow the same level of bonus depreciation that the federal government does. In Connecticut, someone buying a plane would not get a break the first year, but can depreciate the plane's cost over four years, said Michael D'Addio, tax lawyer and principal at Marcum in New Haven. If the plane does not continue to be used at least 50 percent of the time for business, the owner may be subject to depreciation recapture before it is sold. Aside from benefiting business owners and family offices with the means to buy planes, the loophole offers an advantage to recreational pilots who rent by the hour by providing new, safe planes to fly. The actor Anthony Edwards, who played Goose to Tom Cruise's Maverick in the 1986 action movie "Top Gun," learned to fly a plane in 2011, 25 years after the film made Navy fighter pilots cool. "I am the guy who comes in and rents and makes it possible for others to buy planes," said Mr. Edwards, who takes lessons at Performance Flight. "What impresses me is, there are new planes coming in, and as a pilot, you get to experience state of the art." Rentals start at 400 an hour, not cheap, but a far cry from the cost of buying a plane. But as enticing the tax deduction is for some enthusiasts, others balk at the I.R.S. restrictions. Dr. Randall V. Ehrlich, an orthopedic surgeon who lives in Greenwich, Conn., and has three offices around New York, decided not to use the bonus depreciation incentive. He said he could fly to two of his offices more quickly than driving, but he did not like the constraints imposed by the deduction or the lease back structure. "I might get out of the office early and might want to go fly. If the plane is being used by someone else, that would make me very unhappy," Dr. Ehrlich said. "Or spur of the moment, we might fly down to Philadelphia for the afternoon. You lose some of the fun." Even without the lease back component, the tax deduction could still have allowed him to write off the full value of his plane, which cost about 800,000, if he used it just for business in the first year. But the I.R.S. rules are meant for pieces of equipment with a strict business use, not a Saturday jaunt to grab lunch. But following the rules can provide an extra perk: rental income from the fight schools. "I normally wouldn't have bought a new plane," Mr. Siegel said. "I'd buy a used plane, but now, with a new plane, there's significant income each month." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Often I have lain under a sheet on a gurney in a hospital hall, dreading what would happen during some ghastly procedure related to my ovarian cancer. One incident, filtered through a narcotic haze, still haunts me, though it must have occurred more than five years ago. I watched the ceiling roll by as someone pushed me down a corridor into a freezing operating room. Under bright lights, I had to be moved from the cart onto a table and repositioned on my stomach. The rough grip of a nurse shocked me. She jerked me sideways, hurled me over and tightly bound my wrists to what felt like boards. The pressure of her grasp and the bindings left dark bruises. In retrospect, it astonishes me that the event was idiosyncratic. On numerous occasions, we have to be prodded and pierced. Our skin is shaved and painted, our bodies sliced open, various growths excised, sundry organs lopped off, and then we get stapled or stitched back together. At subsequent office visits, fingers press into our flesh, pushing into mouths, necks, armpits, breasts or bellies. Without any preparation, we must devise tactics for dealing with the physical intimacy of treatment. Throughout 10 years of cancer treatment, I have wondered how the considerate physicians, nurses and technicians I encounter manage not to violate my sense of myself, especially because I have always felt anxious about being touched by strangers even in benign circumstances. Before cancer, relatively painless encounters like haircuts and dental cleanings were a challenge. After diagnosis, fear rendered me more thin skinned, touchy. I marvel at friends complaining about doctors who, instead of examining them, gaze at computer screens: If only, I think. "Do you undress for exams?" an aide asks every other month, offering me a robe. I would rather meet the doctor clothed, but she probably needs to tap my ankles, listen to my lungs, feel for lumps and inspect the ileostomy. In part to offset embarrassment when the snaps or ties of the gown fail to keep me covered, I will direct our conversation to her research. While waiting for radiologists to insert tubes into my body or for nurses to instruct me on wound management in the past, I tried to keep up a continual patter of questions. The humiliation of bending over for a rectal exam, the discomfort of a gastrografin enema; before the creepy corporal proximity of exams, I queried those in charge not to take my mind off my body, but instead to somehow embody them. How long have they worked here? Where did they come from? I wanted to remind us that their touching me meant that some part of me was touching them. Maybe the bruising inflicted by that nurse in the O.R. happened because, in my drug induced speechlessness, I couldn't call out to let her know that she was hurting me. Even when we seem insentient, we may be sentient. At the conclusion of that procedure, I heard a voice asking about me, "She's a doctor?" My surgeon responded: "A professor of English, but she cannot hear us." To offset the indignities of treatment, an acquaintance with stomach cancer goes weekly for what is known as healing touch. During this supplementary therapy, she finds herself soothed by a practitioner's hands hovering over parts of her body or sweeping across its contours. It might not benefit me since you are probably not supposed to be chatty during such sessions. The nurses whom I recurrently see expect me to be curious about their holiday vacations. Has Becky picked out a dress for the wedding that motivated her weight loss? How many boxes of Girl Scout cookies have Alesha's daughters sold? I poke and pry with tactful talking, trusting they will reply with tactful touching. If after de accessing the port implanted in my chest, Becky removes her gloves to pat my back, if Alesha gives me a hug before she schedules the next CT scan, I am heartened by the fleeting skin on skin contact that assures me of our mutual humanity. We share "a little of that human touch," as Bruce Springsteen puts it. Read more about the importance of medical touch. In his brilliant sequence of poems, "Duino Elegies," Rainer Maria Rilke considers "the caution of human gestures" carved on ancient gravestones: the hands of one figure lying weightlessly on the shoulders of another. The poet realizes that "the gods press harder against us. But that is the affair of the gods." The wisdom of human beings consists in knowing "This is ours, to touch one another this lightly." When I was at my lowest hairless, emaciated, enervated and we were all convinced that I was dying, my first oncologist, Dr. Daniela Matei, plunked herself down on the floor next to me. I was sitting in one of those bulky recliners in an infusion room, attached to an IV. She gently rested her palms on my knees. Only years later did Dr. Matei send me an image of doctoring that speaks to the emotions that must have impelled her back then: Goya's stunning "Self Portrait With Dr. Arrieta." At the bottom of this rendition of an intimate couple the attentive physician cradling the enfeebled patient against an ominous background, the inscription serves as a dedication. "Goya, in gratitude to his friend Arrieta: for the compassion and care with which he saved his life during the acute and dangerous illness he suffered toward the end of 1819 at 73 years of age." Infirm Goya plucks the bedcovers, but the arms of the doctor steady him in an embrace that evokes a Pieta for some viewers. The poignancy of the picture is filtered through hopefulness, for Goya's mastery conveys the realization that after its scene became a memory, the painter brushed the colors on his canvas with firm strokes. Confident in his craft, he surely realized, as I do too, that distinctive forms of artistry are needed to assure ailing patients of our being in good hands. Susan Gubar, who has been dealing with ovarian cancer since 2008, is distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University. Her latest book is "Late Life Love." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Mr. Trump also far outpaced Mr. Biden on YouTube, getting 207 million views on his videos in the last 30 days to Mr. Biden's 29 million, according to SocialBlade, a data firm that tracks video performance. (SocialBlade's data, which includes views on YouTube ads as well as unpaid videos, is slightly different than CrowdTangle's Facebook and Instagram engagement data, which counts mostly engagement on unpaid posts.) Social media performance is not a proxy for electoral success, of course, and Mr. Trump's campaign would probably prefer to be leading in swing state polls than on Facebook and YouTube. Engagement data also does not capture how many people view or click on posts, only how strong a reaction they elicit. And Facebook has argued that data about "reach" the number of people who actually see a given post in their feeds shows a more accurate picture of what is popular on the platform. (It does not, however, make this data publicly available.) But it is useful to look at the president's claims of partisan bias by tech companies in light of his sky high engagement on those same companies' platforms, because it hints at the nature of his complaints. His arguments are not the pleas of an underdog being silenced, but the threats of a star who wants to be allowed to keep his megaphone. Some of the president's posts in recent weeks have included misinformation about mail in voting, dubious claims about Covid 19 and false and unproven allegations of corruption against Mr. Biden. Several of his posts have been taken down or had fact checking labels applied to them. But these measures do not appear to have dented his account's overall engagement. The president's strongest week on Facebook and Instagram came during his early October hospitalization for Covid 19, when well wishers flooded his pages with supportive likes and comments. On YouTube, his best day came this week, when he took out a number of ads about accusations against Mr. Biden's son Hunter, published by The New York Post. (The New York Times has not independently confirmed The Post's reporting, and Mr. Biden's campaign has dismissed the allegations as "Russian disinformation.") Those ads performed well for Mr. Trump, and his channel got nearly 22 million views on Tuesday alone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Fox News's parent company spent 20 million on Tuesday to settle a lawsuit brought by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson, whose allegations of sexual harassment toppled the network's powerful chairman, Roger Ailes, and engulfed the company in crisis. But if the settlement was meant to signal the close of a damaging chapter for the network, it fell short. Fox's newsroom was hit minutes later by a new shock wave: Greta Van Susteren, one of the channel's best known and longest serving hosts, was leaving, effective immediately. Network officials insisted that the timing was coincidental. But the settlement, combined with Ms. Van Susteren's abrupt departure, underscored the continuing tumult inside Fox News, whose newsroom, once proudly defiant, has been besieged this summer by new allegations of harassment and persistent rumors about turnover in the on air and executive ranks. These days, it seems, the end of one Fox drama is only the start of another. Stars like Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly have contracts that expire next year, and Ms. Van Susteren's exit on Tuesday was taken as an unsettling sign of change. It is unclear whether Fox News, without Mr. Ailes at the helm, can maintain its political clout in a disruptive election season. The uproar is somewhat puzzling for Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, who control Fox News's owner, 21st Century Fox. They say they have taken extraordinary steps to address problems at the network, which is still the highest ranked cable news network in the country, beginning with their swift removal of Mr. Ailes. Specialists in employment law described the 20 million payout to Ms. Carlson a figure confirmed by a person briefed on the agreement as among the largest known settlements for a single plaintiff sexual harassment suit. (Mr. Ailes, who received 40 million from Fox as part of his exit agreement, is not paying any portion of the settlement.) Fox has also settled with at least two other women who came forward with complaints about Mr. Ailes, the person said. And the company issued a rare public apology to Ms. Carlson, "for the fact that Gretchen was not treated with the respect and dignity that she and all of our colleagues deserve." But tensions remain among the network rank and file. Mr. Murdoch, who now presides over Fox News as executive chairman, kept in place several of Mr. Ailes's most loyal deputies and recently promoted them to leadership roles, troubling employees who had hoped for a clean slate. The reasons behind Ms. Van Susteren's departure remained murky, but people on both sides of the negotiations pointed to an icy meeting in July between Ms. Van Susteren and Rupert Murdoch as a turning point in her tenure. Days after Mr. Ailes's exit, Ms. Van Susteren met with Mr. Murdoch in his second floor office inside Fox's Manhattan headquarters. The anchor, accompanied by her husband and agent, John P. Coale, requested more favorable terms to her contract which was not immediately up for renewal and cited an exit clause that allowed her to leave the network in the event that Mr. Ailes was no longer chairman. Mr. Murdoch was not impressed, both sides say. "It was tense," Mr. Coale recalled in a telephone interview on Tuesday. 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. Late last week, Ms. Van Susteren informed Fox that she planned to invoke her exit clause. But she woke up on Tuesday fully expecting to tape her prime time show, "On the Record," that evening. Instead, Mr. Coale said, "someone came to our house and delivered two letters" from the network. The message: "She's out." It was so abrupt that a large scale poster of Ms. Van Susteren, who routinely beat the cable competition in her 7 p.m. time slot, was still displayed outside Fox's Manhattan building when the announcement went out. (The poster was removed later on Tuesday.) Inside the channel's Washington bureau, newspapers sat untouched outside Ms. Van Susteren's still full office. Ms. Van Susteren had initially defended Mr. Ailes, calling Ms. Carlson "disgruntled" and saying that the timing of her lawsuit "is very suspicious." But on Tuesday, in a farewell post on Facebook, Ms. Van Susteren wrote: "Fox has not felt like home to me for a few years." Mr. Coale, in the interview, echoed that sentiment. "There's so much chaos" at Fox, he said. "It's very hard to work there." Asked why his wife had exercised the exit clause, Mr. Coale said, "There's more than meets the eye," adding that there "might be litigation in the future." But he provided no further details. Ms. Van Susteren, on Facebook, wrote that she had to leave the network now because of a time limit on her exit clause. Brit Hume, a veteran Fox political anchor, took over hosting duties for Ms. Van Susteren's show on Tuesday and is expected to continue through the election. "I count Greta a friend and I'm sorry to see her go," Mr. Hume said at the conclusion of Tuesday's broadcast. Although she has been a Fox fixture since 2002, Ms. Van Susteren does not command the same star power as Ms. Kelly or Mr. O'Reilly. Fox News executives on Tuesday dismissed the notion that her departure signaled tough times ahead, noting that the channel has scored record ratings this year. "Fox News has never been stronger," the network's co presidents, Jack Abernethy and Bill Shine, said in a statement. Ms. Van Susteren's exit was viewed by Fox officials as a less consequential development than the company's settlement with Ms. Carlson, whose suit initially faced a legal challenge from Mr. Ailes. The evidence that Ms. Carlson had against Mr. Ailes was damning, according to another person with knowledge of the settlement: For a year and a half, she had recorded her meetings with Mr. Ailes on her mobile phone. (In an interview with The New York Times in July, Ms. Carlson said she recalled "between six and 10" conversations with Mr. Ailes when the chairman made provocative comments.) Most of the remarks that she attributed to Mr. Ailes in her lawsuit including lines like, "I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago, and then you'd be good and better and I'd be good and better" were taken straight from those recordings, the person said. Officials at 21st Century Fox became aware of the recordings about three weeks after Ms. Carlson filed her lawsuit, the person said, after Ms. Carlson's lawyers spoke to investigators from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton Garrison, the law firm hired to look into the accusations against Mr. Ailes. (About 20 women at Fox have come forward during the firm's inquiry to describe inappropriate behavior by Mr. Ailes.) Settlement talks started shortly thereafter, and a deal was reached in mid August, the person said. Ms. Carlson sued Mr. Ailes alone, but 21st Century Fox, which acts as Mr. Ailes's corporate indemnifier, will pay the settlement. As part of the arrangement, which was first reported on Tuesday by Vanity Fair, Ms. Carlson signed a confidentiality agreement. In a sign that Ms. Carlson is not going to shrink from the spotlight, she recently hired the power publicist Cindi Berger of PMK BNC to represent her. She issued a statement on Tuesday saying she was "ready to move on to the next chapter of my life, in which I will redouble my efforts to empower women in the workplace." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
I brought him in as the partner to work with me on the transactions that I was bringing in, and from the two of us the company grew. He focused on making sure our underwriting is up to par, the credit quality of the deals is up to par. A. Business is doing amazing. We're going through our best year. We closed in the last 12 months 2.5 billion in transactions. The first six months of this year we closed 1.5 billion, and based on just maintaining that course, it should be 3 billion. But typically the second half of the year is usually better than the first, so maybe we'll hit 3.5 billion. Q. Why are you so busy? A. The first thing is God. And we have amazing technology proprietary technology that is used to handle the nearly 400 new transactions that we work on each month. It keeps track of every quote, offer and bid that we get from our lenders and all other sources, and in real time. It helps the brokers be able to do their job a little bit better. There's an outside company that actually owns the software and we have exclusive rights as a mortgage broker to use it. Q. What's the average loan amount for your clients? A. Our average loan is around 3.5 million, and moving closer to 4 million. The average loan for a lot of places is under 10 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Whether your shelves are already groaning with prizes or you're up for your first big honor, it feels good to be nominated for a Tony Award. Here are edited excerpts from conversations with nominees on Tuesday. The husband and wife duo are longtime collaborators (Tina Fey writes, Jeff Richmond composes music) and had previously worked together on projects with musical components. But "Mean Girls" represents their first attempt at a full length musical and Ms. Fey's Broadway debut. It was nominated for 12 awards, including for Ms. Fey's book and for the score, by Mr. Richmond and his collaborator Nell Benjamin. REGGIE UGWU How does it feel to be sharing this moment? TINA FEY It's incredibly thrilling. I am just ecstatic that these nominations are coming to every department they're so well deserved. And I cannot lie: I cried a little bit in the middle of Equinox this morning, and not because my workout was too hard I do not push myself at the gym. JEFF RICHMOND I'm just happy for my wife because she so seldom gets any attention or recognition for things she does, so this is just great laughter . Tina, what is it about this nomination that's affected you in a different way? FEY Well, one, it takes five years to get a show up. And so you're really, really invested in it, and it feels very personal. And two, it's such a childhood dream. You go back to when you were a kid and going to see shows getting a Playbill, dreaming of being in a Playbill some day. The show went through some adjustments before you arrived at the version that was nominated. What was the breakthrough? FEY I think it was the two months between our out of town tryout at the National Theater in Washington and rehearsal. All four of us got in a room and just were really bold about cutting and moving things around. We replaced five songs and added all of these book elements and tried to hone the story better. I think the main thing we learned was that we weren't feeling for our heroine as much. Even though she's singing from front to back, we needed to adjust some scene work and lyrics and some songs to really get into her heart more. Tina, this is your first experience on Broadway. On a scale of 1 10, how interested are you in returning right now? When the diva Renee Fleming traded opera for Broadway to appear as Cousin Nettie in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel," she confessed to some insecurities. In opera, her powerful voice is expected to fill cavernous theaters without amplification, but the runs are short and there are usually days off between performances. On Broadway, she gets to use a microphone but must sing in eight shows a week, and talk. She needn't have worried: She was nominated for a Tony for best featured actress in a musical, part of the juggernaut of "Carousel" nominations. MICHAEL COOPER Thank you! Gosh, I'm really grateful, and surprised, to be honest very surprised. Now that you have some time under your belt as a Broadway trouper after all this time on the opera stage, how is it going? Well, I was worried about the eight shows a week because our training is so completely different, we're so much about power and projecting. But I've managed to adjust, I think, pretty well. It helps that I'm surrounded by such extraordinary musical values. It's made it really fun. And frankly, being home for the first time in my life is pretty special. You've never had such a long run anywhere, I'd imagine. Awards are exciting. Would you like to see awards for opera, or a category in the Tonys? Yes! I don't know if it would be appropriate within the Tonys, per se, but the Classical Brits a British awards show for classical music that has been on hiatus is coming back this year, for instance. And I know Lang Lang is very keen that classical music should have an award ceremony as well so that we could drum up excitement in young people for the art form itself. That's the beauty of our show, "Carousel" to have the classical arts so highly represented between Justin Peck the choreographer and ballet and me. It's very exciting to have it noticed in that way. Ari'el Stachel received his first Tony nomination for his performance in the heavily nominated musical "The Band's Visit." Mr. Stachel, a Yemeni Israeli who grew up in the Bay Area, plays an Egyptian trumpeter with a libidinous swagger stranded with his bandmates in a sleepy Israeli town. REGGIE UGWU You've been nominated for your debut performance on Broadway. What's going through your head right now? Oh my goodness. A mixture of exhaustion, elation, happiness. I'm most excited that it's in a role that celebrates a heritage that I've really sort of been ashamed of for many years. The fact that our show is being recognized really shines a positive spotlight on Middle Eastern people, so it's sort of like a twofold win for me. How are you processing that shift from the shame you once felt to the pride you feel now? You know, even three years ago, I wasn't comfortable telling people that I was Middle Eastern. I was scared it would limit my career prospects. In college, I was told not to prepare monologues of my own race. So it's a seismic shift for me. It's really gratifying from an internal place, from a soulful place, in addition to the career part of it, which is extremely exciting. You auditioned seven times for this role. What did it mean to you? I saw the casting call and knew that I needed to be a part of the show. It felt like my option, my shot. It was a character that happened to be Middle Eastern but had an entire arc that had nothing to do with his culture, which is sort of the meat and potatoes. That was exciting. To get your shot in this business, particularly your first one, it feels almost impossible. I felt so much pressure before each audition that I almost had panic attacks each time. By the seventh one, I actually said to everyone in the room, "We're family now, right?" That sort of took the pressure off. Did you ever think during that process that the result would be you hearing your name this morning? A hundred million percent no. This is truly beyond my wildest dreams. Do you think this nomination might help create more roles for Middle Eastern actors on Broadway? What do you hope the effect will be? When Noma Dumezweni was cast as Hermione Granger in the West End production of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," it was another success that she did not see for herself after a childhood spent on the run from South African apartheid. But she also had to deal with critics from the deepest corner of Potter fandom, much to the frustration of the author J.K. Rowling: How could a person of color be cast as Hermione? Ms. Dumezweni, a veteran actress, commandingly drowned those voices out, proving to be a standout performer on both continents, culminating with a Tony nomination. SOPAN DEB Congratulations! Where were you when you found out? I was on the toilet. I woke up late in the morning, and I just headed up to the bathroom and picked up the phone. "Oh, it's Tamara calling!" the actress Tamara Tunie "Girl, you've just been nominated!" "What?" "For the Tonys!" I was like: "Oh my god! Yes! O.K." It was lovely. Do you feel some sort of vindication given some of what you had to deal with when your casting was announced? No. Why I say that is because I never gave that too much power, if that makes sense. My big thing is that I get to work with amazing people. Me as an actor, I do what I do, and I am a black woman and this is just a thing and I get to play Hermione, which is wonderful. But it's always about the work. But then what I'm more vindicated by is for the creators. Being in the room, watching people at the top of their game: Gareth Fry, Christine Jones set design , Steven Hoggett choreographer , John Tiffany director , Jamie Harrison on magic, Carole Hancock hair, wigs and makeup , just an amazing group of people to be working with. As actors, we get the shiny stuff. The vindication is that it still works, and it's still growing, and it still makes sense. Yes, it still may be the world of Harry Potter, but theatrically, it's one of the most amazing things I've been involved with. My big saying is a word called "Ubuntu," a South African word that means "I am because they are," and that's what, for me, is the most thrilling thing. It's all joyous. You gave an emotional interview recently in which you expressed amazement that someone who looks like you could make it to Broadway. You also said your expectations of life are limited because of your refugee upbringing. Well, you've made it, and now you're up for a Tony. Are you getting used to this attention? Are you seeing new heights for yourself? I am seeing new heights for myself in terms of possibilities. Because that's what it is. We have these limitations. Every individual has them in certain parts of our lives. Now the dreams are clearer, if that makes sense because the possibilities are there. I'm not taking anything for granted. Let's just be a day at a time, a moment at a time. This is all lovely, shiny stuff. I'm going to enjoy the next few weeks leading up to the awards ceremony. What characteristics of Hermione Granger do you feel you share? Oh gosh. I've haven't actually been asked that question on a personal level. I hope compassion, wishing the best out of everybody when we're collaborating with people. I hope I have that part of her in me. Andrew Garfield first discovered "Angels in America" when he watched the 2003 HBO mini series. In a phone interview, Mr. Garfield said he was intimidated when he first dove into the grueling role of Prior Walter, for which he was Tony nominated on Tuesday: "I think I'd be a lunatic and arrogant if I wasn't healthily reverent to the play itself and the history of productions and people playing the character." SOPAN DEB Where were you when you found out you were nominated? Probably like most people I was in bed. It's our day off from the show so I was trying and failing to sleep inasmuch as possible. But I was, of course, excited just knowing that the nominations were coming out today. I'm usually very good at turning my phone off and getting myself enough sleep. I was just too excited. This is your second Tony nomination. How has this experience compared to "Death of a Salesman?" It's about five hours longer. That's the simplest thing. Oh wow, sorry, I'm driving past a sculpture that looks like it's directly inspired by "Angels in America." How bizarre. And I know what the sculpture is. Is it always here? It's by 30 Rock, I think. It's winged and a book in the middle of it, with a serpent crawling up a plate. Do you know the sculpture? I think I do. I don't 100 percent know if it's inspired by "Angels." I actually don't think it is at all. But it's just so weird. It's exactly certain imagery from the play. How bizarre. How wonderful. So what was the question? I was just asking how this was different from "Death of a Salesman." "Salesman" is one of the great American plays since the founding of America. I think the difference is obviously the length. Even though the themes that both plays are dealing with are as deep as it gets in terms of the human experience, and as painful as it gets, I would say that doing "Angels" is somehow harder, somehow more costly and even more rewarding in a way. It's hard to compare. I would rather not compare because Arthur Miller and his plays are so important to me, as are Tony's. LaChanze scored her third Tony nomination as one of three performers who play the title role of "Summer: The Donna Summer Musical." She was first nominated for "Once on This Island" in 1991, and won the prize for "The Color Purple" in 2006. SOPAN DEB Were you a Donna Summer fan growing up? Of course. I mean, who wasn't? I was an eighties kid, so yeah, definitely. I wasn't old enough to go to the clubs but I still loved her music. It was always about making me feel good and dance and have a good time. What I was more intrigued about in telling her life story was that her journey wasn't as easy as so many of us think. She came from humble beginnings. She worked her butt off to be this amazing musical icon. The reviews for the show have not been great, but it's selling well and audiences seem to enjoy it. What do you think accounts for that difference? I think that the theatrical critical community has not found its way appreciation of the jukebox musical yet. It's like characterizing everything in the same way. There's a category for revivals. There's a reason there's a category for revivals; the original has already been done. There is no category for music that uses the catalog of an artist. I think something like that should be created, so that we can be critiqued for that and not be compared to a musical that was written with an original score. We haven't gotten there but hopefully we will one day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose startling 1994 memoir, "Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America," won praise for opening a dialogue about clinical depression and helped introduce an unsparing style of confessional writing that remains influential, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 52. The writer David Samuels, a friend since childhood, said the cause was metastatic breast cancer, which in her case had resulted from the BRCA genetic mutation. Ms. Wurtzel had a double mastectomy in 2015. After her diagnosis, she became an advocate for BRCA testing something she had not had and wrote about her cancer experience in The New York Times. "I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer," she wrote. "I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so." Writing about her final illness was a natural choice for Ms. Wurtzel, who had for a quarter century scrutinized her life in relentless detail, becoming a hero to some, especially to many women of her generation and younger, but also drawing scorn. "Prozac Nation," her first book, published when she was 27, was unvarnished in its accounts of her student days at Harvard, her drug use, her extensive sex life and more. "Wurtzel's nation is a nation of one," Karen Schoemer wrote in a dismissive review in Newsweek. "She makes only tenuous attempts to draw parallels between herself and her generation, and she randomly blames her parents, her therapists, her friends, the divorce rate, drugs and the times for her problems." Critics were divided over the confessional tone of "Prozac Nation." But Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that it "ultimately wins the reader over." But Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the book in The New York Times, found more to like. She acknowledged that its self pitying passages "make the reader want to shake the author, and remind her that there are far worse fates than growing up during the '70s in New York and going to Harvard." "But," she added, "Ms. Wurtzel herself is hyperaware of the narcissistic nature of her problems, and her willingness to expose herself narcissism and all ultimately wins the reader over." The book became a cultural reference point and part of a new wave of confessional writing. "Lizzie's literary genius rests not just in her acres of quotable one liners," Mr. Samuels said by email, "but in her invention of what was really a new form, which has more or less replaced literary fiction the memoir by a young person no one has ever heard of before. It was a form that Lizzie fashioned in her own image, because she always needed to be both the character and the author." In a 2013 article in The New Yorker drawing parallels between "Prozac Nation" and the HBO series "Girls," then in its second season, Meghan Daum expressed the admiration and frustration the book inspired in some women. "We resented her for being such a famous and hot little mess," she wrote, "yet we couldn't help but begrudgingly admire her ability to parlay her neuroses into financial rewards and a place in the literary scene." Ms. Wurtzel followed her own lead with her subsequent writing, especially "More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction," published in 2002. That book detailed her abuse of cocaine and of Ritalin, which she would grind up and snort. As she put it in a 2013 essay for New York magazine, "I made a career out of my emotions." Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel was born on July 31, 1967, in Manhattan. Her mother, Lynne Ellen Winters, was married to Donald Wurtzel, and until recently Ms. Wurtzel had assumed that he was her father. In a 2018 essay in New York, she wrote of learning that she was actually the product of an affair between her mother and the photographer Bob Adelman, who died in 2016. She had written voluminously about her difficult relationship with Mr. Wurtzel, who divorced her mother when she was young; in the essay, she reassessed that angst. "Thousands of words on the wrong problem," she wrote. "I have perfected a two handed backhand to clobber the lob that is coming at me that is: the wrong problem. I have aced the wrong problem." She grew up on the Upper East Side and began writing "Prozac Nation" in 1986, while she was a student at Harvard. "It was originally a book about Harvard; it wasn't even about depression," she told the news website Vice in 1994. "But everything in it was about being depressed, so that changed it." While earning her bachelor's degree she wrote for The Harvard Crimson and started an internship at The Dallas Morning News, but she lost that job amid accusations of plagiarism. After graduating she was able to get jobs with New York magazine and The New Yorker, writing about rock music, often in a way that invited derision. When Tina Brown took over as editor of The New Yorker in 1992, Ms. Wurtzel was one of her first cuts. Although Ms. Wurtzel's tone in "Prozac Nation" was often described as self absorbed, she had a different explanation. "The way I am," she told The Fort Worth Star Telegram in 2002, "is that I put everything I have into whatever I'm doing or thinking about at the moment. So it's not right when people say I'm self absorbed. I think I'm just absorbed." When Ms. Wurtzel's "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women" was published in 1998, its cover depicted her in a more confrontational pose than this. One reviewer said it was "one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while." Her first book after "Prozac Nation" was "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women," published in 1998. Its original cover photograph showed Ms. Wurtzel topless and extending her middle finger. "While 'Bitch' is full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts, it is also one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while," Karen Lehrman wrote in a review in The Times. "Unfortunately, the title and cover preview the book's central confusion what exactly about a difficult woman is worthy of praise as well as Wurtzel's own insecurities as a writer and grown up." The book didn't do as well as it might have, because by the time it came out Ms. Wurtzel was struggling with the drug addictions she later detailed in "More, Now, Again." In that book, she bluntly described how she would feed her addiction by whatever means necessary. In 1995, in an afterword to a new edition of "Prozac Nation," Ms. Wurtzel sought to draw a broader lesson from her landmark book. "If 'Prozac Nation' has any particular purpose," she wrote, "it would be to come out and say that clinical depression is a real problem, that it ruins lives, that it ends lives, that it very nearly ended my life; that it afflicts many, many people, many very bright and worthy and thoughtful and caring people, people who could probably save the world or at the very least do it some real good, people who are too mired in despair to even begin to unleash the lifespring of potential that they likely have down deep inside." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"People think Mediterranean food is hummus and tabbouleh and Greek salads," Mr. Prange said. "We took a range of Mediterranean influences and show how diverse they can be." The concept comes at a time when small plates menus are proliferating at Paris restaurants but remain focused on French, produce driven cooking, and foreign cuisines tend to exist in isolation. "I'm half Moroccan, my wife is Lebanese," he said. "This cooking is a big part of our lives." The night of my visit, the menu journeyed from Naples to Tetouan, in Morocco, and Tel Aviv. We started with the Panarima, a sumac infused cocktail, and the house craft beer before ordering one of every dish on the menu. The roasted cauliflower spiced with Kashmiri masala and charred kale was perfectly crisp and paired beautifully with borek stuffed with Kombi cheese and pumpkin. Tender, slow cooked lamb was served with chickpeas and preserved lemon and nicely offset the briny octopus salad, earning "best ever" praise from my companions. If only the pumpkin creme caramel, which the server herself billed as divisive, due to its fleshy texture, could have ended the meal on as high a note. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Take half a dozen retired Navy dolphins and put them in a huge tank with a trainer and some oversized hula hoops for six months and what do you get? Potential clues to unraveling the mysteries behind why some marine mammals are susceptible to mass strandings, scientists hope. In a study published Wednesday in The Journal of Experimental Biology, scientists showed that dolphins and whales used more energy to swim fast than to cruise at normal speeds. This may seem obvious, but marine mammals aren't supposed to get tired swimming. We have assumed that these master divers have adapted physiological workarounds that help them conserve oxygen and energy. And most of the time, they have. But this study suggests that vigorous swimming to avoid threats posed by people as well as predators could come at a cost to mammals that live in the seas. Terrie M. Williams, who studies ecophysiology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her team worked with trainers to encourage the dolphins, as well as one retired theme park killer whale, to perform a variety of behaviors in large saltwater tanks. Some animals would rest at the surface or submerged, move in a straight line across a pool, cruise the perimeter or dive down to swim through hoops placed in different arrangements at the pool's bottom. To the sound of a whistle, they surfaced beneath a special hood and inhaled air while Dr. Williams measured their breathing and oxygen intake. Across a variety of settings, she also measured heart rate, the frequency and amplitude of swimming strokes and swim gait. Her team found that there was not a big difference between the energy the animals used at rest and while swimming at average speeds that range somewhere from 5 to 8 feet per second, according to the study. But drag in the water that increases with speed makes the cetaceans exert more energy as they move faster; the dolphins nearly doubled their normal energy use when swimming their hardest. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It's been a week of viruses and vitriol, jittery markets and even more jittery Democrats. Panic is in the air. Things are spinning out of control. The center cannot hold because there is no center in 2020. But urgency is good. It focuses the mind. A corrupt, ignorant and inept president who has yet to face a crisis finally has something the coronavirus, which has the outside potential to do to the human race what climate change may do to the planet that he can't demagogue away. The need to replace him has never been greater. And yet, the Democratic field is badly flawed: four septuagenarians; a sensible man who looks too young to shave; two people who should have left the race weeks ago. One must emerge in time to save the republic. And so, on to the necessary elimination. We will soon be entering a short span of time that could change the world. Here are some things that have to happen now: Get out! It's the title of a great horror movie. But also a necessary public service that should be performed immediately by Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Mike Bloomberg and perhaps Elizabeth Warren. Roughly one third of Democrats will be voting on Super Tuesday, and the best that any of those candidates can realistically hope for is that two of them will win their home states. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Warren may not even carry Massachusetts. She hasn't worn well, nor shown any strategic smarts. Yes, she took down Bloomberg, a paper tiger whose billions cannot buy him a joke writer, a man shown to be both insufferably paternalistic and ungracefully imperious. In Tuesday's debate, she continued to fillet him. But that fish had already been fried. She spent her considerable powers to annoy on a man who has zero delegates. She seems how to say this? gutless to take on the one person squatting in her lane. Either make the strongest case against Bernie Sanders or get out. Her fellow female senator has shown more Minnesota nice than Minnesota ice, no small thing considering she supposedly eats her salad with a comb when angry. And Klobuchar got off one of the better lines Tuesday: "If we spend the next four months tearing our party apart, we're going to watch Donald Trump spend the next four years tearing our country apart." Politician, heed thy advice: Be gone now for the good of two thirds of Democrats who have yet to warm to Sanders. The likable Klobuchar would make a great vice president; having her on the ticket is one way to sway the three swing states that could earn her the job. Mayor Pete is a delight intelligent, quick on his feet, a man of faith but also a man married to another man, and as such, a groundbreaker. Give him four years and some gray hair and he'll be ready for the show. Buttigieg will not win a state on Super Tuesday not even close and should give up the dream of 2020 as soon as possible. But thanks for that line on Tuesday about a general election race between a man stuck in the social mores of the 1950s and another man frozen in the revolutionary politics of the '60s. The pair of billionaires, Steyer and Bloomberg, are vanity candidates who should look in the mirror of reality. They can do the country an enormous favor by spending zillions in the general election, helping along those who are still blind to the fraud of Donald Trump. If most of the above candidates don't leave the race now, we could have a situation on Tuesday where Sanders wins, say, 30 percent of the vote in California, but no other candidate gets any pledged delegates. The threshold is 15 percent of the statewide vote. So, two thirds of Democrats could vote for someone other than Sanders, and he would be the only one with something to show for it. That's insane. Now, to the chase: Joe Biden vs. Bernie, back where it started. Sigh. "I'm not going to be quiet anymore!" said Biden, trying on his alpha male. Actually, he doesn't have to shout like red faced Bernie to prove he has a pulse. Sanders's dogmatic inflexibility is also his strength with the kids He's so authentic! Donald Trump makes Bernie viable. In an era of chaos, why not vote for a grumpy ideologue with a heart condition who sees the world as a class struggle. You should be careful making political predictions in our perilous era, but there is one I can make with assurance: Four more years of Trump would be catastrophic. Look what's he's already done attacking Supreme Court justices, trying to interfere with the rule of law, ousting good public servants to get revenge since impeachment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Where Everybody Knows Your Name and Accepts Your Politics The wall on the left side of Neary's, a green canopied Irish restaurant and bar on East 57th Street that will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, is covered with framed photos of politicians considered liberal: Hillary and Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, Hugh Carey and Michael Bloomberg. Rudy Giuliani, perhaps surprisingly, is up there, too. On the right wall are George Bush the elder and the younger, Dick Cheney and Ronald Reagan. Though Donald J. Trump he has been a patron, he is not yet on either wall. But since Mr. Trump, the president elect, announced his candidacy 500 odd days ago, the bar has served as a refuge, a safe space for that rare creature: a Trump supporter in New York City. "One hundred percent, it's why I spend so much time in here," Christophe Lirola, an investment banker, said while seated at the bar drinking a beer. "I love having conversations with people about politics, and many places you can't really do that because then it's like the wolves surrounding the sheep." "What's the Show Me state, Missouri?" Mr. Guest said. "I think we are a country of 'show me.' You made a claim? It might have been audacious, like P. T. Barnum you're a salesman, a huckster, a hustler, a barker? O.K. You made a claim? Prove us wrong. That's what our democracy's about." Kevin Philzone, known as Duffy, began bartending at Neary's right after Elaine's, a joint of equal repute, closed in 2011. He said that he was behind Trump from the very beginning and shocked when he won. "I told everybody I thought it was going to be really hairy, really close," he said. Mr. Philzone met Mr. Trump a couple of times at Elaine's and said he even witnessed him behaving in a "crass" manner. "But if you work in construction, you've got to have that in your repertoire," he said. "It's part of your game." A suave older gent, Lee Peck, was sitting by himself at the end of the bar and looking amused. Mr. Peck, a retired banker, has been going to Neary's since the early 1970s. "We used to come up here Friday nights after work and sit at the bar," he said. "A lot of Friday nights. It's a great watering hole, a lot of good people." Mr. Peck, though a longtime conservative, voted for Hillary Clinton. "Trump just turned me off, but he's president, so I have to root for him. So hopefully he's going to be O.K.," he said, and then gestured toward the owner of the bar, Jimmy Neary. "Jimmy loves him. He's always been a big Trump guy." "Yes, I like Donald Trump," said Mr. Neary, 86, who bears some resemblance to Clarence, the angel in "It's a Wonderful Life." He was sitting in one of the red leather corner banquettes and remembering how Mr. Trump's relatives and friends have been visiting his establishment since the era when Mr. Trump was dating Marla Maples and palling around with Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford. "To me, he's an absolute gentleman," Mr. Neary said. "That's all I can say for him." Though happy to talk politics, he didn't mind returning the subject to his restaurant, which opened on St. Patrick's Day in 1967. "The first year was mediocre, not bad," he said. "And then I came in here one evening at 6 o'clock, it was a nice crowd here, and I heard customers at the bar saying, 'He doesn't know who's here.' Quietly, I disappeared and went into the kitchen and looked out of the glass window, and who was sitting in the corner? John Glenn. And I said to myself, 'If I wasn't in business another week, I still had the first man to orbit the earth in my restaurant.'" (Well, the first American, anyway.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Jon Bon Jovi performed in 2012 in New York at a concert hosted by NBC to raise money for victims of Hurricane Sandy. THE rock star Jon Bon Jovi was in London three years ago this week when Hurricane Sandy wiped out the New Jersey beach towns that played a big part in his childhood memories. He flew home to New York to be with his family and then headed south to his home state to see the devastation firsthand. Mr. Bon Jovi used his celebrity to bring in relief money. He said he persuaded Gov. Chris Christie to put his hometown Sayreville, which was hit hard by the storm but is not on the coast, on the list of towns receiving federal money to buy home sites that couldn't be built on again. He donated 1 million of his own money to Sandy relief and was one of the headline acts at a concert that raised 50 million more to help the affected areas. Still, as often happens with disasters, money poured in right after the crisis, but the rebuilding took longer than expected. More than a year ago, Mr. Bon Jovi said in an interview, he and his wife, Dorothea, decided they wanted to do more to help the towns still far from their prestorm condition along the Jersey Shore. That was when a financial adviser told them about impact investing as a way to finance redevelopment. "It was interesting to us," Mr. Bon Jovi said. "We'd never considered the concept of impact investing. In disaster relief, one is quick to write a check. Long after the TV cameras go away, people are still suffering." Impact and socially responsible investing have moved from the fringes, if not to the mainstream, pretty close to it. The strategies are now discussed by a range of investors, as diverse as environmentalists and rock legends. All are interested in having their investments perform a social good housing for displaced residents or financing for local businesses while also earning a return close to the market rate. But that quest, noble as it sounds, presents another challenge: avoiding strategies that promise to do good but then go bad. Selecting an investment to perform a dual role is only getting harder as impact strategies proliferate, all fueled by the money flowing to them. A report last year by the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment said one out of every six dollars managed by professional investors was invested using socially responsible investing criteria. And impact investing may now open up further. Last week, the Labor Department made it easier for the retirement plans it regulates to consider factors like environmental, social and governance goals in making investments, even if the pure financial returns are less. In some ways, how people select these investments should not be that different from how they choose other investments. But passion can cloud judgment. Few people are going to get attached to a domestic equity fund, but plenty of impact investors are passionate about how their investment dollars can improve educational outcomes. "At the end of the day, we're talking about investments designed to perform in a basic investment portfolio," said Andy Sieg, head of global wealth and retirement solutions at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "These are not philanthropic activities masquerading as for profit investments. Impact investments should stand on their own two legs in terms of investment return." Investors can start by assessing the returns and whether they are high enough to justify the risk taken to achieve them. They also need to look at the fees charged by the manager and how much those fees subtract from the return. While this area is still relatively new, Mike Loewengart, vice president of investment strategy at ETrade, said investors should also try to analyze a manager's track record. "You want to have a long tenured management team to properly assess what they've done," he said. "You want a repeatable investment process. It's difficult." But the desire to do good through investing makes applying these rational criteria challenging. Mr. Sieg said he recently dissuaded a client from investing in a fund that the client was excited about a fund the client probably would not have considered if it hadn't been marketed for its impact. After some investigation, Mr. Sieg said he concluded that the fund's fees were too high and its impact too low to justify putting any more into it. "We need to be cleareyed about what we're achieving with impact investing," he said. "We're going to be able to find impact vehicles with an environmental focus, a social policy focus, global impact, local impact." Carra Cote Ackah, director of partnerships and strategic initiatives at the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania, said it is often easier for impact investors to work backward from what they want to achieve. If, she said, it is helping poor children learn to read, that should be the goal, and investors should then find a way to invest in organizations that are trying to achieve that. Yet, she said, certain issues lend themselves to impact investing better than others. Arts, humanities and cultural organizations do not, she said. Disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, work well, as do initiatives aimed at chronic problems in disadvantaged communities. "It's more about the process and rigor of the approach than the issue," she said. "I hope this approach is used in other disaster communities but also as a way to bring together investors, donors and community partners to drive social change." Maria Tanzola, a private wealth adviser at UBS Wealth Management Americas who is working with the Bon Jovis on their selection of impact investments, said UBS hoped to raise 100 million for debt and equity impact investments in New Jersey. With money from the Bon Jovis's JBJ Soul Foundation and others, the company has raised about 10 million so far. "Whatever return we get," Mr. Bon Jovi said, "we're putting back into the foundation." This strategy allows philanthropists to leverage the money in their foundations by putting it into impact investments so it does good while it grows before they give it away. "People sometimes think of their philanthropy as just the giving," Ms. Tanzola said. "This investment strategy amplifies the philanthropy on the ground. It's another way to support things that are important to you." But it's also a way for less wealthy people to make a difference. "We determined that there was donor fatigue, but there was still an opportunity for an investment strategy," she said. The minimum investment in UBS's Impact New Jersey portfolio strategy is 250,000. But Mr. Loewengart said ETrade's retail clients have increasingly asked for impact options and the company now has more than 100 equity mutual funds on its service that market themselves as socially responsible. On the debt side, the investments can be in loans to build homes and affordable rental apartments, mortgage backed securities that are created from the loans, or municipal bonds to rebuild infrastructure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Students with the High Line Paulista workshop carry a bamboo dome past Oscar Niemeyer's Edificio Copan in downtown Sao Paulo.Credit...Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times In Brazil, Mending an Urban Fabric With Geometry and Bamboo SAO PAULO, Brazil On a Tuesday afternoon in early July,Alison Grace Martin, the British artist and weaver, joined a steady stream of Paulistanos along the elevated freeway that curves through downtown Sao Paulo. The two mile "Minhocao" (named after a mythic "gigantic earthworm") was closed to cars that day . The only traffic was on foot and bikes, skateboards and scooters. Picnickers lounged on the median sipping wine. Children ran after soccer balls. A retriever chased a coconut; a pit bull peed on a pile of bamboo. The bamboo freshly cut and split into strips about 20 feet long had arrived with Ms. Martin and engineer James Solly, who were leading an urban design workshop, "High Line Paulista," inspired loosely by Manhattan's elevated greenway. Their students for the week had carried the strips, which would be put to use in an experimental dome construction, like a barn raising, but with bamboo. Plans have long been in the works to turn the Minhocao into a park. Since its opening in 1971, the freeway has been the subject of controversy: a concrete scar that bifurcated neighborhoods, smothering residents with noise and pollution. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Mr. Solly, Ms. Martin's partner for the workshop , is a director at Format Engineers in Bath, England. The firm is perhaps best known for its work with Arthur Mamou Mani, the French architect, and his design for the 2018 Burning Man temple, "Galaxia," built with triangular timber trusses fixed with metal brackets. What Mr. Solly and Ms. Martin both appreciate about woven structures is that there are no nuts and bolts, and few fixings. For the most part, woven bamboo holds itself in place through the friction of the over under over under intersections. And it's a "form finding" process. As Ms. Martin explained to her students, "It's about letting the bamboo do what it wants to." Mr. Solly said he admired Ms. Martin's craft based perspective and logic based shape creation. "What's fun about Alison's work is how beautiful it is, and it just comes from her head," he said. "I could spend ages trying to work out on a computer what she does quickly in a tactile fashion." The two first met in person last fall at a conference on Advances in Architectural Geometry, and with the Sao Paulo workshop they found an opportunity to collaborate. As an engineer, Mr. Solly envisioned translating Ms. Martin's impressive vocabulary of shapes onto bigger structures. "Let's scale it up," he said. "That's where one thing led to another," Ms. Martin said. She focused on her family of five, and her "one woman mission impossible" to make them self sufficient on their small holding. The property had come cheap, thanks to a large stand of invasive bamboo. "We had to chop the bamboo down every year to stop it from getting into the olives and vines and other things I was trying to grow," she said. Eventually, she realized that the best way to deal with bamboo was to treat it as a resource, an opportunity. She made practical garden structures, to support climbing plants peas and borlotti beans, cucumbers, pumpkins and melons. She built chicken coops, raised beds, covers for hay and wood piles as well as shade structures. But she became frustrated with the bamboo construction techniques she found online. It became clear that the weaving could be doing more of the work "if I pushed it a bit," she said. She made models with strips of paper, grew curious about the difference between biaxial and triaxial weaves (with two or three straight strips) and studied how non Euclidean geometry could be applied to weaving. Ms. Martin searched the internet for images of hexagonal mesh structures resembling the objects she was creating. There she encountered Alan Mackay, a crystallographer who predicted the existence of quasicrystals, and Eiji Osawa, a chemist who predicted the structure of the buckminsterfullerene, a soccer ball shaped molecule made of 60 carbon atoms. These scientists made use of the same geometric rules, and often gave a nod to patterns they had observed in the weave of traditional bamboo vases and baskets. "That was a revelation," Ms. Martin said during her lecture. "I felt like I had something really nice in my hands." In 2011, she met Kenneth Snelson, a sculptor, at a seminar in Rome. His motto "weaving, mother of tensegrity" made an impression, as did Anni Albers, a weaver, and Ruth Asawa, a sculptor who once said: "Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done." "That's the way I see things," said Ms. Martin. "I'm not dedicated all day every day to my oeuvre. A little bit every day adds up to something." In 2015, she won first prize at the Future Vision contest organized by the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures. Her entry, a 13 foot wide hyperbolic Lycra patchwork mobile, won out over 27 competing entries from M.I.T., Cambridge University, and the engineering office ARUP, among others. Last year they published a paper, "Beyond the Basket Case," investigating how to translate traditional weaving knowledge into computational design tools. Now they are exploring how to make the rules of weaving attainable at an architectural scale (possibly using robotics). "There is a lot to learn from her in terms of the logic of the weave," he said. The plan for that Tuesday on the Minhocao was to build a dome from 30 strips of bamboo, harvested the weekend before from the hillside garden of James Elkis, a pioneer of the medium, who lives southwest of Sao Paulo. (Ms. Martin had seen his bamboo constructions online about 15 years ago, and when Mr. Elkis mentioned that he now makes bicycle frames from bamboo, Ms. Martin began twisting a strip into a wheel.) The group 27 aspiring young architects and urban and landscape designers from around the world had done a practice run with their tutors on the weekend, with limited success. Their dome, woven upright, was skewed and pointy at the top, rather than round. A crucial part of the workshop curriculum was "digital parameterization" simulating structures on the computer and tweaking design parameters from one iteration to the next. For example, a key software tool, K2Engineering, designed by Cecilie Brandt Olsen, predicts a material's internal "bending stress" based on the applied force. Mr. Solly, having crunched the bamboo's numbers and consulted the paper model, proposed a solution for the skewing: the dome could instead be woven flat on the ground and then "popped up." Ms. Martin thought that bending the strips all at once might cause breakage. But they were keen to get a proof of concept, one way or another. Mr. Solly said, "We'll carry a pile of bamboo up there and see if we get arrested!" Setting out from the workshop's base at Escola Da Cidade, a private college for architecture and urbanism, the bamboo caravan wound its way toward the freeway, occasionally breaking into song "Believe," by Cher, and "Evidencias," by the Brazilian duo Chitaozinho Xororo. The group walked up an exit ramp, found a favorable site and began marking the dome's 50 foot circumference in chalk on the roadway. Visible on the skyline was Oscar Niemeyer's sinuous residential high rise, the Edificio Copan. "It's not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard, inflexible," Niemeyer once said. "What attracts me is the free and sensual curve the curve that I find in the mountains of my country." Once all the strips were woven on the roadway combining weaving principles with a fivefold symmetry pattern typical of Islamic geometry the students moved swiftly, lifting the spray of bamboo and bending down the verticals. The dome popped into shape nicely, as Mr. Solly had predicted. "James deserves all the credit," said Ms. Martin. Still, she told the students, "the computer is not your only tool. There's a lot of information in the paper model." The enterprise drew a crowd, although the police, cruising by on motorbikes, hardly took notice. Felipe Rodrigues, an architect and a member of the Parque Minhocao Association , who was walking a full lap of the freeway while listening to NPR , stopped by to discuss the complexity of the space. "It's alchemy," he said: precious public space, in a city where shopping malls are known as the "Paulista beach." "The park already exists," he said. "It's already here. The park is the people who use it. I don't see it anymore as an elevated highway. This is a platform for activities on which anything can happen." For the remainder of the week, the students assembled in design teams and envisaged their own structures for the park. One team went for a decorative, 50 foot Mobius loop . Another produced a rolling swoosh that became an irresistible tunnel for skateboarders when installed on the Minhocao during the workshop's final day. "It was wild fun," said Camila Calegari Marques, an architect and a Martin groupie of sorts, having participated in a 2017 workshop in Barcelona that involved weaving with wooden strips. And the dome, it turned out, not only assembled well but also disassembled and reassembled efficiently it went up again during the finale. Ms. Martin said, "We had even more useful structural properties than I had envisaged: deployability, nice structural stability and highly portable." At one point, the group stood back from their dome, admired it and then looked to Mr. Lee: Where to next? "Na curva!" he said: At the curve. They hoisted the dome overhead with Mr. Lee's 6 year old daughter underneath, seated on Mr. Solly's shoulders and, singing again, walked it down the Minhocao to the desired bend in the road. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Duane Linklater's "Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes" (2017) is at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal as part of "In Search of Expo 67", one of numerous exhibitions celebrating the exposition's 50th anniversary. MONTREAL These days, when social media and smartphones help fuel polarization and populism, it can be hard to remember how technology once promised to assemble us all into a harmonious, diverse "global village." But when Marshall McLuhan, the high priest of Canadian techno utopianism, coined that term in the early 1960s, a world improved by new media really did seem in the offing. He could see it forming half a century ago in this city, where McLuhan beheld "a huge mosaic" of culture and media, a global rendezvous unlike any before. "What is happening today around the world," McLuhan proclaimed, "is what is happening at Expo." Once upon a time, there really was a global village, and it was Expo 67. This pinnacle of the last century's world expositions brought record audiences, 50 million strong, to a pair of islands in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, where they discovered a cosmopolitan panorama before the whole world fit on a hand held screen. Innovative technologies were on display. Chic employees, mostly women, strolled past in space age uniforms. Ambitious young architects and engineers wowed the crowds with new building types. Most of the sites of Expo 67 are gone. The baseball team named for it moved to Washington. But 50 years later, Montreal's museums are in the grip of Expomania, and no fewer than five exhibitions revisit the summer of 1967 and dreams of the future that could have been. This city is perpetually in festival mode, but now is an especially jubilant moment: 2017 is also the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation and the 375th of the founding of Montreal. This Saturday, to boot, is the Fete de la Saint Jean Baptiste, Quebec's provincial holiday; if you visit, make sure you know how to order drinks in two languages. The most engrossing of these shows is "In Search of Expo 67," an incisive, sometimes wistful exploration of the fair and its afterlives by nearly two dozen contemporary artists, on view at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, known as MAC. Most of the Canadians included here were not yet born when the world came to town. But they are captivated by the Expo's lofty, humanistic rhetoric and nationalist underbelly and while the show fits into a larger vogue in the art world for all things late '60s, it also pulses with a tenderness toward Expo's utopianism that makes it more than just a belated critique. Expo happened to fall on the 100th anniversary of Canada's leave taking from Britain, and the fair served as the country's international coming out party. (A jamboree, too, for the wealthy, newly dynamic Quebec, transformed in the 1960s by its so called revolution tranquille and soon to be gripped by separatist zeal.) In 1967 Canadians celebrated the centenary at a pavilion shaped like a large inverted pyramid (known as Katimavik, or "meeting place," in Inuktitut), where an artificial, abstracted maple tree was bedecked with photographs of everyday people. Today, several artists in "In Search of Expo 67" look askance at that nationalist project, including the indigenous Quebecker Geronimo Inutiq, who contributes a trippy installation that commingles videos, prints and a Katimavik inspired dance floor. Duane Linklater, another indigenous Canadian artist in this show, has produced a new mural whose motifs googly eyes, antlerlike tendrils riff on the decorations of the Indians of Canada pavilion. (The 1967 wall text read, "Walk in our moccasins the trail from our past.") Yet only a fraction of the pavilions at Expo 67 hosted individual nations. Private companies used them to show off new technologies; you could try out a newfangled videophone at the Bell System pavilion, which also included a cinematic projection in the round. Canada's chemical companies put together a psychedelic Kaleidoscope pavilion, its exterior festooned with waving multicolored fins. A Christian pavilion was one of the few that broached the topic of war. Most popular then were the thematic pavilions, with names like "Man the Explorer" or "Man in the Community," whose exhibits fused a thoroughgoing humanism with audacious, immersive image technologies. Expo 67 was an epochal event in the history of new media particularly for multi projector cinema, screened for audiences who often sat on moving platforms and several of its feats have been rebooted this summer. At the Stewart Museum, the exhibition "Expo 67 A World of Dreams" includes a virtual reality re creation of one of the central film experiences of the fair, the five screen "Labyrinth." And, at MAC, the high point of "In Search of Expo 67" is a partial re creation of "Polar Life," by the director Graeme Ferguson, which showcased Arctic and Antarctic landscapes against a bold modernist score across 11 screens. Far more people came to Expo 67 than expected, at a time when Canada's entire population was just 20 million, and the islands were more than just a fairground. They were a cosmopolitan pleasure garden, a place to see and be seen. The swankiest Expo denizens were the 1,800 or so pavilion hostesses, kitted out in polyester or lame uniforms and hired for more reasons than just bilingualism. ("Montreal is generally known for its attractive women," a male CBC broadcaster intoned in 1967, "but this year the situation has become ridiculous.") Expo 67's subtitle was "Man and His World," an English approximation of the title of Saint Exupery's "Terre des Hommes." The place of women at the fair, and the expression of modernity and national ambitions through clothing, is the subject of "Fashioning Expo 67," on view at the McCord Museum downtown. Mannequins display Bill Blass's mod uniforms for hostesses at the American pavilion: a white tent dress with a red white and blue head scarf, plus a killer striped raincoat. At the Quebec pavilion, the attendants wore bulbous cloches, while the Brits toted Union Jack handbags; newly independent African nations went for more traditional designs and wax fabrics. Throughout the Expo, hostesses wore pale blue A line skirts, blazers and pillbox hats. (Over at MAC, the artist Cheryl Sim wears one of these sky blue uniforms in a contemplative three screen video, in which she sings a melancholy remix of the Expo theme song "Un Jour, Un Jour.") The futuristic fashions had a counterpart in the Expo's architecture, entrusted to young, experimental engineers and backed by budgets unimaginable today. Many made use of industrial materials and modular construction techniques above all, Frei Otto's West German pavilion, whose swooping tensile roofs were reprised at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Expo's most lasting architectural project was not a pavilion at all, however, but an experimental housing development. The Israeli Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, then just 28, proposed a new mode of living that married urban density and suburban spaciousness, in the form of concrete cubes stacked like building blocks. Habitat 67 was initially imagined as a self contained community, similar to the "superblocks" of Brasilia, which could be endlessly repeated. It became upper middle class condos, and when I walked past Habitat this week, residents were sunning themselves on the balconies while gardeners buzzed the grass. (Mr. Safdie's designs and models are now at the Centre de Design de l'UQAM, a university art gallery downtown.) Many cities have gained an iconic structure from their days hosting the world: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Space Needle in Seattle, the Atomium in Brussels. Montreal's legacy, along with Habitat, is a massive geodesic dome on Ile Sainte Helene, designed by Buckminster Fuller, which served as the American pavilion in 1967. Inside were paintings by Warhol, memorabilia from Elvis and Hollywood, and space capsules from the Apollo and Gemini programs, but it was Fuller's pavilion itself, pierced in two spots by a monorail track, that enthralled fairgoers most. At MAC, the Canadian artist Charles Stankievech has assembled a bulging archive of materials that limn the contradictory aims of Fuller's dome, as indebted to American military ambitions as to "Spaceship Earth" environmentalism. But I decided to head out to the island, where Fuller's dome gleams beneath the sun. The acrylic panels went up in flames in 1976, and the dome sat vacant for years. It's since been rechristened the Biosphere, and the museum inside hosts exhibitions on the natural world and climate change though, for the summer, a temporary exhibition, "Echo 67," includes testimonials from Expo visitors and a small display on environmental impact. As the clouds went by, and the maple leaf flag fluttered beneath Fuller's awing, column free expanse, I found myself overcome with a feeling I don't often confront when I look at the art of the recent past. That feeling was envy an envy of the certainty in cultural and social advancement felt by the millions who passed across this island, and an envy shared, I think, by many of the artists in MAC's exhibition. It's one thing to identify the gaps in Expo 67's narrative, to call out its sexism and nationalism. Harder, and more urgent, is to admit why artists are still infatuated with past visions of the future that didn't come true. We would give anything to believe in progress again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
AT the Yale University Art Gallery, which fully reopened in December after a painstaking expansion that spanned 14 years and cost 135 million, a sunny new fourth floor gallery was filled recently with a collection of artworks highly unlikely ever to meet in such proximity again. In a conventional museum, it would be almost impossible to imagine them sharing a room to begin with: an ashen Anselm Kiefer painting from 2001, looking like a patch of scorched earth, on the same wall as an early Renaissance "Annunciation" in tempera; across the way, a thousand year old wooden figure from modern day Sierra Leone and a collection of coins from India almost a thousand years older still; around the corner a deadpan 1966 Diane Arbus photograph of a Brooklyn family and, dominating the whole gallery, Ellen Gallagher's eye popping "DeLuxe," a 60 piece contemporary print work that turns old advertisements into phantasmagoric riffs on race and representation. What thread could possibly unite these works? Not a purely curatorial one, of course, but a thread that wends its way through the often wonderfully murky territory where art appreciation meets education. The room, the Levin Study Gallery, is given over to professors from art history but also from African American studies, South Asian studies, gender and sexuality studies, among others who choose pieces from Yale's vast collection to serve as teaching tools. The unorthodox space, open to the public as well as students, serves as a potent visual metaphor for what is happening throughout the institution, the nation's oldest university art museum, and in a broader movement to embed campus art collections much more deeply into university curriculums. Academically affiliated museums are often described as the jewels of their campuses. The term can carry the hidden implication that such collections, while treasures, are mere accessories, attached to universities but with no clear connection to their academic priorities. That criticism, explored in a long range study by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the 1990s, burst into public view in 2009 when Brandeis University, in financial turmoil, briefly proposed selling its highly regarded Rose Art Museum collection. The fight over the Rose's future exposed deep tensions between the university and the museum. "In our view," a university committee later wrote to the administration and board of trustees, "the Rose, like many of its fellow university museums, has been oriented too much toward the art world and not enough toward the academy." Up until a decade or so ago, the Yale art gallery could easily have been in that group. But during the renovation and expansion of its buildings and collections, it began to make fundamental changes to move the museum much more fully into the life of its campus and the neighborhoods of New Haven that surround it. It began to train undergraduates to conduct thematic tours of the holdings. It greatly expanded its collaborations with local public schools, bringing in students (more than 8,000 last year) who are taught about objects in the collections by Yale graduate students. It began a program to allow students from many different disciplines not only art history to serve as curators for special exhibitions. (A group of graduate students and undergraduates is now at work on a show of works donated to Yale by the influential New York collectors Herbert and Dorothy Vogel.) It built a new classroom complex, where works can be brought for study from storage or from the gallery walls. And it worked with Yale academic departments to sharply increase the number of courses from languages to the hard sciences and even business and management that use the museum's galleries as classrooms. During the 2011 12 academic year, 48 courses from departments other than art history or art were taught in the museum; counting the art courses, 578 individual class sessions were held there during the year, said Pamela Franks, the gallery's deputy director for collections and education. "We don't really tell anybody what they should be doing with the collection or saying about the collection." On a recent morning, a half dozen first year Italian students wandered through the European collections, taking part in an exercise in which they secretly selected a work, described it out loud in Italian and hoped they did so well enough for their fellow students to be able to identify it. "Come si dice 'sculpture'?" asked Cordelia de Brosses, a freshman, as she searched for the right words for Giovanni Paolo Panini's 1741 painting "A Capriccio of the Roman Forum," with its wistful view of towering colonnaded ruins. "After you come here and see so many great Italian works of art," Ms. de Brosses said later, "it does make you want to work at least to be able to describe them in good Italian." Over the last year, there has been a burst of new research and debate about how to make such crossovers between art gallery and classroom work. In October, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation published "The Campus Art Museum: A Qualitative Study," based on extensive interviews with museum staff, faculty members and students around the country. At the same time, the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago released another research effort, "Campus Art Museums in the 21st Century: A Conversation." Betty Farrell, the executive director of the policy center, noted that art museums have always been odd ducks within the academic structure, which is built around departments. But, she said, they are starting to find ways both to fit into their universities and to use their neither/nor status to serve as cultural gathering places for both students and the public. "Academic disciplines are pretty strongly walled," Ms. Farrell said, "and it's very hard to jump across them, but it's happening. It hasn't happened everywhere, obviously." Yale curators like to show off a place easily overlooked amid the flash and filigree of the renovation, where such walls have been breached altogether. Until a decade ago the university's ancient coin and medal collection, one of its earliest holdings, was under the jurisdiction of the university library. It had been "basically stuffed, as it were, into a broom closet," said William E. Metcalf, who teaches classics and is the gallery's first curator of coins and medals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
The industrial blocks along West Farms Road in the Bronx, hard up against the Cross Bronx Expressway to the north and the Sheridan Expressway to the east, do not look like a welcoming place for new development. Buildings that once housed a hot dog factory and a metal fabricator are vacant. Another lot is used for storing towed cars. On a recent afternoon, the streetscape was quiet enough for one person to take a nap in his car. A development firm co founded by Gifford Miller, a former New York City Council speaker, though, is betting that the stretch, rezoned for residential use last October, can be transformed into what the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., calls "a small city." The project, which is to include 1,325 units of housing and 46,000 square feet of retail space, took an important step forward this month, when it received 1.2 million in capital financing from Mr. Diaz's office and another 1.3 million allocated by City Councilman Joel Rivera. That money, combined with financing from the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, will allow Mr. Miller's company, Signature Urban Properties, to move forward on construction of the project's first two buildings, he said. The initial plans call for a total of 237 residential units and 4,200 square feet of retail space in those structures, with low income housing in one building and moderate income housing in the other. Construction could begin as soon as early next year, Mr. Miller said, with the entire 10 building project taking seven to nine years to complete. Mr. Miller, 42, who has been away from electoral politics since an unsuccessful run for the Democratic mayoral nomination in 2005, said one of his proudest accomplishments during his time on the council was the redevelopment of the High Line on Manhattan's West Side. As a real estate developer, he aims to do similar "transformational development," he added, by taking areas that have a negative effect on their communities and turning them positive. Mr. Miller founded Signature with a longtime friend, Robert Frost, in 2007. The West Farms project, which is in the central Bronx and south of the Bronx Zoo, is the first for Signature. The company's roughly five acres of land make up less than a third of the 16.8 acres rezoned last fall, the largest such rezoning the borough had seen in decades. Mr. Rivera said the new buildings, which he described as "quality affordable housing," would represent an important change in the area. "Unfortunately you have a lot of dilapidated buildings within the Bronx," he said. "It's about how do you build quality affordable housing that people feel comfortable in." Mr. Rivera said the development's approval process was among the smoothest he had ever seen in part because Signature's executives were responsive to requests from residents and local leaders, but also because of Mr. Miller's experience in the byways of local government. "What can be turbulent waters with community groups, he was able to navigate well because of his experience," Mr. Rivera said. "He did have a wealth of knowledge on where the priorities in the City of New York are, and that's a positive," he added, suggesting that, for example, a proposal for luxury housing would not have been nearly as popular in the Bronx. On a recent visit to the site, Mr. Miller pointed to what he said were signs of the area's potential, including proximity to four subway stops and the extensive restoration work in progress on the 12 acre Starlight Park, across the Sheridan Expressway. Nearby, on 174th Street, is a busy suburban style shopping center anchored by a supermarket. Neighboring housing stock, west of the industrial zone, includes both older apartment buildings and more recent single family houses built as part of a different revitalization effort. Signature's plans call for much denser development, especially next to the Sheridan, with buildings rising as high as 15 stories. "The idea here is to turn it into a vibrant residential community for low to moderate income folks who need a great place to live and access to transit to get to their jobs and their lives," Mr. Miller said. Still, he added, a blend of incomes on the site is important: "You want to get an exciting, vibrant mix that reflects the needs of the community as well as the opportunity to bring in new residents." Derrick A. Lovett, president of the Mid Bronx Desperadoes Community Housing Corporation, a partner in the development, cited another reason for a mix of incomes on the site. Having some higher earning residents living there will help fill the buildings' retail spaces with a broader range of stores, which will then be accessible to all residents, he said. "If you have an area where everyone has very low income," Mr. Lovett said, "then how do you support the businesses in the area?" Construction is to begin early next year in the area near Starlight Park. Still, he said, the biggest demand in the Bronx is for affordable housing. For the 1,200 units his organization owns in 40 buildings, he said, the vacancy rate is 1.5 percent. For the neighborhood at large, any transformation of the rezoned industrial blocks will be a welcome change. "Families deserve to live in safe, decent areas, free of crime and free of danger, and that's not there right now," Mr. Lovett said. "I would caution anyone who's going to walk through there at night, or even sometimes during the day." Besides driving out illicit uses, the developers say, the project will bring physical improvements: Mr. Miller's mother, Lynden Miller, a prominent designer of public gardens, will design the plantings in one of the project's open spaces, he said. On a larger scale, the city's School Construction Authority will have the option to buy one of Signature's lots for a dollar if it decides a school is needed in the area. The biggest potential change to the area, though, is one that the developers are reluctant to discuss. The six lane Sheridan Expressway, which runs at street level along the eastern edge of the rezoned area, is a short road, just over a mile long, with many detractors who say it has limited utility and have called for its removal. Though removal would have obvious benefits for the Signature development the Sheridan is all that separates the company's site from Starlight Park Mr. Miller said the company had not taken a position on the road's future and had tried to design its buildings to accommodate any of the potential outcomes. Still, he added, "We believe that greater accessibility to the park would be a big positive to the community and we support the community planning process that's ongoing." Mr. Rivera, who also has not taken a position on the expressway's future, said he doubted that the issue would be resolved before the end of 2013, when he must step down from the City Council because of term limits. More significant, he said, are the project's immediate benefits. "It's a couple of hundred units of affordable housing that they're going to be breaking ground on in the very near future," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Janet, the all powerful virtual assistant (imagine an intergalactic Alexa) on the metaphysical sitcom "The Good Place," does not have a tattoo. But D'Arcy Carden, the actress who plays her, does. Three fletched arrows a tribute to her three siblings and a play on her maiden name, Erokan ("arrow can," get it?) nestle just below her left elbow. Ms. Carden, in New York recently to take a few meetings, wanted another. Which explains why she was spending a snowy Friday sunk into the pink velvet couch of Rosa Bluestone Perr, a tattoo artist with a private studio in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. She practices a style of tattooing called "stick and poke," which made Ms. Carden a little apprehensive. "Those words are so intimidating," she said. Still, Ms. Carden, 39, her hands wrapped around a mug of peppermint tea, considered her tattoo options. She had thought about getting a crown, a homage to a "weird little chant" her father used to do ("You are the king of the world!"). "She's, like, my new love," Ms. Carden said. "I've loved my dad for many decades. And I've loved my husband for many years. But I'm newly in love with my dog." After growing up in central California and studying theater at Southern Oregon University, she moved to Brooklyn about 15 years ago, taking improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade and working as a guide for the Ride, a sightseeing tour in Manhattan. She and her friends were short on cash, "trying so hard to do what we loved," she said. "I mean, the amount of, like, pizza. And it was such a struggle. And it was such a good time." Five years ago, she and her husband, Jason Carden, an actor and producer, moved out to Los Angeles, to the Silver Lake neighborhood, "which is kind of Brooklyn y," she said. Just when despair was kicking in, the roles came: a loopy spin instructor on "Broad City," an acting student on "Barry" and a lead role as Janet on "The Good Place," in which she plays opposite Kristen Bell and Ted Danson. (Coordinating the shooting schedules for multiple comedies is no joke.) Working on a fizzily optimistic show like "The Good Place" is "healthy for me," Ms. Carden said. "It's about imperfect people trying to be better." After finishing her tea, Ms. Carden took out her iPhone to show Ms. Perr some of the designs she liked. (The phone had a picture of Timothee Chalamet on the home screen. "I thought I'd do Chalamet across my chest," she joked.) "This one spoke to my brain the most," she said, pointing to a cent symbol haloed by diamonds, though Ms. Carden wanted a topper of three dots instead, to represent "Me, Jason and Penny," she said. Ms. Perr uploaded the design to her computer, tweaked it and then sent it to a printer. In the meantime, she had Ms. Carden sign a liability waiver. "Are you trying to scare me?" Ms. Carden said. With the stencil in hand, the two women stood in front of a full length mirror to figure out where the tattoo should go. They quickly decided on the area beneath Ms. Carden's right wrist bone, which would be a slight hassle for the makeup artists on "The Good Place," but until Janet gets a tattoo upgrade, that's that. "You can't overthink it, but you totally have to overthink it, but then you have to just go, like, 'I know I like this,'" Ms. Carden said, sounding like she was trying to convince herself and mostly succeeding. Ms. Perr had Ms. Carden lay faceup on a red massage table. "This is very like the gyno," Ms. Carden said. Ms. Perr pulled on some black plastic gloves and a gold ring that held black ink. She wet Ms. Carden's wrist with a lotion called Stencil Stuff and applied the stencil, almost like a temporary tattoo. Then, holding a needle she began to stick and poke Ms. Carden's wrist, refilling the needle every poke or two, and leaving a dot of ink beneath the skin with each poke. That was less like the gyno. Ms. Carden, who very sensibly does not love needles, had been worried about the pain. But it wasn't so bad. "Oh, I could do this all day!," she said. With her free hand she answered a FaceTime call from her husband. "We're doing it," she said. A couple of "I love you"s and the call was over. Fifteen minutes later, so was the tattooing. Ms. Perr bandaged it, telling her not to swim or immerse herself in water for two weeks and to gently wash the tattoo with unscented soap and maybe apply a little coconut oil. "I love it," Ms. Carden said. "Yup, this is my tattoo and I love it. I love it." Hopefully, the dog will, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Lindsay Rosenblum, a New Orleans native, thought it was a happy coincidence when she realized that a West Village studio she was thinking about renting happened to be in a building where her mother and uncle lived in the late 1970s. On a train to New York from Boston to start her hunt for apartments this spring, Ms. Rosenblum texted her mother about the second floor apartment with a terrace and did her best not to get excited. "I didn't know if it would still be available by the time I got there," she said. Her mother, Katie Rosenblum, was already excited. She had loved living in the building, and when she looked at the listing, the apartment seemed strangely familiar. The building has more than 400 units, many of them similar, but her studio also had a terrace. Digging through old papers, she found a letter from 1980 and immediately called her daughter: It was the same apartment. Ms. Rosenblum, 29, was moving to New York for a job as the director of retail at Margaux, a women's luxury footwear start up, and was hoping to pay less than 3,000 a month in rent. While most of the places she was planning to see had no more than one window, this particular studio had a wall of windows and a private terrace nearly as big as the apartment itself. It was in a doorman building and also had a recently renovated kitchen with a dishwasher. The rent was 2,900 a month. Occupation: Director of retail for Margaux, a luxury footwear start up Walking to work: Margaux's office in Chelsea is about a five minute walk from her apartment. Outdoor space: "Studios in New York can feel pretty constricted," Ms. Rosenblum said. "The terrace really helps." The West Village: "I always liked that it feels particularly European," she said. "New Orleans is a very European city as well, so it reminds me of home." That was a bit higher than it had been when her mother lived there from 1978 to 1980, it rented for 290 to 300 but not much else had changed. Ms. Rosenblum's father was also delighted, as it was his brother's apartment first, from 1975 to 1978. Of course, Ms. Rosenblum wanted the place. The only question was whether to rent or buy. The building had been converted to a co op in the 1980s, and the current owners had listed the apartment for rent and for sale. Ms. Rosenblum hadn't been looking to buy, but given the serendipity of the situation, she couldn't help running the numbers to see if it was feasible. "Obviously, it's a big decision to buy a place, but they'd both spent so much time here," she said of her family members. "This place is so special to me, it made sense to have a nest egg." She submitted an offer of about 500,000, which was accepted, leaving her with a monthly mortgage payment of about 2,400. The sale closed in early June, about a week before Ms. Rosenblum started her new job. When it came to settling in, she benefited from an unusual amount of familial enthusiasm. "My mom saw it when I was moving in and was like, 'Oh my God!'" Ms. Rosenblum said. "Never in my wildest imagination did I think I'd ever see this apartment again," her mother said. "Four decades fell away, and memories came rushing back. Then, in the blink of an eye, I was walking into the future with its infinite possibilities." Together, they went on an outdoor furniture shopping expedition in New Jersey. Ms. Rosenblum's sister, who lives on the Upper East Side, was also enthusiastic; they had often remarked that they would love to live in the building whenever they walked by. Ms. Rosenblum bought her dining table from the previous owner, and replaced a built in Murphy bed with a conventional frame and mattress that she brought, along with a love seat, from her apartment share in Boston. The new furnishings are sleeker and more modern than those in the old family photos, which show a glass topped table with cane chairs, a platform bed built by her uncle and grandfather, and a white rotary phone. Much of the furniture her mother acquired from her uncle when she moved in has been lost to time. But there are a number of family mementos in the apartment, including the painting palette that belonged to Ms. Rosenblum's grandfather, as well as display racks holding three rows of matted family photos that can be switched in and out. And on the terrace is a 1940s butterfly chair that belonged to her grandparents. The apartment is decorated in neutral colors, but Ms. Rosenblum has added a few bright, personal touches, including a colorful sign by Simon Hardeveld, a New Orleans artist, that hangs over the love seat. It reads "Laissez Le Bon Temps Rouler," reminding her of her hometown. "I told him I wanted as many New Orleans things as possible in the sign," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
DOLEMITE IS MY NAME (2019) Stream on Netflix. Eddie Murphy wears vivid suits and tilted hats and carries a weighty cane in this new biopic. The film casts Murphy as the comedian Rudy Ray Moore, who at the crest of the blaxploitation era self financed "Dolemite," a 1975 crime action movie in which he starred as a pimp out for revenge. The original movie became a cult hit. (A typical scene involves an F.B.I. agent being kicked into the trunk of a Cadillac.) The biopic charts the lead up to and the making of that movie, with the help of an all star cast: Tituss Burgess, Keegan Michael Key, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Craig Robinson and Wesley Snipes play some of Moore's associates, and Snoop Dogg and Chris Rock each make cameos. The movie has a "loose, friendly, house party vibe," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, and is intended as a comeback vehicle for Murphy. "I didn't want to just pop back up," he said in a recent interview with The Times. "I wanted a funny movie to remind them that they liked me. This movie turned out so strong that I figured this is a great way to come back." ZOMBOAT! Stream on Hulu. Two post apocalyptic comedy series hit streaming services this week. In this British sitcom available on Hulu, a cheeky group of travelers flee a zombie infested Birmingham, England, by canal. And on Netflix, the comedy DAYBREAK revolves around cliquey teens in a post apocalyptic Glendale, Calif., where a nuclear blast has transformed many grown ups into zombie like monsters . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
DYING is going to have lower tax consequences in New York if you can wait five to eight years. But in the meantime, the new estate and gift tax law that went into effect on April 1 is going to create enormously complex financial planning problems for all sorts of people. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's stated goal at the beginning of the year was to eliminate the incentives for wealthy New Yorkers to "move to die." The idea was to dissuade rich retirees from leaving for places like Florida not just for warmth and sunshine but because estate and gift taxes are much lower there. But given the political realities in Albany, he only partly succeeded. Changes in the law will be phased in gradually, meaning the details will be different every year until 2019, and a seemingly small miscalculation could have major tax consequences. Before the new law was passed, people in New York whose estates were valued at 1 million or less were exempt from estate taxes, but estates of that size are fairly common in New York. That meant a disproportionate number of people were hit by the state tax who would not have been subject to the federal estate tax, which has a much higher exemption. Furthermore, the top rate in New York is a whopping 16 percent much higher than the average across the country. While the new law will gradually raise the exemption level each year until 2019, it leaves the top rate at 16 percent. If all goes as planned, New York will be in a better position on estate and gift taxes than its neighbors New Jersey and Connecticut by 2019. But the state will still be far behind states like Florida and Arizona that have no state estate and gift taxes and better winter weather. Here are some considerations for the affluent and the rich to consider when it comes to dying and making taxable gifts in New York. Middle class confusion: The old exemption was 1 million a person; the new one is 2,062,500. It is set to rise by 1,062,500 each April 1 until 2017 when it will be 5.25 million until it matches whatever the federal exemption is on Jan. 1, 2019, close to 6 million. For all the people under that threshold, this is good, and more people will come under that exemption each year. The bad news is the exemption is structured like "The Price Is Right": If you go one penny over, you lose. The law is written so that the state estate tax is applied gradually once the amount of the estate exceeds the exemption. You begin to lose the exemption amount until the estate exceeds the exemption by 5 percent and New York taxes you on the entire estate as if there was no exemption. It sounds fair, but it isn't logical. According to calculations run by John D. Dadakis, a partner at the law firm Holland Knight, here's how that works: If the estate is worth 1,000 more than the current exemption, the tax bill is 1,077. If it is 100,000 over, the bill is 109,729.50. At an estate valued at 2,165,625 the person would owe 112,050. Paul Hyl, a lawyer in Melville, N.Y., noted that to incur a federal estate tax of 112,050 in Florida (which, you will recall, has no state estate tax), the person would need a much larger estate of 5,620,125. And on the federal level, where every individual estate has an exemption this year of 5.34 million, the math for New York residents gets screwier still. Mr. Dadakis pointed out that someone with an estate of 5,830,455 would owe no federal estate tax but would pay a New York tax of 490,455. The reason is that the state estate tax gets deducted from the estate. However, for someone who is not a New York resident and living in a state where only the federal tax applies the bill would be less: 196,182. In short, it's complex, which is never good. "Complexity obscures understanding," said Mark W. Everson, who served as commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service from 2003 until 2007, a time when the federal estate tax was going through a similar period of change. "You can cause confusion among the taxpayer and that can lead to noncompliance or cost the taxpayer more. On the other hand, complexity gives people incentives to bend the rules, and they seem to comply but they're not consistent with the laws." On a practical level, it means that middle and upper middle class people who would not have to do any federal estate planning will have to do some in New York, at least over the next five years. One solution for estates that are close to the exemption would be to give a charity any money above the exemption that would incur a state estate tax bill, said Chi Yu Liang, a partner at the law firm Withers Bergman. Another solution for married couples is to use the formula clauses that were part of estate plans when the federal exemption was rising each year. These clauses are written so that the maximum exemption amount is put into a credit shelter trust with the rest passing tax free to the surviving spouse. UPPER CLASS DISILLUSIONMENT For the wealthiest people, who could save millions of dollars by moving out of New York, there has been no real change. Sharon L. Klein, managing director of family office services and wealth strategies at Wilmington Trust, said for the wealthiest it was the top rate, not the exemption, that matters. Governor Cuomo had pushed for that rate to be lowered to 10 percent from 16 percent. But he lost that battle, even though the very wealthy was the group most likely to move. "Those are exactly the kind of people you want to incentivize to stay," Ms. Klein said. "You don't really care about the moderately wealthy." The very wealthy who stay in New York will spend their money and pay a lot in property, income, sales and even gas tax. If they leave to avoid an onerous estate tax, the state loses everything. Mitchell A. Drossman, U.S. Trust's national director of wealth planning strategies, pointed out that an estate of 8,089,000 in New York would pay the same amounts in federal and New York taxes 785,000 even though the federal rate is 40 percent and the state rate on that amount is 13.6 percent. This is because of the higher federal exemption. Yet the current New York tax rates expire on March 31, 2015. Presumably this will give the governor and Legislature time to change the rates or make them permanent and remove any doubt. GIFT FRUSTRATION Where the new law could be costly for the wealthy and the affluent alike is two new provisions around gifts. Several states have provisions to prevent people from giving away everything on their deathbed to avoid taxes. New York now has a three year window. Within that period, the amount of the gift is added back into the estate as if it were never given in the first place. The rule applies only to gifts made from April 1, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2018. It adds those gifts back into the estate in such a way that they do not count for the federal tax but could result in a higher New York tax bill. The second gift giving conundrum is more controversial and may not even be legal, lawyers said. Property in another state, like a home in Florida, is not included in New York's calculation for state estate tax (though it is counted for federal purposes). In the new law, if that property is given away say, to children within three years of the person's death, it can be added into the estate and taxed even though it is in another state. "New York wants to bring all the gifts back into your estate," Ms. Liang said. "If it's going to impose a New York State tax that wasn't going to be there before simply because you decided to do some lifetime planning, that appears to be pretty unfair at any level." It would seem to be the antithesis of a law that was meant to end Governor Cuomo's "move to die" tax. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Pottery Is the New Pilates, and Macrame Takes Away the Crazy It was a typical evening at Bklyn Clay, an airy, year old, 24 hour pottery studio in Sunset Park, the Brooklyn neighborhood that is still evolving from its industrial past into a hub for New York City's creative classes. Nadia Lachance, 37, who works in photo production, was making a batch of hands with the fingers crossed: an apt symbol for the group's mood, both restive and optimistic (the red wine was flowing). There, also, was Stephanie Shih, 31, the copy director at Plated, a meal delivery company, who was in between jobs last spring when she started spending more time at the studio, sometimes until midnight. And Urooj Khan, 29, a corporate lawyer who started making pottery after a breakup a few years ago. "The studio was my sanctuary," she said. "I would spend entire weekends at the wheel. Clay requires a lot of presence. There are so many subtle movements that require attention and precision, all the more so when you are a beginner. And that was a relief. My brain hurts after long days at the firm, poring over documents and law treatises, and being at the wheel releases that stress." Ms. Khan also posts her ceramics on Instagram, at RuthBaderKilnsburg: mugs and pitchers emblazoned with the words "male tears" and "i ain't sorry," for the Beyonce song, in looping cursive. It is her habit to come straight from work, in full corporate drag a tailored pantsuit and high heels. "I have trashed more than one pair of heels," she said. "Those 'male tears' cups are gangsta," Jacob Dorland, an information security consultant, said approvingly. "All this stuff really pisses me off. It's so good." A single father whose son left for college this year, Mr. Dorland, 39, came to the studio because he is a friend of Jennifer Waverek's, a co founder, and because he was anticipating emotional fallout from his son's departure. "It's really strange how much your legs get kicked out from under when you've been a single dad for 15 years," he said. At Greenwich House Pottery, there was a surge of attendance for the studio's fall classes, said Jenni Lukasiewicz, the education coordinator there, to 500 students, aged 18 to 95. "Ceramics has attracted so many new makers because it is such an engaging practice," she said. "You put clay on the wheel. It gives you a little fight and you get past it and there is this object." Most Friday mornings, Judi Roaman, a design consultant, can be found there, hand building vessels she'll glaze in black or white, because she finds colors are too complicated. "How much MSNBC can you watch?" she said. "I would bet every therapist would tell you their patients are beyond anxious. Everybody is looking for a place to put it. You can't absorb anymore." Nora Abousteit, 41, has built a business around the soothing power of making stuff. She is the founder of CraftJam, which leads crafting events macrame, pot painting, leather work all over the city, more than 20 each week. "People are overwhelmed and feel totally powerless," she said, "but they feel empowered when they make something. If you do something with your hands, it means you're taking action." On Oct. 25, there was a Drake themed embroidery jam at the Arlo Hotel in SoHo, in honor of the Canadian performer's birthday the day before. Ten people showed up to embroider his face and lyrics on fabric squares. "People want to get together and do something more than just drink," Ms. Abousteit said. Still, Ms. Waverek, 52, of Bklyn Clay said she often feels like a bartender in a very modern bar. She was a creative director who ran her own ad agency before taking pottery classes at Greenwich House. "You hear a lot of stories," she said. "I hear more than I should about people's therapy sessions. We had a woman who came in last year who was going through a divorce. She opted to do ceramics classes rather than traditional therapy. It was great. Cor likes to say that clay absorbs emotion." Cor Garcia Held, 38, Bklyn Clay's co founder, studio manager and educational director, trained as an art therapist. Clay is absorptive, to be sure, Ms. Garcia Held said, but it's also a fine medium for Freudian sublimation, as she explained in an email recently. "The grandmother of art therapy, Edith Kramer, borrowed heavily from Freud and Freud believed that sublimation was a mature and healthy defense mechanism," Ms. Garcia Held wrote. "The basic idea is you take socially unacceptable behavior or ideations and channel them into something that is socially acceptable like art. In other words, you reach the studio fuming over the sexism that you had to put up with at work. Then you and your studio mates share pizza and beer and discuss how sexism affects you on an everyday basis. You take those emotions and make a mug that says, 'male tears.' You leave the studio not wanting to yell at the next innocent man you see on the street. Bam, Sublimation!" The commonality with kindergarten notwithstanding, crafts like this aren't easy, and perhaps that's the point. "People come in thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm going to have this 'Ghost' like experience," Ms. Held Garcia said. "They think it's going to be really soothing and satisfying. But it's hard. They get really frustrated. But they learn about persisting. You have bad days. You can spend four hours and just have one plate. That can make you crazy. But you come back the next day, and you learn from it. That's huge." Fernando Aciar, an Argentine restaurateur, started making ceramics two years ago, when he closed his Manhattan restaurant, FeelFood, worn out by staff politics and fighting with the health department. He is lucky, he said, that his colleagues at Momofuku Nishi, Contra and Wildair in New York City have been happy to fill their restaurants with his elegant work. This early midlife crisis has been extremely productive: In 2015, Mr. Aciar, now 38, made 1,200 pieces for an installation commissioned by Alexandre de Betak, the fashion show producer, for Coach, the luxury brand. Now, he's working on 700 pieces for a restaurant in Houston; this summer, he will spend a few months in Nimes, France, working on a collection for the Hotel Imperator. "I was losing my brain before," Mr. Aciar said. "With ceramics you don't have to solve problems with people and the health department, which in restaurants you have to do all the time. Clay is like baking, which I learned how to do growing up in the country in Argentina. You need to be very strong, but soft and subtle at the same time." Ashleygetsmuddy is the Instagram handle of Ashley Warner, 50, a ceramic artist who is also a psychotherapist. The other day, Ms. Warner noted studies that show how creative work can alter the brain's neural pathways, and how working with your hands can produce changes in multiple brain regions, which can alleviate depression and improve one's ability to problem solve. Some potters are selling their work for charity through initiatives like Crafting Resistance. Last April, a sale at Greenwich House Pottery made 25,000 for the American Civil Liberties Union in four hours. In September, Bklyn Clay hosted a sale that earned just under 10,000 for the Natural Resources Defense Council and GrowNYC; in October, Ms. Shih sold her ceramics to benefit hurricane relief in Puerto Rico. But even the people who buy the work have to figure out where to put it. Kathleen Hackett is a design writer who has also taken up pottery, making pieces that are agreeably lopsided, like her friend Ms. Burnie's work. "I love handmade things," she said. "My house is full of stuff friends and family have made. But when it comes to ceramics and the sheer amount of it around these days, I wonder what on earth will become of it all." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
After his 34 year old wife suffered a devastating asthma attack and later died, the Boston writer Peter DeMarco wrote the following letter to the intensive care unit staff of CHA Cambridge Hospital who cared for her and helped him cope. As I begin to tell my friends and family about the seven days you treated my wife, Laura Levis, in what turned out to be the last days of her young life, they stop me at about the 15th name that I recall. The list includes the doctors, nurses, respiratory specialists, social workers, even cleaning staff members who cared for her. "How do you remember any of their names?" they ask. How could I not, I respond. Every single one of you treated Laura with such professionalism, and kindness, and dignity as she lay unconscious. When she needed shots, you apologized that it was going to hurt a little, whether or not she could hear. When you listened to her heart and lungs through your stethoscopes, and her gown began to slip, you pulled it up to respectfully cover her. You spread a blanket, not only when her body temperature needed regulating, but also when the room was just a little cold, and you thought she'd sleep more comfortably that way. You cared so greatly for her parents, helping them climb into the room's awkward recliner, fetching them fresh water almost by the hour, and by answering every one of their medical questions with incredible patience. My father in law, a doctor himself as you learned, felt he was involved in her care. I can't tell you how important that was to him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Twenty foot wide glass walls retract electronically at the tap of a cellphone app at the over the top 39.5 million furnished mansion John Kean built last year on four acres in Southampton. They disappear into wall pockets, blurring the distinction between indoors and out. The living room, with its full bar, dovetails with an outdoor covered terrace lengthy enough for a banquet table for 75 guests. "You come to the Hamptons to be outside," Mr. Kean said, describing an indoor yet outdoor alfresco fund raising soiree he held last summer at the 15,500 square foot, 10 bedroom, 12 full and three half bath manse that he built on spec. Another tap and a mesh screen came down, enclosing the terrace and turning the geothermally cooled house into a giant screened in porch. The screens "keep the air conditioning in," he said, and the pesky bugs out. Mr. Kean's property is at the high end of the Hamptons housing market, where the average sale price is 1.72 million, but the melding of inside and out is a trend that can be seen even in more modest homes. "In the Hamptons, the outdoors is more important than the indoors," said Gary DePersia, an associate broker with the Corcoran Group, who has the listing. "Houses are being designed to accentuate that," including at least two that he has represented that have underground grottoes offering aquarium like views into outdoor swimming pools, he said. For Hamptonites from the city, "it is such a rare thing to have outdoor space," said Christine Gachot, an owner of Gachot Studios, an interior design firm based in Manhattan. "When you have it, you try to celebrate it as much as possible. We try to design pockets of outdoor living like exterior rooms," putting kitchens, fireplaces, pool areas and bars outside, "very much like you are designing the interior of the home." Depending on how far clients are willing to go, "it is like having a whole extra house." At a contemporary 50 million seven bedroom home built four years ago in Sagaponack, glass walls on both sides of the house slide open to an infinity edge pool, a private beach and the ocean to the east, a pond on the west. "You are almost in a big loggia," said Susan Breitenbach, an associate broker with the Corcoran Group, who has the listing. "The integrated interior exterior is very important," Ms. Breitenbach said. When the owners, who live in Manhattan, come to the Hamptons, "they want their outdoor space. They want their loggias, their terraces, their barbecue, their roof deck, their fireplace, their two outdoor showers in the master bedroom and outdoor Jacuzzis, one in the pool, another on the roof. " Peggy Fruin, an interior designer and co owner of Hampton Design in Bridgehampton, said that she starts by dressing the patio "as if it's just another room with sofas, chairs, short tables for drinks, dining tables and chairs all the amenities for entertaining family and friends." Technology has helped make outdoor decorating easier, she said, with Sunbrella and other "no muss, no wet" fabrics to use on outdoor sectionals, pillows and other furnishings. Quincy Hammond, a Manhattan based landscape architect who frequently designs Hamptons gardens, said that in the past decade, the choices for aluminum, wicker, resin and teak outdoor furniture and fabric options have become "almost as impressive as what they have for the inside." Things like fire pits, gas fireplaces, pool houses for entertaining, outdoor televisions, and "great sun coverage from all the new umbrellas on the market" are also ramping up the outdoor's cachet, Ms. Fruin said. While outdoor showers are not new, for one Amagansett client Ms. Fruin designed an outdoor bathtub off her bedroom that "she could enjoy day or night," with an enclosed tiled wall with candles on shelves, a lush garden and a slatted pergola above. "All the amenities that exist inside the main house are now found outside the main house," he said, including apps that can remotely set the spa to 98 degrees, and turn on the lights or outdoor speakers, while the homeowner is still on the drive east. Mr. D'Agata changed the way that Glenn and Rachelle McGrath use their wooded 2.14 acre Southampton property, by doubling the amount of level land on the property, adding a saltwater pool and building a 30 by 35 foot pavilion. "We entertain a lot," said Mr. McGrath, an insurance executive. "Even in summer months, people would migrate to our kitchen, inside." The pavilion, which has living and dining spaces, a full kitchen and pantry, a bathroom, an outdoor shower, a floor to ceiling fireplace and a speaker system, now draws the visitors outside instead. Swimming pools are the quintessential outdoor playrooms. But in the Hamptons and other luxury destinations, chaise longues are no longer confined to the deck. Greg Darvin, the owner of Pristine Pools in East Hampton, took a cue from resort pools that his clients have enjoyed in the Caribbean or Indonesia. Many of the 25 to 30 in ground saltwater gunite pools he builds a year have "sun shelves" in shallow water for chaise longues and shade umbrellas, making it easy to dip your feet in the water without getting out of your chair. "It is very inviting," Mr. Darvin said, "a fun place to sit with the kids, or Mom and Dad can have a drink or read." The 12 foot wide shelves are also a place for toddlers to splash and play without the need for a separate kiddie pool. Other pools have sloped "beach" entrances. Three years ago, Mr. Darvin built a heated pool with a sun shelf, a spa and room for laps for Dr. Sheryl Leventhal and Peter Schwartz, both 57, at the five bedroom Wainscott house they bought a year earlier for 1.7 million. Their old pool was smaller, faced the other way, and was more steps down from the house. Mr. Darvin "lifted the backyard by six or eight inches and turned the pool longways," Dr. Leventhal said. Including a new outdoor barbecue, landscaping, walkways and deer fencing, the project cost about 400,000. "We were really happy with it," she said. "The whole feel of the house changed because you could see the pool from the house," which has double height windows with transoms across the back. The sun shelf, which holds four chaise longues, became a social space. "I had 14 people staying with me for three days, and everyone was on the sun shelf," Dr. Leventhal said. "You are in the water but out of the water and everybody can be together." Guests also use the hot tub inside the pool, chaise longues in a shadier area behind the pool, and a sectional on a deck one step above the pool level. Two love seats around a fire pit provide another gathering spot. Dr. Leventhal said the reason to go to the Hamptons is to have friends and family over and "get out of our house in Suffern. It is dark and depressing." The couple feel better in the Hamptons "because of the light." James Maloney and Philip Judson entertain every other weekend in the oasislike backyard of their three bedroom, three bath home on half an acre in Northwest Woods, part of East Hampton. "When people come here, they are awe struck. It looks like a resort pool," said Mr. Judson, an agent at Halstead. Flames shoot out of a channel style fire feature in the Corinthian blue gray granite stone wall that wraps around the back of the pool with two waterfalls, part of a redo by Mr. Darvin four years ago. The pool has a sun shelf with chaise longues, marine grade stainless steel tables and shade umbrellas. Below the shelf is a narrower seating ledge for sipping cocktails. An outdoor living room with a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table and two ottomans is on the limestone patio. A dining table is on the deck and a second, private deck sits off the master bedroom. Music is piped outside. Sliding glass doors and a sunroom on the back of the house adds to the feeling that "when you are inside the house, you are really outside," Mr. Judson said. "You can see into the entire front yard and backyard when you are in the house." Ms. Hammond, the landscape architect, said the indoor outdoor trend came from California, and wasdriven by "people wanting more space to expand their entertaining." "We want a reason to be outside other than the sake of just being outside and gardening," Ms. Hammond said. She uses hedges "to create the boundaries of an outdoor room" and provide enclosures, with trees for shade and "an overhead sense of protection." A curved bench under a colonnade in one Southampton flower garden she designed becomes a "separate garden room, like a library in the house, a place you go to do something different," Ms. Hammond said. Vegetable gardens in raised beds, which her clients clamor for, are "like a pantry," providing food for outdoor kitchens and outdoor dining. For those with a vista, roof decks are in vogue. Mr. Kean installed a putting green and Adirondack chairs on his mansion's roof. "Once you are up here, you want to have a cocktail," he said. At Ms. Breitenbach's Sagaponack listing, the roof deck has a Jacuzzi, a kitchen and a fireplace. And in East Hampton, Peter Wilson, a retired corporate lawyer, and Scott Sanders, an interior designer, erected a giant lifeguard chair on the roof of their 16.9 million, 3.2 acre estate to see the ocean. In the spring of 2016, Pamela Glazer, a Southampton based architect, cut out half of a tall attic to create a roof deck as part of the 525,000 renovation of two 1960s prefab homes cobbled together in Hither Hills. She used board and batten on an exterior wall to create a cozy backdrop for a sectional sofa, and a bungalow style railing so the owners would have a place to enjoy cocktails while gazing over their neighbor's houses at the Atlantic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Eli takes a gig trucking an engine upstate, and in the desolate winter setting, takes to chugging antifreeze (or some such horrific liquid) with a local resident, who takes him to a place the end credits call Sludge Club. That's accurate. There he meets Anya (Chelsea Lopez), who has a purple pageboy wig and a devotion to vintage soul music that's compelled her to create a Rube Goldbergesque light show machine to accompany her tunes. When she removes her wig, she has a head of stringy hair that rather resembles that of the Crypt Keeper on that old horror anthology TV show "Tales From the Crypt." So that's different. Written and directed by Xander Robin, the movie continues in this peculiar vein, taking in Anya's hair eating fetish/compulsion and depicting its consequences. The picture climaxes with a grisly hairball removal scene accompanied on the soundtrack by Timmy Thomas's catchy classic "Why Can't We Live Together." You have to wonder what the music supervisor's pitch was in seeking permission for its use. "Are We Not Cats" is a well put together film with a lot of striking imagery, but, as you may have already inferred, something of a specialty item. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber chose Dara Khosrowshahi, who leads the online travel company Expedia, to be its chief executive on Sunday, two people with knowledge of the decision said. The selection capped a contentious search process as the ride hailing company seeks to move past a turbulent period. Mr. Khosrowshahi emerged as the leading candidate from a field of three finalists over a weekend of Uber board meetings, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details were confidential. One finalist, Jeffrey R. Immelt, the former chief of General Electric, withdrew on Sunday when it became clear that he did not have enough support, said two people familiar with the process. The board of directors and executives inside of Uber had instead been leaning toward Meg Whitman, the chief of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the people said. But matters changed quickly over the course of Sunday afternoon, as directors and Ms. Whitman could not agree on terms in which she would take over as chief executive, the people said. Ultimately, the board decided on the third candidate, Mr. Khosrowshahi. Uber, the company's board and Expedia did not respond to requests for comment. Choosing Mr. Khosrowshahi is crucial to returning stability to Uber, the world's biggest ride hailing company, which has been without a leader since its co founder, Travis Kalanick, stepped down from the C.E.O. job under pressure on June 20. Under Mr. Kalanick, Uber changed the transportation landscape by offering people the ability to summon a ride through an app, and the privately held company swelled to a nearly 70 billion colossus. But Uber's future became murkier this year when the company was pummeled by scandal after scandal, including sexual harassment accusations in the workplace, a Department of Justice criminal investigation into some of its methods, and an intellectual property dispute with a self driving car rival. While Uber's business continued to grow, Mr. Kalanick's management style faced scrutiny and investors mutinied against him. How much of an impact Mr. Khosrowshahi can have on Uber is uncertain. The company still bears the imprint of Mr. Kalanick, who remains on Uber's board. The board itself has been rived with discord, especially between Mr. Kalanick and Benchmark, a venture capital firm that is a major Uber shareholder and that also has a seat on Uber's board. Both Mr. Kalanick and Benchmark had their own preferred candidates for a new chief. Benchmark also has sued Mr. Kalanick to try and force him off the board. Mr. Khosrowshahi also joined the board of The New York Times Company in 2015, and previously worked at IAC/InterActive Corp. At Expedia, Mr. Khosrowshahi has been an outspoken chief executive. His family emigrated to the United States from Iran because of the revolution in that country in the late 1970s, so Mr. Khosrowshahi had a personal perspective on the executive order that President Trump signed restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries this year. Expedia, along with Amazon, became one of two technology companies to contribute early declarations to a lawsuit filed by Washington State's attorney general objecting to the travel ban. Mr. Khosrowshahi described his early experience as an immigrant to the United States in an email to employees at that time. "We sure didn't feel like refugees, but in hindsight I guess we were my father and mother left everything behind to come here to be safe and give their boys a chance to re build a life," he wrote. He expressed other pointed concerns in the wake of Mr. Trump's coming to office. In February, he raised eyebrows when he concluded a conference call with Wall Street analysts by saying, "Hopefully we will all be alive to see the end of next year." At Uber, the chief executive search has been turbulent. Board members were split over candidates early on in the process. According to people with knowledge of the situation, Mr. Kalanick favored Mr. Immelt while Benchmark, whose partner Matt Cohler sits on Uber's board, preferred Ms. Whitman. Last month, after Ms. Whitman emerged as a candidate for the job, she posted on Twitter that she was "fully committed to H.P.E. and plan to remain the company's C.E.O." She also gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal last week reiterating that there was "a lot of work to be done at H.P.E." But in reality, Ms. Whitman was in touch with members of Uber's board in recent days about the chief executive role, said the people with knowledge of the process. Mr. Immelt, who recently left his job as chief executive of G.E., also had emerged as a candidate in recent weeks. Mr. Khosrowshahi's candidacy was kept under wraps. As recently as late last week, Uber's board was deadlocked on candidates, the people said. On Friday, the board met in San Francisco, with Mr. Immelt and Mr. Khosrowshahi talking to the directors. Ms. Whitman spoke with directors on Friday and Saturday. On Sunday morning, Mr. Immelt posted on Twitter that he had "decided not to pursue a leadership position at Uber." By then, it was apparent that Mr. Immelt did not have the software experience that some board members deemed important for the Uber chief executive role, said people with knowledge of the process. Another person with knowledge of the situation said Mr. Immelt considered Uber's board to be dysfunctional. G.E. declined to comment on behalf of Mr. Immelt. A spokesman for Ms. Whitman also declined to comment. At that point, the board was leaning toward Ms. Whitman, said two people with knowledge of the process. Ms. Whitman, who had previously also led eBay, had a wealth of management experience. As a female leader, she also offered the opportunity for Uber to improve its workplace image. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
DONALD BERMAN at Bargemusic (May 25, 8 p.m.). Brooklyn's floating concert hall always comes into its own as the days end a little bit later, and the sun shines on the downtown skyline a little bit longer. Catch the view while concentrating on this typically eclectic concert from a fine pianist, who plays music by Bach, Ives, Eric Moe and John Aylward, and notably debuts a piece by Elena Ruehr. 800 838 3006, bargemusic.org EKMELES at St. Peter's Episcopal Church (May 26, 8 p.m.). Music for six voices and electronics from this outstanding ensemble, in the shape of "End Words," a new work by Christopher Trapani, and Karlheinz Stockhausen's microtonal masterpiece from 1968, "Stimmung." ekmeles.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
No Swimming Pools? No Sports to Announce? No Problem In a different world, we'd be talking about golf and tennis, trades and drafts, sign stealing and beanballs. In this world, we're talking about swimmers looking for places to swim, announcers providing play by plays on dogs eating dinner, and soccer players posing for pregame photos while wearing masks. With most pools closed, many swimmers have become desperate. Phoebe Bacon, a member of the U.S. national swim team, found solace in a teammate's backyard pool. It was only 15 meters long, 10 meters shorter than a normal training pool, but it did the trick. Her coach, Tim Kelly, tethered her to a diving board to add some resistance. Nathan Adrian, a five time Olympic gold medalist, trained in a 3 foot deep pool used by the swim school he runs. It's not ideal for Adrian, who is 6 foot 6. Yasmin Rieger, a member of the Wagner College triathlon team, practiced her stroke on dry land by lying down on a stool. She attached her paddles to strength cords and had someone throw water on her. Bree Soileau, a swim coach and triathlete from Texas, took to the bathtub with her fins. She has also posted videos showing swimmers how to practice rhythmic breathing in the shower. Preston Planells, a swimmer at the University of Iowa, did the 200 meter backstroke on his hardwood floor. Brock Brown of Indiana University raced dogs through the snow. The olympians Ryan Murphy and Josh Prenot pushed a car up the hill for their dry land training. DANIELLE ALLENTUCK In case you missed it, The Times covered an idle rugby announcer who creatively turned his skills to announcing ordinary human activity: a trip to a discount store, a kick around in a park. There are other announcers out there with time on their hands. The N.F.L. and baseball announcer Joe Buck jumped into quotidian announcing, turning his attention to a marble race, a dog with a toy football, and baking and grilling. The basketball announcer Mike Breen went to earnest route, with a heartfelt plea for N.B.A. fans to wash their hands and practice social distancing. Nicaragua recorded its first coronavirus death on Thursday. Schools remain open in the country, and the Nicaraguan soccer league is still pressing on, without fans in attendance. All 10 teams are set to play this weekend, even as some disagree with the decision to continue playing. Diriangen, currently second in the league, posed for a pregame photograph on March 21 with 10 of the players wearing masks (the goalkeeper, for whatever reason, did not). Bernardo Laureiro, a player on the team, wrote on Twitter: "I don't want to play, and I don't understand my colleagues who don't say anything. We are the protagonists, no one else. If a team has 30 players, and the 30 say they don't want to play, don't play and that's it." On social media, Nicaraguans have been sharing the ironic meme "Be like Ortega" to encourage people not to go out. President Daniel Ortega has not been seen in public since February. The weekend that would have been. If it isn't too painful, consider the weekend that might have been ... The N.C.A.A. tournaments for men and women would have advanced to the regional finals that determine the Final Four. Will Sabrina Ionescu and Oregon get their chance at the big show? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Oscars proved this year that you can pull off an awards ceremony without a host. But why would the more freewheeling Golden Globes pass on personality? The Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced Tuesday that Ricky Gervais will return to host the Globes, which NBC is broadcasting on Jan. 5. This represents the British comedian's fifth stint as M.C., a Globes record. "Once again, they've made me an offer I can't refuse," Gervais said in a statement, though he added, "This is the very last time I'm doing this, which could make for a fun evening. Gervais first hosted the Globes in 2010, and became known for turning a normally self congratulatory night into something of a roast. That year, he brought a half drunk beer onstage and took potshots at Mel Gibson before introducing him; during his last turn as M.C., in 2016, Gervais once again made fun of Gibson to his face and introduced Matt Damon as "the only person Ben Affleck hasn't been unfaithful to." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A fossil of Collinsium ciliosum, which had 30 limbs, and 72 spikes on its back. The animal kingdom got off to a slow start. Studies on DNA indicate that the first animals evolved more than 750 million years ago, but for well over 200 million years, they left a meager mark on the fossil record. As best as paleontologists can tell, the animal kingdom during that time consisted of little more than sponges and other creatures rooted to the ocean floor. But then, about 520 million years ago during the Cambrian Period, animal evolution shifted into high gear. Fast moving predators, scavengers and burrowers evolved. Many of the major living groups of animals left their first fossils during this so called Cambrian explosion, including our own ancestors. But the Cambrian explosion also brought many bizarre species that have long puzzled paleontologists. For almost 40 years, the poster child for the Cambrian explosion's strangeness has been a hand size armored worm with a name to suit its bizarre appearance: Hallucigenia. But recently, Hallucigenia has lost much of its mystery. Scientists have worked out the creature's anatomy, and they have figured out a lot about how Hallucigenia and its relatives thrived in the Cambrian oceans. And despite its odd appearance, Hallucigenia isn't an incomprehensible zoological experiment. Paleontologists have been able to place it comfortably on the evolutionary branch that led to a group of invertebrates alive today called velvet worms. "What we now know is that these bizarre creatures were not so bizarre at all," said Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol. In 1977, a University of Cambridge paleontologist named Simon Conway Morris published the first account of Hallucigenia. The 508 million year old fossil was part of a cache found in Canada in the early 1900s. Dr. Conway Morris struggled to make sense of the creature, and envisioned it with a worm shaped body. Along one side was a row of tentacles, and on the other side were seven pairs of stilts. At one end of its body was a strange bulb. When a colleague saw the sketch, Dr. Conway Morris later recalled, he burst out laughing. In his report, Dr. Conway Morris presented the animal with its stilts resting on the ocean floor and its tentacles waving, perhaps sucking in food. It was so bizarre that he could offer no firm idea of how it was related to other animals, living or extinct. He named it Hallucigenia after its dreamlike appearance. But a few years later, the paleontologists Hou Xianguang and Lars Ramskold began to dispel the mystery around the animal. Studying Cambrian fossils in China, they discovered what were clearly relatives of Hallucigenia. The fossils were better preserved than those Dr. Conway Morris had studied, and they revealed that he had turned the animals upside down. In reality, Hallucigenia's supposed tentacles were seven pairs of clawed legs. And its stilts were actually long spikes that rose from its back. But fundamental questions remained. Which end, for example, was Hallucigenia's head? In recent years, Martin Smith of the University of Cambridge and Jean Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum have been studying new fossils of Hallucigenia and revisiting old ones with better microscopes. They have published a series of papers, the latest of which appeared last week in Nature. Their studies now give us a much clearer picture of the animal. "Hallucigenia is not a weird wonder it's something we can understand," Dr. Caron said. "We think they were living on the sea floor, probably living on food particles from decaying matter," Dr. Caron said. While Hallucigenia kept its mouth pointed down on its food, its eyes would have scanned the water above. "Despite its slender spines, predators swimming overhead may have been an ever present concern," Dr. Smith suggested. Now, a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that Hallucigenia had Cambrian cousins that evolved a very different way of life. For more than two decades, scientists have been finding bits and pieces of Hallucigenia relatives. In recent years, though, paleontologists at Yunnan University in China have excavated a wealth of 517 million year old Chinese fossils belonging to a single species. Last year, the Yunnan researchers emailed a photograph of one of the fossils to their collaborator, a University of Cambridge paleontologist, Javier Ortega Hernandez. "I thought, 'This is damn weird,' " he said, "which is usually a good way to start." Dr. Ortega Hernandez soon went to China to examine the fossils. The species, which he and his colleagues have named Collinsium ciliosum, looks "like Hallucigenia on steroids," he said | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The cast of "Cabaret Under the Baclonies" performs for residents of the Ehpad Bois de Menuse nursing home in Chalon sur Saone, France, on May 26. CHALON SUR SAONE, France When circumstances close theaters' doors, you can count on some performers to find a window to open. Last week in this city in eastern France, the residents and staff of a nursing home watched from a safe distance some from windows and balconies as five actors appeared in the building's courtyard in front of a makeshift red curtain. "It feels like it's been such a long time," they sang, in a cover of Joe Dassin's wistful chanson "Salut." "Far from home, I've been thinking about you." "Cabaret Under the Balconies" ("Cabaret Sous les Balcons") was the first professional theater performance in France since lockdown was imposed on March 17. The actor and director Lena Breban put it together in just over two weeks, to take theater to some audiences hit especially hard by the pandemic. While most live events in Europe and the United States remain on forced hiatus, the relief of the cast was palpable as they performed at the facility, the Ehpad Bois de Menuse, many of whose residents have Alzheimer's or dementia. While the home hadn't had any Covid 19 cases, over a third of recorded deaths from the disease in France have occurred in similar institutions. The 45 minute show was designed to respect social distancing among the cast members as well as between them and the audience, Breban explained in an introduction. Their approach appeared to resonate with the audience, limited to 40 people. (The show was performed twice so that most of the 90 residents could see it.) Many of them were in wheelchairs, yet could be seen nodding or tapping their feet to the beat. In the courtyard, one woman got up, swung her arms and danced with a masked worker from the home. Another teared up as Lea Lopez, a young performer with a lush voice, sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Valerie Gonthier, a nursing assistant who stayed by the woman's side as she cried, said in an interview afterward that music often stirred up emotions for residents who experienced memory loss. The Ehpad has a choir, but French nursing homes don't typically have the funds to bring in professional performances; Gonthier couldn't remember anything like last week's show in the 26 years she has been with the institution. The production was something of a gamble on the part of the Espace des Arts, a large city theater here where Breban is an associate artist. In an interview after the performance, Nicolas Royer, the theater's director since January, said he disagreed with many French arts administrators who had interpreted government regulations to mean that performances were impossible. He didn't furlough any employees, instead asking the costume department to make surgical style masks, welcoming doctors from a nearby hospital in the theater's guest apartments and hosting training sessions for city workers dealing with the crisis. In April, Royer got a call from Breban, an experienced actress and emerging director who was going stir crazy in her Paris home: She told Royer she was down for anything he dreamed up. One of her projects, a Shakespeare production at the Theatre de la Pepiniere in Paris, had already been postponed for a year; another, a debut at the prestigious Comedie Francaise, was up in the air. "Friends were telling me to do stuff over Zoom, and I kept saying it was beside the point," she said between shows last week. "What motivates me is to see people, to breathe with them." The cast of "Cabaret Under the Balconies" rehearsed over Zoom for seven days and, after the relaxing of lockdown in France in May, met in Chalon sur Saone for one week of in person rehearsals with strict rules. Breban booked cast members with no health conditions. Daily temperature checks and frequent use of sanitizing gel were mandated, and everyone was offered a coronavirus test. By far the most onerous directive for the performers was to maintain a distance from one another of roughly one meter at all times. They worked playfully around the situation during "Cabaret Under the Balconies," throwing in jokes about the virus and slapstick warnings when performers threatened to get too close. "We were confident that we were within labor regulations, with an audience that was already confined and highly protected," Royer said. But not everyone agreed. Some regional funding bodies were fearful of the risks when the Espace des Arts turned to them for financial help: Chalon sur Saone was in a "red" or high risk zone, according to a government map, until this week when the advice was revised. While the Chalon sur Saone metropolitan area offered practical support from the start, the Espace des Arts ended up funding the initial production costs of 35,000 euros, about 39,000, out of its regular budget. On the day, there was a generosity of spirit to the entire performance, which served its purpose better than anything I've seen in a theater during this curtailed season. The last time I went to the theater, two and a half months ago, Isabelle Huppert headlined Ivo van Hove's staging of "The Glass Menagerie." For all the star appeal of that night at the Theatre de l'Odeon, "Cabaret Under the Balconies" was the more memorable event a sincere attempt to go back to basics, in the right place, at the right time. It was also a reminder that some potential audiences remain largely forgotten. After the show, Jeanne Poulachon, a 91 year old resident, said she had never been to the theater. "You don't always have that kind of opportunity. At least I didn't," she said. She was struck by the performers' artistic range, she added. "You have to know your craft to do that. I will remember this day it was splendid." The Espace des Arts' gamble seems to have paid off. After the first shows went smoothly, the local county and two cities, Dijon and Beaune, immediately expressed interest in putting on additional performances for their own nursing homes. Breban will return to traditional stages fairly soon: The Comedie Francaise recently confirmed that her adaptation of Hector Malot's novel "Sans Famille" would go ahead next winter. "Cabaret Under the Balconies" has changed her outlook, however. "To be honest, what we've done here is just as important to me," she said. "There may be no gilding, but we've experienced a form of contact that I need to bring back with me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
JUILLIARD415 at Alice Tully Hall (Jan. 29, 7:30 p.m.). The Baroque violinist Rachel Podger is the guest artist for this concert from Juilliard's period instrument band, and she leads a program entirely of Telemann, ranging all the way from a violin sonata to fuller, ensemble works. 212 799 5000, juilliard.edu RAPHAEL CENDO at Miller Theater (Feb. 1, 8 p.m.). One of the most important things about the indispensable Miller Theater's composer portraits series in the last few years has been to draw attention to good European composers whose work, for whatever reason, has not quite received the performances it deserves on this side of the Atlantic or at least to flesh out their reputation. Here's one of those concerts, played by Yarn/Wire and Either/Or, and including "Direct Action" and the American premier of "Substance." 212 854 7799, millertheatre.org STEPHEN HOUGH at Carnegie Hall (Jan. 30, 8 p.m.). Mr. Hough, a suave and skillful pianist, recently released an attractive new recording of Debussy, on the Hyperion label, that is more than worth checking out. Highlights of that are on offer in this recital, where the two books of "Images" act as a counterweight to Schumann's Fantasy in C and Beethoven's "Appassionata" sonata and he's throwing in the "Clair de lune" for good measure. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Banners for "Phantom of the Opera" hang outside the Seoul theater where its run has recently been extended.Credit...Woohae Cho for The New York Times Banners for "Phantom of the Opera" hang outside the Seoul theater where its run has recently been extended. "The Phantom of the Opera" has garnered plenty of superlatives over the years, including the longest running show in Broadway history. But in recent months, it has also laid claim to a more unlikely title: pathbreaking musical of the Covid 19 era. As theaters around the globe were abruptly shuttered by the pandemic, with no clear path to reopening in sight, the world tour of "Phantom" has been soldiering on in Seoul, South Korea, playing eight shows a week. And it has been drawing robust audiences to its 1600 seat theater, even after an outbreak in the ensemble led to a mandatory three week shutdown in April. The musical, with its 126 member company and hundreds of costumes and props, is believed to be the only large scale English language production running anywhere in the world. And it has remained open not through social distancing measures a virtual impossibility in the theater, either logistically or financially, many say but an approach grounded in strict hygiene. And it's one that its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, is arguing can show the way for the rest of the industry, a point he is hoping to demonstrate to the world, as he prepares to turn the Palladium, one of seven theaters he owns in London, into a laboratory for lessons learned in Seoul. "I don't think we should just be sitting on our hands and saying, it's all doom and gloom, we can't do anything," he said in an interview last week. "We have got to make the theaters as safe for everybody as we possibly can," he said. And South Korea, he said, shows that it can work. That the show, at the Blue Square cultural complex in central Seoul, has gone on is a testament not just to the protocols in the theater, but to South Korea's rigorous system of test, trace and quarantine, which has kept the virus largely under control. It was also a matter of sheer timing and luck, though it didn't seem that way at first. When the tour's previous stop in Busan, South Korea's second biggest city, wrapped up in mid February, the country was emerging as the latest epicenter of the pandemic. The company mostly went home for a break to Britain, Italy, North America, Australia and elsewhere. Serin Kasif, vice president of Lloyd Webber's company, the Really Useful Group, and the producer of the tour, said she was fielding daily messages from company members anxious about whether to return. On March 2, when Kasif flew to Seoul to begin preparations to open there, South Korea had the second highest number of confirmed cases, and the pandemic had not yet fully hit Britain. She contrasted the "overwhelming sense of fear" that developed in London with what she had experienced in Seoul, with its clear governmental directives and local partners who had lived through previous epidemics like SARS. "When I was speaking to our Korean partners, in lead up to the decision to continue, one said, 'The word "unprecedented" keeps getting used, but it's not unprecedented here,' " she explained. "Amazingly," Kasif said, the entire company returned to Seoul. Matt Leisy, a Northwestern University graduate who plays Raoul, said that when he went home to New York during the break, friends were "freaking out" at the idea that he might go back to Korea. But he said he was reassured by the producers' constant communication about safety protocols, as well as their videos of daily life in Seoul. "It was quite scary leading up to us coming back," he said. "Who knew we'd end up being in the safest place in the world?" There are hand sanitizing stations throughout, and ubiquitous signs and announcements reminding everyone that masks must be worn at all times. And in contrast to movie theaters, where alternating rows or seats are left empty, no seats are blocked off (though the first row was removed). Backstage, there's a similar drill: no embracing, no handshakes, no inessential physical contact. Reusable water bottles are forbidden, along with sharing food. Wigs, props and costumes are regularly sprayed or wiped with antibacterial cloths. Everyone must wear a mask, except for actors when they are being made up or go onstage, and some members of the orchestra. Sharon Williams, the head of wardrobe, said that masks and "constant hand washing" aside, protocols for the 17 member costume department are not that different than they would be normally, beyond extra cycles of high temperature washing with anti bacterial soap. The crucial element, she said, is the whole company's rigorous cooperation. "No one is saying 'I'm not going to do it,'" she said. As for the onstage action, Kasif said there have been no modifications and yes, Raoul and Christine still kiss. Which isn't to say the actors haven't had nerve racking moments. Leisy said initially he was "hyperaware" of all the saliva flying around the stage, especially in big numbers like the Act Two showstopper "Masquerade." "When I enunciate, the spit really flies out of my mouth," he said. "At one point, we're all dancing and singing our faces off and I look around and see all this saliva flying. I thought, 'My goodness!'" The run, which has been extended until August (after the touring production of "War Horse" set to follow in the same theater canceled), has not been without its bumps. In late March, about two weeks after the show opened, one of the show's ballerinas said she wasn't feeling well. She was tested, and the result positive was back by 9 a.m. the next morning. Authorities moved swiftly to lock down the theater and check if all guidelines were being followed. A mobile testing unit was installed on the roof of the apartment building where the cast and nonlocal crew live, and everyone was immediately tested both for active virus and antibodies. (A male ensemble member also tested positive but remained asymptomatic.) Yi seul Lee, 28, a graphic designer, had seen the musical in March and said she didn't want to miss the chance to see it again. "Unless we shout very loudly while watching the show or take off our masks, I think we are more or less safe," she said. Still, some fans thought the uncertainties of the pandemic had dampened spirits a bit. In hae Bae, 36, a human resources manager who was seeing "Phantom" for the sixth time, said that every time the actors embraced, the virus popped into her head. And the applause at the curtain call, she said, seemed "timid." "They were way too calm," she said of the audience. "It made me think, 'Coronavirus must have strangled our passion, too.'" Jennifer Schuessler reported from New York, and Su Hyun Lee from Seoul. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
THE STYLE OF MOVEMENT Fashion Dance By Ken Browar and Deborah Ory Dancers are fonts of mystique. Partly due to their bodily capabilities; but consider, too, that their art rarely if ever involves speech. Imagine if all of Tilda Swinton's or Marlon Brando's acts were silent wouldn't these two powerhouses' ineluctable pulls on audiences be all the more potent? You might start to wonder if the otherworldly Swinton spoke in a high pitched murmur recognizable only to dolphins. Or what percentage of Brando's utterances was made up of grunting. Three new coffee table books provide ample evidence of the dancer's ability to enthrall. In "Love, Icebox," the most interesting of the lot, Laura Kuhn John Cage's onetime assistant and now the director of the John Cage Trust collects a series of 39 letters that the composer wrote to the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham during the 1940s. What's lovely about this slim volume is how it traces the full arc of a relationship. The two men met in the late '30s at the Cornish School in Seattle, where Cage was a teacher and Cunningham his student, seven years younger. The initial sorties between the two men were clandestine (Cage was married), but for decades they would go on to be partners then collaborators, and that most oxymoronic seeming thing, fixtures of the avant garde. Cage's early letters are laced with infatuation. "You're a visitation and any one who has a chance to be near you is damned fortunate," he writes in one; in another postmarked the same date: "Need you to lie next to me under, on top, inside, between, close, close." When Cunningham's performance in a 1942 Martha Graham piece goes unheralded by the media, Cage writes, "Nobody recognizes Nijinsky when they see him." Soon he is encouraging Cunningham to break off from Graham and, as Kuhn puts it, "strike out on his own." Though Cage's wife, Xenia, knew about her husband's extramarital relations her own were "an entirely open secret," Kuhn writes she found this particular dyad intolerable, and filed for divorce. Kuhn heart rendingly describes the letter in which Cage conveyed the news to Cunningham as "fragile and ... cut up into small pieces, some of which, folded, have over time broken in two." Cage's subsequent letters to Cunningham are shot through with frustration toward his oft traveling friend: "When in september will you be back? i would like to measure my breath in relation to the air between us." Soon: "Send me more ways to breathe. Oh God I am lonely." On comes a letter wherein Cage doubts his desire to be monogamous is requited. The book's last entry is a breakup letter whose emotional lushness is not what you'd expect from a musician whose most famous composition is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. "I think I have given myself away to you," he writes in or around 1946. "I don't know what is left. When you began to be indifferent, I took delight in that; when cruel, in that, too. I could have gone on forever, living in a complementary way to your treatment. What now but to get quiet and dead?" While the narrative Cage's letters provide has a cumulative force, two books of photographs of dancers are more concerned with isolating moments in time. The photographer Dane Shitagi took his first picture of a ballerina in 1994, when he persuaded a young dancer to pose in front of a waterfall near his native Oahu. His book, "Ballerina Project," is a collection of his subsequent efforts pairing other ballerinas with locations ranging from subway stations to beach piers to urban bridges. Shitagi writes that the "focal point" of the photographs is neither the locations nor dance itself, but rather the ballerinas themselves, "their emotions, their aspirations and the place they are present in their lives." This is an auspicious mission statement, but as one pages through these serene and beautifully composed images, it's hard not to notice that the majority of Shitagi's subjects have their eyes closed or are shot in profile, neither of which helps us to get to know these individuals. Moreover, the near absence of other humans in these portraits gives the impression that dance is a wholly private and introspective pursuit. I missed dance's allegiance to partnering, and found myself fixating on the birds flitting off in several of the photos' margins. I didn't have this problem with "The Style of Movement," Ken Browar and Deborah Ory's gorgeous follow up to their 2016 book, "The Art of Movement," the new book showcasing some of today's most celebrated dancers from modern to ballet to tap wearing sumptuous designer clothing. Like Cage's letters, the photographs herein are all about relationships: sometimes between dancers, but mostly between a dancer and an item of couture. To see clothes take flight on the back of a dancer is to see both the dancer and the garment at their most expansive and expressive. Ordinarily a jewel colored muumuu by Issey Miyake might appear tentlike or inert, but under the stewardship of Martha Graham Dance Company's Xin Ying, captured floating gracefully in midair, the garment is transformed into a tonally rich tribute to the aerospace industry, or flying squirrels. Meanwhile, Ying herself looks by turns magisterial, dutiful, awed, slowed, quickened. As though she's measuring her breath in relation to the air between her and the reader. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Danish design may soon have a watch industry moment. And it's not just that the Copenhagen architect Bjarke Ingels designed the new Audemars Piguet museum, scheduled to open in June. Watch companies in Denmark generally focus on buyers who prize stylish design but at low cost, an approach likely to appeal as the global economy struggles to recover from the coronavirus crisis. "If someone is really interested in that clean Scandinavian look, they might be attracted," said Reginald Brack, a watch and luxury industry analyst and executive director of the NPD Group. He also noted that many Danish watches were considered what the industry calls fashion watches, with prices below 500 because they run on quartz batteries rather than the costlier mechanical movements used by well known Swiss brands. But in Denmark, with a population now estimated at more than 5.8 million, people never have been particularly interested in luxury watch brands. In 2018, a resident's average pretax income was 326,048 Danish kroner ( 47,749), which doesn't easily allow splashing out for a Rolex or Cartier Tank. Similarly, many of the country's approximately 25 watch companies are small operations whose founders were watch fans, but untrained. Jeppe Larsen and Magnus Eriksen, co founders of the Larsen Eriksen watch brand, shared a great passion for design and watches, but "we had no idea how to design or how to produce a watch," Mr. Eriksen said. (Before the coronavirus lockdowns, their watches were sold in 20 countries, including at the Beams fashion chain in Japan and the Tate Modern museum in London.) Here are three companies that have woven Danish design into their own identities. In 2011, Jacob Juul used savings from an export business he formerly owned to start his unisex watch company, Bulbul. He named it for a noisy songbird with a distinctive unicorn hornlike tuft because, Mr. Juul said in a recent phone call from his office in a 19th century building in central Copenhagen, he wanted "something that was unusual but easy to pronounce and easy to spell." Mr. Juul, 44, had no design background so, from a list of 10 favorites, he decided to collaborate with the Danish design group KiBiSi to create Bulbul's first watch. It was named Pebble because its silhouette (something of a square but, at 40 millimeters by 37 millimeters, wider at the top than the bottom) was inspired by pebbles found on Scandinavian beaches. And it took two years to execute because the asymmetrical shape required custom made components "suppliers want to push you in the direction of just making a round watch," Mr. Juul said. The watches, mostly sold through the company's website, range from 179 euros to 499 euros ( 195 to 542). Orders are being taken during the lockdown, and delivered by FedEx. Mr. Juul's plans for the future: moving all the assembly, now done in China and Germany, to Denmark, "which makes it easier for us to know what's going on in the supply chain," he said. It took Mr. Larsen and Mr. Eriksen two years to develop their namesake watch brand, from learning how to design a watch to selecting three production factories in China in order, as Mr. Eriksen said, "to control risk in case one burns down." An example of different might be the Numbers collection, three models created in 2019 with the Danish born graphic designer Mads Jakob Poulsen of Poulsen Projects in New York City. Its Number 1 model, for example, spelled out the number for each hour marker on the 37 millimeter timepiece's dial. (The limited editions, each with 123 pieces, sold out within three months on the company's website, Mr. Eriksen wrote in a later email. Each watch was 1,350 kroner.) Inspiration from the Danish capital seeps through the company's four unisex collections, all powered by Ronda quartz movements made in Switzerland. While the men used their savings and support from family and friends to establish the business, their sales now finance the business, Mr. Eriksen said. And plans for this fall, which have not been curtailed by the Covid 19 shutdowns, are to add new models to the Numbers collection, he said. A strong focus on sustainability is what allows the founders of the watch brand Nordgreen "to distinguish ourselves," said Vasilij Brandt, who along with Pascar Sivam established the business in 2017. The men, both now 29, created a business name that combined their location in Northern Europe (Nord) with a reference to their eco aspirations (green), also reflected in the stylized leaf logo that appears on the dials, crowns and case backs that they source in China. The brand uses Miyota quartz movements from Japan in all of its collections, and offers vegan and nylon straps. Sales are handled through the company's website (which says neither orders nor shipping are being affected by Covid 19) as well as through retailers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
When Jessica and Melissa Tincher take the four hour road trip from their home in Lexington, Ohio, to visit relatives in Indiana, it is a two vehicle affair: They need car seats for each of their four children a 4 year old, a 3 year old and 2 year old twins along with Pack 'n Plays, high chairs, diapers and enough toys to keep everyone entertained. And then there are the two dogs, who together weigh 165 pounds. But as their caravan crosses state lines, the family's relationship changes. In Ohio, their marriage is not fully recognized, which is why only one parent Jessica was permitted to adopt the four biological siblings who came to them through the foster care system. When they drive into Indiana, where they were both raised and married last June, the couple's union is valid, but Melissa still does not have any parental rights. They live in Ohio because Jessica's job as an air traffic controller is there. So Melissa, who stays home to care for the children, must carry around a permission slip of sorts when she takes them to the doctor or other appointments. "I am with them all day every day," Melissa said. "I take care of their day to day needs, and I have no rights to them legally. It's hurtful." But as sweeping as the changes will be, one aspect of marriage may not always be automatically guaranteed: parental rights. "Marriage does not solve all," said Emily Hecht McGowan, director of public policy at the Family Equality Council. "It provides innumerable protections, rights and responsibilities to married couples and parents raising children in a marriage. But it doesn't come close to solving all of the legal and recognition issues that same sex couples and their children face." Family law varies in different states, which is why the advice to same sex couples will remain the same: Nonbiological parents wishing to fully cement legal relationships with their children may need to take another step like adopting or securing another court ordered judgment. If the court rules in their favor, gay couples would for the first time be able to widely adopt children regardless of which state they live in. The right to adopt would provide a profound sense of relief to the Tinchers, along with same sex households across the country, because it would largely end the inequality for many couples whose children have legal ties to only one parent. Now, only individuals or couples whose marriages are legally recognized can generally adopt children in most states. That means same sex couples can adopt in at least 35 states that issue marriage licenses to same sex couples, along with the District of Columbia, according to an analysis by the Movement Advancement Project, though a minority of states have allowed unmarried couples to adopt. With a court ruling legalizing same sex marriage, the report said, married couples would generally be permitted to adopt in all states but one, Mississippi, which expressly bars couples of the same gender from doing so. National marriage status could also provide another way to create legal ties to children, although it may be more tenuous in some states. Traditionally, children born to a married woman are generally presumed to be the legal children of her husband. Many states also have laws that say the husband of a woman who is artificially inseminated with donor sperm is the child's legal father, if he consents to the procedure. Those laws also apply to two married women in many states, but it is unclear whether all states will adopt that position if same sex marriage is legalized nationwide. "There may be some state agencies or others who may challenge that," said Leslie Cooper, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, co counsel in two of the marriage cases pending before the Supreme Court. Married couples who live in states where the law makes it clear that children born into a marriage have legal ties to both parents might be on sound parental ground without adoption if they don't leave their state. But if they travel to, move to or divorce in a state where the parenting law is vague, there may be risks without an adoption or another court order of parentage. Because of the way interstate recognition works on different issues, adoption is the only way to ensure that a parent child relationship is recognized across state lines, said Joanna L. Grossman, a professor of family law at Hofstra University. Some nonbiological parents may not even realize that they have legal relationships with only some of their children, or with those born after the same sex couple was married. Joyce Kauffman, a family lawyer in Cambridge, Mass., represented a woman divorcing her spouse, the biological mother of their two children. One of the children was born before the couple married, while the other was born after. But the nonbiological mother was considered to be the legal parent of only the child born after the marriage. "In the context of the divorce, the children were standing in different legal positions," said Ms. Kauffman, who ultimately suggested that the parties file an adoption petition for the older child while the divorce was pending. Legalizing same sex marriage will not eliminate the potential for discrimination over parental rights in every corner of the country, particularly in places already working on legislation that would undermine a pro marriage ruling. Michigan just passed a law that would allow state funded child welfare agencies to deny services to people including same sex couples who want to provide foster care or adopt based on religious grounds. Virginia and North Dakota already have similar religious exemption laws, according to the Movement Advancement Project, and Alabama and Texas have proposed them. The Tinchers encountered this when they started to care for their two older children, who came from another foster family. After the children had been living with the Tinchers for six weeks, the court appointed child advocate decided to remove the older siblings from the home because she did not feel the situation was in the children's best interest. "As an adult, you have thick enough skin to deal with the discrimination yourself," said Jessica, who got the children back after hiring two lawyers and receiving help from Lambda Legal. "But when the children end up suffering for that, it is really hard." It is impossible to know if marriage recognition would have helped their situation. But legalizing marriage would make families' lives less complicated and open the way for more stability for children. The Windsor decision, the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that struck down part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, extended an array of federal benefits afforded by marriage to same sex couples. But the Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs are not permitted to grant benefits to couples if they live in states that do not recognize their unions, and married couples cannot always file joint state tax returns, either. The Tinchers experience this unevenness in all aspects of their financial lives. Jessica, employed by the federal government, is able to put Melissa on her health insurance policy. But Melissa will not receive any Social Security spousal or survivor benefits on Jessica's record if they remain in Ohio. Jessica also had to file two sets of tax returns: jointly for the federal government but single for the state. "You are trying to raise kids to be open minded," Jessica said. "And at the same time, it's a worry in the back of my mind that we are not the same as everyone else. We are the same. But as far as being treated we are not treated the same." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
New York City Ballet, which has been going through its biggest upheaval in decades, said Friday that its next season would feature a mix of the new and the familiar including six world premieres, Balanchine classics and tributes to two icons of modern dance. It will be City Ballet's first season under its new artistic director, Jonathan Stafford, and associate artistic director, Wendy Whelan, who were appointed last month to succeed the company's longtime leader Peter Martins, who retired last year while under investigation for abusive behavior. But the new season was planned before their appointments by Mr. Stafford and Justin Peck, City Ballet's resident choreographer and artistic adviser. The company will dance new ballets by Edwaard Liang, Lauren Lovette, Mr. Peck, Alexei Ratmansky, Jamar Roberts and Pam Tanowitz. Returning Balanchine works will include "Jewels," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Union Jack," and, of course, "The Nutcracker." And the season will feature the full length "Swan Lake" choreographed by Mr. Martins, who has denied the accusations against him, which a company investigation later called uncorroborated. When Lauren Lovette choreographs, it's as if the steps in her body are in a race to see which ones can get out first: She's just that natural. Ms. Lovette, a City Ballet principal dancer, started making dances at the company affiliated School of American Ballet; she has created two works spirited and fresh for the main company. She's musical, she knows her dancers and she deals with issues of the day. This one will have its debut at the fashion gala. Do I wish her premiere could stand on its own and not be part of that evening? Obviously. But she will make it work. GIA KOURLAS By bringing back this delicately beautiful, mind opening 1958 work, which the company first performed in 1966 and hasn't danced since 2000, City Ballet doesn't just get in on the Cunningham centennial. It re establishes a connection with Cunningham, the modern dance innovator, who studied at the School of American Ballet. A chance to perceive the deep similarities and differences between his choreography and that of Balanchine will be good for the company's dancers and its audience, too. Next step: more Cunningham, please. BRIAN SEIBERT When "Episodes" was created in 1959, it was like a meeting between great power states. Half was choreographed by Martha Graham, half by Balanchine. The sections stayed separate, but as part of the exchange, Balanchine made a strange, pretzely solo for Paul Taylor, then a dancer in Graham's company. Soon, the Graham contribution was discarded, and Balanchine's half, without the Taylor solo, became a classic of the choreographer at his most radical and modern. When City Ballet reinserts the solo, as it hasn't done since 1989, it will be paying tribute to Taylor, who died last year. But it will also be re examining its past in ways that might prove useful in the present. BRIAN SEIBERT Justin Peck seems to have no trouble whipping up expansive, effervescent ballets that hum with the energy of youth. There have been breakthroughs works like "The Times Are Racing" (2017) that catapult the genre forward and, as with any artist, moments of stasis, like this year's pretty but predictable "Principia." What will happen next? With Mr. Peck, City Ballet's resident choreographer, it's always worth finding out. For the winter season, he unveils a new work with a commissioned score by the contemporary classical composer and frequent ballet collaborator Nico Muhly. SIOBHAN BURKE For years, Pam Tanowitz has seemed like an obvious fit for City Ballet: a choreographer who at once honors and stretches the classical ballet vocabulary, forever mining the form for fresh, surprising possibilities. While her first work for the company, coming this spring, builds on a piece she started with other dancers, her 2020 premiere will be her first created fully for members of City Ballet. Whatever she ends up making, this long overdue partnership is cause for celebration. SIOBHAN BURKE It's always good to have an outlier in the mix, and Jamar Roberts, a much admired member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, is just that. He's still new to choreography, but after his 2017 work for Ailey, "Members Don't Get Weary," a powerful, contemporary work about overcoming the blues set to music by John Coltrane, he showed off both his musicality and his ability to move large groups of dancers. At City Ballet, where dancers sing with their feet, that's key. GIA KOURLAS | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Michael Moore has brought his zeal, his humor and his outrage to film, television and books. And now he's bringing them to Broadway. This left wing provocateur is not shy about his agenda, made explicit on a preliminary poster for the production, which poses the question, in all capital letters, "Can a Broadway show bring down a sitting president?" His plan, he said, is to perform a scripted (but also responsive to the news) one man (more or less) show, called "The Terms of My Surrender," eight times a week for 12 weeks, starting in July. He said that the show would simultaneously be entertaining and infuriating not stand up comedy, not a TED Talk, not a rally but "a very developed piece of entertainment for people who like to think." "It's a humorous play about a country that's just elected a madman I mean, there's really no other way to put it," he said in an interview at Sardi's, the theater district mainstay. He was characteristically shlumpy, in an oversized black pullover hoodie and a red 49ers baseball cap; gracious to the passers by who thanked him for his activism and asked for a handshake or a selfie; and thoughtful about theater, as he explained what a firebrand was doing amid the "Cats" crowd. "We're 10 blocks from Trump Tower, we're in the corporate capital of America, we're in the financial capital of America, we're in the media capital of America," Mr. Moore said. "If one was going to stand on a stage and do the things that I'm going to do, there's only one place to do it, and it's here in this city and it's right here at the epicenter of creative expression and free speech." He said that he had been thinking about trying his hand at theater for some time, but the election last year of Donald J. Trump as president which Mr. Moore correctly predicted provided an impetus to do it now. "Can something like this unravel an unhinged man?" he asked. "I think that discombobulation might be our most effective path to undoing his presidency." However, he said it was not solely about the current president. "To say it's just about Trump would simplify it," he said. "I think people will find themselves laughing one minute and wanting to go look for some pitchforks and torches the next." Although Mr. Moore is a Broadway novice, "The Terms of My Surrender" has immediately attracted industry attention. The Shubert Organization has agreed to present it in the 1,018 seat Belasco Theater. Michael Mayer, a Tony winner for "Spring Awakening," is the director, and David Rockwell, a Tony winner for "She Loves Me," will design the set. The show's lead producers are IMG Original Content, making its first stage venture, and Carole Shorenstein Hays, a frequent Broadway producer. "I don't know if I would call it a play; but it is a theater piece,'' Mr. Mayer said. "There is going to be a certain amount of rabble rousing. There's a good chance we'll have some surprise guests throughout the run, and some surprise postshow excursions that will vary night to night." Mr. Moore, 63, became famous as a documentary filmmaker, bursting into public consciousness with the groundbreaking "Roger and Me," in 1989, about his hometown, Flint, Mich., and winning an Oscar in 2003 for "Bowling for Columbine." His theatrical experience is limited he starred in two plays in high school, and tested out some of his new material in London. But he has an unexpected fondness for theater. As a child, he spent summers with relatives on Staten Island, and saw an occasional Broadway show, starting with "Fiddler on the Roof." He has seen a lot of one man and one woman shows. He was even once mugged in Times Square. And he clearly believes in the power of theater to effect change. "It was either this or the Ice Capades," he said. "I've made my movies. I've had two prime time TV series. I've had eight books on your best seller lists. I've done a lot of things with the internet. But I haven't done this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Last Word on Red Carpet Hair: Let It Be What's a hun? For that bit of insider intelligence, you would have to turn to Alicia Vikander, who stepped up to claim her best supporting actress statuette at the Oscars on Sunday, her glossy hair tumbling fast and loose from a lazy half bun at her crown. But when it came to emphatically underdone chic, Ms. Vikander had nothing on Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Emily Blunt and Margot Robbie, each of whom turned her back on the highly lacquered, stiffly sculpted up dos that dominated Oscars past in favor of a free form tumble of waves, one of the freshest, least contrived looks to emerge on the red carpet in years. "I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice that the Oscars seemed a little less stuffy this year," the Hollywood stylist Jen Atkin said. Though she was not in town for the ceremony, Ms. Atkin's fresh from the shower stylistic signature carried the night. "Stars are embracing something more modern and effortless," said Ms. Atkin, whose high wattage clients have included Chrissy Teigen, Katy Perry and the whole of the Kardashian Jenner clan. High time, too. It seems that the Oscars, which has traditionally limped a few paces behind the style curve, has caught up at last. For evidence, there was a heavily pregnant Ms. Teigen, whose artfully mussed hair was arranged in a wispy fishtail braid. Kerry Washington also opted for a starch free style, her hair falling from a back combed mound at her crown and clasped into a raffish ponytail. Ms. Ronan and Ms. Blunt were loosely coifed in a manner that actually reflected the way many style savvy women want to look now. It's no news to younger women, Ms. Atkin pointed out, "that looser strands can give a bit of an edgy finish." For sure, those strands are the emphatically casual counterpoint to the showy regalia that so often accompanies Oscars night the tonsorial equivalent of flat shoes or a well worn leather jacket. Frenchwomen have long embraced this free flowing wash and wear style. Not least among them is the Parisian stylist Odile Gilbert, whose wizardry at the Altuzarra fall show in New York last month was a talking point, with models like Jamie Bochert and Binx Walton flaunting natural hair with a hint of lift and movement. "It's the hair they were born with," Ms. Gilbert told Vogue.com at the time. Interpreted on American shores as the kind of salt sprayed "beach hair" favored by models and their myriad imitators, the look has considerable staying power. As Ms. Atkin maintained, "Model off duty will never go out of style." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LOS ANGELES "Pinchas, how old are you?" Steven Spielberg asked the wall screen, a life size video image of an elderly man in a cardigan, who blinked and answered without missing a beat. "I was born in 1932, so you can make your own arithmetic," responded Pinchas, in a Polish accent. "He asked me to do the math!" Mr. Spielberg laughed. "How did you survive when so many did not?" "How did I survive?" the screen responded. "I survived, I believe, because providence watched over me." The chat went on for five minutes, and while the artificial intelligence looked eerily reminiscent of Mr. Spielberg's earlier films, the goal wasn't entertainment it was education. On the sound sensitive screen was an interactive biography of Pinchas Gutter, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and whose story was part of a tour the director was leading through the redesigned headquarters for the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation, the organization he founded in 1994 to collect testimony from Holocaust survivors. Now Mr. Spielberg has expanded the foundation's footprint on the University of Southern California campus, along with its mission and public focus: to fight hate, which he says has become commonplace globally. "The presence of hate has become taken for granted," Mr. Spielberg said. "We are not doing enough to counter it." The prerecorded video conversation is part of a series using playback technology that invites visitors to converse with 16 survivors of genocide, based on specific word patterns and more than 2,000 questions that vary from views on God to personal history. Earlier this month, the testimony of Pinchas was displayed at the United Nations on the 70th anniversary of the adoption of genocide laws, a storytelling tool to raise awareness. While the foundation continues to archive stories from victims of anti Semitism, and advocate on their behalf, it is also collecting what Mr. Spielberg calls "living testimony" from modern genocide victims. "The Holocaust cannot stand alone," he said with conviction. "We decided to send our videographers into Rwanda to get testimony. From there we went to Cambodia, Armenia we're doing a critical study in the Central African Republic, Guatemala, the Nanjing massacre. Most recently, we're doing testimony on the anti Rohingya violence in Myanmar and the current anti Semitic violence in Europe. We're expanding our scope to counter many forms of hate." Reflecting its founder's legacy, the organization has produced multiple films, including the recent documentary "The Girl and the Picture," about 88 year old Xia Shuqin, who witnessed the murder of her family in the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. It was directed by Vanessa Roth, whose mother was an interviewer for the foundation in the early 1990s. "The Last Goodbye," a virtual reality memorial screening at Holocaust museums in Florida, New York, Illinois and California, takes audiences into the Majdanek concentration camp in German occupied Poland, with Pinchas Gutter as guide, using thousands of photos and 3 D video to explore a railway car , gas chamber and barracks. David Korins, the scenic designer of the musical "Hamilton," is now the foundation's director of museum experiences, with the goal of getting the collection of archival footage into more museums. Rising anti Semitism is providing fresh impetus for the foundation's relaunched efforts. "Not only are people willing to forget about the Holocaust, they're willing to deny it," said Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the human rights organization that has worked with the foundation since the 1990s. "The Shoah Foundation has made a great contribution in that battle for memory." The relaunch coincides with the theatrical rerelease of "Schindler's List." In her 1993 review of the film for The Times, Janet Maslin wrote: "Rising brilliantly to the challenge of this material and displaying an electrifying creative intelligence, Mr. Spielberg has made sure that neither he nor the Holocaust will ever be thought of in the same way again." The film ran in about 1,000 theaters in mid December and was screened free for students nationwide. Although it was digitally remastered in 4K resolution, Mr. Spielberg said, "I didn't touch a frame." The original version of the film is currently available on Netflix. A quarter century on, it remains a complex depiction of Nazi horrors. "We were surprised that somebody even attempted to make a film about it," said Renee Firestone, 94, whose story is told at the foundation. Despite the expansion, some challenges remain, Mr. Smith said. Most testimonies are unavailable online, which means t hey can only be seen at the foundation or the 146 partner libraries and universities ( links are free for families of those interviewed ). There are no transcripts of the recordings yet, but the foundation is spending 10 million building a free online platform for researchers, schools and the general public starting in late 2019, Mr. Smith said. Days before Mr. Spielberg's 72nd birthday, wearing a suede jacket and 1860s style boots from his 2012 opus, "Lincoln," the director munched a granola bar at the foundation's headquarters. The color of his beard is now saltier, he has a few more inches around the middle, but his gray green eyes still shine boyishly when he's discussing his foundation and his seminal film. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. Why expand the mission of the Shoah Foundation? I think there's a measurable uptick in anti Semitism, and certainly an uptick in xenophobia. The racial divide is bigger than I would ever imagine it could be in this modern era. People are voicing hate more now because there's so many more outlets that give voice to reasonable and unreasonable opinions and demands. People in the highest places are allowing others who would never express their hatred to publicly express it. And that's been a big change. There's all kinds of efforts to take the truth and subvert it to twisted ideology. We saw it happen in Europe first, in France, then Poland again I never thought it would come back home to us like it has existed over the last two years. Many groups are clamoring that they have it harder than others how do we overcome that? We can commiserate with each other about suffering and pain, but we should never compete that way. Being marginalized, being discriminated against, having racist and anti Semitic slurs hurled is something that unites all people . Everything against black society is also against the Jewish community. Everything against the gay and lesbian, LGBTQ community is against black and Jewish communities. Hate is hate and the spillover makes us all responsible for watching each others' backs and standing up for each other. None of us could ever be bystanders again. How can Hollywood combat this? Look how many movies are now telling the stories of women. There's a huge shift that is gender centric, and we saw it happen at the beginning of the Harvey Weinstein downfall. Storytelling is fundamentally human. But the art of listening is what I'm hoping the Shoah Foundation is able to inspire. In 2018, Amblin Television, a division of Amblin Partners, Mr. Spielberg's production company, was one of three parties to a 9.5 million settlement agreement with an actress on the CBS show "Bull" who was dropped after she confronted its star about inappropriate comments. A representative for Amblin declined to comment, directing inquiries to CBS, "the sole owner of the show. " What are your earliest memories of being different? My grandmother taught English to Hungarian Holocaust survivors in Cincinnati. I was 2 or 3, and I would sit with them around the table. That's where I learned my numbers on the arm of an Auschwitz survivor who showed me the numbers of his forearm. That was my "Sesame Street." That's how I first learned to count. What more can we do? What do you plan to do? Teachers and parents who need to take responsibility for the acceptance of hatred in the fabric of society. I'm working with the Discovery Channel and the Academy Award winning filmmaker Alex Gibney on a six hour study called "Why We Hate." I'm not planning any more dramatization on the Holocaust itself. I'm putting all my attention on the documentary format. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS (2018) 7 p.m. on Showtime. A celebrated 1973 book by John Bellairs is given the Hollywood treatment here, in a family movie adaptation that stars the actor Owen Vaccaro as a boy who goes to live with his warlock uncle. That uncle, played here by Jack Black, lives in an old house that contains a magic clock hidden in its ... well, you'll just have to watch the movie to find out! Cate Blanchett co stars as the uncle's witch neighbor; Eli Roth, better known for gory movies like "Hostel," directs. The result "doesn't have the sophistication of an adaptation like 'Hugo,'" Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The Times. "But no film in which Cate Blanchett head butts a vivified jack o' lantern could be entirely without merit." To see Black look considerably scruffier (and to see him butcher the word "factotum"), see SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003), airing on Showtime before this movie, at 5 p.m. GREAT PERFORMANCES: NOW HEAR THIS 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The composer Domenico Scarlatti is the subject of this week's episode of this classical music mini series, which is hosted by the violinist and conductor Scott Yoo. The episode looks at how Scarlatti created a style of his own, and successfully straddled the Baroque and Classical periods. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The comeback campaign of Al Franken is coming soon to a satellite radio near you. SiriusXM announced on Wednesday that the former United States senator from Minnesota will host a weekly program, "The Al Franken Show," starting Saturday. He will also contribute to 2020 election coverage on the broadcaster's left wing political channel, SiriusXM Progress. Mr. Franken, a former writer and cast member of "Saturday Night Live," resigned from the Senate in December 2017 under pressure from fellow Democrats after multiple women accused him of unwanted sexual advances. "Listeners can expect a mix of guests from my comedian friends like Chris Rock, to my political pals like former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, to policy experts on the issues in play in 2020," Mr. Franken said in a statement. "When I'm interviewing Harry or former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, I'll be the funny one. When I interview Rock or Patton Oswalt, I'll be the one who served eight and a half years in the Senate." Mr. Franken had stayed out of the public eye since his resignation from the Senate, which he joined in 2009. His resurfacing began in July, with a profile in The New Yorker. The article, by Jane Mayer, cast doubts on some of the accusations against Mr. Franken, and reported that many of the lawmakers who had demanded his resignation now believed he had been forced out too hastily. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Oak Park, Ill., the Chicago suburb where Frank Lloyd Wright spent the early years of his career, may be welcoming a new building into the architect's fold. The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust this week announced plans for a visitor and education center to be built at the architect's former home and studio, which has been open to the public as a museum since 1974. The site is one of dozens the architect designed in the Chicago area, and one of five at which the trust operates public programs and tours. When a property adjacent to Mr. Wright's former residence went up for sale two years ago, the trust bought it and went to work planning how to better serve the estimated 90,000 people who visit his home each year. "It has for a long time been apparent that having a visitor's center would be an important next step," said Celeste Adams, the trust's president and chief executive. "But of equal importance is a need to expand programming and provide a deeper educational impact on visitors and on the community in which we exist." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A year later, the stodgy French luggage house was given a jolt of energy and, yes, cred when its creative director, Marc Jacobs, persuaded his corporate masters to let him begin handing off the precious logo to a series of creatives like the designer Stephen Sprouse and, later, the artist Takashi Murakami to mess up with graffiti or cartoons. The results revitalized Louis Vuitton. They made it relevant at a time when the global cohort of luxury goods consumers was skewing more inexorably toward the young. In the intervening years, there have been so many outings in which designers rode piggyback on commercial labels (culminating with a spring 2017 couture collection from Vetements, whose 54 look lineup consisted entirely of collaborations with brands including Levi's and Juicy Couture), you could think of this strategy as depleted, or "played." Now comes Mr. Jones with a collection that should do little to quiet the whisperings about his disaffection with his owner (was the moving truck print on a shirt front symbolic of something?) or, reportedly, Vuitton's with him. His fall 2017 line was a ho hum grouping of shearling motorcycle jackets, leather Perfectos, baggy pants, artfully untucked shirts, jean jackets bearing the LV logo and ball caps with exaggerated bills. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
What they saw was an explosive growth in the starter bacteria, to the exclusion of almost any other type. Very soon, they began to produce molecules that are usually made later on in the fermentation process, suggesting that having little competition had perhaps allowed them to jump the gun. In contrast, a rainbow of species cropped up more gradually in the other salami, generating a correspondingly more complex and apparently more pleasant array of scent and flavor molecules. Even worse, the microbes in the industrial starter were pumping out acetic acid, the key ingredient in vinegar. That's not a flavor Italian salami aficionados look for: "If you have these notes that are strong in your product," Dr. Cocolin said, "it's not good." This doesn't mean that the starter culture needs to be totally revamped, he said. A small change in the procedure may be enough to get better results: In these salami, the dominance of the starter bacteria and their tendency to produce acid could perhaps have been controlled by lowering the temperature, he suggests. If they were kept in a space that was a little cooler, the bacteria would grow more slowly, perhaps allowing a few other species to find a niche in the sausage and toning down the breakneck pace of acid production. Still, the idea of a more tailored approach perhaps using microbes captured from the wild to get a better flavor is tantalizing. In fact, identifying bacteria for a starter for artisanal Piedmontese salami will be part of the researchers' next project. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Over the period the researchers studied, the opioid epidemic was worsening and many states led mostly by Democrats, but sometimes by Republicans chose to expand coverage under Medicaid, the joint federal and state health insurance program for poor people. The Affordable Care Act gave states the option of covering many more adults through Medicaid , which covers a disproportionate share of people with opioid addiction, starting in 2014. The law also vastly expanded access to addiction treatment by designating it as an "essential benefit" that must be covered through the Obamacare marketplaces and expanded Medicaid . Buprenorphine is one of three medications that the Food and Drug Administration has approved to treat opioid addiction; there is substantial evidence that it sharply reduces the risk of dying from an overdose. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from opioid overdoses over the past decade, including nearly 48,000 last year, and most people with opioid addiction are not getting treatment, according to government studies. The study found that, on average, the rate of Medicaid covered prescriptions for buprenorphine was much lower in states that did not expand the program; most of those states are in the South and Great Plains. In all, 33 states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid since 2014 and 14 have not; they are largely led by Republicans who oppose it on partisan, ideological and fiscal grounds. In three other states Idaho, Nebraska and Utah voters approved ballot measures last fall directing their legislatures to expand Medicaid, but they have not yet done so. All five of the states with the highest buprenorphine prescribing rates for Medicaid recipients Vermont, West Virginia, Kentucky, Montana and Ohio expanded Medicaid. West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio also have among the highest overdose rates in the nation, but overdose deaths fell in all three states last year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The puppeteer and director Basil Twist is a silk whisperer. "It's sort of odd, because I still am kind of baffled by silk," he said in an interview near his Greenwich Village studio. "I think it's mostly that I have a respect for it. The great thing about silk is you don't want to tame it. You don't want to flatten it and stretch it and pull it. You want to let it be wild. And you have to just create the conditions where it can do that and then stand back." In "The Rite of Spring," which makes its New York debut on Wednesday as part of the White Light Festival, Mr. Twist continues his astonishing inventiveness with silk and other seemingly ordinary materials folded paper, curling smoke in a production that deepens his otherworldly melding of abstract puppetry and music. His revelatory "Symphonie Fantastique" (1998) was performed inside a water tank and reimagined what puppets could be: fabric and feathers kicking up a storm to Berlioz. But in "Rite," which he calls "a ballet without dancers," Mr. Twist's canvas is an entire theater. (The all Stravinsky program, to be presented at the Rose Theater, will include new interpretations of "Fireworks" and the "Pulcinella Suite.") "Ever since I made 'Symphonie Fantastique' it seemed obvious: Why don't you do more of this choreography from materials?" he asked. "The concept of doing something bigger had danced around my brain for a long time." He knew the music fairly well. As a child growing up in San Francisco, Mr. Twist used "Rite" as a soundtrack to some movies he made with his siblings. "For, like," as he put it, "a chase sequence." But while working in France on Lee Breuer's "A Streetcar Named Desire," Mr. Twist immersed himself in it. "I would Rollerblade around Paris and listen to 'The Rite of Spring,' " he said. "At some point, I was just like: 'I have to do this with a full orchestra. I can't play it safe.' " Mr. Twist got his wish. "Rite," commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts, is accompanied by the Orchestra of St. Luke's. In it he aims to reflect the intensity of the 1913 Ballets Russes premiere, when Stravinsky's music and Nijinsky's modern, aggressive choreography provoked a near riot in Paris. The music endured, but the ballet disappeared after only nine performances. For "Rite," Mr. Twist wanted to recapture the fluidity and chaos he achieved in "Symphonie." As he discovered, wet fabric is a sad, limp thing, but when floating it reveals the shape of water. Billowing silk has allowed him to recapture that feeling on land. "Smoke does the same thing: You can see the air when it's filled with smoke," he said. "You can tell if it's falling or shooting up or turned into some sort of wave." Amid the swirling smoke and flowing silk are puppeteers, whom Mr. Twist does not take pains to hide. "It's like they're the rioters at the premiere, or they're the orchestra, so I have them in tuxedo tails," Mr. Twist said. "But they're on the periphery. They're the crew of the ship that's tossing at sea, and they're struggling with this machine or trying to run it, and at some point the whole operation turns on them and plucks one of them and throws him into the center." That person turns out to be the chosen one, Christopher Williams, who has worked with Mr. Twist for 15 years. The idea came to Mr. Twist in a dream: He saw a whirl of fabric, like a tornado of silk, and stuck in the middle was Mr. Williams. Yes, there actually is a dancer in "Rite" in a way. "I perform steps, but I really feel like I am one of Basil's puppets, which is really kind of amazing," Mr. Williams explained. "It's a way I've never danced before. I'm not the sacrificial virgin. I am being menaced by the entire theater. At the end, it's the idea of something organic growing out of the human spirit that conquers the giant, theatrical puppet." For Mr. Twist, "Rite" encapsulates ideas about modernism, and though his production is abstract, the furious imagery in it isn't unrelated to environmental issues. He recalled the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. "There was that horrific film that wouldn't stop of that tube just spewing black into this green ocean," Mr. Twist said. "It's Day 15, and it's still shooting out, not slowing down, not stopping they put the cap on it, and it fell off. It was all gorgeous and so intense and graphic and sexual in a way too, but also so horrific and tragic. I was like, that's 'The Rite of Spring.' " But while his "Rite" is full of darkness and decay, "at its most crunched and condensed, there's a beautiful soul a catharsis that transforms it," he said, adding, "That creates an opening for a possibility." Mr. Twist said that he did not think of himself as a storyteller but a creator of time based experiences. He does, rightly, consider himself a choreographer; he collaborated with Christopher Wheeldon on full length versions of "Cinderella" (2012) and "The Winter's Tale" (2014). "He so clearly understands movement," Mr. Wheeldon said. "There's something very fluid and choreographic about his work and the way he's able to make inanimate objects suddenly look like they're really dancing." For Mr. Twist, who worked his silk magic in "Before the Dawn," Kate Bush's stage show in London, dancers are not only artists but warriors. Recently, he started rehearsing a new piece with the dancer Wendy Whelan; the experience has helped him realize how similar ballet partnering is to puppetry. He is even considering studying ballet. "I'd like to," he said, almost bashfully. "I have such admiration for dancers like beyond. And this recent thing, where I've been lucky enough to work in the ballet, I'm just eating it up. I love it so much. It makes me even more like, 'Oh, I will never do that.' So I haven't yet." He smiled. "But I know I'm a good dancer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
As traditional retail stores close and vacancies mount, landlords across the country appear newly receptive to leases as short as a week, eschewing the typical 10 year time frame, even in locations that once shunned limited stays. The upswing in pop up stores, as the short term placements are called, is playing out in all sorts of ways, and in all sorts of places including dark malls, former grocery stores and shuttered art galleries, according to real estate brokers, landlords and tenants. For retailers, the stores can offer lower rents and far less commitment. For the landlords, the reason is just as clear: A short term tenant is better than no tenant at all. "Landlords have their backs against the wall right now," said Samantha Elias, the co founder of the Vintage Twin, a secondhand clothing company whose stores frequently pop up in Manhattan. "I tell them that some money is better than no money, and I promise not to bother you." The rise in pop up stores is adding another element of change to a retail industry facing upheaval from profound shifts in consumer habits and powerful new competitors, especially online. In the past, short term tenants focused on holidays like Halloween: Costumes were hot items in October, but sales evaporated once the calendar turned to November. But today, the products go far beyond monster masks, to skin serums, designer handbags and crystal champagne flutes, as brands see pop ups as an opportunity for quick public exposure or as a possible steppingstone to something bigger. And while some landlords continue to shun short term deals arguing that the rents, which are generally below market rate, do not justify the trouble and cost involved with preparing a space they are quickly dwindling in number. "The trend has become more prevalent in the last year or so," said Karen Bellantoni, a vice chairwoman of RKF, a retail focused national brokerage firm. RKF does not specifically track pop ups, which is also the case with other major firms. But the fleeting boutiques are an increasingly bigger part of agents' business, including in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas and New York. "We're definitely seeing landlords looking for them," Ms. Bellantoni added. Landlords are finally coming around, she said, but they may have no choice, as stores continue to go out of business. Ms. Elias added that "it must be really scary right now" for owners in SoHo, where most of her pop ups have been. But the new stores can cause landlords to lose money, said Stephen Summers, the managing director of Highland Park Village, an upscale shopping center near Dallas that is in the midst of a multiyear renovation. In late 2014, Mr. Summers installed Goop, an online retailer founded by Gwyneth Paltrow, for a four week run in a former grocery store at his historic red tile roof complex, a widely copied model for the 20th century shopping center. Because the store, at 20,000 square feet, was considered too large for Goop's needs, Mr. Summers had to construct a more intimate 1,500 square foot berth, including dressing rooms. That renovation ultimately caused the deal to be unprofitable, he said, even though Goop drew so many customers that there were lines around the block. But Mr. Summers said he was glad to have a relationship with the company. Goop, which has popped up in multiple spots, is planning to open permanent locations, and Mr. Summers plans to court the company. "Pop ups are a responsible way to grow," he said. Like Goop, other web born businesses are seeking a bricks and mortar presence as well, aware that most shopping is still done offline, and are turning to pop ups to get their start. For instance, Daniel Wellington, a six year old watch company with a heavy social media presence, has been selling its timepieces in part through department stores like Bloomingdale's and small jewelry shops. But in November 2015, it opened its first temporary store in the East Village of Manhattan. A year later, it opened one in nearby SoHo for two months. Because that location was a success, Wellington signed a more permanent six year lease for the same space, said Ola Melin, a company spokesman. Wellington also has pop ups in Boston, Miami and Honolulu, among other cities, Mr. Melin said. In SoHo, where pop ups are especially popular, the range in rents can be significant. Long term tenants have been paying in some cases up to 150,000 a month, brokers and tenants say. But pop ups can get deals for 25,000 a month. They generally pay all their rent upfront and agree to leave with a few days' notice if a longer term tenant is signed. While some buildings may be hard to get into, others seem more inviting, like 543 Broadway. That is where Vintage Twin which is owned by Ms. Elias and her twin sister, Morgan has been set up since April, and which bustled with shoppers on a recent weekday afternoon. A tie dyed Grateful Dead concert T shirt from the 1990s was 244. Several pop ups have set up camp at the address, a Beaux Arts edifice, since Carlo Pazolini, a shoes and accessories store, closed in 2015 after a four year stay. "To keep the neighborhood alive and vibrant, you need to have retailers occupying space, especially in today's day and age," said Jared Epstein, a principal of Aurora Capital Associates, the building's landlord. Similarly, last year, Aurora installed the Broadway Market Company, a pop up with various vendors who sell handbags, jewelry and stationery, in a vacant building it owns nearby. Its lease is expected to run about 18 months. Likewise, an Aurora owned building in SoHo in May welcomed Artists and Fleas, another market with tables and racks from different vendors, which replaced a 10,000 square foot Armani Exchange store that closed in March. Artists and Fleas has committed to a one year lease, Mr. Epstein said. Swooping in to capitalize on the rash of empty stores in New York and elsewhere are some new brokerage type businesses, which charge fees to landlords as brokers do and also sometimes market spaces concurrently with other agents. Examples include Space in the Raw, a two year old firm that for about a month last fall joined Taco Bell with Sony PlayStation for a SoHo pop up, in its first New York retail deal. There is also Appear Here, a four year old British company that opened a New York office in April. Since then, it has found homes for dozens of pop ups, said Ross Bailey, its chief executive, including Misbhv, an apparel company, on East 34th Street, in a part of Midtown where empty stores are evident. Mr. Bailey says that contrary to popular belief, young adults want to touch what they buy and also enjoy the physical shopping experience. Besides, "it would be a sad world if everybody was staying at home looking at screens," he said. This month, Appear Here raised nearly 13 million in venture capital, bringing its total in raised funds to about 21 million. But in a way, pop ups, despite their growing ubiquity, are like Band Aids on deep wounds when it comes to the problem of stubborn vacancy rates, brokers say. "Rents are just too high, and it's just too cost prohibitive to be here," said David Barreto, the founder of Cast Iron Real Estate in SoHo and someone who encourages landlords to do what it takes to fill spaces. "It's really just sad." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Ruchit Garg, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, says that he worries that something isn't right with his Internet shopping habit. With each new delivery to his doorstep sometimes several in a day he faces the source of his guilt and frustration: another cardboard box. Then, when he opens the shipment, he is often confronted with a Russian nesting doll's worth of boxes inside boxes to protect his electronics, deodorant, clothing or groceries. Mr. Garg dutifully recycles, but he shared his concerns recently on Twitter. The new arms race for Internet retailers is speed, making the old Federal Express commercial, "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight," seem as quaint as delivery by horse and buggy. Amazon boasted in a news release in December about its "fastest order delivered to date" a Miami customer's craving for a four pack of Starbucks vanilla frappuccino was sated in 10 minutes flat. In 10 major regions, Google Express delivers in a little less than two hours from dozens of stores including toys, drugs, hardware and pet supplies. Postmates, a San Francisco start up, promises deliveries in less than an hour. It dropped off nearly one million packages in December. Over all, the 350 billion e commerce industry has doubled in the last five years, with Amazon setting the pace. Its Prime membership service has grown to more than 50 million subscribers, by one estimate. (And its new faster service, Prime Now, can "get customers pretty much anything in minutes," its website says). Uber calls its new UberRush service "your on demand delivery fleet"; Jet Delivery offers "white glove" service in less than two hours; Instacart can deliver groceries to your door in less than an hour. The environmental cost can include the additional cardboard 35.4 million tons of containerboard were produced in 2014 in the United States, with e commerce companies among the fastest growing users and the emissions from increasingly personalized freight services. "There's a whole fleet of trucks circulating through neighborhoods nonstop," said Dan Sperling, the founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, and the transportation expert on the California Air Resources Board. He also is overseeing a new statewide task force of trucking companies and government officials trying to reduce overall emissions from freight deliveries, including for e commerce. Dr. Sperling said that consumers shared as much responsibility for the environmental cost of the deliveries as the companies that provided the speedy services. "From a sustainability perspective, we're heading in the wrong direction," he said. But measuring the effect of the cardboard economy is more difficult. There are possible trade offs, for example. As people shop more online, they might use their cars less. And delivery services have immense incentive to find the most efficient routes, keeping their fuel costs and emissions down. For its part, Amazon said that delivering to consumers straight from huge warehouses cuts down the need to distribute to thousands of stores. So far, though, shoppers appear to be ordering online while still driving to brick and mortar stores at least as much as in the past, according to Dr. Sperling and other academics. One recent study explored the environmental effect of Internet shopping in Newark, Del., and found that a rise in e commerce in recent years by local residents corresponded to more trucks on the road and an increase in greenhouse emissions. "Online shopping has not helped the environment," he said. "It has made it worse." Other scholars say that, at least for now, online shopping appears to be complementing brick and mortar shopping, not replacing it. "People who shop online also like to see and feel things," said Cara Wang, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who studies transportation issues and has written a paper about habits of online shoppers. "And they have to return things." Dr. Wang and other researchers say the demand for instant delivery, in particular, creates challenges for trucking companies trying to be efficient. Instead of taking big truckloads to single retailers they now make more scattershot deliveries. Many drivers deliver just one item. This is often the case for Postmates, which has a fleet of 15,000 freelance drivers signed up to make deliveries of whatever the customer orders an Uber like service, but for deliveries. The cost typically starts at 5, and a 9 percent service fee applied to the cost of the item. (The company says it also has about 5,000 deliverers who go on bike or foot in dense urban areas). And the push for speed from marketers gives shoppers little incentive to wait. "Why select one week if I can get it in one hour?" asked Miguel Jaller, an assistant professor at U.C. Davis who studies urban freight patterns. Such is the case for Monica Rohleder, who admits to using Amazon Prime so much that "my husband jokes we keep Amazon in business." Ms. Rohleder, who lives in Los Angeles and works at a public relations firm, said she liked overnight delivery, but "within a couple of hours is best" because she is busy with work and her two young children. So she often does not order something until it's urgent. "There's the immediate gratification of getting something and checking it off your list," she said. One afternoon she received six boxes, from Amazon and Nordstrom, for a Hawaii trip, including bathing suits, workout clothes and coloring books. Some of the clothes did not fit, so she returned them. She thinks more about the cardboard that comes into her house than the truck emissions, she said. "It's embarrassing," she added of her mass of weekly recycling. Dennis Colley, the president of the Fibre Box Association the trade group for the corrugated paper, or cardboard, industry estimated that the use of boxes for e commerce was growing faster than most other market segments. However, he emphasized the industry's efforts to be environmentally conscious, and that 90 percent of corrugated packaging were recycled. Amazon is aware of the cardboard issue. Since 2009, it has received 33 million comments, ratings and photographs about its packaging as part of its "packaging feedback program." Amazon said it used that feedback to make sure that cardboard box size was consistent with the size of the product. It also works with manufacturers to send some products without additional cardboard packaging, said Craig Berman, a company spokesman. Though recycling can make consumers think they are helping the environment, the process has its own costs, including the emissions from shipping it to recycling centers, which use a lot of energy and water. Don Fullerton, a professor of finance and an expert in economics and the environment at the University of Illinois, said one possible solution would be to make the retailers responsible for taking back the boxes. That would create incentives for them to come up with solutions for less packaging. "And maybe not put a box inside a box inside a box," he said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Recology, San Francisco's main recycling processor, which collects 100 tons of cardboard every day, has a simpler solution: "Slow down consumption," he said. "Slow down." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra which appeared at Carnegie Hall to patchy effect on Friday, led by the rising star Mirga Grazinyte Tyla has had a rough time lately. James Levine, the conductor who created this ensemble as we know it over the past four decades, retired into an emeritus position in 2016 after years of health problems, his teeth gritted against the move. He was fired this March amid accusations of sexual abuse and harassment. Three days later, he sued the company for breach of contract and defamation. On Friday, hours before the orchestra took the Carnegie stage for the first in its annual series of concerts after the opera season a series Mr. Levine made possible the Met countersued, ensuring that the cloud that has settled over its music making will hover for some time yet. In the meantime, Mr. Levine has been removed, not just from the Met but also from its history. "Our Story," on its website, contains no mention of the man who led more than 2,500 of its performances. Ditto the Met's Sirius XM satellite radio channel, which no longer broadcasts Levine led operas. (They remain available on the company's subscription service, Met Opera on Demand.) This all must be uncomfortable, to say the least, for the members of the band Levine built. They will get some much needed stability when Yannick Nezet Seguin takes over as music director in the fall, two years ahead of schedule. Over the past season, they have seemed to bear the stress and uncertainty of the situation with assurance, sounding superb in modes as different as the weighty shine of "Parsifal" and the effervescent lilt of "Cendrillon." Without Mr. Levine, the opera season went fine, but the performance on Friday, less than a week after the final "Tosca" and "Romeo et Juliette," did sound as if some of that stress and uncertainty had finally caught up with the ensemble. These Carnegie concerts one off programs featuring symphonic works that an opera orchestra hardly ever plays were always predicated on the group's close relationship with Mr. Levine, who was able efficiently to make it sound world class in repertory largely foreign to it. Taking the podium that was long his, Ms. Grazinyte Tyla, making her debut with both this ensemble and at Carnegie, was a remarkable symbol of a company seeking to turn the page. She was scheduled to conduct even before Mr. Levine's downfall, and women were not among his accusers, but the spectacle of a 31 year old female conductor leading "his" orchestra nevertheless felt like a breath of fresh air. (It was unavoidable on other level not to think of new life while watching Ms. Grazinyte Tyla, who is due to have a baby in August.) Born in Lithuania in 1986, she has swiftly come to prominence over the past five years. After serving as an assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 2016 she became the music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England, a position that boosted the careers of Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons. She conducts in generous, sweeping, full arm gestures, charting broad arcs in the air in front of her. And she is a vibrant presence in front of an orchestra, rising to her toes at climaxes. But Debussy's "Prelude a l'Apres Midi d'un Faune," which opened the concert, felt opaque and awkward. While this is delicate, vibrating music, the orchestra was only really characterful when its strings summoned bronzed surges; the colors grayed as the textures lightened. Shostakovich's grim orchestration of Mussorgsky's four part "Songs and Dances of Death" had massed solidity here, but little grandeur or dramatic variety. It is always a pleasure to hear the richly settled sound of the young mezzo soprano Anita Rachvelishvili starring at the Met next season in "Aida," "Samson et Dalila" and "Adriana Lecouvreur" but she, too, seemed content merely to sound good; there wasn't sufficient bite in either singer or orchestra. It's hard to avoid having an effect in Tchaikovsky's crowd pleasing Fourth Symphony, and the playing in it was more confident. But aspects of Ms. Grazinyte Tyla's interpretation of this most overplayed of standards felt unpersuasive. Lingering tempos in the first movement and the pizzicato Scherzo didn't create momentum or open space for newly discovered details. She and the orchestra were most memorable in a quietly poised, beautifully phrased encore for strings, "Svajone" ("Dream"), by the Lithuanian composer Juozas Naujalis. Along with the 43 year old Mr. Nezet Seguin, a new generation of conductors is arriving at the Met. Next season includes opera debuts by artists like Gustavo Dudamel, James Gaffigan, Omer Meir Wellber, Henrik Nanasi and Cornelius Meister. (Yes, all men.) With the company's orchestra seeking a future and its footing after Mr. Levine's fall, this period may well prove crucial. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Lesley Dill, a mixed media artist who has had more than 100 solo exhibitions, works in a 300 square foot studio in her apartment in an Art Deco tower in Downtown Brooklyn that she shares with her husband, Edward Robbins, a journalist and filmmaker. The studio is many times smaller than the museums and galleries in which she typically exhibits her art. Sometimes her ambitions force her to spill into the kitchen. But since the coronavirus appeared and Ms. Dill, 70, had to send her half dozen assistants home, her life has contracted. She has been left alone with hundreds of yards of fabric scrolls on which she stencils lush quotations plucked from the 19th century. Surrounding her, too, are huge cloth figures dressed in spiky word covered garments. These are the components of "Wilderness: Where You Come From Is Gone," Ms. Dill's evolving study of divinity and deviltry in the early United States. The textile figures represent religious crusaders, social activists and Native American leaders whose voices have improbably risen from repression and exclusion. The cast includes the Puritan reformer Anne Hutchinson, the abolitionists John Brown and Sojourner Truth, the Shakers founder Mother Ann Lee, the artist Horace Pippin, the Sauk leader Black Hawk and a dozen others. Exhibited in New York in 2018, "Wilderness" is scheduled to open in its expanded version next year, on May 29, 2021, at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. In late March, Ms Dill spoke by phone about adapting to her new work style. (This interview was edited for clarity and length.) How are you spending your days? The space at the Figge Museum is 90 by 38 feet, with 20 foot ceilings, and my project needs to fill it. I am hoping to complete 16 3 by 12 foot scrolls that wrap the entire gallery. Plus, I'm working on five new 8 foot high textile sculptures to add to the existing 10, plus two 8 foot high drawings. (The existing figures are at the Nohra Haime Gallery in New York, which represents her.) You had to say goodbye to the team of interns who normally help you paint the hundreds of thousands of letters you stencil onto your flat pieces and sculptures. How are you coping? My wonderful right hand studio manager, Sarah Ingber, lives only four blocks away, in Brooklyn Heights, thank God. On the last day she could come here after the ban on nonessential workers, we ordered supplies from Blick and packed up a huge suitcase for her to take home full of paint, brushes and scrolls that I had already stenciled. We also packed up a large scroll and paint for my assistant, Alannah Sears, who lives in Inwood. Our plan is to review the work in snapshots we send back and forth on our phones. Sarah, being so close, can drop off what she has done in the lobby, and I can leave things for her to pick up. When Alannah is finished, I'm going to have her FedEx it back to me. We will let whatever we have touched or worked on breathe for two or three days in some outdoor space. Of course, I spray everything with Formula 409 anyway. Are you listening to actual music? Yes, for the first time alone in my studio in 20 years, I have been playing Bach. His concerto in D minor with two violins makes me swoon. What happens if the sheltering conditions persist for many more weeks and you run out of prepared things to stencil and paint? I will have to learn how to sew with a sewing machine, so I can make the scrolls. I will have to figure out a way to make the textile figure of Horace Pippin; all the other ones are good to go. Apart from altering your process, has the pandemic led you to think differently about your art? My theme is the theme of the original European American settlers and their almost biblical sense of wilderness as a fear of the unknown. It was a place of the devil, where dangers whether from Native Americans, wild animals or starvation lay to be conquered, to be controlled. (Native Americans did not think of the wilderness as wild; for them, the white Europeans were the devil.) In that sense, this virus is that wilderness beast, the invisible unknown. It is the outside force that drives us to think about it, to fear it, to think about our lives differently. And somewhat like both our early European Americans and Native American peoples, I think we will emerge from this experience into a new land one we will try to shape into what is familiar, but also one we don't know yet what meaning it will have globally. You are in contact with contemporary Native Americans for this project. Has the subject of the virus obviously a sensitive one, given the terrible history of Indians and infectious disease come up? It is just starting to. I'm in touch with Johnathan Buffalo, the historic preservation director of the Meskwaki Nation's tribal museum in Iowa, and Ray A. Young Bear, who is the Native American author of the novel "Black Eagle Child." Ray A. Young Bear passed along the words to me of a fellow tribesman: "Now you know how we felt when our predecessors were infected purposely with disease." What else feels relevant to this moment from your cohort of early American firebrands and justice seekers? The controls and the restrictions that we find in the Shakers: They walked one by one on the simple path; they didn't walk side by side. Walking the narrow path is something we're doing now. You have described yourself in interviews as an introvert. Is your personality helping you in these isolating times? Yes. I feel a sense of balance, because the deep introversion that I normally feel the refuge, the prison, the palace of my art making, of my heart and my mind somehow feels matched by the quiet, the silence and the renunciation and isolation of the world right now outside my windows, in the streets. And I find this is true of others. My friend Barbara Takenaga is single, happily working alone in her studio with her dog, Andy, today. Another friend, Charles LeDray, is upstate with his husband, but he is never happier than talking on the phone and working on his incredibly obsessive work. Handwork, that's what it's about. It's about the obsession of the mind being turned into tactile voice. So even facing a crushing deadline, you're not feeling so bad. I would like to be the first to admit that, as an artist, I am lucky compared to many, many people: our health workers, the M.T.A. workers, the homeless, the at risk families in New York. I get to be safe in my studio. My deadline is not for another year. I can get lots of people to help me in the last month to try to make up for this, hopefully. I'm looking on this virus globally, as if the world is a big horse and this big horse is sick. The poetry of Emily Dickinson, another famous introvert, has re emerged in your work over the last 30 years, even supplying the content for your opera, " Divide Light ," which was restaged last year by the New Camerata Opera company and will be projected on the walls of the Figge. Which of her words come to mind now? Emily Dickinson wrote "Some, Too Fragile for Winter Winds." I think that's a feeling that we feel now. And who are the fragile people? It's still unknown. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The Marshall Plan was successful, though, as Steil, the senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, demonstrates, American intervention in postwar Europe did not quite work out as expected. While the Marshall Plan helped restart Europe's economy, it did not provide a glide path for the United States to avoid a long term security entanglement. The American initiative provoked Stalin and led to a series of Kremlin overreactions and misjudgments, including the Berlin blockade of 1948 49. Stalin, who had no interest in reviving Germany's economy let alone European trade, was the captive of conspiracy theories that seamlessly linked the Marshall Plan to a capitalist plot to resurrect the anti Soviet Wehrmacht. Meanwhile, although Western Europeans worried about Stalin especially after he tightened his control over Eastern Europe in response to widespread enthusiasm for Marshall Plan funds they were just as concerned about the ghost of Hitler. In a way that Harry Truman and George Marshall did not predict, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was the price that London and Paris expected the United States to pay for their full participation in what they saw as the risky endeavor of resuscitating the western part of Germany. In the words of Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO's first secretary general, the Atlantic alliance existed to keep "the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down." Steil has written an ambitious, deeply researched narrative that not only delineates the interlocking gears of international politics and economics in early postwar Europe but also introduces a large cast of statesmen, spies and economists that perhaps only Dickens could have corralled with ease. Slow going at first, the book builds intellectual excitement as the characters act and react to one another. NATO is not the only unexpected child of American pragmatism. So, too, in a way, is the drive for European unity. As the American vision for reconstruction takes hold, the British and, especially, the French come to embrace economic coordination not out of a commitment to liberalism but out of a desire to contain the German economic power that Washington is determined to unleash. This pragmatic European turn is dramatized by the conversion of the influential French statesman Jean Monnet. Immediately after the war, Monnet was an economic nationalist, advocating for French control of the German Ruhr to ensure French domination of postwar European steel production. He then became a champion of European unity. Steil's focus on the debate over the future of Europe's economy provides a fresh perspective on the coming Cold War. Although he sidesteps the arguably sterile question of which national policymaker bears the greatest blame for starting the Cold War, he shows both that Truman and Marshall understood that the plan would challenge the Soviet approach to postwar Europe and that Stalin would never tolerate a powerful German economy unless the Soviet Union were the primary beneficiary. At the heart of the Cold War was an irresolvable superpower disagreement over what to do with Germany. Four decades later, Mikhail Gorbachev's acceptance of George H. W. Bush's vision (also the vision of the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl) of a unified Germany in NATO effectively signaled the end of the Cold War. There is one other element of Steil's important narrative that allows events years later to come into clearer focus. George Marshall, in a June 1947 speech at Harvard laying out the rationale for rehabilitating the European economy, cautioned that enlightened self interest in foreign affairs is not an easy sell to the American people. "The very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio," Marshall, who had interacted with so many Americans over the course of a long military career, explained, "make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation." He understood that his fellow citizens were especially vulnerable to demagogues who appealed to narrow, selfish nationalism. In asking Americans "to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country," Marshall pleaded that "political passion and prejudice should have no part." Ultimately, to Marshall's chagrin, Congress would rely less on reason and more on exaggerated fears of communism, stoked by Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe, to sell Americans on engagement with the world. "The very fate of civilization is at stake," said House Speaker Joseph Martin, a Republican, after the February 1948 Soviet coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Nicki Minaj pulled out of a music festival in Saudi Arabia "to make clear my support for the rights of women, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and freedom of expression." "After careful reflection I have decided to no longer move forward with my scheduled concert at Jeddah World Fest," she said in an emailed statement on Tuesday, provided by her record label. She had wanted "nothing more than to bring my show to fans in Saudi Arabia," she added, but had better educated herself on the country's human rights issues over the past week. Ms. Minaj was announced on July 2 as the headline act for Jeddah World Fest, billed as "one of the biggest music events ever staged in the Middle East" and the latest event to try to change the kingdom's international image. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Security experts said they had uncovered evidence that the attack had been in the works since late last year. It was directed at the Pyeongchang Organizing Committee and incorporated code that was specifically designed to disrupt the Games or perhaps even send a political message. "This attacker had no intention of leaving the machine usable," a team of researchers at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence division wrote in an analysis Monday. "The purpose of this malware is to perform destruction of the host" and "leave the computer system offline." In an interview, Talos researchers noted that there was a nuance to the attack that they had not seen before: Even though the hackers clearly demonstrated that they had the ability to destroy victims' computers, they stopped short of doing so. They erased only backup files on Windows machines and left open the possibility that responders could still reboot the computers and fix the damage. "Why did they pull their punch?" asked Craig Williams, a senior technical leader at Talos. "Presumably, it's making some political message" that they could have done far worse, he said. Talos's findings matched those of other internet security companies, like CrowdStrike, which determined on Monday that the attacks had been in the works since at least December. Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike, said his team had discovered time stamps that showed the destructive payload that hit the opening ceremony was constructed on Dec. 27 at 11:39 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time which converts to 6:39 a.m. Eastern Time, 2:39 p.m. in Moscow and 8:39 p.m. in South Korea. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The N.B.A.'s 75th season began Tuesday night with wins by the Nets and the Clippers. A new calendar year arrives in just nine days. The time, then, has never been more right to consult our crystal roundball for the usual batch of eight (almost) fearless predictions for what awaits in thisleague in coming months: James Harden will be traded no later than Jan. 25 two full months before this season's trade deadline. The initial rumblings, at the start of Harden's standoff with the Houston Rockets, suggested that a trade was unlikely to materialize until closer to the March 25 deadline. The Rockets were determined to first see if they could repair their relationship with Harden, then to leverage the two guaranteed seasons left on his contract on the trade market. More current rumblings indicate that tension within the Rockets is mounting each day Harden goes untraded. The Athletic illuminated some of that tension with a report Tuesday that Harden recently threw a ball in practice at Jae'Sean Tate, his new rookie teammate. Both sides now want to move on as quickly as possible. It's time. I still regard Philadelphia as the most likely landing spot for Harden, largely because Ben Simmons most closely fits the description of the sort of building block player Houston is holding out for in return. I'm also told that the familiarity between Daryl Morey and his Rockets successor, Rafael Stone, will outweigh any lingering ill feelings from Morey's move to Philadelphia as president of basketball operations less than two weeks after he walked away from his Houston contract. I know Morey has said that Simmons is going nowhere. I also know Morey made similar statements about Chris Paul before he traded Paul to Oklahoma City for Russell Westbrook. The Heat let it be known this week that they are not actively pursuing Harden, which is a blow for the Rockets because Miami is one of those fearless teams with the oft proven gumption to embrace an enigma like Harden in spite of the various red flags. The Sixers and the Nets, though, may not be the only other options: In recent days, it has become known that Toronto, Boston and Denver have also had exploratory talks with Houston. The Rockets will keep probing the market, as eager to move on now as the superstar they catered to for the past eight seasons. At least three of the following five players will be traded this season in addition to Harden: LaMarcus Aldridge, Aaron Gordon, Buddy Hield, Zach LaVine and Kevin Love. Maybe even all five. Love's case is the most intriguing. He has 91.5 million left on his Cleveland contract with two more seasons after this one. Yet the flurry of contract extensions we've seen during the N.B.A.'s truncated off season may encourage a team or two out there to sacrifice some future salary cap flexibility to absorb Love's deal, knowing that free agent options will be more limited than anticipated. Both Aldridge and Gordon are interesting candidates with their shorter remaining contracts to slot in Boston's 28.5 million trade exception, which the Celtics (depending on their willingness to run up their luxury tax bill) can use to add absorb a huge salary in a trade. Kevin Durant will be the first player in N.B.A. history to go from an Achilles' tendon tear to Most Valuable Player Award candidacy. Kevin Durant's game looked as fluid as ever during the preseason. In Tuesday's New York Times, as part of a staff compendium of award predictions for the coming season, I went with Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks as my M.V.P. selection. As strong as Doncic's case will surely be, I've been asking myself if I should have gone with Durant. It is super early in his comeback, true, and the Nets will be wary of overtaxing their star forward during the regular season. But Durant is shooting, moving and, yes, dunking as fluidly as we've ever seen a player post Achilles' tendon surgery. Even at 32, Durant looks highly capable of changing the devastating history of the most dreaded injury in the sport. Then again, Durant is one of the sport's true offensive unicorns, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The Eastern Conference will earn your respect. I can't claim to have invented the phrase, but I think I've been using "Leastern Conference" jabs in stories for almost 20 years. Even in recent seasons that produced a champion from the East, depth on that side of the N.B.A. has often been lacking. This season will be different. Although the West still has more teams that can credibly compete for a playoff spot, it appears that more challengers to the Lakers' throne (starting with Milwaukee, Miami and the Nets) can be found in the East. Sorting out the East's top seven, if the Indiana Pacers are indeed more dynamic offensively under new coach Nate Bjorkgren, should be complicated and fun. Finishing sixth in each conference will mean more than it ever has before. One of the best things about the N.B.A.'s play in playoff round, beyond giving four more teams than usual a pathway to the postseason, is how much more value finishing sixth in the East or West holds. The No. 6 seed clinches a first round playoff berth. The No. 7 seed slips into a four team scramble that, in the worst case scenario, could result in an early off season. In the N.B.A.'s ongoing quest to make the regular season more meaningful (and watchable), this should help. The No. 9 or No. 10 seed in either conference would have to win two consecutive games to bump off No. 7 or No. 8 for a playoff spot. None Game 1: The format calls for the seventh place team in each conference seed to play No. 8, with the winner claiming the No. 7 seed. None Game 2: The No. 9 seed goes up against No. 10. The loser is eliminated. None Game 3: The loser of Game 1 faces the winner of Game 2. The Game 3 winner claims the final playoff berth, with the loser heading to the lottery. There will be All Star balloting, like usual, even if there is no All Star Game. I think the league, deep down, would like to arrange a simpler All Star Game, just this season, if it made sense to do so. That, however, is a lot to ask in these coronavirus times especially when a true midseason break of some sort is sure to be welcomed by players after the shortest off season in history for most teams. Can you live with traditional All Star balloting, coaches selecting the reserves and the usual Twitter fisticuffs over who got snubbed? I'm pretty sure we're going to get all that. The Miami Heat will reach the N.B.A. finals again. This is going to be harder than it sounds if you remember the above warnings about the East's top seven. It will be doubly difficult if you endorse the belief in some league circles that the Heat would not have advanced to the finals at Walt Disney World if not for some bubble anomalies, like the lack of travel and the absence of hostile environments on the road. Miami's ever demanding culture for players that puts so much emphasis on fitness and focus, as the theory goes, had its roster primed to cope better than anyone with the long bouts of isolation in the bubble and other mental health challenges. I don't buy it. I think the Heat have a worthy, versatile, defensive minded team that orbits around Jimmy Butler and will be stronger this season as Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson develop. They beat the Lakers twice in the finals, remember, despite the injuries sustained by Adebayo and Goran Dragic. There will be a loud campaign for the N.B.A. to start cooking up a new all time team, featuring 75 players as the league's 75th birthday nears in June, to replace or update the league's list of 50 greatest players named in October 1996, the league's 50th season. And if I'm wrong and no loud campaign materializes, I will start it myself. You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I'll field three questions posed via email at marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you're writing in from, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line. Q: The West is obviously going to have more than eight teams vying for playoff spots. Which teams do you think we can rule out now? Natalie Anfuso (Wayne, Pa.) Stein: I totally understand why you're asking, because it's a difficult question to answer. If you're looking to rule out teams completely, I would feel comfortable naming only Oklahoma City and that's just because the Thunder have aggressively embraced a rebuilding posture. It wouldn't surprise me, with Shai Gilgeous Alexander running the offense and Al Horford and Luguentz Dort anchoring the defense, if even the Thunder proved to be a tougher out than expected. Every team in the West that finished eighth or lower last season has grander visions of this season's ceiling. No. 8 Portland believes it will contend for a top four seed after the acquisition of Robert Covington and some additional roster tweaking. Memphis placed ninth and is counting on a similar finish, at worst, purely through Ja Morant's presumed improvement in Year 2. And No. 10 Phoenix is widely regarded as playoff material now after going 8 0 at the Walt Disney World bubble and then trading for Chris Paul. While outsiders await a potential trade that ships out a veteran like LaMarcus Aldridge, DeMar DeRozan or Patty Mills, No. 11 San Antonio is optimistic that the experience its younger players gained in the bubble will make the Spurs a playoff sleeper. No. 13 New Orleans is one of the more difficult teams to assess and figures to have a puncher's chance to reach the postseason purely based on the track record of its new coach, Stan Van Gundy, and Zion Williamson's promising preseason. Golden State, of course, is expected to bounce back from the league's worst record (15 50) to contend for a playoff berth even with Klay Thompson out for the season after he tore his right Achilles' tendon in November. I have more confidence in Karl Anthony Towns and D'Angelo Russell clicking and No. 14 Minnesota joining that mix ahead of No. 12 Sacramento, but the Timberwolves and the Kings have to be considered playoff long shots in a conference this deep. The Kings, remember, have missed the postseason for a league high 14 consecutive seasons and, even with a revamped front office, left numerous rival teams stunned by their decision not to match Atlanta's four year, 72 million offer sheet to Bogdan Bogdanovic. Q: Maybe it wasn't part of the wildest off season ever, but Luke Ridnour had a wild week in 2015 he was traded five times, if I remember correctly. Did he ever play for any of them? Barron Hall (Chicago) Stein: Good follow up question to our recent debate in this space about the proper amount of awe in response to the leaguewide frenzy of transactions in the days before and after the Nov. 18 draft. Ridnour was actually traded four times in a week in June 2015 one trade more than Trevor Ariza was subjected to last month but he never played for any of the teams involved. In fact, Ridnour never played in the league again after his stint with Orlando in 2014 15. He had a nonguaranteed contract worth 2.75 million for the 2015 16 season, which is why Ridnour kept being moved, but he decided to stop playing after Toronto acquired him from Oklahoma City in trade No. 4. The first three trades sent him from Orlando to Memphis, Memphis to Charlotte and Charlotte to Oklahoma City. Ariza is on the Thunder's opening night roster and, according to my old friends at HoopsHype, has been traded 10 times in his career more than any other player in league history. Ariza is likely to be mentioned frequently as the potential recipient of an in season contract buyout that makes him a free agent target for contending teams like the Lakers, but who would be surprised if Oklahoma City finds a way to trade him again? Q: I honestly don't know what normal is anymore, but the last five minutes of the Golden State Sacramento game last Tuesday night were pure joy. All the rookies and reserves were playing their hearts out, Kyle Guy's buzzer beater gave the Kings a win, and Steve Kerr, Alvin Gentry and Luke Walton were all laughing through their masks. As a basketball starved, 70 year old woman, I enjoyed all of it. Bring it on! Gigi Coe Stein: You get the last word, Gigi. Let's hope, as the regular season opens Tuesday night, that we have lots of scenes like the one you describe to dissect and savor. Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo last week became the sixth player to sign a so called supermax contract extension, joining Golden State's Stephen Curry, Portland's Damian Lillard, Houston's James Harden, Washington's Russell Westbrook and Houston's John Wall. Two marquee stars who were eligible to sign supermax deals with their former teams but declined: Anthony Davis (New Orleans) and Kawhi Leonard (San Antonio). Utah's Rudy Gobert was also eligible for the supermax but signed a five year deal on Sunday with the Jazz at roughly 23 million below the highest amount he could have received. The supermax contract was introduced to help incumbent teams retain superstar players, after Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City for Golden State in July 2016, but Harden recently became the third of those six supermax recipients to request a trade. Westbrook has been traded twice since signing his supermax with Oklahoma City in September 2017. Wall signed his with Washington in July 2017 and was traded for Westbrook on Dec. 2 after both players asked for a trade. Charlotte's LaMelo Ball threw some of the best passes I've ever seen during the preseason including a one handed bounce pass against Orlando on Saturday with skip and bend that should be enjoyed over and over but Ball, a rookie guard, is struggling as badly as feared with his shooting. Drafted No. 3 over all by the Hornets in November, Ball shot 26.2 percent from the field and 27.3 percent on 3 pointers in Charlotte's four exhibition games. With a career conversion rate of 44.3 percent, Philadelphia's Seth Curry ranks second in league history in 3 point percentage behind Golden State Coach Steve Kerr, who was a career 45.4 percent shooter from long range. The Warriors' Stephen Curry is sixth at 43.5 percent, behind Hubert Davis (44.1 percent), Drazen Petrovic (43.7 percent) and Duncan Robinson (43.7 percent). We can't forget that Stephen Curry, coming into this season, had attempted 5,739 3 pointers in his 11 N.B.A. seasons. That's more than Kerr (1,599), his brother, Seth (1,007), and Miami's Robinson (641) combined (3,247). Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Composers have been hired for two forthcoming blockbusters about warrior women "Wonder Woman 1984," directed and co written by Patty Jenkins, and "Mulan," directed by Niki Caro from a screenplay by three women. The composers: Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson Williams. Both, plainly, dudes. More than just a missed opportunity to lend flinty female heroes a female musical voice, the announcements were simply the latest examples of women being sorely unheard in film music. A 2018 study by the University of Southern California revealed that for the top 100 fictional films at the box office every year from 2007 to 2017, only 16 female composers were hired, compared with more than 1,200 men. Another report, from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, showed that of the top 250 films at the domestic box office in 2018, 94 percent were scored by men. Karpman was instrumental in expanding the diversity of her branch's membership, which now includes the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina. Karpman also spearheaded the creation of a shortlist in the score category of the Academy Awards. "Had we had a voted upon shortlist last year, I think we would have more diversity," she said. Citing the composers behind "Get Out" and "Mudbound," she added, "I want to see Michael Abels and Tamar kali on Oscar shortlists." (Karpman spoke before the shortlist was announced in December. It includes Terence Blanchard's score for "BlacKkKlansman" his first Oscar nomination if he moves to the next round but, alas, no women.) Tamar kali is one of several new voices in a persistently white male milieu. "Mudbound," directed by Dee Rees, was the Brooklyn artist's first score, which she followed with the Netflix drama "Come Sunday." She's also reteaming with Rees for an adaptation of the Joan Didion novel "The Last Thing He Wanted." As an Afro indigenous woman in the New York punk rock scene, she said, she was already used to being "an outlier within the outliers." "It just kind of fuels your creativity," she explained. "The ethos means even more to you, because you're practicing it every moment even in the pit, even at shows." Like a handful of other female artists, Tamar kali wasn't pursuing film composition, but was commissioned after a director heard her work. Mica Levi, a British rocker from the band formerly known as Micachu and the Shapes, was nominated for an Oscar for "Jackie," which followed her shivering, queasy breakout score for "Under the Skin." The Icelandic cellist composer Hildur Gudnadottir was hired for "Sicario: Day of the Soldado" and the forthcoming "Joker," starring Joaquin Phoenix two patently "macho," big budget features largely because of her experimental electronic solo work. "People approach me looking for a specific type of sound, or feeling," Gudnadottir said. "They don't come knocking on my door for, like, a John Williams score. So that also puts me in a really good position, because I'm normally allowed to be myself." All of this raises the question of why most studio features even female centric no brainers like the "Ghostbusters" reboot and "Ocean's 8" still go to men. The history of women scoring films isn't long. The pioneer was probably Germaine Tailleferre, a French composer who co scored a travelogue in 1926. Thirty years later, the American Bebe Barron created the avant garde electronic sound for "Forbidden Planet" with her husband, Louis. Wendy Carlos's seminal synthesizer album "Switched On Bach" led to her collaborations with Stanley Kubrick on "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Shining." Angela Morley was an Oscar nominated composer whose credits included the 1978 animated feature "Watership Down" and the TV series "Dynasty" and "Dallas." Shirley Walker was a pianist who helped Carmine Coppola realize his score for "Apocalypse Now," and went on to shape scores by Elfman and Zimmer in the 1980s and '90s as an in demand orchestrator. Both men, classically untrained, credit her as a teacher. Walker, who died in 2006, also composed her own scores, notably "Batman: The Animated Series," the "Final Destination" movies and the 2003 horror film "Willard." Yet she could never break into the top tier movies she was helping men with. "I don't think she got in the door for the same meetings that the guys would get," said Lolita Ritmanis, a composer who was mentored by Walker. "I wouldn't say she was bitter. She was a fighter till the end." The first woman to win an Oscar for best score was Rachel Portman, for "Emma" in 1996. (The only other woman to win that prize is Anne Dudley, for "The Full Monty" the next year.) The film industry, Portman said, "tends to be quite cautious." She added that directors feel more comfortable with composers who have "done something really similar sounding before which immediately makes it very difficult to break in. And also this feeling that there's safety if someone else has hired someone before, which I think is particularly hard for women." The women interviewed for this article offered a variety of reasons for the longstanding inequality: institutionalized sexism; a lack of precedents and female role models to inspire girls to go into the field; and the social conditioning of women to be selfless caretakers and not seize the spotlight. Increasingly, women are entering the profession, but are still outnumbered by men. The film scoring certificate program at the University of California, Los Angeles has produced 120 graduates since 2013, of which only 25 percent were female. Likewise, only a quarter of applicants to the film scoring graduate program at U.S.C. this year were female although the school invited seven women to join its 20 student program. Rachel Portman with her Oscar for "Emma" in 1996. She was the first woman to win for best score. Several workshops including the Sundance Institute Film Music Program, which has achieved gender parity the past two years, and the Ascap Film Scoring Workshop are trying to provide more women with real world experience and access to the industry. Universal Pictures started its Film Music Composer Initiative to find talented women and people of color. Winning candidates are writing orchestral scores and running recording sessions at Abbey Road for shorts created by DreamWorks Animation. Nora Kroll Rosenbaum scored the program's first short, "Bird Karma." She praised the initiative for providing opportunities, adding, "That door has been very much shut for a lot of people." There are also new resources for support. The Alliance for Women Film Composers was founded in 2014, and now has close to 400 members. It has raised the visibility of women through concerts and advocacy work, and provides solidarity in a lonely profession with no formal union. "It's a sisterhood, it's a resource," said Ritmanis, president of the alliance. "And although we are very much competitors, we are also each others' cheerleaders." "I think because of the global awareness of women's rights, and MeToo, and Time's Up and all these different movements," she added, "there is an interest and a call to action" among studios and decision makers. "People call me wanting to meet and figure out what they can do, and I do think that there's a lot more opportunity for women to be part of the big audition process" for major feature assignments. As there should be, given their talent, said Doreen Ringer Ross, an executive in the film music division of Broadcast Music Inc., the performing rights organization which manages the catalogs of many of Hollywood's top composers. "The job of a composer is to be really sensitive, is to interpret the emotion of things, musically," she said. "And women are traditionally great at doing that." Still, emerging composers face a double standard. Jesi Nelson has been apprenticing with several male composers as she develops her own career, and she's dealt with potential bosses commenting about her legs or musicians assuming that she's somebody's personal assistant when she's actually running a recording session. "I do get angry, and sometimes I'm just like, what's the point?" Nelson said. "If I'm working these ridiculous hours seven days a week, 18 hour days and it's paying off for somebody to diminish everything that I've worked hard for in a few words based on my gender, like, why am I even doing this? But I love it way too much, so I won't stop." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A Chipotle ad was shot in Idaho at "a fraction of what a full blown production would have cost," according to its chief marketing officer. The advertising industry's tendency toward excess catered parties in Las Vegas headlined by pop stars; unwieldy internal hierarchies stuffed with countless director roles; throw it at the wall ad placement has persisted for years despite concerns about wastefulness. The pandemic may force all of that to change. Some people in the industry say a correction was necessary. Marketing budgets have dwindled as the coronavirus led to nationwide lockdowns and canceled events, and customers are no longer in the mood for flashy TV commercials or bright, cheerful billboards. The research firm Forrester predicted last week that advertising spending in the United States would decline by 25 percent this year and would not recover until 2023. For Twitter, advertising revenue fell 23 percent in the most recent quarter. Now the platform has said it is looking into subscriptions and other ways to make money that do not depend on ads. The ad giant Omnicom Group said on Tuesday that revenue in its second quarter slumped nearly 25 percent and that the decline "is expected to continue for the remainder of the year." Like many of its peers, it laid off 6,100 employees, shed more than 1 million square feet of space, froze hiring and implemented some pay cuts. In place of the pre pandemic parties and dinners, the longtime advertising executive Gaston Legorburu has been going "from war room to war room" at Fortune 500 companies, where he said he found many advertising plans and marketing departments in limbo. His agency, Glue IQ, has placed interim workers at companies that have cut back their staffs. "There's a big correction a lot of these teams have gotten too big and too bloated," he said. "They're now having the realization that they can do twice as much with half as many people." While the industry tightens, the ads it produces have become simpler and more practical. Campaigns are often produced quickly and on the cheap as companies have tried to adjust to the initial shock of lockdown, worldwide civil rights protests and the seesaw of reopenings that have sometimes been interrupted by new outbreaks. More clients have asked that their ads be made by and feature a more diverse group of people, while also demanding more evidence that the ads are effective. Agencies have experimented with digital tools to help brands stay relevant, such as a "tension map" that analyzes online conversations around the country. "This is an industry that is constantly talking about wanting to transform itself, but that is also constantly sticking to very traditional approaches," said Marcelo Pascoa, the vice president for marketing for the beer brand Coors. "Old habits die hard, but people are being forced out of necessity to adapt faster." In 2020 and 2021, agencies will shed 52,000 jobs, according to Jay Pattisall, an analyst with Forrester. Half the jobs will not return, he predicted. Last week, the agency Wieden Kennedy laid off 11 percent of its work force, citing "an impasse" with the pandemic. Havas, another large ad company that laid off employees, said that recovering "will undoubtedly take more time than hoped." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "There will be fewer and smaller agencies that are just as capable, if not more capable, because they'll lean on technology for basic tasks like a bot that takes notes for you during a call, that processes the paperwork to hire an influencer for a campaign, or does audience analysis for a media planner," Mr. Pattisall said. Other work may go to part time contractors, as companies seek flexibility, said Kenny Tomlin, who recently co founded the digital agency CourtAvenue. Mr. Tomlin has helped connect Fortune 100 brands with "pre tired" marketing professionals workers who are on the cusp of retirement but still want occasional work. "There are a lot of client engagements right now that are project based, where they don't want to sign multiyear retainment agreements, and they don't know what their long term budgets are," Mr. Tomlin said. The pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests have forced many companies to take a hard look at their marketing strategies. Visa said this month, during what it called "a time of great introspection and change," that it would take bids from ad agencies hoping to become its go to creative partner. The company, which spent 235 million on marketing in the first quarter of 2020, said it would consider candidates' commitment to diversity in its review. Coca Cola is also "reassessing our overall marketing return on investment on everything from ad viewership across traditional media to improving effectiveness in digital," James Quincey, the chief executive, said during a conference call last week. The company will "be judicious in our use of marketing," he added, as it tries to track changes in regional lockdown policies. But there are reasons for optimism. Dentsu, a major advertising holding company, has returned some agency employees to full shifts after moving them to reduced schedules. At the advertising and communications giant WPP, which has had more than 100,000 employees working from home for months, new business plunged early in the pandemic but has since recovered to early 2020 levels. WPP and the rest of the country have "seen decades of innovation in a few short months," said its chief executive, Mark Read. Live sports, a magnet for advertising, may be on their way back, with the National Basketball Association season scheduled to restart July 30 and the National Hockey League set to return Aug. 1. Ad space attached to four games that helped usher in the Major League Baseball season on Saturday quickly sold out, according to Fox Sports. More than 60 advertisers, such as Hankook Tire and Bud Light, participated. But that space may be at risk: More than a dozen Miami Marlins players and coaches have tested positive for the coronavirus after this weekend's games, putting the rest of the shortened season in doubt. Derek Andersen, the chief financial officer of Snap, warned on a conference call last week that the demand for ads in the third quarter of the year had "historically been bolstered by factors that appear unlikely to materialize in the same way they have in prior years, including the back to school season, film release schedules, and the operations of various sports leagues." The uncertainty has provided a challenge to an industry that tried to gauge the national mood. "The consumer psyche and what they wanted to hear and needed to hear from brands would just change week to week," said Chris Brandt, the chief marketing officer of Chipotle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
At this year's Sundance Film Festival stories of resilience were met with acclaim, as were works by female directors and writers. Desiree Akhavan's film "The Miseducation of Cameron Post," about a young woman sent to a gay conversion therapy camp, won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. dramatic competition. The film's star, Chloe Grace Moretz, dedicated the award to survivors of the discredited practice. "We want this movie to shine a light that it is only illegal in nine states out of the 50 states of this country to practice sexual conversion therapy," she said in her acceptance speech. Because of technical difficulties, Ms. Akhavan's video acceptance speech was not broadcast. Sara Colangelo was the recipient of the U.S. Dramatic Directing Prize for her film "The Kindergarten Teacher," a remake of the 2014 Israel film of the same name about an educator's obsession with a gifted student. Another woman, Iceland's Isold Uggadottir, won the directing prize in the world cinema division for her film "And Breathe Normally." The U.S. Documentary Directing prize went to Alexandria Bombach for her film "On Her Shoulders," about Nadia Murad, a Yazidi activist and sexual assault survivor who endured years of captivity at the hands of ISIS in northern Iraq. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"Hamilton" has been celebrated as a bold exemplar of diversity. But it's not enough to simply slot actors of color into historically white roles. Late June brought news that the animated shows "The Simpsons," "Family Guy," "Big Mouth" and "Central Park" would recast characters of color who have been played by white actors. A week later "Hamilton" dominated the cultural chatter on Independence Day weekend when Disney premiered the film version of the Broadway phenomenon. In both situations performers inhabited characters of racial backgrounds that were different from their own, often referred to as "colorblind casting." But one provoked the usual apologies and promises to do better while the other was celebrated anew as being a bold exemplar of diversity though it ultimately presents a set of more complex concerns. Still, the difference between the two lies in their approaches to the all encompassing nature of whiteness in American industries and narratives. Whereas the world of voice acting for animation is just another dominated by white workers, casting a person of color as a typically white character is an act of subversion, a normalization of something other than the white standard. The Black and brown founding fathers of "Hamilton" make the story of America something that can finally be owned by people of color, as opposed to the reality, which so often refutes the relevancy of their lives and contributions. Though egalitarian in theory, colorblind casting in practice is more often used to exclude performers of color. It's a high minded sounding concept that producers and creators use to free themselves of any social responsibility they may feel toward representing a diverse set of performers. The history of the practice in live action takes is more egregious, and has been well documented: Mickey Rooney's notorious Asian landlord in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; Alec Guinness's Arab prince in "Lawrence of Arabia"; Laurence Olivier in blackface as Othello. In the past decade alone, Natalie Portman, Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson, among others, played characters onscreen who were of Asian descent in the source material. And though this trend so often favors white actors if you have a few hours, or days, to kill, Google "whitewashing controversy" it certainly isn't limited to them. People of color are often tagged in to represent an identity different from their own, as though Chinese is synonymous with Korean or Mexican is synonymous with Indian. It seems needless to say, and yet, here it is: Any casting of a performer in the role of a race other than their own assumes that the artist step into the lived experience of a person whose culture isn't theirs, and so every choice made in that performance will inevitably be an approximation. It is an act of minstrelsy. Despite this recent trend, actors and creators have defended such choices with purportedly merit based arguments. Earlier this year, in fact, Loren Bouchard, one of the creators of "Central Park," explained Bell's casting by saying "Kristen needed to be Molly; we couldn't not make her Molly." More often than not, when the defense rings out in the chord of "they were the best person for the job," that "best person" is white. That is no coincidence. Another popular defense that pops up, most often in internet discourse, involves canon: The story, the holy text, must be preserved as written. Even if this defense didn't presuppose that anything canon should not be open to challenge or reinterpretation, it would still fail to recognize that in many stories the character's whiteness is incidental to the narrative. So why not use that opportunity to re create the character as someone who doesn't fall into the majority? The fact that Ariel is white has nothing to do with her story about wanting to be with her love and walk on land. The casting of a Black actress to play Hermione Granger in the play "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" provoked howls from many fans, but the character's whiteness never had any bearing on her brilliance. In fact, stories that do not take their characters' whiteness as a given may find fresh relevance and invite new audiences into their sphere, because for so many people of color, they don't get to see themselves represented in the media they consume. For me, it was "The Wiz," starring Diana Ross as a Black Dorothy; I loved it so much more than the original "Wizard of Oz." And in 1997, it was Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical "Cinderella" film, which was completely colorblind. The singer actress Brandy was a Black Cinderella, with a white stepmother (Bernadette Peters) and a Black stepsister, as well as a white one. The prince was of Filipino descent, with parents who were Black and white (Whoopi Goldberg and Victor Garber). And Whitney Houston was a glamorous fairy godmother. The whole movie was a visual feast, with bright costumes and playful dance numbers, and it never explained the puzzling genealogies of its characters. It simply allowed the audience to soak in the story and characters as they were. But however well intentioned, there are complications that come with works that aim to use colorblind casting to highlight people of color who wouldn't otherwise be represented. Creators may cast blind, thinking their job done, failing to consider that a Black man cast as a criminal or a Latina woman cast as a saucy seductress even when cast without any regard to their race can still be problematic. One kind of blindness can lead to another. And then there's also the "Hamilton" problem. The show may place diverse bodies on the stage, but productions that would subvert a narrative traditionally owned by white characters must not just tag in actors of color but reconsider the fundamental way the new casting changes the story. In "Hamilton," the revision of American history is dazzling and important, but it also neglects and negates the parts of the original story that don't fit so nicely into this narrow model. The characters' relationship to slavery, for example, is scarcely mentioned, because it would be incongruous with the triumphant recasting of our country's first leaders. (The "Hamilton" star and creator Lin Manuel Miranda responded to this criticism this week, calling it "valid.") The trouble of a colorblind production might not be the casting itself, but the fact that the casting may still erase the reimagined characters' identities. (If Willy Loman is Black, wouldn't he have a more complex understanding of the American dream?) Careless colorblind casting in animated roles, in live action roles on TV, movies or the stage assumes that identities amount to nothing and that all experiences are transferable, which is far from the reality. In a 1996 speech, the playwright August Wilson spoke out against colorblind casting overall, saying: To mount an all Black production of a "Death of a Salesman" or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as Black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large. Wilson called not for colorblind casting, but for institutions that invite art by and for people of color, to tell their own stories and not simply ones adapted for them. He doesn't call for blindness, but visibility: people of color seen on stages and behind the curtains. This applies to all art forms people of color should be on movie screens, on the TV and in recording booths giving voice to stories about them. It's hard not to see his point. Even times when it's employed with good intentions, colorblind casting often fails in the execution. It's a larger problem of the narrative of our nation, which frequently refuses people of color their own stories, reflexively opting for a white purview or offering stories written for white characters but with people of color haphazardly slotted in. We're forever fighting our America's racial default. Blindness is no excuse. In a moment when we're reassessing everything surrounding representation, perhaps it's time for all of us to finally open our eyes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Leland Gilmore, with his dogs Oakley and George, near Mount Hood in Oregon. "These are little escape vessels, escape pods," said Mr. Gilmore, whose business, Benchmark Vehicles makes custom vans for up to 300,000, van not included. I do not own a car or a house or even a bicycle. Nor am I prone to following Instagram trends. Yet for weeks I have had an obsession: getting rid of all my possessions, breaking the apartment lease, and moving with my dog and my girlfriend into a tricked out van. The things I would do in a van! Coronavirus would be just a faint memory in a van on the open road. As with most strange impulses that feel unique, this quirky seeming urge is anything but. The vanlife business is booming. Dozens of new companies are popping up to rent or sell retrofitted sleeper vans, some now with yearlong wait lists. Apps are surfacing to help these van dwellers find legal parking. Big R.V. park conglomerates, whose stocks have soared, are starting to eye the new interest and figure out ways to capitalize. And advocates for the rights of the homeless, who often end up living in cars out of need, are seeing potential new allies among the new professional class of car campers. The last few months have felt chaotic, and the van living sell is that there can be stability in constant motion. "What we say is: We build your escape," said Leland Gilmore, the founder of Benchmark Vehicles, which makes custom vans. "These are little escape vessels, escape pods." Mr. Gilmore typically sells custom vans for 100,000 to 300,000, not including the cost of the van, which is usually a 40,000 and up Mercedes Sprinter. Demand has nearly doubled since lockdowns began, he said, and Benchmark Vehicles just hired three more people. Vanlife has been an influencer trend on Instagram for years. It usually involved a good looking young couple in a van posting gauzy portraits of each other and sweeping scenes of the places they visited. The fantasy life they sold is freedom and simplicity, a radical reduction in burden but not comfort. For these are not backpackers looking tired and worn, with massive calves and wild hair. Vanlife is an aesthetic trend, closer to the tiny home movement, yet even richer, lusher and typically sexier. It is the minimalist fantasy, which is always in part a lie. The vans are 6,000 or more pounds of gear, and living very small and possession free is often much more complicated than living big and sprawling. But as the pandemic has worn on, it is a fantasy more people are finding themselves having. Rohan Dixit, the founder of a medical device start up called Lief, has decided to move full time or close to it into a van, as soon as his order from the van conversion company Ready Set Van comes this fall. "Rent is really expensive, and I really like being out in nature, and now with coronavirus it's like all in person meetings are canceled," said Mr. Dixit, 34, who lives in Berkeley, Calif. "I don't really need to be in the Bay Area." He said his plan was to "go between the mountains and the ocean and anywhere there's a cell signal." Benjamin Fraser, who founded Ready Set Van in March, said he was "blown away by how deep the vanlife dream has permeated culture, and it made me realize we're actually selling a lifestyle, a whole new way of living." He gets about 20 inquiries a day for vans. People have offered to throw in an extra 10,000 to cut in line, which he does not allow. He is soon moving the business into a 15,000 square foot facility near Lambertville, N.J. Before vans, he was into cryptocurrency trading, and the van boom times remind him of that heyday, he said. He worries it could disappear just as quickly. "Is it just going to evaporate the moment we have a vaccine?" Mr. Fraser said. Of course, the dream of getting rid of stuff and hitting the open road has existed for many years. That is what drove the R.V. movement. So I asked Mr. Fraser what the difference between R.V. culture and vanlife was. Vanlifers see themselves as free from restrictions and rules, he said. They do not want to be in R.V. parks. They want to be in the wilderness or on the streets of beach towns. Some of their parking behaviors they will park for days in beach parking lots and residential streets are illegal. This is becoming a problem as their numbers grow. "Some people go far trying to be stealth now," Mr. Fraser said. "They won't have any windows. They'll put like a Joe's Plumbing sign on the side of the van. They beat up the sides of the van to make it look authentic." Jeremiah Weaver, who turns Mercedes Sprinter vans into sleepers in San Fernando, Calif., is booked until the winter. He said many new clients came from cities, especially San Francisco and New York. They are drawn to vanlife in part because of coronavirus quarantines, in part because of high housing prices, and in part because they want to escape what looks to be a summer of protest and unrest. "Right now with coronavirus and the political instability, people want more control over their environment," Mr. Weaver said. "If you're in a van, you know who's in it, you control how clean it is, and you know where you're going." Jay Sfingi, a co founder of Sync Vans in Bellevue, Idaho, whose services are booked through early 2021, said, "There's this sense of wanting to control your own environment more." Some van retrofitters are worried all the new interest from inexperienced van campers like me will bring punishment on them all. "We've now seen basically everyone in this country want to get out in a van, but no one actually understands how to camp off the grid," said Gretchen Bayless, who rents sleeper vans through her company Roamerica. "They think they can park anywhere and that there's like facilities out there on the road. And we have to say, 'No, doing this means you have to get a toilet from us and you go in a bag, and you carry that bag.'" And park services are either limited or closed because of coronavirus shutdowns. "People are just being dumb," Ms. Bayless said, laughing. "So now we've been kind of vetting people who call in." Others watching the movement see potential for new political alliances. As more young professional urban dwellers decide to spend time in vans, longtime activists for the homeless see an opportunity. These new vanlifers might push for changes that help those who live in vans out of need, not as a hobby, he said. As with street dining, these new van dwellers raise questions of both impact and opportunity. So I keep shopping for one of these vans. As I do, I go deeper, reading about the various specs and possible additions. How great would it be to have a rainfall shower head? A bed for four? A desk? Maybe even a television? R.V. owners will realize how ridiculous that sounds. The Winnebago Intent is both less expensive (or at least comparable at 122,000) and sleeps at least five. No wait list. But R.V. business owners know that eventually the hipsters in vans will find their way to the vehicles that were already prepared for them. While vanlifer apps like Hipcamp and Harvest Host help van dwellers find farms and wineries to park in, Rich Stockwell, an R.V. park consultant, said a lot of investors were betting on vanlifers wanting parks pretty soon. People are talking to him about developing more youth oriented parks for vanlifers with areas for children and pets, as well as elaborate business centers. "The analogy I like to use for people with vans is they're just like boaters," he said. "They get foot itis, and they just can't wait to get one more foot, another foot, and pretty soon they're in a big rig." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
What books are on your nightstand? Sean B. Carroll, "The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters." Colin Mayer, "Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good." Daniel Pauly's forthcoming "Vanishing Fish: Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries." Max Tegmark, "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence." All have something to do with the analysis of biological and human ecosystems, my current focus of study. What's the last great book you read? Irenaus Eibl Eibesfeldt, "Human Ethology." The massive, definitive account of communication and social life in hunter gatherer and primitive agricultural societies. It deserves to be used as a permanent classic. What should we read if we want to learn something about naturalists? Gerald Durrell's books, to start, which are full of naturalist observations. My own effort, "Naturalist," was composed with this goal in mind. For the early years of natural history, I recommend Philip Henry Gosse's volume from the middle of the 19th century, "Letters From Alabama." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Hannah Rose Dalton recently posted an image to Instagram of herself in a pink outfit. But this wasn't some Barbie princess fantasy. Instead she wore a draped wrap jacket over a feathered skirt, 15 inch tall platform boots without heels that gave her the appearance of levitating, and a neck brace. A design resembling barbed wire or lightning bolts ran from her cheek along the side of her bald, conical head; there was a smooth patch where her nose should be, and her eyes were a blank sea of putrid yellow. The caption read, "Gurl bye." In another post, Ms. Dalton stands alongside Steven Raj Bhaskaran, her partner in life and business, who prefers the gender neutral pronoun Mx. and wears a white buttoned shirt and leather harness over a black asymmetric skirt and towering black platform boots. From Mx. Bhaskaran's mouth hangs a long black appendage, like a swollen tongue or overgrown tail. From the sides of Mx. Bhaskaran's head dangle two stringy black locks of hair. In the background, a man on his cellphone looks on in confusion. "We're not trying to be an influencer," Mx. Bhaskaran, 24, said during a recent phone call from London. "We're not trying to follow the rules. The rules were not made for us. Instead of trying to reach a standard that's not going to happen, we want to have fun and create what we want to create." Tired of banal and homogeneous standards of beauty, some social media users have begun exploring aesthetic territory once thought of as underground, alternative or even ominous, and they're exposing it to the mainstream. "Looking at what we're afraid of, that fuels what we do," said Ms. Dalton, 23. She and Mx. Bhaskaran design accessories and apparel, which is sold on the e commerce platform Depop. Accounts like Salvia, Hungry and Aunt Petunias Friendz are also marrying the macabre and the glamorous. They have antecedents in the work of Alexander McQueen, 1990s club kids, Cindy Sherman (currently posting eerie self portraits on her own Instagram account) and Lady Gaga. Salvia, the Instagram persona of Lilith Morris, a 17 year old who lives in Wales, is ethereal and scary, like a fairy possessed by a demon. "My look is inspired by science fiction and drag, I find inspiration in so many places," Ms. Morris wrote in an email. "Recently I have been feeling very inspired by tarot cards and the women depicted in Pre Raphaelite art." Her posts can recall the familiar hyperfemininity of Amanda Lepore, the downtown transgender night life fixture, or be more shocking, featuring animalistic and extraterrestrial imagery. "My look has evolved over time and is still changing, it started with shaving my eyebrows and wearing white mascara and grew into how I look today," she wrote. Last fall, Ms. Yee and her team named a strain of the trend "Dark Wonder," highlighting the "overlap between reality and virtual reality coming to the fore and inspiring beauty looks that are experimental, futuristic and with a sci fi twist." Might this be a reaction to world events? "We are living in an age of anxiety, and consumers are looking for a way to escape from the political and economic uncertainty, seeking calm and stability by embracing more spiritual experiences and mystic rituals," Ms. Yee said. After all, as artificial intelligence and automation threaten the job market, is it so strange that some would like to dress up as robots? With the looming threat of ecological disaster, what's the harm in using makeup to explore life as a post human mutant? And why be so negative? Maybe accounts like Salvia and Fecal Matter are in fact heralding an imagined, idealized future of pan gender, post racial identity. "Beauty was very narrowly defined for a very long time," said Sarah Brown, an editor and consultant who was the longtime beauty director of Vogue. "It was a type of person, it was a type of look. I'm talking about beauty, race, body, everything." Now, she said, "I think we're at this incredible moment where people feel comfortable enough to express themselves. They're being accepted and celebrated for what their idea of beauty is." While the images may be off putting to some, they also require an impressive technical virtuosity. "The level of artistry is just off the charts," Ms. Brown said. She was accustomed to seeing that level from elite makeup artists, like Pat McGrath, she said, but "not used to seeing that from an average, aspiring person. I'm just amazed by what people are able to do, the prosthetics and the theatrics and how dramatic it all is." Mx. Bhaskaran and Ms. Dalton stress that this extreme form of dressing isn't a way to get attention which, when they get it, is often negative, they point out. "Our whole lives, we didn't look the way we look right now," Mx. Bhaskaran said. "We had eyebrows, we had hair, we wore flats. For us specifically, the way we are living right now has been the way we always wanted to live." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
An intimate travelogue, "Monsoon" follows Kit (Henry Golding), a software animator raised in London, as he returns to Vietnam, where he was born and lived until he was 6 years old. Kit's eventual goal is to scatter his parents' ashes. His Vietnamese is no longer good, and he has faint memories of his childhood. Lee (David Tran), his cousin, paints a fuller picture of their time as boys. "Monsoon" was written and directed by Hong Khaou, who came to Vietnam as a baby, when his parents fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; they left Vietnam for Britain when he was 8. In writing the film, he drew on impressions from his own long deferred return. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Google faced another regulatory challenge on Monday when the authorities in Turkey opened an investigation into whether the search giant's popular Android software had broken the country's antitrust rules. The investigation in Turkey is the latest legal problem for Google, which faces three separate competition charges in Europe and has already been found to breach antitrust legislation in Russia. United States officials have also investigated the company over its Android and search services, but they have not brought a case. Google denies that it has broken any laws, saying that its digital services like search and online maps do not hinder those of rivals. The number of regulatory investigations worldwide represents a growing threat for the company, just as other Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Amazon increasingly challenge Google in the race to create new tech gadgets and digital services. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'MAESTRO' at the Duke on 42nd Street (previews start on Jan. 3; opens on Jan. 14). Raise a baton to the Ensemble for the Romantic Century's tribute to Arturo Toscanini. John Noble ("The Lord of the Rings," "The Substance of Fire") stars in Eve Wolf's drama, which focuses on Toscanini's antifascist activities and is scored to music by his contemporaries. Will it be, like Toscanini, pitch perfect? 646 223 3010, dukeon42.org UNDER THE RADAR at various locations (performances start on Jan. 3). Myths, monsters, punk rock and Anton Chekhov collide at this hallowed festival of performance and experiment. American favorites like Manual Cinema, Rude Mechs and New Saloon join international artists from Nigeria, Argentina and Norway. Highlights include Lola Arias's exploration of the Falkland Islands conflict, "Minefield," and Tania El Khoury's "As Far as My Fingertips Take Me," an encounter with a refugee. 212 967 7555, undertheradarfestival.com 'ALL IS CALM: THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE OF 1914' at the Sheen Center (closes on Dec. 30). Do you hear what I hear? Theater Latte Da's documentary musical, about the Christmas carols that emanated from World War I trenches, is finishing its song. The depiction of the war itself is somewhat sanitized, but the 10 men are in excellent voice, and when they come together, the sensation is tremendous and the musical chill effect engulfing. 866 811 4111, sheencenter.org 'THE HARD PROBLEM' at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center Theater (closes on Jan. 6). Tom Stoppard's play, a drama of conscience, consciousness and coincidence, reaches its conclusion. Ben Brantley wrote that even though this production, directed by Jack O'Brien and starring Adelaide Clemens, is as cerebral as anything Stoppard has produced, it "often feels like the work of a precocious young neophyte rather than an old master" and "has yet to solve itself." 212 239 6200, lct.org 'HEAD OVER HEELS' at the Hudson Theater (closes on Jan. 6). This Go Gos jukebox musical has the beat, but not for much longer. Inspired by Sir Philip Sidney's Renaissance lyric poem "The Arcadia," the show, directed by Michael Mayer, is awash in cross dressing and mistaken identity. Despite its wild premise, Ben Brantley wrote that the musical "mutters deferentially when what you want is a rebel yell." 855 801 5876, thehudsonbroadway.com 'ONCE ON THIS ISLAND' at Circle in the Square Theater (closes on Jan. 6). A story of poignant self sacrifice and occasional goats, Michael Arden's revival of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's musical, set in the French Antilles, floats away. Jesse Green called it "ravishing," adding that Arden's "staging serves his top to bottom terrific cast of black and Hispanic and Asian actors beautifully." 212 239 6200, onceonthisisland.com 'TORCH SONG' at Second Stage at the Hayes Theater (closes on Jan. 6). The Broadway revival of Harvey Fierstein's play, directed by Moises Kaufman, douses its flame. Ben Brantley had particular praise for Mercedes Ruehl's "expertly coiled performance" and for the show's star, Michael Urie, who gives, he wrote, "a seriously entertaining interpretation of living large as a proactive defense against feeling small." 212 239 6200, torchsongbroadway.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A Thursday matchup that needed overtime to be decided. A pair of entertaining games on Saturday. A potential Super Bowl preview on Sunday. This is shaping up to be an excellent week of football, and we dug in on each team's playoff chances using The Upshot's playoff simulator. Here is a look at N.F.L. Week 15, with all picks made against the spread. The Saints (10 3) are hopeful that Brees, who hasn't played since Week 10, can make his triumphant return this week so he can lead them in a potential Super Bowl preview against the Chiefs (12 1). The Upshot gives the Chiefs a 23 percent chance of repeating as champions, while the Saints, at 16 percent, are considered the most likely winner out of the N.F.C. At their best, both teams have explosive offenses and opportunistic defenses. If the Chiefs have a fatal flaw, it is their boredom, but a road game against a top competitor should keep their attention. So where does that leave this game? It depends on Brees's health. If he plays, and is close to 100 percent, you have to give the Saints a decent chance of an upset. Anything less than that, and a motivated Chiefs team could romp. Pick: Chiefs 3 In a convincing win over Minnesota last week, the Buccaneers (8 5) showed how effective their pass rush can be in creating the disruptions necessary to win tough games. Kirk Cousins was under pressure all game, and even though the Vikings moved the ball well, they couldn't punch the ball into the end zone. A similar script could play out against the Falcons (4 9), who are a threat in any home game but are prone to problems against Tampa Bay's pass rush because of quarterback Matt Ryan's lack of mobility. The Buccaneers are up to a 94 percent chance of ending their 12 season playoff drought, but the line may be too aggressive this week. Pick: Falcons 6 Even with last week's heartbreaking loss to Baltimore, the Browns (9 4) have matched the franchise's best 13 game start since 1994, when Coach Bill Belichick led them to an 11 5 record and a trip to the divisional round of the playoffs. On the strength of its record, Cleveland has an 84 percent chance of making the playoffs for the first time since 2007. While the Giants (5 8) have made a remarkable turnaround from earlier this season, and have a 25 percent chance of winning the N.F.C. East, they are overmatched in this one. Pick: Browns 4 Carolina's defense just got shredded by Denver's Drew Lock, so it's hard to imagine the pain Aaron Rodgers and the Packers (10 3) could inflict on the Panthers (4 9) if they were to go all out. After New Orleans's loss last week, Green Bay, which had already clinched the N.F.C. North, is in the driver's seat for a first round bye. This game has the potential to be a trap, with the Packers looking ahead to a tougher matchup in Week 16 against Tennessee, but Rodgers has been locked in and may trail only Patrick Mahomes in the race for league most valuable player. Pick: Packers 8.5 It's hard to know how the Broncos (5 8) will play from week to week, but a road game in Denver is tough for any opponent, even one as good as the Bills (10 3). Add that the Bills can relax a little considering their 98 percent chance of winning the A.F.C. East (but just a 1 percent chance at a first round bye), and this game could be closer than oddsmakers are predicting. Pick: Broncos 6.5 There were so many jokes. Lamar Jackson engineered one of the wildest wins in recent N.F.L. history, completing a 44 yard touchdown to Marquise Brown on fourth and 5 with less than two minutes left in the game, then watching Cleveland tie the score, and then taking the Ravens far enough for Justin Tucker to kick a game winning, 55 yard field goal. But all anyone wanted to talk about was Jackson's brief absence and how it looked as if he might have taken a bathroom break. Laugh all you want Jackson swears he was receiving fluids to alleviate cramping but the win was a welcome change in what had been a difficult period for the Ravens (8 5). Jackson finally looked like himself, and the Ravens, with a 74 percent chance of making the playoffs, no longer seemed like a team in peril. This game does not figure to be nearly as entertaining. The Jaguars (1 12) haven't won a game since Week 1, and struggle on both sides of the ball. Having Baltimore as a two touchdown favorite when you consider the team's recent defensive struggles seems like a bit too much. Pick: Jaguars 14 In most years, this would be a key A.F.C. South matchup, but the Texans (4 9) have been eliminated from playoff contention and the Colts (9 4) have an 82 percent chance of making the playoffs and a 36 percent chance of winning their division. Houston's Deshaun Watson will be the best player on the field, but the Texans have done a shameful job of keeping talent around him. Indianapolis, on the other hand, made crucial personnel moves in the off season that have taken the team from mediocre to top 10 in offense and defense. Pick: Colts 7 There are situations in which the Lions (5 8) could hold their own against the Titans (9 4), but most of them involve locking Tennessee's Derrick Henry in a well guarded room and insisting nobody knows where he is. Barring high jinks, Detroit seems remarkably overmatched, especially if Matthew Stafford misses the game with the rib injury he sustained last week. Tennessee is in a tough fight with Indianapolis for the A.F.C. South crown, and has a 64 percent chance of holding off the Colts, so the Titans certainly have motivation to keep winning. Pick: Titans 10.5 Both teams are on the outside looking in, but the Bears (6 7) and the Vikings (6 7) are still alive, and both have at least a 20 percent chance of a playoff spot despite Chicago's recent struggles and Minnesota's rough start. Assuming the Bears' offensive resurgence last week was more than a blip would probably be generous, but they certainly have looked their best with Mitchell Trubisky at quarterback. Even accounting for that, Minnesota should be fine, provided the team gives quarterback Kirk Cousins more time to work than he had in a loss to Tampa Bay. Pick: Vikings 3 The Patriots (6 7) have missed the playoffs just twice since 2001, but even with a recent hot streak they are down to a 4 percent chance at qualifying this year, and that number will drop to zero with a loss to the Dolphins (8 5), who have a 43 percent chance at a wild card. The tables appear to have turned in this rivalry, with New England being the scrappy underdog that could spoil things for the seemingly superior team. Miami's style of play doesn't lead to many mistakes, so unless Coach Bill Belichick has something up his sleeve, the Patriots can start making vacation plans for early January. Pick: Dolphins 2.5 Sam Darnold feels like the Darkest Timeline version of Jared Goff. Instead of developing under the tutelage of an era defining offensive genius like Coach Sean McVay, Darnold has been saddled with Coach Adam Gase, and the Jets (0 13) seem to have little chance of avoiding a winless season. The talent imbalance in this game reflected accurately in the point spread is extreme, and a win for Los Angeles (9 4) should help the team increase its 60 percent chance of winning the competitive N.F.C. West. A 17 point spread is absurd, but so are the Jets. Pick: Rams 17 When the schedule came out, this was supposed to showcase Jimmy Garoppolo leading the defending N.F.C. champions into Dak Prescott's house to rekindle a classic rivalry. Backup quarterback Nick Mullens facing off against Andy Dalton doesn't really live up to that advanced billing. Technically, neither team has been eliminated from playoff contention, with the 49ers (5 8) having a 9 percent chance at a wild card spot and the Cowboys (4 9) having a 1 percent chance of winning the N.F.C. East. With San Francisco running back Raheem Mostert uncertain to play and wide receiver Deebo Samuel expected to be out, the Cowboys have a decent chance at a second straight win. Pick: Cowboys 2.5 Oklahoma Coach Lincoln Riley will love this one. Kyler Murray of the Cardinals (7 6) transferred to Oklahoma to play for Riley in 2017 and won the Heisman Trophy in 2018. Jalen Hurts of the Eagles (4 8 1) transferred to Oklahoma to play for Riley in 2019 and was a Heisman finalist. Hurts's promotion to starting quarterback for Philadelphia last week set up this matchup between two of Riley's star pupils, and while the over under on this game isn't particularly high, you can expect plenty of highlight reel plays. Hurts has a chance to keep following in Murray's formidable footsteps, but right now Murray is a more complete player and the Cardinals are a better team. With Arizona's chance at a wild card around 50 percent, the team should be motivated to win at home. Pick: Cardinals 6.5 Things got complicated for Las Vegas when quarterback Derek Carr was removed from the game in the second quarter with a groin injury. But his backup, Marcus Mariota, put on quite a show. The No. 2 pick in the 2015 draft threw for 226 yards and a touchdown while running for 88 yards and another score. That was good enough to keep pace with Los Angeles throughout regulation with some help from Chargers kicker Michael Badgley, who missed go ahead field goal attempts from 47 and 51 yards late in the fourth quarter. But all the Raiders could manage in overtime was a field goal, and that gave Justin Herbert his opening. Herbert, a rookie quarterback who has tantalized with his arm strength all season, showed off his aggressiveness by throwing deep to Jalen Guyton on the third play of his team's possession for a 53 yard gain that put Los Angeles on the Raiders' 2 yard line. It took a few tries, but Herbert eventually pushed the ball over the goal line on a 1 yard keeper to secure the 30 27 win. We picked Chargers 3.5 based on the team finally having ended a game well last week. This week's ending was even better. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
TOKYO The Japanese and American authorities have lifted the final hurdles to the Boeing 787's return to commercial flights, more than three months after the plane's battery problems grounded the fleet. The Japanese authorities on Friday formally approved Boeing's fixes to the lithium ion batteries on its 787 Dreamliner jets and declared the aircraft fit for use. But as an extra precaution before returning the planes to service, Japan's Ministry of Transport asked All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines, which together own about half of the 50 Dreamliners delivered so far, to adopt additional safety measures than those required by the American aviation authorities. Those measures include adding monitors to the batteries to read voltage levels in real time. Separately, the Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday published a new rule that formally lifted the grounding of the 787s operated by carriers based in the United States once the modified lithium ion batteries are installed. Last week, the F.A.A. had given a green light to Boeing to start modifying the batteries on the 787s. In its new rule, known as an airworthiness directive, the F.A.A. gave its first estimate of the cost of the repairs 464,763 per plane though the agency said that could be covered by the plane's warranty and, therefore, paid by Boeing. Boeing's new battery plans are meant to add safety features to the 787's lithium ion batteries that will minimize the chances of their emitting smoke or catching fire, after two units overheated on separate planes in January. Akihiro Ota, the transportation minister, said at a news conference that he was satisfied with the multiple measures Boeing had taken to eliminate risks of fire. "They have adopted defense in depth," Mr. Ota said. All Nippon said that teams of Boeing engineers had already started to replace batteries on all of its 17 Dreamliners and that fixes which take five days per plane would continue until the end of May. The airline said it would start using the planes again for commercial flights when the repairs had been made to its entire fleet. Japan Airlines declined to speculate on how long the fixes would take. All Nippon said its 787s would each undergo a test flight to "confirm that no battery related failures occur during flight." The first test flight is scheduled for Sunday, the airline said in a statement. The carrier has said it hoped to resume regular 787 flights in June. All Nippon said it intended to set up a dedicated Web site to address passenger concerns about the safety of the 787. 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. "Only when we are fully satisfied with the safety of our 787 fleet will we return the aircraft to service," Osamu Shinobe, president and chief executive of All Nippon, said in a statement. Boeing has said that it expects to deliver another 60 planes before the end of the year and that it will produce 10 planes a month after that. United Airlines is currently the only American carrier operating the plane, and now has six 787s in its fleet. The airlines that already own 787s are all eager to resume service, though the timing of the resumption of flights varies. LOT, Poland's national airline, plans to begin commercial 787 flights on June 5 between Warsaw and Chicago. Later, it expects to fly its planes to New York, Toronto and Beijing. Air India said it hoped to have flights by mid May. United, which said earlier this week that the grounding of its 787s had cost it 11 million in the last quarter, has scheduled its 787s to start flying domestic routes on May 31 and plans international flights starting on June 10, from Denver to Tokyo and Houston to London. The airline will then fly its 787s in August from Houston to Lagos, Nigeria, as well as from Los Angeles to Shanghai and Tokyo. The other airlines that own 787s are Qatar Airlines, Ethiopian Airlines and LAN of Chile. American and Japanese regulators have been investigating the Japanese made batteries aboard the 787 after one caught fire aboard a parked plane in Boston operated by Japan Airlines and another emitted smoke on an All Nippon flight in Japan, forcing an emergency landing. The incidents prompted regulators to ground the entire 787 fleet. Norihiro Goto, the head of the Japan Transport Safety Board, said earlier this past week that investigators remained unsure what had caused the batteries to overheat. But Japan was satisfied that Boeing had now considered all conceivable potential problems that could lead to a battery fire, Mr. Goto said. Japanese airlines have been enthusiastic buyers of the 787, Boeing's latest generation, fuel efficient plane. It is the first passenger jet to use lithium ion batteries, which are more powerful, easier to charge and lighter than older battery technologies. But they have also proved to be prone to overheating. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
It wasn't that difficult for Phillip Ratliff to get approval for his first mortgage even though he could afford a down payment of only 5 percent. What was so unusual about Phillip Ratliff's experience in getting approval for his first mortgage was that it wasn't difficult at all even though he could afford a down payment of only 5 percent. In the years after the housing bubble burst, borrowers had to practically promise their firstborn child to secure a mortgage. And while the requirements are still pretty rigorous, particularly for those with less than perfect credit, there are signs that at least some regional lenders and mortgage insurers are beginning to ease up. Some regional banks and credit unions are even offering products that vaguely resemble the more aggressive financing that became all too common during the boom days and eventually got many borrowers into trouble. The piggyback loan, for instance, is back, mortgage lenders and brokers said. That is when borrowers take out two mortgages simultaneously (or a mortgage and a line of credit) so they can avoid the private mortgage insurance required on traditional mortgages for more than 80 percent of the home's value. And some credit unions, including Navy Federal and NASA Federal Credit Union, are offering 100 percent financing, at least in markets where home values have stabilized and appear to be on the upswing. U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo said they still allowed borrowers to use piggyback loans. The big difference this time, lenders and mortgage brokers say, is that the loans are not being made to just anyone but to borrowers who can afford to pay them back (at least for now). "This is all good news for consumers," said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. "We are starting to see some loosening, but it's very specific. It's just in its infancy now, and it's not the type of piggyback loans or low down payment loans that we saw before." And while there were clearly too many confusingly complex loans offered to too many unqualified borrowers at the height of the housing boom, what is being offered now seems reasonable, Mr. Cecala said. How far the lenders will eventually go to stand out from the competition remains to be seen. "The real question," he said, "is, Will they be any more dangerous than what we've seen before?" Lenders are beginning to be more accepting of merely average loan candidates, in certain circumstances. According to Mr. Cecala, traditional mortgages in the last several years were largely made to people with down payments of at least 20 percent and a strong average credit score of 760. "That is phenomenally tough underwriting," he said. "Now, what you are seeing is that lenders are willing to tinker with one element at a time. So if someone is putting at least 20 percent down, they will go down to 720. And if someone has a 760 or a 780 credit score, they might be willing to go up to a 95 percent" financing, he added, referring to a mortgage for 95 percent of the home's value. After 2008, many borrowers with little money to put down, and decent but not perfect credit, had little choice but to look to the Federal Housing Administration. The F.H.A., which does not make loans but insures mortgages that meet its guidelines, filled the hole left by the more traditional lenders: it extended credit to people who had as little as 3.5 percent to put down and spotty credit scores. As a result, the number of new mortgages originated by the F.H.A. ballooned. But now, mortgage lenders and brokers say, more homeowners with smaller down payments are able to use private mortgage insurance. That is because the private insurers, which imposed even stricter qualifying standards than some banks during the housing downturn, are also becoming a bit more flexible. At the same time, the F.H.A. has been significantly increasing its fees over the last couple of years to shore up its finances and encourage more traditional lending again . "We were frequently in the position where we could underwrite the loan but we couldn't find the mortgage insurance," said Brian Thielicke, a partner and senior loan officer at Cobalt Mortgage in Tukwila, Wash. "Now, it's completely gone the other way." Mr. Ratliff, a 27 year old software tester, said he had no real trouble getting a mortgage for the four bedroom house in Seattle that he bought for 325,000. He got a 30 year mortgage with a fixed rate of 3.5 percent. "There was money out there if you had the credit," Mr. Ratliff said, adding that he had a good credit score. Finding an affordable first home proved the hard part, since there were so many other buyers to compete with and few homes in his price range. He was able to make a down payment of 5 percent, or about 16,000, because he obtained private mortgage insurance. He borrowed another 15,000 or so from his 401(k) to cover closing and other costs, including the insurance. (He paid 5,800 upfront so he could avoid monthly insurance payments.) His overall monthly payments, about 1,700 and another 200 for the 401(k) loan, will be only slightly more than what he paid in rent. It appears that more borrowers are taking out mortgages similar to Mr. Ratliff's. Fannie Mae acknowledged, in its 2012 annual report, that it was buying more mortgages where the loan amounts were higher relative to the homes' values. Part of the reason was that the mortgage insurance companies reduced their premiums for loans with higher credit scores (the average credit score on the Fannie loans purchased was still strong at 755) and F.H.A. loans had become more expensive. Fees on F.H.A. backed mortgages have been inching higher for several years. Borrowers must pay an upfront mortgage premium of 1.75 percent of the loan amount, which can be rolled into the mortgage. But as of April 1, another fee, the annual mortgage insurance premium, rose to 1.35 percent from 1.25 percent of the loan, which is broken down into monthly payments. And while this monthly mortgage premium was typically canceled once the mortgage amount fell to less than 78 percent of the original loan value (after a minimum of five years), starting in June, the insurance must generally be paid for the life of the loan. "This will be the game changer for many future borrowers," said Rick Cason, a branch manager at Integrity Mortgage in Orlando, Fla. "No one is going to want to take a loan out where mortgage insurance is guaranteed for the life of the loan. You would simply have to be forced into it because there were no other financing options available and you were desperate." (Private mortgage insurance can be canceled once the loan amount is less than 80 percent of the home's value.) Some lenders, including credit unions, are making more flexible loans that they are keeping in their own portfolio. Navy Federal, for instance, is offering members up to 100 percent financing without requiring private mortgage insurance, though the loans carry a slightly higher interest rate, about 4.125 percent for borrowers with good credit histories. (The average rate on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage was 3.43 percent for the week ending April 11, along with a fee of 0.8 percent of the mortgage amount, according to Freddie Mac.)"Even through the recession, our mortgages performed very well," said Jack Gaffney, executive vice president of lending at Navy Federal. NASA Federal Credit Union which is open to many consumers, not just NASA employees is offering some members with strong credit and income up to 100 percent financing, without mortgage insurance, for primary homes in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, all markets it says are on the rebound. As for the big banks, many of them said they continued to offer mortgages with low down payments. Bank of America said it allowed up to 95 percent of the home value to be financed, with mortgage insurance, in certain regions. Citibank said it offered loans with down payments of less than 20 percent with insurance, too. Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank let qualified borrowers take out two loans one for 80 percent of the home's value and the second for 10 percent, along with a 10 percent down payment which lets them avoid private mortgage insurance. That type of piggyback loan structure "has become more available and we are seeing it more frequently," said Erik Johansson, vice president of mortgage lending at Guaranteed Rate, a mortgage lender in Schaumburg, Ill. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Joe Smith, who presided over three major record companies in a career that stretched from the early days of rock 'n' roll to the CD boom of the 1990s, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91. Mr. Smith led Warner Bros. and Elektra/Asylum in the 1970s and revitalized the Capitol label in the 1980s. A list of the hundreds of artists he worked with reflects the changing nature of pop over the course of his career, from Petula Clark and Peter, Paul and Mary to the Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath, the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Queen, the Cars and Motley Crue. He was associated especially closely with Garth Brooks and with Bonnie Raitt, whom he signed twice first to Warner Bros., in 1971, and later to Capitol, for the commercial breakthrough that began in 1989 with her album "Nick of Time." In a statement, Ms. Raitt praised Mr. Smith for his patient support as her career developed a trait long attributed to Warner Bros. under the leadership of Mr. Smith and Mo Ostin, the label's longtime chairman. "In a business that became more preoccupied with short term profits and commercial viability," she said, "what set Joe apart is that he believed in supporting artists for the long haul, allowing us to stretch and grow at our own pace and direction. Giving me that second chance for 'Nick of Time' has made all the difference in my life and career." Within the business, Mr. Smith was known as a sharp tongued wit. After becoming president of Elektra/Asylum in 1975, he met with employees and was told, without much enthusiasm, about a forthcoming song "by this group Queen that lasts about six minutes." It was called "Bohemian Rhapsody." As Mr. Smith recounted in "History of the Music Biz: The Mike Sigman Interviews," a 2016 collection published by the industry magazine Hits, he gave the staff an order that would not have been out of place in the movie "Glengarry Glen Ross," about the pressure cooker world of small time real estate salesmen. "I called the Elektra promotion guys and said: 'We've having a contest. First prize is you can keep your job. Second prize, you're gone, because I want this record on the radio,'" Mr. Smith recalled saying, inserting an angry expletive. During the 1980s, Mr. Smith took on a personal project to document musicians' stories of their own careers. Inspired by the oral histories of Studs Terkel, he conducted more than 200 interviews with artists ranging from Ella Fitzgerald to Paul McCartney and George Michael. Excerpts were collected in a book, "Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music" (1988). In 2012 he donated the tapes of the interviews to the Library of Congress. Joseph Benjamin Smith was born in Boston on Jan. 26, 1928, to Phil and Lil Smith and raised nearby in Chelsea, Mass. After graduating from high school in 1945, he joined the Army, serving in the occupation forces at Okinawa. He attended Yale and, after graduating, became a popular D.J. in Boston. In 1960 he testified at the congressional hearings on payola, although he himself was unscathed by that scandal. He joined Warner Bros. in 1961 as its national promotion manager and eventually became the label's general manager and, in 1972, its president. When he joined Warner Bros., its biggest names were Bob Newhart and the Everly Brothers. But by the mid 1960s the label, along with most other major ones, was racing to capitalize on the success of rock. In late 1966, Mr. Smith signed the Grateful Dead to a deal that gave the band an unusual degree of control over its music and packaging. The band encouraged Mr. Smith to take LSD to fully understand their music; he declined. During his tenure at Elektra/Asylum, the label's roster of singer songwriters like Jackson Browne, Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell expanded to include new wave and punk bands like the Cars and X. In 1983, Mr. Smith left Elektra/Asylum to become president of Home Sports Entertainment, a regional television network operated by Warner Amex Cable Communications, a joint venture between Warner Communications and American Express. In 1986, he was named president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Grammy Awards, but his tenure was brief; late that year he became vice chairman and chief executive of Capitol EMI, whose flagship label, Capitol, had been ailing for years. Under Mr. Smith, the label's fortunes quickly turned around. Ms. Raitt's "Nick of Time" sold more than five million copies and won three Grammy Awards, including album of the year. He also pushed the label to promote a young artist on its Nashville imprint: Garth Brooks. Mr. Smith's son, Jeff, recalled in an email how his father gave the order: "He asked what the unit's total budget was, then told the fellow that that amount was now the Garth Brooks promotional budget." A few years later, Mr. Smith and Mr. Brooks met at Capitol's headquarters in Hollywood to renegotiate Mr. Brooks's contract one on one. "No manager, no agent, nobody," Mr. Smith recalled in "75 Years of Capitol Records," a company authorized book published in 2016. In 2000, Capitol announced that Mr. Brooks had sold 100 million albums. In addition to his son, Mr. Smith is survived by his wife, Donnie; his daughter, Julie Kellner; and two grandchildren. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
LOS ANGELES In what used to be a Sports Authority store, wedged between a PetSmart and a Ross Dress for Less in the busy by day neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, now stands a 48 foot long sea serpent, a talking macaw with a Mexican accent, and a temporarily grounded 800 pound flying fiberglass elephant. These colorful curiosities and hundreds more are part of a temporary exhibit called "That's From Disneyland!" All of them (even the Country Bear Jamboree postcard machine and the triangular Tinker Bell parking lot sign) belong to one man, Richard Kraft, who has been amassing big ticket Disneyland related objects for 25 years. With the help of his grown son and a local gallery owner, Mr. Kraft has turned what was once a big box store into a fairyland. It may not be the so called Happiest Place on Earth, the actual theme park in Anaheim some 40 miles south, but it may well be the second happiest. Which is saying a lot for a place that used to be 40,000 square feet of run of the treadmill sneakers and logo sweatshirts. If it's from Disneyland and it was ever for sale, Mr. Kraft probably bought it. He even found, on eBay, a Global Van Lines truck, fashioned to look like an early Ford, that had been parked on Main Street U.S.A. in the 1970s. "I have met other very dedicated Disneyland collectors, but Richard has out collected them all, times a hundred," said Charles Phoenix, a self described "retro pop culture humorist" who wrote the book "Addicted to Americana." "Nothing even comes close to the volume and completeness of his collection." Although the actor John Stamos is perhaps the most famous Disney collector, with a very large "D" of his own that can be glimpsed on the internet, Mr. Kraft, a talent agent who represents such Disney composers as Richard Sherman, Alan Menken and Danny Elfman, is generally considered the king. "I made it very clear to John that my 'D' is bigger than his 'D,'" Mr. Kraft said. On Aug. 25, however, he is abdicating. Starting then, he is putting his happy holdings on the auction block, with estimated prices ranging from 50 for a set of Haunted Mansion "hitchhiking ghost" souvenir beanbags to 150,000 for a Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride vehicle. A portion of the proceeds from the two day auction, and related events like an intimate concert by Mr. Menken on Aug. 24, will go to help children with special needs. Mr. Kraft's 4 year old daughter was born with the genetic disorder Coffin Siris syndrome, which can cause learning disabilities. Mr. Kraft, who is in his late 50s, began collecting Disneyana, as this genus of collectibles is called, out of nostalgia. Shortly after his older brother died, he visited Disneyland. Memories came rushing back of the fun he had in childhood on his family's annual vacations to the park from their home in Bakersfield, about three hours away. Soon after, he bought a vintage attraction poster for the Autopia ride. From there it was a quick swerve into the fast lane of collecting. "I'm a very obsessive person, so one poster became every poster," Mr. Kraft said. "Every poster became ride vehicles. Ride vehicles became conceptual art." Most particularly the former bedroom of Mr. Kraft's son Nicholas, 28, which was decorated to look like Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room, as the attraction is officially called, with bamboo walls and a thatched ceiling. "I think my dad used me as an excuse for collecting," Nicholas said. He had a childhood roommate: Jose the audio animatronic parrot, whom no one knew could still speak until the bird was spruced up for the coming auction. "Now all I can think of is what a different childhood I would have had if every morning, Jose had woken me up," Nicholas said. In recent years, as his father sold the Encino house and moved to another home not very far from the exhibit, the collection was mostly locked away in a half dozen storage spaces. "The ones you drive by on the freeway with a crystal meth guy on one side, stolen goods on the other and Dumbo in the middle," Richard Kraft said. And his company, Kraft Engel Management, now not only represents such disparate clients as Moby, Marc Shaiman, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, but also produces theatrical endeavors using their work. Mr. Kraft has overseen various Disney spectaculars at the Hollywood Bowl, including a 2016 screening and concert of "The Little Mermaid" featuring Sara Bareilles, and, this past spring, of "Beauty and the Beast" with Zooey Deschanel. "All of a sudden, making things became more interesting than owning things," Mr. Kraft said. "It all started to make sense." Given Mr. Kraft's innate showmanship, he was bound not to simply get rid of his treasure trove, but, as he said, "give it a grand bon voyage party." Thus this large scale exhibit overseen by Mike Van Eaton, the owner of a gallery also in Sherman Oaks, and a series of special events such as a retro Disneyland slide show by Mr. Phoenix, a signing by the midcentury modern artist Josh Agle (known as Shag), a presentation by the film critic Leonard Maltin and various concerts. "Richard is almost manic in his quest that people have a good time," Mr. Agle said. At the exhibit, he added, "Richard walks up to strangers and tells them about a piece they're looking at, and many times they don't even know it's his collection. He's like Willy Wonka giving a tour of his factory." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The overarching message of this year's exercise related science was that physical activity, in almost any form and amount, changes the arc of our lives. But much of this research also hinted that there may be something unique about pushing yourself at least a little extra that alters and ramps up the benefits of exercise, beginning deep within our cells. Oh, and several studies also helpfully told us that hot baths are a fine idea for those of us who work out, even if the weather is warm. But intensity was the theme of 2017. One of the first studies I wrote about this year detailed the career and physiology of Robert Marchand, a diminutive French centenarian who took up competitive cycling as a retiree and began setting age group records. But after a physiologist revamped his once leisurely training, adding some strenuous pedaling, Mr. Marchand decisively bettered his own records and, at the age of 103, set a new world mark for the most miles pedaled in an hour by a centenarian. His efforts help to belie a number of entrenched beliefs about older people, including that physical performance and aerobic capacity inevitably decline with age and that intense exercise is inadvisable, if not impossible, for the elderly. Other studies this year reinforced the notion that age need not be a deterrent to hard exercise and that such workouts could be key to healthy aging. An animal study that I wrote about in July, for instance, found that frail, elderly mice were capable of completing brief spurts of high intensity running on little treadmills, if the treadmill's pace were adjusted to each mouse's individual fitness level. After four months of this kind of training, the exercised animals were stronger and more aerobically fit than other mice of the same age, and few remained physically frail. Perhaps most striking, "the animals had tolerated the high intensity interval training well," one of the scientists who conducted the study told me. But of course, mice are not people. So it was another study this year that to my mind provided the most persuasive evidence that strenuous exercise alters how we age. In that study, which I wrote about in March (which became my most popular column this year), scientists at the Mayo Clinic compared differences in gene expression inside muscle cells after younger and older people had completed various types of workouts. The greatest differences were seen in the operations of genes after people had practiced high intensity interval training for 12 weeks. In younger people who exercised this way, almost 275 genes were firing differently now than they had been before the exercise. But in people older than 64, more than 400 genes were working differently now and many of those genes are known to be related to the health and aging of cells. In effect, the intense exercise seemed to be changing muscle cells in ways that theoretically could affect biological aging. At this point, I should probably pause and explain that intensity in exercise is a relative concept. The word intense can seem daunting, but in practice, it simply means physical activity that is not a cinch for you. For research purposes, intensity is based on percentages of someone's heart rate maximum. But you and I can ignore these technicalities and pay attention to how we feel. Many scientists have told me that exercise is considered easy if you can talk and sing while participating in it. During relatively moderate exercise, singing becomes difficult. And during intense exercise, you will find it difficult to speak without gasping. But, again, intensity is relative. If you have barely exercised in recent years, five minutes of climbing stairs will constitute an intense and effective workout. If, on the other hand, you regularly stroll during the week, you might consider increasing the pace of those walks for a few minutes at a time, until you no longer can easily converse. The latest science suggests that your cells will thank you. And afterward, other science says, reward yourself with a warm soak. Several ingratiating studies this year indicated that luxuriating in warm water aids in recovery from strenuous exercise and also, surprisingly, helps us to acclimate to hot weather workouts. But as always, the most compelling exercise related research this year reminded us that activity of any kind is essential for human well being. One of my favorite studies of 2017 found that people reported feeling happiest during the day when they had been up and moving compared to when they had remained seated and still. Another memorable study concluded that, statistically, an hour spent running could add about seven hours to our life spans. These gains are not infinite. They seem to be capped at about three years of added life for people who run regularly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The Best and Worst of the Tony Awards 2018 Here's a look at the most memorable moments for better or for worse of the 2018 Tony Awards, compiled by our chief theater critics, Ben Brantley and Jesse Green; the editor and reporter Joshua Barone; and the theater editor, Scott Heller. As Mr. Brantley put it on Sunday night, "This is the best advertisement for theater on network television in a long time, if not ever." Best: Love for the Losers The people who are actually most fundamental to the creation of the works the Tonys honor were the most ruthlessly sidelined on the broadcast itself. That David Yazbek created the best score of the year for "The Band's Visit" went unnoticed by television audiences. And Jack Thorne, who wrote "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," never got to speak from the stage. Even Lin Manuel Miranda noticed, urging "Justice for JackThorne" on Twitter. (You can watch Mr. Thorne's offstage remarks here.) Best: The Personal as Political The show rose to a strained moment in American history with warmth, grace and a vindication of theater's special skill for bringing people together. Ari'el Stachel, a surprise winner as best supporting actor for his performance in "The Band's Visit," spoke movingly about the power of living one's ethnic identity honestly onstage. His castmate Tony Shalhoub, accepting a Tony as best actor in a musical, spoke of his father's arrival at Ellis Island (from Lebanon) 100 years ago. The one discordant note was also the note people are still talking about: Robert De Niro's expletive dotted castigation of President Trump, delivered before introducing Bruce Springsteen's performance. Late in the show, it blew the lid off a slowly simmering pot, and brought down the house. Best: Doing It Her Way (of Course) The "Cursed Child" director, John Tiffany, asked the whole audience to sing "Happy Birthday" to his boyfriend. Even on television, you could see the birthday boy turn a deep shade of beet. (Mr. Tiffany's postshow defense: "When else am I going to get the chance to get all of Radio City to sing 'Happy Birthday' to my boyfriend? Wouldn't you do that?") It's good when shows choose to represent themselves for their truest and most important qualities, rather than simply patch together catchy moments. "Carousel" opted not to do a medley or even a well known song, instead staging the rousing dance number "Blow High, Blow Low." And "Omar Sharif," from "The Band's Visit," was a gorgeous showing of a gorgeous song, and beautifully shot with enough close ups of both performers to get the emotion past the TV screen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
At least 41 children have died of heatstroke this year after being left in the back seat of a parked vehicle. Since 1990, when the annual number of vehicular heatstroke victims was first recorded, more than 800 children have died in hot parked cars. Many of these deaths occurred because parents forgot that the children were in the car. And while automakers offer technology that steers a vehicle or alerts drivers to a car in the next lane, they have not released technology to tell drivers when they are forgetting a child in the back seat. But congressional lawmakers are now weighing whether to require new cars to include a device for detecting children in the back seat and warning the driver of their presence after the car has been turned off. The requirements were attached to a House bill, passed last month, that is meant to speed the development of self driving vehicles. The Senate version of the bill, which cleared a committee vote this month, includes an amendment with the warning requirement. While some automakers, like Hyundai, General Motors and Nissan, have voluntarily developed some types of warning systems, the auto industry has been reluctant to add the technology required by the bills. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the leading auto industry trade group, has said it opposes the proposed rules. After the proposed rules were released in July, the group said: "In particular, we are concerned about proposals where it takes many years before results are seen, because 18 lives have already been lost this year in hot cars. And the proposed mandate for notification technology in cars misses the targeted population, because so few parents of young children buy new cars." This is not the first time that the Auto Alliance has dismissed the need for regulation. In 2011, for example, Robert Strassburger, vice president for vehicle safety at the organization, made a similar argument. "We shouldn't overemphasize the effectiveness of technology," he said, adding that a government requirement for warning devices would initially have minimal impact, because the vast majority of cars on the road are years old. The Auto Alliance, like some other industry groups, calls for education rather than technology. For 10 years, it has pushed messages, both online and in print, that describe why cars overheat when parked in the sun and that advise parents never to leave children in a car. But advocates for stronger rules say the years of educational efforts have not slowed the number of deaths. And in almost all cases, they say, the action is a matter of distraction and simple forgetfulness. "You can't teach people not to forget," said Janette Fennell, president of KidsandCars.org, an organization dedicated to protecting children in and around motor vehicles. "There is a scientific reason why this is happening. It's not that people don't love their kids." David Diamond, a neuroscientist at the University of South Florida who has studied the issue, said a child in the back seat could easily be forgotten. Habit memory can take over during the drive home from work, causing a person to forget to stop on the way for an important prescription. Police officers, he said, have forgotten their guns after laying them down on the toilet paper roll in public bathrooms, so it should not be surprising that parents forget their child in the back seat. "The brain process is the same," Dr. Diamond said. "All involve an interaction between our habit and conscious memory systems." General Motors and Nissan have introduced technologies that remind the driver that a child is in the back seat by analyzing door sequencing. If the rear door is opened before the car is started but not after it is turned off, a warning sounds. The GM reminder is standard or available on numerous 2017 models and will be offered on others for the 2018 model year. The Nissan system is standard on the 2018 Pathfinder and will be on other models in the future. This technology does not meet the standard of the legislation, however, because it does not detect the presence of a child. Hyundai's technology, which is scheduled for release on some 2019 models, can detect someone in the back seat. Some companies that sell equipment to the auto industry have developed warning devices. One such system, the VitaSense, uses low power radio to sense movement and breathing. The technology, developed in Luxembourg by IEE, a manufacturer of automotive sensors, can reportedly detect even a sleeping infant in a rear facing child seat. If a child is detected after the vehicle has been turned off, it alerts the driver by several means, including flashing lights, beeps, and messages sent to cellphones and computers. Ms. Fennell applauded independent efforts to produce a warning device but argued that the only real solution was legislation that required the technology in all new vehicles. When she got an alert from her car that she had left her gas tank open, Ms. Fennell said, "I realized that while my car can tell me that, it can't tell me if a child has been left in the back seat." "We get buzzers and warnings for everything," she said. "How in the world do you not develop a reminder for what is indisputably the most important thing?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
While the latest film adaptation of "Little Women," which opened on Christmas Day, has been getting all the attention lately, Louisa May Alcott's 19th century classic has influenced women writers for generations. Five of them told us what the novel means to them. These are edited excerpts from their responses. "Little Women" was our favorite book in English. My sisters and I discovered it soon after arriving in this country. It was the only book we had ever read about an all girl family of four sisters, just like ours. I don't know how many times we read and reread that book. We couldn't get enough of these strong, lively, resilient March girls. Wow, what an accurate portrayal of sisterhood and all its complexities. What a critical story for us at this juncture in our lives, when we, too, were facing so many changes, losses, challenges to the certainties we had known. Check, check, check. The March girls were white New Englanders, and we were newly arrived immigrants from a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, but there the differences stopped and the uncanny similarities began down to our very names. The first letter of each sister's name was the same as each of ours, in the same birth order: Margaret Meg/Maury; Jo/Julia; Elizabeth Beth/Estela; Amy/Ana. Our personalities and passions matched our twin character. (I, Julia/Jo, wanted to be a writer.) Long before "multicultural literature," before we would find our faces or traditions or histories in American literature, we found our reflection here. The novel beamed me a powerful message that stories were about what we shared with other people, families, sisters even a story that wasn't overtly about us. Conversely, it meant that someday, if Jo/Julia wrote about the Mirabal sisters or the Garcia girls, readers from other backgrounds might find themselves in my stories, too. Louisa May Alcott was one of my first muses. (A for Alvarez, check again!) My grandmother gave my sister and me a copy of "Little Women" when I was about 10. I grew up with the story, and it grew with me, each of the sisters unique, flawed, relatable offering a different path and a distinct perspective at various points in my life. There's a warmth and kindness that breathes from the book, a story of family supporting each other through tough times. When I was younger, I wanted to go live with the March sisters and in a way I did, because they inspired my journey in so many ways, as a writer and a woman. It's as if a piece of each of them lives on inside me. 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. Virginia Kantra is the best selling writer of nearly 30 novels. Her most recent book is "Meg Jo." It's simple: Jo wants to be a writer. Her entire family assumes she will become a writer. And we understand, by virtue of the book we hold in our hands, that she has become a writer. As a girl, that made my own highly improbable professional dreams seem possible. "Little Women" is the first sign I ever had that I might someday become who I am today. Anna Quindlen is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose most recent book is "Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting." "The new movie version of Louisa May Alcott's novel comes as an absolute gift," A.O. Scott writes in his "Little Women" review. I identified with Jo, the main character in "Little Women," because not only was she independent but she also wanted to be a writer. She was situated in the middle of a large family but she was always alone, I thought, with her words in the midst of everything just as I was alone in a small family with one sister. She preferred her room of books, pens and papers where the morning and evening air circulated, and I preferred my small, shared room with my sister in Harlem, facing a blank wall where no air moved. But I knew and shared her spirit, and I laughed and smiled always when she spoke her words of independence and rebellion. Sonia Sanchez, the author of "Homecoming," is a professor emeritus of English at Temple University. It's hard for me to imagine any woman writer who did not see herself in Jo March. Jo was a smart, headstrong, clumsy misfit; a loving sister and daughter who knew her own heart and could be brave, not just in service of her family but also in service of her own ambitions, a poor girl who turns down the rich, handsome dreamboat next door to pursue her ambitions. When I was 10 years old, Jo was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. At least, Part One Jo was. Part Two Jo, as many a brokenhearted reader learned, goes to New York City to work as a governess. Living in a boardinghouse, working part time as a governess, earning a dollar a column for her "'rubbish,' as she called it, Jo felt herself a woman of means, and spun her little romances diligently." But Jo's ink stained fingertips betray her as an author to her fellow lodger, one Prof. Friedrich Bhaer. A reader, a scholar, rumpled and stout, Professor Bhaer is perfect for Jo, except for the part where he how to put it? tells her that her life's work is crap, and that he would rather give children "gunpowder to play with than this bad trash." Instead of telling him where he can stick his judgments, Jo agrees with him and consigns her literary output to the flames (No!). Instead of asking him to support her while she hones her craft, she stops writing (JO!). And then, in a betrayal for which I still have not entirely forgiven Louisa May Alcott, Jo marries her critic, puts down her pen, presumably forever, and resigns herself to a life of noble poverty at his side (AFSKLJGFHGHGH). It felt like an enormous betrayal as a reader. At least I can count myself lucky, insofar as it prepared me for what happened after I myself became a writer of popular fiction. Swap "chick lit" for "sensation stories" and Bhaer's critique this is silly, pandering, dangerous; this is not real literature could have been cut from the 19th century and pasted into the 21st. For every successful female writer, in any era, it seems, a Professor Bhaer is likely somewhere nearby, waiting to explain to her what qualifies as literature and why her work does not. Understanding the circumstances of Alcott's own life and times help me make sense of Jo's capitulation. Alcott, the daughter of a starry eyed Transcendentalist father whose utopian community was a noble failure and who was content to let his wife and daughters support the family, wrote her share of "sensation stories," with titles like "A Long Fatal Love Chase" and "Pauline's Passion and Punishment." She never married "I'd rather be a free spinster, and paddle my own canoe," she said. She had no interest in writing for or about girls, and wrote "Little Women" at a publisher's behest, for money. After Part One was complete, she told a friend that she would have preferred Jo to remain a "literary spinster," "but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn't dare refuse out of perversity went made a funny match for her." Which means that the man telling the woman, "You should be ashamed to write popular stories for money" appears in a book written by a woman, for money; and that a book extolling the unmatched bliss of marriage and children was written by an unmarried woman who never had children. Like life, it's complicated, but complicated in a way that invites endless interpretation and reinventions. Jo March was one of the inspirations for the heroine of my most recent novel, "Mrs. Everything." I'm not the only woman writer to have written a Jo of her own, and I imagine there will be other Jos to follow. Whatever we make of the grown up Jo's marriage, the headstrong, ambitious girl will live on, to inspire generations of girls to come. Jennifer Weiner is a best selling author and contributing Op Ed writer for The Times. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
AVIGNON, France The biggest productions of the 2018 Avignon Festival did not skimp on dramatics. Thomas Jolly presented a mythological king who feeds his brother his own sons; Milo Rau recreated the murder of a gay man in Belgium in 2012; and the festival director Olivier Py cast three men in turn as violent prison inmates, as poets and as coldblooded bankers. Amid the boundary pushing moments, there was one glaring omission: women, both as directors and as protagonists. The lack of parity in French theater is nothing new, but Mr. Py unwittingly drew attention to his own blind spots with the overall theme he selected for this edition of the Avignon Festival: "Gender." Out of 28 directors or collectives in the theater division, there were just seven women in the lineup at Avignon, the most important event in the French theater calendar. Three of them were credited in tandem with a man; two presented their work in the small Chapelle des Penitents Blancs, a venue Mr. Py has set aside for family friendly productions. Carole Thibaut, an experienced director who is at the helm of a National Dramatic Center in Montlucon, summed it up in an impassioned speech, her anger as potent as any of the stage performances on show. She was appearing as a guest during a series of daily performances and lectures directed by David Bobee that took place in the Ceccano Garden in Avignon and were called "Mesdames, Messieurs et le Reste du Monde" ("Ladies, Gentlemen and the Rest of the World"). One of the episodes of that series was billed as a mock staging of a "non racist, non gendered Moliere Awards ceremony," referring to France's biggest theater prizes. Alongside the transgender director Phia Menard, Ms. Thibaut was given one of the imaginary awards. For women, the Cour d'Honneur (the most prestigious stage at Avignon) and the Molieres are not available, she said in her "acceptance speech," rattling off the statistics for this year's festival. "I'm tired of being a nice pal to nice men who have female friends and question the notion of gender while nothing changes," she added. In the event, productions by women during the early part of the festival, which runs through July 24, met with muted receptions. Ines Barahona of Portugal, in collaboration with Miguel Fragata, directed the first youth oriented production at the Chapelle des Penitents Blancs, "Au Dela de la Foret, le Monde" ("Beyond the Forest, the World"). Performed in French by a dynamic duo, Emilie Caen and Anne Elodie Sorlin, it retraced with clarity and empathy the journey of a young Afghan boy from his war ravaged home to Britain. Chloe Dabert, however, did not fare quite so well in the open air Cloitre des Carmes. Ms. Dabert, who was appointed last month to the helm of the Comedie de Reims, specializes in contemporary theater, but here she elected to stage her first classical tragedy, Racine's "Iphigenie." Inspired by the mythological tale of a Greek princess, whose sacrifice to appease the gods ahead of the Trojan War is narrowly avoided, this 1674 play is unforgiving of slack diction and overexaggerated acting. Despite some high points, there was too much of both, with an especially dispiriting effort by Yann Boudaud, who went to battle with Racine's consonants in his role as Agamemnon. Elsewhere, the biggest trend in Avignon this summer seemed to be documentary theater with mixed results. As effective as real stories can be, raw testimonies presented with little commentary are no substitute for dramaturgy. A much better example of confessional performance was Didier Ruiz's "TRANS (mes enlla)," or "TRANS (Beyond)," presented at the Gymnase du Lycee Mistral. Mr. Ruiz has nearly two decades of experience in bringing nonprofessionals to the stage, and it shows in the gentle, assured editing of this production, which weaves together the personal stories of seven transgender men and women, ages 22 to 60. All of them looked at ease as they shared experiences both dark and light, alone or in groups. While it was more documentary than theater, "TRANS (mes enlla)" acted as a tribute to a still marginalized group, and was one of the unqualified successes of the festival's "Gender" theme. The production that dominated conversations in Avignon, however, took a true murder and turned it into layered, carefully calibrated theater. Mr. Rau, the Swiss born director of the Belgian theater NTGent, is no stranger to laying bare the banality of evil, with past works inspired by wartime atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo or by the Belgian child molester and murderer Marc Dutroux. Mr. Rau's production, "La Reprise Histoire(s) du Theatre (I)," takes its time with the story of Ihsane Jarfi, a young gay man who was tortured and beaten to death by four strangers in Liege, Belgium, in 2012. For the first hour, Mr. Rau recreates the team's research into the events and the process of casting the production, which includes two Liege based amateurs. Live film is used to alternate between verisimilar reinvention and commentary, both about the case and the delicate process of turning it into stage material. Credit must go to the extraordinary cast, especially the amateurs who blended in seamlessly: Suzy Cocco is heart rending as Ihsane's mother, while Fabian Leenders, a warehouse agent, delivers with subtlety as one of the killers. When Mr. Rau finally recreated the crime itself, for all its savagery, it didn't feel gratuitous: By this point, the audience had enough critical context to process it. The doom and gloom onstage extended to the fiction offerings. Mr. Py presented his latest creation, "Pur Present" ("Pure Present"), in La Scierie, a new venue just outside the walls of Avignon. This trilogy of short plays for three actors is a chamber effort by the standards of Mr. Py, a French director, but it fits neatly in his oeuvre. In many ways, Mr. Py has picked up in French theater where Paul Claudel and Jean Genet left off: His Christian influenced brand of mysticism divides the world between the saintly and the cynical. His style is often bombastic, yet at its best, as in the first part of "Pur Present," in which a prison ringleader breaks down an angelic new prisoner, it lends characters a real flamboyance. While restraint is not Mr. Py's forte, this "huis clos" would work just as well without the other two parts, although the actors (Nazim Boudjenah, Dali Benssalah and Joseph Fourez) served his vision selflessly over three and a half hours. Mr. Py reserved the most prestigious spot in the Avignon lineup for a favorite of his: the 36 year old French director Thomas Jolly, who opened the festival in the cavernous Cour d'Honneur in the Palais des Papes. Mr. Jolly's loud, special effects heavy productions can be hit or miss, but he rose to the occasion here with "Thyeste," a rare Latin language tragedy based on Greek mythology, by Seneca the Younger. This tale of ruthless revenge suits Mr. Jolly, who cast himself as Atreus, the king who murders his brother Thyestes's children and then serves them up to him during a feast. An actor with more gravitas might have made even more of the role, but the production was shrewdly tailored to its venue. The scenography, credited to Mr. Jolly and to Christele Lefebvre, embraced the Cour's dimensions, with laser lights and oversize sculptures of a head and a hand that appear to have detached from a colossus. The Palais des Papes in the background evoked the epic nature of the story of the House of Atreus, and it was supplemented by a full chorus of children, some rap and a levitating banquet table. If only more women had been given a seat in its vicinity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Eva Maria Westbroek as Minnie in Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West," which runs at the Metropolitan Opera until Oct. 28 and will be performed Friday and Wednesday. 'CELLULAR SONGS' at Le Poisson Rouge (Oct. 14 16, 8 p.m.). Music from the Meredith Monk's latest work, which had its premiere last March, makes an appearance over three nights, performed by her own, all female vocal ensemble. lpr.com 'LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST' at the Metropolitan Opera (Oct. 12 and 17, 7:30 p.m.; through Oct. 27). Jonas Kaufmann steps into the role of Dick Johnson in Puccini's gold rush tale on Wednesday, taking over midrun from Yusif Eyvazov, and singing opposite Eva Maria Westbroek's Minnie. Zeljko Lucic is Jack Rance, Carlo Bosi is Nick, and Michael Todd Simpson is Sonora. Marco Armiliato conducts; the production, by Giancarlo del Monaco, is 27 years old and, according to my colleague Corinna da Fonseca Wollheim, could do with an update. 212 870 7457, metopera.org JUILLIARD ORCHESTRA at Alice Tully Hall (Oct. 15, 7:30 p.m.). Mark Elder, the exquisite British conductor currently leading "Samson et Dalila" at the Met, steps onto the podium to corral the Juilliard's flagship ensemble through the "Four Sea Interludes" from Britten's "Peter Grimes," Strauss's Oboe Concerto (with Robert Nunes as the soloist) and two works by Sibelius, "Night Ride and Sunrise" and the Symphony No. 7. The week ahead is a busy one for the Juilliard students. On Saturday, the period instrument players of Juilliard415 are joined by the Yale Schola Cantorum and led by Masaaki Suzuki in a free concert of Handel's "Alexander's Feast" at St. Michael's Church. And on Sunday afternoon, AXIOM under Jeffrey Milarsky plays a sensational looking program of Knussen, Stravinsky and Andriessen at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. 212 799 5000, juilliard.edu ORCHESTRE REVOLUTIONNAIRE ET ROMANTIQUE at Carnegie Hall (Oct. 14, 3 p.m.; Oct. 15, 8 p.m.). John Eliot Gardiner brings his excellent period instrument band to New York for two concerts made up entirely of Berlioz. On Sunday, hear "Le Corsaire" Overture, "Harold in Italy" with the violist Antoine Tamestit, and "La Mort de Cleopatre" and excerpts from "Les Troyens," both with the mezzo soprano Lucile Richardot. On Monday, the "Symphonie Fantastique" is followed by its rarely heard companion piece, "Lelio," with Simon Callow as the narrator, Michael Spyres and Ashley Riches as the singers, and the National Youth Choir of Scotland. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org ST. THOMAS CHOIR at St. Thomas Church (Oct. 18, 7:30 p.m.). St. Thomas's new Miller Scott organ, named in part after the former director of music John Scott, is heard here in two concertos, by Poulenc and Barber. Also on the bill, with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the men and boys of the St. Thomas Choir under Daniel Hyde, is music by Parry, Janacek and Bernstein. Benjamin Sheen is the organist; Hyesang Park is the soprano. 212 757 7013, saintthomaschurch.org STILE ANTICO at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin (Oct. 13, 8 p.m.). Miller Theater presents this esteemed British vocal ensemble, supreme in the 16th century repertoire they sing for this concert, which looks at the music of the court of Elizabeth I. Byrd, Tallis and Dowland are all represented, as are other, less expected names, like Weelkes, Farmer and Wilbye. 212 854 7799, millertheatre.com TAKACS QUARTET at Alice Tully Hall (Oct. 18, 7:30 p.m.). Still the most predictably impressive string quartet in the world, this group gives a refreshingly simple program of Webern's "Langsamer Satz" and Schubert's String Quintet, with the cellist David Requiro. If something perhaps a little more radical in execution is in order on your Thursday evening, across town at Zankel Hall at exactly the same time you can hear the Belcea Quartet play Mozart's "Prussian" Quartet in B flat, Mendelssohn's furious F minor quartet and a new work by Joseph Phibbs. 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org/great performers LES TALENS LYRIQUES at the Morgan Library Museum (Oct. 16, 7:30 p.m.). The Boston Early Music Festival brings this wonderfully expressive group, led by the stylish harpsichordist Christophe Rousset, to New York for a celebration of Francois Couperin's 350th birthday. The program includes music from the "Concert Royal," written for Louis XIV, solo harpsichord pieces and parts of the "Lecons de tenebres." 212 685 0008, themorgan.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
That was how Andy Warhol described Richard Bernstein, who gave Interview magazine covers their signature look. Everyone wanted it until they didn't. "They had faces then," says Norma Desmond, the silent film star burning out in "Sunset Boulevard," a tragic lament for a more gorgeous time gone by. They had faces then, we could say just as well of a more recent era, that rich era in the 1970s and '80s when Interview magazine ruled the newsstand, its oversize, Technicolor covers a parade of stars. Diana Ross. Mick Jagger. Debbie Harry. Cher. They had faces then or did they just have Richard Bernstein? For 16 years, between 1972 and 1988, when we saw Interview, Richard Bernstein was the first thing we saw. Whoever appeared on its cover, beneath the lipstick scrawl banner, there they were as Mr. Bernstein made them: pop gods with airbrushed aura. Many people assumed the covers were by Andy Warhol, whose name appeared along the top. (Andy Warhol's Interview was rechristened Interview in 1977.) But they were the work of Mr. Bernstein, a Bronx born painter who turned every portrait sitting with a star or socialite into Interview gold. The Deitch exhibition coincides with and celebrates the publication of "Richard Bernstein: Starmaker," a new book on his life and work by Roger and Mauricio Padilha , who have previously applied themselves to Mr. Bernstein's fellow scene makers Antonio Lopez, Chris von Wagenheim and Stephen Sprouse . (Norma Desmond is mentioned in the prologue.) Mr. Bernstein, whose travels took him from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to Swinging London to the back room of Max's Kansas City, the Factory and, eventually, Studio 54, was a decades long fixture at most any party worth attending, and host of plenty. His Chelsea Hotel home and studio, the hotel's former ballroom, was the place to be once Max's closed for the night, and one of his most famous paintings is of the empty Max's back room, silent and glowing under its Dan Flavin light. He partied with the rich and fabulous, sliding precipitously into drugs in the process, then painted them when Mr. Warhol and his editors decided they were ready for the Interview spotlight. They sat for the photographers of the day Bill King, Francesco Scavullo but their photos were painted (over, or entirely) by Mr. Bernstein, a liberty unimaginable today. "He was great at glossing the gloss," said his friend David Croland, a fellow artist and party regular, and onetime boyfriend of both a Warhol Superstar (International Velvet, nee Susan Bottomly) and Robert Mapplethorpe. "Stars are glossy to begin with. That's why they're stars they shine a little brighter. And Richard made them shinier." The brothers Padilha remembered seeking out Interview as kids at magazine shop in their local mall. "The covers were so iconic, we became obsessed," Mauricio said. And when Interview appeared to fold in May (it has already undergone its own complicated rebirth, after filing for bankruptcy, restarting and last week announcing its first issue in its newest incarnation), Instagram was flooded with memorials to its greatness. Many of them, Mr. Padilha noted, were of Bernstein vintage. A Bernstein book had always been on the Padilhas' wish list but didn't come to be until a message reached them from Mr. Bernstein's nephew, who invited them to the family home to see the basement archive. In it were not only Interview covers and ephemera, but also early and late work barely seen or recognized: Pop paintings, late abstracts. An early series called "Pilules" ("Pills"), though not entirely unknown (the Hirshhorn Museum owns two) , had an especially strong impact. "It's that old Pop art thing paint what you see every day, paint what you know," Roger said. "Andy painted soup. Richard painted quaaludes." Along the way, Mr. Bernstein's path crossed those of many. Paloma Picasso assisted him. Peggy Guggenheim attended one of his openings. Though gay, he was briefly engaged to Berry Berenson, the socialite sister of the model and actress Marisa; she left him for Anthony Perkins, whom she met on an Interview interview. Mr. Bernstein and Ms. Berenson nevertheless remained close until her death in 2001, in the 9/11 attacks. "Richard had a really long run," said Corey Grant Tippin, an interiors stylist, who traveled for a time in the Warhol circle as a model and makeup artist. "He was always there." A changing of the guard at Interview in 1988 ended Mr. Bernstein's regular run. Typecast as a magazine portraitist, he struggled in the years that followed. He had a fruitful collaboration with Grace Jones, who commissioned him to create art for several of her albums and singles, but of the many other celebrities he had immortalized at Interview, few wanted to purchase his portraits when he later came calling. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
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